Neuroscience – News

Video: Devanshi Trivedi ’22, neuroscience, philosophy, and ‘what makes us who we are’

�ֲ��ý News — Thu, 26 May 2022 20:35:51 +0000

Devanshi Trivedi ’22 of Rajkot, India, has wanted to study the brain ever since third grade, when a friend told her that our eyes see the world upside down, but our brains flip everything right side up.

Trivedi never lost sight of her interest in learning how the brain works. At �ֲ��ý, she deepened that interest, delving into studies that seek to understand “what makes us who we are,” earning a major in neuroscience and a minor in philosophy.

Devanshi Trivedi ’22 heads into Hathorn Hall to meet with her thesis adviser, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

Trivedi recalls taking her first neuroscience course and thinking, “I have a favorite professor at �ֲ��ý.” Then she took another neuroscience course — and discovered another new favorite professor. It happened enough, she laughs, that her friends would say, “Not again!”

“Every professor in neuroscience has just approached the work in so many different ways,” she says. “That’s been one of the best parts of my experience.”

Trivedi got to know her senior thesis adviser, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene, as a summer research assistant in Greene’s lab after her first year. Being advised by Greene for her thesis is a nice bookend to her �ֲ��ý career. “Hers was the first lab I ever worked in.”

Video by Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College

As Trivedi moved from first year to senior year, she went from being a learner of neuroscience knowledge and research methods to a more active collaborator with Greene through her thesis research.

“I started to have a say in the design elements of my experiments,” she says. “We think together about how we want to analyze the results or what kinds of further work we could do.”

Her neuroscience thesis explores the capacity limits of visual memory, and the curious psychological phenomena of “boundary extension” and “boundary contraction.” The former describes how, after we observe an image and then recall it from memory, we tend to zoom out, recalling details that weren’t actually in the image.

Boundary contraction is where our memories crop an image, recalling fewer details as we remember it. It’s a more recently studied phenomenon. “We believe it is related to the amount of information within an image,” Trivedi says. “Our visual memory may be capacity-limited by the amount of information in images.”

Devanshi Trivedi ’22 clutches her completed neuroscience thesis and a bouquet of flowers, given to her by a friend, as she joined other happy seniors celebrating the completion of their senior theses on the Historic Quad on April 22, 2022. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý Colleg.

While Trevedi arrived at �ֲ��ý with a keen interest in studying the science of the brain, only later did she discover an interest in an humanistic approach, through her minor, philosophy.

“I’ve always loved thinking about the mind and the brain and how those two sort of coexist,” she says. “How does the brain really create a person? That was something that I’ve been able to explore more through the philosophy side of things: How can an organ — that is just matter — create something that is conscious or that is human?”

Whether it’s neuroscience and philosophy, or any other juxtaposition of academic interests, the effect is to “broaden the scope of whatever you thought your field was. And that just gives you so much perspective.”

�ֲ��ý professors’ humorous movie-trailer videos brighten the move to remote learning

Doug Hubley — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 13:34:15 +0000

Here’s a thought for our times: “The best part of migrating a course online is making the trailer.”

The source of that statement is Andrew Kennedy, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry. He made the comment on Twitter on March 20, as he posted a trailer — the cinematic variety, not the kind you tow — for his course “Mechanisms of Memory.”

Like many of his �ֲ��ý colleagues and peers at other schools, Kennedy has been scrambling to move his courses and his interactions with students online as the COVID-19 outbreak has sent students home.

The best part of migrating a course online is making the trailer

— Andrew J Kennedy (@Prof_AJKennedy)

“I’ve never really made a video for class, and I’ve certainly never exclusively administered a course remotely,” says Kennedy.

“It’s one thing to design a class to be a certain way, giving deep thought into how the students might enjoy being engaged with the material and with one another. But it’s another thing entirely to abruptly shift that, and everyone participating in it, into this new virtual space.

“I think I made it to demonstrate to the students and to myself that we can’t just keep doing what we did before.” It’s a make-the-best-of-this attitude that reflects �ֲ��ý’ upbeat determination to keep the pedagogical momentum going.

Kennedy’s trailer, named for the course, racks up the laughs as the professor makes fun of his inexperience and discomfort with remote teaching. Inspired by Kennedy to make her own trailer, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene took the humor a step further.

Titled The Classroom Is Not Enough, her promo for the course “Neuroethics” takes on the cinematic James Bond aesthetic (albeit substituting coffee for the British spy’s martinis).

“Don’t we need a chuckle right now?” says Greene. “In all seriousness, I strongly believe in humor to rebuild the community in my class and to put students in a positive mindset moving forward.” A researcher who studies how the brain makes sense of what we see, Greene is the principal investigator of a major project to create a vast Visual Experience Database.��

Video by Michelle Greene.

https://youtu.be/REoCADGZXy0

Kennedy agrees. “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my students,” he says. “The rest of the semester is going to be hard on everyone, and therefore compassion, community, and continued intellectual engagement have to be at the center of whatever we do going forward.

“But with all that is wrong and omnipresent in our lives right now, I also desperately wanted to laugh and make fun of myself, and I thought the students might need that, too.”

Kennedy’s research includes important achievements in potential therapies for the autism-spectrum disorder called Pitt Hopkins Syndrome and the recent synthesis of a new molecule, Bobcat339, that has the potential to govern the function of genes related to memory loss and genes that aid and abet the spread of cancer.

Along with Kennedy and Greene, a third �ֲ��ý person has turned to the trailer format to advance her online teaching. Amy Bass ’92, author and professor of sports studies at Manhattanville College, did something similar, she says, to get her students “psyched for our migration to distance learning amidst the chaos that is COVID-19.”

I made a little something for my studies students — we go online tomorrow, and we are ready for this adventure.

