The Nature of this Blog

In three words: 'mid-PhD crisis'. When you stop thinking about doing something cool and ask why you are doing it at all. This blog is an online excerpt of lab conversations feat. Elias, serving both as a summary statement of the day's rant to us and to collect more thoughts on the matter. So if you read this, and have something relevant to say, do post.

By way of background, we feel trapped in a field that is content with describing, not explaining, phenomena. Auditory cortex research, though as old as visual cortex research, has not progressed at all (personal opinion) in it's 50-something years of existence. Some abandoned cortex in favor of sub-cortical structures to gather more insight. Others fled because the auditory system is 'a harder problem than vision' (more on that below). The few that stayed on have, well, stayed on - they haven't made much progress.

The one very valid reason for this sorry state of affairs is early fixation on the anesthetized preparation. Perhaps if people had thought of an awake prep, things would have progressed much faster. Other reasons you might commonly run into are always reduced to one of the following:

1) Audition is a far more complicated problem (the self-congratulatory, 'I'm trying so hard' answer: variations are 'Biology is so complex'/'A1 is like V4')
2) We cannot wait for a grand theory of things, we chip away and describe what we can
3) ... there is no third reason, wow

I guess what I'm saying is, auditory neurophysiologists are not phenomenologists by choice: they are phenomenologists by training.



[+/-] show/hide