 Thank you so much. Thank you So yes, so consciousness is today's topic when I first started preparing for this talk I was the one one question that that really bothered me was why do we need to talk of our consciousness here? if we're interested in culture in a sense you don't I I Have often get into these issues in my classes. So many people think of consciousness as a Fairly high-level social phenomena. There was a phrase social awareness, you know so-so consciousness We are not really going to talk about that so much today for the reason that That kind of problems have are interesting. They have exercised the imagination of many scholars, but they But they haven't really get to the core of the interest in the research field largely because of this one Very simple point that if you get it you'll get to basically the whole rest of the talk is that when people talk about consciousness Quite often they are talking about a lot of information Process very deeply and powerfully and complex and Etc. They talk about a very strong signal in the in the head That's when you're conscious and when they talk about unconsciously top of a very feeble little bit of a signal that get processed at a very shallow Superficial An important way in the brain that that's what they meant quite often when they say so if you took even if you take a vision scientist They would say oh, this is like a visually processed stimuli Versus some other Visually mask unconscious stimuli what they really mean is some stimuli get processed very effectively in the brain and some Were just very feeble and didn't really get very far and in that sense Yeah, of course then then Then it's not that Profound I mean when and likewise you can say our social consciousness our social consciousness for environmental issues What they meant was it used to be the case and not many people talk about it now Everyone's knows about it. Yeah, so it's often something like very big very widespread very global very stable very complex Which is something very small very trivial very very local that that that's that you you can talk about the dynamics in the mechanism but that isn't quite how many of us got so crazy and Decided to spend 20 years of your life doing doing this from the the issue really comes from something that is Someone has a more metaphysical flavor The idea is while we we I study brains for living and and and brains of Difficult, right? You know as you seen from some other talks brains are very difficult stuff but one of the most useful approach that has Dominated the the the whole landscape for for about the half century. It's called cognitive science, right? It's cognitive neuroscience with brain analogies from computers to try to understand the brain the brain is a basically a biologically instantiated Information processing machine is a is a meat-based computer not not meat per se, but you know, you know, I mean and And so neurons are like logic gate and not exactly but they're analogies to that and then you have channels You have signal you have signal to noise ratio. You try to bring these terminologies from in the earlier days mostly electrical engineering and now to Computer science to try to make analogies to to think about how this work a bit like why if you understand the heart You think you want to think about hydraulics. What is a pump? How this pump work pump have waft baths and all this stuff so you understand pumps and you can build problems Maybe you can understand hearts Bit of a similar analogy and that approach has worked wonderfully, right? So before that we had psychology had had a history that that is not always doesn't always give it a lot of pride We had we have a lot of psychological approaches that don't didn't work very well And this kind of cognitive approach has worked relatively well But there is one thing that kind of sticks out like a sore thumb and that's consciousness Because computers don't don't feel anything right you be a computer and you understand it from the from the hardware level to the Software level you wrote the whole program and where in the any line of your code This says that the computer should feel Qualitatively something where you can build in something like emotion. I can talk about feelings in that sense emotion would be a kind of slow Reaction that is somewhat inflexible to some other objects. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about simple simple Sensations like like when you see red red looks a certain way, right red is not just picking up some Way flaying from your from from the light way so that the enters your retina and you analyze it Okay, there's a number this is then you match it to red. This is how your computer would do it And if that were true, then swapping red and green would not have much problem Right, you can just swap green and then you just swap the language output functions so the computer would just oh, this is Red because actually it would register green, but it doesn't wouldn't make any difference, right? But in in in people like us it makes a difference red looks red It's not just that you identify you can point to this red and talk to the people internally introspectively it feels red and that seems to be just like not even Clear how do you do this in there's a science? I mean because essentially in science you try to relate some object objectively measurable Variables to some other objectively measurable variables and build models about these objective facts and and and then you account for one set of objective facts via some other objective facts that you call mechanism to whatever But here you have something subjective does essentially is about the person and it's not up to you You can't just open someone's head and say like well this person Has no headache But the person um, but I mean pain is it like well, but this is you I look at your brain your brain seems fine You have no headache it's not gonna work Ultimately there is a subjective authority and and that's subjective authorities not just a matter of knowing It's not that he knows something you don't know To some extent yes, but it's a bit more than that the the the fact that the agent knows something is known qualitatively Objectively phenomenologically and that is a heart problem and in fact that's been called a heart problem so I entered the The feel after reading a book that that's called a heart problem book It's actually called the conscious mind by by Dave Chalmers and and it was written in 90s. I read it as a late teenager And went crazy and every a lot of people did it's not just me so I when I said I went crazy I said it almost with some some endearing pride like they've got a whole group of us That that really revived the interest of the field mean of course Only later on you realize that a history often get revised So that is something that I think this one point number one I'm gonna tell you so the topic I roughly introduced this is what we're gonna talk about you might see Ah, this is really cool, but how does it relate to culture and other stuff what it relates in I think a number of ways In one way might be not what you thought about is is the history of a field that has such a Difficult past so in some way I think we share some interest here So the field of consciousness came from this kind of very very some some sort of philosophical metaphysical indulgent background and Throughout red school. I always remember these conversations with with first my advisor and then every other Professors in the in the department who would now and then pull me aside. Are you sure you really want to do this? Like this doesn't sound like that you're gonna have much of a very easy career because the problem is great It's so it's so challenging and fascinating, but but people who have spent centuries and on this problem People apparently much smarter than you with Nobel Prizes and whatnot have tried these problems And it really doesn't work because it doesn't look like how you can address it scientifically And of course being young and stupid. I was exactly motivated by that that the feeling of you know going against the grain And I thought that was cool You know this is called the hard problems is the biggest challenge Maybe other people who are smart didn't do it, but I will be the one who solved this problem This is exactly the kind of over ambitious young graduate student It's kind of thinking But I think there's an also interesting part which is the sociology of it that you come from a field Where many people think that you're not going to succeed very well You don't have a whole lot of data because the field is not very it's not very well established And how do you try to establish that so that has been a one of the lessons? I've learned in my in my short career How do you convince your colleagues that you know the national funding agencies that funds the most rigorous biomedical research Should fund this research Given the historical baggage And when I talk about historical baggage, I should also mention there was also Freud, right? So Freud is great writer lots of insights accept that Many people would argue that he did more harm than good to the field and And often when I said that you get people would say like why how can you do that? Well That is again that relates to the topic is there's a sociology of science that matters Every time I try to talk about people would say well, let's stick to the science Let's just talk about the ideas. No, you can't I mean if you really if you really think you can you probably are not a scientist Or you don't really understand scientists or you only think you are scientists It's like let's just do experiments and don't interpret them. No, it's part of the game Not just part of the game is part of the the fairy nature of the exercise of science and the sociology matters Right, so the just the social perception of your field matters a lot because it doesn't matter to you They matter to your students too, right? So either if you don't have job security, you better worry about this if you do you better worry about the others Who don't and if your field doesn't grow if your field doesn't attract funding you also are not going to win anything Right, so many many great ideas from the armchairs turn out to be utterly embarrassing Linus Pauling one of the example I like to make is some of you might know me has two Nobel Prizes and At some point who is the late late part of his career. He thought that you know eating vitamin C with cure cancer Yeah, so one two Nobel Prizes you can