Events, NYC :: World Science Festival | WORLD SCIENCE U FOR A DAY: EVOLUTION OF MIND AND MATTER

Yesterday a live event from the World Science U took place at the Advanced Science Research Center Auditorium of City College, CUNY. The title "Evolution of Mind and Matter" anticipated the fusion of cosmology and neuroscience announced as exploration of "humankind's grandest mysteries, from our accelerating universe to human consciousness" led by some of the foremost experts in cosmology, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy". 
The event started with Brian Greene's introduction of World Science U, a online educational platform devoted to science. The live events part of the World Science Festival are an exception as the content of the World Science is delivered usually delivered online with video and animations. 

The first lecture "The Accellarating Universe" was delivered by Adam Riess,  Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Johns Hopkins University. Reiss shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae". Reiss introduced the audience to topics including the accelerating Universe, the measure of astronomical distances, the Hubble constant and the Einstein cosmological constant, the role of supernovae, and shared his journey of discovery which led him to the Nobel Prize.

Einstein's Gravitational  Constant κ 

The following lecture "From Chemistry to Life: On Earth and Abroad" was presented by Dimitar Sasselov, Phillips Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University. Sasselov started with an interdisciplinary approach expanding physics questions to the realm of philosophy and asked the audience: "What is life?" anticipating that such a question does not have an agreeable definition. The presentation continued with the definition of life as a chemical system. He included concepts of dark matter and energy and emphasized the importance of water for life and efforts to find life in the universe. 

The focus shift from the cosmos to the self, from astrophysics to neuroscience with "The Biology of Consciousness" presented by Christof Koch, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Allen Institute for Brain Science. Koch introduction started with statements from philosophy, in the Descartes and the mind-body dualism "I am exist because I am conscious". He introduced the hard problem of consciousness in the explanation of our phenomenal experiences and perceptions. how sensations acquire characteristics, such as colors and tastes. He emphasized how consciousness is challenging to be explored, perhaps more than black holes and brains, for its lack of objective areas of explorations. He introduced a neurobiological approach to consciousnes associated to the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC). Digital consciousness is also a subject of interest, brought by technology: Apple Siri is an example, amplified in the science fiction movie "Her". Finally Koch introduced  the theoretical framework IITC —integrated information theory of consciousness— developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi.

The afternoon sessions was opened by Alfred Mele, William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University with "Free Will and Neuroscience"

Mele introduced three neuroscientific arguments for free will and mentioned that fMRI imaging can show that how human brain makes decisions.

Lee Berger, Paleoanthropologist and Explorer, at the University of the Witwatersrand presented "Exploring Our Humanity". The narration focused on his discovery of fossils of hominidsin  the Rising Star Cave, South Africa. Berger communicated his Passion of discovery and gave, as final suggestion to the audience, to "avoid backyard syndrome" and leave the computer desk: technology is a tool but fieldwork should be revaluated.

Rising Star Cave (25°55′S 27°47′E)

It was an unusual line-up of speakers, from so many different fields, but the results, even if sometimes seemed uncoordinated, was quite interesting and somehow inspiring.

events | Creating Creativity

Art and "science" of phrenology: Erkenne Dich selbst (know yourself)

Creativity has always represented a survival means during the hardship times I experienced several times in my life. For me creativity develop in many modalities and be embodied by several physical media —some of which do not necessarily to aesthetics production. Solving an equation or writing computer programs are creative expressions and often an underlying aesthetics is present in many mathematical and logical cognitive processes.
I am also interested int the nature of creativity and how it relates to the brain morphology and physiology; this interest led me to pursue a PhD on the other hemisphere of the planet, namely Deakin University in Australia. My research "Form Mind Body Space Time" explores the relationship between the aesthetics of human movement and cognitive states; the methodology follows a methodological approach, weaving art and design practices to exercise science and neuroscientific investigations. My objective is to record and measure anedoctal evidence with rigorous experiments —acceptable in scientific terms. One of my research questions is if the mindfulness and aesthetics of human movement, as found in yoga postures to performance arts has influence on mental processes.
My personal research intersect the growing popularity of cognitive sciences in contemporary culture. In the last decades the scientific practices related to neuroscience have expanded from the scientific labs and experiments on mice brain to involve human participation at much greater extents. Probably there are two different developments which are responsible for the broadening of neuroscience among general population: the development of non invasive neuroimaging technology as well as the affordability of electroencephalography (EEG) —the recording of the brain electrical activity. Although the most sophisticated neuroimaging equipment, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), remains in the domain of the scientific community, EEG has become widespread not only in the medical professionals offices but also in homes, mainly for its use in computer games. Neurofeedback and the effects of spiritual practices on the brain have also become the subject of articles and reportage in mainstream media, with photographs of meditation practitioners wearing a EEG headset.
So it is with great anticipation (and expectation) that I will be attending the symposium The Default Mode Network in Aesthetics and Creativity where "leading neuroscientists from top research institutes will gather in New York for a two-day symposium to discuss what the brain is doing when in a wakeful resting state. The DMN – a network of brain regions typically found to be suppressed when individuals focus on their external environment – has been hypothesized to generate spontaneous thoughts during daydreaming and may be crucial for self-referential mental processing, social interactions and the understanding of many neurological disorders."  Tonight keynote speaker Dr. Bill Kelley, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth University, will "present on the Default Mode Network, its history, and our emerging understanding of its function in creative thought."

