It was a wonderful day at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting
today. I found myself with former and current students and of course
more data than one could ever shake a stick at! One thing I did notice
was that modeling doesn’t really get broken out appropriately yet–we
had our poster in a session on place cells. Seems to me that we should
lobby for a couple of sessions of our own next time.

Jim

Excellent blog entry Layne. Thank you. In the near future we’ll be inviting other guest bloggers to contribute on various issues–this was a great start.

Jim

This week’s editorial in Science, “Pedagogy Meets Neuroscience,” is the crest of a wave that began back in June when The Journal of Neuroscience published the commentary, “Science Education: A Neuroscientist’s View of Translational Medicine” (Schwartz-Bloom R. 2005. JNAS, 25 (24): 5667-5669), and Nature printed, “Big Plans for Little Brains” (Volume 435, 1156-1158). The topics of each of these pieces address the potential for neuroscience to inform and reform educational policy, intervention, and practice. This issue lead to my interdisciplinary graduate training in educational psychology and neuroscience, which included experiments on the effects of Ritalin on learning and memory in hyperactive rats, and using EEG to explore the abilities of intellectually gifted and hyperactive adolescent boys to shift between academic and creative tasks. Michael Posner once shared with me videotaped discussions between cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and education professionals brought together by a philanthropic organization in hopes of generating interdisciplinary research topics.

I have witnessed the approach-avoidance dance between the fields of neuroscience and education for about 9 years now. On one hand, neuroscience has been reticent until now to consider the paradigmatic influence that educational psychology could have on discerning relevant research hypotheses. Indeed, the neuroimaging methods we use to adequately explore cognition, its development, and the nature of individual differences are just beginning to mature from their infancy. In this same issue of Science, there is a report that anomolies in certain genes that guide brain development are now linked to dyslexia. But in many ways, the metric between neuroscience and education is still off. Cognition viewed in the lab doesn’t necessarily reflect “real-world” cognition, at least not in the way that practitioners think about it. On the other hand, educators have been quick to conform to whatever pieces of information about the brain they can learn from the popular press and self-proclaimed experts. Intervention techniques that currently exist perturb the plastic brain, but for how long?

John Bruer, President of the McDonnell Foundation, once proclaimed it a “bridge too far” to cross. Now, just recently, the National Science Foundation has laid the foundations of those bridges with their Science of Learning endowments to University of Washington, Stanford, Dartmouth, Carnegie-Mellon, and Boston University. In my own talks about the neuroimaging studies that my lab performs on nonverbal reasoning, I preface remarks to educational audiences with two main topics. First, why it looks like we know so much when we know so little. Indeed, until the advent of neuroimaging, members of the animal kingdom were our “age-old experts.” And second, the need for developing greater scientific literacy so that people are equipped with the skill to evaluate translated scientific information. The challenge on the front of science involves innovating experimentation that will allow us to characterize cognitive function with greater ecological validity so that neuroscience can potentially inform and reform how we educate. We also have a responsibility to promote scientific literacy. The challenge on the front of education is to refrain from conforming to ideas and information that are still new and unreplicated.

Professor Layne Kalbfleisch will be guest blogging an entry related to this week’s editorial in SCIENCE magazine by Elsbeth Stern “Pedagogy meets Neuroscience”. Layne is a professor here at Krasnow, co-chairs our imaging facility and runs KIDlab–Krasnow Investigations of Developmental Learning and Behavior. Welcome to Layne.

We had a wonderful seminar today from Richard Brown of Dalhousie
University on the life of Donald Hebb–who I believe was the
intellectual father of much of what goes on at the Krasnow Institute today.

For those of you who missed the seminar the abstract is here
(http://krasnow.gmu.edu/abstracts_frames/abs05/brown-11-7-05.htm) and
Richard will be presenting a poster at the history of neuroscience
session at the Society for Neuroscience meeting here in Washington which
begins at the end of this week.

I’d also like to welcome our colleagues in neuroscience from around the
world who may be visiting Krasnow and Washington this coming week. I
hope to see many of you at the Meeting.

