Patrick Watson teaches Neuroscience and AI at Minerva. He helps robots cheat on science tests, and writes on love, amnesia, and radical pedagogy for cyborgs.
How to Get Smarter with Neuroscience
Writing on the weird world of thinking things: algorithms, animals, people, systems, and neural tissue.
Selected Work
Formal Analyses 2020
This semester I’m teaching Minerva’s Mathematics Cornerstone—Formal Analysis. This class introduces logic, statistics, Python coding, derivatives, and decision theory. It’s one of my favorite classes.
Sojourn
A micro-RPG published in the 9th Level Games 2020 Level 1 Anthology for Free RPG Day. Choose three meaningful symbols to bring with you on a long and dangerous journey.
Blockchain for Open Scientific Research
This is a patent describes how to check in statistical analyses to a blockchain to help prevent p-hacking and keep an auditable record of how scientists are using their data.
Reinforcement Learning 2020
Check out some of my favorite student projects from my 2020 senior tutorial on Reinforcement Learning!
Virtual Generation of Labeled Motion Data
A VR/AR patent on generating deep learning training data from people dancing in a VR point-cloud.
Predicting Transfer Learning for Images and Semantic Relations
This paper is about how to identify which previously trained computer vision model has the most in common with a new data set. This helps when new data sets are small.
Layered Stochastic Anonymization of Data
This patent describes how to train Deep learning on medical images while maintaining the privacy of the patients in the images.
Practical Data Science 2019
Check out some of my favorite student projects from my 2020 senior Data Science tutorial.
Network Neuroscience 2019
Check out one of my favorite student projects from my 2020 senior Network Neuroscience tutorial.
Human-level Multiple Choice Question Guessing Without Domain Knowledge
This is the paper in my bio! I used dirt-simple NLP to take a middle-school science exam. It didn’t know any science, just multiple-choice guessing techniques. It did almost as well as the worlds best science exam bot, and better than middle schoolers.
Nymph
A creative nonfiction essay about growing up in Missoula, Montana published in the Camas “Rivers” issue.
Enhanced Learning through Multimodal Training
A huge cognitive training project involving exercise, meditation, brain stimulation, and video game training. People learned a little better, but you probably shouldn’t be rushing out to buy a brain stimulator.
Underlying Sources of Cognitive-Anatomical Variation in Multi-Modal Neuroimaging and Cognitive Testing
I did stats to identify how people’s brains actually differ anatomically. There’s a number of different interesting developmental contributions to the final shape of your brain!
The Half-Sacred Disease
A creative nonfiction essay co-written with Natalie Mesnard, published in the Kenyon Review Online Poetics of Science issue.
The Role of the Hippocampus in Flexible Cognition and Social Behavior
My most cited paper, a review co-written with Dr. Rachel D. Rubin.
Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation
A book co-written with Thomas J. Anastasio, Kristen Ann Ehrenberger and Wenyi Zhang published by MIT Press in 2012.