Consciousness Live! with John Kubie (S3 E16)

0:00 okay we are live uh joining me today is an extra special guest uh john qb uh john for those who don't know you could you say a little bit about who you are and what you do okay my name is john qb um being about 70 years old i have a fairly long history and i'd say when i was starting college when i went to college i had two interests one was biology the other psychology and at that time in the early 1970s these were taught totally separately

0:33 almost totally and as a naive student i didn't know there was any connection between the two areas and graduated um and still was not sure where i wanted to go and somehow i got the hint hey there is an overlap between psychology and biology and i uh after a couple years gap he started a graduate school program in was called biopsychology that was before the term neuroscience was very common yeah and um so that became you know the focus from then on

1:08 uh my my research career started working actually in snakes studying in their olfactory systems specifically the vomeronasal system that might seem very strange to someone in psychology but actually leads into the limbic system and some ideas some old old ideas about the limbic system and reptilian brains given a lot of people don't like those ideas but there's actually something to it that we could go into perhaps later uh and this vomeronasal system is also fascinating in its own right

1:41 uh so that was my thesis work it was actually something i'm quite proud of it it was a funny kind of work where it sort of tested experiments that had been done in the 1930s and would using somewhat more modern techniques at that time we sort of answered the questions so it sort of ended a line of research because no one is oh that's the answer that way this system you and so is that nice but it's not you know it's not an active particularly active line of work now eastern snakes okay so moving forward um i was interested in a faction i did a postdoc

2:13 in olfactory physiology with a guy named dave moulton at the university of pennsylvania but i was really interested in behavior emotion i should have mentioned that i think a core driving thing i wanted to understand was emotion and i went you know i was a little screwed up maybe and i wanted to understand my emotional mess-ups and it drives many many people and uh that was sort of a guiding thing uh so i i went to a second postdoc and that was at down state and i was working with a guy named jim

2:47 wrong who was my mentor for many many years and jim was an innovator in doing single cell recording in behaving animals and recording single neurons in the brains of rats while they're actively behaving and trying to see if you can make a linkage between behavior and the activity of single cells and at the time this is the i went there in 1979 uh we'll do some history of that field later i hope um but it was really cutting edge technology the ability to do it and

3:19 based it it was based on advances in silicon and chips and things like that that made it all possible uh and my goal with this it was to get into the meat of the brain into the mind into understanding emotions uh and in doing that jim was working on the hippocampus and well it turns out i got sort of stuck at the hippocampus and didn't get further into emotions but it's been a productive area of work so that was moving into single cell recording in the brain was about 1979 and i stayed in that group

3:51 really really essentially forever um i went from being a postdoc to being a faculty member i went from collaborating principally with jim ronk to another collaborator guy named bob mueller and mueller and i did i think our most you know cited work anyway in the late 1980s and moved the field i think forward both technically and conceptually technically it was the ability to really do recordings of a sort that people could report them in a way people could understand what we were doing

4:22 rather than sort of subjective well i think the cell fires over here we'll get into that later but in really using computers to collect data and video and things to make somewhat more objective uh recording abilities and that the mid-1980s and it proceeded through the 1990s and uh the club bob died about almost 10 years ago and so that obviously that collaboration stopped uh and also my active research slowed down a lot um and in parallel with that i've done a lot of neuroanatomy and teaching i teach

4:55 med students and allied health students other students graduate students i enjoy that's a big aspect of what i've been doing and um then maybe 10 years ago i said geez you know i'm interested in the there's the soft dimensions of this area and one of the soft dimensions people talk about is consciousness and um so i started a group with graduate students um seminar small seminars where we try to think you know we're neuroscientists we should have a handle on

5:27 some something we could have some insight into so we chose the book quest for consciousness i think you know christophe cox's book which was hot you know we are still but it was really the hot book at the time for the neurobiology neuroscientific basis for consciousness and we used that as a starting point and the first great disappointment was the introductory chapter defining what consciousness was and uses cyril's definition saying something like your consciousness is what you have when you wake up in the morning and you lose when you go to

5:58 sleep at night yeah well that's not a great handle to get started with uh we went to the book and really liked it a lot and i learned a lot but also learned how sort of weak the connections are strong and weak and realize that bumping up against the hard problem which many people have bumped up against and that was really the beginning of my philosophical journey i said 10 years ago i'd like to get the date but i'm not sure of that and since then i've been putting my toe in the water about philosophy a

6:34 little bit here and there um met richard a couple of times at the mod things in new york city um i'd never taken a philosophy course i've learned a lot from my daughter who knows much more than i do i've gotten to be pretty good friends with pat churchland and she's very very warm and helpful and smart and knowledgeable and other philosophers uh and so i have spotty background in it please don't hold me to you know formal philosophical standards and understanding of especially the history

7:06 of philosophy where it's so dense and so complicated and i forget the names and the names of schools and whether it's functionalism or physicalism or illusion i keep trying to get those straight maybe richard can help in those areas and so that's um that's sort of where oh and then finally the last half year it's been since march it's going online that's been a big sea change i i'm a sort of a techie of sorts i like to i think like richard like to try new aspects of technology and i've been working with my school a lot and had to do

7:38 remote teaching methods and trying a bunch of other various things seeing what works and doesn't work and yeah so that's a recent challenge is that you up to date yeah that's a lot that's uh very much up to date thanks for all of that um so there's a lot i want to ask you about in that you sort of describe the journey right there but uh i guess i'd like to start with some of your work i guess uh coming from the 80s and 90s um because i'm very interested in the

8:11 hippocampus you know i don't know if you know this about me but i worked in a lab for uh i mean i've worked in a couple different labs but one of them was doing um recordings from awake and behaving animals uh looking for long-range synchrony between the dentate gyrus and the hippocampal formation and the cortex so the idea was to put the electrodes in the rats and let them wander around an environment um and then see if there was you know some synchronization between that so i mean so that's a a different aspect i think of

8:43 uh what the hippocampus is known for so it's like this you know to people talk about it it's important for memory formation retrieval um it's important for spatial navigation um so the hippocampus is this kind of strange and wonderful place so i wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what your research was in that area what kind of what aspect you contribute to and i have some more specific questions too yeah it's a it's an amazingly broad topic it's hard to touch on all the ways that hippocampus interacts with interesting things

9:15 and with physiology and stuff in fact you're i actually don't know what work you did with synchrony but that's a something that i've been seeing more and more about for example synchrony between hippocampus and prefrontal cortex and how they talk to each other with some of the notion being some of the functions we see for hippocampus in rodents may be sheared or transferred to prefrontal cortex in in in primates or humans uh that's just speculation but people find that an attractive hypothesis because most of the work that i think is um most successful in the hippocampus from rats

9:49 um so let's so we journey back and talk about the the uh start of that work and give a little history yeah it'll be tricky and i think important to link this stuff to consciousness but you can't do it just jumping in i think you sort of have to to lay out the story so a little more history than people are probably interested in um i'm interested okay richard and i are interested in yeah um so uh when i was starting you know so if you're in physiology if you did in rats it was sort of second rate if you wanted

10:22 to do the important stuff you did in monkey monkey people have been mad at this so uh and people were stuck in in what was well known in very important marker is that the scoville and milner study in the early 1950s of uh hm the epileptic patient who had bilateral hippocampal damage it was discovered by milner that he had profound amnesia just couldn't remember or learn new things and we won't go into that great detail so suddenly it was really a sea change the notion that there was a small part of the brain

10:55 that seemed to have a big big chunk to do with memory so that was the you know huge landmark event um and so we thought if we're going to figure out the biological substrate for this we have to do it in something very close to humans monkeys in addition it was sort of you know more technically challenging and everywhere it was harder most of the real famous physiologist were monkey physiologist and uh there was a lot of work done in monkey uh hippocampus and um in addressing the role in memory um and in parallel was some

11:32 much less work in uh hippocampus in rats and let me just mention two groups doing or maybe three um so there was my mentor jim ronk john o'keefe and uh uh olds who's well known for self-stimulation and there probably were some others doing hippocampal physiological work but maybe significantly olds and o'keefe old and particularly psychologists and there was a little bit of condescension among physiologists that psychologists can't really do physiology that kind of thing yeah so um the sense was if

12:05 the breakthroughs would come through the monkey work and let's just jump ahead 50 years and that's not what's happened um the breakthroughs actually seem to have come mostly through the hippocampal work and that's not due to one group being better than the other or anything just that's how science works it doesn't always work in the predictable ways and we'll get to this so the important breakthrough if i didn't hope not skipping anything is john o'keefe's discovery of plate cells in the hippocampus yeah and

12:39 uh to do that to record place cells o'keeffe and rock were doing this in parallel in the late 1960s recording single cell activity and neurons and freely moving rats and to do that was technically very challenging um it record required some microelectronics that was only just then available um i remember the name of the chip the very you know this is the kind of uh uh effie field effect transistors with the

13:11 critical elements that were developed and o'keefe and ronk in parallel not know each other started putting these head stages on rat's heads and this meant that the signal going up a cable would not be cluttered by all sorts of artifacts that tiny tiny electrical signals coming from outside of cells and single cells could be sufficiently amplified and cleaned to record clean action potentials from neurons and both importantly both of what what they both were doing putting tiny electrodes in rat brains putting them in a position outside of cells not intracellular

13:45 so being outside of cells they could faithfully record the action potential trains from nearby neurons if they had tried my people might say oh infrastructure is better it's more sensitive if they tried to go into cellular which was technically not feasible but if they had that really damages cells sufficiently they don't get a good record of their action potentials to get good record of the action potential you have to be slightly distant so they were interested in the actual potential activity of single neurons and if you put these extracellular electrodes close enough to a neuron it will be able to record in the

14:19 extracellular space the voltages produced by the action potentials of that neuron so the signals are tiny the typical signal outside of the cell is might be 300 micro volts less than a millivolt way less than this total amplitude of an action potential but both these teams and others were able to get good quality recordings um so o'keefe in one o'keeffe and duskrovsky was the first recorded paper reporting um uh a place else in hippocampus so both of these groups were working in

14:52 the hippocampus for i don't actually i know why jim was doing it i don't know why i don't really know why o'keefe was doing what he thought he'd see but he reported um play cells and it was if you look at the paper okay from distrovsky from 1971 the data's not convinced he said he draws a little uh uh schematic of the apparatus they were on and draw little circles where the cells fired and some some trains of action potentials are sort of illustrated on a strip but it's not that really not convincing you have to sort of take his

