Author: jlolds

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

Do I need words to think?

When I experience conscious thought, it is mostly in words (I am making a big exception for the type of conscious thought that accompanies hitting my thumb accidentally with a hammer). When I remember my dreams, for the most part, it seems to me that those remembered dreams included words. There is an old French movie L’Enfant Sauvage, directed by Francois Truffaut about a child who somehow survives in the wild to grow up without words. In the movie, the child clearly thinks. There is good scientific evidence that the Great Apes think without words. I believe my dogs think…without words. And yet, I can’t imagine my own conscious experience without the internal narrative of language. Why is that? Is it just our own species-specific experience of conscious thought that requires language?

Jim

Berea versus Amherst College: the question of tuition

Read this article by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times about Berea, a college with a billion dollar endowment that doesn’t charge tuition….compared with my Alma Matter, Amherst College.

Money quote:

“You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.”

Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

How the brain interprets mirror images

Natalie Angier from today’s New York Times….

Money quote:

“In a sense, mirrors are the best ‘virtual reality’ system that we can build,” said Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool. “The object ‘inside’ the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyes are concerned it exists as much as any other object.” Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues have also studied what people believe about the nature of mirrors and mirror images, and have found nearly everybody, even students of physics and math, to be shockingly off the mark.

The Chronicle weighs in on provostial teas

I know it’s behind the firewall, but if you get a chance, it’s well worth the read. Money quote:

Several times a semester, Peter N. Stearns invites a couple of dozen faculty members to join him for tea and cookies in the administration building at George Mason University. During teatimes, Mr. Stearns, the provost, takes questions and listens to professors’ suggestions. Sometimes, he says, professors share “imaginative approaches” to teaching that he then passes along to others.

Mr. Stearns believes that the teas have opened up communication with professors and are the kind of thing that leads employees to rank George Mason highly when it comes to relations between faculty members and administrators.

The provost says administrators at George Mason also try to react quickly when professors have good ideas. “If a faculty member comes to me or the president or a dean and says, ‘I’ve got this idea,’ our systematic reaction is: That’s great. Let’s make it work.” Just six months ago, a professor told the provost he wanted to create a center to help third-world countries enhance information security. Administrators gave the OK, and the International Cyber Center was born. The professor who started it is already planning the center’s first conference.

Last day of vacation

I am back in Washington. Tomorrow I’ll return to Krasnow for what will turn out to be quite a busy rest of the summer. There are real challenges ahead–the new construction as we continue to expand, the acquisition of a cellular imaging facility that I believe will complement our MRI and the now accelerating momentum of the Decade of the Mind project as we approach the US general election.

My own take on Science 2.0 has been accepted for publication at The Biological Bulletin. It will be in the August issue.

Jim

The dangers of looking to closely

They’re called incidental findings in brain imaging research on “normal volunteers”. In today’s NY Times Gina Kolata looks at microbleeds in the brain:

“If there were more than we knew of in the general population, that might — and I want to stress might — have important consequences,” Dr. Breteler said. “That is why we started to look for them.”

For more than a decade, Dr. Breteler and her colleagues have followed a group of Rotterdam residents age 45 and older. The goal is to do repeated brain scans on 8,000 people; so far they have scanned nearly 4,000 and are analyzing those data.

“What we found came as a big surprise,” Dr. Breteler said. Previous estimates were that 5 to 7 percent of healthy older people had microbleeds. The Rotterdam study found them in more than 20 percent. And the older the person, the more likely the microbleeds. They were present in 18 percent of 60-year-olds and nearly 40 percent of those over 80.

“We now know that these changes are there and that they are frequent,” Dr. Breteler said. “But we don’t know yet what their clinical impact is, what their prognosis is.”