anyone can can can make really really wrong claims And it's not that because idea was stupid It was just that the empirical evidence doesn't always fall in your favor and how do you guarantee that you need experiments You need replications you need other labs to replicate you So science never exists in this vacuum You always have a think about the sociological aspects of it and in that sense Freud has done major damage, right? Because it gave a lot of bad reputation and as if the field is not empirical enough The ideas might be great, but some of them turn out not to be wrong You're not even wrong some of them and it really according to like Heinz Einstein Literally, and I sometimes agree. It's set to feel backwards for about half a century and these kind of thing can happen And I think consciousness is a very interesting topic in that sense if you're interested in that sort of stuff Which you should if you're not interested you should you should get your copies of Thomas Thomas Kuhn and start reading Especially here a few that there's a sense that we're starting a revolution, right? You're trying to combine a traditionally Very different approach into neuroscience or taking neuroscience at this level You're really talking about some sort of paradigm shift and all these term come from Thomas Kuhn The philosopher you should really read it. He's a physicist turned philosopher So he's not like just someone who talked about it from the outside and if you're interested in this sort of stuff Consciousness is a fascinating topic in his own right for the sociological aspects. We are in a like extremely I Think it's historically is a case study that is worth studying his own right if any of you want to become a historian and and philosopher of Science I highly recommend you to try to come and be a do some do some ethnographic work on this So Okay, that's enough of just hand waving telling you roughly where we stand so So the problem has been as I said, it's about consciousness about how how subjective experience come about so in grad school That was talk about almost like nearly twice two decades ago. I I Following in a movement that is called the neuro correlates of consciousness project So we basically the idea is that well, it's so difficult right you have to explain something subjective can come out Maybe one thing is we start with just collecting some data. That's like often how science works You just you have no idea how problem is you just sit down in armchair and many people have written many things and they just Don't some of them didn't make any sense And so one thing you can do is just identify some variables that you can actually map out and do on us simple Empirical project and the idea is that you have some processes in your brain that that are Qualitative subjective that when you stimulate those brain tissues people people say that they experience stuff a lot of it was done by Dr. Pentfield This is the street is named after him And he stimulated them in cortex during surgery and people's oh I see saw I see stuff or a few being touch or my hand moves, etc And then they also bring tissues that don't quite work like that, right? They What they are bring that the neuro firing them at this there are processes that we know they they actually do stuff Informationally, but they you don't feel anything. You don't you can't talk about them. You don't know why And and you can compare them So that's called the neurocollege consciousness You're not trying to solve why the two pieces of tissues are so different qualitatively in terms of your subjective experience but try to map them out anyway and then then then collect some information about the physiology and an Atomical nature is maybe we'll tell you something and then we'll see from there and that actually that attitude I would Turn out to be a very useful one really that's really how most of science is done And so I'm going to cut the long story short essentially we have favored a type of model So you can think of it as a signal coming to your brain This is an abstraction of a cartoon But we can actually write it down in computational models and and and think about it too You can think once you maybe have some signal in the brain that goes into some sort of process here And then it gives you this objective sensation and also give you the objective Processes you can think of it like that You can also have different parts of the brain maybe some parts are conscious some parts are not conscious So maybe the conscious and the conscious are the same part But they have different levels or they may pass different criteria or something that's the first model The second model would be you have the different signal goes to different parts of the brain So this part of the brain would be conscious this part Which is like that part is not and we'll figure out why later And there's also another kind of model which I favor is going to hierarchical model It sort of connects to in philosophy will go higher all the theories is that you have some early stage of processes That are not really conscious and then when it reach a later stage Or get monitored by a later stage and they become conscious And here's just one example of an experiment how we come to these kind of Idea is that you can set up a task. Let's take a task. It's very simple. You present them a simple shape I think here's a square or a diamond and people would press keys and say whether they saw it or not And as you do these experiments and at near threshold, which is the the arts of psychophysics You just high-trader stimulus. It was not so easy to see and not so hard to see Exactly in between then they would perform at like 70% correct So chance is 50 because it's a two choice. So they like make not exactly as bad as chance and not at ceiling either if they do it that way then you Then they sometimes see the stuff and so I don't see the stuff and then you can also play tricks Because when you do psychophysics you measure everything really well like luminance contrast and all this stuff And then you can actually play with the stimulus in some subtle ways so that in one condition Subjectively they would say that they see the stuff more clearly in this condition and in the other condition They say they subjectively don't see very clearly Okay, so you can see that this difference is small is significant, but it's like a 10% different So this is not a huge effect. We can get to bigger effects later There are other ways you can get this so for instance, you can also take a knife and cut people's visual cortex Which you don't do But you don't damage people's visual cortex But sometimes people's visual cortex get damaged and if his damage is a localized to the primary Visual cortex destroy cortex sometimes a phenomenon called blind sight happens and in that case is basically an exaggerated version of this In the effective visual field, they would say completely have no idea what's going on In fact, I I interviewed one blind sight patient and I thought I was smart I asked him to like, you know, write down the phenomenology try to describe it in more more detail And the guy just laughed at me and so like can you describe what it's like to look through the back of your head? There's nothing there's nothing to talk about. I was a who we would say like it's kind of dark and It's impoverished. I was hoping would give me some words that I can I can use as I know There's no words to describe something that you don't see So it's like completely blind in the half of the visual field and then and then basically sighted in the in the other visual field So you can present stimuli to each of the hemisphere Hem field and then and then titrate them again the the amazing thing is the blind field turns out he can do these tasks He can identify whether there's one shape or the other by guessing, but he would guess like 80% correct So you can match the performance of of accuracy Roughly controlling so there's about about the same amount of signal in both So you're not just like matched comparing big stuff big signal versus small signal And when you compare them You can actually you tend in those studies as well we've done if you you consistently find these like activations in perfunto cortex Measured using fMRI using just like very crude methods of of blood dynamics blood hemodynamics And that but but that give me some idea that even out this may fit kind of fit with this kind of model, right? So it looks like consciousness is something that is about how the signal impact on these higher cognitive areas Where you hold your working memory? Direct your attention and form beliefs about the world and the beliefs is really what I really ultimately think is what? What is most likely going on because I cannot think of a situation when I say I consciously see something? But it doesn't actually change what I believe I mean seeing is not exactly believing Seeing has a high tendency to change your belief sometimes. I see stuff that I don't really believe right? You know is an illusion or you or I heard people sometimes voluntarily ingest hallucinogens for fun in those cases they probably just are having fun They do not believe what they are seeing if you're hallucinating and they know it But even in those cases there's a tendency for you to drive you into believing what you see and sometimes seeing is not just there It forms or the logical basis for your beliefs. It's like it's almost like reasonable I see why there's a there's a bottle here and and and if you ask me how you sure well I'm I'm seeing it right now that seems to be a very reasonable answer So that it impacts on your high-level cognition that basically I think is a not a very profound Finding but I think we are moving forward And I can spend the next half hour or so tell you how we are refining this idea We are putting electrodes in in these areas in patients also sometimes Inbasively in smaller animals We're doing more computational modeling refining these we do tons of experiments on on this sort of stuff some That don't work so well some work better But I'm not going to tell you the story in fact to to fit to the theme as I introduce I'm going to tell you the sociology of it and why I basically I'm stopping doing this kind of work. I think we hit a roadblock there We're not getting anywhere and and turn out the problem is not just because so people I when I started I thought when you get to this point, then you you will meet the heart problem, right? You have to explain Consciousness that's really hard turn