A close friend from my undergraduate days at Amherst College and I had one of our regular lunches recently (he’s in the intelligence field) and an interesting topic came up: the notion that conspiracy theories have a specific cognitive neuroscience associated with them.

Wikipedia defines the term as follows:

A conspiracy theory attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an event (usually a political, social, or historical event) as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance of powerful people or organizations rather than as an overt activity or as natural occurrence.

Christopher Hitchens has referred to these theories as “the exhaust fumes of democracy”, as though they were an emergent of our political system. Although I fear that conspiracy theories are rampant also in places where there is no democracy.

What is interesting about the Wikipedia definition is that it implies a cognitive process of arranging evidence and items in such a way as to create a coherent (albeit sometimes crazy) narrative. Isn’t this what we all do all the time?

For example, as a scientist looking at the signal transduction pathways involved in sea urchin egg fertilization, I am mentally arranging evidence of PKC activation, PH changes and fertilization envelope changes into a coherent molecular narrative that is embodied by a theory that can, in fact, be tested.

What is different about conspiracy theories?

Can we test the theory that Castro or the Mafia had JFK assassinated? I think not. At least not in the sense of Popperian science.

The other question I think is whether the tendency to adopt conspiracy theories as explanation for world events is a phenotype. Are the brains of those folks functioning in unusual ways? That is something perhaps that functional brain imaging can address.

Finally, I raise the question of conspiracy theory structures (or syntax). Are there cultural differences in conspiracy theories? This perhaps is an area for anthropological research.

Jim

I’m reading Jim Collin’s book Good to Great and very much enjoying it. There are many very important ideas I think for an institute like Krasnow. The book itself is a study of a cohort of companies that made a step-wise transition from being very good at what they did to being great at it….in comparison to a matched cohort which did not.

Among my favorite concepts:
–it’s important to have the right people on the “bus”….more important in fact than what the vision is.

–motivational speeches are inherently a waste of time–if you have the right folks, they will be self-motivated

–put your best people on projects with the greatest opportunities, rather than on your biggest problems.

What’s nice about Collin’s book is that he didn’t come into these conclusions with some agenda. Rather the conclusions emerged from an empirical analysis of his data.

Jim

Robin and I spent a delightful evening at the brand new (and spectacular) Strathmore Music Center yesterday. Giancarlo Guerrero led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in one of my favorites: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 featuring 17 year old pianist Natasha Paremski. Sure beats an I-pod! We got our tickets through the University of Michigan alumni club of Washington DC.

Really interesting work at Brown University (John Donoghue)published in Nature and reported on in today’s New York Times–click on the link above.

Money quote:
“But the paper in Nature is the first peer-reviewed publication of an experiment in people with a more sophisticated implant, able to monitor many more brain neurons than earlier devices. The paper helps “shift the notion of such ‘implantable neuromotor prosthetics’ from science fiction towards reality,” Stephen H. Scott, professor of anatomy and cell biology at Queen’s University in Ontario, wrote in a commentary in the journal.”

The last twenty-four hours were spent at the Great Apes Trust learning about an incredible research facility–one focused on generating rich cognitive data from Orangutans and Bonobos that live, not in a Zoo, but an a truly enriched environment. This facility, designed by a talented group of primatalogists including Krasnow’s own Rob Shumaker and led by board chair and founder Ted Towsend lies on some 230 acres of forest and meadowland along the Des Moines River. Suffice it to say, I was impressed. The pictures are of a sculpture that was actually just completed yesterday of Azy, the male organutan, who appears in the next image (next to another female) with Rob Shumaker. My colleague in the sculpture image is Professor Ann Palkovich of Krasnow and the Mason department of anthropology.

Following the site visit, the dinner yesterday evening at Ted’s beautiful house was spectacular.

In the meantime, I’m back for a while. The construction seems to be progressing well and we are looking forward to the excitement that will commence in August with the new academic year.

Jim

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m off to visit a new research effort called The Great Apes Trust–some five miles from downtown Des Moines. We’ve had a long history at Krasnow of interest in the cognitive capabilities of these magnificent animals that share so much biology with us. I’ll hopefully be able to report from the road on what I see (including some pictures). In the meantime, do click on the link above.

