i remember Tom Schofield

2017 is coming to an end. it's been a good year. i've made some great new friends - you know who you are, though many of you 'civilians' probably won't be bothering to read this junk here. it's all good. it's been a productive year too. mostly becoz i work with some seriously amazing people in the lab. i'd like to think i myself have done a fair bit too, but there's one piece of writing i've been putting off till this very last day....

in year 2005, i went to London to do my postdoc. after years of being that awkward, lonely foreigner grad student in Oxford, by then i sort of knew how to socialize. but i was still all kinds of messed up - self-conscious, self-obsessed, competitive, junenvile. a lot of growing up was done in London. for this reason i sometimes call the city my spiritual home. and if a spiritual home came with a spiritual guide, that would be Tom. though he probably never would have approved of that title.

Tom was one of my best of best friends. we hung out all the time. we drank, we fought, we laughed, and had a lot of good times together.

when he left us in 2010, i just clammed up. i couldn't make it to the funeral. the emotions were too raw. they still are. but it's about time i have to write this. coz it's already 7 years overdue.

sorry mate, i would buy you a pint if i saw you in Hell; i’m sure they wouldn’t do half-pints there.

***

months after Tom died, people wrote about what a great budding scientist &  serious researcher he was. to be totally honest i'm not really sure how he would feel about it. he would probably brush it aside and shrug and whatever. i guess secretly he would be flattered too.  but really, the image of a dedicated square of a scholar wasn't quite exactly the Tom i knew. of coz he was intellectually brilliant. but he was more interesting than that. and wiser too.

Tom was the know-it-all about the city, though he really specialized in one kind of most useful knowledge: where to find interesting places to drink. i don't wanna glorify alcoholism, but it was back in England where the standards were a bit... different. pubs closed at 11pm so there's always this sense of urgency there. eating would be wasting precious drinking time, so mostly we drank on empty stomachs, which also has the advantage of maximizing the effective potency of the drinks. official starting time should be 5pm, but now and then we had a little pre-game. once my boss saw us leaving the building early at around 3pm and we causally said we were going to the 'library' (i hope he's not reading this now).

there was one time we wrestled on the streets near Centre Point. i hesistate to tell you all how it started. it has something to do with my making fun of him after he dropped his jacket into a puddle of piss. he was a head taller than me and then some, but somehow i survived. thankfully nobody wins wrestling matches in that kind of state we were in. 

we got ourselves into all kinds of troubles all the times. we got denied entry to clubs, almost getting kicked out from places. let's say, we were downright stupid given we were neurosicentists who should know better what binge drinking could do to our brains. 

but binging wasn't the point. having fun and something outside of work to do was. there was a period of time i wasn't drinking and Tom would ask: "would you like to go to that posh hotel and drink an overpriced pot of tea?" so off we sneaked out from work early in the afternoon again.

another time i did a downright lousy presentation at work. Tom realized something was off and asked if i wanted to go play pool. so off we went. 

soon it became obvious that he was saving me from going mental over work stuff. he was a few years older, and had worked in the 'real world' before he returned to academia. he had a more mature outlook to life. he had his frustration at work too - all the usual about being paid minimum wage as a grad student, etc. but mostly we talked about life, relationships, music (we both loved Suede), interesting places to go to - stuff that are no less important & good for a change.

it was on that one rare occasion that we talked about work stuff at all, that i told him i wanted to write a book. strangely, instead of telling me to have another drink, he was all supportive. it was at that point that i realized he was no less into science than i was. it's just that he saw through the meaninglessness of the cutthroat culture, the rat race of chasing after big journals, accolades, glory and all that stupid stuff. we do science becoz we care. we compete if we have to, but we should aim to do it on our own terms. not taking ourselves too seriously at work doesn't mean we don't take work seriously. 

thank you, older brother. we all miss you.

