Christof Koch (/kɒx/ KOKH;[1] born November 13, 1956) is an American cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness.

He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica,[2] that funds research meant to alleviate suffering, anxiety and other forms of distress in all people.

Koch worked for four years at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT before joining, in 1986, the newly started Computation and Neural Systems PhD program at the California Institute of Technology.

He and his student Nao Tsuchiya invented continuous flash suppression,[13] an efficient psychophysical masking technique for rendering images invisible for many seconds.

but does not include "a bunch of disconnected neurons in a dish, a heap of sand, a galaxy of stars or a black hole,"[6] and by providing an analytical and empirically accessible framework for understanding experience and its mechanistic origins.

In early 2011,[21] Koch became the chief scientist and the president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, leading their ten-year project concerning high-throughput large-scale cortical coding.

The mission is to understand the computations that lead from photons to behavior by observing and modeling the physical transformations of signals in the visual brain of behaving mice.

[23] The first eight years of this ten-year endeavor to build brain observatories were funded by a donation more than $500 million[24] by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen.