Wang Meng

Our understanding of the cognitive functions of the human brain has tremendously benefited from the population functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies in the last three decades. The reliability and replicability of the fMRI results, however, have been recently questioned, which has been named the replication crisis. Sufficient statistical power is fundamental to alleviate the crisis, by either “going big,” leveraging big datasets, or by “going small,” densely scanning several participants. Here we reported a “going small” project implemented in our department, the Bergen breakfast scanning club (BBSC) project, in which three participants were intensively scanned across a year. It is expected this kind of new data collection method can provide novel insights into the variability of brain networks, facilitate research designs and inference, and ultimately lead to the improvement of the reliability of the fMRI results.

Dushu carried a most interesting article in its eleventh issue: "Starlight in the Dark of the Night" . In this article the author, Wu Zengding, introduced to the reader the autobiography of Vera, an aristocratic Russian woman of the nineteenth century who planned the assassination of a Russian tsar. The most engaging part of this article is the analysis—or rather, description—of the "enormous fascination" exerted by revolution. I have said many times that there is nothing more fascinating for young people than revolution and love; and, under certain circumstances, the fascination of revolution is more powerful than that of love. Simply put, at least one of the factors that led Vera to take the extreme road of revolution was her fear and rejection of the shi su existence of married women in old Russia. I am reminded of the heroine, Lin Daojing, in Yang Mo's novel Song of Youth, who is rescued by Yu Shuize from a state of hopelessness after fleeing from marriage, and subsequently cohabits with him. She later ruptures with Yu Shuize , not only because of political conflicts, but also because of conflicts in their outlook on life. Had she stayed with Yu, she would inevitably have gone down the road of worldliness—having children, looking after the home, doing the family budget, dealing with birth, old age, illness, and death; she would have become garrulous and overly talkative, and so forth. There would be no more romance, no more drama—and readers would have objected to that