Hopeless in Tehran

I teach in a summer course called NeuroBridges, which brings students from the countries of the Middle East, including Israel and Iran, to a village in France for 10 days. The course teaches the students about the brain, but more importantly, by having them live together, eat their meals together, and do projects together, the course teaches them about each other. 

Today I received a note from one of those students. She lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. Below is an excerpt of her letter, followed by my response.

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I finally managed to connect to the internet, and I was wondering if you might have a little time for me. I really just wanted to talk for a moment and share what’s been on my mind. You’ve always been such a valuable mentor to me, and I truly trust your wisdom.

In Iran, every day things get worse than the day before. People are slain. Infrastructure is being targeted — historical sites, hospitals, schools. We constantly hear the sounds of air defenses and missiles, and every time it happens I feel a wave of anxiety, wondering whose loved ones might be lost next… or whether the next missile might hit my own loved ones. I remember your wife saying that even in the worst situations, you always manage to find positive points — something to be grateful for. I’ve thought about that a lot. I truly tried to look at things the way you do and find some positive meaning in all of this… but honestly, I couldn’t.

If you were in my place, how would you endure this situation? And what positive point would you try to hold onto?

I am deeply worried about the future — not just mine, but everyone’s. Even if the war ends, there will be severe economic hardship, instabilities...

I’m also afraid that I might not be able to reach my long-time dream of starting a PhD in Europe. With the situation worsening, there will probably be more sanctions, and universities may become even more hesitant to accept Iranian students.

At the same time, because of the war and constant internet disruptions, research in the country has almost completely stopped. Universities are closed. We were working on an animal neuroscience project that had progressed really well, but because of the current conditions we had to sacrifice the mice and stop the project. You might imagine how hard that feels

Sometimes I feel that when a professor chooses a PhD student, they will tend to choose someone who has had uninterrupted research opportunities in a first-world country, rather than someone like me who has fallen behind simply because of war, instability, and internet shutdowns. They might not even be able to imagine what it’s like to continue doing research while worrying about basic financial survival, or while your country is going through so much turmoil. I used the PhD example just to explain how unfair and discouraging things can feel right now.

And it’s not just me. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of ambitious young students who love science and are facing the same uncertainty.

If you have the time, I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts. If you were in my place, in a situation where your home, your dreams, your goals, and the safety of your loved ones all feel threatened at once, how would you keep going?

Excuse me for taking your time.

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I read your note with great concern. I’m so glad that you’re OK. Thank you for writing.

War is often the consequence of a long series of bad decisions by misguided leaders on both sides of the conflict. You are an innocent citizen who is suffering because of their mistakes. I am so very sorry.

It hurts to have lost the research that you had invested so much time in. These bombs are not just killing people and destroying buildings, but the rubble that they have produced might forever block the path that you had planned for building your future.  

When the bombs stop falling, and they will, life will restart, tentatively at first, but then with vigor. You will see small ordinary things anew. Like a child, you will examine the new leaves on a tree and smell its bark with delight. You will share a cup of tea with a friend and look in her eyes and listen to her voice as if for the first time. You will travel to the Caspian and place your toes in the sea and close your eyes and feel joy.

And you will restart your research, and you will apply for graduate schools in Europe and America. And when the professors read your application, they will see something extraordinary: a young woman of magnificent perseverance who pursued her dreams despite war, bombs, and despair.  

As Walt Whitman wrote, “What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer: That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

 

image credit: Atta Kenare/AFP 

 

 

Neurobridges: from synapses to understanding

Neurobridges is a summer school that brings together students from countries in the middle east so that they can learn about the brain, as well as each others' cultures. The aim is to take a small step that might reduce tension and build understanding. Perhaps the best way to show you what Neurobridges is about is by telling you about a few of the conversations that took place during the course.

At lunch, I sat with two students, an Israeli student from Jerusalem. and an Iranian student  from Tehran. After a bit of talk about their individual areas of study, we talked about the summer course. The Iranian student said: "Here the idea is to use science to bring people together, with the purpose of seeing each other’s humanity, to reduce our perception of differences." Then the Israeli student added: "This is much better than bringing people together and having them talk about their cultural differences or similarities. Science is a better excuse to start the conversation."

