Welcome to the natverse, we have tools for brains!

“Most benevolent lecturer, whose topic is Insect Hearing: your effort’s truly fantastic but I’d much rather be dreaming” ~ 9 AM lecture, Laia Serratosa

“Would it be too ambitious to expect that, at least in relation to certain sensory centers or particular mechanisms of neuronal reaction, invertebrates, especially insects, offer some interpretative criteria for the nervous systems of ‘superior’ vertebrates?”" (SR y Cajal)

“When the systems approach can be connected to the mechanisms approach so that its feedback loop and automata becomes clothed in flesh and blood, we shall see real and exciting progress in understanding behaviour.” ~ (Kenneth Roeder)

A tunnel into the brain.

“FROM many directions, workers are tunnelling hopefully into the mountain, some with steam shovels and others with dental drills. Some travel blindly in a circle and come out close to their point of entrance; some connect, usually in a mismatched fashion, with the burrows of others. Some have chosen to disregard the random activities of their fellows and have worked out in a small region an elegant system of tunnels of their own. Both the attraction and confusion of this multitudinous excavation lie in the fact that none of these workers knows precisely what they are looking for, or what they will find.” (Kenneth Roeder)

“THE most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus, or a while as small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.” (J.B.S. Haldane)

I have been very lucky in that I think I have always worked with great people, on a scientiific and personal level. But many PhD students have horror stories of bad management from their PIs. Is there an easy fix?