User:Urbourbo/sandbox/moshebar

Most recent edit request to be found on the subject's talk page

Moshe Bar
Born	Dimona
Nationality	Israeli
Education	Ben-Gurion University, The Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Southern California and Harvard University
Occupation(s)	Cognitive neuroscientist, professor, author

Moshe Bar is an Israeli cognitive neuroscientist. He is a professor at Bar-Ilan University and the Chief Scientific Officer at the Israeli mental health startup Hedonia. He was previously head of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University and before that director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Bar’s research focuses on various aspects of brain function, including memory, foresight, mental load, mind-wandering, mood, and creativity. Bar has also contributed to the development of conscious cities, which takes into account the effects of urban design on mental health.

He has published over 80 research articles, contributed several book chapters, and edited two scientific books. In 2022 he published the popular science book Mindwandering: How Your Constant Mental Drift Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity. He received the 2012 Donald O. Hebb Award from the International Neural Network Society, and he is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Education and professional history

Bar completed a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Ben-Gurion University in 1988. Thereafter, in parallel with military service in the Israeli Air Force, he completed a master’s degree in computer science and applied mathematics in 1994 at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he worked under the supervision of Shimon Ullman.

He pursued doctoral studies in psychology at the University of Southern California, under the supervision of Irving Biederman, earning a Ph.D. in 1998. He continued with postdoctoral research at the psychology department at Harvard University, collaborating with Daniel Schacter and Roger Tootel. Since 2000, Bar held a joint faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory before returning to Israel in 2011 to head the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University.

Thereafter, Bar co-founded the Israeli mental health startup company Hedonia, translating the research-based Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP) method, based on his two decades of research on the topic of mood, depression and thought, into mobile games.

Research and scientific contributions

Bar has made significant contributions to various areas of study, including visual recognition, predictions in the brain, mental simulations and mindwandering, mood and depression, and aesthetic preference. His work challenges traditional views and sheds light on the complex mechanisms underlying these cognitive processes.

Visual recognition

Branching off of his graduate training with professors Shimon Ullman and Irving Biederman, Bar has been using behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI and MEG) methods to reveal critical aspects of how the brain recognizes objects, scenes, and context in the world around us. This research simultaneously challenged two long-held views. First, together with others, he has argued and shown that the propagation of visual analysis in the cortex is not strictly “bottom-up,” as has been believed for decades, but rather that perception is a result of internally driven top-down processes as much as it is of incoming bottom-up sensory information. As such, his work shows that memory and the prefrontal cortex are active players in visual perception. Bar first proposed this notion in a Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience article 2003, and provided the first significant empirical support in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper 2006.

A second debate and new domain of research that was steered by Bar’s ideas and studies involves the evasive distinction between spatial and associative processing. Part of the contribution of his research was to characterize the cortical network that mediates the processing of contextual associations, introduced broadly in a Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper 2004. This newly discovered network included a site in the medial temporal cortex that has traditionally been considered as mediating the representation and processing of spatial information. His findings offer an alternative interpretation for those previous reports, suggesting that the role of this hippocampal region may more generally involve mediating associative information rather than merely space-related information.

Predictions in the brain

Following his research on the role of associations in cognition, Bar’s research has demonstrated the brain's predictive and proactive capabilities. His theoretical and empirical work, focusing on how memory is utilized to generate future predictions, has provided a fresh perspective on cognition and has been a significant part of cognitive neuroscience discourse. Bar integrated the various views on predictions in a special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society 2009, and then expanded in the book Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future edited by Bar for Oxford Press 2011.

Mental simulations and mindwandering

Bar’s research also provides insight into the human tendency for mental simulations and mindwandering. As suggested by his work, humans use their experiences, stored in memory, to simulate new, imagined experiences, can later be used as predictive scripts that guide our cognition, decisions and action. This concept was first introduced to a broader audience in his 2016 New York Times piece 'Think Less, Think Better', and was later expanded in his book Mindwandering in 2022.

Mood and depression

During his time in the US, Bar’s research evolved to include clinical questions, particularly pertaining to psychiatric disorders such as major depression. He started with a theoretical paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2009 that presented a novel synthesis of findings from psychiatry, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, which gave rise to an overarching hypothesis linking mood with thinking patterns and associative processing. The crux of this hypothesis is that a thinking pattern that involves a broad associative scope can elicit positive mood, while a narrow and ruminative thinking pattern can evoke negative mood.

Through collaborations first with the department of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and since his return to Israel with psychiatric institutions there, this theory has been tested and supported and later implemented as a therapeutic tool, later known as Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP).

The behavioral and neuroimaging publications that stemmed from these ideas attracted attention with their global explanatory power and their potential for therapeutic alleviation of symptoms of depression. Bar’s approach, now being employed in healthy and clinical populations, is to train participants with broad associative thinking in a way that will restore their deficient cortical infrastructure and critically diminish ruminative thinking.

