Robin Henig’s piece in today’s Sunday Times magazine is a good read. It’s fairly realistic about the complexities of deception and it presents some interesting alternative approaches to fMRI and EEG–the detection of microfacial movements, with the notion that those represent “cognitive leakage”.

Jim

I have a colleague from a former Soviet block country who honestly can’t understand the whole notion of compliance. When forced to face such issues (e.g. employee safety, laboratory animal use, chemical storage) he quite sincerely throws up his hands and attributes to the enforcers of such rules, the characteristics of the nameless soviet apparatchik–“do they want a bribe,” he wonders?

Compliance is absolutely critical to the safe and ethical conduct of basic cognitive research. Too many graduate students are trained in such a way that they view these procedures as a unnecessary burden on their day to day research. I have, over the course of my own training, heard many times the view that to be a really “intense” bench-top scientist, it’s almost desirable to flaunt the rules. Such is the road to disaster. You don’t carefully balance a centrifuge on that midnight run and the next thing you know there is P32 all over the room. You don’t have an approved protocol for that experiment that you just thought up and the next thing you know, laboratory animal-based research is suspended at your institution.

Compliance is best practice in research. It’s extraordinarily important to take it seriously.

Jim

Looks like 14 March will be when site “mobilization” will occur. And we’re looking at the 14 of April, four weeks later for the first selective clearing. So this is a slip as to when we begin. For those interested, the new building will be enclosed (i.e. tight) by early October. We’re still looking at late February 2007 for completion.

Jim

We went to a very interesting dinner with colleagues yesterday evening. Among the many interesting topics of conversation that came up, was the whole subject of inner city poverty, and how (with the exception perhaps of Katrina) it is mostly invisible to most people. That’s a problem I think. If suffering isn’t salient, then it’s difficult for people of good will to do something about it. Along the same lines, we were discussing the notion of how it is possible, in a culture of rampant materialism, to lose the ability to empathize with suffering. And that also is a kind of poverty, though of a different sort.

In the meantime, I am reading a wonderful book: “Inside The Neolithic Mind” by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (ISBN 0-500-05138-0) which was given to me by the head of our Center for Social Complexity, Claudio Cioffi. The Neolithic Revolution of course was the transition of Homo sapiens from being hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists. What is interesting about this book is that the author’s theorize this occurred not because of some Kipling-like “Just So Story” but rather as an epiphenomenon of social engagement with altered states of consciousness (such as those induced by drugs, near-death experiences and even chanting). And in turn, not unreasonably the authors posit that such group reactions to altered states of consciousness also led to religion. The book is a great combination of archeology and cognitive neuroscience. I highly recommend.

Jim

I got a call from the marketing director of an architectural firm today. He had read about this blog’s off-spring, the Krasnow construction blog in the AIA magazine and decided to look around for himself. He thought that maybe a blog of this type might be a good idea for K-12 construction projects in his home town and I have to say, based on the experience here, I agree with him.

We also got to chatting about the larger utility of a web-instrument such as this. And that discussion dovetailed with a recent discussion I had, in another context, about academic-types and editorials. That discussion revolved around the complexities that often arise when the opinions of say…the chairperson of Dept X and Institution Y (signing as such) is mistaken for the official stance of Y. Needless to say, those complexities often lead to inboxes full of angry emails.

Blogs such as this one occupy a gray zone. They are neither the Op-Ed piece, nor are they an email listserv. The blog, writ large, still awaits the perspective that only some decades of being around will give it, in order for its place as a communication instrument to be fully understood. Until that time, we must settle on this: what’s here is not the official position of my institution–they are instead the open musings of an academic administrator, the internet equivalent of an open office door and a shared cup of java.

Jim

MRI: The machine will arrive on May 8. The schedule slip was due primarily to additional precautions and research into interference with existing labs. Renovation should start about February 20, with dust protection followed by demolition.

Expansion: We are applying for the preliminary design review today. Once we have approved preliminary design we will be able to get foundation and Steel erection permits. We will be applying for site clearing permits most likely in the morning. Tree clearing will be limited to the extents of the building foundation + 20 ‘ to allow for code clearance and construction equipment travel. The trees affected will be minimal. You may start seeing some cones and other equipment showing up over the next few weeks. Office trailers will be set in place as soon as we have a permit for them. We will be installing fencing around the perimeter of the project to limit access to the site. Once this happens, we will loose some parking in the rear access area, and incoming traffic into the building from the rear door will need to be limited.

Jim

The spring semester begins tomorrow at Mason. I’ll be teaching a class
on molecular signal transduction within the context of neuroscience–it
should be as interesting for me as it will be for our doctoral students.

In the meantime, I wish all of our students, faculty and staff the very
best of luck,

Jim

In today’s NY Times magazine. Aren’t these questions that we should be studying at Krasnow?

Money quote:
“Q:Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.

D: Isn’t it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don’t need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.”

Dennett serves on Krasnow’s Scientific Advisory Board.

The Economist has a wonderful story on the rebirth of the City University of New York (CUNY). It’s uplifting and it strikes me as perhaps enlightening for our own public university.

Jim

There are several other important other imaging modalities for an MRI–diffusion tensor (DT) imaging has the potential to allow for the in vivo imaging of tracts within the brain, magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) has the capability of imaging chemical compounds (such as neurotransmitter metabolites)–just to name two.

As we open our Krasnow brain imaging center, I hope that we’ll do more than fMRI. Ultimately I believe it will be a fusion of data that will yield the most important clues in the non-invasive human brain imaging field. Imagine the power of EEG data collected real time with the BOLD signal (the dependent variable in functional MRI) and simultaneously with MRS data related to glutamate and GABA….at that point you begin to force the brain to yield up something more than clues, no?

Jim