 Let me start every talk of this kind as to server the picture of Descartes. I actually was looking at my slides this morning I thought why did I put Descartes in there? I can't exactly remember but anyhow every talk starts with Descartes because philosophers will tell you that the account of the mind the general assumptions about how we study the mind in 2018 derived from Descartes Important views and I think that's true and the one that's relevant for us is what philosophers I typically call internalism and internalism means various things But what it means for us in this class is the view that if you want to understand thought You want to understand the mind if you want to understand cognition? Everything that's relevant is internal to that mind Okay, everything that you have to appeal to everything that's causally relevant is going to be found in the mind itself in the skull and The basic idea I'm going to try to talk about today is the idea that that's not true right that view is not adequate in order to really understand mental life and in order to understand The functioning of the brain and ultimately the function of the of the brain in social contexts We need to think about things That lie outside outside the skull, okay now The idea that we need to look outside the skull is by no means a new one Even in modern history There are lots of figures both both in philosophy and in psychology who have Advocated for one reason or another the idea that we need to look outside The mind in particular in order to explain how the mind works so Sorry or the brain for that matter, sorry, I should have said The modern version of internalism of course is that everything of interest is going to be explained in terms of the brain And we're going to we're going to get to this in due course One of the most interesting figures of figures become a bit of a rock star In contemporary cognitive sciences is a philosopher called Maurice Merleau-Ponty very Really interesting very very unusual Thinker who I can recommend you wrote a great classic called the phenomenology of perception which is one of those you know I once heard very famous philosopher Derek Parfit talk about What makes a great book in philosophy and he says, you know, there's there's two kinds of great books There's the the book that you read and you get to the end of it And you don't have a clue what it was all about, right? Then there's the other kind which is you read it and you get to the end of it You don't have a clue what it was all about, but you get a tingle so if you read the phenomenology of perception falls into that latter core category and Merleau-Ponty was actually quite interested in neuroscience. What was neuroscience of the day? He was interested in He wrote quite a bit about lesion patients Particularly soldiers coming back from the first world war who exhibited these remarkable behaviors that no one had thought about systematically Anyhow Merleau-Ponty the phenomenology of perception makes a great point about the idea that when we perceive things We perceive things in a three-dimensional space and in order to fully perceive them as we understand perception We have to move around in that space. So at the very least there's something about the fact that we are Physical entities that move in a space that seems to be intrinsic to perception So that idea the idea that there's something outside the perceiving being in this case space That's relevant for a complete theory of perception Something that he talks great deal about and provides a kind of paradigm example of something like what you might call context So, uh, this is a first pass at a Not a definition philosophers never give definitions Because they're always wrong by definition So here's my kind of first pass at what context might be in the cognitive neuroscientists Neurosciences so context is is any anything right an object a property process anything that lies outside Scala lies outside the brain. Let's say that somehow causally or From the point of view of explanation relevant understanding mental function And i'm going to come back to this notion of causal or explanatory What I mean roughly is this so there are lots of things that lie outside Our skulls that are relevant to what's happening inside our skulls right now something going on inside your skull is Being caused by the sounds that i'm making Excuse me Whether the sounds that i'm making and the words that i'm saying and the meaning of those words is somehow essential to understanding Brain function or your brain function is obviously not very plausible, right if you'd never heard what I said just now Any account of the brain that was adequate would be adequate to understanding your brain But there are certainly going to be things categories of things that have causal interactions that cause states Of our brains that are going to be going to be relevant to understanding brain function But I think in a way more interesting is the explanation component here So what I really think is interesting to the notion of context is that they're going to be phenomena That have to be understood right that are part of an explanation Of brain function in a in a broad sense of brain functions that idea. We'll we'll get to Anyhow the the gist of it's pretty clear right if you need to appeal to something outside the brain In some way that is important to understanding brain function or maybe cognitive function Then that's part of the context it's context because it's not the brain. That's really all it amounts to But as I suggested at the beginning, I think we have to say an awful lot about Exactly how this is going to work. Okay now one of the more systematic studies of context these days is what's now being called for e cognition And that's just the name that has been given by people working in the field to a whole Range of approaches to understanding cognitive function, especially cognition not so much Neuro function cognition especially Excuse me For thinking about context, I don't want to say I don't think it's true that all there is to context is what The four e's referred to and I'll get to that in a second And I don't think the people who are advocating for e cognition say that either but If you're interested in In context broadly speaking, this is a kind of a coherence systematic attempt to take account of Of context and if that book Is is just about to come out. I think it's coming out in a couple of months and If you have a lazy hundred and sixty five dollars lying around You can buy it. I think that's like Four thousand for canadiens. Okay, so um So four e stands for four categories of phenomena. All that's all would start with e That are supposed to point to categories of As I said entities properties processes that are somehow intrinsic to our understanding of cognition In different senses And these are pretty rough and ready. Okay, so as you might expect picking four e's doesn't necessarily Mesh with you know an attempt to be rigorous at categorizing things This is a bit of a slogan and what we'll do when we turn to real examples is try to say something more precise So cognition is said to be embodied Okay, so here's a little, you know toy example of an embodied cognition when you count on your fingers We are As cartesians and clients to say well, you know, if you didn't have your fingers, you you know You'd be able to count but it's not so clear that that's true Kids really do seem to need their fingers when they're learning how to count and There's some evidence that when you use your body in that way you really are Adding something right your fingers are acting as a tool for for your mind And even though you might not need that tool nonetheless when it's acting as a tool it really is in some sense a kind of scaffolding or You know some sort of support for cognition and therefore deserves in some sense to be identified with the Components of the cognitive process. So look the general idea is if our bodies weren't the way they were Then our cognition wouldn't be the way it is and we certainly make use of our bodily states to to think Second e is embedded and so now we're moving out from the From the environment that our brain lives in namely the body to the larger environment and Uh As you can imagine larger environment incorporates all sorts of things. So here's another little toy example If you're a chef, you know when you learned how to cook Your mother your father told you that the way to do this is to do the mise en place, right? So If you try to remember all the ingredients That go into the dish. That's tough. That's a tough memory problem, right? So the easy thing to do and the organized thing to do is to take all your ingredients and measure them out