Transcript Introduction to Biopsychology [PSB 4002]

Introduction to Biopsychology
[PSB 4002]
Professor Robert Lickliter
DM 260 / 305-348-3441
[email protected]
website: dpblab.fiu.edu
Consciousness
Some Big Questions
• How do brain processes result in conscious
states?
• Is consciousness localized in certain regions
of the brain or is it a global phenomenon?
• If it is confined to certain brain regions,
which ones?
Big Questions (Cont.)
• What is the right level for explaining
consciousness? Is it the level of neurons
and synapses, or do we have to go to
higher functional levels such as neuronal
maps or networks of neurons?
• Might we even have to go beyond the
boundaries of the brain?
Big Questions (Cont.)
• Can we explain consciousness with
existing theories or do we need
some revolutionary new theoretical
concepts to explain it?
• What is “it”?
A Working Definition of
CONSCIOUSNESS:
• Consciousness consists of inner,
qualitative, subjective states and
processes of awareness.
• In other words – being aware of being
aware
Consciousness…
• Consciousness, so defined, begins when we
wake in the morning from sleep and
continues until we fall asleep again, die, go
into a coma, or otherwise become
“unconscious”
• It includes all of the enormous variety of
the awareness we think of as characteristic
of our waking life
It includes everything from:
• feeling a pain
• perceiving objects
visually
• states of anxiety
or depression
• working out
crossword puzzles
• playing chess
• trying to remember
your aunt’s phone
number
• arguing about politics
• or just wishing you
were somewhere else
Being Someone
• Even though we take it for granted, one
thing we will need to understand is why and
how we all experience ourselves as “being
someone”
• For example, at this moment you all have
the impression that it is you who is hearing
this lecture. And it is you who is forming
thoughts about it.
Consciousness
• For humans, consciousness is always tied to
an individual,
first-person perspective:
“I”
“me”
“mine”
A big question:
• how far does consciousness go?
• which species have it and which don’t?
Primary (Core) Consciousness
• The ability to build a multimodal scene
based on several different sources of
concurrent information.
• Does not necessarily contain any selfreferential aspect - it lives in the present
(“here” and “now”), tied to the
succession of events in real time.
Biological functions of brain
structures which support core
consciousness appear to
overlap…
(even though they are widely
distributed in the brain):
1) regulating homeostasis and signaling body
structure and state
2) participating in processes of attention
3) participating in the processes of
wakefulness and sleep
4) participating in the processes of emotion
and feeling
5) participating in the learning process
Higher-Order (Human) Consciousness
• Emerges when reference to the past,
future, and self become available.
• Appears to be tied to the ability for
autobiographical memory, the ability for
language, and being situated in a
social/cultural network (to provide
scaffolding)
• With the emergence of higher-order
consciousness through
autobiographical memory and
language, there is an explicit coupling
of feelings and values, yielding a
subjectivity with narrative powers,
creating a fabric of “identity”,
“beliefs” and a “point of view”
Human Consciousness
• To be aware of oneself as well as to be aware of
others
• To be able to feel and express emotions
• To be able to engage in complex cognition,
including symbolic representations and in
particular, language
• To be able to think about things not present in
the immediate environment (imagination)
• To be able to predict the consequences of events
never before experienced by simulating those
events (including future events)
William James (1842-1910) –
Medical Doctor, Psychologist, Moral and
Religious Philosopher
Published the hugely
influential
two volume book
“The Principles of
Psychology” in 1890.
William James
• In that important book James described
consciousness as:
–individual (private)
–continuous and continually changing
–intentional (about something) and
selective
–a process, not a thing
The “flashlight” vs. the “floodlight”
experience of time
Wow, remember that
great bone I had last
Thanksgiving?
Retrospection and Prospection
• This remarkable set of abilities requires both
“retrospection” - the ability to re-experience
the past AND “prospection” - the ability to
pre-experience the future by simulating it in
our conscious awareness
• This allows us to be able to go beyond “the
information given”
• Most of the time our judgments and
decisions in any situation are arrived at as
a consequence of the evaluation of a set
of internally generated “alternatives”.
These alternatives are typically based on
the seamless integration of the past, the
present, and possible futures.
