mm-Hmmm ...

The critical elements of conversation that somehow didn't make it into the "language". A review of How We Talk, by N. J. Enfield.

Written language is a record of elision. The first written languages were hardly more than accounting symbols, and many early forms of writing lacked basic things like vowels and punctuation. The written forms are a shorthand, for those practiced in the art of spoken language to fill in the blanks, and they still hide a great deal today. For example, the same letter, such as "a" can stand for several vowel sounds, as in ate, art, ahh, am, awe. Another rich part of the language left on the editing room floor are completely unrecorded (except by authors of dialog looking for unusual verisimilitude) sounds, like um, ah, huh, mm-hmmm and the like. N. J. Enfield makes the case that, far from being uncouth interjections, these are critical parts of the language, indeed, part of an elaborate "conversation machine" which is one behavior that distinguishes humans from other animals.

Arabic, a language commonly written without vowels.

When we are in conversation, time is of the essence. We expect attentiveness and quick responses. It is a relationship with moral aspects- with obligations on each side. The speaker should repeat things when asked, not take up too much of the floor, provide clear endings to turns. Enfield describes a very disciplined timing system, where, at least in Japan, responses begin before the first speaker has stopped. Other cultures vary, but everyone responds within half a second. Otherwise, something is discernably wrong. One thing this schedule indicates is that there is a sing-song pattern within the speaker's production that signals the ending of a speaking turn well before it happens. The other is that there is an serious obligation to respond. Not doing so will draw a followup or even rebuke from the speaker. Waiting more time to respond is itself a signal, that the response is not what is desired.. perhaps a "no". It can also be softened by an "uh" or "er" kind of filler that again signals that the responder is 1. having some difficulty processing, and 2. paving the way for a negative response.

Likewise, "mm-Hmm" is a fully functional and honorable part of the language- the real one used in conversation. It is the encouraging sign that the listener is holding up her part of the bargain, paying attention to the speaker continuously. Failing to provide such signs leads the speaker to miss a necessary interaction, and interject.. "Are you listening?".

Finally, Enfield deals with "Huh?", a mechanism listeners use to seek repair of speech that was unclear or unexpected. When a response runs late, it may switch to "Huh?", in a bid to say that processing is incapable of making sense of what the speaker said, please repeat or clarify. But at the same time, if something of the original speech can be salvaged, listeners are much more likely to ask for specific missing information, like "Who?", or "where was that?" or the like. This again shows the moral engine at work, with each participant working as hard as they can to minimize the load on the other, and move the conversation forward in timely fashion.

Huh is also a human universal, one that Enfield supposes came about by functional, convergent evolution, due to its great ease of expression. When we are in a relaxed, listening state, this is the sound we can most easily throw out with a simple breath ... to tell the speaker that something went off track, and needs to be repeated. It is, aside from clearly onomatopoeic expressions, the only truly universal word among humans.

A conversation without words.

It is a more slender book than it seems, devoted to little more than the expressions "uh", "mmm-Hmmm", and "Huh?". Yet it is very interesting to regard conversation from this perspective as a cooperation machine, much more complex than those of other species, even those who are quite vocal, like birds and other apes. But it still leaves huge amounts of our face-to-face conversational engine in the unconscious shadows. For we talk with our hands, faces, and whole bodies as well. Even with clothes. And even more interesting is the nature of music in relation to all this. It is in speech and in our related vocal intimacies and performances that music first happens. Think of a story narration- it involves not only poetry of language, but richly modulated vocal performance that draws listeners along and, among much else, signals beginnings, climaxes, endings, sadness and happiness. This seems to be the language of tone that humans have lately transposed into the free-er realms of instrumental music and other music genres. Analyzing that language remains something of an uncharted frontier.

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Concept as a Shadow of Percept

Binding and grounding- How does our brain organize concepts, properties, and relations?

Evolutionarily, brains developed to interact with the outside world, developing out of senses to orient the organism for food and defense. The basic senses came first, and then the ever more complex networks / computations to deduce what their signals mean and ultimately to build an entire world model, against which to evaluate changes in perception. While perception is now heavily influenced by such mental models, it did not begin there.

This history informs the question of where concepts reside in the brain. The wetness of water is something we feel, and our conception of it is naturally tied to our perception / sensation of it. Our language makes unending use of metaphors that extend this concrete perception-based ontology to the highest abstractions. If someone is a dirty scoundrel, they are only metaphorically dirty, and the visual and tactile aspects of dirtiness are evoked to enrich and clarify the abstraction. While one might imagine that, like computers, our brains store this conceptual data of definitions, categories, properties, etc. just about anywhere, whether in a distributed holographic engram or in dedicated storage areas, the fact is that data storage is localized, such that lesions in various parts of the brain can disrupt recall of specific classes of skills, properties, facts, faces, experiences, etc.

It is also apparent that much of this storage is coincident with our perceptual apparatus (and motor and emotional apparatus). Thus, a brain scan of someone asked to think about and apple and how it differs from a grape will light up areas in the later visual system where incoming perceptions of apples and grapes are decoded into the shape, color, size, etc., which we understand as being their respective properties. Perhaps olfactory and tactile areas come into play as well. Likewise, thinking about a guitar might generate activity in the motor planning areas, providing concepts about playing one. So, analogous to a spotlight of attention, we also have back-casting mini-spotlights of classification and conceptualization that connect "higher" areas in the frontal cortex (which are perhaps asking the questions) to motor, emotional, and perceptual areas, allowing the system to encode complex conceptual schemes once only, where they are first established, in the grounded areas such as in perceptual processing. Once there, they can serve both the immediate perceptual needs of classification, and the evidently related needs of rendering the same classes as concepts.

"Not only is object property information distributed across different locations, but also, these locations are highly predictable on the basis of our knowledge of the spatial organization of the perceptual, action, and affective processing systems. Conceptual information is not spread across the cortex in a seemingly random, arbitrary fashion, but rather follows a systematic plan."

