Abstract: Bence Ölveczky graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Budapest in 1994. In 1998, he started his PhD with Markus Meister at Harvard University, studying motion processing in the retina. He was elected Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2004, and did his fellowship on birdsong learning with Michale Fee at MIT. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research focuses on how the brain learns motor skills. What turned you on to biology in the first place? Clueless about what to do after high school, I heeded my father’s advice to study Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Budapest. The logic was that it would give me a foundation in math and physics while I figured out what to do with my life. But my studies failed to inspire me and I found myself spending far more time in the theatres, opera houses, and museums of Budapest and neighboring Vienna than in the lecture halls of the university. I saw art as a manifestation of the human experience and a mirror through which I could get to know myself. I wanted to understand more about how this magic is created and started reading about arts and artists. The book that turned me on to neuroscience was “Art and Illusion” by Ernst Gombrich, an art historian. Gombrich discussed art in terms of our perceptions, and explained that great artists know how to evoke thoughts, associations, and emotions by using well-worn tricks and some inspired trial-and-error. It was all about stimulus–response relationships. Art served as the stimulus, while the mind created the response. I became fascinated by the idea that one could investigate the mechanistic basis of this response and applied to study Medical Engineering and Medical Physics at Harvard University, hoping that it would be a shortcut to neuroscience. It was. Soon after I arrived on campus, I met Markus Meister, who worked on how visual stimuli reaching the retina are transformed into electrical signals that are sent to higher brain areas to create percepts. It was exactly what I was looking for and I managed to wangle my way into his lab without any formal training in neuroscience or biology. Who were your early influences? My parents encouraged me to be curious and gave me the freedom to explore the world and discover my interests with the certainty that they would catch me if I fell. My brother’s academic successes motivated me to study hard, lest I be the also-ran in the family. Another key influence was my PhD advisor Markus Meister, a rigorous, deep, and critical thinker who taught me by example to question assumptions and challenge dogmas. He encouraged me to come up with my own questions and let me fail and succeed on my own terms. If you had to choose a different field of biology, what would it be? Probably cancer biology. I started reading up on it when my father was diagnosed with late stage stomach cancer. I was able to explain to him the biology behind the disease and ways in which we could beat the diagnosis. The mere possibility of directly contributing to transformative new therapies that extend patient lives and alleviate suffering lends cancer research a dimension that my current work lacks, and one that I would find rewarding and sustaining. Do you have a scientific hero? For my early work on the retina, I was under the spell of Horace Barlow. His ability to pose clear questions and design simple experiments to address them was, and remains, truly inspiring. More recently, I have been worshipping at the altar of Karl Lashley for much the same reasons. And though his research is less related to my own, John Hopfield belongs in the pantheon as well. If you would not have made it as a scientist, what would you have become? Growing up, I wanted to be an architect. Great architects combine art, design, science, engineering and psychology to create functional and beautiful spaces and structures — the ultimate gesamtkunstwerk. My drawing skills, however, were beyond pathetic, so I disqualified myself. My other fantasy was to follow in my mother’s footsteps and become a theatre director. Again, fear of mediocrity kept me far away. I tried my hand at journalism, spending two years after graduation as a reporter and art critic. I was initially thrilled to go to theatre and film festivals and meet and interview artists, but the novelty soon wore off and the decadence and evanescence of the whole endeavor caught up with me. It made me realize how much I value the lasting and meaningful contributions one can make as a scientist. Did your time as a journalist help you become a better scientist? I think of scientists as investigative journalists that work with experimental data as their primary ‘source’. We too are looking to break a good story. Once we have the outlines of one, we gather more information and try to present our ‘scoop’ in a way that engages our audience. It’s fundamentally the same process whether the ‘story’ is about science, art, or politics. Developing narratives for our experimental results is one of the more creative and enjoyable aspects of my work, and one for which my experience with journalism may indeed be helpful. Do you have a favourite conference? There are many stimulating conferences, but the synergy between great science and first-rate skiing is hard to beat. There is something about the mountains that catalyses scientific thought and dialogue, and I know of many creative experiments that were conceived in ski lifts. The Winter Neuroscience conference in Sölden is my favourite, with the Cosyne workshops in Utah a close second. Sadly, large conferences give me headaches, so I tend to avoid them. Do you feel a push towards more applied science, and if so, how does that affect your own work? I would love for my science to be more applied. The best chance of that is if we extend the notion of ‘applied’ to include informing the general public about the mechanistic underpinnings of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions. Just like art, literature, and philosophy, neuroscience can give us a deeper understanding of the human condition. To realize that potential, we need to popularize our work without trivializing it. We need a Feynmann of neuroscience. What is your biggest lamentation about how science is conducted today? Rather than being a collective and collaborative quest to understand the truth about ourselves and the world around us, science has become a bit too much like Monopoly, a zero-sum game with winners and losers, haves and have-nots. The winner is the one who racks up the most Nature and Science papers, and gets the most grants and awards. To succeed in science these days you have to understand and master the intricacies of this game, a realization that can be demoralizing to many who enter science with high-minded ideals and aspirations. I have seen many brilliant students quit science because they are unwilling to engage in the politics and gamesmanship of our enterprise. I think the key is to recognize the rules of the game and play it with decency, while maintaining a playful curiosity-driven approach to science. It may not be easy, but with good mentoring, some luck and shrewdness it can be done as attested by the many great scientists working today. Do you believe there is a need for more crosstalk between biological disciplines? I would welcome more crosstalk with theorists. Biological data are exploding in quantity and complexity and we need smart people with quantitative skills to make sense of it all and extract organizing principles. My most stimulating collaborations have been with theorists whose minds are uncontaminated by entrenched assumptions about what our data should be telling us. More generally, discussions with smart and inquisitive outsiders have always been a great source of new insights, ideas, and research directions. Any strong views on social media and science — for example, the role of science blogs in critiquing published papers? Science functions best when it is dialectic and we should all welcome thoughtful criticism of our work. Science blogs are great forums for this. Some people have a great taste in science and a critical mind to go with it, and I would love to read their opinions on the latest papers. But quality commentary takes significant time and effort and is a rather rare commodity. More common are twitter-level outbursts, which tend to be far less thoughtful and constructive and often end up hampering rather than catalysing meaningful scientific discourse. Do you think there is too much emphasis on big data-gathering collaborations as opposed to hypothesis-driven research by small groups? That’s an interesting and timely question. The BRAIN initiative in the US is focused on developing new tools for data gathering. The human brain project in Europe is deemed premature because of lack of data. There is a hunger for data, data, and more data, but to what end? There seems to be a notion that if only we could record from more neurons, identify more cell types, map more connections, the mystery of the brain would magically reveal itself. John Hopfield warned against this fallacy more than fifteen years ago, when he issued a challenge to neuroscientists to think deeply about the data they have, rather than spend time and resources collecting more. His advice seems largely to have fallen on deaf ears. On the other hand, large projects must necessarily benefit the community as a whole and focusing on tool development is an easy way to reach consensus and set achievable, if incremental, goals. The optimistic viewpoint is that these large-scale investments will facilitate rather than stymie hypothesis-driven research, which will continue to be the main engine for progress in neuroscience.