Charm City Junction

There were only 4 of them, but the band could barely fit on the tiny stage. Even their instruments were small, a banjo, a fiddle, an accordion, and a bass. The room was small too, maybe 25 rows of seats, packed so we would take up every inch. It was Friday night, and we were here to listen to bluegrass, Charm City Junction, we being the 2-year-old whose young mom was trying to pacify, all the way up to the white haired lady who must have been in her 80s, hoping to experience a moment of joy, a wish to be moved.

A lady walked up to introduce the band, but before she did that, she pulled out a piece of paper and read a paragraph, describing how the building was built on the land that originally belonged to a long-gone Indian tribe, by white settlers that likely had African slaves. Then the young men got up on the stage and started playing.

Slowly, like a slight wind on a lake, the music rose, and we were each an anchored boat that reacted by swaying imperceptibly. Each beat a small wave, lifting our shoulders, our feet, our fingers, and then returning them in synchrony, only to start again. As the music built, the rhythms deepened, the whole room swaying to the faster, taller waves. A young lady and her sister got up and started tap dancing, the 2-year-old found space to swing.

Occasionally, the band would invite a family member or friend to join them for a song. When it was the accordionist’s turn, he invited his dad, who also played the accordion. The two of them, sitting next to each other, the energy in one entraining the other, playing an Irish tune. Their waves were like a storm now, moving our bodies, stomping and clapping, cheering and shouting.

On the way out, I saw the dad, sitting next to his grandchildren. They were playing with his white hair, making a mohawk.

Travel story: Chipiona Spain

 

 

Southern Spain, in a little village called Chipiona, I’m spending an evening at my rented condo, watching the sun go down.

Travel is difficult these days, and mine was no different, with 3 hour delay for departure from the US, missing my connecting flight from Madrid to Seville. But with a little bit of money, much can be solved, and so it was for me. I went to the train station, caught the train, and took a long nap until we arrived. I rented a car and started my drive down to a coastal village called Chipiona.

Along the road there were farms full of sun flowers, each about 3 feet tall, row after row, their yellow halo surrounding a red center, standing in the sun, bending to the breeze. They looked like teenagers, shoulder to shoulder, standing on a beach with the wind blowing through their curly blond hair.

I arrived at my condo and called the number I was given. Marina, the cleaning lady I believe, spoke not a word of English, but she found me and gave me the keys. It’s a beautiful condo complex, with a gorgeous pool in the middle, and my 8^th floor balcony overlooks the ocean. Wonderful. But there is no internet, and unbelievably, no towels of any kind. I messaged the owner and he said that because of COVID, he hadn’t placed towels in the place. I walked around thinking that, well, this being a beach town, it shouldn’t be too hard buying a towel from somewhere nearby. Fortunately, by the pool I find a young man that looks like he might work here and ask him. Yes, he finds me a towel. Nice.

That evening I found a fruit stand and bought some apricots, cherries, and grapes. The grapes were local, and quite good. Then I met with some colleagues and we walked to a seafood place by the water. One of the colleagues is from this region, and orders for us. Plate after plate is nothing short of amazing. Flavors that are new to me, like a dish made with rice and squid, all black, served in a large cast iron black pan. The final piece, a fish baked entirely enveloped in a mountain of salt, with the waiter chiseling the fish out of the salt, slowly skinning it, de-boning it, and then serving small pieces for each person. There was so much skill in making this food, and more skill in serving it. And then came the bill: $30 per person, that’s for all the wine and a 7-course meal. A similar scene repeats every dinner.

Thursday arrived and I took a nice long shower and headed down to the conference hotel and gave my talk. In the afternoon they took us on a bus and then a ferry to a nearby national park, where my binoculars were useful, spotting a wild pig, and a rather beautiful small bird which I think was a swallow, but blue and black. Then the bus took us to a winery, where we learned about making sherry in American Oak barrels. During this whole time, the best part was not so much the scenery, but rather the people. Sitting with someone on the bus, walking with another person in the park, standing next to a third person in the winery, each a book of stories, willing to share a chapter. I loved listening. In some ways, this is the best part of small conferences; the people you meet for the first time, and get to spend time an hour or two learning from.

During one of the conversations, I listened to a person who was trained in the US, then decided to go to China because they promised her directorship of a neuroscience institute. Last year, China instituted a policy where every single person has an app on their phone which is either green or red, determining their status based on a nationwide tracking of COVID exposure. She was traveling in some city in China when she found that her app had turned red. No taxi would take her, she couldn’t get back on a plane and go home, and she could not ride the metro. She even was unable to check in at her hotel. She started walking and found a shopkeeper who agreed to let her sleep in the store, on the floor. While at the store she started calling people and found someone high up in the university who knew someone in the government who was able to turn her app back to green. She lives in terror of this app turning red. China’s economic power attracted many scientists, but they are now showing their people the real face of dictatorships.

