94. David Van Essen: The Human Connectome Project, hierarchical processing, and the joys of collaboration

02/18/24 • 61 min

David Van Essen is an Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. In this conversation, we talk about David's path to becoming a neuroscientist, the Human Connectome project, hierarhical processing in the cerebral cortex, and much more.
BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.
Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon
Timestamps
0:00:00: David's childhood: ravens, rockets, and radios
0:05:00: From physics to neuroscience (via chemistry)
0:13:55: Quantitative and qualitative approaches to science
0:19:17: Model species in neuroscience
0:31:35: Hierarchical processing in the cortex
0:46:54: The Human Connectome Project
0:55:00: A book or paper more people should read
0:58:01: Something David wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:00:31: Advice for PhD students/postdocs
Podcast links

Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

David's links

Website: https://geni.us/VanEssen-web
Google Scholar: https://geni.us/VanEssen-scholar

Ben's links

Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References & links
David's autobiographical sketch for the Society for Neuroscience (in Volume 9): https://www.sfn.org/about/history-of-neuroscience/autobiographical-chapters
Felleman & Van Essen (1991). Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex.
Glasser, Coalson, Robinson, Hacker, Harwell, Yacoub, ... & Van Essen (2016). A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex. Nature.
Hubel & Wiesel (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex. The Journal of physiology.
Maunsell & Van Essen (1983). The connections of the middle temporal visual area (MT) and their relationship to a cortical hierarchy in the macaque monkey. Journal of Neuroscience.
Sheldrake (2021). Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures.
Van Essen & Kelly (1973). Morphological identification of simple, complex and hypercomplex cells in the visual cortex of the cat. In Intracellular Staining in Neurobiology (pp. 189-198).
Van Essen & Maunsell (1980). Two‐dimensional maps of the cerebral cortex. Journal of Comparative Neurology.
Van Essen (2012). Cortical cartography and Caret software. Neuroimage.
Van Essen, Smith, Barch, Behrens, Yacoub, Ugurbil & WU-Minn HCP Consortium. (2013). The WU-Minn human connectome project: an overview. Neuroimage.
Wooldridge (1963). The machinery of the brain.

02/18/24 • 61 min

BJKS Podcast - 94. David Van Essen: The Human Connectome Project, hierarchical processing, and the joys of collaboration

Transcript

[This is an automated transcript that contains many errors]
Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] Yes, I mean, as I mentioned before we started recording, uh, you have this nice biographical sketch for the Society for Neuroscience that I will, that I read and that I'll use heavily, kind of just to structure our conversation to some extent. And I thought, uh, I'd, uh, start with some of your kind of childhood observations and in particular some of the ones that relate a lit

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