Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence (2004)

The scenario described in the previous post (see October 26, 2013 post) of the mass of commuter humanity changing trains in a crowded subway station, silently cooperating to avoid colliding with one another as they cross paths was intended to introduce the subject of humans reading and understanding the intentions of others as a foundation of human cooperative activity.  But there is another characteristic of the human brain besides mindreading that supports this outcome:  the human brain constantly anticipates, predicts the future.  In this scenario, it predicts (perhaps not perfectly) the future behavior of others (more likely their immediate behavior), where they are directing their motion, where they are turning, whether they are accelerating or slowing down.  Jeff Hawkins labels this intelligence:  how the brain predicts behavior and future events is the subject of On Intelligence. Hawkins' interest is in understanding human intelligence to build a foundation for improved machine intelligence. The focus of his inquiry is the neocortex, the outermost layers of the human brain, and memory.  What Hawkins offers up is the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.  This differs from a computational framework.

Hawkins is not out to explain what makes us human (compare September 27, 2009 post).  Nor is he out to explain human consciousness (compare April 8, 2011 post).  But he does briefly touch on these matters.  Previous posts in the blog address human imagination and creativity as a hallmark of what makes us "human,"  (see November 6, 2011 and May 22, 2011 post), and Hawkins presents a model discussed below about the role of the neocortex in imagination, including imagination by false analogy.  What he does not touch on is the role of the brain in generating and controlling emotions, the subject of Jaak Panksepp's research (see May 19, 2013 post), which naturally links to the origins of the moral and social aspects of what makes us human.  (See November 21, 2012 post).  So while Hawkins does connect the neocortex and thalamus within his memory-prediction framework (see below), he does not elaborate upon the role of the large thalamo-cortical system that resides in the human brain that plays a substantial role in what makes us human and the biological basis of human consciousness.  (See April 8, 2011 post).

Prior posts identify the critical role of the hippocampus in memory formation, but ultimately long-term memory is shifted to the cerebral cortex through a process known as consolidation that occurs during sleep.   (See September 10, 2013 and November 6, 2011 posts).  As a prior post described:  "Memories are distributed in the same parts of the brain that encoded the original experience. So sounds are found in the auditory cortex, taste and skin sensory memories are found in the somatosensory cortex, and sight in the visual cortex. But procedural -- "how to" --- memories are stored outside of the cortex, in the cerebellum and putamen, and fear memories are stored in the amygdala."  Hawkins' thesis is that the cortex is critical to human capacity to predict events because of the linkage to memory storage in the cortex.  In focusing on the neocortex, Hawkins is looking at, evolutionarily speaking, the most recent adaptation in the development of animal neurological systems.  The neocortex is unique to mammals, and the human neocortex is larger than the neocortex in any other mammal, facts that suggest the human neocortex is critical to understanding what makes us human. This is just the opposite of Jaak Panksepp's focus on the older parts of the brain, the brain stem and the midbrain.  (See May 19, 2013 post).  It is not as though Hawkins believes these older parts of the brain are irrelevant to human behavior.  "First," Hawkins says, "the human mind is created not only by the neocortex but also by the emotional systems of the old brain and by the complexity of the human body.  To be human you need all of your biological machinery, not just a cortex."  But Hawkins is ultimately interested in the creation of an intelligent machine, and he believes that in the pursuit of that interest he needs to understand what makes humans "intelligent."  He finds that understanding in how the neocortex is structured and proposes a model for how it operates to predict future events. 

Hawkins' model is based on our current knowledge of the structure of the neocortex.  That much is known.  And here is a graphical representation of that structure:



                                                           SENSORY INPUT

Each region of the neocortex is known to consist of four areas, labeled 1, 2, 4 and IT. The graph above represents those four layers, with IT at the top and 4, 2, and 1 below it for one of the regions of the cortex (visual, auditory, somatosensory, motor). The visual cortex layers are labeled, from bottom to top, V1, V2, V4, and IT; the auditory cortex layers labeled A1, A2, A4 and IT; the somatosensory (touch) cortex layers labeled S1, S2, S4 and IT, and similarly for the motor cortex.  The arrows are pointed in both directions, indicating that information moves in both directions between the areas. 

Neurons fire in a specific pattern in response to a specific sensory stimulus.  For the exact same sensory stimulus, the same neurons will fire in the same pattern within this hierarchy.  For a different sensory stimulus, different neurons will fire in a pattern.  The brain's capacity to recognize (predict) these patterns is at the heart of memory.

Recall the discussion in connection with Rodrigo Quiroges' book, Borges and Memory (September 10, 2013 post):  "Each neuron in the retina responds to a particular point, and we can infer the outline of a cube starting from the activity of about thirty of them [retinal neurons].  Next the neurons in the primary visual cortex fire in response to oriented lines; fewer neurons are involved and yet the cube is more clearly seen.  This information is received in turn by neurons in higher visual areas, which are triggered by more complex patterns --- for example, the angles defined by the crossing of two or three lines.  . . As the processing of visual information progresses through different brain areas, the information represented by each neuron becomes more complex, and at the same time fewer neurons are needed to encode a given stimulus."  The arrows representing sensory input from the retinal neurons are the arrows pointing to area V1 of the visual cortex.  A particular pattern of neurons firing in V1 leads neurons in V2 to fire, and all the way up to IT.  As just noted, in each higher layer "fewer neurons are involved."  In V1, the cells are spatially specific, tiny feature-recognition cells that infrequently fire depending on which of the millions of retinal neurons are providing sensory input; at the higher IT, the cells are constantly firing, spatially non-specific, object recognition cells.  One of way of thinking about this is that certain neurons in V1 fired in recognition of two ears, a nose, two eyes, and perhaps even more details like the texture of skin, facial hair, the color of hair; neurons in IT fired in recognition of an entire head or face.  Cells in the IT encode for categories; Hawkins calls them "invariant representations."  In philosophy, these invariant representations might be analogous to Plato's forms.  It is here one would find neurons firing in response to things --- rocks, platypuses, your house, a song, Jennifer Aniston or Bill Clinton.  (See September 10, 2013 post). 

Psychologists recognize the same phenomenon, although in different terms.  Paul Bloom asserts that humans are "splitters" and "lumpers," but for the most part we are lumpers. Borges' Funes was a splitter.  (See September 10, 2013 post).    "Our minds have evolved," Bloom says, "to put things into categories and to ignore or downplay what makes these things distinct.  Some categories are more obvious than others: all children understand the categories chairs and tigers; only scientists are comfortable with the categories such as ungulates and quarks.  What all categories share is that they capture a potential infinity of individuals under a single perspective.  They lump."  Bloom says, "We lump the world into categories so that we can learn."  He adds, "A perfect memory, one that treats each experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless.  The whole point of storing the past is to make sense of the present and to plan for the future.  Without categories [or concepts], everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalized or learned."     

The neocortex consists of six horizontal layers of cells (I-VI) each roughly 2mm thick (shown below for area V1 of the visual cortex).   The cells within each layer are aligned in columns perpendicular to the layers.  The layers in each column are connected via axons, making synapses along the way.  "Columns do not stand out like neat little pillars," explains Hawkins, "nothing in the cortex is that simple, but their existence can be inferred from several lines of evidence."  Vertically aligned cells tend to become active for the same stimulus. 

 

Again, as was the case with the different areas of a region of the cortex, information is moving both up and down the layers of a given area.  Inputs move up the columns; memories move down the columns.  "When you begin to realize that the cortex's core function is to make predictions, then you have to put feedback into the model; the brain has to send information flowing back toward the region that first receives inputs.  Prediction requires a comparison between what is happening and what you expect to happen.  What is actually happening flows up, and what you expect to happen flows down."
 
