Understanding Consciousness by Understanding the Brain

Christof Koch, Neuroscientist and Author
Allen Institute for Brain Science chief scientist gives a public talk
7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30 

TACOMA, Wash. – After hundreds of years of diligent science, we still regard our own brain as largely an enigma. But perhaps this is not so surprising. The human brain, after all, is the most complex piece of organized matter in the known universe.

Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent more than 25 years studying the brain and consciousness.

“The aim of my life as a scientist is to understand how consciousness comes into the world,” says Koch. “This incredible apparatus, the brain, not only gives rise to behaviors, but also has subjective feelings, experiences pains and pleasures and the sights and sounds of life.”

 On Thursday, Oct. 30, the public is invited to hear Koch speak and to participate in a lively Q&A session at a town hall-style meeting at University of Puget Sound. The eminent scientist and author will speak on Understanding Consciousness by Understanding the Brain, 7–8:30 p.m., in Thompson Hall, Room 175. A map of campus is linked below.

The free public event is the first in a series to be offered by the Keck Initiative for NeuroCulture—a new learning and research effort funded by a $250,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation in Los Angeles. The aim is to introduce college undergraduates, high school students, and the community to a better understanding of neuroscience. The award, made this year to Puget Sound’s expanded neuroscience program, is supporting student research, TED-style public talks, workshops for K-12 students, and other activities.

Visiting speaker Christof Koch is clearly dedicated to opening up the complex world of the brain to the public. He has published extensively and writes regularly for Scientific American, unravelling his extensive knowledge in stories that lay audiences can relate to. His most recent book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, blends science and memoir to explore topics that probe the roots of consciousness.

To understand the brain, Koch says, we must study it at a cellular level. This is the goal of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Funded by philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the institute embarked in 2012 on an ambitious 10-year initiative to characterize the structure and function of the cerebral cortex. 

“We will thereby be in a position to comprehend how mind arises out of matter and to better apprehend who we are,” Koch says.

Koch has worked in artificial intelligence, neural modeling, and theoretical and experimental neuroscience. He had a long-standing collaboration with the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick and, motivated in part by that relationship, wrote The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach in 2004. Previously Koch was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was, for 27 years, a faculty member at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received his bachelor’s degree from the Lycée Descartes in Morocco, his master’s degree in physics from University of Tübingen in Germany, and his doctorate from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany.

For directions and a map of the University of Puget Sound campus: pugetsound.edu/directions ; For accessibility information please contact accessibility@pugetsound.edu or 253.879.3236, or visit pugetsound.edu/accessibility.