Brain-imaging in Japanese

When I got to Mitani this morning, dressed as "Spidey Santa", the school nurse Kuboyama-sensei had newspaper clippings for me.

Last week, when Kamitani's "Neuron" paper came out on Thursday it made the front page of the Asahi Shinbun (目で見た文字や図形、脳活動からコンピューターが再現 "Letters and Shapes seen with the eye are recreated from brain activity by a computer.") The Asahi is kind of like Japan's NYTimes, one of the two most-read national newspapers, with the Yomiuri. It was also written-up on page 3 of the more local Sanyou Shinbun. Both had some great manga like the ones I've doodled in my notebooks, to illustrate how brain-imaging and pattern classification work. A person imagining a snowman, having his brain decoded and the snowman reproduced on a computer screen. The headlines mention mental images, too: "Dreams and fantasies we can see" was the headline of one:夢や空想見えれかも, yume ya kuusou mierekamo. It's exciting to see the experiment start popping up in the real-world press.

I haven't spotted anything in the mainstream U.S. media yet, but it popped up on pink tentacle through digg.com if anybody wants to read something in English that's not hardcore technical jargon. My friend Adam mentioned the experiment on a train on Saturday, after reading about it on Digg, without ever having heard of it from me ;-)

I spent all afternoon learning how to say things like "brain-imaging", "changes in cerebral blood flow", and "functional magnetic resonance imaging" in Japanese. It's exciting to be learning the vocabulary, and even kanji, I'd need to talk about my thesis in Japan. Let me know if you guys spot the study anywhere else.

p.s. No newspaper yet has mentioned the foreigner who provided mild grammatical help and was credited in small print on page 33. Most papers, true to Japanese style, don't even mention the main author of the paper. Just Kamitani, since he's the 研究室長、the head of the lab. No credit to the little guys...

Simstim

Definitely the coolest science cover I've seen ;-) That roll of "brain film" is actual pictures reproduced from visual-cortex activity, of what people were seeing or reading. This is the first time my name's appeared in a scientific journal. In a brain-reading study from Yuki Kamitani's lab in Kyoto called "Visual image reconstruction from human brain activity." I'm the only non-Japanese name on the paper! I'm credited in the acknowledgments section on the last page for "manuscript editing" (fixing English prepositions and overuse of the word "the", mostly; very scientific). I can send anybody a copy if you're interested to read it.

The paper gets pretty technical in parts, but at least take a look at the first two figures. These are two of the clearest images of brain-pattern classification I've seen, like cartoons of how this science is done. And the pictures of the word "NEURON" reconstructed in real-time from visual-cortex brain activity are eery. I love how the figures illustrate the power of the technique both scientifically-- in terms of "mean square errors"-- and viscerally, in the form of the actual images being decoded direct from the brain. I'm excited to have been attached to this paper in any way, even if my only contribution was English prepositions and articles (If you read a particularly well-used "the", "of", or "in", that may have been me ;-). I really think this is a paradigm shift in brain-imaging... Gone are the days of flaky region-of-interest studies pointing to a hunk of cortex "representing language" or "emotion". If you like this one, definitely check out the Mitchell, 2007 paper from Carnegie Mellon. Those people are decoding words-- novel nouns that the classifier's never seen before!-- from brain pattern's, by defining "meaning" in terms of a noun's frequency of co-ocurrence with certain sensory-motor verbs. Language theory meets biology meets computer science in a really thrilling way.

Speaking of speech. I heard today on the November "Neuropod" podcast on this year's Society For Neuroscience conference (SfN; the conference I went to in Atlanta in senior year; this year in DC) that a neuroscientist and a brain surgeon at BU, Frank Gunter and Dr. Kennedy, have designed a brain-machine interface that can decode speech sounds from neural activity. Speech from thought! Our work is connected to this-- the ultimate clinical goal for all brain-pattern-classification work, like my Spidey experiment in Ken's lab-- to help brain- damaged people regain use of speech and motion and their senses.

