Exploring the Mechanisms of Cognition: Insights from Neuroscience and Computation

No known object is as complex as the human brain. As scientists seek to comprehend its operational principles, we must apply a multidisciplinary approach. The 2024 Gordon Conference for the Neurobiology of Cognition span inter-related areas of cognitive, systems, and computational neuroscience most relevant for understanding how brain circuits give rise to our abilities to think, feel, act, decide, plan, and learn. The conference is designed to spark new avenues for discussion among participants with diverse scientific backgrounds whose paths might not normally cross. Individual sessions draw upon a mix of approaches for studying neural circuits at multiple spatial and temporal scales, in both humans and animal models, and the mechanisms by which such circuits give rise to cognition and behavior.

The conference program will bring together the latest techniques and approaches including electrophysiology of neural populations, imaging of neural circuits at multiple spatial scales and in concert with novel molecular tools, interrogation of the human brain via neuroimaging and electrophysiology, and computational approaches inspired by rapid advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Much attention is given to the recent explosion in data acquisition methods, and the capacity to analyze enormous datasets using increasingly sophisticated computational approaches. A persistent question in the background is how the elaborate architecture of the brain, governed by fundamental electrical, molecular, and mathematical principles, supports our subjective experience and directs our external behavior. The confluence of perspectives at this meeting, with diverse scientists called together to consider the most important topics in cognitive neuroscience, promises to cast new light on some of the most challenging and fascinating questions about how the brain works.