And then organize them spatially in the order you're going to use them, right? And what that does for you Apart from organizing the kitchen is it it takes a tough memory task remembering a list of things and converts it into an easy task because It's a perceptual task now, right? So if you want to know, sorry, I'm not supposed to step over the line If you want to know what to start with first you start with flour And then you go to the milk because that's the milk is there, right? So So what you're doing here again is you're using in this case the spatial properties of the environment around you to As philosophers and psychologists sometimes say to offload a cognitive problem So you take a tough problem which is in your head namely the problem of remembering a list of ingredients and you as it were Right put it in the environment by organizing your environment spatially Okay This is a sort of a nice example if you actually go and do this you'll have the sensation, right? Which represents the situation of suddenly having this tough problem be easier, right? You'll actually feel that you're not straining in the same way you were So it's quite plausible if it's actually less demanding on your mind It's quite plausible that the environment really is in some sense to be articulated, right participating in your cognition Okay, third E is inactive inactive is a big fuzzy notion I'm gonna I'm gonna Characterize inactive as somehow involving Interaction and dependency Okay, so think of somebody at a cocktail party Having a conversation There's a sense in which that person could Speak the words that she's speaking in the order she's speaking them and over the time period she's speaking them But it doesn't really make sense to look at one side of a conversation, right? And indeed producing that side of the conversation in some sense Depends in a fairly subtle way on being attentive to what the other person is saying, right? So conversation as people sometimes point out is kind of improvisatory You're engaged in A back and forth and what you do depends on what the other person just did And if you're not attentive and sensitive to what they just did then what you're doing doesn't make much sense So the thought is somehow that certain kinds of cognition Really depend essentially on other things happening in the environment I mean in this case, it's another person doing things, but it need not be such a thing Okay, so there's some notion of dependency again, that would have to be articulated fairly specifically There's some notion maybe of time That's gonna play a role frequently There's probably a range of things But in any case the idea here of an activity is the idea of a responsiveness of the Mind or brain to features of the environment that somehow Requires reference to that environment to make sense of what's going on Okay I don't say that that's perfectly clear what I just said When we get to some examples, maybe it'll be clear I think in general by the way I'm not too fussed about Precise definitions because I you know, I think there's a lot of work to be done first What I'm going to hope is that when you see a case of inactivity, you know like pornography, you know You won't be able to define it, but you'll you'll know it when you see it Okay All right, the fourth e Is extension and extension actually falls into two categories one of which is In a way in a kind of funny way one of which is both really I think kind of Core to what a scientist should be thinking about And the other which is very close and yet is very far away from what any scientist is going to care about and it's much more of a philosopher's Philosopher's adventure But anyway, they're both very interesting. So let's start with extended cognition and this refers to I think one of the papers I suggested you read the paper by ed hutchins who's an anthropologist Uh hutchins actually very Interested in travel in the modes of travel And so he actually does this remarkable ethnography of things like like landing a plane or He has a book an entire book written about piloting a navy ship This is very interesting stuff. And so if you read the paper What you discovered is that according to hutchins the following thing is true The standard account of how the mind works in 2018 is what's called computationalism, right? Is that familiar to everybody? So it's it's the computer model of the mind. It says in effect that thinking is having symbols that get Manipulated by various operations just like a computer Now whether you agree that or not take that as given which to say take it as the standard account of the mind right now What hutchins says is there there are certain kinds of behaviors Say like landing an airplane such that if you write down In computational terms what has to be accomplished for the behavior to be successfully executed In other words, here you are the plane's flying up here and there's some behavior or rather Right some series of computations that has to happen for the plane to be down there without crashing If you write down those computational steps and you ask Where those steps are carried out the answer is in the cockpit as a whole and not inside the skull of any one Of the pilots and not inside exclusively the space of any one tool or any one bit of technology Okay, so if you ask Who's carrying out the computation or what system is carrying out the computation that we call in ordinary behavioral terms landing an airplane The answer is the cockpit everything inside the cockpit So the thought then is Cognition the thinking the reasoning actually In this case, right doesn't only Isn't only restricted to one brain or one skull It's not even restricted to two skulls the pilot and the co-pilot It actually spills out That's actually a misleading metaphor, but kind of kind of memorable is it spills outside the skull of both pilots to include the tools and the the The other parts of the technology in the in the cockpit Okay, so the thinking as it were is happening In the cockpit as a whole that's the idea What's nice about this if you haven't read that paper. I think of all the papers I gave you That's the one I would I would most recommend. It's a really interesting paper I think it's been quite influential and what's so nice about it is that You don't have to make any fancy philosophical assumptions brought theoretical assumptions other than your commitment to computationalism. It's not very controversial Once you accept that it's a it's you know, it's a very Uncontroversial view about What's happening that leads to this remarkable conclusion that somehow thinking is this disembodied process Let me just pause here for a sec. I don't want to go too fast, right as I said is I don't I'm not invested in finishing So are we okay? Yeah Now a few yeah Good So let me say one thing about this. I think the categories are fuzzy and overlap No question about that. So let's ask what's the difference between the inactive part and the extended part One thing you might say here About this this inactivity You might if you're in a kind of conservative frame of mind you might say well look Let's not get overexcited here, right? I mean There's two people and they each have a mind in virtue of each having a brain Let's say and while it's true that what one is doing is somehow responsive to or dependent on what the other is doing So there is there is something interesting happening Everything of interest is still happening inside the skulls of these two people, right? There's no you wouldn't want to say oh, there's a single You might say it, but you don't have to say there's a single cognitive process happening here That somehow supervenes on right is encompasses the two individuals as two components of a single system The idea about extension is that that is what you want to say that there's a sense in which the thinking Uh, the thinking is happening 10,000 feet above any individual what you might call a thinker What we traditionally call a thinker to encompass People objects processes and so on outside the skull Just two quick foot notes. So first of all Most people don't make hard distinction between these two individuals that would never represent progressive elaborations at the same frame So you don't feel like, you know, it has to be this or it has to be that. This is crushing out a more complete picture The other thing though is that I think we're starting in activism from the point of your initial question or the terminal Because in many conversations where an activism field emphasizes cognition without action So it's not so much that I think the act of it is the idea that what you're actually trying to do is not develop a representation of your computation You're trying to intervene