Chris Eliasmith, Ph.D. Chris’s formal academic background is interdisciplinary, spanning engineering, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. His research reflects this diversity but is tied together by its focus on the workings of the mind.

Chris’s early philosophical work critiqued the dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science, and discussed related issues of computation and the architecture of the mind. His PhD thesis suggests a new theory of meaning which draws heavily on neural considerations. More recently he have written on these topics as well as issues related to embodiment/embeddedness, categorization, information theory, neural modeling, statistical representation, and the integration of neuroscience and psychology. In short, my work has been in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science.

Chris’s philosophical work has been paralleled by work in theoretical neuroscience. With Charles Anderson, he has developed a general method for building large-scale, biologically detailed models of neural systems. Chris has applied this method in a variety of contexts, including rat navigation, working memory, lamprey swimming, hemineglect, and language-based reasoning.

He has a new book, How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition, Oxford University Press, 2013, which brings together all of this past work.