This speech-decoder is an implanted electrode in the brain of a guy in Georgia with "locked-in syndrome", who's paralyzed except for his eyes. The coolest part about the brain chip is that it's a "neurotrophic device", meaning that it's filled with nerve food-- neurotrophic factors, nutrients for neurons. So, the axons of the nerves actually grow inside the chip, stitching it in place so it doesn't move relative to the brain. A genuine neural cyborg! The hope is that within five years, this locked-in man who hasn't been able to speak beyond yes/no eye-blinks for years, might be able to talk at speech-speed through a computer's synthesized voice. Amazing stuff huh?

If anyone's interested to hear the podcast, it's the November edition here. Neuropod is the journal Nature Neuroscience's monthly podcast, and I love it. It's at a layman's enough level that someone pretty interested in brain science would get something out of it, and it clues you into the latest cutting edge in research if you happen to not be in academia... So I can get cool new articles sent to me from Greg, my grad student buddy back at Princeton. Brain still hungry for brain. and stomach for dinner.

best from the paddies and brains of japan,
T

夢 Obama's election across the world.

I was hanging my Spidey suit out to dry one evening last week when my neighbor walked by with his dog and introduced himself.

He asked in Japanese if I was American, then whether I support Obama or McCain. When I said Obama, his response was immediate: "If Obama is elected, he will be assassinated." I raised an eyebrow, he explained: "In America, there are lots of guns." I didn't understand the Japanese word for 'assassinate', or was surprised he'd used it, so he held up his hand like a gun to show what he meant. "Like Kennedy, or King-san. Same thing. America is a dangerous place." I finished hanging my Spidey mask, shook the guy's hand and said I'd see him around.

Spiderman told my kids today about America's election, as I taught my last Halloween lessons in costume. I told them Obama had been elected, by 7 million votes, and about the Obama and Sarah Palin jack-o-lanters my Dad carved for last Friday night. I told them the most popular Halloween costumes in the U.S. are monsters, super-heroes, jobs like policeman, doctor and teacher, and this year, Obama and McCain costumes. (Obama costumes sold more than McCain's, according to the BBC). The kids seemed pretty excited at the idea of America's first black president. One second-grade girl, Megumi-chan, said she wanted to vote for Obama too. Her teacher had to tell her she can't vote for President, because she's Japanese. It was sad. At lunch one of the 6th graders asked me a lot of questions about America's political system and history, and quoted Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" (just that sentence, not the speech...). His teacher seemed interested, too, to teach me about Japan's political process, parties, and legislature, and to ask me about ours.

I got a cellphone e-mail after school from my Korean friend Minhee in Japanese, congratulating America on Obama's election. The subject line said 夢 yume: dream. Her message, in emoticons, Japanese characters, and one English sentence, said:

オハヨー [pink music note] [Ohayo = Good morning!]

オバマの当選おめでとう [yellow star] [Congratulations on Obama's election]

We can do it!
感動的だったよ [This makes me believe "we can do it!". I was very moved. [smiley face]]

今日も頑張ってね [Today too, let's do our best, eh? [Minhee's signature winking girl with rabbit ears]

Getting Minhee's message made it worth living abroad on Obama's election night. The excitement being generated by one man in Chicago is palpable on the other side of the globe.

* * *

The school nurse this morning at Nakagawa Shougakko seemed moved by Obama's victory, and envious of me as an American. She told me that Japan's prime minister (大統領　daitouryou; same kanji as "daimyou", feudal lord) is not popularly elected. "Citizens don't choose our leader in Japan," she said in Japanese. She added that she wants to see change in Japan, but it doesn't happen here.

Japan's prime minister is chosen by the Diet: The head of the party with the most seats in the two-house legislature becomes president of the country. These representatives are elected by the citizens, but only about 50% of Japan's eligible voters tend to show up, and the same conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party (自民党　Jimintou) has run Japan's government continuously since World War II. Almost every prime minister since the war had been a bureacrat in the pre-war government, or a descendant of one, the same aristocratic old boys' network, and the government is overwhelmingly male. Only 7.5% of the Diet is women. In the 2002 election, 10% of the candidates were women but only 5% got elected, despite more than half of the voters being women! In the time from 1989 to 2001, when America had 3 presidents, Japan had no fewer than TWELVE prime ministers-- each forced to resign after a few months or years because of corruption scandals or a vote of no-confidence. Pork-barrel meetings behind closed-doors among old men in suits is really how politics are done in Japan. The Japanese people seem generally apathetic. Almost no Japanese people I've met have political opinions. Most, when you ask, will tell you straight: "I don't care about politics" or "I'm not interested in government."

