Cog Lunch: Pramod RT

April 14, 2026
12pm
Location: 46-3189

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98257778188​​​​​​​
Speaker: Pramod RT

Affiliation: Kanwisher Lab
Title: Intuitive Physics in the Human Brain 

Abstract: Intuitive Physics – our ability to understand the physical world, predict what will happen next, and plan successful actions in it – has long fascinated cognitive scientists, yet its neural basis is still not well understood. In this talk, I will present results from a series of fMRI studies investigating intuitive physics in the human brain. Specifically, I will characterize a set of fronto-parietal regions, called the Physics Network (PN), showing that they not only represent physical scene properties like stability and object-to-object spatial relationships, but also predicted future states of the scene. I will then show that these brain regions respond strongly to cause-and-effect relationships in the physical (but not the social) domain, suggesting that they may be representing the causal structure of the physical world. Finally, I will present some exciting single-neuron responses to physical reasoning in the human brain.