in the world. So the fundamental conversation is not, you know, Whether I think about things is what do I say to you now and that's the computational problems That already shifts the whole discussion a little bit It does and I think I think it's absolutely a fair point. I focused on the dynamical part because typically so the Merleau-Ponty is a classical inactivist, right? You see things you act on the world so on One of the I was emphasizing one piece of that Which is this idea that You see something and you say so you have a target, right? And how do you learn how far away something is, right? Suppose you're a baby, right? And you you have some sort of distance perception But how do you start to calibrate how far something is when it looks that way? Well, one obvious way to do it is to walk toward it and see how long it takes you So the kind of or inactivist process as you say, right? Is action where the action gives you feedback That somehow leads to further cognition. So I'm sort of emphasizing that dynamic The dynamic feature of Of behavior according to which you're having a conversation with the environment So I am trying maybe maybe I'm trying to shove these things into make it a bit more unified than it is But anyways, that's absolutely right. So I think this notion of action Is certainly part of it if you look at say the work of somebody like Alvin Noe Who is a very important contemporary figure In in this tradition who works on perception and other things even he even claims that consciousness Involves action in a certain kind of way. So Anyhow, I find that a little bit less plausible But certainly in certain kinds of perceptual tasks Action certainly seems to be part of it. And of course, uh, the other thing that's important And what Lauren said is there's also a kind of behind this idea. There's a kind of you know foe or rough evolutionary idea according to which Thinking is only useful in the grand scheme of things if it leads to More adaptive behavior, right? So according to according to the framework for all of biology, namely evolutionary theory, You know thinking for its own sake is of no value If if you think but that doesn't change your behavior then Evolution gets no purchase on that thinking. So in in in that sense, of course Cognition has to be related to action in some way or other For us to make sense of it biologically Okay, great. So, uh That's extended cognition Now in turn very briefly because this is less important for us, but it's really fun So, uh, it would be I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this case So a very famous paper 998 written by uh, andy clark and david chalmers two very influential philosophers of mind Um, they take this idea of extended cognition and they extend it further And I'll just give you the very famous example, which will give you the flavor of this idea very quickly So, uh, they they have a little thought experiment Uh, and the thought experiment goes like this. Uh, inga is walking In manhattan and she sees a sign that says, uh, there's um, I can never remember who the artist is But anyhow, there's an exhibit on at the museum of modern art And inga is very interested in, uh, this painter and so knowing Where she is and knowing that the museum of modern art is on 53rd street and the 53rd street is that way She turns that way and she heads toward 53rd street Okay, now auto is also walking through manhattan and he sees the same advertisement and he thinks yes I'm interested in that painter And so he also wants to go to that exhibit But auto is, uh, suffering from dementia and he can't remember things And as a result, he started to keep a notebook Hence my notebook picture, right? There's my there's my visual. He keeps a notebook where he writes down Things that he are important to him that he can't remember like the moma is on 53rd street And so knowing that he's where he is and the 53rd street is there He turns and walks toward 53rd street. Now. Here's the claim The function of auto's notebook In his mental economy is identical to the function of inga's memory, which is in her brain Throw in a few basic assumptions that are uncontroversial Clark and charmer say and what you get is That auto's notebook when it functions in the way it just did is actually part of auto's mind In just the way as we want to say that inga's memory long-term memory is part of her mind and it's irrelevant that the memory Is located in a bit of neural tissue inside a brain Or that it's located on a piece of paper in a notebook outside the brain as long as the function is the same As I say with certain philosophical assumptions you get uh You get the claim that that thing under certain circumstances is part of the mind and so it's not just thinking That leaks out outside your skull in the way that hutchins advocates The mind itself Is not located Inside your skull according to these these folks Okay, so even though your brain is inside your skull your mind is not or at least not always So that's the extended mind and as I say I think this kind of case should be taken very seriously by scientists This is not a scientific Claim but it's a lot of fun And so you can you can give that some thought if you want okay Now so that's Those are some examples intuitive examples of what you might think of as context in the sense that I characterized it There states processes entities that lie outside the skull that are in one way or another that I've mostly just hand-waved at essential to understanding mental function and so part of the context of mental function now just an observation To get to the start to move toward our topic. Some of this context isn't social, right? Hand or or this stuff or a notebook and some of it is social namely other people And some of it is both right so if you're landing a plane if you're the pilot then some of the context of what you're doing is the other pilot co-pilot and some of it is the Is the other stuff in the cockpit all of it is is essential to Make sense of what it is that you're doing Okay, so somehow or other we're we're you know, we're headed for this notion of social context But that's only really one category just happens to be a very important one for human beings Because human beings are are social animals Okay, any questions about that that's the end of that bit So let me turn to a couple of examples of things that are seem to me examples of social context in real science rather than in the sort of Hand-wavy examples. I just gave you this is it's sort of a I'm sorry. It's a very busy figure But I'll I'll give you the yeah I just I do have a question about the social and the non-social so by non-social you're meaning that are not The norm involved the context doesn't involve any interaction with other people Well, what I mean is we'll see in a second that interaction isn't necessary what I mean is that the part of the context right the part of the thing that's somehow relevant to understanding mental life Is social if that part is a person I suppose it could be an animal too, but for simplicity a person And it's not social if it's not But as we'll see in a second you don't have to be interacting with that person for that for another person to be part of your cognitive context Yeah, sure. I I think um, I'm not fussed about that. I don't have any views about that. Um I don't think so far. I can't see that it matters if you want to count You know if if um, you know in some Helen Fisher, you know as the anthropologist who does these very interesting brain-imaging studies of Of of new love of passionate love. Do you know her? She's a bit of a Celebrity, um, and she describes these experiments, you know where she asks people to come in with an object So they're all there. These are all for those of you don't know this. She's a anthropologist I think she's a Rutgers and she she's interested in what's going on in your brain when you fall in love or when you get dumped and um, she's interested in the distinction between that first phase of love and the sort of You know that first few months and then the everything that comes after right, which you know, okay, so um So, uh, so she does these experiments where she asks people have just fallen up to bring in, you know, I don't know what You know something that is associated with their beloved and and and they bring them in and she describes they bring them in like, you know, like religious icons and indeed Those objects evoke in in brain states something like what you might expect a person to evoke. So if you want to count that as social That's okay by me. Um, I actually interestingly, uh Again, I haven't worked this out fully. I don't think it matters. I mean You know, I I mean the lauren suggested this topic