David Redish is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the J.B. Johnston Land Grant Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He is a poet, playwright, and scientist. His work addresses questions of decision-making and the implications of that understanding on the self and what it means to be human.
He was trained in computational, theoretical and experimental neuroscience and has contributed to our understanding of decision-making and cognition. His work spans questions of decision-making from the theoretical to the experimental to the clinical translations. In particular, Redish has contributed to our understanding of imagination and provided direct observations of cognitive processes such as planning and regret in nonhuman animals. His work has contributed to scientists’ understanding of how neural circuits process information to provide an animal with different decision-making systems, and how interactions between that information process and the external world can create difficulties, leading to psychiatric conditions.
Redish has written three books, including “Beyond the Cognitive Map: From Place Cells to Episodic Memory” (MIT Press, 1999) and “The Mind Within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong” (Oxford University Press, 2013). His most recent book is “Changing How We Choose: The New Science of Morality” (MIT Press, 2022), which addresses how social codes interact with our decision systems to create working societies. He also co-edited the book “Computational Psychiatry: New Perspectives on Mental Illness” (MIT Press, 2016) with Joshua Gordon.