This is the subject of a review, and of a recent paper which attempts to show that it is white matter tracts that constitute the property recognizing units of the brain, not the grey matter targets of their communication. They call this model "representation by connection", and their case is not well made. Yet the overall topic is extremely interesing, so here goes. The fact that this characteristic distribution of property storage in the peripheral systems exists is not in dispute. What is still uncertain is how it is all knit together and what, exactly, is being communicated back and forth. And, of course, what out of these ingredients constitutes the resulting gestalt of consciousness.

The new paper tries to make a big distinction between grey matter (the dense cellular areas of the brain) and white matter (the tracts of myelinated connecting axons, which have recently been so beautifully traced by DTI MRI. They collected 80 people who have suffered lesions in various localized areas of the brain, due to strokes, hemorrhage, or trauma, and correlate their deficits in object property recall / naming, which are specific and diverse, with separately derived maps of white matter tracts, and semantic / notional distance between the same concepts, as provided by a sampling of normal college students. The latter was taken in several dimensions, including properties of color, manipulability, motion, phonological, shape, usage, and others, but only set up a conceptual space field- it was not explicitly correlated with brain anatomy.

"Distributed GM (grey matter) regions that represent different attribute dimensions (e.g., shape, color, manner of interaction) of the same object are connected by WM (white matter). The WM linking pattern itself would then contain multiple dimensions of information in these GM regions and, importantly, additional information about the manner of mapping among various attributes. The incorporation of these elements has been argued to be necessary for the “higher-order” semantic similarity relationships, which are not explained by attribute-specific spaces, to emerge."

The authors developed anatomical maps of normal white matter tracts, and then developed a map of semantic correlations given the defects in the brain damaged patients, over-laying their cognitive defects, on the same object classification tasks as above, over their individual brain defect regions. The question was then, once the semantic defects were anatomically mapped, are their relative positions correlated with the mapping in conceptual space done by normal volunteers? One would naturally expect that yes, cognition of similar objects (scissors, knives) would happen in spatially close areas of the brain. This was indeed found. What it means, however, especially for the author's theory, is extremely hard to say. It is especially hard as the paper is not well written, (the group is from China), leaving their core ideas rather murky.

"In conclusion, using a structural-property-pattern-based RSA (representational similarity analysis) approach, we found that the WM (white matter) structures mainly connecting occipital/middle temporal regions and anterior temporal regions represent fine-grained higher-order semantic information. Such semantic relatedness effects were not attributable to modality-specific attributes (shape, manipula- tion, color, and motion) or to the representation contents of the cortical regions that they connected and were above and beyond the broad categorical distinctions. By connecting multiple modality-specific attributes, higher-order semantic space can be formed through patterns of these connections."

Example of one finding. Two brain areas of gray matter in the left hemisphere (red, superior temporal gyrus; and green, the calcarine sulcus) are linked by a mapped white matter tract. The graph shows a significant r-value for the correlation between the neural similarity (map of white matter lesions by properties reported to be defective) and the author's custom mapping of semantic similarity.

They do claim explicitly that the corresponding gray matter maps from the brain-damaged patients did not correlate as well with the semantic space patterns as did the white matter maps. But this is not so surprising, as gray matter regions (which could be imagined as the CPUs of the brain) are all connected via the white matter (the networking cables). So for a process that depends on the collation of numerous pieces of information, (the concept property units harvested from each percept / action planning/ emotion region), it would be natural to expect that cutting the cables might be a cleaner way to cause particular property type deficits. That doesn't mean, however, that it is the cables that are conscious, or that are doing the most important processing.

So I think, aside from the operational issues, which look rather daunting in this paper and whose resulting correlation maps are only marginally compelling, there are serious theoretical issues that indicate that while this field is ripe for advancement, this does not seem to be the paper to get us there.

A much more through and positive review than this one.

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Brain: Is Size Everything?

Properties other than size also make human brains different.

There is no doubt that humans experience a unique sense of consciousness and form of cognition. While other animals like chimpanzees, dolphins, dogs, elephants, and crows are amazingly smart in general and have highly developed capabilities of their own, they don't touch our abilities for planning, remembering, focusing, and at the top of the list- language, both spoken and thought. It remains hard to characterize these differences, because we are still learning so much about the cognition of other animals, and because even with introspection, language, science, and the rest of our inquisitive armamentarium, our own mental processes remain opaque to a large degree.

However, there are clear differences, and how can they be expained? We turn out not to be the only animals with large brains. Sperm whales have brains about nine times as heavy as ours. Even some dolpins have bigger brains than we do. Monkeys typically have smaller brains than cows, despite much higher intelligence. Mice have brains that are, per body weight, almost ten times as large as ours. So size is not, by itself, the issue. There is more going on.

Biggest does not equal smartest. At least that is what we think.

On the other hand, over the last few million years, size has clearly meant something, as our brains have grown at a very rapid clip. So it appears that within a given lineage, size increases may serve as the easiest way to change cognitive capacity, and can serve as a proxy for intelligence. But it is far more hazardous to make comparisons between different lineages, since their architectures and thus capabilities may be very different. So who knows- maybe octopuses are smarter than we are, despite having smaller brains, and several of them.

But bigger is better, among our closer relatives.

For example, thanks to our particular architecture, we pack more neurons into a gram of brain than do whales, so we end up with as many or more brain cells as elephants and whales. And what is more, our brain being more compact gives those neurons a distinct advantage in speed / connectivity. There has been a good deal of work on the genetic level to look for genes and other genetic features that show accelerated evolution in the human lineage- quantitative work that can show with high confidence that some gene variation or regulatory site is novel and significant in humans. But linking that data to the human phenotype has been a challenge, as is true generally with human genetics. The best route has typically been to find other variations in the same area that lead to disease or other pathology, which can give strong clues about the overall function. Or providing mice with the human version of the gene, though the chances of seeing something informative, let alone amazing(!), by this route are rather slim.

