Brain Behavior Institute 2008 - Session 3
Review
Science as loopy, story telling/revising rather than truth/facts
I have to remember I am not teaching the truth but "we are getting it less wrong" ... Tola
Teaching science to a group of 8th graders who believe they know everything and can be convinced of very little can be a bit challenging when certain scientific theories go against their belief system. I look forward to using this explanation of science to better explain why neither their beliefs, nor scientific explanations for certain issues are right or wrong, nor do they have to be. I also look forward to applying the concept of science as an ongoing story revision to better explain this concept ... Sage
I personally dislike the idea of calling science a “story” especially with high school students who have little regard for what is important or “real”. To say the word “story” will automatically have my students thinking that it is a lie. ... Joyce
Although I feel very uneasy being told that nothing can be proven, I do understand the importance of viewing theories, like evolution, as incredibly useful concepts, supported by lots of good data, that helps explains a lot of observations. However, I think it is very important to talk about how not all 'data' is equally valuable; i.e that we can't take a theory and use any old data to say it is supported. All theories are not created equal, in terms of supporting data ... Carol
I, too, was not quite comfortable being told that there is no "truth" -- at least not in science . . . and that nothing is absolutely right. Math and science are closely related. There are things in math that are absolutely right or wrong. There are "proofs." This is why I think we need to distinguish between a theory and a law . . . and that wasn't mentioned today ... Alan
- getting better at process at least as important as acquiring content
- a social process: diversity/transaction essential
I think that one of the most interesting things about the use of Langston's Ant was how easily we all attribute human qualities to a triangle on a screen. To a certain extent I think that our tendency to attribute agency to everything limits our ability to penetrate the governing rules behind certain systems ... Adi
I would really like to find similar simulations for second graders. I know that my students would be led into wonderful places as long as I am able to guide them ... Concetta
Here are some websites to check out... mostly beneficial for middle grades science curriculum. Sorry, not all are interactive ... Sage
Secrets at Sea is an engaging activity that requires the students to literally, follow a story/case in order to save the food web. It is constantly quizzing the user in different fashions and at the same time requires the user to think by himself/herself on what the next step to solving this mystery is ... Upon starting this activity, Babtunde and I, had trouble going through the lesson because there were no direct instructions on what to do. However after clicking around the page for a few mintues, we were able to find our way to solving the case. Having gone through it once, it is significantly easier to navigate and instruct others ... Penn and Tunde
Some other sites might be of interest, but the above ones, I think, most closely satisfy the assignment ... Alan
- observations lead to stories/questions/new observations, reconsidertion of old observations
- computers, computer models valuable educational tools
- distributed systems
- engaging, surprising, interactive, to learn by exploring?
Moving on ... to the nervous system
Where we are ... questions?
- I am interested in nutrition and how diet effects brain function ... Sage
- I would like to know more about the physiological changes in the brain as a student progresses from K-12 and how learning and absorbing information alters ... Penn
- I am interested in memory ... Julia
- What does 'intelligence' look like in the brain; i.e what is going on in the brain when we think, which parts are activated during 'thinking'? What makes someone smart? a genius? creative? Can we help kids to be smarter by understanding how the brain process information? ... Carol
- What is currently going on with the clinical trial in progress in which researchers (inventors) have hard wired a processor onto a man's brain ... Alan
- I am particularly interested in brain development as it applies to ADHD and ADD students ... Grace
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The Brain - is wider than the Sky - For - put them side by side - The one the other will contain With ease - and You - beside-
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Implications if Emily was right?
- Brain = behavior, there isn't anything else
- "a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells ... and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them" ... Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis
- "it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else" ... Vilayanur Ramachandram
- Brain is different in different people
- Brain is constantly changing
- From Bibical Times to Today: What Has Changed and What Hasn't About Epilepsy
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
- The Gregarious Brain - NY Times Magazine, 8 July 2007
What story do you hear/see in Emily Dickinson's poem? Do you think the brain is wide enough to contain the sky ... "and You beside"? What would this imply? In general? About education? Write your thoughts in the forum area below.