social context and social neuroscience So that's what i'm talking about, but I think it's context, which is really the you know So the social part of course is very important as I say because human beings are social animals and I do of course I agree that Two things that social context is bound to be more important in general And of course if you're interested in social neuroscience, which is what this class is about Then it's bound to be the social world. That's the predominant part of the context, but to me Uh, thinking about the nature of mental function and neural function. It's the idea of context, which I think is the The kind of radical one. So I'm not I don't mind too much. I think uh, at least that's my position now I I'm totally happy to be persuaded otherwise. You know, so that's that's very helpful. Um, uh, I suppose I mean it certainly does explain right why we hang on to objects In certain ways why objects have significance for us and so on, you know It it presumably may even explain Particular phenomena of interest. I don't know fetishes or something and may may explain actual Uh behaviors in a way that we couldn't explain any other way. Yeah, good. Okay Uh, thank you for that Um, okay, so let's talk a little bit about social context So I don't worry too much about this illustration. It's from a uh, a study That's actually a bit controversial I gather, but um, it's a study I admire enormously Um, uh, and it's a study in the theory of mind Which as you know is uh, the capacity that human beings have to think about other people's mental states and, uh One of the interesting questions and here actually this this touches on me that I myself I'm interested in for what it's worth doesn't have anything really but Uh, there's a bit of a debate about whether when you think about other people's mental states You have to kind of do this very deliberately and consciously, right? So if you ask, you know, if you point if laurence pointed to someone to point to the conny and said what's conny right now? What's she thinking? You know, I might have to I know conny a little bit and I might have to work at and so on but Number of people I suppose including me think that they're even though we do do that There's also this other capacity for theory of mind Which probably happens very fast and automatically and effortlessly and unconsciously Because right now, uh, you know I have to keep track to a little A little extent of what you guys are thinking and feeling right if I start to see that you're getting bored Or that you're looking puzzled, you know, I have to I have to respond to that as a lecturer But of course if I pay a lot There's a lot of people in the room if I start paying attention to what everyone's looking like I'm not going to be able to think about what is i'm trying to say So in in ordinary social interactions We probably do keep tabs on what other people are thinking and feeling maybe not very precisely But we do it kind of off to the side Anyhow this study shows that something like that probably is right and the study is incredibly elegant It's very very simple a participant is shown a bunch of cartoons And uh in the cartoon you see a ball rolling behind a wall, right? So there's a little video Sequence of pictures and the ball rolls behind a wall and sometimes you can see the ball and sometimes you can't see the ball And your task as a participant in this experiment is just to press a button when you see the ball So it's a straight Perceptual task incredibly simple perceptual task Now the interesting thing is as you see Here, I'll use the high tech thing there. There's a little man, you know in many of these pictures Okay, who's also watching the ball from a different perspective because he's off to the side The little man is never mentioned. You're not interacting with the little man You're never asked anything about the little man. You're not supposed to say anything about what you think is going on with him What the experiment shows though Apparently is that the reaction time of the person doing this as a participant is dependent on what the little man sees Okay, so in a context when the little man sees the ball Right, it's easier. It's you are faster to say I see the ball And when the little man doesn't see the ball, it's you're slower when you see the ball Now what this seems to show incidentally according to the study Infants do the same thing. They show the same behavior So what the study seems to show is Even when you're not explicitly paying attention to another person in your environment And when nothing about that person matters to the behavior you're exhibiting It's as if the presence of that person initiates a process that we call theory of mind Where you start to keep track of what they're thinking or at least in this case Something like what's going on from their perspective And if this turns out to be right then what that shows is that in order to understand the cognition of the participant You have to be aware of the fact that there's another person in their environment This is changing your attention on this position Sure, so that may be right. I suppose I don't remember all the controls they did so I can't say for sure, but yeah, you'd have to look at Look at controlling for this in other ways. So You could presumably So if you imagine for example, it's something about attention You can imagine manipulating the attention of the participant without there being human beings precisely to get at that sort of issue So you may be right So There may be more conservative interpretations of this And What's interesting about that is this may be a case where in the end Maybe it isn't social context. Maybe it isn't the presence of a person Maybe you could Get the same effect by indicating something important in some other way, right? Yeah, but again the An activist account I'm thinking of down below in the way we construct a more minimalist account of this It's not to say that it isn't important that it's a person It's to say that what's important about the person is that the way in which we are either wired or learned early on That where a person is attending Should guide or does guide it, you know, no one should it's not to say that guides are But that's see that's sorry misunderstood then that's not going to work in this case Because according to the data The pattern of response depends on what is in the mind of that person So it's not just that they're looking, but it's whether from their perspective You can't see this. There's a three-dimensional arrangement here whether from their perspective They can see the ball that you're also attending to So you have to know you have to calculate a computer whatever that right now Even though that person's in the same position something is going on perceptually with them So the mere presence and attention is not enough here No, it's what they see It's what they actually see. Yeah, thank you that so I'm sorry that wasn't clear that actually makes all the difference Yeah Again, I can't remember all the controls the Uh It's only the sort of crucial result, which is the what the whether the The cartoon figure sees the ball or doesn't see the ball that seems to be the the crucial factor Yeah, so look there could be various things who aren't yours. I think this is quite interesting and important So if it turned out right That you do another experiment you do control and you get some interesting effect merely by the fact that the person's there Then you might say, okay, so that's another kind of context, right? The presence of a person does something or maybe has laurence is suggesting the presence of a person who seems to be paying attention Right, you know, and that of course kids do that from very very early on. They look where their mother's looking Um, or is it something more elaborate? So there could be various things here. I I choose this just because I happen to like I like this experiment very much And as I said particularly like I like the fact that It it works it works for our topic very nicely. I think assuming the results are right because it shows that you don't have to be interacting, right? It's uh, it's this is not a case where a person is like Is like the the tools in the cockpit where you're using that person, right? It's this is not like an old couple that know Know what the other person knows and and depend on the other person for all sorts of things If this is not a basketball I have a had a wonderful phd student who was a big fan of basketball and she she had this idea for a while of looking at the cognition of the team in the way that hutchins Looks at the cognition of two pilots of the behavior being getting the ball from one end of the court to the other