I’m Simon Bohn, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. I study how neural activity generates cognitive states like seeing and remembering.

Visual Memory

How does seeing something become a memory that it has been seen? I investigated this question in Nicole Rust’s lab, where I recorded from populations of neurons in the inferotemporal cortex and the hippocampus and uncovered evidence for a previously unknown computation transforming the neural representation between these two brain areas. This work answered long-standing questions about the neural code the brain uses to support familiarity and proposed a novel role for the medial temporal lobe in this process.

Click here for the full paper.

Perception

When we look at something, neurons in the inferotemporal cortex respond in predictable ways. But how does this neural activity lead to the perception of seeing? In Arash Afraz’s lab at the National Institutes of Health, I used optogenetics to map the relationship between neural activity and perception. I found that this novel method could reliably elicit conscious percepts from impulses delivered to inferotemporal cortex, and that the ability to detect these percepts varied with what was being concurrently viewed. These findings have implications for the development of visual prostheses, as well as furthering our understanding of how neural activity is read out to generate visual perception.

Click here for a dispatch written on the paper, and here for the paper itself.