Thinking about how the brain (nervous system) works (if Dickinson right)
| Reflex brain | Loopy brain |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| The problem | Another loop |
The brain is built to explore
- From stimulus/response box to semi-autonomous input/output box consisting of interconnected input/outboxes consisting of ... large number of very small input/output boxes (neurons)
- Neurons have some degree of autonomy, so therefore does nervous system, can view as output/input box as appropriately as input/output box
- The architecture of the brain gives it the characteristics of an explorer
Is the real brain (nervous system) actually that way?
Yep ...
- Sensory neurons the only way in, motor neurons the only way out, mostly interneurons
- Similar but different in different organisms, different in same organism at different times, genes AND experience
- All neurons, differences in behavior are differences in organization of neurons
(change organization of neurons, change behavior)
Key points
- Brain=behavior a good story
- Variation from brain to brain (diversity)
- For outside to affect brain it has to pass through sensory neurons
- Changes in brains with experience
- Brains have characteristics independent of experience and can generate outputs independent of experience
- Brains are designed (by evolution) to explore, to do loopy science
What most interests you about what we've talked about so far? In what ways might it be relevant in your classroom? Where new questions does it open up for you?
Questions
I have so many questions about the nature of the brain/mind, its hard to narrow them down to three, but here is a start:
What is consciousness?
Will giving people an awareness of the way their brain (mind) works change the way they live their lives?
Can people be trained to enter flow states?
Depressing news
Picking up on the discussion of science as truth versus story there was a great article in the Boston Globe two days ago about how the scientific community got the story of Prozac wrong.
Apparently our old story of depression being caused by shortage of serotonin in the brain does not seem to be borne out by observation. One of the first cracks in this theory came from observing the phenomenon of “Prozac lag”. Prozac increases the amount of serotonin in the brain immediately, but it usually takes weeks for the effect of Prozac to be felt by patients.
This led scientists to study other possible mechanisms in depression. One possibility which was explored is that depression functions much like chronic stress in that during both neurons are deprived of the proteins they need to thrive.
It’s a fascinating read and shows just how quickly a science story can be absorbed by a culture, even if the story turns out to not quite explain some pretty basic observations. I imagine that we will go through similar shifts in dealing with the topic of ADD drugs.
Read the full story here:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/06/head_fake/
Of course the history of medicine is filled with these kinds of stories. The New York Times did a great piece on the science of epidemiology and some of the potentially awful mistakes of correlation the medical community has made over the years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html
Subjective Science of the Mind
I really like the following quote from B. Alan Wallace's Contemplative Science. He describes Buddhism as the science of subjective inquiry.
I am interested in seeing if this type of model can be applied to students in traditional education settings.
Here is the quote:
As noted in the previous account of Gautama's initial training with Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta, from the very origins of Buddhism there has been a strong emphasis on the primacy of experience, or "direct knowledge," over conceptual inference, metaphysical speculation, or simple belief. This is reflected in the common response by the disciples of the Buddha to others who expressed an interest in his teachings: "Come and see!" (ehi passi). This emphasis entailed rigorous training in ethics and attentional training, which can reasonably be viewed as experiments in altering one's lifestyle and modes of attention. Buddhist contemplatives then trained in using their finely honed attention to observe and analyze a wide range of inner and outer phenomena. If a mode of inquiry is deemed empirical if it is based on experiment and observation rather than theory alone, then Buddhist "insight" (vipasyana) meditation can be regarded as highly empirical. However, a major difference between Buddhist, contemplative empiricism and scientific, technological empiricism is that the latter involves quantitative measurements and sophisticated mathematical analysis, resulting in the formulation of precise mathematical laws of nature. Buddhist empiricism, in contrast, is qualitative rather than quantitative, and it is primarily concerned with understanding and transforming conscious experience, rather than understanding and controlling the objective world that exists independently of it. (pg. 76)
Here is the link to the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Contemplative-Science-Buddhism-Neuroscience-Converge/dp/0231138342
Wallace
Your Blog entries are fascinating
Brain questions................
1. If we use only a small fraction of our brain capacity, then what is the essence of the rest we don't utilise within a lifetime?
2. Could it be that the reason the brain has such a large capacity than we can or ever have utilised is to give room for evolutionary development that might come upon mankind as time goes by?
The full poem
importance of brain
I find the notion that the
Emily's Brain Thing
Emily’s ideas about the mind being as wide as the sky, allows you to have an impact on your own ideas of what our mind is really about. My take on this is that the brain is a train station that has infinite amounts of information, stimulations, emotions, chemicals, reasoning, and logic going in and out constantly. In retrospect, our brain needs to allow time to settle down and let it rest and rejuvenate it self completely.
