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Mind Brain Lecture
2026 GUEST SPEAKER
"AI-derived Mechanisms of Human Vision"
Monday, March 30th, 4 pm
Staller Center Main Stage
Livestreamed at stonybrook.edu/live
James J. DiCarlo, MD, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. James J. DiCarlo is the Peter de Florez Professor of Systems and Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also director of the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence and investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Over the past decade, neuroscience, cognitive science and computer science (“AI”) converged to create specific, image-computable, deep neural network models intended to appropriately abstract, emulate and explain the mechanisms of primate core ventral visual processing, up to its deepest neural level, the inferior temporal cortex (IT). Because these leading neuroscientific emulator models — aka “digital twins” — are fully observable and machine-executable, they offer predictive and potential application power that our field’s prior conceptual models did not. Dr. DiCarlo's ongoing work is aimed at asking if current digital twin models might support non-invasive, beneficial brain modulation. In his talk, Dr. DiCarlo will describe a key result: we demonstrate that we can use a digital twin to design spatial patterns of light energy that, when “added” to the organism’s retinal input in the context of ongoing natural visual processing, results in precise, user-selectable, modulation of the pattern of a population of IT neurons. Because the IT visual neural populations are known to directly connect to and modulate downstream neural circuits (e.g. amygdala) that may underlie psychological affective states (e.g. mood and anxiety), this novel basic science may unlock a new, non-invasive application avenue of potential future human clinical benefit.