Professor Sanjay Manohar
About
Professor Sanjay Manohar is a computational neurologist at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. He works at the intersection of biological brain science and artificial neural networks that simulate thought.
His recent work provides computational accounts of motivation, memory, language and social cognition at the level of neurons. The models emphasise explaining human behaviour, neural representations, and how they go wrong in neurological and psychiatric diseases.
Professor Manohar has written a book on scientific computer programming (OUP, in production) and a children’s book about the brain (Adventures of the Brain, 2024).
He received the 2020 Willis Intermediate Career Research Prize, and has experience in industry consulting for AI companies and in clinical medicine with 10 years as an NHS consultant in dementia.
Expertise
- Neuroscience
- AI
- Brain
- Neural networks
- Motivation
- Social cognition
- Neurology
- Machine learning
Selected publications
- 'Older adults are more susceptible to impulsive social influence', PsyRxiv (2024)
- 'Machine learning approach for ambient-light-corrected parameters and the Pupil Reactivity score in smartphone-based pupillometry', Frontiers in Neurology (2024)
- 'Dopamine promotes instrumental motivation, but reduces reward-related vigour', eLife (2020)
- 'Neural mechanisms of attending to items in working memory', Neurosci biobeh rev (2019)
- Distinct motivational effects of contingent and non- contingent rewards (2017)
- Reward sensitivity deficits modulated by dopamine are associated with apathy in Parkinson's disease (2016)
- Human ventromedial prefrontal lesions alter incentivisation by reward (2016)
- 'Reward pays the cost of noise reduction in motor and cognitive control', Curr Biol (2015)
Media experience
Professor Sanjay Manohar has media experience including a recent guest appearance as a panellist on BBC Radio 4.
Languages
English