Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/02/2013 06:15 PM Report

Speaking of how choices are described . . .

Trash or Landfill?

Google has the right idea:

http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/504799556bb3f7513d000003-590/signs-of-google-are-everywhere- including-a-well-stocked-kitchen-and-plenty-of-recycling-bins.jpg

Put your garbage in a receptacle labeled "landfill" perhaps you will take a moment to recycle.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/26/2013 03:32 AM Report

This speaks to what Eric said at the end:

Francis Collins: Very much so. This is an exciting opportunity, this is the kind of visionary projects that’s right on the edge of the possible, which is what NIH should be all about. We have, after all, gotten the ability to understand the brain in certain ways but there’s a huge areas that we don’t really have a clue about how it works.

For instance, we can record from and individual brain cell, a neuron and see what it’s doing and we can take pictures of the brain with MRI scans or CT scans or (Pet) scans and see the whole thing.

But there’s this enormous gap in between about how the circuits in the brain function in order to be able to move my hand or to look at you and process that information or to lay down a memory. We don’t know how that works. With technologies, you have to be inventive, so a lot of this is going to be technology development, a lot of it is going to be Nano technology.

What we aim to do is to be able to record from thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of brain cells at the same time and to be able to afford to understand how these circuits work. That’s the brain activity map that’s being talked about. Very early days, you know, really have a scientific, you heard about milestones and timetables and costs, but it’s getting to be a very exciting moment to put something together that we couldn’t have thought of.

Brian Lamb: The article says it’s going to be harder to do that than the human (GNOM) project, do you agree?

Francis Collins: I think I would agree, the human (GNOM) project had the advantage of having a clear end point. You’re going to read out those three billion letters of DNA and you’re going to say we’re done and we said that in 2003, we were done. This brain map, it’s hard to say when you complete the effort because the brain, enormously complicated, a 100 trillion cells, all of the ways that they interact with each other, we will never be able to say, we’ve got it.

We understand it, it will be an ongoing effort, so we have to really nail down, what are we talking about here with the activity map. Not that we’re going to completely reveal all the secrets of the brain, but then we’re going to reveal some of them in an ordered way. And that builds by nailing down some of those goals and accelerating timetable.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/15/2013 04:01 PM Report

Charlie, perhaps drill down further on Libet and free will?

Dr. Robert W. Doty, professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Rochester:[27]

“Benjamin Libet's discoveries are of extraordinary interest. His is almost the only approach yet to yield any credible evidence of how conscious awareness is produced by the brain. Libet's work is unique, and speaks to questions asked by all humankind.”

Dr. Susan J. Blackmore, visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol:[28]

“Many philosophers and scientists have argued that free will is an illusion. Unlike all of them, Benjamin Libet found a way to test it.”

MrVjillarston  03/15/2013 04:55 AM Report

The great thing about the Libet experiment was that it demonstrated that physics precedes 'mind'. It brought back the possibility that physics can contribute to the Hippocratic solution in the arena of therapy. Mind does not have location. Neurons do. They are located roughly at 1:1.5m X 10^-2. In the experiment, event registration first occurs in the brain. Then after about 200-600 milliseconds of time, the subject registers a conscious command to move a muscle; a de-synchronization of objective to subjective events become evident. The same kind of de-synchronization takes place in dreaming order. Physical activity first registers with rapid eye movement, and then upon awakening the subject automatically makes up a story out of it--the random data memory--and it is convincingly real to the dreamer until the subject realizes in a waking state it was total nonsense.

Von Neumann [tCatB] said the nervous system was "..prima facie digital..the basic component of this system is the..'neuron'..". Transversal logic obliges the admission that there is also a digital similarity in computers, not necessarily by equivalency, but necessarily by imitation. The Turing test, Kurzweil's singularity, and of course IBM's Watson make the simulation case: that if we have 'mind', so do computers. Watson has copied human intelligence and decision making better than the other humans playing the same thinking game. Where the similarity breaks down though is that machines are synchronous in all-circuits while humans are not. That is, the Libet demonstrates a de-synchronous circuitry, in the subjective event. The problem with the 'mind' argument however, is that the goal posts kept moving: now the theory of mind is said to be about deducing intentional states in others. Again an AI computer can learn to do that. The imitation [Plato] argument has a logical necessity that the mind argument does not.

I thought Shadlen's red-green experiment sounded more like a 'Geiger-counter'. Which again reinforces the physics case of detecting something invisible that was physical--the territory of physics.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/15/2013 02:28 AM Report

GREAT JOB!

Thank you.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/15/2013 02:27 AM Report

Eric tells us that every mental process is a brain process, nothing mythical out there.

