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