Moshe Bar graduated in biomedical engineering from Ben-Gurion University in Israel, in 1988. After graduating, he took a master’s degree in Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

In 1994, he started a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. His dissertation, which received a prestigious award from the university’s Department of Psychology, studied the effects of the brain due to subliminal visual stimuli.

Moshe Bar finished his PhD at Harvard and continued working with Harvard Medical School, where he became associate professor of Psychiatry and Radiology as well as being an associate professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He is currently director of the ‘Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center’ at the Bar-Ilan University of Tel Aviv and director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Boston.

In his work, he analyses the connections between the human brain and vision, by examining the real context, and therefore the brain’s ability to make predictions. To do this, he uses state-of-the-art instruments and technology, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography.

Bar studies the way the human mind can ‘exploit’ the real context. His studies prove that objects in a given place are recognised more quickly and accurately if supported by contextual information. He also identified some areas of the brain called ‘context networks’, proving that such areas are activated quickly enough to make perception easier. In partnership with the National Institute of Mental Health, he has recently applied his research into contextual associations to neuropsychiatry, in the attempt to understand if the neural networks that mediate contextual associations are functionally altered in subjects suffering from mood disorders.