Brains are important things; they're where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a whole, not just in the cells of the brain. In some sense this is trivially true; our brains interact with the rest of our bodies, taking in signals and giving back instructions. But it seems bold to situate important elements of cognition itself in the actual non-brain parts of the body. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is a psychologist and neuroscientist who uses imaging technologies to study how different parts of the brain and body are involved in different cognitive tasks. We talk a lot about mirror neurons, those brain cells that light up both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see someone else performing the action. Understanding how these cells work could be key to a better view of empathy and interpersonal interactions.
Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is an Associate Professor in the Brain and Creativity Institute and the Department of Occupational Science at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, and has also done research at the University of Parma and the University of California, Berkeley.
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. For a long time, people very naturally assumed that there was the mind, the disembodied essence of what we were as people and where the thinking happened. And then there was the body, and the mind talked to the body. They weren't part of the same thing, they were two separate entities that could somehow communicate. Famously of course, the philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes, really formalized this idea of mind-body dualism. You can read a little bit about that in my book, "The Big Picture", where I try to bring to the historical foreground, the figure of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia who criticized Descartes for what we would now call the interaction problem. How in the world is this disembodied mind is supposed to be talking to our actual body? Of course, with the progress of science and our understanding of how neurons in the brain work, we see increasingly the mind is just a reflection of what the brain is doing.
0:01:03 SC: These days, most working neuroscientists are not dualists when it comes to the mind and the brain, they study the brain to think about how the mind is working. In fact, you can go farther than that. If the brain is where thinking happens, what about the rest of the body? There are nerves in the rest of the body, in fact, there are cells and organs and so forth that clearly influence what's going on in the brain. Might it not be more appropriate to think of the whole body as doing cognition in some sense? That's the thesis of a movement in neuroscience called Embodied Cognition. The idea that where we are thinking includes our whole bodies, not just the little brain inside our skull. There's even something called embedded cognition, which if I understand it correctly, goes and says, actually, it's the whole world where we start doing our thinking. When you're writing on a notepad, that notepad should be counted as part of your cognitive apparatus just like your brain. I'm not so sure about that, but the embodied cognition at least makes a lot of sense.
0:02:01 SC: So today's guest, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, here in Los Angeles. And she studies how exactly cognition happens in the brain and in the body, for example, by putting people in functional MRI machines, giving them different tasks, watching how blood flows to different parts of the brain. And Lisa is an expert in mirror neurons, these are the hypothesized neurons. There's a lot of evidence that they're there, certainly a lot of evidence are there in monkeys. But even human beings, we have neurons in our brain that fire both when we do something and when we see somebody else do the same thing. They mirror in our brains what we see someone else doing. And these mirror neurons, the theory goes, play a crucial role in not just cognition, but empathy, how we understand the motivations and the thoughts of other people, and maybe even in some neurological diseases. This is cutting-edge stuff, it's controversial. We're not exactly sure what's happening, but we'll learn a lot about it in today's conversation. We'll talk about mirror neurons, embodied cognition more generally, and a little bit about what neuroscience has to teach us about the process of human creativity. So, let's go.
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0:03:33 SC: Alright. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03:36 Lisa Aziz-Zadeh: Thank you. It's great to be here.
0:03:38 SC: So, we're talking about embodied cognition. There's lot of words that are near here, like embedded cognition and things like that. So, we'll get to all that. Let's just take a step back and contextualize this. So, cognition is not exactly the same as thinking, is that right?
0:03:54 LA: Cognition is not the same as thinking. So, no. I would say cognition is larger and broader than thinking. It encompasses also emotions, also subconscious processing and so forth.
0:04:06 SC: And we have this intuitive way of thinking about how we think. I have the feeling that people are intuitive dualists, they're Rene Descartes. They think of their mind as something almost separate from the body, affected by it. And your thing is going in the more or less, the opposite direction and putting the mind more and more into the body, is that right?
0:04:29 LA: Right. So the more we learn about neuroscience, the more we learn that the body is part of the brain. So, all the neurons are interacting with the body all the time. And so, from your gut to the senses on your fingers, to hearing and even the... The eye is probably the most relevant 'cause it's so attached to the brain actually. But all of this interacts with the brain so largely that it's really impossible to separate processing in the brain from processing in the body.
0:05:04 SC: Right. And so, that's the philosophy behind embedded cognition. And so, where did this come from? Who started thinking this way?
0:05:11 LA: Psychologists have been thinking about this for a long time, so there's Chalmers, there's Goldstein...
0:05:16 SC: David Chalmers, that is? Yes?
0:05:17 LA: Yes, that's right. George Lakoff is a linguist who has been thinking about this also for a long time in terms of language processing, so he talks about embodied metaphors, how we speak with our metaphors of the body and actions.
0:05:34 SC: So sorry, what does that mean?
0:05:35 LA: Yeah, things like grasping the situation, handling the truth. So these are all embodied ways of talking about very abstract things.
0:05:45 SC: Okay, so as a linguist that makes sense. He's trying to think about why we use certain visual metaphor, I guess, embodied metaphors.
0:05:52 LA: Embodied metaphors, exactly. And then there's the neuroscience behind it. There was the discovery of mirror neurons, which I think we'll talk about in a little bit. But mirror neurons were found to be neurons that are active both when I do something and just when I watch someone do something, so I'm not doing anything at all. But they're active in my motor cortex as if I'm doing something. So this kind of simulating other people's actions. And then this actually supported a lot of George Lakoff's work in linguistics, where we found that when people said words like grasping the situation or handling the truth, you would find activity in the motor cortex.
0:06:37 SC: Okay, and so this is more or less, this is where you come in. Because my impression, you should tell me, but my impression is that your scientific work involves poking inside people's brains and seeing what's going on when they're doing different things.
0:06:50 LA: Right.
0:06:51 SC: How do you do that?
0:06:52 LA: So I don't actually physically poke in the brain.
0:06:54 SC: Oh, that's too bad.
0:06:56 LA: So we use MRI and we use functional MRI. So we put people inside the MRI scanner and we have them do something while they're in there, and we look at the activity in different parts of the brain.
0:07:09 SC: So this MRI is a gigantic thing in someone's lab, and so they're not strapped down maybe, but they're lying down and their head is in the big donut, is that right?
0:07:18 LA: Exactly, right.
0:07:19 SC: And hasn't there been some controversy over how reliable fMRI are? Do you know...
0:07:26 LA: Sure. Every scientific method has its problems and MRI is a pretty gross scientific method. So you can't capture an individual neuron, you're really getting indirect measures of deoxygenated blood flow. So the parts of the brain that use the more oxygen are the ones that are working, and that's what you're measuring.
0:07:50 SC: And my impression is it's good at locating things in the brain, is less good at time resolution or something.
0:07:54 LA: Exactly right, it has a lag. It doesn't give you precise timing and localization, it's about, you can get by two... By two cubic millimeters.
0:08:07 SC: Okay. And that's a lot of neurons.
0:08:09 LA: That's a lot of neurons, yeah.
0:08:09 SC: Right. Yeah, okay.
0:08:11 LA: Yeah.
0:08:12 SC: Alright, so let's get back to the embedded... Could you help me understand embedded cognition versus embodied, versus situated, there's also, right? These are all things we could talk about?
0:08:21 LA: Yeah. They overlap largely. Embodied cognition is the idea that the way that we think is inherently rooted in our body systems. So if you are anxious or nervous, that's actually activity from your internal organs that your brain is processing.
