bjoern.brembs.blog : a neuroscientist's blog

Behavioral Freedom and Decision-Making in Flies - an Evolutionary Precursor of 'Free Will'?

bjoern — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:40:23 -0400

This July I will be speaking with this title at the University of Québec at Montréal summer institute "The Evolution and Function of Consciousness". With me will be such luminaries as Daniel Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Wolf Singer, Simon Baron-Cohen, Patrick Haggard, Stevan Harnad, Joe Ledoux, Alfred Mele, John Searle and many others. What an impressive line-up! It will be the highlight of the summer for me.

It's a little strange (and somewhat intimidating) for a fly researcher to speak at a meeting on consciousness, but the organizers apparently intend to include researchers who can show the range of brain fucntions that do not require human consciousness. Here's what I sent them as an abstract for the program:

The collaborative actions of chance and necessity make up the foundation of evolutionary success: the deterministic rules of selection act upon the stochastic genetic variation to bring about adaptive change. Genetics studies both the variability of genomes and the almost faithful transmission of genetic information from generation to generation. The same concerted action of chance and necessity underlies bacterial chemotaxis: Escherichia coli uses straight runs and random tumbles to orient in odor plumes. In both instances, we understand both the mechanisms underlying the generation of variability and those of the the deterministic components. The behavior of organisms with nervous systems also employs this powerful combination when at first different behaviors are tried out in a new situation until the desired goal is achieved. Subsequent encounters with the same situation then lead to the successful behavior increasingly quickly. While we understand the deterministic selection processes ('reinforcement') leading to the reliable production of the behavior comparatively well, we know next to nothing about how the behavioral variability is generated that provides the substrate for these selection processes to act upon. Mutation, sexual recombination, jumping genes or horizontal gene transfer are crucial not only for evolution to take place, these fundamentally stochastic processes also make evolution principally unpredictable. Analogously, the processes by which brains generate variable and sometimes genuinely new behaviors are crucial for brains to generate adaptive behavioral choice and make brains principally unpredictable. It is this unpredictability which forms the evolutionary basis for behavioral freedom, a candidate for the evolutionary precursor to what we today call 'free will' in humans.

I still believe in gravity. Do you?

bjoern — Sat, 05 May 2012 07:50:58 -0400

Only hours after the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based rightwing thinktank notorious for promoting climate scepticism, has pulled what it called a "provocative billboard", it has started a new campaign, this time aimed at a new scientific target - gravity. Just like the previous campaign, which lasted just 24h and that "was always intended to be only an experiment", the new billboard is also starring Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber whose manifesto expressed his belief in gravity.

"We believe that - just like Global Warming - 'gravity' is a hoax perpetrated upon the American people by scientists and the liberal media" a spoeksperson for the foundation said. "The scientists are defrauding the tax payer to the order of billions of dollars which they then deposit it in secret Swiss bank accounts, pretending to do 'research' on projects like the Lagre Hadron Collider near Geneva." According to the foundation's spokesperson, future billboards will feature other "murderers and madmen" because they often "either threatened to use gravity or misused the force best described by intelligent falling". One such person featured on future billboards may be Osama bin Laden has he blamed the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the attacks on 9/11 on gravity, rather than the deliberate destruction by the CIA/Mossad. "The point is that believing in 'gravity' is not 'mainstream,' smart, or sophisticated." the spokesperson emphasized, "In fact, it is just the opposite of those things. Still believing in gravity – after all the scientific discoveries and revelations that point against this theory – is more than a little nutty. In fact, some really crazy people use it to justify immoral and frightening behavior."

The spokesperson concluded: "The people who still believe in gravity are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of gravity aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen."

The data confirm: don't get children before tenure

bjoern — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:31:39 -0400

This morning, on the podcast of the journal Science was an interview with Beryl Lieff Benderly who covered the topic of women in science. They talked about a recent feature article in American Scientist precisely on that topic. That article stated what has been clear for any scientist wanting or already with children: children are a major risk factor if you plan to land a permanent academic position. As I've described before (and every scientist knows), you work 12-16h days, 6-7 days a week just to be able to compete with the huge glut of postdocs also searching for that coveted tenured position. If you have children, that means you won't see them until they're old enough to be awake when you are (given appropriate childcare), or you cut down on that time, risking your job - and thereby risking to land on a job market rife with young talent when you're over 40, without having ever seen a company from the inside, sporting a highly specialized skill set which is utterly useless outside of academia and a family to feed. It is quite obvious that, at least currently, you'd find more men willing to forgo a family than women (whatever the reasons may be), explaining a lower percentage of women tenured faculty.