15:25 scientific word for it which now we do because he's a nobel prize winner he wasn't a nobel prize winner then he was a young kid and um so that was and he said this was that this he asserted this was a cognitive map and mapping system a huge assertion based on very few cells from a couple of animals just wildly contained so a little background there is the notion that there's a map in rat's brain dates back to tolman's work in the 30s and 40s and 50s pure psychological behavioral work not

15:58 localized anywhere in the brain and it was a fascinating duel between camps of psychology about whether rats or had cognitive functions map like functions of their brain or whether they're more sr automatons robot robot light and so tolman laid the foundation um o'keefe sort of picked up on that and said this was he proposing the hippocampus was the where we would find coleman's cognitive map huge leap of cognitive you know guesswork but it wasn't the title of this paper really

16:31 amazing um so o'keefe was both doing these technological advances and these theoretical propositions that were just great but wild um of give jim wrongsome into the picture here he was doing the same kind of work in the hippocampus didn't not clearly see the place else he got wind of o'keeffe and went and visited him for a few months and they became good friends and slowly jim got also convinced to the place of phenomenon that was maybe a little slow

17:04 he always says he didn't he takes no credit for it but though sometimes he's given some um so at least these two labs are pushing forward with these techniques um another important marker a huge importantly important marker is o'keeffe and a colleague lynn naedel published a remarkable book the hippocampus is a cognitive map right i think that publication date 1978 and it laid out this fantastic theory basically built on tolman and the place of findings still pretty sparse

17:37 place well findings but the theory you know laid out a challenge that um it's just a richard have you read the book do you know the book yeah i do know the book yes yeah so recently so and no you wrote something about it recently actually you were wrong like a revisiting of it uh so to speak right so i mean it starts out with i think 80 pages on philosophy and and that way this is the country in perspective you know if the lynn nadell is a terrific psychologist in his own right

18:09 balanced o'keefe terrifically and um i think they that's one chapter the one another wonderful thing that they did this is maybe the most impressive chapter was to review the then current hippocampal lesion literature and psychologists at that time were very fond of making lesions and brains and trying to figure out what the different parts of the brains did right and the hippocampus was the target and they were all there are several theories about what the hippocampus did at the time things like response inhibition and a few other theories and what o'keefe and nadel did was go

18:44 through the literature and see if they could reproduce all the deficits in terms of the animals being basically lost in space unable to find their way around and they did a remarkable job there so the original authors never really examined that as a possibility and they reconciled much of the literature that exist in literature in in this perspective so it was really terrific uh and moving forward people began to do lesion experiments and sort of confirm this um but at the time i don't think that

19:17 they had they were doing any there was very very little uh so and they moved into chapters on physiology including eeg rhythms theta rhythm that kind of thing and chapters on single unit recording and tying it into human memory stuff to some degree surprisingly to me they didn't tie it into ltp learning the plasticity in the nervous system something that was just recently discovered and they well knew about but they asked them why that wasn't there no didn't get a clear answer but so it's this remarkable book in 1978

19:50 laid down the framework that i think many of us still work in there are lots of things that were mistakes they did have they did have a model of how it worked not you know the very skimpy model and wrong but they tried that that was an important first step is how would you how would neurons really do this how would this possibly come to pass and and so that's been the start of many many models um that have there's some come come afterwards that yeah can you say a little bit about the what place cells are

20:22 okay what a place though so i talked about this recently and that was so imagine um you're a rat and you have this you're holding a tiny little geiger counter and in your in if you're in a chamber maybe it's a big rectangular box and somewhere in the box but someone has put a little tiny little bit of uranium and so you're walking around the apparatus and when the gyro counters we've all heard it go pop up pop up and so the closer you are to this piece of uranium the more pops you'll hear it'll pop you know very slow when you're and as you

20:55 get closer with many direct distance or direction your you the rat is moving you'll have this popping sound increase well that's what a play cell is like there's no uranium there's no geiger counter but it pops when the animal is near a location in the apparatus and so that's one cell and that would be a place cell and now you take another cell in the apparatus and we will describe that cell as having a firing field which is the center of this piece where the uranium was it grades off in space and maybe it the size of the field might

21:29 cover about a quarter of the apparatus is pretty big but it's got very crisp center take another cell and um it will have a firing field somewhere else in the apparatus and another cell somewhere else and from very few cells people made the inference that well it'll cover the apparatus and pretty shortly thereafter that was discovered well across rats and of course lots of cells that that seems to be true the firing fields considering enough cell will cover the apparatus so one thing you might think of at first

22:02 well if it's a map there's be some topographic organization in two ways one is if you took this set of cells from one apparatus to another and they all fired together that the spatial relations across the cells ought to stay the same turned out that's not true and they scatter i'll get into that in a moment the other topography you might expect is that if you recorded neighboring neurons in the hippocampus for their pyramidal cells the large projection cells if you recorded one you go to its

22:34 neighbor you might say expect that it has a neighboring firing field not the case uh pretty early on people were able to record multiple cells from a single electrode or a few electrodes nearby and see if the fields were centered or localized didn't seem like not at all the case and the other aspect of going from one apparatus to another actually bob mueller and i think were the first to well describe this um and what we let me describe our experiments a little bit more detail this is 1987 published going from a cylindrical enclosure to a

23:09 rectangular enclosure to a cylinder twice the size and a rectangle twice so the animal's familiar is very familiar with these apparatuses it walks around the behavioral task by the way almost certainly is not dependent on the hippocampus the rats just are we tried to get them to explore the space and randomly drop food pellets to different locations and i don't know the experiments ever been clearly done but you damaged the hippocampus that behavior is not disrupted the goal is really just to get the animal exploring all parts of the environment and it's somewhat interesting that this

23:42 hippocampal system seems engaged spatially even when the task is not spatial so getting back to the data here is what we saw with going from let's imagine we were able to record a few cells at a time in the small apparatus the small cylinder taking the rat to the small enclosure what we would just see with something like if we're recording three cells two of them might become totally dead silent the third one would would go to a location we could could not predict and maybe one or two other cells would suddenly be seen as fun

24:15 as active of having their own firing fields so and then the same kind of thing going from one apparatus to another if the apparatuses are somewhat similar in shape there's not that radical change that sort of some of the cells change some don't but if they're sufficiently different you get what's called we called remapping now commonly called global remapping and it leads to the idea that each that the hippocampal map if you want to think of it that way is unique to each environment the animal's in

24:47 that this is you have to make a new map every time you change an environment right it's a it's a system that's capable of holding multiple maps and then it gets up to the complicated issue how many maps can it hold is that a you know in in in cases where the hippocampus is damaged with the mapping system fall down and where they fall apart and how all those sorts of issues the capacity and these are fascinating questions which are just not clearly answered even now yeah but uh the idea the idea is that so first of all the idea of a map

25:21 the play cell with the buzzing and whatnot this is uh mapped onto the environment irrespective of the animal's body position in the environment and that's right yes and no yes and no uh the first approximation yes in it in a large 2d space of this sort yes um if it's an alleyway kind of situation they're highly directional okay so if there's a lot of vertical places not vertical uh no no i meant um so if the animal was running one

25:53 direction and in an alley in the other direction it probably only fire when the animal is going one direction oh i see okay so what some of the original studies were in what's called eight radial arm mazes or eight arm mazes which have lots of alleys and those when the animal's in the alley it's highly directional when it's in the central platform it's omnidirectional okay um and these are the same cells same cells right okay um that's a confusion to me the omnidirectionality is more impressive and surprising and that was

26:26 what was first described the directionality you can't quite explain it you could the as your point is suggesting the animals sort of in a sense have to learn these places we go put into a novel environment the whole thing doesn't spring up immediately right it looks like a few cells sprang up and then over time it crystallizes but um i this suspicion i would have is that in an alleyway it's it's a partial partially learned perhaps there's no utility into knowing the same place if it always ends in two different

26:58 directions i don't have a good answer for that either functionally or physiologically but that's basically what we've seen okay um maybe this is a good time to talk about direction because there's another so um my mentor jim ronk who i talked about earlier um his maybe i guess his most famous finding is head direction cells yeah and so head direction cells are recorded not in the hippocam the hypo we don't have a figure but the hippocampus is one region of the rat

27:31 brain it's a it's a primitive cortex or an older light it's a cortex with simpler organization than neocortex adjacent to it are a few transitional cortical zones and then there's neocortex if you go to these transitional critical zones frequently what jim started doing was exploring these transitional zones and in one of them he found these cells called head direction cells and head direction cells are sort of the orthogonal or totally different from place cells where a place of to first approximation

28:04 fires in a place irrespective of a direction the head direction cells file with direction irrespective of place and it's important to point out the direction is not direction with respect to the animal's body it's respect and risk direction with respect to the outside world and you you might think of it as a compass-like direction but it's not magnetic complex because you can rotate the environment the whole thing rotates but if you record where the cell fires in different parts of space it's always

28:36 parallel vectors as if it's a compass pointing that direction and the head direction cell signal it's hard to give you guys a sense of it the play cell signal is really robust but the head direction cell signal is more robust and whenever you record firing of cells in the brain you say is that really what it's interested in maybe there's some correlate that's stronger or better you know we're just missing the essence um and that argument can can sort of be made for plate cells it cannot be made for head direction cells

29:08 they respond like a 10 sensory receptor you know they're totally predictable responses there's no room in basically no variance no room for another signal to piggyback on uh so that's a separate system a separate signal and you know if you're creating a navigational robot these are two good signals to have yeah so you can't you can't really even knowing where you are if you don't know what direction you're heading you're not going to get towards your goal and if you have to know both begin heading out uh so what are the ideas about how the system computes this

29:43 this axis so that the vectors go along or in other words how does it stay primitive that yeah i think there's a lot of description of how these you know the the basic behavioral properties and different environments and the sensory inputs but how they downstream can compute behavioral trajectories is much less far along and how they and the uh the neuronal computational dynamics is not well understood you know really how the neurons compute

30:15 one thing from one step to another uh surprisingly big challenges i you could blame the community but i think that's not fair it's just the challenges that it'll keep laid out 50 years ago it was a 50 whatever the number of years ago are bigger than people suspected yeah and it's it's a i think there is a lot of progress but it in it's in smaller steps so one of the things outlined sorry oh sorry just say one of the things that i'm really interested in is this uh the way