Getting back to brain function, a recent paper discussed new work in the field, particularly on the properties of neurons themselves, which might help explain some of our mental distinctiveness. This was all done on brains from recently-living humans, which are understandably hard to get and hard to work with, in a brain slice+electrodes system. One finding is that we have a unique class of "super-neurons"- cells which fire so strongly that a single one can set off responses to the next neuron and thus to larger cortical circuits. This is not seen in other species (per their claim) and is unusual because in typical brain tissue / circuits, it takes converging firings from several or many upstream cells to bump a neuron into action- which is, after all, the whole point of information integration.

The efficiency possibilities are clear. If a percept can happen from the firing of a single famous face cell, (though these are likely to be part of a neural network, rather than regimented as one cell per face), then we need fewer of them to carry memories. The cells and synapses discussed here actually target inhibitory neurons, but the logic remains the same- that if single cells can control large-scale network activities, you need fewer of them, though their tuning and activity then are of paramount importance.

Two neurons meet... The intensely spiking pyramidal neuron (red) which firs first, and the post-synaptic, receiving cell  (blue) are portrayed (C) as they were stained and micrographed in the tissue. The layers of the cortical sheet are given roman numerals. Synapses between them are numbered in D. Panel B shows an averaged stimulus -> response graph of the two cells, showing that the receiving basket cell (bc) quite frequently fires (74% of the time) when the sending cell fires, despite their very sparse synapses. The lower graph (26%) shows the other events, when pyramidal cell firing evokes only a grudging sigh in the receiving cell. In other species, this is all one would see in such single-cell stimulus / encounters. Panel A shows that the receiving cell not only fires once, but several times per upstream spike.

"Although the ratio of triggering poly- versus monosynaptic postsynaptic potentials was 0.01 in the rat and 1.73 in the human in our hands, it should be emphasized that the human patients were treated differently during anesthesia and surgery, and the excitability of human neurons might be different in the external solution also used for rat experiments."

"However, the human neocortical neurons also exhibit specializations only reported in our species. One such feature is the capacity of excitatory principal cells to elicit firing in local inhibitory interneurons with a single action potential via very strong excitatory synapses. It has been suggested that this feature has specifically evolved to enhance coordinated firing of neuronal ensembles in higher brain functions."

Additionally, learning happens very quickly among these super-neurons, so that they do not regularly overwhelm their targets. After ten minutes of stimulation, the downstream cell had already learned to ignore the stimulus. So while most processing takes place in the usual integrative network pathways to come up with usefully transformed information, there seem to be cases when directness and efficiency rose in importance, in the human lineage, and thus led to the development of these super-neurons. This kind of study adds a cell-biology level to the much-better characterized, but as yet tenuously connected phenotypic and genetic levels of differences that make humans distinctive from their ancestors and fellow-beings on the planet.

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Sleep Brain Waves Are Not Only Slow, But Circular

Memories are delicate physical structures in the brain, and get cleaned up / thrown out / enhanced during sleep- but how?

The mysteries of sleep are slowly becoming unraveled, and not a minute too soon, since we are both depriving ourselves of sleep as never before, and using such deprivation as an instrument of torture. Sleep seems essential for refreshing the brain in multiple ways- tidying in both physical and logical respects. A "glymphatic" system that operates at night, when the cellular volume of the brain shrinks slightly, to physically drive cleaning fluid through the brain to clear out garbage, has been one remarkable finding. Sleep is also when memory "consolidation" happens, which means reinforcing the more important ones, re-distributing or copying them from the hippocampus to the cortex, and deleting less important ones. Then there is dreaming, that link to the deep unconscious which sleep facilitates, with perhaps higher psychological functions.

A well-known feature of sleep is its brain waves, which are especially strong and slow. They appear to function as part of the memory consolidation system, but really, we know very little about them. There are two types of significant sleep waves- the sleep spindles that happen in stage 2 sleep, and the very slow delta waves that happen in the deepest level, stage 3.

A recent paper looked at the geometric pattern of the spindle waves, using epileptic patients who have had their skulls opened extensively for investigation, and allowed the researchers to apply a large field of electrodes to one hemisphere for this tangential study. It finds that instead of the whole brain pulsating with simultaneous spikes and troughs, there is a moving, circular pattern of activation, progressing from the lower temporal cortex, to the parietal cortex, on to the frontal cortex, and back to the start. This makes sense causally, in that there are always conduction delays from one place to another, so it is difficult to imagine one pacemaker (in this case the thalamus) running simultaneous electrical oscillations all over the brain.

Example of sleep spindle propagation. A shows one spindle sequence and the electrode locations, B shows the time course, and D shows averaged vector directions of propagation over all subject and readings, notably in a temporal -> parietal -> frontal direction.

The interesting thing is that this paper argues that this pattern also makes sense functionally, in that it helps consolidate connections between distant points much better than simultaneous activation would. I find their case hard to understand as well as doubtful, but it revolves around the timing issues of long-term potentiation (LTP) and depression (LTD) among neurons.

Spike timing-dependent plasticity is the name for a broad theory of how neuronal connections are managed. If two neurons are connected to each other in the usual fashion, with dendrites from A exciting the axonal network of B, the relative timing of firing of A and B has great influence on whether their connection (synapse) is strengthened for future events, or weakened. If A fires ~10 ms (milliseconds) before B, then the synapse is strengthened. This makes obvious functional sense, implying that A *caused or helped cause B to fire, a successful event that would presumably be good to enshrine in a more permanent connection. Conversely, if A fires anywhere from 10 to 50 ms after B fires, then the logic is reversed, and the physical effect is also reversed: the synaptic connection is made weaker.

Proposed theory, whereby synchronized spindles (top) would result in troughs falling on the evoked action potentials of the original targets (EPSP), causing depression / weakening of all connections. But in B, which resembles the actual state of affairs, successive spindles, when hitting the target neurons, would be at peak value, (assuming that targets of the original neurons and the spindle wave are traveling in the same direction), and thus foster strengthening of all connections.

Given that the sleep spindle waves happen at ~11-15 Hz, or about 80 ms intervals, the authors argue that if they just propagated point to point from the thalamic pacemaker out to points in the cortex, they would arrive at various times, but their effect on secondary targets- the targets of the immediately driven cells, whose firing is delayed by, say, 20 ms- would be to cause chronic long-term depression of those target connections, since the next spindle peak falls roughly into the zone of LTD.