At another meal, a young lady from Macedonia mentioned that she learned from an Iranian student that the two cultures shared a custom: "when the host offered you food, you politely declined. When they offered it again, you again declined. Only on the third time you accepted. I was delighted to learn that this was the measure of etiquette in both cultures."

The Palestinian Israeli young woman, born and raised in Haifa, now studying for her PhD in Europe, was sitting across the lunch table from a Jewish Israeli young woman, a postdoc in America. The Palestinian woman called herself Palestinian, but she said: "The Jewish Israelis don’t like it when I call myself Palestinian. They’d prefer if I called myself Arab Israeli."

She continued: "Until college it was rare for me to have any interaction with kids of my own age who were not Palestinian. This is because there are 4 types of schools, 3 of which are Jewish, and the fourth one which is for Arabs. There are rare schools that admit both. When I graduated from college and wanted to apply for grad school, there were many foundations that offered scholarships, but all of them required military or public service. I didn’t have those."  

The Israeli woman replied: “Why didn’t you volunteer for civil service?”

The Palestinian woman said: “How could I serve a government that is oppressing me and my people?”

The Israeli woman replied: “But you are Israeli, this is your country.”

The Palestinian woman replied: “I am Palestinian. I live in an occupied land. Right now my whole people are just trying to survive. I can’t think about helping Israel.” She continued: “When you go to Ben Gurion airport and try to leave the country, if you are Palestinian, you are taken aside for extra searches. When someone asks the authorities why, they say, "What's a little inconvenience to search your body and suitcase if it improves safety?”

The Israeli woman said: "I'm sorry about that. I know that's not fair."

But the conversations are not just bridges that help build understanding among young people, they are also a conduit for learning among the professors, who also come from diverse backgrounds. Here is a sampling:

At breakfast each morning, the professors sit together and talk. I learned that at Hebrew University, the admissions officers are encouraged to enroll students from East Jerusalem, i.e., Arab Israelis. My colleague said: "the university receives more funding for graduating this population of students than Jewish students."

He continued: “If the Arab Israelis participated more, for example, by voting, they would have more power in the government. The fact that they don’t seem to want to participate tells me that they don’t seem to want to be a part of Israel.” Another colleague mentioned that look at the Druze people in Israel. They participate in the Army, and other aspects of being an Israeli. "Recently I heard that the best high school in the country is one in the Druze region."

Listening to these exchanges, I'm reminded that the value of Neurobridges is not that it dissolves political realities or resolves historical wounds, but that it creates a space where curiosity takes precedence over fear, and where the first move toward understanding is made not through slogans or diplomacy but through shared pursuit of ideas. When students and faculty discover that science can be a neutral ground on which difficult identities can coexist, and even converse, they begin to see one another with more dimensionality. That shift is small and fragile, but it is real, and it accumulates. In a region where young people are more often taught to imagine an adversary than a colleague, the act of studying synapses, brain circuits, and behavior side by side becomes a modest but profound counterexample. Neurobridges does not claim to fix the world; it simply gives the next generation a better starting point.

Visting a synagogue in New York

On Yom Kippur, which marks the beginning of the Jewish new year and the end of a 24 hour fasting period, I went to a synagogue in New York at the invitation of one of my students, Salomon, who is a cantor, which is the person that leads the service through singing from the Torah. 

The synagogue is a couple of blocks from my hotel and not knowing anything about what to do, I decided to wait until I saw men with skullcaps and just follow them and see what they did. This worked well: I saw the men open their jackets to show themselves to the security people in front, and that's what I did too. They waved me in like I was a regular. 

Once inside, I saw that men went in one door, and women went in another door. I walked in the correct door and saw that the men had donned skullcaps and a white & black shawl. I got myself a skullcap (yamaka), but didn’t feel right putting on the shawl. I stood near a wall, trying not to be seen. Someone came over and handed me a Torah and pointed me to the right page. It was Hebrew on one side, and English on the other, with the pages going from right to left, just like Persian. 