— Amy Bass (@bassab1)

Both �ֲ��ý professors used basic technology that was close at hand to film the pieces — a laptop for Kennedy, who shot the piece entirely in his Dana Chemistry Hall office, and a smartphone for Greene, who combined new footage with sourced clips from her course. Both used iMovie to assemble the trailers.

Making the trailer “was a blast. It was the first time I laughed in a week,” Kennedy says, adding that after he posted it “a bunch of former students reached out to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.”

“My students have enjoyed it,” says Greene. “They’ve especially latched on to my cat Tesla being the new class TA. On our Slack discussion channel, they have even created an emoji of him.”

Tesla is a new TA in the neuro program? (Courtesy of Michelle Greene)

�ֲ��ý announces $3.97 million National Science Foundation grant for visual database project

Doug Hubley — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 15:02:58 +0000

�ֲ��ý College has received a National Science Foundation grant of $3.97 million to create a groundbreaking Visual Experience Database to support research in fields that rely on the analysis and recognition of images, such as neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene is the principal investigator for the project to create a Visual Experience Database (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

The largest-ever federal grant awarded to �ֲ��ý, the four-year award will fuel the creation of a vast gallery of videos that depict what, and how, people see as they go about daily activities. �ֲ��ý developed the grant proposal collaboratively with researchers at North Dakota State University and the University of Nevada, Reno.

Michelle R. Greene, an assistant professor of neuroscience at �ֲ��ý who studies how the brain makes sense of what we see, is the principal investigator for the project.

“I’m delighted and overwhelmed,” said Greene, “and intensely excited. I have a terrific team of co-principal investigators, so fostering and furthering those connections will make these next four years really fun.”

The co-principal investigators are Benjamin Balas, a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at North Dakota, and Paul MacNeilage and Mark Lescroart, neuroscientists and assistant professors of psychology at Nevada.

“We are honored to be the lead partner in this multi-state collaboration,” said �ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer. “This grant is important for Maine, Nevada, and North Dakota, and it also has the potential for significant impact on the future of vision research, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.”

“It’s meaningful that the National Science Foundation has chosen a national liberal arts college like �ֲ��ý to take the lead on this project.”

“This grant brings deserved recognition to Professor Greene, an exemplary member of the �ֲ��ý faculty who has contributed significantly to the body of published work on visual perception and who engages students extensively in her research,” said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“It’s meaningful that the National Science Foundation has chosen a national liberal arts college like �ֲ��ý to take the lead on this project,” Hill added. “Indeed, �ֲ��ý is well-positioned to collaborate on the work to create a Visual Experience Database to support researchers around the world as they grapple with, and bring greater understanding to, the social and ethical consequences of computer vision and artificial intelligence.”

Student researcher Hanna De Bruyn ’18 (left) works with Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene to prepare an EEG test in March 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“Maine’s colleges and universities are consistently at the forefront of groundbreaking research that improves people’s lives and enhances our understanding of the world around us,” said U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King of Maine in a joint statement.

They added, “Through this funding, �ֲ��ý College will partner with two other universities to build a database to study human behavior and development through first-person experiences. We applaud the NSF’s investment in �ֲ��ý’ project, which will help advance the field of vision science.”

The VED will comprise more than 240 hours of video created specifically for this project and findable through a publicly accessible database. Wearing cameras that simulate human vision, as well as devices to track head and eye movements, observers will undertake routine activities such as walking, shopping, or touring a museum.

Because they were not intended for research purposes, existing still and moving images are compromised by the many biases their creators bring to them.

By enlisting diverse observers local to each of the three participating institutions, the project will record how changes in environment, age, and task affect the act of looking.

Much of the data used in such fields as visual neuroscience, psychology, computer vision (a branch of artificial intelligence), and computational sociology consists of vast collections of still and moving images. These are curated largely from public online resources such as YouTube and Google — but because they were not intended for research purposes, they are compromised by the many biases their creators bring to them.

Artificial intelligence systems have biases because they’re not being fed enough solid data, says Michelle Greene.

The reasons someone may choose a particular photo subject, frame an image a certain way, or upload one image and not another are all biases that diminish the material’s value as data. Such “biases exist at every level,” said Greene, “and all of the databases that we’ve been using for years are subject to them.” The VED assets, in contrast, will be created specifically to represent ordinary scenes and will be subject to experimental controls.

Undergraduates at all three schools, including 28 at �ֲ��ý over the four-year grant period, will take part in the research. Among other roles, students will serve as videographers, creating assets for the VED, Greene said.

“I can imagine that next summer there’s going to be a small army of folks going out into various parts of the world, seeing what the world looks like when we’re hiking, when we’re at the beach, when we’re grocery shopping, and all kinds of more mundane things.”

The project to create a Visual Experience Database will benefit �ֲ��ý students “at all levels,” says Michelle Greene, an assistant professor of neuroscience at �ֲ��ý who is the principal investigator for the project.

Students will benefit from the many research questions that the VED will engender. “A database like this essentially means there will be thesis projects for decades to come,” said Greene. “There are many basic questions that we haven’t been able to answer because we haven’t had the data.”

She said that �ֲ��ý’ being a liberal arts college will enrich the VED project in distinctive ways. “One is our focus on equity and inclusion. We’re trying to get a diverse set of visual experiences to catalog in the VED, and I think that holding that in the forefront is something a liberal arts college can do that might be a somewhat harder sell” at other types of institutions.

Innovation in artificial intelligence, in particular, stands to benefit from the VED.

�ֲ��ý’ intimate scale, coupled with the liberal arts approach to education, “allows us to engage in some multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking,” she added. “And one of the things I particularly love about �ֲ��ý is that I engage in conversations with faculty members across the college — if I were at a larger institution, we probably wouldn’t touch paths and learn from one another.

