Distinguished University Professorship Lecture Series - Fall 2026 (with audio descriptions)
University of Michigan
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Key ideas
- Long-term data from the Health and Retirement Study reveals that while annual societal dementia costs in the U.S. exceed $200 billion—driven primarily by uncompensated family caregiving—dementia prevalence among adults over 65 decreased between 2000 and 2012 due to higher educational attainment and improved cardiovascular health. (94:59)
- High-speed eye-tracking and response-signal experiments demonstrate that attentional deficits in adults with ADHD stem not from heightened susceptibility to initial peripheral distraction, but from an impaired ability to recover and refocus once distracted. (61:43)
- New historical analysis reveals that Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam operated as an anti-imperialist heterotopia and a vehicle for processing grief surrounding the violent suppression of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. (17:01)
- Epidemiological research indicates that clinical dementia is predominantly a mixed neuropathology combining Alzheimer's biomarkers with microvascular damage, with decades-long declines in dementia incidence now threatened by rising population rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes. (109:50)
Detailed notes
## Background Published by the University of Michigan on YouTube on October 7, 2026, this video documents the Fall 2026 Distinguished University Professorship Lecture held at the Michigan League Ballroom on September 30, 2026. The recording provides an audio-described presentation honoring faculty members Juan Cole, John Jonides, and Kenneth Langa for their exceptional achievements in research, teaching, and service.
## TL;DR The symposium showcases lectures by three newly appointed Distinguished University Professors representing diverse academic disciplines. Historian Juan Cole explores how Edward FitzGerald's celebrated translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was shaped by personal heartbreak, Victorian social alienation, and the imperial trauma of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Cognitive neuroscientist John Jonides reviews behavioral, eye-tracking, and fMRI research to explain how prefrontal cognitive control mechanisms suppress reflexive distractions and habit-driven responses. Physician-researcher Kenneth Langa concludes with a 30-year retrospective on the Health and Retirement Study, detailing the societal burden of dementia, generational declines in cognitive impairment, and actionable lifestyle interventions for brain health.
## Atmosphere & style The event carries an erudite, reverent, and celebratory tone fitting a top-tier academic investiture, framed by formal introductions from university leadership. Each lecture establishes a distinct emotional rhythm, moving seamlessly from intimate family acknowledgments and tributes to deceased mentors into rigorous scholarly storytelling. The presentations are infused with understated academic wit—from jokes about artificial intelligence placing toasters on ceilings to tongue-in-cheek advice on choosing wealthy parents—giving the proceedings an engaging, warm, and deeply reflective atmosphere.
## Bulletin - [01:34:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5699s) Long-term data from the Health and Retirement Study reveals that while annual societal dementia costs in the U.S. exceed $200 billion—driven primarily by uncompensated family caregiving—dementia prevalence among adults over 65 decreased between 2000 and 2012 due to higher educational attainment and improved cardiovascular health. - [01:01:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3703s) High-speed eye-tracking and response-signal experiments demonstrate that attentional deficits in adults with ADHD stem not from heightened susceptibility to initial peripheral distraction, but from an impaired ability to recover and refocus once distracted. - [17:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1021s) New historical analysis reveals that Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam operated as an anti-imperialist heterotopia and a vehicle for processing grief surrounding the violent suppression of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. - [01:49:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6590s) Epidemiological research indicates that clinical dementia is predominantly a mixed neuropathology combining Alzheimer's biomarkers with microvascular damage, with decades-long declines in dementia incidence now threatened by rising population rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
## Key takeaways - [00:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=10s) The University of Michigan conferred the 2026 Distinguished University Professorship on faculty members Juan Cole, John Jonides, and Kenneth Langa in recognition of exceptional scholarship, teaching, and public service. - [17:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1021s) Edward FitzGerald's famous English translation of the Rubaiyat was composed amidst personal turmoil and acute anxiety over the 1857 Indian Rebellion, which endangered his close intellectual and romantic companion Edward Cowell in Kolkata. - [19:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1175s) FitzGerald incorporated subtle anti-imperial critiques into his translations, questioning the moral governance of Queen Victoria and comparing the British Empire's overextension to the fallen dynasties of ancient Persian monarchs. - [28:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1683s) Departing from traditional Orientalist tropes that framed the East as barbaric, FitzGerald utilized Omar Khayyam's poetry to construct a secular, carpe diem heterotopia offering refuge from Victorian religious dogma. - [30:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1828s) FitzGerald's formal innovation fused the native Persian ruba'i AABA rhyme scheme with English iambic pentameter, producing a distinct literary structure that influenced 20th-century American poets such as T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. - [41:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2512s) Cognitive control is defined as the capacity to steer thought and behavior toward internal goals rather than automated habits or prepotent environmental cues, developing gradually between age three and the mid-20s. - [48:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2910s) Involuntary attentional capture by peripheral motion and onset represents an evolutionary adaptation that overrides volitional control to ensure rapid responses to imminent survival threats. - [57:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3441s) Dual-process computational modeling and timed response tasks demonstrate that habitual visual responses dominate immediate processing before slower, goal-directed cognitive control can assert accuracy. - [01:02:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3767s) Functional neuroimaging reveals that the prefrontal cortex experiences peak bilateral and medial activation during short-latency habit-versus-goal conflicts, subduing once cognitive control overrides the reflexive impulse. - [01:01:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3703s) Adults with ADHD exhibit normal levels of initial involuntary distraction in eye-tracking tasks, identifying their primary deficit as an inability to efficiently disengage from distractors and recover goal focus. - [01:29:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5391s) The Michigan Health and Retirement Study (HRS) represents a critical global research infrastructure, operating as an open-access public good that has expanded to over 40 partner countries through the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol. - [01:34:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5699s) Informal family caregiving accounts for the single largest share of dementia's $200 billion annual economic burden in the United States, outpacing institutional nursing home expenditures. - [01:34:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5699s) The decline in U.S. dementia prevalence from 11.5% in 2000 through 2012 was primarily driven by greater cognitive reserve from increased education, better cardiovascular risk management, and the environmental phase-out of leaded gasoline. - [01:40:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6009s) Longitudinal survey data demonstrates that critical illness such as sepsis leaves lasting cognitive impairments in older adults, while broader comparative analyses reveal higher chronic disease rates in the U.S. than in England across all income quintiles. - [01:49:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6590s) Most clinical dementia cases involve mixed neuropathology—combining amyloid and tau with microvascular injury—highlighting that protecting cardiovascular health and controlling metabolic risk factors remain the most effective interventions for maintaining brain health.
## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=10s) Welcoming the 2026 Distinguished University Professors
President Domenico Grasso opens the ceremony at the Michigan League Ballroom by defining the Distinguished University Professorship as an exceptional honor that embodies the University of Michigan’s threefold mission of teaching, research, and service. This distinction recognizes scholars who advance the public good through rigorous scholarship, transformative education, creative endeavors, and dedicated mentorship. Grasso invokes the legacy of past recipients who reshaped entire disciplines and global public health, citing epidemiologist Thomas Francis Jr., who directed the nationwide clinical trials that validated the safety and efficacy of the Salk polio vaccine; geneticist James V. Neel, founder of the nation's first academic department of human genetics at Michigan; renowned opera soprano Shirley Verrett; and neuroscientist Huda Akil, whose pioneering discoveries unraveled the biological mechanisms of depression, chronic pain, and addiction.
Turning to the audience, Grasso asks all previously named Distinguished University Professors in attendance to stand. Acknowledging the applause, he remarks on the rarity of this "quite a selective club" before introducing the three faculty members being inducted into the pantheon of Michigan academic excellence: - **Juan Cole**, appointed the Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor of History. - **John Jonides**, appointed the Edward E. Smith Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. - **Kenneth Langa**, appointed the A. Regula Herzog Distinguished University Professor of Internal Medicine and Survey Research.
Following the applause, Grasso welcomes Provost Laurie McCauley to the podium to present the honorees.
[02:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=175s) Provost McCauley Introduces Professor Juan Cole
Provost Laurie McCauley reflects on the ceremony as one of the quintessential highlights of the academic year, underscoring President Grasso’s longstanding emphasis on faculty serving as public intellectuals. She describes the honorees as thinkers working at the frontiers of knowledge who actively translate their discoveries and creative practice into the public sphere. McCauley also expresses gratitude to Mike Solomon, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Graduate Studies and Dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, for heading the faculty selection committee and serving as moderator for the question-and-answer periods following each presentation.
McCauley then introduces the afternoon's first lecturer, Dr. Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of History in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Cole has spent decades reshaping international perspectives on the Middle East and South Asia by uniting painstaking scholarly archival research with wide-ranging public commentary. Over his prolific career, Cole has authored 21 books, published over 110 book chapters, and produced a vast corpus of academic and public-facing articles. At Michigan, he has directed multiple international and regional studies centers and mentored generations of graduate students. His scholarly reputation has earned him invitations to give named lectures and receive honors at institutions worldwide, including Qatar University, Northwestern University, the University of Washington, Lingnan University in Hong Kong, the American University in Cairo, and the Library of Congress.
McCauley announces the title of Cole’s presentation: *"The 1857 Indian Revolution and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."* The lecture explores the geopolitical and personal circumstances surrounding Edward FitzGerald’s 19th-century English translation of medieval Persian quatrains, composed during the armed Indian uprising against the British East India Company, which subsequently grew into one of the earliest megahits of modern print culture.
