Updates

The first update to my Seminar-Script (S_Updates: only from November 2006 to July 2007) can be downloaded here as a PDF (c. 44 MB)

All this is from now on (August 2007) continued online here (—all bold emphases are mine; all capital references refer to my References):

September 23, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Prof. Julia Fischer (Göttingen):

<<< Sehr geehrte Frau Prof. Fischer

Im Deutschlandfunk werden Sie zitiert mit dem Satz: "Und das ist natürlich eine wichtige Voraussetzung [für menschliche Sprache und Kommunikation), um überhaupt das Bedürfnis zu entwickeln, den anderen zu informieren, den mentalen Zustand des anderen zu verändern, nicht nur sein Verhalten [wie die Paviane]".

Sehr wahr: zunächst ist es nur ein "Bedürfnis", den "mentalen Zustand eines Anderen ändern zu wollen". Denn: die Gewissheit, "den mentalen Zustand" eines "anderen (!) Menschen" TATSAECHLICH verändert zu haben, gab und gibt es (noch...) nicht (trotz disambiguierender Sprache, Ritualbeweise, Glaubensbeweise, Credos, etc.).

Und so hatten denn auch schon die Inquisitoren und Folterknechte des Mittelalters (vor allem in Spanien) reichlich Mühe damit, den mentalen Zustand eines Häretikers zu ändern, da ja nur indirekte Mittel (wie z.B. Folter des betreffenden Körpers) zur Verfügung standen. Und auch heutige neurobiologische fMRI-Techniken ("human brain mapping") dürften hier kaum besser abschneiden (von extrem individuellen und methodisch extrem selektiven "fMRI voxel maps" lässt sich eben kaum auf das Verhalten eines Subjektes schließen - und auch nicht umgekehrt).

Und so schrieb schon der spanische (!) Schriftsteller Miguel de Unanumo über einen "sozial" extrem erfolgreichen Priester, der aber "tief im Innersten" Atheist war (eben: das Verhalten ist nie aussagekräftig, siehe Nietzsche: der "Mensch" ist das Tier, das am besten lügen kann...).

Erst durch heutige neuroTECHNISCHE Methoden, die die Gehirne zweier co-evolvierender Körper ("Menschen") direkt verlinken würden ("neurotechnical linking" - vgl. Kevin Warwick et al.) wäre es vielleicht einmal möglich, diese bis heute andauernde und ubiquitäre "soziale Ungewissheit" (d.h. nie wissen zu können, was im "Kopf" eines "Anderen" tatsächlich vorgeht...) zu eliminieren. >>>

September 10, 2008

In their paper entitled "Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise", the authors Ulrich KIRK et al. (in: Brain and Cognition, see References) studied the behaviour and neural correlates of architecture experts and novices looking at more or less "pleasing" buildings and faces in the fMRI-scanner:
In fact, the authors found that experts and novices rated the buildings similarly, but the experts recruited not only subcortical reward areas (like Nucl. accumbens = NAcc), but also higher areas like the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) together with an increased activation of memory related areas (precuneus <> hippocampus):
"We found that only some regions associated with the processing of reward are modulated by expertise (OFC, subcallosal cingulate gyrus [i.e., monitoring the inner emotional status?]), while activity in NAcc was typical of both experts and non-experts, suggesting that these regions play different roles in reward processing. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that experts and non-experts differ in their neural response to expertise stimuli [i.e., buildings] per se, irrespective of aesthetic ratings ["pleasantness"]. This typological response was observed bilaterally in the hippocampus and precuneus, and suggests that experts [with their more differentiated and more wide-spread maps...] may integrate current input into a framework of prior knowledge [memory!] and use this information to organize aesthetic judgements".

September 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "Neural correlates of object indeterminacy in art compositions", the authors Scott L. FAIRHALL & Alumit ISHAI (in: Consciousness and Cognition, see References) compared "representational paintings" to "indeterminate" paintings to "abstract" paintings to "scrambled" paintings, and note:
"We found activation within a distributed cortical network that includes extrastriate ventral and dorsal visual regions, as well as parietal, limbic and prefrontal regions. Consistent with our hypotheses, representational paintings with meaningful content evoked stronger activation than abstract and indeterminate paintings in the fusiform gyrus. [cf. ELBS 2005!] Moreover, we found enhanced activation in the precuneus and medial frontal gyrus during the presentation of scrambled paintings. Finally, stronger activation in response to representational paintings was found in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ)."
And as I already noted in my dissertation and Dallas lecture, the strongest activation of the TPJ may occur when viewing ("abstract"!) paintings by Barnett Newman... Or as John Onians always says (quoting painters like Picasso): "there is no abstract art" - not least because "H. sapiens" is extremely biased toward seeing "meanings" everywhere...

September 3, 2008

In their "opinion"-paper entitled "Battle of the sexes may set the brain", the authors Christopher BADCOCK & Bernard CRESPI (in: Nature, see References) believe that "psychiatric illness may be less to do with the genes a mother and father pass down, and more to do with which genes they program for expression [i.e., maternal/paternal imprinting]. ... The religious, magical and mystical delusions that cause people with paranoia to see evidence of mind, intention and meaning in everything seem to be opposite of autistic deficits in theory of mind, which result in an inability to understand that others have their own beliefs and intents."
In detail, "small deviations in imprinted-gene expression towards a maternal bias should result in smaller babies that are energetically 'cheaper' to mothers, and who are easier behaviourally - more placid, less demanding and more mentalistically attuned to interpreting and understanding the mental state of others. Large maternally biased deviations should lead to psychosis. ... [In contrast, and on the other end of the spectrum,] Autistic disorders typically become noticeable in childhood [because of "our" social bias as "foremost ultra-social humans" and eagerly observing "parents"...?]; psychosis mostly develops in late adolescence or early adulthood".

September 2, 2008

In their paper entitled "Dissociable neural mechanisms for determining the perceived heaviness of objects and the predicted weight of objects during lifting: An fMRI investigation of the size-weight illusion", the authors Philippe A. CHOUINARD et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) try to track down the "locus" of density perception in the human brain by making experimental use of the size-weight illusion (i.e., when inferring two objects with the same weight but being different in size as having a different mass):
"Taken together, we conclude that the real-world properties of objects, such as size and weight, are computed by [temporal, parietal) sensory areas and by M1 [primary motor cortex] respectively, whereas the perceived heaviness of objects, presumably based on their apparent density, is computed by PMv [ventral premotor cortex]."

August 30, 2008

It is really sad to note that we have now hundreds of futuristic Sci-Fi computer games ("World of Warcraft" etc.), but we are still not able to reconstruct the past in FULL (authentic) DETAIL in the form of a "total movie of the whole history":

What I desperately need is some kind of "musée imaginaire" (Malraux) or virtual "Google History" or "movie of history", i.e., a total movie showing you ALL historical landscapes and shifts and changes (i.e., shifting territories, political alliances, philosophical ideas, paintings, music styles, monetary flows, energetic flows, etc.):

Imagine pupils learning "History" by just sitting in a cinema or virtual "Google History", and by watching a film (movie, time-machine) constructed and based on ALL original-authentic (digitalized) historical documents (paintings, texts, pieces of music, thoughts, costumes, poems, instruments, etc.).

And this "movie of History" would be continually updated and perfected by ALL historians of the world (perhaps working together via Google?) — so that I will have a totally smooth map of all times, showing all shifting networks and maps (alliances, battle frontiers, schools of painting, theatre, music etc.) IN REAL TIME without any cracks, gaps, missing links, and fissures.

In this way, the whole "chain of being" will then become completely transparent and crystal-clear to pupils (who love watching movies with music!).

Hence, within such an uninterrupted time flow and time scale (just scroll up and down in "Google History"!), there will be a big variety and complexity, and no ideologies any more, but only a time-scale without any gaps (i.e., stereotypes like "gothic style", "absolutism", etc.).

In fact, you could even choose between a "movie of history" flowing faster (i.e., showing only the most significant historical shifts, transitions, changes of style, changes of thought, changes of sciences, etc in a compressed and fast manner), or a movie shifting more slowly (i.e., showing the whole dense complex shifting networks and maps without any cracks and gaps, i.e., showing the "whole chain of being").

And thanks to this movie ("Google History"), I would perhaps even be able to "analyze" one day this whole (and ever denser...) movie of history with the help of physical (thermodynamic) theories explaining you the thermodynamics (i.e., the changes, shifts, flows, and histories) of all these maps, "ideas" (i.e., neural maps), ideologies, battle fields, financial markets, paintings, music styles, etc.

THIS WILL BE GREAT - because I could then communicate my head as a historian (which already has stored all these pictures, pieces of music, networks of ideas) to my pupils ADEQUATELY.

BUT in order to create (and continually update) such a movie materially, all historians (art historians, historians of technics, historians of politics, historians of science, historians of ideas, archaeologists, historians of music, ethnologists, etc.) would have to work together (via Google?) instead of publishing, digitalizing, and burying their work and discoveries in arbitrary journals, websites, and formats.

August 16, 2008

Following KUHN & LAND 2006 (see my S_Updates), the authors Stephen L. MACKNIK et al. have now written the perhaps first review of the methodological impact of "the magician's art" on today's neurobiological methods of investigation, i.e., when scanning brains for all kinds of ("unconscious") "biases", "visual illusions", "attention / awareness shifts", etc., and they once again note that the magician primarily manipulates the spectators' attention rather than their gaze, and that the magicians use the spectator's biases [including "causality" and all kinds of "social biases"] in an extremely controlled strategical way — e.g., the "skilled magician informs every motion with a convincing intention" so as to misdirect the suspicious spectator's attention:
"Just as visual scientists use visual illusions to identify the neural mechanisms of perception, neuroscientists could use illusory correlations to identify the neural mechanisms that underlie the cognitive computations of cause and effect".
All in all, "magic combines multiple principles of attention, awareness, trust and perception to both overtly and covertly misdirect the audience".
Notably, especially priming and repetition ("habituation", and hence: not looking attentively any more, but relying on "stereotypical anticipations" instead) are used by magicians (for example, in the "vanishing ball illusion" — see also KUHN & LAND 2006).
Besides, "To steal a watch directly from the wrist of a mark, the pickpocket might first squeeze the wrist while the watch is still on (invoking contrast-gain adaptation). This has two effects. First, it makes a highcontrast somatosensory impression that adapts the touch receptors in the skin, making them less sensitive to the subsequent light touches that are required to unbuckle and remove the watch. Second, the highcontrast impression leaves behind a somatosensory afterimage, giving rise to the illusion that the watch is still on after it has been removed."
"Social cues, such as the magician’s gaze (for instance, in the Vanishing Ball Illusion), their voice and verbal communication and their body language (pointing, tension/relaxation), also play an important part in manipulating the spectator’s attentional spotlight. [But] Misdirection occurs not only in space (what the audience looks at) but also in time (when the audience looks). ... Many magicians use comedy and laughter as a way to reduce focused attention at critical points in time. ... Usually a delay is introduced between method (that is, cause) and effect, preventing the spectator from causally linking the two".
And the magicians even know how to use the spectator's memory (which is involved only in "salient" things): "An apparently natural or spontaneous action [i.e., non-salient], such as scratching one’s head, will not be memorable (although it might be critical to the execution of the trick)."