Events | Linking Mind and Brain, lecture at CUNY Graduate Center

Tonight the CUNY Graduate Center hosted a conversation between the theoretical physicist (neurophysicist) William Bialek and the philosopher of psychology, Jesse Prinz ,author of the forthcoming book The Conscious Brain.
The conversation touched several topics ranging from quantitative biology and neuroscience to philosophy, visual illusions, pseudoscience.

Bialek started the conversation introducing that the focus of  theoretical physics as the mathematical analysis of nature, is often taken over by a qualitative description, able to fill the gaps left by quantitative methods. Jesse Prinz then introduced his philosophical investigations, which in opposition to Bialek methods, start from a very large scale  and then narrow down to physical analysis — from abstract generalizations to concrete cases.

Can consciousness  be explained as a series of brain processes? The human brain has over one-hundred billions of  neurons and only a small percentage relates to consciousness. Prinz then narrowed consciousness to visual experiences, more specifically to the retinal representations occurring  in the visual cortex referred to as V1, V2, V3, V4, V5 in the brain mapping.  Brain injuries have also a great role in explaining consciousness.
Another interesting phenomenon in the study of consciousness is in the interpretation of ambiguous such as the Kanizsa triangles. Subliminal advertisement also is based on the connection between perception and conscious interpretation of perception.
The conversation continued with the fascinating numbers involved in the description of the human brain:100 billions of neurons reside in the human brain and 1mm thick of the folded cortex contains 100000 neurons cells each with 5000 connections (axons).The conversation ended with a mention of the pseudoscience often present in writings on neuroscience from mainstream publications such as the recent NY Times article "You Love Your iPhone. Literally".
The conversation dealt with several visual topics and I would have appreciated a more visual presentations. Nevertheless the overall themes were introduced in simple terms to be appreciated by a general audience —simplicity and clarity which are often lacking in the many neuroscience related events which are becoming increasingly popular.

Events NYC | 2d Perceptions of a 3d World

“What Does the Brain Do? Questioning Perception, Consciousness, and Free Will” was the title of a debate taking place at the Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) of NYU, as part of the “Walls and Bridges” series by Villa Gillet —one of the many events on neuroscience presented to a general audience which are recently quite frequent in NYC.

The debate was announced as “Neurosciences can provide unexpected insights into free will by questioning how we see, hear and feel. To what extent do our decisions, thoughts and actions depend on our perceptions? Perhaps the best way to understand what the brain is doing is by studying what happens when it breaks down.”

Such an important title immediately attracted my attention, although I felt dubious that such extensive topics could be explored (even if only surfaced) in a two-hour presentation. In fact in the debate there were not too many references to consciousness or free will. Yet I found very interesting some of the presentation focusing on abnormalities in perceptions and how reality can be experienced very differently by people with major problems in visual perception.
Oliver Sacks’s presentation focused on loss of stereoscopic vision. Sacks, a neurologist physician and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, has recently published a book “The Mind’s Eye”, where he writes about being diagnosed with a rare eye tumor which caused loss of vision on his right side, therefore his stereoscopic vision, which enables the perception of depth. Dr. Sack had to learn to compensate his loss of by adapting to move in a “flat” world and experienced how perceptual problems bring major loss of functionality.

The neurobiologist Susan Barry lived through an opposite experience (from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional world) belongs to: crossed-eyed from early infancy, she lived in a flat world until when as an adult she regained stereoscopic vision. In her presentation she mentioned the quality of cognitive conscious experience and how the perception of space can be altered. The perception of solid and void was distorted as one of the most basic experiences we give for granted, such as looking ourselves in the mirror or watching the snow falling.

Leaving the event I thought of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions the 1884 novel by Edwin Abbott Abbott, the fantasy of a two-dimensional world (Flatland) inhabited by geometric figures and narrated by a square: a geometric definition of world is so much part of our daily life, either we are aware or not…

PS I dealt quite extensively with the topic of stereoscopic vision in digital visualization and “virtual reality” in my 1996 book “Designing Digital Space”

Events NYC | Neurotechniques: New Approaches to Understanding Mind, Brain and Behavior

Astrocytes, from the Cell Centered Database (CCDB)

At the Italian Academy an all-day workshop brings together neuroscientists from across US academic institutions to present the latest techniques in neuroscience ---the interdisciplinary science, branch of biology, concerned with the study of the nervous system.
Neuroscience methodologies and focus of research draw from both physical science and humanities to include, mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science as well as medicine, psychology and philosophy. In recent years neuroscence has greatly developed due to the major advancement of computing and digital imaging techniques, utilized to gather experimental data.

