Michael Platt
2009; Elsevier BV; Volume: 19; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/j.cub.2008.12.022
ISSN1879-0445
Autores ResumoMichael Platt is Associate Professor of Neurobiology at the Duke University Medical Center, as well as Co-Director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Duke University, and is a member of the faculty of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Evolutionary Anthropology. His research focuses on the neuroethology and neuroeconomics of primate behavior and cognition. He uses a broad array of techniques to understand how the brain makes decisions in uncertain and socially complex environments. This research is motivated by ethology and evolutionary biology, with a focus on how specific features of the physical and social environment have shaped both behavior and biology in different species. Michael received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, both in biological anthropology. He then did a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience at New York University. Michael's research has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and National Geographic, as well as on ABC's Good Morning America, NPR, CBC, BBC, and MTV. Have you always been interested in biology? I can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in biology, particularly animal behavior and evolution. My family lived in rural Ohio when I was four or five5 years old, and I recall spending a lot of time outdoors watching hummingbirds around the big spruce trees next to our house. A more formative moment was when my mother took me to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and I had the chance to see the 'Lucy' skeleton (Australopithecus afarensis) — at that time the earliest known hominid specimen. This was a truly transformative experience, and generated an intense obsession with primate and human evolution, altogether at odds with my strict Catholic upbringing. Throughout childhood, I kept a set of Time-Life books on 'Evolution', 'The Primates', and 'Animal Behavior' under my bed to read each night before going to sleep. Unfortunately, the local public schools were not so welcoming towards my interests in evolutionary biology; the conspicuous absence of any teaching of evolution nearly drove me away from biology. What is the best advice you've been given? Probably the best advice I've ever been given was from my father, who was uniquely gifted in many ways but who, through bad luck and an obsession with bridge and fast cars, ended up dropping out of college and working as an auto mechanic. Despite clearly working beneath his potential, he always encouraged me to follow my passions and not to worry about choosing a career just to make money. Coming from a guy who toiled tirelessly under the hood of a car all day, this wisdom deeply influenced me. And I've tried to follow this advice throughout my career by following my interests — from human evolution to primate behavior to neuroscience and back again. What advice would you offer to someone starting a career in biology? Evolution often favors generalists over specialists; witness the success of rats, cockroaches, and rhesus macaques. Students would be wise to follow suit. They should read and study widely, not only within science, but also in literature and the arts. After all, the most interesting questions for biologists are those that pertain to what makes us uniquely human, and how our brains enable this behavior. To pursue these questions one needs an appreciation for how really smart people, who are not scientists, have approached the same problems. My other really strong recommendation is that students learn to write effectively, and practice writing often. Science depends on clear communication, both to other scientists and perhaps more importantly to the public at large. What role has chance played in your scientific career? I wouldn't be where I am today without a lot of luck. I lucked into going to Yale, first as a football recruit and then later supported by a fellowship from Cleveland alumni. I lucked into meeting and learning from so many important people in the fields of primate behavior and neuroscience early in my career. My first semester at Yale, I happened to take a course on Primate Evolution, given by Mark Birchette — the best teacher I've ever had — and his course re-ignited my passion for biology. Probably the luckiest moment of my scientific and personal life was meeting my future wife, Elizabeth Brannon, a current leader in the field of primate cognition, while we were studying stumptail macaques on an island in Mexico during college. That field experience led me to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate work in primate behavior with Dorothy Cheney, Robert Seyfarth, and Robert Harding. A disastrous field season spent looking for, and not finding, capuchin monkeys in Venezuela, complete with an attack by a swarm of sweat bees, convinced me that my temperament was better suited to work in the laboratory. Subsequently, I joined Paul Glimcher's lab at NYU for post-doctoral training in neuroscience. Coincidentally, Paul had done his thesis work at the University of Pennsylvania and knew my advisors well, so he was willing to take a gamble on me despite my having absolutely no experience in neurophysiology; and I was willing to gamble on him because he was interested in primate behavior and promised me that, once I had learned the tools, I could actually do something unique and interesting in neuroscience. I spent two dull years studying the role of the parietal cortex in eye movements, while Paul and I began hatching a new set of studies aimed at applying behavioral economic models to the neurobiology of decision making. After our paper on the "Neural Correlates of Decision Variables in Parietal Cortex" was published in Nature in 1999, I was lucky enough to land a job at Duke that gave me the freedom to pursue my interests in neuroethology and neuroeconomics. What are your favorite papers or books? Several papers and books have been extremely important in my intellectual development. Darwin's great trilogy — The Origin of Species, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals — has provided important inspiration for my work. Eric Charnov's paper on the Marginal Value Theorem for patch-leaving decisions by foraging animals really blew my mind, convincing me that formal mathematical models can provide a powerful approach for predicting and explaining behavior. Robert Trivers' seminal papers on reciprocal altruism and parental investment demonstrated that the same formal, mathematical approach could be applied to the evolution of social behavior. Randy Gallistel's The Organization of Learning prompted me to think about how the fundamental challenges of navigation and foraging in space and time may be solved by representing information about the environment rather than simply potentiating stimulus–response associations. The neuroscience paper that has had the biggest influence on me was probably Bill Newsome and Mike Shadlen's on motion perception and decision making — that paper really got people thinking about how to study the neurobiology of choice. What do you see as the biggest challenge confronting progress in cognitive neuroscience? My own bias is that neuroscience today largely avoids thinking about brain and behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Although there is some consideration given to homology in brain structure — for example, rhesus macaques and humans clearly share multiple visual processing areas due to common descent — the idea that specialized neural hardware may have evolved to support specialized behavior and cognition is often given short shrift. Thus, rhesus monkeys often serve as a model for understanding human neurophysiology, and mice serve as a model for exploring the genetics that contribute to human behavior and cognition. But this approach fails to account for the unique problems each species has had to confront over its evolutionary history. In order to understand human nature, we'll need to understand the comparative biology and behavior of a wide range of primates — specifically how different species of primates have adapted to particular social and environmental conditions. We may find some surprising differences, and some equally shocking similarities, with our own brains, genes, and behavior.
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