Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Bad Project

I’m not going to link to it, but loyal readers should definitely check on the Zheng lab’s You Tube video “Bad Project”.

The real issue for today’s blog post is how to avoid getting stuck with the proverbial bad project. And the advice is aimed at our doctoral student readers.

This is a difficult problem, because 1) grad students typically don’t have a huge amount of say on what project their PI gives them and 2) they also don’t often have the experience to avoid those bad projects on the rare occasions where they do have a choice. So what to do?

First, let’s face it. If you are on a rotation, a bad project isn’t necessarily the kiss of death. It’s just wasted time (and it might not even have to be that if you learn some new methods). But, if it’s your dissertation project then, indeed, you’re toast.

Second, the ultimate answer to avoiding a bad project is finding a good PI. This is something you do have control over (at least as far as your thesis is concerned, it’s generally a mutual decision).  As I’ve written before, PI’s come in two extremes: the extremely junior newly minted assistant professor who can give you lots of attention, but may not have the resources to support your project well, and further may also not have the experience to know the bad project from the good one. The other extreme is the lab chief with 20 postdocs and 40 graduate students, not to mention several technicians. Here you’ve got someone who probably could tell you which projects are bad, but doesn’t have the time or attention span or will to do so. In the worst case scenario (just like in the Video, you’ll inherent the bad project of someone more senior in the lab who is fortunate enough to have punched her ticket (PhD) and be leaving.

So pick a PI in the middle of that distribution unless, of course, your scientific passion pushes you otherwise. But, in that case, go in with your eyes wide open.

The musical brain

Several years ago, Bonnie Simon, hosted me at the Cosmos Club to ask me about the neuroscience of human musical experiences. At the time, I pointed her in the roughly correct directions towards the fMRI literature and wondered whether my friend and colleague, Bill Reeder, Dean of our College of Visual and Performing Arts, might have something valuable to add–after all he is a real opera performer; I just enjoy classical music.

Here’s a more recent blogpost from Jonah Lehrer at Wired. Not surprisingly the neurotransmitter, dopamine, plays a starring role (although recent work from Huda Akil’s lab calls into question the exact role of dopamine in reward).

I’m fairly certain that, one day, when we understand a lot more about the brain, it will be the mathematical aspects of music as reflected in the dynamics of tone and rhythms that will turn out to be the key to why humans, of all ilks, love it so much.

So perhaps the more underlying question is why (and whether) human beings have a deep underlying need for mathematics–from my viewpoint in the enjoyment of aspects of the natural experience which are especially mathematically symmetric (or not).

Walk through of the new space

With the Advisory Board, we did another walk through of the new Krasnow Institute space–the progress is terrific. I’m extremely pleased with the speed of construction and the caliber of the new labs. Thanks as always to the members of our Board who play a central role in the vitality of Mason’s Institute for Advanced Study.

MLK Day 2011

The University’s administrative offices are closed today, so I went
on a long walk through the woods near my house. Gulf Run Nature
Preserve is one of Arlington’s gems, extending from just south of our
house to the Potomac River following the course of an old stream
along the “gone wild” ruins of an old estate that, in the 1920’s
belonged to a movie starlet. Mid-afternoon on a January day, with a
gray sky and the promise of some sort of wintery-mix this evening,
one might expect to find it empty. But no. As part of the National
Day of Service, in honor of Dr. King, the woods was filled with
volunteers, removing invasive plants to protect the local ecosystem.
It was inspiring.
Myself, I was on the look-out for some small splash of color against
the winter browns and grays. It came, finally, in the form of a thorn-
bush, evergreen, it’s pale greet skin and thorn, accented by an
electric tinge of scarlet at the business end of the thorn itself. It
made for a beautiful digital photo.
Washington’s deciduous winter will no doubt sequence into the lush
explosion of color that starts here in March and culminates in May.
But for now, the life of the mind is relatively undisturbed by nature.

Meanwhile, I thinking about Irene Pepperberg’s recent short post at John
Brockman’s Edge site on fixed action patterns and humans. These are
of course the behaviors associated with neuroethology–one’s that
supposedly involve little to no cognition. She wonders to what extent
complex human behaviors (and their social neuroscience emergents)
are potentially driven by human “fixed action patterns”.

Certainly, the behavioral economic discount curve, with all its
weirdness, might be driven by human fixed action patterns.

Happy MLK Day 2011!

Educated is being multilingual….

From today’s on-line version of the Straits Times here. Money quote:

The number of Singaporeans proficient in two or more languages jumped from 56 per cent ten years ago to 71 per cent in 2010.
The use of English at home is also more prevalent, especially among the younger age groups. Among residents aged five to 14 years old, English was the home language for 52 per cent of Chinese and 50 per cent of Indians. Twenty-six per cent of Malays in the same age group now speak English at home, a spike from 9.4 per cent in 2000.

The Largeness of Science

Today was a rare occasion when I sat down, not with Science or Nature, but rather with Discover and the Scientific American. What struck me was the enormity of the modern science enterprise. I like to think that sitting in the director’s chair at an institute for advanced study, I’d have a pretty good feel for at least the feature landscape of science, but while this may be true for the intersection of neurobiology, cognitive psychology and computer science, I’m astounded by what’s going on entirely outside that rather broad purview–in fields such ranging from cosmology down to microbiology.

So my question is: how does a person deeply interested in science (writ large) keep up? This is a challenge not only for folks like myself, but true as well for the bench-top principle investigator. A few years ago, our university took out a site subscription to the Faculty of 1000–which amounts to a sort of expert crowdsourcing of the literature. I valued that a great deal. It seems to be headed in the right direction.

I also acknowledge that Wikipedia (at least in my own narrow expertise of molecular neuroscience) is usually pretty good as far as getting the facts right. Which leaves me hopeful that it might be as good in other fields for which I’m not qualified to make that judgment.

Plutocracy Now!

Chrystia Freeland’s new piece in the Atlantic is here. I remain agnostic about all things economic (except for our own economists at Krasnow) but this is an extremely well-written piece and certainly captures the current ethos.

I’ve been an avid reader of Freeland’s work from her Financial Times days. She’s currently at Reuters.