The Brain of Buddha
My encounter with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the scientific study of meditation in a Tibetan Monastery in India, …
Category Archives: SciAm column
A Tribute to Oliver Sacks from Colleague and Friend Christof Koch
Oliver Sacks has left the world. The British-born neurologist-cum-writer who called New York City his home for the past half …
A Biological Imitation Game
The digital reconstruction of a slice of rat somatosensory cortex in 2015 in Cell from the Blue Brain Project provides …
Lust and the Turing Test
By and large, we watch movies to be entertained, not to be provoked into deep thought. Occasionally, a film does …
How the Computer Beat the Go Master
As a leading go player falls to a machine, artificial intelligence takes a decisive step on the road to overtaking …
Panpsychism
Panpsychism, the ancient doctrine that consciousness is ubiquitous, offers some lessons in how to think about subjective experience today. Published …
Movies in the cortical theater
Functional MRI can peer inside your brain and watch you watching a YouTube clip. [PDF]
Sex and Violence
Using optical and genetic techniques, neuroscientists have identified an “on/off” switch for aggression in the brain. [PDF]
Fatal Attraction
Some protozoa infect the brain of their host, shaping its behavior in ways most suited to the pathogen, even if …
Think different
The ways in which brains differ from one another shows up in the way their owners perceive the world. [PDF]
The Passions of Christof Koch 