Emily On the Brain
What is society?
Society
This is quite interesting. There are things in the United States (as a basically Christian society) that we will be outraged if they happen here. However in a Muslim country they are considered normal life behavior.
To be exact, I may never understand why any lady would accept that she and three others can be legally married to one man under the same roof and the contrary is regarded as complete abomination and sin to God.
With your comment I can explain the above philosophy with some confidence that”each individual lives in a world that has been constructed by their own brains".
Brain Behavior Institue 2008
The Brain is everything!
Initially I thought the brain and the mind are two different things. The former deals with logic and the latter deals with emotions. However I want to agree according to Emiliy Dickinson that both aspects of our life take their roots from the brain.
This brings up a question. Can we then say that two individuals behaving differently is as a result of their emotional side of the brain rather than the logical part? I'm agreeing to this because logic is always (or supposed to be) straight forward. However emotions can change from one individual to another depending on the individual's experience
from where action comes
interested in the implications of Emily's poem for the origin of action. at first, i thought that there was no room for "God" in this concept of the brain containing everything. if action originates from the brain, then there is no divine intervention? but, where does the brain come from? "God" could still be the creator who set in motion all the multitudes of diverse individual brains.
alternatively, brains emerged from timeless interactions of matter and energy, which in turn is neither created or destroyed, only changes in form.
i just want a story that allows for "free will". still considering the evidence.
Free Will (Franklin)
Sorry couldn't resist the stupid pun. I probably lack free will in the pun department.
Seriously though, I want to try and address the issue of free will.
It seems like this is a really interesting and confusing story.
It’s an old story too. One version of the story goes like this. God made us. God knows everything, therefore we can’t possible do anything that contradicts God’s will. Therefore we should call ourselves Calvinist and wear strange hats. Of course as someone who believes in free-will, I believe the hat part is a choice, but I am getting ahead of myself.
John Calvin wearing his favorite hat
The other version of the story is that God created humans with free-will. In this version of the story there is a garden, an apple, a snake and Good and Evil. Leaving aside the garden, snake and apple our job in this story is to choose Good and avoid Evil.
Dilemmas of Free Will: Which T-Shirt should I wear?
But what observations can we use to explore these stories? As it turns out, not so many.
So what’s a better story about free-will?
We have started to get some interesting brain-related stories about free-will. One of these stories is that much of what happens in our brain happens with out us being consciously aware of it or before we become consciously aware of it.
Even more interesting is that our conscious brain likes to make up stories to justify things that its already decided. In split brain patients this is called confabulation
In non-split brain people this is called rationalization, or sometimes denial (assuming you are dating a Freudian).
But I digress.
The point is that these stories are testable and can lead to other more interesting stories. I also happen to believe that there is another interesting story about free will, which is a bit more challenging to explore but also relevant.
This is the story told by Viktor Frankel, a psychologist who survived Nazi concentration camps.
Frankel observed inmates at the concentration camp. He was curious why some survived while other died. His explanation was that the people who survived were the ones who found a way to make meaning of their suffering. Free-will for Frankel was not a question of God or closed systems. It was not even really a question of behavior. Free-will was a choice about how we make sense about what is going on in our lives and how that affects our subjective quality of life as well as how it helps us adapt to the difficulties of life.
This is a very similar story to the one told by the Buddha several thousand years before. According to the Buddha life has a subjective quality of feeling either good (pleasurable, comfortable, warm, fuzzy, happy) or bad (painful, sad, annoying, depressing etc). Our natural tendency is to gravitate towards the good and avoid the bad.
According the Buddha’s story, this is a very powerfully ingrained pattern of behavior that is hard to avoid. It is also according to his story a pattern that causes us more suffering and unhappiness.
To the Buddha, free will is about paying very close attention to the thoughts and feelings that are involved in our patterns of behavior. In paying very close attention we can begin to understand many of our conditioned involuntary responses to certain things. Once we understand them, we have some freedom to act differently. This for the Buddha is free will.