out the really hard problem is not that the hot problem is always about people You're in science you do science with other scientists, and that's a problem so I told you that in the 90s books are written about about These kind of problem and mostly they related this to physics So there's a there's a line of history that I think is heavily revised heavily revisionist This sets that Modern studies of consciousness started in the 90s. It's just not true I think to get away with it because before the 90s there was no internet So the people who are used to you know searching for your papers online in your whatever search engine You don't read those older papers Do you I mean I I must say I confess I I have a much harder time Convincing myself to get myself to the library and then request a copy and make Xerox You soon know some of you don't even know what Xerox are you make these these copies and then you download and you scan them in PDF and then read them on my tablet and they just just forgot Oh, actually I could have just read the physical paper, but people don't do those anymore So a lot of the literature from the 80s and 70s were forgotten. In fact, I just described the phenomenon blind site It was not the way before the 90s by 80s 70s some classic lip-bed studies in the 80s 70s But people who say that in the 90s everything happened What they meant was this what they meant was the few was small Although it's still small actually hasn't really gone much bigger Because doing this kind of work seems so hard and you are doing a research program that doesn't have a clear objective for what you're trying to solve Which actually is not that big of a problem you think about memory research people wouldn't say I want to solve memory But people always have this feeling that they have to solve consciousness It's a bit of a legacy thing There's a hard problem there and a bunch of really smart people try to raise to us Solving this problem. That's always been this culture in the 90s. That was really brought to the forefront Couple of Nobel Prize winners namely Francis Crick discover, you know cold discover or Joinly discover first with I think roast rustling Franklin provided a data and then with with Watson they they wrote a paper and claimed to have Invented the double-heeled structure good Nobel Prize Jared Edelman, you know also in physiology medicine and Roger Penrose didn't have who doesn't have a Nobel Prize But basically you have the equivalent in physics a wolf model with wolf price with Steven Hawkins So these are the really serious giants in the few and then they get it together in the 90s And then they really try to declare it now. It's time to really attack this problem And actually even back then I think many psychologists and neuroscientists did not exactly know what was going on It's like what why are we suddenly doing this like like it's a new thing because we have been doing this These studies is just that the field is small. We don't have a lot of funding But then they went along for the ride I think it's a good thing right you have heavy hitters and joining a few making really really High-poly high-profile claims and making it all the media what really changes I think those guys call up nature and science editors and said like look we have no data But I have no bell price. You should let me publish this opinion piece in your journal And guess what happens when you do that? They always say yes Editors I mean nothing against them or for them in support, but having worked in the industry for a long time You know how editors work if you're famous you can you can you can publish anything Yeah, if you're well-known you're very well established the quality of the site of the article often is virtually irrelevant So it's not to say those papers are bad, but those paper Frankly also objectively speaking had no had no data and and then we didn't roll a lot of theoretical pieces There was still the good days. I think people didn't realize how what kind of problem we've gotten ourselves into I was in I was attracted into that field in that in that from that kind of activities from this kind of publicity Issues so at some point it becomes a celebrity show you go to these consciousness conferences You see more Nobel Prize winners and and and famous people it's almost like celebrity sighting for for a graduate student It was a real treat. I mean I went I started went to this conference in early 2000s a retreat You suddenly go you thought you feel they're joining some VIP club and they're very welcoming because nobody had data Right, so you're you're the first generation of graduate students who might be collecting data. Yeah, we like you So you're joining a club of a club that has a very high Intelligence I fresh presumably but also very high ego many of them think that they are going to be the ones solving these problems Which makes it very good the culture is very different from any other field people just really want to do work You know you go to a simers. I think very few people who say I will solve a simer We're like we'll understand it better and hopefully Create some novel treatments that may or may not work will find out in 10 years after some trials people would feel like that Right, but in consciousness everybody think they are going to be the one and so the sort of so the What a concept you can call an intelligence to ego ratio may not be particularly high the intelligence is very high And likewise the the data to theory ratio is just abysmal Everybody has a theory you have more you have more no more number of theories a number of authors At the same time you don't have a lot of data it created a culture where people can say anything and And they can also say it they know that the Media start to like them because the media floodgate opened So everyone a lot of people competing more for the media mandate and competing and and that is compounded with the fact that We don't have a lot of mainstream funding from there We still don't and some people I think actively also try to continue to say oh, we're not going to get those funding Let's get private funding But given this situation you think about where the private funding goes the private funding goes to those guys who are in the very close circles of the of the celebrity club So it I think it really becomes a problem that came to a head in the past few years and we only now know it I didn't know it. I thought it was great. I thought it was a great few of such You know high profile and I benefited from it I published papers that I frankly don't think are that good but they're in good journals because the topic was was hot And and the journals editors like us, but I think our substance is lacking So that's been a problem. I'm gonna give you a specific example. This is gonna be tricky I'm gonna use specific sample from people. I know they are my you know friendly opponents These people wrote my reference letter there. I I like them I know them well enough to know that they will not take offense so I can point out But it's just a small tip of the iceberg is the whole field has a structural problem So these people are professor Christoph Kalk These are very well known established scientists in the few and outside a few too So I feel that they can they can take a little bit of our heat here without without much problem There are others who are basically charlatans and would do the same kind of thing all the time So is it relates to the story. I've been telling you right means a parallel plot Unfortunately, so I was saying the like prefrontal cortex seems to be important for consciousness and they have been criticizing me for Point I think is fair that they say like we've been lesion prefrontal cortex do people go blind, right? You're you're studies about visual consciousness relation prefrontal cortex. They don't go blind. This is a Relatively fair point. I'll address it next But to make one interesting comment Christoph Kalk himself used to be on the other side of the debate He used to think PFC is the holy grail consciousness and when people made his argument to him He ignore them. So now that he's turned to the other side for some reason We'll get to why in a bit maybe and and and he now criticized me for not handling these lesion case as well I will get to that And but he also said something like we know subjective and objective measures So subjective measures meaning you just ask them what are they sort of thing Objective measure as in the case is you just see you make them you measure the ability to discriminate these targets, right? These two measures are basically the same thing They should be in concordance with each other if they apply judiciously they wrote in a high-profile paper nature reviews neuroscience 2016 So I was a you know at least a little bit taken aback because if you do it once one step of logistic reasoning They're basically saying that I'm not judicious because I just found this right So this is where subjective objective measures empirically dissociate, but they say no they shouldn't if you are really doing it, right? Okay, that's a little bit of a slingshot argument that that that doesn't say much But you just run through to the end of it I also mentioned right the phenomenon I did are supported also in other extreme cases such as blindside So by writing this you're also writing off the phenomenon of blindside, which is in textbooks You're also writing off not just that actually, you know the case of DF, you know You're a Canadian hero my and my good friend and mentor Mel Goodale So Mel Goodale's work is about the dorsal and ventral stream dissociation and the famous patient DF DF can actually put a cart into a slot so you have objective measure you can ability to task But DF could not tell you what the orientation was subjective was missing and again There's like bread and butter Classbooks standard. I mean you could you find it you find a textbook of neuro psychology that does not have that case in it You better should not be using that textbook And these are really classic stuff So basically writing off the whole industry of neuro psychology like all these people are not judicious. It doesn't make sense and And then you also have cases where they would say all psychophysics are irrelevant because psychophysics study things that are kind of near threshold You're either kind of between seeing and not seeing really you want cases where you clearly see or clearly don't see The argument I can superficially sounds right, but if you really think about what