August 13, 2008

In their paper entitled "Hierarchical coding for sequential task events in the monkey prefrontal cortex", the authors Natasha SIGALA et al. (in: PNAS, see References) use the (mathematical) language of "vector coding" for their study of hierarchical processing: "For each task phase (cue, delay, or target), and for different stimulus information (e.g., different cue identities) within each phase, we accordingly obtained a pattern or vector of activity across the population of all recorded cells. The results show that successive task phases are coded by successive, approximately orthogonal activity vectors [i.e., strongly different attractors and basins of attraction?]. Within each phase, activity patterns are strongly correlated for different stimuli, suggesting that stimulus information is coded by modulation of the basic task phase vector [i.e., by the modulation of an attractor?].”

“Together, these results show a hierarchical

representation, with one basic activity pattern [i.e., attractor or "neural map"?] associated with each task phase, and stimulus information coded by modulations of the phase pattern. Both within and between task phases, PFC representations were also modulated by hemifield, with generally lower correlations between hemifields.”
“Orthogonal codes may underlie the construction of complex behavioral sequences, each consisting of many, dissimilar cognitive segments. Within each step, in contrast, correlated codes describe different stimulus alternatives. Correlated codes are useful for similar operations, in this case, when fixed cognitive processes are applied to varying stimulus content.”

July 31, 2008

In their extremely clear paper (and map) entitled "A Motion Illusion Reveals Mechanisms of Perceptual Stabilization", the authors Anton L. BEER et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) investigate the "rotating snake" (or "rolling circles") illusion in detail (cf. also my Seminar-Script Seminar-Script, S3 Figure 41!), where the contrast gradient (from black-blue to white-yellow) elicits a peripheral drift illusion ("rotation") when the viewer does not fixate very 'well', i.e., when there are still micromovements (shifts) of the eye (more precisely: the fovea: see image below):
"Consistent with previous research, we found that the strength of the peripheral drift illusion varies with the degree of drift micromovements. ‘Poor’ fixation resulted in a larger variability of drift micromovements and stronger illusory motion than ‘good’ fixation. Other types of eye movements, such as microsaccades, seemed to be less relevant. Fixation instability (variability of drifts) was most pronounced immediately after pattern onset and declined as fixation continued. This is consistent with the literature showing that stimulus onset temporarily increases micromovements, and that voluntary attention that requires some time to become effective can suppress micromovements. Importantly, the decrease of fixational eye movements corresponds well with the phenomenological characteristics of the peripheral drift illusion, which is most strongly observed immediately after pattern onset and slowly fades after prolonged fixation. Although micromovements are crucial for the peripheral drift illusion they may not fully explain the phenomenology of this illusion. Instead the peripheral drift illusion demonstrates a failure to compensate for retinal image slips generated by micromovements. ... This compensatory mechanism seems to utilize visual (retinal) signals for estimating eye movements rather than extraretinal signals. Note that illusory motion was modulated by central but not peripheral drift patterns suggesting that eye movements were predominantly estimated based on visual signals from the central visual field."

July 23, 2008

And if you are interested in "corollary discharge across the animal kingdom", then you may read this paper by Trinity B. CRAPSE & Marc A. SOMMER (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) with nice — but perhaps already old-fashioned (see LOGOTHETIS 2008!) — Uexküllian "action-perception-cycle" schemata (see picture below) illustrating the difference between "corollary discharge" [from pre-motor or higher motor areas down to different levels of the sensory pathway] vs. "efference copy" [from motor neurons to sensory neurons] vs. "reafference" vs. "exafference" [the latter terms both introduced by Mittelstädt & Holst long ago]. Interestingly enough, even my Mapology has to differentiate between some "reafference" and "exafference" (see What is Mapology, points 5 ff.), i.e., between "non-contingent" (i.e., Self-produced, "activABLE") and "contingent" maps (not activated by my Self, i.e., within my "own" "Potential landscape"):

July 21, 2008

In their paper entitled "Arousal and Attention: Self-chosen Stimulation Optimizes Cortical Excitability and Minimizes Compensatory Effort", the authors Thomas FISCHER et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) continue old (SCP = slow cortical EEG- potentials and Beta-activity) research about the inverted U-shaped relationship between general arousal and best performance reflected by the higher amplitude of the initial component of the so-called CNV [contingent negative variation] ("nature always prefers the average level"):
"General arousal appears to be reflected by the tonic cortical negativity (TCN), with stronger negativity related to higher arousal .... At first, as already postulated by Hull (1943), people try to seek out environments or tasks providing optimal stimulation for (effortless) bottom-up arousal regulation. If this is impossible in attention-demanding tasks, a top-down mechanism seems to be invoked for low-arousal compensation."
Now, one of the most important system for general arousal is not only the reticular formation, but also the NAS (noradrenergic system) linking (bidirectionally) the locus coeruleus (LC) to the medial prefrontal (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which play an important role in the top-down modulation of the NAS: "ACC exerts top-down control over LC activity in order to adjust arousability for optimal task performance. Increased task-related activity in ACC, the mPFC, and the thalamus, observed in low-arousal conditions, supports the view that these structures subserve effortful compensation. ... Th[is] effortful compensation process has [also] been linked to enhanced power in high-frequency bands of ... the range of 19-30 Hz [beta2]"
When now comparing task performance under "low" vs. "high" vs. "self-(!)chosen" conditions, the authors found the best performance and "the largest iCNV amplitude ... in the condition with self-chosen stimulation ... In comparison to self-chosen and high-stimulation levels, frontal beta2 power was significantly higher in the low-stimulation condition ... Based on our results, it may be conjectured that low ACC activity and concomitant good performance can be ascribed to an optimal arousal level, at which no compensatory activity [by ACC, mPFC and so forth] is necessary".

July 14, 2008

For a neurodynamic view of schizophrenia involving shifted (altered) "attractor landscapes" and "state spaces" (following Freeman, Kelso, Thelen & Smith, et al.), see the recent essay by Nico VAN BEVEREN & Lieuwe DE HAAN (in: PLoS One, see References [in this illustrative essay you will also find the reference to Ouzounis C & Maziere P (2006): Maps, books and other metaphors for systems biology, in: Biosystems 85 : 6-10]).
It nicely fits into my broader framework of "Potential landscapes" (for a respective animation of such a dynamic potential landscape see Potential landscapes!)...

July 9, 2008

In three recent papers, one of my most favourite subject is investigated by researchers: according to me (see ELBS 2005), experts build up ever larger attractors ("giant attractors") and hence some ever larger "coherent whole" or "differentiated associativity" (DA). Due to the ever larger catchment area of such "giant attractors", experts do not have to reach stable attractors (e.g., when categorizing faces), but it suffices for them to play with the catchment area of these attractors (i.e., with transients and trajectories leading to these attractors): hence, experts do not play (and navigate) with their attractors, but by hinting at them via the transients (or saddle points or shifts) in the large catchment area of their giant attractors (which ultimately lead to these attractors like rivers flowing to a common sink or "potential basin": see also my Seminar-Script, S5 Figure 44 [see the attached image below!] and my What is Mapology? point 23, where I called these transients or saddle points "shifts" or "tendencies" or "trajectories" [toward an attractor] ).

Hence, experts are much faster than laymen, and second, they have a more stable (and at the same time: more flexible) giant attractor that is also more sensitive to subtlest shifts and incongruities (due to a larger catchment area).

Exactly this has now been proven by three research groups:
In their paper entitled "Increased Brain Signal Variability Accompanies Lower Behaivoural Variability in Development", the authors Anthony Randal McINTOSH et al. (in: PLoS Computational Biology, see References) found that "brain signal variability increases in children from 8-15 y and is even higher in young adults. Importantly, we show that this increased brain variability correlates with reduced behavioural variability and more accurate performance. ... Myelination and neural pruning increase differentiation of information flow in the brain, enabling a shift from a system that responds in a slow and stimulus-locked manner, to one that responds more rapidly and where the internal variability reflects the parallel exploration of the functional repertoire before converging to an optimal response."
In a follow-up paper to DURSTEWITZ & DECO 2007 entitled "Transient Dynamics for Neural Processing", the authors Misha RABINOVICH et al. (in: Science, see References) compare the brain to a "liquid-state machine" where the succession of "metastable" states visited by the system (its trajectory, or transient) is stable (resistant to noise, and reliable "even in the face of small variations in initial conditions"), finally making up a "heteroclinic sequence linking saddle points [see once again the image attached below: the red arrows displaying these "transients", "saddle points" or "shifts-tensions-tendencies"!]. These saddles can be pictured as successive and temporary winners in a non-ending competitive game".

Furthermore, extremely "SENSITIVE" experts — while navigating and shifting within their giant attractors on the saddle points/transients/trajectories — may be cabABLE of detecting the slightest (subtlest) shifts and deviations (and "emotional" imbalances?) via their Insula (being adjacent to the posterior insular-vestibular cortex [PIVC] and temporoparietal junction or "Self"]: in a follow-up paper to DI DIO et al. 2007 [on the Insula being recruited when facing disturbed-distorted-imbalanced proportions in works of art like classic sculptures...] entitled "Early neuronal responses in right limbic structures mediate harmony incongruity processing in musical experts", the authors Clara E. JAMES et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) determined "the temporal dynamics of neuronal activity in highly trained pianists and musical laymen in response to syntactic harmonic incongruities in expressive music, which were easily detected by the experts but not by the laymen. Our results revealed that closure incongruity [i.e., an "imbalance"?] evokes a selective early response in musical experts ... in right temporal limbic areas, encompassing the hippocampal complex and amygdala, and in right insula".

July 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex", the authors Patric HAGMANN et al. (in: PLoS Biology, see References) used the diffusion spectrum imaging method (see also Schmahmann et al. 2007 in my S_Update Feb 2007_Fig. 5c) in order to find evidence for the "existence of a structural core composed of posterior medial and parietal cortical regions that are densely interconnected and topologically central."
In fact, the authors "identified eight anatomical subregions as members of the structural core. These are the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, the cuneus, the paracentral lobule, the isthmus of the cingulate, the banks of the superior temporal sulcus, and the inferior and superior parietal cortex, all of them in both hemispheres", which heavily overlap with key components ("bottom-up drivers") of the "default network".

However, these interindividual connectivity maps (of each individual Potential landscape of association [or more precisely: connectivity -- see image below]?) are still restricted to the cortex, but "future improvements in diffusion imaging and tractography, as well as computational network analysis, will no doubt reveal additional features of the connectional anatomy of the human brain. It will be important to include major subcortical regions, such as the thalamus [AND: the BASAL GANGLIA!!] into future network analyses. Another advance would be to parcellate the cortex not on the basis of sulcal and gyral landmarks, but rather on the basis of regularities in functional connections that are observed in individual participants [see image just below]".

