Transcript From autism to ADHD: computational simulations

Social intelligence:
what we need to understand
Włodzisław Duch
Department of Informatics,
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland
School of Computer Engineering,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Google: W. Duch
SINTELNET, Warszawa 10.3.2012
What is there to learn?
Industry: what happens with our machines?
Cognitive robotics: vision, perception, language.
Bioinformatics, life sciences.
• Brains ... what is in EEG?
What happens in the brain?
FuturICT
The FuturICT flagship proposal
intends to unify hundreds of the
best scientists in Europe to
explore social life on earth and
everything it relates to.
The FuturICT flagship proposal
will produce historic
breakthroughs and provide
powerful new ways to manage
challenges that make the modern
world so difficult to predict,
including the financial crisis.
A bit like Cybersyn project in Chile
(1970-73) in real-time cybernetics
control of economy.
DI NCU Projects:NCI
Neurocognitive Informatics –new branch of science.
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Computational creativity, insight, intuition, imagery.
Imagery agnosia, especially imagery amusia.
Neurocognitive approach to language, word games.
Medical information retrieval, analysis, visualization.
Visualization of high-D trajectories, signal analysis.
Brain stem models and consciousness in artificial systems.
Autism, ADHD, phenomics, comprehensive theory.
Infants: observation, guided development.
Integration of Humanized Interface Technologies (HIT).
Neural determinism, free will, and social consequences.
Interdisciplinary Center of
Innovative Technologies
Why am I interested in this?
ICIT in construction,
working - end of 2012.
Neurocognitive lab,
5 rooms, many
projects requiring
experiments.
Funding: national/EU grants
Understanding brain
plasticity, mind states.
Brains are formed by experience
Each brain is unique, due to genetic and environmental factors.
Neural determinism: spontaneous thought
Sporns O, Tononi G, Kötter R (2005) The human connectome: A structural
description of the human brain. PLoS Comput Biol 1: 245–251
What our Self knows?
Northoff et.al, Self-referential processing in our brain - a meta-analysis
of imaging studies on the self. Neuroimage 31, 440, 2006
CMS, Cortical Midline Structures, are all involved in the verbal, spatial,
emotional and face recognition test when self and others are
distinguished. These structures are rarely damaged and are in
between the rest of the cortex and limbic/brain stem structures.
Proto-self: body; autobiographical: memory; social: relations.
Brain and antisocial behavior
Mobbs D, Lau HC, Jones OD, Frith CD,
Law, Responsibility, and the Brain. PLoS Biol 5(4): e103 (2007)
Prefrontal cortex (PFC) makes us moral and rational.
Damage to PFC leads to acquired sociopathy, impulsive affective criminals.
Damage to amygdala leads to poor empathy and low fear, typical of
psychopathic emotionless criminals.
Estimation ~25% of all imprisoned in the USA fall in these two categories,
frequently due to birth complication and trauma.
Will is just another feeling
Wegner DM, The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press(2002)
We may be acting but do not realize that we are: ex: ouija board,
facilitated communication; water divination and hypnotism.
We are not acting, but think that we are: subjects may be induced to
believe that they have performed some actions, or that their actions are
achieving far more than they in fact are.
Conscious acts of will are never the direct causes of our actions,
instead, both conscious willing and action are the effects of a common
unconscious cause.
TMS stimulations: even if one side is selected 80% of times the choice is
felt as free ... we could be radio controlled!
Will is just another feeling resulting from attention to the state of the
pre-supplementary motor cortex (Pre-SMA).
Is consciousness causing actions?
Bargh (1997b) estimates: Our psychological reactions from moment to
moment… are 99.44% automatic.
Dijksterhuis et al. (2005): sequential conscious
thinking in comparison to the unconscious
parallel processing cannot accomplish much;
“strictly speaking, conscious thought does not
exist”, conscious thought is merely some
unconsciously processed information or brain
state that wins the competition to enter
awareness (highest control level).
Baumeister, R. F., Masicampo, E. J., & Vohs, K.
D. Do conscious thoughts cause behavior?
Annual Review of Psychology (2011).
Answer: yes, but not directly, we have no
conscious control over what comes to our mind,
but conscious thoughts influence mental states.
Is it good for you?
R.F. Baumeister et al. Prosocial benefits of feeling free:
Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35: 260-268, 2009.
