Background
I hail from a den of lobbyists, defense contractors, and bureaucrats: the wooded suburbs of Northern Virginia. After a pleasant suburban childhood, I spent my undergraduate career (Northwestern U) reading random books and doing a chemistry major. I was never very passionate about chemistry: my greatest achievement was taking a sulfuric-acid-induced trip to the chemical shower. Sometime during my post-college years as an ESL teacher in Poland and South Korea, I became fascinated with one implication of the materialist theory of mind — if all of our experiences have physical correlates in the brain, then there must be an experience-space in some sense “isomorphic” to the space of possible brain architectures… Who knew that our place in mind-space is just like our place in the physical space! A tiny island in a vast ocean of possibility. Unfortunately, the currently available means to take vacations from our little corner of mind-space are limited to meditation, drugs, sleep deprivation, and head trauma. I decided to pursue computational neuroscience because it seemed like the best way to contribute to the development of alternatives. After a stint learning programming and helping build a knowledge base out of 100 years of hippocampus literature (hippocampome.org, out of the Ascoli Lab at George Mason University), I ended up at the Redwood Center. These days I study hippocampal neural codes in Fritz Sommer’s lab and read political theory in my spare time.