Author: jlolds

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

Election Day 2008

Well today we elect a new President. Hopefully we’ll have a clean election and clarity by morning. Here at George Mason, it’s been wonderful to watch the voting shuttle vans taking students to the polling places. You can feel the excitement.

Tomorrow (if the results are clear) we’ll begin to analyze the science agenda of the new administration. We’ll be paying close attention to what information we can glean of the transition team, particularly in the context of the science agenda and how that agenda may play out for the Decade of the Mind initiative.
The economic crisis of course intersects with our scientific agenda and will certainly constrain our new President.
Jim

Cognitive neuroscience and the election (NY Times Op Ed)

Sam Wang and Joshua Gold (of Princeton and Penn respectively) bring cognitive neuroscience to the US general election next week:

If decisions are lurking somewhere in the brains of undecided voters, could brain imaging methods reveal their inclinations? Not yet. Recent research has shown that when undecided voters looked at images of candidates, their brains’ emotional centers were often activated. But this reveals little information about the content of their thoughts. Such research serves mainly to demonstrate how hard it is for scientists to physically trace complex concepts like preference.

New Gates Foundation grants

The Gates Foundation pursues a pretty innovative approach in awarding research grants. Here’s the key quote from the Financial Times:

To apply for a grant, the foundation requires only the outline of a hypothesis and a way of testing it: it does not need applicants to provide data to support their theory, a requirement that puts many researchers, especially those from the developing world, in a chicken-and-egg conundrum.

I’ve been urging our PI’s to think outside the box lately about funding sources. This looks like a pretty good idea, although it needs to be tied to world health.

Jim

Dopamine in the news

Clive Crook from the Financial Times on a study (Stice et al) that just came out in SCIENCE.

Money quote:

Fatter volunteers had less activation in the dorsal striatum part of the brain than their leaner counterparts as they drank. This region releases dopamine, a brain chemical, in response to food and drink. The amount released corresponds to the degree of pleasure produced by the experience

I wonder if this applies to bankers and money?

Here’s a link to SCIENCE magazine’s podcast about the article.
Jim

Smarter or Dumber?

You’re recall Nicholas Carr’s very controversial article in the Atlantic over the summer that suggested that on-line searching was making us stupid. Today, CNN.com reports on a study which purports to show the opposite! Dr. Gary Small used fMRI showed that:

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning

Meanwhile cross town rival…

Liz Zelinski, a professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California, said the findings about the brain activity differences aren’t surprising and offered this analogy: “If you wanted to study how hard people can exercise, and you take people that already exercise and people that don’t exercise, aren’t they going to be different to start out?”

Don’t you think fMRI is getting a bit oversold these days?

Jim

Another Nobel Prize for MBL in Woods Hole

This time for the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein or GFP–used now ubiquitously in all fields of biosciences:

Japan’s Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the prize for their research on green fluorescent protein, or GFP, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

And where does Shimomura work?

Shimomura, born in 1928, works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the Boston University Medical School.

Congrats to Director Gary Borisy and all the good folks at the MBL!

Jim

Financial Times on Machine Learning

Alane Cane has written a spectacular piece in today’s FT regarding the limitations of AI and cognitive computing. Featured in the article is IBM’s Dharmendra Modha:

IBM was a pioneer in the field and today continues to invest heavily in AI research. Dharmendra Modha, a scientist in the company’s California research laboratory is working on cognitive computing, which he defines as a computer model that simultaneously exhibits characteristics seated in the human brain, including perception and emotion.

His aim is to discover how the brain works, not how the mind works, he is quick to emphasise.

Last year, his group achieved a milestone by managing to simulate the operation of a mouse brain on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer.

He notes: “We deployed the simulator on a 4096 processor Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 256 megabytes of memory per processor.

We were able to represent 8m neurons and 6,300 synapses (connections) per neuron in the one terabyte main memory of the system.”

There will be, of course, a considerable time lag before the benefits of this research are seen in actual products.

Mr Modha thinks it could be 10 years before cognitive computing of the kind he is working on makes its debut in productivity and security systems. It is, however, a giant leap from 1956 when an IBM supercomputer of the day simulated the firing of a mere 512 neurons

Read the whole article!

Jim

Neuroethics and fMRI

Here’s a sociologist worrying that we’ll be classifying kids on the basis of their fMRI:

At the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 1968, the social activist Martin Nicolaus leveled a blistering critique at traditional criminologists and sociologists. He said — and I am paraphrasing here because it was a panel discussion, not a paper — you people have your eyes down and your hands up, while you should have your eyes up and your hands down.

He was speaking language that social scientists of the era would have easily understood. “Eyes down” meant that almost all the research on deviance and crime was focused on the poor and their behavior, while “hands up” meant that the support for such research was coming from the rich and powerful — from foundations, the government, and corporations. Conversely, of course, “eyes up” meant turning one’s research focus to the study of the pathological behavior of the elite and privileged, and “hands down” meant giving more of a helping hand to the excluded, impoverished, and disenfranchised. What was true of the social scientists’ almost monomaniacal attention to the deviance of the poor in the 1960s is even truer of the neuroscientists of the last decade’s vanguard research.

A common tactic is to do brain scans on people who have already displayed violent or aggressive behavior. While this will net the adolescent boys in juvenile correctional facilities, it will surely miss the spawning white-collar bandits in energy markets or subprime home loans.

This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can see where this is going can’t you? Let’s brain scan Hank Paulson. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Jim