At taiko practice last night, I asked my friend Yasu why Japanese people aren't more political. I asked in particular about Japan's "Peace Constitution" (平和憲法), which has barely been modified from the version written by the Americans 60 years ago. Yasu shrugged and said "We don't care. It's so old." So it is... but there was a time when it wasn't old, and no one seems to have cared then either. The Constitution is a living document, anyway-- it's the basis of Japanese law. But honestly, no one here cares. "Popular sovereignty" isn't a felt ideal in Japan-- personal freedom and responsibility isn't a political tradition here, and the people here don't seem to feel civic responsibility, or political power. Nationalistic, sometimes racist pride at the purity of the Japanese race, yes, but not civic responsibility, not active involvement in the political process.

Many Japanese politicians don't even have responsible political views. Many are outright right-wing nationalists, and revisionist history deniers-- and few in Japan seem bothered by this. The Prime Minster at the time when we were born, Nakasone (still a popular political figure), said in a speech in 1986 that Japanese are more intelligent than people from multiracial societies, because unlike the U.S., their blood is not tainted by Hispanics and blacks. Nakasone also was the first PM to visit Yasukuni Shrine, which honors war dead from WWII including convicted war criminals, angering Koreans and Chinese and blurring the line back into official state Shinto. The current prime minister, Aso Tarou, refuses to acknowledge the Korean "comfort women" who were kept as prostitutes by Japanese soldiers in the War, supports the textbook revisions (教科書 作る買い、kyoukasho tsukuru kai) to omit teaching the history of Japan's wartime atrocities in schools. Some of his ministers have denied the Nanjing Massacre, including his tourism minister who was dismissed a month ago for saying that "Japanese don't like foreigners" and that Japan is a proudly mono-ethnic society. The mayor of Tokyo, Ishihara Yoshitsune, is probably the most disturbing. He has repeatedly said that Korea wanted Japan to take it over during its occupation from 1910-1945, and suggested that many Asian countries are better off now, having been Japanese colonies, whereas European and American former colonies are floundering. He also believes that the U.S. used the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima rather than on Germany for racist reasons, ignoring the not insignificant fact that atomic bombs were not tested until July 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Ishihara is allowed to say racist nationalistic nonsense like this, and nobody within Japan speaks up. Nobody cares.

The nurse's Obama enthusiasm today made me appreciate how rare our "we the people" politics truly is. I feel lucky to have been born American.

Democracy as Science: truth is provisional

Absolutes are anathema to scientists, and liberals. James Madison, the great experimenter-founder of America, stitched the ephemerality, the mutability of all truth into the very fabric of our government, in what Joseph Ellis calls the "evolutionary revolution" of America's founding (American Creation, 3-19).

When I read about James Madison's political philosophy last month in Ellis' American Creation ("The Argument" p. 87-126), I realized that Madison envisioned politics as a scientist would. He founded American government on progressive renewal-- the belief that principles must be challenged continually in order to remain vital, that conflict would stabilize not weaken a democracy, that no politics of individual liberty remains free if it calcifies into conservative doctrine, but must be kept "true" by being debated, questioned, tested. As in the peer review process of science, where any theory is validated with experimental evidence and old theories are continually tested, clarified, sharpened, modernized, by new experiments, American politics should be forever a work in progress.

Obama, as an expert on constitutional law, understands this:
"Its not just absolute power that the founders sought to guard against. Implicit in the Constitution's structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth — the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or 'ism', any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course."
(From The Audacity of Hope, quoted here.)

