Appraisals of Cognitive Neuropsychology

Olaf Sporns Discovering the Human Connectome H aving just returned from the OHBM (Organization for Human Brain Mapping) it's not hard to be phenomenally ecstatic about the state of research and raring to apply new techniques and theories to my data.   There is much to be hopeful for; I encountered many brilliant people who are excited about their research and how neuroscience is helping to unlock the secrets of the mind. That said, there did seem to be a great deal of research that was following the coat-tails of last year's big ideas.  This year the "big thing" was graph theory - the branch of mathematics and computer science that was previously applied to other fields such as social network visualization and biology  by Olaf Sporns and applied to brain networks.   Graph theory works on the notion that you can reduce a matrix (normally a correlation matrix) to a set of nodes (which represent specific brain regions) and edges (which represent either phys...

Doctor of philosophy: that title carries a lot of weight.  It speaks of years  of struggle and deep thought on a very specific topic.  W ithin the academic community t he conferral of the title implies  a certain standard and a sense that we've been through the same rigorous process and made it out the other side (or at least will, for those of us still going through the process).   By talking to attendees of international conferences, I have reached the distinct impression that PhD programs vary incredibly - even within the same field.  Nowhere is this difference greater than the Europe/North-America divide.   In North America, a doctorate is a nominally four year program (assuming you're in the sciences - we won't speak of the humanities where it's not unusual for some people to take seven years to finish).  This is usually  after   the conferral of a masters degree meaning that the typical North American Doctoral student w...