Thinking Outside the Brain

When Carnegie Mellon University alumnus and Director of Neuroscience Research at DeepMind Matthew Botvinick (DC 2001) walked into the first biology class of his life as a teenager, he was confident all the questions in his brain — about his brain — were about to be answered.

“When I got the textbook, the first thing I did was turn to the brain section. I thought finally I was going to learn something about the brain,” Matthew recalls. “Both because it was the 1980s and this was a junior high textbook, there wasn’t much in there. I thought there’s nothing here about the mind, attention, memory, personality or awareness.”

Unable to satisfy his interest about neural networks, he pivoted toward a career in medicine. During medical school at Cornell University, he told the physician advising his psychiatry rotation his conclusions learned in that first biology class.

In response, he handed Matthew a two-volume set of books — “Parallel Distributed Processing: Psychological and biological models” by then CMU University Professor Jay McClelland. 

“I was blown away. I stayed up all night reading them,” Matthew remembers. “It was an exciting discovery that I could actually pursue those things that I’d been interested in my whole life and here were a set of researchers who were doing that in a scientifically meaningful way.”

That sleepless night put him on his path through a doctorate in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences earned simultaneously with a medical residency in psychiatry, then professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University and, eventually, to Google partner DeepMind in London.

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