Jim

A colleague of mine in Spain (both accomplished neuroscientist and
business person) induced me to try out Skype the other day (www.skype
com). Skype is Internet telephony with instant message capability that
is cost free “in network”. I-chat, Yahoo IM and AOL IM all have similar
capabilities. Skype is somewhat unique in that it has very low cost
“call out” capabilities–meaning that you can call someone at a regular
cell or land line, someone who is off the Internet.
What struck both of us is that these modalities may be of great utility
for enhancing international scientific initiatives. Imagine two
laboratories, on separate continents, engaged in a collaboration, funded
by perhaps an international granting agency. Now imagine being a fly on
the wall in a state-of-the-art electrophyiology laboratory (such as we
have at Krasnow):
A postdoc on one side of the ocean, patch clamping a hippocampal
pyramidal cell (in the early afternoon) might be able to assist another
postdoc (working in the early evening) with a recording of a similar
cell, sharing data in real time, while at the same time perhaps spending
30 minutes at a time communicating nothing at all–concentrating instead
on the bench work at hand.
The point is that it would cost nothing, but it would potentially create
a virtual adjacency that could be very powerful. Skype and it’s cousins
allow for a good deal more than voice/instant message communication.
Files can be transfered. Web links can be rapidly exchanged. And in the
case of I-chat, good video link is available.
These notions of free and ubiquitous communication brings back a
poignant memory from my recent trip to Curacao. In the main square,
overlooking the harbor, seated outside and alone at an Internet cafe
under a palm tree, a young woman with a web cam on her laptop was
clearly instant messaging with her boyfriend (or perhaps a close
relative). I imagine that the young woman was Dutch, since Curacao is
part of the Netherlands Antilles–perhaps the other party was on the
other side of the Atlantic, in Holland. The world has indeed changed.

Jim

Space is always a real “bread and butter” issue (or should one say a hot button issue?) at an institute for advanced study. Not only is space related to perceived prestige and power (especially when there are no titles or other honorifics on the office doors), but more importantly space is directly related to the ability to carry out research.

Within this overall context, it’s incumbent upon a director to make the hard choices on space allocation–and most importantly to put the interests of the institute (and in our case also the university) at the forefront.

For me when I make choices regarding space I consider the following factors in roughly descending order:
–overall scientific viability of the institute as a whole
–retaining our scientific talent
–preserving scientific viability of individual PI’s based on meritocracy criteria
–equity

Sometimes this results in individual and/or group unhappiness I know. Especially when, on the rare occasion, I have to change the status quo.

Jim

We wish UCSB and Mike well as they launch a sister institute on the west coast.

Money quote:
“UC Santa Barbara has received a $3.5-million contribution from SAGE Publications to launch a dynamic new interdisciplinary research center for the study of the mind. SAGE made the gift to commemorate its 40th anniversary as a leading international publisher for scholarly, educational, and professional markets.
The SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind will bring together UC Santa Barbara scholars from a broad range of academic disciplines in the arts and humanities, social sciences, the sciences, and engineering to explore the multidimensional nature of the human mind.

UCSB has attracted a top scholar to lead the pioneering new effort. Michael Gazzaniga, widely regarded as the founder of the cognitive neuroscience field, will direct the SAGE Center. Gazzaniga is currently the David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth where he directs the college’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. In January, he will join UCSB’s Psychology Department, where he began his academic career in 1967 as an assistant professor of psychology.”

With November upon us, the academic semester, holiday season in sight, builds in intensity. Nevertheless, as the trees hit their peak colors, I am reminded of how beautiful this season is here in the Washington area. We are so lucky to be here–all of us.

In Washington *and* in academia, there is a fine art to blocking,
obstructing that which you may not wish to come to pass. It’s a
delicate dance of course because there are often powerful
constituencies behind initiatives. I remember when I used to live
near the National Zoo, my wife and I met a politically well-connected
guy who pointedly told us that it’s possible to block anything or
anyone “in this town”.
Hmmm.
I’m bringing this up because of course I think such process
“filibustering” is inappropriate. If you are against something, then
the proper way to oppose it is to come out, make your best case, let
the decision-makers have at it, and live with the course of history.
And definitely such a proper course requires both more courage and
more importantly, a greater respect for the folks who are charged
with saying yeah or nay.
Along these lines, may I recommend Jane Smiley’s novel of academia
“Moo”. It’s a delightful description of academic obstructionism taken
to obsession–and very entertaining!

Jim