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A Response to Alva Noë’s “Art and the Limits of Neuroscience”

[ 3 ] December 5, 2011

Alva Noë

A philosopher wrote a blog post on the New York Times’ website, and I don’t agree with him. I started this website–The Beautiful Brain– two years ago with the intent to explore the very pursuits this philosopher deems misguided, so I’ve written the following to keep track of my differences of opinion, and to provide an alternate point of view for anyone interested.

In an essay published in the New York Times’ Opinionator blogs section, philosopher Alva Noë (author of the 2009 book Out of Our Heads) takes aim at the kingdom of present-day neuroscience by directing his attacks at one of this kingdom’s most speculative and remote outposts: Neuroaesthetics. The following is my paragraph-by-paragraph response to Noë’s essay. The essay can be read first in its entirety here.

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

By ALVA NOË

What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience.

Noë’s first-down play call is an immediate flag for me. The trend these days? Just a major trend, generally, out in society, these days? This opening generalization blows up a balloon Noë will set out to deflate. But the balloon is filled with unfounded air.

Yes, some approach the mega-question “What is art?” in the key of neuroscience. But I’d imagine even those people who do occasionally set forth speculative, neuroscience-infused ideas about why we create art and what it reveals about human nature would acknowledge that neuroscience is still, today, just one way among very many ways to talk about art– that art historical discussion is still a major “trend,” not yet offset by the trend (in Noë’s formulation) of looking at it through the lens of neuroscience.

For example, the entry wall text at the Guggenheim’s current Cattelan show in New York City makes some big statements about the role of art in our world, but none of which are injected with an ounce of current neuroscience. This is because– even for those interested in the neuroscience of art– neuroscience is, for now, but one key still buried in a thick book of musical theory about how to approach the meaning of art– and when it comes to someone as embedded in the politics and culture of his time as Cattelan, there would be no sense yet in incorporating the neuroscience we have at our disposal in 2011 to display in this wall text for the general public visiting the show. Thousands will see the Cattelan show at the Guggenheim. None will read about any neuroscience there, and for good reason.

Noë is doing some overly negative poking at a young and humbly speculative field. This field is eager to test out new tools and put forth some bold ideas in journals and specialty books, all backed by empirical studies. But it is a field which is not claiming full explanation or revelation, not claiming it’s ready to replace the art historical wall text at the Guggenheim with a few paragraphs on edge detection, peak shift, color opposition, and association cortex. This is not the trend. Rather, this is someone you’d want to invite to dinner because the wide-ranging conversation about the perception of art could suffer from being a bit outdated and run-of-the-mill for 2011 if they aren’t there.

Continuing:

“Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals.

I’ll step aside here and let the conclusions of one of the papers Noë links to in this section speak for itself. From Zeki and Lamb, 1994 (Perhaps this neuroscience-of-art trend is a little less recent than Noë led us to believe with his above “these days..” formulation), after pages of inspired work:

In the last few pages, we have tried to use kinetic art and its development as a means of illustrating our general point that, in creating his art, the artist unknowingly undertakes an experiment in which he studies the organization of the visual brain. We have tried to analyse kinetic art in terms of the known neurology of the brain in general and of the pathways subserving visual motion in particular. We have shown that area V5 must be critical for kinetic art. We have therefore also shown that it is possible to relate the experience of kinetic art to the healthy activation of small parts of the brain. We do not mean to imply that the resulting aesthetic experience is due solely to the activity of V5 but only that V5 is necessary for it. It is perhaps a measure of how far we have come along in visual physiology that we can do so and can also begin to enquire into the relationship between physiology and visual art. It goes without saying that there is much in kinetic art which we have left unexplored, even at this level, and there is much at a higher level which we are not even competent to explore. The relationship of brain organization to aesthetics, the symbolism inherent not only in kinetic art, but in all art, the relationship of art to sexual impulses — these are all subjects which are worthy of study, though in a millennial future when we have learned a great deal more about the brain. In other ways, however, the millennial future which poets and artists have dreamed about is already here and, however small our contribution, it is satisfying to us to try to formulate the beginnings of an understanding of the relationship between the organization of the brain and its manifestation in art. [full paper]

Does any of the above warrant attack for overreaching or presupposing? To me, this is a humble but exciting new voice in the conversation, not the end-all answer-man shouting over everyone in the room. Personally, I’d like to hear more in years to come. Noë, it appears, would not like to hear much more. He goes on to speak directly about Zeki, the author of the above passage:

Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything.

I interviewed John Onians in 2009 after I attended a neuroaesthetics conference in Copenhagen. You can listen to our talk in a podcast here– the interview gets underway just after 8 minutes in. (please excuse the production value, it was the first episode!). Here’s an excerpt from about 11:50 in to give you a sense of how different this John Onians (quoted directly) was than the Onians which Noë refers to (without specific quotes) above:

____

Me: What can the findings of neuroscience– the hard cellular data, the brain scans– what can that add, or further, in our understanding of art and art history?

John Onians: The more I learned about neuroscience the more I discovered that there were some areas of knowledge that were particularly helpful to art historians… But it is certainly true that there is not a large body of data which can be presented as a single, coherent framework. I think it’s quite helpful for scientists if people in the humanities come into this area. Because in the humanities, we can use the material in the way we use all the other knowledge and theoretical frameworks in the humanities. We’re not making scientific claims about our work. We’re saying, “I have a hunch about how this may help me.”

_____

I’m not sure where Noë is looking, but when I talked to Onians, I got the sense that neuroscience is a new tool that he is encouraging those in the humanities to add to their toolkit, not as a field that is “fighting a battle” with the humanities. Noë is actually being more divisive here than the chief example he uses to further his argument has ever been.

Continuing:

 What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness.

