All of my visa things were taken care of entirely. I am now in China on a one-year student visa, and after I register at the local police station I will be free to exit and enter the country at my leisure. Everything was taken care of without any issues. The only downside is that now the Chinese government has all of my personal information, especially my medical information, in triplicate several times over.
So the reason I'm actually in Guangzhou is to work, not just to enjoy living in a semi-tropical Chinese city. This year, I will be working at South China Normal University, in the lab of Prof. Wang Suiping in the school of psychology on the neuroscience of language. SCNU is the third-ranked psychology program in China, and the first outside of Beijing (the top two being Peking University and Beijing Normal University).
Note the palm trees in the second photo. Still not sure I approve of such things.
Anyways, Prof. Wang and the rest of the School of Psychology has been great. They've been very welcoming, and Prof. Wang has told me there's a wide variety of possibilities that I can work on this year. There are a good 20 students, Master's and PhD, in her lab, all working on various projects that I can join if I'm interested. Additionally, some of the other professors do more computational modeling-type research, which is a bit of a favorite of mine, so I may get a chance to work with them a bit too.
Right now, I'm starting to work with one PhD student, who does work on bilingualism. His research focuses on native Chinese speakers who learned English later in life, and what the activity in their brain looks like when they're speaking one vs. the other, when they have to switch between the two, and the like. He's also working on, and I think this is the real interesting stuff, what the overall network of active brain areas looks like. There's a very cool phenomenon known as small-world networks, that arises in all sorts of real-world networks and is examinable using a field of math known as graph theory. When I say network, I mean anything that can be represented as something like the following:
This is a graph, and it's basically a bunch of nodes/vertices (dots) connected by edges (lines) to show that there's a relation between them. Though this looks fairly abstract and mathy, graphs can represent many different real world networks. For example, a social network: each node represents a person, and there's an edge between two nodes if the people they represent are friends. Or a transportation network: each node represents a stop, and there's an edge between two nodes if there's a way to get between them. Or brains: each node represents a part of the brain, and there's an edge between two nodes if those two areas are connected.
A small-world network is a special type of network that seems to appear naturally, to evolve in any sufficiently complex network, both artificial and natural. Brains, social networks, power grids, etc. all show properties of this type of network, first described by Strogatz and Watts, 1998, in the paper that coined the term. A small-world network satisfies two major criteria: for a given node, most of its neighbors are in turn neighbors of each other, and you can get from one node to any other node in a relatively small number of steps. In human social relations, the first criterion displays itself in the fact that most of your friends are probably friends with each other, and the second is responsible for the notorious game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In brains, this allows related areas of the brain to easily talk to each other, while also allowing information to easily flow across the entire brain if necessary. Obviously, both criteria would also be met in a graph where every node was connected to every other, but the small-world network is special because it manages to achieve these two criteria with a relatively low number of edges. This is desirable because it's less costly: for social networks, no one is friendly enough to be friends with every person on Earth; for a power grid or transportation network, it would be a waste of resources; for brains, it would be a waste of energy.
So basically human brains (and every other central nervous system examined so far) are small-world networks, which is cool, but why's that important? Besides the fact that it makes sense evolutionary, because it minimizes cost while maximizing efficiency of information processing, it's also important because there's evidence that the properties of the brain network change when people are in different states. People with autism and schizophrenia appear to have differently structured networks, and the functional network of your brain (not the physical connections, but how the activity in different parts of the brain syncs up) appears to change based on whether you're awake but not doing anything, asleep, anesthetized, doing a specific task, or drugged.
Gangyi, the grad student I will be working with, one experiment that he's working on examines how the functional network of the brain differs when speakers are speaking English vs. Chinese. And this is the project that I will be helping him on at first.
Of course, being a native English speaker (the only in the lab and possibly the only one in the school of psychology...), I will also be assisting the lab by helping them revise the papers they write in English for publication. And I may teach some undergrads English, as well as tutoring my boss's young daughter, who lived for a year in the US several years ago but hasn't had significant exposure to English since. In exchange for that, I may learn how to do traditional Chinese painting. So that's super exciting.
And that's a long-winded explanation of what this next year might be like for me. Sorry for the technical bit in the middle, but graph theory is really cool, and it's exciting that it has very useful applications in neuroscience. Math!