In a way that seems to be more or less Automatic and dynamic and fluid and so on even though nobody knows what the other person is thinking explicitly. Anyhow, so they're um What's nice is that this is the mere presence of the person Initiates what looks like a certain kind of cognition So isn't that a form of interaction unspoken interaction since you both are sharing a touch Yeah, it's look it's possible. I suppose that uh That even though it's not part of the instructions in the experiment But that may be some sort of assumption that p that participants are making it is possible Um, so, you know, I don't know. I don't say that this the interpretation the author's offer is the absolutely right one um, and uh But even so right seems to me that The very fact that the presence initiates some assumption about a joint activity. I think is is interesting Yes, Samuel Briefly assist you with another example because some people in the room may or may not know that in the inactivist scam There are people who are Stunchly interested in denying that there are such things as mental states and that we assume is to each other's mental states And they want to say that it's only a culture about a western thing But michael tomasello uses an example to illustrate the same thing and he says imagine A 15-month-old or a two-year-old who watches someone that they don't know drop their wallet They pick up the wallet and they give it to them So this doesn't just show that you know intrinsic altruistic behavior But the child understands that the person walking has a false belief to the extent that they believe they have a wallet You know in their pocket the wallet falls and they gives it back to them Now how do you explain this scenario without the notion of mental state and mentalizing? I'm not sure right Right interesting Yeah, well, yeah. No, that's very interesting. Okay. Good. Thank you. Um, okay other other questions I'll make it again. I'll just just more for pedagogical purposes. So I refer to yeah, we told him that We care of minds in a series of books Is what we call radical and activist cognitive science So the attempt is to describe these complex behaviors not as Driven by mental representations and plans and theories But as a sequence of contingencies, you know the kind of interactions you're talking about they're action oriented They're arguing this is what we learned. We learned how to tell stories, for example And I think that it actually makes very good sense on Where is this more elaborate capacity I think is very off-scarrow version of these theories is not an active spiritual people's adults Lots of resources and lots of theories and lots of models and we're using these things But if you say how does this process get jump-studied with a very non-preverable child I think the very minimalist account they try to deal with how you can learn a series of actions That are essentially context-dependent and modeled by the people around you And they don't involve about what's going on. It's actually more possible to improve Right I think that's right good Okay Maybe for reasons of time Oh, no, I'll mention. Does everyone know this famous experiment the Good Samaritan experiment experiment? Who doesn't know about it? Okay, so you're in a minority, so I'll It's interesting. Okay. Well, I'm just yeah. All right. So this is another very famous example of social context So And this is often this experiment is often used as a kind of paradigm of what Social psychology has been doing for for many decades. So this is an experiment Done at the Princeton Theological Seminary and the participants were all seminarians And the seminarians Are brought into a room and they're told that as part of their training they're going to have A short period to prepare a little sermon And then they're going to give the sermon in front of another group of Another group of advisors and the theme of their sermon is the Good Samaritan. Okay And so the seminarians are given half an hour and they have to give this sermon And then of course, they're divided up into two groups and one group is told We have to go down that to the other building in order to for you to meet the committee where you're going to give the sermon And gosh, we're really late and we really better get on it and they're rushed and the other group isn't rushed And here's what happens when you You take the rushed group and you walk them down the other building they encounter Collaborators of the experiment of the experimenter well one in particular who's lying clearly injured On the on the side of the path between the the building where the seminarians are in and the building where they're due to give their sermon and Bear in mind right they're thinking about the Good Samaritan That's what they're thinking about right now And they encounter someone who's in need of help and when they're rushed they actually literally step over one of You know they step over this person on the way to on the way to give their sermon and the the seminarians who are not rushed Of course stop and help the person who's in need of help and the the the finding here is supposed to be this When you're under pressure You are likely not to pay attention to things that you would pay attention to otherwise now More broadly of course what this means is when the environment is configured in such a way namely other people You know are expecting you and there are certain kind of social norms about how you ought to behave and particularly when you're a student And they're the professors and so on Your behavior is going to be directed in one way and when you're not you're not And this is an example broadly speaking what social social psychology has been showing In one experiment after another for decades In the sense that we normally think has good internalists right that all of the Explanatory resources We need to to to articulate an answer to the question. Why did Lawrence do what he did are in Lawrence's head in particular Lawrence's personality His his virtues his vices and so on at least that's in western culture But that in fact a lot more of the explanation of why Lawrence said what he did really lies in the in the context right in in In the social and in fact other features of the environment that are Demanding certain kinds of action on his on his part. Okay, so it's a lovely experiment. It's an old experiment now and I recommend it by the way, this this um, sorry, it's like this this uh, this idea this so-called mistake of it of Identifying features of things inside your mind, especially your personality as explanations of your behavior That's usually called the fundamental attributional error, right? So we we attribute the motivations to you rather than to the environment. Yeah, go ahead Can I ask a question about Maybe naive ideas about the true self because it seems to me that many people would be like to say, you know Humans are very altruistic and given an ideal set of condition The true nature comes out and they will help when the conditions are not right then then they won't help But could we also just say that there is no true self outside of what the context affords or even demands That's all there is that's I think that's probably well, it may be true I think that would be too strong claim to make on the basis of just this kind of experiment though. There is um There is the view. Uh, it's actually a very famous play written by my phd supervisor Gilbert Harman Who who argues that what social psychology shows is that there there's nothing like personality traits? I mean, so he he actually Takes the most radical interpretation and as a result he argues that since there are no personality traits and virtues So-called virtues as philosophers conceive of them our personality traits then virtue theory as applies to ethics makes no sense So he thinks that a certain kind of ethical Characterization of human behavior is incoherent because what social psychology shows is that That nature that part of ourself namely or that way of characterizing ourselves namely in terms of you know Courageous shy or whatever that those those features don't exist. They're all indentures We've been several times already in the last day and a half arriving at this point and Yeah Right, right Yeah, yeah, no, I think uh I I don't as I don't have an official view about about this What's so nice about this really is just you know Even if you get the thin edge of the wedge in clearly, uh in western culture anyhow thinking about behavior explaining behavior As much you know the way we do it as much too constrained Okay, so uh, that's the end of of social context Let me now narrow this a little bit or refocus it to talk about context in neuroscience And here's