An interesting breakfast: three threads and a poached egg

I had a very interesting early morning breakfast at the Pentagon City Ritz this morning with two colleagues and a guest. The conversation started out with the guest asking some very pointed questions about neuroscience but quickly expanded into several interesting and intersecting threads:

One thread had to do with the link between deception (as in deceiving others), self-deception and memory (in all of its various kinds, but mainly focusing on episodic).

There was another thread that was centered on the notion of intracellular communication (signal transduction in the language of biologists) as a metaphor for network communication principles.

And the third thread dealt with the inherent contradiction of having collaborations be fruitful when elements of the data are classified (i.e. secret). By the way, this is not only true in the milieu of DOD, it’s also true in many areas of science, and further any area where intellectual property is at stake.

It seems to me that all of these threads should be elements of what we look at here at Krasnow: the first clearly in the field of cognitive neuroscience, the second partly in molecular cell biology, but also tied up with adaptive systems and the third in the domain of social complexity.

Jim