tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post2623100936474840022..comments2024-03-09T09:06:35.288+00:00Comments on Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists: There's More to Us Than Our Brains - So What Does The Brain Do?Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-2394716848470940842017-04-27T12:26:20.956+01:002017-04-27T12:26:20.956+01:00Fixed, thanks!Fixed, thanks!Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-11001010099338660292017-04-26T07:52:13.312+01:002017-04-26T07:52:13.312+01:00"highly responsive to use."
This link i..."highly responsive to use."<br /><br />This link is dead.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02699531120602844497noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-62563128156519426282011-08-18T08:45:47.303+01:002011-08-18T08:45:47.303+01:00Oh, one more thing. What I'm transcribing is l...Oh, one more thing. What I'm transcribing is literally an "inner voice." It is my voice, it is speaking in "my" syntax and tones, as though I were extemporaneously speaking, say at a professional gathering. "So, Mikke, what do you think about Policy Issue X?" Except that this inner voice is coming up with things I've never consciously considered. It is in there "writing on its own" inasmuch as writing = shaping, honing, developing, associating facts and lines of memory and reason, as well as various strategies for communicating those in various ways to various audiences.<br /><br />So either my brain has suddenly sprouted Write-o-Matic modules at an exponentially more complex, new, level. Or I've always had them and they've just never worked this well before. Or I'm going to start hearing Ralph Wiggum's leprechaun. ;D<br /><br />Thank you for reading this, and for preparing this blog, which will be a rich starting point for me as I do some digging on the issue of what the brain is doing while it's busy counting basketballs and ignoring the gorilla.Mikkenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-12304479668878586492011-08-18T08:45:26.314+01:002011-08-18T08:45:26.314+01:00I'm looking forward to reading this post in mo...I'm looking forward to reading this post in more detail. I hope my contribution here is not too far off topic, or torquing; if it is, I would not be offended to have it not be posted here. I am a writer, in that the written word has always been a major part both of my vocation and my avocational interests. Since retiring, I've been writing on topics that have nothing to do with my former vocation (sustainability research and policy). <br /><br />I am one of those individuals who seems to have been hard wired for written language from toddlerhood. So I've spent my entire life observing, practicing, learning about, and teaching writing and methods, no matter what my actual jobs have been. In some cases I was hired for one thing and pushed over to the wordsmithing/communications area because of these capacities. <br /><br />I've been off of my usual daily writing schedule for some three months--a concatenation of major household projects and family visits/issues. Now getting back to my routines, I am trying to document (for myself) the (generally amusing) sense that I'm sharing a skull with an alien. <br /><br />I have been observing that half a dozen writing projects, in process, that were parked this spring as I went about the more immediate tasks seem to have been "getting written" without my actual presence. The upshot is that I am feeling that I'm taking dictation on them--whole paragraphs and lines of reasoning, association, and memory are coming to me fully formed. If I have the time and focus to "transcribe" them, I do--but there are many daily interruptions. <br /><br />I am not aware of having "thought about" any of these topics in the interim, and can't see how that would have happened, given the tight scheduling and pace of these past few months when my conscious attention was consumed 18 hours per day.<br /><br />It's oddly like keeping a dream journal, where, for me, in order to transcribe the sleep visions I have to pause before coming to full waking/external oriented (perceptual) consciousness and "replay the tape" of the dreams while they are still "fresh." Then I can write them down, or talk about/remember them. If I fail to "replay the tape," they are lost. <br /><br />In the case of the "emergent writing," I'm not replaying them before writing them; the transcription IS the replaying. But the overall sense of "having to get it while it's fresh" is very similar. In my professional writing, I never needed to do this, but it wasn't so automatic, either; every word was sweated out and felt very different, somehow. <br /><br />This...crossover...of...I don't even know how to say it...mental cybernetics seems to have shifted considerably regarding writing since what I suspect to be menopause (I have no uterus, so am just guessing; I still seem to have monthly hormonal cycles). It reopens my intent to do some searching/reading on the interaction of hormones and the brain's memory and language centers.