Vatsun meets the Committee

Well, I'm not sure why you'd be interested in how it went, but it went well... considering my incendiary slides (which included a graphic timeline of how much the world has moved on between 1975 and 2001, while A1 still obsessed over tonotopy). Let's call the committee members A - E (for obvious reasons, plus you'll have fun guessing who they are). 'A' and 'B' kinda looked upset over my trashing of A1 research, not to mention the statement I made about vocalizations being only a subset of natural stimuli. 'C' was mostly concerned that I was a 4th year student still making too specific hypotheses. 'D' was insightful but silent mostly. 'E' was the only person interested in my two-tonepip idea.

'A' graciously defended me citing all the effort I had put into my erstwhile doomed project, and gave me credit for building a new setup etc. Other than that, I guess we'd already spoken about most other things. B's reaction was more interesting. Initially he was sceptical, perhaps even a tad outraged (especially when I commented on unsubstantiated theories of an ex-postdoc of his), but eventually, conceded that he didn't have a better idea of studying the system either, so he might as well support me. Most of my argument with him centered on the dimensionality of audition: B made the commonly made point that the 'linear' STRF is actually the second-order Weiner kernel and therefore non-sync. neurons were possibly 3rd or 4th order, and I countered with my intuition for sound which is that once frequency channels are separated, it is essentially a first -order amplitude-time system.

'C' was mostly concerned that I would not be able to graduate. He wanted me to get some data, both from my old and new projects and describe something to get out. His concern about my hypotheses being too specific was valid. And, 'C' made the very insightful suggestion that perhaps I should incorporate natural statistics into my two tone-pip stimuli.

Not much else to say about 'D' and 'E'. I should talk to them more though, they probably have more ideas than I do on these matters. We'll see how it goes.




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