Science's assumption about the nature of "truth" is that it doesn't exist. All facts are provisional on experimental evidence. This is why it is silly when Creationists argue that evolution is "just" a theory. That's right, it is a theory, as is all of human knowledge-- but it happens to be a theory that is supported by more empirical evidence, replicable experimental evidence, than, say, the "theory" of Intelligent Design (which isn't a theory because it poses no testable hypotheses to verify). Churchill might have said about natural selection what he did about government: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried". Yes, it's just a theory, inferior perhaps to absolute truth, but it is better than any other theory we've come up with yet-- including the theory of an absolute truth. Scientific "knowledge" is a liquid rather than a solid form of fact, adaptable rather than brittle. It is a body of temporary claims, that today's scientist realizes may be overturned, or better put, re-framed, by the discoveries of tomorrow. We work to make our picture of the world ever clearer, recognizing that the scientists of the future will see a different world than the one we see now, and will adapt our contribution to that newer, more modern reality.

Madison envisioned American politics like this, as a laboratory, "an institutionalized forum for everlasting debate" (125). He came to believe that the best resolution to the argument over central versus state sovereignty was to leave it unresolved, forever . In fact to institutionalize the conflict, to make the tension permanent. That way, competing factions would continually negotiate compromise between two opposing visions of America, allowing neither to dominate unchallenged. John Adams used the same logic in distributing powers among the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches of government, and in keeping the Judiciary independent of the federal government. A distributed network of competing interests insured against consolidation of power, and against political stultification. Ideas that are being constantly debated-- "peer reviewed" in the science language-- never have the chance to calcify into unquestioned facts or political cudgels.

"The genius of Madison's argument," as Ellis writes, "for a version of sovereignty that was at once shared and divided raised the wholly pragmatic and politically painful compromises reached at the Constitutional Convention to the level of a novel political discovery: to wit, the notion that government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated" (p. 123).

The role of government: Not to provide answers, but to provide a framework in which the questions can continue to be debated. Discussed. Sounds an awful lot like the kind of world Obama sees.

Hopefully we'll all live in that world, starting tomorrow.

Country of Possibilities: Our liberal mandate

My ex writing prof Roger Cohen writes about American Stories in today's NYTimes. How America is the only country on Earth where Obama's story could be possible. Why Obama stands to bring hope and credibility back to the American ideal, its "twin badges" of liberty and capitalism, of equal rights and possibilities for all-- races, religions, nationalities, classes, sexualities-- that America is supposed to represent. Undermined by 8 years of Bush conservatism, and the cartoonishly fundamentalist "Good versus Evil" world view that goes with it.

Roger's take on Obama made me think of my dad's favorite historian Joe Ellis, who writes the following in his great latest book "American Creation".

"America's founding succeeded [in that] against all odds, the most liberal nation-state in the history of Western Civilization was now firmly embedded in the most extensive and richly endowed plot of land on the planet. The plot itself was providential, a function of geographic and chronological good fortune. The political shape of the emerging American nation was a more human creation, flawed as all human creations must be, most notably in its prevailing racial prejudices and its inability to envision the multicultural ideal we now take for granted.
"But the design of the political foundation was ingenious in its combination of stability and agility, most especially its prudent placement of an explanding liberal mandate at the start that left room, up ahead, for an Abraham Lincoln and a Martin Luther King to join the list of founders. In that sense, perhaps the most creative act of the founding era was to make time as well as space an indispensable ally, in effect extending the founding moment everlastingly into the future." (

Next Tuesday could be America's 21st century founding moment, and we will be a part of it. I'm convinced if Obama is elected, America's "expanding liberal mandate" will have taken a historic leap that will be remembered forever in the history of our founding-- a leap towards a globalist, progressive, genuinely egalitarian world society. When another Joseph Ellis comes along in 300 years, Obama and the diplomatic, open outlook he'll bring to American foreign policy, will be added to that list of liberalism's founding moments. We're here, now, to be a part of it. We can describe it to our kids and grandkids when they read it in their history books. Our potentially multi-lingual, multi-colored American kids, whose world, thanks to the ever-expanding power of the Internet, will be so much bigger than ours has ever been able to be.

With hope.
T

America's Election in Japanese Cartoons

I'm jealous you guys get to be in America next Tuesday night.

This week's 小学校毎日新聞Mainichi Shinbun elementary-school newspaper has a front page story on the American election. The illustration is a manga of Obama and McCain over a map of the American voters, including Spiderman, Batman, and Superman near NYC, a cowboy out west, a Johnny Depp-ish pirate for Owen's mom, two (gay?) male sailors holding hands; a black jazz trumpeter and a basketball player; some football and baseball players, a boxer, a gangster, a priest and a nun, a few news broadcasters, King Kong, Mickey Mouse, and a big bald eagle. Makes me miss my country, Spidey, Louis Armstrong, and The Godfather in particular.

