Feb

Guest Post: Marcel Just is more important than the new president

Good morning readers. Today’s entry is a guest post from an anonymous contributor (and does not in any way reflect the opinions of the PLB editorial board).

“Recent research by Marcel Just has found exactly where the brain resides: apparently, it’s somewhere in the head but don’t ask me where exactly because I’m not a neuroscientist.

Anyhow, this groundbreaking research, which results from the jobs of many vigorous hands and minds, is so important it overshadows the announcement of the new president at CMU. Look (screenshot above), there is our new spiritual and fiscal leader in the tiny little box at the bottom right hand corner of the webpage – literally towered over by Marcel. Indeed, so large is Marcel that it is expected that he will soon be given the title Emperor, Czar, or God of Psychology. Expect a Survey Monkey poll in the next few weeks to determine which of these titles will adorn Dr. Just’s office in the future.” –Anonymous

88 days ago Short URL Comments

Marcel Just

Jan

Marcel Just Stumped By Kotovsky’s Brain

Marcel Just’s latest efforts to decode the semantic organization of the human brain hit an apparent snag last week.

Dr. Just (shown left above) was in search of a test subject to try out some new tweaks on his fMRI decoder algorithm. This program promised a more efficient readout of neural activity from fMRI signals that could predict what a subject was thinking while in the scanner.

Ken Kotovsky (shown at right above) just happened to be walking back from Schatz when he ran into Dr. Just.

“I was just walking by, you know, and Marcel asked if I had anything to do this afternoon,” said Dr. Kotovsky, “I thought… why the hell not?”

Unfortunately, after only a few minutes in the scanner, it became apparent that something was not working properly.

“You know, it was the strangest thing,” said Dr. Just, “No matter what stimulus we gave him to think about in the scanner, we got the strangest output from the decoder.”

At this point Dr. Just holds up a list of visual stimuli presented to the test subject (Dr. Kotovsky) and the predicted image generated by the computer (shown below). ”No matter what we showed him, the computer kept coming back with images of essentially the same thing!”

No word yet as to whether the error resided in the algorithm modifications or the test subject.