Future: Brain Sciences

Dr. William T. Newsome bridges the fields of neurophysiology and perceptual psychology.

Through his outstanding research, he has demonstrated the correlation between certain brain cells and the process of visual perception and how the brain interprets the signals arriving from the eye. If these links between nerve cell activity and perception can be clarified, researchers will be able to find the best ways of looking at the brain to determine normal and abnormal neural functioning.

Newsome has provided evidence that certain perceptions are caused by the stimulation of distinct circuits of neurons in the visual cortex. In addition to this, Newsome’s laboratories study the neural basis of psychological decision-making, a critical link between perception and action.

To address such issues, Newsome conducted simultaneous behavioral and physiological experiments in rhesus monkeys, trained to perform carefully selected visual discrimination tasks.

Newsome is an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine (U.S.). He received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 2002.

The 2004 Dan David Prize honors Dr. William T. Newsome in the field of Brain Sciences for his leading discoveries in the fields of neurophysiology and perceptual psychology.