Where is my thought generated? Is that my existence?

American neuroscientist David Eagleman, who directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine, contends that most of the operations of the brain are inaccessible to awareness, such that the conscious mind "is like a stowaway on a transatlantic steam ship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot."

(Now that has HUGE Public Policy implications!!!)

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/15/2013 01:58 AM Report

All right gentleman--amygdala override manifesting as road rage. What do we do?

Hot state, Cold State, System 1, System 2 . . . just classify it?

How about we sing "Happy Birthday to You"?

"For (Gabby) Giffords, therapy started with songs like "Happy Birthday," said Maegan Morrow, the Congresswoman's music therapist at TIRR Memorial Hermann Rehabilitation Hospital in Houston. At first, Giffords would simply sing the word "you" after Morrow sang, "Happy Birthday to…"

Scientists are still working out the details of how this kind of therapy works. But one likely explanation is that music is represented in many areas of the brain, while just two brain regions process language. Music also tends to dig deeper, more well-worn pathways between neurons.

Through music patients can reach into their stored knowledge about words.

http://news.discovery.com/human/health/gabrielle-giffords-photos-111116.htm

(So your amygdala is overriding your pre-frontal cortex and road rage ensues then sing "Happy Birthday To You" to pull up from this downward spiral and avoid the possible trip to the courtroom).

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/15/2013 01:32 AM Report

We are told that the MRI is a crude measure, whole brain areas at a time, crude spatial and crude temporal scale. Much more refined equipment should be expected in the courtroom than the MRI.

(Perhaps more refined than the lie detector which is very crude and yet is still used.)

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/15/2013 01:15 AM Report

Yes indeed Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics for decision making.

The way choices are described makes a huge difference.

Fat content, organ donation, littering or even whitewashing a fence can all be choices that are dependent on the right description.

Just have a read about how Tom Sawyer got his fence whitewashed: http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html

opensociety  03/14/2013 01:11 PM Report

Re. Mischel's experiments on intervening in the self-restraint capabilities of children - this does not in and of itself demonstrate that the later negative effects observed among the non-waiters are prevented by such interventions. It only demonstrates immediate effects, and does not strike me as convincing evidence that interventions are effective in the long run. Not that they may not be, but the experiment described is not evidence of this.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/14/2013 02:38 AM Report

Yes, for ADHD let's try to train instead of medicate.

We are told the public policy implications mean you can teach it (delayed gratification) in preschool. Utilize the imagination--pretend the cookie is not real by putting a frame around it. The findings of the marshmallow test mean it is an enormously important skill, it has predictive qualities, it is teachable. Delayability is an important brain skill.

(For public school education, with 30+ students in a classroom, it is critical. Perhaps someone can do the experiment on home schooled students to see if the implications there are as great?)

Zev  03/14/2013 02:05 AM Report

Reading REMant's rambling, incoherent and pompous drivel, one begins to understand that the one thing that he is clearly lacking is REM, along with a sense of humility and reason.

NeilMacCallister  03/13/2013 11:22 PM Report

..or if you are tired of politics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IasCZL072fQ

NeilMacCallister  03/13/2013 10:49 PM Report

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOpzDAiwW4g

Andrew76  03/13/2013 10:47 PM Report

What is the value of this testing? It seems to me that it highlights the importance of early years when it comes to each person's development. I also think it shows just how important the task of parenting really is. Attachment style seems to be linked very closely to the quality of parenting a child receives. The take-away message implied by all of this testing is very relevant to any parent who wants to make sure his or her child has the best possible chance of developing into a socially well-adjusted adult.

RM2  03/12/2013 09:34 PM Report

Thanks for another excellent program in this roundtable series. If you haven't already covered the subject of how emotional well-being affects brain health, and vice versa, I am one of many who would like to hear about it.

Thanks again.

sugar  03/12/2013 08:40 PM Report

Having recently immersed myself in Samuel Beckett, I have to wonder what this is all about. Yet, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" in spite of all the MRIs CAT scans, marshmallow experiments, will power, etc. What value all this brain testing? Humans are individuals and attempts to make them average and to behave according to a narrow structural code hasn't worked in the past and won't work in the future. Sad, but true.

YNHow  03/12/2013 05:27 PM Report

fascinating.

Ellen_Dibble  03/12/2013 02:11 PM Report

"to exist" -- thanks for taking down the specifics of Daniel Kahneman's point about the effect of holding seven digits in disinhibiting (I call that multitasking, and yes I think it can unlock the subliminal; I think Buddhist chants do something similar). And thanks also for taking down Mischel's specific words about how to teach a child to use the imagination to assist in postponing gratification. (I have no idea what he means, still; I can imagine bored children would ring the bell not to receive sweets but simply to be let free.)