This is an outrageous claim. Neuroscience is young, and we actually do have some absolutely astounding accounts of human experience from the thousands of brain scientists who have carried out steady, empirical work over the decades (check out John Kubie in the comments section of Noë’s piece for a nice response from a member of the scientific community).

Take the biology that gives an account for the very real experience of our visual blind spot, for one small example. And if we’re talking about the neuroscience of art, are you going to tell me that the underlying neuroscience of color and luminance as applied to the study of Monet’s “Impression Sunrise” is of no interest?

And that no one has noticed? A section on these neuroscientific insights appears on the Wikipedia entry for Monet’s “Impression Sunrise” painting, where they take up almost as much space as the “History” section.

Noë continues:

The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted. You are your brain. Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,” because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves. But what is really astonishing about this supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not! The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels — and that we are that thing — is an old one. Descartes thought that the thinking thing inside had to be immaterial; he couldn’t conceive how flesh could perform the job. Scientists today suppose that it is the brain that is the thing inside us that thinks and feels. But the basic idea is the same. And this is not an idle point. However surprising it may seem, the fact is we don’t actually have a better understanding how the brain might produce consciousness than Descartes did of how the immaterial soul would accomplish this feat; after all, at the present time we lack even the rudimentary outlines of a neural theory of consciousness.

I thought the user “Dave” in the New York Times’ comment section responded to this section well. Here’s Dave:

False. The insight that the brain operates similarly to a computer put us light years ahead of Descartes in terms of understanding how the brain might produce consciousness. We still have a LONG way to go, but certainly theories like Daniel Dennett’s “multiple drafts” or Benard Baars’ “global workspace” are more on target than Descartes’ ghost in the machine.

Noë is severely undervaluing the work of a lot of important thinkers since Descartes. Continuing:

What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

I re-read this section several times to try to figure out Noë’s deductive steps. In the meantime, here’s Dave the commenter again, with more valid criticisms:

Let me see if I can understand the authors’ argument. It seems to go something like this:

1) We need a healthy body, a normal environment, and social contact in order to be mentally healthy (that is, in order to not have a mental illness).

2) Therefore, we need a healthy body, a normal environment, and social contact in order to be CONSCIOUS.

It should be apparent that the leap from 1 to 2 is just plain silly. Mental health does not equal consciousness. If it did, we would have to say that people suffering from depression or schizophrenia do not have conscious experiences, or that moving to a deserted island would make your consciousness disappear.

The author seems to think that because the brain interacts with its environment, consciousness must therefore take place in the environment instead of in the brain. Perhaps I’m missing something, but this just seems loopy.

The statement “It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art” sounds like the denial stage of grieving over the decades-in-the-making entry of modern neuroscience into the discussion of art objects.

Moreover, it’s like saying, “It is people, not their stomachs, that process food.” Remove the stomach and try to process food. Remove the brain and try to make and enjoy art. But remove a finger or three, a limb or two, even another internal organ or more, pluck us away at a young age and put us in a remote territory, and we’re still making and enjoying art, thanks to our intact brains. I can’t go along with Noë’s argument here, just as I couldn’t believe in a lot of his arguments in Out of Our Heads. He rightly points out the need for integrative neuroscience, yet doesn’t take us anywhere new. As the Scientific American MIND review of his book noted, “The problem is that where Noë clears away stale ideas, he offers little of substance to replace them. One comes away from the book without a definitive example of a conscious state that would require more than a brain.”

Noë then offers more towards the above claim:

We need finally to break with the dogma that you are something inside of you — whether we think of this as the brain or an immaterial soul — and we need finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them (a dynamic exchange that no doubt depends on the brain, among other things). Importantly, to break with the Cartesian dogmas of contemporary neuroscience would not be to cave in and give up on a commitment to understanding ourselves as natural. It would be rather to rethink what a biologically adequate conception of our nature would be.

At their best, Noë’s ideas remind us that the brain is an embodied organ; that the nervous system extends to all the far reaches of the body; that the brain is shaped through learning, which takes place in a dynamic environment where we interact with others. But this interaction in the environment leads to neuronal reorganization at every step of the way inside our heads.

At their worst, as in the above passage, Noë’s ideas start to sound like a vague “everything is connected” New Age agenda. It’s provocative to ask the reader to consider a “break” with deep-seated understandings of contemporary neuroscience– but in the end, there are no alternatives to be found here. We’d do better to turn back to the heavy-hitters: Dennett, Damasio, Edelstein, and countless others who prefer to explore the mind as it is achieved by what rests between our two ears.

Noë continues:

But there is a second obstacle to progress in neuroaesthetics. Neural approaches to art have not yet been able to find a way to bring art into focus in the laboratory. As mentioned, theorists in this field like to say that art is constrained by the laws of the brain. But in practice what this is usually taken to come down to is the humble fact that the brain constrains the experience of art because it constrains all experience. Visual artists, for example, don’t work with ultraviolet light, as Zeki reminds us, because we can’t see ultraviolet light. They do work with shape and form and color because we can see them.

Now it is doubtless correct that visual artists confine themselves to materials and effects that are, well, visible. And likewise, it seems right that our perception of works of art, like our perception of anything, depends on the nature of our perceptual capacities, capacities which, in their turn, are constrained by the brain.

But there is a problem with this: An account of how the brain constrains our ability to perceive has no greater claim to being an account of our ability to perceive art than it has to being an account of how we perceive sports, or how we perceive the man across from us on the subway. In works about neuroaesthetics, art is discussed in the prefaces and touted on the book jackets, but never really manages to show up in the body of the works themselves!

What works has Noë been reading? Not Margaret Livingstone’s, whose Vision and Art is bursting with… art, including the Monet example given above. Apparently not much of Zeki either, who consistently deals with real art in the body of his works, including the very paper that Noë links to.

