American Post-Doc in Paris
Auditory Neurocientist studying sequences in natutal and artificial perception
| Google Scholar | https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xdKw7WkAAAAJ |
| Lab | https://research.pasteur.fr/en/team/auditory-cognition-and-communication/ |
I'm finding it a little hard to work today with this in my head.
Antarctic ice extent is now 6.4 standard deviations below the mean. That is, I'm reliably told, a one in 13 billion year event.
We're about to see a lot of shit hit a lot of fans. And we are far from ready.
Business as usual is over. Politics as usual is over. We need to be putting our effort into building systems that can help us survive what greed and power and wilful blindness have wrought.
I got to visit Aarhus University in Denmark yesterday to give a talk and discuss my research at the Center for #MusicInTheBrain. My first time visiting an institute for a talk since COVID. I presented research on how to adjust our strategies of us AI to explain rather than predict neural activity in musical sewuences. Mapping oscillators to Bayesian models in temporal prediction and how predictions play an important role in audiograms.
I got to have long discussions ranging from the purpose of mental illness in music development, the feeling of groove in parkinson's and cross frequency coupling in interpersonal synchronization. Very nice to be at a center dedicated to music neuroscience and see all the varied ways it can be studied.
And at the end I got to catch the last days of the Groove Workshop, seeing really good talks by @joncannon_neuro, Ed Large and Benjamin Morillon over a pizza and beer.
Thanks to Peter Keller for the invitation and an amazing day! I hope I get invited again soon!
Personally, I set aside writing times in my calendar. When someone asks if I can meet then, the answer is "no, I'm sorry. It's already booked."
I have also long ago found my own personal "efficiencies" - I write best in the morning, so I reserve those times for writing.
There are also a whole slew of "tricks" I learned from my creative writing background - including
(1) the vomit draft - always edit on paper (electronic paper is OK), just don't edit in your head.
(2) the "Hemingway point" - when you've written a lot for the day, stop in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you come back tomorrow, you can start writing by finishing that sentence.
(3) make it habit - don't just write when the spirit moves you
(4) rewrite by retyping / rewriting, not by moving paragraphs around, even if you are retyping the same text over
(5) make sure there is time to edit. After you've written something, put it aside for a week or a month and come back to it. (Write other stuff in the meantime see note 3.) Then rewrite [note 4] that month-old text.
Importantly, there is no one "right way" to write. Try stuff out. Your mileage will vary. Find your own personal efficiencies. And yes, your efficiencies will change as your life changes. Be prepared for that, and then go find the new efficiencies.
Oh, and (6) Don't forget to READ! Read all kinds of things - fiction, not; in-field, out; great literature, trashy literature; great science, great art. Sometimes people get so wrapped up in their own writing, particularly as other life-needs occur, they don't do enough reading.
Lessons from a maggot.
I just finished reading this awesome paper from @albertcardona and colleagues, in which they map the Drosophila larva connectome, which is made up of 3,013 neurons and 544,000 synapses.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.28.516756v1
The paper is full of interesting results, but here are my 4 favorites!
๐งตโ 1/6
New preprint ๐
Enhancing Precision in Human Neuroscience https://psyarxiv.com/m8c4k/
In this article we introduce measurement precision and its importance for well-powered studies in human neuroscience. We cover determinants for precision in a range of neuroscientific methods (MRI, M/EEG, EMG, ECG, EDA, Eye-Tracking, Endocrinology, and Genetics).
Was really fun being a part of this project, fantastic team effort.
(an ode to more than 280 characters...)
How sensitive is the human ear in physical terms, you ask? #acoustics #sensory #hearing #psychoacoustics #auditoryneuroscience #factoid
Well. The reference level 0 dB SPL is meant to be the (on average) softest detectable sound for a human ear. It corresponds to 20 micropascals of pressure. How little is that?
Well. 1 Pa is the equivalent of a single dollar bill resting on a table. Soooo it's way less than that. But for random reasons (i.e., writing a grant) I wanted to quantify this some more. What weight resting on an ear drum is equivalent to 20 mPa?
\[ 1 Pa = 1 \frac{N}{m^2} \]
Well. An ear drum has a surface area of ~60๐๐ยฒ so 20 micropascals applied to the eardrum is the equivalent of how much force?
2*10โปโต๐๐*6*10โปโต๐ยฒ=1.2*10โปโน๐
about 1 nanoNewton...
On the table, the acceleration is due to earth's gravity. In that case, 1 N is about 100 grams of mass, so 1 nanoNewton is about 100 nanograms.
So. If you tilted your head parallel to the ground and some one flattened a grain of maize pollen to the surface area of your ear drum and let it fall on to your ear drum, you would hear it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(mass)#10%E2%88%9212_to_10%E2%88%926_kg
But if it were a grain of birch pollen... you wouldn't. ๐ค
OK... I'm definitely not using that... back to the grant. ๐โ
Tim Hollo
Redish Lab
Marcus Ghosh
Dan Quintana