they mean They mean that all the psychophysics that's been done since the date of fattener To Norma Graham David Maher Screen and sweat SS Steve and all of those are irrelevant to consciousness writing off entire product against if you study perception psychology Psychophysics and signal detection is like your yeah again your your your one-on-one Material is like all of these like no you can throw them out a window And and they the last one is a little bit of unfair But it's a paraphrase, but you can actually find something very close to what they say again in very high profile places in print and video So basically our theory is the best because it's the most promising It's really there's not much to do this kind of claim you can find it mostly from Christophe maybe less from Julio And again, I know and like these people that's why I can say it I hope that they would not kill me afterwards, but this is just really the culture just give you a snippet of there are the people I'm not so comfortable quoting, you know And this is really kind of how things work if you have the media mandate and Christophe say these things in nature Scientific American if you really have the media mandate you can say whatever yeah It doesn't the details don't matter you can suck if you if some evidence from a whole branch of science Against your views and even though you once thought those evidence are good you cited those in your favor You can now just write it off. So now that whole branch is just not very good. I'm not gonna. I'm just going on And that has become kind of how it works So that sounds a little bit like close to at home in them. I don't want to do that So this is a this is a more clear case of a actual case What happened so so they yeah, they say PFC lesion doesn't cost blindness And I think if you go to textbook you find the same thing PFC lesion do not do not abolish subjective awareness But I think here is not clear what they meant for two reasons one is I we don't say that Lesioning PFC would make you blind. We said the PFC in some specific areas of PFC It's not for vision, but it's for subjective introspection of vision, right? It's your conscious experience. It's part of your part of the substrate supporting a conscious experience So if you lesion the area you may not go blind In fact, we expect you not to go blind, but we expect you to have something like blindside Right, you should have the ability to do tasks you might perform well But if I asked you to reflect on your experience, you might have some trouble doing that and are those tasks being done Actually they have but we haven't gotten to that yet So mostly they're not talking about those yet and the other issue is that the prefrontal cortex we Again, it's very well known in textbooks that you have you have you have to you have to you have to have a sphere And and they are densely connected and they work together and also you have parietal counterparts so they're like you have four CPUs if you like for for this for this circuit and Very careful experiments have been done in my colleague like Bob Knight's lab showing that if you remove one of the CPUs The other three takes over This is a well-known property co-redundancy, right? If you likewise you can think about I have two hands So my my I'm using my my right hand to drink water right now first open it if I choose my right hand to drink water right now, then then this is the my my Skeletal correlate of water drinking or the mechanism for water drinking and if you lesion my right hand That will be kind of cruel, but if you tie up my my right hand I can just move it to my left hand And I would do the same job So I don't turn blind you don't necessarily turn blind you actually in that case you have to find out the redundant System you have to identify also these four CPUs are highly connected. You need to lesion them off So that would be a lot to do and if you do then people tend not to be testable anymore I mean you don't again. You don't lesion them But I often say in in fail to say in passive voice If the if those areas get for all four areas in your front-rowing prior to counterpart your lesion It's very difficult test them. They they're often impermanent coma. So There is one case of a patient. They said that has bilateral prefrontal lesion Because I think it has the tumor and then the doctor order to It was in the 40s They just ordered to cut out the whole prefrontal cortex at some point in psychiatry We we know that there was a bad idea that people thought it was a good thing to do if they to cut off the whole prefrontal cortex Might help them to improve with the personality and stuff in that case They just took out the prefrontal cortex after that At least there was a paper and then they cited this case is okay. So all these like Arguments that we've been making is that what you yeah you lesion the pfc didn't affect much because the lesions were unilateral So here's a case of bilateral Lesion and the people was all the people was from the 40s. So I as I said I've got into interest in the history and my colleague Bob and I urge me just let's download this paper and Get it get the paper from the from the library Actually, we have to go to the library request the copy because it's so old and then get it and serox and stuff And we read the paper and the brain looks like this This is a case of the patient with complete bilateral prefrontal lesion Here's a brain. So I don't know about it. It looks like It clearly doesn't seem to add up. This is the right atmosphere. There's a whole brain here I mean the whole part brain here. So it's like what's going on and then you read the paper more carefully is a bit It's basically by a sole author that the author was an urologist And he ordered a surgeon to do the whatever Surgery and back then there was no MRI. So probably the surgeon just missed That's why I thought and then I bring this figure up and people said no no hang on Maybe this is just a clerical error. You're not being charitable, right? You're interpreting the data kind of harsh Maybe this is the pre-op Image they just have a clerical error that makes it up. I said what hang on. There were 1940s, there were no pre-op images. There are no MRI. This is post-mortem The person's dead when you look at the ring and they still have that much prefer to contact You prefer to go to grow back like that, right? I wish it does so clearly something is very wrong about the paper and So we wrote a piece and point out presumably you didn't read the paper when you cited this as your most critical case I'm pretty I was pretty damn sure that they just did not download or read the paper They just cited it based on the title all the abstract and They gave me a reply that was even more interesting. I think they said Well, no no no hang on. So this is how you think the the brain is right This is a prefrontal cortex. You think it's there actually is not quite like that This is the central sulcus they say and So the central sulcus is so you have a little bit of you know So sort of premotor area, but most of the frontal cortex used to be here is now gone They actually said that it was in print so you can check this out It was in this pane of paper. These teeth these figures were taken from in print. I don't want to Comment further almost someone was like smirking you shouldn't mock your colleagues This is actually a gen this is actually what happened in a journal called journal of neuroscience Which is the flagship journal for society for neuroscience? We are disagreeing. Where is the central sulcus? Which is the first anatomical landmark you learn in neuropsychology and I know I'm nobody. I'm just I just happen to be a food professor who teach these things while living And they are from very senior scholars and we are disagreeing about these in print I mean, I just know whatever like I think I know was a true answer I asked enough neurologist residents double-blind and asked them blinded and so like tell me which figure is more plausible I asked enough of them to have convinced myself. I think I think I'm okay, but let's say they are right Let's say they're right for a moment. Really. We disagree with the central sulcus is in print that doesn't make the field look very good and That that is really where I stand. I feel The consciousness is a few is not moving forward at this point because we don't have to infrastructure Of the field to move forward, you know people when I when I was a graduate student again being young and cocky and And so so contentious and everything My my my my doctor father passing him always told me one thing is you are only as good as your peers. I Was like, no, I'm of course. I'm better than my peers. I'm I'm the Outstanding Stars do them better than the view. No, you're never better than the peers because you're you have committed as a scientist to a system That's called peer review That's all you have right. I mean you do experiments. You think you're right you have to publish it I mean we don't you publish it somewhere You have to convince your colleagues that you're right and if your colleagues collectively as a feel does not have a structure To to examine facts if we are in engage in a business where facts don't really matter ideas that are most important We sit in our arm chairs and solve the heart problem of consciousness because you know, Penfield fail Echoes fail all these Nobel Prize winners fail, but I'll be the last one Everyone had this kind of ego as added to you to want to be the last one and write our facts Then it would not work. However good your experiments. You are you will not work. You'll be stuck there Um It was a bit personal um And I'm gonna show you a bit of evidence just to rub this part up that That actually this is a paper from Steve Fleming my good friend who also study these things. He has a more constructive personality And I have so he's like let's not get too worked up Let's just do some studies and find some prefrontal patients and show them that actually Even in unilateral pet lesions so here here the patients are actually not Bilateral it's very hard to find bilateral patients that are testable actually most of them are very impaired even just prefrontal So you find a lesion relatively large lesion and preventive cortex and show in these of three groups So in white is the healthy control in red would be the anterior prefrontal lesion patients often you let mostly unilateral in Blue are the temporal lobe lesions So we get them to do a perceptual task and a memory task simple You know