I find both of the Buddha’s story and Frankel’s story useful in my own life. Both help to explain large parts of my subjective experience around how and why I make certain choices. Is that free-will? I am not sure. But its useful.
other sources, besides Wikipedia!!!
http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/defenses.html
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/freud.html
distinguishing randomness from free will?
your two stories resonate with me. as far as taoist philosophy overlaps with buddhism and as far as psychoanalysis overlaps with Frankel's "re-making" meaning out of the card you are dealt.
but as much as these stories are useful to my ability to rationalize and create meaning, i still am interested in whether this type of free will is post-hoc rationalization in which case i am just a piano being played by god or natural order (determinism) or is my free will "really" a capacity to change/alter hardwired stimulus response. if the later is the case, which is my gut feeling, then an even more difficult question arises. if i can alter my behavior how am i to be sure it is not the result of a random generator that makes my behavior seem non-deterministic. the question is...how can one tell the difference between randomness (accompanied by post-hoc rationalization/storytelling) and free will? or perhaps it is enough for free will to equate to randomness...freeing us from strict determinism. maybe free will is our story for the brains capacity to generate randomness?
Maybe just a little free will
So are we just a player piano (dust or divine) with a nifty rationalization gadget or are we free to alter our behavior in meaningful ways?
I actually do believe that free-will is a story our brain (or gut - if you’re a Colbert fan) tells us.
But I don’t think we can dismiss it as “just” a story. I think the stories that we tell ourselves are our (possible) escape hatch from determinism. We can’t change our parents, our genes, our birthplace etc. but we can constantly tell new stories about the world.
Our ability to tell stories about the world, allows us to try out different behaviors. It opens the door for real novelty and creativity.
Having said that, my own sense is that we tend to wildly overestimate the ways in which we have free will. So much of our behavior is determined in ways that are opaque to us. Much of the rest we rationalize.
But I do think that we have the capacity as humans to become close observers of the workings of our own minds (see the Wallace quote above) . In doing so we can begin to re-shape the stories that we tell ourselves so they become more nuanced and descriptive. I think that this is the art of good subjective science (or Wisdom as they called it back in the day).
Recovery from addiction is a good example of how a change of story can change behavior. Paradoxically addicts admit that they are powerless (lack free-will?) over their addictions. In changing the story they open new possibilities in their patterns of behavior.
Its almost as if we have to recognize the many ways in which we lack free-will, in order to be able to really act on the very few ways in which we do have free will.
I hope that makes some degree of sense. I am curious to hear what observations have led you to the gut feeling that we do indeed have free will.
Evidence for Free Will
Evidence for my gut feeling of “free will” :
I first started reflecting on this seriously in high school when are started reading Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche and other existentialists. These thinkers lead me to believe I would be judged on my actions and my life was a blank page. I could write what I wanted. That was the end of it (more or less) for quite some time.
Then came some experiences with animal behavior. I adapted a lab on animal choice, called a food preference test. I used Pieris rapa or White Cabbage Butterfly caterpillars to help students think about stimulus/response as well as how to distinguish between randomness and pattern using a chi-squared test of significance. What became very clear to me (not so much for my students) was the difficulty in distinguishing between pre-determined stimulus response and choice. Were these simple organism making a choice or just reacting to a particular input. How does one tell the difference between hardwired stimulus/response and free will?
At about the same time I was learning about Leech neuron randomness from colleagues at Bryn Mawr College. It seems even a single naked neuron floating in a petri dish would behave in non-deterministic ways. This is the data that Paul Grobstien showed the Brain and Behavior Institute. This data might be interpreted as a neuron making a choice to act in an unpredictable manner. but how does one tell the difference between unpredictable outputs and free will?
Another consideration comes from my studies in Chaos theory and Emergent theory. Hebbs’ rule describes how networks of neurons self-organize. A simplification of the rule is, “Neurons that fire together, wire together”. Wired together neurons are ideas, feelings and causal factors in action.
Finally, I became depressed and it began to affect my drive, relationships and happiness. Believing that neurons could be conditioned to wire differently and believing (from Damasio) that these networks are the building blocks ideas, feelings and thus action, I began to reflect my way out of depression.
Put this all together and I think we have much less free will then most believe, but we can influence our own actions with deliberate and careful conscious and unconscious reflecting.
Am curious if any of this overlaps with your experience and what other evidence you most rely on for your conclusions.
A little bit of perspective