Good L.A. Weekly profile of Caltech professor of computation and neural systems, Christoff Koch.
As we sit in Koch’s office, he offers to reveal to me a small portion of my own zombie self. For a moment I am seized by visions of a nasty chemical cocktail, my mind turned to mush, my body rendered into a helpless puppet, but instead of reaching for a syringe, Koch turns on his computer. He brings up an image of an airplane on a runway and tells me that when he presses a key some major feature will disappear. I am to tell him what it is. Koch jabs at the keyboard and the image flashes momentarily, but as far as I can tell everything remains the same. He does it again, several times, but still I see nothing different. Finally Koch tells me it is the aircraft’s fuselage that disappears. Once it’s pointed out, the omission becomes glaringly evident.