0:08:45 SC: Okay, I'm sorry. So it's literally because of your organs doing something...
0:08:49 LA: Exactly.
0:08:50 SC: That you're feeling anxious.
0:08:51 LA: Right.
0:08:52 SC: It's not just because a certain neuron in your brain sent a little signal to it, a nearby neuron.
0:08:57 LA: No. We know from the sympathetic and parasympathetics systems that you have this large interaction with the body. And the brain is constantly picking up information from the body. And so let's just talk about being nervous. So if you feel like you've butterflies in your stomach, and you're anxious, that's actually because your internal organs are being primed by your sympathetic nervous system. And then that information is going to the brain and it's being interpreted as being nervous.
0:09:27 SC: Okay. I'm trying to understand you. I've read a little bit about this. I guess where... And I think it's still controversial, the whole thing. This is science of the cutting edge, we don't agree on everything yet, so there's...
0:09:39 LA: It's a theory.
0:09:40 SC: It's a theory. There are crimagins and there's enthusiasts and the whole bit. So there's a trivial sense, in which, sure, my body, my brain talk to each other.
0:09:50 LA: Yeah.
0:09:50 SC: But you're trying to be a little bit more dramatic than that, is that right?
0:09:54 LA: Right. The idea is if you had a brain outside of a body, could it actually process things the way we do? And so if you believe in this theory of embodied cognition then you would say no.
0:10:06 SC: What would it be, there's a brain in the vat experiment, if you put a brain in a vat and poke electrical signals at it, you're saying that would not be a human-like cognition going on.
0:10:16 LA: No, I don't think so. I think the way that we inherently think and the way we process information has to do with interaction with the body. And the brain in the vat wouldn't be able to do it the same way.
0:10:28 SC: Couldn't we somehow, very clearly mimic the signals it's getting from a body?
0:10:36 LA: This is completely... [laughter]
0:10:38 SC: Oh, yeah. I know. You're a serious scientist so I'm playing fun philosophical games but...
0:10:43 LA: Right. The question is, could you make a computer program that could have enough information in it, that it could simulate a body? I guess the answer is, "We don't know." It's theoretically probably possible but seems a little bit far-fetched.
0:11:04 SC: It makes sense biologically. I always say this when I have biologists or neuroscientists on the podcast, but we were not intelligently designed. There's not a team designing the brain and a separate team designing the body that had to work well together, the whole thing grew up organically. So, in some sense, why should cognition end at the boundary of the brain? The nervous system fills our whole body.
0:11:34 LA: Exactly, right. Exactly.
0:11:36 SC: And so, how do we test the extent to which that's true? How do we figure out?
0:11:40 LA: Right. A lot of the experiments that we run look at parts of the brain that are thought to be purely sensory motor, and we see if those regions are involved in this higher cognitive processing.
0:11:55 SC: Okay. So, explain what sensory motor means in this context and higher cognitive processing.
0:12:01 LA: Okay. There's parts of the brain that are involved in motor control, making the body do things. And it was theoretically thought before, that those regions really just only do that, they don't do much more than that. Maybe they have some sensory functions as well, but not much more beyond that. And more and more we find that they're involved in social cognition, understanding other people's intentions, understanding their actions. They're involved in linguistic processing of actions. Okay, so language, something else that we thought was higher cognition. And then they also might be involved in things like empathic processing. Things that we thought were really like the highest level of cognition.
0:12:45 SC: So, yes, the higher levels of cognition, we're thinking more abstract thought, emotions, things like that?
0:12:51 LA: Exactly.
0:12:52 SC: As opposed to the more unconscious things that are going on, right?
0:12:56 LA: That's right.
0:12:57 SC: And didn't I read in one of these Wikipedia articles I was looking at, that it was a starting realization when we figured out that most of the computing power in the brain is spent on our unconscious processes. What we think of as automatic and the higher cognitive capacity is a relatively tiny amount of our brain work?
0:13:18 LA: Yes, except that it's division between higher and lower, is a tough one.
0:13:23 SC: It's a fuzzy one, yeah.
0:13:24 LA: It's a fuzzy one. And so I'm not sure really where you draw the line. Also, something really interesting that's coming out more and more now is the idea of predictive modeling. Have you heard of this? So, the idea is that, there's two types of processing. There's what we call bottom-up. It goes from your sensory systems, your eyes, your nose, your mouth, your somatosensory to the brain. And then there's top-down. So, that's things that we predict will happen, that we start to already process as if they're happening. It's driven by the brain and goes back down to the primary areas.
0:14:02 SC: Okay.
0:14:03 LA: Okay. And so, it used to be that maybe... This comes actually from robotics. What we found in robotics was that if everything was bottom-up, it'd be too slow. Okay, so the robot would be way too slow to do anything. And so, we started to do what we called forward modelling for robots. And so in there, you start to have some kind of predictive model and the bottom-up model also sees if it can match it, and then you do some more robust processing that way, and it increases speed. And so, we realized the brain probably also works like that, but people pretty much thought it was about 50-50, bottom-up and top-down. And now, more and more research is coming out saying that, the percentages are much more toward the top-down than the bottom-up. And so we process things with this kind of prediction of what we expect to see. People are giving numbers like 90%.
0:15:02 SC: Alright. So you can quantify this? This is... I don't know what that means, 90% of what?
0:15:05 LA: Yeah. It's very difficult, it's very difficult to quantify, but you're looking basically at information coming from sensory systems versus information going down from prefrontal cortex and things like that.
0:15:18 SC: And this is like the classic problem of how in the world can people catch a baseball. We're not doing calculus in our head, obviously.
0:15:25 LA: Exactly.
0:15:26 SC: But somehow, our brains are predicting things.
0:15:30 LA: Right.
0:15:30 SC: And we're judging the reality that we measure any one time versus those predictions, is that right?
0:15:35 LA: Exactly, right.
0:15:37 SC: And so you're saying that this is the paradigm for how we do everything in the world?
0:15:42 LA: It seems like it. And it's a little surprising, if it's actually something like 90%. But, yeah, most of the work seems to be supporting that.
0:15:55 SC: And I think this has something to do, again, I get philosophical about these things, with our perception of the flow of time, because we're constantly... So, you're saying that, and maybe we can get into the details here a little bit because this is interesting. But, you're saying that we have models of both ourselves and the environment that we project in the future, then we're updating them all the time.
0:16:15 LA: Exactly, right.
0:16:16 SC: That's... I think that I've heard people claim, this is why we feel that we're moving through time because of this constant give and take.
0:16:24 LA: That's interesting. I think that this is also where the interaction of neuroscience with physics comes in.
0:16:31 SC: Absolutely, yeah.
0:16:32 LA: Which is super interesting, yeah.
0:16:36 SC: What we call the present moment is actually a few milliseconds in the past 'cause it takes us time to...
0:16:40 LA: To process it.
0:16:41 SC: To process everything, right, yeah. So, is it one map of our body that is in our brain, one little homunculus, or there're different little parts doing different things?
0:16:50 LA: There is a lot of different parts doing a lot of different things.
0:16:53 SC: So, for example?
0:16:55 LA: You have the motor areas, you have the somatosensory areas, you have auditory processing regions. Even in the motor areas, you have multiple, multiple maps.
0:17:05 SC: Okay.
