Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is an ICREA lecturer and Head of the Perception and Memory Laboratory at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute in Barcelona. Previously he was the Director of the Centre for Systems Neurosciences and Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He studied Physics at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then did a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Lubeck in Germany followed by postdoctoral periods in Germany and California. He held research and visiting lecturer positions at the University of Nijmegen, the Leibniz Institute of Neurobiology, the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Pascual Maragall Foundation, the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET, the Peng Cheng Laboratory, and the RuiJin Hospital. His scientific interest is in the neural mechanisms of visual perception and memory, and in the bases of human thought and intelligence. He discovered what are known as “concept neurons” or “grandmother cells”. He has published five books, translated into several languages, including The Forgetting Machine, Borges and Memory and Cosas que nunca creeríais. Since 2019, he has been a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the United Kingdom. In 2019, he obtained the President International Fellowship awarded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and since 2023 he is a Changjiang Jiangxi Scholar, the highest academic distinction awarded by the Chinese government.