Nature Cingulate Letter Rejected

Last year at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in San Diego, my colleagues and I presented the "Cingular Theory of Unification: The Cingulate Cortex does Everything" as a humorous satirical poster on the contemporary problem of neophrenology. You can read the extensive story here on my friend Shelley's old blog.

Rather happily for me and my colleagues, this work shall be published later this year in a German neuroscience satirical book "Braintertainment 2.0" and translated into "Die Cinguläre Theorie der Vereinigung: Der Gyrus Cinguli ist Für Alle Geistigen Leistungen Zuständig."

One slight untold detail about this work though was that right when my colleagues and I were presenting it at SfN, a paper in Nature came out about the cingulate cortex's role in "optimism." I could not believe my eyes. How much longer are the imaging folks going to get Science and Nature papers for simply mapping the brain? It's a totally fine scientific endeavor to do so, but such work is not the big science worthy of high-tier journals. So, I wrote a letter to Nature, which they never published. Its too bad. The text is below:

Dear Nature Magazine,

Your recent published findings of Sharot et. al, describing the functional brain regions involved in optimism have converged us into a rather drastic conclusion but that is nonetheless inevitable. Considering that the cingulate cortex is involved in loneliness, religious experiences, political leanings, stimulus-reward associations, motor planning, error detection, social evaluations, reward expectancy, sleep, and so on (references available upon request), we here propose the “Cingular Theory of Unification,” whereby we propose that the cingulate cortex does everything and is involved in all aspects of human behavior. We can thus move from determining what the cingulate cortex does to researching HOW the cingulate performs its infinite myriads of divine functions.

Tim Marzullo, Greg Gage, Hirak Parikh

University of Michigan

Flying Over Ann Arbor at 2500 ft

I love flying, but I hate flying. 

Seeing a plane in the air never ceases to amaze me: that actually works? You can actually fly in the air? I get the sense of wonder at man's magnificent achievement every time.

However, I don't know how to fly a plane, and the lack of control makes me uncomfortable. I can't stand being in a jet liner with 100 hundred other people being flown in a long aluminum tube by a pilot I don't even know. Every noise the plane makes freaks me out. Now, I don't let this get in the way of traveling, but I am never happy in a plane.

This love/hate relationship can be seen in the video above. My buddy Luis was in town, and after I turned in my dissertation last week I thought it would be fun to fly with him and see Ann Arbor from a different perspective. And it was fun, but everyday the plane jerked (it was pretty bumpy in that small plane), I'd freak out in my mind. I didn't show it to Luis of course, but I had the simultaneous feeling of loving the adventure and the view but also wanting to get on the ground as fast as possible.

Rolling Your Own Load Cell

Anyone who knows me with even the tiniest of familiarity knows I am a proponent of manned space flight and a space flight history buff. I've often bemoaned the slow development of propulsion systems of the past decades. As a young man growing up in the internet generation, I've been shocked at how the computer industry can be changed by lone wolf programmers hacking their way over a few months (re: facebook, youtube, napster, bit torrent, etc..).

I wish such bottom up innovation came in the space industry, but the truth is, rocket development is both very hard and very expensive. I wish I could read on slashdot tomorrow: "Teenager from Alabama invents cheap way to bend space time, making traditional chemical propulsion engines obsolete," but I know that will never happen. 

But it still occurred to me that I shouldn't be complaining. If I really wish more people would try to understand and tinker with rockets, why aren't I doing it? I realize I am not going to the change the world with my cardboard tubes filled with a gunpowder paste, but it at least is a fun exercise actually learning what goes into rocket design.

Over the past two months, maybe one-two nights a week, I have been developing a load cell rig so that I can actually digitally record on my labtop the thrust-time profile of my homemade rocket engines. I bought a load cell from Aerocon systems  and a cheap USB D/A converter from DATAQ systems. The amplifier I built myself, and you can see the first working demo here.

With the help of an electrical engineer friend of mine, we made the amplifier from a common op amp chip. There is a lovely website, here, that tells you exactly what resisters and capacitor values to use to set the gain and bandpass filtering you desire. We set our load cell amplifier for a 20 gain and a 300 Hz low pass filter. The image above left shows the configuration on the chip pins, and the image above right shows the whole circuit with power supply and indicator lights.

