Specializations.

I am a biophysicist who is married to a biochemist.

A biophysicist is someone who knows less about physics than a physicist, and less about biology than a biologist.

A biochemist, on the other hand, is someone who knows everything.

Brains are different like bikes are different.

The dominant analogy for the brain has tracked the leading technology of the day.

The human brain was like a clockwork, then a hydraulic system, then an electronic circuit, then a digital computer, then a computer network, – until the present day, when, according to Stephen Kosslyn & Wayne Miller, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the brain is like a bicycle:

Our brains are not engaged in some sort of constant cerebral tug of war, with one part seeking dominance over another. (What a poor evolutionary strategy that would have been!) Rather, they can be likened roughly to the parts of a bicycle: the frame, seat, wheels, handlebars, pedals, gears, brakes and chain that work together to provide transportation.

The distinguished scientist and journalist continue:

Although the ... parts of the brain are always used during all of our waking lives, people do not rely on them to an equal degree. To extend the bicycle analogy, not everyone rides a bike the same way. Some may meander, others may race.

To be sure, Kosslyn &  Miller are right: Brains are like bikes.

But Kosslyn &  Miller are wrong, in that brains are not different like bikers are different; brains are different like bikes are different.

The apt bike analogy for inter-individual differences in brain function is not inter-individual differences in how people ride bikes, but rather inter-individual differences in bikes. Road bikes, mountain bikes, cyclocross bikes, touring bikes, BMX bikes, commuters, recumbents, etc. – bikes are different.

Brains are like bikes, and brains are different from one another like bikes are different from one another – not like how cyclists ride differently from one another, okay?

Because otherwise, you're just putting Descartes in the saddle.

Title of the Week!

"The Effect of Criticism on Functional Brain Connectivity and Associations with Neuroticism" by Michelle Nadine Servaas, Harriëtte Riese, Remco Jan Renken, Jan-Bernard Cornelis Marsman, Johan Lambregs, Johan Ormel, and André Aleman, appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

Title of the week!

"'Doctor' or 'darling'? Decoding the communication partner from ECoG* of the anterior temporal lobe during non-experimental, real-life social interaction" appears in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

________
*"ECoG" (pronounced "ee-cog" = Electrocorticography or intracranial EEG)

See this man if you possibly can!

Mr. Reggie Watts, who is not writing a book entitled "The Coolness of the Closeness of Now", was amazing last night at the Wooly Mammoth Theater, where tickets are selling fast for performances through this Friday.

"... friction and vibration and resonance ..."

There's a form of neuroessentialism that holds that because the brain is made of cells, we should study cellular neuroscience, and not psychology, if our goal is to understand the mind. To us, that's a bit like saying that to better appreciate the beauty of a sonata performed by a string quartet, you should just study friction and vibration and resonance, and not bother with the theory or history of music.

Like Speaking Another Language

I greatly enjoyed working with my Chilean client, and recently delivering two programs in Chile. One of the great pleasures was the difference in language: rather than "persuasion", my client referred to "seduction". Instead of talking about the "framework" of the program, we discussed the "journey" of the day.

Although there were interpreters at each of the two programs, I was careful not to fall back on American English idioms. I avoided saying things like "fall back" and instead choose "revert". Instead of "come back", I would say "return". Instead of "want", I speak to "desire" and "intent". I looked to the Latin rhetorical roots so as to be better understood and to present information more efficiently and respectfully. Conversing became both more intentional and more surprising, and I cherished in the poetry of our interactions.

A colleague's son was recently studying vocabulary, in preparation for his middle school entrance exam. He remarked that it was "like speaking another language". Indeed!

Human word, syllable, combination
of spread light and the find art of the silversmith,
hereditary goblet which gathers
the communications of the blood --
here is where silence came together with
the wholeness of the human word,
and, for human beings, not to speak is to die --
language extends even to the hair,
the mouth speaks without the lips moving --
all of a sudden the eyes are words.

I take the word and go over it
as though it were nothing more than a human shape,
its arrangements awe me and I find my way
through each variation in the spoken word --
I utter and I am and without speaking I approach
the limit of words and the silence.

I drink to the word, raising
a word or a shining cup,
in it I drink
the pure wine of language
or inexhaustible water,
maternal source of words,
and cup and water and wine
give rise to my song
because the verb is the source
and vivid life -- it is blood,
blood which expresses its substance
and so implies its own unwinding --
words give glass-quality to glass, blood to blood,
and life to life itself.

Excerpt from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's "The Word"

Six.

Today we heard Steve Wozniak on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me!" talk about how he has six smart-phones, and six brackets to hold all of them on his car dashboard, and six different navigation apps running on them, so he gets six different sets of advice on how to get to his destination.

"... it is too narrow for that."

In a 1953 letter, Wolfgang Pauli related to Carl Jung a comment that Ernst Mach had made, some decades earlier, regarding Freudian psychoanalysis:

"These people try to use the vagina as if it were a telescope so that they can see the world through it. But that is not its natural function – it is too narrow for that."

