Center For the Neural Basis of Cognition

Steve Gotts
Personal Webpage

The relationship between mind and brain is fascinating, but it is difficult to study because it spans so many different traditional disciplines within academics. When I first started applying to graduate programs, I noticed that a number of places had a specialization in something like cognitive neuroscience within a particular department with a few faculty participating. However, very few programs seemed to take a more explicitly interdisciplinary approach. The CNBC stood out to me because it had the infrastructure necessary to allow training in multiple disciplines and methodologies, with faculty participating across the full range of disciplines associated with cognitive neuroscience.

My own experience as a CMU Psychology/CNBC student serves as one example of the sort of opportunities available here for interdisciplinary training. I began graduate school with a strong interest in the neuropsychology of semantic memory. My first project involved using connectionist models to account for behavioral dissociations in different groups of brain-damaged patients by first training the models on a semantic task and then "lesioning" them in different ways by removing connections to simulate the effects of neurological injury/disease. My advisor (David Plaut) then arranged for me to spend several months at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London so that I could learn more about the empirical methods used in studying patients.

At about the same time, I was learning about the biophysics of real neurons in the CNBC core courses, and several of the neural phenomena that I encountered seemed like they might provide deeper insight into the pattern of behavioral performance that I had previously simulated using connectionist models. The background that I received in these neuroscience courses and my previous exposure to computational modeling techniques allowed me to pursue these insights under the joint supervision of my advisor in CMU Psychology and a faculty member in the mathematics department at the University of Pittsburgh (Carson Chow) who is also a member of the CNBC. In other words, the exposure that I had to neuroscience phenomena in my CNBC courses and the cross-departmental interactions that the CNBC directly promoted allowed my research to develop in a completely different direction than it otherwise would have.

The CNBC also provides some nice social benefits by introducing you to graduate students in many different departments at both universities. If your home department is reasonably small, this is particularly helpful because it can otherwise be difficult to meet people outside of your department. Some of my best friendships throughout grad school were formed through the CNBC, and these friendships and social activities helped me to keep perspective (and sometimes my sanity) over the long haul. (A friend once told me: "Remember - grad school is an endurance race, not a sprint.") Pittsburgh also offers plenty of good distractions from work. My personal favorite distraction is to go out with friends to hear live music over some dark beer.

While at the CNBC, I've benefited from training in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, computational modeling approaches to cognition, and the biophysical modeling of individual neural cells and large cortical neural networks. I'll be leaving shortly to participate in a post-doctoral training project that explores the interaction of attention and learning in the brain through a combination of neural recording experiments in behaving animals, human psychophysical experiments, and computational modeling. It's hard to see how I could have been prepared to do these things within the confines of any single academic department. If you're interested in understanding how the mind emerges from neural processes, the CNBC provides the community, resources, and activities to point you in the right direction.

Advisor: David Plaut

Year: Sixth

The relationship between mind and brain is fascinating, but it is difficult to study because it spans so many different traditional disciplines within academics. When I first started applying to graduate programs, I noticed that a number of places had a specialization in something like cognitive neuroscience within a particular department with a few faculty participating. However, very few programs seemed to take a more explicitly interdisciplinary approach. The CNBC stood out to me because it had the infrastructure necessary to allow training in multiple disciplines and methodologies, with faculty participating across the full range of disciplines associated with cognitive neuroscience.

My own experience as a CMU Psychology/CNBC student serves as one example of the sort of opportunities available here for interdisciplinary training. I began graduate school with a strong interest in the neuropsychology of semantic memory. My first project involved using connectionist models to account for behavioral dissociations in different groups of brain-damaged patients by first training the models on a semantic task and then "lesioning" them in different ways by removing connections to simulate the effects of neurological injury/disease. My advisor (David Plaut) then arranged for me to spend several months at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London so that I could learn more about the empirical methods used in studying patients.

At about the same time, I was learning about the biophysics of real neurons in the CNBC core courses, and several of the neural phenomena that I encountered seemed like they might provide deeper insight into the pattern of behavioral performance that I had previously simulated using connectionist models. The background that I received in these neuroscience courses and my previous exposure to computational modeling techniques allowed me to pursue these insights under the joint supervision of my advisor in CMU Psychology and a faculty member in the mathematics department at the University of Pittsburgh (Carson Chow) who is also a member of the CNBC. In other words, the exposure that I had to neuroscience phenomena in my CNBC courses and the cross-departmental interactions that the CNBC directly promoted allowed my research to develop in a completely different direction than it otherwise would have.

The CNBC also provides some nice social benefits by introducing you to graduate students in many different departments at both universities. If your home department is reasonably small, this is particularly helpful because it can otherwise be difficult to meet people outside of your department. Some of my best friendships throughout grad school were formed through the CNBC, and these friendships and social activities helped me to keep perspective (and sometimes my sanity) over the long haul. (A friend once told me: "Remember - grad school is an endurance race, not a sprint.") Pittsburgh also offers plenty of good distractions from work. My personal favorite distraction is to go out with friends to hear live music over some dark beer.

While at the CNBC, I've benefited from training in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, computational modeling approaches to cognition, and the biophysical modeling of individual neural cells and large cortical neural networks. I'll be leaving shortly to participate in a post-doctoral training project that explores the interaction of attention and learning in the brain through a combination of neural recording experiments in behaving animals, human psychophysical experiments, and computational modeling. It's hard to see how I could have been prepared to do these things within the confines of any single academic department. If you're interested in understanding how the mind emerges from neural processes, the CNBC provides the community, resources, and activities to point you in the right direction.