Contents 1 June 28, 2008 2 December 9, 2007 3 My homepage is now completely completed (see [6], and my Dallas lecture at Publications).= 4 Thanks to everybody - and all of this work has cost me a lot of years and money. You perfectly know my German saying: Ich mache ja alles umsonst...

June 28, 2008

At last, I have been able to escape from Germany (i.e., a country in which 99.9999% of all bodies seem to believe in the existence of "Jews", "Germans", "Americans", etc. etc. etc. etc., and in which I have been exploited in a more than slavish way...)!
I have now moved back to Switzerland...

June 20, 2008

In his important review entitled "What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI", the author Nikos K. LOGOTHETIS (in: Nature, see References) reviews the principles of fMRI — and he crucially notes that the fMRI signal is much more reflecting neuromodulatory effects (attention, motivation, learning, etc.) and some cortical excitatory-inhibitory (net) balance than some "sensory [subcortical] input" itself....

June 15, 2008

I didn't know that the U.S. Army may have copied Barnett Newman's painting style when designing their "Global War on Terrorism Medal" ribbon (see also my now updated Dallas lecture, slides 37 ff.!!! Publications):

June 13, 2008

I haven't known that the "ultra-social" Nationalsocialists also persecuted so-called "asocial" bodies.
See also EPLEY et al. 2008 (see References): the most "social" bodies ("people") are likely to be the most "de-humanizing" (i.e., the most "nationalsocialist") ones...
And that's why I largely prefer to live with peaceful and nice autists...

June 12, 2008

I have now looked through Barbara Maria STAFFORD's new book "Echo objects" (see References) and I must say that I am quite disappointed of its rather traditional contents.
I suggest to you reading my (much shorter, and much more up-to-date) Dallas lecture and regular Updates (here!) instead (see Publications) — and you will then certainly learn much more about today's Neuro-esthetics...

June 11, 2008

I have now updated my "Curriculum"-page with this Appendix (and "learning" may be nothing else than the adaptation/updating of permanently shifting maps (see [1]...):
(*) Please note:
Most things that are payABLE (i.e., that CAN be paid) have no value and no sense, and hence, there may be at least two ABILITIES which you CAN never pay (pace some primitive "neuro-economists"!):
1. A perfectly educated map-maker ("brain", "teacher", etc.).
2. Unconditioned (i.e., "erotic"? "aesthetic"?) "love" (which automatically excludes some quite primitive-primal "parental love", "marital love", "romantic love", "bindings", "bondings", etc. etc. etc.).
Unfortunately enough, both these "personality traits" (i.e., ABILITies of a map-maker or "brain") seem to be EXTREMELY RARE, and nor have "we" been ABLE to map (pace some primitive "neuro-economists"!) the neurobiological underpinnings of both these RICHEST ABILIties and capacities...

June 5, 2008

In their extremely important paper entitled "Perceiving the Present and a Systematization of Illusions", the authors Mark A. CHANGIZI et al. (in: Cognitive Science, see References) strenghten the old claim that the brain can only "predict" the present due to a processing latency of the neural system ("Given a stimulus at time t, to predict what an observer perceives, we must have some means by which we can say what the probable scene will be at time t+100 msec" — see also LLINAS 2001; cf. also my Seminar-script, S5 Figure 40 !!!).
With this fundamental "principle" (John Onians) in mind, the authors now categorize nearly all known visual illusions ("distortions") due to the empirical regularities following the "optic-flow regularity hypothesis": "A target in the region of the visual field toward which the observer is moving will undergo, in the next moment, a greater (A) increase in projected size, (B) increase in projected speed, (C) decrease in luminance contrast, and (D) decrease in distance from the observer".

In detail, the authors list 28 distinct ecological regularities that amount to 28 distinct predicted illusion classes: "This is because, under perceiving the present, the perception is predicted to be representative of the way the scene will be in the next moment ... therefore, perceiving the present expects observers to have perceptions that accord with these expected next-moment features".

The authors now demonstrate this "prediction (optic flow) bias" (even when looking at static pictures and "illusions"!!!!) with at least one example (see picture below):
"For two objects of similar distance from passing the observer, the one nearer the region of the visual field with smaller projected sizes tend to undergo, in the next moment, a greater percentage of increase in projected size", so that in the associated "Ebbinghaus illusion" "the left side of the figure has, overall, smaller projected size features than the right side of the figure; thus, the left target, being probably nearer to the direction of motion, should undergo, in the next moment, a greater percentage of increase in projected size. Because the two targets (i.e., the center circle on the left and the center circle on the right) have identical projected sizes, the left target will undergo, in the next moment, a greater increase in projected size than the one on the right; and perceiving the present expects observers to perceive the left target to project larger than the one on the right".

June 3, 2008

In their paper entitled "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns", the authors Tom M. MITCHELL et al. (in: Science, see References) note (cf. KAY et al. 2008):
"We present a computational model that makes directly testable predictions of the fMRI activity associated with thinking about arbitrary concrete nouns, including many nouns for which no fMRI data are currently available. The theory underlying this computational model [i.e., a mapping that correlates and compares different maps and atlases: linguistic maps/atlases vs. visual fMRI voxel maps/atlases (i.e., Potential landscapes)] is that the neural basis of the semantic representation of concrete nouns is related to the distributional properties of those words in a broadly based corpus [atlas] of the language ... The success of the specific model, which uses 25 sensory-motor verbs [as basic vectors that are then linearly combined for each arbitrary word] (as compared with alternative models based on randomly sampled sets of 25 semantic features), lends credence to the conjecture that neural representations of concrete nouns are in part grounded in sensory-motor features [e.g., "eat" may activate especially insular cortices, "touch" activates somatosensory cortices]. However, the learned signatures associated with the 25 intermediate semantic features also exhibit significant activation in brain areas not directly associated with sensory-motor function, including frontal [i.e., "emotional"?] regions".

All in all, "this research represents a shift in the paradigm for studying neural representations in the brain [or more precisely: voxel maps and fMRI maps], moving from [analytic] work that has cataloged the patterns [maps] of fMRI activity associated with specific categories of words and pictures to instead building computational [i.e., synthetic] models [i.e., mappings] that predict the fMRI activity for abritrary words".

May 30, 2008

In their paper entitled "Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures", the authors Stanislas DEHAENE et al. (in: Science, see References) report a shift from a more "naturally [stochastically] biased" logarithmic mapping of numbers onto space to some linear (Cartesian) mapping of numbers onto space during Western enculturation: "This compressive response fits nicely with animal and infant studies that demonstrate that numerical perception obeys Weber's law ... A shift from logarithmic to linear mapping occurs later in development, between first and fourth grade, depending on experience and the range of numbers tested ... The logarithmic code may have been selected during evolution for its compactness: Like an engineer's slide rule, a log scale provides a compact neural representation of several orders of magnitude with fixed relative precision".

Hence, you see once more: everything boils down to (shifting) maps...

May 16, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Reorienting System of the Human Brain: From Environment to Theory of Mind", the (aging) authors Maurizio CORBETTA et al. (in: Neuron, see References) note (cf. the Figure below):
"Survival can depend on the ability to change a current course of action to respond to potentially advantageous or threatening stimuli. This ‘‘reorienting’’ response involves the coordinated action of a right hemisphere dominant ventral frontoparietal network that interrupts and resets ongoing activity and a dorsal frontoparietal network specialized for selecting and linking stimuli and responses. At rest, each network is distinct and internally correlated, but when attention is focused, the ventral network is suppressed to prevent reorienting to distracting events."
While the dorsal network is activated during the execution of selective goal-directed tasks (simultaneously deactivating the default network), the ventral network (especially the TPJ) seems to be activated by all "behaviourally relevant stimuli" (i.e., stimuli relevant to some "Self" or intimate goal or target map):
"While the relationship between reorienting signals in the ventral attention network and sense of body remains to be explored, an intriguing hypothesis is that similar environmental and bodily representations and their comparison may be co-opted for ToM [theory of mind] interactions and that attention signals in TPJ may be important to switch between internal, bodily, or self-perspective and external, environmental, or other’s viewpoint, a key ingredient of ToM."

The TPJ seems to be innervated by norepinephrine neuromodulators (stemming from the LC = locus coeruleus): "LC neurons exhibit both tonic and phasic activity modes. Tonic activity is low in an unaroused state that facilitates sleep and disengagement from the environment, moderate when the organism is engaged in a focused task of high utility and filters out irrelevant stimuli, and high when the organism is not committed to a task, is exploring the environment, and there is uncertainty concerning the proper relationship between stimuli and responses."

Hence, the TPJ is mainly activated during the high tonic activity/exploratory LC mode, which may "correspond to the ABILITY of any salient [i.e., Self-relevant, or behaviourally relevant, or goal-relevant] stimulus".

As a result, the "ventral attention network is involved in reorienting [i.e., shifting] from one task state to another, either in the environment or between internally and externally directed activities".

HOWEVER, the authors "do not consider in this discussion the relationship between cortical and subcortical regions involved in the control of attention. There is strong evidence that subcortical structures like the superior colliculus are involved in stimulus-driven but also goal-driven attention", nor do the authors "know the timing of the activation of ventral and dorsal networks [and important subcortical "gating" structures like LC, SC, thalamus, basal ganglia] on timescales that are closer to the underlying neural signals".

Hence, this map proposed by these authors is rather "incomplete" and perhaps only a dreamful wish of (aging) neuroscientists (desperately) struggling for a total map of the (ever shifting) "brain"...

May 14, 2008

In their extremely informative paper entitled "Young Children Do Not Integrate Visual and Haptic Form Information", the authors Monica GORI et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) note:
"Before 8 years of age, children do not integrate visual and haptic spatial information, but one or the other sense dominates, irrespective of its reliability (as assessed by discrimination thresholds), at least over the range we studied. However, there is no evidence that either vision or touch acts as a ‘‘gold standard,’’ always dominating the other. For size discrimination, haptic information dominated in determining not only the perceived height but also in determining thresholds ... For orientation discriminations, vision dominated in conditions in which vision and haptic information should be weighted approximately equally. [See the Figure below!]."

"As different modalities, and indeed different tasks within each modality, develop at different rates, it is to be expected that maturation of crossmodal integration should also be task dependent, only developing after both relevant modalities are mature. ... Why should cross-sensory integration of spatial information develop so late? ... It is possible that for the developing child, calibration [i.e., the mapping between maps] is more important than optimizing perception by integration: Also, if sensory information is integrated, one sense [i.e., map] cannot be used to calibrate the other [map]. In addition, the rate of physical growth can vary between sensory systems, causing problems for integration.
But why should haptic information dominate size discriminations and visual-information-orientation discriminations? Orientation is a primary visual quality that can be gleaned directly from the retinal image, without correction for viewing distance or other variables. Indeed, one of the characterizing properties of neurons in primary visual cortex of primates is their selectivity to orientation. However, for haptic discrimination, this information is not encoded directly but needs to be recovered from the pattern of stimulation of sensor array [i.e., indirectly via touch, grasping, and hearing]."

