ESP Biography

GREG HALE, MIT grad student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Major: Neuroscience/Psychology

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: Not available.

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I grew up in rural New Jersey in a house behind a neighbor's buffalo farm. Growing up, I was fascinated by psychology and consciousness, and I decided that people must have some kind of 'spirit' in order to be alive. I went to college at Rutgers University, where I studied psychology and neuroscience, and there I got interested in how consciousness could emerge from a physical systems like brains.
I did research in several labs in college. First I worked with Louis Matzel, where we showed that individual mice who perform well on some learning tasks tend to perform well on others, too (the implication is that mice have a form of 'general intelligence'!). Then I went to a phamaceutical company to study schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease in mice and rats.
I graduated from Rutgers in 2006 and came to MIT, to work with Matt Wilson. In Matt's lab, I study the way space is represented in rats' brains. We have shown that 'place cells' (cells that are active when the rat is in a specific position), send signals in sequences as rats move along a given path, and that during sleep, those same paths are replayed in various regions of the brain.

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

C9958: Advanced Functional Programming in Splash 2015 (Nov. 21 - 22, 2015)

Oh sure, you could write a program that runs over all the elements of a list and does something, but that's not interesting. How about something that iterates over any data structure? Or a function that runs backwards? Maybe we'll even make the "printf" function type-safe. Monads and typeclasses will be among the easier things we cover in this class. This class will be taught in Haskell, but the concepts covered are more general.

S2444: Introduction to Neuroscience in HSSP Summer 2009 (Jul. 12, 2009)

The human brain is made of about ten billion neurons and more than one trillion neuron-to-neuron connections. Scientists can study the behavior of individual neurons and their connections like any other physical system. Yet they are only grazing the surface on how this remarkable network of interacting neurons can serve as the physical embodiment of our personalities, perceptions, memories, decisions, and habits. We invite you to come explore mysteries of the brain and the mind with us. In this course we will introduce you to what scientists know, and what scientists don't yet know, about the way the brain works. We will discuss current techniques in neuroscience research, and explore the field by dissecting sheep brains (optional activity).