30:47 that um various signals from these neurons may be interacting with more global eeg signals like the theta rhythm which we hear a lot about the way these signals are nested in the in the data and the way that data may uh operate to synchronize i sidetrack that question for a second yeah there's one other cell type that that embarrass if they don't introduce and that's great cells they're very famous um in like it was at the turn of the 21st century the mosers group in primetime discovered mid cells

31:19 yes so so we i described place cells earlier as having this one firing field i mean usually something that they have a couple but they're sort of random with respect to each other uh the mosers and their students and post recording in the medial in the internal cortex and the medial and toronto cortex discovered the new surprising cell type and they sent their place cells in that they fire in specific locations of the environment but instead of having a single bump or a random second one the the pattern of the bumps is incredibly regular and it creates a

31:52 grid-like arrangement um and the it's roughly a hexagonal grid that covers the environment so amazing discovery early on it was thought reasons probably right now thought that oh if we just add these grids together if they're out of phase and so we've just added together that would produce some place cell and it would computationally but it doesn't seem it works out that way when you wipe out the deletions of the grid cell system the place files

32:25 sort of change a little you know it's not a simple story so that's one of the i think blind alleys is the simple ideas of how these things could be extracted from one from another don't work out that well but the grid cells are really really important the general notion is they contribute to something called path integration that is using your own path to understand where you are in space the history of your movements that's a whole another sort of complicated story but the grid cells have to tie in the grid by the way the grid cell area the medial and rhino cortex projects right into the

32:57 hippocampus and so it really feeds in uh anatomically perfect the idea that the placed cells would come from grid cells seemed like it had to be true it's not so simple you know it doesn't work out that kind of thing okay let's go back to that never quite that's simple the oscillation story yeah part of me is wondering like because i know the mosers have introduced some of this stuff and uh there's other you know work that that relies on this too but what the picture that you get is kind of

33:30 that there are these that information can be broadcast in some sense or carried or tuned into by different systems in the brain by by using these different oscillation frequencies is is that too much of a metaphor reading into the brain is functioning do you think or do you think that's no but i think it's not well enough understood to to get really into it and plus i'm not probably the one to tell the story but um yeah i think there's a general notion that different areas have to coordinate and get synchronized in some fashion single cells

34:01 don't produce any signal that's of use to an animal with billions of cells they have to synchronize in some way and it takes a collection of cells to get to the behavioral endpoint and to some degree isolations organize and collect information from a unit one region to another um and there's multiple different frequencies that are important i mean different it seems like a a bunch of of um signals coordination frequencies that are going on in parallel and since it multiplex is the term so you get low frequencies coordination

34:35 at the same time high frequencies coming through carrying apparently a different signal but not interfering with each other too too much and um then sometimes these things interact with each other um but yeah i think that the oscillation stories are widely pursued um they generally assume that for areas to communicate effectively their neurons have to fire get in sync with each other and how that works is a big uh issue and one i'm probably just not the best person to be give you metaphors or

35:08 ideas or where things are yeah okay but so how does this story that we're talking about because this is sort of what i started off asking about the beginning was it seems like you hear these two stories about the hippocampus and its related areas uh so the one is the story that we're talking about how important it is for spatial navigation there are place cells grid cells head direction cells and then the other is this story about from hm that uh you know it seems to have this role in encoding long-term memories which is why maybe you were surprised that ltp wasn't mentioned

35:41 in the early book or whatever but so these they seem like different stories but yet they focus on the same set of structures and i don't hear much about that in the in the story of play cell grid cells and there's not a lot of the right i think that every one of the placebo grids our world understands that those two stories have to be merged you know it's just not reasonable to think that the same structure does two totally different things or does one thing in rats and does something totally different in humans it's the organization is so identical and things right plus more recently people found place else to be human it's

36:14 different technically difficult usually the patients lying in bed waiting for surgery or something like that so you can't have them run through maintenance but uh this the phenomenon it doesn't seem like it's a rat specific thing dish rats are convenient um and then they met the question do the rats have episodic memory which is maybe we'll we'll head a little bit but yeah so the uh the treasure at the end of the rainbow is to merge these two points of thought now that there is a sort of

36:46 midway theory uh i would sort of call it a pioneer most by howard eichenbaum which is that the place cell system is part of a more general system that's all about just relations and associations and um focusing too much on the spatial thing is is missing the main feature i'm not of that thing i think the place is fundamentally important the system is evolved and organized to do and my guess is to to do spatial tasks and the other things

37:18 right on top of this basic ability rather than thinking there's a more general ability that that came to pass we can see the spatial nature of it um most easily because the way we do the techniques um i don't really think it's useful to get into a debate about that but i i still think that the spatial thing is the fundamental thing and it's not some said not secondary to some more general thing the rats are doing if we generalize what i would say is that um with the spatial

37:49 navigational system gives you is a two-dimensional interactive system so it really has reduced dimensionality and it can compute associations and trajectories and paths across a two-dimensional representation uh functionally in evolution to dement you know if you think of uh the animal behavior and some of the more primitive animals and long ago in time getting around in space is a real important thing you know yeah it's knowing where the food is where your nest is where danger places are

38:20 having some map of their environment to these things this isn't not some abstract ability this is real life and death and uh evolve function and are fascinating things about what once animals became began to locomote they develop brains and animals that don't locomote don't do have brains and even animals that locomote and then early parts of their lives and then become cecile i think there's the word then they sort of play they their brains disappear it's sort of you know locomotion and and finding your way around is a core behavioral function

38:53 and so i think that my guess is that's the core um and understanding it will lead to insights about maybe more abstract um uses of the same uh cellular machinery that's interesting so your idea would be that the spatial stuff is is really important for survival but then the episodic memory stuff may be um a kind of offshoot of that in some sense no maybe an offshoot but i'm not sure how different an offshoot but uh linked to it yes interesting

39:28 yeah so yeah because it would it be that do you think the hippocampus has any role in planning possible church directories is that one of the things oh that's a good lead in question and i love it that's um uh so maybe the background for this is to give a little hip phil some you know undergraduate philosophical framework that the charge from daniel dennett uh and i think if i remember correctly he had a book in the early mid 90s kinds of minds yeah talks about four kinds of nines i think

39:59 i gotta remember the name i use this paramount i sort of remember it so there's the uh darwin so he then it's terminologies the ability to do cute tricks the you know be able to do fancy behavior and what it takes to defensively so the the lowest level creature that can do fancy behavior has a darwinian mind that is its ability to do fancy behavior tricks is totally in inherited uh from its parents its ancestors it develops over eons and multiple generations the second somewhat more fancy creature

40:33 is this canarian i think he calls it where they can do trial and error during their lifetime and evolve better behaviors as they are by trial and error and so it's not just your ancestors learning slow social learning across eons it's learning within a lifetime the third level he calls um the who to give credit to he gives he names these all by uh pop aryan papi yeah thank you thank you carl popper gets the credit and that's doing

41:05 uh not having to do trial and error in real time but to matt doing it into imagination if i go there what will happen if i take this route what will happen figure that route what will happen and um i think he had a quote from popper about how many lie you know animals lives saved by not going off cliffs and things like that and just doing it so so yeah so that the level three creatures that is is my favorite and it's what um i think is going on in the hippocampus is taking imagined routes through space to uh see

41:38 what the most the optimal route is and i think with theirs i think where there's fascinating evidence uh of these imagined trajectories and well now i have to remember the name of the authors of the study i like there are several studies that examine this um blanking the author's names as i frequently do yeah i can put a link afterwards okay remember later they may come up to me a little bit so basically what they did was um actually the design was a little complicated they trained rats to go to food

42:12 they had multiple food wells in a big big environment and during a single um behavioral trial the one food well was was baited and could be rebated and then so they knew during the day past which the rats would know what food and well was the um baited one didn't get it that's correct and they also baited around the edges this was a little complicated design so the rat would go between the one in the middle that's hard to find and one around the edge they're fairly easy to find they have to alternate between those two goals and

42:45 so and they're recording um hundreds of hippocampal neurons so when you record hundreds of hippocampal neurons you can make a good guess of what the animal's representation of it is exactly where it is any place in the environment so through a bayesian decoding scheme they can say oh the animal and they could show they beautifully showed that the animal's representation of where it was tracking really where they're at was virtually anywhere in this large space wow you can only one cell at a time you can only tell when it's in that one

43:18 field but if you're recording hundreds oh you put these all this information together you make a good guess of where the animal hippocampus is pointing to and um where the animal thinks it is in a sense uh or our guess of what the where the animal thinks it is okay so that's the background so what do they do the the um the animal or the task further is it's alternating between the location the goal in the in the middle of the apparatus and going around the edges and what they find is when the animal finds food around the edges

43:52 it then has to figure out what what's the best path to get to the goal and since the location it finds around the edges vary from time to time it's not always the same path from try one to trial two they have to compute a different optimal path to get to this goal location and what does the rat do the rat when it finds food at the edges doesn't immediately discovery towards the goal it seems to pause and go out of the locomotor pattern and rear and look around a little bit and during this look around behavior there are um very rapid trains of action potentials

44:27 and this was a phenomenon discovered by yuri obazaki is that during these so-called sharp waves the sharp waves are the eeg waves riding on the sharp waves are very rapid trains of action potentials and you see the sharp waves when the animal pauses and rears and you can if you're very careful record the trains of action potentials and what this study's authors i'm still struggling for did was they watched these shark waves when the animal was scanning the environment

44:58 presumably trying to figure out a best route to get to the goal and on successive sharp waves they would play out what you could call a path that is a sequence of action potentials the represented place cell that would take the animal from where it currently was to one part of the apparatus and with successive sharp waves different paths emerged going different places and one of them one of the paths would take the animal very close towards the goal and then the animal would go down and

45:32 follow a behavioral path very close to the imagined path so this is not a perfect experiment it didn't you know it wasn't exactly impressive but but but it's it's what we imagine i imagine it's coming the animal is sitting there and it's in it's you know the preference if i go there will i find the gold you know very quickly going through these simulate these internal simulations of pens and determining whether they're effective ones or not so i think that um so make sure i understand so what i know about the sharp wave so you're saying

