What were learning from 5000 brains Read Montague

other people everyone is interested in

other people everyone has relationships

with other people and they’re interested

in these relationships for a variety of

reasons good relationships bad

relationships annoying relationships

agnostic relationships and what I’m

gonna do is focus on the central piece

of an interaction that goes on in a

relationship so I’m going to take as

inspiration the fact that we’re all

interested in interacting with other

people I’m in a completely strip it of

all its complicating features and I’m

gonna turn that object that simplified

object into a scientific probe and

provide the early stages embryonic

stages of new insights into what happens

in two brains while they simultaneously

interact but before I do that let me

tell you a couple of things that made

this possible the first is we can now

eavesdrop safely on healthy brain

activity without needles and

radioactivity without any kind of

clinical reason we can go down the

street and record from your friends and

neighbors brains while they do a variety

of cognitive tasks and we use a method

called functional magnetic resonance

imaging you probably all read about it

or heard about it into some incarnation

let me give you a two-sentence version

of it so we’ve all heard of MRIs MRIs

use magnetic fields and radio waves and

they take snapshots of your brain or

your knee or your stomach grayscale

images that are frozen in time in the

1990s it was discovered you could use

the same machines in a different mode

and in that mode you could make

microscopic blood flow movies from

hundreds of thousands of sites

independently in the brain okay so what

in fact that’s so what is in the brain

changes in neural activity the things

that make your brain work the things

that make your software work in your

brain are tightly correlated with

changes in blood flow you make a blood

flow movie you have an independent proxy

of brain activity this is literally

revolutionized cognitive science take

any cognitive domain you want memory

motor planning thinking about your

mother-in-law

getting angry at people emotional

slightly goes on and on put people into

functional MRI devices and image how

these kinds of variables map on to brain

activity it’s in its early stages and

it’s crewed by some measures but in fact

twenty years ago we were at nothing you

couldn’t do people like this you

couldn’t do healthy people that’s caused

a literal revolution and it’s opened us

up to a new experimental preparation

neurobiologist as you well know have

lots of experimental preps worms and

rodents and fruit flies and things like

this and now we have a new experimental

prep human beings we can now use human

beings to study and model the software

in human beings and we have a few

burgeoning biological measures okay let

me give you one example of the kinds of

experiments that people do and it’s in

the area of what you’d call valuation

valuation is just what you think it is

you know if you went to and you were

evaluating two companies on against one

another you’d want to know which was

more valuable cultures discovered the

key feature evaluation thousands of

years ago if you want to compare oranges

to windshields what do you do well you

can’t compare oranges into windshields

they’re immiscible they don’t mix

without one another so instead you

convert them to a common currency scale

put them on that scale and value them

accordingly well your brain has to do

something just like that as well and

we’re now beginning to understand and

identify brain systems involved in

valuation and one of them includes a

neurotransmitter system whose cells are

located in your brainstem and deliver

the chemical dopamine to the rest of

your brain I won’t go through the

details of it but that’s an important

discovery and we know a good bit about

that now and it’s just a small piece of

it but it’s important because those are

the neurons that you would lose if you

had Parkinson’s disease and they’re also

the neurons that are hijacked by

literally every drug of abuse and that

makes sense drugs of abuse would come in

and they would change the way you value

the world they change the way you value

the symbols associated with your drug of

choice and they make you value that over

everything else here’s the key feature

though these neurons are also involved

in the way you can assign value to

literally abstract ideas and I put some

symbols up here that we assign value to

for various reasons we have a behavioral

superpower in our brain and it at least

in part involves dopamine we can deny

every instinct we have for survival

an idea from ear idea no other species

can do that in 1997 the cult Heaven’s

Gate

committed mass suicide predicated on the

idea that there was a spaceship hiding

in the tail of the then visible comet

hale-bopp waiting to take them to the

next level it was a true it was an

incredibly tragic event more than

two-thirds of them had college degrees

but the point here is they were able to

deny their instincts for survival using

exactly the same systems that were put

there to make them survive that’s a lot

of control okay

one thing that’s I’ve left out of this

narrative is the obvious thing which is

to focus the rest of my little talk and

that is other people these same

valuation systems are redeployed when

we’re valuing interactions with other

people so the same dopamine system that

gets addicted to drugs that makes you

freeze when you get Parkinson’s disease

that’s contributes to various forms of

psychosis is also redeployed to value

interactions with other people and to

assign value to gestures that you do

when you’re interacting with somebody

else let me give you an example of this

you bring to the table such enormous

processing power in this domain that you

hardly even notice it I’m just give you

a few examples so here’s a baby she’s

three months old she still poops in her

diapers and she can’t do calculus she’s

related to me somebody be very glad that

she’s up here on the screen you can

cover up one of her eyes and you can

still read something in the other eye

and I see sort of curiosity in one eye I

see maybe a little bit of surprise in

the other here’s a couple they’re

sharing a moment together and we’ve

ended up an experiment where you can cut

out different pieces of this frame and

you can still see that they’re sharing

about they’re sharing it sort of in

parallel you could now the elements of

the scene also communicate this to us

but you could read it straight off their

faces and if you compare their faces to

normal faces it would be a very subtle

cue here’s another couple he’s

projecting out at us and she’s clearly

projecting you know love and admiration

at him here’s another couple

and I’m thinking I’m not seeing love and

admiration on the left in fact I know

this is his sister and you can just see