[06:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=375s) Edward FitzGerald and the World of the Rubaiyat
Taking the lectern, Juan Cole humorously notes his tight 20-minute window and acknowledges that younger audiences today may not recognize the title *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam*. Yet, for over a century, FitzGerald’s translation reigned as the single most famous and widely quoted poem in the English language. Cole recalls that during his own youth in the 1960s and 1970s, encounter with the text was ubiquitous, and while lines from it still surface in popular idiom, broad public memory of it has largely faded. The unlikely rise of an 11th-century Persian collection of *rubāʿiyyāt*—four-line stanzas or quatrains—into a Victorian literary sensation represents one of the most curious episodes in literary history.
Cole turns to the man responsible for the text's English incarnation: Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald was an Anglo-Irish gentleman scholar of immense inherited wealth whose family owned vast estates spanning both England and Ireland. After taking his degree at Cambridge, FitzGerald effectively retired from active professional life. Disinclined toward the bustling high-society parties favored by his mother, he adopted a bohemian, reclusive existence in a Suffolk cottage, spending his days reading and writing long, reflective letters that established him as one of the preeminent epistolary stylists of the Victorian era.
```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Transmission of the Rubaiyat to Edward FitzGerald accDescr: Flow diagram illustrating the linguistic and personal chain that carried Omar Khayyam's Persian quatrains into FitzGerald's hands. subgraph Origins["Persianate Literary Tradition"] A["Omar Khayyam<br/>(11th-c. Mathematician & Poet)"] --> B["Manuscript Preserved at<br/>Bodleian Library, Oxford"] end subgraph Chancery["Imperial Language Networks"] C["Persian Chancery Tradition<br/>(Mughals, Central Asia, Marathas)"] --> D["Retired East India Co. Officials<br/>(Tutoring in England)"] D --> E["Edward Byles Cowell<br/>(Linguistic Prodigy)"] end subgraph Transmission["Mentorship & Translation"] B --> E E -->|"Tutors in Persian (1852)"| F["Edward FitzGerald<br/>(Gentleman Scholar)"] E -->|"Transcribes & shares Bodleian MS (1856)"| F F --> G["The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam<br/>(1859 Translation)"] end ```
FitzGerald was a gay man living in an era that possessed no open public vocabulary for same-sex attraction, what Oscar Wilde would later term the "love that cannot be named." Those in FitzGerald’s intimate social circle were well aware of his romantic inclinations. His wife would later bitterly recall that if any handsome young schoolfellow appeared as an "embryo Apollo," FitzGerald would instantly make the boy his "heart's idol." FitzGerald freely admitted to falling deeply in love with male companions throughout his school days and adult life. In an ill-fated effort to conform to social expectations and rescue his reputation, he eventually entered into a brief, disastrous marriage that left both parties profoundly miserable.
- FitzGerald possessed extraordinary Anglo-Irish landed wealth, allowing him to bypass traditional employment entirely. - He lived a quiet, reclusive life in Suffolk, earning renown as a prolific letter writer. - Victorian social taboos forced his romantic attachments to male companions to remain officially unacknowledged.
[09:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=580s) The Romantic Friendship with Edward Cowell and the Persian Connection
In his mid-30s, while living in Suffolk, FitzGerald met Edward Byles Cowell, a young merchant’s son from the nearby town of Ipswich. Cowell was an intellectual prodigy with a savant-like gift for foreign languages, determined to elevate himself beyond his provincial commercial background and gain admittance to Oxford. FitzGerald and Cowell formed what Victorians characterized as an intense "romantic friendship." When Cowell left Suffolk for Oxford, FitzGerald was dismayed by the physical separation. Even after Cowell married, FitzGerald routinely visited Oxford, staying in the young couple’s home for weeks at a time—an arrangement that caused obvious friction with the new Mrs. Cowell.
Cowell’s interest in Persian originated in the public library in Ipswich. At the time, Persian served as far more than the vernacular of Iran: it functioned as the primary chancery and administrative lingua franca across a vast swath of the Islamic world and South Asia. Official business and diplomacy were conducted in Persian across: - The Mughal Empire in India - The Emirate of Bukhara in Central Asia - The administrative courts of the Ottoman Empire - Regional Hindu polities, such as the Maratha Empire
When the British East India Company dismantled and inherited the apparatus of the Mughal state, its administrators were compelled to master Persian to govern the subcontinent. Consequently, retired East India Company officers returning to Britain brought their language skills home, translating classical verse and tutoring ambitious young scholars. Cowell studied under one of these veteran company officials. Eager to preserve his emotional and intellectual bond with the young scholar, FitzGerald asked Cowell to tutor him as well, beginning formal Persian lessons in 1852.
Upon finishing his degree in classics at Oxford, Cowell struggled to find an academic post in Britain due to his humble provincial origins and unconventional focus on Oriental languages. He ultimately accepted an appointment at Presidency College in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. The news devastated FitzGerald, who wept bitterly at the prospect of losing his friend to a distant continent. In the mid-19th century, prior to modern medicine and sanitation, travel to the tropics was fraught with lethal diseases, and FitzGerald feared he would never see Cowell alive again.
[13:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=821s) Discovering Khayyam and Translating Through Personal Crises
Shortly before his departure for India, Cowell was cataloging Persian manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford when he came upon an unheralded manuscript containing the *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam*. Khayyam, celebrated during his lifetime in medieval Iran primarily as an astronomer and mathematician, was credited with writing short, epigrammatic four-line poems. Examining the text, Cowell uncovered verse brimming with hedonistic and radically skeptical philosophy: - The outright denial of an afterlife or heavenly paradise. - An admonition to ignore theological dogmas and "take the cash on the barrelhead" in the present world. - A reminder that human beings will spend eternity "sleeping a long time under the black earth." - The urgent counsel to seize worldly pleasures—feasting, wine, and human intimacy—before death strikes.
For a Victorian scholar, these brazenly secular, carpe diem sentiments were astonishing. Cowell read through portions of the text with FitzGerald during their study sessions, copied out the manuscript for him, and sailed for Kolkata in 1856. Over the following eighteen months, FitzGerald threw himself into translating the quatrains into English verse.
Cole observes that while literary scholars have generated an enormous body of commentary on FitzGerald's poem, professional historians have seldom situated the work within its immediate historical moment. Historians insist on deep contextualization, examining what else was occurring around the author. FitzGerald undertook his translation amidst three compounding personal crises: 1. **The Agony of Separation:** FitzGerald was mourning the departure of his beloved Cowell to Kolkata, an assignment he viewed as a virtual death sentence. 2. **Social Alienation and the "Confirmed Bachelor":** FitzGerald found himself isolated from conventional society, marked by his contemporaries as an unmarried eccentric. 3. **A Catastrophic Marriage:** In a desperate bid to rehabilitate his standing in polite society, FitzGerald entered into a disastrous marriage. His new wife had believed she was marrying into aristocratic wealth and high society, only to find herself tied to a reclusive, distressed man who was utterly unsuited for marital life. Cole leaves the audience on this precipice of domestic breakdown as FitzGerald retreats into Khayyam's ancient poetry to cope with his unraveling world.
[17:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1021s) The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and FitzGerald's Personal Crises
Edward FitzGerald’s scholarly work unfolded against a backdrop of deep domestic misery and sudden geopolitical upheaval. He detested high society, and his brief marriage was rapidly unraveling at the very moment he was immersed in translating Persian verse. In May 1857, the Indian Rebellion—frequently termed the "mutiny" by the British and commemorated by Indians as the First Revolution or First War of Independence—erupted across the subcontinent. This catastrophic uprising immediately placed FitzGerald’s close friend and mentor, Edward Byles Cowell, along with Cowell’s wife Elizabeth, in mortal jeopardy in Kolkata. FitzGerald was frantic with worry for his friend, who was forced to teach his daily classes armed with a musket.
The rebellion escalated with shocking speed as the historic capital of Delhi fell to the rebel forces. British soldiers and their families were massacred in cantonments across the region, sparking sensationalized, vicious rumors in the English press that exaggerated the atrocities even beyond their already horrific reality. Possessing hundreds of Omar Khayyam's quatrains to choose from, FitzGerald actively selected and shaped those that resonated with these overlapping crises in his personal life and the empire. Themes of heavy wine-drinking and imminent, inescapable mortality became central to his selections, reflecting the terror of seeing his dearest companion trapped in an overseas war zone while his own life in England fell apart.
- **Outbreak of the Uprising**: May 1857 marked the start of the great rebellion, throwing British colonial rule into immediate peril. - **Dangers in Kolkata**: Edward Byles Cowell was forced to carry a musket everywhere, teaching students while visibly armed. - **Thematic Focus**: FitzGerald curated quatrains saturated with imagery of carpe diem, wine, and the fragility of human existence.
---
[19:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1175s) FitzGerald's Unrecognized Anti-Imperialism
Because FitzGerald was a prolific and candid letter-writer, his private correspondence preserves an intimate record of his thoughts during the rebellion. Reflecting on the violence, he remarked that he did not know what to think of India except that it was "very terrible," dryly observing: "I always think a nation with great estates is like a man, with them more trouble than profit." This remark, delivered with the world-weary skepticism of a disappointed country landlord, reveals a fundamentally anti-imperial stance that has gone largely unaddressed in literary scholarship. FitzGerald was not an activist or an ideological Marxist—even if he harbored intuitions regarding overproduction and systemic crises within capitalism—yet he fundamentally disapproved of the British imperial enterprise.
