Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology

My central teaching objective is, unsurprisingly, that my students leave the course understanding the material. I have another objective in addition to this, though: to create and foster budding intellectuals. I am a follower of the philosophy that a university education should primarily nurture the mind, and only secondarily prepare one for an occupation; students should be educated, not just trained. My heuristic assumption is that each student wishes to be an academic, and accordingly I never find myself thinking, "This student only wants a good job, so I will dispense with teaching them anything but how to satisfactorily solve this or that problem." Of course, this is a "heuristic" assumption since I know full well that most students have no intention of actually becoming academics. My purpose, however, is not to create academics, but to spark untapped intellectual thoughts in the students. Consequently, whether I am teaching physics, astronomy, logic, mathematics, computer science or cognitive science, I make a point of communicating to the students the deeper aspects of the subject under study; what it all means, how it connects to other disciplines, and so on. If I were to presume that the students are not intellectually interested in the subject, and I were to sit back and wait for the occasional self-motivated intellectual student to present himself, I would be missing out on the opportunity to excite the students and cultivate their minds. People usually develop intellectual interests only by hearing about them, and who better and more appropriate to hear it from than a lecturer at university?

Contact Details: MC 139-74 Caltech Pasadena California 91125 United States of America Tel: (626) 395-2363 Fax: (626) 792-8583 Email: changizi@changizi.com WWW: www.changizi.com/

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Recent Publications by Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology:
Thermodynamic constraints on neural dimensions, firing rates, brain temperature and size. There have been suggestions that heat caused by cerebral metabolic...	6th May, 2009	Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, Division of Biology	J Comput Neurosci. 2009 Dec;27(3):415-36. Epub 2009 May 5. DOI Direct Link
Feedforward to the past: the relation between neuronal connectivity, amplification, and short-term memory. Two studies in this issue of Neuron challenge widely held assumptions...	31st March, 2009	Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of	Neuron. 2009 Feb 26;61(4):499-501. DOI Direct Link
A functional explanation for the effects of visual exposure on preference. Visual exposure to an object can modulate an observer's degree of...	29th January, 2009	Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, MC 139-74, California	Perception. 2008;37(10):1510-9.
The neural basis for combinatorial coding in a cortical population response. We have used a combination of theory and experiment to assess how...	24th January, 2009	Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, W. M. Keck Foundation	J Neurosci. 2008 Dec 10;28(50):13522-31. DOI Direct Link
Memory traces in dynamical systems. To perform nontrivial, real-time computations on a sensory input stream,...	6th January, 2009	Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of	Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Dec 2;105(48):18970-5. Epub 2008 Nov 19. DOI Direct Link
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