An excellent meeting with our Russian Colleagues today. I particularly enjoyed meeting Larissa A. Tsvetkova, the dean of the Faculty of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University, home of Krasnow’s own Lev Vekker.

Also enjoyed learning about Sandia Lab’s exciting new initiatives in the Cognitive Sciences and meeting Russ Skocypec and Stephem Roehrig along with old colleague Chris Forsythe.

Sandia is a crucial nexus to the national “mind” strategy.

Tomorrow, back on the plane and headed to Dulles. And home.

Jim

We broke through the clouds at about 10,000 feet yesterday over a very rainy Albuquerque airport. It had actually been icing on our decent and the landing was a particularly exciting cross-wind touchdown–I hate to think about the stresses on the Airbus’ composite tail as it moved the plane back to the center line of the runway. The precipitation at the taxi-stand was a cold one and I literally dumped my bags in the back to get out of the weather.

This morning at 8AM, the meeting begins–a Russia US collaboration meeting on neurotechnologies over at Sandia Lab’s International Activities Center. What are neurotechnologies anyway? The first thing that comes to mind is the so-called “brain-machine interface” that defines the future neuroengineering of prosthetics. But I would additionally put in that category any of the non-invasive brain imaging technologies, drugs and machines that augment cognition and finally hardware (circuits) that have some of the characteristics of neurons.

Should be interesting.

Jim

Or perhaps another field to be called geriatric neuroeconomics? Tyler Cowen links to this paper in his blog Marginal Revolution today. Apparently our economic sophistication is on an inverted U-curve with respect to age. Is there a neural basis for that?

Jim

I’ve heard Vernor speak before. Somehow, I’m quite skeptical about his claim that computers will be able to exceed our cognitive capabilities relatively soon. AI has been over-sold for a very long time, so the field still suffers from credibility issues. Nevertheless, it seems to me that merely throwing Moore’s Law at something as architecturally complex as the human brain is problematical. Each neuron in our brain is a whole lot more than an integrate-and-fire computational element. Each neuron represents a constellation of hierarchical biochemical and biophysical processes constrained by an orderly, yet unique morphology. There are something like 100 billion of these neurons and each of them as perhaps 10,000 connections to others. How you go from a digital computer to something approaching the human brain is daunting.

I suppose the ultimate question is: will a PC pass the Turing Test anytime soon.

Jim

Apparently a neuroscience graduate student from Ann Arbor (where I got my PhD by the way) got herself in some temporary hot water on her neuroscience blog. The problem stemmed from putting up some graphs from a journal article that she was critiquing. When she replaced the actual published graphs with her own version of the same, the trouble went away.

Jim

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on-line has an excellent article about a report that has recently been released in the journal Academic Medicine. Bottom line: the median annual cost for running an institutional review board (to protect human subjects) is around $800,000. That’s a lot of money. The use of human subjects in research is an expensive business and universities need to budget with those expenses firmly in mind.

Jim

I am torn between two potential syllabi for my Fall graduate course, Neuroscience Methods. The course has been taught in the past as essentially a grantsmanship class with a heavy dose of critical scientific thinking along with experimental design.

The other idea is to actually present a survey of extant neuroscience methods, with the notion that, these days, in order to be a truly successful investigator, one needs to at least be able to understand how disparate methods can be deployed to test hypotheses. So in this case, the syllabus would be focused on techniques.

I’d value feedback from our students (and others) on which might be more valuable.

Jim

A colleague of mine and I had lunch today at an Indian restaurant in Fairfax. We are thinking of writing a book together and the discussion was going back and forth over the different threads that we might include (more on that at some other time). By the by, I was complimented over my time management. I guess the idea was that it must be difficult for an institute director to contemplate writing a book while running a science enterprise at the same time. Must be the time management skills. After thinking for a moment I responded that the only possible way I was able to manage my time at all is having a superb support staff (both here at George Mason and in Woods Hole).

One trick to time management in senior positions is getting comfortable with the power of a scheduler. You give up some of your autonomy (the ability to set your own calendar) in return for the coordination and flexibility that comes from having one central node where all the competing time commitments can be dealt with. The advent of reliable (and free) on-line calendaring systems and then the ability to push that calendar information to mobile devices has also helped make the system work for us.

Jim

You know neuroscience has become a central societal meme when Slate Magazine devotes a special issue to it.

Jim

An impressive paper by Couey et al. in Neuron demonstrates how central nicotinic receptors act to down regulate neocortical spike time dependent plasticity (click on the link above).

Now, imagine neocortical acetylcholine tone reduced as a result of cell loss in the basal forebrain early in Alzheimer’s Disease. The result would be apparently greater potentiation at cortical SDTP glutamatergic synapses. Kind of counter-intuitive, no?

Jim