<groan, ok, here goes...>
In article <29405-380BCB23-73 at storefull-172.iap.bryant.webtv.net> ,
Y-chat at webtv.net writes:
>These studies, which are published in the November issue of The
>Scientific American, used some anesthetized monkeys for the same,
>(albeit more pertinent) studies as the one done on the cats. However,
>the bulk of the study programs involved conscious monkeys whose measured
>neuronic activity has given a great leap forward ,not only in basic
>vision research, but in the area of cognitive thinking and
>consciousness. Since the monkey studies have been going on for some
>time, it is my opinion that to duplicate the anesthetized studies on
>felines is a cheap trick to get published and latch on to the real work
>that is being done.
>
I assume you are talking about Nikos Logothetis' review article "Vision:
A window on consciousness". First of all, that is not where the studies
were published. The studies were published in primary research journals.
Scientific American almost never publishes primary research but mostly
news, reviews and commentary (there's a difference, you know). Secondly,
you are flat wrong if you think that the kind of studies reported there
are the same as in the recent cat paper by Dan and colleagues. The latter
paper has nothing at all to do with consciousness because the animals
were anesthetized. Why don't you read the original papers instead of just
reading reviews and press releases ( I mean NO disrespect to the authors
of such reviews or especially to Nikos; but I'll bet that they, being
scientists, would agree that reviews cannot substitute for firsthand
reading of the actual scientific report). Then, if you still feel that
the Dan studies are just duplicating previous work, explain to us -why-
you think that, and refer explicitly to the contents of the research
instead of just blathering on about "neuronic activity" (?), "cognitive
thinking" (??) and a "great leaps forward", as if you had the slightest
idea of what the work actually was about.
and....
In article <940330490.770180 at server.australia.net.au> John H.,
johnhkm at netsprintXXXX.net.au writes:
>You should look more carefully, many of these posts are
>from research centers and good internet sources (like the SFN site, Max
>Planck, Harvard Uni ... ).
I'm not complaining about the sources. I'm complaining because you're
cluttering up bandwidth with stuff that's reproduced elsewhere on the
internet already, without adding -any- additional content or opinions,
except in the one case I noticed in which you did, and by doing so
clearly showed that you hadn't understood the study that the press
release was originally about. I think we can all do without -further-
misinformation on this group.
>Well be careful here, copying entire sections may be copyright infringement.
You may report me at http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/feedback, if you like.
>You are a presumptuous creature.
Thank you.
>Just out of curiousity, what sort of
>research are you doing? Give me a break, I'm just an outsider trying to
>understand and without a formal education that is proving rather difficult
>at present.
If you are really trying to understand, then why not read the papers and
ask questions about things you don't understand. This is a great forum
for getting input on things that you don't understand. But you don't
often ask any questions here in your posts.
And just to satisfy your curiousity, I'm an electrophysiologist and I
study inhibitory synaptic transmission and GABA-A channel biophysics in
slices of rat brain. I have to kill the rats in order to get their brains
out (in accordance with NIH guidelines, of course), and trust me, I have
no delusions about whether the rats enjoy me doing that.
Matt Jones
