About this event

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The lecture will cover:

• Focussing on the challenges Turing faced in relation to Enigma
• Exploring Turing’s strongly Bayesian problem solving approaches
• Looking at the similarities with the problem the brain faces in making sense of its environment
• Looking at how this translates into algorithms used in decisions in relation to the world
• Extending the problem to the greater complexity entailed by an environment where there are other intentional agents
• Determining how the approach and solutions to Enigma forged by Turing can be turned inwards, where the brain itself is the unknown, to probe mechanistic processes that give rise to the very apparatus that is the human mind

 

Speaker

Ray Dolan is Mary Kinross Professor of Neuropsychiatry at UCL and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, at UCL.

He is a neuroscientist whose primary research interest is the neurobiology of emotion, and how emotion interacts with other components of cognition. A focus in his work has been on the role of emotion in human decision making.

He has published over 400 peer review papers in a career spanning more than 20 years and is consistently ranked among the top five most cited neuroscientists in the world in the field of neuroscience and behaviour.

He has received recognition for his work in awards that include the Alexander Von Humboldt Research Award (2004), the Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation (2006), the International Max Planck Research Award (2007).

In 2011 he was made Visiting Einstein Fellow to the Humboldt University, Berlin. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2000 and Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2010.