Academic Appointments
- Professor of Neuroscience

The evolution of sophisticated brains has freed us from the immediacy of sensation and action by giving us the capacity for flexible decision-making. The evidence we obtain through our senses (or from memory) need not precipitate an immediate, reflexive response. Instead our decisions are deliberative and provisional, contingent on other sources of information, long-term goals, and values. I believe the principles of brain function that underlie simple forms of reasoning and decision-making are also the building blocks of human cognition.
Brain circuits support integration of evidence from diverse sources (for example, different senses and memory), assign more or less weight to cues that differ in their reliability, calculate expected costs and benefits associated with anticipated outcomes, process elapsed time to meet a deadline or to assess temporal cost, and implement rules (such as deciding on what to decide upon) and policies (balancing accuracy against speed).
Read more at http://www.beinghuman.org/article/decisions-window-cognition
Departments and Divisions
- Department of Neuroscience
Education and Training
- PhD, 1985 Neurobiology, University of California, Berkeley
- MD, 1988 medicine, Brown University School of Medicine, Providence, RI
- Residency: 1992 Stanford Medical School
Links
Lab Locations
Jerome L. Greene Science Center
3227 Broadway
Quad 5A
New York, NY 10027- Phone:
- (212) 305-9941
- Email:
- shadlen@columbia.edu
Research Interests
- Cognitive/Systems Neuroscience
- Synapses and Circuits
NIH Grants
FLEXIBLE ROUTING OF INFORMATION THROUGH SPECIALIZED NETWORKS IN THE BRAIN (Private)
Jul 1 2016 - Jun 30 2019
SIMONS SOCIETY OF FELLOWS - JUNIOR FELLOW (Private)
Jul 1 2016 - Jun 30 2019
MECHANISMS OF VISUAL PERCEPTION (Federal Gov)
May 1 1996 - Feb 28 2019
MECHANISMS OF VISUAL PERCEPTION (Federal Gov)
May 1 1996 - Feb 28 2018
MECHANISMS OF VISUAL PERCEPTION (Federal Gov)
May 1 1996 - Feb 28 2018
CHEMOGENETIC MANIPULATION OF PERSISTENT ACTIVITY IN PRIMATE ASSOCIATION CORTEX (Private)
Jan 15 2016 - Jan 14 2018
DECIDING AND REVISING: A UNIFYING FRAMEWORK FOR DECISION MAKING AND MOTOR CONTROL (Private)
Dec 1 2012 - Nov 30 2014