새의 생리학에서 뇌 과학까지: fusiform face area를 찾아서

From birds to brains: My twisted (and very lucky) path to the fusiform face area As told by Nancy Kanwisher Mine is not one of those inspiring stories of people who found their way to science against all odds. I grew up in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where science was handed to me on a platter, from the Children's School of Science to the summer courses one could just walk into uninvited, to the library of the Marine Biology Labs which was open at all hours every day of the year, to the Friday Evening Lectures, the place to see and be seen in town. My first publication, on the physiology of diving birds, was co-authored with my dad a field biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and his then-student Geir Wing Gabrielsen, now of the Norwegian Polar Institute (Figure 1). Adventures in Norway In fact, an important part of my introduction to science took place in Norway. Long after my dad had pissed off pretty much all of his colleagues in the U.S., he still had scientific friends in Norway, and he travelled there regularly to collaborate with them. I first visited Norway when he brought our family on one of these trips. He bought an old Norwegian fishing boat in ill repair named the "Nordlys." I remember boarding the boat in Bergen harbor, where we feasted on smoked mackerel from the fish market and then headed down the coast on a voyage that was glorious, memorable and quite dangerous. A few years later my dad was planning an expedition to study ptarmigans on the island of Karlsoy near Tromso with Geir and several other scientists. I wanted to join, but there was no funding to bring an unskilled 17-year-old along, and flights to Norway were expensive. So, I got a cheap flight to Amsterdam, where I bought a bicycle and made my way to Tromso by a combination of pedal-power and train, including a thrilling bike ride over the Dovrefjell from Oslo to Trondheim. On Karlsoy, we lived in an old farmhouse, and went tromping across the island under the midnight sun to run field experiments on nesting ptarmigans. Working in Molly Potters lab As an undergrad at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) majoring in biology, I struggled. Despite my privileged early exposure to science, I had not learned much in public high school and I was simply not prepared for MIT. I worked in a lab studying differentiation of blood cells, but I did not enjoy killing a mouse for each experiment. So, I sought refuge in a department where they did not kill their subjects: the (then) MIT Psychology Department. There I worked in the lab of Molly Potter, a towering intellect of cognitive psychology and also a warm, fun, and supportive mentor who fished me off the bottom of the wait list for grad school a year later. My dad was scandalized that I planned to study psychology, which in his mind had all the rigor of astrology. But my dad was wrong. I learned from Molly how to make powerful inferences about the inner workings of the mind from humble behavioral data, which is a bit like trying to figure out how a car works just by driving it around. Still, in cognitive science, as in auto mechanics, there is no substitute for looking under the hood. During my first year in grad school, the first noninvasive brain imaging study of human visual cortex was published on the cover of Science magazine, showing a very blurry yellow blob at the back of the head when people looked at patterned visual stimuli compared to diffuse illumination. I was blown away. I wrote a proposal to use this device to answer a suite of questions about the mind, and sent it to all the brain imaging labs in the world (there were four). Does mental imagery engage the same brain machinery as visual perception? Does attention modulate responses early in the visual processing pathway? Where in the brain do we match incoming visual information with stored descriptions of what familiar objects look like? I gave a draft of the proposal to Molly, and she was furious. In her mind I was "selling out" to neuroscientists who failed to understand the power of behavioral data in revealing the mechanisms of the mind. But she got over herself the next day and has supported my efforts to answer cognitive questions with brain data ever since. "I got frustrated and dropped out of graduate school three times to pursue journalism instead". The luck turned Only one of the brain imaging labs wrote back, and soon thereafter the trail went cold. Meanwhile I ran behavioral experiments on sentence understanding and visual perception. The questions were exciting and the experimental logic appealing, but most of my experiments bombed. For years. I got frustrated and dropped out of graduate school three times to pursue journalism instead. I once spent a month in Nicaragua at the peak of the contra war hitchhiking around in army jeeps and interviewing Sandinista officials in my abysmal Spanish. Molly was ever patient, insisting that my experimental ideas were good and that I was just unlucky with the data. Eventually my luck turned, and a weird but powerful perceptual phenomenon landed in my lap. When people read strings of words presented rapidly in "rapid serial visual presentation," a method Molly had pioneered, they failed to see the second occurrence of a repeated word (even when several other words intervened). Molly and her colleague Helene Intraub, who had first discovered this phenomenon, kindly allowed me to try to get to the bottom of it for my Ph.D. thesis. Nine months and seventeen experiments later I handed in my thesis on "repetition blindness." To celebrate, I spent the next four months travelling in Nepal and Indonesia. The fun and success of working on a newly-discovered and whopping perceptual effect arrived after I had already decided that I was not going to make it in science. Meanwhile, important world problems loomed, and I spent the next year studying nuclear strategy with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in Peace and International Security, trying to diagnose the cognitive biases that perpetuated misconceptions about U.S. foreign and military policy. Although fascinating, I eventually decided that cognitive biases were not the primary drivers of bad policy, and it made more sense to pursue political activism and science separately. I applied for and received an NIH "FIRST" Award to continue my work on repetition blindness. The brilliant Anne Treisman kindly enabled me to bring this work to Berkeley where I pursued the connections between repetition blindness (the failure to link one perceptual feature with two distinct object representations) and Anne's work on illusory conjunctions (the failure to correctly link two features to a single object representation). That work went well enough that I was offered a faculty position at UCLA a couple years later. I think I had a grand total of two publications at the time. It was so much easier back then to land a faculty position! One of my future colleagues explained to me that they had tried but failed to hire the great Mike Posner, and I was their "poor man's Mike Posner." I was flattered. My first brain imaging experiment All this time I had been trying unsuccessfully to claw my way into brain imaging centers to ask questions about perception using brain data. Then in my first semester at UCLA I got a phone call from John Mazziotta, the scientist who had published the paper in Science that blew me away in grad school. John ran the UCLA PET imaging lab and said that they needed a psychologist to consult on a grant. I agreed and reminded him that the experiments I had pitched to him long ago had still not been done and still had great potential. This back and forth went on for the next year, until one day John called to say that he needed a letter of collaboration faxed over that afternoon . I said, John, give me two subjects! That was how I got to do my first brain imaging experiment, a decade after I first started angling for the opportunity. "He