FW: To Jeffrey - Thank you; Events; Visit

Dear Jeffrey,

Thank you so very very much for the wire transfer via Rich Kahn yesterday.

My apologies for missing your call Wednesday morning - one of my two half-days per month caring for patients in the MGH Cognitive Neurology Unit.  Quite a mix of diagnoses this week - vascular dementia, traumatic brain injury, depression-induced dementia, and episodic confusion/rage caused by complex partial seizures. 

It would be great to see you before I take over the inpatient consult service 24/7 for two weeks beginning Thurs June 26.  Save for Wed 6/25, my schedule is pretty open.  I'd be happy to jump on the shuttle to come down and catch up. 

Immediately thereafter, I'm talking at the Music & the Mind Symposium at Tufts, where I served on the Advisory Committee...the 25th anniversary of Lerdahl & Jackendoff's "A Generative Theory of Tonal Music" will be feted at that event...Lerdahl's more recent "Tonal Pitch Space" is a more viable treatment of music "grammar" - Fred and Ray would be among the first to say that tree structures don't really work for music, which has no equivalent of noun and verb phrases.

Also -

Today/tonight is the 50 Anniversary of the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory of Auditory Physiology - many consider it the premier auditory physiology lab in the country, at least until the start of this decade, when it heeded the NIH Deafness Institute's call to do more mouse genetics and thus diluted its unparalleled focus on systems neuroscience & bioengineering...they've never done much though at the interface of auditory perception and cognition or in the auditory cortex, quite different from Hubel's emphasis on color, shape etc and visual cortex, which is why I did my thesis with David instead of EPL... here's the weblink: http://research.meei.harvard.edu/EPL/EPL50.html.  Founded by Nelson Kiang PhD, who graduated U Chicago at 16y, one of the original Chicago whiz kids, father was a pre-Mao Chinese politician with ties to (maybe related to?) Chiang Kai-shek (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWchaing.htm)...Nelson says he needs only 2-3 hrs of sleep per day...spends nights up in bed reading...now about 75 yo...he was a big supporter 15 years ago for my move to Harvard and NIH Scientist-Physician Award...I still hold a Research Associate appointment at EPL, which is housed in Mass Eye & Ear....

With heartfelt thanks - hope to see you soon!
Mark

mtramo@hms.harvard.edu
cellphone 781-718-6390
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