“So I’m particularly excited about the ways in which this type of data can be used across disciplines.”

Innovation in artificial intelligence, in particular, stands to benefit from the VED. Model systems in computer vision “are very data-hungry,” said Greene. “They tend to require tens of millions of images, and have been downloading these tens of millions of images from the internet. We will now give them tens of millions of images that are more representative of daily-life experience.”

The VED will be a public resource. “This is taxpayer-supported,” Greene said, which means that it should be publicly accessible, both for the sake of transparency and simply because it should be a public good.

She added, “We see throughout digital life that when a resource is available, people appropriate it in really interesting ways. I’m hoping that there may be artists, digital historians, computational sociologists that might want to use this database. And, as such, it should be available to everybody.”

Michelle Greene explains why it is important and valuable for society that the Visual Experience Database will be publicly available.

The VED grant was made through the NSF’s Research Infrastructure Improvement Program, part of the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. These initiatives are designed to build research capabilities in underserved regions of the country and thereby make those regions more competitive in seeking other federal R&D funding.

The project team will release a suite of software tools for using the database. The team will also establish a program of “Big Data Skills Summer Workshops” to give students basic programming and computational literacy skills that will not only support their contributions to this project, but help prepare them for a variety of STEM occupations.

“If we can take the next generation of students and get them the best skills, the kind of experience I wish I’d had as a student early on, that is a key part of the workforce development component of the grant,” Greene said.

Brains and how we study them: Views from the Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience

Doug Hubley — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 17:12:45 +0000

“What’s lost or gained if we actually concede that humans are machines, and what is lost or gained if we concede that machines can become human?”

Roll these questions around in your mind for a minute, and you’ll get a sense of what makes �ֲ��ý’ approach to teaching neuroscience distinctive. As exemplified in a recent talk by Nancy Koven, John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience, it’s an approach that considers not just the science of neuroscience, but the cultural context into which that science and its subjects are inextricably woven.

The �ֲ��ý neuroscience program, perhaps uniquely, points “specifically to the value of humanistic inquiry to help students evaluate the context in which neuroscience operates,” Koven said in the Oct. 25 talk that celebrated her appointment as the inaugural Kelsey Professor.

Nancy Koven delivers her address, “Stories of Neuroscience,” celebrating her appointment as the John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience on Oct. 25. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

Titled “Stories of Neuroscience,” Koven’s address was the centerpiece of a crowded and festive gathering that, as President Clayton Spencer indicated in her welcome, had every reason to rock. “The celebration of a professorship is always one of the most significant moments in the life of a college,” she said, “and today’s celebration is particularly rich because it is multi-generational in multiple ways.”

First, the new professorship honors John Kelsey, who came to �ֲ��ý in 1979, taught and conducted research for 34 years, and, in Spencer’s words, became “a distinguished and beloved member of the �ֲ��ý faculty who had an outsized impact on the life of the college and the lives of many, many students.”

Kelsey, who was on hand for the occasion (and lent a hand too, helping to set out extra seats as the room filled up), played a definitive role in establishing �ֲ��ý’ Program in Neuroscience, which Koven chairs.

In Koven, Spencer continued, the Kelsey Professorship honors “a current faculty member who upholds these traditions of commitment and generosity in every aspect of her work — teaching, research, and service.”

Sally Kelsey and her husband, Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey — namesake of the new �ֲ��ý professorship— chat with another table prior to Nancy Koven’s address on Oct. 25. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

And the professorship itself, announced last spring, was the gift of a family “with long ties over many decades to �ֲ��ý”: the Bonneys, represented at Koven’s talk by members of three generations, including the couple who endowed the Kelsey professorship, trustee chair Michael J. Bonney ’80 and Alison Grott Bonney ’80.

Using his introduction to offer a primer on Kelsey, Koven, and the neuroscience program itself, Dean of the Faculty Malcolm Hill summarized the program as “one which today provides students with a deep understanding of the relationship between the nervous system and behavior, but also the historical, political, and ethical context in which neuroscience operates.

“This is important in our liberal arts context here at �ֲ��ý.”

A �ֲ��ý professor since 2006, Koven is a clinical neuropsychologist who studies connections between brain regions and cognitive and emotional functions. Her address did uphold its title with a couple of stories, including one about an early lesson about tribal hierarchies in the medical establishment.

The audience fills the Keck Classroom in Pettengill Hall for Nancy Koven’s talk, “Stories of Neuroscience” on Oct. 25, 2018. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

But the heart of the talk was a sampler of student work at the intersection of neuroscience and what Koven called humanistic inquiry — a means of enriching a discipline, she explained, that can otherwise be reductive to a fault, treat brains as disembodied phenomena, and fail to see its own reflection in its conclusions.

“In essence,” she said, “we simplify the complexity of a person into variables that we care most about, hope that we’re capturing the essentials, average those essentials with those from other stripped-down people, hope that the resulting data that’s really no one is really everyone, and then tip-toe quietly around this question of what to do with all those juicy leftovers.”

With science fiction common to both, a first-year seminar and an upper-level seminar that Koven created provided examples of the humanistic approach in action.

Offered in 2016, the FYS engaged new “students from the get-go with lines of humanistic inquiry,” she explained. Last winter’s upper-level course, “Embodied Cognition, Technoculture, and Future of Identity,” provided a “culturally critical lens” for students already well-versed in neuroscience.

John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Kelsey meets with neuroscience major Adelae Durand ’19 of Cumberland, R.I., in Koven’s lab on Oct. 11, 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Why science-fi? It’s a genre that “prompt[s] a realization for the reader that the here-and-now of our world does not have to be the way it is,” and ideally liberates readers to ask challenging questions. Another commonality between the courses is that Koven asks her students in both to undertake creative work in a variety of media.

