Read Montague

Brainstormer, Idea generator, Parent, Scientist

Read Montague is the founding director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. He holds a professorship in the Department of Physics at Virginia Tech. He is also the recipient of a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship and is a professor in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. Montague’s work centers broadly on human social cognition, decision-making, and willful choice with a goal of understanding the detailed underlying neurobiology of these functions in health and disease. Montague’s work particularly focuses on a computational neuroscience approach – the connection between physical mechanisms present in real neural tissue and the computational functions that these mechanisms embody. His laboratory uses theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to these issues. In particular, the group now employs novel approaches to functional neuroimaging of groups of interacting humans, new biomarkers for mental disease, spectroscopy, real-time voltammetry, and computational simulations. Montague also directs the Roanoke Brain Study (RBS), a project aimed at understanding decision-making through the lifespan and its relationship to brain development, function, and disease.

Understanding how we understand others. How this capacity develops and breaks down in mental disease. Discovering mathematical principles of both.

It's trivially easy to fool yourself. Having a really new idea, one that attracts no enthusiasm from others. This is hard and elusive.