Networks

I am off tomorrow to drive to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to give a talk about neocortical networks during human development (in particular, the first six years of life). This is work that I’ve been conducting with my graduate student, David Cooper–we’ve been using a massive data set built up from the 1930’s until the 1960’s by J. Conel, who was a pediatric neurosurgeon in Boston. The notion has been to use very advanced statistical techniques on the Conel data to reveal coordinated cortical neurodevelopment during the first six years of life. In particular, we’re interested in the idea of a “hidden” clock which paces development in much the same way as a coxain paces the oarsman of a crew team. For some cortical areas development is very much paced by this clock (we surmise these are cortical areas where selection pressure is very much against “innovation”. In other areas, development proceeds completely independently of the clock (as if driven by external environmental stimulation).

The interesting driver here is that the pacing or coordination can manifest as either neurogenesis/migration or pruning. In other words, the direction of the change doesn’t matter, it’s the timing of the changes.

Jim