Reading The Human Swarm 5: Night-time action and brain-to-brain coupling [Shazam!!]

Ch12 of The Human Swarm, “Sensing Others” starts off with two dynamite paragraphs. I say they’re dynamite because they speak to two of my hobby horses, a relatively recent one, and one that goes back to my graduate school days. Let’s dig in (p. 161):

Spend time among hunter-gatherers and you realize sleeping through the night is a modern idea. On my trip to Namibia, I listened as Bushmen conversed under a chiseled Milky Way in voices elaborate as birds, full of clicks, twang, and twitter. Their huts were barely visible in the flicker of family fires as they shared both traditional tales and evens of the day with gusto and moments of dramatic acting. When the sun was up their conversations centered on daily business. Nighttime was story time, with tales conveying the big picture of a proper social life and affirming people’s connections with the greater society.

That’s my recent hobby horse, and it is grounded in my own behavior. While I’m basically an “early to bed, early to rise” guy, in recent years I’ve noticed that in creative phases I may get up once or twice in the night and work (creatively) for an hour or two. Some posts:

• Sleep, NOT, an 8-hour block (9.27.12)
• Sleeping Habits (mine – 11.15.12)
• Sleep Ain’t What It used to Be (1.12.13)
• Sleep: 8 continuous hours is a cultural convention, not a natural need (5.14.14)

Moffett’s second paragraph is about brain-to-brain communication:

Years later their animated storytelling came vividly to mind as I stood behind Uri Hasson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, while he hunched over a computer displaying a series of brain scans. Hassonhad been observing the cerebral activity of people watching a movie. The snippets he played were open to interpretation: some viewers might suspect the husband in the film was unfaithful while others might conclude the wife was a liar. When Hasson looked at scans of the viewers’ brains, he found they differed accordingly. If, however, audience members talked to each other as they watched a video, their cerebral cortexes synchronized: the same portions of their brains lit up when they began to follow the story line with a unified point of view. Hasson calls this mind-to-mind coupling “a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world.” The pleasure the Bushmen expressed that starry night must have come from such a melding of minds.

Moffett sites an article I’d posted here at New Savanna in 2013, Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world. I’ve posted a number of articles by Hasson. More generally, I’ve got a good many posts on the topics of coupling and synchrony (you’ll find there’s a fair amount of overlap between those two topics). There is now a large and growing literature on the neural activity of people interacting with one another.

My interest in this topic goes back to my graduate school days, when David Hays got me interested in the work of William Condon, who’d taken high-speed video of people intereacting with one another and observed that their movments where synchronized on a scale of 10s of milliseconds. This then became the central conception of my 2001 book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, where I devoted the second and third chapters to developing the dual notions that, 1) tighly coupled synchronzed movement is central to music-making, and 2) and music-making is central to human society. I developed these ideas in the context of Walter Freeman’s conception of the nervous system as a complex dynamical system.

Now I’ve got to get back to reading Moffett’s book. More later.

Brain-to-Brain Coupling

I originally posted this in December 2013. I'm bumping it to the top of the queue as this topic is much on my mind these days.

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Mark Liberman has just posted on this topic over at Language Log, so I'm boosting this post to the top of the pile. He also cites the Hasson article.

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Trends Cogn Sci. 2012 Feb;16(2):114-21. Epub 2012 Jan 3.

Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world.

Hasson U, Ghazanfar AA, Galantucci B, Garrod S, Keysers C.

Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, hasson@princeton.edu

Abstract

Cognition materializes in an interpersonal space. The emergence of complex behaviors requires the coordination of actions among individuals according to a shared set of rules. Despite the central role of other individuals in shaping one's mind, most cognitive studies focus on processes that occur within a single individual. We call for a shift from a single-brain to a multi-brain frame of reference. We argue that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment. Brain-to-brain coupling constrains and shapes the actions of each individual in a social network, leading to complex joint behaviors that could not have emerged in isolation.