The earliest post goes the whole range, it seems to me, on free will, ethics, consciousness, self-hood, existentialism, moral authority, and also careening towards nutritional status, maybe genetic status, cultural norms -- if he didn't mention it, I can extrapolate. You can spend decades studying the history of humans addressing all that, much of it wise and relevant.

About brain science revealing lies, by the way a lot of people deceive themselves, convince themselves or become convinced of something that is false. People can avoid learning or noticing things, on purpose. Sometimes we are all mistaken. It seems to me in courtrooms, humans, with all our fallibility, will see brain science as a statistical aid, nothing more. A judge tells jurors that "whether you know it or not, you've spent your whole life learning how to determine whether others are telling the truth or not." That suggests that younger or more isolated jurors might not be the most competent, and that maybe experienced trial judges are the more competent, in general. Whether they or anyone can fathom the mental experience of someone with a radically different orientation or brain function, I doubt that. Empathy has its limits.

Can brain science bridge that gap? Can it heal that gap, at times? Fifty years ago, this was a mystery. We no longer think in terms of magic and witchcraft, or possession by a devil. That was Kandel's introduction, as I recall, that there is "no mystery." I'm thinking that in court inquiries, the judge says to an attorney, "You may ask the question once you lay a foundation." And at last there is sufficient scientific foundation to continue to ask the questions.

ShalomFreedman  03/12/2013 10:55 AM Report

In spite of Eric Kandel's championing of a new 'biology of the mind' I do not think that he or anyone else has succeeded in reducing consciousness and self- consciousness in all their complexity to 'brain activity'. This is not to question the value of the brain researches that are outlined in this program. It is simply to note that a certain way of looking at things in which brain- science is the beginning and end of all study of Mind is most probably mistaken. There are levels of discourse and those which focus on brain- activity take us only so far.

PS I did not understand the implications of this discussion for public policy, except in the discussions advocacy of more funding for brain research. That is something it is difficult on the surface to quarrel with.

toexist  03/12/2013 10:35 AM Report

The Opportunity Cost of Slow Thinking

35:20 … “when people are cognitively busy, when you keep seven digits in their head while doing other things, so their system 2 is occupied. So, their ability to inhibit impulses is different. They use more sexist language, for example, while keeping that material in their head and in many other ways you can see that their self-control is impaired. So there is a correlation, it’s very close, between the resources that are needed for self-control and the resources that are needed for computation.”—Daniel Kahneman

To judge oneself and others as immediate reservoirs and spigots of action instead of judging the action, speech and otherwise, is to be preoccupied with dismal rhetoric and politics. Such orientation is not only psychological projection. It impairs the spontaneous inhibiting of impulses. See also polyvagal theory.*

The official psychological and legal propaganda of self-identity with virtual free will is an authoritarian device to confuse and break down spontaneous inhibition of instinctive reflex, for the delusional authoritarian impulse control, or puppetry.

The Marshmallow Experiment

16:00 “So the position of being frozen on the measure is completely off. We’re talking about correlations that are significant. We’re not talking about a destiny for an individual. So I want to be perfectly clear that branding is completely off, particularly since the most exciting findings of the marshmallow experiment are the ease with which it is possible to change an individual’s ability to delay gratification. There are very straightforward ways to do it that connect with how the brain works. In the experiments we’ve done, we’ve taken children who were unable to wait for a minute and suggested to them before we leave the room, “if you want to, if you want to, you can make believe that the stuff in front of you is just a picture, put a frame around it in your head,” and the child understands that, knows what a picture is, knows how to put a frame around it in the head, and the moment that happens, you walk out of the room, the child is able to wait fifteen minutes. You show the child a picture of the object and say make-believe it’s real, and the child rings the bell within a minute or two.”—Walter Mischel.

The point is that if there is a frame around all experience or the ‘real’ of reality as simply sense data or narrative, no matter the spatial-temporal context, consciousness renders coherently.

Other animals cannot know that the conscious experience is not existence. Humans can. It is simply psychotic to hold each other responsible for dynamics that spontaneously happen, because such a position is more than social, psychological or legal opinion. It is a dismal error and the disease at the root of all crime. Consciousness freed from evoking existence does not need any god for hyper real validation of bottomless existentialist nonsense.