Expressing such doubts required an uncommon detachment at a time when a blinding wave of jingoistic fervor, rage, and patriotic chauvinism swept Victorian England. His translations from this period directly channeled this political despondency. In an early translation draft preserved in one of his letters, he writes:
> "I long for Wine! oh Sáki of my soul. > Prepare thy song and fill the mourning bowl, > For this first summer month that brings the Rose > Takes many a Sultan with it as it goes."
While the Persian refers to a medieval *sultan* (ruler) and the *sáki* (wine-pourer), the verse in FitzGerald's hands read as a coded critique of the British Crown, hinting that Queen Victoria's imperial reign itself stood on the brink of collapse.
```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Influences on FitzGerald's Rubaiyat accDescr: Diagram illustrating how personal and geopolitical crises shaped FitzGerald's translation choices.
subgraph Crises["Simultaneous Crises (1857–1858)"] A["Domestic Unhappiness<br/>(Failing Marriage)"] B["Separation from Cowell<br/>(Romantic Friendship)"] C["Indian Rebellion of 1857<br/>(Siege & Slaughter)"] end
subgraph Ideology["Anti-Imperial Poetics"] D["Rejection of Imperial Jingoism<br/>('More trouble than profit')"] E["Thematic Curation<br/>(Wine, Transience, Fallen Kings)"] end
subgraph Output["The Rubáiyát"] F["Heterotopia of Wine & Joy<br/>(Alternative Victorian Orientalism)"] end
A --> E B --> E C --> D D --> E E --> F ```
---
[21:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1287s) The Siege of Lucknow and FitzGerald's Letters to Cowell
The war took a particularly harrowing turn when rebel forces overran Lucknow, then the fourth-largest city in India, trapping British officials, soldiers, and civilian families within the Residency compound. A British relieving force managed to fight its way into the compound under heavy fire, only to find themselves encircled and unable to break back out, compounding the number of hostages. British society back home was consumed by newspaper reports of the siege, following every turn of events with an anxious, obsessive mania.
FitzGerald closely followed these developments while receiving letters from Cowell that offered little optimism. While history records that the British brutally suppressed the revolt and went on to rule India for another nine decades, no such outcome was guaranteed in the autumn of 1857. FitzGerald feared the entire imperial apparatus was doomed. In October 1857, he confessed his anxieties to Cowell:
> "Only all are trembling for Lucknow, crowded with helplessness and innocence. I am ashamed to think how little I understand all these things: but have wiser men, and men in Place understood much more? Or, understanding have they done what they should?"
FitzGerald’s professed ignorance was a pointed rhetorical strike at the imperial leadership in London: if the British had not interfered in sovereign affairs where they had no rightful business, such uprisings would never have occurred. Sending such blistering anti-establishment reflections directly to Cowell, who was physically besieged in the epicenter of the crisis, underscores FitzGerald's complete alienation from Victorian imperial orthodoxy.
---
[24:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1444s) The Strip of Herbage: Romance, Empire, and Loss
FitzGerald transformed his emotional rift with Cowell into verse, infusing the Persian originals with profound personal sorrow. In one of the published quatrains, he writes:
> "With me along some strip of herbage strewn > that just divides the desert from the sown, > where name of slave and Sultan scarcely is known, > and pity Sultan Mahmud on his throne."
In the Persian tradition, this imagery contrasts the radiant perfection of romantic passion with the hollow, burdensome squalor of worldly power. Mahmud of Ghazni had been a celebrated medieval conqueror who led extensive military campaigns into India; here, the speaker looks down from a lovers' sanctuary and pities the emperor on his throne. For FitzGerald, this functioned as an allegory for his relationship with Cowell. The two men had shared an unspoken romantic friendship—an intimacy relegated to the boundary where civilized cultivation ends and wilderness begins, "along some strip of herbage strewn that just divides the desert from the sown." In choosing colonial administration in India, Cowell had traded that sacred sanctuary for the machinery of empire, leaving FitzGerald to mourn the companion who had cast his lot with power.
The eventual British suppression of the uprising came at an immense, horrifying human toll, achieved through an overwhelming deployment of British troops and heavy artillery. While historical figures remain contested, at least 400,000 Indians were killed—roughly 100,000 combatants alongside 300,000 noncombatant men, women, and children—with other estimates citing 800,000 or even millions of casualties. In the aftermath, British administrators routinely reported crippling shortages of agricultural labor, indicating the wholesale slaughter of an entire generation of working-age men. Watching this carnage unfold, FitzGerald continued to lament the empire in his letters to Cowell over the following years, writing that "our outward limbs go on lengthening while our central heart beats weaklier," wishing openly that Britain were a modest, small country instead. His translated quatrains repeatedly dwelt on the decay of historic tyrants whose monuments vanished into dust:
> "And look—a thousand Blossoms with the Day > Woke—and a thousand scatter'd into Clay: > And this first Summer Month that brings the Rose > Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away."
- **Casualties of the Rebellion**: At least 400,000 confirmed dead, with high estimates ranging to 800,000 or millions, creating severe regional labor shortages. - **Imperial Overreach**: FitzGerald compared the British Empire to a dying organism whose extremities expanded while its heart failed. - **Persian Archetypes**: Ancient mythical Iranian monarchs like Jamshyd and Kaikobad were deployed to remind readers that even the mightiest dynasties turn to dust.
---
[28:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1683s) Omar Khayyam as Heterotopia and Alternative Orientalism
Drawing upon the conceptual framework of French philosopher Michel Foucault, this reading of FitzGerald’s *Rubáiyát* demonstrates that the poem constructs neither a utopian dreamland nor a dystopian nightmare, but a *heterotopia*—a physical and imaginative counter-site. Foucault specifically identified Persian gardens, graveyards, and taverns as archetypal heterotopic spaces, environments that mirror, contest, and invert the outside world. This framing complicates Edward Said’s classic critique of Orientalism, which demonstrated how Western literature predominantly fashioned the East into a fanatical, backward, and savage dystopia to justify imperial dominance.
FitzGerald’s East operates under an entirely different logic. Far from being a site of savagery, it is an essential refuge, saturated with existential skepticism and profound melancholy, yet bursting with carnal joy and aesthetic escape—a philosophical "Las Vegas for the Victorian mind." This distinct strain of Orientalism captured the Victorian imagination, inspiring the creation of dedicated Omar Khayyam dining clubs and prompting readers to adopt its agnosticism and hedonism as an everyday philosophy. FitzGerald captures this urgent, bittersweet embrace of life in one of the collection's most haunting quatrains:
> "One moment in Annihilation's Waste, > One moment, of the Well of Life to taste— > The stars are setting and the Caravan > Starts for the dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!"
---
[30:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1828s) Q&A: Literary Parallels and the AABA Rhyme Scheme
Following the lecture, host Michael Solomon opened the floor for audience questions. The first questioner drew an intriguing parallel between FitzGerald’s psychological motivations and those of the poet A. E. Housman. The attendee pointed out that Housman wrote his celebrated collection *A Shropshire Lad* within a single, intense year—the very year Oscar Wilde was put on trial and imprisoned for homosexual offenses. Citing archival findings by the late UCLA librarian Paul Naidich concerning Housman’s private liaisons in Paris, the audience member suggested that Housman, like FitzGerald, used verse as an emotional refuge to survive intense social and romantic anguish. Professor Cole agreed with the comparison and added another key literary parallel: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s *In Memoriam A.H.H.*, written over seventeen years in grief over the death of his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Tennyson himself noted that he detected direct thematic and tonal echoes of his own elegy in FitzGerald’s translation of Khayyam.
A second audience member asked about the musicality of the quatrains, noting their frequent musical adaptations, and inquired whether the distinct AABA rhyme scheme originated in the Persian text or was an English invention. Professor Cole confirmed that the AABA form is native to the classic Persian *ruba'i*. FitzGerald had not utilized it in his earliest translation attempts, but had a major breakthrough—likely around autumn 1857—when he committed to rendering the poems into English using the original Persian rhyme structure while setting the lines in traditional English iambic pentameter. This exotic structure fascinated Victorian readers, who found its asymmetrical, haiku-like cadence thrilling. The unrhymed third line serves as a deliberate pivot that introduces surprise and suspense before the fourth line resolves the stanza, prompting the Victorian novelist George Meredith to famously describe the third line of FitzGerald’s quatrain as inherently "kingly."
[33:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2016s) The Making and Viral Rise of FitzGerald's *Rubaiyat*
In response to a final audience question regarding how Edward FitzGerald’s translation came together into the famous book known today as the *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam*, Juan Cole explains that the work emerged directly out of FitzGerald's correspondence with Edward Cowell while Cowell was living in India. FitzGerald personally curated which verses to translate based largely on his own emotional preoccupations at that moment in his life. Cole notes with a touch of dry humor that FitzGerald had briefly fallen into alcoholism around that time, meaning the poem's recurring references to wine were deeply meaningful to him—though "just for that year," after which he recovered. Cowell had previously broken ground by publishing translations of Persian poetry for broader public audiences in periodicals akin to modern magazines like *The Atlantic* or *The New Republic*, moving away from the private translations East India Company officials typically kept among fellow aficionados. FitzGerald sought to follow Cowell's path by submitting a selection of Omar Khayyam’s verses to a popular British magazine.