Paradox:
even though we can retrospect and
prospect, thereby making our
“temporal window” very large
compared to other animals, this
particular moment (now) is all we have
to work with consciously (in other
words, all consciousness occurs in
“real-time”)
• These counterfactuals are constructed to
compare what happened or is happening with
what could have happened. Without such
alternatives or simulations, it would be very
difficult to fine tune our behavior and to avoid
making the same mistakes over and over again,
as well as anticipate and plan for needs not
currently experienced.
Introduction to Biopsychology
[PSB 4002]
Professor Robert Lickliter
DM 260 / 305-348-3441
[email protected]
website: dpblab.fiu.edu
Midterm #4 (Final Exam)
• Tuesday, December 10 from 12 – 2 pm
Chapters 21, 22, and 2 in your textbook
Lecture material through Thursday, December 5
Acting NOW in Anticipation of LATER
Examples:
Making your lunch
Flossing your teeth
Applying to graduate school
Investing in a savings account
Address threats of global warming
??
• These remarkable abilities to “mental time travel”
were not always available to us – coming to terms
with the flow of time and becoming skilled at using
the past and possible futures to inform and direct
our actions, choices, and goals emerged over a long
period of time during early childhood
• Of course, now we take such abilities for granted
and can’t imagine operating any other way
Comprehension of yesterday and
tomorrow emerges gradually over the
preschool years.
Recent evidence suggests that imagining
the future depends on the same neural
circuits and mechanisms that are needed
for remembering the past.
Simulation of future events seems to require
a system that can flexibly re-combine details
from past events.
According to this idea, thoughts of past and
future events draw on similar information
stored in episodic memory.
This notion has been termed the:
constructive episodic simulation
hypothesis
and is generally presumed to be unique
to humans
For example, if young children have limited
skills at reconstructing the events of the
past, they will likely also have limited ability
to anticipate or predict the future
Oh boy, chocolate pudding!
Modulation of internal and external
events through the construct of ‘self’
allows us to remove ourself from the
present and construct “alternative”
interpretations of past, present, and
future events. In normal individuals, this
“off-line” ability to consciously evaluate
and adjust behavior relies in large part
on the activity of the prefrontal cortex.
plans, goals, strategies, decisions
The prefrontal cortex is thought to be
crucial for integrating and discriminating
internally and externally derived models
of the world. These functions occupy a
major portion of our conscious
awareness, including rumination on the
past, speculation about the future, and
real-time daydreams about a different
present and possible futures.
Mind & Behavior
• The brain is embodied and the body is
embedded in its environment – you can’t
separate the activity of the brain from the
body or the environment
• Further, in humans, society and its culture
distributes cognitive activity across many
brains. We do not have an “isolated” mind.
In contrast, non-human animals do. What
they know is what they have experienced
directly.
Starting from scratch, guided by only
the preceding generation
Because of our use of language, because of our
extended period of development (and the
scaffolding its requires), because of our societies
and cultures and their artifacts, we don’t have to
“start over” each generation.
Just by being born human, we each “inherit” an
enormous potential store of knowledge and
information. We can stand on (and benefit from)
the shoulders of the many generations of people
who came before us, and who left us their
insights, experiences, failures and successes.
Extelligence
In humans, society and its culture
distributes cognitive activity across
many brains. We do not have an
“isolated” mind. In contrast, nonhuman animals do. What they know is
limited to what they have experienced
or observed directly.
When children are educated, ideas and
technologies are maintained across
generations, spanning the gaps left by the
passing of individual brains. When reading
and writing are mastered, ideas and
technologies can be maintained by anyone
with access to a teacher, books, and more
recently a computer (including the ideas and
histories of a different culture, different
country, different era).
The combination of prospective thinking and
extelligence extends the mind’s reach,
allowing for long-term planning, formulation of
possible scenarios, “virtual” experiences to
guide, constrain and add meaning to our “real”
or direct experiences.
This allows a wide range of human activities
not seen in other animals, including art, music,
literature, film, as well as multiple forms of
“entertainment”, such as sports, gambling,
video games, shopping, amusement parks,
etc.
The external environment, actively structured
by us, becomes a source of cognitively
enhancing “wideware” - external items,
artifacts, tools, etc. that scaffold our cognitive
skills and abilities.
Examples: smart phones, calculators, calendars,
audio and video recordings, etc.