0:17:06 LA: In somatosensory areas you have multiple maps for your internal organs. You have several maps in different parts.
0:17:15 SC: One per organ or several maps of each organ?
0:17:18 LA: No, so several maps of integrated information from the organs. Yeah.
0:17:24 SC: Okay. So we're getting information from our heart and our liver and our lungs, and that's going to different parts of the brain that are predicting different things? Is that what it's thinking about?
0:17:32 LA: Yeah. Processing it and predicting it and so forth.
0:17:36 SC: And so you begin to see why embodied cognition would sound like a good idea, because
0:17:43 LA: Right, right. The more you study it, you find that there really isn't parts of the brain that are... Don't get information from the body.
0:17:52 SC: Right. Okay. And you can see this happen in your FMRIs?
0:18:00 LA: Yes.
0:18:00 SC: Or you can see something happening?
0:18:00 LA: You can see something... Indirect evidence, we would call it, yeah.
0:18:04 SC: What is a very specific thing that you would ask someone to do when they're in that FMRI?
0:18:08 LA: Okay, so the original studies in mirror neurons were done in monkeys so they'd put electrodes inside a specific motor neuron. And they watch the monkey do something and they see what happens when the monkey observes someone else make the same action. What we do, that's the analog of that in humans, is we put them in the scanner and we have them perform an action like reach for a cup or a ball or something like that and then have them watch someone else do the same action. And then we can go further and have them think about the intentions of that person or think about what that person might be feeling when they're doing that action.
0:18:51 SC: It's something you do with a human, you can't do with a monkey that very easily.
0:18:53 LA: Exactly, right. And then you could do facial expressions, you can have them imitate facial expressions and things like that.
0:18:58 SC: And what we're learning is that evolution is very good at recycling; it's using the same part of the brain to do what we might think of as very different tasks.
0:19:09 LA: Exactly, right. So it makes sense that through evolution you first probably had action; the brain had to do something. And then sensory perception, and that basically took up the whole brain. And as evolution progressed, then you start to use these areas for cognition.
0:19:28 SC: Right. You've mentioned mirror neurons a couple of times. Let's just admit that we should talk about what these are. So tell us what a mirror neuron is, how many of them are, is there a particular place in the brain where we find them?
0:19:39 LA: Yeah. Mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys, they were discovered in monkey area F5, which is equivalent to the premotor cortex in humans, and the inferior frontal gyrus as well. And they were found to be active; using single cell electrodes that were inserted into this area of the monkey brain, they found that these neurons are active when the monkey does something as well as when the monkey sees someone making the same action.
0:20:11 SC: Okay. And this was... When are we talking about?
0:20:14 LA: '96.
0:20:15 SC: Oh, that recently. Okay.
0:20:16 LA: Yes, and this was by Rizzolatti's lab in Parma, Italy.
0:20:21 SC: And so the same neurons... Again, is it even possible to ask how many neurons we're talking about here? Is it four neurons?
0:20:28 LA: No, no, no, it's quite a lot, and it's the same brain regions. This F5 brain region has... It's a mosaic, so there's some mirror neurons there, there's other kinds of neurons there and so forth.
0:20:41 SC: And there's 85 billion neurons in the brain, so there's probably a whole bunch that are doing this.
0:20:46 LA: Yes, right.
0:20:46 SC: But it really is... But how specialized are neurons? They're localized in different parts of the brain, but are the actual neurons in one part of the brain different than neurons in other parts of the brain?
0:20:57 LA: Yes. Mirror neurons are specifically motor neurons, so they're really only in motor areas. They've been found now in the parietal cortex as well as in this premotor area, and then you'll find visual neurons in other parts and so forth.
0:21:14 SC: Right. So we discovered them in monkeys, there's a little neuron that does the same thing if the monkey's doing something and sees someone else do it, and we're not allowed to cut open human being skulls and put electric signals in there, so it's harder to test this for human beings, but it would make sense, right?
0:21:33 LA: Right. The way that we do it is by using something like FMRI, you could also use EEG, TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, has also been used. So there's all these indirect measures.
0:21:48 SC: And this is something that we think has to do with not... Okay. What is the point? Why do these mirror neurons do this? So, fine, I see... I pick up a cup, some neurons fire. I see you pick up a cup, the same neurons fire in my brain. What's up with that?
0:22:04 LA: Okay. This is where the theory comes in, right?
0:22:06 SC: Yes.
0:22:07 LA: Okay. There's a bunch of different theories. One very basic one is that it's involved in processing other people's actions. That's the most simple one. And then there's theories of simulation, that the way I understand you, the way I understand what you're doing, the way I understand when you reach for a cup, that means that you're probably thirsty, is by simulating. I know that when I reach for a cup, that's because I'm thirsty. And so if my motor regions are simulating unconsciously what you're doing at every moment, then I have an understanding of your experience.
0:22:46 SC: So it helps me have a theory of your mind if I can sort of simulate it.
0:22:50 LA: Exactly.
0:22:51 SC: So it's the simulation hypothesis, it's like everything is just a little simulation in my brain.
0:22:55 LA: Exactly. Right. Right. And you're doing this constantly, 'cause there's not just one person in front of you, but there's a lot of people doing a lot of things, so there's a lot to keep track of.
0:23:06 SC: Right. And is that... So I keep going back and forth between this, but we do an experiment to learn that the neurons are mirroring and then we invent a theory that says this helps us understand other people's brains. So how do we test that theory?
0:23:21 LA: Right. There's different ways. You just design clever experiments to try to get at what's the difference between understanding someone's intention versus understanding the context of a scene versus understanding reaching without actually picking up a cup. And you could look at brain differences for mirror neurons, or what you think are mirror neurons, for each of those scenarios and compare activity levels.
0:23:48 SC: Is there an example of a clever experiment you can think of?
0:23:51 LA: Yeah. Actually one of them comes from Rizzolatti's lab, where he's actually doing this in the monkey. And so he has the monkey reach for an apple, and then he has the monkey watch an experimenter reach for the apple. And then he has an occluded scenario where he... At the moment where the grasp to the apple is gonna happen, there's a screen put on that the monkey can no longer see if the apple was there or not. And so now there's just a grasp but there's no object that the monkey sees, but the monkey saw previously that the apple was there, so he has to infer, right?
0:24:29 SC: Right.
0:24:30 LA: And so you find that the mirror neurons are still active. But if the apple was not there and the person grasped for it, then the mirror neurons no longer activate.
0:24:41 SC: Oh, okay. So you know the person is doing the same thing...
0:24:44 LA: Same exact action.
0:24:45 SC: Because it has a different meaning...
0:24:46 LA: Yes.
0:24:47 SC: 'Cause it not grasping for something...
0:24:48 LA: Yes.
0:24:49 SC: These neurons don't fire.
0:24:50 LA: Right. And so from this, the Rizzolatti group infers that the intention of the goal is very important for these neurons, and so you're actually processing intentions.
0:25:02 SC: Good. Yet another reminder that the way the neurons represent the world is not just it's a picture of the world, this is a complicated thing where there's meanings and intentions...
0:25:13 LA: And goals and... Right.
0:25:14 SC: And goals, and purposes.
0:25:15 LA: Motivation, right.
0:25:16 SC: And stuff like that. Yeah. Does this teach us much about human psychology, do you think?
0:25:22 LA: Sure. I think that we're always trying to understand other people's intentions and trying to understand the underlying meaning of their actions. And so it could be that these neurons in humans are also involved in doing that.
