neuroecology | social neuroscience, decision-making, ecology, economics: thoughts from adam j calho
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I research how brains use sensory information about the world to make decisions and choose behaviors. I am mostly interested in studying natural and social behvaiors. Currently, I use fruit fly courtship as a way to investigate these questions.
neuroecology | social neuroscience, decision-making, ecology, economics: thoughts from adam j calho
3y ago
I wanted to know how to find other scientists doing similar (but different!) work to me. I like to think that I know most of the people working on nearby topics, but what about people who take similar approaches on totally different problems? There were a lot of good suggestions (especially the neuromatch algorithm), but I want to highlight two in particular:
Michael Hendricks mentioned the Journal/Author Name Estimator (JANE), which takes your abstracts and tries to figure out who you are most similar to. When I throw in a few of my abstracts I mostly get C. elegans people I know:
Annika Bar ..read more
neuroecology | social neuroscience, decision-making, ecology, economics: thoughts from adam j calho
4y ago
I was curious how people got into neuroscience. Random happenstance? A lifelong love of gap junctions? So I asked about it on twitter and got hundreds of responses.
I did a quick analysis of about half the responses, putting them in different categories. It quickly became clear that certain themes were popping up again and again:
It doesn’t surprise me too much that a lot of people became interested in neuroscience for a special reason: they cared about learning or decision-making or free will. A lot of you are here because a particular book or lecture was so good it blew you away. I wa ..read more
neuroecology | social neuroscience, decision-making, ecology, economics: thoughts from adam j calho
4y ago
I am in Berlin for the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN) conference. It is an interesting collection of people working on more human (though some animal) cognitive neuroscience, often using neural network models. In its third year, CCN is an interesting contrast to Cosyne, a conference more focused on traditional systems neuroscience along with computational modeling.
While I’m here, I thought I would do a quick analysis along the lines of what I have done in years past for Cosyne. I only have one year’s worth of data so there is a limit on what I can analyze but I wanted to know – w ..read more
neuroecology | social neuroscience, decision-making, ecology, economics: thoughts from adam j calho
4y ago
At a meeting in New York last week [edit: many months ago by the time I got around to posting this], we were discussing the recent push in neuroscience for more naturalistic behaviors. One of the problems, someone pointed out, is that they are difficult to analyze. But surely there must be whole fields devoted to understanding natural behaviors? Why do we, as neuroscientists, not interact with them?
When I started this blog I named it neuroecology for exactly that reason: there was this whole field of ecology that has thought about natural behaviors very deeply for a long, long time and going ..read more
neuroecology | social neuroscience, decision-making, ecology, economics: thoughts from adam j calho
5y ago
For the past two years, I tried to crowd-source a complete list of everyone who got hired into a neuroscience faculty job over the previous year. I think the list has almost everyone who was hired in the US… let’s see if we can do better this year?
I posted an analysis of some of the results here – one of the key “surprises” was that no, you don’t actually need a Cell/Nature/Science paper to get a faculty job.
If you know who was hired to fill one or more of the listed N. American assistant professor positions in neuroscience or an allied field, please email me with this information (neurorumb ..read more