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Sebastian Seung
Professor of Computational Neuroscience, MIT (Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Physics); HHMI Investigator
Professor of Computational Neuroscience, MIT (Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Physics); HHMI Investigator
What makes each of us unique? Your identity rests partially on your genome, but life experiences also shape aspects of your identity such as memories and learned abilities, thought to be encoded in your connectome, the map of connections between your neurons: 'You are more than your genes. You are your connectome.' But your connectome has been too daunting to investigate, because it contains millions of times more connections than your genome has letters. Sebastian will describe futuristic technologies currently being developed to find connectomes, and outline prospects for curing brain disorders and improving ourselves by promoting the natural kinds of connectome change: reweighting, reconnection, rewiring, and regeneration.
Sebastian Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics at MIT, Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 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 interdisciplinary research has spanned physics, computer science, and neuroscience; his MIT laboratory invents technologies for finding the connectome, analogous to the genome of the mind. His popular science book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2012. He is an avid squash player and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.