The Learning Curve
Well, why was I in Paris, and how did I get there?
I wrote to a professor in ENS one day in late January, and received a quick positive reply. This was my last e-mail in a series of around ten e-mails I had written to eminent professors from various universities I wanted to work with, and my first one in the even semester. Over the winter vacation, I had fine-tuned my cover letter and in this mail, I projected my interests and the reasoning for my transition better – such little things made all the difference. I had two telephonic chats with her, the first one for her to gauge my experience and skills and the second to finalise my project. All I had to do now was apply for the Charpak Scholarship from Campus France. However, there was a slim possibility of not getting the scholarship and hence I brought up the difficult conversation of funding with my mentor. This was a good thing as my mentor assured me of funding to pursue my internship at ENS. The Charpak Scholarship deadline was in March and the results were out in a week. Fortunately, I was awarded the scholarship, and supplemented with the stipend from the university. I could now live, learn and love Paris without bothering about the expenditure.
ENS is a grande école, which is basically a higher education institution outside the public university system. This essentially means that ENS has the privilege and right to choose students through highly competitive and selective exams, unlike the others. Sounds familiar? It is a fairly small, but highly ranked institute, over two hundred years old, with Fourier, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Pasteur among its renowned and diverse alumni. ENS is located in the Latin Quarter of Paris along with many other educational institutions – towering buildings of French Gothic architecture with spacious modern interiors. It was very surprising to see no well-demarcated campus area like ours.
As for the research project, I was trying to understand the basis of hallucinations in schizophrenics through computational modelling. I was exploring a different field and most of the biology was alien to me, but a basic understanding was sufficient for me to contribute to the research going on at my mentor’s lab. Neurons in the brain communicate with each other through electrical impulses called action potentials. The marvel of the brain is in the connections between neurons – the way it makes new ones and severs those not needed. Broadly, these connections can be excitatory and inhibitory. If a neuron A is fired, an excitatory connection with another neuron – say, neuron B – would make neuron B more likely to fire action potentials. If the connection is inhibitory, it makes B less likely to fire action potentials.
My project was based on the theory that hallucinations in schizophrenia are a result of imbalance between excitation and inhibition, leading to runaway conclusions. What I did was build a very pretty model called the Hidden Markov Model on Matlab to try and simulate the effects of hallucinations or delusions, like jumping to conclusions in absence of enough sensory evidence – say, relating random events like a man in suit and a random tingling sensation in the hand as being part of a conspiracy with a chip inserted in the hand. Of course, the simulations are done at a much more basic level, with binary decisions like deciding if something exists or not, or is turning one way or another. The goal of this research would be to use this model to diagnose and define the stage and kind of schizophrenia in a patient.
The members of the lab usually came in at ten in the morning, headed straight to the coffee machine, conversed on really comfortable sofas or propped against the kitchen counter in the lab and then headed back to resume work. Everybody is engrossed in their work and interrupts only for an intellectual insight or debate. I had a neat desk, and everybody did their part to make me feel comfortable during my stay. There are no restrictions on timings or a particular number of hours to clock in – I would come in and leave early. Sometimes, I would leave earlier to catch a performance or visit a tourist spot in the off-peak hours and finish my work from home. My mentor and I had weekly meetings where she spent as much time with me as with her doctoral students. I had the freedom to propose and implement all of my ideas.
