Voyage across Great Brain Ocean

As Nature reported, now a cultural revolution of science has broken out in Japan.

A series of meetings by the government cuts deeply many budgets for scientific researches, as well as other useless goverment-funded programmes. The budgets cut by the meetings include a specific grant for young scientists.

In a meeting, some reports said a ruling lawmaker shouted; “if we pay huge amount of money for scientific researches, each of us should be rewarded by the result of them!”

Was her insane? Why should each of tax-payers should be rewarded?

In common sense, an advance of science itself should be a reward for whole human beings. All scientific studies must contribute to benefit for all of us on the earth; they are never for a specific people or nation. Therefore we scientists are united across the world and we tackle many issues together.

But our goverment doesn’t think so. They believe scientific studies in Japan must contribute to benefit only for Japan, and must reward people in Japan only by monetary profit. They must be stupid.

Now many young scientists are leaving Japan and seeking academic jobs in other countries. So then, if you are researcher hoping an academic position in Japan, I have to tell you;

Give up your hope and go home now. Japan is no longer a good country. Here is a land of nightmare.

The work I mentioned in the last month is supposed to be published in October. Although it’s not a high-impact journal, I hope you like it.

In this study, I argued “modulators” change the configuration according to whether actively attending or not. Also I have to enphasize, unlike Bressler’s study, I adopted the ROI-average strategy, NOT the single-voxel stats strategy. This must be important.

In coming SfN meeting (Neuroscience 2009), he and his colleagues is presenting an issue about it. Sure, their argument will be beneficial for any Granger causality analysis studies. But I wonder if the single-voxel stats strategy they prefer can cause incorrect results. I’ll ask them in Chicago.

Some decades ago, study on neural correlates of visual attention was restricted within visual cortices; it’s naturally, because at that time researchers were still naive about the brain’s world. People only could investigate the relation between attentional efforts and neural activity measured at the visual cortex, as an output of modulated percept.

But recently, the situation has changed. I feel such a long-lasting era of the study on “modulatee” of attention is ending.

Of course, I have to say we are still required to elucidate the neural correlates of “modulatee” of attention. Although still many experts are tackling the issue, some of them are now starting to study “modulator” of attention.

Here I show a representative case: Robert Desimone. I guess you know his excellent review paper published in Annual Reviews of Neuroscience. Needless to say, he must be the most famous researcher of the “modulatee”. But, in May of this year, he published a paper in Science magazine, titled “High-frequency, long-range coupling between prefrontal and visual cortex during attention”.

It’s amazing. I realized he already moved to the “modulator” from the “modulatee”. I think it was a series of rough results, but it must be a critical point for attention studies. I’ve known such a movement already appeared in functional neuroimaging (e.g. Bressler 2008, Capotosto 2009), and that Desimone’s work was published means the new era of attention studies is beginning: from the “modulatee” to the “modulator”.

Ah, I also have to say actually a paper of mine will be published in Septemeber or October of this year, in which the relationships between the “modulatee” and the “modulator” were evaluated by Granger causality and discussed based on the hypothesis of “the fronto-parietal networks”. Coming soon!

Do you know who is the most famous (born-in-Japan) neuroscientist in Japan? Susumu Tonegawa? Masao Ito? Yasushi Miyashita? Keiji Tanaka? Jun Tanji? Seiji Ogawa?

No, no. They are only known to neuroscientists, not to normal people. Instead, one “brain scientist” is the most well known to them; Ken Mogi.

Do you know who Ken Mogi is? I guess you never know. It’s naturally; because his research activity is less known to neuroscientists abroad. Indeed, he has published only 4 papers in neuroscience. Unfortunately, the papers were published in not so high-impact journals.

Despite such a low research activity in neuroscience, he is now extremely popular with normal people. He has some regular TV programs, writes regularly for some magazines, and appears in some TV spots or many ads. He has also published popular books about “brain science”.

That sounds nice. But, its truth is worst. Why? He familiarizes not correct knowledge in neuroscience to normal people, but neuromyth and other irresponsible comments about neuroscience as “brain science”! He always plagiarizes others’ research results and pretends as if he himself did such studies. He is always likely to link anything with “brain” as an excellent scientific hypothesis he already proposed (needless to say, it’s false). And what’s worse is… these days he is often introduced as “the most probable candidate for the Nobel prize” in many TV programs! Even though he has only published 4 papers in less-impact journals!

