Welcome to the website for Chris M. Glaze.

Bio

I was born and raised on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. I spent two years at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, five years back in DC in politics, and returned to school to study psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I am now a PhD student. I live in the neighborhood of Hampden in Baltimore, MD, with the gorgeous, ingenious dork I married and our son.

Interests

Neuroscience

This is my job but it is also one of my most intense interests. Here is a very good introduction to neuroscience.

How are "mind" and "brain" related? I started thinking about this through several philosophical debates. Is the mind shaped by experience or genes? Is it material or transcendental? Do mental phenomena have to be directly tied to local brain regions?

Science may resolve these theoretical questions, but philosophers deserve credit for insights into what one could possibly expect a priori. For example, Immanuel Kant argued in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that the mind must be predisposed to structure experience and sensations in particular ways. These arguments were made by Kant in the late 18th century but presaged the cognitive science revolution during the mid-20th century.

Many in neuroscience tend to speak of a neural "basis" for cognition, which has an analogous meaning in linear algebra: The Cartesian coordinate system provides a basis, the x-axis and y-axis, for many vectors and equations. In a similar way, the nervous system may provide the basic components for the mind. Mental patterns do not have some life that is independent of neural processes; they are neural processes, but interesting compositions of these processes, just as a cell is a combination of atoms, or an equation is a set of points on the XY plane.

Great science sites:

Public Library of Science	Tree of Life	NIH PubMed
Nature	MathWorld	JHU Signals and Systems

Music

I played guitar when I was younger and recently picked up the banjo, bluegrass style. I've tried composing with a cheap software program that makes violin sounds a friend once described as "honky".

3 of my favorite classical pieces:

-Igor Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Solo Pianofortes. The first movement goes especially well with strong coffee and statistical analysis.

-Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2. Star Wars + goth + pure genius = this music.

-Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2. An incredibly vivid piece--imagine a Warner Bros cartoon that features a violin and a mysterious existential encounter.

Good sites on classical music:

Classical.net

BBC Radio

Gramophone

Others:

-Raymond Scott is best known for his cartoonish swing, but was also one of the earlier electronic composers and started on minimalism in the early 1960's.

-The early works of Devo, often considered proto-punk, were very abrasive, absurd, satirical and musically creative.

-Don Caballero is brilliant. Their later music (beginning with What Burns Never Returns in 1998) is textured, abstract and rhythmically layered.

I am very much into proto.

News and politics

Favorite news sources:

The Newshour	The NY Times	The Washington Post
The Economist	BBC World News	National Public Radio

Other great resources:

C-SPAN

FedStats

PollingReport.com

I write letters to editors, and I vote. I do not drink Merlot (too thin).