Folks who read my blog know that I’m very interested in medical education. Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education references two very interesting curricular programs, one at the University of Missouri Kansas City and the other at Duke. The Missouri program is actually quite mature (35 years) and facilitates an early medical degree by integration with a baccalaureate program. The Duke program is a bit more interesting in that it modifies the medical curriculum to facilitate clinical clerkships and research opportunities in years M3 and M4–the goal being more clinical researchers.

I additionally bring to your attention a new call for Flexner II from Academic Medicine. That meme seems to be expanding.

Jim

Bottom line: our brains can’t really handle more than one task at once without degrading performance.

Money quote:

Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

I wonder if I should stop reading my blackberry when stopped at red lights?

Jim

Colleague Dharmendra Modha (of IBM’s Almaden Research Center) refers me to the web page for what looks like a very interesting conference in early May. Besides Dharmendra, speakers include Nobel Laureate Don Glaser and Michael Arbib.

Jim

Relating an interesting debate between author and neuroscience grad student Sam Harris and Stuart Hameroff. Andrew Sullivan himself has been involved recently in a long exchange of thoughtful emails with Harris on the question of faith and science.

The wonderful weekend edition of The Financial Times reviews three books on the neurophilosophy of free will.

Money quote:

Two neuroscientists working in Australia have taken Libet’s discovery one step further. They found that, when asking people to choose to move either their left or right hands, it was possible to influence their choice by electronically stimulating certain parts of their brains. So, for example, the scientists could force the subjects always to choose to move their left hands. But despite their choice being electronically directed, these patients continued to report that they were freely choosing which hand to move.

So not only is your steering wheel not attached to anything, but if your car was being steered by someone else by remote control, you would not even notice. Every time it turns left, you just move your toy steering wheel and think, ”Ah yes, I want to turn left.”

The George Mason University Board of Visitors unanimously approved a change in the Institute’s status this morning allowing it to hold and administer tenure-line faculty lines. This will greatly strengthen the Institute’s ability to recruit and retain the very best scientists while at the same time retaining the trans-disciplinary scientific program as we collaborate with other Mason academic units and external scientific institutions.

In other news, we’re still in the middle of “faculty search” season–with offers out on the table and I’m looking very much forward to welcoming a new cadre of principal investigators to Krasnow in the Fall. Announcements are not very far away.

The MRI Center is now ready to go operational. I encourage PI’s across the National Capital Area to contact us regarding protocols. Remember, this is a high field, 3T Siemens Allegra. A lot of folks consider the machine to be optimal for functional brain imaging. The link for information is here.

Finally, the new building is almost done. I’ve walked through a number of our job candidates. I’m looking forward to an occasion to take all of our scientific staff on a walk through soon.

Jim

I’m one of the international co-organizers of this year’s Quantum Mind Conference in Salzburg. But quite apart from the conference (although along a very relevant line) I bring to your attention a piece in The American Scholar by Robert Lanza, a professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Money quote:

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does the music indeed exist.

Jim

So it’s a pretty interesting article albeit written with too much faith in the ability of fMRI to “tell all”. The focus of the story is a neuroscience-law interdisciplinary program that’s at Vanderbilt University under the direction of Owen Jones, who is a professor of law and biology there. Front and center is VUIIS (Vanderbilt University Institute for Imaging Science) and its functional imaging capabilities.

Money quote:

Jones is turning Vanderbilt into a kind of Los Alamos for neurolaw. The university has just opened a $27 million neuroimaging center and has poached leading neuroscientists from around the world; soon, Jones hopes to enroll students in the nation’s first program in law and neuroscience. “It’s breathlessly exciting,” he says. “This is the new frontier in law and science — we’re peering into the black box to see how the brain is actually working, that hidden place in the dark quiet, where we have our private thoughts and private reactions — and the law will inevitably have to decide how to deal with this new technology.”

I guess my take is that we’ve got a very long way to go before we start accurately reading out private thoughts from the current technology–resolution is too low both in the spatial and temporal dimensions to pick up the neural code (or at least the version of it that relates to the sort of episodic memory Rosen is writing about).

Nevertheless, the ethical and legal issues raised are very real.

Click on the link above to read the whole thing.

Jim

Just picked up the Sunday NY Times on the doorstep–the magazine's lead is on the subject of neuroscience and the law. Looks like a good read. I'll comment and link later today.

Jim

From today’s Chronicle on-line: HHMI and Elsevier have reached an agreement that will allow the Institute to pay (on an individualized basis) to make one of their author’s papers immediately open access.

Money quote:

The new agreement would pay Elsevier $1,000 for each article published in a Cell Press journal and $1,500 for each article in other Elsevier journals.