0:25:39 SC: So that's where empathy comes in, for example.
0:25:42 LA: Mm-hmm.
0:25:42 SC: So do you study empathy for this reason?
0:25:44 LA: I do. We also find that people who score high on trait empathy, measures of empathy, they actually show more activity in these mirror regions.
0:25:55 SC: Okay. Is it something to be said about people who don't show any activity in this region?
0:26:04 LA: Yes. We find that... I also study individuals with autism, and we actually show that they have less activity in these regions. And some people with autism also have lower empathic processing, and difficulty with social processing in general is the key misfunction in autism. You also find this... Empathy is complicated; there's different kinds of empathy. Psychologists generally divide empathy into three components: There's sympathy, which is kind of mentalizing is what we would call it, where you're thinking about someone's actions and intentions and feelings, but in a very abstract way.
0:26:58 SC: Right, okay. So I'm not identifying with you as a person, but I'm getting this idea of what you're thinking.
0:27:04 LA: Yeah. The best example I can give of this is if you're in a relationship and your partner is really upset with you, and you're having a really hard time getting it. [laughter]
0:27:14 SC: That's never happened to me, but sure.
0:27:16 LA: But they explain it more and more, and you're kind of like in this abstract realm, you're like, "Okay, I kinda understand why you're upset with me."
0:27:24 SC: Intellectually.
0:27:25 LA: Intellectually. I would never respond that way myself, but I can...
0:27:30 SC: That's called sympathy, that's a weird...
0:27:31 LA: It's called sympathy, right.
0:27:32 SC: Right, that sounds like a weird use of the word sympathy to me, but okay.
0:27:37 LA: It's a very cognitive form of empathy and very abstract. Then we have empathy, which is sharing someone's feelings. Here I feel exactly what you feel, so if you're in pain, I actually feel that pain myself.
0:27:55 SC: Literally feel it.
0:27:56 LA: Yeah, literally feel it.
0:27:57 SC: Okay.
0:27:58 LA: And then there's compassion, and compassion is proactive behavior where you actually wanna do something to help the person. So not only do you feel, but you feel compassion for them and you wanna do something to help them.
0:28:14 SC: And in principle...
0:28:14 LA: You have this feeling of warmth for the other person.
0:28:16 SC: I would guess all three of these are separate, right? I have compassion even if I don't feel...
0:28:20 LA: Exactly, exactly. First of all, there are three different networks in the brain.
0:28:25 SC: Oh, okay, so we can map these out.
0:28:26 LA: Mm-hmm. And then there's different disorders that... So someone could... For example, psychopaths are very good with this abstract sympathy, but very bad with empathy. They don't actually feel the other person's pain. But they're very good at manipulating people, because they have this kind of mentalizing and sympathy where they can abstractly understand people. And then people with autism tend to be just the opposite.
0:28:57 SC: So, sorry, they...
0:28:58 LA: So they...
0:29:00 SC: They're not good at sympathy.
0:29:02 LA: They're not good at sympathy, but they're okay with affect sharing.
0:29:06 SC: Oh, okay, interesting. And it's very interesting, the idea there are networks in the brain that do these different functions. Are they quite discrete and obviously separate? Is there some fixed number, we're gonna discover 20 years from now, "Yes, there are 35 networks in the brain that do these different emotional things," or is it that they blend into each other?
0:29:28 LA: You mean empathic processing or are we talking about embodied cognition?
0:29:31 SC: Just more generally. Just...
0:29:32 LA: Embodied?
0:29:33 SC: Yeah.
0:29:33 LA: Yeah. Okay, we talked about mirror neurons, but since the discovery of mirror neurons, a lot of different kinds of shared circuits, we call them, have been found. For example, in the somatosensory areas, areas that are active when I'm touched, we find that they're also active when I watch you being touched. We find that also with disgust regions, regions that are active when I feel disgusted, when I see you experiencing disgust, they're also active.
0:30:01 SC: I read that husbands have these reactions when their wives are pregnant, they get fake pregnancies, they get morning sickness.
0:30:08 LA: Oh, that's interesting, I haven't heard of that.
0:30:10 SC: Well, so I say I heard of it, I literally watched it on Castle Rock last night, there's this TV show, Stephen King-based TV show, and honestly they were all about mirror neurons, the slightly crazy character was convinced that her mirror neurons were reaching out and...
0:30:25 LA: That's funny.
0:30:26 SC: Touching other people.
0:30:27 LA: They actually used that term?
0:30:28 SC: Oh, yeah, they did. Yeah.
0:30:29 LA: Oh, wow.
0:30:30 SC: And so I think that was in addendum that was not in the original Stephen King stories, but they...
0:30:34 LA: That's funny.
0:30:34 SC: 'Cause for him it was just psychic powers, but now it's mirror neurons.
0:30:38 LA: Oh, wow. [laughter]
0:30:38 SC: So maybe it's not true, the pregnancy thing I learned. I shouldn't trust Hulu Originals as my source material for psychological insight, but it makes sense, right?
0:30:47 LA: Right.
0:30:47 SC: It is part of... And it's adaptive, understanding how other people are feeling things, but we don't wanna go too far, right? 'Cause we're not the same as them.
0:30:57 LA: Right. You find actually for people in the medical world, they activate these shared circuits for empathy, affect sharing, much less than other people.
0:31:08 SC: I was gonna say, and also maybe homicide detectives, right? When there's all these dead people and they have to be clinical and cognitive about it, they can't feel like "Oh my god, this is a terrible tragedy."
0:31:20 LA: Right, exactly. And so for people who are lacking empathy, you probably wanna work on that. But in the typical population, what you probably wanna focus your time working on is compassion instead. You don't want people to be stuck feeling someone's pain to the point that they can't do anything about it, but you want them instead to try to focus on compassion to actually do something.
0:31:46 SC: Are there generally therapeutic implications for the kind of discoveries you make?
0:31:53 LA: Right now, our work is focused on autism, so we're trying to figure out... The difficulty with autism is that there's so many different subtypes, and so we're working on different subtypes of autism and trying to categorize them so that we can focus interventions, not just everyone with autism gets to do this one intervention, but maybe if you have this particular subtype this would help you more.
0:32:16 SC: I know it's very complicated and controversial, and it's... I have friends who have autistic kids and it's very emotional. How would you just explain what autism is to someone who didn't know what it was?
0:32:28 LA: Yeah, autism is defined by a deficit in social interaction. The social piece of it, not being able to think about other people's emotions and understand their intentions, is probably the biggest disorder in autism. And then there's also repetitive actions that are made and also communication deficits.
0:32:55 SC: So it's something like you don't know when other people are upset or you don't know why they're upset or why they're happy?
0:33:00 LA: Right.
0:33:00 SC: You don't get those cues, right?
0:33:02 LA: Right, right, right. Processing other people's social information.
0:33:07 SC: And this goes back to the idea that one of the roles of the mirror neurons is when we see somebody looking happy or looking sad or whatever, there's something goes off in our brain that is related to what happens when we're happy and sad that helps us understand, is that right?
0:33:21 LA: Exactly, this kind of simulating other people from a neurological perspective.
0:33:27 SC: Right. And I seem to recall that in the very earliest days when mirror neurons were being talked about, this connection with autism was made and people pushed back on it and other people hyped it up. And so what is the state of play right now?
