From today’s New York Times:

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.

Comment: This is I believe an essential question for those of us at the Krasnow Institute trying to wrestle with the bear we call consciousness. Is there some aspect of consciousness that requires free will?

One other question: we clearly all have the ability (or at least most of us as adults) to say “no” to the dopamine reinforcement system of the brain. I think many would view such neurobiologically by understanding the no as an inhibition signal from frontal cortical areas. This raises the question of simply operationalizing free will to the underlying brain science. Perhaps a more tractable approach.

Jim

I’ve linked to a list of recent articles using a whole genome approach to studying diseases. Essentially this is a classic example of the post-Popperian approach to biomedical research–rather than treat the question as a detective story, carefully putting together a series of hypotheses to test a theory, we instead simply “print” out all of the genetic information and see what’s different. Of course is the case of many brain diseases this may obscure the role for the environment in the etiologies…but the advocates of this industrial style of science are gaining a good deal of strength (look at the journals where these article are published).

I do see a tremendous utility in such research from the standpoint of adding new potential therapeutic targets and also giving us clues outside a disease’s conventional dogma.

In the meantime, happy 2007.

Jim

In today’s Sunday NYT: a very interesting portrait of neuroscientist Daniel Levitin (one of several neuroscientists with a real musical background) on his theory of how our brains are wired to enjoy music. Some of it is a bit far fetched, but it’s intriguing nonetheless.

Money quote:

This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.

This is the last blogpost here for 2006. Happy New Year to all of my readers and we’ll look forward to a productive 2007.

Jim

With the new year soon upon us, I thought I would telegraph some of the significant events for the next semester. I'll be off to the the SICB meeting in Phoenix in the first week of January to chair the editorial board meeting for The Biological Bulletin. I'll try to take some pictures from the road and post them (although I suspect my digital images from trips to Austria and China later in the year will be more interesting). Then on January 11 and 12, the Institute will hold its annual scientific retreat, this year organized by Professor Layne Kalbfleisch. I've written about the retreat before–it's a chance for all of us to get together to talk about our scientific research off-site. In future years, we'll be moving the retreat to the end of the Spring semester, to allow us to coordinate overlap with the Institute's two advisory boards.

Also during January we'll be interviewing candidates for the various PI searches that are on-going. I'm looking forward to meeting with the finalists. These interviews will continue into February. The anticipation is that there will be three new PI's joining the Institute at the beginning of next academic year.

Later in the Spring, we'll be hosting the Decade of the Mind Symposium. The keynote speaker list looks spectacular. More about that later.

Jim

Today marks the last day of the Fall semester. For me, the high point
has been the remarkable scientific productivity among our PI's and
the tremendous dedication of our wonderful support staff. But the
success at Krasnow is really, more than anything else, a team effort:
our graduate students, postdocs and external advisory board members
have also contributed mightily to the dynamism and scientific
excitement at this Institute…12 miles perhaps (as the bird flies)
from the U.S. Congress that ultimately supports so much of our work
and 100 holiday seasons since the seminal Nobel Prize of Cajal that
serves so many of us as inspiration.

Jim

The Institute now has a Wikipedia entry (click on the link above).

Jim

One common tension in the thesis work is the often unstated conflict between the major professor’s view on ownership versus that of the graduate student. As a matter of fact, the graduate student author generally holds copyright on the words and figures in the thesis; the major professor is generally viewed as owning the data and having rights to senior authorship on the resultant publications. However there are many complexities involved and any real understanding of the issues (at least in the biosciences) must be nuanced.

From my viewpoint, the stumbling block often really lies with the question of who has the right to pursue future follow-on research resulting from the thesis (the graduate student or the major professor). The newly minted Ph.D. understandably feels that she or he has done the experiments, has become the world’s expert on that small area of science , has just completed a tome (i.e. the thesis) on the subject and therefore has the rights to the future research based on the thesis findings.

However, in a typical NIH-funded lab, in my opinion, the PI owns the actual raw data (not the graduate student) and it is generally assumed that the intellectual kernel of the thesis came from the PI (at least as much as from the graduate student). This is less clear in the case of non-federally funded research of course.

The key is that the thread of research in the thesis usually exists within the larger context of that of the major professor and his/her laboratory. Thus the argument is made that the follow-on research stays within that larger context of the PI’s lab while the graduate student goes on to different (and hopefully more interesting) projects during the postdoctoral years.

In practice, conflicts have usually been resolved in favor on the major professor as opposed to the graduate student.

So my recommendation is: enjoy the very real ownership of your dissertation itself…and look forward to all the future science you can do, once you are an independent investigator.

Jim

This is pretty big news for those of us who collaborate extensively:

Money quote:

Beginning with research grant applications submitted for February 2007 receipt dates, the NIH will allow applicants and their institutions to identify more than one Principal Investigator (PI). The Multiple PI option will be extended to most research grant applications submitted electronically through Grants.gov (http://www.grants.gov/) using the SF424 R&R application package. Grant applications that will accommodate more than one PI beginning in February include: R01, R03, R13/U13, R15, R18/U18, R21, R21/R33, R25, R33, R34, R41, R42, R43, R44, and C06/UC6 (see http://era.nih.gov/ElectronicReceipt/strategy_timeline.htm). Some types of applications including individual career awards (K08, K23, etc.), individual fellowships (F31, F32, etc.), Dissertation Grants (R36), Director’s Pioneer Awards (DP1), and Shared Instrumentation Grants (S10) will not accommodate more than a single PI. The restriction to a single PI will be described in announcements for those programs.

There are several unpaid duties that go with being a scientist–among them, refereeing manuscripts for publication, serving on grant review “study sections” and of course writing recommendations. This last obligation is often the least understood.

There are several aspects to writing a recommendation letter that are clearly fraught with ambiguity:

First, given our lawsuit-friendly times, how frank should one really be? My opinion is that if you can’t write someone an outstanding support letter, it’s really better to tell them that up front so that they can go elsewhere. I realize that this might put other institutions and granting agencies at risk, but, following my principle, a really awful scientist is going to have a hard time getting any support letters.

Second: the phenomenon of “recommendation letter inflation”. It’s just a fact of life–the intense competition for jobs and grants probably pushes the trend, but if you really want the individual to get the job, you’d better not “condemn them with faint praise”. This goes against the grain for a lot of scientists, because in their papers, when discussing their data, any tendency towards over-hype is very properly held against one.

Third, it’s key to get across in the very first or second sentence, how long you have known the person you are recommending –and in what capacity. If this isn’t made clear, the entire letter becomes considerably less useful to the reader.

Finally, I always believe that it’s useful to step back at some point and indicate where the individual’s trajectory appears to be headed in your opinion– are they headed for the National Academy? Or maybe just towards being a solid scientific citizen (well funded and publishing in good journals).

Jim

There’s a great article by Clive Thompson in today’s NY Times magazine called “Rewiring the Spy”.

Money quote:

Today’s spies exist in an age of constant information exchange, in which everyday citizens swap news, dial up satellite pictures of their houses and collaborate on distant Web sites with strangers. As John Arquilla told me, if the spies do not join the rest of the world, they risk growing to resemble the rigid, unchanging bureaucracy that they once confronted during the cold war. “Fifteen years ago we were fighting the Soviet Union,” he said. “Who knew it would be replicated today in the intelligence community?”

Jim