H+ Summit: Neuroscience

This post is a response to the neuroscience track at the H+ Summit, June 12-13 2010 at the Harvard University Science Center in Cambridge, MA.

It was in the morning of the first day of the conference.

It was amazing how much information these speakers were able to pack into 10 minutes. A lot of people came with more information than they could dish out, but they still managed to pack a lot into a short talk. Again I am struck with the impression that we should generally be able to do more with less time than we usually allow ourselves in our institutions.

Ed Boyden talked about “controlling brain circuits with light” by causing neurons to become photosensitive through, if I understand this correctly, gene therapy. Basically, a harmless virus is given a payload of genetic material and sent to target a particular area of the brain, which can then be turned on or off using light. I was amazed not only at the relevant content of his presentation, but at the background. I would not have thought we were up to that sort of procedure yet, even leaving aside hi particular findings. But I should not be surprised; no one knows what science doesn’t know.

Alex Backer talked about a bunch of interesting things. He has several projects going to allow people to use our time more efficiently, a kind of quality-of-life extension. everybodyscience is a project that allows folks to publish new science results for quicker feedback cycles than academic science. Qless is a web app accessible via cell phone to remove physically waiting in line - apparently, we on average spend about 2 years of our lives waiting in line. Who knew?

Lauren Silbert talked about neuroscience relating to interpersonal communication. Apparently, when two people are communicating, similar patters appear in the listener’s brain as in the speaker’s. This would be surprising to those of us who think of the brain as something of a “blank slate”, as we imagine that different brains would have their information stored in different places. But the real punchline was that if you observe the speaker and listener but have the listener hearing a different conversation instead, then the brain patterns will be different - so this wasn’t just identifying a “I’m listening to someone” pattern. She showed some good old-fashioned science, talking about some details of experimental design and whatnot. It was a little hard to follow since she kept saying the same things over and over again (probably useful if your field is interpersonal communication), particularly restating obvious conclusions.

Alexandra Elbakyan had some interesting things to say about brain-enhancing computer hardware. Specifically, she was interested in extending our conscious experience to the computer chips we’re connected to. I’m not really sure what problem she was trying to solve here; as far as I know, no one is complaining that their computer chips don’t feel conscious enough, and I don’t have a theory of consciousness that would suggest we’ll run into this problem. But it was nonetheless thought-provoking.

I think Noah Goodman’s talk was a bit abstract for me. I only grasp lamda calculus at the most basic level, and I’m not sure if I’m missing something or if he really was saying something as simple as “thought is probabilistic computation”.

Andrea Kuszewski talked about ways to improve our intelligence using the tools available to us now. She suggested we rely less on tools that remove thinking, in order to train our brains to work harder. Some folks were critical of her reference to “Brain training games”, which studies have shown to be ineffectual. Still, I found myself trying to find my way around without Google Maps a bit more for the rest of the weekend.