In memoriam....Dr. Roy John

mail By Dr. Robert thatcher: I am deeply saddened to hear of Roy's passing. I first met Roy in 1971 while I was a post doc at Albert Einstein Coll. of Med teaching neuroanatomy and doing intracellular impalements of the thalamus. In that year I began helped him write the first grant application to develop quantitative EEG as a discipline and as a method to clinically evaluate a wide variety of patients. We wrote only one sentence on eyes open and eyes closed recordings and over 50 pages on active tasks. At the time we did not think that resting EEG was of much value except as a baseline and that the most important approach would be active task databases. The Nat. Science Foundation grant was funded in 1972 after which I became a faculty member at New York Medical College and I began my career in the field of QEEG working with Roy. We opened a QEEG Clinic in June 1973, probably the first in the world. Roy was and still is the most intelligent and warm hearted person that I have ever met with a huge passion and depth of understanding about many things. He was politically radical and opened his home to refugees from Chile after Allente was overthrown by the CIA and he frequency traveled to Cuba. He befriended Fidel Castro and over time built the first psychiatric and neurosciences institute in Cuba by sending equipment and lending his knowledge. We had many discussions and performed many multiple unit and evoked potential experiments and toyed with markov time series statistics and the issues of phase synchrony. I mathematically modeled this process using markov probability measures but not with much success. Roy attracted a large group of very bright and energetic people including Eric Schwartz, Leslie Prichep and many others. We use to have regular meetings with people from around the world including Grastyan (Buszaki's mentor) and others in America like Walter Freeman and John Tukey. These were very exciting days with many new thoughts and much creativity. I was fortunate to author a book with Roy titled "Functional Neuroscience"

, vol. I and Roy and I co-edited the series "Functional Neuroscience" vol. II and III. The Functional Neuroscience book had a lot of emphasis on the thalamus and thalamo-cortical networks as well as many of Roy's early ideas about consciousness. In 1977 Roy moved to NYU school of Medicine I became an associate profession and worked in Roy's labs. This too was an exciting time since by then we had several large grants and a team of about 50 people collecting and analyzing EEG and evoked potentials in different locations. Roy continued to travel to Cuba and spent a lot of time there while we struggled to meet deadlines in New York. We created several normative databases and it was during this period that I learned what not to do and what is best to do when building a normative database. I moved to the University of Maryland as a full professor in 1979 and continued to collaborate with Roy and moved the same 20 amplifier system used for the development of NxLink to the Univ. of Maryland and this is one of the reasons that the Neuroguide database is so similar and is so compatible with the NxLink normative database. I remained in contact with Roy over the years and we frequently would talk by telephone about his ideas about consciousness. The paper "From synchronous neuronal discharge to subjective awareness?" was Roy's recent pride and joy (this paper can be article 27 at: http://www.appliedneuroscience.com/Articles.htm Roy's most intense interest was the subject of memory and consciousness and he was pursuing this mysterious aspect of the human mind when I first met him in 1971 and we had many discussions as he developed and honed his ideas that are expressed in his most recent publications. Roy was a natural born scientist at his core with preference toward theory and a strong mathematical flair with a mind that reminded me of Carl Gauss. Roy would suddenly conceive of far reaching ideas and he did not care much about the details because he knew that his ideas were correct. He left for others to figure out the details, this is what Gauss did when he left the proofs of his ideas to others. Roy had a broad and encompassing mind and he was a global internationalist having been in world war II and being able to speak four different languages (Spanish, German & French). There were so many occasions when difficult concepts were being discussed when Roy would perceptively cut to the heart of the matter and immediately transform everyone in the room toward a simple and elegant solution. Sometimes this would almost take your breath away. Roy had five children and he was a dedicated father to all of them. I was always impressed with his dedication to his children and his love of mankind. I will always miss him. Bob