This part of Spain is special. The mansions have hints of Islamic style architecture, with many of them featuring a shallow pool, a fountain at the center, blue-green colored tile. On the beach, young people wear the usual swimsuits, but there are also others who are in hijab. On the concrete strand that borders the beach, women balancing a tray of jewelry on their head, selling their wares. The diversity is beautiful, a convergence of civilizations, peacefully coexisting.

I was swimming in the ocean when I heard a bell, and then on the loudspeaker, something in Spanish. Not knowing what it was I kept on swimming, but then noticed that people were leaving the water. I thought, hmm, maybe it’s a shark, so I got out. At the conference I was telling the story to my Spanish speaking friend, and he said, it was probably the lunch special that they were advertising.

Returning home from Cambridge

 

Looking through my window on the right side of the plane, with the afternoon sun gently warming me, we are about two hours out of Iceland, with another 4 to go  before we land in Baltimore. Here, over the very northern Canada, the land below is only hills, lakes, and rivers, with the occasional patches of snow that are brightly lit by the encouraging May sun. There are no trees, no signs of man.

Slowly the first indications of humanity appear. They are not houses, but roads, winding and alone, curving with the bends of a valley. About an hour later, the geometric pattern has changed from fractal borders of land and water to Cartesian borders of lines and sharp angles. Now we have property and farms, straight roads, and intersections. Far on the horizon, I can imagine the curvature of the earth, as the clouds bend and fall away.

Along the journey, I am reading a collection of essays on migration. One tells the story of a Jewish group, having fled Russia, along with a group of Italians, who have landed in Ellis Island (which the author calls, Elli’s Island). He is in his early twenties, and though he cannot understand the language of the Italians, he notes that they really stress their “r’s”. He laments that the rich are simply waved in, while the poor are separated, sent to a large hall, observed and marked with chalk on their coats, and then questioned. 

The 12 year old girl is being asked how old she is, and whether she can count from 1 to 12, which she does fine. Then she is asked if she can count from 12 to 1. She is having trouble, so she is separated from her family, because she might be “feeble minded”. You are asked to name people that know you in the US, their addresses, and they are contacted by telegram, and you wait to see if they come to claim you. The essay ends as they are standing in Manhattan, facing the water, and one of them starts shouting to no one, gleefully telling the Russians that you didn’t want us, but you will miss us, and we are never coming back. It’s better to be free in a strange land than not be wanted in your own.

Now the scenery is shores of Maryland. The plane is descending. There are tiny islands, a curved coastline, and houses with piers sending out feelers into the water, like synapses on a neuron's dendrite. The boats are docked along the piers, but some are traveling, like neurotransmitters, sending messages from one neuron to another.

It’s been more than two years since I have seen this magnificent land from above. My god it’s a beautiful place.

Michelangelo's poem

On the train back from Manhattan, the magazine in the seat-pocket had an article about the drummer Questlove. He had written a book, which the magazine described this way:

"he's put all that he's learned about inspiration into a new book, ... which is packed with patient, deliberate breadcrumbs intended to help people get unstuck creatively."

What an interesting way to describe a self-help book, "deliberate breadcrumbs".

It was a lovely day that started in Baltimore with the view from the train window: occasional coastlines, bridges, towns, and bare trees. We saw the sun rise, red horizon above the water. Outside of Philly, a group of rowers synchronized their colorful paddles as we crossed a bridge. One of those brief moments that leaves a picture in your memory.

I walked over to the cafe car and got us some tea. It felt wonderful holding it warm in my hands. Breakfast was cheese and tomato sandwiches that I brought, along with butter and jam sandwiches that my mom brought.

We arrived in Penn Station and took the metro to Central Park, then walked across the park to the Met. We met my daughter (and her friend) there, who surprised me with a box of macaroons, and my mom surprised her with two small paintings that she had bought on her recent trip to Iran.

This was the last weekend for the Michelangelo exhibit, so it was crowded. But the crowds were kind, and polite, as we inevitably ran into each other in front of this drawing or that. I reveled in the myriad of languages that I heard, so many ways to say "wow", followed by something that I couldn't understand.

The exhibit was all about Michelangelo’s "studies", drawings that he had made before he painted or sculpted the final piece. Almost all of them in pencil or another monochrome tool.

Because the pieces were studies, if you looked close, there was a story there, depicting a day in his life, some 600 years ago. On one of those days, he started with a piece of paper and drew a man, fully clothed, sitting, with detail that looked as though the drawing itself was chiseled in stone. Then he turned the paper around, and now doodled, drawing another man, this one naked, standing. Finally, he used the rest of the paper to write a poem.