The morning sessions were devoted to presentation of experimental data from different types of neurotechniques:

• Michael Goldberg, Professor of Brain & Behavior, Neuroscience, Neurology, Psychiatry, Ophthalmology at Columbia University, “What a single electrode can tell a neuroscientist about the brain: insights into the problem of spatial accuracy”: results from single electrode recording in the determination of spatial accuracy. Goldberg’s research “specializes in studying the physiology of cognitive processes: visual attention, spatial perception and decision making. He studies the psychophysics and physiology of cognitive processes in the monkey, using single unit recording, iontophoresis, and careful behavioral measurements. He has made enormous contributions to the field of single-cell physiology in awake, behaving primates. He is one of the founding fathers of the technique.”*
• Elizabeth Hillman, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, “Understanding neurovascular coupling with intravital microscopy and optical imaging”. Hillman
• introduced her work on Functional Optical Imaging in the understanding of neurovascular activity; the optical techniques used by her Laboratory at Columbia University include two-photon microscopy, laminar optical tomography, dynamic contrast enhanced molecular imaging and hyperspectral imaging. She also showed visually intriguing images of astrocytes, a cell type in the Central Nervous System; the clearly discernable patterns in the images which made me wonder if there is an underlying logic in their spatial configuration of the astrocytes morphology…
• Aniruddha Das, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Columbia University, “Simultaneous measurements of spikes and hemodynamics in alert subjects: What can brain imaging tell us about neural activity?” Das presented his experiments with fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to detect neural activity in monkeys.
• Adam Kohn, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, “Measuring signal propagation in the visual system with multi-electrode recordings” introduced Kohn’s research on “ the neural circuits that underlie visual perception, using multi-electrodes to measure changes in the correlation of the activity of populations of cells in early visual cortex. His research is showing how the brain could be using the rich amount of information available for sensory processing. He hopes that by understanding the principles of adaptation we will also gain insight into other forms of plasticity such as perceptual learning and recovery from injury.”*
• The morning session ended with John Maunsell, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard University. Maunsell’s presentation “Multi-electrode Recordings to Construct a Neuronal Population Measure of Attention” is representative of his experimental work “directed at understanding the function of visual cerebral cortex. Much of his work has examined how attention alters the way that neurons represented visual objects, and how these changes improve behavioral performance.”*

One issue, raised from a question by the audience, particularly caught my attention: the derangement of the experiment, due to the intrusive nature of the experiment itself, in the specific case of the insertion of electrodes in the monkey or rats. It reminded me of the double slit experiment of quantum physics.

An electrode array

The remaining sessions seemed to me broader in scope of a more interdisciplinary nature and more accessible to a general audience:

• David Heeger, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, New York University even introduced some intriguing visual illusions in “ Computational Neuroimaging”. Heeger’s research “spans an interdisciplinary cross-section of engineering, psychology, and neuroscience, the current focus of which is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and computational theory to quantitatively investigate the relationship between brain and behavior.”*
• Uri Hasson, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, presented “Reliability of cortical activity during natural stimulation”. Hasson’s research “focuses on developing new methods to assess both shared and idiosyncratic aspects of the cortical response time courses across individuals. These methods measure the reliability of cortical activity, within or between subjects, in response to naturalistic stimulation. Despite the seemingly uncontrolled task, some of these complex stimuli evoke highly reliable and selective responses in many brain areas.” I found his presentation most interesting, especially in the experiments relating to meaning.
• Frank Tong, Associate Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, presented “Decoding visual and mental states from human brain activity” which explored the role of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the human visual system. Tong’s uses “uses functional neuroimaging and computational methods to understand how the human visual system represents basic features, complex objects, and conscious visual experiences.”* His presentation was also quite intriguing to me for the mention of interpreting mental states through experimental measurements.
• Winrich Freiwald, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, The Rockefeller University, presented “Understanding cortical networks by integrating fMRI and electrophysiology” Winrich's work uses these methods “ to answer questions such as: How does face selectivity emerge in a single cell? How is information transformed from one face patch to another? And how is information extracted from a patch?”*
• Karl Deisseroth, Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, concluded the workshop with a presentation on “Optogenetics” the technology he created, which “uses light to control and tune brain activity”.*

The workshop was announced “to present research and methodological approach from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective.” My impression is that the interdisciplinary perspective was missing from the majority of presentations, coming solely from experimental scientific experiments in the hard-sciences context and lacking a synthesis and critical considerations ---which would have been appreciated by an audience of not only scientists. Also missing were a general synthesis and critical considerations of why certain techniques are important and why the can make meaningful contributions to knowledge and practices, to go beyond the universe of the experiment. Nevertheless the workshop offered great learning opportunities even for an audience ---including myself--- not belonging to the field of neuroscience.

*from the web page of the workshop