Belief in free will may foster a sense of thoughtful reflection and
willingness to exert energy, promoting helpfulness and reducing
aggression. Disbelief in free will may make behavior more reliant on
selfish, automatic impulses and therefore less socially desirable.
• Induced disbelief in free will reduced willingness to help others.
• Chronic disbelief in free will was associated with reduced helping
behavior.
• Induced disbelief in free will caused participants to act more
aggressively than others.
Conclusion: belief in free will seems to promote socially desirable and
harmonious behavior, contributes to feeling of empowerment.
Brain and will
Brain exists solely for its own survival, not to understand ourselves.
Only by looking from outside we can understand the brain and draw
conclusions about its nature and functions.
Edward Osborne Wilson
What are the options? Naive, reflexive and mechanical.
Will
Will
Consciousness
Brain
Gens
Environment
Stochastic eff.
Behavior
Consciousness
Consciousness
Brain
G
E
S
Behavior
Brain
G
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S
Behavior
Personal responsibility
• Traditional view breaks down: there is no “self”
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or ghost in the machine pulling the strings.
Self is one of many processes that brain is
implementing, conscious of a small subset of brain processes.
If self is not in control then how can it be responsible?
My brain made me do it, I am not responsible?
To what degree and in what sense can we speak of free choices?
Solutions: even more responsibility?
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Whole person is responsible, not just the ego or self.
We are responsible for our actions, good intentions are not enough.
We are responsible for who we become, our own development!
The brain has to educate itself and to “know oneself” better.
We are responsible for the development of our children, setting out
examples and model roles.
Spiritual development is our moral obligation.
Educational questions
How strong is neural determinism? How strong are
influences from learned behavioral patterns?
Khmer Rouge children were given “leadership in torture
and executions”, practicing torture on animals.
Religious conversion between different religious
traditions is quite rare.
Should free choice be enforced on small babies?
From Greece to China positive and negative behavioral
patterns have been provided through legends, dramas
and religious stories, helping to learn virtues and values
through personifications (arete, persona, bodisatwa),
helping in self-regulation of behavior.
Where is the source of values for young generation?
Where are their heroes, role models? Harry Potter?
“Self" without limits
• Decisions are made by the whole brain, not all decisions
or resolutions are consciously realized.
• I can control my behavior according to my values,
but first I should make it conscious = understand myself.
• Free will (compatibilist style) = conscious control of
behavior in accord with acquired beliefs and values.
Environmental relations
Social relations
All processes in the brain that
influence behavior
I=
model of
self
Social, big mind
Self is a complex of
brain states and
relations between
these states.
Boundaries of self
do not make much
sense, all strongly
coupled processes
are part of big mind.
Self-control
Effective self-control is highly beneficial to individuals and
to society, but it is rather difficult to achieve.
Strong will, perseverance, can be trained as any other personality trait.
In the past this was done by physical training, competition, motivation to
win social approval and prizes.
In ancient Greece the concept of paidea (preserved in encyclopedia”)
meant training for liberty (freedom) and nobility (the beautiful), the sum of
physical / intellectual achievement to which an individual can aspire.
Self-control ability predicts academic performance better than IQ.
Self-control requires mental energy that is limited! Without energy (blood
glucose) ability to perform many adaptive behaviors is compromised: this
affects intelligent thought, effective decision making, taking initiative.
Trait (dispositional tendency) self-control appears to have few
or no downsides, but requires long training.
IDoCare: help
for development of perfect babies!
Can we influence brain development in beneficial way?
Problem: about 5-10% of all children have a developmental disability that
causes problems in their speech and language development.
Identification of congenital hearing loss in USA is at 2½ years of age!
Solution: permanent monitoring of babies in the crib, stimulation, recording
and analysis of their responses, providing guideline for their perceptual and
cognitive development, calling an expert help if needed.
Key sensors: suction response (basic method in developmental psychology),
motion detectors, auditory and visual monitoring.
Potential: market for baby monitors (Sony, BT...) is billions of $; so far they
only let parents to hear or see the baby and play ambient music.
IDoCare intelligent crib
Revolutionary enhancement of baby monitors: intelligent crib with wireless
suction, motion detector and audio/visual monitoring, plus software for early
diagnostics of developmental problems.
