junior1 at ibm.net [Bernie Arruza] writes:
[snip]
>Universities have very little incentive to merge their departments to study the
>mysteries of the brain.
Excuse me, but you are quite wrong. I guess you don't know that many
universities in the past 10 years have been establishing cognitive science
and cognitive neuroscience departments and programs. Whole conferences and
journals devoted to these new integrative disciplines have sprung up. The
1990s have been proclaimed the "Decade of the Brain" and the fed govt and
private foundations have made funding cognitive neuroscience a priority.
[snip]
>Unless things change, this train is going to slow down!. We are all waiting for
>a scientific breakthrough. Wouldn't a technical breakthrough help to improve the
>odds of success for all of us interested in how the brain functions?
The train is going to slow down? Are you kidding? The train has been
speeding up since -- well, IMHO I'd say the 40s (when McCulloch & Pitts
introduced a neural network model), and our understanding of the
relationships between brain and mind are constantly evolving. This
is truly an exciting time to be working in this area. If you want
technical breakthroughs, since about 1980 we've had: magnetoencephalography
(MEG), EEG/MEG source localization, positron emission tomography, magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) and functional MRI. If you want to talk about
modeling -- did you hear about the connectionist "revolution" that started
in the mid-80s? That's just a short and skewed very list of the exciting
developments that have driven the field recently. (No offense to people
working with animal models, I'm not very familiar with those techniques.)
Kevin
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Kevin Spencer
Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory and Beckman Institute
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
kspencer at p300.cpl.uiuc.edu
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