Memories are stored in this hierarchical structure.  "The design of the cortex and the method by which it learns naturally discover the hierarchical relationships in the world.  You are not born with knowledge of language, houses, or music.  The cortex has a clever learning algorithm that naturally finds whatever hierarchical structure exists and captures it.  When structure is absent, we are thrown into confusion, even chaos. *** You can only experience a subset of the world at any moment in time.  You can only be in one room of your home, looking in one direction.  Because of the hierarchy of the cortex, you are able to know that you are at home, in your living room, looking at a window, even though at that moment your eyes happened to be fixated on a window latch.  Higher regions of cortex are maintaining a representation of your home, while lower regions are representing rooms, and still lower regions are looking at window.  Similarly, the hierarchy allows you to know you are listening to both a song and album of music, even though at any point in time you are hearing only one note, which on its own tells you next to nothing."  Critical to this capability is the brain's ability to process sequences and recognize patterns of sequences.  "Information flowing in to the brain naturally arrives as a sequence of patterns."  When the patterns are repeated through a repeated firing of a particular combination of neurons, the cortical region forms a persistent representation, or memory, for the sequence.  In learning sequences, we form invariant representations of objects.  When certain input patterns repeat over and over, cortical regions "know that those experiences are caused by a real object in the world." 

One of the most important attributes of Hawkins' model is a concept called auto-associative memory.  This is what enables the brain to recall something by sensing only a portion of that memory.  In the case of the brain, that input may belong to an entirely different category than what is recalled.  Auto-associative memory is part of pattern recognition:  the cortex does not need to see the entire pattern in order to recognize the larger pattern.  The second feature of auto-associative memory, says Hawkins, is that an auto-associative memory can be designed to store sequences of patterns, or temporal patterns.  He says this is accomplished by adding a time-delay to feedback. 

The cortex is linked to the thalamus.  Hawkins says that one of the six layers of cells (L5 - second from the bottom in a given cortical area) within the neocortex is wired to the thalamus, which in turn sends information back to Layer I (the highest layer in a given cortical layer), acting as a delayed feedback important to learning sequences and to predicting.  The thalamus is selective in what it transmits back to the cortex because the number of neurons going to the thalamus exceeds the number of neurons back to the cortex by a factor of ten.  This requires an understanding of reentrant activity and recursion, which need not be explained here.  But Layer 1 (at the top of a given cortical area) is also receiving information from higher cortical areas (e.g. in the case of the visual cortex, layer 1 in V4 from layer 6 in IT; layer 1 in V2 from layer 6 in V4, etc.)  So layer 1 now has two inputs:  from the thalamus and from the higher cortical area.  Layer 1, Hawkins emphasizes, now carries "much of the information we need to predict when a column should be active.  Using these two signals in layer 1, a region of cortex can learn and recall multiple sequences of patterns." 

Cortical regions "store" sequences of patterns when synapses are strengthened by repeated firing.  "If this occurs often enough, the layer 1 synapses [at the top of the region] become strong enough to make the cells in layers 2, 3, and 5 [below] fire, even when a layer 4 cell hasn't fired--- meaning parts of the column can become active without receiving input from a lower region of the cortex.  In this way, cells in layers 2, 3, and 5 learn to 'anticipate' when they should fire based on the pattern in layer 1.  Before learning, the column can only come active if driven by a layer 4 cell.  After learning, the column can become partially active via memory.  When a column becomes active via layer1 synapses, it is anticipating being driven from below.  This is prediction.  If the column could speak, it would say, 'When I have been active in the past, this particular set of my layer 1 synapses have been active.  So when I see this particular set again, I will fire in anticipation.'  Finally, layer 6 cells can send their output back into layer 4 cells of their own column.  Hawkins says that when they do, our predictions become the input.  This is what we do, he adds, when we daydream, think, imagine.  It allows us to see the consequences of our own predictions, noting that we do this when we plan the future, rehearse speeches, and worry about future events.  In Hawkins' model, this has to be part of what Michael Gazzaniga refers to as our decoupling mechanism.  (See May 22, 2011 post)

This is Hawkins' model of the brain's capacity to predict, intelligence if you will.  Of course, it is a  more complex than I have regurgitated here.  "If a region of cortex finds it can reliably and predictably move among these input patterns using a series of physical motions (such as saccades of the eyes or fondling with the fingers) and can predict them accurately as they unfold in time (such as the sounds comprising a song or the spoken word), the brain interprets these as having a causal relationship.  The odds of numerous input patters occurring in the same relation over and over again by sheer coincidence are vanishingly small.  A predictable sequence of patterns must be part of a larger object that really exists.  So reliable predictability is an ironclad way of knowing that different events in the world are physically tied together.  Every face has eyes, ears, mouth and nose.  If the brain sees an eye, the saccades and sees another eye, then saccades and sees a mouth, it can feel certain it is seeing a face."

This begins at a very early age in our post-natal development.  The two basic components of learning, explains Hawkins, are forming the classifications of patterns and building sequences.  "The basics of forming sequences is to group patterns together that are part of the same object.  One way to do this is by grouping patterns that occur contiguously in time.  If a child holds a toy in her hand and slowly moves it, her brain can safely assume that the image on her retina is of the same object moment to moment, and therefore the changing set of patterns can be grouped together.  At other times, you need outside instruction to help you decide which patterns belong together.  To learn that apples and bananas are fruits, but carrots and celery are not, requires a teacher to guide you to group these items as fruits.  Either way, your brain slowly builds sequences of patterns that belong together.  But as a region of cortex builds sequences, the input to the next region changes.  The input changes from representing mostly individual patterns to representing groups of patterns.  The input to a region changes from notes to melodies, from letters to words, from noses to faces, and so on.  Where before a region built sequences of letters, it now builds sequences of words,  The unexpected result of this learning process is that, during repetitive learning, representations of objects move down the cortical hierarchy.  During the early years of your life, your memories of the world first form in higher regions of cortex, but as you learn they are re-formed in lower and lower parts of the cortical hierarchy."

Michael Shermer (see June 12, 2011 post) made the same point in a slightly different way when he referred to "patternicity."  According to Shermer, as sensory data flows into the brain, there is a "tendency" for the brain to begin looking for meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. He calls this process patternicity. Shermer asserts that patternicity is premised on "association learning," which is "fundamental to all animal behavior from which is "fundamental to all animal behavior from C. elegans (roundworm) to homo sapiens." Because our survival may depend on split-second decisions in which there is no time to research and discover underlying facts about every threat or opportunity that faces us, evolution set the brain's default mode in the position of assuming that all patterns are real, says Shermer. A cost associated with this behavior is that the brain may lump causal associations (e.g. wind causes plants to rustle) with non-causal associations (e.g. there is an unseen agent in the plants). In this circumstance, superstition --- incorrect causal associations --- is born. "In this sense, patternicities such as superstition and magical thinking are not so much errors in cognition as they are the natural processes of a learning brain." Religion, conspiracy theories and political beliefs fit this model as well.

My surmise is that beliefs and concepts rooted in false analogy become stored in memory in higher cortical areas when they are reinforced over and over through cultural transmission.  Something like this may be what Edward O. Wilson means when he refers to epigenetic rules and culture. "Human nature," Wilson says, is the "inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are epigenetic rules, which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory. These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make. . ."  (See April 8, 2013 post).  Storytelling --- the creation of works of fiction --- may be important to making and reinforcing memories.  (See August 15, 2011 post).  Thus, when a prediction based on a false analogy is violated and one would normally recognize an error, the error message is transmitted back up to the higher cortical areas for a check.  But because the belief based in false analogy resides there in the higher areas, the false analogy may never be corrected. The false analogy becomes an invariant representation.  Paul Bloom explains in Descartes' Baby just how these concepts and beliefs can be rooted in our brains at a very early age, and as Hawkins describes above, memories formed earlier in life form in the higher regions of the cortex.  These false analogies can be difficult to dislodge.