Hardware: embedding pressure and temperature sensors in telemetric
pacifier, for monitoring and feedback of baby's reactions to stimuli.
Software: signal analysis and blind source separation; interpretation of baby’s
responses, selection of stimuli and comments for parents.
Home applications: monitoring, diagnostics, preventive actions by
enhancement of perceptual discrimination by giving rewards for solving
perceptual problems.
T e le m e tric
p a c ifie r
la -la … la -ra -ra …
W ire le s s
c om m u n ic a tio n
re c e iv e r
A /D c o n ve rte r
D a ta b a s e o f
speech sounds
C o n tro l u n it
Children love to be stimulated,
s o u n d s e q u e nand
c e s IDoCare will be the first active
S p einfluence
a ke r
environment that will allow them to
what they see and hear.
D /A c o n v e rte r
A u d io vis u a l
d e v ic e (re w a rd )
D a ta b a s e o f
re w a rd p a tte rn s
RAM
N o n -v o la tile
m em ory
Active learning may gently pressure baby’s brain to develop perceptual and
cognitive skills to their full potential achieved now by very few.
Visual top-down
• Normal perception requires top-down
influences to form expectations.
• What if PC/FC feedback connections to
visual/auditory areas are weak?
• This does not qualify as agnosia, but is a
kind of imagery agnosia, a syndrom that
has not yet been clearly identified!
How will the weak top-down connections in visual modality manifest?
Attention problems? Only if signals are very weak (ex. in poor lighting conditions)
object recognition may be impaired.
Other symptoms: poor visual imagination, memory for visual features, inability to
draw from memory, recall and describe faces and objects, notice changes, slow in
making puzzles, difficulty to see 3D magic eye pictures, perhaps more introvert?
More conceptual than perceptual thinking … recognition memory may work fine.
Individual differences in learning and thinking styles are large!
Imagery Agnosia
New branch of neuropsychology: imagery agnosias.
Classical agnosias ~30 major types: alexia, akinetopsia, alexithimia, many visual
types: prosopagnosia, simultanagnosia, semantic agnosia , form, color …
Little access to perceptual imagery in visual, auditory, tactile or gustatory mode.
Without internal feedback the only way to learn about plans formed by the brain
is to act and observe results: trying to play an instrument in this condition is like
blindsight, maneuvering blindly in the auditory space, without the ability to
imagine results of next move (hitting piano key).
• Learning to play music without imagery is difficult – how far can one go?
Which key do I have to press if I have no idea how it will sound like?
• Recognition memory is fine, but it is difficult to repeat or remember simple
melodies (memory-motor map).
• No problem to read & improvise music, higher cognition is fine.
• Conscious mental rehearsal is not possible.
• Immediate feedback may help?
From Genes to Neurons
Genes => Proteins => ion channels, synapses
=> neuron properties, networks
=> neurodynamics => abnormal behavior!
From Neurons to Behavior
=> neuron properties, networks
 neurodynamics => abnormal behavior! Autism, ADHD, epilepsy …
 Help neuroscience to ask relevant questions.
Normal-Autism
All plots for the flag word, different values of b_inc_dt parameter in the
accommodation mechanism. b_inc_dt = 0.01 & b_inc_dt = 0.005
b_inc_dt = time constant for increases in intracellular calcium which builds
up slowly as a function of activation.
http://kdobosz.wikidot.com/dyslexia-accommodation-parameters
Social intelligence Q
Ants (termites, bees) do not know much, but their
collective behavior has sense from social point of view.
M. Maeterlinck wrote about “the spirit of an anthill”.
• How can we understand ourselves, various aspects
of our brain states, how to regulate our emotions.
• How social structures influence individual cognition:
beliefs, taboos, morality, customs, culture …
Top-down causation and emergent properties.
• How can we create desired patterns of behavior,
increase motivation, from infants to neurofeedback in education.
• What is the role of imagery, how good role models serve as a
reference to define goals, increase self-reflection, choose “greater
good” instead of instant gratification.
• Why certain styles in music, art and literature become popular,
and what do they do to our brains?
Brains & Music 22-24.05.2011!
http://www.kognitywistyka.umk.pl/2011/
Exciting times
are coming!
Thank you
for synchronizing
your neurons
and lending
your ears
Google: W Duch
=> Papers, Talks, Photos, Music etc.