Jason
Sherwin

Takeaways from Society for Neuroscience Conference

This past week was the annual Society for Neuroscience (SFN) conference in San Diego, CA. Over 30,000 neuroscience researchers attended the four-day conference held in the San Diego Convention Center. Needless to say, this flow of people can create  vast opportunities in terms of meeting fellow...


Jason
Sherwin

Takeaways from the Organization for Computational Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting

Dispatch from Paris: This week was the annual meeting of the Organization for Computational Neuroscience. This year, it took place at Université Paris Descartes. And so, here we were this week – unraveling the mystery of “cogito ergo sum” (In English: “I think, therefore I am”), or at lea...


Jason
Sherwin

Giving a presentation on touchy subjects

This posting is about giving a presentation on touchy subjects. Everyone knows that academia is high on ego. And it’s understandably so: we have invested our lives into what we do. There’s no way to “not take it personally.” It’s our work, it’s our time, it’s our life’s work. So...


Jason
Sherwin

Invitation to the Cog-Neuro Colloquium

Every researcher has got to tell the world what he/she has been working on for all those Saturday nights when he/she didn't go out. So that's what I'll be doing March 20 at the City College of New York Cognitive Neuroscience Colloquium! Come and join the discussion on the neuroscience of pop music, ...


Jason
Sherwin

Knowing when to punt

Knowing when to punt is an important part of creativity. Sometimes, some ideas don’t work out how you expect them to and knowing when to let them go can be the difference between going stale and going forward. Recently, we had a project in the lab that looked promising from various angles. We h...


Jason
Sherwin

How do you actually fund the research?

There’s a joke in the research world that you don’t submit a research proposal to NIH until you’ve already done the research. When I was a rookie in the biomedical research world, and I was told this cinema vérité version of things, I thought in typical naïveté, ‘but how do you actually ...


Jason
Sherwin

The Hot Word Today

Information seems to be the hot word today. It’s one of those slippery concepts that exists in a somewhat definable way in mathematics and science – particularly in information theory – but it is a hot item with or without a precise way to define it. Just look at finance, media, or a zillion o...


Jason
Sherwin

Having a little bit of fun

This posting is about having a little bit of fun – but serious “fun” – in neuroscience. The reason it is fun is because we get to use the pop song “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (featured in Rocky III) as a stimulus set for experiments in neuroscience. 


Jason
Sherwin

Pop Music and Neural Data

This posting delves a little more into the focus of my research: the cognition of music. In particular, we will look at an article recently published in Scientific American called “Brain Scans Predict Pop Hits.” It is a summary article of a paper by Gregory Berns and Sara Moore from Emory Univer...


Jason
Sherwin

The search for missing information

This posting is about ‘the search for missing information.’ In particular, we compare a TED Talk by Eli Pariser on the ‘filter bubble’ to the neuro-engineering work I do on what is called cortically-coupled computer vision (C3Vision). In Mr. Pariser’s talk, he warns of the potential danger...


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