But things out there need to act on the brain, no?

@utafrith

Uta Frith

Uta Frith: “What is the role of language? When we consider social interactions this almost always involves language. Is language actually the primary driver of our social interactions, or is it the other way round?”

Kristian Tylen: ” … My preference is to think that language both evolves from and is shaped by our interactions with the surrounding physical and social environment.  And so it is out there rather than inside us. This is demonstrated by the way that language structures are motivated. Take the way we talk about pitch  In English and Danish: We talk about low and high pitch mapping onto low and high spatial notation. Other languages for instance use thick and thin or big and small. These relations all map onto universal experience. Low tones come from big creatures and high tones from small creatures. And it turns out that it is very difficult to learn the opposite relations.”

Uta Frith: “But things out there need to act on the brain, no?  I don’t disagree with you that the world outside the mind is a starting point, but the experience of the outside shaped the inside, over millenia.  As a consequence, I guess there are some pre-shaped circuits in the brain, which might become obsolete, if  the environment changed radically.  So this is why I would put the outside in second place, and the inside first.”

Source: Putting Language into the Social BrainSocial Minds: A Piece of the Frithmind.

The new science of prospective psychology

“What if the mind is not a storehouse of knowledge, but an engine of prediction? What if we are not Homo sapiens, but Homo Prospectus?” Martin E. P. Seligman

future1The University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center has established a new branch of Cognitive Psychology: Prospective Psychology. Prospective Psychology investigates the mental representation and evaluation of possible futures. Through the Templeton Science of Prospection Awards, 22 two-year projects will explore the field of prospection.

To read: Seligman, M. E. P., Railton, P., Baumeister, R. F., & Sripada, C. (2013). Navigating into the future or driven by the past. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 119-141.

Where is the brain in the Human Brain Project?

New article on the crisis of the Human Brain Project: Nature, 03 September 2014.

“The crisis results mainly from ambiguities concerning the place of neuroscience in the HBP. From the beginning, neuroscientists pointed out that large-scale simulations make little sense unless constrained by data, and used to test precise hypotheses. In fact, we lack, among other resources, a detailed ‘connectome’, a map of connections between neurons within and across brain areas that could guide simulations. There is no unified format for building functional databases or for annotating data sets that encompass data collected under varying conditions. Most importantly, there are no formulated biological hypotheses for these simulations to test.”

Update on September 16:
Independent EC evaluators have now recommended “the effective integration of the cognitive neuroscience community” into the Human Brain Project and the project has appointed a mediator to help them implement this and other recommendations, including those concerning its governance structure.

The myth of mirror neurons

Gregory Hickok: The myth of mirror neurons. The real neuroscience of communication and cognition. W. W. Norton 2014.

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Myth-of-Mirror-Neurons/

Source: Publisher

From publisher’s website: “In The Myth of Mirror Neurons, neuroscientist Gregory Hickok reexamines the mirror neuron story and finds that it is built on a tenuous foundation—a pair of codependent assumptions about mirror neuron activity and human understanding. Drawing on a broad range of observations from work on animal behavior, modern neuroimaging, neurological disorders, and more, Hickok argues that the foundational assumptions fall flat in light of the facts.”

Review by Patricia Smith Churchland in Nature 511, 532–533 (31 July 2014): “Hickok’s critique deserves to be widely discussed, especially because many scientists have bought into the mirror-neuron theory of action understanding, perhaps because they lack the time or inclination to peer into its workings themselves. Hickok performs a valuable service by laying out the pros and cons clearly and fairly. He ends by agreeing that although mirror neurons may well have a role in explaining communication and empathy, many other neural networks with complex responses are undoubtedly involved. Those networks and their roles are still to be clarified.”

Human Brain Project: the role of cognitive neuroscience still up in the air

The European Commission (EC) issued, on July 18th, a reply to the Open Letter submitted, on July 7th, by a group of concerned neuroscientists. The reply can be found here. The future role of cognitive neuroscience in the project is still unclear. There are promises to address “the most effective integration of the cognitive neuroscience community in HBP’s activities.”