On the other hand, if the spindle waves propagate in a wave-front fashion through the cortex, then (B in figure) the target cells would be hit more or less simultaneously by the evoked firing from the A cells excited by the spindle wave, and then the spindle wave itself as it progressed to hit them as it moved through the cortex.

The researchers go on to find, beyond from the rotational progress of the sleep spindles, that these 11-15 Hz waves entrain gamma waves as well, and they imply that over 2.5 hours of sleep which they observed in one subject, these gamma waves strengthened in a way that supports their hypothesis that the sleep spindles are progressively reinforcing neural connections, including memories.

I find this work very hard to take seriously, though it comes from a very serious lab. If the neural network is 3-dimensional and extensive across the cortex, there is no way to predict the transmission time (estimated above at 20 ms) from one neuron to the next. Nor does the orientation of each particular sub-network necessarily have anything to do with the circular rotation scheme seen in the electrical recordings. That geometric data is much more easily explained as a mechanistic consequence, even side-effect, of not being able to activate all areas of the brain at the same time. Lastly, the idea that sleep spindles, or any process, indiscriminately strengthen all neural connections seems unhelpful, since the point of the "consolidation" process is both to discard old and minor memories / connections as well as to enhance more significant ones.

Graphs of spindle wave phase, taken 5.6 minutes apart in one subject. This suggests to the authors that coherence is progressively enhanced through the stage 2 sleep process, presumable due to positive neural connections being strengthened. Related videos and data are at the publication site.

At the same time, I do not have a counter-theory about how these waves accomplish their function, which certainly is connected with memory management. (Please comment if you have greater insight into these processes or this paper!) So we have a great deal to learn. It is a fascinating area of research, trying to build a unified theory of how the anatomical connections in the brain, and the electrical functions including oscillations of various periods, function to make our minds function, and refresh.

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Time is a Great Mystery, But the Self is an Even Greater One

What is time? And can a physics professor harness it for spiritual speculation? A review of Richard Muller's book about the nature of time, entitled "Now".

We are all critics and all cranks. Some just get a wider audience. Richard Muller, distinguished professor of physics at Berkeley, recounts a good deal of his pathbreaking research in his latest book, as well as roles in founding and inspiring the work of others, some of which / whom went on to win Nobel prizes. Along the way, he provides a high level and very pleasant introduction to the highlights of twentieth century physics. But he can't seem to resist going down some very personal tangents as well, like free will, Richard Dawkins, and a profession of faith.

His views on time are obviously the theme of the book, and the tease as well. He keeps the meat of the matter till the last few pages. To put it most simply, he dismisses the common idea that the progression of time in the universe is connected to the increase of entropy that is expressed in the second law of thermodynamics. Instead, he proposes that time, having been created with the advent of the big bang, as was space itself, represents the continual expansion of that four-dimensional construct that is our universe. Thus we all exist in a "now" that is the bleeding edge of cosmic 4-D expansion, just as space itself is continually expanding. Looking outward at anything, however close or far, is always looking back in time into areas of the universe that have already happened. And just as there is no center or edge to the expansion of space, there is also no edge to the progression of time- all points in space progress through "now", leaving aside the relativistic oddities of some "nows" getting slowed down by relative spatial or gravitational acceleration.

I find this idea very attractive. It is far more sensible than the entropy idea, and probably the best thing going, until we gain a deeper understanding of the mysteries of cosmic origins, the structure of space, and of quantum physics in particular. The latter still resists both unification with other aspects of physics and, frankly, common sense. Yet this edge-of-the-big-bang is far from a theory- it is just a hunch, with minimal predictions, the main one of which is that time might be accelerating along with the accelerating expansion of the universe, if space and time happen to be linked in that way.

However, when it comes to amateur philosophy, the book makes a good deal less sense. Muller spends an effective few chapters on the limits of science and philosophical physicalism- the great deal that we don't know, and perhaps can't know. The nature of the origin of the big bang, given that it originated both the time and space that we are familiar with, is surely one. The various mysteries of quantum physics are others. But some of his other suggested limits edge into very questionable territory.

Combined with other known limits, like the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, and Gödel's theorems of incompleteness, we end up with large areas of reality that are essentially unknowable, at least in a scientific sense. One of these is the future. Because of quantum indeterminacy, as well as chaos theory, physics turns out to not be deterministic as the classical physicists had believed since the time of Newton. This provides, in Muller's eyes, openings for things like qualia, free will and souls.

There is a long discussion of the "what it is like to see red" question, featuring Mary, who is raised in a grey world but knows didactically everything there is to know about color vision. When she first sees color as a mature adult, does she learn anything new? Muller's answer is yes, and he takes that as an intrinsic limit on human knowledge.

The whole qualia question, which is what the "seeing red" exercise is about, seems to me to say much less than Muller and others think. He believes that it points to something beyond our physical constitution that characterizes us- a soul. For the same reason, he claims that he would not want to be transported à la Star Trek, for even if his physical body were reconstituted down to the smallest detail, he might not end up being "himself". Again, a non-material soul lies at the bottom of this, which he explicitly claims, even though he is doubtful whether it survives death:

"When I see blue, do you see blue? That is not a scientific question. Does that make it invalid? This issue is related to the difference between the brain and the mind. Is there something beyond the brain, something behind the circuitry, something more than the physical, mechanical set of atoms, something that can not only see, but knows what a color looks like? I can't prove to you that such knowledge exists. I can only attempt to pursuade you."

To me, there seems to be no reason whatsoever to propose anything beyond the physical mechanism to account for all this. We can grant that subjective experience is utterly different from didactic knowledge. That is intrinsic to beings with consciousness and experiences, and is covered by a difference of perspective. I, looking into your brain, will never have the experiences that you are having subjectively via that brain. It is like expecting someone reading the computer code behind World of Warcraft to experience gaining powers and making alliances. That supposition is a simple, but profound, category error.

