BRKVW said:

"1. Q: fMRI which has relatively good spatial resolution, but poor temporal resolution with MEG which has excellent temporal resololution, but relatively poor temporal resolution.
A: Very interesting. Exactly how fast (slow) are fMRIs now? I recently had an MRI (of my head), what a primitive piece of … "

To do fMRI studies you usually do two types of scans. The first scan is the type you had, an anatomical scan. This is a very high resolution picture that takes a long time. Then, you do functional scans while the subject is doing some task of interest (e.g. a perceptual task, a cognitive task). The functional scans are faster and measure the levels of oxygenated blood in different regions of the brain. However, due to the physical constraints of the machine, it takes about 2 seconds to do a full scan (all slices) and then start over on the next scan.

You can think of each scan as a quick "picture" of the whole brain. After scanning, the slices are reconstructed as you are going to do with yours. Physicists are working on ways to make the temporal resolution better. It was stuck at about 2 seconds for a long time (still a very normal resolution). Now, some places are, I believe, down to about 1 second.

Still, 1 second is a long time in terms of cognitive processing. So, all of the activation for things that happen at 50 ms after stimulus presentation get smeared together with much later things going on at say, 500-600 ms, etc. Spatial smearing is a problem as well. 3-dimensional voxels are the base unit and these will be several cubic millimeters in volume. Once you do a lot of filtering, normalization and such you get these kind of "blobs" that you see in studies so that you can make a kind of general claim about "where" something is happening. Hopefully, in the future the resolution will get much better.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the current goal is to get down to the level of one cortical column in size?

MEG - which I'm using now - measures the magnetic field around the skull. It has millisecond accuracy but relatively poor spatial resolution. The idea is to use both to get information about both "where" and "when" particular cognitive processes are getting played out. In my case - linguistic processes.

BRKVW said:

"Jokes aside, what have you learned about people that contain more than one language. Of perhaps greater interest are people who contain more than one language structure (as in SOV, SVO)."

This is an interesting question. I'm actually working on a review paper of bilingual imaging studies right now. Well actually it's on the backburner. The literature is a bit of a mess on these issues for several reasons. First there are separate literatures for linguistics, neuroimaging, psycholinguistics, English as a Second Language, etc. In general we know that certain elements of language (such as phonology and certain elements of syntax) *seem* to be very difficult for most people to learn after childhood. A general cutoff for native-like "accent" could be around 4 years of age. Other aspects, such as learning new vocabulary and things like basic word order seem to be learnable at later (adult) ages.

As for SOV and SVO, I believe that they are about equally prevelant in the world's languages. Languages have also, historically, switched from one to the other:

"I thee wed" = SOV
"I love you" = SVO

Certain elements of the syntax fall out of whatever order the language takes. English has prepositions. Japanese should, being SOV, have post-positions, etc.

Wisp, has Varela left any legacy in your lab? :-)

I:
postdoc @ UCSF
neuroscience and cog science trained
working on multisensory integration, speech perception/production, auditory cortex plasticity, perceptual learning and seeing through the fog.
EEG,MEG,fMRI and good old psychophysics...

Just got annoyed by the "Understanding the nature of the mind" tribe and back to real stuff...I think.

Nice (re)meeting you all!