Hawkins has been helpful in providing a model of the cortex as the part of the brain devoted to our capacity to predict.  When tied into the models of other parts of the brain relating to consciousness and emotion discussed elsewhere in this blog, we begin to assemble the whole human brain and begin an appreciation of what makes us "human."  (See September 27, 2009 post discussing Michael Gazzaniga's reference to Jeff Hawkins).  While Hawkins' interest lies in the intelligent machine, he does not believe a machine can ever become "human."

And finally, Hawkins confirms why I have had held to my instinct that John Searle's Chinese Room argument was intuitively correct.  The man in the Chinese Room must have been human.

Michael Tomasello, The Origins of Human Communication (2008)

Every work morning I board the subway to travel to my office, and approximately halfway on this journey I change trains.  Changing trains entails exiting a train into a crowd of people who are looking to board the train I am leaving, walking some 50-70 steps to a staircase while passing many people who are, like myself, leaving the train I just left, or, heading in the opposite direction to the train I just left.  I descend stairs to another platform and then walk roughly 20 steps on the platform to wait for an oncoming train that will take me to my destination.  During this change of trains, I probably come close to 100 or more persons within a 5-10 foot radius of my person. I do not know these people.  Most people are not talking.  A few I recognize as having seen previously on this journey, but still I don't know them.  I don't talk with them.  Some I see only out of my peripheral vision.  The amazing part of this brief, everyday journey navigating through a mass of people is that I almost always avoid any physical contact with them, and the same is true for most of them as well.  It is easy to think that each individual is merely moving autonomously toward their individual goal, but the reality is that each individual is acting cooperatively with the others to ensure that the others are able to move toward their individual goals by not colliding (with modest, likely accidental exception) or inhibiting the others as they move.  It is like a dance.  Occasionally someone crosses diagonally in front of me, but I avoid a collision by slowing down or moving sideways.  Avoiding contact with and staying out of the way of other moving persons is a shared intention; in the case of humans, cultural rules have played a key role in enabling the individual to realize their shared intention:  e.g., stay on the right of oncoming persons; follow the person ahead of you.  But the individuals are not merely blindly following rules; they are watching the faces and body movements of others and reading their minds. 

Place a camera high above this subway station and make a video of the masses transitioning between trains.  The flow of people almost seems choreographed; it is not as chaotic as one might think it could be.  Now watch this video of ants marching.  The movement of ants seems just as orderly as my video of humans passing in the subway station.  But it is different.   Ants communicate differently, relying on chemicals and touch. They are acting automatically, inflexibly.  Chemotaxis (see May 19, 2013 post) is at play here.  In contrast, humans read the intentions of other humans in their facial expressions, gaze, and motions (see July 16, 2010 and  September 18, 2009 post), even when no words or spoken, and this is relatively unique in the animal kingdom.  Apes are known to understand intentions of others, and apes are known to experience empathy.  (See November 9, 2010 post). Mirror neurons, which some argue enable us to feel what others are feeling or experiencing, were first discovered in monkeys.  (See September 18, 2009 post).  What apes do not do --- and humans do, according to Michael Tomasello --- is share intentions and goals with others.

Mindreading introduces us to theory of mind.  (See November 21, 2012 and  June 12, 2011 posts) It is not a "theory" so much as it is a state of awareness:  our ability to attribute mental states to others --- mindreading.  In my little "everyday vignette" just described, our theory of mind is almost unconscious, and I would submit that this ability is close to unique, if not unique in the animal kingdom. If apes enjoy a theory of mind, it is certainly not as well-developed as humans.  It plays out in nearly every other human scenario imaginable because we are social animals.  (See November 21, 2012 post).  Our theory of mind undoubtedly varies among these scenarios, for example, if our attentiveness to something specific about another person is heightened, there is probably a heightened attentiveness to another's specific mental state; whereas in my vignette the subway passenger's theory of mind is likely ascribing generic mental states to the masses of other humans around. 

Michael Tomasello's Origins of Human Communication is not specifically about verbal speech or language, which is the focus of Christine Kenneally's The First Word.  (See August 31, 2009 post).  It is about human communication. In Tomasello's view, language is not hardwired genetically into the brains of humans, and while he does not debate whether language is an adaptation or exaptation (see October 25, 2011 post), Tomasello treats language as an emergent property, emerging from antecedent forms of human communication --- specifically gestures such as pointing or pantomiming.  And Tomasello is armed with a lot of research data to advance his argument.  Given that humans do not generally utter a spoken word of language until they are older than one year (14-18 months), Tomasello finds his antecedents in babies and, with an evolutionary longer gaze, in apes, the genetically closest animal to homo sapiens sapiens.  Pointing and pantomiming are gestures human babies use before they begin to speak (with language essentially becoming a substitute for pantomiming). 

Tomasello's thesis is that the "ultimate explanation for how it is that human beings are able to communicate with one another in such complex ways with such simple gestures is that they have unique ways of engaging with one another socially.  More specifically, human beings cooperate with one another in species-unique ways involving processes of shared intentionality."  By "simple gestures," Tomasello is referring to the acts of pointing and pantomiming.  He notes that apes point and respond to pointing, but the key difference here with humans is that when apes point they are making requests --- demanding action by others. "Bring me that food." Apes possess the ability to follow gaze direction.  Apes want the other to see something and do something.    Humans, by contrast, point not only to direct the other human's attention to something, but to share information with others, request help and cooperation, even when there is no benefit to themselves.  (See September 27, 2012, September 12, 2012, and October 13, 2010 posts for discussions of direct and indirect reciprocal altruism). "Pointing," says Tomasello, "is based on humans' natural tendency to follow the gaze direction of others to external targets, and pantomiming is based on humans' natural tendency to interpret the actions of others intentionally.  This naturalness makes them good candidates as an intermediate step between ape communication and arbitrary linguistic conventions [of humans]."  While there are some primatologists who credit apes with more cooperative, social behavior than Tomasello acknowledges, what differentiates apes and humans, he says, is an underlying psychological infrastructure --- made possible by cultural learning and imitation that allows humans to learn from others and understand their intentions.  That leads to shared intentionality --- sometimes referred to as "we" intentionality --- collaborative interactions in which participants share psychological states with one another and have shared goals and shared action plans.  This brings us to the research observations about human babies.  Tomasello (2007):

"[H]uman adults quite often teach youngsters things by demonstrating what they should do – which the youngsters then respond to by imitating (and internalizing what is learned.  Adult chimpanzees do not demonstrate things for youngsters (or at least do this very seldom). Interestingly, when human adults instruct their children in this way (providing communicative cues that they are trying to demonstrate something), 14-month-old infants copy the particular actions the adults used, and they do so much more often than when adults do not explicitly instruct – in which case they just copy the result the adult achieved (Gergely & Csibra, 2006). Furthermore, there is some evidence that 1-year-old infants are beginning to see the collaborative structure of some imitative interactions. Thus, they sometimes observe adult actions directed to them, and then reverse roles and redirect the actions back to the demonstrator, making it clear by looking to the demonstrator’s face that they see this as a joint activity (Carpenter, Tomasello & Striano, 2005). Chimpanzees may on occasion redirect such learned actions back to their partners, but they do not look to their partner’s face in this way (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005). Thus, chimpanzees’ social learning is actually fairly individualistic, whereas 1-year-old children often respond to instruction and imitate collaboratively, often with the motivation to communicate shared states with others.