Should we care about so much (subjective) knowledge and experience going up in smoke every second and every lifetime? Surely it is a tragedy, which we try to remedy by sharing subjectivity via conversation, writing, the arts, and other ways. But the fact that, being perspectivally enclosed, it is beyond science (certainly with current technologies) means neither that it is an illusion, nor that its reality is somehow "beyond the physical". Its complete dependence on the physical is clear from the biology of stroke, dementia, development, mental time delays, and innumerable other phenomena.

The wonderfulness of its construction, and its tendency to lull us into flights of subjective omnipotence or is no excuse for not taking the biology seriously. This is true even if one appreciates that physics (let alone biology) can not explain, or even represent, everything. There are many things that they can still properly explain, and many things that they put very tight boundaries on even if complete explanations are not yet available.

But there is more...

"There is a spiritual world separate from the real world.  Wave functions from the two worlds are entangled, but since the spiritual world is not amenable to physical measurement, the entanglement can't be detected. Spirit can affect physical behavior- I can choose to build or smash a teacup; I can choose to make war or seek peace- through what I call free will." 

"It is remarkable how often you run into the phrase "Science says..." to support an idea that actually has no foundation in science. It is often physicalism in disguise "Science says we have no free will." Nonsense. That statemen is inspired by physics, but it has no justification in physics. We can't predict when an atom will disintegrate, and the laws of physics, as they currently exist, say that this failure is fundamental. If we can't predict such a simple physical phenomenon, then how can we imagine that someday we will be able to show that human behavior is completely deterministic?"

The weakest aspect of the book is its numerous discussions of free will. Muller seems to have  a particularly unexamined notion of it. He cites quantum indeterminacy as providing an opening for free will, since it means that the universe is not determined. But how does randomness and indeterminate-ness help the cause? How does our ability to make choices and affect the flow of events relate to reality's constitutive randomness? An inability to predict or compute the future does not imply that our physical mechanism can not and does not make choices, including meaningful ones. For example, computers make choices all the time, and increasingly sophisticated, random-event influenced, and, to us, unintelligible ones.

If everything were determined, that would not even affect our sensation of free will. That is the Greek tragedy, where key events are pre-ordained, but still the actors feel themselves to be acting meaningfully, until the end when the hand of fate is revealed to all. Even such slim (and fictional) concessions to fate are out of the question when the future is truly unknown due to all the physical principles Muller cites.

But determined or not, it is not clear what this free will really is. In the worst-case scenario, everything is determined, and we can also predict the future- a future that we can do nothing to change, because everything up to that point as been determined as well. But how would that really feel? I think it would still feel as though we had free will, since we would have reasons for doing what we are going to do, which feel compelling, leading to exactly the actions that we are taking, predicted or not.

I think the secret is that free will is, particularly here in Muller's book, but also more generally, a code word for "soul". It is another, and even more vague, way to make claims for a non-physical entity that lies behind our most important actions and deepest feelings. The intuition is that mere mechanism can not conjure the sovereignity of choice, and is somehow separate from the all-important "I", whose immateriality and freedom are so intutively self-evident.

"Am I simply a wood chip caught in a complicated machine, bouncing around as the gears turn, confusing my rapid action with my importance?"

Why an eminent physicist feels the need to posit special, extra-scientific hypotheses around the issue of consciousness is truly unfortunate. His inability to explain the big bang does not prompt similar flights of intuition unbound, yet his lack of knowledge about biology and inability to bridge the far more modest conceptual gap between subjective consciousness and what we know scientifically (exemplified by the qualia/Mary exercise) does. It is ironic that intuition is so particularly susceptible to error and inflation when trying to analyze itself.

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Association, Attention, and Gamma Waves

Associative memory gets broken down by frequency band and location.

Do you have your own madelaine? A place, song, taste, or feel that transports you into the past? That is associative memory, retrieving a more complete set of experiences based on a relatively simple, (if uncannily specific) cue. It may seem effortless, but under the hood, a great deal is obviously going on. Memory is associated with the hippocampus structure deep within the brain. Missing that structure blocks formation of new memories or retrieval memories by association. (Though some older memories may still be available- it is not clear yet whether memories are stored exclusively in the hippocampus, or are only staged there for eventual transfer to other parts of the cortex for long-term storage.)

"Specifically, dense recurrent connections among CA3 pyramidal cells [in the hippocampus] are thought to allow, after a single exposure, for auto-associative reinstatement of a previous learning pattern upon receiving a retrieval cue. Consistent with a role for pattern completion, selective knock-out of the CA3 NMDA receptor was shown to result in impaired memory on a Morris water maze when only partial environmental cues were available, i.e. when performance presumably relied more strongly on successful pattern completion."

A recent paper makes use of direct recording in the brains of surgical patients to observe neural activity and rhythyms as they learn and recall events. Given enough analysis, one can "fingerprint" particular experiences, and see that they are represented similarly when they first occur, and again when they are remembered. The acuity of being able to put electrodes directly into the hippocampus is far higher than the non-invasive methods of fMRI.

The test was to present patients with words and pictures to make an association. Then later, the word alone was presented and the patient asked to remember the full scene. Or a control word with no association was presented. The latter was called item recognition, which involves others types of recall, while the former was called associative recognition.

Correlation between the first presentation and the recall event, in activity from the hippocampus electrodes. For associative recall, (vs item recall) the correlation is clearly higher and more complex. The AR surrogate data comes from the average of the original readings during the presentation of the AR stimulus/scenes, rather than their recall, as an additional control similar to the item recall.

It is clear that associative recall generates a richer experience and richer readings from the hippocampus. That is not news, really. What was interesting was that the researchers had access to far more activity detail and could especially look at the rhythmic effects of this recall.

A dramatic increase in gamma waves as recall happens. Concurrently, alpha waves decline.

That is basically it for this rather short paper. They make the key points that recall involves re-representation of the original stimulus, in some form that is detected by these electrode readings, though far from being understood or decoded by them. And secondly that this recall is accompanied, on this very local basis, by a big increase in gamma wave activity and a decrease in alpha wave activity. This all agrees with the developing paradigm, which is that alpha wave patterns correlate with default / resting brain activity, while gamma waves happen during attention and intense thought. Gamma waves are not carriers of information the way radio waves are, but seem to represent the coordination of select areas of the brain as they form ad-hoc coalitions to attend to some thing- the spotlight of attention, and of consciousness.

