Salil Patel

I am a computational neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of TimeTrace Labs, a mathematics and artificial intelligence company in Bloomsbury, London. Before that I was an academic (radiologist).

This site collects essays, published writing, and reading.

An ink and watercolour portrait of Salil Patel

Selected writing

  1. Motel CaliforniaEssay · August 2026On Rex Motel, family, and a childhood between London and Ventura.
  2. What CreatesEssay · August 2026On ants, and the conditions under which a group becomes cleverer than the people in it.
  3. What CarriesEssay · February 2026Creativity is recombination under pressure. The myth of genius exists to let the rest of us off the hook.
  4. What HoldsEssay · December 2025Newton did his best work in a plague year, in the ruins of an old order. The scientific method is what remained when custom fell away.
  5. Sound of MindThe Economist · October 2024Sound patterns the human ear cannot detect. Psychiatry is starting to listen.
  6. On Presidents and PoetryEssay · 2022RFK and Aeschylus, JFK and Frost, Biden and Heaney. Tragedy is what binds presidents to poets.
  7. Certainty in UncertaintyThe Oxford Review of Books · May 2020In politics, changing your mind is a sin. In science, it is the method.
All writing

Bookshelf

  1. Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway, and the diaries
  2. Primo Levi — If This Is a Man / The Periodic Table
  3. Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities
  4. Jorge Luis Borges — Labyrinths
The full shelf