“externalizing the nervous system”
Introduction to Biopsychology
[PSB 4002]
Professor Robert Lickliter
DM 260 / 305-348-3441
[email protected]
website: dpblab.fiu.edu
Our trans-generational advantage
broken brains
Psychiatric Disease
• The general characteristics of psychiatric
(mental) disease:
–perceptual awareness and orientation
–symbolic conceptual functioning
–emotional responses
–executive control
Psychiatric Disease
• A given syndrome or disorder is not:
– “just a matter of biochemistry” or
– “just a matter of neuroanatomy”, or
– “just a matter of genetics”, or
– “just a matter of individual history”
• It is always some combination of these
varied factors. Thus, no two patients will
be alike and no two successful
treatments will be alike.
Risk and Protective Factors
• Individuals vary in their exposure to certain
environments and the biological systems they
inherit.
• Mediators and moderators: influence the
onset and maintenance of psychiatric and
developmental disorders.
Multifinality
Shared
Experience or
Trait
Equifinality
Shared
Outcome
Psychiatric Disease
• The example of schizophrenia:
–Type I. psychotic episodes, delusions,
hallucinations, disordered and
paranoid thoughts
–Type II. Loss of emotional response
(flat affect), abnormal postures, lack of
spontaneous speech
Epidemiology of Schizophrenia
• Onset is variable, but most common onset is
in the 20’s and 30’s.
• Some evidence for early life development risk
factors.
• A “spectrum” disorder
• Thought to involve abnormalities in:
– Hippocampus
– Cortex (loss of grey matter)
– Dopamine imbalance
Treatment
• Some success with antidopaminergic
medications, but not without consequence.
• As of now, there is no “cure” for chronic
schizophrenia, however episodic
manifestations may come and go based on
environmental context.
• Animal models of the disorder have proven
elusive.
Developmental Disorders
• Atypical development of brain/body systems
leads to developmental disorders such as:
Autism
• inability to recognize other’s emotions and intentions,
low language production, high degree of emotional
reactivity, self-stimulation, and repetitive behaviors
(also a spectrum disorder).
Introduction to Biopsychology
[PSB 4002]
Professor Robert Lickliter
DM 260 / 305-348-3441
[email protected]
website: dpblab.fiu.edu
The Use of Robotics to Discover the
Dynamics of Embodiment
Embodied or Epigenetic Robotics
• Makes the assumption that behavior is
result of the complex interaction between
the system and its circumstances, and not
directly specified by or predicted from a
description of its initial state
• Rodney Brooks, a pioneering roboticist, has
termed this “intelligence without
representation”
Assumptions
• The key idea is that an intelligent system will be emerge
from initially limited perception-action couplings.
• Such a system is defined not by its”programmed”
function (knowledge representation) but by its activity.
• The range and possibilities for actions are context
dependent, that is depend on the situation the system
finds itself in.
• This embeds development in a physical, biological, and
social world
The Challenges of Epigenetic Robotics
• Learning about objects and events
• Learning about people
• Learning about the self
(sound familiar?)
Lessons from Human Development
how does a learner who does not know what
there is to learn manage to learn anyway?
(remember, you don’t know what you don’t know)
be multi-modal
be incremental
be physical (explore)
be social
learn a language
The costs of extended consciousness
• knowing danger, fear, pain, loss, and
death
• Our extended knowledge is obtained in a
bargain we did not choose
-the cost of a deeper and wider existence is
the loss of innocence about that
existence
• As humans, we are aware from a young age
that we and those we love will certainly die
Free Will
• Do we control our own minds?
– Most people assume they have conscious
access to their intentions and motives and
assume they consciously guide their choices
and actions
– Evidence from biopsychology and
neuroscience suggests these assumptions are
optimistic at best. Indeed, many of our
actions and ideas spring to life in a way that
can only admire – or at times regret.
BEHAVIOUR
SENSORY
STIMULATION
Patterned
neural activity
Neural
connectivity
Individual
nerve cell
activity
Neural
growth
Cell membrane
Non-neural
activity
Non-neural
growth
Extracellular
biochemistry
Intracellular
biochemistry
Protein
synthesis
GENETIC
ACTIVITY
PHYSICAL
INFLUENCES
Johnston & Edwards (2002)