“What mental phenomena might we police?”

In the FYS, for instance, “I asked students to conceptualize a piece of future neurotechnology, and to think about commercialization by marketing this fictitious concept in the format of a Victorian-era ad,” she said.

In both courses, she assigned students to find two real examples of “body technologies that have implications for cognition, emotion, sensation, perception, or movement” — with one example being something sanctioned by medical neuroscience, and the other representing “body hacking,” where people install technology into their bodies independent of the medical establishment.

The body-hacking example was a “third ear” — an ear-shaped growth on an that is equipped with a microphone and wifi to enable, “basically, a global sharing of a person’s immediate soundscape.” Its medically approved counterpoint was a deep-brain stimulator, implanted in people with conditions such as epilepsy, that both monitors brain activity and applies an electrical pulse as needed to avert possible seizures.

Michael Bonney ’80, chair of the �ֲ��ý Board of Trustees, in conversation prior to Nancy Koven’s address Oct. 25 celebrating her appointment as Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience. Bonney and his wife, Alison Grott Bonney ’80, endowed the Kelsey chair. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

“What I deeply appreciate” about that example, Koven said, was a question that it raised for the student who submitted it, Claire MacKay ’20: “While this device addresses troubling symptoms of a disease, it is nonetheless a vehicle by which to impose electrical norms in the brain. What mental phenomena might we police?” That was one of many provocative student queries that Koven shared and that, in and of themselves, were one of the most engaging aspects of the talk.

An outstanding example of student creative work came from the upper-level course and Koven’s challenge to create a so-called body-shopping catalog for consumers in a future “in which the body is an optional mode of existence and is, as such, deliberately constructed and customized.”

Julie Stitt Self ’18 and Lindsey Beauregard ’18 rose to the challenge by creating a faux Amazon.com site that took themes from the course and set them in a commercial context. With one of their imaginary products, the customer can be re-embodied in literature: “Feel like you always have your head stuck in a book? Try your whole body. Swap out your meat bag and become a body of literature instead.”

“It opens the door for people, now bodies of information, to be uploaded into digital beings.”

The site came complete with Amazon verisimilitude in the form of apparatus such as customer reviews. “Generally love this product,” said one review. “Not only can I keep immaculate records of my memories, but I can also write myself into a new fantasy whenever I choose.”

Koven introduces her audience to a theme that has emerged from her students’ work: the relentless thinning of the wall between human and machine. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

That project speaks to one of the broader themes that emerged from the student work: the relentless thinning of the wall between human and machine, and a mind-bending projection of that trend. Digitalization, Koven said, “reinforces the idea that bodies can be read as information, opening the door for human beings to be rendered in code.

“For excited futurists, it opens the door for people, now bodies of information, to be uploaded into digital beings. A wide-scale leaving-behind of what some see as a perennial problem of the body would constitute a digital diaspora. Digital uploading also invites the idea of digital downloading, and it promises immortality either way,” as the body-shopping notion suggests.

Still, the prospect of a digital diaspora “is fraught territory,” Koven noted, especially among those who have worked so hard to defend their identities here in the realm of flesh and blood. She said, “Looking forward can sometimes seem like a dereliction of duty to the past and to the present.”

But not when it comes to teaching and learning neuroscience at �ֲ��ý. Koven concluded that “a vital part of undergraduate neuroscience is to look at brains — yes, absolutely to look at brains — but to also look at how we look at brains, and to contemplate the kind of cultural icon the brain has become.

“I think humanistic lines of inquiry help up do this kind of work, and I’m delighted to be part of a developing �ֲ��ý neuroscience story that recognizes this.”

From left, John Kelsey, Nancy Koven, Michael Bonney ’80, and Alison Grott Bonney ’80 pose for a photo after Koven’s talk. The Bonneys’ gift endowed the new neuroscience professorship held by Koven and named in honor of Kelsey, a member of the psychology faculty for 34 years. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

How do we know what we’re seeing? A �ֲ��ý professor finds out

Emily McConville — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 17:17:06 +0000

In milliseconds, our brains take the information that meets our eyes and categorize it into everyday scenes like offices or kitchens, associated with memories, emotions, and applications for our daily lives.

Neuroscientists who study such scene categorization run into a challenge, says Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene. It’s tough to measure how what Greene calls “features” of a scene — such as colors, textures, or the words we associate with a scene — contribute to categorization, especially since each feature affects the others.

So Greene and a colleague set out to mathematically model the role each feature plays in scene categorization over time, part of a research project funded by the National Science Foundation. In doing so, they found that complex features like function contribute to categorization as early in the process as simple ones, like color.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

Greene’s resulting paper, “From Pixels to Scene Categories: Unique and Early Contributions of Functional and Visual Features,” co-authored with Colgate University’s Bruce C. Hansen, won best paper at the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience in September.

Hansen and Greene, who uses machine learning to study visual perception, identified 11 features that contribute to scene categorization. Some of them are “low-level” features, meaning a computer could recognize them, Greene says. These include colors, textures, and edges.

Some are “high-level” features, meaning only humans can label them. These include specific objects, like a blender in a kitchen or a computer monitor in an office, as well as function, which refers to what a person might do in a scene, such as sleeping in a bedroom.

Human brains process these features in conjunction with each other to comprehend scenes — in our minds, at the instant of recognizing a scene, an individual feature can’t be isolated.

“If you change the geometry of the room, that’s also going to change the low-level features of the room,” Greene says. “If you change the low-level features, it’s going to change the high-level features.”

