The number of neurons in the human brain is enormous, but the number of meaningful thoughts you could possibly entertain is much larger still. You can understand the sentences "The strongest man in Iceland learned to play bassoon at the Sorbonne" or "The robot with a mustache can't make a free-throw", or “The United States congress is a well-functioning institution”, even though no one has ever said or even thought these particular things.

But if someone asks you to remember the following digits in the order in which they were presented: (5,9, 0, 1, 5, 3, 6, 7, 8), it’s unlikely that the same billions of neurons (and trillions of synapses) will be up to the task.

Why is the mind so adept in cases, but so limited in others?

Beginning in 2024, I will be an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Dartmouth College, and will be principal investigator of the Dartmouth Lab for Mind, Brain, and Computation. We will draw on information-theory, neural networks, and probabilistic models to better understand our ability to efficiently make sense of the world in some cases, but not others. We are interested in developing computational models that help understand both how and why the mind is the way it is. We will evaluate these models using human behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments.

Please reach out if you are interested in working with us! I will be accepting graduate students (through the PhD program in Psychological and Brain Sciences***), and hiring post-docs and research assistants. We will work closely with the PhilLab in Dartmouth Cognitive Science.

Prior to starting at Dartmouth, I was a post-doc working with Jon Cohen and others at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, pursuing computational models of knowledge representation, memory, and relational reasoning. I received my PhD from Harvard, with Josh Greene. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and intracranial recording of neural activity to study how the brain dynamically encodes structure (who did what to whom) to make sense of a sentence. Here is some press coverage of that work: Harvard Gazette, ABC Australia, BBC, BrainPost. Prior to graduate school, I worked as a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania with Sharon Thompson-Schill, and studied Philosophy and Psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio.