Introduction to Biopsychology [PSB 4002]

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Introduction to BiopsychologyPSB 4002

• Professor Robert Lickliter
• DM 260 / 305-348-3441
• licklite_at_fiu.edu
• website dpblab.fiu.edu

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Consciousness
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Some Big Questions

• How do brain processes result in conscious
  states?
• Is consciousness localized in certain regions of
  the brain or is it a global phenomenon?
• If it is confined to certain brain regions,
  which ones?

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Big Questions (Cont.)

• What is the right level for explaining
  consciousness? Is it the level of neurons and
  synapses, or do we have to go to higher
  functional levels such as neuronal maps or
  networks of neurons?
• Might we even have to go beyond the boundaries of
  the brain?

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Big Questions (Cont.)

• Can we explain consciousness with existing
  theories or do we need some revolutionary new
  theoretical concepts to explain it?
• What is it?

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A Working Definition of CONSCIOUSNESS

• Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative,
  subjective states and processes of awareness.
• In other words being aware of being aware

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Consciousness

• Consciousness, so defined, begins when we wake in
  the morning from sleep and continues until we
  fall asleep again, die, go into a coma, or
  otherwise become unconscious
• It includes all of the enormous variety of the
  awareness we think of as characteristic of our
  waking life

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It includes everything from

• feeling a pain
• perceiving objects visually
• states of anxiety or depression
• working out crossword puzzles

• playing chess
• trying to remember your aunts phone number
• arguing about politics
• or just wishing you were somewhere else

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Being Someone

• Even though we take it for granted, one thing we
  will need to understand is why and how we all
  experience ourselves as being someone
• For example, at this moment you all have the
  impression that it is you who is hearing this
  lecture. And it is you who is forming thoughts
  about it.

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Consciousness

• For humans, consciousness is always tied to an
  individual,
• first-person perspective
• I
• me
• mine

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A big question

• how far does consciousness go?
• which species have it and which dont?

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Primary (Core) Consciousness

• The ability to build a multimodal scene based on
  several different sources of concurrent
  information.
• Does not necessarily contain any self-referential
  aspect - it lives in the present (here and
  now), tied to the succession of events in real
  time.

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Biological functions of brain structures which
support core consciousness appear to overlap
(even though they are widely distributed in the
brain)
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1. regulating homeostasis and signaling body
   structure and state
2. participating in processes of attention
3. participating in the processes of wakefulness and
   sleep
4. participating in the processes of emotion and
   feeling
5. participating in the learning process

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Higher-Order (Human) Consciousness

• Emerges when reference to the past, future, and
  self become available.
• Appears to be tied to the ability for
  autobiographical memory, the ability for
  language, and being situated in a social/cultural
  network (to provide scaffolding)

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• With the emergence of higher-order consciousness
  through autobiographical memory and language,
  there is an explicit coupling of feelings and
  values, yielding a subjectivity with narrative
  powers, creating a fabric of identity,
  beliefs and a point of view

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Human Consciousness

• To be aware of oneself as well as to be aware of
  others
• To be able to feel and express emotions
• To be able to engage in complex cognition,
  including symbolic representations and in
  particular, language
• To be able to think about things not present in
  the immediate environment (imagination)
• To be able to predict the consequences of events
  never before experienced by simulating those
  events (including future events)

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• William James (1842-1910)
• Medical Doctor, Psychologist, Moral and
  Religious Philosopher

Published the hugely influential two volume
book The Principles of Psychology in 1890.
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William James

• In that important book James described
  consciousness as
• individual (private) 
• continuous and continually changing
• intentional (about something) and selective
• a process, not a thing

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The flashlight vs. the floodlight experience
of time
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Wow, remember that great bone I had last
Thanksgiving?
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Retrospection and Prospection

• This remarkable set of abilities requires both
  retrospection - the ability to re-experience
  the past AND prospection - the ability to
  pre-experience the future by simulating it in our
  conscious awareness
• This allows us to be able to go beyond the
  information given

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• Most of the time our judgments and decisions in
  any situation are arrived at as a consequence of
  the evaluation of a set of internally generated
  alternatives. These alternatives are typically
  based on the seamless integration of the past,
  the present, and possible futures.