In December 2017, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene works with Hanna De Bruyn ’18 to run an EEG test with Katie Hartnett ’18. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Greene and Hansen found ways to measure the effects of various features individually. For example, to measure functions, they took the American Time Use Survey, which asks people how they spend their time, and associated the answers — watching TV, cooking, working — with different scenes, like a living room, a kitchen, and an office.

Once they had a way to track individual features, they gathered a selection of thousands of images and, using both computer coding and human categorization through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk tool, associated high- and low-level features with each scene.

With all that data in hand, they used a technique in linear algebra called whitening transformation to orthogonalize, or parse out, each individual feature so they could study it independently from the others.

“We put all of these features together in a nice big matrix and de-correlated them,” Greene says. “Here’s color by itself, here’s edges by itself, objects by itself, so on and so forth.”

In March, Michelle Greene and Hanna De Bruyn ’18 prepare to give an EEG test for De Bruyn’s senior thesis. Greene works extensively with students on her research. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Greene and Hansen then compared the results of their model to human brain activity using EEG tests.

“We can get, in a millisecond-by-millisecond way, the extent to which similarity in the EEG patterns tracks similarity with regard to any of these orthogonalized features,” Greene says.

Greene originally thought that the brain would perceive low-level features like color and texture first, then bring in high-level features in order to identify the scene. Instead, she found that high-level features are involved in visual processing early on.

Greene will delve deeper into how individual features affect visual perception, studying how manipulating one feature in an image affects how we process the image. She’ll also see if a brain processes images differently based on whether its owner is told to focus on a specific feature, such as color.

Greene works extensively with �ֲ��ý students on these questions — she says the students get to learn computer programming and how to run EEG tests, and Greene herself gets fresh perspectives on her work.

Sometimes, students “see that this obvious assumption is an assumption, and we should test it,” she says.

Cheer the Chairs: Nancy Koven appointed to new Kelsey Professorship

�ֲ��ý News — Thu, 24 May 2018 21:26:20 +0000

A member of the �ֲ��ý faculty since 2006, Nancy Koven is the inaugural holder of the John E. Kelsey Professorship in Neuroscience.

Endowed by Michael J. Bonney ’80 and Alison Grott Bonney ’80, this new professorship honors Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey and his foundational contributions to the Program in Neuroscience during his 37 years on the faculty, and it recognizes a faculty member who exemplifies the supportive, innovative, and learning-by-doing approach to neuroscience teaching and research at �ֲ��ý.

Professorships honor �ֲ��ý faculty

This is the fourth in a series of profiles of �ֲ��ý faculty members who were appointed to endowed professorships in 2017–18.

Nancy Koven explains what the appointment means to her:

The generosity of the Bonney family seemingly knows no bounds! They already have had such a powerfully transformative impact on the entire �ֲ��ý community — past, present, and future — and, as if that were not inspiring enough, they have named this new professorship in honor of one of the most transformative professors to ever teach at �ֲ��ý: John Kelsey.

I am delighted to see John recognized in this way, and I’m humbled to be the first holder of the Kelsey Professorship.

During an end-of-year “follies” reception for neuroscience faculty and their seniors, John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Koven (right) and neuroscience colleague Laura Ligouri (left) react as Lindsey Beauregard ’18 of Hollis, N.H., offers an alternative career idea for Koven. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

When I first stepped foot onto the �ֲ��ý campus over a decade ago, I was surprised by an uncanny sense of having returned rather than having just arrived.

Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey was a �ֲ��ý teacher and researcher for 37 years.

John and colleagues in the Department of Psychology welcomed me like family, and the overall rapport among �ֲ��ý faculty and staff, the rich integration of campus and community, and the close working relationships between faculty and students were, and still are, vital to that sense of belonging.

Over this past decade, the Program in Neuroscience has grown in size and expanded in exciting, new interdisciplinary directions, but the foundational ideal that John Kelsey put into place — that there is considerable joy in communal learning, creative exploration, and hard work — remains vibrant.

About Nancy Koven

John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Koven, who chairs the Program in Neuroscience, teaches core and advanced courses as well as a First-Year Seminar on the intersection of neuroscience and literature. Koven’s research in neuropsychiatry examines brain structure and function in the context of adult mental health, focusing on the complex interplay between the roles of cognition and emotion in human behavior.

A past recipient of the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, she routinely includes student collaborators in her research, which has been funded through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Maine Institute for Human Genetics and Health.

Research using EEG machines comes to �ֲ��ý

Sarah Rothmann '19 — Thu, 12 Apr 2018 15:40:22 +0000

�ֲ��ý students in certain majors, like psychology and neuroscience, conduct studies on topics ranging from behavior patterns to how the brain perceives images. Often, they recruit fellow �ֲ��ý students as participants.

In early March, I was one of those students.

For her senior thesis in neuroscience, Hanna De Bruyn ’18 worked with Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene to set up a study that examined visual perception.

In early March, I participated in a study Hanna De Bruyn ’18 conducted for her senior thesis in neuroscience. Here, De Bruyn and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene get ready to give me an EEG test. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Specifically, De Bruyn looked at “backward masking”: the phenomenon whereby a visual stimulus, known as the target, is followed by another stimulus, the mask. The second stimulus prevents the brain from perceiving the target image to a certain extent, meaning it doesn’t form as good a memory.

Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine and machine learning techniques, they measured how much information about the original picture persists in our brain when the mask is on the screen. I was one of 15 participants in the study, which was approved by �ֲ��ý’ Institutional Review Board.��

EEG machines, which measure electrical activity in the brain, are often used to detect epilepsy and other disorders, or in neuroscience studies like De Bruyn’s. This is the first year that EEG tests have taken place on campus for senior thesis projects. Greene, who arrived on campus last fall, uses her expertise in visual perception and EEG technology to work with students interested in the neurological complexities of vision.