Fortunately, today I wore a jacket, a white shirt, and black pants. This was amazingly appropriate because every other man was also wearing a jacket, white shirt, and black pants. Unfortunately, I also wore leather shoes, which I later learned is a no-no because men are supposed to avoid it (men wore canvas tennis shoes etc., women seem to not care, perhaps the rules don't apply to them). Women were seated in a separate (back) section, men in front. Honestly it seemed to me that women were largely excluded from the whole ceremony. 

After about 10 minutes against the wall Salomon saw me and brought me to a pew and introduced me to his congregation as his professor from Johns Hopkins. He then went to the center of the room and began reading from the Torah by singing it. Occasionally, the congregation would join him, signing and swaying their bodies. The rabbi, a young man, only said a few words to start the service, then opened a door at the front of the room where they housed the Torah in scroll form but then closed it after a couple of songs. The front of the synagogue was a wall of stained glass, mostly red colors. 

The service, which lasted about 1.5 hours, was entirely in Hebrew but I was able to follow it because of the translations in my Torah. The service was about asking for forgiveness for your sins and praising Hashem, which means “the name”, a reference to God. I imagined that this same service was probably performed 2000 years ago. 

We mostly stood throughout the service, and I tried to closely follow things by flipping my pages when I saw others do so. It was particularly lovely listening to Salomon’s amazing voice, who sings like an opera star. A couple of times his two sons joined him and sang with him. 

 As the service ended, men around me wished me a good year, and Salomon was surrounded by the congregation who shook his hand and thanked him. We then gathered outside the main room and there was a nice spread of bagels, cream cheese, salmon, egg salad, tuna salad, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I was very much at home with this kind of food. 

 I kept the yamaka.

Building bridges between Muslims and Jews through neuroscience

The newspaper had images of bombs and rockets falling on Beirut, desperate people trying to escape, faces of sadness. On days like this I feel hopeless--that it’s all getting worse, and there is nothing I can do. Yet, as I looked around me in my classroom in the Cluny abbey at a French village near the Swiss border, I could count around 30 graduate students who a few days ago had traveled from Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, etc., sitting together, waiting for me to teach them about the brain.

I could see that a few of the ladies were wearing head scarves, and some of the guys had donned yamakas. Here, they were not separated by a security wall. Rather, they were sitting next to each other, having coffee and tea. The 10-day course had housed them in dormitories so that a Jewish girl from Haifa was sharing a room with a Muslim girl from Tehran.  At lunch, some got kosher meals, and some vegan, but they ate together, at the same table.

The idea of the course was born in 2015 during a conversation between two friends taking a walk in Jerusalem, Yonatan Loewenstein, a professor at the Hebrew University, and Ahmed El Hady, a professor at the Max Plank Institute in Germany. They imagined a summer school where Jews and Muslims would come for a few days and learn about the brain, and then leave having also learned a little about each other. They scraped together the funds from the Simons Foundation, and from an anonymous donor in the UK, and began organizing the course with the help of David Hansel and Carole Levens, both at the CNRS, Paris. They named the course NeuroBridges.

But the organizers paid a price for their efforts. Ahmed got emails with pictures of blood on it, calling him a traitor. Yonatan had a paper that was in review for over a year, the reviewer trying to punish him. Academia is full of calls for disengagement and boycott. But the saddest thing for the organizers was not these petty retributions. Rather, the Palestinian students who were accepted in the course, and had planned to come, then canceled at the last minute.

I was one of the handful of scientists that had come to help. Curious about how the students felt about their experience, I probed them at our meals, asking them to tell me what had surprised them.

One student said, “After I applied and got accepted, I looked at the schedule and got a bit scared. I thought it might be overwhelming, spending so much time in such close quarters with people that I didn’t know. Almost every waking hour! I thought for sure I would need to have some time apart. But now, after a week of being together, I realize that my roommate is like a sister that I never knew I had.”

Another student said: “I wear a headscarf both here, and in Iran. But when you’re in Iran, wearing a scarf signifies to others something about your political beliefs, that you are supporting the government. Maybe here in France it’s the same way. But I’m not trying to send a signal about which side I’m on. I cover my hair because it’s a personal statement between myself and god. When I mentioned this to my roommate, it surprised her.”

