Photo Gallery

Jack and Liu in China:
Jack and Liu took the optimal imager to Shanghai where Prof. Chao-Yi Li does similar work to ours on visual cortex. As well as studying the intrinsic signal produced in visual cortex as a result of global vs. local stimulation (Li's forte), Li noticed oscillatory, reciprocal changes in blood flow in the two hemispheres! We are presenting this work at the Miami neuroscience meeting this year.

Not far from Shanghai are the exquisite Huang Shan (Yellow Mountains).

Jack always found those Chinese paintings of mountains somewhat unreal, with their well-mannered pines and teetering, impossibly steep crags floating on downy pillows of cloud.

But Huang Shan was really like that! Chinese versions of Brocken spectres ascending to heaven everywhere.

  Li and Liu in Shanghai, April 1999
 

This beautiful Burmese pup was on sale in a Shanghai street market

Huang Shan (Yellow Mountains):
A number of features make these mountains unique.......The extraordinary shapes taken by the granite, the discipline of the pines and the misty atmosphere.

 
 
 

A Taoist master showing his power over gravity!  No PhotoShop fudging here.
 
 


 

This is probably the most photographed pine in the world, extending its arms in open welcome.


 

Bridges and railings are festooned with padlocks in this part of the world..........solid metal testimony to the strength of the pair-bond of the couple who put then there.
 


 

1. Up-to-date image of Jack:

My daughter, Chloe, was amused by the younger (1988 vintage) out-of-date picture of myself that I have used on the home page.

So here are some more current views. The monochrome was taken by Johannes Zanker at the wonderful meeting on visual cortex held at the Australian National University in February 1999.
The colour shot with Bert was taken by David Sproule from the Australian for the November issue of Contact, the alumnus magazine of Univ. Queensland. It is accompanied by an 80s shot of Galen on the sand dunes of Myall Lakes.

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2. Jack and Tara in India:
The following picture was also taken in early 1999, by a taxi driver in Pothamkot, a busy trading town in an otherwise-depressed agricultural area at the foot of the Himalaya in NW India.

It was miserably cold, made worse by the smog/fog that kept out the sun constantly.

Our somewhat cheerful disposition in the shot owes much to the previous week that we had spent in the sun, high above above the smog, at Dharamsala amongst the equally sunny Tibetans.

TSA R'LUNG and THIGLE.
Tao, Vedas, Tibetan Buddhism and Right-Left Brain Differences:
I was rather surprised to find that Eastern mystics were already aware of many aspects of our work that we thought were new on account of our fancy methodology. Apparently, introspection and meditation have the powers to reveal aspects of the brain and mind that are little suspected in the West. (Those suspicious of the subjective nature of these approaches will soon be out-of-date with the advent of fMRI, which offers a means to test objectively a subjective state).
One example concerns the innate bias for the colour red and the horizontal orientation that seems to be the rule (>90%) for the Left hemisphere of subjects that I have tested using my "hemispheric switch" apparatus.
Here is a picture from an old Tibetan text that illustrates what Taoist and Buddhist monks have confirmed.....a set of reproducible differences between the Left and Right sides of the body, including a propensity of the Right side (Left hemisphere) for red...horizontal...up...far...straight...go.....etc (one has to give the Eastern mystics a bit of rope on the decussation of the hemispheres' outputs...they cannot be expected to have known about this crossing....but they certainly seem to have picked up all the right-side (Left hemisphere) propensities.
 


 
 

ELECTRIC RONA
The recent increasing prominence of weather phenomena (tornadoes in England, huge hailstones in Sydney,  coral bleaching in all the tropical reefs, thousand square kilometre icebergs breaking off in Antarctica etc) seems to herald the approaching new milennium and global warming., I thought that this 60 s picture of Rona in an electrical storm was a propos.



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