Vishwanathan Mohan was originally trained in the field Microelectronics and VLSI design at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and began his scientific career playing with neuromorphic VLSI models of associative memories. While memory is the capacity of the nervous system to benefit from experience, to gain experience there is a need for physical interactions between the body and the world, coupled with mechanisms that abstract useful information in such interactions and organize them into our memories. This resulted in his parallel research training in the field of cognitive robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he has been a learning/playing partner to the humanoid iCub since its inception, helping it to gradually expand its cognitive horizons and at the same time trying to understand the computational principles that endow us with similar capabilities. A distinctive feature of his research so far has further been the emphasis on both ‘green’ learning and ‘green’ computing: or efficiently recycling learnt ‘experiences’ of the past in novel tasks/contexts and efficiently recycling ‘energy’ while performing the underlying computations (and the associated field of reversible logic). Most of his present research is funded through the EU's Seventh Framework program (FP7) projects iTalk, DARWIN, EFAA and the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive sciences department of IIT. From a long term perspective, he is curious to understand the fundamental principles that underlie transformations between three major forms of causality in nature: the physical, the neural and the mental.