The Presidential Election
Politics on a weblog is like picking up a stick of old, wet dynamite. You might grab it and absolutely nothing happens, or it might very well explode in your face. It is for this reason that I try to avoid political discussion on prefrontal.org. Every weblog must have a focus, and there are more than enough political blogs to go around. Still, I am compelled to write just one post after the recent presidential election. One post to say how much I have been desperately hoping for a new direction in our political system. One post to tell you how much of that hope I have invested in one man. One post to announce that I worked hard to help that man be successful. One post, to tell you that he was in fact successful.
Congratulations, President-elect Barack Obama.
[Photo from Joe Raedle/Getty Images]
Quote of the Week - Gigerenzer
A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology department once asked me “Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity maps]?’ It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are expensive, and you don’t understand them” - Gerd Gigerenzer
Vandenberg Space Launch
Now, let’s be clear, this is a weblog of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Still, those who know me understand that I began my undergraduate career in the aerospace engineering department. I have loved space flight since before I could ride a bicycle. I made a scrapbook when I was six years old that held every news clipping about the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy - I still have it. Even now I love reading books on the Apollo moon landing program and Werner von Braun’s role in the early space program. Call it a hobby - it has always been a source of obsession. Still, in all my years I have never witnessed a live space launch.
Reason #318 why Santa Barbara is such an awesome place to live is the fact that we are 90 minutes away from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Vandenberg is a major spaceport in the United States for commercial and military space operations. They don’t always post their launch schedule, but enthusiasts from around the world pool their collective knowledge to assemble a rough idea of when rockets will be blasting off. In my case I had luck on my side, as a local television station was covering the countdown of a target launch vehicle from Vandenberg last Tuesday. I hopped up off the couch and got in the car.
The mission was related to the NFIRE (Near Field InfraRed Experiment) satellite, which was designed to gather data on the orbital observation of rocket exhaust plumes. To calibrate the sensors on the satellite they needed a, well, rocket exhaust plume. The target launch vehicle was a modified Minotaur ballistic missile, which was meant to simulate a ballistic missile launch for the NFIRE satellite.
My wife and I headed up into the hills of Santa Barbara to see if we could witness the launch. Online Vandenberg observation FAQs indicated that it should definitely be visible. There was a two hour launch window that corresponded to two overhead passes of the NFIRE satellite (see above picture). We barely made it in time - as the satellite made its first pass, but we saw nothing but a few shooting stars. By looking at the orbital data for the NFIRE sat online (yea iPhone!) I knew the next satellite pass would begin at 11:57pm. Sure enough, at 11:58 we saw a bright orange light coming up from the horizon and blazing up into the night. Compared to your Fourth of July fireworks it wasn’t very special, but the knowledge that it was leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was about the coolest thing I have seen in a while.
Cheers to spaceflight everybody.
The Neuroscience of Running
Just over a year ago I began running as form of regular exercise. I was looking for an outdoor activity that I could do year-round in New Hampshire and found running to be enjoyable in both warm and cold weather. It took a few weeks to (literally) get up to speed, but I have been running an average of twice a week ever since. Over the last year I have begun to collect all of the fitness-related neuroscience articles that occasionally arrive at my inbox. I have been saving a few of them for a short review on the anniversary of my first run. That time has arrived, and so has the post - click to read more.
Read the rest of this post »
Signs You Have Been Scanning Too Much
I have no idea where it came from originally, but I ran across this list while I was cleaning my digital house the other day. It is pretty funny, but also frighteningly accurate…
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Signs You Have Been Scanning Too Much
10. You wake up to the repeated beeping of your alarm clock, assume it’s just the scanner and go back to sleep.
9. While pouring syrup on your Eggo waffles, you note that you missed a few voxels.
8. Your knowledge of brain anatomy exceeds your knowledge of geography. As in, “The transverse occipital sulcus intersects the intraparietal sulcus near the level of the parieto-occipital fissure” and “The Sahara is in Afghanistan, I think.”
