Science on Screen: Theater of Thought
Synopsis:
Werner Herzog sets his sights on yet another mysterious landscape – the human brain – for clues as to why a hunk of tissue can produce profound thoughts and feelings while considering the philosophical, ethical, and social implications of fast-advancing neural technology.
6:30: Pre-Film Discussion with Dr. Shreya Saxena
Dr. Saxena will lead a talk on the building blocks of intelligence, how thoughts are constructed, and how organic thought compares to artificial intelligence.
About Dr. Shreya Saxena
Dr. Saxena is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department and a core member of the Center for Neurocomputation and Machine Intelligence at the Wu Tsai Institute. She joined Yale in 2023 from the University of Florida’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Before this, Saxena was a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. She did her PhD in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, studying the closed-loop control of fast movements from a control theory perspective.
Saxena received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