46:06 nested on the sharp waves there's a burst of action potentials the neurons which are firing those action potentials represent place cells yes so that firing pattern indicates like there would be sequences along an executed path if the animal were to execute a band and for example and that's really quite amazing when you think about it that that you can find that clear evidence of that happening right and that's right it's mind-blowing now is it a perfect study did you know are there flaws that you could argue about yeah you could see them but technically recording as i was saying

46:39 hundreds of play cells is incredibly challenging and a behaving animal and um training the task and getting the recordings it's a it's a very very impressive study yeah sort of which could remember the names of the authors but uh yeah you can fill it in okay so um and there but that's not doesn't sit alone there are others that i don't find quite as a pr you know is extraordinary but um that's the general notion

47:11 is that riding on the shark waves are trains of action potentials that represent pads but they're not pads that are during execution their pads they are somewhat like episodic memory interesting so you can see the bridge between there and some kind of episodic memory or mental time travel or something like that so let's take when else do you see these trains of action potentials so now take the same rant and put them to sleep i'd let them sleep let them sleep and record from their brains and their various patterns of sleep to sleep stages and stuff and

47:45 during some stages of sleep different things emerge during some stages these trains of action potentials occur which are relatively slow and sort of in real time in other stages the shark wave like trains will occur the interesting things is the trains of action potentials come very close to representing real trains that had been observed in the animal in his previous waking episode episode right and if you think about random processes if you would randomly identify cells in the hippocampus they

48:20 would never make yeah if a string of 10 cells fight would never make a real path they're just too many possibilities and certainly not a real path in the behavior in the apparatus the animal recently was in yet what's seen as something close to the real paths in the recent page uh so there's this idea of replay during sleep which uh closely parallels that pre-play during exploration and one can think it doesn't take a big big stretch of imagination

48:52 is that replay during sleep is let's say is linked to if not episodic memory right it's like a consolidation process so you can link it well that too so it's also part of the process that selects what aspects of my recent experience i'm going to consolidate and store for future and what aspects will let them disappear so but it both is a replay so the very very fast replay doesn't seem likely to be episodic it's just two memory you know episodic memories don't occur that quickly but the slow perhaps is episodic

49:25 memory but it's it's becomes a a model or a substrate how we can begin to think about it and so path through space are much like episode episodes in episodic memory and we can because we have this ability to know where the animal was at one time during its recent experience we can call that a real path so is there i mean this is something i don't know really know a lot about but is there any work that uses maybe like optimal genetics or something like that which can like get some of these things the fire sponge at will so to speak and maybe would the animal navigate in that

49:59 way if you recreated some of these patterns optogenetically or something like that you're challenging me so i'm i'm a twitter user i think you are also yeah and twitter's become my way of sort of most efficient way of tracking recent publications and i think i get about two or three relevant hippocampal publications per day is a pretty active field yeah and uh with my amnesia i don't restore them all so well yeah so there's a lot of work without

50:31 the genetics i can't think of anything that is um quite quite as pro you know strong as you're suggesting and so some of them really seem like failures um but uh yeah that uh there's a lot of work in that regard i think maybe combined with that or more exciting are some of the optical recording methods so much earlier in our talk i talked about the single unit recording with electrodes where i sort of inferred you could maybe get two

51:04 or three cells at one time if you're real good and um so the electrode recording methods have progressed a lot and uh in the studies that have done most recently they may have gotten up to hundreds of electrodes recordings with fancier electrode techniques and putting more electrodes in the brain and all sorts of things like that these are all microarrays though so they'd all macro arrays right and edges of silicon chips and things of that sort um the the big change i think is is optical recording and as far as i

51:41 know so far it's done only in mice where you expose a region of the hippocampus from from above and put a video cam a tiny little video camera mounted on the animal's head and use calcium imaging to see which cells are available spikes in calcium now calcium spikes are not the same as sodium spikes they're really different but they're they're much slower you get this calpers this increase in calcium apparently when they're a whole bunch of sodium spikes from traditional action potentials

52:14 um but so these calcium pulses can be used as a marker for maybe you get one calcium pulse for 10 quick action potential so when the animal is in the middle of a firing field you'd imagine that would give you one calcium spike so with these microscopes mounted on most mice heads they can view fields of thousands of neurons wow and they can watch the calcium spikes and videos and they get there's a lot of advantages here if they truly represent what we were with the electoral draw recording

52:46 among them are you recording thousands second you know the spatial relations across the cells see if that wow original topology may have been something there and third they apparently can record for months or maybe a month long periods of time recording the same cells over and over again so that these things together with the advances in the electro electrophysiology where you can put hundreds of electrodes or the imaging technology where you can record thousands of neurons and seemingly similar dependent variables um

53:20 these prob these are well i just call promising they produce some important results but mostly they're you know show that the techniques are there to really do new sorts of things yeah i mean so that's so that's very interesting i mean one of the obviously the more technological things that we have the better that we're at but uh i mean to get back to this point about the relation of memory to the hippocampal spatial uh stuff um was there so would you have bilateral hippocampal

53:56 lesions uh do you also find deficits and spatial navigation i mean hm was already able to walk around and stuff but he wasn't able to well human with animals certainly they're just well that they can use landmarks and things like that uh so go towards a post or something of that sort but to do this map like computation they're lost and the most famous apparatus for that is the morris water maze um right this was developed i think it was about 1990 something like that and it seems a very elegant task um

54:31 for people may not know it it's a large like six to ten foot diameter swimming pool uh there is a hidden platform uh surface a couple inches or so below the surface the water is made opaque with something so the animal can't see the platform and uh the animal through just a couple of training trials put in a rat put into the apparatus and swims directly to the plant the rats swim pretty well but they don't like the water so the diver you know so they learned very quickly to swim towards the platform and get there

55:03 and they take very linear paths even though they're starting from different start points uh why is it better than other things well the the goal is not marked it's not it's in no way a landmark they can't follow a single landmark on the wall or it's something say follow that and it's hidden and the pads are unique so it it's uh very very widely used and an elegant design to to show a map like navigational strategy i mean you can if you want to put landmarks in the background or

55:35 oh there's lots of things you can manipulate yeah yeah um and then you can test memory and short-term memory and long-term you can you know trying over days within days lots of ways of manipulating this and every imaginable thing has been tried i think and can you do that with uh when i guess you could when the animal has electrodes implanted for recording like well it's very hard um should i confess something i think i can confess i think i may have reviewed one of the moser's very very first papers where they were trying to do

56:06 electrophysiology in the in the water maze makes a lot of sense these are the two not a great paper uh the big problem is you can't get the animal to sample or parts of space so you can't create a map the map-like representation that was done earlier and so it it's it's not been much pursued um yet it did you going back decade to our original study but also current work to get these place cell maps you have to have the animal walking across the

56:38 environment for tens of minutes and lots of sampling of all regions of space um otherwise you won't have their problems with that as well is there variation path to pass and all sorts of things of that sort but you the the water recording in the water is not a very good way to go okay plus the short and stuff like that but then that's not the obstacle the obstacle is the animal can't explore the whole world okay okay so uh but sorry i started a side track

57:11 you from the original uh point which was about the use of the water maze okay yes the water is the elegant design and um so early on i think the ultimate 8r maze was a very popular design there's the barnes maze which is a good design the water maize is elegant there are other ones richard morris develops these beautiful mazes coming out every year so but uh the water maze is sort of the landmark you know this is sort of the gold standard i think um the task is how do you create a behavioral apparatus

57:43 that will show the animal couldn't be using a strategy other than a cognitive mapping strategy right and that's the challenge that was tolman was trying to do you know many many decades ago and with every task you design people can say well they could have been doing it this way you know that's a trick they could have learned it wasn't quite as fancy as you were you were making it out to be um and so the goal is to design a task that would be very hard for an animal to use without a cognitive map and then to show that if you disrupt the part of the brain that seems to be the

58:15 cognitive map that the behavior is disrupted and that's what the water maze accomplishes i think yeah and so this is i mean in one of the ways i mean the thing about this is a huge success story obviously from cognitive neuroscience uh so he's trying to take take some some function like this localize it carefully rule out all sorts of counter examples and possible other mechanisms and so this idea that there's a cognitive american hippocampus has really stood the test in the way that you expect good science to so i guess was partially recognized with the nobel prize or dude is that the way you see yes yeah so

58:49 what was it five years ago or so yeah john o'keefe and the moser shared the nobel prize and it was for this work i was a little disappointed the way it was advertised in the a little bit in the way they their their talks were beautiful talks but they never talk about learning and they know about him they don't go that far they talk because they think it was advertised as their hippocampus as a gps system yeah yes as far as it goes but they don't take these take it one step further and i think you know what you and i are trying to do is in others is trying to take the one step

59:22 further right see you know how it links to higher cognitive other cognitive functions and uh there we're not as far along but that's i think why i'm talking to you into something called consciousness now yeah exactly exactly so i mean that actually segues into what i was going to ask you about anyway but uh so in yours in your view who's reading this map out so these these neurons are connected to oh the little man of the brain don't you know yeah exactly where's the signal being sent to and

59:57 what uh what systems are making use of it that's a really you know i don't think i can answer the question very you know very happily i can make stabs at it and sometimes they are better stabs than others and i'm not sure what stab is going to come come forth uh but yeah it's uh how do you get from there to behavior um and so maybe i should backtrack and talk about my thoughts about consciousness a little bit because i think these are two things that we want to get to merge yeah so my perspective on consciousness is that

1:00:31 it has to have behavioral functions or i'm not interested in it um it has to in because if it doesn't have behavioral function it cannot be an evolved function can't be something that the of utility to the organism and that sort of you know thing but you know where i stand here i stand well let me just tell you a second so what what's the it here what you say if it doesn't have utilities if consciousness doesn't have an outlet to behavior it can't that means to me it doesn't have a function and if it doesn't have a function

1:01:02 it can't have a behaviorally evolved function and let me just say i'm not interested in it you know i'm almost kind what do you mean by consciousness is what i mean so whatever we we wherever we come to be mean by consciousness we have to move backwards a little bit i'm not sure we'll get there but um the system i would like to try to understand is a high level system that leads to behavioral flexibility and some of and we find that we introspect about consciousness it has a lot of these features yeah so because i mean for my

