What I Heard

(Not necessarily what was said) at presentations, seminars, and so on

Eric Kandel on the brain

Apr 292008

The Neurophilosophy blog reposts a 21-minute interview with Erik Kandel, who won a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on learning and memory (see my comments on his book, In Search of Memory).

The original interview appears at Scienceblogs.de, a German-language cousin of Neurophilosophy. That site includes some highlights and related timecodes in German (which I can’t read).

I also found an online episode of the Charlie Rose television show, with guest host Dr. Harold Varmus (CEO of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) interviewing Dr. Kandel. (Note: this is a one-hour program. At the link, you can download the program for iPod or PSP.)

Just a snippet from around the 21-minute mark in the Charlie Rose video, regarding short-term and long-term memory:

…the critical thing that we found…is that short-term memory involves a transient strengthening in the communication between nerve cells…

With long-term memory…the signaling systems move into the nucleus, and there they turn on genes… Genes will be altered in your brain…

Many people think that the genes are the determinants of behavior… In the brain, genes are the servants of the environment…

It was a bit surprising to me.

Anyone concerned with how learning occurs owes a great deal to Kandel, who readily acknowledges owing a great deal to the sea slug Aplysia, whose large and relatively few neurons provided the ideal subject for Kandel’s research.

Aplysia californica

Learning lectures to go

What I heard

Apr 252008

I came across the Xyleme Learning blog and then their podcast series, Xyleme Voices. I’ve got a long drive today, so as I write this, I’m downloading the four items currently shown.

In case you’re interested, they include:

Stroke of insight: Jill Bolte Taylor

Brain food, What I heard

Mar 162008

Many thanks to my friend Kate Trgovac, who was at TED this year and told me about this unique presentation by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor.

One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

(About 18 minutes, 44 seconds)

Online presence and the need to know

Connecting, What I heard

Feb 092008

Ian Delaney’s post, 25/M/S or Maybe Not, introduced me to the Lift conference (and its website, which offers recorded talks in a TED-like fashion).

The post focused on a talk by Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel. She discusses lying online, starting with her frustration when she couldn’t remember what date of birth she’d given to Flickr — meaning that she was locked out of her own account.

That remark alone hooked me, because I often manufacture dates of birth or ZIP codes. I realize that the Washington Post online site wants to have demographics; I just don’t see why they need to have mine. (For speedy retrieval, when a store asks my phone number, I give one from a job I left seven years ago.)

Here’s Bell’s talk:

I especially enjoyed Ian Delaney’s musing about transparency and online connection:

On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world â€˜what are you doing right now?â€™. But I did a little search on Twitter for â€˜having a wankâ€™ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bellâ€™s contention.

Bell points out (sensibly, I think) that technology changes far faster than people do. I read lots of opinions about technology transforming how we live and work; Bell reminds us that internal transformation can take a bit longer. As she says, deception and self-deception may be necessary parts of human survival.