0:33:40 LA: Yeah, what we think is that autism is very heterogeneous, and there's probably types of autism where mirror neurons are more involved than other types. And so we're actually looking at autism that's comorbid with dyspraxia. Dyspraxia is a disorder, a developmental disorder of coordination, and a lot of kids with autism have it.
0:34:07 SC: So they're less coordinated?
0:34:08 LA: Right, but it's particularly a motor deficit. And since it's a motor deficit, we thought that maybe these kids with autism who have dyspraxia are more likely to have this kind of broken mirror hypothesis, if you will. And the data do seem to support that. And so the idea is that maybe the reason some people find mirror neurons are less active in autism and other people haven't is that autism is so heterogeneous and you're not looking at the same group.
0:34:40 SC: Yeah. So some day, again, in the future, we'll realize there's really 12 different things going on and we lumped them all under the label of autism.
0:34:48 LA: Exactly.
0:34:48 SC: And so you're pretty convinced that at least some of them have a heavy involvement with...
0:34:53 LA: Not to say that's the only thing going on.
0:34:55 SC: Sure.
0:34:55 LA: Right. So we do find a lot of other brain regions that are also different in these kids, but that this might be one component.
0:35:04 SC: Okay, and does that have any therapeutic implications? We learn something about where in the brain something is happening, but we're not gonna go in there and poke it with an electrode. So what can we do?
0:35:16 LA: Yeah, it's complicated, especially given that this is just probably one piece of the story. But one kind of therapy that has been done with kids with autism with some success is called imitation therapy, where you teach kids with autism to imitate. And by imitating, they're not only working the motor pathways that they need to, but also trying to understand the social implications.
0:35:43 SC: Is it almost like they're training their neurons to be mirror neurons?
0:35:46 LA: Exactly. Yeah. And this, again, needs to be further tested, but the idea is that maybe this kind of therapy would be most effective with these kids who have the additional dyspraxia, and maybe it's not a common therapy to just throw on every kid with autism.
0:36:03 SC: Because the hypothesis is not that they lack the mirror neurons, but that the neurons in their brain just aren't mirroring the right way, is that fair?
0:36:14 LA: Right, that they might not be working the same way.
0:36:16 SC: Okay, so that in some sense it provides hope in the sense that you can train them to do something that maybe isn't automatic, but you can teach them.
0:36:23 LA: Right, right.
0:36:24 SC: My understanding is a lot of autistic kids, just at the crudest level, train themselves to recognize social cues and emotional things on faces just in a kind of rote way, even if they don't feel it themselves, and this is...
0:36:38 LA: Exactly, exactly. So it's very abstract.
0:36:40 SC: Right. So this is maybe a more visceral version of that, is that fair?
0:36:43 LA: Exactly, yeah, that's the idea, an embodied version, if you will.
0:36:46 SC: An embodied version. Yes, very good. And beyond autistic kids, are there wider psychological implications?
0:36:54 LA: Yes. We did a bunch of studies on stroke patients. After stroke, the main common... If you have a motor impairment following stroke, the most common thing that you do is physical therapy or occupational therapy. But the problem is there's only so many hours a day you could do that, and people get tired, it's a lot of work. And insurance companies only pay for that for the first three months. And so one idea is if we know that watching other people activates your own motor system, what about creating these videos of therapeutic things that you're watching someone else do? And you can think of it kind of like homework; you give it to a patient before they come into their PT or OT, and the night before, and they're watching these over and over again, and the brain is getting primed. And the idea is that when they go to do that the next day, they should actually be better. And so we do find some support for that as well.
0:37:58 SC: So when you have a stroke, is, since I know nothing about this, is most of the damage in your brain or is it throughout your body?
0:38:05 LA: No, so stroke is specific to the brain.
0:38:07 SC: Specific to the brain.
0:38:08 LA: Yeah. Yeah.
0:38:08 SC: And is it... It's mostly physical damage to the neurons or is it just sort of a rewiring?
0:38:13 LA: Exactly. Yes, yeah.
0:38:15 SC: So, in some sense...
0:38:16 LA: It's a lesion. Yeah.
0:38:17 SC: A lesion in the brain, okay.
0:38:18 LA: Yeah.
0:38:18 SC: So occupational physical therapy, you're stretching and trying new motor skills.
0:38:24 LA: Right. So you're hoping that would rewire the brain.
0:38:26 SC: But you're saying it is the brain after all, so we can hope to try to rewire the brain in more directly brain-centered ways, like...
0:38:33 LA: Well or...
0:38:34 SC: Thinking.
0:38:35 LA: By thinking. Exactly. Right. And if we believe in this embodied cognition, then there's other ways to activate these motor systems beyond just moving back to the body.
0:38:46 SC: Right. So, do we try virtual reality?
0:38:49 LA: Virtual reality could be very helpful. It's a little more difficult with people with stroke 'cause they can get dizzy and fall down and you know...
0:38:58 SC: Right, okay.
0:38:58 LA: Right. So you wanna be careful when you do that. But just having them watch these movies seems to be pretty effective also.
0:39:04 SC: Okay, very good. And what about just people who don't seem that empathetic? [laughter] What about people who don't have an obvious physiological issue? But...
0:39:16 LA: You mean like a psychopath?
0:39:17 SC: Yeah or just couples therapy, someone who's not sharing their partner's desires as much as they would like.
0:39:22 LA: Oh, okay. Yeah. So the most comprehensive study of this being done is actually being done by Tania Singer's lab. And what she finds is she has people do mindful meditation and different kinds of mindful meditation for a long term. I don't know exactly the details of how long they're doing it for. But she has them either do sympathy, compassion training, mindful meditation. It's something called loving-kindness, mindful meditation or some kind of control task.
0:40:02 SC: Right.
0:40:03 LA: And what she finds is that actually doing this kind of meditation increases structural changes in these networks.
0:40:13 SC: In the brain?
0:40:14 LA: In the brain.
0:40:14 SC: You can see the brain wiring itself differently, 'cause you're doing meditation.
0:40:15 LA: Yeah. Yes. Exactly. And also functional changes and also behavioral changes as well.
0:40:25 SC: Interesting. I think that people get a little bit scared or overly impressed by the phrase rewiring the brain, like this rewires the brain. But in fact, everything we do at any moment in time is always rewiring our brain. Every memory we take is, every memory we remember is rewiring our brain, so...
0:40:37 LA: Right. True. That's true. Right. Yeah. So the interesting thing for her is that she sees these, in these like either the compassion network or the sympathy network or the empathy network, depending on which one you're focusing on in your meditation.
0:40:53 SC: And I think, you've said this already, but it's still remarkable to me, so we can take an fMRI and see a place light up and go, "Oh, that's the sympathy network?"
0:41:01 LA: Mm-hmm. Right. So, again, the empathy network, the emotion resonance ones, seems to be in these emotion regions, mirror neuron regions and so forth. The sympathy regions tend to be prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and the precuneus.
0:41:19 SC: It does become harder and harder to be a mind-body dualist when you see this part of the brain is responsible for this emotional reaction, right?
0:41:28 LA: Right, right. So yeah. So, there are people who would argue, and I'm not sure they're wrong, that there is this embodied cognition but the sympathy network might be different than that.
0:41:41 SC: I see.
0:41:41 LA: And it might be more abstract.
0:41:43 SC: Right.
0:41:44 LA: It's complicated 'cause the prefrontal cortex also still gets a lot of information from the body, as do all these regions.