However, in 1857, spurred in part by anxieties surrounding the Indian Rebellion, the British Parliament enacted a stringent new obscenity law designed to enforce moral discipline among the lower classes in both Britain and the colonies. Terrified of evangelical public morality societies that actively sued publishers, the magazine's editor balked at printing verses that openly celebrated bohemian indulgence and called foundational religious tenets—such as resurrection and the afterlife—into question. Because FitzGerald possessed substantial independent wealth, he reacted with defiance rather than retreat: he expanded the collection, deliberately incorporating verses even more scandalous than those originally rejected, warning his editor that they might prove "strong for your divines" (the Anglican clergy). Selecting about 75 quatrains, he took the manuscript to Bernard Quaritch, a Piccadilly bookseller who specialized in orientalist works and "also, I think, did a bit of smut." FitzGerald paid Quaritch out of his own pocket to print the volume and mail review copies.
Initially, the pamphlet was an obscure, commercial failure. Its fortunes turned dramatically in the 1860s and 1870s when members of the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde encountered the verses and fell in love with their aesthetic and philosophy. The enthusiasm quickly swept through undergraduate circles at Oxford and Cambridge before crossing the Atlantic. In the United States, the Boston publishing firm Houghton Mifflin pirated FitzGerald's unprotected translation, released a lavishly illustrated edition, and turned it into an overnight sensation. Cole notes a suggestion made to him by colleague John Carson: following the immense trauma of the American Civil War, the *Rubaiyat*'s somber existential themes resonated deeply with American readers in a manner reminiscent of Walt Whitman. By 1900, new editions were appearing almost daily, selling millions of copies as popular gift books. The translation left an indelible mark on English and American literature, inspiring T.S. Eliot to take up writing, forming the basis of a Eugene O'Neill play, and directly influencing Robert Frost's celebrated poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," which borrows the bleak thematic atmosphere and the classic Persian *ruba'i* rhyme scheme.
- **1857 Obscenity Law:** Passed amid British imperial crackdowns following the Indian Rebellion, leading conservative editors to fear evangelical lawsuits over heterodox, anti-clerical literature. - **Bernard Quaritch:** The Piccadilly publisher commissioned by FitzGerald at personal expense to print and circulate the first edition. - **Pre-Raphaelite revival:** British artists championed the text, introducing it to university undergraduates and setting off a broader cultural craze. - **Houghton Mifflin:** Boston publisher that pirated FitzGerald's work, paired it with illustrations, and launched its viral post-Civil War popularity in America.
---
[39:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2360s) Provost Lori McCauley Introduces Dr. John Jonides
Provost Lori McCauley takes the stage, praising Cole's remarkable "talent for bringing history to life" before shifting gears to introduce the afternoon's next honoree, Dr. John Jonides. Appointed the Edward E. Smith Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Jonides holds joint appointments as a Professor of Psychology in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Professor of Radiology in the Medical School, and co-director of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility. McCauley describes Jonides as a foundational cognitive neuroscientist whose innovative research established the University of Michigan as an international powerhouse in the study of human cognition.
McCauley highlights Jonides's early, pioneering contributions to brain imaging, which mapped the architecture of executive functioning and unraveled the distinct neural pathways responsible for storing versus manipulating information in working memory. Since joining the Michigan faculty in 1975, Jonides has shaped institutional research infrastructure by co-founding the Functional MRI Laboratory and launching the Summer Neuroimaging Training Course. Beyond his lab, during his tenure as associate dean, Jonides conceptualized and rolled out the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), which became an influential national template for bringing underrepresented undergraduates into hands-on academic research. Recognizing his broad career contributions, the Association for Psychological Science awarded him the William James Fellow Award for Lifetime Achievement. McCauley previews his lecture topic, "Paying Attention," noting that because visual scenes carry vastly more detail than the human brain can process simultaneously, Jonides will explore the psychological and neural mechanisms that make selective attention possible.
---
[41:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2512s) Tribute to Edward E. Smith and the Foundations of Cognitive Control
Taking the lectern, Dr. John Jonides expresses his gratitude to Provost McCauley and opens with a heartfelt tribute to the scholar for whom his collegiate chair is named: Edward E. Smith. Smith completed his doctoral degree at Michigan before pursuing a celebrated national academic career. He eventually returned to Ann Arbor as a faculty member for approximately 15 years, during which he and Jonides developed an intense intellectual and personal partnership, co-authoring roughly 30 scientific papers. Jonides remembers Smith warmly not only as a brilliant collaborator and thinker, but as a trusted running partner and cherished friend. Jonides also acknowledges the broader community of faculty colleagues and student researchers who contributed to the findings presented in the lecture.
Turning to the core thesis of his presentation, Jonides defines paying attention as the recruitment of "cognitive control"—the capacity to direct behavior toward an internal goal rather than yielding to reflexive impulses, ingrained habits, or prepotent environmental cues. Cognitive control is an almost uniquely human faculty that matures very gradually throughout childhood, as any parent knows firsthand, and serves as the bedrock of all complex, intelligent behavior. To ground this concept in everyday reality, Jonides recounts a personal experience from earlier in the year when he traveled to Australia for an invited lecture. Having driven in the United States his entire life—sitting on the vehicle's left, keeping to the right side of the road, and negotiating roundabouts from right to left—driving in Australia forced him to invert every single automated reflex simultaneously. Suppressing decades of deeply wired physical habits in real time was a pure exercise in cognitive control, driven by the immediate, overarching goal "to stay alive."
```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Architecture of Cognitive Control and Attention accDescr: Flowchart illustrating the components and controllers of cognitive control as outlined by John Jonides.
subgraph CC["Cognitive Control: Goal-Directed Behavior"] direction TB R1["Requirement 1:<br/>Short-Term Memory System<br/>(Maintains and updates goals)"] R2["Requirement 2:<br/>Selective Attention<br/>(Focuses on targets, excludes distractions)"] end
subgraph Sensory["Sensory Implementation"] S1["Cross-Modal Capability:<br/>Auditory, Gustatory, Visual"] S2["Visual Attention:<br/>Filtering overwhelming visual scenes"] end
subgraph Controllers["Mechanisms Controlling Attention"] C1["1. Sheer Volition / Overt Effort<br/>(e.g., Finding Waldo)"] C2["2. Past Experience<br/>(Learned expectations)"] C3["3. Third Mechanism<br/>(Addressed later in lecture)"] end
CC --> Sensory Sensory --> Controllers ```
---
[45:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2711s) The Two Pillars of Attention and the "Finding Waldo" Search
Jonides outlines the two fundamental psychological components necessary for attentional control to work. First, the brain requires an active short-term memory system capable of holding current goals in mind and updating them dynamically as environmental conditions shift. While Jonides has spent decades studying short-term memory, he sets it aside for the day to focus on the second indispensable requirement: selective attention. This is the capacity to isolate relevant target information while suppressing irrelevant noise, whether external (such as unexpected loud sounds) or internal (such as mind wandering).
While selective attention operates across all human senses—enabling someone at a noisy cocktail party to follow a single conversational thread, or a skilled sommelier to detect subtle cherry notes in a Cabernet Sauvignon while tuning out other flavor compounds—Jonides focuses on the visual modality, the primary domain of his experimental work. To demonstrate visual overload, he presents a windshield view from a moving automobile filled with buildings, parked cars, traffic cones, pedestrians, and cyclists. Because the visual system cannot possibly comprehend all these inputs simultaneously, evolutionary pressures equipped humans with selective attention to isolate only the visual data relevant to driving safely.
This leads to the fundamental scientific question: what actually directs where attention lands? Psychological science identifies three primary controllers:
1. **Sheer Volition (Overt Effort):** Direct, intentional focus driven entirely by conscious will. Jonides illustrates this using the classic children's puzzle *Where's Waldo?* (Finding Waldo). Confronted with an overwhelmingly cluttered, multi-character illustration, an observer cannot rely on automatic visual capture; they must systematically scan the scene section by section until locating Waldo's distinctive striped features in the upper-left quadrant. 2. **Past Experience:** The guiding influence of prior history, learning, and environmental familiarity on where the visual system expects to find crucial information. 3. **A Third Controller:** A neural mechanism Jonides flags for later discussion alongside the return to overt effort.
[48:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2910s) Salience and Obligatory Attentional Capture
To illustrate how past experience guides attention, the speaker asks the audience to look at an image of a kitchen scene and find the toaster. Almost everyone locates it instantly on the countertop because prior knowledge dictates where toasters typically live. While a toaster could theoretically sit on the floor, nobody looks there first—and, as the speaker quips to laughter, "surely, nobody looked at the ceiling, because only AI would put a toaster on a ceiling." While the impact of learned experience on attentional deployment has been a major research focus, the talk pivots toward how salient environmental events themselves seize mental focus regardless of top-down goals.
To demonstrate environmental salience, the speaker rolls video footage where a dog suddenly darts from left to right across the front of a car. Viewers cannot help but track the animal. This immediate visual grab occurs because the dog appears in the visual periphery and is moving—two features that robustly dominate attentional priority. Decades of laboratory studies with students demonstrate that such salient environmental events control attention in an obligatory, involuntary manner where voluntary intent has virtually no say.
To prove this lack of volitional control experimentally, participants view a circular display of eight letters and must identify whether an "L" or an "R" is present. Before the letters appear, a central cue arrow points randomly to one of the eight locations. Crucially, the arrow points to the actual target letter only one-eighth of the time and to a distractor letter the other seven-eighths of the time, making it entirely uninformative. When this non-predictive cue appears centrally, subjects successfully exercise volitional control: they ignore the arrow, and response times remain identical whether it pointed to the target or not. However, when the exact same non-predictive arrow appears as an abrupt onset in the periphery, volitional control collapses; participants respond significantly faster when the peripheral arrow happens to point to the target letter, unable to override the reflexive pull of the peripheral flash.
