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Moshe Bar is an Israeli cognitive neuroscientist. He is a professor at Bar-Ilan University and the Chief Scientific Officer at the Israeli mental health startup Hedonia. He was previously head of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University and before that director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Bar’s research focuses on various aspects of brain function, including memory, foresight, mental load, mind-wandering, mood, and creativity. Bar has also contributed to the development of conscious cities, which takes into account the effects of urban design on mental health.

He has published over 80 research articles, contributed several book chapters, and edited two scientific books. In 2022 he published the popular science book Mindwandering: How Your Constant Mental Drift Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity. He received the 2012 Donald O. Hebb Award from the International Neural Network Society, and he is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Education and professional history
Bar completed a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Ben-Gurion University in 1988. Thereafter, in parallel with military service in the Israeli Air Force, he completed a master’s degree in computer science and applied mathematics in 1994 at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he worked under the supervision of Shimon Ullman.

He pursued doctoral studies in psychology at the University of Southern California, under the supervision of Irving Biederman, earning a Ph.D. in 1998. He continued with postdoctoral research at the psychology department at Harvard University, collaborating with Daniel Schacter and Roger Tootel. Since 2000, Bar held a joint faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory before returning to Israel in 2011 to head the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University.

Thereafter, Bar co-founded the Israeli mental health startup company Hedonia, translating the research-based Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP) method, based on his two decades of research on the topic of mood, depression and thought, into mobile games.

Research and scientific contributions
Bar has made significant contributions to various areas of study, including visual recognition, predictions in the brain, mental simulations and mindwandering, mood and depression, and aesthetic preference. His work challenges traditional views and sheds light on the complex mechanisms underlying these cognitive processes.

Visual recognition
Branching off of his graduate training with professors Shimon Ullman and Irving Biederman, Bar has been using behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI and MEG) methods to reveal critical aspects of how the brain recognizes objects, scenes, and context in the world around us. This research simultaneously challenged two long-held views. First, together with others, he has argued and shown that the propagation of visual analysis in the cortex is not strictly “bottom-up,” as has been believed for decades, but rather that perception is a result of internally driven top-down processes as much as it is of incoming bottom-up sensory information. As such, his work shows that memory and the prefrontal cortex are active players in visual perception. Bar first proposed this notion in a Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience article 2003, and provided the first significant empirical support in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper 2006.

A second debate and new domain of research that was steered by Bar’s ideas and studies involves the evasive distinction between spatial and associative processing. Part of the contribution of his research was to characterize the cortical network that mediates the processing of contextual associations, introduced broadly in a Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper 2004. This newly discovered network included a site in the medial temporal cortex that has traditionally been considered as mediating the representation and processing of spatial information. His findings offer an alternative interpretation for those previous reports, suggesting that the role of this hippocampal region may more generally involve mediating associative information rather than merely space-related information.

Predictions in the brain
Following his research on the role of associations in cognition, Bar’s research has demonstrated the brain's predictive and proactive capabilities. His theoretical and empirical work, focusing on how memory is utilized to generate future predictions, has provided a fresh perspective on cognition and has been a significant part of cognitive neuroscience discourse. Bar integrated the various views on predictions in a special issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society 2009, and then expanded in the book Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future edited by Bar for Oxford Press 2011.

Mental simulations and mindwandering
Bar’s research also provides insight into the human tendency for mental simulations and mindwandering. As suggested by his work, humans use their experiences, stored in memory, to simulate new, imagined experiences, can later be used as predictive scripts that guide our cognition, decisions and action. This concept was first introduced to a broader audience in his 2016 New York Times piece 'Think Less, Think Better', and was later expanded in his book Mindwandering in 2022.

Mood and depression
During his time in the US, Bar’s research evolved to include clinical questions, particularly pertaining to psychiatric disorders such as major depression. He started with a theoretical paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2009 that presented a novel synthesis of findings from psychiatry, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, which gave rise to an overarching hypothesis linking mood with thinking patterns and associative processing. The crux of this hypothesis is that a thinking pattern that involves a broad associative scope can elicit positive mood, while a narrow and ruminative thinking pattern can evoke negative mood.

Through collaborations first with the department of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, and since his return to Israel with psychiatric institutions there, this theory has been tested and supported and later implemented as a therapeutic tool, later known as Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP).

The behavioral and neuroimaging publications that stemmed from these ideas attracted attention with their global explanatory power and their potential for therapeutic alleviation of symptoms of depression. Bar’s approach, now being employed in healthy and clinical populations, is to train participants with broad associative thinking in a way that will restore their deficient cortical infrastructure and critically diminish ruminative thinking.

Aesthetic preference
Bar's research on aesthetics extends into the domains of design, architecture, and public health. His studies on streetscapes, for example, have contributed to design criteria that encourage physical activity. Bar's exploration of the effect of contour on subjective preference and emotion, such as smooth versus sharp, has influenced designers and architects alike.