Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study

This conference on "The Mind, the Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems" brought together an unusual group of scientists including two Nobel laureates (Murray Gell-Mann and Herbert A. Simon) and produced new approaches to this frontier in addition to a book published by SFI.

The Krasnow Institute is home to a scientific community of 100 (many of them PhDs) most of whom are also either faculty or trainees at George Mason University.

By bringing together faculty expertise in these multiple disciplines, the Center provides opportunities for cross-training in neuroscience, psychology, and engineering, both at the graduate and postdoctoral levels.

CN3 researchers investigate the relationship between brain structure, activity, and function from the subcellular to the network level, with a specific focus on the biophysical and biochemical mechanisms of learning and memory.

In the long term, we seek to create large-scale, biologically plausible network models of entire portions of the mammalian brain, such as the hippocampus, to understand the neural circuits and cellular events underlying the expression, storage, and retrieval of associative memory.

Conflict and cooperation, emergent economic systems, network dynamics, and long-term societal adaptation to environmental change are among the current lines of investigation.