- In the kitchen search task, learned spatial priors guide visual search toward plausible surfaces (countertops) rather than implausible ones (floors or ceilings). - Sudden motion and peripheral visual onset serve as automatic, hardwired drivers of visual attention. - In the letter discrimination task, central arrows pointing to the target at chance rate (1/8 of trials) are easily ignored. - Peripheral onset arrows pointing at chance rate still automatically prime visual processing, speeding reaction times despite explicit instructions to disregard them.
[52:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3163s) Tracking the Time Course of Capture with Timed Response Procedures
Investigating how this obligatory capture unfolds millisecond by millisecond required developing new experimental paradigms using high-speed eye tracking. In a representative visual search task, participants fixate on the center of a screen and are instructed to execute a saccade as rapidly as possible to an oddly shaped geometric target (such as a diamond embedded among circles). In the baseline condition, only shape distractors are present. In the critical test condition, an oddly colored item appears in the periphery. Subjects are explicitly instructed to ignore color and look only for shape, making the colored peripheral item entirely task-irrelevant.
To map the exact temporal dynamics of processing, the speaker and colleague Taraz Lee, alongside their students, implemented a response-signal speed-accuracy trade-off procedure. A trial begins with rhythmic auditory pacing beeps spanning a fixed three-second countdown, culminating in a high-pitched tone at exactly 3.0 seconds that commands an immediate response. The researchers systematically vary the display onset latency relative to that terminal tone. If the visual display appears early, the participant enjoys substantial processing time (PT) before the deadline tone; if it appears late, processing time is severely truncated.
```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Response Signal Speed-Accuracy Trade-off Paradigm accDescr: Displays how the time allowed for visual processing is manipulated across a fixed three-second countdown ending with an auditory tone.
subgraph TimeInterval ["Three-Second Countdown Interval"] A["Trial Start (0.0s)"] --> B["Pacing Cues (Auditory Beeps)"] B --> C["High-Pitched Beep (3.0s Deadline)"] end
subgraph Manipulation ["Onset Manipulation"] D["Early Visual Display Onset<br/>Long Processing Time (PT)"] E["Mid Visual Display Onset<br/>Medium Processing Time (PT)"] F["Late Visual Display Onset<br/>Short Processing Time (PT)"] end
D -.->|"Responses Sampled at 3.0s"| C E -.->|"Responses Sampled at 3.0s"| C F -.->|"Responses Sampled at 3.0s"| C ```
Sampling performance across this continuum reveals distinct cognitive phases:
- At extremely brief processing durations, participants guess at chance level because perceptual information has not yet accumulated. - Without a peripheral distractor, saccade accuracy toward the shape target climbs smoothly and rapidly to near 100%, with erroneous eye movements to non-targets plummeting to zero. - When an irrelevant, brightly colored peripheral distractor is present, accuracy profiles diverge dramatically: an early spike in the data (represented by an orange curve) shows eyes reflexively darting directly to the distractor before voluntary control can assert itself. - This involuntary initial capture occurs despite participants possessing explicit knowledge and intentions to ignore the color feature.
[57:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3441s) Direction vs. Location Conflict and Computational Modeling
The speaker illustrates this battle between reflexive capture and voluntary direction using a spatial compatibility arrow task. Participants are instructed to make a left- or right-finger button press corresponding strictly to the direction pointed by an arrow. However, the arrow itself appears physically offset on either the left or right side of the computer screen. In congruent trials, arrow position and arrow direction match (for example, a rightward-pointing arrow placed on the right side). In incongruent trials, arrow position conflicts directly with pointing direction (such as a leftward-pointing arrow presented on the right side).
Because peripheral visual location involuntarily grabs attention faster than central symbolic meaning can be parsed, strong interference arises during incongruent presentations. Plotting accuracy across processing time (PT) exposes a dramatic anomaly: in congruent displays, accuracy begins at chance and shoots upward toward ceiling; in incongruent displays, early accuracy actually plummets well below chance level. Participants are systematically "seduced into paying attention to the position of the arrow" and fire the incorrect finger before voluntary goal representations can catch up and steer the response.
To formalize these empirical dynamics, the research team developed a computational model of cognitive control founded on a core dual-process premise. On one hand, rapid, prepotent, reflex- and habit-based mechanisms automatically translate stimulus location into an immediate motor response. On the other hand, deliberate, goal-directed processes decode symbolic arrow direction to activate the task-appropriate command. Because automatic pathways possess a faster onset latency, habit processes temporarily dominate execution at brief response intervals until goal-relevant control overrides them.
- Congruent condition: spatial location and symbolic direction activate the identical motor channel, yielding fast, monotonic accuracy gains. - Incongruent condition: spatial location triggers the opposing motor effector, driving accuracy below chance at short processing times. - Dual-process computational architecture mathematically reproduces the dipping accuracy curve by weighting the race between rapid habit-based impulses and slower goal-driven cognitive control.
[01:01:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3703s) Distraction and Recovery in ADHD
The conversation turns to how these attentional vulnerabilities operate across clinical populations, specifically individuals diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Audience members often assume that individuals who struggle with sustained attention must simply be far more prone to acute environmental distraction. To test this assumption, the lab evaluated unmedicated adults with ADHD alongside neurotypical controls on the spatial arrow interference task.
The empirical data confirm that individuals with unmedicated ADHD make significantly more errors on conflicting trials, appearing more intensely swayed by the misleading peripheral spatial location. However, deeper time-course modeling uncovers a surprising nuance that counters standard intuition. The primary impairment in ADHD is not a heightened vulnerability to initial distraction—both neurotypical and ADHD visual systems suffer the exact same early reflexive pull toward peripheral onsets. Rather, the difference lies in post-capture recovery: once an irrelevant stimulus grabs attention, individuals with ADHD take substantially longer to suppress the intrusive impulse and steer their focus back toward the primary task goal.
- Unmedicated participants with ADHD demonstrate higher error rates and deeper dips on incongruent trials than neurotypical controls. - The deficit is specifically characterized by an impaired recovery mechanism rather than an elevated baseline sensitivity to peripheral capture: "the problem in those with ADHD is not that they're more distracted by say, peripheral information. It's that once distracted, they have a harder time getting back on task."
[01:02:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3767s) Neural Mechanisms of Resolving Habit vs. Goal Conflict
Professor John Jonides turns to the final topic of his lecture: isolating the neural mechanisms that enable humans to disambiguate automatic habits from intentional goals and respond in a goal-directed manner. Using an fMRI version of the behavioral conflict task described earlier, his research group placed participants into an MRI scanner to record functional brain data while they attempted to suppress habitual responses in favor of deliberate goals.
The behavioral patterns gathered inside the scanner closely mirrored the prior laboratory data: in the consistent condition, accuracy rapidly climbed, whereas in the inconsistent condition, accuracy plummeted well below chance before subjects managed to recover. To isolate brain activity, the researchers sampled three discrete processing times along this behavioral trajectory: - A **short processing time**, capturing the moment of maximum conflict when the automatic habit dominates and subjects show the greatest inability to disengage. - A **medium processing time**, where conflict is substantially reduced as cognitive control begins to take hold. - A **long processing time**, where conflict has largely resolved and goal-directed control is fully established.
```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: fMRI Activation Across Processing Times accDescr: Diagram showing brain activation levels decreasing as processing time increases from high conflict to resolution. subgraph Times["Processing Time Intervals"] A["Short Interval<br/>(Maximum conflict)"] --> B["Medium Interval<br/>(Reduced conflict)"] B --> C["Long Interval<br/>(Conflict resolved)"] end subgraph Brain["Prefrontal Cortex Response"] D["Substantial Activation<br/>(Lateral & medial PFC)"] --> E["Reduced Activation"] E --> F["Minimal / Baseline Activation"] end A -.-> D B -.-> E C -.-> F ```
Brain imaging revealed that during the shortest processing interval—when subjects experienced the greatest difficulty disengaging from habitual tendencies—pronounced activation appeared across lateral and medial regions of the prefrontal cortex (highlighted by green ovals on his slides). As predicted, this prefrontal activation dropped noticeably at the medium interval and was scarcely visible at the longest interval once the habit was successfully suppressed. Jonides emphasizes that significant work remains to fully map the neural substrates and psychological mechanisms governing cognitive control before concluding his presentation to warm applause.
---
[01:07:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=4026s) Q&A: Child Development, Evolutionary Drivers, and the Stroop Effect
Vice Provost Michael Solomon opens the floor to audience questions. The first question comes from an education researcher who studies early childhood teaching. She asks whether these cognitive control capacities exhibit developmental trajectories, hypothesizing that formal schooling might be inherently misaligned with young children's natural attentional capacities, potentially driving school failure, exclusion, and marginalization. Jonides agrees, calling the question "absolutely fascinating." While not his direct area of study, he notes the developmental literature demonstrates that cognitive control begins developing around age three and does not mature until the mid-20s. Because traditional schooling ignores this prolonged developmental timeline, a pronounced friction exists between children's developmental capacities and institutional expectations. He adds that whether such control skills can be systematically trained at younger ages remains an important open question.