And what theorists like to say that art is “constrained” by the laws of the brain, a supposition that Noë keeps returning to in this essay? That’s like saying that sports are constrained by the laws of physics. In fact, it’s the laws of physics that give rise to every physical aspect of sports– the outcomes, the boundaries, even the miracles. There is something dissonant about Noë’s conception of cause-and-effect when it comes to art and the brain. Writing, as Noë does above, that the “brain constrains our ability to perceive” seems to suggest that we first have an ability to perceive, and then the brain comes along, and somehow constrains perception. Explain to me the cause and effect in this model of perception– it’s nonsensical.

Again, neuroscience is young. If we know anything about visual perception, it’s that it happens in stages in the brain, and in anatomically distinct regions that are responsible for different parts of the process. Some of the most compelling findings in perceptual neuroscience only have to do with the early stages of processing: lines, color, motion, coherence, object recognition. There are as of yet more unknown aspects of perception, often referred to as “higher” brain functions, though they undoubtedly trickle top-down to influence the very early stages of perception: the integration of one’s own memory and emotions, associations with anything relevant to the work at hand, intellectual significance. No one is claiming to have answers to everything yet– just go back and read Zeki’s passage quoted above to remind yourself of the end-of-the-day humility of someone at the center of the work that Noë is criticizing.

Noë continues:

Some of us might wonder whether the relevant question is how we perceive works of art, anyway. What we ought to be asking is: Why do we value some works as art? Why do they move us? Why does art matter?  And here again, the closest neural scientists or psychologists come to saying anything about this kind of aesthetic evaluation is to say something about preference. But the class of things we like, or that we prefer as compared to other things, is much wider than the class of things we value as art. And the sorts of reasons we have for valuing one art work over another are not the same kind of reasons we would give for liking one person more than another, or one flavor more than another. And it is no help to appeal to beauty here. Beauty is both too wide and too narrow. Not all art works are beautiful (or pleasing for that matter, even if many are), and not everything we find beautiful (a person, say, or a sunset) is a work of art.

Again we find not that neuroaesthetics takes aim at our target and misses, but that it fails even to bring the target into focus.

Why do I value Monet’s Impression Sunrise? For many reasons. Some art historical– its significance to the school of impressionism, its departures and influences. Some personal and indescribable– waves of feeling, a sudden mood. And some reasons, despite Noë’s overbearing negativity, stemming from recent offerings of perceptual neuroscience. When I read Livingstone’s account of Sunrise, I was given an awareness of the perceptual process occurring inside my own biology that added deep value to my conscious awareness of viewing the art, just as my own emotional resonances and art historical understanding of the piece had.

Livingstone’s work led me to some new questions I hadn’t really considered before in studying art history: Maybe some artists have intuitively, quite unconsciously, tapped into universal features of our neurobiology to induce widespread appreciation of their artistic output? Maybe it follows, then, that it could be interesting and useful to study these universal aspects of our biology of perception?

Yet it’s early. Neuroaesthetics, like the neuroscience of consciousness itself, is still in its infancy. Is there any reason to doubt that progress will be made? Is there any principled reason to be skeptical that there can be a valuable study of art making use of the methods and tools of neuroscience? I think the answer to these questions must be yes, but not because there is no value in bringing art and empirical science into contact, and not because art does not reflect our human biology.

“Value” here is totally relative, totally subjective. If this passage told me anything, it’s that Noë and I have a very different definition of what a “valuable study of art” is.

To begin to see this, consider: engagement with a work of art is a bit like engagement with another person in conversation; and a work of art itself can be usefully compared with a humorous gesture or a joke. Just as getting a joke requires sensitivity to a whole background context, to presuppositions and intended as well as unintended meanings, so “getting” a work of art requires an attunement to problems, questions, attitudes and expectations; it requires an engagement with the context in which the work of art has work to do. We might say that works of art pose questions and encountering a work of art meaningfully requires understanding the relevant questions and getting why they matter, or maybe even, why they don’t matter, or don’t matter any more, or why they would matter in one context but not another. In short, the work of art, whatever its local subject matter or specific concerns ― God, life, death, politics, the beautiful, art itself, perceptual consciousness ― and whatever its medium, is doing something like philosophical work.

I’m with Noë here– art and philosophy are doing similar work.

One consequence of this is that it may belong to the very nature of art, as it belongs to the nature of philosophy, that there can be nothing like a settled, once-and-for-all account of what art is, just as there can be no all-purpose account of what happens when people communicate or when they laugh together. Art, even for those who make it and love it, is always a question, a problem for itself. What is art? The question must arise, but it allows no definitive answer.

Absolutely! No one is saying they have a definitive answer, though.

For these reasons, neuroscience, which looks at events in the brains of individual people and can do no more than describe and analyze them, may just be the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art.

Here Noë is being quite authoritative on two positions: first, that neuroscience is trying to be definitive about art (even Zeki doesn’t claim this), and second, that it’s the wrong kind of empirical study for understanding art. This is like telling your daughter she can’t go on a playdate with a new friend from school when a) your daughter hasn’t asked to go on the playdate yet, but merely mentioned that she talked to a new student that day, and b) you’ve personally never met nor seen this new student yourself. But no playdate!

Noë’s concluding sections are hasty, over-the-top, and they put words into the mouth of an entire scientific field:

Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.

Noë’s legion of strawmen rushing in with their ready-made neuroscientific answers to the deepest questions apparently need to go back home and question how empirically rigorous they’ve been. But if Noë has anything more to say about this “more plausible” and “more empirically rigorous” study of the perception of art, it’s not to be found here. Stirring up the conversation with alternative propositions or lines of research is a good thing; but putting words in a entire field’s mouth, telling it what it is not and will never be: these are things that, when posted on the New York Times’ site, amount to a swell of unfounded negativity in full public view. Noë comes off in this essay like Raymond Tallis, minus the humble Socratic admission of knowing that he doesn’t know. We’ll have to wait to see what Noë does suggest in his forthcoming book on art and human nature.