* Polyvagal theory further points to the spontaneous automation of inhibiting reflexes. There is not only no free will. The narrative of personal volition is incoherent nonsense, because determination is not personal. It has no first origin.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/12/2013 04:00 AM Report

Yes Alan Alda, we do not want branding over a simple marshmallow test at ages between three and five.

Updated 'marshmallow test' offers insight on kids' delayed gratification.

"The original marshmallow papers mentioned that environmental reasons could play a role in decision-making, but the idea was not followed through," Kidd said. "Instead, it was assumed children who did not delay gratification had poor impulse control."

It was also in California where the seeds for University of Rochester's new twist on the marshmallow studies took root.

Reliable and unreliable researchers are keys to impulse control:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2012/10/16/science-marshmallow-test-delayed-gratification/1 636207/

(Perhaps University of Rochester needs to redesign their methodology so they might eat it? Reductionism is so seductive to the brain.)

Gelles  03/12/2013 02:03 AM Report

Public policy, as is the case for all things that can be put into words, pictures or descriptions of any sort, is constrained by the functioning of human minds and brains. Remove the brain and nature persists but policy does not.

Davy H, below, is frustrated by REMant's mind and thoughts expressed at length in the first post in this discussion. Davy goes over the top in his post: we owe each other great latitude, scope and talk in our posts. Often, one man's post is beyond another's talent to comprehend a vocabulary he does not use. Or, even simpler, the length of some comments taxes us beyond our patience.

I admit REMant today goes to far and too fast for me today. I cannot muster the energy to follow his train of thought.

For example, REM says, "There is absolutely no rationale for giving prizes for 'discoveries,' which have been completely understood for thousands of years, anyway."

The rationale for rewarding discovery of things already discovered by others may well be that one man's discovery is not enough to launch movements to effect critical change.

Anyway, I will have to return to this discussion again. When I first heard Eric Kandel's introductory remarks I was thrilled -- I was sure I would complement the whole series because it lead to better policy and better outcomes on account of empirical science. I am still sure of this. But I am also exhausted from contemplating the progress indicated by studying how the brain creates language and other models of reality. It does so for the very young and for the very old. And yet it does not leave any two brains with the exactly same result just because they saw the exactly the same events. It seems we only understand things we are prepared to understand. And each one of us is prepared in a unique way. Objectivity is possibly not possible. Subjectivity may make fools of the best and the brightest of us, as has been demonstrated from the beginning until now.

cld  03/12/2013 01:32 AM Report

new topics: what causes children to respond to the marshmallow test differently?

the affect of diet on the brain

antalics  03/11/2013 11:46 PM Report

First of all I apologize for any grammatical errors because I am voice speaking this post.

that the human mind may reveal it secrets by way of hi technology is in my opinion beyond dispute in fact the brain is already giving away it secret but the secrets are being surrendered by willing participants.

the notion that we might be legally able 2 subject a defendant for example in a criminal proceeding to a brain scan without their willing participation I view as inconscionable.

therefore it is my opinion that the use of MRI scan as a judicial tool will be relegated to the same domain as current lie detector technology.

Davyh  03/11/2013 05:03 PM Report

God Remant you're a bag of wind.

REMant  03/11/2013 11:43 AM Report

The implications were made quite clear a long time ago by people like Thomas Szasz (who died largely unremarked last fall) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and if you don't think it can happen here, consider that some Florida lawmakers recently introduced legislation to require ammunition buyers to undergo prior anger management training. We went through a similar, controversial T-group craze decades ago, and ppl are still regularly forced to undergo "sensitivity training" and the like by courts and employers. Despite making a great fuss about gulags and concentration camps, we, ourselves, were still engaged in eugenics as late as the 1960s. And it took several days only this past week for the Attorney General of the United States to acknowledge the president of this country is not authorized by its constitution to label ppl as terrorists and summarily execute them.

As the folks paraded on this program have abundantly illustrated, the public is being told by the "helping professions" they are not responsible for their "diseases," and prescribed medication, put on welfare, or given preferential treatment for employment, etc, as long as they confess they are sinners, believe they can never take responsibility for their own lives, and give up any idea of privacy, propriety, virtue, and independence. Most psychiatry comes right out of Whig reform, the crusades against drink, drugs, onanism (look it up), the establishment of reformatories and penitentiaries, and despite the belief they were the "Christian Party," reflected the decline of Protestantism, and re-emergence of a Jesuitical casuistry.

Revivals and reform movements emerged largely, I think, to assuage the poverty and hardship of settling this continent and coping with the Industrial Revolution, which we still see in emerging nations, as well as in the Bible. They reflect the hope that the meek will inherit the earth, a "family romance" of progress, and give rise to ideas of being God's chosen, holiness, righteousness, exceptionalism and manifest destiny, as much as to programs of moral and technical improvement. And, of course, they always reappear in similar conditions. Recent American political tradition seems no less in their thrall than at any time in our history. There is no little semblance to fascism and communism.