<br /><br />The present experience of my "brain" having been off on its own, writing even though "I" couldn't, is startling, oddly charming, and something I'd like to understand better. I've had things like this happen, and even have worked with my own mind to strengthen it, around design of processes or products (my partner, the engineer, frequently solves technical problems while he sleeps), invention of tools/processes, or other problem solving. I've experienced it with kinesic movement/learning (for instance, dance moves that just will not click…then, overnight, the body/mind somehow gets all the pieces in place, and next day, wham, there it is.)<br /><br />This is the first time that I have experienced it in a purely linguistic form of this sort. I have always drafted very fluently, and only once in 35 years had a "writer's block."Mikkenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-9469604867963128732011-07-28T14:51:29.191+01:002011-07-28T14:51:29.191+01:00I think I get what you mean. One of the problems o...<i>I think I get what you mean. One of the problems of learning theory is probably that we don't actually care how a rat presses a lever/carries out the behaviour.</i><br />This is it. <br /><br />The ecological approach has behaviourist roots, so we have plenty in common, but less Skinner and more Watson.Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-19964801187778959122011-07-28T11:54:20.636+01:002011-07-28T11:54:20.636+01:00I think I get what you mean. One of the problems o...I think I get what you mean. One of the problems of learning theory is probably that we don't actually care how a rat presses a lever/carries out the behaviour.<br />This is not to say that the identity of the behaviour is unimportant (though to many theorists it is).<br />Interesting discussion, its making me think of many of the problems in our approach (though I still think its better than the cognitive approach!).<br />This is some of the sort of work that is carried out:<br />B. Reynolds. (2001). A cellular mechanism of reward related learning. Nature, 413, 64-67.<br />Matell, M. S., Meck, W. H., & Nicolelis, M. A. L. (2003). Interval timing and the encoding of signal duration by ensembles of cortical and striatal neurons. Behavioral neuroscience, 117(4), 760-772.<br /><br />and here is some current thinking on the nature of stimulus representations in pavlovian conditioning - no brains contained within.<br /><br />Harris, J. a. (2006). Elemental representations of stimuli in associative learning. Psychological review, 113(3), 584-605. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.113.3.584Pam Blundellnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-16857910280234395652011-07-28T07:23:51.801+01:002011-07-28T07:23:51.801+01:00To add to that:roughly, the difference I had in mi...To add to that:roughly, the difference I had in mind on terms of models is laid out <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/perception-action-dynamical-systems.html" rel="nofollow">here</a> and <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/perceptionaction-model-of-coordination.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>. To me, the goal is models that contain implementations of actual mechanism, rather than abstract parameters. (This isn't a specific critique of learning theories, it's a wide problem.)Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-13836022959928784312011-07-28T02:28:42.845+01:002011-07-28T02:28:42.845+01:00Pam,
"Meaning" is a funny word. It is a...Pam, <br />"Meaning" is a funny word. It is an awkward conversation, because the Gibson stuff comes out of Peirce and James and Pragmatism, which is poorly understood. (With the caveat that, in my experience, the Europeans and South Americans have a much better handle on this stuff than those in North America). A more neutral way to have the discussion is to say that the Ecological Approach to perception handles with 'perception' many things that traditional 'continental' philosophy has told us cannot be handled without a dualistic concept of mental meaning-making. At the most basic level 'affordances' blur the traditional boundary between 'objective object properties' and 'subjective meaning' as traditionally understood. There is more, but that is the core. <br /><br />You are also correct that Eco-Psych should talk more with behavioral neuroscientists (and I would add behaviorists in general). Surely, much opportunity for cross-fertilization of ideas and good collaboration has been stymied by an overstatement of the differences between the two movements. <br /><br />Would you have a suggestion for an easy reading or two to understand how modern behaviorists treat neuronal processes while staying true to their roots? <br /><br />EricEric Charleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17412168482569793996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-81782498252679507912011-07-27T15:58:24.283+01:002011-07-27T15:58:24.283+01:00Contemporary learning theory has moved on signific...Contemporary learning theory has moved on significantly from the 'co-occurance = association' notion - so that's a straw man.