I went up to the northside to have dinner with a friend the other day, and it felt like I was visiting another city. It’s only been a month since I moved down from Logan Square, but I guess it doesn’t take long to become a creature of the insular lifestyle of Hyde Park. Or else it was the apocalyptic weather, a hot wind whipping out of somewhere, filling the sky with dust and grit and turning it strange colors. Or else I’ve been buried in my work, in statistics and behavior and electrophysiology, all of which I’m enjoying immensely.

I couldn’t have asked for a better postdoc, really. Dan’s lab is a great place to work, and I’m learning a lot. My dissertation was technically demanding but not very theoretical, and to be completely honest, not especially biological. I was working with animals, of course, and studying a biological phenomenon, but the phenomenon and its mechanism are thought to be so general that it shouldn’t matter what animal you study them in. In other words, it’s biology from a physicist’s perspective, which tended to be the dominant mode at Berkeley and probably in molecular and cell biology departments everywhere. I’m not so doctrinaire as to insist that there is something wrong with the generalist approach, but it’s certainly not the best fit to my interests and strengths. Biology, for me, is all about particularities: how species’ behavioral and perceptual abilities fit with their place in the ecosystem. We need to understand general mechanisms in order to have some idea of the constraints on adaptations. One of the things I like a lot about the University of Chicago is that people here can bring complicated theoretical and experimental tools to bear on problems without becoming wedded to model systems.

A paragraph is probably not enough to describe the differences in these approaches, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the complicated landscape of neuroscience departments with respect to this question. And I’m just getting a sense of it myself. I’m going to a couple of conferences in July which should provide an interesting contrast. First a Gordon Conference on neural circuits and plasticity, and then the big neuroethology conference in late July.

In other news, I adopted another starling. Her/his name is Carol/Karol, depending on how things turn out. Right now her irises are a sort of pale blue-gray, which is why I’m leaning toward female. She nearly got stuck behind the refrigerator last night, which leads me to wonder if starlings aren’t a bit accident-prone.

(cdm|June2007)