Paul Richard Adams, FRS is a neuroscientist currently serving as a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook University in New York.
[1] He graduated from London University with a PhD, and did postdoctoral work with Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute.
With others, he pioneered the concepts of open channel block[3][4] and neuromodulation,[5][6] which now play central roles in neuroscience.
He is now working on a theory about the neocortex, centering on the idea that sophisticated learning requires extremely specific synaptic strength adjustments.
[7][8] He (working with Kingsley Cox) has proposed that this problem could be overcome, in the neocortex, by a process called “Hebbian proofreading”, using some neurons (e.g. in layer 6) as detectors of correlated activity between other neurons (e.g. in thalamus and upper layers), which then edit recent plasticity at the corresponding thalamocortical synapses.