 ***

 "Human children, on the other hand, often are concerned with sharing psychological states with others by providing them with helpful information, forming shared intentions and attention with them, and learning from demonstrations produced for their benefit. The emergence of these skills and motives for shared intentionality during human evolution did not create totally new cognitive  skills. Rather, what it did was to take existing skills of, for example, gaze following, manipulative communication, group action, and social learning, and transform them into their collectively based counterparts of joint attention, cooperative communication, collaborative action, and instructed learning – cornerstones of cultural living. Shared intentionality is a small psychological difference that made a huge difference in human evolution in the way that humans conduct their lives.

"In terms of ontogeny, Tomasello et al (2005) hypothesized that the basic skills and motivations for shared intentionality typically emerge at around the first birthday from the interaction of two developmental trajectories, each representing an evolutionary adaptation from some different point in time. The first trajectory is a general primate (or perhaps great ape) line of development for understanding intentional action and perception, which evolved in the context of primates’ crucially important competitive interactions with one another over food, mates, and other resources (Machiavellian intelligence; Byrne; Whiten, 1988). The second trajectory is a uniquely human line of development for sharing psychological states with others, which seems to be present in nascent form from very early in human ontogeny as infants share emotional states with others in turn-taking sequences (Trevarthen, 1979). The interaction of these two lines of development creates, at around 1 year of age, skills and motivations for sharing psychological states with others in fairly local social interactions, and then later skills and motivations for reacting to and even internalizing various kinds of social norms, collective beliefs, and cultural institutions."

The cooperative homo hunter-gatherer phenomenon is believed to have emerged among homo erectus, hundreds of thousands of years before homo sapiens. (See November 21, 2012 post).  Exactly when their social structures emerged is a matter of debate, but as forms of homo cooperation evolved forms of communication would be expected to emerge as well and how those forms of communication might have evolved is what Michael Tomasello explores in The Origins of Human Communication.   The timing of the emergence of verbal language among homo is also a matter of debate and no consensus, but some put that event as occurring among homo sapiens 50-70,000 years ago and perhaps as early as 100,000 years ago, but perhaps earlier.  That timing would correlate with what we believe is the evolutionary origins of modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, in Africa. Whatever the timing for the origins of human speech, there is a gap of hundreds of thousands of years between the origins of communication and verbal speech. But it is over these hundreds of thousands of years, if not over a million years, of the evolution of cooperation among the species of genus homo, that the psychological infrastructure critical to human eusociality cited by Tomasello developed:

 
"[O]ur proposal," Tomasello writes, " is the relatively uncontroversial one that human collaboration was initially mutualistic --- with this mutualism depending on the first step of more tolerant and food-generous participants [see e.g. March 28, 2013 post].  The more novel part of the proposal is that mutualistic collaboration is the natural home of cooperative communication.  Specifically, skills of recursive mindreading arose initially in forming joint goals, and then this led to joint attention on things relevant to the joint goal (top-down) and eventually to other forms of common conceptual ground.  Helping motives, already present to some degree in great apes outside of communication, can flourish in mutualistic collaboration in which helping you helps me.  And so communication requests for help --- either for actions or for information --- and compliance with these (and perhaps even something in the direction of offering help by informing) were very likely born in mutualistic collaboration.  At this point in our quasi-evolutionary tale, then, we have, at a minimum, point to request help and a tendency to grant such requests --- with perhaps some offers of help with useful information --- in the immediate common ground of mutualistic collaborative interactions."

Helping by informing becomes the cornerstone of indirect reciprocity, which Martin Nowak finds makes humans "supercooperators:" the only species that "can summon the full power of indirect reciprocity, thanks to our rich and flexible language."  (See September 17, 2012 post).

Missing from Tomasello's discussion of social cognition and the human communication is the emotional content and perhaps underpinnings of that communication.  Tomasello cites inflexible ape vocalization as "tightly tied to emotion," but as prior posts in this blog point out there is uniquely human social behavior anchored in emotions arising in the more ancient part of our brains.  (See May 19, 2013 and November 21, 2012 posts).   Jaak Panksepp's discussion (May 19, 2013 post) of the care system, the grief system, and the play system are just examples of the emotional underpinnings of the psychological infrastructure that Tomasello relies upon to build his viewpoint.  I do not purport to have read everything that Tomasello has researched and written, so maybe this discussion occurs elsewhere.  I note that he does comment in his 2005 article, that "theorists such as Trevarthen (1979), Braten (2000), and especially Hobson (2002), have elaborated the interpersonal and emotional discussions of early human ontogeny in much more detail than we have here.  We mostly agree with their accounts . . ."

There are two final points in this discussion.  First, the evidence from babies supports the conclusion that our social cognition and behavior is not innate.  Tomasello calls this ontogenetic, which is the nurture side of the nature versus nurture (post natal learning) debate.  (See September 18, 2009 post).  With respecting to language, for example, V.S. Ramachandran believes that what is innate is our "capacity for acquiring rules of language," not language or verbal speech itself.  (See October 25, 2011 and February 15, 2012 posts).  Tomasello certainly concurs with the view that "[t]he actual acquisition of language occurs as a result of social interaction. Ramachandran believes that language was enabled by cross linkages in the brain between different motor maps (e.g. the area responsible for manual gestures and the area responsible for orafacial movements).  (Id.)  Second, Marco Iacoboni's suggestion (September 18, 2009 post) that the individualistic or competitive models of human behavior leave much to be desired is worth invoking.  As a prior post (id) observed, "Self and other are 'inextricably blended,' says Iacoboni. The sense of self follows the sense of 'us,' which is the first "sense" of awareness an infant has immediately following its birth as a result of mother infant interactions. We are social animals first."  While competition and individual behavior is not necessarily a vice and might be deemed virtue (see January 30, 2010 post), it is not the endpoint in our understanding and modeling of our human cognitive framework.   In the contentious political conversation that now embraces America, it is not sufficiently recognized that the social and cooperative dimension of the human cognitive framework is dominant to competition in that framework as well as our evolutionary history as a key to human survival.  (See November 21, 2012 and August 22, 2012 posts).  If we can cooperatively navigate our way successfully through a subway station without thinking too deeply about what we are doing, we ought to be able to collaboratively solve a public policy issue.

 

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages (2001)

Information is typically packaged.  The smallest unit of information (something like a bit) (see August 23, 2009 and August 17, 2009 posts) has limited meaning (information value) on its own.  Aggregating, absorbing, connecting, colliding, and communicating with other units of information expands the information value associated with the package of bits.  These packages of information include small subatomic units, electrons, atoms, chemical compounds, photons, waves of sound and light, proteins, genotypes, cells, organs, phenotypes, letters, words, songs, books, and culture. (See November 27, 2010 post).

Information migrates.  (See May 20, 2012 post)  It is in nearly constant motion.  And when it is in motion, information can be altered and its meaning changed.  (See August 15, 2011 and  August 23, 2009 posts).  Sometimes information is degraded by change; sometimes information is enhanced. Information moves with its package; the package migrates, and information moves along.  Genes, Peoples and Languages is about the movement of genetic information in the package of a phenotype and the scientific quest to track the movement and transformation of modern human genes over the course of roughly one hundred thousand years.  And along the way, as a result of natural selection, and in some geographic areas, genetic drift, the information in this genetic package was edited and revised from the general population that preceded it:  hair texture and color changed, skin color changed, small genetic changes enabled humans to digest milk, immunized them from diseases such as malaria in certain areas, morphologies changed, and so on. 