How can it be, Lady, as one can see,
from long experience, that the live image,
sculpted in the hard alpine stone, lasts longer
than its maker, whom the years return to ashes?

Behavioral research at Journal of Neuroscience

In a recent issue of Journal of Neuroscience, the editors described an ongoing policy of increasing the percentage of papers that are “desk-rejected”, that is, rejected without peer review. The data showed that from Jan. 2014 to March 2016, the percentage of such decisions increased from 5% of submitted papers to around 25%. What concerned me was that the policy appeared to focus on a specific group of neuroscientists: those who primarily relied on behavioral experiments to infer function of the brain. We conducted a survey to quantify this impression.

130 people responded to the survey, 62% of whom had published a paper in JNeurosci. These authors represented about 342 articles in JNeurosci (this is a lower bound because a handful of authors had published 10 or more articles but the survey counted their contributions as 10). Of the papers that the authors had published in JNeurosci, about 40% were behavioral, without explicit neural correlates. Therefore, the survey participants represented a group of scientists that relied substantially, but not exclusively, on behavioral research.

The participants reported that they had experienced 148 desk-rejections. Among the desk-rejected manuscripts, about 75% were rejected because the editors felt that the work “lacked insights into neural mechanisms”. Here are some examples of the letters sent to the authors:

• “For purely behavioral studies, our criteria have evolved to require that a behavioral study provides novel insights into the underlying neural representations and mechanisms.”

• "The study does make some experimental predictions, but they are all behavioral."

• "while the study had a number of strengths, the emphasis was on behavioral processes rather than neural mechanisms which are the focus for The Journal of Neuroscience.”

• “It is, unfortunately, the case that it is not possible for us to consider manuscripts where the emphasis is on behavior.”

•  “I am afraid that it has become much rarer for behavior only manuscripts to be sent out for review at The Journal of Neuroscience.”

This policy has left a strong impression on the participants, as noted in their comments.

• "It is well-known that it is useless to submit behavioral studies to this journal even if neural mechanisms are discussed in the Introduction and Discussion."

• "To understand how the brain works, we have to understand the structure of the information processing and predict the behaviour before jumping to see the neural correlates of it. Therefore, I believe behavioural research is a fundamental part of neuroscience. It is sad to see one of the journals I respect is underestimating the value of behavioural neuroscience."

• "Although my personal experience included neural data, I definitely share the impression.  Quite a few journals including j neurosci are rejecting papers at the editorial stage and I have a sense behavioral studies are being excluded more; also agree that this is not wise for the journal."

• "I gave up submitting papers to JN or reviewing for them, a position which I also advertised to colleagues who came to me asking for advice whether they should consider JN as an outlet for their own work. My feeling has become that submitting papers that are mostly behavioural/computational to JN is a waste of time and effort."

• "The loss of behavioral research is dangerous to neuroscience. The idea that we will understand the brain without a nuanced understanding of behavior, i.e. the only neural output that ultimately matters, is misguided."

• "It will be a huge mistake to give any kind of low priority to behavioral/psychphysics/cognitive only studies! These papers are the basics of neuroscience. After all, this is what we aim to understand : human (or animal) behavior! Moreover, even as an electrophysiologist, i would say without hesitation that the contribution of purely behavioral papers to our understanding of computations in the brain is huge, and equal to that of invasive studies. Sometimes it is even more convincing to draw a conclusion about the neural correlates by observing the behavior, than by observing the actual neural correlate. this is due to two main factors: 1. Limitations and technical confounds of the physiological measures; 2. The superiority of a clean targeted well-thought-of purely behavioral design, compared to when compromised when one need to accommodate technological confounds of physiological methods. To sum, behavioral and psychophysics is, almost by definition, the foundation of neurosciences."

Fortunately, the editors are beginning to respond to these concerns. Senior Editor Dan Sanes left a constructive comment noting that this issue will be discussed at the journal's board meeting in November. Senior Editor Yavin Shaham spoke with me and noted that a policy statement that appeared to focus on behavioral research was problematic. Editor-in-Chief Marina Picciotto mentioned that she has asked for data regarding desk-rejections in the past 6 months and will compare them to similar data from 3 years ago to ascertain whether behavioral work has been unfairly impacted.

Meanwhile, David Herzfeld has begun a systematic, quantitative analysis of all papers published in the history of JNeurosci. The data has allowed us to quantify the citation impact of behavioral research, with the results published here.

In a thoughtful perspective, John Krakauer, Asif Ghazanfar, Alex Gomez-Marin, Malcolm MacIver, and David Poeppel considered the question of whether behavioral experiments are fundamental to advancing neuroscience. They noted that whereas the focus of neuroscience appears to have shifted to neural circuits, behavioral experiments provide the guiding vision of what that circuit might be doing. They wrote: "when scientists ask 'how does the brain generate behavior,' they are in fact asking a question best approached through behavioral work, specifically task analysis, aided by theory, that allows behavior to be decomposed into separable modules and processing operations... The neural basis of behavior cannot be properly characterized without first allowing for independent, detailed study of the behavior itself."