Hence, while children still have to struggle with "calibrations" (i.e, the brain-internal mutual mapping between maps), adults may already have an optimally weighted (and hence totally interlinked and blurred) Potential landscape and neural network with perfectly mutually mapped maps (then being activated in an optimal cross-modal "integrative" fashion upon sensory stimulation...)...

May 12, 2008

In his paper entitled "Cerebellar contributions to speech production and speech perception", the author Hermann ACKERMANN (in: Current Biology, see References) tries to pin down all pathways involved in speech:
An "executive network" containing sensorimotor cortex, basal ganglia, inferior parts of the cerebellum, and a "preparative loop network" consisting of SMA, premotor cortex, superior parts of the cerebellum and anterior insula.
The basic processing units of speech are not phonemes, but rather syllables, which are linked together and "precisely timed" within words and letter strings via the basal ganglia and cerebellum (see also My map of the brain!).
ALL IN ALL, there may be several pathways for speech production:
1) an old pathway shared with other mammals for "shouting" / "calling" ("within emotional reactions"): anterior cingulate cortex > midbrain > brainstem > vocal tract.
2) "externally generated speech" ("naming"): visual cortex ("object to be named") > inferotemporal cortex > temporal pole > anterior insula (cf. SHAFTO et al. 2007!) > Broca area / basal ganglia / cerebellum > motor cortex > brainstem (direct route).
3) "internally generated speech": SMA > Broca / basal ganglia / cerebellum > motor cortex > brain stem (direct route).

And here is where the FOXP2 may come in: "Investigations of the distributional pattern of FOXP2 expression in songbirds provide some preliminary insights. The avian brain network supporting vocal imitative learning – a circuitry assumed homologous to the human basal ganglia motor loop ... – upregulates FOXP2 expression during periods of song acquisition. ... Given these data, the FOXP2 gene appears especially to influence cortico-subcortical circuits participating in the acquisition and execution of sensorimotor skills – such as the loops traversing the basal ganglia and the cerebellum."

May 7, 2008

Yesterday, I attended a lecture given by the physicist (or: experimentalist) Robert B. Laughlin in Tübingen — and symptomatically, he even had to use an old art historical (!) example to make his point about "self-organizing" "emergent laws" (and Gestalt theories) clear: when stepping back from Monet's seemingly "abstract" late paintings, the "realistic pattern" (or: "attractor"? "meaning"? "map"?) "emerges" from the "meaningless" dots of paint... — provided the map-maker (or "observer", or "brain"?) "knows" (i.e., has a map about) what pond plants may look like... (see here also my Dallas Lecture in Publications!).

Laughlin was really astonished about the high-precision maps (and mathematical numbers) in his own (and extremely narrow) field.
Well, for "sociologists of science", the extreme exactitude of his measurements is no miracle: after all, the extremely narrow circle of physicists (and co-related technicians, engineers, etc.) has co-evolved for a long time during a successful history, so that their mutual (circular?) mappings have become ever more interlinked ("entangled"? "synchronized"? "adapted"?), standardized, purified, linearized and logarithmized — eventually yielding exact linear and local "laws" (i.e., mathematical mappings) like U = I*R in a wide range of (not yet logarithmized?) scales...

It may be similar to social relationships (i.e., interactions, mutual mappings, etc.): the longer, the more interlinked, and the more intense the mutual mappings within a narrow circle of map-makers (say, between husband and wife), the more exact their mutual (standardized, ritualized, etc.) mappings may eventually become... (especially when you have high-precision mapping tools and some other extremely expensive technical equipment that only a few map-makers [like physicists paid by cold-war politicians?] can afford...).

Hence, you see once more: all boils down to ever more precise and ever more local-selective (mutual) map(ping)s between and within map-makers...

And by the way: what Laughlin called "ideologies" or "belief systems", is nothing else than my "maps": but "we" have to act and to earn money, so that "we" really need (even mathematical) maps in order to be able to act and to "persuade" (within social games)... — even if they may turn out to be "wrong" or "merely religious" in the end...

May 6, 2008

Today, I received an e-mail by Marc Schoenwiesner (following my own request and reminder in an e-mail to him and Robert Zatorre, Isabelle Peretz, and Diana Deutsch) that the BRAMS institute (see www.brams.org) is now in fact preparing a paper about the perception of reverberation.

That means: my old dream about such an fMRI study and data (see ELBS 2005: the Wagner-Project) has become true!!!!!!

I eagerly wait for their paper now (to appear in a few months from now) — although I have a bit some doubts whether these authors will really see the impact and multidisciplinary links of their rather specialist research approach (see my own sketch of such a project on "roomyness", and the impressive links to Music History, Psychology, Philosophy, Paleohistory, Neuro-Esthetics and Art History in general in my Wagner-Project: Future Projects).

May 5, 2008

If you are interested in the latest methods (and mapping tools) for "obtaining a complete physical map of the nervous system" (Lichtman et al.) by "high-throughput electron microscopy", "nanoscopy" and most recent "Brainbow microscopy", you may read the paper entitled "A technicolour approach to the connectome" by Jeff LICHTMAN et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References).

April 30, 2008

In a follow-up paper to their own paper (see SCHULTE-RUETHER et al. 2007), the authors Martin SCHULTE-RUETHER et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) note (see also my updated Dallas Lecture in Publications!):
"Subjects either focused on their own emotional response to emotion expressing [!] faces (SELF-task) or evaluated the emotional state expressed by the faces (OTHER-task). Behaviourally, females rates SELF-related emotions significantly stronger than males. ... During SELF-related processing, females recruited the right inferior frontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus stronger than males. In contrast, there was increased neural activity in the left temporoparietal junction [TPJ] in males (relative to females). ... The data suggest that females recruit areas containing mirror neurons to a higher degree than males during both SELF- and OTHER-related processing in empathic face-to-face interactions. This may underlie emotional "contagion" in females. Together with the observation that males differentially rely on the temporoparietal junction (an area mediating the distinction between the SELF and OTHERS) the data suggest that females and males rely on different strategies when assessing their own emotions in response to other people".

Now, this is what "we" medieval theologians and scientists always already have known for a long time: so-called "females" seem to be less ABLE to inhibit their ("unconscious"?) "social biases" and "emotional contagions", and hence activate their TPJs (in order to inhibit the mirror neuron network, and in order to clearly differentiate between some SELF and OTHERs) to a lesser degree than so-called "males".

April 29, 2008

In their paper entitled "Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces", the authors Clifton CALLENDER et al. (in: Science, see References) note:
"Musicians generate equivalence classes of objects by ignoring five kinds of transformation: octave shifts, [O]... permutations [P], .. transpositions [T], .. inversions, ... and cardinality changes, which insert duplications into an object ... A number of traditional music-theoretical concepts can be understood in this way, including chord (OPC), chord type (OPTC), set class (OPTIC), chord-progression (individual OPC), voice-leading (uniform OP), pitch class (single notes under O), and many others."

"Geometrically, a musical object can be represented as a point in R^n. The four OPTI equivalences create quotient spaces by identifying (or "gluing together") points in R^n. ... Our model ... describ[es] the complete family of continuous n-note spaces corresponding to the 32 OPTIC equivalence relations. Of these, the most useful are the OP, OPT, and OPTI spaces, representing voice-leading relations among chords, chord types, and set classes, respectively. ... Beyond modeling musical similarity, the geometrical perspective provides a unified framework for investigating a wide range of contemporary music-theoretical topics, including "contour", and "K-nets". This reflects the fact that the OPTIC equivalences have been central to Western musical discourse since at least the seventeenth century. Our model translates [i.e., maps] these music-theoretical terms into precise geometrical language, revealing a rich set of mathematical consequences."

And needless to say that "voice-leading" is defined as "mappings between adjacent chords in a score” (Rachel Wells Hall) – and hence the future goal of all these multidisciplinary mappings may be: to find correlations between musicological (geometric) maps and a musician's brain (i.e., neural maps), when both are contiguously-continuously shifting around within their (neuronal) maps...

April 27, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Diane Colye (and Stephen Marglin):

Dear Mrs Coyle

Thank you for your nice book ("The Soulful Science", 2007)!

The best sentence in your book was the following (: 253):
"I predict that during the next ten years the astonishing mapping of our societies taking place now...".

But I hope that you will soon see the problem of "maps", "mappings", and "map-maker(s!)" (see [2]).
Including the all-pervading problem of a "social bias" and H. sapiens as an extremely biased "ultrasocial animal" (HERRMANN et al. 2007) or better: map-maker (i.e., "brain?").

My own personal experience with a lot of students in Economy, Law, and Politics is that all these egotistical beings obsessed with sex didn't want to hear anything about theoretical issues any more (because there may be no such thing as an "economical theory"), but only headed for one single thing as fast as possible (as good Adam Smithian animals): "making money as fast as possible" and having sex and fun...

By the way: you should never refer to religious terms like "trust" etc.
Instead, when economies do grow and try to establish themselves in new territories ("expansion"), they first bother about issues of law.

Only when you have functioning (i.e., "independent" and "non-corrupt" (!)) institutions of law in a territory, economic growth will be able in these new territories... (see the OLD East European and NOW European-law adherent countries like Slovenia, etc.).

Hence, you may have greatly underrated the importance of "law" and "jurisprudence" in your book...

But please be also careful as well: even "Jurisprudence" is not an objective theory --- laws and "jurisprudence" are an extremely arbitrary thing... (only the Physics of Energy would be objective? - See Wilhelm Ostwald's futile attempt to transform the economical sciences into the physical science of Entropy and Thermodynamics already in 1909 [OSTWALD 1909] --- long before Georgescu-Roegen et al. !!!!!!!!!...).

Yours sincerely (and with a greeting to Marglin's "Dismal Science" of 2008) --- OE "

April 26, 2008

In his very good review entitled "General anaesthesia: from molecular targets to neuronal pathways of sleep and arousal", the author Nicholas P. FRANKS (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) notes that the most important receptors targeted by anaesthetics may be (inhibitory) GABAergic neurons (in Cortex, Hypothalamus, brain stem etc.), and:
"certain regions are consistently more deactivated than others. Studies with propofol, sevoflurane and xenon showed deactivation of the thalamus and some midbrain structures that are associated with the ascending reticular activating system, together with varying degrees of deactivation of particular association cortices, such as the precuneus and the posterior cingulate cortex ... Interestingly, the polymodal association cortices tend to be affected more profoundly than the primary and secondary sensory cortices. This functional dissociation between unimodal and polymodal cortices implies that during sleep the brain can respond to external stimuli (such as loud noises) but lacks the higher levels of processing that are necessary to make meaningful sense of the input."

In fact, "the thalamus is the major gateway for the flow of sensory information from the periphery into the cortex and can switch [i.e., shift] between a state that allows the flow of ascending information and one that essentially isolates the cortex from the environment" (see also my distinction between contingent "activity circles" and seemingly non-congingent (simulation-like) "activation circles" and "default-modes" in My map of the brain !).

