Much of our daily life requires us to make inferences about the world around us. As you think about which direction your tennis opponent will hit the ball, or try to figure out why your child is crying, your brain is searching for answers about possibilities that are not directly accessible through sensory experiences. MIT Associate Professor Mehrdad Jazayeri has devoted most of his career to exploring how the brain creates internal representations, or models, of the external world to make intelligent inferences about hidden states of the world. “The…