0:41:51 SC: Yeah.
0:41:51 LA: But yeah.
0:41:51 SC: My default at this stage of scientific progress is to think that we don't know anything about neuroscience at all. We have some good ideas, and some of them will turn out to be right, but we have no right to be confident in some ideas versus others. 'Cause, like you say, it's way more complicated than physics is.
0:42:06 LA: It's way more complicated. So actually, just to embody this even more, one of the things that we're now... Got some funding to do is to add a micro-biotic component.
0:42:15 SC: Okay, so explain what that means.
0:42:17 LA: Yeah, so you have these bacteria in your gut and they actually interact with neurons in your gut
0:42:26 SC: Neurons in your gut.
0:42:26 LA: Yes. And with your different systems in the brain and different systems in the body, so your immune systems and so forth, and those interact with the brain. And so going back to autism, we know that a lot of kids with autism have stomach problems, and it has been found that they also have different microbiota than the typical population. And given that we also know that the microbiota are now interacting, not directly, indirectly with either visceral neurons in the stomach or through metabolites that can travel to the brain, they interact with the brain. So these microbiota... Then the question is, how does this all fit together? So how do... What's going on in your stomach with these bacteria interact with brain functioning and with behavior.
0:43:20 SC: So you're saying when people claim that they make decisions with their gut, they might be literally doing that.
0:43:26 LA: Exactly. Exactly.
0:43:28 SC: That's scary. And I know some people like that. I talked about this on a podcast with Carl Zimmer, the microbiome, we have all these microbes living in approximately the same number of cells in the microbiome as there are human cells in our body. And that gets back to... I just keep wanting to go to these bigger philosophical questions. That's embodied cognition, and it kind of makes sense that our body is important. So, one of the things that is gonna be a challenge when people try to construct artificial intelligences is that they don't have, not just bodies, but the motivations that the body gives us. Hunger and sleepiness and things like that. Are we learning about the prospects for artificial intelligence by studying embodied cognition?
0:44:20 LA: I think we're just mainly understanding how complicated it would be to create a system, and then especially when you introduce the interaction of the body with these bacteria. And so, how is that influencing our cognition and how we think, and so forth.
0:44:36 SC: Yeah. I think that there are books about uploading our brains, right, into the matrix and just letting us live in the simulated reality. So that will be... Basically your point is just that's even harder than you think, 'cause you don't have a body once you're up there.
0:44:52 LA: Exactly. And everything that goes with it.
0:44:54 SC: Right, and I've long thought that it just wouldn't be... Even if you could copy piece by piece all of your neurons and all their connections into the computer, it wouldn't be a copy of you exactly because of these things, because your inputs are different and it's just gonna be... Maybe it'll be conscious, maybe it'll be intelligent, but it won't have the motivation.
0:45:15 LA: It'll be different.
0:45:16 SC: It'll be different. It won't be you. And yeah, somehow it doesn't count as immortality if you upload our brain that way, right?
0:45:23 LA: No, unfortunately. [laughter]
0:45:26 SC: But then there's also, I forget what the word is, but there's the idea, extended cognition? The idea that we use our environment around us as part of our cognitive capacities, that goes beyond embodied cognition.
0:45:38 LA: Right. That the context of the situation and the environment that you're in also is extremely important.
0:45:46 SC: So, if I take notes to remember something, I should count that notepad as part of my cognitive system. Is that right?
0:45:53 LA: Right, right.
0:45:54 SC: Do you think this is a good idea? [laughter] You have feelings about this?
0:46:00 LA: Well, there's that saying, "The medium is larger than the message", right? [laughter]
0:46:04 SC: Never heard of it that way before. Yes, that's right.
0:46:08 LA: So in that sense, yes. I think definitely the environment and non-biological systems are an important part of our cognitive processes.
0:46:23 SC: I mean, certainly as a physicist, if I'm standing at the blackboard, writing some equations and solving them, in some sense, I can think of the blackboard and the chalk as part of my cognitive system just like my brain.
0:46:34 LA: Right.
0:46:34 SC: But in some sense, it's completely different. So, is there... Quasi-philosophical or just become a scientific question, where is the useful place to draw the distinctions between these different things?
0:46:45 LA: Right. So, there's actually these neurons where if you work with a tool long enough, that tool becomes embedded as part of your body representation.
0:46:56 SC: Okay, because we have these maps in our brain, different parts of our body. And so for example, when people have prosthesis or even just a cane, that can be mapped on by our brain, right?
0:47:07 LA: Exactly and it actually doesn't even take that long. So, in these monkey studies where they're using a rake to reach for a piece of food, within a matter of minutes that rake becomes part of their body representation.
0:47:21 SC: Minutes.
0:47:22 LA: Yeah.
0:47:22 SC: So, how do we know that? Is that the...
0:47:24 LA: That's actually by looking at single electrodes.
0:47:26 SC: By single electrodes...
0:47:27 LA: So, they're looking at the representation of the reaching movement. And then they start to see that it fills up to the periphery, to just where the rake goes.
0:47:40 SC: And this helps also explain things like phantom limb syndrome?
0:47:43 LA: Phantom limb is a little bit different. So that's when you lose a body part, but you feel like it's still there. And we think that that's more due to rewiring where if you look at the homunculus, the body map in the brain in somatosensory regions, the... For example, the face and the hand are very close together. So, now if you've lost a hand, the face area takes over the cortex that used to be logged to the hand. And so now, if you touch the face of a person who's lost a hand, they often feel it in their phantom hand.
0:48:26 SC: Oh, I see. Okay.
0:48:26 LA: Right. But that's because the cortex is not gonna leave that real estate alone. It's gonna use it for something else. And the face was the closest thing, so it took it over.
0:48:34 SC: Free CPU cycles as far as the brain is concerned, right?
0:48:36 LA: Exactly, right.
0:48:38 SC: Interesting. And does that have implications when we do get into virtual reality, our virtual bodies. Like, we can look different in virtual reality than we do in regular reality. So, if we have an avatar, does our avatar... I mean, I guess it depends on the quality of the virtual reality experience, but does our avatar get a map of representation in the brain?
0:49:00 LA: Oh, that's an interesting question. I don't know if anyone's actually looked at that, but I could imagine that it could happen, yeah.
0:49:07 SC: Because usually, we pick avatars that are better looking versions of ourselves, right?
0:49:13 LA: Right.
0:49:13 SC: But we could imagine avatars to look completely different. Different numbers of arms and legs. And I can imagine really good VR controllers that would let us control all those things separately.
0:49:22 LA: Right. And I'm thinking of like, if you watch little kids playing video games and they make the avatar jump, they actually jumped themselves a little bit. They do like a little hop, so it's this kind of embodiment of the avatar.
0:49:33 SC: Right. That maked perfect sense. And I know one of the other things you've worked on is related to this. How we relate to people different than us, right?
0:49:42 LA: Right, right, right.
0:49:42 SC: Part of it, of course, we see people like us, it's the same part of our brain reacting is when we react ourselves as people become more and more different. Differences in age or ethnicity or gender or sickness, or whatever. Does that make it harder to empathize?
0:50:01 LA: Yeah. Okay. So, if you think about this embodied cognition, it's very easy to understand why you would wanna embody and simulate people that you like and people you wanna be like. And there's actually the chameleon effect in psychology, where it's been found over and over again that you implicitly imitate people who are similar to you and people you wanna be like and people you admire. So, if I'm having a conversation with you and you lean forward, I lean forward. If you... And this is all implicit. We're not thinking about it.