For the rest of the scientists out there studying perception and adding valuable voices to the chorus of a deepened and widened understanding of and appreciation for all forms of art, we can continue to thank the labs that slowly but surely generate the insights we find useful and insightful enough to include in peer-reviewed journals, academic textbooks, and books for the general public. The deepest questions– the rings of the “target” Noë believes neuroscience can’t even bring into focus– will not be answered instantaneously. That is why they are the deepest questions.

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The Thing That Discovers Itself

[ 1 ] August 24, 2011

What do a single cell, a simple organism, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist have in common?  Each has a life story.

In 2007, scientists discovered spherical and ellipsoidal forms preserved in the ancient sandstone slabs of Western Australia.  They were microfossils, impressions just a few millionths of a meter long, beyond invisible to the unmagnified eye.  But whatever they were, they were old.  Their chemical traces—carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and phosphorous—date back approximately 3.4 billion years.  Because carbon and nitrogen are common elements in all living things, these newfound forms were once alive.  They were bacteria.  They fed off sulfur compounds.  They clung to sand grains in the sediment.  Dr. David Wacey from the University of Western Australia concluded that “early life was very simple, just single cells and small chains, some perhaps house in protective tubes.”[i] This could be the story of the first life on earth.

How many lives have come to pass on this planet?  An estimated one hundred billion human beings have existed.[ii] But we are just one species of roughly two million that are known.  Many more have yet to be undiscovered.  The National Science Foundation’s “Tree of Life” project estimates that there could be between five and one hundred million species present today.[iii] Then there are the extinct.  One popular claim holds that 99.9%of all species are long gone.[iv] Life has been present here on Earth for over three billion years.  Who knows how fruitful and multiplicative each species has been during its existence?

Despite the unknowable number and unimaginable variety of its forms, there is essential unity to life.  Every individual has descended from a common ancestor.[vi] We all take part in evolution, the process of change in genetic composition of a population due to both random and nonrandom mechanisms.  Our genes either do or do not endure, and those genes that have higher-than-average frequencies within the population can be considered fitter.  Evolution is an ongoing process of determining “What is more fit?”  We contribute data to this survey by shepherding our genes to the next generation.  So it goes, from generation to generation.  The arrow of time points forever forward; we must survive and pass on.  Because of the deep influence of evolution—from genes to species—patterns are conserved.  Genetic information is coded in the same basic molecular language: A, C, G, and T or U.[vii] All individuals are composed of cells, the smallest basic unit of life.  And the story of a life—of your life and all life—will unfold in a somewhat predictable way.

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The Neuroscience of Tetris

[ 8 ] June 3, 2011

Think of all the puzzle games you’ve ever played. Which has forced you to make visuospatial connections at a rate faster than your brain can normally process them? Can you think of one that combines subtle geometric nuances with coordination of the eyes and fingers to create visual harmony? How about a game where you must cyclically build and destroy structures using randomized building blocks? Tetris is one of the most ubiquitous electronic games of all time, probably because it hides this beautiful complexity behind the faceof seven simple falling blocks, the infamous Tetriminoes.

When Alexey Pajitnov developed Tetris in the ‘80s it was an instant hit. People all over the world crammed around Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) consoles to play with the falling blocks and score points, and now the game has sold over 100,000 million copies worldwide. Today Tetris has developed into something of an online sport, spawning hundreds of yearly tournaments and even a global ranking system. The game is available on almost any platform you can think of and, at the very least, there will always be a person in a crowd who can hum the game’s famous Russian tune, “Korobeniki.” It’s probably safe to say that Tetris is here to stay for a very long time.

Yet what’s most fascinating about this game aren’t the statistics behind its virality. As anyone with an online PhD knows, human-computer interaction is an important part of the learning process that relies on fragile brain-machine interfacing. People break learning curves by activating multiple senses to overcome extreme knowledge barriers, and until very recently scientists had only speculated that playing Tetris relied on this type interfacing in a way that few other systems do. And in 2009, research was published in the open access journal BioMed Central Research Notes that changed the way people think about Tetris.

Gray matter is an amalgam of neuronal cells that is distributed throughout the central nervous system. It is involved in things like memory and sensory applications, and is remarkable in that it has demonstrated plasticity– the ability to shrink and thicken in response to repetitive external stimuli. As young children learn new information their gray matter develops accordingly. Yet when humans reach old age, it is generally believed that cognitive capacity decreases until death. Gray matter’s plasticity, however, allows even the adult brain to continue growing. In all simplicity, Tetris has been found to act upon this flexibility of brain matter by actually thickening it, thereby strengthening neural networks and the webs they control.

The BMC study used a MRI to scan the brains of subjects who practiced Tetris for 30 minutes a day. They compared these images to the MRIs of people who had not practiced Tetris at all. In the experimental group, the researchers found that the subjects’ gray matter had thickened, leading them to believe that the game is responsible for physical cognitive development that should (in theory) also improve things like memory capacity. In effect, playing Tetris allows your brain to operate more efficiently. But how?

Just like any motor, the brain needs fuel to work properly and consistently. Sugars like glucose provide this fuel.  A prevailing theory known as the Tetris Effect states that when a person initially starts to play Tetris, their brain consumes a huge amount of glucose in order to solve its fast-paced puzzles. Through consistent and limited daily practice, the brain begins to consume less glucose to perform just as well, if not better, at Tetris. After a few months the brain becomes so efficient at playing the game that it requires only a very small amount of fuel to perform the game’s rapid puzzle work. What this shows is that the brain actually learns how to solve Tetris conundrums with energy efficiency while it improves performance on the same tasks that once required loads of glucose. This is a prime example of brain efficiency– still a mysterious concept to researchers.

