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In January, because the Charles River was beginning to freeze over, Keith Murray and the opposite members of MIT’s males’s heavyweight crew staff took to erging on the indoor rowing machine. For 80 minutes at a time, Murray endured one of the vital grueling exercises of his school expertise. To distract himself from the ache, he would discuss along with his teammates, masking all the pieces from nice philosophical concepts to non-public espresso preferences.
For Murray, nearly any dialog is a chance to discover how folks suppose and why they suppose in sure methods. At the moment a senior double majoring in computation and cognition, and linguistics and philosophy, Murray tries to grasp the human expertise based mostly on data from all of those fields.
“I’m attempting to mix completely different approaches collectively to grasp the complexities of human cognition,” he says. “For instance, from a physiological perspective, the mind is simply billions of neurons firing suddenly, however this hardly scratches the floor of cognition.”
Murray grew up in Corydon, Indiana, the place he attended the Indiana Academy for Science, Arithmetic, and Humanities throughout his junior 12 months of highschool. He was uncovered to philosophy there, studying the concepts of Plato, Socrates, and Thomas Aquinas, to call just a few. When taking a look at faculties, Murray grew to become interested by MIT as a result of he wished to find out about human thought processes from completely different views. “Coming to MIT, I knew I wished to do one thing philosophical. However I wished to even be on the extra technical aspect of issues,” he says.
As soon as on campus, Murray instantly pursued a chance via the Undergraduate Analysis Alternative Program (UROP) within the Digital Humanities Lab. There he labored with language-processing expertise to investigate gendered language in varied novels, with the top objective of displaying the info for an internet viewers. He realized concerning the primary mathematical fashions used for analyzing and presenting knowledge on-line, to check the social implications of linguistic phrases and expressions.
Murray additionally joined the Concourse studying neighborhood, which introduced collectively completely different views from the humanities, sciences, and math in a weekly seminar. “I used to be uncovered to some glorious examples of how one can do interdisciplinary work,” he remembers.
In the summertime earlier than his sophomore 12 months, Murray took a place as a researcher within the Harnett Lab, the place as a substitute of working with novels, he was working with mice. Alongside postdoc Lucas Fisher, Murray skilled mice to do navigational duties utilizing digital actuality tools. His objective was to discover neural encoding in navigation, understanding why the mice behaved in sure methods after being proven sure stimuli on the screens. Spending time within the lab, Murray grew to become more and more interested by neuroscience and the organic elements behind human thought processes.
He sought out different neuroscience-related analysis experiences, which led him to discover a SuperUROP mission in MIT’s Laptop Science and Synthetic Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Working beneath Professor Nancy Lynch, he designed theoretical fashions of the retina utilizing machine studying. Murray was excited to use the methods he realized in 9.40 (Introduction to Neural Computation) to handle advanced neurological issues. Murray considers this considered one of his most difficult analysis experiences, because the expertise was solely on-line.
“It was in the course of the pandemic, so I needed to be taught so much alone; I couldn’t precisely do analysis in a lab. It was an enormous problem, however on the finish, I realized so much and ended up getting a publication out of it,” he displays.
This previous semester, Murray has labored within the lab of Professor Ila Fiete within the McGovern Institute for Mind Analysis, establishing deep-learning fashions of animals performing navigational duties. By way of this UROP, which builds on his closing mission from Fiete’s class 9.49 (Neural Circuits for Cognition), Murray has been working to include present theoretical fashions of the hippocampus to research the intersection between synthetic intelligence and neuroscience.
Reflecting on his different analysis experiences, Murray says they’ve proven him new methods to discover the human mind from a number of views, one thing he finds useful as he tries to grasp the complexity of human habits.
Exterior of his educational pursuits, Murray has continued to row with the crew staff, the place he walked on his first 12 months. He sees rowing as a strategy to construct up his power, each bodily and mentally. “After I’m doing my class work or I’m fascinated with initiatives, I’m utilizing the identical psychological toughness that I developed throughout rowing,” he says. “That’s one thing I realized at MIT, to domesticate the dedication you set towards one thing. It’s all the identical psychological toughness whether or not you apply it to bodily actions like rowing, or analysis initiatives.”
Trying forward, Murray hopes to pursue a PhD in neuroscience, trying to discover methods to include his love of philosophy and human thought into his cognitive analysis. “I believe there’s much more to do with neuroscience, particularly with synthetic intelligence. There are such a lot of new technological developments taking place proper now,” he says.