I have just been sent a press release for immediate distribution from some of the signatories of the Open Letter. “We are very encouraged to hear that the EC is willing to take notice of the overwhelming concern in the neuroscience community evident in the signatories to the open letter. The suggestion that the ring-fenced budget will not be unlocked unless there is a satisfactory approach to the issues raised is most welcome, but needs to be accompanied by an open and transparent mechanism for ensuring that the approach is indeed satisfactory. We therefore need to understand how the independent evaluation mentioned in the EU’s message will meet the simple and obvious standards for the review that we raised. We expect a true two-way dialogue involving formal engagement by the EC with neuroscientists of all stripes, not only within, but also outside the HBP. The agenda for tackling the enormous challenges of understanding the human brain must be an inclusive one.”

Media contacts: Zachary Mainen, Alexandre Pouget, Peter Dayan

A BBC News report is here.

Human Brain Project under fire

http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/01/human-brain-project-and-graphene-win.html

Source: 33rd square

Sources: Nature 511, July 7, 2014. Also: The Guardian, July 7, 2014.

The European Human Brain Project has come under fire. In an open letter, more than 500 neuroscientists oppose the management style of the project. The Guardian and Nature report that the international protest was triggered by the elimination of studies on cognition from the project. Cognitive neuroscientists feel ousted.

From The Guardian: “Central to the latest controversy are recent changes made by Henry Markram, head of the Human Brain Project at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne. The changes sidelined cognitive scientists who study high-level brain functions, such as thought and behaviour. Without them, the brain simulation will be built from the bottom up, drawing on more fundamental science, such as studies of individual neurons.”

From Nature: “Stanislas Dehaene … says that such a simulation, “while not totally useless, will fail to elucidate brain functions and diseases, much like a simulation of every feather on a bird would fail to clarify flight”. Along with other ousted colleagues, Dehaene believes that a top-down, reverse-engineering approach is required, starting with behaviour and high-density recordings of electrical activity in the brains of humans or animals to elucidate how information is encoded and used.”

More discussion from MIT Technology Review.

Cracking the brain’s code

Christof Koch & Gary Marcus: Cracking the Brain’s Code. How does the brain speak to itself? MIT Technology Review. June 17, 2014

“The brain as a whole, throughout our waking lives, is a veritable symphony of neural spikes—perhaps one trillion per second. To a large degree, to decipher the brain is to infer the meaning of its spikes. But the challenge is that spikes mean different things in different contexts. It is already clear that neuroscientists are unlikely to be as lucky as molecular biologists. Whereas the code converting nucleotides to amino acids is nearly universal, used in essentially the same way throughout the body and throughout the natural world, the spike-to-information code is likely to be a hodgepodge: not just one code but many, differing not only to some degree between different species but even between different parts of the brain. The brain has many functions, from controlling our muscles and voice to interpreting the sights, sounds, and smells that surround us, and each kind of problem necessitates its own kinds of codes.”

This is part of a group of articles on Hacking the Soul, which also includes an interview with Rebecca Saxe.

3D movies of brains

From MIT News. With video.

Caenorhabditis_elegans

Caenorhabditis elegans. Wikimedia Commons

http://www.hhmi.org/research/zebrafish-systems-neuroscience-whole-brain-analysis-neural-circuits-underlying-learned

Larval zebrafish. Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute

“Researchers at MIT and the University of Vienna have created an imaging system that reveals neural activity throughout the brains of living animals. This technique, the first that can generate 3-D movies of entire brains at the millisecond timescale, could help scientists discover how neuronal networks process sensory information and generate behavior. The team used the new system to simultaneously image the activity of every neuron in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, as well as the entire brain of a zebrafish larva, offering a more complete picture of nervous system activity than has been previously possible.”

Robert Prevedel et al., Simultaneous whole-animal 3D imaging of neuronal activity using light-field microscopy. Nature Methods, 18 May 2014.