“[EEG] is one of these lovely techniques because you can learn it easily as an undergraduate, and you are able to analyze and see millisecond-by-millisecond brain activity, which is really exciting,” Greene told me.

The timing was perfect for De Bruyn, who spent two summers researching epilepsy and had seen doctors give EEG tests at the Child Study Center at Yale University’s School of Medicine. EEGs, she realized, lay at the intersection of her interests in health, coding, and education.

I had never done an EEG test before, and I learned that there’s quite a lot to the process.

I met De Bruyn and Greene in Hathorn Hall. After testing my vision, they sterilized my forehead with alcohol wipes, then placed what resembled a swim cap on my head. Then they connected 64 electrodes to my scalp; each electrode was connected to the EEG machine.

The process of taking an EEG test for a neuroscience study is long and complex: I took a vision test, my forehead was sterilized with alcohol wipes, and what resembled a swim cap was placed on my head. Then, 64 electrodes were connected. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

De Bruyn informed me that photographs of scenes such as a bedroom or a skyscraper would flash before me, regulated by a code that De Bruyn wrote. If the same image appeared twice in a row, I was instructed to press the space bar.

This seemed easy enough, but once the study began, the photographs moved very quickly, and were followed by either more blurry images — the masks — or by a blank screen, a control. It was difficult to keep track of the order of the images, let alone remember not to blink or move!

The study usually runs for two hours and comprises 45 blocks of images. But for all the preparation and instruction, I only lasted an hour. My brain waves were too hard to read. De Bruyn assured me that such complications are common and inevitable.

My task was to watch a series of images while the EEG machine measured my brain activity. This was more difficult than expected. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

After examining the data from the other participants, De Bruyn and Greene found that they were able to perceive the same amount of information from the target image whether it was followed by a mask or a control. That’s different from what other studies have found, Greene says.

“It’s interesting because it shows the extent to which the brain is still processing the picture even though it is no longer physically present,” she explains.

These twists and turns are what De Bruyn enjoys about her major.

“I have learned that the world is way more complex than what I thought,” she says. “It amazes me and always leaves me wanting to learn more.”

Treatment for the horrors of PTSD could be near, thanks to landmark research by Edward Meloni ’91

Jay Burns — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 14:43:57 +0000

Somewhere tonight, someone — make that millions of someones — will wake up in desperate terror, reliving the horror of a traumatic event. The someones will range from combat veterans and abuse survivors to witnesses to mass-shootings and victims of natural disasters.

Right now, there’s nothing they can do except let the panic dissipate, like waiting out a summer thunderstorm. But in the near future, a remedy might be literally within reach, thanks to landmark memory research by Ed Meloni ’91.

Picture this: Sitting on the bedstand of that someone is a xenon-gas inhaler. The sufferer breathes deeply from the inhaler. And poof: Not only is the traumatic memory gone, but so is the associated and sometimes debilitating condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ed Meloni ’91 speaks to students in Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Koven’s course on embodied cognition during his mid-March visit as the College Key Distinguished Alumnus in Residence. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

In any given year, more than eight million Americans suffer from PTSD, which develops in some people who have experienced a traumatic personal event. Most people probably know something about PTSD through its depiction in popular culture, particularly war movies. Early on, in 1946, there was the post-World War II movie Best Years of Their Lives, then movies like Coming Home, Born on the Fourth of July, and The Hurt Locker, all of which portray PTSD sufferers.

The nightmares and flashbacks — two — feel very real. In one way, they are, and that’s the key to Meloni’s research on xenon gas as a potential treatment.

at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, where he works alongside , director of the hospital’s Behavioral Genetics Laboratory. During his visit to �ֲ��ý in March as the College Key’s Distinguished Alumnus in Residence, Meloni joined neuroscience classes, met with students, and delivered an evening lecture. He and I spoke for about an hour.

Researchers, Meloni explained, used to believe that “recalling a memory was like reading a file.” It was read, then put back. “We thought memories were immutable.” Meloni and other scientists have shown that’s not the case. “Our memories can be changed; new information can be integrated.”

(In fact, Meloni says, “our memories are probably not faithful representations of what really happened,” which has great implications for the reliability of crime eyewitnesses, a field of research by �ֲ��ý psychology professor Amy Douglass.)

This process of memory retrieval and updating is known as reconsolidation, and Meloni is an expert in the field. In 2014, he and colleagues at McLean showed that xenon gas can block the reconsolidation of fearful memories in lab rats, effectively eliminating the fear. The discovery garnered national attention for its promise to end PTSD suffering.

Now, the promise is getting close to reality.

PTSD can affect military service members who experience a traumatic event in combat. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Nadine Barclay)

For a discovery that could bear directly on human life, the route to finding it was “indirect,” Meloni says. “It was chance and serendipity.” (And, we would add, also some creative thinking on his part.)

As the story goes, a colleague of Meloni’s was presenting research data at a conference, where he learned that a medical gas company was interested in providing a device that would allow scientists to use xenon gas in their rat-model experiments on neurodegenerative diseases.

“You can’t just get a rat to put a mask on.”

The device was needed because “gases are hard to work with” in research that uses a rat model, Meloni explains. “There are a lot of intricacies with gas delivery. It’s not as simple as giving a drug. You can’t just get a rat to put a mask on.”

So the medical gas company funded a research apparatus at McLean, the first of its kind in the world, to test the effects of xenon gas on a rat model.

In terms of its general medical use, xenon is hardly new; though expensive, it’s considered a superior anesthetic and is used in diagnostic imaging. And in recent years, new research indicated that xenon could be “neuroprotective” in the brain, Meloni says, a general term meaning that it might protect nerve cells from the kind of damage found in neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic brain injuries, such as concussion.