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Paradox even though we can retrospect and
prospect, thereby making our temporal window
very large compared to other animals, this
particular moment (now) is all we have to work
with consciously (in other words, all
consciousness occurs in real-time)
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• These counterfactuals are constructed to compare
  what happened or is happening with what could
  have happened. Without such alternatives or
  simulations, it would be very difficult to fine
  tune our behavior and to avoid making the same
  mistakes over and over again, as well as
  anticipate and plan for needs not currently
  experienced.

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Introduction to BiopsychologyPSB 4002

• Professor Robert Lickliter
• DM 260 / 305-348-3441
• licklite_at_fiu.edu
• website dpblab.fiu.edu

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Midterm 4 (Final Exam)

• Tuesday, December 10 from 12 2 pm

Chapters 21, 22, and 2 in your textbook Lecture
material through Thursday, December 5
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Acting NOW in Anticipation of LATER
Examples Making your lunch Flossing your
teeth Applying to graduate school Investing in a
savings account Address threats of global
warming ??
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• These remarkable abilities to mental time
  travel were not always available to us coming
  to terms with the flow of time and becoming
  skilled at using the past and possible futures to
  inform and direct our actions, choices, and goals
  emerged over a long period of time during early
  childhood
• Of course, now we take such abilities for granted
  and cant imagine operating any other way

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Comprehension of yesterday and tomorrow emerges
gradually over the preschool years.
Recent evidence suggests that imagining the
future depends on the same neural circuits and
mechanisms that are needed for remembering the
past.
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Simulation of future events seems to require a
system that can flexibly re-combine details from
past events.
According to this idea, thoughts of past and
future events draw on similar information stored
in episodic memory.
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This notion has been termed the constructive
episodic simulation hypothesis and is generally
presumed to be unique to humans
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For example, if young children have limited
skills at reconstructing the events of the past,
they will likely also have limited ability to
anticipate or predict the future
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Oh boy, chocolate pudding!
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Modulation of internal and external events
through the construct of self allows us to
remove ourself from the present and construct
alternative interpretations of past, present,
and future events. In normal individuals, this
off-line ability to consciously evaluate and
adjust behavior relies in large part on the
activity of the prefrontal cortex.
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plans, goals, strategies, decisions
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The prefrontal cortex is thought to be crucial
for integrating and discriminating internally and
externally derived models of the world. These
functions occupy a major portion of our conscious
awareness, including rumination on the past,
speculation about the future, and real-time
daydreams about a different present and possible
futures.
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Mind Behavior

• The brain is embodied and the body is embedded in
  its environment you cant separate the activity
  of the brain from the body or the environment
• Further, in humans, society and its culture
  distributes cognitive activity across many
  brains. We do not have an isolated mind. In
  contrast, non-human animals do. What they know
  is what they have experienced directly.

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Starting from scratch, guided by only the
preceding generation
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Because of our use of language, because of our
extended period of development (and the
scaffolding its requires), because of our
societies and cultures and their artifacts, we
dont have to start over each generation. Just
by being born human, we each inherit an
enormous potential store of knowledge and
information. We can stand on (and benefit from)
the shoulders of the many generations of people
who came before us, and who left us their
insights, experiences, failures and successes.
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Extelligence
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In humans, society and its culture distributes
cognitive activity across many brains. We do not
have an isolated mind. In contrast, non-human
animals do. What they know is limited to what
they have experienced or observed directly.
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When children are educated, ideas and
technologies are maintained across generations,
spanning the gaps left by the passing of
individual brains. When reading and writing are
mastered, ideas and technologies can be
maintained by anyone with access to a teacher,
books, and more recently a computer (including
the ideas and histories of a different culture,
different country, different era).  
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The combination of prospective thinking and
extelligence extends the minds reach, allowing
for long-term planning, formulation of possible
scenarios, virtual experiences to guide,
constrain and add meaning to our real or direct
experiences. This allows a wide range of human
activities not seen in other animals, including
art, music, literature, film, as well as multiple
forms of entertainment, such as sports,
gambling, video games, shopping, amusement parks,
etc.
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The external environment, actively structured by
us, becomes a source of cognitively enhancing
wideware - external items, artifacts, tools,
etc. that scaffold our cognitive skills and
abilities. Examples smart phones, calculators,
calendars, audio and video recordings, etc.
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externalizing the nervous system
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Introduction to BiopsychologyPSB 4002