This research supports the Out of Africa hypothesis:  that modern human origins begin on the African continent approximately 100,000 years ago, likely in southern Africa; that intra-continental African migration ensued northward along East Africa in the thousands of years afterward; and the first migration of homo sapiens out of Africa occurred roughly 50-60,000 years ago to the Arabian peninsula and the Levant, likely along the coast, and ultimately to southern Asia (India), southeast Asia, and Oceania (Australia) about 45,000 years ago.   And about the same time that modern humans were reaching Oceania, migrations out of the Levant northward in the direction of Europe, and later in the direction of central Asia and ultimately to North America roughly 15,000 years ago. What should not be forgotten in this focus on modern human migration is that a similar migratory path may have been taken over a million years earlier by homo erectus.

Cavalli-Sforza sees a parallel between genetic evolution and cultural evolution. The units and type of information as well as the means of information transmission in these two circumstances, however, are radically different.   Speech acts (including rituals) and language are the means of transmitting cultural information, and Cavalli-Sforza treats linguistic evolution as a type of cultural evolution.  But genes and culture do not co-evolve. As mentioned in an earlier post, "Language is a social institution, and social institutions and culture evolve, albeit at a different and faster pace than biological evolution."  (August 31, 2009 post). Language changes can occur as a result of migration and conquest of another's territory.  Cavalli-Sforza documents this in a number of cases.  Religion is another attribute of culture that likewise can change as a result of migration and conquest.  (See May 12, 2010 post).  And ideas can change as a result of migration and conquest.  (See May 20, 2012 post).  "There is a fundamental difference between biological and cultural mutation," writes Cavalli-Sforza.  "Cultural mutations may result from random events, and thus be very similar to genetic mutations, but cultural changes are more often intentional or directed to a very specific goal, while biological mutations are blind to their potential benefit.  At the level of mutation, cultural evolution can be directed while genetic change cannot."   Later he adds, "We must note a significant difference between biological and linguistic mutation.  A genetic mutant is generally very similar to the original gene, since one gives rise to another with only a small change.  Words vary in more complicated ways.  The same root can change meaning.  One word can have may unrelated senses.  One could try to establish greater similarities between genes and words taking into account all of the peculiarities, but it is not clear that would be useful."  The curious aspect of Cavalli-Sforza's discussion of biological and cultural evolution and transmission is the absence of any discussion of the evolutionary debate about whether evolution operates on genes, phenotypes, or groups that has laced this subject for several decades now.  (See November 4, 2009, November 30, 2009, September 12, 2012, and September 17, 2012 posts).  References to Richard Dawkins, memes, and Edward Wilson are not to be found.  Cavalli-Sforza's discussion on this subject is disjointed, and one wonders how he would treat the subject of the unit of information on which evolution operates.

Rodrigo Q. Quiroga, Borges and Memory (2012)

Memory is a subject that is no stranger to this blog.  (See February 26, 2013, December 2, 2011, November 6, 2011, September 20, 2011, August 15, 2011, April 8, 2011, November 27, 2010, September 9, 2010 posts.).  Rodrigo Quiroga's Borges and Memory effectively assembles most of the comments and observations in these earlier posts and weaves in the parallel observations of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges' about human memory, demonstrating that Borges' astute observations hold close to the empirical research of neuroscience.  Borges' artistic tool drafted by Quiroga to make his point is a short story authored by Borges in 1942, Funes the Memorious, about a man who could not forget the most trivial facts and datum and sustained an incredible memory.  In Borges' words, Funes had an "infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, a useless mental catalogue of all the images of his memory."  He was "almost incapable of ideas in general," which means he could not abstract and generalize.  In light of Daniel Schacter's characterization of the human mind's near universal capacity for forgetting (see September 20, 2011 post), sometimes instantly, sometimes only over considerable periods of time --- and the evolutionary benefits of forgetting --- the story of Funes is a unique story, one far removed from normal experience.  But Quiroga informs and documents that there are real cases of persons like Funes, who are simply incapable of forgetting the slightest details and their memories are clogged with useless data.  He also confirms that these individuals are limited in their ability to generalize and abstract.  There is the case of Solomon Shereshevskii of Russia, a patient of Alexander Luria, whose capacity for memorizing meaningless sequences of numbers, formulae, words, sequences of syllables, and retaining them in memory for years is much like the Funes of Borges' imagination.  Shereshevskii's diagnosis includes severe synesthesia. (See November 20, 2011  and October 25, 2011 post). Shereshevskii reportedly tells Luria that he could not read nor study because it made him lose track of what he was reading if he had to think about words beyond their literal meaning.

And there are others, and they are often referred to as savants and in other cases are regarded as autistic:  Kim Peek (whom the story Rain Man was based upon) who was diagnosed with FG Syndrome, Daniel Tammet whose incredible ability to recall sequences of numbers (including large numbers such as primes) was ascribed to synesthesia, Leslie Lemke who suffered from cerebral palsy and was blind, but was nevertheless a highly skilled pianist who had an enormous memory for music after hearing a song only once, and Jill Price, for whom the inability was a curse.

We sometimes refer to a person's "photographic" memory.  But that is not the way memory works, particularly memory based on visual perception.  Recall Antonio Damasio's account of how the brain retains and retrieves memories.  (See April 8, 2011 post).   Larger human brains lack the storage capacity for "large files of recorded images of prior events." To solve this problem, Damasio argues, human brains "borrowed the dispositional strategy" from early evolution that allows us to be able to retrieve those memories without, figuratively speaking, having to film and store those images. Here is how Damasio says this works. He refers to ancient dispositional networks, which we can identify as the subcortical systems discussed by Jaak Panksepp in his account of  human emotional systems (see May 19, 2013 post), and these are unconscious, automatic dispositions that are essentially hardwired into our biology. Recall Panksepp's discussion of the Fear System and the link between emotions and memory:  "Learning and memory are automatic and involuntary responses (mediated by unconscious mechanisms of the brain), which in their most lasting forms are commonly tethered to emotional arousal. Emotional arousal is a necessary condition for the creation of fear-learning memories."  (May 19, 2013 post). The ancient dispositional networks and the more recent, evolutionarily speaking, mapping networks in the brain, says Damasio, are now connected. A current perception triggers the dispositional network that directs the brain to reassemble aspects of past perceptions from the part of the cerebral cortex that had been previously activated when an original perception of an object occurred and where the representation or image was mapped. This occurs in what Damasio refers to as convergence-divergence zones that record "the coincidence of activity in neurons hailing from different brain sites, neurons that had been made active by the mapping of a certain object." A part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to image space where images of all sensory types occurs and map-making occurs; a separate part of the cerebral cortex is devoted to dispositional space where the tools exist to reactivate and generate images previously experienced --- affectionately called "grandmother cells" after our ability to recall our grandmother. The contents of dispositions, Damasio says, are always unconscious --- he says they are "encrypted" and "implicit" --- in contrast to the explicit images in the image space created by current perceptions. The "encrypted" dispositions are not themselves images, but merely implicit formulas for how to reconstruct maps in image space. Our "knowledge base" is, by this hypothesis, part of our unconscious brain, stored in code, waiting to be retrieved from what Damasio refers to as "association cortices" (and hence the analogy to Hume's associationism).

