Hello readers 🙂
Last week was a bit hectic, what with two exams on Friday, and this week proves to be busy as well. But spring break is just a week away; sentiments of this sort are scrawled across whiteboards all around campus :). My first challenge for the week is to interview for the Beckman scholarship. This is a highly competitive research grant for undergraduates, though happily the college has already achieved an institution grant, so it’s all inter-Wellesley competition from here on out :). I know of several of my friends who are applying for it… it won’t be a breeze, that’s for sure!
This will be my second interview ever, not counting college application interviews, and my longest—20 minutes! Last week, I interviewed for the new China-Albright program, and made it to the final round, but was not accepted. I am again at the final round stage for the Beckman interview, so I am excited (and nervous) to see what will occur :).
Luckily, I’m not going at it alone! Though the CWS offers mock interviews, the quick turn-around for both the China and Beckman programs hasn’t let me take advantage of this (and though I technically should have done one just to prepare in general, I didn’t really look that far ahead :)). However, I’ve talked to my parents, I’ve talked to Prof. Higgins (she has generously agreed to write my recommendation letters, for which I will always be thankful), and Prof. Conway did a mock interview with me yesterday. It was the most beneficial thing he could have done for me, because yet again, he has made me reflect much more deeply about who I am and what my goals are.
“What are your research goals?” he asked me. Having already done hours of research on the lab’s work, the Beckman scholarship, and my project in the lab, and yet not having thought about this question, I started stuttering and hedging. “No, no,” he told me—“you can’t just tell them that you don’t know. You mustn’t be cautious—don’t make your answers a question mark. This is the whole point, what they’re looking for… what do you want? How does being in my lab contribute to these goals? How will the Beckman scholarship further these goals? They want someone who can tell a story, and make that story interesting.”
I tried again, and he stopped me midway through. Made me reword and clarify something, then told me to work on that idea. And so I biked to my thinking haven, otherwise known as the elliptical machine. And I gestured and talked to myself for more than an hour, until I had a story.
We all tell ourselves stories. I find it fascinating that we don’t know who we are without these stories; that we can’t predict our behavior, only look backwards and look for themes. It seems that we’re explaining our lives as soon as we live them, so that even a path that doesn’t make any sense was surely a progression in retrospect. And these stories define how we approach the world: how we present ourselves to others, and define frameworks to evaluate our actions.
So here’s a story I can tell myself.
I’ve always been interested in people. Or more precisely, been frustrated by people, because unlike my homework, where at least the expectations were clear, people did irrational things all the time. And when people would get angry or upset, my typical response was bafflement, because I had obviously done something wrong… but what? I often had no idea.
This was upsetting. (Social pain activates the same circuits as physical pain, did you know?) And my solution, the one I have always turned to, is to make social rules for myself. In this situation, you must not do that. In that situation, you must do this. I begged others for a categorization of what I had done wrong, so I wouldn’t do it again. Turns out, though, that most people don’t approach social mistakes this way. Turns out that these rules are unconscious, intrinsic. Turns out, questions about these rules, even mentioning such things as rules, is annoying.
And yet.
Don’t we, as humans, follow the same pattern of thought over generations? In the history of humanity, all of our core questions are the same. Who are we, what is our purpose, what is love, what is death. With new innovations, the specific questions change, but we cannot change millions of years of evolution, the neural circuits that drive our thoughts. Our behavior must follow rules, because as a species we are new, and undiverged. We recognize a “human nature.” The patterns of thought we share make us human.
In physics, there’s a law called the theory of relativity. There’s also theories of motion, simple laws that unify infinite examples from life under one heading. Nature follows rules—the world we’re born into is always expected, or at least expected in its unexpectedness. We could not be so arrogant as to think we don’t adhere to an order that the universe follows.
So there must be rules, rules that govern human behavior and thought. If we could find these rules, we could accomplish miracles. Human nature is filled with wondrous things—generosity, kindness, devotion. It’s also filled with jealousy, anger, and greed. What if we could know these neural circuits, know which parts of the brain, and how these circuits are connected—what if we could take out the bad parts of us, and replace with the new? What if we could replace damaged parts, and make people better? What if we could replace the brain, replace it with a new, better human being.
I don’t think we’ll ever create an artificial brain that could exactly mimic a human’s. There’s too much we don’t know—too much information spread over circuits, vast in numbers of cells and connections. But that is my ultimate vision for science—if you could find all of these rules, draft our actions and emotions into lines of code, put them into a computer and let it run. Make people better. Change the way we think, our approach to everything. Transform our world.
