High anxiety at the Sunday Times Magazine

Robin Henig has an extensive piece in today’s Sunday New York Times Magazine focused on anxiety and the work of Harvard developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan (along with many of his students who are now independent investigators).

I found the piece to be curiously anecdotal in terms of its presentation of very extensive longitudinal data–perhaps satisfying for non-scientists, but quite frustrating for those of us who want to look at actual data to prove or disprove hypotheses.
Nevertheless, the piece raises the excellent question of the extent to which the phenomenon we call anxiety is deeply linked the the limbic brain structure called the amygdala. The latest fMRI studies are at least able to provide something beyond classic psychometric tests.

Timo Hannay’s notes on Joi Ito’s talk at Nature

Friend and colleague Timo Hannay at Nature took notes on Creative Common’s guru Joi Ito’s presentation there. Money quote:

CC licensing increases demand but cannibalises sales. So there’s a trade-off depending on the demand and sales of any given piece of work at any given time. The questions about CC licensing are therefore practical ones about what, who and when – not a religious decision. (Though for scientific and certain other types of content, CC believes in free access.)

In these situations, the communities often police themselves, enforcing social norms such as attribution and non-commercial restrictions. [Joi gave a Star Wars fan fiction example.] In some cases, fans create derivative versions (e.g., subtitled films) to encourage the publisher to release an official (paid) version, removing the amateur version when they succeed.

Academic Job Interviews in the biosciences

As some readers know, I’m co-teaching a survival-skills course for our neuroscience doctoral students this semester. Last week we talked about job talks and the crucial skills involved in flying in for the day-and-a-half interview for an assistant professor-level tenure-track job.

In thinking about the whole process, the notion of a bank stress test comes to mind. The schedule is quite grueling, it demands a very high level of constant alertness, and there are ample opportunities for making mistakes.

In my experience, the biggest tripping hazard comes at the end of the job talk on Day 1: you’ve just finished giving a spectacular talk after a long series of interviews with potential colleagues. You lower your guard and begin to relax just as you need to be at your peak performance–the dinner where your potential colleagues will attempt to ply you with drinks and food for two hours while simulating the behaviors that go with a social dinner. In actuality, they are looking for insight into your level of scientific abilities and character–all while offering you ample rope to hang yourself with.

Some rules of the road for that dinner:
1) Stay with the formal clothes that you were wearing at your job talk. This is no time to dress-down.

2) Don’t have more than one glass of wine at most. Your ability to remain focused is paramount to success and by this time on Day 1, you are probably close to exhaustion.

3) Don’t gossip. Deflect questions designed to get you to dish on current or former colleagues. Worst case scenario: your dishing goes right back to the person you were dealing the dirt on,. Best case scenario: your scientific character is impugned.

4) Keep aware of your body. Avoid nervous behavioral habits and eat carefully enough to avoid spilling disasters.

5) Ask questions–but keep the questions within the professional scope.

6) Try to focus most of your intentions on intelligent give-and-take scientific conversations, all the while, taking care not to monopolize either in quantity or amplitude. In other words, listen carefully, speak intelligently but not too loudly.

Finally, remember you are not “off-camera” until you shut your hotel room door for the night.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Jim

Is the FT the last serious paper?

From Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. I’m not sure. I still really enjoy the Old Gray Lady and am partial enough to the WSJ to purchase a subscription for family members. But the Financial Times is really indispensable to me. I find it to be extremely well written. More importantly the firewall between the editorial page and the news seems to be rock solid.

Jim

Vasily Kandinsky

I woke up this morning to find the not uncommon mountain phenomenon of being inside a cloud. Virginia’s Blue Ridge can have pretty dramatic weather changes. So instead of the vibrant Fall colors outside my study window, there’s the opportunity to think about painters–and Vasily Kandinsky is my favorite. A retrospective of his work just opened at the Guggenheim in New York. Here’s a preview at Newsweek.

Enjoy. I hope to make it up to NYC to see the real deal very soon.
Jim

Faculty meeting and then headed for the mountains

I’ve been invited today to deliver some comments and do a Q&A by the Institute faculty. After that, I’m headed off to our mountain house for the weekend. While I’m there, I’m going to continue working on a course for next semester on hippocampal function. Interestingly, while much has been written over the years about the mammalian hippocampus, the evidence for what its current function is (in humans) remains somewhat unclear. It most certainly isn’t the “memory” center of the brain, although it pretty clearly plays some important role in mnemonic neurobiology. But it certainly is an aesthetically striking structure, so much so, that it practically pleaded for a functional explanation as soon as it was examined and described histologically by Cajal and his contemporaries. It is also extraordinarily well-embedded in the brain’s system of network connections. So well-embedded in fact that one might devise many “just-so” stories for hippocampal function and seem to be quite reasonable.

Jim