Akhilesh Tayade

Akhilesh is a B.Tech-M.Tech Dual Degree student in the BSBE department at IIT Kanpur. As much as he longs to understand brains and minds, he is intrigued by the very existence of biological life on our planet. This fascination drives him to understand how molecules, cells, and circuits give rise to neural systems that allow organisms to adapt to their environments. He has been working on a project to understand how exploit/explore decisions made by humans in a patch-foraging task are affected by their personality and the social context in which they reside. Akhilesh was selected for the CAMP (Computational Approaches to Memory and Plasticity) 2022 Summer School organized at NCBS, Bangalore. “One of the fascinating ideas in the school I learned was the idea of degeneracy in biological systems. I am still trying to understand how it relates to the ideas in the paper ‘More is different’ by PW Anderson, which was also introduced to me in the CAMP," says Akhilesh.