The BMC study appears to actually link gray matter plasticity to brain efficiency, but no substantial research making these claims has been published at this time. At the bare minimum, it is probably safe to assume that Tetris affects the brain in a way that is healthy and even beneficial to learning. So why not exercise that gray matter and give your brain a boost? You might find Tetris difficult at first, but it grows on you. Better yet, it’ll grow your noggin, too!

Jeremy Fordham is a contributing writer for Online PhD Programs. He is an engineer who hopes to inspire dialogue in unique niches by addressing topics at the intersection of many disciplines.

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“Limitless” and Buick Ad Get the Brain All Wrong

[ 7 ] March 23, 2011

Bradley Cooper in "Limitless"

Tracing the influence of present-day brain research on mainstream media and the film industry is a fascinating but routinely frustrating endeavor. The hope is that filmmakers and advertising executives would use their powerful platforms as an opportunity to engage their viewers and buyers with real science, and to use the few opportunities they have to slip in a brain reference to really make sure they are saying something that is based on current understandings. The optimistic result could be a gradual correction in the public consciousness of some prevalent urban legends about the brain.

But more often than not, we see mass media take the easy road– the road that doesn’t require consulting real scientists or taking a genuine interest in scientific accuracy. Instead, the brain is often used for the alluring and impenetrable aura it exudes to further a fantastical plot or sell more products. It is one thing to stay entirely in the realm of fantasy– it is another to claim a basis in the real world and then to get your facts wrong, leading a viewership on to believe that what you’re saying is right.

In the past years, we’ve seen Avatar– with some significant gaps in logic though overall a genuinely intriguing take on a global neural network– and Inception, which, in my opinion, made the mistake of trying to ground its fantastical worlds in actual insights about actual dreaming that humans do (Ellen Page’s endless scenes of rationalizing how this was all possible), but seemed to take absolutely nothing from modern sleep and dreaming research.

Today there are two more significant mentions of the brain swirling in mass media. One is the trailer for the film Limitless, which opened this past weekend in the U.S. Let’s just deal with the trailer, which first grabbed my attention when a male character says the following to Bradley Cooper:

“You know how they say that we can only access 20% of our brain? This lets you access all of it.”

Cut to flashy digital animations of brain tissue. And another generation that will continue to believe that what “they” say about only using a fraction of your brain is still correct. This is an incredibly lazy and irresponsible tidbit to include in a trailer that has now been seen by millions of people around the world. From a Scientific American article published in 2008:

Though an alluring idea, the “10 percent myth” is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although it’s true that at any given moment all of the brain’s regions are not concurrently firing, brain researchers using imaging technology have shown that, like the body’s muscles, most are continually active over a 24-hour period. “Evidence would show over a day you use 100 percent of the brain,” says John Henley, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

In the same vein of mainstream irresponsibility, a new Buick car commercial currently running on all the major networks makes an outrageous claim about the brain’s daily function.

The voiceover begins: “Humans have three thousand thoughts a day. The engine of the Regal Turbo has a hundred and twenty five million thoughts a second.”

I could not believe this ad copy could make it through any rational modern day chain of command. Where did this tidbit come from?

And it goes on, making a completely impossible comparison between the “thoughts” of a mind, however you quantify those, and the “thoughts” of a car’s engine, attempting to mine the allure of the brain to sell more cars.

One can’t even begin to counter this ad because it’s not clear where their research process began and ended, and where they plucked that number from. If you ask any respectable and humble neuroscientist today, the answer you’d get is that there is no way we can even quantify a single thought, let alone figure out how many we have in a day, with current scientific methods. Not even close.

But if you had to guess, just feel it out, does 3,000 a day– which averages out to somewhere between 2 and 3 thoughts a minute– seem intuitively right to you? If the guy driving that car in the Buick ad is having just 2 or 3 thoughts a minute I pray his car is really having 125 million a second, for his safety and the safety of us all.

Perhaps Buick ripped the 3,000 thoughts a day factoid from a quote by A-Rod’s performance coach, Jim Fannin, in a 2004 New York Times article:

”Superstars don’t think like everyone else,” Fannin said. ”The average person has 2,000 to 3,000 thoughts a day, and 60 percent of the average person’s thoughts are in chaos. The superstar has 1,100 to 1,300 thoughts a day. They eliminate worry, envy, jealousy, embarrassment and anger. The superstar thinks a lot less and holds a thought longer.” [source]

If A-Rod only has 1,100 thoughts a day, that may make sense. And maybe Jim Fannin now writes copy for Buick ads.

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Learning to Walk

[ 3 ] January 27, 2011

I have no memory of learning to walk.  I fill the void with out-of-body images: photographs my parents took and slipped into the plastic sleeves of our family archives.  In one photo, I’m pushing myself up from the floor: arms straight, bottom up, feet on tiptoes, as if in yogic preparation for what’s to come.  In another, I am standing up straight, holding the leg of our china cabinet with one hand and reaching the other outward for balance.  I’m looking down at my feet with great focus. My little slippers show no signs of wear – yet.

Of course I’m not alone; none of us remembers our first step.  All we know is that it happened some time at the beginning of our lives.  As a human species, meanwhile, we might assume that our “beginning” happened when we began to walk.  There is no memory – no knowledge – of when exactly this happened.  And so we fill the void with fossils that might suggest a divergence from the four-legged locomotion of our ancestors.