A young lady turned and said: “When I was a kid, I would read the Koran, but one day I came across a verse in which in the matters of inheritance, boys were given much more than girls. I felt uneasy. The god that I loved did not quite love me back.”

The young lady sitting next to her, from Tel Aviv, smiled and said, “That’s exactly how I feel!”, “You see, two years ago I got married, but not in the official way. I didn’t register with the ministry of religion and didn’t perform the ceremony in a synagogue. You see, getting married that way made it so that, if god forbid, I came to ask for a divorce, I will have to do it in an official setting where they usually humiliate the woman.”

In that classroom, looking up at their beautiful faces, I thought that rather than diving into the lecture, I read them a quote from St. Augustine, who some 1700 years ago wrote: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”

Yonatan Loewenstein and Ahmed El Hady, organizers of the course.

The course was held at in a historic abbey in Cluny, France, where there were ongoing excavations to uncover artifacts.

Site of the course, Cluny abbey.

Lecture hall.

Two little ants

On the beige sandstone patio there are a few tiny ants.
There is one who is closely following another.
He occasionally makes contact with the one in front,
but then quickly backs off.

Once he actually passed the leader, then circled back.
He knows his place.

The two of them are walking along the edge,
but then suddenly,
the leader turns and goes toward the plants.
The guy behind misses this turn, and keeps going.

After a foot of going about it alone, he stops and notices
something's wrong.
He's all alone.

He abandons the straight line and starts doing short, exploratory circles,
but his circles are too far from the leader.
Sometimes he comes across another ant,
They touch, but he turns away,
restarting his circle.

I wonder when he will give up,
I wonder who will take him home.

Lost in Dallas: a short story

"I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow in Dallas", I texted my cousin Jason, a 40 something father of two teenagers. "Do you want to get together for dinner?"

He texted back: "I've lost my mother! She walked out a couple of days ago and we can't find her anywhere!!"

Oh my god. I knew that she wasn’t well, having suffered from schizophrenia for much of her life. Jason’s father had been taking care of her, but he passed away last year. Like any worthy son, he moved her from Houston up to his house in Dallas, becoming her caregiver.

"I'm so sorry Jason." I texted back, figuring that we won’t be seeing each other on my trip down to Dallas tomorrow, which I’m going because some months ago I was invited to give a talk there. I had planned to take my mom with me, thinking that it would be good to have a small family get together.

The next day comes and my 83 year old mom and I make our way (slowly) through the airport. She prefers that I get her a wheelchair as it makes it easier to board the plane, and indeed we get to sit in the front row, with her taking the window seat and me taking the aisle, and a young lady joining us later in the middle seat. I take out my computer and start working on the talk that I'm supposed to give, and the young lady takes out her crochet needle and starts working on what I later learn is a sweater. She asks me about the slides on my computer, and I ask her about her crocheting, and my mom joins in, mentioning that she loves to knit. She has brought sandwiches and gives the spare one to the young lady. I close my computer and put it away in the pocket in front of me and spend the rest of the flight engaged in the conversation.

As we are landing, I text Jason and ask about his mom. He replies "I found her! A policeman found her walking barefoot and took her to the hospital. She's been there for three days as Jane Doe."

“Oh my god that’s wonderful”, I text back. We make plans to meet later that day and have dinner together.

The university has sent a driver, and he takes us to the hotel, which is only about 10 minutes away. We check in and go to the room and unpack. That's when I realize that I can’t find my computer. “I must’ve left it on seat pocket on the plane!”, I hysterically tell my mom.

In my mind I’m going over the possibilities. Perhaps the cleaning crew found the computer, in which case it would be stored somewhere in the airport. But the plane was late, and they were boarding immediately after we deplaned, which makes it more likely that the computer and the plane are now on the other side of the country.

A million things are going through my head. I can buy another laptop. I can give a chalk-talk. I kick myself for not having backed things up for more than a week. But that won’t help now as I don’t have the backup here with me. That conversation with the crocheting lady distracted me. But honestly, I really want to blame my mom, who is sitting with me in the hotel room calmly having a cup of tea.

Using my phone, I search for information on what to do if you’ve done something stupid like this and learn that if the airline finds the computer, they will take it to the lost luggage office at the airport. There is a phone number and I call them, only to get their answering machine. I leave a message.

