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2.11: Adolescent Brain Stuff with Rosa Li

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This week on the podcast we decide to jump into the developing brain with PhD student Rosa Li. In our conversation we discuss the difficulty of scanning the brains of children (and adolescents, and adults, everyone really), the extended negotiation that is a dissertation proposal, and the organizational side of science communication. Also: Nonsensical neuroscience, behavioral economics, and the most ridiculous RA position of all time.

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Show Notes

The retrofuturistic cover art for this week’s episode comes from a series of postcards drawn by Jean-Marc Côté and others in the early twentieth century. The students in this particular image are diligently learning the history of France.

The complete and utter nonsense masquerading as actual neuroscience discussed in this week’s introduction was first discussed in this article. With a little help from a familiar source, it was quickly dissected by the fine folks at The Science of Us.

Vaughn Bell’s excellent essay about mental health, stigma, and the brain was published at Mind Hacks.

For a nicely broad overview of Rosa’s field of research, check out this article she wrote for Slate.

For an empirical take on the question of when adulthood begins, check out this recent paper from an interdisciplinary team led by Alexandra O. Cohen. Further muddying the waters is the theory of “emerging adulthood” posited by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and others.

Having a 100% chance of earning five dollars or a 50% chance of earning ten dollars is the the simplest iteration of the classic risk aversion paradigm outlined by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their seminal 1979 article on decision making. That paper, along with a similarly influential article by Richard Thaler, are widely regarded as the the foundational texts of behavioral economics. Along with Vernon L. Smith, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University where he leads the Mind and Development Lab. When he isn’t writing about the development of language in academic publications, he writes on similarly simple topics like morality and religion. Thanks to the Open Yale Courses project, you can attend his introductory psychology course for free via YouTube.

Visual area MT (Medial Temporal) (also sometimes called Visual area V5) is a region of visual cortex that, since the early 1970s, has been thought to play a major role in the perception of motion.

Disruption of the MT can cause akinetopsia, a neuropsychological disorder in which a patient cannot perceive motion. Probably the most famous case of akinetopsia is Subject L.M. who began having difficulty with motion perception following a severe case of sinus vein thrombosis. A series of follow-up brain imaging studies demonstrated significant damage to her bilateral MT and disrupted activity throughout her visual system.

Laurie Santos is the director of Yale’s Comparative Cognition Lab. For more on her work studying the evolutionary roots of decision making, check out her Ted talk on “monkeynomics”. You can also read the academic paper on the topic here.

Rosa is actually the second guest this season who got into cognitive psychology/neuroscience research because of little monkeys.

Until recently, the Talairach Atlas (specifically the 1988 edition, developed by Jean Talairach and Pierre Tourneaux) was the de facto standard for precisely describing locations in the human brain. To conduct comparisons in human brain imaging studies, individual brains are generally mapped to a standard space. However, because the Talairach Atlas is based on a single postmortem brain (that of a 60 year old alcoholic French woman), it has largely fallen out of favor in comparison to those created by the Montreal Neurological Institute which better reflect “average” neuroanatomy. This article presents a nicely rigorous comparison of the Talairach and MNI systems.

From its tools to its underlying philosophy, cognitive neuroscience is basically built on the premise of researchers looking at the same complex systems in different ways.

No seriously, a research group affiliated with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business really did ask people drink wine in an MRI. For a thorough (though rather uncritical) review of consumer neuroscience, check out this article.

For over sixty years, the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) has provided support for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Though it has always been extremely competitive, it was announced earlier this year that graduate students will now only have a single opportunity to apply to the GRFP. Because graduate stipends are distressingly variable between different disciplines, universities, and academic departments, an NSF fellowship can represent a (comparatively) major windfall for hungry graduate students.

Eveline Crone is full professor in the unit Developmental and Educational Psychology of the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University. Most of the literature on Brain Time is in Dutch, but this paper provides a nice overview.

Switching things up and doing science in different lab environments was the subject of several previous episodes and (spoiler alert) will come up again soon.

Aside from his work researching decision making, Scott Huettel is probably best known for literally writing the book on functional magnetic resonance imaging.

If you follow Bold Signals on Facebook, you’d already have seen this nicely readable explanation of the algorithm used to match med students to residency programs from FiveThirtyEight.

ComSciCon is a series of workshops focused on the communication of complex and technical concepts organized by graduate students, for graduate students. Initially organized by graduate students at Harvard University and MIT, ComSciCon now encompasses a number of local workshops and a K12 outreach program.

When it comes critically evaluating neuroscientific information, Rosa recently transfigured this post by neuroscientist Russ Poldrack into a handy infographic.

The “Democrats and Republicans have different brains” and “People really love their iPhones” examples of nonsensical neuroscience were both drawn from pieces published in the New York Times Opinion Pages. Russ Poldrack and a number of other neuroscientists signed letters to the editor in response to both pieces.

This week’s Bold Signals Book Club selection is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr. Collecting stories published before Tiptree was revealed to be a pen name of Alice B. Sheldon, this volume includes an eclectic mix of “hard” and “soft” science fiction. Lost in the (admittedly fascinating) story of Tiptree’s true identity is the fact that her stories are really, really good. Portending the cyberpunk genre and the stories of George Saunders, the stories in this collection are as thought provoking as they are darkly humorous.

If you’d like to purchase any of the books discussed in the book club and support the podcast at the same time, take a gander at our Amazon store. The podcast also has an Amazon wishlist if you’d like to donate a book. The full list of book club books is here.

Music in this Episode

“Enterprise 1“ by Languis

“Molasses” by Podington Bear

“That’s a Terrible Name for a Song” by Velella Velella

“Something” by Kai Engel

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3160828