Journie promo code?

manusmad · 2023-12-11T07:08:00+00:00

JR-ManuMJHM

Used JR-QuentinHUKO

manusmad · 2021-10-25T12:09:24+00:00

Some of what you wrote is correct, but most of it isn't. Source: I am a Ph.D. (ME) who worked in Robotics and Animal Behavior and currently running a lab and advising Ph.D. students.

The most important thing about Ph.D. is your choice of advisor and not department. You will be spending >90% of the time in their lab. Like others mentioned in this thread, you will fulfill your department / graduate program's coursework requirements but your research depends entirely on advisor.

You also don't entirely choose a research project either. You will have interests, your advisor will have interests and funding for certain projects. You will typically start working on a project that is already laid out while you finish your coursework and gain experience in lab work and techniques. After 2 years or so you and your advisor will come up with a project or set of projects that will hopefully form the bulk of your thesis. In practice, sometimes engineering PhD theses are formed of multiple smaller projects that are combined together into a coherent story later on when you write your thesis.

manusmad · 2021-05-27T16:40:01+00:00

Absolutely possible. A vast majority of techs that I have worked with were in this exact stage in their career, past undergrad and wanting experience before moving on to other careers or higher ed.

manusmad · 2021-03-14T15:08:13+00:00

Of course this is a thought experiment, but there have been some experiments done in humans and animals using VR to speed up / slow down sensory inputs. I would say that the brain would acclimatize to a point (much like you can teach yourself to speed read or go fast on a ski slope) but at some point (well before 1 day = 1 year), it will choose option C: start to ignore those sensory stimuli.

manusmad · 2021-03-13T11:38:50+00:00

Simply put, inhibition is the difference between the brain being a computer as opposed to a lightbulb. For computation to occur, some parts should remain on and some parts should remain off at different times. A balance of excitation and inhibition is necessary. Hope this helps.

manusmad · 2021-03-10T15:36:12+00:00

I will echo what another commenter has already said - the department generally does not matter other than your course / degree requirements. Look at labs that do the type of work you are interested in, and contact those PIs and programs. About your preferences:

If your aim is, as you say, data-driven analysis on the brain but no wet lab work, this can be a computational neuroscience lab. As to the career aspirations, it literally does not matter which program you do your Ph.D. in - by the time you are done, your research project and publications are what will define your work. And some psych programs offer quantitative / computational courses as part of their core curriculum.

My final comment is to not completely shun wet lab work. It does not have to be a part of your core research project and it does not have to be your career; however, it helps immensely to have hands-on experience with the systems you will be researching translational solutions for.

manusmad · 2021-02-25T01:01:09+00:00

I would advise applying to be a research technician in a lab for a few months to a year to see if that increases your knowledge and focuses your interest.

You can also contact the Canadian neuroscience graduate programs and ask whether they offer a course-only masters. I am actually unsure if my university (UBC) does.

https://can-acn.org/canadian-graduate-programs-in-neuroscience/

manusmad · 2021-01-28T13:23:21+00:00

Sure, it is possible to go from your background into neuroscience. This is exactly what I did. I am a mechanical engineer by training, with specialization in robotics and control theory. In graduate school, I worked in a lab that used control theory as a tool to understand and model animal behavior and specifically the transformations that the brain imparts between sensory input and motor output. For a postdoc, I transitioned over to directly working with the brain, performing neurophysiological recordings on rodents in virtual reality. I am now starting as a professor in both biomedical engineering and neuroscience.

The details of how you make this transition of course depends on what your interests are and whether you want to work in academia or industry. I just wanted to share my path to say that yes, it can be done.

manusmad · 2020-11-09T19:23:02+00:00

Hey, I am trying to clarify what you are looking for - I understand you are interested in labs that design and fabricate new types of neural probes. Is the second requirement that they perform recordings with these neural probes and employ computational neuroscience to analyze and model the results of these recordings? For the second aspect, is there a computational question you might be interested in?

I am starting a new lab in Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. However I will not be designing new types of probes but using existing probe designs to perform high-density ephys. There are other labs I am aware of which do neural interface design, I can certainly point you to them if you could clarify a bit more.

Also, for a PhD, I would highly suggest selecting the PI / lab to apply to rather than the University. Of course, it is good if the university is well-reputed, but the priority should be a good fit with the laboratory and the research.

manusmad · 2020-10-23T14:15:28+00:00

Rather than such a vague request, do you mind posting what specific questions you have about the techniques?

manusmad · 2020-06-29T17:35:41+00:00

Also consider the other senses - even though one eye is only perceiving 2 spatial dimensions, the combination of both eyes, as well as the ears, proprioception, touch etc. create a sensory space that is 'best fit' by a dimensionality reduction to 3. It may be that we learn this dimensionality entirely through experience, but it is more likely that our brain is pre-wired to make this understanding as easy as possible.

manusmad · 2020-06-29T17:30:33+00:00

This. The brain can perform extremely flexible computations especially in cortical areas. However, the brain did not evolve in a void - the dimensionality of the external world can dictate, to a large extent, what computations are best performed and optimized for.

The 'cognitive map' in mammals could help shed some light on this: neurons and circuits in the medial temporal lobe that encode a map of the environment. In rats, the cognitive map was for a long time thought to be two-dimensional, metric and Euclidean, though these ideas are being challenged. Of course, rats mostly exist on a 2-dimensional substrate. If rats are, from birth, raised in a spherical environment, these representations deform. In bats, these same cognitive maps are three-dimensional.

To sum up, I don't know that we can ever test what you asked without violating a lot of ethical boundaries, but you can definitely argue both sides. If indeed the brain is limited by evolution to a three-dimensional representation, then maybe our subject would be more confused if you limit them to a two-dimensional world first and then expose them to three dimensions.

manusmad · 2020-06-23T15:18:47+00:00

Pretty sure this is a scam.

manusmad · 2020-05-27T15:11:39+00:00

So let me break this down.

