In her fascinating new book Seven and A Half Lessons About The Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett recounts a story about the way our brains process information and then go around predicting our actions.
During the troubled period before the end of Apartheid in southern Africa, a young man was drafted into the army, handed a rifle and asked to hunt guerrillas.
One day in the forest during practice, he saw to his horror a long line of guerrilla fighters in fatigues, and they were armed with assault rifles. The young man flipped the safety of his rifle and took position to fire the first shot. He would have shot had it not been for a tap on his shoulder, and his friend told him not to shoot, for it was just a boy with a long line of cows, and the dreaded assault rifle was just a stick.
Professor Barrett recounts this story to make a significant point that memory plays in automating the decisions we make. The most crucial way we tap into our memories is by the narrative we construct from our sensory organs. One of the essential things that the brain does is actively construct experiences. If you were to interact with a piece of abstract art, say a Rothko, or Picasso the artist only does half the work, the other half is done by your brain as it reaches deep into memory to construct a narrative from the opaque elements of the art.
However, the aim of this short piece is not to declaim that we have no role to play in our interaction with the world, but instead to point out that our brains actively predict our reality based on our experiences, if we start curating a different set of experiences our realities might start diverging.
To explain this further let us go back in time to the young man in Rhodesia. The reason he mistook a young herder for a leader of a guerrilla group was because he was primed for it. Our brains sometimes override the information presented to them by the sensory organs as they create a reality based on what we have actively done in certain situations in the past, this is the greatest trick known to every person trying to sell you a product. Next time round before you buy the new fruity phone, or go on a trip, or have a heated political exchange, spend some time and think from the other side and you will have curated a new experience. Whoever says you can't teach an old dog new tricks, you can and often it is worth it.
The Review This Week
What We're Reading- What Behavioral Abilities Emerged at Key Milestones in Human Brain Evolution?
For many behavioural researchers, a recurring theme that emerges is that of the complexity of our current world advancing at a rate faster than that of our brains. Many cite our 'cavemen brains' as the reason for our inability to make sense of complex, overwhelming phenomenon such as climate change. To even begin to try and understand what our brains are potentially capable of, it's worth going back to see how it has developed over the last few millennia. This article by Max Bennet undertakes an exploration into a 600 million year phylogenetic history of human intelligence (phylogenetics - the study of evolutionary relationships between biological entities). Using biological evolutionary evidence, the author discusses 13 hypotheses to trace this evolution of the brain - The emergence of taxis navigation and associated learning in early bilaterians; the emergence of map based navigation, 'interval timing' and omission learning in early vertebrates; the emergence of vicarious trial and error (VTE), counterfactual learning and episodic memory in early mammals; the emergence of the ability to 'anticipate a need in the future', theory of mind and learning motor skills through observation in early primates; and the emergence of language and music in early humans.
Read the paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.685853/full#h3
What We're Listening To- Is there a System 3? (ft. Leigh Caldwell)
To any self-respecting behaviour science enthusiast - amateur & expert alike, the system 1 and system 2 model is one of the founding principles of the field. A basic assumption. A series of articles, listed alongside the episode description gives context to this podcast discussion - one of the most recent discussions on a potential System 3. Varyingly described as a spectrum between Systems 1 & 2, as a form of mental simulation that responds to anticipated reward in a stimulus-response relationship and as a tool that, in fact, aids deliberative System 2 thinking - the discussion is interesting in trying to make sense of what this kind a mechanism does, how it fits into a 2 system model - if it even does, and whether a 2 system model is even the best framework to view our world through. The creators of the podcast, as well as the guest, all agree that larger conversations are required to begin working on these questions. But this is a great catch up for to see where we are at the moment. Listen to the podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4wRZnBN5ekAhnjocUAkjwK?si=f83aed0a44b24bf0
What We're Watching- A neural portrait of the human mind - TED 2014
Nancy Kanwisher closes this talk with a sentiment that resonates with me, personally. We need to undertake neuroscience research to understand one of the greatest mysteries of all time - the human brain. Through this 17 minute talk, she maps areas of the brain that her team and others have been able to identify as those that contribute to specific mental and cognitive processes such as vision, hearing and language. There are some seriously cool brain images for those of you who find them interesting. The vast grey landscape at 12.05 also holds a lot of promise - unchartered territory in this quest for those of us who dare to explore it. Watch the TED Talk here:https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_kanwisher_a_neural_portrait_of_the_human_mind/transcript?language=en
Nancy Kanwisher is a renowned neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose course, the Human Brain, has recently been made available online for all us cheap nerds. In the first lecture she goes through what the course aims to cover in her engaging narrative style - the organisation of the brain as a reflection of the mind, what a mind is, the specific mental processes specific to different parts of the brain, how brains develop normally, as a result of injury and through learning and experience. I am really looking forward to the entire series. If anyone would like to join me in following the course, here is the course playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60IKRN_pFptIBxeiMc0MCJP
The Lab This Week
Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory
The Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory headed by Professor Lisa Feldman Barrettis developing a systems-level model of the brain and body mechanisms underlying mental life, unifying human affect, emotion, motivation, cognition and action. Our current topics include:
- A predictive processing approach to understanding mind and brain, with a focus on metabolic processes, allostasis, and interoception
- The nature and dynamics of affective processing, including the structure of affect, the neurobiology of affect and how it changes with age and disease, individual differences in affective reactivity, and how affect supports memory and perception.
- The theory of constructed emotion, including the conceptual system for emotion (how emotion knowledge is represented and structured in the mind and the brain) and the role of language and conceptual knowledge about emotion in constituting the experience and perception of emotion.
- Cultural variation in emotion, with a focus on small-scale, remote societies
- Sex differences in emotion, including the influence of ovarian hormones on brainconnectivity, with corresponding changes in memory and experience.
- The neuroscience of emotion from an evolutionary-developmental (evo-devo) perspective.
