If you’re a science or health journalist and you’re interested in what researchers are learning about the brain, there’s only one place to spend June 11 and 12, 2015: right here in Cambridge, at the offices of the Knight Science Journalism program.
That’s where you’ll meet eight top Boston-area neuroscience and cognitive science researchers as part of Frontiers in Brain Science: The Kavli Science Journalism Workshop.
And if you move fast, there’s still time to apply for a $750 travel stipend to attend; the deadline is April 10. The travel funding comes courtesy of our valued partner, the Kavli Foundation.
We shared a preview of the workshop on March 1. Today I’m excited to tell you about the terrific researchers we’re bringing in to share the latest news about their work. They’ll help the assembled journalists explore (and sometimes explode) modern notions about the ingredients of consciousness and intelligence.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University; a research scientist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital; and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern. Her research asks how distributed networks in the brain combine to give rise to the mental states we call emotions.
“Our work shows that an emotion can’t be localized to small clusters of neurons,” Barrett wrote to me recently. “The amygdala, for example, is not the home of fear in the brain, although hundreds of news and magazines articles keep stating this. In general, the brain does not respect the subjective distinctions we make between types of emotions like anger, sadness, and fear, or even between categories like seeing (perception), thinking (cognition), and feeling (emotion).”
Joshua Hartshorne is a post-doctoral fellow in the Computational Cognitive Science Group at MIT, where he has studied under advisor Joshua Tenenbaum. Hartshorne uses computational models, Web-based cognitive testing, and experimental techniques such as EEG to study how humans package sound into grammar-based language.
In a meta-analysis of cognitive test results published this spring in the journal Psychological Science with Laura Germine of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital Next, Hartshorne showed that traditional notions about how cognition changes with age—“fluid” in the young and “crystallized” in the aged—may be insufficient. “This dichotomy between early peaks and later peaks is way too coarse,” Hartshorne told a New York Times reporter. “There are a lot more patterns going on, and we need to take those into account to fully understand the effects of age on cognition.” Next year Hartshorne will assume an assistant professorship in the Department of Psychology at Boston College.
Narayanan “Bobby” Kasthuri is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the Boston University School of Medicine. His research focuses on the “connectome,” the map of neuronal connections in the brain that presumably, at some level, undergirds such phenomena as intelligence, memory, and mental disorders. In his lab, researchers slice and image tiny sections of mouse brains, producing stunning 3D images of axons, glia, dendrites, and their meeting points; it’s a small first step toward mapping the connections in human brains, which have 100 trillion neurons.
“If you look at a neuron of a human and a neuron of a mouse, they look essentially the same,” Kasthuri recently told former Knight Fellow Barb Moran, who now writes for the BU Research website. “We share 98 percent of our genome. So the strong hypothesis is that we have the same LEGO blocks, but we build a huge palace with our LEGO blocks, and mice build more of a hut. And if that’s true, it would imply that connections are deeply correlative and causative to things like our memories, our personalities, and our fears. The connectome would be the map of that.”
Tomaso Poggio is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. He’s also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a collaboration headquartered at the McGovern. He’s an expert in the biophysical behavior of the visual system and computational analysis of vision and learning.
How does the brain give rise to intelligence? Will we ever be able to build intelligent machines? The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines will receive $25 million from the National Science Foundation over the next five years to accelerate research on those questions. The center’s goal, according to its website, is to “discover how intelligence is grounded in computation, how these computations are implemented in neural systems, how they develop during childhood, and how social interaction amplifies the power of these computations.”
Poggio himself is credited with developing neural network models that can learn to recognize signals such as the presence of animals in nature scenes. Now he hopes to create a theoretical platform to integrate work across four research themes: the integration of intelligence, including vision, language and motor skills; circuits for intelligence, spanning research in neurobiology and electrical engineering; the development of intelligence in children; and social intelligence.
Rebecca Saxe is an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where she was formerly a doctoral student in the lab of Nancy Kanwisher. The question driving her research is how the human brain gives rise to a “Theory of Mind”—the ability to infer and reason about another person’s states of mind.
Saxe’s lab has used functional MRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and other techniques to build a case that Theory of Mind arises from a strikingly small area of the cortex, the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction. Disrupting this brain region using TMS, Saxe has demonstrated, can change the way people make moral judgments about the actions of others. (Subjects whose RTPJ is disrupted place less emphasis on inferred intentions and more on outcomes, for example.)
Saxe argued in a TED talk that “people come especially well equipped to think about other people’s thoughts…We have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking. This system takes a long time to develop, slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence. And even in adulthood, differences in this brain region can explain differences in adults in how we think about and judge other people.”
Helen Tager-Flusberg is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston University and in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Boston University Medical School. She’s also the head of BU’s Center for Autism Research Excellence, which has a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to measure and model the brain areas involved in producing and understanding speech and find out how these processes go wrong in children with a “minimally verbal” form of autism.
For years, Tager-Flusberg has been investigating the idea that to learn language effectively, children must also develop a Theory of Mind—again, the ability to understand other people’s beliefs and intentions. In this view, language problems in autistic youngsters may be rooted in social-cognition deficits. From analyzing conversations between autistic children and their parents, for example, Tager-Flusberg has found that the children tend to leave out references to psychological states, and to use pronouns out of context. “When you tell a story, it’s not about you telling a story, it’s about your listener hearing it,” she told the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. “To have theory of mind, you’ve got to appreciate that that’s what you’re doing.”
Joshua Tenenbaum is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and head of its Computational Cognitive Science Group. He writes that he and his colleagues “study one of the most basic and distinctively human aspects of cognition: the ability to learn so much about the world, rapidly and flexibly. Given just a few relevant experiences, even young children can infer the meaning of a new word, the hidden properties of an object or substance, or the existence of a new causal relation or social rule. These inferences go far beyond the data given: after seeing three or four examples of ‘horses,’ a two-year-old will confidently judge whether any new entity is a horse or not, and she will be mostly correct, except for the occasional donkey or camel.
“We want to understand these everyday inductive leaps in computational terms. What is the underlying logic that supports reliable generalization from so little data? What are its cognitive and neural mechanisms?”
Tenenbaum’s group uses computational models and behavioral experiments in adults and children to make quantitative predictions about the workings of these mechanisms and to build learning machines based on the same principles.
Van Wedeen is the Director of Connectomics at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Boston. He’s also an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and an assistant neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, where the Martinos Center is located. He’s the inventor of a long list of methods for using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to get ever-clearer pictures of structures in the human brain, including the bundles of neurons that connect distant parts of the brain, such as the left and right hemispheres.
Wedeen and his colleagues hope to map these connecting structures both in healthy people and in those with development or mental health problems or brain damage. “We have all these mental health problems and our method for understanding them has really not changed for over a hundred years,” Wedeen told a BBC reporter in 2013. “We don’t have imaging methods as we do for the heart to tell what’s really going on. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could get in there and see these things and give people advice concerning what their risks are and how we could help them overcome those problems?”
Wedeen’s work is part of the Human Connectome Project, a five-year, $40 million effort funded by the National Institutes of Health to scan the brains of 1,200 people and create a map of the entire human neural wiring system.
Capacity for this exciting and exclusive workshop is limited to 32 journalists. We’re saving the first 12 slots for the journalists selected for the travel funding (click here to apply). The next two groups of seats will go to the current Knight Fellows and current students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Finally, we’ll give out any remaining seats to professional science writers in the local area (i.e., those who don’t require a travel stipend), including KSJ alumni. If you’d like to put your name on the waiting list for one of those slots, please write to KSJ’s program and events assistant Eric Strattman at ejstratt@mit.edu.
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