Working with Gerald Edelman

Hello and welcome everybody. It is September 19th, 2020-23. We're here at the Active Inference Institute in Guest Stream 58.1 and today the session will be around the experiences of those who have worked with Gerald Edelman. Edelman lived from 1929 to 2014 and as hopefully this conversation can explore and unpack a little bit, worked in various areas related to the brain, body, and mind. So without further ado, I will have our guests introduce themselves, give a little bit of a background on how they came to be working with Professor Edelman, and then we have several prepared questions and several other questions. So thank you all for joining and perhaps Andrew, if you'd like to begin. All right, so I'll just start a little bit with my background. I did my PhD at University of Minnesota and then I did my postdoc at Hopkins with Apostles George Opelis and Vernon Mott Castle and then I got a job in Phoenix working in a small neuroscience institute or neuroscience department at a hospital and I worked there for six or seven years and my interest was working with non-human primates with monkeys and studying how they reached for different objects and drew objects and then looked at activity in primary motor cortex and we carried out different kinds of analysis based on the directionality of the neurons in motor cortex, built populations, and were able to actually look at these neural signals and see how they corresponded in a pretty exact way to the way the animals are moved in time and space, in other words trajectories. And after working there six or seven years I was invited to come and look at this new institute that Gerald Edelman was establishing in San Diego in La Jolla and met a bunch of super interesting people like Giulio Tononi and Olaf Spornes and really their deep intellect and curiosity and creativity has convinced me to move to San Diego. And so I ended up moving there and so Edelman was able to build this gorgeous research facility and he was able to build this project and the story on the Torrey Pines cliffs basically and it was a magnificent architecture and he recruited a number of people besides Spornes and Tononi and so he divided the group into theorists and experimentalists and I was an experimentalist and I was really exposed to a whole new way of thinking about neuroscience in terms of sort of the cognitive aspects of it, which I still have difficulty with to tell you personally because I don't even know how you define cognition and I'm not sure that anybody really can or as Vernon Moncastle would say, I don't know the answer to that nor does anybody else. Maybe Carl would take issue with that. But anyway, the coolest thing about it was being really exposed to a lot of creative thinking and deep intellectual endeavors and I've really never regretted the seven or eight years I spent there. I think it really helped change the way my career went from being sort of a motor control, strict, sort of, you know, very careful scientist to using my imagination a lot more than I would have otherwise. So I'll leave it at that. Awesome. Cheng Ming? Okay, yeah, I can speak about my journey with Dr. Ederman. So I was originally from Taiwan. I graduated with a medical degree in Taiwan University in 1978, but I was very interested in doing basic science. So I applied the PhD program and got into Rockefeller University and that started to search for a laboratory. And certainly Dr. Ederman, you know, with his very powerful intellectual capacity building in the building, you know, it was on ninth floor of the Bronx laboratory. I was very impressed. So I joined the laboratory. So since 78 to 83, I was a PhD student. And I was working on the topic called called neural cell adhesion molecule. So at the time Ederman already got his Nobel Prize for immunoglobulin. But he would be, you know, usually, you know, in usually elegant way would say, I solve the molecular recognition. So he said, I don't want to be staying in immunology…