Neurobiology is beginning to furnish an understanding of the brain mechanisms that give rise to such higher cognitive functions as planning, remembering, and deciding. In this lecture, UW Professor Michael Shadlen focuses on neurons in the parietal lobe that underlie a simple kind of decision making - forming a commitment to one of two competing hypotheses about a visual scene. Interestingly, the neural computations that underlie such a decision process were anticipated during WWII by Alan Turing and Abraham Wald. Turing applied this tool to break the German navy’s Enigma cipher, while Wald invented the field of sequential analysis. In addition to mathematical elegance and winning wars, Shadlen's experiments suggest that this computational strategy may lie at the core of higher brain function. From the Series:CSE Colloquia - 2006