Walls and Bridges

PROFESSOR OF COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE

USA

Biography

Sebastian Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and External Member of the Max Planck Society. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University, and formerly worked at Bell Laboratories. His laboratory at MIT is inventing technologies for finding connectomes, maps of connections between the brain's neurons. His goals are to understand perception, see the material basis of memory, and search for connectopathies, hypothetical "miswirings" of the brain associated with psychiatric disorders. His popular science book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are was recently hailed in the Wall Street Journal by Daniel Levitin as "the best lay book on brain science I've ever read."