The unique research device in place, Meloni was initially part of an unrelated study that yielded “a strong signal” that xenon was indeed neuroprotective. Specifically, xenon is an “NMDA receptor antagonist” that protects the brain from an insult, glutamate excitotoxicity.

That led Meloni to wonder: If xenon is an NMDA receptor antagonist, it should block learning and memory because that’s the outcome when animals are given drugs that block the NMDA receptor. “They don’t learn,” he says. “Or, they stop fearing something they learned.”

“I just wanted to test that,” Meloni says. And among myriad tests involving xenon, rats, and fear, three results proved pivotal. First, they found that giving xenon gas to rats prevented them from developing a certain fear, in this case the fear of a mild shock. “We blocked the learning of fear,” Meloni recalls.

“I was floored,” Meloni says. “That was the home run.”

At this point, Meloni’s expertise in memory reconsolidation kicked in. He thought, “What if the animals are already afraid? Can xenon block a memory that was already there?”

So Meloni decided to pair the administration of gas with the reactivation of a fearful memory (in this case, a mild shock) that the rats had learned by Pavlovian association. When the fear was reactivated, in this case by the sound of a tone previously paired with the shock, the rats were immediately exposed to xenon gas. Tested a few days later — even weeks later — they did not show fear when the tone was presented.

“I was floored,” Meloni says. “That was the home run.”

Xenon gas fills a discharge tube shaped like the element’s atomic symbol. (Photograph by Pslawinski [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons)

Refining their findings, the researchers gave xenon to fear-conditioned rats but did not reactivate their fear by presenting the tone. Tested a few days later, the rats remained fearful. “That suggested that pairing the gas administration with the reactivation of the memory was critical for this whole thing to work,” Meloni says. “Right away I knew we could translate it to PTSD.”

Last summer, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gave Meloni and fellow researcher Marc Kaufman a — essentially a patent approval — for using xenon gas to treat PTSD. The biotech firm Nobilis Therapeutics has licensed the patent and seeks to develop a hand-held medical device for self-administration of xenon.

The hand-held device “is absolutely critical,” Meloni says. “If a medical professional identifies that you might benefit from xenon therapy, you want to administer it as soon as the traumatic memory is reactivated, which happens “organically, out in the real world,” Meloni notes, in nightmares, flashbacks, or by exposure to cues that remind the patient of the traumatic event, much like when the tone is presented to the fear-conditioned rats. “That’s when we think you’re going to get the most therapeutic effect.”

Of course, FDA approval is still required. “Up until now, there’s been no FDA-approved way to administer xenon gas aside from an elaborate anesthesia machine” in a medical setting, Meloni explains. At the moment, Meloni and colleagues are awaiting the go-ahead from the FDA to begin clinical human trials at McLean.

John Kelsey “activated my brain,” Meloni says.

If Meloni has shown smart and creative thinking in his xenon research, it’s safe to say those abilities were cultivated by his �ֲ��ý professors. A student in the days before �ֲ��ý developed its neuroscience program, Meloni designed his own interdisciplinary major to combine interests in biology and psychology.

Meloni wanted to study the brain, and “psychology alone didn’t quite fit the bill because the brain is a biological organism. Everything of the mind is derived from the biology of the brain — our cognition, how we feel — so I went with biology of the brain plus psychology: biopsychology.”

On the bio side, mentors included Pam Baker ’69, now retired, and Lee Abrahamsen. On the psych side, it was John Kelsey. (Also retired, Kelsey was recently honored with the creation of a new endowed professorship in his name, the John E. Kelsey Professorship in Neuroscience.)

As a faculty mentor, John Kelsey “activated my brain,” says Ed Meloni ’91. Here, at the 2014 Mount David Summit, Kelsey hugs friend and colleague Kathy Low, professor of psychology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Kelsey “activated my brain,” Meloni says. “He forced you to think constructively and creatively and to problem-solve, to figure it out.”

For Meloni, a common denominator among his professors was “friendliness. �ֲ��ý professors take the time to get to know you personally and make sure you’re absorbing the material. They’re teachers, plus something more.”

Those �ֲ��ý qualities are invoked a lot because they’re valuable. “For an underclassman, that’s just so big. It’s so inspiring. It just resonates.”

Video: Alex Gogliettino ’17 learns to think like a scientist

Phyllis Graber Jensen — Thu, 18 May 2017 22:07:12 +0000

His �ֲ��ý mentors taught neuroscience major Alex Gogliettino ’17 of Branford, Conn., how to think like a scientist.

Headed to a Ph.D. program at Stanford University, Gogliettino describes his biggest �ֲ��ý discovery: You can make a career from being curious and asking questions.

Q&A: Neuroscience major Alex Gogliettino ’17 explores ‘what makes us who we are’

Sarah Rothmann '19 — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 16:49:04 +0000

As an English major, I can guarantee that I won’t be called upon to inject a drug into a mouse brain. But for neuroscience honors candidate Alex Gogliettino ’17 of Branford, Conn., that’s a basic skill.

Already accepted into doctoral programs in neuroscience for next year, Gogliettino has spent hundreds of hours in a �ֲ��ý lab using a mouse model to analyze and interpret a possible treatment for an exceptionally rare autism-spectrum disorder in humans.

In preparation for his honors thesis research, he spent the past two summers working at , receiving support from a �ֲ��ý Summer Research Fellowship and the Kelsey Prize for Neuroscience Research, named for Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey.

This year, he’s brought all his �ֲ��ý training to bear on his thesis, “DNA Methylomics: Targeting TET1 as a Treatment for Intellectual Disability,” and as he explained it to me, this was my immediate thought: This is important, and I need to know more.

When somebody asks you about your thesis, what’s your elevator speech?