• Capitalism is going to the dogs.
• And ends up sabotaging our infrastructure and lives, if there's a profit.
• A philosophy and culture of non-accountability.
• Yes, a right-wing conspiracy. And love of innuendo.
• Trump puts it out there for all to see.
• But who is really paying attention?
• Certainly not his own party.
• Please, please don't pay us any taxes!
• Good thing she's not governor.
• Climate apathy is bad too.
• Sometimes, math is just a curtain to hide intuition and bias.
• Gazprom: corruption, bloat, and decline.

Living on the Spectrum

Of sexuality, and other existential dimensions.

It is common now to refer to people diagnosed with autism as being "on the spectrum". The disorder is unusual for the number of genes whose mutation can contribute to it, estimated at about 100 to 400. Thus it is easy to see why affected people turn up with a wide spectrum of phenotypes, and indeed why that spectrum extends well into the "normal" range- people who may be only slightly odd, but never formally diagnosed.

But we live on many other spectra of talent, capability, being. Indeed everything about us is variable. Height, color, sociability, musical ability, extraversion, intelligence are common examples. A recent story in the New Yorker profiled a London police unit of specialists who recognize faces. It turns out that people occupy a wide spectrum of facial recognition talent, from those who can not recognize themselves in a mirror, to those who never forget a face, no matter how briefly glimpsed. It is a capability that is so private and obscure that people typically do not realize what the normal range is and where they fall in its spectrum. So it is only with the burgeoning video surveillance carried out in Britain that high levels of this talent became belatedly recognized as relatively common as well as useful.

One of the most interesting spectra is that of gender. The Olympics reminded us (among many other forms of diversity) that diversity among humans extends to a spectrum of gender. Indeed, one's biological gender, and the gender one feels oneself to be, and the gender one is sexually attracted to, each seem to lie on spectra that, while usually correlated with the "normal" axes and occupying a bimodal distribution, can range spectacularly, and independently, to far reaches.

This is particularly interesting in light of the tight and binary social construction that has traditionally been put on gender. Why is that? Why enforce uniformity where there is variability? An interesting book about the philosophy of the Matrix series of films poses a similar question, in the context of Zion, which tries to be a gender-neutral society, as opposed to the Matrix, which is conventionally normed. Can we escape binary thinking? Should we?

I can think of three general hypotheses. First is pure patriarchy and power. The clear delineation of gender, as also happens in white/black racism with the one-drop rule, eliminates ambiguity when power is being divided up, with all power going to one group, and not the other. Oppression is much harder to institutionalize (and tribalize) without simple rules about who is in, and who is out. Setting the "normal" standard for each class is also a form of social power, as everyone in junior high school learns. When power and attractiveness are properties by definition of the "typical" and "normal", the social system maintains itself in a consistent, conservative way.

A second reason is simply our way of thinking. We are habitually reductionistic, thinking in cartoons and schematics. Cars are reduced to metaphorical "wheels", men and women are objectified mutually to their most basic aspects and organs. With a natural bimodal distribution of gender, it is natural to schematize them as two clear classes, declare those as "normal" and then be made uncomfortable by deviation from that simple mental model. Perhaps, conceptually, humans do not "do" diversity terribly well, since our understanding of the world depends so strongly on our capacity to make "sense", i.e. rules and schemata, out of the welter of reality.

Thirdly, one might turn to deeper psychology, seeing that our models for existence come from complex, unconscious archetypes. The mother/female and father/male archetypes are probably the most powerful we have. Whole religions have been founded on each, with the father especially blowing up to cosmic, infinite, and omnipotent proportions. Conversely, the Catholic church has a difficult time controlling the growth of the mother archetype in the person of the Madonna, which in some regions such as Mexico can even put Jesus in the shade.

So we have to fight on numerious psychological fronts to deal with reality in an honest way, especially to interact with the reality and psychology of others fairly.

• Almost a decade on, monetary policy makers start thinking about fiscal assistance for recovery.
• Not yet post-racial.
• Are we heading into a spiral of stagnation and inequality?
• Interdicting North Korea.
• Gene Wilder.
• Trumpism, for his peers.
• A sad day for Brazil.
• Our feudal system continues getting worse.
• Wimps- popular, but shy.
• A bad Mexican performance.

No, I do Not Really Feel Your Pain

Where is pain in the brain, and is empathic pain in the same domain?

Our culture has gone through some interesting evolutions in the experience of pain. From antiquity through medieval times, inflicting pain was entertainment and justice, in forms such as gladiatorial fighting, bull-fighting, burning at the stake, trial by torture, and plain old torture. In modern times we seem to have softened to the point of respecting human rights, one of which is to not inflict gratuitous pain, even on deserving criminals. Perhaps this is due to the subjugation of pain in medical and dental settings, which has raised our expectations for an untroubled existence. Or perhaps it is due to dominance of secularism which continues to guide moral innovation and refuses to countenance twisted theistic rationalizations for our painful existence, let alone explicit theological torture. With the current election, we seem to be taking a step backward in the excruciating-ness department, but still one may hope for the best!

Despite such variation in cultural tolerance of pain, (especially that of others), our intrinsic capacities are naturally long-standing and common to most animals. In particular, pain is perhaps the most immediate and insistant instance of consciousness, and thus a particularly interesting case for investigating the nature of consciousness and its presumptive basis in the brain. One thing we have learned is that pain comes in many forms, from vague itches to excruciating burns. And in addition, we experience various abstract pains, such as bereavement, the sudden horror of devastating news, and the empathy we feel for the pain of others- at least some people, in some cutural settings(!)

So it is not a simple field. A recent paper made some new observations about empathic pain. Prior work has shown substantial overlap of self-pain and empathic pain as represented in the brain, leading to theories that it is involuntary and almost as vivid as one's own. But we know that that is not quite true- that spectators at the colosseum could, though social training and construction, view the torture and dismemberment of unfortunate gladiators with enthusiastic bloodlust rather than squeamish sympathy.

