Dr. Gal Vishne

The riddle of consciousness – how we understand our own subjective experience – has been more of a philosophical than a scientific discussion. Gal Vishne is aiming to change this popular conception, by applying the new field of computational cognitive neuroscience (CCN), where she is establishing herself as an expert, to study subjective experience.

Dr. Vishne’s doctorate from the International PhD Program in Computational Neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem focused on elucidating the neuronal mechanisms behind our ongoing perception of the visual world. Her research, featured in popular media venues such as Science Daily, employed rare intra-cranial recordings of the brain’s neuronal responses, obtained from patients who were undergoing surgery for intractable epilepsy. Using this unique source of data, Dr. Vishne discovered a surprising dissociation between the processing of visual information in sensory posterior regions, where information was sustained, and control frontal regions, where it was transient.

For her postdoc at the Data Science Institute of Columbia University, Dr. Vishne aims to use recordings from monkeys and humans to understand better how our decisions are shaped by ongoing experience and vice versa. In particular, she is interested in the role of temporal anticipation and uncertainty in shaping our perception of the immediate sensory environment and our ongoing conscious experience.

Dr. Vishne believes that a better understanding of consciousness could eventually help identify and treat minimally conscious or vegetative patients. At the societal and moral level, it could influence the way we treat infants, animals, or artificial intelligence. She hopes to eventually open her own lab in Israel to create a large impact on research into CCN, which is just beginning to emerge in Israel. https://neurogal.github.io