But when paleoanthropologists sift through African rubble and ash, they are not only looking for traces of bipedalism.  They hope that their sweat-drenched labors will yield evidence of something greater, yet infinitely more elusive: consciousness.  What exactly consciousness is still incites debate; its varied definitions begin inside the brain and move outward.  Cognition in the head, language at the mouth, creation with the hands and, finally, some subjective relationship with the rest of the world.  Since not all of these phenomena fossilize, paleoanthropologists can only try to unearth manifestations of conscious – or “modern” – behavior.  Tools, for example.  Or art.

When, then, did humans gain these two great capacities – walking and conscious behavior?  And is there any connection between the two?

One Step for Homo erectus

Lucy

Ardi

In 1974, Homo erectus, or upright man, got a mascot: a fossil hominid named Lucy.  Archeologist Donald Johanson spotted part of her femur sticking out from the dusty ground in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia, and three weeks later his team had unearthed forty percent of her skeleton.  They could tell from the way her knee bent and her lumbar curved that she had spent most of her time on two feet.  They also determined that at 3.2 million years old, she was the earliest example of a walking hominid.

Another find in Laetoli, Tanzania a few years later more or less confirmed this chronology.  A team led by Mary Leakey discovered three sets of footprints pressed into volcanic ash and cemented by rainwater.  No knuckle prints preceded the impressions; this was not the path of lumbering primates.  Homo erectus had walked here, too – this time, 3.7 million years ago.

Then, in 1992, archeologists unearthed another skeleton, just forty-six miles from the site where Johanson found Lucy. Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi, walked on all fours and upright – she did this 4.4 million years ago.

Movement & Consciousness
Despite an ever-fluctuating timeline, we know that our ancestors reared up on their hind legs some several million years ago.  More sophisticated endeavors, it turns out, came much later.  In seeking to qualify “consciousness” for a scientific audience, the archeologist Christopher S. Henshilwood defined modern human behavior as “thoughts and actions underwritten by minds equivalent to those of Homo sapiens today.”  In 1991, in a cave on the coast of South Africa, Henshilwood found an example of this: small pieces of ochre, crosshatched and otherwise engraved.  The creators had used tools, certainly, and since the abstract images on the ochre suggest some “arbitrary conventions unrelated to reality-based convention,” perhaps the tool-bearers had symbols in mind.  Maybe they were making art for art’s sake.  In any case, this was modern human behavior at its purest, and its earliest.  Henshilwood estimated the ochre to be 77,000 years old.

Crosshatched Ochre

77,000.  That number never fails to astound me.  Because if hominids began walking around millions of years before they began to resemble Homo sapiens, then walking shaped their consciousness – our consciousness.  Walking makes us think.  It makes us human, not just as upright walkers but as creatures of reason and creativity.  It was, and is, something as fundamental to the human experience as sex, or death.

Contemporary philosopher Alva Noë, in his book Out of Our Heads, writes that the whole of the conscious human experience relies upon movement; that “consciousness is not something that happens in us.  It’s something that we do.”  Noë critiques some cognitive scientists’ tendency to relegate consciousness to the brain alone and unwed it from the world around the body.  In Noë’s mind, the two are inextricable: the former would not exist without the latter.  “Perceptual consciousness” involves accessing objects and visual information by moving a hand or an eye toward them.  Experience, according to Noë, lies in the “two-way dynamic exchange between the world and the active perceiver.”  You can’t think without moving through or towards something.

Timeline of the Hominid Lineage

It is easy to imagine the roots of consciousness, or early modern behavior, developing with the movements of our Homo erectus ancestors.  Early humans were nomads, after all.  They sought food and fertile mates, and when abundance turned to scarcity, they moved on.  “Neither humanity nor its environment was static,” writes Joseph Amato in On Foot.  “Walking was shaped to place and place was shaped to walking.”  Early humans centered their lives on the assumption that they were transient, and that the land they encountered would always be moving past them.

Before I learned to walk, I slept in a crib.  My parents placed their swaddled babe in the middle of the crib each night, only to find come morning that I had somehow moved myself forward.  My father recalls watching me, on several occasions, trying to propel myself ­­through the front of the crib – my head pressed against the wooden slats, my arms and legs performing a determined, dry-land breast stroke.  “If every newborn baby has an appetite for forward motion,” writes Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines, “the next step is to find out why it hates lying still.”  My efforts earned me the title “ The Go-Go Girl.”

A Wandering Artist

If movement stimulates thought, then perhaps lots of movement allows the mind to reach new planes of contemplation and creativity.  The Greeks explored this idea with their creation of the god Dionysus (Bacchus, in Latin).  Bringer of wine, pleasure, and the Bacchic euphoria, the god’s epithet is, simply, “ The Wanderer.”  He moves with a posse of revelers; in Euripides’ Bacchae, he “urges on the wandering band with shouts and renews their frenzied dancing, as his delicate locks toss in the breeze.”

But Dionysus is more than a party animal; he’s an artist.  What looks like debauchery is actually a kind of feverish groping for inspiration; a successful frenzy climaxes in an ecstatic release of dance, music, and unfettered creativity.  And while everything about Dionysus may be over the top – the booze, the sex, the staying up until all hours – his perpetual state of motion seems to prime him for enhanced activity, creative or otherwise.

The Cult of Dionysus was an affront to the civilized self-restraint championed by Greek city-states (and personified by the god Apollo).  It was also wildly popular among Greek citizens.  They worshiped a god who was, in many ways, much more free than they could ever be.  Dionysus’ ability to reach a state of pure pleasure and existential clarity is certainly enviable.  Is it a coincidence that the Greeks conceived of a figure whose identity was inextricable from – and enhanced by – ceaseless movement?  Perhaps the Greeks, in their infinite wisdom, recognized walking as something that defines being human, and purposefully bestowed a predilection for life-affirming activities on “The Wanderer.”

