Author: jlolds

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

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.

Autism Spectrum Disorder and Vaccines

Today’s major science news of course is that The British Medical Journal, after an exhaustive review, concluded that the 1998 paper linking autism to vaccines was in fact fraud. ScienceInsider has the news here.

This is a neuroscience story with tremendous legs. It is a spectacular illustration of how policy and neuroscience can intersect with disastrous results.

Money quote:

His report is another strike against the already-retracted research, which was led by Wakefield. A 2002 study failed to replicate the findings; the British General Medical Council spent 2.5 years investigating and a year ago concluded that Wakefield’s conduct was “dishonest” and “misleading.” The Lancet retracted the paper, and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in the United Kingdom.