ABOVE: © Jane Shauck Photography
When Nick Turk-Browne was a teenager, he read V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain, a gift from his father, and was fascinated by the book’s message that “our experience of the world is constructed by our brain,” he says. “It blew my mind. It got me very much interested in this question of how do we experience the world, and how does our brain construct that experience?”
This fascination has been a guiding force for Turk-Browne, now a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Yale University. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 2004, he moved to Yale’s psychology department for a PhD, and “was a superstar from the beginning,” recalls psychologist Marvin Chun, one of Turk-Browne’s advisors. “He absolutely is one of the most productive and creative PhD students I’ve mentored in my entire career.”
In grad school, Turk-Browne focused on how the brain ...