0:50:36 SC: It's called mirroring, right?
0:50:38 LA: Yeah. It's also called the chameleon effect.
0:50:39 SC: Okay.
0:50:42 LA: Okay. And then we do this less and less with people we don't wanna be like. Right. So, if you don't like someone, you tend to just have less of this chameleon effect. So, the question that we wanted to ask in a bunch of our studies was, how do you then process people who are very different from you? And perhaps the most dramatic difference that you can have is having a different body than someone else. So, we looked at a person who was born without arms and legs. And we were curious how she processes body parts that she doesn't have, and how she understands them. So if you take the theory of embodied cognition seriously, you use your body representations to understand other people's bodies. But if you don't have those body representations, then what do you do?
0:51:32 SC: Right. Nothing for your neurons to mirror.
0:51:34 LA: Right. So we put her in the scanner, and we had her watch different kinds of actions. Some actions were possible for her even within different body parts. So for example, picking up a pen, she does with her mouth. And some things... Excuse me. Are completely impossible for her. So like going on tip-toe or using scissors. She can't do that. And basically, what we found is that even for things that she can't do, she still tries to use her motor representations to understand other people. But she... For things that are impossible for her, she additionally uses these sympathy regions.
0:52:15 SC: Oh, okay. So she's sort of offloading that task through a different a part of the brain in some sense.
0:52:19 LA: Exactly. Exactly. So she tries to simulate it and when that doesn't work, she also uses the sympathy regions, these mentalizing regions. However, she has like a lifetime of experience looking at people with full bodies, right?
0:52:37 SC: Right.
0:52:37 LA: And so we also did the opposite, we brought typical people watching her residual limb doing actions. So for us, that's a weird body part. We don't often see that. And what we found is that when we get people more familiar with her, they start to see it as if it's a hand or a leg. Very... Like a normal body part. But in the beginning, you see a lot of activity that's different. And so the idea is that, with more exposure to people who are different from us, then we start to see them very similarly.
0:53:15 SC: We normalize them in some sense.
0:53:17 LA: Exactly. And we embody them very similarly.
0:53:20 SC: But it's a weird thing because we're... I mean, is it... I don't know. I don't wanna say a worry, but is it that we're not treating them as they are. We're fitting them into a box meant for us and they're really kind of different.
0:53:33 LA: Yeah, so in the beginning, what we see when they're not familiar with the person is a lot of activity in visual areas. So they're using visual processing to understand this person, but not this kind of more embodied processing. And so the idea is, if we think that the embodied processing is important, then we would want to have that be similar to watching other people. And so the more familiar we get them with the person, then the more of that they have.
0:54:05 SC: What about for animals? Can you do the same thing for just watching centipedes?
0:54:09 LA: Yeah. Okay. So an interesting study was when they brought... When they had a human watch a monkey, a dog, or a human make actions. And they found that for all of those, if you were watching the person or animal eat, you activated your mirror neurons.
0:54:32 SC: Okay, 'cause that's common to everything.
0:54:33 LA: 'Cause that's common. We can do that. But if it was something like the human speaking versus the monkey making vocalizations, versus the dog barking, you would activate your mirror neurons system for the first two, but not for the dog barking.
0:54:49 SC: Not for the barking.
0:54:50 LA: Yeah, 'cause that's just so different. It's something we can't do.
0:54:54 SC: But do you think we could train ourselves?
0:54:56 LA: Yes. [laughter]
0:54:58 SC: So, crazy cat ladies have systems in their brains that track them yelling and things like that.
0:55:04 LA: Yes. So, I actually gave a talk on this at Disney Animation and people were shocked. They were like, "What do you mean? We know how to do that?" [laughter] And they started showing me how they can actually bark exactly like a dog, so it was funny.
0:55:16 SC: Wow. Okay. But they're experts. They're trained in this.
0:55:19 LA: They're experts, Exactly.
0:55:19 SC: That's right.
0:55:20 LA: But it probably still has its limits. So for example, there is this theory about the snake. I think you've heard about this?
0:55:27 SC: I have not.
0:55:27 LA: I think it's an interesting theory. So the snake is the extreme other. It moves in a way that we can probably never replicate, right?
0:55:35 SC: Right.
0:55:35 LA: And so probably we don't embody it the same way. And so the theory is that that's why in many cultures around the world, the snake becomes either the deity, or the devil.
0:55:46 SC: Or the devil. I have not heard this.
0:55:49 LA: 'Cause it's this extreme other.
0:55:50 SC: Okay. So yeah. Powerful cosmic figures are ones that don't map onto our representations of our body.
0:55:56 LA: That's the theory.
0:55:58 SC: What about... Isn't the octopus the extreme other in some sense?
0:56:01 LA: Oh, right.
0:56:01 SC: It has a very different neural system than we do.
0:56:04 LA: Yeah, that's true. But it's less seen. I mean, how many times do you see...
0:56:07 SC: No, that's true. But have people thought of putting the octopus in an fMRI and finding... [laughter] I'm sorry but...
0:56:15 LA: Not that I've heard of. But you do also have Ursula from...
0:56:19 SC: Sure.
0:56:21 LA: Right? Where it's also the kind of the mean.
0:56:23 SC: Put her eyes on her. It's not a very realistic representation. And... Okay. The other thing I remember is that you've also done work on creativity and human creativity. And is this an outgrowth of the work on embodied cognition, or is it separate?
0:56:39 LA: No, it's very separate, actually.
0:56:41 SC: Okay. Lay it on us. What have you thought about creativity?
0:56:44 LA: Okay. So, this work is basically looking at the interactions between the left hemisphere and right hemisphere. So you've probably heard that the right hemisphere is the emotional, artistic hemisphere. That's what a lot of people attribute to the right hemisphere. And the left hemisphere just kind of sucks. [laughter] It's your mathematical, your verbal.
0:57:10 SC: I can use again.
0:57:11 LA: Yeah.
0:57:11 SC: It's not our...
0:57:13 LA: But if someone asked you, are you a right hemisphere or left hemisphere person? You would rather say you are right. That's the cool hemisphere.
0:57:21 SC: The cool hemisphere, yes certainly. The nerdy hemisphere and the cool hemisphere, yes.
0:57:23 LA: Exactly, right. So, however... So, in popular culture, the right hemisphere is your creative brain, however in the '70s Joe Bogen had this theory that creativity comes not just from the right hemisphere but an interaction between left hemisphere processing, which is this more serial, more localized, more fast processing and so an interaction between the left hemisphere with the right hemisphere, which is this more visual-spatial, this more drawn out long-term processing, just all the processing and it's that interaction of having both of those processing going on at the same time that leads to creativity, not just one versus the other.
0:58:11 SC: Okay, that makes sense.
0:58:12 LA: So we did a series of studies to test that and basically we supported that hypothesis.
0:58:19 SC: How much does that help us understand where ideas come from? Sure, okay it's interaction between things. Is there something about that interaction that we can pinpoint?
0:58:28 LA: Yeah, that's the more difficult question. So we do know from a bunch of psychology studies that thinking about a problem from different perspectives is really important, thinking about a problem for a long time with a lot of focus and then taking a break is really important, right?
0:58:50 SC: And can we attribute that to where our subconscious is still chugging along at it?
