News

Founding CTN member Philosopher Paul Thagard has a new book out: Dreams, Jokes and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness.

The book provides:

• Clear and empirically supported explanation of consciousness as resulting from four brain  mechanisms.
• Application to a broad range of conscious experiences including smell, hunger, loneliness,  self-awareness, religious experience, sports performance, and romantic chemistry. 
• Use of these mechanisms to generate novel theories of dreaming, humor, and musical experience.
• Proposal of a new theory of time consciousness drawing on recent advances in neuroscience.
• Assessment of consciousness in non-human animals and machines, including the new generative  AI models such as ChatGPT. 
• Development of a new solution to the mind-body problem, called coherent materialism. 

And in a preview of coming attractions, stay tuned for his next book AI Boom or Doom?  Philosophy and Psychology of the New Artificial Intelligence, to be published soon by MIT Press

For more information you can follow this link to Paul´s blog.

Sarah An, Editoral Assistant at the Imprint recently reported on the CTN Brain Day 2025:

https://uwimprint.ca/brain-day-exploring-all-things-brain-through-an-interdisciplinary-lens/

Thought Process a podcast by UWloo alumnus Jack MacKinnon features conversations with CTN members:

CTN Founding Director Chris Eliasmith discusses if AI can ever be truly conscious on the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast.

Sue Ann Campbell is President Elect of the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society. CAIMS represents applied and industrial mathematics in Canada. The society has become a significant presence in industrial, scientific, and technological circles within and outside of Canada.

The University of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience seminar series begins the Fall 2022 term on October 25 with a virtual presentation by Adrien Peyrache at 14:30, and continues the following week, Nov 1 at 14:30 with a virtual presentation by Yalda Mohsenzadeh.

Bryan Tripp and collaborators have published a new paper in PLOS Computational Biology showing how biological constraints can lead to a highly effective model of mouse visual cortex.

As part of her recent Master's work in Psychology (Updating Local and Global Probability Events During Maze Navigation) Sixuan Chen completed the diploma in Theoretical Neuroscience. Congratulations Sixuan. Sixuan is currently a lab manager and research associate with the laboratory of Wei Ji Ma of New York University.

Britt Anderson, CTN core member (Psychology) will be a discussant for the "What is Attention?" session of the London School of Economics workshop: Attention: An international workshop to be held Sept 14 and 15.