1:01:36 personal perspective i think the question of whether consciousness has a function is an open question okay i wouldn't want to define it into the concept of of consciousness okay i'm only going to person pursue the at the the other yeah and uh you're the fork that it has no output no function i'm just not going to i mean so what's the what's the reason for doing that though because time is limited and stuff but uh well i mean free will and all will and all those sorts of things and

1:02:09 you know i i i maybe my you know optimistic bias that i that my mind is meaningful it's not just an epic phenomenon um that's you know i if i have to i only have so much i can do with my life and if i don't want to pursue things that i think are uninteresting and then yeah but you don't want to pursue dead ends either and rule out no possibilities simply because uh but i think this this channel hasn't been pursued sufficiently uh-huh yeah okay so what do you tell me what do you mean by that what's not been okay so we've gotten as far as

1:02:43 um thinking that there's a system in the hippocampus which can look at possible executed behaviors and choose the optimal one right okay so let's call that deliberation so that i think that's the core function of consciousness is deliberation now whether the hippocampal system is the consciousness deliberation system or not i'll leave open-ended but i think examining possible alternatives and choosing an optimal one is a very pretty important function and i'll you know say that

1:03:16 that that asp deliberation i'm not i'm not going to say it's the only function but it's a core function of consciousness yeah so what you're saying then is that it can't happen unconsciously oh aspects certainly happen unconsciously there's lots of ideas of how these imagined outcomes occur in lower level motor systems the cerebellum and other places but um that's why i would not say for sure that the hippocampus is the consciousness system but i'd say my you know just introspectively

1:03:48 that fits what i think my consciousness is good for yeah but so my question though is whether you think that that can be done without consciousness so could you have a system that can engage in that sort of behavior like right should you make a yeah could i think it's i i can't challenge that at all i think it certainly could be done i think you could make a a robot that did what you'd call deliberation and um selected optimal outcome projected of the future in some fashion would it be conscious yeah exactly i'll leave that to you philosophy

1:04:20 then well that was kind of my question to you because if you're going to build into the notion of consciousness that's functional at this this usefulness prescription then you sort of have to say that that thing is conscious or you have to explain what it is about what you have to add to something like that to get consciousness in which case you'll sort of be on my end of the spectrum wondering what the function of consciousness is i i can't in that case you could uh if you had if you had a

1:04:54 a system that just deliberated unconsciously and then added something to it that then gave it consciousness um you know like whatever it is certain biological state or certain higher order awareness or whatever then you it sort of the idea is that the usefulness to the animal comes from all the uncut the stuff that was unconscious so it'd be just as useful unconscious as it is crunches and so the usefulness is uh something over even within the framework this is not so you know i'm not such an expert on but even within the framework of

1:05:27 conscious decision making there's all sorts of evidence of unconscious biases you know when people go to a grocery store and choose what's on the right side of the shelf you know people study this kind of stuff so yeah i i don't question that there are unconscious biases in this deliberative process or there's unconscious aspects of the deliberation um it's not just that there's aspects it's that deliberation itself could be unconscious the whole point yeah it could all be unconscious i can't you know say it's not possibly possible but interest

1:05:59 now we get to the other side introspectively it seems like it's conscious um when i deliberate i you know i'm aware of the alternatives uh and i seem to select the one that i think is going to be beneficial um right but that doesn't mean that's the core function of consciousness if it can happen unconsciously and the usefulness is something that's independent of being conscious and some it could be there with consciousness it could be there without consciousness seem to separate two mysteries of

1:06:41 consciousness quality and free will my guess is that they when people move closer to understanding things those won't be so separate that there shouldn't be two mysteries in something that you know let's see if we can solve it with one um and um i link qualia closely to motivation and motivation closely to having this i think we skipped perhaps too rapidly ahead in our discussion um uh so let's back up let's back up a little bit and move to the notion that these hippocampal paths

1:07:15 are um passed through single maps but the animal has multiple maps in its brain so right now i'm in my you know computer room if there's a map maybe i'm not constantly a map of the computer room but i don't have right now i'm behalf of my office or my route to work or anything like that there's one going on at a time and we'll just let's make a hypothetical guess that's that's my current conscious framework and i think the paths that i would compute are specific to that framework and i think we can look into the

1:07:47 hippocampus and see evidence for that that's what i'm saying with when the animal exhibits these paths they're specific to the framework the animal previously because it was awakened it's not all the possible previous environments the animal had been in yeah right right right they're both useful so um that so and i think that corresponds and i can only make a correspondence i can make a you know a demonstration to the way this conscious deliberation process works yeah

1:08:18 it's framework dependent and other people might call it context dependent and i like the word context and i tried to use it in terms of these map frameworks they represent context and people in neuroscience use the term context in various ways but i think of them as single maps represent behavioral context they represent the realm of opportunities that are possible now and i don't want to think about all the other possible things so they're an opportunity space of some sort and right so the so the the episodic memories the possible paths all those things are

1:08:54 embedded in a context in a framework and i see this as mapping pretty nicely onto uh conscious processes that so what i'm offering is like a conceptual challenge to that so the idea is that if you agree that these things can be done without consciousness um and there's not only evidence that there's unconscious biases but you know there's evidence that deliberative processes are more rational by some definition of rational in terms of self-interest when they're done

1:09:26 unconsciously when you have a distracting task and you have to make judgments about a mortgage uh your judgments about which mortgage to pick are actually better in terms of interest rates and that thing when you don't have time to consciously deliberate but you're distracted by this um task that you have to perform as opposed to the control group which had was given explicit arguments favoring certain of the mortgage packages so they make worse off decisions than the people who have to make these um these distracted decisions so that seems i mean you could interpret that it's not

1:09:59 to clean a study and none of this is but you know you could interpret that one impossible one plausible interpretation of that is that um uh the deliberative process is better when you're not bogged down and conscious of liberation um yeah i i i would put it your sort of automatic processes are not deliberative and uh there's a lot of this is again not my area but i i sort of like it a lot um there's a notion of model-based and model-free decision-making

1:10:32 right and model-based decision-making are sort of these what we're talking about is hippocampal deliberative processing model-free is more like sr stimulus response where you're not deliberate you're not evaluating alternatives you're just doing a computation that seems efficient and gets you the right goal sometimes it's actually better that's that there's you know that for you're saying in the example you have that sometimes the interest rate computation is better if you're not really thinking about all the alternatives or weighing in with you know what your vacation whatever different things are going on

1:11:04 consciously thinking about them right the claim was that you were still thinking well i think i think in the way i dissociate it's not i think the task you have is a mix of deliberation and unconscious thought what i think of is habit versus deliberative action so habit actions frequently are faster and better than deliberated actions and um so the model for habit actions i think of is driving along a very very familiar route um i think a lot of people sort of think about this so i make a long drive to and from work

1:11:36 every day and well it's clearly sensory response they've got visual inputs that are being processed i'm turning and turning but um they see it having done it so often it it seems to be embedded in a habit system and i can have a conversation while it's going on i can think about problems at work and things like that and do a pretty efficient job i haven't crashed yet of getting to and from work um may and arguably better than if i'm really concentrating and some people argue that these action-based systems are more efficient than faster right but that's slightly

1:12:09 different though because that's a action you've done a lot so these mortgage computation things this is something right i mean we've been getting the specifics of this you know whether you could do the computation very quickly and with a one-on-one one track and one one algorithm whether you compare several i i don't don't know the pro that that specifically but here i think there's a lot of work going that there's habit systems versus the deliberative systems are really different in that now in this root imagine example the driving example suddenly you put it um a block a detour i can't take my

1:12:42 familiar route what happens to me then well i can't i can't carry on my conversation with my a passenger or on the phone anymore it's not supposed to talk on the phone when you're driving but confession um i can't carry the conversation i got to think and what happens i think what happens i feel what happens is my cognitive map pops up and i say where am i and what are the possible alternative routes that aren't my familiar routes and if i have a good enough cognitive map i might be able to come up with a good route i try a few in my mind and uh try executing one of them

1:13:14 so well now we just use google maps so we don't have to do that anymore wasting weight right but just so that that you may be an old-fashioned guy but um that's my model in in the automatic processing mode but that's i mean that i mean look this happened to me the other day where i was uh i was on the sub this is not the other day this is the before the pandemic but i was on the subway i was reading a book and the um subway stopped and it was my stop and i didn't even realize it

1:13:48 uh i i kind of vaguely remember hearing the ding dong you know sound of the doors opening or whatever and the next thing i know i was walking down the stairs and i was like still reading my book and i looked up and i was like at the going down the stairs uh the subway station i was like where the hell am i i realized i was at the right stop actually so it was currently it was yeah it was exactly the right stop um and i navigated the stairs i was kind of just following people or i didn't wasn't even where i was really walking i was like surprised that i was on the stairs so that sort of stuff happens a lot i think but it also i mean sometimes you

1:14:21 notice the detour consciously but sometimes you don't sometimes it says detour and you get off the highway uh sometimes they have little markers and say turn left you know they give you landmarks but sometimes then you realize all of a sudden oh where am i so i i i do i hear this line a lot and by the way i'm not someone i'm not denying that consciousness has a function i'm not making that argument i'm simply thinking that yeah i always think of you i think of you as a fairly reasonable person thank you i mean i know more hardline people than me that think that there is it's more conclusively demonstrable that there's

1:14:54 no function for consciousness i'm not like that but i do think it's an open question because that what opens the question is that we do a lot of this stuff unconsciously and so when you see the rat do it um the behavior is compatible with something that you do consciously maybe but if it can be done unconsciously then there's a question about uh what does consciousness add to it um and maybe what you're saying is right that has flexibility or problem solving abilities but everything that people suggest you can find

1:15:26 examples of those things being done unconsciously and there's a more general line of thinking which just says look the content of this stuff is what's really important it's what it represents and those things can occur consciously or not so the important part is the part that's independent of it being conscious and for anything that you specify it's the it's the it's the representational content of the states that's doing the work how it's related to the world and that could happen consciously or unconsciously so that the animal could not be a robot it could be a responsive flexible computing

1:15:59 organism and yet do it in a way that everything was do unconscious think that's not a possibility i think i'm i'm only aware of one conscious entity for sure and that's me i'm not even sure you're conscious so it's hard to know what the possibilities are and you know whether the rats are conscious or my dog these are just guesses um and we're forced to make them i don't know you know uh i there's the extreme cautionary view that

