How did you get into cognitive neuroscience?
I grew up in Woods Hole, Massachussets, a town that's full of biologists (like my father). We had lots of wild animals when I was a kid--skunks, raccoons, sea gulls--and there was lots of nature going on.
Later, as a biology major in college, I got sick of killing mice, so I looked around for labs where you didn't have to kill the studied object and ended up in the psychology department.
How do you do what you do?
In my lab, we've been using functional MRI, which is a brain-imaging technique, to scan people's brains while they look at different types of stuff. We try to figure out what processes have their own bit of brain allocated to them. It's great because it's like we are discovering pieces of the mind. And luckily we have all the equipment, so we usually can get an answer to a question within a couple of weeks. It's immediate gratification science.
One thing we are interested in now is how you represent an object in your head. The idea is that there is some kind of representation in your head of something you see, and we want to know what it is like. We use a technique, based on the fact that neural activity goes down if you look at the same thing twice in a row, to ask what counts as the same to each part of the brain. So, suppose I show you a stapler once, and then I show you the stapler three times as big. Is the neural activity going to go down because your brain thinks that is the same, or is it going to go up because it thinks that is different? By using this technique, we can ask essentially any question we want to about the nature of a representation.
How many people are involved in what you do?
There are about thirteen people working under me in my lab.
What do you like most or dislike most about cognitive neuroscience?
I really like teaching and research is a blast, but I find it very difficult to do both at once. I work around sixty hours a week, but there is still stuff that I just can't get to.
What was high school like? Were you into cognitive neuroscience?
During the summer, I would crash biology lectures in Woods Hole. But I left school halfway through my junior year because I thought it was a waste of time. I didn't have all the requirements for college, so I applied to a bunch and didn't get in anywhere except Wellesley College. That was much more interesting than high school.
What other things would you like to do? What else would you like to try?
Whenever I can, I travel to remote places and hike around. At work, we are just wandering into hearing and how people understand math.
Tell us about your work with face recognition.
People are social primates, so we care very much about who we are looking at. It's perhaps not too surprising that we have special-purpose machinery in the brain that we use to perceive faces.
