Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute – Change perception, change your world | Chen Institute

In 2019, Caltech researchers demonstrated a new method to use light to control active matter. Back then, the team focused on active matter in the form of millimeter-sized protein filaments. Now, powered by insights from computational theory, the team, has developed the first “programming language” for active matter, enabling researchers to conduct precise operations in […]

Chen Scholar, Nathan P. Staff, M.D., Ph.D. a Professor of Neurology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, and colleagues recently published research in the journal Brain which focuses on improving the diagnosis and prognosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a severe motor neuron disease, using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. ALS is […]

Caltech’s John O’Doherty is on a quest to understand how human brains make decisions: how they gather evidence about their environments and their own impacts on these environments and then apply this information to their decision-making. Researchers in his lab examine subjects to find how brains learn from positive and negative feedback, and why some […]

Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies’ sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a trillion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes. This new study raises major new avenues of exploration for […]

Brain–machine interfaces (BMIs) have enabled a handful of test participants who are unable to move or speak to communicate simply by thinking. An implanted device picks up the neural signals associated with a particular thought and converts them into control signals that are fed into a computer or a robotic limb. For example, a quadriplegic […]

The autonomic nervous system orchestrates the functions of internal organs such as the heart and gut, serving as a connection between the brain and the rest of the body. It is classified in two divisions—the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, often described as the body’s accelerator and brake, respectively. For example, the sympathetic nervous system activates […]