"Thus, when the brain is in an activated, wakeful state, the corticofugal pathway (which is exclusively excitatory) provides a tonic depolarization of the thalamocortical neurons, tending to prevent them from entering synchronized, oscillatory states. This provides some degree of positive feedback, because if the TC [thalamocortical] neurons enter into an oscillatory mode as a result of a diminished excitation of the arousal pathways, then the tonic corticofugal excitation will also be reduced, further favouring synchronous oscillation. Anaesthetics could act, at least in part, by inhibiting cortical neurons and thus favouring TC burst firing and a sleep-like state. ... An explanation for the sudden switch between consciousness and unconsciousness might lie in the intrinsic bi-stability [once again: two stable attractors!!!] of thalamocortical neurons, together with the reciprocal inhibitory connections that exist between hypothalamic sleep-promoting centres and the arousal nuclei in the midbrain and the brainstem...".

April 24, 2008

When you read the paper by J. Dylan CLYNE & Gero MIESENBOECK entitled "Sex-Specific Control and Tuning of the Pattern Generator for Courtship Song in Drosophila" (in: Cell, see References), you can see once more that all scientific maps (and map-makings) are indeed heavily local, selective, and (necessarily) methodically extremely biased (because there is no total map of everything):
"By photoactivating all ~2000 fru neurons of males at once, we were able to elicit courtship behaviors, such as abdominal thrusting and unilateral wing vibrations, but only in a small fraction of 1.7% of all trials (n = 240). The lack of consistent responses under these circumstances is not entirely surprising: different subsets of fru neurons likely play antagonistic roles in courtship ... so that their simultaneous activation may result in conflicts. However, when the fru circuitry of the ventral ganglion was isolated by physically severing the neck connectives [and hence isolating the spinal ganglions and song pattern generators from the upper brain], headless male torsos (‘‘flyPods’’) sang readily and reliably when exposed to light."

With regard to the two kinds of song patterns generated by the Drosophila males and stimulated fru-females (two bistable attractors and "order-parameters": sine or pulse song...), the authors hypothesize that there may be (triodic) master-controllers in the upper brain, so that "one type of descending interneuron could then set the value of this parameter and thereby control the type of acoustic input (sine or pulse song), whereas a second class of interneuron could signal the decision to sing, without specifying a particular song rhythm".

April 23, 2008

In their paper entitled "Lateral asymmetry of bodily emotion expression", the authors Claire L. ROETHER et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) note:
"Our experiment provides the first demonstration of pronounced lateral asymmetries in human emotional full-body movement. These motor asymmetries influence the perceived expressiveness of emotional gait. Lateral asymmetry of emotional expression is thus not specific to the face, but extends to the movement of the human body [here: the left body side moving with significantly higher joint-angle amplitudes], consistent with a general dominance of the right hemisphere in the control of emotional expression, independent of the effector. Such asymmetries in locomotion patterns seem surprising given the selection pressure towards symmetry in locomotion".

April 21, 2008

In their paper entitled "Intrinsic noise, dissipation cost, and robustness of cellular networks: The underlying energy landscape of MAPK signal transduction", the authors Saul LAPIDUS (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"The ultimate goal of biology is to understand the function of specific systems. At the cell level, the function of the system is realized through the network of interactions between molecules. ... The purpose of this article was to study the global robustness or stability against intrinsic fluctuations and random perturbation to the inherent chemical reaction rates directly from the properties of the potential energy landscape [cf. [3]] of the network. ... Noisy conditions thus play a very important role in these chemical reaction networks and are much more realistic than the average mean concentrations. To describe the system under noisy conditions, we will define a potential energy function that is derived from the steady-state probability of the network. After this landscape is determined, the probability of each state is known and we can begin to analyze global features. ... The potential energy function U(x) can be related to steady-state probability: Pss(x) = 1/Z*exp(-U(x)). ... For certain configurations of concentrations, the network adopts a certain potential energy (or the corresponding probability). The dimensionality of the configurational state space is huge. We are interested, first of all, in the most probable configuration that corresponds to the lowest energy state."

"We used the experimentally inferred rate parameters to prove that the network is funneled in configurational space of protein concentrations toward the ground nonequilibrium steady-state fixed point under the intrinsic statistical fluctuations."

And now comes the most important point (cf. also WHITFIELD 2007), which shows that "evolution" may only be a subcase and subdiscipline of Physics (and ultimately Mathematics):
"We show that natural evolution might only select certain parameter space with the funneled underlying energy landscape. The other part of the parameter space that generates the rough potential landscape cannot guarantee the global robustness and therefore is not able to appropriately perform the specific biological function required for efficient transformation of the information signals. They are more likely to phase out from evolution. The funneled landscape, therefore, may be a realization of the Darwinian principle of natural selection at the cellular network level for efficient transformation of the information (signal transduction). As we see, the funneled landscape provides an optimal criterion to select the suitable parameter subspace of cellular networks, guarantee the robustness, cost the least dissipations, and perform specific biological functions."

April 19, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to the editors and authors of 2008's "Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science" (Martin Curd, Stathis Psillos, et al.):

"Dear Editors and Authors

Thank you for your book, but sadly enough, this your "Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science" (2008) seems to be neither up-to-date, nor complete:

It is a pity that your book does not contain the extremely important term "map" (or: "mapping"?) — a term which happens to be used in nearly all "sciences" (i.e., maps) and by nearly all "scientists" (i.e., map-makers) in an ever increasing way (you may only scan this week's issue of the magazine "Science" [see, e.g., ENSERINK 2008]...).

That's why I --- being funded by no body --- have tried to start a "competely new" and extremely consistent "Philosophy of Science" (i.e., map of maps) based on this nicely ambiguous term (**): see http://www.mapology.org/en/Main_Page .

This extremely short text is not easy to read — but there may be two easier books (ELBS 2005, ELBS 2006 — see References).

Yours sincerely, and as usual with my last sentence:

** And those who will have the "best" (neural?) maps... (or more prosaically with Ernan McCullin referring to Kurt Lewin in your book above on p. 498: The virtues of a "good" [i.e., "fitting"?] map...).

OE "

April 17, 2008

In a follow-up (?) study to BRASS & HEYES 2005 on "Face-Specific and Domain-General Characteristics of Cortical Responses during Self-Recognition", the authors Motoaki SUGIURA et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) compared "cortical activation during recognition of self-face and self-name" vs. the faces and names of "familiar persons", and then conclude with regard to the prominent shift in (de-)activation at the TPJ (Temporoparietal Junction):
"The domain-nonspecific reduction of temporoparietal activation during self-recognition revealed in this study may reflect the developmental process of self-recognition. The acquisition of self-recognition ABILITY is manifested as a disappearance of social behaviour directed at one's own mirror image. All animals confronted with their own mirror images first show the same social behaviour, such as aggressive displays, as to their conspecifics; then, a limited number of species stop showing this social behaviour before they show evidence of self-recognition. ... If temporoparietal activation reflects automatic preparation for social behaviour, and the developmental process of self-recognition involves the suppression of social behaviour, it may be reasonable to assume that self-specific reduction of temporoparietal activation is an active suppression process". (Cf. also my Dallas Lecture, Slide 36 Publications!).

April 15-16, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Ernst Fehr and Harvey Whitehouse:

"I was quite astonished to see an article in the New Scientist on your Oxfordian "explaining religion" project (EXREL).
First of all, the title of this project may already have a "religious" bias from the very start: in my view, map-makers like "scientists" NEVER look for "explanations" (only "religious map-makers" may do that...), but ONLY try to develop ever more precise mapping tools and maps enABLing them to predict (and especially to manipulate) "the uncertain future" ever "better" (i.e., in a "better" "fitting" way).

All this may only be another "religious bias" of a seemingly extremely "socially biased" animal (like the "ultrasocial" H. sapiens), partly correlated with H. sapiens's extreme "ontological bias" (i.e., "our" desperate struggling for some "truth" and "stability" and "stable absolute maps and coordinates") and "historical bias" (i.e., "our" struggling for "evolutionary reasons", "historical causes", "final purposes", "explanations", "causal maps", etc.).

And no wonder that people like Richard Dawkins have recently got into serious trouble when fighting with creationists (and vice versa)...

After all, "our" "brains" (or: "neural maps"?) have not been "designed" for looking for (ontological) "explanations" (down to childish things like "big bangs", "first movers", "evolutionary causes", etc.), but rather for making ever "better" (i.e., ever MORE "fitting") predictions based on ever MORE precise maps...

And by the way: the EXREL project seems to be largely funded by the European Union, that means: by politicians who do not care about "explanations", but who do want to be ABLE to make (hopefully) ever better predictions of "religious behaviours" (especially by mapping and predicting the behaviours of so-called "Islamic terrorists", of course?...)?

Best wishes for your project nevertheless --- OE".

And by the way: all this is nicely illustrated in this week's article in Science on Derek Smith as a "Mapmaker for the world of influenza" (ENSERINK 2008): Derek Smith only tries to develop ever more precise (real-time) global maps of the genomes and distribution of different influenza strains in order to be ABLE to predict (and to manipulate) flu outbreaks and shifting genomes (i.e., shifts and "changes") ever better...

April 14, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Kevin Ochsner:
"Thank you very much for your paper on the necessity of an "interactive" view of "empathy" in Psychological Science (entitled "It Takes TWO").
You note that: "Empathy — the capacity to feel the emotions of other individuals — is so critical to social relationships and prosocial behavior", but (as an art historian) I always have to remind and to add that this definition of "empathy" may also hold for Hitler's perfect "anti-social" (or yet: "pro-social"?) capacity to feel (and to quickly respond to) the emotions of his "(national)social(ist) mass".
But nevertheless, thank you very much for underlining that empathy (in your sense above) necessarily remains a tremendously ambiguous capacity and challenge (due to inferring "other" minds and emotions ONLY by means of CLOSELY reading bodily expressions), which may only be ever more disambiguated via extended interactive feedback sequences, including perhaps linguistic interactions (and hence the "necessity" of the evolution of some "language" in an extremely "ultrasocial" and socially biased "H. sapiens"?), or via future "direct" and "totally" disambiguated (i.e., neurotechnical?) linkings of TWO brains...?

Yours sincerely and best wishes --- OE"

April 13, 2008

Everyone is now talking about the increasing hunger in the world (or better: in the so-called "poor countries") — due to the grains wasted in favour of biofuel etc.
But look at my pupils and my conspecifics here in "Germany": all these my dirty conspecifics driving cars on Sundays, feeding their pets with bio-fuel (etc. etc.).
And you see here once more that H. sapiens is still rather "neolithic" (because being still dependent on agriculture and pets), and you also see that not even my first GOAL ("maintaining upright all already existing individual bodies as best as POSSIBLE") has been fulfilled in the last thousand years.
Hence, "we" (H. sapiens, including "politicians", "lawyers", "economists" etc.) seem to be really "imPOTENT" and "poor" (i.e., "selfish", "inconsistent, "neolithic", and "single-minded") map-makers indeed...