Quiroga concurs in substantial part.  "The brain does not reproduce visual stimuli like a digital camera or television, but rather processes their meaning starting from relatively little information and a set of unconscious inferences.  Now, if the neurons in the primary visual cortex do not simply copy information detected by the retina, what do they do?  This was what David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel at the Johns Hopkins University set out to study in the late 1950s.  Following a serendipitous event and a spectacular series of experiments that ensued (which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981).  Hubel and Wiesel discovered neurons in the primary visual cortex that respond to oriented lines.  This information eventually reaches the inferior temporal lobe where "face cells" -- ie., neurons that respond to human or monkey faces but not to other images, for example of hands, fruits or houses --- were found in experiments with monkeys. . . Each neuron in the retina responds to a particular point, and we can infer the outline of a cube starting from the activity of about thirty of them [retinal neurons].  Next the neurons in the primary visual cortex fire in response to oriented lines; fewer neurons are involved and yet the cube is more clearly seen.  This information is received in turn by neurons in higher visual areas, which are triggered by more complex patterns --- for example, the angles defined by the crossing of two or three lines.  . . As the processing of visual information progresses through different brain areas, the information represented by each neuron becomes more complex, and at the same time fewer neurons are needed to encode a given stimulus.  In the late 1960s, Polish psychologist Jerzy Konorski wondered if at the end of this process there might be individual neurons that represent an object or a person as a whole.  Is there, for example, a neuron that represents the concept of 'my home,' another one that responds to 'my dog,' and another for 'my grandmother.'"  Quiroga believed the answer lies in or near the hippocampus, because of a case made famous by Brenda Milner involving split brain surgery that removed a patient's hippocampus and resulted in an inability to form explicit, new memories. 

Quiroga became engaged in research with Christof Koch at Caltech that studied recordings of activity of individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe that responded not to a generic face, but responded uniquely to the faces of individual humans:  actress Jennifer Aniston, soccer star Diego Maradona, and Mr. T.  Medial temporal lobe structures that are critical for long-term memory include the amygdala, brainstem, and hippocampus, along with the surrounding hippocampal region consisting of the perirhinal, parahippocampal, and entorhinal neocortical regions. The hippocampus is critical for memory formation, and the surrounding medial temporal cortex is currently theorized to be critical for memory storage. The prefrontal and visual cortices are also involved in explicit memory.  The firing of neurons that begins in the retina (or in the case of auditory stimuli, in the cochlea), goes through the primary visual cortex (or other primary cortical areas), passing through higher visual areas in the temporal lobe ultimately reaches the hippocampus.  The many individual neurons in the retina respond to many discrete visual stimuli that does not represent the image as a whole.  At some point in the brain's pathways from the retina to the hippocampus the brain assembles these varied discrete stimuli.  What Quiroga and others found is that the "Jennifer Aniston neuron" did not respond to a single image of Jennifer Aniston, but to multiple images of Jennifer Aniston.  Further research found that a specific neuron would also respond to a multitude of Star Wars characters --- Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Darth Vader.  What this signified is that the unique neuron did not associate with a particular camera image, but to a conceptual image.  This "loss of detail" led Quiroga to conclude that the neuron codes for an abstraction of Jennifer Aniston.  "We can see Funes," writes Quiroga, "as someone lacking those Jennifer Aniston neurons that encode abstract concepts."  He repeats, "We do not process images in our brains in the same way a camera does; on the contrary, we extract a meaning and leave aside a multitude of details.. . . Just like perception, memory is a creative process; when we remember something we do not repeat the experience as it was; rather we relive it in another context, create a new representation, and even change its meaning."  If we integrate Damasio into Quiroga's thinking, the convergence-divergence zones assemble "a cascade of processes that involve memories and emotions," "extracting particular features that help us recognize these people and objects in very different circumstances."  (See November 6, 2011 post).

Quiroga quotes Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis):  "What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there.  Seeing is an active, constructive process.  Your brain makes the best interpretation it can according to its previous experience and the limited and ambiguous information provided by our eyes." This recalls Michael Gazzaniga's "Interpreter" (see July 25, 2013, September 27, 2009 posts).  A previous post that quotes Crick and Gazzaniga is likewise worth recalling (see May 22, 2011 post).  This latter post introduces the subject of the brain's capacity to engage in self-deception, to imagine things that don't exist in reality.  I think in most cases we do not engage in self-deception, the brain's default mode is to construct a reality as close to the reality that is out there.  So what we see, most of the time, is really there, or at least close to it.  (See February 4, 2012 post).  Information in our quantum world is probablistic. It is true that the brain quickly discards much information that is never encoded.  As Daniel Schacter has explained --- and Quiroga acknowledges --- our memories can become very fragile if not unreliable, and our "reality" can read more like fiction.  (See September 20, 2011 post).  And that is interesting, because the minds of savants like Funes have the ability to recollect and retain for considerable periods of time incredible detail without assigning meaning and in those cases the brain does not filter out reality from gibberish.

Roberto Saviano, Beauty and The Inferno (2012)

In All The Names, Jose Saramago tells the story of a civil servant in an unnamed city of an unnamed country charged with maintaining the birth, marriage, and death records of a nation's citizens.  The government agency, the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, operates a data warehouse combining records of both the living and the dead.  Of course, there is a story, a life history, for every one of these citizens and former citizens, but the data warehouse does not record those stories.  In a revolutionary moment, Saramago's protagonist, an equally anonymous "Senor Jose," rebels against his assigned duty and follows his curiosity to uncover the story of one citizen whose data record on an index card prompted his curious interest in a life beyond data. 

Sr. Jose had a secret hobby that propelled him to look deeper into a person than the data in the data warehouse.  He collected news items about famous citizens of his country, and he would supplement his curiosity about the famous by climbing the walls of the Central Registry to collect their birth data, including information about the names of parents, godparents, birthplaces, addresses, and the like.  And one night, in the Central Registry, while collecting the index cards of five famous persons, he inadvertently pulls out a card of a sixth person, an unknown woman, not famous, and he becomes obsessed with learning her story.  He can't turn to the newspapers.  She's not famous, after all.  He puts her index card back in the file along with the five cards of the famous, but not before copying the data on the card.  Sr. Jose "makes a decision," writes Saramago: he decided to look for the unknown woman.  Saramago's discussion of this "decision" assembles in one paragraph a succinct discussion of free will comparatively similar to the way free will (or the lack thereof) is discussed in two recent postings on the subject (see July 15, 2013 post and May 19, 2013 post):

"Senhor Jose's decision appeared two days later.  Generally speaking, we don't talk about a decision appearing to us, people jealously guard both their identity, however vague it might be, and their authority, what little they may have, and prefer to give the impression that they reflected deeply before taking the final step, that they pondered the pros and cons, that after intense mental effort, they finally made a decision.  It has to be said that things never happen like that.  Obviously it would not enter anyone's head to eat without feeling hungry, and hunger does not depend on our will, it comes into being of its own accord, the result of objective bodily needs, it is a physical and chemical problem whose solution, in a more less satisfactory way, will be found in the contents of a plate.  Even such a simple act as going down into the street to buy a newspaper presupposes not only a desire to receive news, which, since it is a desire, is necessarily an appetite, the effect of specific physico-chemical activities in the body, albeit of a different nature, that routine act presupposes, for example, the unconscious certainty, belief or hope that the delivery van was not late or that the newspaper stand is not closed due to illness or to the voluntary absence of the proprietor.  Moreover, if we persist in stating that we are the ones who make our decisions, then we would have to begin to explain, to discern, to distinguish, who it is in us who made the decision and who subsequently carried it out, impossible operations by anyone's standards.  Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us.  The proof can be found in the fact that, though life leads us to carry out the most diverse actions one after the other, we do not preclude each one with a period of reflection, evaluation and calculation, and only then declare ourselves able to decide if we will go out to lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman."  Sr. Jose walks out his door and goes to see the street where the woman purportedly lived. Sr. Jose's search to find the woman named on the sixth index card becomes an obsession to learn her story, driven by what Jaak Panksepp calls our Seeking system urges (see May 19, 2013 post).

