Although classes don’t begin until Friday, the giant is awakening from its slumber. Students are beginning to move in, the campus is looking immaculate.

I am at the moment deeply involved in a number of academic searches–this is the beginning of the high season for that academic activity also. In the next several blog entries, I’ll write about the process–how it is typically implemented, and how I think it can be made more effective.

Later in the semester I’ll spend some time discussing fundraising–which is an increasingly important activity for scientific administrators.

Jim

In this week’s SCIENCE, Rakic reviews a recent paper in PNAS (R. D. Bhardwaj et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 103, 12564 (2006). [PNAS]) which uses 14C to study the question of adult neurogenesis. Bottom-line is negative.

Money quote
” The innovative study by Bhardwaj et al. demonstrates with advanced methodology–¹⁴C dating of cell births–that no new neurons are added to the human neocortex after birth. The authors take advantage of a transiently sharp increase in the level of the radioactive carbon isotope, ¹⁴C, in Earth’s atmosphere during the era of aboveground testing of nuclear weapons between the mid-1950s and the time of the nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. In the years following these events, the level of ¹⁴C in the atmosphere declined to preexisting low background levels. The authors acquired cortical tissue from the autopsies of seven individuals born in Sweden between 1933 and 1973, and examined the level of ¹⁴C in individual cells by accelerator mass spectrometry. The presence of ¹⁴C in genomic DNA indicates that cells passed through their last cell division at a time when the atmospheric level of this isotope was high.”

I was at lunch in Washington yesterday and my guest (from the policy world) brought up a very interesting point: namely the problem inherent in the request from a policy-maker to an analyst (or a senior professor to a graduate student) to confirm a finding by conducting some other observation.

Of course, from the scientific standpoint, we really should be asking the graduate student to attempt to disprove the finding, right? That is they should be attempting to experimentally falsify the hypothesis/theory/conventional wisdom.

Now think about the last figure in so very many papers–the cartoon diagram for how it is speculated that “everything works” in vivo. The picture I call the Just So Story after Kipling. How many times are we in danger of asking our trainees to confirm the Just So Story instead of falsifying it? How are our rewards structures set up in science vis a vis this problem?

Jim

Lots of issues with the new blogger beta this morning. Hopefully these will be resolved shortly.

In the meantime I thought I would take this time out to thank Jim Rutt of the Krasnow Advisory Board for his very generous new gift to the Institute–following on to his very substantial support in the past. It’s private sector support like Jim’s which has allowed the Krasnow Institute to take risks in how we approach science. When I think back over my own years as institute director, I can think of no more important source of support that our individual leadership donors.

Thank you again Jim Rutt and thanks to all who have helped the Institute grow to what it has become today.

Neuroscience explanations for couch potato-ism.

Really interesting article in today’s SCIENCE magazine (click on the link above) by Kearns et al.

Money quote from the abstract:
“We studied networks of human subjects attempting to solve the graph or network coloring problem, which models settings in which it is desirable to distinguish one’s behavior from that of one’s network neighbors. Networks generated by preferential attachment made solving the coloring problem more difficult than did networks based on cyclical structures, and “small worlds” networks were easier still. We also showed that providing more information can have opposite effects on performance, depending on network structure.”

Jim

I will be joining GMU as an Assistant Professor in the Dept of Psychology and as a PI in NICKI at the Krasnow Institute of Advanced Studies. My research is concerned with understanding the mechanisms used by the human brain that allow us to recognize the movements of other people, such as how they walk or move their face or hands. Most of us would have had the experience of recognizing someone familiar to us purely on the basis of the way they walk – even if we can’t see their face. Accurately perceiving the movements of others is important for things as basic as navigating your way in a crowded street, to more complex situations such as recognizing friends from a distance, identifying threats from others, or picking up on the subtle, nonverbal cues that signal attraction.

Recognizing the movements of others is something that we do with ease, yet this type of motion is complex, has many degrees of freedom and thus poses a significant perceptual problem. My work is centered on how we solve this perceptual problem. Recently I have begun working on the idea that we use information about the configuration of the human body in order to place constraints on how we expect it might move – for example, we know that the upper arm must remain connected to the shoulder, and this limits its range of motion. It turns out that an area in the brain known to be critical for recognizing human movement, called the superior temporal sulcus (STS), uses this kind of body-shape information. This is a relatively simple idea that is borrowed from computer vision approaches to recognizing human movement, but gives us some clues to the way the human brain processes this complex motion. It also shows how ideas from computer vision can inform the understanding of human vision, and vice versa, something I plan to pursue further…

To investigate these issues I use a number of brain imaging methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). fMRI measures changes to a magnetic field due to increases or decreases in blood oxygenation that are coupled to neuronal firing, and thus fMRI provides a way of non-invasively measuring brain function at high (2-5mm) spatial resolution. EEG is a measure of brain electrical activity recorded from the scalp, and gives millisecond accuracy of the timing of neural events.

I was born in Melbourne, Australia and completed my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Sciences Institute at Swinburne University in Melbourne, focusing on the neurochemical basis of attention and short-term memory in humans. Following this I completed a post-doc at the Center for Advanced Imaging in the Department of Radiology at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV. Here I conducted a number studies using fMRI and EEG to examine the neural basis of the recognition of human movement, as well as learning a number of methodological issues associated with MRI. My research focus here was on how we visually represent the movement of different body parts, such as faces, arms, and legs. This work showed that when we see the movements of other people we activate our own motor representations in a manner consistent with the body part we see moving – that is, seeing another’s hand move activates representations of our own hand movements. This is another idea I will pursue in my research endeavors.