____

Source: "137: Jung, Pauli, and the pursuit of a scientific obsession" by Arthur I. Miller.

NeuroCooking goes to Hollywood!

In the 2006 crime thriller "Lucky Number Slevin", when title character Slevin Kelevra, played by Josh Harnett, says that he suffers from a condition called atarexia, he is referring to a word (Ἀταραξία) from ancient Greek philosophy that translates roughly to "tranquility", and which was used by the Epicureans to refer to "the only true happiness available to a person".

"Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems."

Just one sentence (another one titles this post) from James Garvey's interview with Peter Hacker:

"There is no such thing as a brain’s thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing."

[emphasis in original]

"bar soap", "conventional oven", "film camera", and now, "task-fMRI"

"A 'retronym' is a new name for an object or concept to differentiate the original form or version of it from a more recent form or version."

Examples include "acoustic guitar" & "analog watch".

At the recent resting-state conference in Milwaukee, a new acronym was proposed: "T-fMRI", for task-fMRI, as distinguished from R-fMRI, for resting fMRI.

And the answer is...?

At the recent excellent resting-state conference in Milwaukee, a question arose over dinner: Is the brain a machine for turning the past into the future, or a machine for turning the future into the past?

...and he should know!

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

-Richard P. Feynman

Do you mostly hang out with WEIRDos?

In their paper "The weirdest people in the world?", Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that:

1. The scientific literature in the field of experimental psychology consists primarily of reports of experiments upon subjects who were handy and willing – namely, college undergraduates, who are "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)".
2. "...WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers ... [in] domains ... includ[ing] visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ."
3. "...we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity."

No source is balanced.

We recently dined with lovely people who are aficionados of a television news show which they praised for its balance. However, we are skeptical that "balance" can come from any single source, whether on FOX News or on PBS. We believe that balance is something you have to make for yourself.

In the run-up to the American Presidential election in the year 2000, The Economist endorsed Mr. Bush, The Nation ran articles supporting the candidacy of Mr. Nader, and The New Yorker repeatedly swooned over Mr. Gore. Because we subscribed to all three weeklies, we had actual balance.

In his book 1988 book "Corruptions of Empire:Life Studies and the Reagan Era", Mr. Alexander Cockburn skewered one show's pretense of balance:

Ken Rockwell is Wrong about Americans.

"...[people] who come here from elsewhere ... are amazed that Americans will sit around and complain while opportunities surround them, instead of getting off their butts and doing something to better themselves.

"Why do foreigners do so well ... while native Americans like me are more likely to sit around and complain ..."

– Mr. Ken Rockwell, 7/8/2010.

Mr. Rockwell is often right about photography – but he's wrong to deny the innovation, entrepreneurship, and initiative of the American people.

[Let's not even mention the irony of Mr. Rockwell calling himself a "native American".]

Ken Rockwell is Wrong about the Rich.

"Rich people are doing great."

– Mr. Ken Rockwell, 7/8/2010.

"Wealthy Reduce Buying in a Blow to the Recovery"

– New York Times headline, 7/17/2010.

Mr. Rockwell is often right about photography – but he's wrong when he claims that demand from the rich for high-end goods and services is strong and sustaining.

[Those poor dear rich people; they've been hit hard too by These Trying Economic Times.]

Ken Rockwell is Wrong on the Economy.

"More than 14 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half of them have been jobless for six months or longer."

– Mr. Bob Herbert, 7/13/2010.

"The myth of an economic crisis is just a crutch so that people who aren't doing that great right now can blame their problems on someone else instead of themselves."

– Mr. Ken Rockwell, 7/8/2010.

Mr. Rockwell is often right about photography – but he's dead wrong about macroeconomics, and about the millions of Americans who want to work but can't find a job. They may be "mythic" (in the sense of "heroic") – but they are not "mythical" (in the sense of "fictitious"). They are no myth. They are real.

Want data? Here (from Wolfram|Alpha):

Unemployed Americans:

Median Duration of Unemployment, USA:

The (other) League of Zeugmatographers!

Prof. Paul Lauterbur (1929 – 2007) coined the term "zeugmatography" to describe the role played by applied field gradients in magnetic resonance imaging: they encode spatial position into signal frequency; they yoke (greek: ζεῦγμα or zeugma) frequency to position.

We would like to suggest an alternate meaning for zeugmatography.

A zeugma is a figure of speech, or rhetorical form, involving a yoking or coupling. My favorite zeugmas are syllepses, where one verb is applied to two nouns, but with different meanings, often concrete vs. abstract, as for instance in: "he lost his coat and his temper".

The form -tography is widely used to refer to writing or text. For example, "cryptography" does not refer to encoded images; it refers to encoded messages.

Accordingly, we would like to suggest that zeugmatography could also mean the writing of zeugmas, including syllepses. Thus, while I was typing "he lost his coat and his temper" back there, I was performing zeugmatography, or being a zeugmatographer.

What do you think, NeuroCooking friends? Would you like to join our League of Zeugmatographers? All you have to do is write a syllepsis!