Shubhankar Saha

Trained in the fundamental aspects of biology in my bachelors, I turned towards the fascinating world of neuroscience to understand how our brain makes sense of the visual world around us. By peeping inside the primate-brain through the scope of multi-electrode recording and using cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques and carefully-crafted human behavioral experiments, I aspire to find the rules that govern our visual intelligence. 

Below are few of the problems that my brain solves with ease but does not tell me how it does so!

• How do we predict unfolding of physical events that we regularly see around us? For example, how do we know that when a big object hits a small object, the smaller object will recoil more - even before the event has actually happened!

• How do we see a straight line (pattern) on a paper (surface) even after the paper has been crumpled? Does our brain follow specific rules to process the straight line while discounting for the paper? If so, what happens to this rule if a pattern is disjointed from its surface?

• How do we see shapes forming out of motion? For example, in the displays for "point-light-walkers", event though there are only few dots that are moving on the screen, we have no problem inferring shape of a person through this motion. How such information gets encoded in our brain?

I am presently a PMRF scholar, trying to find answers to some of these questions in Indian Institute of Science (IISc), with my PhD advisor Dr. SP Arun. I am presently working in the Primate Research Facility of IISc with Bonnet macaques to find neural correlates of solving these high-level cognitive problems.