more on IIT, and ASSC (our annual conference) as Xmas

been meaning to write this note for a while. sorry to my colleague Julia Crone @ UCLA for postponing it for so long. the last few months have really been brutal.

when i posted this piece on IIT, i realize that the first-author of one of the papers i mentioned is a colleague at UCLA, working in my good friend Martin Monti's lab. so i wrote to Julia to ask about her opinion, as to whether she thought her paper really supported IIT, as it may sound like in places.

as i suspected, the answer is no, she doesn't really think so. in her exact words: "I believe that theories of consciousness just as any other cognitive theory should be addressed with a straightforward experimental design that speak for or against the theory of question. In such a scenario, it is indeed possible to ask whether the results are supportive of IIT or not. However, using complex, data-driven approaches in a messy patient population with a whole bunch of primary and secondary processes that affect the BOLD signal does not allow to test a theory of consciousness. Moreover, the results most likely reflect the level of cognition in patients which may or may not lead to a total breakdown of consciousness." (all emphases mine)

obviously i find much to agree with Julia's very sensible reply. but if so, why did i quote her as if her study was intended to be in support of IIT? i didn't actually say so, not exactly. i just took a quote directly from her paper: "disturbances in [connectivity between certain brain regions] have severe impact on information integration and are reflected in deficits in cognitive functioning probably leading to a total breakdown of consciousness” (emphasis mine)

in correspondence Julia clarified that she referred to information integration as a general notion related to complexity of networks, not specifically related to IIT: "Please also keep in mind that graph theoretical metrics such as local efficiency (differentiating patients in this study) are measuring the degree of local information integration of specific central hubs but are not equivalent to the concept of Phi or other complexity measures which may be more suitable to address IIT" (emphasis mine). i think that makes perfect sense. so i feel i owe it to her to clarify that her position here: she isn't one of the 'believers' thinking that her study supported IIT (or falsified it, for that matter).

however, in meetings, i have also seen how this study as well as similar others have been cited as evidence in support of IIT. i guess sometimes that's what matters: how things are interpreted, perceived, discussed over coffee breaks, inspired new studies, impacted young people's career decisions, etc etc. in this case, it sounds like it just wasn't the authors' intention, but it might have been taken as such all the same.

like i said in the original post, how to interpret that individual finding specifically is just a small part of the issue. we have more things to worry about IIT and the status of the field in general. that post is really about the frontline culture, our image in the media, how our colleagues see us, and ultimately how it all matters.

***

since this is end of the year.....looking back, that post on IIT might have been one of the more serious pieces of writing i've done this year. 'serious' may sound funny coz it's not even published officially, in a peer-reviewed journal or something.

but as some of you have guessed, the materials there will become part of Chapter 1 of the book, in which i will justify why we should only focus on a few theories but not an extensive survey of everything that's been said about consciosuness; at the risk of sounding ruder than i intend.. much of it just isn't worth our trouble.

the post was for this reason also 'serious' in another sense. as i mentioned, i owe huge debts to both Christof and Giulio, intellectual and otherwise. many of the other more junior proponents of IIT (e.g. Ryota Kanai, Melanie Boly, Nao Tsuchiya) are also good friends - friends with whom we sort of grew up together, all the way from when we were starry eyed grad students trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.

i have often likened ASSC to xmas, time of the year when you have to see all your cousins, both the beloved and annoying ones alike, catching up on how well we've done lately, repair and renew old bonds as needed, introduce new members of the family to others, etc.

what does it mean to criticize each others' work so harshly when you actually see them as good friends or even families? this is a question i asked myself many many times, and perhaps more frequently this year than in previous years. in the next few post, i'll talk about this more.

new lab webpage

Ned Block told me my lab web really needed updating. so here it is...

https://sites.google.com/view/hakwan-lau-lab

end of the year.... should have done this earlier for the grad admission cycle. but we aren't really in recruitment mode this year. rather nice to be able to take stock right before the holidays.

in the next few posts i'll post more updates and reflections on what we've done this year too.