It is an exciting time to be starting a lab at GMU and at the Krasnow especially. It is my goal to set up a research program that is multidisciplinary, integrating knowledge about human vision, neuroscience, and computer vision and modeling to understand how we see others and interact with them.

Great posts from my colleagues Nathalia and Juan….I’m sure their research will be a fine addition to the Krasnow research portfolio.

Here in Woods Hole, today is the first day of the General Scientific Meetings–a two day affair devoted to summer research findings that has a very very long history. This evening, the Woods Hole neuroscience community will get together for the annual wine and cheese reception at the Swope Center-as it also does annually at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.

In the meantime, today we have the first taste of Fall….Vineyard sound and the sky are crystal clear blue and the humidity of summer has been replaced with the crispness that precedes the change in season.

Jim

I have also been invited by Jim to introduce myself. Since I’m about to start, in a couple of weeks, as assistant professor of the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at GMU, I thought it would be useful to briefly describe my background, and then discuss my research interests.

My research started with the retinal spreading depression, which is an experimental model for migraine auras. I developed models and demonstrated that this phenomenon can be explained with either cellular automata and/or reaction-diffusion equations that emulate wave propagation in anisotropic media and spiral formation. The results of these experiments constituted my Master’s thesis. Afterwards I developed a test system for the German retina implant project, based on in vitro chicken eyecups, and also tested in vivo stimulation parameters in anesthetized rabbits. I then received a fellowship to design “neuroelectronic arrays”, consisting of two- and three-dimensional microelectrode arrays for recording electrical activity of neurons in culture. After receiving my Ph.D., I went to Stanford University as a postdoc. There I investigated cardiac cell responses to changes in metabolism. Cell cultures were grown on microfabricated Clark-type oxygen sensors, and submitted to various drugs which modulated sensor responses. For the last two years I have been involved in developing seizure control devices and electrode design for low frequency stimulation.

Now that I am about to start my own lab, I intend to continue some of the efforts described above, in particular developing sensors coated with intelligent materials. Intelligent materials are polymers or polymeric coatings which react to environment or substrate stimuli (such as light, voltage, and pH). Potential applications of these sensors are multifold: from tissue engineering and implantable devices to traditional MEMS applications (actuators, development of electronic nose for detection of oil or alcohol in unsafe environments). I’m also interested in the spreading depression phenomenon in slices, in particular under the effect of electric fields. I hypothesize that some symptoms from migraines evolve due to charge imbalance in the nervous system and that they can be modulated experimentally and modeled in a very straightforward way.

One of our staff drew my attention to some new digital photos of our
new Krasnow laboratory expansion yesterday. It’s amazing how much
it’s changed in the ten days or so since I left for Woods Hole. It
reminds me of how rapidly the new academic year is approaching. For
me the new academic year is always symbolic of turning a clean page–
in a way that is much more salient than the calendar new year. At
Krasnow this is a very special new academic year because it coincides
with the welcoming of four new PI’s to our scientific community: Rob
Axtell (with the Center for Social Complexity), Juan Cebral (who
wrote about his work very recently in this blog), Nathalia Peixoto
(with the Center for Neural Dynamics) and Jim Thompson (who will be
joining NICKI). We are also actively participating in two new
searches and my hope is that we’ll be welcoming two additional PI’s
next Fall as we begin to fill out the Institute’s new space.

At the same time, we’ll be adding a new Center (more about that soon)
to be led by Giorgio Ascoli and we’ll commence regular dedicated
research operations of the new brain imaging center (NICKI) under the
able leadership of Layne Kalbfleisch and Kevin McCabe. We’ll have a
significant celebratory event sometime in the Fall to publicly
acknowledge these major new initiatives.

This has been a summer of major space moves: the Center for Social
Complexity has moved into its extraordinary new dedicated space
(which includes an enormous “simulation wall”). In addition, the
laboratory of Kimberly “Avrama” Blackwell has now moved into new
space more suitable for neurophysiology. So with NICKI, the Institute
is now very much reconfigured–I hope that old friends will consider
visiting, just to get a feel for the new layout and meet the new folks.

None of this would be possible without the continued efforts of the
incredibly dedicated Krasnow staff: Joe Carls, Marcy Moe, Cindy
Roberts, Jennifer Sturgis and Jane Wendelin. They have worked
tirelessly through the Summer to get things ready for the new
semester. We’re also very lucky to have, as Associate Director (and
CIO), Ken DeJong (who also happens to lead the Krasnow Adaptive
Systems Laboratory). Ken has played a key role in backing me up this
summer as I traveled extensively and supervising the massive changes
in our computer subnet that have been made necessary by the new MRI
and other security issues.

Finally a word about a very special event that will be coming in the
Spring: the Institute will be holding a major symposium to celebrate
its “coming of age” and to mark a new initiative to study the human
mind: among the confirmed speakers are Floyd Bloom, John Holland,
Nancy Kanwisher, Patricia Churchland, Vernon Smith and Guilio Tononi. I’ll have
much more on this scientific event later in the academic year. But
thanks clearly need to go to Krasnow Director Emeritus, Harold
Morowitz and his assistant Sara Bradley for all of their work getting
this important project going.

Finally, this will be an academic year of transition for me: I’ll be
planning for my second appointed term as Krasnow Director–due to
commence next July. I will be consulting extensively with all of our
faculty and staff about those plans and hope to go public with them
here on this blog sometime next May.

Jim