The positive immigrant

My friend Youseph had just returned from a trip to Iran. His father, a former foreign minister of Iran, under house arrest for many years, had passed away, and he had returned to Tehran for the 40th day ceremony. 

We met for breakfast. I found a table at the rather busy Einstein Bagels, and when he walked in, the first thing he did was to hand me a jar, with a small package of saffron in it. The jar was the one that I had given him some months back, with my homemade tomato soup. 

I sat mesmerized as he described the trip, what it's like to hear about your father from people that remembered him. Reminded me of when I had made a similar trip, some 8 years ago. 

Youseph is a positive person (aren't all immigrants?). So many changes to Tehran: signs that read come to the mosque, where you'll find a quiet place to think, where you can find shelter from an abusive relationship, where you can find peace. The mayor's initiative to fill the city with flowers. A new and interesting bridge, architecturally gorgeous, designed by a young woman. 

He recalled that as he mentioned his observations, people in the room, those who lived in Tehran, would occasionally dismiss it. "I think you're the first person that has actually read this propaganda that they put on walls." And "who cares about the flowers when after going to college for 4 years, you have to drive a taxi."

He fell into thought when I told him that he should write down his observations. I'm pretty sure I get this desire to record things from my dad. He loved to identify places and people that were in the picture on the back of that printed image. 

I look at his handwriting, and I see a record of his movements, as well as his thoughts, still here today.

Is Journal of Neuroscience discriminating against behavioral research?

Journal of Neuroscience is the flagship scientific publication for the Society for Neuroscience, a journal that was established in 1981 “to publish research in the field of neuroscience and to serve the membership of the Society for Neuroscience”. Unfortunately, available data suggest that the journal’s impact has been declining, at least as evidenced by the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). Perhaps as a reaction to these trends, in the past two years policy statements from the journal’s editorial board, and anecdotal evidence from the review process, suggest that the journal has instituted a policy of discrimination against a specific kind of neuroscience research: non-invasive, psychophysical experiments are rejected without peer review.

I am alarmed by this change. I believe that the new policy is flawed for a number of reasons.

• The available data suggest a poor relationship between rejection rates and journal impact factor, making it unlikely that increasing rejection rates will result in improved impact factor.
• The focus on rejecting a specific body of research is discriminatory and runs counter to the principle of representing research of all members of the Society for Neuroscience.
• The current policy, as applied to the journal’s own data would eliminate some of the highest cited papers in the journal’s history. That is, the new policy may worsen the plight of the journal.

The declining impact factor and the journal’s new policies

The Society for Neuroscience is an organization that represents scientists who study the field of neuroscience at all levels, including molecular, cellular, systems, behavioral, and computational. Unfortunately, over the past 20 years the flagship journal of this society has seen a general decline in its impact factor.

Data source: Thomson Reuters InCites Journal Citation Reports.

The reasons for this decline are unclear, though I speculate that one factor is the rapid rise of new, competing journals. Perhaps in response to these trends, in January 2016 the journal published an article describing changes to the review process. The new policy aimed to increase the rate of rejection of papers at the editorial stage, before they are submitted to peer review. The data that were included in a follow up article showed that from January 2014 to March 2016, the total percent of papers rejected increased modestly from around 70% to nearly 80%, while the percent of papers rejected before peer-review increased by a factor of five: from 5% to about 25%.

The new policy described the kind of research that the editors rejected without review. They wrote: “… purely biophysical or behavioral studies should provide novel insights into, and make specific predictions about, neural mechanisms or neural representations.” A typical rejection letter from the senior editor gave the following reason for rejection without review of a study that used psychophysical, non-invasive recording techniques to measure behavior: “we felt that The Journal of Neuroscience is not the right venue because the findings do not inform us about or implicate a specific neural mechanism.”

It appears to me that the journal’s new policy is targeting a specific group of neuroscientists: those who primarily rely on behavioral data to infer function of the brain. Given that this is the official journal of the Society, the discrimination would divide the membership into classes that can and cannot publish in the journal.

What to do

To help address these issues, we need data that quantifies how the policy is affecting the ability of the community to publish in the journal. To help with that, I ask that you to take a few moments to complete this survey.

The objective of the survey is to collect data regarding the publishing experience of scientists who may have been affected by this policy. We hope to be able to answer a simple question: what has been the impact of papers published in the journal that have relied primarily on psychophysical tools to measure behavior? We hope to present the data to the journal’s editors, clarifying the impact of their new policy.

Survey results are accumulated here.

A follow-up article appears here.

A paper with analysis of the data appears here.

Thank you for your help.