These questions are important not just because they seem "cool" but rather because they will enable us to build artificial systems that can be sentient. Accordingly, my professional goal is to find principles that we need to know for building sentient machines and transfer information from biological brains into those machines.
I received my pharmacy doctorate from SUMS in Iran and I have been trying to address these questions through different methods such as psychophysics, Electrophysiology, animal behavior, and theoretical analysis. As a graduate student, I build neural networks (PAN Lab, IU Psychology) and test the predictions of these models through large-scale in vitro neural recording (Beggs Lab, IU Neuroscience).

Specifically, I am building novel hierarchical echo state networks  to predict spatiotemporal signals. These models are inspired by predictive coding theory and canonical microcircuits in the neocortex.