where in a way it gets more interesting because I think the stuff. I've just been talking about it's not all that controversial um, uh, it's really I reviewed it by way of Uh, you know pedagogy. Um, where I think it gets more interesting is whether any of this applies to understanding brains Okay So brains after all unlike minds are physical objects And you might think that it's one of the virtues of neuroscience that it is the study organized around understanding How a particular object works and that's makes it in a certain way easier maybe than thinking about how the mind works But I think uh to the extent there's a take-home message of this lecture It's that in order to understand how brains work you need to appeal to context every bit as much That's why this lecture is called the situated brain. Um, so let me take a uh an example as a way of motivating this from visual neuroscience so, um Everybody here probably well I'm sure you know roughly that neurons many neurons. Let's take visual neurons, right? So nobody knew how neurons worked until roughly Hubel and weasel does everyone know who hubel and weasel were? Yeah, okay. No, okay, so uh, David Hubel and torsten weasel were physiologists working in the 60s who Were students or postdocs of somebody who was one of the early People actually taking electrophysiological measurements of neural activity And so you'd put an electrode next to a neuron or in a neuron and you'd see you track its electrical behavior But uh, it would sort of you know, so you when you when you do this in a lab you sort of hear a little sound, right? You you uh, you magnify the sound you hear a little you turn the electrical thing into sound and you hear You know you hear a little thing Um, and so the these neurons would would be active But the great mystery was what made them active, right? What made this neuron suddenly leap into action and fire in action potential Nobody knew um, and then in a very famous bit of scientific serendipity Uh Hubel and weasel were were so they they had a cat and an anesthetized cat That was had its head on a little A little metal plate and and they had an electrode in its head And they had a screen where they were projecting images in an effort to and actually I heard hubel talk about this hubel By the way, did his md at mcgill. He's one of mcgill's great. He's an ontarian who did his md in mcgill Um, he was hubel tells the story, but you know, we were Taking a magazine and moving it back and forth We were trying to figure out what it is that this neuron was interested in and then he he took a slide in the old days You know, there were glass slides that you would stick in the projector that had something on it And they noticed that the slide made this particular neuron suddenly fire And they they looked at what was on the slide tried another time They couldn't do it and eventually they figured out that it wasn't what was on the slide But it was the the edge of the slide moving across into the projector that was generating this Spontaneous activity on the spontaneous responsive activity to the to the neuron And so I'm going to have to step across. Sorry. I hope this is okay What they discovered is that I'll do it here. What they discovered is that Different neurons In the sense were most responsive to bars moving At a particular angle in a particular direction, right? So Here's a neuron that likes a bar at 45 degrees moving in that direction um, and That was how in a certain way modern visual neurophysiology was Was started because it it uh, it revealed that neurons are highly specific That what neurons respond to can be A very very very narrow set of stimuli. Here's a neuron, right? That is not even interested in moving bars, right? It's only interested in a bar at this angle moving in that direction And so there began right from the 60s a kind of enormous explosion In visual neurophysiology much of which maybe most of which is devoted to Putting an electron next to a neuron and trying to figure out what that neuron likes And it turns out that likes all sorts of things there. You probably know right there are studies now that At least one study that claims to have shown that found a neuron that likes. Uh, what's your name? What's your name? Sorry Was it no it was um, anyways somebody like jennifer aniston, right? So in the single neuron that only responded To jennifer aniston and lots of jennifer aniston, right jennifer aniston front on and so on So not just that face, but that person, right? This is any human being This is a finding from some years ago. Um, so okay, and this is still an ongoing business So this is an example. So here's a famous of a neuron of huble and weasel This is a a neuron a neuron interested in color Um something I worked on for many years So this is a neuron that this is not what the neuron looks like This is a representation of the part of space and the stimulus So if the neuron is looking here at this part of space if it shines if you shine a green light here It reacts in uh, it likes it. Where is it? You shine a green light here likes it a little bit You shine a red light in the middle likes it a lot And so it looks like here's a neuron that is interested in some sort of contrast red green contrast And indeed these are neurons that are supposed to have generated a certain, uh, visual structure Anyway, it's a long story. The gist of it is there's very precise responses on the part of neurons now, okay What uh, the neuron likes Right is known as its receptive field very roughly speaking So the receptive field it's actually more than what it likes. So in this case the receptive field is that part of space That the neuron is attending to And a particular stimulus in that part of space that is the if you say Uh, what that is then you are saying You are describing the receptive field of that neuron. So this is a neuron that has a so-called center surround Structure it likes one thing in the middle. It likes a different thing on the on the on the outside and so on That is the fundamental concept of all of perceptual Neuroscience. It's a big deal the receptive field Now here's a really interesting thing Yeah, well, let me I'll get to this in a minute. Uh, if there's time here's oh wow Okay, I always say that I have no investment in finishing and then I discover that I'm lying that I do want to finish I do want to get to okay Uh, here's the interesting thing Notice how I described the receptive field I said it's that part of space that the that the neuron is responding to And a particular kind of stimulus in that part of space. Yeah, in other words, I'm describing The functional properties of this neuron. I'm saying the most important thing But what this neuron does by making reference to the environment, right? There's no other way to do it You can you can classify neurons anatomically right there neurons with different shapes and different, uh Different structures and you can classify them in terms of their neurotransmitters and in terms of their ion channels There are lots of uh physiological methods for for lumping neurons together But if you want to know at least what a perceptual neuron is doing there is no other way at the moment Then to talk about its response to the external world Okay, so that's an example of what you might think of as a kind of I mean I I think of it as an activity even though um actions not particularly Immediately implicated because there's a kind of interaction between the world and the environment The between the brain the environment the the characterization of the neuron depends on our understanding of what's in the environment now notice, right? I said I said before that context involves causal or explanatory Features and I think here you have both, right? So if I talk about the center surround structure I'm saying something causal which is if you shine a red light here some causal process will be initiated But I'm also explaining right my theory makes reference to this concept of receptive field Even if particular neuron never exhibits a particular causal response So there's something uh theoretically important About the environment merely to the articulation of what these neurons do I don't know if that that helps get at the distinction, but anyhow, I think it's there Okay, so that's kind of fundamental story about Something we really do understand. I mean this is a part of neuroscience to the extent that we understand anything in neuroscience This is what we understand. We understand Uh fundamental perceptual particularly visual visual function um Now here's the really remarkable thing So hubel and weasel won the Nobel Prize in the 1980s for work that really was staggeringly important It turns out though that much of that