Patrick Donald Watson earned a PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Illinois. His scientific publications have appeared in Hippocampus, Neurocomputation, and Frontiers in Neuroscience. He is also one of the authors of Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation (MIT Press, 2012), an interdisciplinary work exploring links between the neuroscience of memory and the preservation of historical information by social systems. He currently holds a dual appointment as a research scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Center and as an Assistant Professor at the Minerva Institute.
Fall 2016: The Poetics of Science
The Half-Sacred Disease
I remember disjointed details. It was winter, and we’d agreed to meet at a pub called the Blind Pig. I was wearing a tweed coat that felt like armor and wondering why I’d decided to go out.