1:16:32 we can't infer consciousness and non-human animals because we can't talk to them so the conservative point of view is let's assume that they're not conscious and i i have pet dogs i see the amazing behavioral flexibility they have their ability to anticipate the future and to try to get you to do what they want you to do and it it's it's you know there's certainly there's still deliberation that's there this concern about the future that kind of thing so let me get i i mean dogs though just to interject dogs might be a

1:17:05 special case because of their co-evolution with humans yeah yeah yeah right so you know they spent a lot of time with us and that you know they're like one of the few animals that care about our gays direction and care about pleasing us like other animals don't have those traits so dogs might be an exception uh but you take your your typical rat i understand what you're saying rats they have all these behaviors um but uh i i i mean i believe that rats are conscious personally um that extends at least to mammals but i still think there's a methodological question uh which is what would count as evidence that would convince a skeptic and there i think

1:17:38 that it's harder to make a case if you have a real die-hard skeptic yeah i don't think i can do that but i what i what i can do is give you a behavioral system that has a lot of nice features that has a deliberative feature and some others i would and it corresponds really nicely in a one-to-one way with our introspective sense of consciousness and so i think it's a much more appealing intuitive notion of what kind and i think i can explain some of these though you know subconscious effects pretty reasonably well without breaking

1:18:11 the model um so what's another feature of this high level system is it's integrated in whole body it involves all of you these other systems you know it's about behavioral choices that involve your entire body not just how you move your arm or some sort of subsystem it's in total body decision making so it involves a sense of self a sense of outside world it involves some sort of what's called an allocentric representation of self with respect and there's all sorts of features that are part of

1:18:43 this sort of high level decision making system that we were probing that correspond pretty nicely to what should be in a consciousness conscious system um agency there's you know how how i can affect the world and make a change for ways that are good for me or my family or the world whatever all those things are things we want to put into a conscious deliberative system i don't think agency is part of some of these lower level systems or the integration those sorts of things and so you add together these features you would like to have in this copper this operational system and then see how

1:19:17 well it fits with what we think about consciousness and i don't think they're not going to break down the hard problem and say oh yes we solved it i don't think that's very close but um i can make these two models come close together and get as close as possible good pretty fast i think i mean i think the hard problem is a different question so the hard problem is from philosophy obviously is the question of why is there consciousness at all basically uh so that's why is any physical process accompanied by consciousness or um you know uh that's i think the

1:19:51 essence of the heart problem that that's a that's a different question uh i i don't think we need to answer that question to do science um maybe it'll have an answer maybe it won't maybe we'll have some i mean certain theories of consciousness will give you an answer so maybe we need to figure out what uh what what theory is is best suited and then come back to the heart problem but the question that we're talking about is more like circumscribed than that so if you just look at um theories of consciousness like neurobiological theory so like iit or

1:20:24 global workspace theory or even the higher order theory which you know i spent some time thinking about yeah but i i think about all these theories of consciousness um you know so i write about some mostly i mean if you don't know me i defend the hierarchy mostly because everyone attacks it so i i say hey you know it's not that bad guys it's not that i really think it's true i didn't know your motivation now i know your motivation yeah well i mean it's a funny story when i was in grad school i mean probably no one cares but when i first read a paper by david rosenthal actually i was an undergraduate and i just thought it was the most outlandish thing i ever heard i was like

1:20:56 this is uh just ridiculous like being conscious just having a thought like you know it's can sky ever take an lsd or like you know anything but of course and then i remember i brought it up in class i was like this is so wild and it just can't be true and my teacher uh a guy named ken bach who's a philosopher guy he was like oh i'll tell him that you said that uh turns out they knew each other but this was the first time i really became aware that like philosophers were still alive and that these weren't like all the old dead people like before like plato and kant and so forth

1:21:28 but anyway so um so my first reaction to the hierarchy theory at least in that version of it was like this is just ludicrous but then i gradually became convinced that no actually it's uh not completely ludicrous it's not it's not obviously false you can you can say some things and so but the response that i kept getting from other people was the one that i had oh it's obviously false so i spent a lot of time saying look it's it's got things that are going for it um that doesn't mean that i ultimately think that it's the one true theory i think we don't know i think there's a lot that we don't know and we're still in a delicate stage

1:22:02 where we don't know the right balance between theory and data right you need both any theories to make sense of the data you need data to construct the theories but right now there's a lot of a lot of both a lot of theories a lot of data it's not clear which is what directions any other stuff is really pointing except for very circumstance yeah okay so i'm thinking back to the interview you did with joe ladue and david rosenthal yeah and uh i've been resistant to what i understood at the higher order theories um but in the interview i ended up agreeing with david rosenthal almost all the time and my favorite thing that i remember

1:22:34 remember from that was him saying i just don't understand that what the what it's like to be idea of what consciousness is and i've always struggled with that as well so i just it doesn't what it's like that's doesn't seem it's not intuitively meaningful to me but that's just an aside but i didn't find that attractive i mean so he's got particular motivation for saying that so i mean i think we i mean to me that's a fundamental idea um which introduces the core concept of the explanandam the thing that we're all trying to understand and explain so

1:23:08 um i i think it makes a sense certainly when i was introduced to that i think it made sense to me that there was something that it was like to be me and that there were there's nothing that it's like to be the lamp post so that contrast seems intuitively clear to me and when i say that there's something that's like to be me what i what we mean it's just that from my point of view there's a way things appear there's an external environment located in a certain orientation there are objects that i think are reachable some which i think are not so they're just you know you can also say things about you know redness i know you

1:23:41 have a beef with that but you know so there are the various qualitative features sounds taste colors but also like grass and bailey i can see right now there's a book on my desk i could grab it from here if i wanted to i could i could tell that it's reachable those are all facts about what it's like to be me um which i think are ordinary facts that when you talk to people about that so yeah just experience we just said um the the last thing you said i really do like which is the agency aspect of what i can and can't do there's a book there i can answer it keeps out of reach that kind of thing

1:24:13 that's i think a core embedded personal identity agency self non-self these are all aspects of this higher order representation that that should be included and um but then you know what is what what it's like talk refers to it refers to the sum total of all that stuff well okay no i'm i'm pretty dumb and it takes me to learn while to learn new things and um and i have a lot probably being careful in philosophy there's a lot of careful thinkers and i i i try to take advantage of that

1:24:48 because when i finally get something it sort of sticks pretty well but it takes me a while so maybe what it's like to be is one of those things yeah well it's you know so that's how i get into it it's just it's the notion of experience um we all have experience uh here's a question i have for you which i post on twitter and we're dealing with memory in consciousness so i post this on twitter just at a sort of a lark and i said if you don't have a memory if you if an organ doesn't have any memory can it be conscious and i assumed everyone's going to say of course it can be conscious we know these amnestics but most people say no

1:25:22 memory there's no consciousness what do you think well so what do you mean by consciousness you mean yeah yeah yeah i mean that's something that it's like for the organism um so could there be an instantaneous experience no i think it experienced unfolds in time which is partially where the memory thing comes from but you would have to you would have to be able to well i don't want to say recognize recognize i guess the experience

1:25:55 um which is going to require some memory abilities so you think so just have the experience without having any memory at all right there's a constant flow of something called experience but it disappears as soon as you have it and there's no looking forward no looking back it's just instantaneous tough and let me just yeah compare that also with the driving example where clearly as i'm driving home an automatic pilot i'm making sensory behavioral responses and if you stop me at a moment you say what are you thinking like i would probably be able to report it pretty well

1:26:27 but uh not uncommonly of the experience somebody what you had um it's going frequently i just it doesn't have any permanent residue in any way and it's as if it wasn't experienced well i mean it depends so memory doesn't mean episodic memory i wasn't thinking so i don't know why people are interpreting the question on youtube i don't know either because you know we have iconic memory um so you know uh i meant you know i meant i meant declarative memory i

1:27:00 would i didn't mean favorite patterns and things like that uh-huh okay because that's what i was going to say so that might count as memory and so once you get down to like what if you just mean information retention or something like that that was sort of more on the lines along which i was thinking that you would need memory um but you know so in philosophy there's a related question which is uh can you have experience with cut without concepts um so i think the way a lot of philosophers use the word concept is sort of synonymous with the way a lot of neuroscientists and psychologists use

1:27:32 the word memory uh especially semantic memory so that you have to recall these things and um give them names and name the items like is that a screwdriver or a fruit or whatever so there's there's a whole debate of philosophy about whether you could have non non-conceptual content to experience uh or whether content always involves categorizing it or something like that so um yeah i haven't given much thought to this but in in the path way of thinking about things um do you have to do the does the environment have

1:28:05 to be a concept and that the items along the path have to have conceptually be chunked and categorized or not i'd have to think about that to you know come but but the the rough notion i get from the very distant view of psych philosophy the idea that consciousness and language are you know so coexistent uh without language there's no that seems really silly to me but um yeah well that's a different claim so um you know i certainly think mice are conscious uh there's something that's like to be a

1:28:37 mouse but they don't have language and infants too probably but they don't have language so i don't i think that the the more respectable version election the one that i would actually take serious and entertain is the idea that language can shape your experience in a different way so that i think that while it's the case that rats probably experience something like fear they don't experience what we call fear because they don't have that concept and the concept of danger that we do the fear so they are the whole fear story is so complicated yeah and as i had said earlier on i got into this largely to understand emotion

1:29:09 so i'm sort of been a bystander trying to figure that out about 10 years ago i was really pleased that it looked like the various fear people were coming to a consensus but now it's gone apart right and i think that it's going apart in wild ways so what was the consensus you mean the sort of uh subcortical model of uh consciousness i thought it was um lisa feldman yeah she had a nice review article like it was 2005 annual reviews of psychology and

1:29:41 neuroscience and there were a few other papers coming out around the same time almost saying the same kind of thing it certainly wasn't james long a thing but sort of looking back what did i just experience falling a concept based on it and also having some um hedonic value to it it was good it seemed to coalesce along those lines it seemed pretty solid and reasonable um but um now the arguments that uh be and i just could you know whether it's a behavioral

1:30:13 whether consciousness is behavior whether emotion is behavior whether it's internal feeling uh joel the ladue i do as i said recently consciousness i mean fear is a feeling and i like that but the next steps i don't like so much but but i just see the whole discussion is coming complicated and apart there's no yeah you see a consensus i don't know well i mean part of what you're saying is the cognitivist theories of emotions which were sort of fighting against this darwin notion um that there are these basic emotions which uh

