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.

Your functional neuroimaging update (with study questions).

1. "Graphs are the new blobs."

Discuss. How are graphs and blobs similar? How are they different?

2.  A leading search engine gives no hits on that phrase:

Do you expect this to remain true for long?

SCIENTISTS REPORT BRAIN CENTER BRAIN CENTER; ANNOUNCE CENTER CENTER CENTER.

NeuroCooking NewsService, Kensington Maryland, 1 April 2013: In an announcement of stunning importance, leading neuroscientists today reported the discovery of the brain center dedicated to subserving belief in dedicated brain centers, and the founding of a research center devoted to study of the newly-discovered brain center for brain centers.

"Those functional neuroimaging reports of dedicated brain centers for things like pinball, banjo music, and knitting? Some people believe that stuff, and some don't," said Dr. Wan Ker of Bigger University, who led the study. "We asked why only some people believe it, and used functional brain imaging to answer the question. We found, in the subicular insula, a region that 'lights up' only in people who believe that stuff, and only when they believe it. So, we have found the brain center that subserves belief in brain centers."

Capitalizing on their findings, Prof. Ker and colleagues also announced the establishment of the Center for the Study of the Center for Centers (a.k.a. the Center Center Center) as well as plans to file for related patents. They have already filed a patent on using fMRI to select people with especially active center centers for journal editorial boards. No word on whether Center Center Center candidates will have their own center centers assessed.


[first reported here on April 1, 2010]

"Then the machine turned on and began to let out a very annoying array of loud, high-pitched tones that then repeated, like a car alarm cycle."

At a recent conference in Sonoma, California, I met the novelist Reif Larsen.

Most of the conference attendees were architects and designers, but the speakers were from very varied fields. I showed how magnetic resonance imaging can reveal the functional organization of our brains, even when we are simply resting; he read from his amazing debut novel, "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet."

I thought I saw a twinkle in his eye when Reif told me that he had learned about functional MRI for his novel. And, a few days later, I read this in Chapter 14, wherein the novel's 12 year old protagonist undergoes an MRI scan, the sounds of which remind him of a car alarm:

Then she told me to just lie there and think of nothing, although I of course thought of car alarms. I hope this did not screw up her data sets: she would unknowingly show an MRI of "Boy Contemplating Nothing" to her colleagues at a big conference when in fact it was actually an MRI of "Boy Contemplating the Terrible Nature of Car Alarms."

This is not a slide.

I had planned to, but I changed my mind, and I did not show this slide at last week's Applied Brilliance Conference:

However, I did show this one:

Correlation and um, y'know, the other thing...

"Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates" appears in the October 10th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Not that there'd be anything wrong with that...

My talk at the upcoming Applied Brilliance Conference will be nothing like this:

Applied what?

I plan to show this slide at the upcoming Applied Brilliance Conference:

"I feel / I feel like I am falling / and it feels / it feels like it's okay..."

"...we ain't nothing / but we are something..."

- from "Fall Apart with You" by Alejandro Escovedo (who will be appearing at Maxwell's in Hoboken on Monday!)

"Finally, SUPEREGO-related neural activity was localized to lateral prefrontal and parietal cortex."

"A Triple Dissociation of Neural Systems Supporting ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO" (because "... Social Neuroscience, Neuroeconomics, and Developmental Social Cognitive Affective Clinical Neuroscience are just not cutting edge enough anymore...") appears in Psyence.

A Racy Taint.

Just the final sentence of the article "Off-Color Communiques Taint FBI Sting in Court: Racy text messages between informant and agents turn off jurors" by Del Quentin Wilber, which appears on the front page of today's Washington Post:

“U [expletive] [expletive],” the agent texted back.

Title of the Week!

"Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing" appears in the journal Science.

The irresistible epistemology of the visual false negative.

This is one photograph of a spore print, taken of mushroom specimens left for hours on a sheet of black paper and a sheet of white paper:

See the haze of white spores on the black paper? If you think about it, you know that there must be similar patterns of spores on the white paper, too, even though you can't see them. And really, even though you know they must be there, you can clearly see that there's nothing there.

Footnote of the month: On laws of nature.

Following upon our footnote of the month for July, we present, barely in time, a very different footnote of the month for August. Here is the fourth footnote of the Introduction to the fascinating 2006 book "Rhythms of the Brain" by Prof. György Buzsáki:

"Nature, of course, has no laws, desires, goals, or drives. It simply generates certain regularities that we conveniently assume are governed by some outside forces and use a third-person perspective to refer to these regularities."

Headline of the Week!

An article entitled "Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists" appears in the Guardian.

In Minnesota, the opposite of "vanity sizing"?

Have you heard of "vanity sizing", or "size inflation"? That's when articles of clothing are (sometimes much!) larger than the nominal sizes indicated on their labels. In most of the USA, clothes are bigger than the labels say. But, not everywhere. In some places, it appears, nominal sizes are ambitious, rather than modest: If you've got a head, a firm named for (but not actually located in) one of the Twin Ports (Duluth, Minnesota & Superior, Wisconsin) wants to sell you a size "XL/2XL" hat, with the caveat that:

"Size XL/2XL fits sizes M, L, and XL (does not fit size 2XL)"

Do these headwear purveyors think their size-M customers will leave their "XL/2XL" hats out, labels visible, so that their friends will think they're smart people with big heads?

"The truth is more important than the facts."

Frank Lloyd Wright said that.

My cat, Truthiness, photographed by Jim.