And that is my broadest research question. Now bring it down, scale it back, return to real size.
I came to Wellesley because of the research opportunities. I was drawn to neuroscience early on—had inklings in high school, knew by the end of first year—because it really is the study of these patterns of thought. Like psychology, when you’re studying the mind… with the mind. That’s the challenge of research in general, because how can we study the brain—which through its neural processing, transforms physical stimuli into the way we think—with the end result from our brains? You can do it—very slowly—by looking at the problem with the maximum breadth of human patterns of thought.
Neuroscience calls me because it is multidisciplinary. Whole communities of different people, trained in slightly different ways to look at the world, all driven by the pursuit of fundamental rules, are working together. I can see no other way of finding the rules to human thought and behavior, because the problem is so complex. But when you have psychologists, who are studying human reactions to whole scenes, and biologists, who are studying aggregations of molecules, and chemists, who are studying those molecules, and physicists, who are studying the rules of those molecules, and mathematicians, who are studying the rules beneath those rules…. I think that is the best chance we have of discovery, revelation.
Smaller.
I chose and committed to Professor Conway lab because his work is the fundamentals. Our inputs from the outside world are physical stimuli. Take light. Waves of electromagnetic radiation hitting our retinas—a film at the back of the eye. Waves of electromagnetic radiation. Does that mean anything to you? It doesn’t to me.
Yet these waves of electromagnetic radiation hit our retinas, and pass through the photoreceptors, and the signal is turned into electricity that travels along the bipolar cells and the LGN and hundreds of thousands of cells to create…. blue. Not just blue, this color that humans may artificially separate from all of color categories, but blue in its range, blue in its emotions. The processing that transforms electromagnetic radiation produces emotions, reactions that incorporate all of our past experiences and culture and give blue a feel. This is astounding—and color is only one part of our visual systems—we see shape, form, contrast, motion, color, objects, faces, global pictures, locations, expressions… color. So simple.
We don’t know how color works. It produces a complementary-color afterimage if you stare at it too long, and somehow we see a blue in sunlight and a blue in shadow as one and the same. There’s neural processing going on, even if it seems effortless—even if it seems like illusions should never work, because we see exactly what is shown in the external environment. How could we ever find a rule for human behavior when we don’t even know how we compute color? The fundamentals are essential. That’s why we go to school. Basic research before any applications, and that’s why I’m here.
Closer.
Color is encoded by three dimensions—hue, saturation, and luminance. Hue is what you think of as color—“red,” or “orange,” or “purple.” Luminance is how many photons are reflected off the color; it’s easiest to think of it as brightness, which is a function of luminance. Saturation is essentially how “blue” a blue is—cobalt blue, which is closer to black, produces a much different effect than baby blue, which is closer to white. Our research question is how these dimensions are encoded by the neurons in our brains.
We have a fairly good idea for how hue is encoded. There’s something called a “rate code,” which means that information is transferred between neurons depending on the rate that a neuron fires. A specific group of neuron might fire more for the color blue, and another group might fire more for red. However, if hue is being encoded by rate, how are luminance and saturation being encoded?
The other way that information is commonly transferred in neural circuits is a temporal code—information encoded by differences in timing. Maybe the neurons all fire at the exact same rate, but some neurons fire faster for blue and slower for other colors. The easiest way to search for a temporal code is by using latency—how long it takes for a neuron to respond when you show it a specific color, at a specific saturation, at a specific luminance.
That’s my project. I have latency data from neurons that were shown these colors, and my job is to analyze them, see if I can spot any patterns for how saturation and luminance may be encoded by the brain. And in doing this specific project, I am learning how to analyze data, how to create computer code, and how to analyze electrophysiology data. I am being exposed to fMRI (brain imaging), psychophysics (presenting physical stimuli and analyzing the resulting perceptions), and research questions. I am learning how to ask and answer questions, so that eventually, with experiences and knowledge of the techniques, I’ll be able to frame my own research questions, in a new and unique way.
And that’s my story.
It will doubtless be refined as I grow older and wiser. Stepping back, I’m amazed that I was able to craft it, given urgency and a prompt. All of these thoughts and beliefs muddled about in our heads, and if we take the time and energy we can recrystallize one thread of the story. It’s an amazing capability, and even if nothing comes out of this, I’m grateful to the people who made it happen, including my own brain.
One human brain = all of the internet’s processing capability in the world. We’re amazing creatures.
Best to you all,
Monica