The hotel has a pool. I’m going nuts, so to reduce the stress I go for a swim. Then with nothing to do, I collect my mom and we take a ride back to the airport. There is a line at the lost luggage counter, I can hear the phone ringing and no one answering it. We slowly make our way to the front and the lady says “I’m sorry, but no one has turned in a computer.” “Please give us a call later tonight.” I want to scream “but you don’t answer the phone!”, but silently turn and head back to the car.

We go back to the hotel and have a cup of tea. I realize that it’s the uncertainty of not knowing that’s hard to take, boiling up my anxiety. Indeed, I’d be happy to pay someone a few hundred dollars right now just so I would know whether the computer is going to be found or not. It’s an illogical thing to do because knowing about the outcome in advance will have no impact on the outcome, yet I’m willing to pay for it just so I wouldn’t have to suffer not knowing. But why is it that not knowing something can produce anxiety?

Emma Pierson and Noah Goodman at Stanford University have studied this phenomenon. In 2014, they ran an online study where volunteers were asked to imagine being locked in a room for an hour. At the end of the hour there was a chance that they would win or lose an amount of money. Would they prefer to be told at the beginning of the hour whether they will be winning or losing?

They found that people craved advance information, and this desire increased with the probability of winning or losing, especially as the stakes increased. Indeed, people were willing to pay for that information, despite the fact that having advanced information had no bearing on the outcome. Pierson and Goodman explained this behavior by noting that information allowed people to plan for the future, and this was valuable because we have limited cognitive resources. Knowing the outcome in advance allowed us to plan for how we would conduct our affairs after the key event revealed itself.

Bilal Bari and Sam Gershman followed up this work in 2024 with a similar study, replicating the Pierson and Goodman results. They found that if there was a good chance that we would earn $1000, we would be willing to pay to find out at the beginning of the hour, but we would rather avoid knowing if there was a good chance that we would lose money. Bari and Gershman then performed psychological testing on the subjects to assess their susceptibility to anxiety and found that the subjects with high anxiety traits exhibited a greater desire to pay for the advance information. That is, people who suffered from anxiety placed a higher value on the information that would inform them of the outcome.

For me, knowing if they would find my computer or not relieved me of the various conflicting plans that I would otherwise have to carry with me until the event. That relief, that lifting of the dark cloud that was consuming my thoughts, is what I was willing to pay for.

Fortunately, distraction arrives in the form of my cousin and his two beautiful kids, which he’s been raising pretty much on his own. You see, it’s not just his mom that has schizophrenia, it’s also his wife, a brilliant physicist whom he had to divorce a few years ago. Despite the separation, he takes care of her as well. I can’t find words to tell him how much I admired his love of family.

He picks us up and we go to his house. I ask about the search for his mom. He says “I was out driving the neighborhood each moment of my waking hours for 3 days. I knocked on doors, put up flyers, called the police and the hospitals.” “I was just going out of my mind.”

He continues: “The police wanted a doctor’s note saying my mom had dementia. Apparently, they don’t search for a missing person with schizophrenia.” “And the hospitals said they had no one under with that description in the emergency room.”

Then he says: “You know who helped me the most?”

“Who?” I ask.

“The homeless. They would give me a hug, and sometimes cry with me. They understood what it meant to be lost.”

“So how did you find her?” I ask.

“The city hospital had her in their psychiatric ward. She eventually calmed down to the point where she could tell them her name and they contacted me.”

“Oh my god. I’m so glad she’s OK.” I reply.

“I decided that as long as she’s in the hospital, let’s have them do some of the routine stuff that she should’ve done years ago, you know, mammogram, etc., before I bring her home.”

As we are talking, his daughter, who is perhaps 12, is making tea, while his son, who is maybe a year or two older, is cleaning the kitchen. The kids are running the house, which perhaps is not surprising given the situation with their mom and grandmother.

We go out to dinner, and as we are waiting for the check, I step outside to call the airport. Once again, it’s the answering machine. On the drive back to the hotel Jason suggests, “let’s try the airport.” We drive over and as they wait in the no-parking zone, I go over to the lost luggage office. There is no one around, except for the lady behind the counter. I walk over and ask if the cleaning crew happened to have found my computer on the flight down from Baltimore. She glances down to the counter and keeps looking down. I follow her gaze and shout “That’s my computer!”

