Category: Integrating

Cognitive scientist Sacha Barber has created a three-part guide to the mechanics and mathematics of neural networks.

If you’re interested in how many artificial intelligence systems work, the guide takes you through the mathematics of neural networks, to the basic of creating your own network in the C programming language.

Even if you’re not a mathematician or programmer, the article is worth a scan so you can get an idea of the level of complexity that is needed for a group of mathematical functions to start displaying ‘cognitive’ properties.

The first thing you’ll notice is how simple the functions are.

With many sorts of neural networks, the difficulty is not in creating the ‘building blocks’ – i.e. the simulated neurons, but in creating a network structure that is useful for solving problems.

While engineers might be interested in creating networks to solve practical problems, neuropsychologists often create networks to simulate encapsulated mental processes, and then damage the networks to simulate brain damage.

This allows the researchers to test out ideas about how cognitive processes might be organised in the brain.

Link to ‘AI : Neural Network for beginners’.

This week’s Time Magazine has a wonderfully in-depth article on the science and implications of consciousness by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker.

It shouldn’t be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As Ren√© Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body’s death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.” And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.

As well as the article itself, there’s some great links on the left hand side of the page to video, graphics and related articles.

Link to Time article ‘The Mystery of Consciousness’.

The New York Times has a remarkably comprehensive article on ‘positive psychology’ – the research and applied field that aims to understand happiness and human growth.

The article takes a critical look at the field, what the research is showing and how it’s being applied and taught.

Traditionally, psychology has been more focused on mental illness and pathology, with the implicit assumption that freedom from distress is akin to happiness.

Psychologists have begun to challenge this idea and look specifically at human virtues which have been sorely neglected throughout psychology’s history.

For example, despite the fact that we use a concept of wisdom in everyday life and value people considered wise, barely any work has been done to develop a psychological theory of wisdom.

The NYT article is remarkably well researched and discusses the roots of the movement and it current critics.

Link to NYT article ‘Happiness 101’.

Memoirs of a Postgrad has an eye-opening analysis of the world of cognitive robotics – the science of developing ‘cognitive agents’.

When we think of ‘intelligent robots’ we tend to think of the human-think-alike androids from science-fiction, but the article argues that we should think about it more in terms of intelligence that would manifest itself it whatever way the robot interacts with the world.

Bats undoubtedly have a special sort of ‘bat intelligence’ because they interact with the world in unique ways and need to perform tasks only relevant to bats.

Similarly, a robot might be small, have wheels and only have limited sensors, and so its intelligence should be ’embodied’ within its own ways of experiencing and interacting with the world.

However, the article argues there’s more to it than just simple interaction.

…cognition requires not only real-time interaction with the real world (thus incorporating the concept of embodiment), it also requires the ability to internally improve ones interaction with the environment without it actually being present. So, the cognitive agent must be able internally simulate in some way its interactions with the world, and be able to learn from this process…

Link to ‘What does Cognitive Robotics mean?’

I’ve just found a wonderful article online that appeared a couple of years ago in The New Yorker retelling the curious and surprising story of how the DSM was written.

The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Published by the American Psychiatric Association it gives the criteria that define different types of mental disorder.

In Europe we tend to use an alternative, the ICD (interestingly, the two manuals don’t always agree) but the DSM is often used by researchers for consistency.

The current version of the DSM is a revised version of the 4th edition. The 5th edition, the DSM V, is due out in 2011.

Politically, the DSM is very important as it describes what mental states and behaviours are considered pathological by mainstream medicine, as well as having massive implications for medical practice and healthcare provision.

As time has gone on, the definitions are more influenced by research and less influenced by political pressures and the whims of the authors.

However, there’s one particularly surprising bit of the New Yorker article that describes how two disorders got in an earlier version:

Spitzer read the paper and asked Peele and Luisada if he could come to Washington to meet them. During a forty-minute conversation, the three decided that “hysterical psychoses” should really be divided into two disorders. Short episodes of delusion and hallucination would be labelled “brief reactive psychosis,” and the tendency to show up in an emergency room without authentic cause would be called “factitious disorder.” “Then Bob asked for a typewriter,” Peele says. To Peele‚Äôs surprise, Spitzer drafted the definitions on the spot. “He banged out criteria sets for factitious disorder and for brief reactive psychosis, and it struck me that this was a productive fellow! He comes in to talk about an issue and walks away with diagnostic criteria for two different mental disorders!” Both factitious disorder and brief reactive psychosis were included in the DSM-III with only minor adjustments.

The article is a thoroughly fascinating look into the history and politics of the ‘bible’ of psychiatry, and is a great introduction to some of the vagaries of defining mental illness.

Link to New Yorker article ‘The Dictionary of Disorder’.

