Koch, Christof

Christof is Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Born in the American Midwest (Kansas City), he grew up in Amsterdam/Holland, Bonn/Germany, Ottawa/Canada, and Rabat/Marocco. After earning his PhD in nonlinear information processing in dendritic trees (the receptive surfaces in brain cells), he began in Caltech’s then newly started Computation and Neural Systems program. Working with the late Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA genetic code and Nobel Prize Laureate, he accelerated his research and understanding of the \"neural correlates of consciousness.\" Since the early 1990s, he has been active in promoting consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has had wide influence in convincing his peers that by using modern techniques of neurobiology real progress can be made. Christof approaches the neuronal basis of consciousness by studying visual consciousness, since vision is the best understood of all the human senses. Not satisfied with the limits and vagueness of philosophy, he and other scientists are hunting for these \"neural correlates of consciousness.\" In other words they are gathering hard data about which cells and circuits in the brain are active during specific conscious experiences. They hope such data will lead to new theories on consciousness, which many people see as life\'s central mystery. He is the author of The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach. Here is how Christof and Francis Crick introduce their approach: “We assume that when people talk about ‘consciousness,’ there is something to be explained. While most neuroscientists acknowledge that consciousness exists, and that at present it is something of a mystery, most of them do not attempt to study it, mainly for one of two reasons: (1) They consider it to be a philosophical problem, and so best left to philosophers. (2) They concede that it is a scientific problem, but think it is premature to study it now. We have taken exactly the opposite point of view. We think that most of the philosophical aspects of the problem should, for the moment, be left on one side, and that the time to start the scientific attack is now. We can state bluntly the major question that neuroscience must first answer: It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not; what is the difference between them? In particular, are the neurons involved of any particular neuronal type? What is special (if anything) about their connections? And what is special (if anything)about their way of firing? The neuronal correlate of consciousness if often referred to as the NCC. Whenever some information is represented in the NCC it is represented in consciousness. In approaching the problem, we made the tentative assumption that all the different aspects of consciousness (for example, pain, visual awareness, self-consciousness, and so on) employ a basic common mechanism or perhaps a few such mechanisms. If one could understand the mechanism for one aspect, then, we hope, we will have gone most of the way towards understanding them all.”