1:30:45 you know we share with our animals siblings or whatever um and so a large part of the stuff you're talking about was trying to as a counterpoint to that was suggesting that the emotions are mostly cognitively constructed there is no such thing as fear that you're born with um rather you know you have to learn what is dangerous and your concepts are so let me describe a model for fear as i would like to say it or something as a deliberative process okay you see the bear in the woods and you run and you're not conscious of it you're sweet you know

1:31:17 the the emotional emotional behavior is there but there's no emotion yet because you're just in automatic pilot mode and that's i think what joe ladue argues that there's this low-level survival circuit that gets you away from that beer exactly so now you climb a tree and you feel a little safe and then you say oh uh oh beards can climb trees i'm not really safe and and you give yourself but you feel you got 30 seconds to deal with things and now you uh

1:31:50 [Music] fear is the motivation to get away from the bear and then you deliberate about possible because i run this direction flight up the hill but should i drop you can't find some food can i drop it and they'll if you maybe think of some strategies that might be alternatives and so i think so i think of fear as a conscious motivational state that is the grounding for deriving strategies to to deal with that state yeah i think i could i mean that

1:32:26 sounds sounds fine to me um obviously fear is involved with motivation but it's so the the question is where in the brain are these processes taking okay so again we understand like what the old argument is yeah i i don't care that's not you know i'm in the hippocampus it's not in the hippocampus the most not hitting the campus i don't they can settle that it doesn't have to be localized well memories involve the hippocampus right uh these kind of emotional yeah traumatic memory oh yeah no that probably does involve

1:32:58 again contextual fear conditioning you know that's a big literature and yeah that brings up the term context again and that's where this map-like thing comes comes right and uh it gets into complicated splitting hair issues but um we probably don't have the time or where we'll all go there um so so i mean i i agree with what you're saying about fear so obviously i bring papers with joe and i think i know his perspective and um i'm not 100

1:33:31 uh committed to it or against it i think it's an important and interesting view of alliance with the higher order theory in the important ways which i think is interesting um emotionally with that paper that we wrote we were trying to get people to top this conversation which you don't like but we were trying to get people to to uh to join discussions that were going on in the literature on consciousness and discussions that were going on in the literature on emotions which were going on separately but were really overlapping and that was the debate over a first order versus higher order theory so in the

1:34:04 emotion literature you have exactly this debate the one that you're describing between people like lisa feldman barrett and on the other hand the ox penske who you know thinks that fear is in the amygdala and then people like uh lisa who are gonna say it's in the cortex somewhere it's a constructed state and so there was this debate basically that was going on um between these two camps and it maps on pretty much directly to the debates what you find going on in consciousness literature about not specifically about emotions but just in general about

1:34:36 whether um cortex or subcortical areas are where the neural correlates of consciousness is going to be found and that in turn itself maps on to the question about first order higher order theory so there's all these debates which were concurrently going on but not really talking to each other so that was part of our main goal was to say here's our model uh something that we think is interesting but also just to get the conversation going um because we think this is an important issue and you know so um i think largely there's like a terminological issue in

1:35:08 that debate which is what so whatever's going on in the in the hippocampus or excuse me the amygdala you could call that unconscious fear processing or you could call it a survival network or danger detector that semantics of it may be important or whatever but it's the same states that everyone said about there's some states in there that are tracking danger that are cueing your behavior and so forth and so on um and then that can happen without consciousness though so uh when you see the snake subliminally um the amygdala is still activated and i i don't know about all these deliberative paths that would

1:35:41 be interesting to find out so i'm not sure if that's going to activate uh escape routes and things of that nature um those are pretty good doable kinds of experiments i think yeah um put it in different frameworks and humans and monkeys and rats and see see if you can see evidence of deliberation in certain times um i think obviously we're not going to design in a perfect experiment now but yeah yeah that could you could look at that and then you would have some evidence about whether these kinds of processes could

1:36:13 be done unconsciously um whether they're activated by stimuli which are not perceived so i don't know uh but anyway so that would be sort of what the issue would and i always like it when abstract philosophical ideas can have some kind of connection to empirically tractable uh results so this might be one of those areas that would be interesting to find out um and i'd be happy resting you know this idea on uh an empirical kind of claim like that whether there is this uh unconscious deliberative process um so anyway okay okay can i stir up

1:36:48 can i stir up a couple of more enemies before we finish and uh so there are a number of threads of neural scientists trying to explain consciousness and um i don't like the end point being perception that is my perceptual awareness and i i would like to link to action and um you could name a whole number of people who say oh now there's a conscious percept that that's consciousness i think as i've been trying to push you have to put it into an action framework

1:37:21 and um uh the many many areas where i think that that's missing it's a visual system is so hardly studied where yeah so i was just going to say is that with the visual system so highly studied partially though because we're very visual animals right large part of the brain is devoted there's there's more part of the brain devoted to vision than there is to action right so that's significant actually the strategy that i've used is sort of an animal pseudo-evolutionary argument of looking

1:37:53 at core functions and so you can see people you know starting with people you're going to be misguided by how big the visual system is because it's so complicated it's a difficult job you know it's size and overwhelming it makes you think that's the lens of the story but if you look at core functions the core functions will be linked to action so pain is i think a better model qualia or whatever than red where pain you can think you can see the connection to action much more readily i think you could make the argument for red as well but that's a little less clear-cut

1:38:28 um yeah so that's the i mean there is a good story there uh you know primates use colors basically to distinguish right fruits from unripe ones right so use actions those quality are open for flexible learning so you might not be born with the predisposition but you learn to hate blueberries or something like that and you know so the site those sorts of things so at least they're flexible their tags and which flexible things could be answered could be yeah so i mean i think part of the part of the problem is this whole issue that we've been talking about for

1:39:00 last while is this notion of how it connects to the function so that everyone agrees that when you perceive something red that you're having a conscious experience right um and that uh well i guess i it doesn't work so it's gonna say then when you unconsciously perceive it that you're not having a conscious experience but there are people who debate that actually that's the overflow debate so that's not even safe so you get the same problems with the with the redness but i get what you're saying is that

1:39:31 you wish people focus more on this kind of feeling of uh of agency and action uh motivational states as opposed to it kind of motivationally interesting because i take what i mean the point where part of the point that you're making is very important which is that it it's kind of easy to get people to see this oh could your red be the same as my blue right you can if if you work at a little bit people will come to understand what you're talking about that oh maybe we both call it blue but to you it looks yellow um but you say that it's blue but and so

1:40:04 you could you could get people to all and some people naturally discover i mean when i teach this to the undergrad some students are like yeah i thought of that when i was a teenager other students are like i don't understand but then over time come to see it so but eventually you can get people in that ballpark but if you try the same thing with pain um yeah they don't come around so it's like could your pleasure be what i feel when i feel pain and yet you still smile and um you go around and say oh this is delicious even though when you're eating the cake it feels like something stabbing you with needles inside your mouth

1:40:35 it's like people have they resist that very very much uh to the extreme they're like no that's not that's not something you can see but now of course really principled people in this area they do take that route so when i asked david chalmers this question he said yeah um it's conceivable that your pain be my pleasure and we'd be inverse in that way and yet behave identically um not true of our world that you know like all this weird conceivable stuff it's in some possible world but so if there are people who haven't really consistently tried to take that line but i think the average person finds

1:41:07 that to be very strange that you feel pain but smile or that you feel uh another example i i personal example i like of linking percepts to behavior and experience was um a single personal experience when i was about 15 or 16 and i'm getting quite drunk on beer and uh the you know throwing up all night and you know hang over the next day and stuff and for maybe three years the smell of beer made me nauseous and i couldn't walk into a bar

1:41:38 or something and we traveled in in highly pub and stuff it just i didn't hate it but i certainly wouldn't go you know i couldn't couldn't approach those plates i really wanted to be able to drink beer again but that that that that clearly essentially behavioral is supposed to link that was made i wasn't born with it but it was always there for the linkage to be made and i think that you know that's another single clear example with um no it's is your smell of beer the same as mine well i've got nauseous and you don't and you know the smell seems identifiable but so you think the smell changed because

1:42:11 so you might say no it didn't tell us the same but it just had different links i think so the smell our experience of the smell of the beer might still be the same though say again it felt like the same i didn't wouldn't have called the new different smell yeah so that's not the case uh so the case that i was imagining was like your yellow is right blue um so here there's the it's the same experience in both cases just so the smell is the same it's just now having new uh

1:42:43 but it but it's it's possible linkage to behaviors you know it it was there all along for a possible linkage may not never have occurred but in this case a strong one was linked and i came in yeah and that's you know i think that's important because there's this culture that we have of reacting to behaviorism um and we tell this nice story about you know cog and part of it is that place cells i think are a large part of that so there's always the famous chomp keith chomsky uh review or whatever but also like the things that we're talking about is that you ruled out all of the

1:43:14 options besides cognitive maps so there's no stimulus response story you can tell that makes sense of all the data that we have about rats and mazes so there's got to be some cognitive mechanism that's going on in there so um so anyway but so there's a story about our reaction to behaviorism um and the triumph of cognitivism in general cognitive neuroscience in particular in this case but uh there's a tendency to overreact i think sometimes and to throw throw out some of the important insights that behaviors had which was um to some extent is what

1:43:49 we're talking about here so there are tremendous connections between behavior and our understanding of mental states maybe there's always something left over and you can't analyze behavior um completely in mental states completely in terms of behavior and you can't do science that way you need to appeal to internal mechanisms and so on but but there are strong connections between our mental state notions and the correct the behavioral criterion of them um and you know no more is that more clear than we talk about animals like we were talking about before when you see the dog's behavior it's almost impossible not to associate

1:44:21 the mental state that goes along with it because there is this tight connection in our thinking and behaviorists really made you know they they did us a service sort of in philosophy and psychology although they're slightly different movements um but they did us a service by pointing out how far he could go just by talking about behavior how strong the connections really are and one of the things that's talking about red as opposed to these other motivational states really does a disservice another way in which it does in this service is that it fosters this idea that um there is this kind of easy separation between the mental and behavioral

1:44:54 notions which makes it appear easier to imagine zombies and inverts and things like that that he doesn't like but so you know i think you're right that focusing more on these cases is going to help so i'm definitely on board with that good we come to total agreement yeah i mean uh i still don't think that you're gonna get a first order theory out of this so i think you're gonna have to supplement it um with what's i mean you know i don't know it's very hard for me to understand the first order theories generally that there's consciousness but no one knows

