It’s muggy here! But it’s good to be back. In the next couple of blog entries I’ll speculate about what a Mason Medical School might actually look like.

Jim

An excellent meeting with our Russian Colleagues today. I particularly enjoyed meeting Larissa A. Tsvetkova, the dean of the Faculty of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University, home of Krasnow’s own Lev Vekker.

Also enjoyed learning about Sandia Lab’s exciting new initiatives in the Cognitive Sciences and meeting Russ Skocypec and Stephem Roehrig along with old colleague Chris Forsythe.

Sandia is a crucial nexus to the national “mind” strategy.

Tomorrow, back on the plane and headed to Dulles. And home.

Jim

We broke through the clouds at about 10,000 feet yesterday over a very rainy Albuquerque airport. It had actually been icing on our decent and the landing was a particularly exciting cross-wind touchdown–I hate to think about the stresses on the Airbus’ composite tail as it moved the plane back to the center line of the runway. The precipitation at the taxi-stand was a cold one and I literally dumped my bags in the back to get out of the weather.

This morning at 8AM, the meeting begins–a Russia US collaboration meeting on neurotechnologies over at Sandia Lab’s International Activities Center. What are neurotechnologies anyway? The first thing that comes to mind is the so-called “brain-machine interface” that defines the future neuroengineering of prosthetics. But I would additionally put in that category any of the non-invasive brain imaging technologies, drugs and machines that augment cognition and finally hardware (circuits) that have some of the characteristics of neurons.

Should be interesting.

Jim

Or perhaps another field to be called geriatric neuroeconomics? Tyler Cowen links to this paper in his blog Marginal Revolution today. Apparently our economic sophistication is on an inverted U-curve with respect to age. Is there a neural basis for that?

Jim

I’ve heard Vernor speak before. Somehow, I’m quite skeptical about his claim that computers will be able to exceed our cognitive capabilities relatively soon. AI has been over-sold for a very long time, so the field still suffers from credibility issues. Nevertheless, it seems to me that merely throwing Moore’s Law at something as architecturally complex as the human brain is problematical. Each neuron in our brain is a whole lot more than an integrate-and-fire computational element. Each neuron represents a constellation of hierarchical biochemical and biophysical processes constrained by an orderly, yet unique morphology. There are something like 100 billion of these neurons and each of them as perhaps 10,000 connections to others. How you go from a digital computer to something approaching the human brain is daunting.

I suppose the ultimate question is: will a PC pass the Turing Test anytime soon.

Jim

Apparently a neuroscience graduate student from Ann Arbor (where I got my PhD by the way) got herself in some temporary hot water on her neuroscience blog. The problem stemmed from putting up some graphs from a journal article that she was critiquing. When she replaced the actual published graphs with her own version of the same, the trouble went away.

Jim

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on-line has an excellent article about a report that has recently been released in the journal Academic Medicine. Bottom line: the median annual cost for running an institutional review board (to protect human subjects) is around $800,000. That’s a lot of money. The use of human subjects in research is an expensive business and universities need to budget with those expenses firmly in mind.

Jim