Dale moved from Atlanta, GA to Bethesda, MD as a child, blowing his chance at becoming a true southern gentleman. As consolation, he was awarded dual degrees and 3rd place in a campus-wide table tennis tournament by the University of Maryland. Weighing his prospects as a professional athlete, he decided to train at the National Institute of Mental Health in neuroscience. On occasion, Dale tried to escape his ever-northward destiny. One summer, he reportedly biked west across the U.S., pedaling from Maryland to Oregon to help fight cancer. But his efforts proved fruitless; Dale moved north again to Philadelphia and joined Penn's Neuroscience Graduate Group. He yearns to one day search for research positions in all cardinal directions. Outside of lab, Dale enjoys reading, music, art, gaming, hiking, and maintaining lists of exciting future hobbies.
Curiosity is a fundamental aspect of human nature, yet most studies rely on small, Western samples. Analyzing 482,760 Wikipedia readers across 50 countries, this study replicates two known curiosity styles—"busybody" and "hunter"—and reveals a third, the "dancer," characterized by creative exploration. By linking these styles to global indicators like education and well-being, the findings shed light on how digital knowledge-seeking behaviors are shaped by cultural and geographical factors.
Practitioners of mindfulness effortfully de-automatize habitual reactions and center the present moment. We investigated how to understand these defining components of mindful experience using formal theory and associated computational metrics of brain network structure and function. In an experiment, we instructed college students to mindfully regulate their responses to alcohol in an fMRI scanner. Analyzing their neural activity, we identified changes in brain function during mindfulness. These changes in brain function characterize how individuals exert effort to de-automatize natural reactions to alcohol. We found associated brain metrics that predicted how likely college students were to drink alcohol in the future. Analyzing how their brain activity naturally changes over time, we found that brain regions that used more effort tended to renew activity more quickly. Since renewing activity is updating the present, the brain may center the present moment when it uses more effort. Our findings advance our understanding of brain network processes that characterize elusive subjective experiences during mindfulness. The general framework can be applied to study other forms of meditation and attention, and when processes of attention go awry in psychiatric disorders involving worry, anxiety, and rumination.
Throughout life, we might seek a calling, companions, skills, entertainment, truth, self-knowledge, beauty, and edification. In this review, we describe how the practice of curiosity can be viewed as an extended and open-ended search for valuable information with hidden identity and location in a complex space of interconnected information. We propose how a computational model of efficient search can be used to bridge curiosity, cognitive maps, and model-based reinforcement learning.
We develop and test a theory of how brain network architecture and biology perform lossy compression to support efficient communication among spatially distributed brain regions. Our framework adapts the mathematics of information theory to understand the limits of sending and receiving packets of information with individually varying speed and reliability across white matter pathways of differing integrity. Longer pathways distort information flow, so brain regions with higher transmission fidelity send and receive packets with greater rate and reliability as a function of network topology prioritizing shortest paths. Our model parsimoniously explains communication as a function of network complexity, how highly connected hub regions integrate information, and the speed and accuracy of behavior.
The hippocampus and its small subregions are areas of the brain that play an integral role in memory. Our study leveraged new brain imaging methods to study these small subregions and their relation to memory impairment in childhood-onset schizophrenia patients. We found evidence of disrupted morphometric structure (i.e. tissue contraction) associated with impaired memory. If further research corroborates these findings, the specific structural links to memory impairment could inform targeted clinical interventions.
We provided evidence of a new genetic mutation associated with childhood-onset schizophrenia; specifically, the duplication of the 15q13.3 chromosomal region. Our findings hold import to affected families and their genetic counselors, for whom incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity of these mutations offer substantial challenges. In previous research, the affected genes normally encode neuronal channel receptor proteins which were related to schizophrenia symptoms when mutated. Further research on gene dosage and downstream effects of this mutation may enhance understanding of contributing factors to schizophrenia and improve assessments of genetic risk.
Penn Network Visualization Program Summer workshop for high schoolers and undergraduates, working with invited artists and professors from around the nation at the intersection of art, design, science, and networks.
Description from the gallery: '"Dyslexic Dictionary" is a provocation — an invitation to explore and redefine. Nine dyslexic artists have been commissioned to produce a creative response to words, books, poems and even the alphabet itself, highlighting how their minds experience language. Participating artists include Governor Gavin Newsom, Gil Gershoni, Adeniyi Akingbade, Christian Boer, Adam Eli Feibelman, Sally Gardner, Martin Grasser, Rebecca Kamen and Kelsey Ann Kasom.'
Video description: Dyslexia highlights thoughts that are often more perceptual than verbal, shaping a uniquely visuospatial imagination. To depict Rebecca Kamen's visuospatial imagination, we used artificial intelligence (diffusion models) to translate verbal transcripts from Rebecca's interviews and presentations into animated images. Animations visualize the dynamic, fluid, and spontaneous forces underlying Rebecca's connective imagination—her curiosity.
This video spotlights one of Rebecca's artworks, Corona 3, and animates it into slightly different images according to guided prompts from transcripts describing the art. These verbal prompts include: “Vehicles of discovery, the dance of creation and destruction, an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The style of German zoologist Ernst Haeckel." By having artificial intelligence translate words into images, we appreciate a visual reimagining of the unique stories and neurodiverse artists behind how art takes shape.
Below, we took this approach a step further. British poet, SJ Fowler and Rebecca Kamen created an illustrated poem, Kamen's Lens, following years of communication about art, dyslexia, and inspirations. Here SJ Fowler performs a reading of Kamen's Lens. Six illustrations are each paired to their corresponding section of poetry and were animated using the text of the poetry itself.
Sparking Curiosity depicts the network dynamics of Rebecca Kamen's art process. This network was created from transcribed interviews, where each circle represents a word describing an idea that shaped her artistic journey; and each line indicates how similar those words are to each other. The colors represent communities of ideas that are more alike. Every frame of the video summarizes the spark of hundreds of ideas and their immediate neighbors in the same order as spoken during the interview.