References

Emma Pierson and Noah Goodman (2014) Uncertainty and denial: a resource-rational model of the value of information. PLOS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0113342

Bari, B. A., & Gershman, S. J. (2024). The value of non-instrumental information in anxiety: insights from a resource-rational model of planning. PsyArXiv Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hwm78

 

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. 

Elizabeth's hopes and dreams

Early mornings, as I walk the path from the university parking lot to my lab, I stop and pick up occasional potato chip bags or candy wrappers that were left behind by children and other pedestrians that shared the sidewalk, maybe on their way home yesterday from the nearby school, or maybe on their way back from the corner store.

Sometimes there is a crumpled piece of paper, someone’s graded test, perhaps a homework, little windows into a child’s life.

It’s worth looking, because the way they see the world is a perspective akin to that of poets: by recasting the obvious, they help you rediscover the beauty that’s right in front of you.

And so a few days ago I picked up this crumpled piece of paper, where a girl named Elizabeth had listed her hopes and dreams, crossed out a few things, and then finally put check marks next to the ones that, I imagined, she identified as the key ingredients for the recipe of her life.  

From Jonathan to Joni

My colleague Joni began her presentation by describing a patient named “Elliot”, a businessman who had a tumor in his frontal lobe. The surgeons had successfully removed the tumor, but now Elliot “wasn’t Elliot anymore.” His life had started to fall apart. He lost his job, where he had been a successful executive. He divorced his wife, and then married a prostitute (which also ended badly).

Elliot had gone to see Antonio Damasio, the eminent neuroscientist. Damasio noticed that Elliot did fine in all the usual tests, exhibiting intact memory and excellent intelligence. But when asked to look at pictures of emotionally charged events, like an auto accident, or people in distress, Elliot did not register the usual signs of being affected by what he was seeing. The damage to Elliot’s brain had caused him to be unable to access his emotional memory to assign value to things that he sensed or actions that he might do. 

Without access to this emotional context, options could only be evaluated based on “cold-blooded logic”, Damasio noted. And when all you have is logic, options appeared of the same value in the landscape of decisions, and decision-making became quite difficult.

So Elliot might take hours trying to decide between various options for dinner. Food, after all, is something that can be viewed logically as having some caloric value, and some health benefits, but for a normal person the choice of what to eat is often based on memories of how it felt when you ate that food. Without access to memory of pleasure associated with eating the food (which is derived largely from the emotional context in which the food was eaten), the caloric content of food becomes a sterile dimension to base decisions.

Joni used this example to motivate her own research, which focused on the activity of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex of animals. She showed that the neurons increased their activity when the option promised greater reward, and lowered their activity when the option required the animal to exert greater effort (through lever presses). She showed that the neurons of the orbitofrontal cortex were encoding value of the option, taking into account a measure of the reward that it promised, minus the effort that it required.

And so perhaps when there was damage to these neurons, and their connections to the brainstem regions that were important for registering emotional context of events, people lost the ability to make choices based on the subjective value of that option, that is, how they felt about that choice.

But damage to the frontal lobe, particularly the regions that so dramatically altered the ability to make choices, also changed the way people reacted toward the patient. Joni brought this up later as she sat in my office, describing that a major problem that patients faced following these forms of surgery was in their ability to continue their relationships with people whom they had known all their lives. These friends and family members had a hard time adjusting to a person who looked exactly the same as before, but now suddenly had changed internally. That is, Elliot wasn’t Elliot anymore.

As Joni explained this problem, a tear formed in her eyes.

I suddenly understood that in some ways, a similar problem was faced by people who changed their gender. For them, on the inside they were exactly the same person as before, but now on the outside, they looked something else entirely. That outwardly change made it hard for lifelong friends, children, family, to maintain the relationships that they had built together. Just when they needed it most, the critical bonds were being strained.

You see, about a year ago, Joni was Jonathan, married and father to children. Now, she was an elegantly dressed woman with eye shadow and curves.

“I’m still the same person I always was. I’m just being more authentic now.”