me saying okay we’re doing this for the

camera and then afterwards you steal my

candy and you punch me in the face

he’ll kill me for showing that all right

so what does this mean it means we bring

an enormous amount of processing power

to the problem

it engages deep systems in our brain and

dopaminergic systems that are there to

make you chase sex food and salt they

keep you alive it gives them the pie it

gives that kind of a behavioral punch

which we’ve called a superpower so how

can we take that and arrange a kind of

stage social interaction and turn that

into a scientific probe and the short

answer is games

economic games so what we do is we go

into two areas one areas called

experimental economics the other is

called behavioral economics and we steal

their games and we contrive them to our

own purposes this shows you one

particular game called an ultimatum game

red person is given $100 and can offer a

split to blue let’s say red wants to

keep 70 and offers blue 30 so he offers

a 70/30 split with blue control passes

the blue and blue says I accept it in

which case I hit the money or blue says

I reject it in which case no one gets

anything okay so a rational choice

economists would say well you should

take all nonzero offers what do people

do people are indifferent at an 80/20

split at 8020 it’s a coin flip whether

you accept that or not why is that yeah

because you’re pissed off

you’re mad that’s an unfair offer and

you know what an unfair offer is this is

a kind of game done by my lab and many

around the world that just gives you an

example of the kind of thing that that

these games probe the interesting thing

is these games require that you have a

lot of cognitive apparatus online you

have to be able to come to the table

with a proper model of another person

you have to be able to remember what

you’ve done

you have to stand up in the moment to do

that then you have to update your model

based on the signals coming back and you

have to do something that is interesting

which is you have to do a kind of depth

of thought assay that is you have to

decide what that other person expects of

you you have to send signals to manage

your

image in their mind like a job interview

you sit across the desk from somebody

they have some prior image of you you

send signals across a desk to move their

image of you from one place to place

whether you want it to be we’re so good

at this we don’t really even notice it

these kinds of probes exploit it okay in

doing this what we’ve discovered is that

humans are literal Canaries and social

exchanges Canaries used to be used as

kind of biosensors and mines when

methane built up or carbon dioxide built

up or oxygen was diminished the birds

would swoon before people would so it

acted as an early warning system hey get

out of the mine things aren’t going so

well people come to the table and even

these very blunt staged social

interactions and they and there’s

numbers going back and forth between the

people and they bring enormous

sensitivities to it so we realize we

could exploit this and in fact as we’ve

done that and we’ve done this now in

many thousands of people I think on the

order of five or six thousand we

actually do make this a biological probe

need bigger numbers than that remarkably

so but anyway patterns have emerged and

we’ve been able to take those patterns

convert them into mathematical models

and use those mathematical models to

gain new insights into these exchanges

okay so what well the so what is that’s

a really nice behavioral measure the

economic game’s bring to us notions of

optimal play we can compute that during

the game and we can use that to sort of

carve up the behavior here’s the cool

thing six or seven years ago we

developed a team it was at the time in

Houston Texas it’s now in Virginia and

London and we built software that’ll

link functional magnetic resonance

imaging devices up over the internet I

guess we’ve done up to six machines at a

time but let’s just focus on two so it

synchronizes machines anywhere in the

world we synchronize the machines set

them into these stage social

interactions and we eavesdrop on both of

the interacting brains so for the first

time we don’t have to look at just

averages over single individuals and or

have individuals playing computers or

try to make inferences that way we can

study individual dyads we can study the

way that one person interacts with

another person turn the numbers up and

start to gain new insight

into the boundaries of normal cognition

but more importantly we can put people

with classically defined mental

illnesses or brain damage into these

social interactions and use these as

probes of that so we’ve started this

effort we’ve made a few hits a few I

think embryonic discoveries we think

there’s a future to this but it’s our

way of going in and redefining with a

new lexicon a mathematical and actually

as opposed to the standard ways that we

think about mental illness

characterizing these diseases by using

the people as birds in the exchange that

is we exploit the fact that the healthy

partner playing somebody with major

depression or playing somebody with

autism spectrum disorder or playing

somebody with attention deficit

hyperactivity disorder we use that as a

kind of bio sensor and then we use

computer programs to model that person

and it gives us a kind of assay of this

early days and we’re just beginning

we’re setting up sites around the world

here a few of our collaborating sites

the the hub ironically enough is

centered in little Roanoke Virginia

there’s another hub in London now and

the rest are getting set up we hope to

give the data away at some stage that’s

a complicated issue about making it

available to the rest of the world but

we’re also studying just a small part of

what makes us interesting as human

beings and so I would invite other

people who are interested in this to ask

us for the software or even for guidance

on how to move forward with that

I mean levy one thought and closing the

interesting thing about studying

cognition has been that we’ve been

limited in a way we just haven’t had the

tools to look at interacting brain is

simultaneously the fact is though that

even when we’re alone we’re a profoundly

social creature we’re not a solitary

mind built out of properties that kept

it alive in the world independent of

other people in fact our minds depend on

other people they depend on other people

and they’re expressed in other people so

the notion of who you are you often

don’t know who you are until you see

yourself in interaction with people that

are close to you people that are enemies

of you people that are agnostic to you

so this is the first sort of step into

using

that insight into what makes us human

beings turning it into a tool and trying

to gain new insights into mental illness

thanks for having me