shapes and stuff like very boring and here the performance in the perception and a memory task as you can see Just basically the groups don't really differ There are some titration of stimulus that that by design keep it this way But but you can see that basically they don't they don't really differ very much in performance at least in the experiment What they differ was this measure here that I call metacognitive accuracy Which is something that we invented because we really want to quantify how big this effect is Because people keep saying these event will be small even if we find it So in the case of memory what happens is after doing a memory trial they rated how sure they are they're correct so and then you can find a metric to correlate how how the memory confidence with the memory Accuracy so in the normal young healthy adults the correlation is pretty good, right? So when you say I I'm sure I remember your phone number. I tend to actually do And when I say I probably lost it and I then I most likely cannot guess it right just by chance so your confidence actually reflects your your ability to do the task because you have conscious introspection of the memory experience, right and And so in the memory case you can see there's no difference between the three groups either What is really different is specific to the perceptual task so in the perceptual task when you do a visual detection task or discrimination task here To a FC and then after you do that you've irate your confidence for these patients is all over the map They're just like they did the effect reduced by half. So it's not a small effect I mean you have to quantify it in a psychometric scale to see how big the effects are It's not like they have everyday problems is a unilateral lesion So as I said, I don't expect them to be to have the function completely abolish you took out one of the four CPUs But clearly there is some very selective problem that relates to introspecting upon your perceptual quality It's not just introspection in general. So I think it's a beautiful study I'm not on the study which makes me feel more comfortable. It's not just like we we try to make these claims It's actually known in the literature. There was 2014 and then This debate happened in 2017 when they already started right off these things and the other amazing thing is after right writing this up We pointed it out and I and I actually Talked to these people in person. What happened was Christof Koch published another nature paper repeating the same point this year As if this doesn't exist the debate in exist So we have a kind of shout louder who can shout louder in a more high-profile Positions kind of kind of debate. So that's kind of upsetting. So let's move on I don't want to end my talk on this bad of telling you all the dirty laundry is now in our field So that actually that thing has one silver lining. It really impacted my career in a way that It is still happening and still unfolding my graduate students are all freaking out a little bit because of how much it it really it It kind of bothered me almost at a personal level my my my young Students would always come and tell me how well you should you should not take things for personally and calm down a little bit And stuff, so it's good to have students who are more mature than you are As a person, but it's at the same time. It has a positive impact on me I don't I get a little bit worked up, of course So it is not fun, but at the same time it got me to really to start a thing about clinical applications I feel there's no way to end this right? I mean a lot of basic science debates are the same way how thing really get to the point that people can really say Very improbable crazy things and yet gain and retain the social trust I always think about this problem when I when I was a just a child I remember my my my my school teacher told me the dolphins enough fish. I was like really disappointed. I Thought like dolphins and fish they swim in the ocean to look like a fish Why they not fish and is it enough fish because they you know, they don't lay eggs Well laying eggs didn't seem very important to me. I mean they swim In the ocean, I mean they look the shape totally like a fish and is it no scales and so like those are what you think are important I think the important thing is that they have to swim in the ocean and look like a fish and they said like No, this is not how biologists Decided and I always felt like this is really a matter of who you who decided but at the same time I have respect for biologists, right because they do seem to be doing cool stuff They're not bunch of quacks. So okay, you guys is fish. I I grudgingly accept and as I get to high school then you get even more crazy stuff I know people who say that they put one thing in two places at the same time It's like come on. This is like this is just a lie cannot be true and they're quantum physicists They actually said like your CD player works because of our ability to put one thing in two places at the same time It's like yeah, my CD player does work and then and then meanwhile there's a well We also are the same industry of people who put a man on the moon So we say we tell you we put one thing in two places at the same time all the time tabletop physics I believe them. I never saw it, but I just believe them. I think a lot of science is really that it's like How much you have achieved as a field? If you achieve enough stuff then then the trust would start to build and and that's Increasingly what I think is important and again, I don't want to sound patch I don't know I don't know the struggle and the challenges in your field I feel these lessons might be relevant here You really want to create a new paradigm or new something new so over the discussion in last few days We talk a lot about Effect sizes and I think these are exactly what matters It's no good you publish two papers and then and then five of your colleagues You know love it and you really want to do something that even people outside would have to feel the impact and say well Actually, you know if you want if you want to establish that PTSD can be can be cured in a certain way You need to think about those cultural and social factors. Otherwise your your million-dollar drug drug program doesn't work Those are the things that really we got them Interested so I actually started thinking about stuff like that and around those time I I moved to UCLA from Columbia in 2012 at Columbia We don't have a clinical program so many many psychology programs doesn't have a clinical program Because you know clinical psychology is just applied. It's not real science a real real I grew up in a tradition where real basic scientists think we're better But I but I moved to UCLA where my really wonderful colleagues They are there are wonderful clinicians and I and I got to appreciate what they do so one of one of my Colleagues who made a really big impact on my career. There is a Michelle Crask So what she does is she take the annual physiology models of rodent learning and a lot of them is on fear because I I think it's easy to do fear conditioning rodent and and turns out like decades of research of now century of research on on animal Conditioning have given us very very solid theoretical grounding for for basically treating phobia and anxiety and PDST this sort of stuff and the idea is just similar to Pethloff's dog Of course Pethloff famously rung a bell and and then pair the bells Ringing sound with with delivery of food and then the dogs start to salivate salivate and afterwards just ring the bell the dog Salivate and then use again then the question how do you unlearn that? And you can unlearn that by ringing the bell without giving the food for many many time So you can re-associate you get to relearn. Okay. Now the ball games changed now that this so-called CS plus the conditions Simmers is no longer associated with this US and likewise you can think about If you have spider phobia, it's the same thing right you can you can think of the spider as a CS plus that has been maybe Associated with poisoning or something bad in your ancestral history or your your hot-coated memory And then how do you get rid of spider phobia again? You present a spider over and over without the Getting bit getting poisoned, then you'll be fine So you relearn that this stimulus is not actually paired with something so traumatic Likewise if you've been cut by a knife And you just have to slowly see a knife and see how the people use knife exposed to the stimulus and Recondition yourself that that is actually no no real danger and it really works and and we know the the the basis of this down to molecular single-cell level any any level of biology that that you would desire to have this is a really the most one of the more grounded Therapy that you can do the problem. Of course is people are a bit different from rodents Especially not lap rodents. They they they have the choices, right? They they they are not you know held in a cage So when you tell them, this is the therapy usually they already say I'm not sure I want to do that Right have I have spider phobia and you're basically telling me I'm paying your money to try to get over it by Hang out with spiders That isn't very good. And many of them actually leave so in the case of Phobia that's actually I would think is the primary reason that we are not treating phobia all the times Usually it's just attrition. They have to a few sessions. They drop out For those who actually complete the session they tend to do fairly well And in the case of more extreme like PTSD Especially like war veteran PTSD I heard PTSD talk about several times in this in this meeting that is the I think is the basic Primary reason why they are not getting treated so we people develop it basically a typical war veteran I mean there are different cases, of course But the typical ones that you hear about from these clinic is they come in and they said I'm not sleeping well They don't they don't say they have PTSD. They say I'm not sleeping. Well, can you give me sleeping pills? And and then you say well, I think maybe you need to see a Clinical psychologist to go through some exposure therapy and then quite often they'll say I don't need a shrink Is I don't have a problem here. I'm not mentally damaged or anything. I mean I came from war. I'm fine I lost two friends, but I'm fine. I just I just want sleeping pills. They just want a pill They just don't want to go through the treatment So now doing