April 12, 2008

In their paper entitled "Virtual reality study of paranoid thinking in the general population", the authors Daniel FREEMAN et al. (in: British Journal of Psychiatry, see References) demonstrate "that virtual reality is a safe and acceptable method of studying paranoia in the laboratory. Computer characters can elicit paranoid reactions. Consistent with the latest epidemiological research, over 40% of our general population sample had paranoid thoughts".

Now, this result is not very surprising (and that's why I had to write an e-mail to Freeman et al. with the following text here:), given the increasing evidence that "Homo sapiens" seems to be an extremely "ultrasocial" animal (HERRMANN et al. 2007) with an extreme "social bias", so that nearly all its thoughts may revolve around "social inferences".
That means: H. sapiens may excel at making inferences, e.g., when making up or simulating "hidden intentions" & "hidden causes" & "other minds" in "other" "bodies" (e.g., when being in a "typically human"(?) "default-state" of a "wandering mind" [MASON et al. 2007], or when being in a task-free situation like traveling on the underground [FREEMAN et al. 2008]?).
And this excessive capacity of a "Theory of mind" (and default-state?) may even extend to paranoid thinkings in some (pathological?) individuals...?
After all, according to CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007, "most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons”.

April 10, 2008

In their paper entitled "Drifting grating stimulation reveals particular activation properties of visual neurons in the caudate nucleus", the authors Attila NAGY et al. (in: EJN, see References) performed a study on cats concerning the responses of the caudate nucleus (CN) to (visual) sinewave drifting gratings (and hence crucially extend the primitive notion of a "visual cortical brain" to much more important subcortical structures like the CN...):
"Earlier morphological findings in cats and rabbits stressed the predominant role of the geniculostriate pathway that conveys visual information toward the CN ... However, recent morphological and physiological studies support the suggestion that the extrageniculate ascending tectofugal pathways [including the superior colliculi [SC]] project to the CN in reptiles, birds and mammals ..."
Now, the authors corroborate earlier findings (in cats) that the "spatiotemporal visual properties of the CN neurons are extremely similar to those of the subset SC, LM-Sg and the AES [anterior ectosylvian sulcus] cortex, with their preference for very low spatial and very high temporal frequencies and narrow spatial and temporal tuning characteristics [!]."
In fact, the AES cortex may even be "the origin of the modulation in the CN." Besides, the "CN neurons are good candidates for tasks involved in the perception of motion and probably in the perception of changes [i.e, shifts] in the visual environment during self-motion, with their extremely large receptive fields, their preferences for low spatial frequencies, and their fine spatial and temporal tuning" (cf. also REDGRAVE & GURNEY 2006, and My map of the brain!).

April 6, 2008

In a follow-up paper to MUCKLI et al. 2005, the authors Bashir AHMED et al. in their paper entitled "Cortical Dynamics Subserving Visual Apparent Motion" (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note (and you see here once again the increasing use of mapologically crucial linguistic terms like "shifts" and "maps"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!):
"Motion can be perceived when static images are successively presented with a spatial shift. This type of motion is an illusion and is termed apparent motion (AM). Here we show, with a voltage sensitive dye applied to the visual cortex of the ferret, that presentation of a sequence of stationary, short duration, stimuli which are perceived to produce AM are, initially, mapped in areas 17 and 18 as separate stationary representations. But time locked to the offset of the 1st stimulus, a sequence of signals are elicited. First, an activation traverses cortical areas 19 and 21 in the direction of AM. Simultaneously, a motion dependent feedback signal from these areas activates neurons between areas 19/21 and areas 17/18. Finally, an activation is recorded, traveling always from the representation of the 1st to the representation of the next or succeeding stimuli. This activation elicits spikes from neurons situated between these stimulus representations in areas 17/18."

"In summary, the results showed that after the offset of the 1st stimulus, a moving activation wave-front appears in areas 19/21 and a motion feedback is sent to areas 17/18. Immediately, the area 17/18 wave-front starts and progresses together with the area 19/21 wave-front in the direction of AM. In the time interval during which the 17/18 wave-front traverses from one retinotopic to the next retinotopic site, the neurons located between these retinotopic sites generate spike responses."

April 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "Aversive Learning Enhances Perceptual and Cortical Discrimination of Indiscriminable Odor Cues", the authors Wen LI et al. (in: Science, see References) "combined multivariate functional magnetic resonance imaging with olfactory psychophysics to show that initially indistinguishable odor enantiomers (mirror-image molecules) become discriminable after aversive conditioning, paralleling the spatial divergence of ensemble activity patterns [i.e., "odor maps"] in primary olfactory (piriform) cortex. ... Twelve healthy human subjects ... were presented with four enantiomers (two different pairs), one of which (the target CS+, “tgCS+”) was repetitively paired with an electric shock (US) during a conditioning phase, whereas its chiral counterpart (“chCS+”) was not accompanied by shock ... The second pair of odor enantiomers served as nonconditioned control stimuli (“CS–” and “chCS–”). ... The central prediction was that associative learning would enhance behavioral discrimination of related CS+ odorants, in parallel with reorganization of neural coding in human primary olfactory (piriform) cortex".

In fact, the authors not only found a more and more differentiating Potential landscape (i.e., ever MORE differentiated maps or attractor landscapes with ever more differentiated attractors - see my Figure below), but they also found post-conditionally "increased mean responses to tgCS+ (versus CS– odors) in the OFC bilaterally."

You see: the more differentiated the maps "you" (i.e., your SELF or POTENTIAL landscape...) have, the higher your (discriminative) ABILITIes and SENSITIVities (cf. also my now updated Dallas lecture, Publications, Slide 21b!):
"Clinically, our data raise the intriguing possibility that neurobiological derangements in the ability to distinguish between salient cues and perceptually related inconsequential stimuli may underlie the emergence of anxiety disorders characterized by exaggerated sensory sensitivity and hypervigilance."

March 27, 2008

In their paper entitled "Emotional environments retune the valence of appetitive versus fearful functions in nucleus accumbens", the authors Sheila M. REYNOLDS & Kent C. BERRIDGE (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) note with regard to shifting (remapped) functional maps in the (limbic) nucleus accumbens:
"The capacity of situations to retune [i.e., to re-map] limbic function has hardly been explored. Here we examined how environmental ambience shapes adaptive behaviors by reorganizing appetitive versus defensive function maps in nucleus accumbens. Appetitive and defensive motivations are generated along an anatomical rostrocaudal gradient by glutamatergic circuits in the medial shell, analogous to a limbic ‘affective keyboard’. Each microinjection of the AMPA glutamate antagonist 6,7-dinitroquinoxaline-2,3-dione (DNQX, or related drug) disrupts glutamate signals from the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus in a spherical < 0.75-mm radius of the shell. Just as a keyboard has many notes, microinjections of DNQX evoke many different combinations of appetitive and fearful behaviors, corresponding to their location along the rostrocaudal gradient. In rostral regions of the medial shell, DNQX microinjections generate intense appetitive behaviors in rats: large increases in eating behavior and food intake, and the establishment of conditioned place preferences. In contrast, identical DNQX microinjections in the caudal shell generate equally intense, but negatively valenced, fearful behaviors: distress vocalizations, escape attempts, conditioned place avoidance and 'defensive treading'... Intermediate sites in the shell evoke various mixtures of appetitive and fearful behaviors corresponding to their relative position along the rostrocaudal gradient."

"In summary [cf. the Figure below], our data suggest that the incentive or fearful valence of motivation generated by a particular local glutamate disruption in nucleus accumbens depends at least on two factors: the location along a rostrocaudal affective keyboard, which assigns an anatomically determined bias of appetitive or fearful valence, and current signals about environmental ambience ["home environment" vs. "stressful environment"] that can flip the valence generated by disruption of moderately biased local circuits in the medial shell. Corticolimbic circuits involving nucleus accumbens may therefore flexibly remap affective-generating functions from moment to moment as external situations change."

March 25, 2008

Recently, "my parents" have asked me the question (while reading Richard Dawkins): "Why is there religion, and why are there (religious) wars?".

And here is my extremely short answer (already given in my extremely short book entitled "Map 2020" - see Publications): "Because" of the "social bias" of an extremely "ultrasocial" H. sapiens ("we"), or "because" of the "ontological bias" ("our" desperate struggling for "truth" and "stability"), or "because" of some "historical bias" (i.e., struggling for "evolutionary reasons", "historical causes", "final purposes", "(scientific!) explanations", etc.).

But unfortunately enough, badly educated map-makers like the evolutionary (!) socio(!)biologist Richard Dawkins never name (nor discuss) these (seemingly) "age-old" biases with their correct names (despite Francis Bacon, Xenophanes, etc.).

Hence, if "we" were all solipsist (i.e., "socially incompetent") autists, monads, or perfectly educated (i.e., unbiased) map-makers (who only try to develop ever more precise maps in order to manipulate "this world" ever better and in a more predictable way), there might be no "religious" people (and "wars"...) any more...

March 20, 2008

In their paper entitled "The representation of Egomotion in the Human Brain", the authors Matthew B. WALL & Andrew T. SMITH (in: Current Biology, see References) "identify two areas of the human brain that represent visual cues to egomotion more directly than does [the optic-flow sensitive area] MST. These areas respond strongly to a single optic-flow stimulus but become relatively unresponsive when the stimulus is surrounded with further flow patches and thereby made inconsistent with egomotion. One is putative area VIP in the anterior portion of the intraparietal sulcus. The other is a new visual area, which we refer to as cingulate sulcus visual area (CSv) [lying anterior to the posterior cingulate cortex]. Areas V1–V4 and MT respond about equally to both types of flow stimulus. MST has intermediate properties, responding well to multiple patches but with a modest preference for a single, egomotion-compatible patch. We suggest that MST is merely an intermediate processing stage for visual cues to egomotion and that such cues are more comprehensively encoded by VIP and CSv."

March 18, 2008

In their paper entitled "Synaptic Theory of Working Memory", the authors Gianluigi MONGILLO et al. (in: Science, see References) remind "us" once again that there is not only some attractor dynamics on the level of (spiking) neurons, but also on the (lower) levels of single neurons and their synaptic trees (including oscillating biochemical networks and calcium buffers):
"It is usually assumed that enhanced spiking activity in the form of persistent reverberation for several seconds is the neural correlate of working memory [WM]. Here, we propose that working memory is sustained by calcium-mediated synaptic facilitation in the recurrent connections of neocortical networks. In this account, the presynaptic residual calcium is used as a buffer that is loaded, refreshed, and read out by spiking activity. Because of the long time constants of calcium kinetics, the refresh rate can be low, resulting in a mechanism that is metabolically efficient and robust. The duration and stability of working memory can be regulated by modulating the spontaneous activity in the network [i.e., by non-specific periodic inputs to the network]."
"In the above scenario, the network has a single stable activity state [i.e., attractor] corresponding to the spontaneous activity, thus appropriately timed external signals are required to extract the memory from synaptic to spiking form. A more persistent form of WM requires the selective population to exhibit a bistable activity regime [i.e., two attractors], where the spontaneous state coexists with another stable state. Our network can be forced into this regime by increasing spontaneous activity by means of a global nonspecific background input ... In the bistable regime, post-synaptic spikes [PSs] become persistent without reactivating inputs ... Each reactivation increases u [the residual calcium level) and decreases x [the available resources], the latter terminating the PS. The time between subsequent PSs is controlled by the recovery from synaptic depression so that the PSs tend to occur with a period on the order of tD [which ...] would correspond to cortical oscillations in the theta-range, as observed during WM experiments."