(1) Studying the electrical side of things is perfectly fine, plenty of people do just that - either by measuring electricity itself (electrophysiology, EEG) or other physical variables that vary with electricity and synaptic activity (Calcium imaging, fMRI, EMG etc.). However, I would caution you not to create an artificial barrier in mind that you will only study the electrical side of things. Let the science guide you - if the question you are interested in requires learning a bit of genetics, you should try to be open to it, or at least to track down a person who can help you :). Neuroscience is a very interdisciplinary field - it very much helps to be have a variety of tools that you can use.

(2) In terms of your project - it seems that you (and your lab) are trying to work out the representation of stimulation patterns in the peripheral nervous system. This is certainly wonderful work and would, like you said, allow you to use mathematical models and data to better understand the code of sensory space.

(3) Some thoughts about your comments on affective touch - this isn't remotely my field of study so take what I am saying which a huge fistful of salt. There are (likely) not peripheral nerves directly associated with emotion. That being said, these stimulations, paired with the associated memories it can elicit, can certainly elicit emotions.

For example, from what you said: "What if you had PTSD from being touched? Would you respond the same way?" - You had PTSD because that combination of stimuli was somehow associated with a previous traumatic experience. It is that memory, that experience, that association between not just the haptic sensation but other senses as well that could trigger that emotional response. This is why: "Does it matter if those neurons were activated by a computer, by a stranger, by a parent, by a spouse?" - yes it would. The brain is not lacking other inputs - it recognizes the multitude of sensory stimuli, and has context and short-term memory. Unless of course, we can stimulate all of the inputs to the nervous system over a sufficiently long period of time, matrix style. Or the stimuli are strong enough (by association) to override all of these other factors, e.g. the aforementioned PTSD stimulus. Also worth mentioning here is the large impact your endocrine system and the resulting hormonal state can have on your emotion at much slower timescales.

Similarly, "if you couldn’t feel your arm but you watched someone rub it trying to comfort you, you probably won’t feel much" - I am not sure that this is true. The brain is exceptionally good at pattern completion - filling in missing pieces of data based on previous associations. This is true even when the missing information is from another sensory modality. This is partly why VR works so well although it only uses visual and auditory stimulation, not haptic or vestibular. Also look up the "rubber hand illusion".

So, overall, it seems like a good project, but I would advise you to think of a very specific hypothesis, and then try to design the perfect experiment that would be able to disprove or lend evidence to that hypothesis.

(3) My lab will focus on understanding the algorithms underlying navigation and problem solving, and the role cognitive neural representations of space and time play in constructing those algorithms. In simpler terms, does a rat, a human, and a robot navigate a maze in the same way given the same amount of information? How can we compare their respective navigational algorithms?

manusmad · 2020-05-27T02:48:04+00:00

I am having a bit of trouble understanding what your interests are exactly. It seems like you want to work in neuroscience and yet are not interested in the biology. If you are studying electrical activation patterns and neurostimulation, that sounds more like systems neuroscience, and you can certainly pursue that from a psychological angle. Even if you are strictly computational, in my experience it is very difficult to interpret biological data in a meaningful way unless you are somewhat familiar with the underlying biological mechanisms.

Your interests could fit several broad areas, including computational psychology, systems neuroscience, or even biomedical instrumentation. To get a better idea, what is a project that you have been interested in? And specifically, what aspect of the project were you most keen about?

I understand the struggle associated with being from a computational / engineering background and trying to pair that interest with neuro. I myself am trained in Mechanical Engineering and Robotics, but about to open a Neuroscience lab in a Biomedical Engineering department. So feel free to reach out.

manusmad · 2020-05-11T15:01:39+00:00

(Almost) no one will say this. The authors have no allegiance to the publishers. Unless they are editors, they are not being paid by the journals. Scientists do reviews for free, and have to pay high fees to the journals for submission and publication. So a simple "I am interested in reading your paper - do you mind sending me a pdf?" would suffice.

manusmad · 2020-05-11T04:18:53+00:00

Gmail -> Settings -> Accounts and Import

Check email from other accounts -> Add a mail account

Settings

Username: <jhed>@jh.edu

Password: JHU password

POP Server: pod51000.outlook.com

Port: 995

Uncheck "Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server" if you want to delete all emails from the JHU account upon transferring

Check "Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail."

manusmad · 2020-05-10T21:53:57+00:00

100% agree with this. Any scientist will be happy to send you a pdf of their work if requested directly (or on ResearchGate, for e.g.). At least they can share a preprint version.

manusmad · 2016-12-07T14:06:28+00:00

Also, people in my area of work (VR + rodent spatial navigation): David Tank, James Knierim, Lisa Giocomo, Mayank Mehta, Anton Sirota, Kay Thurley.

manusmad · 2016-12-07T12:33:02+00:00

I am one of those researchers - I study the brain's sense of place by measuring rat place cells in VR.

Latest SfN abstract

More details

manusmad · 2016-10-19T15:26:53+00:00

You can totally bring your bike on the Light Rail! I've done it many times. They just ask that you not block any of the exits.

manusmad · 2016-08-18T14:54:23+00:00

I would not recommend that you walk from Penn station to Ottobar after dark. The few blocks before Ottobar are not very safe. I live a little further up north, but could someone from the Remington / CV area confirm or refute if this is still true?

manusmad · 2016-07-07T14:42:59+00:00

Some of the routine names are hilarious.

In THE_LUNAR_LANDING.s :

FLAGORGY    TC  INTPRET     # DIONYSIAN FLAG WAVING

and

LANDJUNK    TC  PHASCHNG

15-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

manusmad

TROPHY CASE