Consider the life of an exceptional journalist, an investigative journalist who wants to tell a story, not just report data.    Roberto Saviano made a decision to investigate and expose the Camorra, one of the Mafia clans in his native Naples area of Italy.   Saviano probably did "reflect deeply before taking the final step," to borrow a phrase from Saramago, After all, inquiry and publicity of a Mafia sect knowingly undertakes a risk to self-preservation.  He knows that the people he writes about in his book Gamorrah  are killers and will not hesitate to kill him if it suits them.  He knows this; he must have reflected deeply about this.  This is, in the words of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, "self-determination.  (See July 15, 2013 post).  Saviano assented to his course of action in exposing the Camorra, although he may very well have been driven by his Seeking system and perhaps modulated by his Fear system.  (See May 19, 2013 post).  Jose Saramago described Roberto Saviano as someone who "mastered the art of living."  (See July 17, 2011 post).  He is referring to Saviano's "courage," which refers to a mental persistence to persevere in the face of fear.  Courage has to be found in the neocortex of the brain, not the subcortical emotional systems that Panksepp finds controlling.  But yes, Senhor Jose made a decision that probably did not involve much reflection to search for the story of a woman who is more than a piece of data; Roberto Saviano made a decision to confront fear and seek truth that undoubtedly involved substantial reflection.  Their intent is different:  Senhor Jose is out to satisfy his own curiosity and perhaps derive some private reflection on the meaning of his life; Roberto Saviano is not interested in merely satisfying some private need, but to engage in social communication with a broader public, perhaps to arouse the public's reflection to some collective action.

"A writer can never be a good person," writes Saviano.  "Often he comes to writing precisely because he realizes he cannot be a good person.  He ends up writing with a sense of guilt for not being able to change things, in the hope that his indirect actions will multiply in his readers' consciousness, that they might act in his stead or alongside him, creating the ultimate dream of a community of people who understand, feel and walk together.  People who live." 

Beauty and The Inferno represents Roberto Saviano's further reflection on his infernal life in the wake of the publication of Gamorrah, in which he lives a life guarded by police charged with protecting his life from the threats of the Camorra.  The parallels with the life of Salman Rushdie following the Iranian fatwa issued after publication of The Satanic Verses immediately come to mind, and the parallel is not lost on Saviano who writes an essay about his invitation to join Rushdie for a panel discussion at the Swedish Academy.   But Beauty and The Inferno also reads a bit like Profiles in Courage.  And among all the names that Saviano recognizes for leading a courageous life not dissimilar from his, some of whom suffered a fate we call premature death, include:  Joe Pistone who squealed on the American mafia; Giancarlo Siani who also wrote about the Camorra; Uwe Johnson; Gustav Herling; Varlam Shalamov; Anna Politkovskaya.  Names that may have remained anonymous pieces of data, but Saviano has captured their stories.

George Saunders, Tenth of December (2013)

I rarely read a short story.  I respect that writing a good short story can be as challenging, if not more challenging in many respects as writing a novella or novel.  There is less time to dawdle and get to the point in a short story, but in my experience the fleeting taste that one experiences in a short story is not as satisfying as a well-developed character, cast of characters, and extended plot of a novel.  In several of George Saunders' short stories in Tenth of December , I was left with that same level of satisfaction (I don't want to say dissatisfaction, because that is not what I mean; but I do mean to say less than satisfying).  I expect a short story to figuratively punch me in the face and get my attention.  And one of Saunders' stories, Escape from Spiderhead, did just that.  A world manipulated by soma -- Huxley's Brave New World --- comes to mind. 

Saunders introduces a brave new world of drug-induced manipulation imaginatively different than Huxley.  Soma leaves  Huxley's masses anesthetized; Saunders' imaginary pharma cocktails manipulate and heighten every subcortical emotional system in Jaak Panksepp's lexicon (see May 19, 2013 post). The drugs from Saunders' imaginary MobiPak manipulate the Seeking, Lust, Fear, Care and Rage systems, for example, driving passionate sex among people who would likely have no interest in one another.  Add some Verbaluce to the cocktail, and suddenly your cortical regions are verbalizing your feelings more honestly than your emotional systems can feel them.  Veritalk and ChatEase are also available to manipulate communications capabilities.  And so are the drugs to reverse everything that the other drugs manipulated in the first instance.

And who submits to this life?  Very subtly Saunders unfolds this regime.  I nearly missed it when one of the manipulative experimenters begins a conversation, "Do you even know her story?  You don't.  You legally can't.  Does it involve whiskey, gangs, infanticide?  I can't say.  Can I imply, somewhat peripherally, that her past, violent and sordid, did not exactly include a dog named Lassie and lot of family talks about the Bible while Grammy sat doing macramé, adjusting her posture because the quaint fireplace was so sizzling?"  And then a page later:  "Mom always looked heartsick when our time was up.  It had almost killed her when they arrested me.  The trial had almost killed her.  She's spent her savings to get me out of real jail and in here."  These lab rats are criminals diverted from the penal system; something like a halfway house where the only escape may be suicide.  But the suicide that closes this short story --- in stark contrast to Albert Camus' treatment of suicide as a rejection of freedom and a refusal to embrace life passionately --- presents one of the more enobling characteristics of human behavior:  sacrifice in order to avoid harm to another --- altruistic behavior of a type considered in several previous posts (see October 13, 2010 post).   This is the stuff that vividly punches you in the face.  It could have been a novel.

Michael Gazzaniga, Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011)

What do we want to be free from?  That is the question that drives Michael Gazzaniga's inquiry about free will and the science of the brain.  "We don't want to be free from our experience of life, we need that for decisions.  We don't want to be free from our temperament because that also guides our decisions.  We actually don't want to be free from causation, we use that for prediction.  A receiver trying to catch a football does not want to be free from all the automatic adjustments that his body is making to maintain his speed and trajectory as he dodges tackles.  We don't want to be free from our successfully evolved decision-making device.  What do we want to be free from?"

I awaken at 5:30 in the morning.  Gradually my mind becomes cognitive (conscious) again.  My body is telling me to stay put.  Don't get up.  Rest some more.  I lie still for many more minutes, and inevitably my mind starts to race about what I need to do (or don't need to do) in the coming day.  I need to get out of bed and start doing things.  But when?  I can probably afford to lie in bed until 7am and still do what I need to do over the course of the remaining day.  I lie still for awhile longer.  It is now forty-five minutes later.  My mind wrestles with whether I should continue to try and rest or get out of bed and start being active. I cannot lie still anymore. I tell myself I will get out of bed and read a chapter of Michael Gazzaniga's book, Who's In Charge? and I do.  I had a decision to make and I made it:  I got out of bed at 6:15am instead of perhaps 7am.  Is that what free-will is all about?  What was I free from?  No one else was dictating that I stay in bed.  There was no social rule telling me I had to stay in bed until 7am.  My body was not chained to the bed.  But was this decision entirely unchained from all causes?  Jaak Panskepp has compellingly explained that our Seeking urges begin with our automatic impulses deep in the subcortical areas of our brain, (see previous post), so perhaps my urge to read and learn and cease lying down was something less than volitional? 

Much of what we humans and other animals do in our lives is automatic, unconscious, instinctive.  As Panksepp points out, even learning, memory, and habit formation is unconscious.  What is learned and habitual is not the stuff of choices and decision trees, and yet choice is what free will is purportedly about.  And choice, the hallmark of "who's in charge," is typically assigned to the neocortex of the brain that resides on top of the limbic system and the forebrain.  Yet if we concur with Panksepp that it is the brain's subcortical emotional system that energizes the neocortex, not the other way around, the role of the neocortex appears to be only regulatory of the urges that come from below the cortex:  controlling and inhibiting impulses, instinct, and habit, not initiating behavior in the first instance. 