In any case, nothing the modern physiological psychologist will ever show, shows us how it should be used. It can't. No "is," is ever an "ought." And these ppl above all should know that, because all thinking is unquestionably rationalization, which, in fact, concerned much of this discussion. There is absolutely no rationale for giving prizes for "discoveries," which have been completely understood for thousands of years, anyway.

No doubt kids (and the elderly, I might add) have difficulty holding their horses, as we used to say, but I would like to know what is irrational about wanting to eat a cookie now instead of two later? It might be argued that deferred gratification is necessary saving, possibly in a complete misreading of Weber, who made it fairly clear that status was the issue, never mind the ninety percent of economists we hear opposed to saving, along with the country's chief executive. I would think rather the experiment is intended to demonstrate how we can reform others along the lines mentioned, as, indeed, the gentleman eventually admitted, through the use of what appears to be garden-variety behavior mod. There is nothing new in this either. Any behaviorism, Pavlov or Skinner, begins by depriving the animal.

This is, as I said last week, another instance of "reform science." Any decent, honest scientist, like a genuine man of faith, would be interested, not in promoting ideas, but in disproving them, to see if they are natural. Behaviorists, like other skeptics, don't believe in nature and can no more be scientists, than Social Darwinists, Darwinists. And this doesn't suggest a lack of confidence, but exactly the opposite. Most ppl I know are afraid of questioning themselves, but it is a trait absolutely essential in a man of science or of God, and certainly ought to be in a judge.

The Libet experiment shows only that we are not cognizant of everything we do, which should come as no great shock to anyone, not even Prof Kandel. The idea that we respond to things before we are completely aware of them was implicit in the James-Lange theory, and of course made a lot of by Freud, Victorians desiring to be in control of things. They were so, however, because of the intense social focus on the approval of others and the fear of shame by Whig society. Behaviorists used it to argue against the the validity of introspection, and even human freedom. The notion has been seized on, as well, for millennia to prove we aren't predestined and that there's no design in nature. Reformers can thereby justify arguing ppl are enslaved, while enslaving them, themselves, as they like.

However, it was the deterministic Luther and Calvin, who saw the greater freedom in abandoning the idea of God's direct involvement with man, (in this preceded by Arians and Islam). The whole point of their conversion (incomprehensible to many) is to restrain willfulness in order to free the individual, not to condition conduct.

One runs into the use of "opt-out" to get around "free will" all the time, and habituation, which is what it relies on, has been the tool of authoritarians for centuries, as I also mentioned with respect to government recently. Free will is the issue in the debate between the theory of the English constitution, which gives power to courts and juries, and the American which gives it to legislatures. Marshall and many Federalists sided with the former, and the latter migrated to the Democrats. Ironically those who advocate a "living" constitution actually expect it to be one which sanctions their schemes, while those who believe in legislation recognize that law has no sanction except among those creating it. But, it is not as the "legal realists" would have it, pragmatic, if we believe we can push God around, nor can we call ourselves scientists.

The idea of will, itself, has long been used by some to mean conduct following upon conscious decision, or intent, and by others as unthinking or creative passion. It is alleged to have been absent in the Greeks, who, unlike the Romans preferred to describe events rather than infer causation or give names to things, a trait which seems to me continued in the Japanese and Germans. (And has been perhaps the key to their success.)

The Stoics, for instance, saw no conflict between reason and passion, just as Aristotle none between moderation and the ideal. They held that one was enjoined to live according to nature, and, tho entitled to this - from whence comes the "right" of self-preservation - nature was difficult to fathom and required a lifetime. Their ethics became the foundation for republicanism, Protestantism and real science, and prefigured natural selection, which is simply the acknowledgement that whatever man may propose, God disposes. Skeptics of design, deities unto themselves, do not believe in natural selection either. But something does not out of nothing come, at least to our understanding. And will can have nothing to do with it. Whether intention is a mirage is really only a matter of consequence, and that, in turn, on our ability to adequately do science, which amounts to natural selection, or living according to nature.

BTW, the president merely mentioned "unlocking the answers to Alzheimer's," and neglected to mention the scientific community's complaints at the time about the deleterious effect over-concentration on the space program was having on R & D generally, as well as, the fact, despite a lot of NASA chest-thumping, that it has never even begun to pay back its cost, memory foam, freeze-dried food and reflective blankets, notwithstanding.