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Danko Nikolić (born 10 April 1966) is a Croatian-German neuroscientist, cognitive scientist and data scientist. He is best known for introducing the concept of ideasthesia, according to which synesthesia does not reflect the sensory features of the stimulus, but emerges from the meaning of the stimulus.

Life
Danko Nikolić is born at 10 April 1966 in Zagreb, Croatia. From the University of Zagreb he received two very different degrees, one in Civil Engineering (1992) and another in Psychology (1994). After that he moved to USA where, at the Department of Psychology of University of Oklahoma, he received the masters degree (1997) and the PhD (1999). After that he went back to Europe, where he got a position at the Department of Neurophysiology of Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, as well as a Research Fellow appointment at Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. In addition, he received titles from the University of Zagreb, first a Private Docent title (2010) and then an Associate Professor title (2014). At the Max Plack Institute, Nikolić worked on many topics in cognitive sciences, the main topic of which was parallel recording from cat visual cortex by using multiple Michigan probes. A significant shift in his career happened in 2016 when he left Max Planck and got a job as a researcher/adviser in privately financed company. Being highly interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, since June 2017 he works as a data scientist at Teradata.

Research
Synesthesia/Ideasthesia. Nikolić and his team have performed several studies suggesting that, contrary to a widespread belief, synesthesia is not a purely sensory phenomenon. Instead, semantics plays a crucial role, in the sense that experiences which look like perception are really generated by the meaning. Hence, Nikolić proposed that this phenomenon should be called ideaesthesia, which comes from Greek and means “sensing concepts”.

Practopoiesis. Nikolić has proposed an ambitious theory of mind called practopoiesis, which generalizes the principles of evolution in biology. It is a theory of adaptive systems that attempts to describe the organization of all aspects of life, including biological intelligence and the mind. The theory is abstract, in the sense that it is based on principles of cybernetics and does not deal explicitly with physiological realizations such as plasticity, inhibition or excitation. Such an abstract form of the theory makes it very general, so it can be applied to artificial intelligence.

Visual Cognition. Nikolić and his collaborators studied mechanisms of the formation of visual long-term memory. Their results show that formation of visual long-term memory is closely related to visual working memory. That is, the ability to store information into long-term memory is determined by the amount of information that can be stored in visual working memory. In addition, they studied the relation between visual working memory and mechanisms of visual attention. Their fMRI study revealed a close overlap between the brain areas activated by two seemingly different tasks, namely an attention task and a working-memory task. This indicates that attention and working memory are based on the same neurophysiological mechanisms.