Over the next several blog entries, I’ll be addressing the question of the future–that is the next five years at the Institute. The overarching questions that I hope to address are 1) how do we facilitate truly significant scientific discoveries at the Institute, 2) how do we build on our current success while managing change and 3) how do we relate to the rapidly emerging research enterprise at George Mason.

By way of introduction to these topics, the context must continue to be: excellence in research aimed at understanding the function (under both normal and pathological conditions) of the working human brain, while at the same time focusing on understanding both the origin of, and reverse engineering, its architecture and physiology.

These are among the most difficult scientific questions out there. The goal is for the Institute to make substantive contributions to this clearly trans-disciplinary field of inquiry. The challenge remains, as always, that scientific success is never assured, nor even predictable in its course. So we must create the optimal conditions for such fundamental discovery, rather than micromanaging the research programs of our scientific faculty.

Jim

So I’ve covered a lot of the Krasnow waterfront in this blog. To search
the index use the search tool in the upper-left corner. That’ll bring up
a listing of where that term was used in the blog. I tried it with the
term “Krasnow”. It worked pretty well.

Jim

This just in from our Design Build Contractor:
————————————————————————–

Mike,

Whiting-Turner is very excited to mobilize to the site in anticipation
of starting construction in the next few weeks. Below is a list of
activities that will be happening starting Tuesday February 14 and
continuing for the next two weeks:

1) Temporary site security fence delivered and installed
2) Construction dumpster delivered and placed
3) Construction gate installed
4) WT trailers will be delivered and installed
5) Temporary power, data, phones installed to trailer
6) Temporary toilet facilities placed on site
7) Tree selection and identification for future clearing activities

These activities will require that a few of the staff, faculty and
students of Krasnow to alter their current parking and walking habits.
There will not be any parking or access to the rear of the Krasnow
Institute unless in an emergency.

Jim Jaco will be on site Monday to work on laying out the specific areas
and identifying site fence boundaries. WT will work with Siemens to
coordinate with their site logistics.

Thanks,

Scott McEntee
Project Manager

I had a very interesting early morning breakfast at the Pentagon City Ritz this morning with two colleagues and a guest. The conversation started out with the guest asking some very pointed questions about neuroscience but quickly expanded into several interesting and intersecting threads:

One thread had to do with the link between deception (as in deceiving others), self-deception and memory (in all of its various kinds, but mainly focusing on episodic).

There was another thread that was centered on the notion of intracellular communication (signal transduction in the language of biologists) as a metaphor for network communication principles.

And the third thread dealt with the inherent contradiction of having collaborations be fruitful when elements of the data are classified (i.e. secret). By the way, this is not only true in the milieu of DOD, it’s also true in many areas of science, and further any area where intellectual property is at stake.

It seems to me that all of these threads should be elements of what we look at here at Krasnow: the first clearly in the field of cognitive neuroscience, the second partly in molecular cell biology, but also tied up with adaptive systems and the third in the domain of social complexity.

Jim

Robin Henig’s piece in today’s Sunday Times magazine is a good read. It’s fairly realistic about the complexities of deception and it presents some interesting alternative approaches to fMRI and EEG–the detection of microfacial movements, with the notion that those represent “cognitive leakage”.

Jim

I have a colleague from a former Soviet block country who honestly can’t understand the whole notion of compliance. When forced to face such issues (e.g. employee safety, laboratory animal use, chemical storage) he quite sincerely throws up his hands and attributes to the enforcers of such rules, the characteristics of the nameless soviet apparatchik–“do they want a bribe,” he wonders?

Compliance is absolutely critical to the safe and ethical conduct of basic cognitive research. Too many graduate students are trained in such a way that they view these procedures as a unnecessary burden on their day to day research. I have, over the course of my own training, heard many times the view that to be a really “intense” bench-top scientist, it’s almost desirable to flaunt the rules. Such is the road to disaster. You don’t carefully balance a centrifuge on that midnight run and the next thing you know there is P32 all over the room. You don’t have an approved protocol for that experiment that you just thought up and the next thing you know, laboratory animal-based research is suspended at your institution.

Compliance is best practice in research. It’s extraordinarily important to take it seriously.

Jim

Looks like 14 March will be when site “mobilization” will occur. And we’re looking at the 14 of April, four weeks later for the first selective clearing. So this is a slip as to when we begin. For those interested, the new building will be enclosed (i.e. tight) by early October. We’re still looking at late February 2007 for completion.

Jim

We went to a very interesting dinner with colleagues yesterday evening. Among the many interesting topics of conversation that came up, was the whole subject of inner city poverty, and how (with the exception perhaps of Katrina) it is mostly invisible to most people. That’s a problem I think. If suffering isn’t salient, then it’s difficult for people of good will to do something about it. Along the same lines, we were discussing the notion of how it is possible, in a culture of rampant materialism, to lose the ability to empathize with suffering. And that also is a kind of poverty, though of a different sort.

In the meantime, I am reading a wonderful book: “Inside The Neolithic Mind” by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (ISBN 0-500-05138-0) which was given to me by the head of our Center for Social Complexity, Claudio Cioffi. The Neolithic Revolution of course was the transition of Homo sapiens from being hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists. What is interesting about this book is that the author’s theorize this occurred not because of some Kipling-like “Just So Story” but rather as an epiphenomenon of social engagement with altered states of consciousness (such as those induced by drugs, near-death experiences and even chanting). And in turn, not unreasonably the authors posit that such group reactions to altered states of consciousness also led to religion. The book is a great combination of archeology and cognitive neuroscience. I highly recommend.

Jim

I got a call from the marketing director of an architectural firm today. He had read about this blog’s off-spring, the Krasnow construction blog in the AIA magazine and decided to look around for himself. He thought that maybe a blog of this type might be a good idea for K-12 construction projects in his home town and I have to say, based on the experience here, I agree with him.

We also got to chatting about the larger utility of a web-instrument such as this. And that discussion dovetailed with a recent discussion I had, in another context, about academic-types and editorials. That discussion revolved around the complexities that often arise when the opinions of say…the chairperson of Dept X and Institution Y (signing as such) is mistaken for the official stance of Y. Needless to say, those complexities often lead to inboxes full of angry emails.

Blogs such as this one occupy a gray zone. They are neither the Op-Ed piece, nor are they an email listserv. The blog, writ large, still awaits the perspective that only some decades of being around will give it, in order for its place as a communication instrument to be fully understood. Until that time, we must settle on this: what’s here is not the official position of my institution–they are instead the open musings of an academic administrator, the internet equivalent of an open office door and a shared cup of java.

Jim

MRI: The machine will arrive on May 8. The schedule slip was due primarily to additional precautions and research into interference with existing labs. Renovation should start about February 20, with dust protection followed by demolition.

Expansion: We are applying for the preliminary design review today. Once we have approved preliminary design we will be able to get foundation and Steel erection permits. We will be applying for site clearing permits most likely in the morning. Tree clearing will be limited to the extents of the building foundation + 20 ‘ to allow for code clearance and construction equipment travel. The trees affected will be minimal. You may start seeing some cones and other equipment showing up over the next few weeks. Office trailers will be set in place as soon as we have a permit for them. We will be installing fencing around the perimeter of the project to limit access to the site. Once this happens, we will loose some parking in the rear access area, and incoming traffic into the building from the rear door will need to be limited.

Jim