Aesthetic preference

Bar's research on aesthetics extends into the domains of design, architecture, and public health. His studies on streetscapes, for example, have contributed to design criteria that encourage physical activity. Bar's exploration of the effect of contour on subjective preference and emotion, such as smooth versus sharp, has influenced designers and architects alike.

Select bibliography

Scientific publications

• Baror, S.; Bar, M. (2016). "Associative Activation and Its Relation to Exploration and Exploitation in the Brain". Psychological Science.
• Axelrod, V.; Rees, G.; Lavidor, M.; Bar, M. (2015). "Increasing propensity to mind-wander with transcranial direct current stimulation". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112 (11): 3314–9.
• Aminoff, E.M.; Kveraga, K.; Bar, M. (2013). "The role of the parahippocampal cortex in cognition". Trends in Cognitive Science. 17 (8): 379–90.
• Bar, M. (2011). "Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future". Oxford: Oxford University Press. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• Bar, M. (2009). "A cognitive neuroscience hypothesis of mood and depression". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 13 (11): 456–463.
• Kveraga, K.; Boshyan, J.; Bar, M. (2007). "Magnocellular projections as the trigger of top-down facilitation in recognition". Journal of Neuroscience. 27: 13232–13240.
• Bar, M. (2007). "The Proactive Brain: Using analogies and associations to generate predictions". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 11 (7): 280–289.
• Bar, M.; Kassam, K.; Ghuman, A.; Boshyan, J.; Dale, A.; Hämäläinen, M.; Marinkovic, K.; Schacter, D.L.; Rosen, B.; Halgren, E. (2006). "Top-down facilitation of visual recognition". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 103 (2): 449–54.
• Bar, M. (2004). "Visual objects in context". Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 5: 617–629.
• Bar, M. (2003). "A cortical mechanism for triggering top-down facilitation in visual object recognition". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 15: 600–609.
• Bar, M.; Aminoff, E. (2003). "Cortical analysis of visual context". Neuron. 38: 347–358.

Books and book chapters

• Bar, M. (2022). Mindwandering: How Your Constant Mental Drift Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity. Hachette Go.
• Kveraga, K.; Bar, M. (2014). Scene Vision: Making Sense of What We See. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Bar, M.; Bubic, A. (2013). "Top-down Effects in Visual Perception". In Ochsner, K.; Kosslyn, S. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience. The Oxford Handbook Series. Oxford University Press. pp. 60–73.
• Bar, M., ed. (2011). Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Bar, M. (2011). "Predictions: A universal principle in the operation of the human brain (Introduction)". Predictions in the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. v–vii.
  • Bar, M. (2011). "The proactive brain". Predictions in the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 13–26.
  • Barrett, L.F.; Bar, M. (2011). "See it with feeling: Affective predictions during object perception". Predictions in the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 107–121.
• Bar, M. (2005). "Top-down facilitation of visual object recognition". In Itti, L.; Rees, G.; Tsotsos, J. (eds.). Neurobiology of Attention. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Academic Press. pp. 140–5.

Articles to the public

• Bar, Moshe (2023-04-14). "How a Small Step Out of Your Comfort Zone Can Trigger Growth and Creativity". Haaretz.
• Bar, Moshe (2022-12-02). "How the Desire for Certainty Is Preventing You From Being Happy". Haaretz.
• Bar, Moshe (2022-02-09). "How to Finally Stop Obsessing About That Thing That Keeps You up at Night". Literary Hub.
• Bar, Moshe (June 2016). "Think Less, Think Better". The New York Times.
• Palti, Itai; Bar, Moshe (August 2015). "A Manifesto for Conscious Cities: Should Streets Be Sensitive to Our Mental Needs?". The Guardian.
• Bar, Moshe (February 2014). "Use Your Delusion" (PDF). Boston Globe.
• Bar, Moshe (January 2012). "Why New Year's Resolutions Are So Hard to Keep". Boston Globe.
• Bar, Moshe (May 2011). "Human Memory: What Did You Do Last Sunday?". Los Angeles Times.

Further reading

• Love, Shayla (2018-08-08). "What Weed and Cocaine Do to Memory". Vice.
• Sapolsky, Robert (June 2015). "The Benefits of Mind-Wandering". The Wall Street Journal.
• Shani, Ayelett (June 2013). "Why Being Anxious Will Help You Cope with Life". Haaretz.
• Clark, Andy (January 2012). "Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?". The New York Times.
• Tylevich, Katya. "Mind Games: Modern Design Memes Touch Our Brains, but Do We Want to Know How?" (PDF). Frame. September/October 2011 (82).
• Reistad-Long, Sara (April 2010). "Pie in the Sky: Broad Thinking Brings Broad Grins". Psychology Today.
• Lauren Lee, Jenny (August 2009). "What Do You See? Emotion May Help the Visual System Jump the Gun to Predict What the Brain Will See". Science News Magazine.
• Anthes, Emily (April 2009). "How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood". Scientific American.
• Humiston, Courtney (January 2008). "The Children of Boomers Are Legion, and They Are Making Their Own Mark". Media Magazine.

External links

• Personal website
• Publications