There’s a fantastic article over at The Neurophilosopher’s Blog on augmented cognition – technology that integrates with our cognitive abilities to extend our capabilities.

We live in a time in which we are overwhelmed by information obtained from multiple sources, such as the internet, television, and radio. We are usually unable to give our undivided attention to any one source of information, but instead give ‘continuous partial attention’ to all of them by constantly flitting between them. The limitations of cognitive processes, particularly attention and working memory, place a ceiling on the capacity of the brain to process and store information. It is these processes that some researchers are aiming to enhance with augmented cognition, an emerging field which aims to use computational technology to enhance human performance in various tasks by overcoming the bottlenecks in processes such as attention and memory.

AugCog, as it is sometimes known, is now a top priority for military and aerospace companies.

They are starting to develop technology that takes account of the operator’s psychological state and adapts, so it can be used as efficiently as possible.

For example, the technology could monitor the brain so a visor would display only essential information if the person is under pressure.

In an ingenious twist on this sort of research, researchers recently developed a device which monitors other people’s faces for emotion and alerts the user to their current state.

This would be particularly useful for people who have trouble reading facial expressions, such as people with autism or people who have suffered certain forms of brain injury.

The Neurophilosopher’s article is a fantastic tour of how this technology is starting to take advantage our of psychological strengths to make up for the weaknesses, using examples from projects in development and researchers in the field.

The article also has a slick DARPA funded video (downloadable version here) that advertises the field and gives a sci-fi flavoured view of the cognitively augmented future.

Link to ‘Augmented cognition: Science fact or science fiction?’.
Link to more info from Augmented Cognition International Society.

Seed Magazine has an article on Marcia Smilack – a photographer and video artist with a rare form of synaesthesia in which all her senses intermingle.

Smilack aims to capture this experience in her work and express it for people without the condition.

The article discusses why art may be such a good expression of synaesthetic experiences and describes some current research that demonstrates that synaesthetes’ drawings of music were also thought to be a ‘better match’ by people without the condition.

This perhaps suggests that we all have some sort of innate ability to make sense of inter-sensory cross-overs.

Smilack’s films are a particularly striking attempt to capture part of the experience.

The video for Coldcut’s Music 4 No Musicians always struck me as particularly synaesthetic if you’re after an interesting (and very mellow) attempt to link sound and vision.

Link to Seed article ‘The Most Beautiful Painting You’ve Ever Heard’.
Link to Marcia Smilack’s website.
Link to Coldcut’s Music 4 No Musicians (takes a while to get going).

The Psychologist have just made an article available online that looks at the history an ongoing work of Ediburgh University’s Koestler Parapsychology Unit.

It is one of the few academic parapsychology units in the world and the unit takes pride in a strictly scientific approach to studying the paranormal.

As well as studying whether there is any scientific basis to ‘psi’ phenomena, they also study the psychology of people who believe in the paranormal.

There is now a good body of research suggesting paranormal belief correlates with a number of psychological and neurological factors, such as content-specific reasoning biases and increased temporal lobe activity.

The Psychologist article looks at the history of the unit and how its work has developed since it was founded.

Link to ’20 years at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit’.

…although a third seem to suffer from conceptual problems! A paper published this week by the British Medical Journal report that children with higher IQs tend to go on to become vegetarian.

Adults who classified themselves as vegetarian tended to be five points higher in IQ when they were tested at age 10.

Interestingly, the results remained stable after education and social class were controlled for.

However, a third of people who classified themselves as vegetarian ate chicken or fish, suggesting most people work with a reasonably flexible definition.

This study is from a research group in Southhampton who are looking at the link between childhood factors and adult brain development.

We recently reported on an earlier study on childhood head size and IQ.

Link to write-up from BBC News.
Link to abstract from the BMJ.

Cognitive Daily has a great review of an intriguing study that suggests that thinking quickly could boost your mood.

People with mania, a state of uncontrollably ‘high’ mood, often say they have racing thoughts, and people with depression sometimes feel as if their thoughts are slowed, impaired or sluggish.

Psychologists Emily Pronin and Daniel Wegner decided to see whether they could influence mood by changing how fast people think.

They asked participants to read text at different speeds then asked them to rate their mood afterwards. People who had read text at the fastest speeds, reported a lift in mood.

The study involved some more comprehensive investigations, and there’s more at Cognitive Daily if you want the nitty gritty.

Link to ‘Depressed? Think faster thoughts, and your mood may improve’.

An excerpt from a letter to this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry on the effects of ketamine and the similarities and differences with psychosis, by Drs James Stone and Lyn Pilowsky:

“We also recently studied healthy volunteers following ketamine administration… Most experienced severe distortions of time, believing that a minute was several hours in duration. They also showed blunting of affect and loss of emotional reactivity. A few showed a marked disinhibition, with facetious replies to questions and apparent euphoria in the first 10‚Äì20 min after administration of ketamine. Several participants reported the belief that they were composed solely of thoughts, and that their bodies had either become nonexistent or were separate from them. One reported that he believed he could control people in the room by pointing with his hands, and another reported persecutory delusions.”