Now, the authors of the American Scientist article confirm these fairly obvious mechanisms:

Childless women are paid, promoted and rewarded equivalently to their male peers (and in some analyses at even higher rates). Children completely change the landscape for women—but do not appear to have the same effect on the careers of men.

Thus supporting the notion that women do not seem to be explicitly discriminated against, at least not on a large scale, but opt to not apply for tenured positions at a larger rate than men. The Science article summarizes:

But mothers, especially those with young children -- and even women planning on motherhood -- are “far more likely to move out of the research-professor pipeline…. No other factor can account for as much leakage of women….”

The Science article also quotes other researchers supporting the notion that time missed due to giving birth and then taking care of the infant is not tolerated by tenure committees, adding a crucial component to the competition: not only do you have to work 60-80h workweeks, you can't take any breaks, either.

The Science article concludes by describing another profession (clinical pediatrics) in which the demands on the candidates have changed over time to accommodate women in the workforce. Transferred to science this would mean that you'd have to clock scientists to prevent them from working more than the regular, predictable and child friendly 9-5, 5 days a week (and enforce it!), and tenure committees would have to choose women with child-breaks over equally qualified candidates without children. Clearly, while this is doable, we're not even close to even debating it. Is this Science article the beginning of such a debate? Should we make science a 9-5 job in order to accommodate women with children? Or should we get used to not having a 50-50 distribution of men and women?
Until any such reforms happen, I can advise from experience (now backed up by data): if you want to see your children grow up and stay in science, don't get children before you have tenure - irrespective of whether you're male or female.

The cost of knowledge - in 2003?

bjoern — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:16:47 -0400

My former supervisor (in 1993!) Göran Englund may not be a Field's Medalist (he's an ecologist!), but already in 2003, he saw corporate publishers behaving in the same way which gave rise to the Elsevier boycott this year, almost ten years later: extorting university libraries with overpriced journals. Back then, he calculated a "blacklist" of journals, ranked by subscription price per article in his field of ecology. Interestingly, the bottom of this list is populated by the high-ranking society and non-profit journals, while the expensive spots are occupied by the lower-ranking, overpriced journals of corporate publishers. Unfortunately, he never published his analysis, but after a phone-conversation initiated for an entirely different reason today, he sent me his blacklist. Here's what he said about it nine years ago:

The crisis in academic publishing

The market is dysfunctional – there is no mechanism regulating journal prices.
Prices of commercially published journals often increase by 10-20% per year
In ecology the average prices of commercially published journals are four times higher than those published by non-profit organizations.
Libraries cancel subscriptions – Our research is not efficiently disseminated.
We pay more and get less.

What can be done?

Examine the pricing policy of any commercially published journal before you contribute as an author, reviewer, or editor. If possible, refuse to do business with publishers who practice "predatory pricing."
Submit papers to journals that have reasonable prices.
As a member of a scholarly association, encourage the creation of competitors to expensive commercial journals.
Inform your colleagues.

More information on the crisis at: www.createchange.org.

The document also contains one small figure at the end that I thought I should paste in here:

I've converted the entire document to PDF for everyone to enjoy. It almost goes without saying: after 2003, Göran never published, reviewed or edited for any of the commercial journals any more.

...and now for some Peerevaluation

bjoern — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:56:56 -0500

Michelle Moscicki: Shrexploration: to always be bold or not always to be bold?

bjoern — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:00:28 -0500

The final talk at the Royce Conference of University of Alberta was on behavioral types/syndromes or 'characters' such as boldness, exploration, aggression, etc. Behavioral syndromes are characterized by repeated behavioral patterns in similar situations, i.e., consistent behavioral patterns over time where different behavioral options exist. Her research addresses the question of whether behavioral syndromes can be found in her model system, the Convict Cichlid. To this end she studies exploration, and the response to 'Schreckstoff' - the pheromone that makes fish show various predator responses (hence the title "Shrexploration"). She found that bold and exploratory individuals were bold and exploratory in different contexts and situations, suggesting that stable behavioral syndromes exist in these animals. This raises the interesting possibility that cichlid fish populations are made up of subpopulations covering the entire spectrum of bold vs. timid behaviors by individual differences that appear to be constant over time and situations. This is consistent with studies in other fish and indeed with many other, also terrestrial species. This field of research suggests that there seems to be an evolutionary strategy for populations to maximize their exploration/exploitation balance using individual differences rather than intra-individual variability in behavior.