7. You have developed a rapid ritual for checking your body for metal that resembles the macarena.
6. When you seen drawings of brains in the popular media, you instantly decide whether or not they are anatomically correct.
5. Friends wonder how you can run a four million dollar scanner and still fail to program a VCR.
4. You suffer frequent left/right confusion and find yourself saying things like, “Make a left turn at the lights… No, I meant a *radiological* left!”
3. At parties, you scope out people’s subject-worthiness: “It was great talking to you. Say, what are you doing Friday night? … Do you have any metal in your body?…”
2. Not only can you recognize the brains of your frequently-scanned co-workers, but also their teeth from the bite bar impressions.
1. When reminded of a special occasion, you remember it fondly because the scanner was free all day long and you collected lots of good data.
Quote of the Week - Feynman
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” - Richard Feynman
New Software: HRFun (OS X)
I have been spending a fair amount of time learning the Objective-C programming language lately. While I spend most of my time in Matlab, I am thinking about writing some Mac OS X applications in the future. For those of you who are looking to do the same I can highly recommend the Aaron Hillegass book “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” as a good way to get started. I will go into the learning Objective-C in another post, but wanted to take a second to announce the first complete fruit of my learning labor: HRFun.
HRFun is a small Cocoa application that allows a user to explore the construction of a canonical hemodynamic response from the summation of two gamma functions. This is the method used by the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) folks to model what happens in the brain when a stimulus is applied. For instance, if I show a brief flashing checkerboard pattern to a subject while conducting functional MRI then areas of visual cortex would have signal changes similar to the canonical HRF. I was curious about how varying the parameters of the gamma functions would change the predicted hemodynamic response, so I created this application that lets me vary any parameter I want.
It’s not a terribly useful app, but for those who are curious to learn more about the SPM construction of a canonical HRF it can be a useful tool. HRFun is my first OS X application to be released, so there are probably some inefficiencies and bugs in the code. Still, I have been diligent to test the software out and smooth the rough edges. Also, the source code has been released under the GPL. So, if you need an Objective-C class to create a hemodynamic response you’re in luck!
Let me know what you think - positive or negative. This is a learning project, so any feedback is appreciated. My next goal is to figure out how to load an fMRI timeseries - then the real fun begins.
HRFun wiki page: http://prefrontal.org/wiki/index.php/HRFun
Quote of the Week - Tukey
“The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.” - John W. Tukey, 1986
Brain Art: Axial Mosaic
This is a piece we did as a cover illustration for the journal Human Brain Mapping. It depicts an axial slice of the brain composed of smaller images in the axial, sagittal, and coronal planes. To get the smaller images we used a simple Matlab script to go through each subject’s high-resolution 3D anatomical image and grab all possible 2D images in each plane. This resulted in 157 sagittal images, 189 coronal images, and 156 axial images for each subject. In total we ended up with about 10,000 smaller images to use. We then used the program MacOSaiX to take the thousands of small images and find the best fit for each hexagonal cell to represent the larger axial image. The blue and red coloring was added in Photoshop and represents the probabilistic values of white and gray matter in the current slice.
Click through to the larger image to really get a better feel for the photo. Cheers!
Prefrontal.org anniversary!
Truth be told we are a few weeks past the one year mark. Still, I couldn’t be happier about the degree of progress this blog has made in the last twelve months. What began as a simple motivation to practice writing has slowly evolved to become a more complete personal weblog of developmental cognitive neuroscience. In 12,000 words laid down across 50 posts there have been reviews of empirical articles, impressions of public presentations, software reviews, opinion pieces, and updates on the struggle to finish my PhD thesis. It is amazing to look back and see the greater whole that has formed one post at a time.
What is the goal for the second year? My primary goal is to post more often (2-3 times per week) and to aim for in-depth posts that take a bit more time to prepare. This will give the readers of this site additional material to peruse and gives me even more writing practice. The secondary goal is to continue filling in the quiet parts of the site, such as the ‘About’ and ‘Research’ pages. Who knows where this plan will take use 12 months from now, but if we can duplicate the success of the first year I will be more than happy.
Thanks for reading.