0:58:54 LA: Exactly and we know that the 'aha' moment, these kinds of creative moments come from a lot of subconscious processing. So, oftentimes when you're doing this non-creative processing, you'll know exactly where you are in the problem solving. You'll say "I need five more minutes and then I'll have the answer." Whereas with these creative 'aha' moments, someone will ask you how close are you to the solution and you'll say, "I have no idea, wait a second I got it." And so yeah it's a lot more of this unconscious processing along with the conscious processing.
0:59:32 SC: So do people from Silicon Valley come and ask your advice on how to become more creative and things like that?
0:59:40 LA: We have some steps that when... I teach at class and we do this workshop on creative ways to solve problems but no, no one from Silicon Valley has come.
0:59:54 SC: Not yet. Need a better agent probably. Alright, so to sort of wrap things up, let's think about the broader picture here. I have casually said neuroscience is still in a state where we're not really sure about anything, but you're the expert. What do you think about our current understanding of how the brain works and how it connects to the body overall and the prospects. How long will it take before we really nail some of these things down and what is most exciting things that we should be looking forward to in the future?
1:00:26 LA: Yeah, I think what it means by... What you mean by nailing it down, I think we're getting closer and closer to understanding enough to be able to help people in different situations, understanding enough to know what kinds of cognitive processing are useful and helpful to society and the self versus ones that are probably not.
1:00:50 SC: I mean that's pretty good.
1:00:51 LA: That's pretty good, right? I think the goal for any neuroscientist is to have a comprehensive understanding of the brain. I think we're a long way off from that but I don't know if that's absolutely necessary to do all the other stuff that we need to do to just help move society forward and to help people with problems get better.
1:01:17 SC: There is the human brain initiative and that's just... Is that mostly concerned with mapping out the connections between the neurons?
1:01:24 LA: Yes, for the most part it is, which is not what we really do here.
1:01:29 SC: Would it even be helpful for you to have such a map?
1:01:33 LA: Without an understanding of the algorithm, it's difficult to do much without it. I think knowing the algorithm is more important than the map.
1:01:43 SC: I've heard people analogize it to like it's literally like having a map of the city but not knowing why anyone is going down a road for one reason or another. So, you don't understand the economic life of the city.
1:01:53 LA: Sure. It's good knowledge to have.
1:01:55 SC: It's helpful.
1:01:56 LA: Just like the DNA sequence is good to know, right? But it's not enough.
1:02:03 SC: Are there tools that are better than FMRI that are hopefully coming down the pike?
1:02:09 LA: Yeah, so MRI has its limits, so you can't move your head while you're inside the scanner.
1:02:13 SC: Okay that's a limit.
1:02:14 LA: So that's a huge limit. It's loud and scary for some people. If you have any kind of metallic thing in your body, you can't do it. So. Is there anything better? Not yet.
1:02:29 SC: What do you think about brain-computer interfaces?
1:02:32 LA: Yeah. I mean I think they're great for people who have lost parts of their body and who need some kind of prosthetic to do something for them. I think they're amazing. Are you thinking about robot soldiers and stuff?
1:02:46 SC: No, I'm thinking about implants into our heads that will let us access our emails without a smartphone. That's what I wanna have someday.
1:02:55 LA: You wanna have that?
1:02:56 SC: I do.
1:02:56 LA: Really?
1:03:00 SC: I think it's kind of inevitable, so I'm just planning for it.
1:03:00 LA: I think most people are hoping to... Ways to unplug.
1:03:04 SC: Well I would hope I'd be able to unplug. Yeah, I guess maybe that's a downside, like what if there's no off switch to it.
1:03:08 LA: Right, right, right. You are getting every single advertisement come at you.
1:03:12 SC: I know that there are companies now that will put a gear on your head, a rig, that will try to read some of the activity in your brain. It's very crude 'cause it's outside your skull. There's a big layer in between and that's a long way. I'm not trying to give the impression that I overhyped the idea of literally implanting something into your skull. That sounds much harder, maybe it'll never work.
1:03:36 LA: Right. Okay. But they do... They are starting to do that with people who have prosthetics, right?
1:03:43 SC: I don't know.
1:03:44 LA: Yeah, yeah. So that's... It is being done and that's a very good reason to do it. For downloading email I'm not sure that's a great... There's just so much bacteria you can get from...
1:03:55 SC: But this also, the work that you're doing in body cognition, is that gonna be helpful to that kind of thing? If you really at some level, someday we'll try to... Presumably if you have prosthetics you wanna make them more and more like parts of your body.
1:04:10 LA: Right. And ideally you'll have sensory signals that are going to your brain so you can embody that. Yeah. So I think that having that kind of system where you also are getting feedback from the prosthetic is also gonna be very important.
1:04:28 SC: It seems like there's gonna be... I'm a physicist, so I still like physics but there's a lot of exciting things going on in neuroscience.
1:04:36 LA: Yeah, for sure.
1:04:37 SC: The year by year changes are quite impressive.
1:04:39 LA: Yeah, I would agree. And it's kind of nice because I think as a physicist you're also feeling this but there's part of neuroscience that's becoming kind of like a humanity, which is very philosophical and interacting with linguistics and with psychology and with people processing. And I think there's parts of physics that have become like this as well. And it's beautiful to be in a field like that.
1:05:05 SC: I totally agree, and I was trying to refrain from asking you to define consciousness or anything like that. That's not your thing, right? That's not...
1:05:12 LA: Not so much but... And that's a whole other hour. [laughter]
1:05:15 SC: Right. I mean many working neuroscientists, I think that people on the street maybe get the misimpression that that's what neuroscientists do. They sit around arguing about what consciousness is, but there's a lot still to be done in what Chalmers called the easy problem of consciousness, which is like just how the brain gets through the day. Forget about thinking of itself and getting experiences of the redness of red but how we see things and react to them and that's probably part of what the embodied cognition paradigm is trying to figure things out.
1:05:44 LA: Yes, I think so.
1:05:46 SC: All right.
1:05:46 LA: That's the goal.
1:05:47 SC: Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, thank you so much for this conversation.
1:05:49 LA: Thank you, thank you.
[music]
A great guest for your podcast would be Christina Hoff-Summers. She is the author of many books but one that might be the basis of a great discussion would be “The Science on Women and Science”.
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Women-Christina-Hoff-Sommers/dp/0844742813
I had not heard of the stomach problems in people with autism before. I thought the sub-classification of possible overlapping disorders was interesting. I do wonder if there is a comorbidity of aspergers and ADHD. Especially with respect to hyperfocus and people on the spectrum having intense interest in certain subjects. The lack of motor skills made me think of Feynman when he wrote about his fear of having to throw a ball when it landed near him:
“I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence
and land near me, because I never could get it over the fence—it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.”
What about individualism and mirror neurons? Should we instead make room for people with different types of neurology because there may be a benefit if a society has a diverse neurology? If someone is left handed are they more right brained, are their brains organized in a completely different way, is their corpus callusum thicker?
Pingback: Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast: Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy | 3 Quarks Daily
Nice Feynman quote
Re: individualism I don’t think there was any argument against neurodiversity. If anything Lisa Aziz seems pro-diversity.
I didn’t know that about autism and microbiota either.
The lack of coordination would make sense. I’m curious how lack of coordination is measured, how wide of a spectrum it is, and if it corresponds to the spectrum of differing microbiota? pardon my awkward phrasing.
I found this episode really charming! Thanks!!