Here's a photo of me with a bunch of professors to round out this post.
The woman in the shiny purple shirt to my left in this picture is Yang Kun, my friend who works for The Asia Foundation in Beijing. She helped me move to Guangzhou and get settled and returned to Beijing yesterday; moving down would've been much harder without her, so I'm really thankful she could join me for a couple days. The woman in the not-shiny purple dress to my right is my boss, Wang Suiping, and the man in the blue striped polo is her husband Zhang Wei, the Dean of the School of Psychology. They have both been great, and I'm very thankful to have the opportunity to work with them and the rest of the SCNU School of Psychology this year!
So the reason I'm actually in Guangzhou is to work, not just to enjoy living in a semi-tropical Chinese city. This year, I will be working at South China Normal University, in the lab of Prof. Wang Suiping in the school of psychology on the neuroscience of language. SCNU is the third-ranked psychology program in China, and the first outside of Beijing (the top two being Peking University and Beijing Normal University).
Note the palm trees in the second photo. Still not sure I approve of such things.
Anyways, Prof. Wang and the rest of the School of Psychology has been great. They've been very welcoming, and Prof. Wang has told me there's a wide variety of possibilities that I can work on this year. There are a good 20 students, Master's and PhD, in her lab, all working on various projects that I can join if I'm interested. Additionally, some of the other professors do more computational modeling-type research, which is a bit of a favorite of mine, so I may get a chance to work with them a bit too.
Right now, I'm starting to work with one PhD student, who does work on bilingualism. His research focuses on native Chinese speakers who learned English later in life, and what the activity in their brain looks like when they're speaking one vs. the other, when they have to switch between the two, and the like. He's also working on, and I think this is the real interesting stuff, what the overall network of active brain areas looks like. There's a very cool phenomenon known as small-world networks, that arises in all sorts of real-world networks and is examinable using a field of math known as graph theory. When I say network, I mean anything that can be represented as something like the following:
A small-world network is a special type of network that seems to appear naturally, to evolve in any sufficiently complex network, both artificial and natural. Brains, social networks, power grids, etc. all show properties of this type of network, first described by Strogatz and Watts, 1998, in the paper that coined the term. A small-world network satisfies two major criteria: for a given node, most of its neighbors are in turn neighbors of each other, and you can get from one node to any other node in a relatively small number of steps. In human social relations, the first criterion displays itself in the fact that most of your friends are probably friends with each other, and the second is responsible for the notorious game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In brains, this allows related areas of the brain to easily talk to each other, while also allowing information to easily flow across the entire brain if necessary. Obviously, both criteria would also be met in a graph where every node was connected to every other, but the small-world network is special because it manages to achieve these two criteria with a relatively low number of edges. This is desirable because it's less costly: for social networks, no one is friendly enough to be friends with every person on Earth; for a power grid or transportation network, it would be a waste of resources; for brains, it would be a waste of energy.
So basically human brains (and every other central nervous system examined so far) are small-world networks, which is cool, but why's that important? Besides the fact that it makes sense evolutionary, because it minimizes cost while maximizing efficiency of information processing, it's also important because there's evidence that the properties of the brain network change when people are in different states. People with autism and schizophrenia appear to have differently structured networks, and the functional network of your brain (not the physical connections, but how the activity in different parts of the brain syncs up) appears to change based on whether you're awake but not doing anything, asleep, anesthetized, doing a specific task, or drugged.
Gangyi, the grad student I will be working with, one experiment that he's working on examines how the functional network of the brain differs when speakers are speaking English vs. Chinese. And this is the project that I will be helping him on at first.
Of course, being a native English speaker (the only in the lab and possibly the only one in the school of psychology...), I will also be assisting the lab by helping them revise the papers they write in English for publication. And I may teach some undergrads English, as well as tutoring my boss's young daughter, who lived for a year in the US several years ago but hasn't had significant exposure to English since. In exchange for that, I may learn how to do traditional Chinese painting. So that's super exciting.
And that's a long-winded explanation of what this next year might be like for me. Sorry for the technical bit in the middle, but graph theory is really cool, and it's exciting that it has very useful applications in neuroscience. Math!
Here's a photo of me with a bunch of professors to round out this post.
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