I am Janis Hesse, since 2013 a graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech.
One of my major interests is the binding problem, one of the deepest mysteries of the brain: Since different features like colour, motion and shape are computed in parallel by independent processing streams, how can the brain bind them together to create the unifying conscious experience of an object?
In the Tsao lab we propose the “Silhouette-based Selection Hypothesis” to solve the binding problem and give a mechanism of how objects become the universal information unit selectable by attention, actions, and thoughts. My aim is to combine fMRI-guided electrophysiology in monkeys and rodents with theoretical modeling to test the hypothesis.