March 10, 2008

The EXTREMELY important paper entitled "Identifying natural images from human brain activity" by the authors Kendrick N. KAY et al. (in: Nature, see References) seems to be the first step toward a so much longed-for "Potential function" (U(x,t)) of each individual brain (see also my Dallas lecture at Publications and [4]):
"Our experiment consisted of two stages [cf. Figure below!]. In the first stage, model estimation, fMRI data were recorded from visual areas V1, V2 and V3 while each subject viewed 1,750 natural images [i.e., visual maps]. We used these data to estimate a quantitative receptive-field model for each voxel. The model [i.e., the mathematical map U(x)] was based on a Gabor wavelet pyramid and described tuning along the dimensions of space, orientation and spatial frequency."
"In the second stage, image identification, fMRI data [i.e., visual fMRI voxel maps] were recorded while each subject viewed 120 novel natural images. This yielded 120 distinct voxel activity patterns for each subject. For each voxel activity pattern we attempted to identify which image had been seen. To do this, the receptive-field models estimated in the first stage of the experiment were used to predict the voxel activity pattern that would be evoked by each of the 120 images. The image whose predicted voxel activity pattern [i.e., map] was most correlated (Pearson’s r) with the measured voxel activity pattern was selected."
"A general visual decoder would be especially useful if it could operate on brain activity evoked by a single perceptual event. However, because fMRI data are noisy, the results reported above were obtained using voxel activity patterns averaged across 13 repeated trials. ... Single-trial performance was 51% (834/1620) and 32% (516/1620) for subjects S1 and S2, respectively; once again, chance performance is just 0.8%."

You see: "we" now get very clever at mapping (linking) maps of different kinds (obtained with mathematical, neurobiological or visual methods)...
And that's why I always say: the clash of maps (and mappings) and the mapping of (individual) map-makers (i.e., brains? nervous systems? V1-V3?) has now really begun (and hence also the following virulent problems: Who maps whom? Who maps what? What maps what? And who has the legal right to map Afghanistan by Tornado fighters?)...

However (and sadly enough), the authors only give a function U(x) that crucially lacks time-dependency (and hence, "real neuronal attractor dynamics"), so that the authors have to note grudgingly at the end of their paper: "Why does identification sometimes fail? Inspection revealed that identification errors tended to occur when the selected image was visually similar to the correct image"...

March 8, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Spatial Attention Network Interacts with Limbic and Monoaminergic Systems to Modulate Motivation-Induced Attention Shifts", the authors Aprajita MOHANTY et al. (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) show that the posterior Cingulate Cortex (which receives substantial input from the anterior Cingulate Cortex being Crick's "location of the will", and from the posterior Insula) may feedforward viscerosomatic information about the "motivational" state (hungry) to the posterior Parietal Cortex (involved in attentional shifts and building up "salience maps"):
"Amygdala, posterior cingulate, locus coeruleus, and substantia nigra showed selective sensitivity to food-related cues when hungry but not when satiated, an effect that did not generalize to tools. Posterior parietal cortex (PPC), including intraparietal sulcus, posterior cingulate, and the orbitofrontal cortex displayed correlations with the speed of attentional shifts that were sensitive not just to motivational state but also to the motivational value of the target. Stronger functional coupling between PPC and posterior cingulate occurred during attentional biasing toward motivationally relevant food targets. These results reveal conjoint limbic and monoaminergic encoding of motivational salience in spatial attention. They emphasize the interactive role of posterior parietal and cingulate cortices in integrating motivational information with spatial attention, a process that is critical for selective allocation of attentional resources in an environment where target position and relevance can change rapidly."
And: "Hence, the PC is ideally suited to serve as a neural interface between motivation, as encoded by the limbic system, and spatial attention. We have previously found that neural activity in the PC correlates positively with anticipatory shifts of spatial attention and that this relationship is strengthened by the presence of monetary incentives, indicating that the PC is involved in anticipatory biasing of spatial attention to motivationally relevant events."

March 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Misattribution of movement agency following right parietal TMS", the authors Catherine PRESTON & Roger NEWPORT (in: SCAN, see References) use TMS to disturb the normal functioning of the right TPJ [rIPL] during virtual own/other hand movements (the trajectories of which were partly artificially shifted, so as to disturb feedback and hence the sense of agency).
Interestingly, the authors now note: "When TMS is applied over the rlPL, participants are more likely to give a judgment of other ... compared with when no TMS is applied", so that the (socially biased?] default response of the TPJ seems to be attribution of agency to "others".
However, the authors now speculate that this misattribution is due to a "disruption of predicted state mechanisms" carried out by the TPJ (but cf. also BRASS & HEYES 2005: this misattribution could also be due to a failed inhibition of mirror neurons in other areas? Unfortunately enough, these authors do not seem to know this paper by Brass & Heyes. You see: nobody is perfect...).

March 1, 2008

In their paper entitled "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation", the authors Charles J. LIMB & Allen R. BRAUN (in: PLoS ONE, see References) note:
"Because musical improvisation incorporates a broad range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention that is intrinsically difficult to control (while retaining musical integrity), we designed to [improvisation] paradigms [based upon the same notes], one that was relatively low (which we have termed Scale) and one that was high (which we have termed Jazz) in musical complexity. ... In Scale's control condition ... subjects repeatedly played a one-octave C major scale in quarter notes [cf. also ELBS 2005, the "Wagner-Project"!]. ... In the Jazz paradigm, ... during the control condition ..., subjects played the composition with the auditory accompaniment of a pre-recorded jazz quartet. During the corresponding improvisation condition ... subjects were given freedom to improvise, using the chord structure of the composition and the same auditory accompaniment as the basis for improvisation."

The authors now found that "spontaneous improvisation, independent of the degree of musical complexity, is characterized by widespread deactivation of lateral portions of the prefrontal cortex together with focal activation of medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC, BA 10]. ... In jazz music, improvisation is considered to be a highly individual expression of an artist's own musical viewpoint [or: Self?]. The association of MPFC activity with the production of autobiographical narrative is germane in this context [cf. also FARB et al. 2007 in my Update below, December 31, 2007!], and as such, one could argue that improvisation is a way of expressing one's own musical voice or story."
"Whereas activation of the lateral regions appears to support self-monitoring and focused attention, deactivation may be associated with defocused, free-floating attention that permits spontaneous unplanned associations, and sudden insights or realizations ... The idea that spontaneous composition relies to some degree on intuition, the "ability to arrive at a solution without reasoning", may be consistent with the dissociated pattern of prefrontal activity we observed."

"Moreover, a comparable dissociated pattern of activity in prefrontal regions has been reported to occur during REM sleep ..., a provocative finding when one considers that dreaming is exemplified by a sense of defocused attention, an abundance of unplanned, irrational associations and apparent loss of volitional control".

February 29, 2008

In their (MEG-)paper entitled "A Specific and Rapid Neural Signature for Parental Instinct", the authors Morten L. KRINGELBACH et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) have tried to map the neural maps underlying Konrad Lorenz' "Kindchenschema" (infant schema) via MEG, since "no published studies have compared responses to unfamiliar infant faces with responses to unfamiliar adult faces":
"At around 130 ms after presentation of a face, significantly more activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex [MOFC] in response to infant than to adult faces in the 10-15 Hz band ... This striking difference in activity elicited by infant compared to adult faces was not found in the right fusiform face area [FFA], where the initial activity occurred earlier around 100 ms in the 10-20 Hz and in the 25-35 Hz bands".
"To test whether these results held when restricted to participants who were not parents, we excluded the three parents from the analysis. Using solely the data from the non-parents produced the same results. ... [However,] It might also be of interest to future studies to investigate the brain responses to infants of other species."

Hence, you see (once again, cf. also KVERAGA et al. 2007 in my Update below of December 10, 2007!) that during the propagation of neural activity along the ventral visual stream (Thalamus > Occipital visual area V1 > LOC > FFA) a lot of modulations of this stream (FFA) via parallel processed "top-down" areas may occur at the same time (e.g., via Thalamus > Amygdala [containing face-selective neurons!] > MOFC > FFA ?)...

February 28, 2008

In their paper entitled "Predicting Human Interactive Learning by Regret-Driven Neural Networks", the authors Davide MARCHIORI & Massimo WARGLIEN (in: Science, see References) note that three factors may drive learning: reinforcement learning, a player's beliefs about other players' moves (ToM!), and post-decision regret for foregone payoffs:
"Our model maps the structure of a strategic game onto a neural network in a very straightforward way, by having an input node xj corresponding to each payoff in the game matrix and by also including the opponent's payoffs and an output node yj for each action available to a player k. ... Thus far, the model is a very conventional, simple analog perceptron, where learning is modeled, as usual, as adaptive updating of the connections' weights. ... Regret is computed as the difference between the actual payoff received by a player k and the maximum payoff obtainable, given other players' actions. Thus, the psychological intuition ... is that connection weight adjustment is driven by a series of factors that can be summarized as adjustment = learning rate x distance from ex-post best response x regret x input saliency. ... As compared with Hopfield's perceptron rule, the main difference of this variant is that the error feedback is multiplied by the regret size".
The authors now found that "regret-based models always fared better than the other models ... demonstrating the determinant role played by the introduction of regret as a source of feedback for learning" (perhaps mediated by regret and disappointment networks in the lateral habenula, VTA, Striatum, Amy, or MOFC?).

February 26, 2008

In their extremely important paper entitled "Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction", the authors Nicholas EPLEY et al. (in: Psychological Science, see References) note:
"People engage in a variety of behaviors to alleviate the pain of social disconnection. For example, they actively seek connections with other people ... imagine important social relationships ... and increase attention to social cues in the environment ... Such behaviors involve attempts to establish connections with other existing humans, but we suggest that disconnected people may adopt an even more creative approach by inventing humanlike agents in their environment to serve as potential sources of connection. People may do so in at least two distinct ways: by anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as mechanical devices and nonhuman animals to make them appear more humanlike or by increasing belief in the existence of commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God) ... Chronic isolation has been a long-standing explanation for classic examples of anthropomorphism — from seeing mermaids in the ocean to naming geological features by their humanlike features [cf. Art history: from neolithic cave-sculptors to Mantegna!]."

Now, the authors conducted a test for such "mental state attributions" to mechanical gadgets, pets, and religious agents, and they predicted that "participants who were chronically lonely or momentarily induced to think about loneliness would create agents of social connection by altering the mental states they attributed to nonhuman agents ... or by increasing their belief in supernatural agents."