Kyle Mathewson: Hippocampal Oscillations in Human Intracranial Recording

bjoern — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:29:13 -0500

Up next at the Royce Conference of University of Alberta was a Skype presentation from Chicago by a former postdoc in Clayton Dickson's lab, Kyle Mathewson on electrode recordings in epileptic patients. He looked at slow brain wave oscillations in sleeping patients and how they relate to memory consolidation. The recordings come from a whole night's sleep with implanted electrodes recording single cell activity in various parts of their cortex. In deep-sleep phases, slow wave oscillations appear ot be more common than in awake or less deep sleep phases. The oscillations he detected matched the EEG oscillations measured on the patients' scalp. He specifically looked at data from those electrodes which were placed in the medial temporal lobes, the brain structures most commonly associated with memory processes. These data mimic those of rats, such that slower frequency oscillations correlate with deeper sleep phases (as measured by EEG). He found that there are gamma power oscillations nested in theta frequency waves. This phase-amplitude nesting is correlated with sleep stage. He showed two YouTube videos with some of the data, but the videos are set to private, so I can't link to them here.

Christopher Sturdy: musical responses and chickadees

bjoern — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:57:09 -0500

Here at the Royce Conference of University of Alberta, three consecutive talks were from graduate students in the lab of Chris Sturdy. The first one was on 'response strategies for musical stimuli: parsing the properties of sound' and presented by Lee Vilinsky. Not really knowing much about musical notes, I didn't really understand much of what his results entailed, unfortunately. Apparently, consonants/dissonants is not a symmetrical parameter to pitch height, such that training participants on either parameter did not result in symmetrical results when the participants were tested with novel tones that differed in both parameters.

The second talk was on 'discrimination of fee-bee songs based on geography in black-capped chickadees' and presented by Allison Hahn. Like many birds, chickadee vocalizations can be divided into calls and songs. In the case of chickadees, their calls are long and their songs are short. This talk was about the comparatively simple 'fee-bee' song of chickadees. These songs show local dialects and computer-based functional analysis revealed that songs from British Columbia and from Ontario can be distinguished with an average of 80% acuity (up to 85%). They used operant conditioning to train lab-grown chickadees to distinguish between these two dialects, in order to see if the birds can detect the differences in the different dialects. It took the birds about 400 trials to start to discriminate the two dialects and after 1000 trials they were able to distinguish the two dialect with over 80%.

Th third and final talk was about 'To (Chick-a-)Dee, or not to Dee? That is the question'. This talk was by Chris himself and he talked about immediate-early gene expression in auditory forebrain areas of chickadees and whether or not this expression varies with phylogenetic distance. What he found that there was lots of ieg expression in auditory centers if the birds heard chickadee songs from different chickadee species and not so much if the song was not a chickadee song. This finding help across different parts of auditory forebrain and non-chickadee song didn't increase ieg expression over silence. In a more refined experiment with only portions of songs from more or less related songbird species slected to sound similar to a chickadee 'dee' syllable, all yielded increased ieg expression, suggesting that similar songs elicit similar gene expression irrespective of phylogenetic relatedness. Expression of these genes is thought to reflect recent activity in the neurons where this expression can be found and thus these results imply that these regions are involved in differentiating between different songs.

Marcia Spetch: Extreme memory and risky choice

bjoern — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:01:24 -0500

Here at the Royce Conference of University of Alberta, Marcia Spetch talked about her research on risky choice. She started out by stating that people tend to be risk-averse for gains and risk-prone for losses. She observes the behavior of pigeons to study how brains compute risk and chose risky or less risky options. As humans, pigeons are risk-averse on gain trials and risk-prone on gain trials. However, if pigeons and humans are allowed to experience several trials, these odds change and they become risk-prone for gains and risk-averse for losses over the course of the trials. She hypothesized that this might come from memory being better for extreme events such as the big wins, while losses are not seen as so extreme.

To test this hypothesis, she tested humans on a word task where the participants had to chose one of two words and then received a random reward for their choice. It turned out that the participants remembered the words best that had the least and the largest rewards. Another experiment included introducing less extreme rewards/losses in a standard choice assay. She found that the odds of being risk-averse or -prone didn't change in these trials whereas it did change for the extreme trials.

Visiting University of Alberta: discussing publishing instead of science

bjoern — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:41:27 -0500

For the last day and a half I've been visiting University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. I've been invited by Clayton Dickson in the psychology department to give a presentation at this year's Royce Conference here. I'm up to speak at 15:30 later today.