A second audience member asks whether heightened distraction at short latency intervals reflects an evolutionary survival mechanism, such as rapidly orienting toward an approaching predator. Jonides agrees wholeheartedly: > "I'm absolutely convinced that this largely involuntary ability to pay attention to items in the periphery and also to moving objects has been evolutionarily engineered so that we don't have control over it. And it's a good thing, because we don't want control over it. We want to be able to respond adaptively when dangerous situations occur."
A third questioner asks how this paradigm connects to information retrieval and the classic Stroop effect studied since the 1970s. Jonides explains that the Stroop effect illustrates the very same cognitive bottleneck: a difficulty in disengaging from automatic, habitual processing (word reading) to prioritize an explicit goal (naming ink color). His group's work confirms that the Stroop effect adheres to identical temporal principles, reflecting a generalized cognitive vulnerability where salient distractors temporarily hijack attention away from intended goals.
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[11:10:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=40232s) Research Origins and Taras Lee's Contribution
An audience member praises the cleverness of the experimental paradigm and asks whether selecting these processing time measurements reflects a broader field consensus or how the team devised the approach. Jonides uses the question to share an origin story, playfully asking his colleague Taras Lee to stand up in the audience for recognition.
About three and a half to four years prior, Lee sent Jonides an early paper detailing a preliminary version of this measurement technique before the two had ever collaborated. Jonides was so captivated by the concept that he contacted Lee immediately; within approximately one month, they co-authored a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and secured funding to establish the research program. While they did not invent the raw method from scratch, Jonides notes with pride that they refined and adapted it enough to feel genuine scientific ownership over the paradigm.
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[01:12:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=4341s) Introduction of Dr. Kenneth Langa
Provost Laurie McCauley returns to the podium to thank Professor Jonides, commending all the day's honorees for condensing lifetimes of groundbreaking scholarship into concise twenty-minute lectures. She then introduces the afternoon's final honoree: Dr. Kenneth Langa, appointed as the A. Regula Herzog Distinguished University Professor of Internal Medicine and Survey Research, as well as the Cyrus Sturgis Research Professor of Internal Medicine in the Medical School.
Provost McCauley outlines Dr. Langa's transformative academic career: - Arrived at the University of Michigan in 1994 for internal medicine residency training and joined the faculty in 1999. - Longtime educator of internal medicine residents and practicing primary care physician at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. - Serves as co-director (previously associate director) of the NIH-funded Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the largest and most influential longitudinal investigation of aging in the United States. - Secured the $195 million renewal for the HRS, representing the single largest research grant in the history of the University of Michigan. - Expanded the HRS longitudinal survey framework globally across more than 35 partner nations. - Authored over 400 peer-reviewed articles, brought in more than $215 million in NIH research funding to the university, and gained election to the National Academy of Medicine alongside multiple mentorship awards.
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[01:14:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=4485s) Kenneth Langa: Thirty Years of Place, People, and Aging Research
Dr. Kenneth Langa takes the stage, expressing gratitude to Provost McCauley, the university, and the audience, joking about the challenge of following the formidable presentations given by Juan Cole and John Jonides. Langa outlines the structure of his retrospective, organizing his 30-year career into three pillars: 1. **The Place:** The University of Michigan environment that nurtured his career and his family. 2. **The People:** The mentors and collaborators who shaped his journey, most notably the late social psychologist A. Regula Herzog. 3. **The Work:** The large-scale epidemiological and health policy research conducted alongside junior faculty and colleagues.
Langa pinpoints the exact start of his personal connection to Ann Arbor: December 9, 1993, when he and his wife, Lucy, drove from Chicago—where he was finishing his MD-PhD dual degree—to interview at Michigan for his internal medicine residency, setting into motion three decades of scholarship on aging and dementia.
[01:16:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=4590s) Coming to Ann Arbor and Melanie's Path in Medicine
While finishing work at the University of Chicago, Dr. Larry McMahon—the speaker's first boss in general medicine at Michigan—arranged a series of interviews with Steve Bernstein, Mark Fendrick, Rod Hayward, Joel Howell, and Stephen Katz, all of whom became pivotal colleagues and lifelong mentors. While the academic opportunities and faculty culture firmly sold him on Michigan, his wife Lucy loved Ann Arbor itself, and as he humorously observes to the audience, everyone knows whose opinion carries the ultimate weight in a household move. A principal factor driving Lucy’s enthusiasm was providing a rich environment for their young children, Melanie and Dan, who are shown in an archival photograph grinning over Zingerman's cookies.
The University of Michigan quickly became woven into the fabric of the entire family's life. In middle school at Tappan, Melanie met Dr. Mary Pedley, an assistant curator of maps at the William L. Clements Library who happened to be teaching Latin. Dr. Pedley became a beloved mentor, guiding Melanie through a four-year independent study project at Community High School exploring historical maps of the Northwest Passage. This work culminated during her senior year in a curated Clements Library exhibition entitled *An Imaginary Arctic*, which earned widespread coverage in *The University Record*—jokingly described as receiving far more press attention than most of the speaker's own faculty research.
Melanie later returned to Ann Arbor for post-baccalaureate medical preparation and collaborated with psychology professor Joseph Gone on the diagnostic complexities of depression within Native American communities. That foundational research shaped her professional calling; today she practices family medicine in Port Angeles, Washington, serving Native American and rural populations. Her clinic biography proudly announces that she grew up in Ann Arbor loving the change of four seasons, vibrant fall foliage, and knowing that football Saturdays were the only days you ever encountered traffic, ending with a spirited "GO BLUE."
- **Key Mentors Met in Division of General Medicine:** Steve Bernstein, Mark Fendrick, Rod Hayward, Joel Howell, Stephen Katz, and Larry McMahon. - **Melanie's Clements Library Exhibition:** *An Imaginary Arctic*, curated under the mentorship of Dr. Mary Pedley. - **Current Role:** Family physician in Port Angeles, Washington, caring for Native American populations following early clinical psychology research with Dr. Joseph Gone.
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[01:20:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=4826s) Dan Langa's Musical Trajectory and Lucy's Campus Ties
The speaker's son Dan, who traveled with his partner Diana from Northampton as a surprise for the lecture, developed his early passions on the university campus as well. At age three, Dan took up golf at Radrick Farms Golf Course, a university facility where he and his father spent countless hours. Dan developed into a scratch golfer and went on to compete as a four-year starter for Amherst College. Parallel to athletics, the University Musical Society (UMS) ignited his creative career. After attending an electrifying UMS concert by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra around age ten, Dan was thoroughly entranced by jazz. He played trumpet in the acclaimed Community High jazz program, studied music at Amherst, completed a master's in composition at NYU, and now teaches and composes music, recently releasing an album titled *After Nothing Comes*, which music publication *Various Small Flames* lauded for its singular, shimmering, cyclical rhythms.
Lucy also established deep roots across campus, devoting 15 years as a volunteer docent at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), leading youth educational tours. Her second home on campus is the Crisler Center. Growing up in Minneapolis, her father took her to basketball games starting at age five, sparking a lifelong devotion to college hoops. For 27 years, she and the speaker attended nearly every home game at Crisler Center. The household celebrated Michigan's recent national championship run with immense fervor, including a trip Lucy took with her friend Amy Story to Chicago for the Big Ten Tournament, where they tracked down favorite player Morez Johnson for a photo.
- **Dan Langa's Musical Milestones:** Jazz trumpeter at Community High School; music composition degree from NYU; faculty member at Amherst College; composer of *After Nothing Comes* (available on streaming platforms). - **Lucy Langa's Campus Roles:** 15-year docent at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA); nearly three-decade season ticket holder at Crisler Center.
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[01:24:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5054s) Regula Herzog and the Origins of Survey-Based Cognitive Measurement
When transitioning to research at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), the late Regula Herzog served as an invaluable mentor and pioneer. Herzog, a distinguished research scientist at ISR and professor of psychology who tragically passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2002, was an original co-investigator on the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). She was instrumental in demonstrating that complex cognitive testing could be effectively conducted within large-scale, population-based telephone surveys.
```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: Translation of Cognitive Assessment Tools accDescr: Diagram showing how clinical tests like the Mini-Mental State Examination were adapted by Regula Herzog and Bob Wallace into telephone surveys for the HRS. subgraph Clinical["Clinical Setting"] A["In-Person Cognitive Tests<br/>(e.g., MMSE)"] end subgraph Adaptation["Methodological Innovation"] B["Adaptation for Surveys<br/>& Phone Administration"] end subgraph HRS["Population Science"] C["AHEAD / HRS Wave 1<br/>Cognitive Index"] D["Nationwide Population-Level<br/>Dementia Trends"] end A --> B B --> C C --> D ```
Before Herzog's groundbreaking paper with Iowa epidemiologist Bob Wallace evaluating data from the initial AHEAD cohort (Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old), cognitive screening tools such as the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) were primarily restricted to face-to-face clinic evaluations. Herzog and Wallace proved that survey-adapted cognitive items possessed robust psychometric properties, acceptable rates of missing data, high construct validity, and the expected correlations with sociodemographic factors, general health, and everyday functioning. In establishing the validity of telephone-administered cognitive testing, Herzog essentially laid the methodological foundation for the speaker’s subsequent three decades of dementia research.
- **Key Methodological Milestone:** Demonstrating construct validity and psychometric reliability of telephone-administered cognitive measures in the 1990s AHEAD survey wave. - **Legacy:** Established the standard framework for measuring population-level cognitive health, functional status, and dementia prevalence.
