Amir Amedi, PhD

About the speaker

Prof. Amir Amedi is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Remepy, pioneer of Hybrid Drugs; Professor at the School of Medicine and School of Psychology, Reichman University; and Founding Director of the Baruch Ivcher Institute for Brain, Cognition & Technology and the Ruth and Meir Rosental Brain Imaging Center. He was previously Professor of Medical Neurobiology and Cognitive Sciences at the Hebrew University, where he completed his PhD in computational neuroscience (2005). He has published over 150 papers and book chapters and holds over 20 patents (granted or under review). His awards include the Wolf Foundation's Krill Prize and three European Research Council grants.

Talk topics

• Seeing with sound, hearing with touch

  How sensory-substitution technologies such as EyeMusic let blind people ‘see’ through sound, and what this reveals about how the brain is organised by task rather than by sense.

• The plastic brain

  How experience, sensory loss and training reshape the adult brain, from brain-imaging studies of blind and deaf people to rehabilitation.

• Hybrid Drugs: medicine meets multisensory technology

  Combining medication with multisensory digital interventions to improve clinical outcomes, including research in Parkinson’s disease and subjective cognitive decline.

• Multisensory technology for health and wellbeing

  Immersive audio-tactile environments, virtual reality and touch-based hearing, and how they can support people with hearing loss, trauma or anxiety.

Sample abstract

For decades, textbooks described the brain as a set of sensory machines: a visual brain, an auditory brain, a tactile brain. Research with people who are born blind tells a different story. Using sensory-substitution devices that translate images into sounds or touch, blind participants learn to recognise shapes, letters, faces and even body postures, and their ‘visual’ cortex responds to these tasks. Prof. Amir Amedi will show how these findings reveal a brain organised by task rather than by sense, and how that insight is now shaping new technologies: immersive audio-tactile environments, tools for people with hearing loss, and Hybrid Drugs that pair medication with multisensory digital interventions.