So where is it, and how do we feel pain of both types? These authors discuss various defects with the current model, particularly that brain locations that have been noted as activated during both own-pain and empathic pain are not really pain centers per se, but are activated by many non-pain events, to the point of being some of the most frequently activated areas in the brain across all fMRI studies.

"Only a small minority of dACC neurons are pain-related, and the dACC encodes emotional events, including rejection and general negative emotion, in a way that is distinct from how it encodes pain."

Indeed, the best anatomical correlate of pain perception in the brain is not found at a single anatomical location, but in a network (the Neurologic Pain Signature or NPS) that is something of an abstract, deduced entity, built up out of statistical measures of where the hurt shows up, specifically and reliably, in fMRI. The authors try to refine these anatomical claims with their own fMRI studies.

"The NPS has over 90% sensitivity and specificity in predicting somatic pain relative to several other salient states, including non-painful warmth, anticipated pain, pain recall, social rejection, and general negative emotion."

Active sites from actual, somatic heat-induced pain on the subject's arms or legs.

Their hapless subjects where seared on their forearms or feet with about 10 seconds of high temperature (46, 47, pr 48˚C, which is 115, 117, 118˚F). This doesn't sound too bad, really, perhaps just noticeable. The vicarious / empathic pain was more interesting: being shown pictures of a person putting a shovel through their foot, or cutting a finger with a knife, and asked to imagine this happenening to themselves. Trained actors were used, I assume. What they showed certainly causes a chill to go down your spine, but it does not share specific aspects with the experienced pain. The vicarious pain was not heat- better to show someone taking a blowtorch to their extremeties. Interestingly, however, the researchers claim to be able to differentiate between pain vicariously induced at the arm vs the leg. Even by this very indirect means, there are site/anatomy-specific signatures evident in the brain signals.

For exprienced pain, they validated the NPS network, seeing it reliably show up in their scans. But the vicarious / empathic pain was a different story. In fact, they found that the NPS areas were negatively correlated with empathic pain, and devised a newly calculated network to describe what was activated, which they call the vicarious pain signature, or VPS. Helpfully, however, they compared their VPS pattern with those prompted by negative affect pictures, and by romantic/social rejection and found no correlation. So evidently, fMRI is getting good enough to distinguish between several negative emotions.

Active sites from vicarious pain, i.e. from pictures of other people doing painful things to themselves. Note the quite different patterns of activation vs above.

Global correlations between experimental fMRI patterns and the modeled networks of the NPS or VPS. Note the complete lack of correlation of the somatic pain with the VPS, and conversely the vicarious pain with the NPS.

One question is how high-level the NPS network is. Does it represent the actual physical pain but not the consciousness of it, or does it represent both? In prior work, the same lab showed that they also saw complete distinction between NPS and efforts the subject might make to cognitively control that pain, seen as dampening from the frontal cortex. Insofar as the subjects of these studies could manage their pain, it did not affect the NPS intensity at all, but worked at another, higher level. So no, while the NPS correlates with some aspects of pain and its cognition, it does not seem to encompass the highest level processes of conscious pain management, and perhaps even perception.

But back to the main study. The authors observed the NPS quite consistently, and saw its intensity increasing with increasing amounts of applied pain. And as noted, the VPS was quite different. But it did overlap in very few areas- the anterior insula (aINS) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). These have been previously cited as the points of overlap, thus as sites showing that we feel the pain of others. The aINS is a profound part of our brain, functioning in awareness, consciousness, sense of self, and sociality and other emotions, like the sense of importance of things- meaning. Thus it is natural that it might be activated in both these experimental regimes, without "meaning" quite the same thing.

Likewise, the dACC also functions in emotion and consciousness, as well as reward evaluation, internal conflict, and impulse control. Again, functions that might come up in both experimental scenarios without meaning quite the same thing. Whether a pain is on your own body or elsewhere, at some very high level it is just another input to evaluate for what we are going to decide to do next. In any case, the researchers give additional evidence from lack of correlation on the finest voxel-level scales within both regions to suggest that what is going on in these locations is quite different in the two pain scenarios.

So, despite our mirror neurons and the best intentions, pain is not readily shared, and counts quite a bit less when it happens in others rather than in ourselves. Which is good, since being incapacitated by someone else's pain would probably help neither person. It also points to the importance and privacy of personal consciousness. While we keep coming up with technologies to share / immerse our mental selves in other worlds (telling stories, books, movies, VR), we do so because our capacity to do so unaided is quite limited. We are naturally wired first and foremost to feel ourselves.

• If the 1% gain a lot from free trade, and many low-wage workers lose what is to them a lot, but to the 1% a little, is it a good thing?
• Growth is dead. No wonder the fight to split the pie is getting fiercer.
• We all needed someone to blow up the GOP.
• Marxists vs Trump.
• We are not a healthy country.

Animals Don't Care about Global Warming

It is entirely a human problem.

Global warming is the biggest problem of our time and the next one too. The icons of this problem may be the stranded polar bears, the ravaged coral reefs, the species ranges moving steadily northwards. But what do the animals think about this? Not much, really. Only we have the conscious scope and appreciation of future and past to recognize what is happening. Only we can stand back in awe and horror at what we ourselves are doing, and deem it bad.

Stranded polar bear.

So while the problem of global warming affects the biosphere, killing off species and decimating ecosystems, it is only we who can care about it. Whether our care focuses on the harm that this heating is doing to us directly, via hotter living conditions, drought, impaired agriculture, disease, war, etc., or whether our care focuses on other aspects of the biosphere that we appreciate from a more aesthetic and nature-loving perspective, it is all on us.