Flâneur State of Mind

It’s one thing for a god to achieve a state of controlled chaos just by walking around.  But can a mortal?  In 1863, Charles Baudelaire wrote an essay called “The Painter of Modern Life,” in which he reviewed the work of artist Constantin Guys.  In seeking the proper word to praise Guys, Baudelaire layered new meaning onto the word flâneur, the masculine French noun meaning “stroller” or “saunterer.” Baudelaire’s flâneur became a sort of urban synthesis of observer, philosopher, dandy, and artist – a contemplative individual who walks the city in order to experience and understand it.

“For the perfect flâneur, the passionate spectator,” he wrote, “it is an immense job to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.”  A harbinger of the modern age, this cultural oddity could “be away from home and yet [feel] oneself everywhere at home.”  For an artist, to be a flâneur is to enjoy a penchant for deep perception – to imbue one’s art with the “acrid or heady bouquet of the wine of life.”  Evidently, the only way to do this is to loose oneself from all social and personal mores and become what Ralph Waldo Emerson would later call the “transparent eyeball.”

In the moment of perfect flâneur lucidity, the symbolic infrastructure of the landscape crumbles.  With nothing left to mediate her experience, the artist can finally connect with the earth directly below her feet and, if she’s lucky, represent it more fully.  Perhaps that lucidity is a kind of hyper-consciousness activated by constant movement.

Marchand Abat-Jours | Eugene Atget, 1900

In her 1973 essay “On Photography,” Susan Sontag identifies photography as an “extension of the eye of the flâneur” – a middle-class endeavor that, like the meditative stroll of the flâneur, involves setting out to find something real and exciting.”  She cites Atget’s shabby and surreal Paris, Brassaï’s ephemeral images from Paris de nuit, and Weegee’s seamy New York City night scene as exemplars of the flâneur aesthetic.  “The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker,” Sontag writes, “reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.”  What Dionysus, Baudelaire’s flâneur, and Sontag’s urban photographer have in common is that their constant movement through space brings them something in the way of a higher understanding – of themselves, of their surroundings, of their creative capabilities.

After graduating from high school, I embarked upon my own artistic exploits à la flâneur, although I did not know that word at the time.  In Rome, I walked to Trastevere in the pouring rain, and photographed motorcycle headlights illuminating raindrops.  In Bulgaria, I walked through the Saturday bazaar, and photographed a man and a woman below a large poster of old Soviet propaganda: In the arms of mother Russia you will be safe.  In Berlin, a man walking past a building near Checkpoint Charlie, covered with graffiti and still baring its shrapnel wounds.  In Munich, snow-covered tourists squinting upwards at Marienplatz’s Glockenspiel clock tower– an ornate cuckoo clock with moving wooden figures in colorful tights.

Channeling Wanderlust

I walk to understand new places (as much as a stranger can), and only when I think I have succeeded do I capture a frame.  My wanderlust forces me to move; movement, in turn allows me to instill in my creations the “heady bouquet of the wine of life.”  I am a follower of Dionysus, an epilogue for Sontag.  It doesn’t matter that I – we – can’t remember learning to walk.  What matters is that we walk, unabashedly, on the ground that swallowed our ancestors.  And that we embrace our wanderlust, that igniter of thought and creation.

GALLERY | PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANGELA JANE EVANCIE

____________________________________________

Angela Jane Evancie is a writer, photographer and radio producer based in Burlington, Vermont.  She graduated from Middlebury College in 2009 with a joint degree in English and Geography.  She is spending this year with a Compton Mentor Fellowship in multimedia journalism.

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When Memory Starts Working

[ 3 ] September 11, 2010

Stained pyramidal neurons in the prefrontal cortex. Pyramidal cells are the principal labor force of working memory in the PFC.

Working memory is the tool that allows us to navigate an ever-changing world, as we assess what information to ignore, what information to retain for mere seconds, and what information to process as lasting, long-term memories. It is the process that is at work at this very moment, as you—the reader—move from sentence to sentence: each one, I would hope, building on the previous. Or perhaps your mind is elsewhere—your eyes scanning these lines in rhythm yet your attention lost—then, alas, I have failed. But working memory is still working—you have just established a stronger neural coalition with another brain region, and not that of the visual stream from the text before your eyes. If that is the case, I beg your return!

Working memory has been studied on all levels of neuroscientific analysis, from behavioral tests to the cellular mechanisms of neurotransmitter release and receptor function at the synapse.  The idea that working memory is contained within one region of the brain is most likely a false assumption— however, the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the region just behind the forehead, is most often correlated with working memory, as well as a host of other executive functions that are uniquely human, such as complex planning, decision making, and the censorship of one’s impulses. Mark D’Esposito, researcher at the University of California in Berkeley, provides the following definition: “Working memory refers to the temporary retention of information that was just experience but no longer exists in the external environment, or was just retrieved from long-term memory” (D’Esposito, 2007).

Working memory is a particularly difficult cognitive process to study because of its rapidly transient nature. It is the moment after sensory information has entered the brain, but before consolidation into short-term or long-term memory occurs—it is the moment after you receive directions over the phone and where you begin to recite those steps to yourself in hopes of finding your destination.

Presumably the refinement of this process and the ability to instantly call upon the vast stores of memory in the brain to solve problems presented by working memory has been very evolutionarily adaptive for humans: perhaps this explains why working memory is thought to be correlated with the activity of the PFC, an area that has increased in size so rapidly since we parted evolutionary paths with the apes. As the human brain has tripled in size over the five million years of evolution from our ape ancestors, the PFC has increased in size sixfold. This type of rapid increase in cortical surface area over our evolutionary history is not seen anywhere else in the brain.