something positive taking what I've learned in the past like decade and so about what I know about Consciousness, I think we can do a thing to help people here. So the idea is I know how to From those studies, I know how to read out unconscious signal in the brain out pretty well I don't know how why they're unconscious and why they're some unconscious I have some ideas, but not very clear But I can read them out to the point that I can not just like read out a signal then showed on a blob on a brain I can actually read out a fine-grained pattern and I can feed it to a computer algorithm So that I can actually decode the content so-called kind of using pattern recognition a bit like the kind of deep learning AI type Of stuff that you guys hear about all the time is now And I can actually read out the content of what what those Pixels means so it's not just a blob here. I can say like what these blob with this pattern means that you are very likely Seeing something like red lines in front of you and another pattern I can see what this other pattern means that you're seeing green lines in front of you So red and green lines if you just presented to the brain then the visual cortex light up Traditionally as of about ten years ago most researchers will say well the activation was similar But at this point we can actually reliably tell from from your brain pattern whether you're seeing green lines or red lines It's a technique called multi voxel pattern analysis. It's just like pattern recognition stuff So if you do that then you can do a kind of neural feedback that I really like neural feedback is just a Variant or bio feedback you can present stuff from your brain To to the screen and then over time people learn to control it. That's the typical type of neural feedback I'm not so fond of that because I know that bring signals are Measuring basically are very poor. So when your signal is poor, you don't have much to control and quite often those studies have have some replication issues But here I'm not replicating. I'm not just feeding back you to bring signal itself I'm feeding back the decoded brain signal. So I'm not just reading it This is your brain activity try to control it very hard to do But here is a fine-grained pattern voxel of activity and sometimes these coders can be like 70 80% correct So that pretty decent signal sometimes 90 even So you can feed that signal back and then so in this study. They it's actually This is my study too. So they started off in Japan with my colleagues miss your Kawato and they actually start the first paper in 2011 I read it. I was just like blown away So so to follow from the original design, they just tell you let do something to your brain They actually said that I think it's the translation in Japanese. It may sound that's funny But do something somehow to a brain and then up to 12 seconds you get his feedback It's like a big circle. It's a big circle. That means that you won a hundred yen to about a dollar But you quite often is half a dollar or something you want you win some money for a trial Maybe if you don't pay them that much, I'm sorry I think the maximum they can earn is actually 10 yen the maximum you earn in one trial is just a 10th of the all just 10 cents. Yeah, otherwise they earn too much money So usually in the end we try to we try to make sure that they they get pays me like 30 40 bucks But not not much more. We're cheap So that's right So every trial they would just learn to do something to the brain and then get some money And then but after like three hours or five hours of doing this in different over across different days Then they would say they can they can control this stuff and then you think oh, so you must have figure it out, right? So I tell you like so tell me what's your strategy. So actually when the Brain scanner was hooked up in such a way that that circle is big every time you think of red lines But not green lines, right specific You would think that they would have figured out or they might think of thick fair or something related. They might think every time I see Like blood because of red or fire engines and I would then I would get a signal turn out they completely have no idea They just said I would think about lunch Yeah, no time I would think about like something completely related. I think of my favorite food sushi the night and then the thing got bigger They have no idea and then I think what happens is this there's just a feedback loop in itself They just don't have to do anything perhaps They just to bring it to bring pattern happened and then they get rewarded and then with the right pattern They just get rewarded turns out that this is a completely past almost like a completely passive reinforced procedure Which is nice? Which is what we want because here you're effectively getting a way to induce a specific patterns into the brain Unconsciously they don't have to cooperate if it's a trauma patient They don't have to think about a trauma then you would get more which is to think about whatever Just do whatever try to earn more money and then if they earn more money that the right patterns is happening That means that they're getting exposed to that pattern and meanwhile that pattern is getting reinforced as well So a negative thing is now being associated instead of something negative is being associated with a mild Monetary reward so we actually did the study If we did a study exactly like that so we first pair We first pair the the the lines with the with a brain pattern We we learn how to decode these patterns from the brain and then we pair these stimuli with electric shocks So the reason is we want to make them frightening to see whether this procedure can erase the fear later So we pair the the red pattern with shock the green pattern with shot and it is a yellow one that is just control Doesn't do anything And then here is just a kind of like sanity check to show that this is a skin conductance response You know this it's just basically you when you're when you're afraid your skin get get you sweat a little you get scared So so the conductance goes up So these are the conductance values for the red guy and for the green guy compared to the baseline So they become positive effectively so they do become more afraid of these two as they should because the shock is Not not nice but then they do this basically Four hours of training in the scanner over three days that they they don't we didn't tell them nothing about the Instruction what they're doing is that I sit in here look at this gray thing no color Do whatever you can to try to make this circle bigger later on and We just we just don't tell them what what to do and there was some very very bewildered Okay, whatever, but after an hour so this I know this is fun. I'm earning money And then what happens is they if they think about the red thing is a green thing they earn more money But I want to say they think about they think about it unconsciously And then in fact low and behold after a few hours the skin conductance for the red thing reduced by half and The of course the idea is that because this thing has been associated with positive reward now This become less frightening and it's specific to this stimulus. It's not just that this training help them So that makes a thing. Well, maybe we can even use it to bypass Amir's kind of problem this placebo effects Which is a huge problem right in the whole industry of clinical psychology in clinical psychology I mean in drug research you can see people should control for placebo effects I'm not they don't because they're they're sloppy in clinical psychology all of these therapies that my my colleagues do in my department You have a therapist sitting and talking to the to the to the patient or client How can you double-blind control it? You cannot give people sham therapy is a train train some, you know people to learn the reverse of CBT Learn during wrong instructions or random randomized to CBT instructions and get them to give people sham therapies So that will be single-blind and then the patient and then the therapy provider themselves would not know that they have learned Wrong CBT because that would be double-blind, right? It's like no you're just not gonna do that But here you're basically doing something that is truly blinded. This is just a computer algorithm So we actually did the next study which is truly double-blind. This is actually single-blind because we didn't think of it that point But as soon as we tried to replicate and do the second study we thought of for something even more Interesting but challenging if we really want to move it to real real world. Here's the real challenge So right right earlier. I told you how you learn these patterns So you learn this voxel pattern. These are fine-grained patterns that differs from from brain to brain depends on your vasculature So you show these people red lines and green lines many many of them and then you learn these patterns, right? and And in real life you may think okay if you're afraid of like chainsaws and spiders and Litos and stuff I would just show you show you many of these pictures and I learned your pattern But then you're back to square one. It's not gonna work because people are afraid of these things They don't want to see these things and you they would refuse to be to be hide in the claustrophobic environment to be seen many these images many times and have to attend to them So what we did was something truly crazy and it's pulled off by a fellow crazy Montreal guy Go Vincent and often song test wrote to Michelle. He's from here University it came to my lab and be a post and did a post out with me This is a truly truly insane sci-fi study that I think No one else would have pulled it off because I think most people just would not even try so all the kudos to even having the Scientific courage just to try because in logically we can be done so logically this how it can be done You present people many many many images images from 40 categories, right? So these are small, but there's snakes, you know the bugs of cockroaches. I'm super afraid of them bats and other things I'm some are less frightening but some 40 type of stuff and And you put in the beginning we put 50 people to do this 15 people to do this and then now think about who's afraid of snake anyone afraid of snakes your first snake Yes, you're afraid of snakes. That's good. So you can see all these things Without snake right sans snake because you don't like snakes But you see all the rest of the 