work might not have been quite right Or it was limited So in the 1990s people started to do their experiments again Under different conditions. So as I said in the original experiments, right cats were Cats were either unconscious literally anesthetized Or they were immobilized And you might expect and this is kind of the kind of an activity that laurance was referring to You might expect that an animal that's unconscious, right? It's not necessarily going to show neural responses that are The neural responses that the brain is as it were normally normally Revealing So people started to do experiments where they let animals move, right? And they also started doing experiments where instead of showing them Bars, which are after all not terribly naturalistic stimuli They started just started showing them pictures like this. This is it's hard to see But it's just a bunch of people and some trees in the background and what they found was That the neurons the very neurons that hubel and weasel were looking at in the first visual area view one Behaved completely differently when they were functioning in as it were normal conditions Uh conditions of consciousness movement and in response to naturalistic images. They function completely differently Um and in much more complicated ways and in particular the receptive field Changed so it turns out that the receptive field of the very same neurons Varies as a function of the statistics of the image was to say How complicated it is it depends on what's happened prior, right? What so the neuron has a history of behavior of action? And it's also dependent as you might expect on what the world looks like So it's as if this is again the inactive part that the the kind of inactivity I hadn't mind before right It's as if the neuron is in conversation with the world and the world is saying this is how I am So you have to adopt this way of functioning. Okay, so it's not there's anything wrong With this. I mean, it's not the normal way in which a cat And some human weasel didn't didn't discover things that weren't true It's just that what they discovered was was very very restricted to a very unnatural set of circumstances And so a good deal of the neural neuron functioning Wasn't wasn't part of the data But in a way, this is necessary to make the very point, right? If you have an immobile cat responding to this very simple stimulus The environment and the cat cat's body says to the neuron in fact respond to this way, right? And then you put that same neuron in a different environment and the environment as it were Gets the neuron. However, it does it gets the neuron in a different state and the neurons behavior is different Okay, so that seems to be a very very clear example of the way in which the environment the context of neural functioning And this is individual neurons, right very specific Is both causally relevant and also theoretically relevant to understanding neural function If you don't understand what's going on in the environment, then you have no way of describing The function of v1 neurons, right? So a textbook account to v1 neurons that doesn't mention the environment Is not theoretically adequate. That's a bad textbook. That's my point. Okay Okay So was that clear that was maybe that was reasonably fast Um, I want to make sure that's clear because it seems to me. This is not very controversial stuff This is stuff, but it's very radical. Okay. It gives us a very different picture of Neural theory of neuroscience and neural function Are we okay? I'm going to skip this bit. Um Well, just I'll just give you the bottom the take home message. So, uh, I work a little bit on On psychosis schizophrenia and other mental disorders that exhibit primarily delusions and hallucinations and one of the things that's been known for a long time but Is not very much represented in mainstream psychiatry. I have to come to a place like McGill to learn about these things certainly North American psychiatry is that We know quite a bit about the social conditions as they relate to schizophrenia even schizophrenia and They have a very robust effect on schizophrenia. It's very surprising right schizophrenia with bipolar disorder Is usually described as usually characterized as the or biological illness right to the extent that psychiatric disorders Have a biological underpinning schizophrenia is the paradigm and yet I'm inclined to say I mean laurence may correct me But I actually think we know more about the social causes or the social risk factors associated with schizophrenia Even then we do about the physiological ones the genetic ones and so on We still don't have a gene or a set of genes for schizophrenia We still don't know what a schizophrenic brain looks like really, but we do know three things We know that childhood adversity being an immigrant or the child of an immigrant and living in a city Or a populated area are all robustly associated with the risk of schizophrenia and in fact Say let's take the urban environment living in Sao Paulo say compared to living in burlington Probably more than doubles your risk of schizophrenia Even being born in Sao Paulo and living there through your teenage years Is enough probably to double the risk of schizophrenia and that's the same increase in risk as you get from abusing cannabis Okay, which is a Significant risk factor socio schizophrenia. So it's very it's very well established and it's very big By the standards of risk factors for schizophrenia So why am I telling you this well because obviously the social world is having some downstream effect on the brain to make the brain more vulnerable and As far as I know I'll just skip ahead. It's the only study that I know of I may have missed something more recently that shows a direct relationship between The city that you're born in and the city that you grew up in and brain activity So roughly what this study did was it Asked participants to do a task that stressed them and then it Did took an image of the brain under stress and it found that Regions of the brain particular the the pcc And the amygdala were differentially responsive as a function of the city that you grew up in At least lived until you were 15 That that's the pcc that that varied and the amygdala varied with the city that you were currently living in and by city I mean population okay, so the number of people That you're living in interacts in some way with With stress states I'll just mention one thing because this is one of the things I'm really interested in So city size affects your risk of schizophrenia Notice that if you're living in south hollow, there are so there let's say 20 million people in south hollow The number of people you ever meet Relative to 20 million is approximately, you know Approximately zero, right? I mean round it off to a whole number at zero Because the people that you interact with there's a tiny tiny fraction of the population Same if you're living in montreal or burlington, right? You're interacting roughly with the same number of people a couple of hundred probably So here's the real mystery the number of people in your environment The vast majority of whom you never meet you never see you never interact with in any way Their presence Raises your risk of schizophrenia. So there's another example of something like the mere presence of people Of course, it's not their mere presence. You have to know something about their presence, but you never interact with them Right, so something's going on in your head that depends on their being there Even though They're not even in your environment in any way. That's perceptible Okay, so that's an example of social So in the case of neurons we were talking about context physical Properties of stimuli as context for neural function now we're talking about the social world as a causal part of the part of the causal context in In psychosis, yeah But how do you know that the people were not perceptible because You know, you can be in a city not talk to anyone but you feel the noise, right? You feel or you get the information here the news it's different from being you know weekend on the countryside where no one is So and that noise or even information to use Yeah, no, it's a great question. So there's quite a bit to say about this I'll just give you a couple of things that are relevant. So It's misleading to put this as everyone does and as I did in terms of city versus non-city because the risk associated The risk of schizophrenia is nearly a linear function of population and indeed population density. So it's continuous So let's take an example. Let's compare somebody, right? So twins identical twins separated at birth One's in new york and one's in salpaolo now I take it i've