I’m one of the international co-organizers of this year’s Quantum Mind Conference in Salzburg. But quite apart from the conference (although along a very relevant line) I bring to your attention a piece in The American Scholar by Robert Lanza, a professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Money quote:

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does the music indeed exist.

Jim

So it’s a pretty interesting article albeit written with too much faith in the ability of fMRI to “tell all”. The focus of the story is a neuroscience-law interdisciplinary program that’s at Vanderbilt University under the direction of Owen Jones, who is a professor of law and biology there. Front and center is VUIIS (Vanderbilt University Institute for Imaging Science) and its functional imaging capabilities.

Money quote:

Jones is turning Vanderbilt into a kind of Los Alamos for neurolaw. The university has just opened a $27 million neuroimaging center and has poached leading neuroscientists from around the world; soon, Jones hopes to enroll students in the nation’s first program in law and neuroscience. “It’s breathlessly exciting,” he says. “This is the new frontier in law and science — we’re peering into the black box to see how the brain is actually working, that hidden place in the dark quiet, where we have our private thoughts and private reactions — and the law will inevitably have to decide how to deal with this new technology.”

I guess my take is that we’ve got a very long way to go before we start accurately reading out private thoughts from the current technology–resolution is too low both in the spatial and temporal dimensions to pick up the neural code (or at least the version of it that relates to the sort of episodic memory Rosen is writing about).

Nevertheless, the ethical and legal issues raised are very real.

Click on the link above to read the whole thing.

Jim

Just picked up the Sunday NY Times on the doorstep–the magazine's lead is on the subject of neuroscience and the law. Looks like a good read. I'll comment and link later today.

Jim

From today’s Chronicle on-line: HHMI and Elsevier have reached an agreement that will allow the Institute to pay (on an individualized basis) to make one of their author’s papers immediately open access.

Money quote:

The new agreement would pay Elsevier $1,000 for each article published in a Cell Press journal and $1,500 for each article in other Elsevier journals.

Yesterday Krasnow's Advisory Board met. It was a very productive meeting that included talks by two of our faculty and one of our alumni, a walk-through of the new building, and a delightful dinner discussion about among other things: great ape cognition, MRI physics and quantum mechanics. I never fail to be impressed by our board. Over the years their advice has been crucial to the growth and success of the Krasnow Institute.

Jim

Dan Greenberg’s latest piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Money quote:

Some striking contrasts of wealth and stinginess are evident in the data on endowments and official statistics on research compiled by the National Science Foundation. The richest universities spend a great deal of other people’s money on research, but only minuscule amounts of their own funds.

For example, in the 2004 fiscal year, Harvard and Yale Universities had the two biggest endowments, respectively. According to the NSF’s calculations, Harvard spent none of its own money on R&D, but $399-million from federal funds; it had an endowment of $25.4-billion and received $589-million in gifts. Although Yale spent $26.1-million from its coffers on R&D, it also spent $330-million from the government; its endowment was $15.2-billion, and it took in $285-million in gifts. Other pre-eminent research universities followed the same pattern. Institutions do spend money on infrastructure for research, like new labs, but those funds make up only a tiny fraction of the budgets of rich universities.

Landed yesterday at Reagan National Airport in the late afternoon with a gorgeous view of the Mall and the monuments outside my window. Sometimes I forget what a beautiful city this is. And surprisingly the snow had basically all melted. So perhaps with the beginning of March, Spring has arrived in Washington just on schedule.

Jim

I’m in Woods Hole this morning for several meetings. Winter here is a strange combination of activity (the scientific institutions are year-round activities) and utter peacefulness (the beaches are essentially empty).

Yesterday, on my way here, I stopped in Cambridge for a late lunch with my sister, who is a psychiatrist, and we had a long conversation about where medical education should be headed in the coming years? What changes can we expect in the curriculum? And given that medical students probably need to learn some entirely new things (think biomedical engineering, medical informatics, nanotechnology) how would one incorporate the new items and the old, in the same amount of time? There aren’t easy answers to this, but it’s entirely fascinating.

Jim

It’s snowing outside my Arlington Virginia house…just a stop light from the DC line and the Potomac River. Snow is always preferable to the “wintery mix” that really means ice…which is what we get often in these parts of the US. I’ve been out shoveling the walkway but it looks like that might be a losing battle at this point…the stuff is coming down very hard. Nevertheless, I can still hear the jets taking off from Reagan National Airport–which is good because tomorrow I’m headed for Woods Hole, taking the US Air shuttle into Boston.

Boston is about 75 miles north of Woods Hole, and I’ll be driving down after spending the afternoon at my sister’s house in Cambridge. Hopefully it’ll all be plowed snow and I’ll have an easy time of it.

As for Woods Hole and the MBL ? It’ll remind me of the winter I spent there in 1979-1980, quiet, beautiful and very much full of the sea. I’m there for a meeting with the journal’s staff and a meeting with the MBL director.

Jim

George is a super accomplished science writer and we both share a close mutual friend. Here he reviews Douglas Hofstadter’s new book in The Scientific American.

Money quote:

Think of your eyes as that video camera, but with a significant upgrade: a mechanism, the brain, that not only registers images but abstracts them, arranging and constantly rearranging the data into mental structures–symbols, Hofstadter calls them–that stand as proxies for the exterior world. Along with your models of things and places are symbols for each of your friends, family members and colleagues, some so rich that the people almost live in your head.

Jim