Connections: We now have the means to connect neuronal activity to behavior in a worm and in a fish. That’s exciting, but it isn’t the end of the story. Fortunately, there are a couple of passages in the recent NIH BRAIN Initiative Report that emphasize that efforts to understand the brain can’t be limited to finding the links between neuronal activity and observable behavior. “In advanced organisms our concept of ‘behavior’ must be extended to include sophisticated internal cognitive processes in addition to externally observable actions” … “Mental life can flourish within the nervous system, even if the behavioral link to the observable world is tenuous. Thus the BRAIN Initiative should focus on internal cognitive processes and mental states in addition to overt behavior.” Unfortunately, research on language and the brain doesn’t seem to be on the agenda for the NIH BRAIN initiative. That’s a big oversight, if not an outright blunder – there is probably no cognitive domain that we collectively know more about at an abstract, computational, level. There is no better window into the human mind than language, and it’s already wide open. The Max Planck Society must have seen the potential and importance of ongoing brain research on language when electing Angela Friederici as their new vice-president.  There is also an NSF report about a recent workshop on Linking Language and Cognition to Neuroscience via Computation

Connections: The neural code that makes us human.

A dictionary for the meanings of genes

From Cori Bargmann’s autobiography

Source: http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/CoriBargmann/

Source: The Rockefeller University

“Human biology, especially human neurobiology, is very complex, and our view of the human brain is fragmentary. However, the genomes of humans and worms share more genes than any of us expected, including most classes of genes that are important in the nervous system. (The complexity of the human nervous system comes from regulating the genes in different ways, and from deploying them in vastly larger numbers of neurons.) The basic functions of those genes are similar in all animals, so if we view one goal of biology as building a “dictionary” containing the meaning of each gene, we can assemble definitions in that dictionary from any animal, with a good chance that the definitions and grammar will apply across all animals and humans. Those of us who study worms hope to meet those who study human brains in the middle, using the universality of biology to translate understanding across organisms.”

Cori Bargmann’s 2013 Breakthrough Prize talk: Using fixed circuits to generate flexible behavior

I am intrigued by the notion of compositionality displayed by the ‘grammar of genes’. A particular gene invariably makes the same contribution in every animal that has it, but this invariable contribution is altered through predictable contextual interactions so that the same set of genes can lead to very different outcomes. The issue is relevant for the old debate about meaning composition for conditionals. In my paper for the Edgington volume, for example, I showed that embedded conditionals interact with surrounding quantifiers in not completely ‘algorithmic’ ways. Does this mean that we should just give up on the idea of a compositional semantics for conditionals? Or should we rethink our ideas about compositionality in natural language semantics? Non-compositionality is a fact of life for content words (cat, blue, sing …), which are part of the non-logical vocabulary of natural languages. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs can change their meanings in seemingly unpredictable ways, depending on the linguistic and non-linguistic environment they find themselves in. But the semantic contribution of function words (if, and, every, …), which are part of the logical vocabulary of natural languages, seems to be invariant and resistant to uncontrolled contextual interference. Context seems to be able to affect the interpretation of function words only through certain grammatically determined ‘gates’ or ‘channels’  like those responsible for domain restrictions

Connections: Oxford Handbook of Compositionality.  

Connections: NIH BRAIN Working Group.

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds. TED talk. More than 2 million views. 

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/ape-teaches.html

Rebecca Saxe. Source: PBS

“Above and slightly behind your right ear, exists a part of your brain many scientists believe is specifically dedicated to thinking about other people’s thoughts – to predicting them, reading them, and empathizing with them. It’s called the temporoparietal junction, and this is the area cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe focuses on in her research.”

Q & A: Rebecca Saxe. From the MIT Technology Review. “To me, the signature of human social cognition is the same thing that makes good old-fashioned AI hard, which is its generativity. We can recognize and think about and reason through a literally infinite set of situations and goals and human minds. And yet we have a very particular and finite machinery to do that. So what are the right ingredients? If we know what those are, then we can try to understand how the combinations of those ingredients generate this massively productive, infinitely generalizable human capacity.”