The article explains, to a Japanese elementary schooler and me, that America's election process is complicated because America is a 連ぽ国家 (renpotsu/kokka), a union of states nation: "America" is a "country" (国 kuni) but also 50 separate states gathered together. There's a great manga showing McCain and Obama's heads poking over the American flag, both sweating with voices merged saying "It's complicated". A speech bubble runs from the stars, saying "The 50 states' voters choose". Next to the speech bubble, in front of the stripes, stand five men and women representing the "538人" electoral college voters, and an arrow runs from them back to the two candidates above, with a speech bubble saying "The candidate who obtains 270 or more people is elected." Absolutely the most clear representation of the electoral process I've ever seen... in a Japanese newspaper for 10 year olds.

The kids' newspaper reminds me why comics are such an awesome communication tool. I see the manga on the covers of the kids' newspaper tacked on the school bulletin board every day, and if it's an interesting story-- about politics, or a neuroscientist, or "What was life like for grandpa?", about Japanese history during WWII-- I copy the article and spend my free period translating the kanji in it. That's how I've learned the characters for "neuron", "development", "green fluorescent protein", "gene", and now "Democrat", "Republican", and "election".

I also learned today the reason our election day is on Tuesday. Since America is a Christian country (クリスト教の国, "Ku-ri-su-to　kyo no kuni", country of Christ's teachings) where the president-elect puts his hand on the Bible at his inauguration, we could never have Election Day on the "day of repose”、安息日, Sunday, like they do in Japan. (Japanese people are mind-boggled that Americans vote on a weekday, because they can't imagine how any voter with a job could make it home for dinner with his family before 10pm, let alone to a voting booth, on a day of work.) Why not Monday you ask? well, since our country is freaking gynormous-- about 25 times the size of Japan-- and covers a few time zones, we don't want to encroach on Californians' day of rest either (at least, I think that's what it says). So we vote on Tuesdays.

I'm very jealous that you guys will get to sit around a TV, Super-Bowl style, with your friends next Tuesday night, with beers (Dogfishhead! god I miss you), Doritos and pizzas, and shout at the TV (or celebrate all night if the results are obvious fast, knock on wood), as the votes are tallied. But there's something interesting about viewing this election from abroad, too. I never figured I'd be learning Japanese from the American electoral process, but now that I have, I'm damn sure never gonna forget it. Especially when Obama wins.

Did you know that next year will be the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, and the Lincoln Memorial, founded in 1922 in DC, will be re-dedicated by the new president on May 22? No black people were invited to Lincoln's 100-year birthday party in Illinois. Few were at the opening of the memorial either, where Lincoln was praised by the Republican president as the preserver of the union, not freer of the slaves. As Thomas Mallon put it in a great article, "Set In Stone: Abraham Lincoln and the politics of memory":
"The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed-- measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps-- in the fourscore and seven years since 1922."

Breathtaking stuff. Wish I were with you, and Obama, on Tuesday night.

P.S. This American Life ran a great show this week on the Obama and McCain campaigns' competition in Pennsylvania-- "Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle", as James Carville put it. An interesting microcosm of the country as a whole, on the brink before next Tuesday. By the time of Ira Glass' next episode, we'll have a new president.

Green tech rising

My dad sent me this NYT mag article, Capitalism to the Rescue, to cheer me up about investment. It's about Kleiner-Perkins, the venture capital firm that funded Google and now invests in scientists working on renewable energy. I find it inspiring as a former/ maybe-future scientist, to learn that this progressive, pro-fundamental science current is so strong in America's financial world. The money-gamblers aren't all cynics, some have hope to invest in basic science exploration. Here's an inspiring American financial story in the midst of the economic meltdown. It's an interesting point that the reason, other than Wall Street, that the U.S. financial world is unique is based in California, not New York. It's our venture capital/ tech/ science culture, and it's the reason why I've never been sold on the case people make that American cultural influence in general is on the wane worldwide. We're at a cutting edge that matters.