What happens in Japan? Actually, I also don’t know why such a questionable guy got popular with normal people. But I know a little about him as follows; he used to be known as one of physicists claiming the importance of “qualia” concept and study on consciousness (but not in neuroscience), and he once failed to get a tenured position in neuroscience, and then he began to get a lot of media exposure after he was invited by Sony Computer Science Institute.

As far as I know, when he was known as a physicist, he appeared to be a rather normal scientist. I’ve heard in the field of consciousness study he is still known as a normal researcher. But… now he is nothing but a TV star talking questionable “brain science”, that is, pseudo neuroscience. He is now a pseudo neuroscientist. I think probably he is a good billboard for pseudo neuroscience with the evil “brain boom”, promoted by Japenese evil media, because he always encourages it and maybe, he cannot earn a living without it (of course, he is regarded as an outsider by the neuroscience community).

In many TV programs, he talks such as “face of yourself wearing no makeup activates the basal ganglia, and it means your brain must be satisfied with your face wearing no makeup rather than the one wearing a lot of makeup”, “you can drive rest 95% of your brain by the training I propose although usually only 5% works”, or “in love romance, man should drive his brain in a suitable way for male brain and woman should for female brain”. Everything he usually talks is only neuromyth.

But, if you are neuroscientist and if you are planning to visit Japan, you have to be ready for getting asked such as: “Oh, you are neuroscientist abroad! So, how do you think about Ken Mogi? He is the most influential neuroscientist in Japan!”.

Unfortunately, the data server of this blog crashed in April of this year. After then, some entries have been lost…

But I think this may be an opportunity for renewing this blog. Of course I’ll re-write some entries lost by the crash, but also I’m going to publish the other type of entries: about the academic society and its truth in Japan.

Readers may wonder why I write such a thing. This is because a postdoc visited me through a friend of mine, in order to seek the possibility of getting job in Japan. But I also wonder why he came at this occasion? Although recently Nature pointed out the possibility of collapse of the scientific academia in Japan? I guess he didn’t know how Japanese old researchers dislike foreign researchers or students and how inconvenient Japanese society is for foreign people.

So then, I decided; via this blog, I’m going to publish entries about not only Japanese society, but also the truth of the academia in Japan.

(Note: this entry was once lost by the server crash in the April 2009)

Recently, a paper written by Ed Vul caused great controversy among not only psychological but also neuroscientific community. His argument led to more general discussion about inappropriate analysis of experimental data, so called “circular analysis”. Regardless of whether studies criticized by Vul actually ran “non-independent two-step analysis”, a potential danger of such a circular analysis has been broadly known among researchers.

But, I want to say; is that only a factor causing “voodoo correlations”? Indeed, one of Vul’s points was important: an example of correlation between temperature reading at a certain weather station and a specific set of stocks. This example means even a set of independent two variates can cause a significant and higher correlation because of inevitable noises or by a pure chance. It’s a very important arguement.

It also means a danger of picking up a single-voxel value or statistics from fMRI data. The example shown above suggests a single-voxel statistics can be extremely highly correlated with a certain behavioral index by a pure chance. This can lead to an incorrect conclusion.
In order to evaluate this phenomenon quantitatively, I performed a very simple simulation. I assumed 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 participants joined a certain fMRI experiment. About the fMRI data, the number of voxels were assumed as 64 * 64 * 32 (in-plane resolution was 64 * 64 matrix and 32 contiguous slices). In the fMRI experiment, measured BOLD signals (precisely, they were only beta-values) were assumed to be entirely randomly distributed (normal distribution) and to be independent across voxels. At the same time, the participants were assumed to perform a certain social neuroscientific task; in which, a behavioral index was obtained from each participant.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s also a shocking news for me.  As Washington Post reported, this mass murder appears to attract much attention from over all the world, because Akihabara is now coming to be the most famous and major sightseeing spot in Japan.  Now police and prosecutorial officials are investigating how and why the suspect commited it, so I decline to write about this murder itself.

But I want to say about three background factors of this.  First one is the insufficient social security system in Japan.  Second one is so-called the ‘extended suicide’ and suicide tendency in Japan.  And the last one is desperate attitude of flame-out young people.

Read the rest of this entry »