39 of them and I also see the 39 of them and I can see snake for you Because I'm not afraid of snakes. I'm Cantonese we eat snakes. It's not big So we so so I see all our snakes and now with this I can then put my brain's Pattern to yours recalibrate our patterns so that they are in the same similar space based on the other 33 39 things so essentially I tried to rearrange my voxel. So my apple pattern is similar to your apple pattern my Worms pattern is similar to your worms pattern my cockroach pattern is similar to your work So calibrated as much as we can using those out of 39 things and then from there I was and we're having calibrated now your brain and my brain looks very similar in that space Then my snake pattern would probably project to yours and work quite well and one you might think not work that well But if I get everyone else here to help you So you have like many surrogates they all see snakes for you to decode your snake pattern Then you can do that in fact you can using this method It sounds crazy But you can actually then decode someone's snake pattern without the person ever seeing snake for up to like 80 percent correct You can actually just just 80 percent meaning I show you an image And then I can just read from your brain pattern whether you are seeing snake or not seeing snake at 80 percent correct Not perfect, but pretty good And then you put it to work and in fact it does work So here is basically going through this first because similar. This is the skin conductance From the active control to the other control this time is computer randomized So we don't know everyone's people usually afraid of two things So let's say you're afraid of snakes and you're also afraid of butterflies I just made it up then I let the computer randomly choose one to target so you don't know which one it was And so the one that that is being being neurofeedback modulated is the active one and you can see the SCR went down Basically this time the effect was even stronger than the last one And then the for the controller didn't change and likewise your amygdala Activity a region that is important for fear and especially conditioned fear also activity went down So it worked So I'm gonna basically end here And say leave some time for questions. This has been a Funny reason why I end up doing this right as I told you a story I wasn't many of my clinical colleagues think that is a such a good thing that Haka has finally become the turn from the less indulgent Scientists trying to solve these hard problems to become more compassionate. I want to help people I said like no actually I like helping people. It's fine But the motivation is not that and then some other people think oh, maybe funding is really hard people complain about funding So you want to do these kind of more practical research? I said also? Yeah, if money is also good but what really drove me was really trying to establish the field and how to gain legitimacy in a field where Basically the basic Respect from our colleagues has always been an issue where it's very hard to establish who is saying the truth thing it feels a bit like More like humanity is a bit like philosophy where where things are so subjective so I come from philosophy. I Then like nothing wrong with that subjective Evaluative process, but I feel the science should be more objective and how do I bring some ground truth And this is really how I got into this So I really mentioned that the future plan is that well basically if you think about this this could be Further than this. We are not just like treating phobia here for right now is phobia We're having a grant to move in the clinical trial to actually test to use this to treat phobia patient We also think about like ptsd. They are the more extreme man of phobia But you think about it broadly this can be the whole of basically clinical psychology all this cognitive behavioral therapy Most of them have a structure like this. You try to re-associate one thought with another you try to Reassociate one behavior you try to discourage or encourage some behavior except it is all done in in in you know In in person, but if you can do this then you can put it on the brain So this is a picture of a nature paper from Jack the landslap showing that you can actually decode Semantic concepts from different voxels of the brain too. So concepts like money power Motherhood love sex all of these things are concepts in your brain all these all these Freud Do the all these concepts that the Freudians love And except that now you can finally do a double blind you can actually if you think that some concepts Activated would help certain subjects specific with problems this time you can do a double blind clinical intro and and that I think Should be exciting. Thank you There was kind of a split where where the psychologist would focus on the Easy problem and then the physicists would work on the hard problem to Roger Penrose Yeah, had some bizarre theories about right Plunt and mechanics applying that to understanding consciousness. It has that been abandoned like this kind of this really Yeah, I think I think I think right so Penrose hasn't made very far So Roger Penrose I highly respected Oxford professor I think I don't actually know that he would say like his working relationship with Stephen Hawkins was Stephen Hawkins Needed someone even better than Hawkins himself in math So we find Penrose as a collaborator. So these are like seriously influential Mathematical physicist and he wrote a couple of books and that I think most people in psychology and neuroscience didn't like it and in some way I Feel there's a parallel here again to To these people I know and like they are also doing it now in a very in a way There's very much because I didn't even talk about their theory their theory is pretty much like a Penrose like kind of theory Just from the armchair you think of some mathematical axioms and say this is how it works And I think that's also why they tend to write off empirical details is in a way very much like Penrose I think Penrose basically was inspired by the girdles in completeness kind of kind of things So so there are some mathematical properties that he wants to believe should work in the brain and Then they're mounting evidence that it does not work in a brain like that all these quantum physics It does not work like that and there's mounting evidence that the this from psychology to that the brain is not Psychology is not consistent. There's no there's no need to apply Gordolian theorem to it But he just write off the details in order to let the ideas have their way So in a sense that that thing is still very much alike, but Penrose himself has not made a lot of impact so It seems to me that this is not it's a very important story about the sociology of science This is we talked earlier we have an earlier course in the summer a critical neuroscience And you're a case study with it perfectly within that in terms of all the dilemmas about how Parans are constructed and defended and how there's always surplus meaning in these paradigms There's not necessarily a paraphrase there's an important process but within science in terms of social applications We're deeply teaching and understanding what's going on here And certainly we've claimed to have a conscience everybody's attention created because what could be more important to me as a Conscious being But it seems to be something else is going on here in your work, which I think is very very Positive which is in the effort to understand mechanism You're you're rather than looking for what's the essence of consciousness including localize the one place I think the main philosophical mechanism is saying there's something really wrong with that for the framing there because the Conscious is a process that You know Things that may not be localize Also, I guess the difference between as I see to know me is by this thing. It's not On the face it sounds a little more possible But in the language you're doing is your fractionating things and I'm happy to know the way to go into this And to me is very relevant to a fundamental issue We have the sexual and clinical care, which is this tension and what people say And what we can measure in various ways and we've covered this repeatedly over this week that men tell you that you put them in stressful situation They tell you it's not bothering me at all yet They showed this big, you know one long or GSR response and we can already do that with you know forget brands You can do that just with your song a lot of other plazas for this years ago to show Sensitize this is very very important because it's unpacking more complicated process of Adapting to environment coping with it managing in certain ways in which self-awareness Reflection is only part of what's going on. So it seems to me by tackling a clinical And I think I'll be what you're gonna get closer to your goal because you're gonna end up not with a model that begins So that this is the spot and this is the you know, this is what has to light up But more like this is the process and this is what has to happen People to have this kind of experience along the way I think you're you know you're providing only intervention But as much people have to understand you know what happens when people engage with the environment So final point about this, you know you I fascinating I used to think Philosophically we would never have to kind of mapping My notion was finally you and I both instantiate snakes in our brain There's no reason are they have to look anything like each other They could be all they do is serve that function in our network and they could be totally different place in the brain Different way that knows it turns out there is a certain amount of convergence and you can begin to My question would be Do you think that if we knew the learning histories of people we knew their cultural backgrounds? And so here you have a reference where 15 people will amalgamate these will use the other 14 to Guess what his brain is gonna look like when you see the snake so we can already guess pretty well You think that was if we knew something about people's cultural background history Well now we can do a much better job of that Because these exposures Are not really isolated all just in a context of certain kinds of experiences Yeah, I yeah great question I think let me redress the first part after but the question first. I think so We always suspected so but we don't have the data So the studies were because the method