My adviser and I are basically knocking down a protein — that is, blocking it from being made in the brain — to try to enhance learning and memory in mice that have been genetically modified to have a certain intellectual disability.

The protein is the one in my thesis title: TET1, or “Ten-eleven translocation methylcytosine dioxygenase 1.”

We are also trying to better understand the molecular mechanisms that underpin learning and memory.

How do you make what you write accessible to students, like me, who are not in STEM fields?

That’s one of the biggest challenges in science: Communicating to individuals who are not necessarily involved in science what exactly you are doing.

My actual thesis delves deeply into the molecular biology, but in the first few pages I discuss what this topic means to me personally and how it is addressing a societal issue and a pressing biomedical issue, intellectual disability. I explain why I’m intrigued by it.

And why are you intrigued by it?

OK, this gets pretty philosophical. Humans have the capacity to recall just crazy amounts of detail from earlier parts of our lives. And that capacity really is what makes us who we are. We are what we can remember about our past. That’s just crazy, and it’s just a unique, really interesting puzzle.

And also, there are diseases of the brain, like Alzheimer’s and many others, where individuals can’t do that. And in rare disorders like the one I am studying, Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome, they have impaired language and memory function.

Can you go into a little more detail about Pitt Hopkins?

Individuals with this disease are missing a functional copy of a single gene known as Transcription Factor 4.

Pitt Hopkins is an extremely rare disease. There are only about 500 people in the world that we know of. Individuals with Pitt Hopkins Syndrome often do not develop language — spoken or sign.

My project is based on Pitt Hopkins research being done at �ֲ��ý by my thesis adviser, Andrew Kennedy. We think one of the reasons is a disruption in their capacity for verbal memory.

How is your relationship with your adviser, Andrew Kennedy?

He’s new, and I didn’t really meet him until this year.

Last year, I was taking a neuroscience class, and my professor, Nancy Koven, was saying how �ֲ��ý was hiring a new professor and we should go to the research talk that each candidate gives. I went and I thought that he was asking really interesting questions about learning and memory.

So I just emailed him, a cold email saying, “I would love to work with you.” He emailed me back and said, “That would be cool. Here are the projects that you can work on.”

Alex Gogliettino’s thesis adviser is Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Kennedy, shown teaching an organic chemistry lab on Feb. 9, 2017, in Dana Chemistry Hall. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

I really like working with him. He’s always available through email, phone, etc. He’s only 33 and has just finished his post-doc so he knows what’s like to be an undergrad.

More important, he also went to a small college, Providence College, so he knows what the relationship between a small-college professor and a student is. He really cares and understands that this whole thing is a learning experience.

What is your thesis routine?

The most important part was to make sure I familiarized myself with the literature, so I started reading last May. That’s probably one of the hardest parts of a project like this: wrapping your head around what is actually happening in the field, where the barriers to new knowledge are, and what we know vs. what we don’t know. That is a really important part of science.

Last semester, almost every morning from around 9 to 12, I would write. I would have the most energy in the morning, and writing is very taxing, that’s the best time for me.

The spot where I wrote really didn’t matter. I would just go somewhere I was comfortable and could work for three hours. It would depend. I would mix it up. First floor of the library sometimes. Then the third floor, then the second floor. And sometimes in my room at my desk.

Was going through the literature daunting?

When you start familiarizing yourself with the field, the first pieces of literature you are going to read are pretty intense. Honestly, reading a scientific paper in an unfamiliar field takes about five hours to go through. You’ve got to just take your time and start as early as you possibly can.

I started out with reading review articles, which are not necessarily studies per se, but are reviewing the literature. They give you a scope of the field. They give you perspective, help you familiarize yourself with the jargon and, again, tell you what’s known and what’s not known about the field.

And once I started to get a feel for that, I started delving deep into the hard-core research papers. It was daunting, a little bit, but I would just take my time.

What has been most enjoyable about working on your senior thesis?

The most interesting part are the questions we are asking about our ability to recall things from the past, and how that fits into the bigger picture of understanding how the brain gives rise to consciousness. That is the coolest part.

The most difficult?

I think the most difficult part is that this work is technically difficult and very time-consuming. That’s not negative, just challenging.

Working with animals requires a good amount of dexterity and injecting drugs into a mouse brain is pretty hard. In the grand scheme of cognitive neurobiology research, it’s pretty simple surgery, but at the undergraduate level it is probably one of the most challenging things that I would do.

Neuroscience major Alex Gogliettino ’17 of Branford, Conn., poses in a Carnegie Science Hall laboratory on Feb. 28, 2017. The red light helps create a calm environment for the lab’s work with mice. Since mice cannot see red light, they behave as they would in their preferred, darkened environment. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

Also, another component of my thesis involves working with big data and doing computer-science work, so I had to teach myself a lot of computer science stuff, too. That was tough and challenging, but you grow and learn a lot from it.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Especially with lab theses, there is only a certain amount of control when you run the experiments. And there is a lot of stuff you can’t control. That is just going to happen.

One of the most important parts of doing thesis, and being involved with science at all, is just understanding that nothing is ever going to be perfect. You are going to mess up and you are going to fail. But don’t be discouraged or shy away from that. Just learn from your mistakes and move on. Be a little too optimistic at times because you need that positive energy to keep going, because there will be a lot of roadblocks to be found, but you can overcome them.

Plans for next year?

I hope to continue doing neuroscience research for the next five years, at least.

I’ve been accepted to a couple neuroscience Ph.D. programs, at Washington University and Vanderbilt, and am heading to Stanford for interviews this week.

I have the potential opportunity to work with a professor who advised Professor Kennedy, doing the same sort of work at a research university that we’re doing here at �ֲ��ý.

Interviews are just a great time to talk science with professors and be immersed in an environment where everyone is as passionate about studying neuroscience as you are.