Yesterday, I gave a presentation at their Neuroscience institute and before and after that talk visited labs, talked to colleagues here and had lunch with graduate students. Tellingly, much of the discussions we'd had was about publishing and the way we do science rather than on the science the people here were doing, despite me asking them about their research. Apparently, things are now so bad that publishing occupies more of researchers minds than their actual research. This has never been the case even though people tend to ask me about publishing issues simply due to my efforts in the open access movement.

Obviously, so many people everywhere being preoccupied with something that of course is important but that should be working so smoothly that nobody should have to worry, is of tremendous concern. It also appears that now is a very good time to change things as attention is at an all time high and support is overwhelming. Even the lunch with the graduate students was predominantly about publishing and what the current status quo means for them and what they can do to help bring scholarly communications back into our (i.e., their) control. Having visited many, many labs in the last 5 years, this is really the first time that publishing has been on the mind of people so much. It's time for change and people know it.

Libraries and their faculty should join forces against corporate publishers

bjoern — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 07:10:34 -0500

I've recently argued that libraries are in a perfect position to take over from current commercial publishers: they're already publishing our theses, ancient texts, data and many of our papers in institutional repositories. Thus, it would only be a small step and with the billions freed in funding from subscriptions no longer needed, the transition would be cheap and painless. In fact, I cannot see any reason justifying the involvement of corporate publishers, when libraries can do the same tasks better and more cheaply. Apparently, librarians feel quite the same way researchers do:

Had lunch with two of the Ph.D. librarians who run our central library to talk about the above. If you think scientists are upset about these issues … whoa Nelly … my library colleagues were practically spitting blood. We talked at length about possible solutions, including scenarios where ridiculous subscription costs could be diverted to pay publication charges in OA journals. They’ve got me convinced that it will be important for researchers and librarians to get on the same page as we work within our Universities for change. But after all, they are *our* Universities, and if anyone can change them, its up to us …

Add to that this recent LSE post on the role of libraries:

Fundamentally the librarians in research supporting roles that I know want to bring down barriers to accessing scholarly research. Inflexible packages and rocketing prices don’t make that goal any more likely. That’s why the second point raised by this anonymous blogger is so resonant with me: “As far as we are concerned, publishers have ONE JOB: disseminating the results of our work to the widest possible audience” Again, Libraries want the same thing, and we want to help. University Libraries have a critical role in helping people find research, and many are now helping researchers make their work accessible with repositories or even hosting journal titles.

Now is the time to speak to your librarian: cut subscriptions to corporate publishers, maybe just the ten most expensive journals, if their contract allows them to, and invest the saved funds in developing modern scholarly communication standards which will appeal to all faculty and helps bring scholarly communication back under institutional control.

Even now the RWA was worth it for Elsevier

bjoern — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:25:42 -0500

Everyone is shouting it from the rooftops already: Elsevier has dropped its support for the Research Works Act. As mentioned before, to me, this doesn't change my stance towards corporate publishers one bit. As John Baez said in his comment to Timothy Gowers' G+ post:

For companies like Elsevier, the great thing about bills like the Research Work Act is that they make us work hard just to keep the status quo, instead of what we really want: changing the status quo.

The approx. US$40k Elsevier spent on Reps. Issa and Maloney were dollars once set aside by an institution to pay for access to scholarly works. With more than a billion US$ in profit per year, in the two months that Open Access advocates have been busy defending Open Access, Elsevier has made just about 165 million in profits. With that return on investment, Elsevier can go on forever without any credible threat to their bottom line.

What needs to happen is that scholars need to go into the offensive rather than merely reacting to publishers' moves. Supporting the FRPAA is one intermediary step in this direction, but more needs to follow. This may be in the form of an initiative to move all our scholarly communication over to libraries or some other action aiming at bringing our works back under our control. Whatever it is, if we want to move towards greater functionality in scholarly publishing, we need to attack the bottom line of the corporations or the only thing we'll see are the kinds of token efforts we can see in the Elsevier press release.

Because of the emotionality to be seen everywhere, I'm cautiously optimistic that the RWA incident may have served as a rallying cry or galvanization point for such movements, but I'm not holding my breath. An industry with around 4 billion US$ practically burning a hole in their pockets has a lot to lose and plenty of resources to prevent any such loss.

Therefore, it is important to keep the pressure on right now and to remember that we, the public institutions, hold the purse-strings to the corporate profits. We decide directly about the money that will be used against us. Stop subscribing to journals from corporate publishers and use the saved funds to create something better that is under our own control and therefore directly benefits the taxpayer.