<br /><br />What do you mean by 'meaning'? <br /><br />I still think you might find the behavioural neuroscience approach less frustrating than the cognitive one. Although there tends to be an assumption that stimuli form invariant representations (obviously not true!), we certainly don't rely on magic such as 'face processing' or 'episodic memory'.Pam Blundellnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-73069126430439183162011-07-27T11:38:02.127+01:002011-07-27T11:38:02.127+01:00Eric's actually covered a lot of the ground I ...Eric's actually covered a lot of the ground I was going to hit. Let me just add a couple of things;<br /><br />1. My main goal here isn't actually to argue about what representations are. I have many reasons to think they are the wrong formalism for understanding cognition, and I'm now trying to front up to the question 'if not representation, then what is the brain doing?'. So I don't want to spend too much time on representation here; Sabrina and I have <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/search/label/representation" rel="nofollow">posted about these things throughout the blog</a>, and Sabrina has more coming sparking off this post; feel free to comment!<br /><br />Pam: I have no particular beef with behaviourist learning models, other than they also trade in fairly simplistic notions about what counts as input. I also don't think the kind of associational mechanisms they entail are sufficient; any two things can be associated just by virtue of co-occurance, but what you need is meaning. I prefer the Gibsons 'differentiation of invariant information' approach.<br /><br />Anon: representations, as used in cognitive psychology, are only necessary if you have a gap to fill between information and behaviour. See below for the issue here.<br /><br />Tom:<br /><i>You argue that the brain doesn't "represent" because the environment is rich enough to support behaviour. This may work for perception-action type behaviours but it doesn't really cover all cognition or brain function in my view. E.g., episodic memory allows me to retrieve information about who I sat next to at my sister's wedding over a year ago. Hard to see how this is supported by the environment.</i><br />This is a standard reply, and it certainly needs an answer. Sabrina's plotting on this front, it's something she's especially interested in. <br /><br />Here's my potted reply: I think cognitive science jumped too far upstream too early. Instead of starting at the bottom and working up, cognitive science started studying things like 'episodic memory' and 'imagination' and all those complex things. They then looked to see how these things might be supported, and because they assumed poverty of stimulus and hadn't done any work at this critical, lower level, they identified a gap between the world and the behaviour they observed. They filled this gap with representations, and proceeded to interpret everything they did next in those terms.<br /><br />What I think is required is for psychology to go back to the drawing board a bit, and get a clearer picture of what is actually available to support behaviour. If you go back to the start, and work your way back up carefully, you actually end up in a different place. My hunch, my bet, is that if cognitive/neuro-science did this then we would actually end up studying different things, and talking about them in different ways. So your difficulty in seeing that it could be something else is a) a product of an historical process we need to rerun and b) therefore not my problem, just yours.<br /><br />Gibson reran this process, and ended up in a fundamentally different (and I think, better) place. On this blog I've spent a lot of time talking about why I think this approach is better and viable. I now want to spend some time resting on this foundation without defending it further and taking the next step: if not representation, then what? <br /><br />What I can't do much of is rest on modern neuroscience, because that data was collected and interpreted within a framework I think is incoherent and a dead end, and that is incommensurate with the re-evaluation inspired by Gibson. I don't think the current tools and methods are suitable to answer the questions I'm asking, and I'm trying to develop a feel for what might be required.<br /><br />This is helping, thanks all - keep it coming! I'll try to refine all this into a post next week as well, but this conversation is helping :)Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-4165152033188373422011-07-27T06:25:28.786+01:002011-07-27T06:25:28.786+01:00Nice Post!