---
[01:27:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5232s) Mentors, Collaborators, and Clinical Practice at the VA
The trajectory of the speaker’s career was propelled by pivotal moments and dedicated colleagues. At Chicago, Eddie Lawler chaired his dissertation committee, which also included health economist Bob Willis. In 1996, Willis moved to Michigan to take over leadership of the HRS from its founder, F. Thomas Juster. The following year, Willis invited the speaker to a one-hour meeting at ISR alongside Regula Herzog—a single conversation that fundamentally reshaped his career path by bringing him directly into the HRS research core to study dementia.
Over the decades, a close circle of investigators advanced this work at ISR, including former principal investigator David Weir, associate directors Mary Beth Ofstedal and Helen Levy, current co-director Jessica Faul, and longtime data analysts Mohamed Kabeto and Ryan McCammon. Simultaneously, within the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and the Division of General Medicine, Dr. Larry McMahon, Joel Howell, Rod Hayward, Mark Fendrick, and Mike Chernew provided essential mentorship—often over working lunches at Kang's Korean Restaurant. On the clinical side, working alongside colleagues Eve Kerr and Sanjay Saint at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System grounded this population research in 29 continuous years of direct patient care for military veterans.
- **Foundational 1997 ISR Meeting:** Bob Willis and Regula Herzog recruited the speaker to integrate cognitive assessment and dementia modeling into the HRS. - **Key General Medicine & VA Collaborators:** Larry McMahon, Joel Howell, Rod Hayward, Mark Fendrick, Mike Chernew, Eve Kerr, and Sanjay Saint. - **Core HRS Team Members:** David Weir, Mary Beth Ofstedal, Helen Levy, Jessica Faul, Mohamed Kabeto, and Ryan McCammon.
---
[01:29:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5391s) The Architecture and Global Impact of the Health and Retirement Study
The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) represents a vast, multidisciplinary enterprise based at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Launched in 1992 in response to a congressional mandate directing the National Institutes of Health to track the health, economic circumstances, and retirement transitions of aging baby boomers, the study is funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Social Security Administration. The HRS repeatedly surveys a nationally representative cohort of roughly 20,000 American adults through a combination of face-to-face, telephone, and online assessments.
A foundational tenet of the HRS is its role as an unrestricted public good. Microdata are cleaned, documented, and made publicly accessible to scientific investigators worldwide. This model has sparked extraordinary global productivity: over 9,000 scientific publications have utilized HRS data, maintaining a pace of more than 500 peer-reviewed papers annually—averaging one to two new studies released every day across fields spanning economics, public health, neurology, sociology, and public policy.
- **Baseline Sample Size:** Approximately 20,000 U.S. adults followed longitudinally every two years. - **Primary Funders:** National Institute on Aging (NIA) and Social Security Administration (SSA). - **Scientific Reach:** More than 9,000 total peer-reviewed publications; 500+ papers generated each year worldwide.
[01:33:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5584s) The Global Reach and Expanding Scope of the Health and Retirement Study
The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) has evolved dramatically from its original design into a multidimensional scientific resource. While cognitive assessment remains central to the speaker's own scholarship, the survey has significantly expanded by linking self-reported longitudinal data with administrative records, notably Medicare claims and Social Security data. The study has also incorporated biomarker collection, drawing blood samples to conduct genetic and molecular research. The ultimate objective is comprehensive: assembling every conceivable data stream capable of illuminating the biological, social, and economic realities of aging across the United States and internationally.
This model has sparked an expansive global footprint. Following remarks earlier in the program by Provost Laurie McCauley, the speaker highlights that over forty countries have established longitudinal aging studies modeled directly on the Michigan HRS. Central to this worldwide infrastructure is the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) network, a specialized substudy dedicated to dementia assessment designed to ensure cross-national comparability. The past five years have seen an especially rapid and fascinating surge in new HRS-modeled research cohorts established throughout Africa.
[01:34:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5699s) Measuring the Hidden Burden and Real Economic Costs of Dementia
Reflecting on early investigations using HRS data, the speaker recounts efforts to quantify the informal toll of cognitive decline and dementia. Dementia is clinically defined here as a deterioration in cognitive functioning severe enough to compromise an individual's independent living. Prior to the HRS—specifically before Regula Herzog led the integration of cognitive batteries into large population-based surveys—it was impossible to measure systematically how family caregiving escalates alongside worsening impairment. That foundational work aimed to formally register the unpaid labor and substantial burdens borne by families "on the books."
```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Allocation of Monetary Costs of Dementia in the United States accDescr: Diagram illustrating the breakdown of dementia costs per case and nationwide, highlighting informal care and institutional care as primary drivers.
subgraph TotalBurden["National & Individual Economic Burden (2010 Data)"] A["Annual Cost: ~$50,000 per Case"] B["Total U.S. Impact: ~$200 Billion Annually"] end
subgraph CoreComponents["Primary Cost Drivers"] C["Informal Family Caregiving\n(Largest share of total cost)"] D["Nursing Homes & Long-Term Residential Care"] E["Direct Medical Care & Out-of-Pocket Expenses"] end
TotalBurden --> CoreComponents ```
Building on these measurement methods, a landmark economic analysis led by Michael Hurd synthesized diverse financial, healthcare, and survey data to compute the total societal cost of dementia in the United States. Utilizing 2010 benchmarks, the analysis revealed: - An economic impact of approximately $50,000 per individual dementia case per year. - A nationwide aggregate cost reaching roughly $200 billion annually. - Unpaid family caregiving represented the single largest slice of the cost breakdown, followed closely by nursing home placements and institutional long-term care.
[01:38:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=5880s) Longitudinal Trends and Protective Drivers of Cognitive Health
Because the HRS surveys the same national population over extended periods, researchers can evaluate secular shifts in chronic health conditions—tracking whether the prevalence of illnesses like diabetes or heart disease is climbing or falling. Tracking dementia over time yielded an encouraging finding: in 2000, dementia prevalence among American adults aged 65 and older stood at approximately 11.5%, but by 2012, this figure had dropped significantly. This optimistic trend of declining age-specific dementia risk has since been replicated across several high-income nations.
Several protective factors appear to be driving this population-level decrease in risk: - **Educational attainment:** Increased educational access across generations has bolstered cognitive reserve. Drawing a connection to an earlier presentation by John, the speaker explains that intellectually challenging the brain strengthens synaptic architecture, outfitting individuals to better tolerate neurological pathologies that accumulate over a lifetime. - **Cardiovascular management:** Improved clinical treatment and control of midlife cardiovascular risk factors (such as hypertension). - **Environmental policies:** Broad public health interventions, such as the phased removal of lead from automotive gasoline, which reduced cumulative neurotoxic exposures across entire generations.
[01:40:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6009s) Mentorship, Critical Illness Outcomes, and Cross-National Inequities
The discussion turns to collaborative work with junior colleagues and the diverse questions answered through the HRS data infrastructure. Jack Iwashyna, an intensive care physician and alumnus of the same Chicago MD-PhD program as the speaker, joined the Michigan faculty and initiated groundbreaking research into the long-term cognitive and functional trajectories of ICU survivors. Sepsis—a life-threatening systemic infection that triggers multisystem organ failure—carries an acute in-hospital mortality rate of nearly 50%. Merging HRS survey records with Medicare claims files, Iwashyna proved that surviving sepsis leaves substantial neurological scars: patients experienced a statistically significant surge in severe cognitive impairment that persisted as long as six years after their initial hospital episode.
Turning to international comparative work, Michigan health economist HwaJung Choi utilized harmonized datasets from the HRS and its English counterpart (the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing) to examine chronic disease distributions stratified by household income. When charting illness rates from lowest to highest income quintiles: - The United States exhibited higher overall rates of chronic disease than England across every evaluated health category. - The health disparity between the two nations was most acute among the poorest citizens, demonstrating that America's excess chronic disease burden is heavily concentrated at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution.
[01:43:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6198s) Global Harmonization and the Democratic Necessity of Reliable Data
The speaker praises the current generation of early-career faculty advancing the HRS and HCAP global initiatives: - **Lindsay Kobayashi** (Associate Professor, School of Public Health): Co-directs the international HCAP network alongside the speaker, overseeing cognitive studies across South Africa and the European Union while tackling the complex psychometric challenges of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey harmonization. - **Josh Ehrlich** (Associate Professor of Ophthalmology, Medical School): Directs the Center for Sensory Health and Aging Research and has inaugurated an HRS study cohort in Kenya, exploring how sensory impairments—such as visual and auditory loss—drive cognitive decline and alter brain health. - **Emily Briceño** (Neuropsychologist): Embedded HRS/HCAP cognitive modules into long-running population projects, including the Corpus Christi stroke surveillance study led for decades by Lewis Morgenstern, as well as emerging field cohorts in Nepal. - **David Flood** (Assistant Professor, Medical School): Oversees clinical and population-based aging studies establishing baseline infrastructure in Guatemala.
Beyond the academic insights, the speaker emphasizes the civic necessity of robust social surveys. Sustaining a functioning democracy requires evidence-informed discourse grounded in uncompromised population data to assess the genuine consequences of public policy. In an environment where political actors distort facts and discard scientific evidence when drafting legislation, the mission of survey institutions like Michigan's Institute for Social Research (ISR) becomes paramount.