The prefrontal cortex first came into focus as a potential seat of working memory when single cell recordings found persistent, sustained levels of neuronal firing in that region during tests that require a monkey to retain information over a short period of time in order to perform goal-directed behaviors (Fuster and Alexander, 1971; Kubota and Niki, 1971). These tasks often require a remembered response to a previously administered stimulus cue, such as an eye saccade to the remembered location of a previously displayed flash of light. The single cell recordings from these early studies revealed that neurons in the PFC seemed to show fast-spiking behavior that was sustained for the period of time that the stimulus location was retained by the monkey.

Figure 1 (click image for more information)

In humans, these findings have been supported by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, which measures levels of bloodflow throughout the brain) techniques that show pronounced PFC activity during delay tasks (Curtis and D’Esposito, 2003). While these results lead us toward the PFC, figure 1b clearly shows that there are additional regions that yield pronounced fMRI readings during the delayed response task at hand. Other experiments have shown that these coalitions of activation during the retention phase fluctuate depending on whether the task is retrospective (requiring the recall of past sensory experience) or prospective (anticipating future action).

The prefrontal cortex can be divided into three distinct regions that have been shown to correlate with the processing of different types of information. While the distinctions are based largely on superficial fMRI data, the orbitofrontal and ventromedial areas seem to be most relevant to reward-based decision making. The dorsolateral areas seems to be critical in making decisions that call for the consideration of multiple sources of information, and the anterior and ventral cingulated cortex appear to activate most saliently when dealing with conflicting sensory data that requires integration (Krawczyk, 2002).

Like most of the brain, neurons in the PFC are activated by the predominant excitatory neurotransmitter, glutamate, and inhibited by GABA. While these transmitters are the most widespread and are necessary for PFC activity, other modulatory neurotransmitters have been shown to play a crucial role in working memory. Catecholamines—specifically dopamine and norepinephrine—play direct roles in working memory in humans and animals.

Figure 2 (click image for more information)

Depletion of catecholamines in rats has been shown to severely impair working memory in rats (Simon et al. 1979), whereas the application of dopamine into the PFC of monkeys performing working memory tasks has been shown to significantly increase spike activity (Sawaguchi 2001).

Yet the correlation of increased working memory ability on a behavioral level and higher levels of catecholamines is not exponential: an important body of research has established the presence of an inverted-U-shaped response curve that suggests working memory functions with an optimal range of dopamine D1 receptor stimulation in the PFC,

Figure 3 (click image for more information)

with insufficient and excessive stimulation showing dramatic drop-offs in working memory-dependent task performance (Williams and Goldman-Rakic, 1995). Results have suggested that dopamine is involved in the PFC not as a reward mechanism for successful actions but as a modulatory factor that aids, and perhaps causes—at the correct levels of release—the accurate recall of relevant elements of working memory.

To that effect, a 2005 study showed that distinct molecular processes are at work for memory retrieval lasting seconds versus memories recalled after several minutes (Runyan and Dash, 2005). In this experiment, slice preparations from rats were studied after tasks requiring quick, working memory, versus longer “short-term” memory retrieval, such as that seen in the experiment discussed above. The results show that there is a clear difference in PKA activity between these two temporal periods of information storage and retrieval: in working memory, PKA action was demonstrated to be detrimental, while in short-term memory, PKA function was necessary to avoid behavioral error. The explanation of these results set forth in the study suggests that in longer periods of memory retention the need to select between conflicting internal representations becomes necessary—a process that, on the cellular level, is mediated by PKA activity—while working memory relies more on transient, singular representations without as much conflicting information.

While these cellular studies offer insight into the dynamics of PFC circuits, our task is to connect these synaptic behaviors to the behavior of the organism, as far as working memory is concerned. In addition to the action of dopamine, NMDA receptor action seems to be a crucial component of local PFC circuitry. NMDA receptors are particularly intriguing in the study of working memory because of their unique properties that require depolarization to remove a magnesium block and allow ions to flow into the cell, furthering depolarization. This delayed-onset behavior has been suggested as a possible mechanism for PFC pyramidal cells to sustain firing after initial excitation, and thus as a possible cellular trace of the storage of working memory.

NMDA receptor activation has been repeatedly linked to the innervation of the dopaminergic system (Tsukada et al. 2005). One can begin to see how reverberating connections between sensory regions and the PFC could be the telltale sign of working memory, dependent on NMDA receptor-mediated dopaminergic modulation in pyramidal neurons in the PFC as well as inhibition of background noise to focus on the retention of specific sensory cues for their relay to appropriate, goal-directed outputs, or consolidation into longer-term memories by the hippocampus. A study published last month in the Journal of Neural Systems by researchers at Boston University explains how dopaminergic neurons may keep short-term memories alive in the PFC by firing sharply initially and then maintaining a lower voltage, just enough to prime the cell for a quick re-fire.

As we begin to sort out what neurotransmitters, receptors, and types of neurons are involved in the circuitry of the PFC and thus ostensibly working memory, we can begin to see how cellular events, such as the NMDA-mediated release of dopamine onto pyramidal neurons, can modulate specific synaptic dynamics and lead to the sustained activity that is the hallmark of working memory. Can we make the causative association between the firing of neurons in the PFC—the presumed integrator of various incoming streams—and the behavioral output of the organism? Are there distinct maps in the PFC for spatial orientation, color, or other sensory data that are overlaid in interesting ways, or are these selective response fields ever-shifting, dependent on the incoming stream from the sensory system(s) at play?

Moving from correlation to causation will be the next major challenge for research into the most transient forms of memory we posses. The research has important implications for our understanding of internal representations, as information is moved from sensory inputs to higher cortical regions. If we can narrow down what is necessary and sufficient to explain a given representation of an external stimulus in the briefest of retained intervals, then we could be moving closer to understanding at least a piece of subjective, first-person experience.

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