Author: jlolds

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

This is how you build interdisciplinary strength

From the Chronicle of Higher Education on the University of Michigan’s plan to build faculty strength in interdisciplinary areas:

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor plans to spend $30-million over the next five years on hiring 100 new tenure-track faculty members to lead interdisciplinary research and teaching in areas such as energy and environmental sustainability.

Kudos to President Coleman–that’s really vision and it’ll make a difference I believe. This from a state with an economy that is anemic at best.

Jim

On the evolution of the web

Academic blogger Jean Burgess at Queensland University reflect on how one’s personal web presence as evolved (with social networking and googling)–it’s apparently getting more difficult than ever for Google to report back individual home pages….remember, those things with “under construction” icons?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this also, but in the context of how academic blogging is beginning to intersect meaningfully with professional social networking spaces such as Plaxo or Linkedin through feeds. I first syndicated this blog to the University of Michigan’s alumni social network, but have since added Plaxo.

Here’s an excellent quote from Burgess’ blog entry on this subject:

One thing that has struck me lately, is that this hyper-distributed version of online presence, connecting us in different ways to a variety of colleagues, professional, personal, and online acquaintances, and close friends, couldn’t be further from the 1990s personal home page – a one-stop shop that often seemed to incorporate everything from a CV to cat photos, holiday snaps, essays and online diary. It’s important to note that, given the comparative unevenness of internet access, use and participation at the time, the personal home page was a form of cultural production never adopted at anything like the current scale of blogs and SNS profiles.

Jim

Thinking about TCMS

I am referring to trans-cranial magnetic stimulation–that other major killer-app besides brain imaging that’s come out of the neurotechnology revolution. Think of it as a way to reach out and “touch” an ensemble of neurons without the need for them to “see air” (i.e. neurosurgery). Essentially electrical stimulation of the brain without electrodes (in the brain).

My question has to do with the slightly more esoteric question of whether such stimulation, when appropriately tuned to characteristic firing modes of neuronal groups (say theta –or 4 to 8 Hz) can either tweak or eliminate such characteristic synchronous oscillatory activity.

Any takers out there?

Jim

Joys of Serving on a Search Committee: No Really!

There is a common notion that among academics that serving on a search committee is a whole lot less satisfying that say, giving a talk in Aspen or making a new discovery at the laboratory bench. But this isn’t always true. Yesterday our search committee got together to make some key decisions in one of our faculty searches and–even though the meeting was 2 hours long–it was an absolute pleasure. Why?

For one thing, most of us have been colleagues for years. There is an easy going professional friendship that allows for humor, yet at the same time manifests a group open-mindedness.

Secondly, we have an incredible set of candidates. There are folks who, among themselves, have published in the likes of Cell, Nature, Neuron and the like, who come with existing NIH grants in hand, and whose research statements are both well-written and frankly intriguing. Growing your faculty becomes enjoyable when the prospects are for great new colleagues.

Finally, with a computer plugged into a powerpoint projector, we were able to call up CV’s, letters and the like and read them together, with ease.

Jim

Losing research dollars to overseas universities

Here’s an interesting piece by Carl Schramm, who is the president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He posits a slow decline in American research universities so that “it may be unwise, therefore, for regions to rely on universities as primary engines of growth and innovation. But local governments might pursue a strategy of urging universities to pool their commercialization efforts.”

The reason for the decline?

Money quote:

The likeliest reason for this worrisome trend is that many companies are tired of haggling over intellectual property rights—and in a world of globalized R&D, they no longer have to. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Baker Hughes, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Microsoft, to name just a few major firms on a growing list, are now shifting research funding to universities in England, India, Russia, and China, where they have access to top scientists and often face fewer intellectual property hurdles.

Memo to University IP operation: please take note.

Jim

Reading NSF grants

Yes, I’ve got quite a stack of them on my desk. Some of them are really superb. Some of the ones you would expect to be the best, however, are quite flawed. Reviewing grants takes time and lots of energy but can be very rewarding intellectually. There is something about making a case for funding in writing that is both very difficult and yet eminently possible. Hence, we all continue to write grants….and review them.

Jim

Nature’s Cover

Yes, it’s that time of year: the Society for Neuroscience’s meeting this year is in San Diego. On cue, Nature and Science usually devote their cover to the field. This year Nature has a spectacular cover on the Brainbow project at Harvard.

As usual Science Magazine follows suit. Neuroscience is a field in full.

This year I’ll be staying in Washington. However, the Institute will have a very significant presence at the convention. I’ll look for some guest contributions on the meeting when our folks return.

Jim

NPR’s series on Deception

NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston is doing a three part series on deception (the second part of which aired on today’s Morning Edition). I think it’s pretty excellent and worth paying attention to. I do think however, that my own notion of the “lies that we are interested in” as opposed to the casual non-interesting lie is key. Lie detection only makes sense in the context of catching spies, fraud etc. It doesn’t seem to be fruitful in terms of finding out what your colleagues really think of you.

Jim

Neuroscience on the Mall

This evening I’m giving a talk at the Smithsonian about where neuroscience is as a field, here early in the 21st century. In some senses I’ll be optimistic. Certainly there has been much progress understanding some of the fundamental processes that underlie neural function, particularly where it is mainly homeostatic as opposed to cognitive. But in another sense, there is a real frustration–one that I’ve expressed before, that we are very very far from a coherent theory of brain function. That is why I have a real worry, with all the new “neuro” social fields (eg. neurolaw, neuroeconomics) that the field will get “over-sold” the way AI did in the 1960’s.

How to avoid.

Well, I believe we need to really adopt integrative approaches that study the brain across the different spatial and temporal levels (and there are many). For example, if we are to understand why music is the muse for so many humans, that it is–across cultures–then we need to know something about the auditory pathways. But we also need to understand something about the brain’s dopamine reinforcement systems…and perhaps something about synaptic plasticity….but also we need to look at a phenomenon like perfect pitch. All of these various aspects of music (within the context of brain function) need to be integrated. Without studying the phenomenon across multiple levels, it’s just hair cell physiology, auditory cortex tonotopic maps, and a human with a smile on his or her face.

Which brings me to the subject of “mind” and the notion of a federal investment into a “Decade of the Mind”. Why, given the above worries, do I believe that now is the time for a Decade of the Mind? The answer I believe has to do with an emerging critical mass of scientists (across many fields, not just neuroscience) who are seriously studying the phenomena of mind (such as music) across levels. They are using new imaging techniques. They are using high performance computation to build models and then testing those models against real data. They are sharing that data. And most importantly they are approaching this monumentally important scientific question in an integrative manner.

The pay off: in terms of people healed, technologies developed, economic growth and security (writ large) would without a doubt be huge.

Jim