Six Degrees of Charles Sherrington

Over Thanksgiving break I was watching Oliver Stone's epic "JFK" for the first time. I had no idea what a star-studded cast I was in for! Then I saw Kevin Bacon was in this movie and it really became obvious to me why Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon works so well.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a play on words for six degrees of separation. This phenomenon assumes that most every actor/tress can be linked through his or her film roles to the actor Kevin Bacon. This is really cool, for example, this is how John Wayne is related to Kevin Bacon:



You can then get really fancy and describe and actor/tress using what is called their "Bacon Number". So for the example above, Kevin Bacon's number is "0" (duh), Eli Wallach's number is "1" having starred directly with Kevin Bacon, and John Wayne's number is "2" having never starred with Bacon directly.

A very similar situation exists in my little world of neuroscience. There was one researcher, Sir Charles Sherrington, who is known as the father of modern neuroscience and who trained a number of very prominent neuroscientists in their own right. Some of these trainees and visiting collaborators included Sir John Eccles, Ragnar Granit, Thomas Grahm Brown, and Derek Denny-Brown.

I thought it would be a cool idea to examine the Six Degrees of Charles Sherrington. Then in the middle of writing this post I stumbled upon a nifty website called NeuroTree.org. This is a family tree for neuroscientists where people are connected by mentorship and collaboration as opposed to blood relations. This website deserves an entirely separate review but the one feature I found was "Distance". I entered my name as Person 1 and Charles Sherrington as Person 2, clicked update and...



And my Sherrington number would be "6", six degrees of Charles Sherrington. If you are a neuro-geek like me go ahead and use the "Distance" feature to see how removed you are from the father of neuroscience!

Before Thanksgiving...

Before Thanksgiving dinner, 172 pounds. After Thanksgiving dinner, 174 pounds. listen

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Time-Lapse Cadaver Dissection - Revisited

Two years ago I got very interested in making time-lapse movies. I found a lovely Mac app called Gawker that really puts out some good movies. One of my first subjects was a bird that had set up a nest in the gutter outside of my apartment window:



The comments on this video were interesting and critical, suggesting it was a waste of time and not very artistic. Oh well, I moved on to more cheery subject matter like the construction of a ginger bread house around Christmas of last year:



Then I had another idea, time-lapse dissection of human cadavers! I was always surprised at how much prep time is invested in making the cadavers presentable for an undergrad anatomy lab. Tons of tissue needs to be removed in order to reveal the interesting structures that lie below. After searching for awhile, it seemed as though no over has ever done this before. So I grabbed my camcorder and MacBook and took a trip to the cadaver lab. My first two videos can be seen here.

Now that the semester is winding down there will be a few free days in the cadaver lab for me to get in their and work with the cadavers. I was hoping to get some feedback on what region of the body people would like to see my record next. Take a moment to fill out this poll and the region with the highest number of votes will be dissected:

Optimizing SfN Poster Design Using Eye Tracking Software

This week I attended my second SfN meeting in Washington D.C. In my spare time between poster sessions, I walked the entire vendor exhibition section browsing for companies that I know of. One vendor that caught my eye (pun to be appreciated shortly) was SensoMotoric Instruments, a developer of eye-tracking software.

A very helpful company representative took time to discuss the details of how the software works despite no obvious benefit of implementing their software in my research.

Then it hit me. If this eye tracking software can be used by web-designers to optimize the layout of their web pages, surely it can be used by researchers to optimize the layout of their conference posters.

The following day I returned to their exhibition booth with a PDF of my poster loaded on a USB drive. The gentlemen helped me load my poster into their eye tracking software called BeGaze and a new "experiment was launched". I was the subject and I was seated in front of a 17 in monitor that had an infrared eye camera that could automatically detect eye gaze direction and head position.

The video below shows the path my eyes took when scanning my poster:



The larger the circle diameter, the longer time was spent focusing on that point.

Once this data was collected, various options exist to describe the way I viewed my own poster. One of which is the colorful Attention Map. The idea here is that the areas of my poster that had a longer gaze time have "warmer" colors:

Another view is the Focus Map, which shows all areas that I looked at ignoring the time spent. This way I can see what areas I didn't even pay attention to:

To go to another level of analysis, you can assign regions of interest (e.g., title, intro, results, discussion, etc.):

Then you can compare values of dwell time for a group of subjects and perform statistical analysis. I have made a graph here:

The data above are from one person, myself, but with more people viewing you may be able to get a real feel for what areas of your poster people focus on. You can also assess the path people take as they move through your poster and compare that to what you envisioned when you were putting it together in the lab.

I'm afraid I don't have the time to look into the application of this software to really fine-tuning your posters for next neuroscience. However, the representative at the booth was very excited at the prospect of setting up a kiosk at the SfN conference, having people load their poster file onto a computer, and then have the next 20 people that come scan their poster and collect data.

So if you see this next year at neuroscience you now know it came to be.