The Olympic Torch Backpack

A few months ago my friends and I got into a debate about China's plan to bring a torch up to Mt. Everest. Climbing the mountain is hard enough, but bringing a torch as well? And how would the torch even continue to burn in the oxygen poor, windy, snowy conditions of the mountain? So, in some down time, I drew a schematic for how I would design an Olympic Torch Backpack. My friend Shelley blogged about it, to some moderate success. Now, I usually take jokes way beyond the point they need to be, so late one night after a couple beers I submitted the olympic torch backpack to the tech-transfer office here at the University of Michigan.

My e-mail:

Hello Tech Transfer Office,
I am a graduate student in Daryl Kipke's Neural Engineering Lab at UM, and my friends and I got in a recent discussion about the 2008 Winter Olympics. It turns out the Chinese Government plans to carry the Olympic Torch up to the peak of Mt. Everest. This, of course, got the engineering head of mine thinking about how you would actually get a torch up to the oxygen thin windy snowing conditions of the mountain. I drew up a schematic, and my colleagues suggested I submit it to your office. Imagine a UM logo on an olympic torch on Mt. Everest!

My question is: is it worth patenting? I know you have a disclosure form on your website, but for this kind of thing I thought it would be best to contact you directly in this fashion.

Sincerely,
Tim Marzullo

And a month later the response:

Subject: olympic torch design

Hi Tim,

Your email was forwarded to me!  Very ingenious design :-)  However, since the design has been published online on www.seedmagazine.com, it has been publicly disclosed.  Based on patent laws, once an invention has been publicly disclosed, it is no longer patentable in any countries except for the US.  As a result we feel that we will not be able to get enough patent protection even if we decided to pursue this.

Please feel free to give me a call if you have any additional questions, I'd be happy to discuss this with you.

Nadine

Tech Transfer Office

University of Michigan

Oh well. It was a fun exercise. But, yesterday the Chinese actually did bring the torch up Mt. Everest. Unfortunately, they cheated a bit. They simply lit the torch on the peak, rather than carrying it up the whole way. If I had known of that less stringent technical requirement, I would have just made the torch out of gunpowder, since gunpowder has its own oxidizer built in and will even burn in outerspace. China went about it a different way and made their torch to burn on propane, which evidently will still burn at the lower oxygen density of 28,000 ft.

You can see the whole shenanigans via youtube.

Neurophysiology of Flight Control

In my pipe dreams, I'd love to combine my hobbyist interest in space flight with my day job as a neuroscientist. In my early days I tried to do this by working on vestibular systems, but I found that field simply wasn't very interesting. It's as if, take neuroscience, which is interesting, and space flight, which is interesting, and combine them together, and you get something boring? Sorry to all you vestibular folks out, maybe its just I am not a sensory neuroscience guy. 

Anyway, I've always thought that once wireless technology improves, it be a lot of fun, and probably ground breaking, to extend my study of motor cortex electrophysiology to the motor physiology of flight control in birds. What is the representation of wings in the motor cortex. How does the motor cortex (neopallidum in birds I think) encode controlled stalls when landing?

Well, I have no knowledge, really, of aerodynamics, and some investigators here at the University of Michigan wrote a book: "The Aerodynamics of Low Reynolds Number Flyers" which I just bought today on Amazon. Ask me in four months if I was actually able to understand it and come up with an experiment!

To be fair, however, there is one professor, Michael Dickinson of Caltech, studying the neurophysiology of flight in the much more manageable preparation of the fruit fly. 

Hottest Scientist Ever

If you are a Rhodes Scholar, beautiful, in a rock band, and an excellent scientist, I just want to let you know, I instantaneously have a crush on you.

What's your name again..Pardis Sabeti? Wow, that's a pretty name. You're Iranian? Saleem! Hodahoffes! Mochikira! I know Farci! Let's go out.

My Scientist Hero

Awhile ago my lab had a contract with DARPA to train sharks using brain electrodes. I was only minorly involved in the project, but I did get to meet the coolest scientist ever. We collaborated with Dr. Jeff Carrier of Albion University, as his lab actually housed the sharks we implanted.

I want out to Albion one day to help with the electrophysiology, and during some down time I asked Jeff, "You know, in our lab, we work on neural interfaces, which has potential clinical benefit, so we have a variety of funding sources. When you are a pure biologist simply interested in shark behavior, how do you get funding to do your experiments?"

Jeff then looked at me straight in the eye and said "Any f**king way I can. I put my house on a second mortgage to lease a boat to do my experiments." 

Now that is pretty badass. I'm never complaining about the difficulty of getting funding ever again.