Talk:John O'Keefe (neuroscientist)

Contested deletion
This page should not be speedy deleted as an unambiguous copyright infringement, because I wrote the vast majority of the page from scratch based on my knowledge of John O'Keefe's articles and a few pieces of information from other web sites. I have now shortened and altered the single short paragraph that contained material from the Gruber web site. I did not see any notice on the Gruber web site about copyright, and I only used that material because it contained some biographical information that I did not know and thought would be useful for others. I have now shortened the paragraph to contain primarily information that I already knew without consulting the Gruber web site. --173.48.209.24 (talk) 19:52, 24 November 2013 (UTC)
 * If it doesn't explicitly state it is available under a license compatible with use on Wikipedia, assume it isn't. Shortening the paragraph to contain information that you already knew without consulting it is missing the point completely. ErikHaugen (talk &#124; contribs) 00:14, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Important Note
O’Keefe experimental data does not indicate or prove a temporal coding paradigm, O’Keefe has used temporal patterns to show the existence of place cells. Removed "and his discovery that they show temporal coding in the form of Theta rhythm theta phase precession" since temporal coding and EEG, local field potentials in the form of theta rhythm, theta phase precession are distinct. For details please read https://www.researchgate.net/post/Place_cells_What_does_it_prove — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.9.129.235 (talk • contribs)
 * Please note that the above comment is not in accordance with talk page guidelines ("Talk pages are for discussing the article, not for general conversation about the article's subject"), as it does not discuss ways to improve the article. Instead, it tries to prove some OR/fringe point that a person on ResearchGate is spamming other people on that service about. Normally, comments like this are deleted from talk pages, but insists on maintaining it. --Randykitty (talk) 12:12, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I've looked carefully at the edits. I see no problem with leaving the IP's comments here on the talk page, and responding to them. But the IP is just plain wrong on the facts. I would support some toning down of the page if, hypothetically, the language implied that temporal coding accounts, in total, for information processing in the brain, because the literature is far from being there yet. But all that this page says is that Dr. O'Keefe discovered theta phase precession in place cells, and that theta phase precession is a form of temporal coding. Those are facts. For goodness' sake, O'Keefe just won the Nobel Prize in part for that particular finding, so it's pretty well established. Phase precession is about timing of action potentials, so it's temporal (maybe other things too, to some extent, but it's correct to call it temporal). I would have no objection, however, to some expansion of the language, to convey the ways that phase precession is something more specific than temporal coding in its general sense (ie, not simply the timing of action potentials within one neuron, but the timing, in one neuron, relative to the timing in the surrounding population.) --Tryptofish (talk) 15:32, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, theta phase precession was the topic of my Ph.D. dissertation ( http://www.its.caltech.edu/~bi250b/papers/skaggs%201996.pdf ), so I know it pretty well. I'm personally not keen on the term "temporal coding", because it implicitly implies that the hippocampus uses spike timing to convey information to other parts of the brain.  In my own favored theory, that's not what precession is about.  But that's really a quibble, and the term is widely used in the literature.  For a Wikipedia article, I don't see any problem with it. Looie496 (talk) 12:58, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I agree with you, now that you say it, that we really are not dealing with simple spike timing, and I just made an edit that attempts to make the distinction more explicit. To that extent, I think that the IP editor has a valid point, in that it really is not simple spike timing at all, even though it is very much about timing in a relative sense. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:31, 30 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I've tweaked the wording a bit, to make it clear that the precession is actually relative to the EEG, not directly relative to any specific set of cells. Other than that (and a couple more trivial tweaks) it looks good. Looie496 (talk) 01:30, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks both; the discussion took me out of my depth a while back, but does confirm I was right to revert the removal of the IP comment. Wiki CRUK John (talk) 10:59, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Overall Evaluation
This article is very good at describing his research as well as his current position at UCL. It does not go in depth to his early life or his Nobel Prize as one may expect. More information should be added to the Nobel Prize description. This article is well-developed considering current information available in 2015.Abbey-MU (talk) 21:29, 26 January 2020 (UTC)