| Christof Koch | |
|---|---|
 Christof Koch, 2008
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| Born | November 13, 1956 Kansas City, Missouri |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Biophysics |
| Alma mater | University of Tübingen Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics |
| Doctoral advisor | Valentin Braitenberg Tomaso Poggio |
Christof Koch (born November 13, 1956, Kansas City) is an American neuroscientist working on the neural basis of consciousness. He currently holds the position of Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, California Institute of Technology, where he has been since 1986. He is co-founder of the company "Eye-Predict" which attempts to aid in advertising by predicting eye-movements for given photos.[1]
He is the son of German parents; his father was a diplomat. He went to a Jesuit high school in Morocco. He received a PhD in nonlinear information processing from the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany in 1982. He then worked at MIT.
He has been active since the early 1990s in the promotion of consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has been particularly influential in arguing that consciousness can now be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology. His primary collaborator in the endeavour of locating the neural correlates of consciousness was the late Francis Crick.
Koch was the executive officer of the Computation and Neural Systems program at Caltech from 2000 to 2005. He was the local organizer of the 2005 meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
Koch is a vegetarian, and has expressed sympathy for animal rights due to the neurological similarities between human and non-human animals.[2]
Koch has an Erdős number of three.[3]
Publications
- Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons, Oxford U. Press, (1999), ISBN 0-19-518199-9
- The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach, Roberts and Co., (2004), ISBN 0-9747077-0-8
References
- ^ Welche Ameise versteht schon Einstein? Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 May 2007. (German)
- ^ Miscellaneous Things, accessed 21 March 2009
- ^ Miscellaneous Things, accessed 21 March 2009
External links
- Homepage of Christof Koch
- Homepage of Koch's laboratory
- His book The Quest for Consciousness
- Online lecture videos from an undergraduate course taught by Christof Koch at Caltech in 2003 on the neurobiological basis of consciousness.
- Neural Correlates of Consciousness, Scholarpedia article by Christof Koch
- Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
- Radio interview with Christof Koch and Francis Crick, 2001
- Radio interview with Christof Koch and Constanze Hofstoetter, 2005
- Interview on the Brain Science Podcast, 2007
- Christof Koch, a short clip
- Interview with Christof Koch on the neuroscience of reading and the movie in your mind
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