Back when we were killing off the North American megafauna, humans themselves probably had almost as little consciousness of what they were doing as the animals they were killing. Except, perhaps, for a twinge about hunting out one area and having to move on to the next, a process that may have encouraged the remarkably rapid settlement of the Americas clear down to Monte Verde.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde

But now things are different, and the cultural, political, and economic divide comes down between those who do not want to look and those who do, and who see devastating loss. The temptation of keeping our consciousness under wraps, and of denying our hard-won conception of the vast reality around us so that we can consume endlessly and reproduce geometrically, is hard to fight, when all the other side has to offer is an aesthetic, pro-nature and pro-posterity viewpoint.

• Are climate voters pivotal in this election?
• Past annals of climate change.
• Who's carrying those pitchforks?
• Gun nuttery reductio ad absurdum.
• Could central banks take over all basic banking?
• And who needs monetary policy anyhow?
• In-depth on Turkey and the Gülenists.
• But is it treason?
• Which side is Hillary on? At least she's not on Putin's side.
• Can we keep going down the capitalist road? The problem isn't capitalism per se, but the capture of the media, culture, and politics by its winners- the 1%, which leads to an unwillingness to regulate it properly.
• Tobin tax, Si!
• Our egghead in chief.

Perception is Not a One-Way Street

Perceptions happen in the brain as a reality-modeling process that uses input from external senses, but does so gradually in a looping (i.e. Bayesian) refinement process using motor activity to drive attention and sensory perturbation.

The fact that perceptions come via our sensory organs, and stop once those organs are impaired, strongly suggests a simple camera-type model of one-way perceptual flow. Yet, recent research all points in the other direction, that perception is a more active process wherein the sense organs are central, but are also directed by attention and by pre-existing models of the available perceptual field in a top-down way. Thus we end up with a cognitive loop where the mind holds models of reality which are incrementally updated by the senses, but not wiped and replaced as if they were simple video feeds. The model is the perception and is more valuable than the input.

One small example of a top-down element in this cognitive loop is visual attention. Our eyes are little outposts of the brain, and are told where to point. Even if something surprising happens in the visual field, the brain has to do a little processing before shifting attention, and thus the eyeballs, to that event. Our eyes are shifting all the time, being pointed to areas of interest, following movie scenes, words on a page, etc. None of this is directed by the eyes themselves, (including the jittery saccade system), but by higher levels of cognition.

The paper for this week notes ironically that visual perception studies have worked very hard to eliminate eye and other motion from their studies, to provide consistent mapping of what the experimenters present, to where the perceptions show up in visual fields of the brain. Yet motion and directed attention are fundamental to complex sensation.

Other sensory systems vary substantially in their dependence on motion. Hearing is perhaps least dependent, as one can analyze a scene from a stationary position, though movement of either the sound or the subject, in time and space, are extremely helpful to enrich perception. Touch, through our hairs and skin, is intrinsically dependent on movement and action. Taste and smell are also, though in a subtler way. Any monotonic smell will die pretty rapidly, subjectively, as we get used to it. It is the bloom of fresh tastes with each mouthful or new aromas that create sensation, as implied by the expression "clearing the palate". Aside from the issues of the brain's top-down construction of these perceptions through its choices and modeling, there is also the input of motor components directly, and dynamic time elements, that enrich / enliven perception multi-modally, beyond a simple input stream model.

The many loops from sensory (left) to motor (right) parts of the perceptual network. This figure is focused on whisker perception by mice.

The current paper discusses these issues and makes the point that since our senses have always been embodied and in-motion, they are naturally optimized for dynamic learning. And that the brain circuits mediating between sensation and action are pervasive and very difficult to separate in practice. The authors hypothesize very generally that perception consists of a cognitive quasi-steady state where motor cues are consistent with tactile and other sensory cues (assuming a cognitive model within which this consistence is defined), which is then perturbed by changes in any part of the system, especially sensory organ input, upon which the network seeks a new steady state. They term the core of the network the motor-sensory-motor (MSM) loop, thus empahsizing the motor aspects, and somewhat unfairly de-emphasizing the sensory aspects, which after all are specialized for higher abundance and diversity of data than the motor system. But we can grant that they are an integrated system. They also add that much perception is not conscious, so the fixation of a great deal of research on conscious reports, while understandable, is limiting.

"A crucial aspect of such an attractor is that the dynamics leading to it encompass the entire relevant MSM-loop and thus depend on the function transferring sensor motion into receptors activation; this transfer function describes the perceived object or feature via its physical interactions with sensor motion. Thus, ‘memories’ stored in such perceptual attractors are stored in brain-world interactions, rather than in brain internal representations."

A simple experiment. A camera is set up to watch a video screen, which shows  light and dark half-screens which can move side-to-side. The software creates a sensory-motor loop to pan motors on the camera to enable it to track the visual edge, as shown in E. It is evident that there is not much learning involved, but simply a demonstration of an algorithm's effective integration of motor and sensory elements for pursuit of a simple feature.

Eventually, the researchers present some results, from a mathematical model and robot that they have constructed. The robot has a camera and motors to move around with, plus computer and algorithm. The camera only sends change data, as does the retina, not entire visual scenes, and the visual field is extremely simple- a screen with a dark and light side, which can move right or left. The motorized camera system, using equations approximating a MSM loop, can relatively easily home in on and track the visual right/left divider, and thus demonstrate dynamic perception driven by both motor and sensory elements. The cognitive model was naturally implicit in the computer code that ran the system, which was expecting to track just such a light/dark line. One must say that this was not a particularly difficult or novel task, so the heart of the paper is its introductory material.

• The US has long been a wealthy country.
• If we want to control carbon emissions, we can't wait for carbon supplies to run out.
• Market failure, marketing, and fraud, umpteenth edition. Trump wasn't the only one getting into the scam-school business.
• Finance is eating away at your retirement.
• Why is the House of Representatives in hostile hands?
• UBI- utopian in a good way, or a bad way?
• Trump transitions from stupid to deranged.
• The fight against corruption and crony Keynesianism, in India.
• Whom do policymakers talk to? Hint- not you.
• Whom are you talking to at the call center? Someone playing hot potato.
• Those nutty gun nuts.
• Is Islam a special case, in how it interacts with political and psychological instability?
• Graph of the week- a brief history of inequality from 1725.