• Professor Robert Lickliter
• DM 260 / 305-348-3441
• licklite_at_fiu.edu
• website dpblab.fiu.edu

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Our trans-generational advantage
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broken brains
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Psychiatric Disease

• The general characteristics of psychiatric
  (mental) disease
• perceptual awareness and orientation
• symbolic conceptual functioning
• emotional responses
• executive control

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Psychiatric Disease

• A given syndrome or disorder is not
• just a matter of biochemistry or
• just a matter of neuroanatomy, or
• just a matter of genetics, or
• just a matter of individual history
• It is always some combination of these varied
  factors. Thus, no two patients will be alike and
  no two successful treatments will be alike.

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Risk and Protective Factors

• Individuals vary in their exposure to certain
  environments and the biological systems they
  inherit.
• Mediators and moderators influence the onset and
  maintenance of psychiatric and developmental
  disorders.

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Multifinality
Shared Experience or Trait
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Equifinality

• Shared Outcome

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Psychiatric Disease

• The example of schizophrenia 
• Type I. psychotic episodes, delusions,
  hallucinations, disordered and paranoid thoughts
• Type II. Loss of emotional response (flat
  affect), abnormal postures, lack of spontaneous
  speech

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Epidemiology of Schizophrenia

• Onset is variable, but most common onset is in
  the 20s and 30s.
• Some evidence for early life development risk
  factors.
• A spectrum disorder
• Thought to involve abnormalities in
• Hippocampus
• Cortex (loss of grey matter)
• Dopamine imbalance

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Treatment

• Some success with antidopaminergic medications,
  but not without consequence.
• As of now, there is no cure for chronic
  schizophrenia, however episodic manifestations
  may come and go based on environmental context.
• Animal models of the disorder have proven
  elusive.

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Developmental Disorders

• Atypical development of brain/body systems leads
  to developmental disorders such as
• Autism
• inability to recognize others emotions and
  intentions, low language production, high degree
  of emotional reactivity, self-stimulation, and
  repetitive behaviors (also a spectrum disorder).

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Introduction to BiopsychologyPSB 4002

• Professor Robert Lickliter
• DM 260 / 305-348-3441
• licklite_at_fiu.edu
• website dpblab.fiu.edu

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The Use of Robotics to Discover the Dynamics of
Embodiment
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Embodied or Epigenetic Robotics

• Makes the assumption that behavior is result of
  the complex interaction between the system and
  its circumstances, and not directly specified by
  or predicted from a description of its initial
  state
• Rodney Brooks, a pioneering roboticist, has
  termed this intelligence without representation

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Assumptions

• The key idea is that an intelligent system will
  be emerge from initially limited
  perception-action couplings.
• Such a system is defined not by itsprogrammed
  function (knowledge representation) but by its
  activity.
• The range and possibilities for actions are
  context dependent, that is depend on the
  situation the system finds itself in.
• This embeds development in a physical,
  biological, and social world

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The Challenges of Epigenetic Robotics

• Learning about objects and events
• Learning about people
• Learning about the self
• (sound familiar?)

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Lessons from Human Developmenthow does a
learner who does not know what there is to learn
manage to learn anyway?(remember, you dont
know what you dont know)
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be multi-modal be incremental be physical
(explore) be social learn a language
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The costs of extended consciousness

• knowing danger, fear, pain, loss, and death

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• Our extended knowledge is obtained in a bargain
  we did not choose
• -the cost of a deeper and wider existence is the
  loss of innocence about that existence
• As humans, we are aware from a young age that we
  and those we love will certainly die

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Free Will

• Do we control our own minds?
• Most people assume they have conscious access to
  their intentions and motives and assume they
  consciously guide their choices and actions
• Evidence from biopsychology and neuroscience
  suggests these assumptions are optimistic at
  best. Indeed, many of our actions and ideas
  spring to life in a way that can only admire or
  at times regret.

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