Reaction Reconsidered

Trashed too soon?

In recent years I've been ignoring pleas for donations to colleges. The ones that contact me
a) have multibillion-dollar endowments and don't need my help; and
b) have allowed the silencing of points of view that differ from the dominant orthodoxy on college campuses. Without a moment's thought I threw the message from Marvin Chun into the trash folder.

Who is Marvin Chun?

Chun, dean of Yale College, the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology, and professor of neuroscience, was born and raised in California by his immigrant parents. When he was 12, his family moved back to Korea where he attended junior high, high school, and college.

Chun was recognized by the foundation for his work in cognitive neuroscience. From images of brain activity alone, his lab has recreated faces viewed by subjects. In a separate line of work, they can read out an individual’s attention levels, intelligence, and personality.

Marvin Chun, who has MIT, Harvard, Vanderbilt, and Yale on his c.v., is studying "mind-reading." From a 2014 article: [bold added]

Pretty good, and that was in 2014.

“It is a form of mind reading,” said Marvin Chun, professor of psychology, cognitive science and neurobiology and an author of the paper in the journal Neuroimage. [snip]

One of Chun’s students, Alan S. Cowen, then a Yale junior now pursuing an advanced degree at the University of California at Berkeley, wanted to know whether it would be possible to reconstruct a human face from patterns of brain activity. The task was daunting, because faces are more similar to each other than buildings. Also large areas of the brain are recruited in the processing of human faces, a testament to its importance in survival.

“We perceive faces in a much greater level of detail than we perceive other things,” Cowen said.

Working with funding from the Yale Provost’s office, Cowen and post doctoral researcher Brice Kuhl, now an assistant professor at New York University, showed six subjects 300 different “training” faces while undergoing fMRI scans. They used the data to create a sort of statistical library of how those brains responded to individual faces. They then showed the six subjects new sets of faces while they were undergoing scans. Taking that fMRI data alone, researchers used their statistical library to reconstruct the faces their subjects were viewing.

By strapping some electrodes to your head the scientists could approximate the faces you were seeing, and that was in 2014. One can only wonder the state of the science today ("an individual’s attention levels, intelligence, and personality") and how much--not whether--the government is involved.

I'm sorry, Dr. Chun, for my overly quick reaction to your e-mail. Yale is extremely important to me and my family, whose continued health is also extremely important. Where do I send the check?