Lost Science is a series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.
Jessica Cantlon: I’ve been studying human brains and cognition for many decades. One question we’ve been tackling recently is: How can we improve human intelligence?
Specifically, I’ve been focusing on mathematical thinking and spatial visualization, which are tasks that require us to trace patterns across multiple dimensions at the same time, like predicting how physical objects move through space.
These are difficult skills that aren’t formally taught in schools. But being able to do this well is so important for 21st-century jobs, and increasingly so. Engineers, surgeons, people who navigate ships and airplanes — these people need to be able to visualize how to avoid obstacles or how their actions are going to affect the objects they’re working with.
One of my research goals was to see if it’s possible to teach people how to get better at this, while tackling some of the most challenging problems that people face. We had a $1.5 million grant with the U.S. Navy to study if it’s possible to improve these kinds of skills, as part of a larger scientific research project called the attention control program.
We were putting participants in f.M.R.I. machines, scanning their brains and then giving them nine weeks of training in solving spatial problems. At the end of the training, we would scan each person’s brain again to see how it had changed. We also wanted to compare results between genders, because there have been lots of claims in the past that women perform worse at these kinds of tasks. Scientists have debated whether that difference was biological, social or cultural in origin.
Our early results showed that the trainings worked, and we didn’t see differences in neural activity between the genders. But we got only two-thirds of the scans we needed and never had time to analyze the data, because our grant was canceled at the end of last year, halfway through the project. We lost about a third of our total funding and had to scramble to find alternative funding for the postdoctoral researcher, technician and graduate student who were supported by the grant.
In fact, they closed the entire program that our project was part of. They told us it was because the department was shifting its priorities away from basic research to more applied research. That’s a problem, because basic research provides the fundamental building blocks of scientific discovery, the kind that lead to breakthroughs and discoveries, like Nobel Prize-winning work.
Without it, applied science — which is exactly what it sounds like, scientific discoveries applied to the real world — will stagnate and not improve. There won’t be more discoveries, and we’ll just stop at what we already know.
Jessica Cantlon is a professor of psychology and the chair of developmental neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University.
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