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PMID: 22221820 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

PMCID: PMC3269540 [Available on 2013/2/1]

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The key statement is that “that in many cases the neural processes in one brain are coupled to the neural processes in another brain via the transmission of a signal through the environment.” I made such an argument the conceptual centerpiece of my 2001 book on music, Beethoven's Anvil. I reprised and extended some of those ideas in my essay-review of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals. See also my post, The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality, my various posts on coupling, and the piece I did with David Ramsey, Musical Coupling: Social and Physical Healing in Three Disabled Patients.

Addendum: Here's an informal write-up of Hasson's work.

Brains Couple When People Talk

Uri Hasson, a Princeton psychologist who's also done some interesting work on brain activity while watching movies, has discovered that, when two people converse, their brains become coupled. Writing in a blog at Scientific America Douglas Fields reports:

There have been many functional brain-imaging studies involving language, but never before have researchers examined both the speaker's and the listener's brains while they communicate to see what is happening inside each brain. The researchers found that when the two people communicate, neural activity over wide regions of their brains becomes almost synchronous, with the listener's brain activity patterns mirroring those sweeping through the speaker's brain, albeit with a short lag of about one second. If the listener, however, fails to comprehend what the speaker is trying to communicate, their brain patterns decouple.

. . . .

In order to find out what happens in the brain when the speaker and listener communicate or fail to connect, Hasson, an assistant professor in Princeton's Department of Psychology, and his team had to first overcome both technical problems using new analytical methods as well as special nonmagnetic noise-canceling microphones. He asked his student to tell an unrehearsed simple story while imaging her brain. Then they played back that story to several listeners and found that the listener's brain patterns closely matched what was happening inside the speaker's head as she told the story.

These results are exciting but not surprising. Back in the late 60s and early 1970s William Condon did high-speed video taping of people interacting with one another. He found, for example, that the listener's head and body movements tracked the intonation patters of the speaker's language. Interestingly enough, this was true even for neonates, their body motions tracked speech patterns of nearby speakers.

I made such interactional synchrony the conceptual centerpiece of my 2001 book on music, Beethoven's Anvil. I also reprise and extend some of those ideas in my essay-review of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals. See also my post, The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality.

Beyond projection: We need to rethink human society, making evolutionary cultural dynamics primary

In my freshman year at Johns Hopkins I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. It’s been on my mind ever since and I’ve blogged about it I don’t know how many times, e.g. TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

A full decade before Parsons, John Dollard published Caste and Class in a Southern Town, which “redirected the study of southern race relations in general and lynching in particular” by asking a simple question: Why do people need racism? The question implies that mistaken beliefs about others are symptoms of racism, not its cause. Racism has some useful function in the individual or collective lives of racists. What function could that be? Dollard’s answer was, in effect, to keep the peace.

In a post from 2013, Blacks, Blues, and Soul Sickness: Lynching and Racism in the USofA, I quote him making an argument the anticipates Parsons’ 1947 argument. Dollard observes that social life is often frustrating, generating aggressive impulses which cannot be always be satisfied. In Dollard’s view this leads to

a generalized or “free-floating” aggression . . . [that] can be thought of as a tendency to kick, hit, scorn or derogate someone or something if one could only find out what. A second necessity is that of a permissive social pattern. This must exist in order to lift the in-group taboos on hostility. The permissive pattern isolates a group within the society which may be disliked. Usually it is a defenseless group. . . The third essential in race prejudice is that the object must be uniformly identifiable. [pp. 445-446]

In other words, white racists are using blacks as scapegoats for the accumulated frustrations they experience in daily life. Aggressive impulses are being displaced from their real objects, which are appropriate targets, to substitute objects, toward whom one can act aggressively.

