Tarik’s mission is to understand the emergence and the organizational principles of complex adaptive systems, both natural and artificial. While being interested in a wide range of phenomena in nature and society, Tarik’s current focus is on the study of the human brain and cognition.This mission is motivated and driven by the following questions: What are the principles that would enable us to understand how the human brain models reality and self? How neuromolecular and neurophysiological processes give rise to psychological phenomena and how the physical and molecular/biological bases of these phenomena can be adequately modelled and further integrated with psychological theories? To what extent can we model brain and cognition by means of methodologies developed in the area of complex systems science, and under what conditions can we implement our knowledge about neurocognition into in-silico artificial organisms and virtually embodied autonomous agents and thereby test our neurocognitive integrative models?

More recently, Tarik’s work has been cited in Ben Goertzel’s book The Hidden Pattern (2006, Brown Walker Press), in Constantino Tsallis’ book Introduction to Nonextensive Statistical Mechanics: Approaching a Complex World (2009, Springer Verlag), in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Volume 4681 (2007) 25-33), in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications (Volume 387 (2008) 3242–3252), in Journal of Image and Graphics (Volume 13 (2008) 119-123), again in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications (Volume 388 (2009) 174–186), in Acta Physica Polonica A (Volume 117 (2010) 695-699), and in Current Anthropology (Volume 51 (2010) 423-424). Tarik’s Erdös number is 5, his Mandelbrot number is 2.

Keywords: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Neural Networks, Complex Systems, Language, Learning, Memory, Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, Statistical Physics, Neuroeconomics.