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Behavior and the Brain 2: Cognitive neuroscience summary
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Behavior and the Brain 2: Cognitive NeuroscienceWeek 1
Lecture 1 - Introduction
Cognitive neuroscience is a mixture of things like psychology (concepts, cognition), philosophy,
biology, chemistry, and AI
What is the relationship between thoughts/behavior and the brain?
- Stimulus → perception (seeing) → memory (recognizing) → decision making (thinking)
→ response
- These stages were impossible to investigate for quite some time in the earlier
days.
- Many modules/processes/subprocesses/mechanisms involved
Can we find one-to-one mappings between mechanisms in the brain and psychology (mental
stuff)?
The mind-body problem
- How can the body have a causal influence on the mind (and vice versa?)
- René Descartes
- The body works like a machine
- Animals have no soul
▪ Reductionism/mechanistic thinking)
▪ The soul causes thought (situated in
the pineal gland)
• Dualism
→ General consensus: the mind is what the brain does
1
,The modularity of the brain → extent to which there are specific regions that do specific stuff
- Phrenology says modular!
- Chomsky (language)
- and Fodor (modularity of the mind)
- modules are domain-specific
- their operation is mandatory
- they are informationally encapsulated (=other information that I have about
something cannot change it)
- Examples are language, vision, maps, pathways, etc.
- An interesting question is not where modules are, but what they do and how they map
onto mind and behavior
What is an explanation of a function or a phenomenon → Memory, visual perception,
consciousness, attention, emotion?
Explanation of a function or (mental) phenomenon
- Box-arrow cognition models (functional)
- Apply some sort of functional analysis, often use mental terms in the boxes
- Box models are often underdetermined (multiple different box models can
explain the observed phenomenon)
- Reductionist explanation
- Identity statements between higher and lower
levels
- To go from one level to another → bridge laws
2
, - Mechanistic explanation
- A mechanism for a phenomenon consists of entities and activities organized so
that they are responsible for a phenomenon
- The whole is more important than the sum of its parts (non-reductive)
- The whole is the same as the sum of its parts (reductive)
- Explain a phenomenon (memory) through its
parts/mechanist (LTP, hippocampus, etc.)
- Spooky emergency → we put things together, and it
emerges but we don’t know why
What level of description matters?
- Phenomena may not have a ‘fundamental’ level of explanation, but require a multilevel
understanding
- Some levels can be so far removed from the phenomenon that it is hard to see how they
are related
How to identify different mechanisms?
- Etiological causal relevance
- Does not identify a mechanism
- Establishing constitutive relevance
- Mutual manipulability
- You are able to manipulate using bottom-up experiments and manipulate using
the phenomenon as a whole
What is the phenomenon under investigation?
- Do the (mental) phenomena we want to explain map onto brain mechanisms?
- Phenomena such as motion, detection, working memory, change blindness, and pitch
perception may not fit onto the mechanistic process structure of the brain
3
, Two types of errors
- Lumping errors involve assuming that several distinct phenomena are actually one
- “Memory” may not be one thing
- “Attention” may not be one thing
- Splitting errors is about treating singular phenomena as distinct
- “Attention” may share the same mechanism with “working memory” etc.
Lecture 2 – History of Cognitive Neuroscience
Egypt
The Edwin Smith papyrus
- Ancient Egyptian medical text, a piece of writing on trauma ca. 1500 BC
- Rational text! → The first known anatomical descriptions of the brain
- The word ‘brain’ appears for the first time in any language → people were already
thinking about the brain and what it meant
Ancient Greeks
- Thales of Miletus's (550 BC) theory of psuchẽ (mind and soul), present in magnets
- The first to try to explain natural phenomena through theories and hypotheses without
reference to mythology
- The first to use deductive reasoning (applied to geometry)
- Plato: Theory of Forms, no direct access to reality
- He thought that ideal forms existed in some realms and that the things we
experience like trees or triangles are just diffused forms of those perfect things
in other realms → we are experiencing a watered-down/diffused version of a
perfect (other) reality.
- Pythagoras: coined the term philosopher → first distinction between mind and soul
- Metempsychosis: the immortal soul survives the body
- First conceptualization of dualism
- Aristotle wrote “Para Psyche” about motivation:
- Urges, desires, impulses (libido)
4
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