Christof Koch
President and Chief Scientific Officer
The Allen Institute for Brain Science, Seattle, United States
Profile – Christof Koch (b. 1956)
Known for his multicoloured clothes and hair, Christof Koch was born in Kansas, but grew up in the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, and Morocco. He originally studied physics, and worked at MIT before moving to the California Institute of Technology to run his own K-Lab. He is now also Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, where he aims to create three-dimensional atlases of mouse and human brains that contain anatomical and genomic data, because ‘to understand consciousness, we need to be able to image the activity of millions of individual neurons at the same time’. Koch collaborated with Nobel laureate Francis Crick from the late 1980s until Crick’s death in 2004, writing numerous papers and developing a ‘framework for consciousness’ that guided their search for the neural correlates of consciousness. He first worried about consciousness when he was 18 and in pain: it’s just action potentials and ions sloshing about – why should they hurt? Asked how his studies of consciousness have affected his life, Christof said ‘I’ve stopped eating the flesh of most animals’. He finds ecstasy running and climbing mountains and once took a solitary mountain hike to convince himself that there really is freedom of action.
More biographical information
Brief bio at Allen Institute
The spiritual, reductionist consciousness of Christof Koch. Interview with Steve Paulson on Nautilus, April 2017
What it will take for computers to be conscious. Interview for MIT Technology Review, October 2014
A neuroscientist’s radical theory of how networks become conscious. Interview for Wired, November 2013
Detailed personal website
Publications
Koch’s books with his comments (under ‘my books and papers’ tab)
Regular column in Scientific American
Citations on Google Scholar
Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Crick, F., and Koch, C. (1990). Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness. Seminars in the Neurosciences, 2, 263–275. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Crick, F., and Koch, C. (1998). Consciousness and neuroscience. Cerebral Cortex, 8, 97–107. Also reprinted in B. J. Baars, W. P. Banks, and J. B. Newman (Eds), Essential sources in the scientific study of consciousness (pp. 35–53). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Direct PDF download (final version) here. Google Books preview here.
Crick, F., and Koch, C. (2000). The unconscious homunculus. Neuropsychoanalysis, 2(1), 3–11. Also reprinted in T. Metzinger (Ed.), Neural correlates of consciousness: Empirical and conceptual questions (pp. 103–110). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paywall-protected journal record here. Google Books preview here.
Crick, F., and Koch, C. (2003). A framework for consciousness. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 119–126. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Koch, C. (2004). The quest for consciousness: A neurobiological approach. Englewood, CO: Roberts & Co. Amazon preview here.
Koch, C., and Hepp, K. (2006). Quantum mechanics in the brain. Nature, 440, 611–612. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (preprint) here.
Koch, C., Massimini, M., Boly, M., and Tononi, G. (2016). Neural correlates of consciousness: Progress and problems. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17, 307–321. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Koch, C., and Tsuchiya, N. (2007). Attention and consciousness: Two distinct brain processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(1), 16–22. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (preprint) here.
Tononi, G., and Koch, C. (2008). The neural correlates of consciousness: An update. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 239–261. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Tononi, G., and Koch, C. (2015). Consciousness: Here, there and everywhere? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 370(1668), 20140167. Open-access full text here.
Video
Contributions to Closer to Truth
Consciousness in biological and artificial brains. Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, July 2015
Breaking the wall to understanding consciousness. Lecture on his work at the Allen Institute, Falling Walls, Berlin, November 2014
The scientific pursuit of consciousness. TEDx talk, Rainier, January 2014
Consciousness: One of the last great mysteries of life. Short lecture on which systems are conscious, the Guardian, October 2010
Koch with the Dalai Lama and monks, text and video
Audio
Discussing consciousness and near-death experiences on Skeptiko, August 2017