SummarySummaryUntil 2002 I was a postdoctoral research fellow working at the Institute for Neural Computation, which is a joint venture between the University of California at San Diego and the Salk Institute. Practically speaking, this means I get to hang out full time in the Marty Sereno laboratory in the Department of Cognitive Science, having conversations about our new exciting stimuli packages such as squirrel TV, Buffy-no-topy, body parts, the romantic hand stroking task, and so on. My current research project is to test Lakoff and Johnson's Embodiment Hypothesis using neuroimaging methods, particularly fMRI. Practically speaking, this means I want to take pictures of brains listening to poetry - poetry being a major hobby of mine. My other major hobby is climbing mountains, which has nothing to with my research or my vita or my resume, but someday I'll get around to listing every major mountain I have climbed. Other than those, I have the usual sundry and sordid passions, including brewing my own beer, arguing politics and software hacking. And, oh yeah, I suppose I'm somewhat notorious for the fact that I put together the Online Metaphor Center.
I am now at the Colorado Advanced Research Institute. More on this development later.
(Much more info including citations available on my research page.)
My major research project at UCSD is to test Lakoff and Johnson's arguments about embodied cognitive semantics empirically using neurophysiological methods such as fMRI and ERPs. One such experiment consists of three related tasks. In the first task, the hand somatosensory areas of the cortex are marked out by lightly stimulating the surface of the right palm and fingers (ie, the romantic hand stroking task) contrasted against blocks where no such sensory stimulation takes place. In the second task, the participant reads a block of sentences about the hands (including the fingers, thumb etc.), which is contrasted with a block of random subject matter sentences. In the third task, the participant reads a block of sentences which use hand terms metaphorically, which is again contrasted against a block of random subject matter sentences. We expected to see much a stronger response to the somatosensory condition, and increasingly weaker responses to the other conditions--but we also predicted a high degree of overlap in the hand somatopic maps the sensory and the semantic tasks. The first image is the left hemisphere response to the somatosensory condition, the second is to the literal hand sentences, the third is to the metaphoric sentences, all for a single subject. The sequence then repeats for the right hemisphere.
Finally, I provide a large figure with the outline of the somatosensory response traced onto the literal and metaphoric conditions to illustrate the degree of overlapbetween the somatosenosry and the language conditions. I argue that this is evidence that supposedly "low-level" topological neural maps play crucial role in "higher" cognition, i.e. semantic understanding.
Procedural notes: The design was a blocked design in which a participant performs each task and contrast alternately for eight 32-second blocks apiece during an eight-minute thirty-two second fMRI scan. Due to the length of the experiment, not all tasks were performed on the same day. The somatosensory task was always done last during any given scan session. Three scans of language task data were averaged together, while the somatosensory data is from a single scan. Red-yellow indicates the response during the on-blocks, while blue indicates the response during the off-blocks (random sentences or no sensory stimulation). Data was gathered using a small surface coil placed over the top of the head in order to increase signal to noise for the linguistic task, and therefore the entire brain was not imaged. The scanner used was a 1.5T Siemens machine, and the data was mapped using a fourier analysis with the FreeSurfer software package. The brain images shown are an inflated view with the gyri and sulci expanded so that no data is hidden in the cortical folds.
Pedaling Without Pushing (Reflections on Our Lack of Traction in Bad Elections)
The Music Inside (pdf only)
When I was a wee lad, I used to work at the American Homebrewer's Association, where I was a lowly production assistant working on Zymurgy, and typeset my first full book as a book designer, Principles of Brewing Science. The pay wasn't great, but the fringe benefits were sure spectacular!
Then there are my good pals at Verminbrewing.com! Check them out!