[01:45:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6356s) Clinical Prescriptions for Brain Health and Final Acknowledgments
Transitioning from the role of macro-level epidemiologist back to practicing clinician, the speaker "puts the white coat back on" to share actionable strategies for lowering individual dementia risk. Opening with self-deprecating humor, the speaker jokes that the single most foolproof intervention to avoid dementia is simply to "die young"—noting wryly that few clinic patients find that therapeutic option attractive. The quip highlights the fundamental demographic driver of the modern dementia epidemic: longevity itself, as populations worldwide live decades longer than past generations. Similarly, "choosing educated and wealthy parents" is an impossible luxury, yet reflects how deeply socioeconomic conditions pattern longevity and cognitive health.
For practical, daily actions supported by evidence, the speaker recommends: - **Walk:** Aerobic physical exercise is described as "the only silver bullet in medicine," demonstrating protective benefits against nearly all chronic ailments. - **Talk:** Active social engagement and maintaining strong bonds with family, friends, and community groups. - **Stimulate the brain:** Continuous lifelong learning, reading, and mental challenges. - **Cardiovascular management:** Rigorously controlling blood pressure and vascular risks. - **Sleep hygiene:** Getting consistent, adequate restorative sleep. - **Sensory correction:** Proactively repairing cataracts and wearing hearing aids to preserve cognitive inputs.
The lecture concludes with heartfelt gratitude to the University of Michigan, the speaker's family, and clinical colleagues in General Medicine and the HRS team. Specific tribute is paid to study participants and foundational mentors Regula Herzog and Bob Willis for initiating this intellectual path. Following audience applause, Michael Solomon opens the floor to begin the question-and-answer period.
[01:49:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6590s) The Role of Nutrition and Dietary Data in Population Studies
An audience member opens the question-and-answer period by pointing out an apparent omission in the concluding slides: the role of nutrition, specifically referencing work by Dr. Neal Barnard and recent lifestyle and dietary intervention research by Dr. Dean Ornish demonstrating the therapeutic effects of a whole-food, plant-based diet.
Dr. Kenneth Langa readily acknowledges the point, affirming that "what you eat matters a lot" alongside daily lifestyle factors such as restorative sleep. He explains that diet was largely omitted from his presentation because nutritional intake is notoriously difficult to measure accurately across large longitudinal cohorts. While investigators have incorporated dietary questions into the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) at various intervals, self-reported dietary metrics are exceptionally difficult to capture reliably in population-level research. As a result, population epidemiologists study diet somewhat less directly, though its physiological impact is captured downstream within cardiovascular risk profiles.
[01:51:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6666s) Dementia Incidence Trends: Declines, Plateaus, and Chronic Disease Risks
Session moderator Michael Solomon directs the microphone to an attendee named Chris, who asks for an update on the temporal trends in dementia incidence. Chris expresses surprise at the data demonstrating a steady decline in age-specific dementia through 2012, noting that one might expect documented numbers to rise as public awareness has grown and clinical diagnostic methods have sharpened. He asks whether newer data exist beyond 2012 and what mechanisms might explain the trajectory.
Langa explains that while his research group focused on cohorts spanning 1993, 2000, and 2012, external investigations in the United States and peer high-income nations tracked that downward trend through roughly 2020. However, more recent surveillance reveals concerning signals that this decline has begun leveling off and may be actively rebounding. Langa notes that the principal culprit behind this flattening or reversal appears to be the sharp escalation of other chronic metabolic conditions, particularly the surging population rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes. He highlights that ongoing international network studies are working to verify whether these concerning shifts are mirrored globally.
[01:52:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6761s) Vascular Health, the Blood-Brain Barrier, and Mixed Dementia Pathologies
Another audience member shifts the conversation from broad epidemiology to pathophysiology, asking about the role of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in cognitive decline. Pointing to earlier mentions of lead, environmental pollutants, and post-COVID "brain fog," the questioner asks whether targeted research examines how blood-brain barrier permeability mediates neurodegeneration.
Langa notes that while he is not a basic neuroscientist studying cellular mechanisms under a microscope like his colleague John, vascular dynamics remain central to brain health. He emphasizes an evolutionary metric he frequently shares: although the adult brain constitutes only about 5% of total body weight, it demands roughly 20% of cardiac blood flow, underscoring its profound vulnerability to circulatory disruption.
Furthermore, three decades of population-based brain autopsy studies have overturned the idea that dementia is typically caused by a single isolated disease. Instead, almost all individuals clinically diagnosed with dementia display mixed neuropathologies. While Alzheimer's disease contributes the hallmark "bad proteins, amyloid and tau," the vast majority of patients simultaneously exhibit small silent strokes or microvascular damage from chronic hypertension. These vascular injuries breach the blood-brain barrier, triggering neuroinflammation and driving neuronal cell death. Langa adds that his colleague Jack Iwashyna has been actively investigating the mechanisms linking long COVID and brain fog to ongoing neurocognitive dysfunction, though definitive clinical answers remain an active area of investigation.
- The human brain accounts for approximately 5% of overall body mass, yet demands roughly 20% of resting cardiac output. - Autopsy research over the past 30 years demonstrates that the majority of clinical dementia cases are mixed-pathology cases involving classic Alzheimer's proteins (amyloid plaques and tau tangles) alongside vascular insults and micro-strokes. - Chronic hypertension alters blood-brain barrier integrity, promoting localized cerebral inflammation and accelerating cell loss.
[01:55:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6912s) Concluding Remarks and Reception Announcement
Michael Solomon steps back to the podium to call for a round of applause for Dr. Kenneth Langa in recognition of his appointment as a Distinguished University Professor. After the applause subsides, Solomon officially concludes the lecture series, thanking the audience and inviting all attendees to join an immediate celebratory reception honoring all three of the semester's Distinguished University Professorship recipients.
## Notable quotes > [00:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=10s) quite a selective club — Domenico Grasso
> [02:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=175s) The 1857 Indian Revolution and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. — Laurie McCauley
> [19:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1175s) I always think a nation with great estates is like a man, with them more trouble than profit. — Edward FitzGerald
> [21:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1287s) Only all are trembling for Lucknow, crowded with helplessness and innocence. I am ashamed to think how little I understand all these things: but have wiser men, and men in Place understood much more? Or, understanding have they done what they should? — Edward FitzGerald
> [24:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1444s) With me along some strip of herbage strewn that just divides the desert from the sown, where name of slave and Sultan scarcely is known, and pity Sultan Mahmud on his throne. — Edward FitzGerald
> [28:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1683s) Las Vegas for the Victorian mind — Juan Cole
> [28:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=1683s) One moment in Annihilation's Waste, One moment, of the Well of Life to taste— The stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste! — Edward FitzGerald
> [48:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=2910s) surely, nobody looked at the ceiling, because only AI would put a toaster on a ceiling. — John Jonides
> [01:01:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=3703s) the problem in those with ADHD is not that they're more distracted by say, peripheral information. It's that once distracted, they have a harder time getting back on task. — John Jonides
> [01:07:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=4026s) I'm absolutely convinced that this largely involuntary ability to pay attention to items in the periphery and also to moving objects has been evolutionarily engineered so that we don't have control over it. And it's a good thing, because we don't want control over it. We want to be able to respond adaptively when dangerous situations occur. — John Jonides
> [01:45:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6356s) die young — Kenneth Langa
> [01:45:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6356s) choosing educated and wealthy parents — Kenneth Langa
> [01:45:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6356s) the only silver bullet in medicine — Kenneth Langa
> [01:49:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6590s) what you eat matters a lot — Kenneth Langa
> [01:52:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU&t=6761s) bad proteins, amyloid and tau — Kenneth Langa
## Mentioned Domenico Grasso, Thomas Francis Jr., James V. Neel, Shirley Verrett, Huda Akil, Juan Cole, John Jonides, Kenneth Langa, Laurie McCauley, Mike Solomon, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Edward FitzGerald, Omar Khayyam, Edward Byles Cowell, Elizabeth Cowell, Mughal Empire, Emirate of Bukhara, Ottoman Empire, Maratha Empire, British East India Company, Bodleian Library, Presidency College, Kolkata, Queen Victoria, Mahmud of Ghazni, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, A. E. Housman, Oscar Wilde, Paul Naidich, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Arthur Henry Hallam, George Meredith, Bernard Quaritch, Pre-Raphaelites, Houghton Mifflin, Walt Whitman, John Carson, T.S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Robert Frost, Edward E. Smith, Taraz Lee, National Science Foundation, A. Regula Herzog, Health and Retirement Study, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, National Academy of Medicine, University of Chicago, Larry McMahon, Steve Bernstein, Mark Fendrick, Rod Hayward, Joel Howell, Stephen Katz, Lucy Langa, Melanie Langa, Dan Langa, Mary Pedley, William L. Clements Library, Community High School, Joseph Gone, Radrick Farms Golf Course, Amherst College, University Musical Society, Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, New York University, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Crisler Center, Morez Johnson, Institute for Social Research, Bob Wallace, Eddie Lawler, Bob Willis, F. Thomas Juster, David Weir, Mary Beth Ofstedal, Helen Levy, Jessica Faul, Mohamed Kabeto, Ryan McCammon, Mike Chernew, Eve Kerr, Sanjay Saint, Michael Hurd, Jack Iwashyna, HwaJung Choi, Lindsay Kobayashi, Josh Ehrlich, Emily Briceño, Lewis Morgenstern, David Flood, Neal Barnard, Dean Ornish, National Institute on Aging, Social Security Administration, Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol, English Longitudinal Study of Ageing
## Video description Fall 2026 Distinguished University Professorship Lecture
September 30, 2026 Michigan League Ballroom
A version of this video without audio descriptions is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUpAFFwbVoI
[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7Xu5wJJHU)