Christof Koch

Koch was born in 1956 to a German diplomat and a doctor; he grew up in Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and Morocco and attended Jesuit schools.⁠[1]

He has said he grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family and lost his religious faith as he matured, though he still finds meaning in Bach’s religious music.⁠[2]

He completed his baccalaureate in Morocco, earned a BS and MS in physics at the University of Tübingen, and in 1982 received a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.⁠[3]

Tomaso PoggioTomaso PoggioTomaso Poggio is an Italian-born American computational neuroscientist and the Eugene McDermott Professor Emeritus of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He led the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines and is known for computational theories of vision, learning theory and hierarchical models of recognition in the visual cortex.Open the full entry mentored him through a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in biophysics.⁠[1]

He followed Poggio to MIT as a postdoctoral researcher and joined Caltech four years later.⁠[1]

In 1986 he was appointed an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, where he taught until 2013, finally as Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology.⁠[4]

In 1990 Francis Crick and Koch co-wrote an influential article that sought to study consciousness scientifically without first defining it, sidestepping a long philosophical stalemate; in his neurobiology work Crick collaborated most closely with Koch, a computational neuroscientist.⁠[5]

In 2003 an unedited typescript of Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, including a foreword by Francis Crick, was sent to James D. Watson; it is held in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.⁠[6]

Crick died of colon cancer on July 28, 2004; only days earlier he had been editing a manuscript written jointly with Koch.⁠[5]

In 2007 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the biological sciences, specialty neurosciences.⁠[7]

In 2011 he left Caltech to lead the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.⁠[8]

The Seattle nonprofit, backed by the billionaire Paul AllenPaul AllenPaul Allen (1953–2018) was an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975. After leaving Microsoft’s management in 1983 he founded the investment and project-management firm Vulcan, owned the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, funded private spaceflight projects including SpaceShipOne and Stratolaunch, and created institutions such as the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, giving more than $2.65 billion to philanthropy during his life.Open the full entry, hired him as its chief scientific officer; its chief executive, Allan Jones, said the institute was thrilled to have someone of his caliber directing its scientific efforts.⁠[9]

In 2012 MIT Press published his 184-page Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, which blends memoir and science, covering his personal life, his confrontation with mortality, his gradual loss of Catholic faith and the question of free will.⁠[10]

In 2015 Koch became president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.⁠[3]

In 2016 Koch, Marcello Massimini, Melanie Boly and Giulio Tononi published the review “Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems” in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, volume 17.⁠[11]

On July 13, 2016, the Allen Institute for Brain Science released the Allen Brain Observatory, whose first data release surveyed more than 18,000 neurons in four areas of the mouse visual cortex; Koch said no one had ever taken such a standardized approach to surveying the active brain at cellular resolution.⁠[12]

In 2018 Koch directed a team of more than 330 people at the Allen Institute, whose budget was roughly $100 million a year, with the aim of building “brain observatories” to track neuron activity in mice.⁠[8]

In September 2018 he appeared on episode 2 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, on the topic of consciousness; the episode introduced him as president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.⁠[13]

On September 24, 2019, MIT Press published his The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, which builds on integrated information theory to argue that even a highly complex computer could simulate experience without having any, and adopts a form of panpsychism; the neuroscientist Steven Rose wrote in a review that he was unconvinced.⁠[14]

In April 2020 the Allen Institute announced a new phase of its neuroscience research: Koch, then president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, would continue to lead the MindScope Program as its chief scientist, while Hongkui Zeng took over leadership of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.⁠[15]

In 1998 Koch bet the philosopher David ChalmersDavid ChalmersDavid Chalmers is an Australian-born philosopher and cognitive scientist and University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, known for formulating the “hard problem” of consciousness and for proposing the extended mind thesis with Andy Clark.Open the full entry a case of wine that within 25 years researchers would find a “clear” neural pattern underlying consciousness. At the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting at New York University in June 2023, Chalmers was declared the winner; Koch handed over the wine and placed a new bet that clarity would be reached by 2048.⁠[16]

In September 2023, 124 scholars posted a letter on PsyArXiv arguing that integrated information theory should be labelled pseudoscience; Koch, a proponent of the theory, replied that it is a theory that may of course be empirically wrong, but that it states its assumptions clearly.⁠[17]

On May 7, 2024, Basic Books published his Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It, which discusses the physical basis and measurement of consciousness, psychedelic and mystical experiences, near-death experiences, and why generative AI may feel nothing.⁠[18]

He has described a near-death experience during the opening days of Covid, after which his fear of death largely disappeared; he lives in Seattle after more than a quarter of a century in Southern California.⁠[19]

He is a Meritorious Investigator at the Allen Institute.⁠[4]

He is also chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation.⁠[3]

Allen Institute: Official website: https://alleninstitute.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]