Link to full letter from December’s BJP.

Subtleties are important in language. I learnt this by using the phrase ‘tengo 26 anos’ in Spanish where I should have used ‘tengo 26 a√±os’. As I discovered, the difference is slight but surprisingly meaningful.

While a computer is fooled by my error, a Spanish speaker would likely find it hilarious, but would get my intended meaning, because, in language, context is everything.

One of the most difficult things for computer translation is that context includes not only the other words in a sentence, but the state of the world, shared cultural assumptions, and even the mental state of each person in the conversation.

If this seems like an impossible problem to solve, Wired has an article on companies trying to create better translators, and they’ve managed it with some significant success.

They’ve achieved their success by ‘doing a Google‘ and taking advantage of the fact that while it’s impossible to get a computer to understand human concepts, it is possible to use the massive amount of text on the internet as a database of human assumptions.

The computer translator generates as many translations as it can, and then matches each one to the ‘database’ of text to see which one is most like real human language. The one that matches is most likely to be the best translation.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the general idea.

For the first time in history, the internet has provided a massive amount of self-generating human data that can be easily accessed by our tools of analysis.

Rather than expecting computers to be individually intelligent, it might be more fruitful to get them to process the structure of behaviour, and get meaning from the real humans.

Link to Wired article ‘Me Translate Pretty One Day’.

While searching for more information on Bram Stoker’s supposed death by syphilis in the medical literature (I found nothing), I did come across this summary of a fascinating paper about the influence of late-Victorian neurology on Dracula.

Cerebral automatism, the brain, and the soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. 2006 Jun;15(2):131-52.

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries. Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was “determined” through the reflex action of the body and brain – a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker’s vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.

The paper is by English Professor Anne Stiles and frustratingly, the full-text isn’t freely available online, although the full reference is listed on PubMed for those with access to the journal.

If anyone does ‘find’ a freely-accessible copy online, please let me know and I’ll be happy to link to it.

However, Stiles was a guest on ABC Radio’s All in the Mind last year discussing the role of neurology in Victoria horror novels, the transcript of which is still available.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

ABC Radio’s In Conversation has just broadcast a discussion on our relationship with technology with Prof Mike Michael, a psychologist and sociologist who researches how we interact with new devices and scientific developments.

Michael discusses how psychologists and anthropologists are increasingly being employed to understand how technology is used by people in day-to-day life, which can sometimes be quite different from the way the manufacturers originally intended.

…if one thinks of the microwave; when that was initially marketed it was as a brown or black, it was basically aimed at men and it failed dismally. And then it was converted to a white good and aimed at women, and that obviously mapped on to all sorts of gender divisions of labour within the kitchen and so on, and it’s a success. …

Another example is the telephone. The telephone initially was thought to be a business tool for men and it had some success, but it was when women took it over as a social tool for maintaining social contacts with friends and family that it really took off.

Michael argues that as well as the practical uses of technology, these items can also take on social uses, can be used to create or weaken immediate social environments, or to broadcast messages about a person’s identity to others.

The programme covers technologies as diverse as the mobile phone to gene therapy and xenotransplantation.

Link to audio and transcript of In Conversation.

“The colour of a placebo can influence its effects. When administered without information about whether they are stimulants or depressives, blue placebo pills produce depressant effects, whereas red placebos induce stimulant effects (Blackwell et al., 1972). Patients report falling asleep significantly more quickly and sleeping longer after taking a blue capsule than after taking an orange capsule (Luchelli et al., 1978). Red placebos are more effective pain relievers than white, blue or green placebos (Huskisson, 1974; Nagao et al., 1968).”

From Prof Irving Kirch’s chapter on placebo in The Power of Belief: Psychosocial Influences on Illness, Disability and Medicine (ISBN 0198530110).

[Paramutation] describes an interaction between different alleles or even different loci [areas on a chromosome], which results in a stable alteration in their functional state… Consequently, the properties of an inherited gene may in part be dependent on a gene sequence that is not actually co-inherited. Clearly, this flouts what we generally think of as genetic inheritance. Furthermore, if parental experiences affect the expression of RNA molecules involved in RNA induced DNA silencing, it is conceivable that heritable changes in gene activity might result from environmental stimuli.

An excerpt from p21 of Psychiatric Genetics and Genomics (ISBN 0198564864) that describes a potential way that experience could affect the genetic information that gets inherited by the next generation.

This is part of a largely unexplored area known as epigenetics which examines the biochemistry of gene expression.

It is thought that understanding epigenetics will be crucial for working out the genetic influences on mind and brain function.