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The school, which includes psychology, speech, language and hearing sciences, neuroscience and cognitive science, will also offer new undergraduate majors and collaborative projects between researchers.

By Jeff Harrison, University Communications
October 22, 2009

The new School of Mind, Brain, and Behavior at the University of Arizona was begun out of necessity, through a faculty initiative launched in the midst of the current economic downturn. But the net result may be the creation of a new academic entity on the national forefront of neuroscientific and cognitive research and education, and is likely to reach into other areas of the University as well.

The school is a fusion of three existing academic departments – psychology, speech, language and hearing sciences, and the new neuroscience department – plus the graduate interdisciplinary program in cognitive science that is due to become a department. The school expects to start offering new undergraduate majors within the next two years.

Expectations also are that the school will foster new collaborations and research ventures ranging from understanding the brain down to its molecular and cellular components to its role in complex social interactions and decision making.

Ironically, had the UA not been saddled with staggering budget cuts, the likelihood of such a school ever forming would have been remote.

Alfred Kaszniak, the head of the UA psychology department, said that the school offers an opportunity to gain more than the sum of the school's separate parts, "but we have a lot of hard work to make that a reality."

"One of the greatest challenges is because the disciplines have been ‘siloed' for some period of time, like countries that don't interact with one another have their own culture, expectations and ways of doing most everything," Kaszniak said. "Looking at geographic disbursement across the campus, how do we bring faculty together?"

Besides being spread across different parts of the campus, faculty also have increased workloads, more pressure to find grants and in some cases are teaching larger classes. Kaszniak said finding ways for more interaction is "a significant challenge."

The brain, of course, is the thread that runs through the school's core units, all of which all have distinct missions. Kaszniak said other universities are trying to move in a similar direction as the UA, "but bringing together this particular combination of psych, speech, neuroscience, and the interdisciplianry graduate programs is, I think, quite unique."

Psychology is one of the largest departments at the UA, and has clinical and research missions in cognition and behavior in areas such as aging and memory, Alzheimer's disease and Down syndrome, depression, sleep disorders and psychological contributors to medical illnesses.

The department's neuroimaging laboratory also has drawn interest from researchers both inside and outside the department as well.

Speech, language and hearing sciences also has a clinical mission, including hearing and autism, and is noted for research in communication disorders such as aphasia and hearing loss.

Elena Plante, the head of speech, language and hearing sciences, said she regularly collaborates with Lee Ryan, an associate professor and the director of the fMRI neuroimaging lab in psychology. Plante said the new school should improve the infrastructure for the kinds of research she and Ryan currently do, and that others will do in the future.

"I think that it will help foster a long-held goal of ours of making the lab more widely used by people who aren't yet using it, but have the competence and interest that are relevant to these kinds of resources," Plante said.

Neuroscience, the study of the nervous system, centers on the field of neurobiology, which Regents' Professor John Hildebrand calls the "nuts and bolts" of the brain. Neuroscience has implications ranging from behavior and development, to evolution, genetics and pharmacology, and even biologically inspired robotics and mechanisms of neurological and psychiatric diseases.

The new department of neurosciences was established by the transfer of the faculty of the former Arizona Research Laboratories Division of Neurobiology to the College of Science. Hildebrand, formerly the director of the Division of Neurobiology and now head of the new neuroscience department, said the school provides important opportunities for its 10 core faculty members and seven colleagues in other departments.

"Ever since the ARL Division of Neurobiology was established, it has been ordained that we eventually would become an academic unit in a college. It has been stimulating to work with leaders from those partner units to develop exciting plans for the new department and School."

Cognitive Science hosts the interdisciplinary study of the mind, encompassing the study of intelligent behavior as well as the brain mechanisms and computations underlying that behavior. Research areas include judgement and decision-making, language acquisition and comprehension and visual recognition.

The Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience educates doctoral students to become teachers and researchers in neuroscience in areas as varied as molecular and cellular systems, and behavioral, cognitive, theoretical and clinical neuroscience.

So, where is the common ground for all of these units? Kaszniak said it's an ongoing process.

"There is a lot of resistance to combining things at the risk of losing identity and traditions," he said.

"The hope is that what is lost is more than made up for in those possible new interactions.

"But more importantly, how does the interaction between us and the sharing of very different ways of thinking about the brain, thinking about behavior, how behavior emerges from this small glob of tissue? That, I think, is something that has tremendous promise because that may be what provides for breakthroughs, totally different ways of seeing how the brain actually works."

There already is some indication that faculty have been intrigued by the new school. Carol Barnes, the director of the McKnight Brain Institute recently hosted an inaugural event for the school at her home.

"I live in the far reaches of northeast Tucson and rather than have people drive through dark, winding roads in the desert, I thought it would be a good idea to have everyone come on University vans," Barnes said. "By the time they got to my house, there were a lot of fantastic interactions going on. People who hadn't worked with each other, who often didn't know each other were engaged in amazing conversations.

"The bigger vision here is we will interact more effectively than we previously were able to, and there is a wealth of subject matter to tap into," she said.

While four units will become the core of the school, Kaszniak said there is an array of faculty in other units doing related research in linguistics, medical anthropology and philosophy, mathematics, biology and biomedical engineering, to name only a few. They also are being encouraged to affiliate with MBB. But, said Kaszniak, those units and their faculty already have a close affinity to their own colleges. Adding more departments and units to the core would not, he emphasized, strengthen the school by increasing its size.

"Another example of our challenges involves our social psychologists who are gifted in extraordinary ways of asking questions about how individuals interact with each other. We know that they won't pursue a seminar focusing on ion channels in cell membranes as being helpful or informative to them. 

"We have to think carefully about what are the places of greatest potential yield, how do we focus on the big questions that engage and inspire people to think in novel ways and not get caught up in some unworkable vision that we're suddenly all going to become experts from the molecular to the social levels," he said.

Also at the heart of the School of Mind, Brain, and Behavior are students, who at the beginning were asked for their input in the planning process.

Elena Plante said the school "allows us to create things at both the undergraduate and doctoral levels that we definitely were not able to before and can be done better through interdisciplinary cooperation."

On the drawing board, she said, is a general education sequence that would integrate areas across the school's faculty. Also, a new undergraduate degree program in neural and cognitive sciences could become a magnet for high-achieving students from across the country.

At issue also is how to deliver curriculum offerings in a cost-effective way. Kaszniak said courses currently taught by different departments might have sufficient overlap that would allow them to be combined into a single course without increasing the faculty teaching costs.

Students could also benefit from an increase in permeability between campus laboratories. Graduate students, for example, could spend time in labs other than their own to enhance their expertise in related areas.

Ideally, all of the students in the school – graduates and undergraduates – would work closely together and mentor one another. It would benefit the less experienced students and beneficially stretch resources.

The school also has organized itself a bit differently. The heads and directors within the school will function as an executive committee, what one member called a "council of equals." And instead of having a director, Kaszniak will serve as the "speaker."

"The implication is that it is not a hierarchical organization, but rather one governed by consensus. We've had some success so far with that at consolidating resources in tech support, saving dollars there and also improving the quality of that support, so we're convinced it's possible."

Kaszniak said while money was a significant motivator in creating the school, what is more important is the faculty interest in the growing science concerning mind, brain and behavior, which he said has accelerated in the last decade.

"We want to make sure that not only do we stay at the forefront of making those discoveries, but that we're in a position to integrate them together and maximize that kind of interactive and synthetic view wouldn't have been possible without this new school," he said.