For Gazzaniga, neuroscience (the study of the brain) does not offer much support for the common understanding of free will.  The evidence from neuroscience is inconsistent with free will.  Gazzaniga's first point is that there is no single executive decision center in the brain.  The brain is composed of distinct modules, and while we may have a unified sense of self and making decisions, neuroscience does not support our sense that we are making decisions entirely liberated from either the environment around us or within us. Our sense of psychological unity, says Gazzaniga, emerges out of specialized system in the left side of our neocortex, which he call The Interpreter. (See June 12, 2011 post and June 5, 2011 post).  This is the area of the brain in which the human tendency to want to explain things is found as well as our capacity for imagination.  (See May 22, 2011 post).  But as Gazzaniga explains, The Interpreter is slow.  It comes to life after the event it seeks to explain has occurred.  So what does it mean that we humans build our theories about ourselves after the fact?  "This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism."

Gazzaniga cites research by Hakwan Lau of Columbia University that purports to show how the brain could lead the mind into thinking that the explanation developed by The Interpreter after a certain behavior was an intention occurring before a spontaneous action occurred; in essence, tricking the mind into thinking that the explanation was an intention.  Lau discovered that an area of the brain in the frontal cortex known as the supplemental motor area (SMA) (involved with planning of motor actions that are sequences of action done from memory).  An area called the pre-SMA is involved with creating new sequences of action in memory, which gives one the feeling of the urge to move (perhaps not unlike my getting out of bed in the morning to read Gazzaniga's book).  It is the pre-SMA area that is activated when humans generate actions of their own choice.  Lau applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the pre-SMA that locally activates nerve cells in the pre-SMA.  Describing Lau's research, Gazzaniga explains:  "When TMS is applied over the pre-SMA after the execution of a spontaneous action, the perceived onset of the intention to act, that moment when you become conscious that you intend to act, is shifted backward in time on the temporal map, and the perceived time of the actual action, the moment when you are conscious that your acting, is shifted forward in time."   In other words, the perceived onset of intention depends, at least in part, on neural activity that takes place after the execution of action.  While Lau is careful to say that without further experimentation "one cannot draw the strong conclusion that the experience of having conscious control of a simple motor action [e.g. getting out of bed in the morning] is entirely illusory," he adds that his experimental "results throw doubt on the commonsensical view that the experience of intention, including the experienced onset, is completely determined before an action."  Lau adds, "An alternative view that is compatible with the data is that one function of the experience of intention [even if it occurs afterwards] might be to help clarify the ownership of actions, which can help to guide future actions."  Gazzaniga concludes, however, that The Interpreter "makes the story fit with the pleasing idea one actually willed the action."  Free will is illusory, he says.

There is certainly no consensus among neuroscientists and psychologists over this research, just as thousands of years of philosophical debate has not achieved consensus about free-will.  But one truth about free-will drawn from the philosophical debate is that it is at least a theoretical construct used to justify the notion of personal responsibility for one's actions.  And that leads to the discussion of whether our free-will, if it really does exist, is limited to self-control and regulating existing tendencies of human behavior that are selfish or impulsive or emotionally driven?  This is where I think Jaak Panksepp is coming from (see previous post) when he says, "At primary-process levels of emotional processing there is no free will, there is no 'controlled cognitions.' Neither do the automatic secondary processes of learning and memory functions, that are molded by our wild animal passions developmentally, exhibit free will.  That can only emerge from well-sculpted, deeply reflective, cognitive attitudes."  Free-will is reflected in those "controlled cognitions" that respond to the neocortex being energized by the emotional systems of the subcortical areas of the brain.  There is consensus that the ability to deliberate and rationally choose between different courses of actions.  As Antonio Damasio has documented in Looking for Spinoza and Descartes Error, choosing between different courses of action is not an act of cognition alone, but of cognition and emotion in tandem.  (See also April 8, 2011 post).  There are certain emotions that are linked with feelings of responsibility such as sympathy and regret and these emotions do not originate in the cortex where the brain's "executive control" is said to reside. 

Yet what inspires those controlled cognitions?  I submit it is memory and culture and our body's biochemistry.  And that brings us to Gazzaniga's chapter on the "the social mind," a subject that is covered in many previous posts dealing with mirror neurons, mimicry, moral feelings and related emotions.  (See November 21, 2012, September 17, 2012, September 12, 2012, December 10, 2011, posts). Gazzaniga endorses this point of view. Echoing Christopher Boehm (see November 21, 2012 post), Gazzaniga writes, "If Michael Tomasello and Brian Hare are correct that we have been domesticating ourselves over thousands of years through ostracizing and killing those who were too aggressive, in essence removing them from the gene pool and modifying our social environment, then we have been making rules for groups to live by and enforcing them throughout our evolutionary history."  Gazzaniga adds, "The culture to which we belong actually plays a significant role in shaping some of our cognitive processes."  And in terms of our biochemistry, Gazzaniga notes, "'Easterners and Westerners also vary in their genetic makeup . . . Much research had already shown that serotonin plays a part in attention, cognitive flexibility, and long-term memory, so [researchers] decided that looking into a specific serotonin system polymorphism (a DNA sequence variation), which was known to affect an individual's mode of thinking, could prove fruitful [in accounting for differences in attention across cultures].  They looked at different alleles (genes which have different nucleic acid sequences occupying the same position on a paired chromosome that control the same inherited characteristic) of the 5-HTRIA gene that ultimately controls neurotransmission of serotonin.  They found that there was a significant interaction between the type of 5-HTRIA alleles a person had and the culture in which he lived.  This interaction affected where that particular person's attention was directed.  Those person processing the identical DNA sequences in the matched gene pairs (homozygous) G allege, which is associated with the reduced ability to adapt to changes, more strongly endorse the culturally reinforced mode of thinking than those with homozygous C allele. . . Summarizing these findings, these researchers concluded, 'The same genetic predispositions can result in different psychological outcomes, depending on an individual's cultural context.'"

Gazzaniga suggests that what is sorely needed in this discussion is new terminology, which may be another way of saying that the discussion needs to be repurposed.  For example, we can abandon thousands of years of debate that this discussion is between causal determinism and free-will.  This is essentially conceding to neuroscientists and others that our actions are determined in many respects by biology and the environment (including culture), and that cognition is not truly independent of biology and the environment.  Professors Ryan and Deci at the University of Rochester and others use a different terminology, "self-determination" and autonomy (self-regulation).  Self-determination and autonomy are not liberated from causal influences that motivate behavior ("people's autonomy lies not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions").  They are not "free" in that sense.  Critical to these terms is that our neocortex "assents" to whatever we have been motivated to do after some reflection.  This rules out instinctive, habitual, unconscious behavior, and since we arguably assent habitually to much of our behavior each day without much reflection, it focuses on true choices.  This cognitive scenario may very well involve a narrow subset of human life.  I would think this is heavily an exercise exhibiting self-control.

Responsibility is a social construct, Gazzaniga says, echoing John Searle's deontological view of how humans construct a social reality.  (See February 24, 2013 post).  "Responsibility is not located in the brain.  The brain has no area or network for responsibility. . . the way to think about responsibility is that it is an interaction between people, a social contract.  Responsibility reflects a rule that emerges out of one or more agents interacting in a social context, and the hope that we share is that each individual will follow certain rules."  But there are aspects of the brain that do lead to this interaction between people in a social context and support the development of rules for responsibility, and we have identified these in prior posts:  the emotional systems and structures of the brain that promote care, grief, play, empathy, sympathy, fear, among others.  (See May 19, 2013 post and November 21, 2012 post).