I think you are correct that brain-av...Nice Post! <br /><br />I think you are correct that brain-aversion has been a detriment to Ecological Psychology and, I would add, to behaviorists. If we could articulate a better vision of the role of the brain as a component of the active organism, rather than as the control system for a Cartesian robot, we would be much better off. It is ridiculously challenging, and while there is much good work being done, it is not well enough understood yet to provide a simple, usable alternative to the cognitive vocabulary. One interesting place we might find help with this is the budding interest in "Neuropragmatism" (e.g. http://neuropragmatism.com/). I think an increasing number of neuroscientists are becoming disillusioned with the cognitive framework, so the time is ripe. Any chance you want to draft some notes, or let me steal from your blog for a chapter in the nascent Eco-Psych textbook project?<br /><br />To other posters: The problems with the representational model of the mind are not obvious in themselves. The problems are that the representational model derives from a faulty understanding of the mind-body relationship, and a faulty model of what it means to be an actor in the world. Thus, I am increasingly convinced that arguing about the existence or non-existence of representations in the brain is not productive. To be productive, the discussion has to focus on more basic issues. The fundamental function of the brain is to be part of the system whereby people act in the world. That actions are directed at objects and events spread out over space and time doesn't really change anything. Redefining the word representation to not mean re-presentation doesn't help, if you keep all the baggage that the word brings with it. Similarly, the term 'information processing' is now so ambiguous that it has become virtually meaningless except for inevitably carrying some bit of supposedly disavowed baggage. (Information about what? Information to whom?)<br /><br />I'm one of those crazy people who think you need to understand something better to explain it more simply. If you cannot think of a way to explain what the brain does that does not use the words "representation" or "information processing", then they are crutches, and not convenient short-hands. If you can explain what the brain does without those words, ask yourself seriously what is value-added about using them. If most of the apparent value is illusory (e.g. it makes it sound like we are talking about re-presenting, when we really are not), then we should probably ditch the terms. <br /><br />Eric<br /><br />P.S. Really, the textbook project is started, you want to draft something?Eric Charleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17412168482569793996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-54140738953432857602011-07-26T20:34:49.654+01:002011-07-26T20:34:49.654+01:00An interesting post but I don't understand why...An interesting post but I don't understand why you equate representations with the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument. I am quite happy with the idea that the world provides a rich, detailed, dynamic & statistically structured input, but I still find it helpful to think about how cognition might transform and represent this input to accomplish different tasks.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-37929147445005962862011-07-26T20:14:45.794+01:002011-07-26T20:14:45.794+01:00You argue that the brain doesn't "represe...You argue that the brain doesn't "represent" because the environment is rich enough to support behaviour. This may work for perception-action type behaviours but it doesn't really cover all cognition or brain function in my view. E.g., episodic memory allows me to retrieve information about who I sat next to at my sister's wedding over a year ago. Hard to see how this is supported by the environment.<br /><br />"Representation" is sometimes taken as a loaded word, but I don't think it should be controversial. The central nervous system is (in my view) in the business of transforming information from one form to another. For example, the pattern of light on the retina is transformed into a pattern of firing in primary visual cortex. It seems reasonable to call this transformed information a representation. <br /><br />Whatever you call it the brain is transforming information into different forms. Some can support action fairly directly in line with the ideas you put forward (e.g., some parietal representations seem to mediate perception-action transformations) but others fit less well.<br /><br />I still take the view that neural network models are quite a good way of understanding real neural computation, albeit hugely simplified. In this framework it is hard to define discrete "computations" but a given neuron or population of neuron retains the same computation so long as its connections are unchanged. To extrapolate a given part of the brain is doing something, and it is our job to find out what. If the same part of the brain is active in more than one task, it is nonetheless doing the same thing so we should infer that the tasks can entail the common computations. This is what fMRI is useful for.<br /><br />It is clear that the brain is a very dynamic system, but it is not so obvious (to me) that it can only be understood through its dynamics. It seems to me that fMRI gives very useful information about the nature of processing/representation/computation in different parts of the brain. Brain imaging is still in its infancy and I don't think we yet understand this very well. It seems possible or likely that the functional organization of these regions might be understood in terms of some simple principles reflecting brain topology and connectivity, and I think fMRI can play an important role in understanding the spatial constraints, while other techniques (DTI, EEG, MEG etc) might be more useful for understanding dynamics and connectivity. Both will be important.Tom Hartleyhttp://www-users.york.ac.uk/~th512/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-73076396099155194392011-07-26T19:17:25.240+01:002011-07-26T19:17:25.240+01:00I think the question of representation is interest...I think the question of representation is interesting. And its used differently by different sorts of psychologists. So to a cognitive psychologist "representation" will mean something quite different to a traditional animal learning theorist.<br />Where do you stand on things like Rescorla-Wagner model? There have to be learned responses to environmental stimuli - because otherwise we wouldn't know how to react in the world. And there is reasonable neuroscience research suggesting that the delta term in RW is represented by activity of dopamine neurons in striatum.<br />What about things like Pearce-Hall? Given that stimulus rich environment, we need to be able to decide which stimulus representations to assign value to, and attend - and Pearce-Hall (and Mackintosh) 'attentional' mechanisms are one way of doing this. (Though attention is another problematic concept imo). And again, there is good neuroscience evidence showing that the brain impacts on Pearce-Hall alpha - eg. effects of lesions of central nucleus.<br />Maybe you need to get away from cognitive neuroscience and look at behavioural neuroscience?Pam Blundellhttps://plus.google.com/109361178609703027543/postsnoreply@blogger.com