Christof Koch's Home Page

Born in the American Midwest (Kansas City), I grew up in Amsterdam/Holland, Bonn/Germany, Ottawa/Canada, and Rabat/Marocco where I graduated from the Lycée Descartes with a French Baccalaurèat (Section C) in 1974.

I studied Physics and Philosophy in Tübingen, Germany, and was awarded my Master of Physics in 1980 and my PhD (Nonlinear information processing in dendritic trees of arbitrary geometry) from the Max-Planck-Institut for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen in 1982. My Doctor-Fathers were Prof. Valentin Braitenberg and Prof. Tomaso Poggio.

After four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the Department of Psychology at MIT, I joined Caltech's newly started Computation and Neural Systems option in 1986 as a Professor of Computation and Neural Systems, running K-Lab as well as being the Executive Officer of CNS. I remain at Caltech to this day.

My major intellectual interests are:

• Finding out how consciousness arises out of the brain. My long-term goal is to discover and characterize the neuronal correlates of consciousness (the NCC). I collaborated for 16 years in this exciting endeavor with the late Dr. Francis Crick at the Salk Institute. For a brief summary of our thoughts on this aspect of the Mind-Brain problem, see this paper that appeared in Nature Neuroscience in 2003. A photo-essay and the cover story from the LA Weekly provide a different view.

  This research has made its way into a book for a general scientific audience, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neuroscientific Approach. The book discusses the Crick-Koch framework for how consciousness, the subjective mind, arises out of the flickering interactions within the neurons of the cerebral cortex and related structures.
  
  
  

• Understanding how individual nerve cells can process information, that is what are the biophysical mechanisms underlying computation at the level of synapses, channels and membranes. I wrote a textbook on this topic, entitled Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons.
  
  

• I am associated with the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), that promotes research within cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and other relevant disciplines in the sciences and humanities, directed toward understanding the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of consciousness. Its next annual meeting will take place here at Caltech in June of 2005. I'm also in a much broader, unorthodox but fun conference Toward a Science of Consciousness in April 2006 in Tucson, Arizona.
  
  

• I love to climb mountains, towers and big walls (that's me doing a Tyrolean Traverse between Lost Arrow Spire and the Canyon rim, 2800 feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley; the picture on the top of this page was taken by Katie Sheeman). You ask me why? Jon Krakauer expresses it quite well "By and by, your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trance-like state settles over your efforts, the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. The accrued guilt and clutter of day-to-day existence, all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose, and by the seriousness of the task at hand."
  
  

• I do have three goals for 2004. To finish my book (done; see above), to run a few Marathons (done; I did run my first Marathon in Los Angeles in March and my first Ultra-Marathon in the San Gabriel Mountains in April) and to climb Halfdome in Yosemite Valley the hard way (also done; see here). So now I have to set goals for 2005. Hmmh...

You can download my publications as well as a detailed Curriculum Vitae (in .pdf format).

In the spring of 2005, I will be teaching CNS/Bi 120: The Neuronal Basis of Consciousness". I will not be teaching Vision until the winter of 2006.

In collaboration with Digital Studio, S.A. in Paris, France, I'm working on a 13 minute long animated movie travelling through the visual system, from the retina to deep into cortex ( see one frame from a pilot).

In the summer of 2000, my son Alexander and I joined an archeological expedition to dig up part of the Temple built by King Herod in 20 BC in Caesarea, along the Israeli coast. While there, I got a Apple tattoo. Together with the Boeing B-747 Jumbo Jet and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Apple Macintosh is the most beautiful and elegant artifact of the 20-th century. A perfect marriage of form with function. And to answer the obvious question, yes, this tattoo will remain this crisp and cool until the day I die.

Check out these images of my brain. Cool, eh! To find out more or to look at most of my brain, hit this button .

To see a photograph of me sitting in a tree, hit here .

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