Robert Desimone

Photo courtesy Kent Dayton

• Director, McGovern Institute
  Doris and Don Berkey Professor, Dept of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
  
• Publications

• phone: 617-324-0639
• fax: 617-452-4119
• MIT address: 46-3160
• email: desimone@mit.edu

Meet Bob Desimone

Attending to important matters
Robert Desimone studies the brain mechanisms that allow us to focus our attention on a specific task while filtering out irrelevant distractions. Our brains are constantly bombarded with sensory information. The ability to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant distractions is a critical skill, one that is impaired in many brain disorders. By studying the visual system of humans and animals, Desimone has shown that when we attend to something specific, neurons in certain brain regions fire in unison -- like a chorus rising above the noise -- allowing the relevant information to be ‘heard’ more efficiently by other regions of the brain.
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Biography
Robert Desimone is director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Prior to joining the McGovern Institute in 2004, he was director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Mental Health, the largest mental health research center in the world. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of numerous awards, including the Troland Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Golden Brain Award of the Minerva Foundation.