AND NOW COMES THE MOST IMPORTANT HYPOTHESIS (cf. also my Curriculum Vitae, Curriculum, and cf. also my online Dallas lecture 2008, Slide 37 Publications):
"If social disconnection increases the tendency to seek humanlike agents in one’s environment, then a strong sense of social connection should decrease this tendency to seek humanlike agents. A lack of motivation to connect with other humans should decrease the tendency to perceive humanlike traits in these other humans as well. This reasoning suggests that when evaluating other individuals, people who are especially socially connected might also be more likely to dehumanize those to whom they are not socially connected ... We found exactly this pattern in one recent experiment in which participants induced to feel strongly connected to another person were less likely to attribute humanlike mental states to members of an out-group than were those not induced to feel connected to another person ... Although being socially connected has many desirable consequences for one’s mental and physical health, it may have some undesirable consequences as well [cf. e.g., nationalsocialist biases and "dehumanizations"?]."

February 20-25, 2008

I am currently in Dallas at the CAA conference session on "Neuro-Art-History" where I give a (as usually non-paid, i.e., non-corrupted...) talk about Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman (see Publications).
I am not sure whether the audience will grasp all things involved in my lecture (which is extremely dense...).
And it is sad to say that I may have (in vain...) spent several thousand dollars and many decades of extremely hard work (see Curriculum) JUST for seeing Philip Johnson's Thanksgiving Square Chapel with the beautiful French stained glass by Gabriel Loire...

February 19, 2008

In their paper entitled "Korean Preschoolers' Advanced Inhibitory Control and Its Relation to Other Executive Skills and Mental State Understanding", the authors Seungmi OH & Charlie LEWIS (in: Child Development, see References) note with regard to Theory of Mind [ToM] and inhibitory skills (including the inhibition of mirror neurons via the TPJ?):
"Some [authors] have asserted that understanding of internal states [i.e., ToM] facilitates self-control ... According to this view, some degree of mental state understanding is itself a precursor to later developments in the executive system. ... In contrast, others have argued that advances in different aspects of executive control are necessary or even sufficient for the development of mind awareness. ... A third perspective about the effects of executive control on theory-of-mind development holds that inhibitory control is a key to developing social understanding [cf. also BRASS & HEYES 2005!]."
By comparing Korean preschoolers with their "Western" conspecifics, the authors now find that "on three of the four measures of inhibitory control ..., not only was the difference between the two cultures significant, but on each measure, the younger Korean 3-year-olds were performing above the level of their English counterparts who were almost 5 years old. ... [HOWEVER,] The lack of consistent relations between executive skills and mental state understanding, particularly in the Korean sample, may well be explained by the high levels of performance on the former, particularly the measures of inhibitory control, in the Korean children. The lack of transfer of these precocious executive skills into false belief understanding in the Korean preschoolers casts doubts on the necessity of a functional relationship between these two areas of cognitive development that has been assumed with reference to Western data."
"Although there is agreement between parents and teachers on the importance of socializing Korean children into a society emphasizing self-control within [Confucian] harmonized social interactions, there might be other possible reasons why Korean children appear to show higher levels of performance on tests involving inhibition. For example, child-directed speech may be a cradle for learning the elements of control. Such speech directed towards babies in Korea is characterized by a greater use of verbs than that in other languages ... The emphasis is on action and, by implication, its control ... It seems likely that this input and a related early child output of action terms are geared towards stressing the importance of self-control".

February 18, 2008

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "An Agent Harms a Victim: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on Specific Moral Emotions", the authors Gayannée KEDIA et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) try to disentangle four different "moral emotions" by a two factorial "agent harms a victim" LOTTERY scenario ("Self-anger": "You discover your lucky numbers but then you remember that you have forgotten to validate your ticket"; "guilt": "You discover your colleague's lucky numbers but then you remember that you forgotten to validate his ticket", "other-anger": "You discover your lucky numbers but then your colleage remembers that he has forgotten to validate your ticket", and "compassion": "You discover your colleague's lucky numbers but then he remembers that he has forgotten to validate his ticket"):
"First, we found that the stories involving someone else (guilt, other-anger, and compassion conditions) recruited more intensely the ToM network [TPJ, dMPFC, precuneus] than the self-focused ones (self-anger condition). ... The involvement of the amygdala in the experience of guilt and other-anger is of particular interest given that this structure has been associated with the capacity to detect possible threat ... The statistical interaction between the two experimental factors also indicated that stories in which both the self and someone else were concerned exhibited greater activity in the ToM network ... than those involving only the self or other ... On this note, Saxe has hypothesized that the dMPFC would support shared attention between "ME," someone, and an object or a goal. In the present study, this triadic relation was carried out by the guilt and other-anger stories: Each type of situation involved "ME" and someone else faced with a harmful act relying on an object (e.g., the lottery ticket that was not validated)."

February 17, 2008

In their paper entitled "Binding 3-D Object Perception in the Human Visual Cortex", the authors Yang JIANG et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) note:
"How do visual luminance, shape, motion, and depth bind together in the brain to represent the coherent percept of a 3-D object within hundreds of milliseconds? We provide evidence from simultaneous MEG and EEG data that perception of 3-D objects defined by luminance or elicits sequential activity in human visual cortices within 500 ms."
The authors now show not only the whole temporal dynamics involved with object perception (V1 > hMT > LO > vTemp), but also that "activity in the lateral occipital (LO) complex is associated with an increase of induced power in the gamma band, a hallmark of binding. The close correspondence of an induced gamma response with concurrent sources located in the LO in both experimental conditions (~ 200 ms for luminance and ~300 ms for dynamic cues) strongly suggests that the LO is the key region for the assembly of object features."

February 16, 2008

In their paper entitled "Perceptual learning depends on perceptual constancy", the authors Patrick GARRIGAN & Philip J. KELLMAN (in: PNAS, see References) note the following:
"We perceive by means of energy received at the senses, but it is the properties of the material world — objects, surfaces, spatial arrangements, and events — that matter most for thought and action. Early responses in each sensory system necessarily relate to energy dimensions, but obtaining perceptual attributes that reflect properties of the material world requires computing relations among sensory activations. ... Sensory data fluctuate continually. ... Sensory values may be encoded at early stages, but relational processing derives higher-order regularities, and only the latter comprise perceptual representations and accessible inputs for learning."

Now, their sentence that "our view is consistent with that of Ahissar and Hochstein, who proposed a "reverse hierarchy" theory of perceptual learning: the idea that "learning is a top-down process, which begins at high-level areas of the visual system, and when these do not suffice, progresses backwards to the input levels" definitely reminded of Hippolyte Taine (see also my Seminar Script, Seminar-Script, S4 Figure 15):
”Les sensations élémentaires qui composent directement nos sensations ordinaires sont elles-mêmes des composés de sensations moindres … Quant aux éléments et aux éléments des éléments, la conscience ne les atteint pas, le raison-nement les conclut; ils sont aux sensations ce que les molecules secondaires et les atomes primitifs sont au corps; nous n’en avons qu’une conception abstraite, et ce qui nous les représente est non une image, mais une notation” (Taine 1870: 188, emphasis mine).

You see: there is nothing "new" under the sun... (But, alas, people do not know all former writings any more...?)

February 13, 2008

This evening, I have attended a lecture given by Michael Hagner (ETHZ) and Charlotte Klonk (HU Berlin) at Tübingen University (within the "Studium Generale").

Unfortunately enough, I had to remember them that (among other things ranging from Dürer, LeBrun & Lavater up to "functional circles" already drawn by Descartes, Meynert, Uexüll, and today's "perception-action cycle" theorists):

All maps are selective (and extremely local). And all mapping tools are extremely (methodically) biased.
And: "we" (still) have no global maps (in real-time)... (and according to Nicholas of Cusa: will never have).

And unfortunately enough: "we" are damned to make maps, because "we" are damned to "act" [see Lenin and the poor medical doctors who have to save lives and brains...]. ... AND YOU CAN NOT ACT without a (neural?) map...?

February 12, 2008

More and more, I have enough of (biased) "Evolution" and "Biology" (etc. — and despite the GREAT book by John ALCOCK (2005) on Animal Behavior (see References), which I can only warmly recommend to you all!).

Instead, I am more and more turning back to some hard Physics and Mathematics (and Mapology), and to great articles like those by Valdur SAKS et al. 2007 (see also References), where Saks and co-workers show their struggling for precise (physical, mathematical) maps and for (desperately needed!) better mappings of cellular energetic landscapes and (thermo-)dynamic molecular processes...

After all, Biology (including some "evolution" and its physical constraints) should always be understood as a mere subdiscipline of Physics (excluding Astronomy and Cosmology, which - alas! - still happen to be rather a kind of "Astrology"...)...

And I still cannot understand how "my conspecifics" can indulge in dinner partys, warfare, social games, and egotistical short-lived goals, instead of struggling for better maps and manipulations (for fighting not other "people" and other "races", but rather cancer, diseases, world-wide stupidity and short-comings, etc.)...

And with regard to some (biased) "stupidity", I can only welcome articles like the one by Sally Lehrman in the February issue of "Scientific American" (p. 23 f.: "From Race to DNA"), where the author strongly argues for an (overdue) replacement of biased terms and obsolete-obscene concepts like "race" with less biased terms like "ancestry" (within some nearly unbiased "personalized medicine"), while always taking into account not only phylo- and ontogenetical, but also strong environmental factors (i.e., strong physical and energetic constraints that still remain to be mapped at large...).

February 9, 2008

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "Brain Activation for Consonants and Vowels", the authors Manuel CARREIRAS & Cathy J. PRICE (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note:
"Perea and Lupker (2004) found significant masked priming effects for consonant transpositions (relovucion-REVOLUCION vs. retosucion-REVOLUCION), but not for vowel transpositions (revulocion-REVOLUCION vs. revalicion-REVOLUCION). ... Interestingly, Semitic languages attest to the role of consonants in making lexical distinctions. In these languages, lexical roots are formed exclusively by consonants, whereas vowels are inserted to indicate morphological patterns."
In fact, "vowel processing shares neural resources with prosodic processing", and "prosodic processing is typically associated with right hemisphere activation ... and lexical processing is typically associated with the left hemisphere activation."
"To this end, pseudowords were created by transposing or replacing 2 nonadjacent letters. For example (PRIVAMERA) from the word PRIMAVERA "SPRING" and their replaced consonant controls (PRISALERA) as well as transposed letter-vowel pseudowords (PRIMEVARA) and their replaced vowel [sic!] controls (PRIMOVURA)."
"Notably, we observed increased activation in the right STS [superior temporal sulcus] for vowels relative to consonants during visual word processing tasks, with this effect being stronger during reading aloud than lexcial decision. ... Vowel changes alter prosodic information more than consonant changes ... Transposed-letter consonant pseudowords are more similar to words than the transposed vowel or the replaced-letter pseudowords, as the error rates and reaction times show. ... Thus, the rejection process is more difficult in the case of transposed consonants than in any other experimental condition, and right middle frontal activation is also higher."

February 7, 2008

In their article entitled "Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics", the authors Linda SMITH & Chen YU (in: Cognition, see References) note:
"The experiment reported here shows for the first time that infants rapidly learn multi