of this wonderful decoder neuro feedback method was originally started in Japan so we've been collaborating with them and In the end we flew people over and these all scan in Japan. So all of these were based on mostly male Japanese graduate students in a in engineering schools. So they are very very narrow group of people But that's a good thing because then as we now want to take it to a clinic one of the argument for getting NIH funding is to say well Clearly we have a we have something to demonstrate that it might have potential But we need to get a demographically representative Population so can you give us the money to scan in Los Angeles? So they said okay So we are so we are now gonna scan people who would reflect of fairly diverse Maybe as as about as diverse as Montreal this kind of population We will find out and I and I would anticipate from the from the existing literature that yes and no yes You you would definitely improve of somewhat with your take into other the account of not just ethnicity and culture the shape of the brain is a little bit different across different ethnic groups and And the representation will be different too, but the good thing is the I Don't have the evidence at all, but it's to speculate off the cuff the for the higher level representations in the prefrontal cortex You be tapping to those I think they will be very different They will be very different from people to people and the culture would be one major major and experience I will be one one one major factor to account for the difference for the early visual cortex though It seems to be really quite quite quite consistent and we are tapping into the unconscious representation mostly in the end Because of the the robustness of the of the structure in the visual cortex I'm sure that they would in even there you will find some ethnic and cultural differences too But I think I anticipate they might be relatively small Maybe Maybe yeah, but but it would not be that Limiting in a sense that when you do when you do exposure therapy if I show you the picture of a spider quite often the experiment I also didn't take into account your cultural background as much That's right. Yeah. Yeah, so when it when it comes to that point then then then ignoring culture would be a limiting factor But probably by then we would not ignore culture. Yeah But I always Pure it's more like pure form of fear And then entering the second world war combat urosa Explain it from a different yeah now in I Think I think you're right The awareness of our PDST has changed right the PDST is a one of the newest form of Psychiatric diseases. It doesn't have a history as long as as it's not documented In the same way like like schizophrenia Which has remained relatively stable compared to this and especially in PDSTs victims and In female victims that they are patients There's a cultural factor is huge. They used to be a sense that they many of them were suppressed and not report them Things are getting better and as these are changing the question is why All these imagery or is very basic exposure approaches still work And I think that's a good point that allowed me to get back to to Lawrence earlier too. So so yeah, it's just fascinating all of these Issues are coming to a hint like just really in the past few years So this is from Joe Ladoo Ladoo and pine so Joe Ladoo, of course is one of the people who Sometimes being Sometimes being said that his response were putting amygdala on on the map of fear He has actually he has a rock band called amygdaloid Which sings and he sings about songs about fear So he did most of his work about like this amygdala a very simple circuit of fear is a rodent physiologist great scientist But but also he actually had an interest in in consciousness that that people didn't know so much because he did his PhD with Ghazaniga on split bring patients. So even early on he started thinking about this So recently he started thinking about exactly these issues. You have traditionally a lot of these drugs It's same same in social phobia A lot of these drugs take animal models like a rodent model and then in rodent model This is your study amygdala, you know, you really know the circuit down to like single cell level And you know the molecular mechanism for reconciliation amazing beautiful science been done And you want to take these to the human is a good case right take this is a human case and those drugs don't work So in Joe's writing and is he would you would talk about the fact that you can keep people like anti Insighted drugs like band cells and etc. And and and and their hands stop sweating They stop having butterflies in the stomach when they go to parties But if you ask them, do you enjoy going to parties? They say no if you're stressful And they just like but you tell them like but your body is not freaking out You used to like shake and then sweat and they say yeah, I know but it still feels stressful and the idea maybe For someone like Joe so that so these issues are really coming to the forefront of psychiatry to which I find very very happy and Joe has his Opponent who is my colleague Michael fence low and they are people who still defend note that the fierce circuit model is still right I'm making the fear circles do right There's still people who still defend the animal model and say like we just haven't fully understood it yet And that's why it doesn't work. I think that there's something to it And but but there are some people like Joe's I don't know But this is actually just the wrong circuit amygdala is not even about fear. It's not about consciousness No amygdala just physiological Survival response all the fear experiences come from this higher cognitive areas Pretty much like the hierarchy model. I was talking about And and the civil lining so we will debate that will until we find out we don't know But civil lining is probably something usually when you have a debate like this is tend to be something in between the two right And in terms of treatment, I think what happens over the same is a bit like the case of depression So think about Steve Holland's work where where he showed that actually Pete SSRIs are not completely useless Some some people maybe more skeptical about that. I think it's by and large quite bad for you If you control for placebo effects well enough the effects are pretty tiny, but I think it's is quite still widely accepted that SSRIs are good for when you have very sharp on set and intense major Depression that might be life-threatening. So you take the SSRI and meanwhile you go and see your CBT and They'll say well, but why we go to CBT. You don't need SSRI or your CBT is what really sustained your long-term Recovery but the two actually come to mentally so as you think about this model to if you if you first shut down the very basic physiological freaking out and Then you go to see your doctors Then your your clinical psychology is going to have a much easier time trying to do image Imagination studies or other forms of studies so the To put it that way. I think your question is more subtle. You think about the except just the image exposure or Or mental exposure. How does it work? How because of the it seems to be so complex Yeah, it still works because it's probably still deal with this first level stuff You still get rid of the conditioned fear, which is probably just a small part of it But getting rid of that first then going into the deeper part of your mind would become easier from there probably so the person who who who stopped sweating and shaking hair and then then you know hands shaking and Heart pounding to convince that person to eventually enjoy a party might be somewhat easier at least Then then the person who was still hasn't taken those drugs yet You're describing it as a kind of additive model But there's also evidence that I agree on I think there are multiple components But I think that these things also are Interactive there's an old paper right now later just on treatment of anxiety and agro phobia Actually years Learning is not just to get comfortable of situation, but how to master your anger And if you think the master of my anger is in the pill then that's your strategy So that's the point being that what's really going on here is that In everyday functioning these things are not simply going on parallel They are sort of constantly And so The whole period of what is happening in exposure therapy is not simply that you're You're Yeah, right now I was I was thinking about something interactive too, but I was thinking mostly in simple You know synergistic interaction So when you have both the physiological problem and and the high cognitive level problem They would just access for each other, but I think you raise a good point They may not let me sometimes if you lose the physiological component too quickly Then the the cognitive strategies just aren't gonna work because some of them are just taught they tell you how to master the Physiologist now that that is gone. There's nothing to master anymore. You have to master something else. Yeah, that's a very good point Words and Yeah We don't have evidence obviously we have now two papers. I mean we've done more papers more more on your feedback in general But for treatment related and we've done two papers so far So this is something that give me hope I would think that the working hypothesis is whatever you can really decode from these brain patterns You should be able to do that at least there's no reason to just to to doubt why we're not generalized so far The issue why we are not doing that yet. It's really I think the part of it the Justification for the studies that is it's quite expensive You require fMRI which is expensive and we require multiple sessions of fMRI which is expensive The justification is it is expensive, but it is much cheaper than seeing her one-on-one Therapist I mean in some sense cheaper or comparable because it's now computerized So we are usually thinking of cases where we really have a justification So the strongest cases will be like PTSD Where they really refuse to see the therapist and so going under the conscious hood would have a would have a clear Reason and for other things like these concepts It's not so clear to me yet why you need that instead of instead of ask them to just write an essay about the topic Which usually kind of works. I think unless you want to associate some concept with Negative reinforcement that would be somewhat harder. Yeah, we haven't Haven't gone this far yet, but hopeful