about me

This blog entry is about who I am and what I want to do with this blog. I am a neuroscientist working with honeybees and how their behavior and brain activity matches. On here, I will not so much talk about what I have found or hope to find concerning this issue, but mainly how I like to work in this field. This might be of interest to all kinds of people. I will talk about bees, amplifiers, self-made electronics and the role of the internet in all that. I will write down the things I do in the lab that might be useful for others. The idea of working openly intrigues me - by sharing results and methods our research quality will rise. A central topic will be autodidactic learning, I know where and how to search for answers and knowledge. I am good at finding solutions in fields I have no clue about.

Fields that I know something about are Electrophysiology and honey bee behavior. Electrophysiology, in my case extracellular recordings, means measuring the activity of a handful of neurons (nerve-cells) in a functioning brain of a bee. Behavior of a bee will be everything from movements within the hive to dance communication, social interactions and learning. I want to know what abstraction the bee can perform (behaviorally measured) and how it is computed (brain activity). Those relations are extremely interesting but also methodologically demanding. Getting a good (brain activity) recording is a lot of work and involves a lot of electrophysics. To solve those problems there are good books (The AxonGuide) and the traditional way may cut it, but one is a lot faster and more up to date when the researcher involves the internet. Chances are, even in science, that the problem you are having others had too. So there will either be already an answer on a previous question or you yourself ask, and if there are 10-100 people in the whole world who know the answer, more often than not, one of them will read your question and answer it. A common reaction to this line of thought is: “Why would someone highly educated sit in front of the internet and answer stupid questions?” The answer is easy, think about yourself, researcher or not, if you come across a question within a topic only you have in depth knowledge about, wouldn’t you talk about it for hours? It is very rewarding when you so that. Also in some cases you can help a completely foreign field of science, how cool is that!

The other thing is that the experiments I do here are quite demanding on the analytical site. I write a lot of code to analyze my data and hope that I did not make any mistakes. For what I do there are no toolboxes, at least that I know of. There is no code review involved; I don’t even know how that would have worked the “classical” way. The things my colleagues do are far from my projects, so they can’t do it. I can’t pay someone to do so, that would be too expensive. And to get a whole collaboration with a group of computer scientists would just take up too much time. I need help now! So what I do is asking questions on stackoverflow.com and redddit.com. I also share my code on github.com and put as much as possible online (synapse.org). Soon I will give jupyter.com a try, it might be the golden goose I was always waiting for (jn.physiology.org/content/116/2/252.long)!

Besides all this normal neuroscientific aspects of my work, I tinker with electronics to build devices that allow me to interact with the bees. I will write about some of them here, how I build them, where I found the materials, code and the corresponding knowledge. I will be very specific about what platforms I use, why I use a certain licence and even where to order chips. I hope that I can get some of you to try these ways of doing science and provide help and guidance along the way. Let’s explore the world of open science together!