Talk:Phase precession

Interesting

Neat to see an article on the topic that was the center of my academic career. I wonder, though, what you think about renaming this article as "theta phase precession", and leaving the current title as a redirect? I am partly responsible for popularizing the term "phase precession", but I have always felt guilty about it, because the fact is that all precession is phase precession. ("Precession" means "phase advance", so "phase precession" translates as "phase phase advance", a construction that raises red flags with the Department of Redundancy Department.) Looie496 (talk) 00:43, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! I was noticing some other hippocampus-related pages, and it occurred to me that we had a lack of coverage of this. I'm going to make "theta phase precession" a redirect to here, but I have low enthusiasm for doing it the other way around. I just re-looked at the cites to see how often "theta" is attached to the term, and (outside of that paper by Skaggs et al.!) it doesn't appear to be done all or most of the time, and I prefer keeping the page name simple if possible. Also, perhaps the same phenomenon will be found at other frequencies. By the way, thanks for fixing the Nobel reference to being "in part": I actually intended to do that myself, but intentionally wrote it that way for the first 24 hours after page creation to help ward off any trigger-happy CSD types. Thanks again, --Tryptofish (talk) 21:31, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

lede

O'Keefe won a half share of the 2014 Nobel Prize (May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser had the other half) for "discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain." It doesn't per se indicate that it was for his paper with Michael Recce. The sentence as written is correct, but confusing. I don't know how to change it but I recommend changing it somehow especially if a source can be found to indicate clearly what work we're talking about. Maybe say that O'Keefe, who wrote about this subject, later won a Nobel Prize shared with unrelated parties. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:14, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Chris for pointing that out. I changed "won" to "shared" and changed the source to another one from the Nobel website, that has a section explicitly devoted to phase precession. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:59, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't think this belongs on the page, but that source says, remarkably, that the paper about discovering precession had been rejected by multiple journals before finally being accepted for publication. Wow, just wow. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:20, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

I didn't know that, but I don't find it all that surprising. O'Keefe is a very careful scientist, but he has had a tendency to publish papers that are not very convincing. The O'Keefe and Dostrovsky paper that first described place cells was not at all convincing, and neither was the O'Keefe and Recce paper. I didn't take the phenomenon seriously until I saw it in my own data and realized how robust it is -- this doesn't come through in the O'Keefe and Recce paper, where it looks like hardly more than a statistical fluke. One of my primary goals in my own paper was to make that robustness overwhelmingly clear, so that nobody could doubt the reality of the phenomenon. For what it's worth, I believe the Nobel prize had much more to do with place cells and the cognitive map hypothesis than with theta phase precession. Looie496 (talk) 18:15, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

About your last sentence, it's clear that the basic idea of the prize was to recognize place and grid cells, but I see it as all being part of the same opus of work. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:16, 28 January 2018 (UTC)