1:45:26 about it to me that i'm kind of um i find that uh to be very mysterious um so my challenge to you is is the value in the second order 30 theory what does the animal or the human gain from having the second order representation i think i'm coming aboard with it with with some of the ideas but i'd like to know the the function yeah so i mean it's a possibility that there is no function i think that's um something you have to admit that if the

1:45:59 theory were true that it's possible that i have no function um on the other hand it's whatever function the higher order states have so if they have a if they end up having a function then um i mean so one thing you might think is look how if you like if you like your story about deliberation um how is it that when they're in this deliberate proc deliberative process you're not aware of yourself as doing all this deliberation uh there's a sense in which you know you're doing it you're aware of it when it's going on uh consciously or do you not agree with that sort of

1:46:33 just from your point of view doesn't it seem that way i'm not quite sure i think it was agreeing that there are probably levels the nervous system where something like liberation takes place on contact cerebellar modeling or something of that sort of various actions are considered and before one is selected i'm not such an expert in those areas but it certainly seems reasonable it doesn't mean um i'm just sort of positive i was talking about the other end so when you are engaged in this deliberative process consciously right it seems like that to you

1:47:03 um it seems like you are engaged in that deliberative process so so it seems to me like it's part of the the nature of the experience part of if you sort of focus on the the content of it that there's this self this reflective aspect there yeah one of the aspects of deliberation is a sort of a working memory component so if you try out several alternatives you have to keep the several of them in mind even if it was tried out you know a couple seconds ago and you have to evaluate the alternatives in some form before you make a decision

1:47:35 so right uh yeah you have to be at some some higher level awareness that you are in a deliberative mode right yeah that's exactly what i'm saying so it seems like almost a conceptual claim that uh that if you sort of think about the experience that you have that you see that has this reflective component to it um and that that's part of the explanation of how the state gets to be the way that it is in the other hand i'm not sure that you say i am having this experience as opposed to you know you just sort of in a sense you're aware of the

1:48:06 alternatives but whether it's you know i am the one who's having assessing these alternatives as opposed to some other mind i don't know that that's what's going on you don't so you think that when you have experiences like that that it's an open question whose experience it is well it's yours but you don't sit back and say this is my experience you know you i think you have to hold the this deliberative notion with holding these alternatives somewhat parallel in mind before making a selection but whether that means that you are so super aware that you're

1:48:41 deliberating like you sort of are super aware why couldn't you just be like there's a peripheral sense in which it's uh you're aware of it but it's not yeah i think that part of the resistance that people have to the higher order view is that they think that there's this grandiose notion of me sitting back surveying the mental states right but it may be a relatively automatic metacognitive process that's not very effortless if someone poked you and said what are you thinking about well i'm thinking about which route to take home actually you could they could you could probably jump out and describe that to somebody right exactly so you know and people like rosenthal have argued that that's a

1:49:15 step part of an argument for the existence of the higher order states that we that we posit so that the fact that you can report it in that way suggests that you are aware of the mental state so there's the higher order state you can say i'm in this state or whatever but anyway so you know i'm not here to try to convince you i'm just my main goal is to uh get people to think about these issues yeah so you know not everyone's gonna agree about the hierarchy theory but i do think that it's not it's worth taking seriously and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand um but so what i was suggesting was that part of the reason why you might like it

1:49:48 is because there's this sense in which it explains how you do the deliberation what consciousness would add to it that makes it more useful it would add the sense of awareness of yourself as doing the task um which seems like it would be hard to do otherwise but anyway that's speculative and who knows um we can begin to wrap this up with what wrapping back to something you brought up in the very very beginning okay and that was one of these oscillations about yeah and my suspect suspicion is that consciousness will involve

1:50:20 lots of your brain and they have to be somewhat talking to each other and synchronized not just say the little part of the hippocampus doing one thing in the frontal but somehow they have to be tied together at some level and there's there's an emergence when enough of the brain takes over we have little evidence there there that you have several conscious processing going on at once it seems like one and if there were these little islands doing it then why couldn't you have several um so my guess is that the synchrony thing you were talking about

1:50:52 earlier is real real important and will be a key to unraveling some of this stuff yeah i agree that synchrony stuff's going to be important i mean even if it's not important in the consciousness part it's clearly important in the other part of the story which is the binding problem things of that nature um which it's going to at least explain the content if not the consciousness itself would explain what we're conscious of so one of the phenomena of consciousness is it's that's a constraint that's really there

1:51:25 i mean unless people say oh yeah i can be you know i can think about i don't think so yeah exactly i know i always have to talk about my students about multitasking they're like nope yeah so we really we really multitask like no you don't necessarily switch really quick they're like no we're doing it at the same time no you're not but anyway so it does seem that way right subjectively it's like you're doing both at the same time it's like actually it's it's not in parallel but anyway so i i mean i'm someone who likes to explore the ideas so i like thinking about these issues and the different uh no different trade-offs that the

1:51:58 theories have to make but that's mostly what i'm in the game for um i think it's an open question i do think the hierarchy theory has some advantages over some other particular theories like i think it's more plausible than iit for example um but iit is something that's uh you know it's also some people like so i don't know um i certainly don't want to be viewed as someone who's like thinks oh we know for sure this is the way things are i think it's an exciting time to be doing any of this sort of stuff i do wish that some of these you know patches of success would be quilted into a more coherent structure so i do wonder sort of at the

1:52:32 end what what do you think sort of wrapping up full single what do you think is the future of cognitive neuroscience as in terms of it being a discipline um which is a kind of unique and distinct part of the neurosciences in general that's a tough question um one of this one of the issues is which tools we have and there's some emerging tools that are for cognitive neuroscience so one of the sets of tools we've done a lot paid a lot of attention to is recording the neurons in the brain and how they opened up a new approach another is functional imaging which is

1:53:06 almost totally separate and independent and i'm not an expert there but these are approaching then there are others in the out you know lots of tools give you avenues for making connections um uh i pursue the neuronal neuron and neuron network approach to how it helps think about things um and it you know brings things closer together uh to me it helps to have these almost as metaphors for how things are likely to work it's an it's a real instantiation of

1:53:39 something that gives the behavioral properties that we're looking for whether it is the thing it's the way i like to i i tend to think about them i don't get so much out of the fmri stuff it doesn't help do you think they're both part of the same field oh yeah is there i mean yeah i mean i don't think that there are those linkages have been made very well but they will yeah you made so it's just when you say you don't get very much out of it what you mean is that you for the questions you want to ask it's not a good tool for you this the papers i read haven't said oh that's a new type thing that i got to tie into my

1:54:12 theories of how things work i don't doesn't work that way so much um yeah no it's certainly you know digging tunnels from two different directions you hope they meet but they haven't met yet and you know you're in the path and maybe you'll meet maybe not they don't then work just keep digging yeah yeah okay multiple tunnels they're gonna come together i mean i guess that kind of was your answer when i was talking but what i was asking was like do you think cognitive neuroscience is it's a discipline that's here to stay

1:54:44 it's like being assimilated into the mainstream neuroscience or is it still okay oh yeah a little historical context if we have time for that so yeah i think roughly when i was starting the the the the formidable and pres formidable the impressive serious neuroscience was close to the sensory end and the motor ends of things where you could sort of work out serial processing and get an understanding of the you know motor neurons lead to muscle contraction that that side of things or in stretch receptors and understanding the the stimulus response profiles and moving upstream slowly

1:55:16 um and um i think nobel prize talks where the uh mosers and o'keefe i think moses did more of a job saying how o'keefe put a neuron electrode right in the middle of the brain everyone said that's the stupidest approach imaginable that'll never get you anywhere and you've got to either do this moving from the outside approach or else we'll never learn about the brain works and lo and behold you made a big discovery and i think it's something that's really built from that um so that and i think the change in um the whole field of neuroscience from like 40 years ago to now it's

1:55:50 very very dramatic that there's that people understand you just don't build you know in a reductionist framework from the periphery on in and not lead to understanding sometimes not all the time but sometimes putting electrode in the middle will give you a piece of gold that you can follow most of the time but the few pieces of gold they're worth you know worth it yeah and do you see like uh consciousness science as an important part of that or that's someone who's interested i mean and has a career in cognitive neuroscience your whole life and now you're interested in uh

1:56:21 consciousness um do you think the science of consciousness as a separate and distinct part of this project or oh yeah i thought you know book quest for consciousness was wonderful dehain's more recent book was also very you know really really good um and i think that those are powerful yeah right and though i don't read that literature all that carefully but yeah i think that those are you know i think that they that my objection to each of them is they're too much on the perceptual side not on the action side but yeah i think that that

1:56:53 that things um are moving well that's good i mean because some people worry about i mean i was hoping i've always been hopeful that consciousness would sort of do what attention did um you know and sort of uh become a mainstream area in its own right where there are people you know you can get a career or get grants and have a lab and sort of be a reputable person well if you could explain attention to me i'd appreciate it oh really yeah well that's i didn't know that was a requirement uh what do you got against attention i guess that's a whole separate

1:57:24 conversation we have to have yeah not for me yeah i can talk about five minutes on tension then i'm done so yeah attention and consciousness there's a big top i mean that's that's the key i don't know yeah they're they're okay interesting um all right well i i mean i hate to break this up because i'm having a fun time talking with you but i do have a nap time which is about to end downstairs so i do okay start wrapping this up but i do wonder if there's anything which hasn't come up what you were hoping would come up so is there anything i wrote you an email

1:57:57 and i mentioned about five really different topics and then four of them didn't come up so yeah i i think i'm going to leave it at this it covers a lot okay we'll have you back you know if you're if you're game you come back we'll talk about those other four topics okay yeah yeah and we have time on our hands as we're in pandemic mode yeah exactly that is for sure there's no doubt about that i got the rest of the summer all right john well thank you so much for joining me i had a great time talking with you um it was fun i think it's the first time i've ever uh

1:58:30 talked with you for a long period of time like this so i've seen you like i said a couple times in new york and uh on twitter a lot but it's nice to talk with you in in more depth and to get to know what you're thinking about right i really like your work and know your approach so thanks for joining me i appreciate it thank you been terrific okay so we're ending the okay so i heard a question