Helmholtz Club

More than 3 decades ago Dr. Ramachandran, together with Francis Crick (who used to be affiliated with the CBC) and Professor Gordon Shaw of UC Irvine, founded a think-tank called the Helmholtz Club of Southern California which has been meeting monthly for thirty two years. It has flourished and evolved into a world-renowned institution for discussing novel ideas on visual psychophysics and neuroscience. It is currently under the leadership of Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute. A new paper has just beeen published by the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, outlining the early formative years of the Helmholtz Club and its important role in the history of ideas. ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136984861300174X )

Crick also often acknowledged the conversations he had with CHIP /CBC faculty as having influenced his thinking on human vision and brain function in general (see, for example, Robert Olby’s biography of Francis Crick pages 387-88).