Physicists, What Is That Going to Buy You?

This is our second episode with Jack Gallant, PhD, a neuroscientist and engineer. Jack is currently a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Class of 1940 Endowed Chair at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The first podcast with him delved so deeply into his approach to assessing fMRI data and his philosophy of doing good science and good fMRI that Peter felt they didn’t get a chance to talk about Jack’s groundbreaking results and what questions they open up. In this episode, Peter and Jack discuss his fascinating and potentially paradigm shifting results on widely distributed, semantic maps in the brain that shift and warp depending on the task itself. Peter’s perspective is that these results open up new avenues for insight into fundamentals of brain organization. The brain is not just a conglomeration of distinct and static modules, but a shifting landscape of representation, much of which may be shaped primarily by our experience in the world. How we or our attention shifts these landscapes is an open and potentially profound question.  Peter and Jack also discuss prospects for layer fMRI as well as the challenges of clinical MRI.