never been to salpaolo, but I assume That the noise and the fuss and the hustle and bust and so on in salpaolo is not twice as great as it is in new york But the risk Is twice as great So In general, you're right, but it doesn't account for the nuances of the data Now you're quite right though that the kind of things you're mentioning like Seeing people that you never meet seeing people you never really interact with could be relevant Um, but I think that and in fact, it's one of the things I'm interested in I think it's not gonna it's not gonna do the job though because um, if you walk around my island For example, I don't know if you're a montreal or if you walk around my island it's a Quite dense neighborhood one of the densest in in the vicinity, but uh And and no doubt the people who grew up there and live there probably have a slightly higher risk Of psychosis to everyone else in montreal, but the risk is more like the rest of montreal You know not not like the risk in new york I have no explanation. I this is uh, this has been a puzzle since 19 roughly 1939 and what psychiatry and epidemiology has been doing is Establishing with greater and greater care that this is real But nobody knows what causes it what we've done. I think the greatest advances In research and epidemiology have been to rule out some obvious explanations. So um, You might think well, you know in a big city like say london viruses are transmitted more rapidly Being you know, it's a getting of our sorry Yeah, but it's not But unfortunately it isn't so no because there's there's research that shows that Um risk of schizophrenia is different across different neighborhoods in london So in the very same city, uh, you know people thought very important early hypothesis Maybe people disposed to get schizophrenia or more inclined to move to a city So it's schizophrenia causes city living rather than the other way around but that's not true Yeah, no, no, I'm sure it does And as they're challenging I'm sure you can call the many many ways in which this larger No, I'm sure that that's right and there is very little research I mean apart from the research in london there's very little research in fact no research on mega cities But as I say, it's going to be tougher than it sounds because if the relationship really is linear, right? Then you have to explain why south paulo doubles your risk compared to new york, right? That's not going to be that easy I mean why south paulo is worse than burlington. Sure. No problem south paulo in new york I don't know south paulo in mexico city. I don't know, you know, I it's not obvious So there's a real problem here and actually, you know, that is one thing that we are working on I'm working with suparna chowdhury a neuroscientist danuel weissach political theorist and lisa borne steen an urban planning Professor miguel to do exactly this kind of thing to try to Get at a slightly more nuanced account of what city living is like from the point of view of the phenomenology of it What is it like to be in a neighborhood and how could that experience somehow affect your perception of the city? So, yeah, yeah I actually collaborated on a large european business study on psychology disorder What we found is that we found this urban rural psychology we found it in north Europe, but not in south europe. So if you compared The incidents among cities in in spain and the more rural area there were no differences I was just wondering if you mean so a city in spain compared to a rural area in spain or You found no differences. No, there were no differences. So I'm astonished. Is this the big the study that jim vanos is the head of now? Yeah, okay. So what's your sense of where the data what what the data show now? I mean, sorry, let me just make let me back up. So you said you saw differences in northern europe? Yeah, as a function of population. Yeah, so there's this urban rural Difference in incidents in psychosis especially in the Netherlands and in the UK But that was not clear in the weekend much day. So again rural versus city Right, okay. So what's your sense of what the overall So if you added all this data to all the other studies, right? What's the what's the meta analysis going to show? recent meta analysis showing that And the benefit countries again This difference between rural and urban Incidents is not that clear It's like a group of calendar. I think I think it's a w of choice study So I just think that this whole urban rural My difference is more complex than we That we used to think Right. Well, oh, I absolutely agree with that. It's probably more like a proxy for something else that seems more private than among Um, northern european cities than Right, so I absolutely agree with that. Um, and so maybe I'll just Jump to that issue because that seems to me to get at what potentially is most interesting about this Okay, so let me this will be the No, no, this is um, so this is actually a very good place to end Uh, just one point. Um, so so, uh Okay, so So we ask the question what's causing this nobody knows right? Um, but what most people think maybe maybe you don't think this maybe the new data don't show this But what most people have thought is that whatever the phenomenon is it looks like it's a social phenomenon I mean, there is this kind of second generation drift hypothesis that's still around but it looks like it's social So let me just tell you very briefly about um a study that I really admire done by a guy called james kirkebride In london and kirkebride has been trying in various ways to look at What could be Social about the causes of the urban effect and he did this lovely study where he looked at different neighborhoods in london And used as a measure of kind of the social fabric of a neighborhood voter turnout in council elections Right, you know, you know the study, right? So he looked at how many people vote in their local elections And he hypothesized that in a neighborhood where lots of people vote in their local elections There's a big investment on the part of lots of people in that neighborhood And in neighborhoods where they don't vote people don't much care about the neighborhood And what he found is that in neighborhoods where people voted where turnout was high Incidents of schizophrenia was relatively lower And so of course this is in the very same city And it suggests and there's other studies that suggest similar things that really what's going on here is not just numbers of people But something like social capital the social fabric the very very complex series of social features of a neighborhood Now why do I think this is a nice Wait place to stop because it seems to me that if we're going to be able to understand the urban effect in psychosis We're going to need a theory a very elaborate theory of the social life that might be interacting with With the brain processes that lead ultimately to schizophrenia And unlike the case of neurons where at least in simple neurons you can say oh, it's red light It's green light. You don't need a theory to talk about that You do need a theory a very elaborate theory in this case sociological theory of some kind to characterize the context In order to begin to understand what's going on in the brain. So it seems to me Another maybe a sub take home message here is if you want to study Brain function you need not just a theory of brain function But a theory of the context in which that brain function is happening So you need in effect two categories of theory theory of the thing itself and a theory of its Surroundings in order to understand what it's doing. So uh And moreover, there's a feedback feed forward here, right? So if you look at amygdala function or or a pacc function Uh not knowing something about cities You're not going to be able to see that this part of the brain is interested in something to do with the social environment But if you have a social theory and in particular more nuanced theory about social life You could go and you could ask the question. What aspect of social life Is is this part of the brain responding to right? So it's not just that neuroscience moves ahead and the social science Science runs after it trying to figure out what Brain functions telling us about human beings. It's that social science sometimes will have to run ahead first, right? And tell the neuroscience is what to look for and then so you get a back and forth between the social world and Theories of neural function and that to me is the most interesting feature of context that context is a theoretical Resource as it were theoretical set of theoretical mysteries too that you need to begin to tackle in order to understand Uh a neural function itself Okay, I'll stop there