Dr. Uri Maoz
- Education:
- The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bachelor of Science
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ph.D.
Biography
You experience it to be within your power to stop reading this paragraph. Apparently, you freely decided to continue. Perhaps you are curious how it will unfold. But you strongly sense that you could have done otherwise; you could have stopped reading (and you still can). However, from what we know about the laws of nature, it is not clear how the brain could control a neural process that would result in different outcomes when starting from the same brain state. It is also unclear how your interest in the contents of this paragraph led to the neural process that culminated in you reading it.
Dr. Uri Maoz, who joined Chapman University in 2017 as an Assistant Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Crean College and at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences, investigates these and similar topics. His research lies at the intersection of volition, decision-making, and moral choice. He uses a combination of empirical techniques (e.g., EEG, intracranial recordings, behavioral studies) and theoretical modeling to develop a computational account of volition, with an emphasis on the decision-making processes that lead to voluntary action and on the role of consciousness in such processes. In particular, he uses machine-learning to carry out online, real-time, closed-loop analysis of neural data, as it is recorded. He is further interested in the legal, ethical, conceptual, and economic implications of this work.
Dr. Maoz earned a B.Sc. in computer science and general humanistic studies and a Ph.D. in neural computation from the Hebrew University. As part of his graduate studies he was a visiting student in the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Collège de France. He was then a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Later, he was a researcher at the Department of Neurosurgery at UCLA and then faculty at the Department of Psychology there. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Anesthesiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine and at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He is also a Visiting Associate in Biology and Bioengineering at Caltech.
Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences
Recent Creative, Scholarly Work and Publications
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Kreiman G, Liljenström H, Schurger A, Maoz U. (2022) How can computational models help us understand free will? In Maoz U & Sinnott-Armstrong W (Eds.). Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation. Oxford University Press
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Lee SJ, Wong SM, Maoz U, Hallett M. (2022) How can we determine the precise timing of mental events related to action? In Maoz U & Sinnott-Armstrong W (Eds.). Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation. Oxford University Press.
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Hopkins A, Mudrik L, Maoz U. (2022) How does lacking consensus about the neural basis of consciousness and volition affect theorizing about conscious volition? In Maoz U & Sinnott-Armstrong W (Eds.). Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation. Oxford University Press.
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Gavenas J, Hallett M, Maoz U. (2022) Which neural mechanisms could enable conscious control of action? In Maoz U & Sinnott-Armstrong W (Eds.). Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation. Oxford University Press
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Hopkins A & Maoz U. (2022) What is known about the neural correlates of beliefs and desires that inform human choices? In Maoz U & Sinnott-Armstrong W (Eds.). Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation. Oxford University Press
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Bold J, Mudrik L, Maoz U. (2022) How are arbitrary and deliberate decisions similar and different? In Maoz U & Sinnott-Armstrong W (Eds.). Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation. Oxford University Press.
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Maoz U & Sinnott-Armstrong W (Eds.), Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation: Oxford University Press. 2022
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Liang D, Frederick D, Lledo E, Rosenfield N, Berardi V, Linstead E, Maoz U. (2022) Examining the Utility of Nonlinear versus Linear Regression for Predicting Body Image Outcomes: Results from The U.S. National Body Project I. Body Image 41, 32-45
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Mudrik L, Gur Arie I, Amir Y, Shir Y, Hieronymi P, Maoz U, O'Connor T, Schurger A, Vargas M, Vierkant T, Sinnott-Armstrong W, Roskies A. (2022) Free will without consciousness? Trends in Cognitive Science (TiCS). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.03.005
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Gavenas J, Hieronymi P, Maoz U. (2022) Diverging lay intuitions about concepts related to free will in arbitrary and deliberate decisions. Consciousness and Cognition 106,103434
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Omura Y, Kipke J, Salavatian S, Afyouni A, Wooten C, Herkenham R, Maoz U, Lashgari E, Dale E, Howard-Quijano K, Mahajan, A. (2021) Neuraxial Bupivacaine Reduces Ventricular Arrhythmias during Myocardial Ischemia by Suppressing the Neuronal Activity and Interactions in the Dorsal Horn and Intermediolateral Nucleus of Spinal Cord. Anesthesiology. 134: 405–420
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Lashgari E, Maoz, U. (2021) Dimensionality reduction for classification of object weight from electromyography. PLoS ONE 16(8): e0255926
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Lashgari E, Ott J, Connelly A, Baldi P, Maoz U (2021). An end-to-end CNN with attentional mechanism applied to raw EEG in a BCI classification task. Journal of Neural Engineering 18: 0460e3
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Wong A, Merholz G, Maoz U. (2021) Characterizing human random-sequence generation in competitive and non-competitive environments using Lempel-Ziv complexity. Scientific Reports 11, 20662
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Chandravadia N, Liang D, Carlson A, Schjetan A, Faraut M, Chung J, Reed C, Dichter B, Maoz U, Kalia S, Valiante T, Mamelak A, Rutishauser U. (2020) A NWB-based Dataset and Processing Pipeline of Human Single-Neuron Activity During a Declarative Memory Task. Scientific Data, 7(1), 1-12
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Lashgari E, Liang D, Maoz, U. (2020) Data Augmentation for Deep Learning-Based Electroencephalography. Journal of Neuroscience Methods. 346:108885
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Mudrik, L, Levy, JD, Gavenas, J, & Maoz, U. (2020) Studying volition with actions that matter: combining the fields of neuroeconomics and the neuroscience of volition, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 7(1):67-86
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Maoz U and Linstead E. (2019) Brain imaging and artificial intelligence, in Raz A. and Thibault R., (Eds). The Dark Side of Brain Imaging. Elsevier Press.
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Maoz U, Sita K, Van Boxtel J and Mudrik L. (2019) Does it matter whether you or your brain did it? An empirical investigation of the influence of the double subject fallacy on moral responsibility judgments. Frontiers Psychology.
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Oh J*, Yun K*, Maoz U, Kim T, Chae J. (2019) Identifying Depression in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Data using a Deep Learning Algorithm. Journal of Affective Disorders (257).
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Hill B, Brown B, Gabel E, Lee C, Cannesson M, Loohuis L, Johnson R, Jew B, Maoz U, Mahajan A, Sankararaman S, Hofer I, Halperin E. (2019) An automated machine learning-based model predicts postoperative mortality using readily-extractable preoperative electronic health record data British Journal of Anaesthesia. 123(6):877-886
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Maoz U, Yaffe G, Koch C and Mudrik L. (2019) Neural precursors of decisions that matter—an ERP study of deliberate and arbitrary choice. eLife
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Titiz AS, Hill MRH, Eliashiv D, Tchemodanov N, Maoz U, Stern J, Tran M, Mankin E, Behnke E, Suthana, NA, Fried I. (2017) Theta-Burst Microstimulation in the Human Entorhinal Area Improves Memory. eLife