Jim

This is the summer of planning with a relatively long time horizon. Part of the reason for that is my reappointment to a second five year term as director; another component has to do with the enormous about of change that is happening this summer as a result of construction and turnover in scientific staff (we have lost two valued PI’s and gained three new ones). Certainly with the new space and the magnet, there are opportunities to recruit individuals that simply weren’t possible before.

One aspect of this long term planning that comes to mind this morning is how to take the vision for what we want to be, as an institute, to the next level. By this I mean, how do we take the areas in which we excel and subsequently take actions to become great in those areas. And as a corollary, how do we decide on what areas we excel in?

This line of thought leads me to think of sustainability, particularly in what is increasingly clearly a challenging federal funding environment. We are going to have to be qualitatively more entrepreneurial to sustain our research in the current biomedical federal funding climate.

Along the same lines, there is the need to continue to take risks. Risk averse institutes for advanced studies are an oxymoron. George Johnson, the science journalist, has called that sensibility a “fire in the mind”. How do we keep that fire burning?

Jim

In contrast to the typical university department, the scientist leaders of Krasnow are termed “principal investigators”. This term of course derives from the world of grants, where a PI is the legally accountable spender-in-chief for the direct costs associated with an award (and also for her laboratory, the “decider”). At Krasnow however, the term means something considerably more complex. For one thing, it reflects the seniority (based upon research) to participate in the decisions that reflect the direction of the Institute as a whole–such has recruitment of new PI’s, selection of seminar series speakers and mentorship issues. On another level, it reflect the independence of the PI as far as their research is concerned. Thus, crucially, the PI initiates research at Krasnow.

Every semester, the Krasnow PI’s gather for lunch, as a group, to discuss the direction of the Institute. At the last such gathering, we dined at a small Turkish restaurant in Fairfax, I was struck by how collegial this group has become over the years. And this is also an important component of what it means to be a Krasnow PI: to be a colleague of ones fellow PI’s. Krasnow PI’s collaborate with one another, and when they aren’t collaborating, they serve as scientific sounding boards for one another.

Most of Krasnow’s PI’s are also university faculty members at George Mason. These two roles are distinct from one another, although they are very complementary: research is a crucial criterion for promotion and tenure. So very often, a Krasnow PI is also a professor in some academic unit of the University (Krasnow isn’t an academic unit by-the-way). Thus a Krasnow PI usually has to balance teaching and departmental service obligations with a life of scientific research at the Institute–and this isn’t always trivial.

An odd item: there are no titles on the office name plates at Krasnow. So PI status is a bit murky. But I think in whole, that ambiguity on the door labels makes for a more open scientific atmosphere here at the Institute. Students and postdocs wander in with new ideas, and ultimately those ideas are the engine of science.

Happy 4th of July,

Jim

Be sure, if you can,  to check out Evan Ratliff’s very interesting article in today’s Sunday New York Times magazine. I’m more inclined towards the mini-seizure theory than anything else.

Money quote:
“Could ordinary déjà vu be a minor version of the same thing, a brief misfire in a temporal-lobe circuit that sets off the feeling of remembering? “Somebody like A.K.P. shows that there is this sensation that is separate from memory,” Moulin told me. “If his can go chronically wrong, ours can go momentarily wrong.”

It’s good to be home although the city is still recovering from its unprecidented bath–something on the order of 12.5 inches in four days at Reagan National Airport. Our house, near the Potomac’s Chain Bridge, seems to be fine. For the Fourth, we’ll be joining friends who have chartered a boat to cruise the River past the monuments as the fireworks illuminate them. I hope for good weather.

I’m very pleased that the June  issue of The Biological Bulletin is out and we’ve made it free. It’s a special “virtual symposium” on marine invertebrate models of learning and memory–the notion being that if we can understand the mechanisms of learning in a simple system of say, 10,000 neurons, perhaps we’ll get insight into the mechanisms that subserve learning in our own brains with one hundred billion nerve cells. Kudos to issue editors Donna McPhie and Mark Miller for a spectacular job!