Michael Shadlen, MD, PhD
- Professor of Neuroscience (in the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute)
Overview
Academic Appointments
- Professor of Neuroscience (in the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute)
Gender
- Male
Credentials & Experience
Education & Training
- PhD, 1985 Neurobiology, University of California, Berkeley
- MD, 1988 medicine, Brown University School of Medicine, Providence, RI
- Residency: 1992 Stanford Medical School
Honors & Awards
- Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Research
The evolution of sophisticated brains has freed us from the immediacy of sensation and action by giving us the capacity for flexible decision-making. The evidence we obtain through our senses (or from memory) need not precipitate an immediate, reflexive response. Instead our decisions are deliberative and provisional, contingent on other sources of information, long-term goals, and values. I believe the principles of brain function that underlie simple forms of reasoning and decision-making are also the building blocks of human cognition.
Brain circuits support integration of evidence from diverse sources (for example, different senses and memory), assign more or less weight to cues that differ in their reliability, calculate expected costs and benefits associated with anticipated outcomes, process elapsed time to meet a deadline or to assess temporal cost, and implement rules (such as deciding on what to decide upon) and policies (balancing accuracy against speed).
Read more at http://www.beinghuman.org/article/decisions-window-cognition
Research Interests
- Cognitive/Systems Neuroscience
- Synapses and Circuits