Then just yesterday I quoted Stephen Greenblatt on how the English nourished antisemitism from 1290 through to the mid-17th century, a period when there were no Jews at all in England. This anxiety, anger, resentment, and hatred thus had to originate entirely within the socio-cultural dynamics of English society. It had nothing at all to do with interaction with real Jews.

There’s an obvious pattern here. I could multiply examples. You’ll find some of them in the articles I’ve linked.

But the psychodynamic imagery of projection, which was at the heart of Parson’s rather convoluted psychoanalytic account is not helpful. It seems to imply that one sees or senses something within oneself, right here, picks it up and then tosses it, that is, projects it, to someone else, over there. The process is not that deliberate and self-conscious. It just happens.

It’s more like a failure to differentiate in the first place, a failure nurtured by various cultural practices, including rituals and stories. For it is through those kinds of practices that the negative affect becomes attributed to other people and other groups. Ultimately, we’ve got to go back to infancy, which is after all, where Freud started, where the infant is unable to differentiate between ego and alter. How do cultural mechanisms shape those interactions?

It's turtles all the way down, that is, interpersonal interaction. That’s what I struggled to conceptualize in the special case of music in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, “Part I: Collective Dynamics,” pp. 23-90. And I started where one must start, with the brain. What is going on in the brains of people while they’re interacting?

That question was just barely an empirical one when I wrote the book, but it had become (almost) empirical. I was able to cite some early work by Uri Hasson. That early work has blossomed into an extensive area of research crossing many disciplinary lines. You can find some of that word by searching my blog on the name “Hasson,” and the tags, “coupling” and “synchrony”.

More later.

Three Notes on Literature, Form, and Computation

This post is a concatenation of three older posts, all dealing with (the idea of) the actual process of computation. These notes are intended for people who find the idea of literary form as computational form somewhere between odd and morally repulsive. If yo lean toward the repulsive end of that continuum there's probably nothing I can say that will change your mind, but these comments are relatively brief. Read them; what do you have to lose? If you're more inclined to find the conjunction of literature and computing merely odd – perhaps even edging over into intriguing (rising tone), then these notes should be useful.

Computing = Math, NOT 

Everyone knows that computers are about math. And that may be one source of humanistic resistance to computational research techniques, especially in the use of corpus technique for examining large bodies of texts of historical or literary interest. So: Computers are math, math is not language, literary texts ARE language; therefore the use of computer in analyzing literary texts is taboo as it sullies the linguistic purity of those texts. QED

Except that digital computers aren’t about math, at least not essentially so. To equate computers with math is to mis-identify computing with one use of computing, the calculation of numerical values. That equation also mis-identifies mathematics with but one aspect of mathematics, numerical calculations.

* * * * *

The contrast between math and language is, of course, deeply embedded in the American educational system. In particular, it is built into the various standardized tests one takes on the way into college and then, from there, into graduate school. One takes tests that are designed to test verbal abilities, one thing, and mathematical abilities, a different thing. And, while some people score more or less the same on both, others do very much better on one of them. The upshot is that it is easy and natural for us to think in terms of math-like subjects and verbal-like subjects and people good at either but not necessarily both.

The problem is that what takes place “under the hood” in corpus linguistics is not just math (statistics) and natural language (the texts). It’s also and mostly computation, and computation is not math, though, as I said up top, the association between the two is a strong one.

When Alan Turing formalized the idea of computing in the idea of an abstract machine, that abstract machine processed symbols—in a very general sense of both "symbol" and "process". That is, Turing formalized computation as a very constrained linguistic process.

Sets of symbols and processes on them can be devised to do a great many things. Ordinary arithmetic is one of them. To learn arithmetic we must first memorize tables of atomic equivalences for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Thus:

1 + 1 = 2

1 + 2 = 3

1 + 3 = 4

. . .

9 + 7 = 16

9 + 8 = 17

9 + 9 = 18

And so on through subtraction, multiplication, and division. To these we add a few simple little recipes (aka algorithms) for performing calculations by applying these atomic equivalences to given arrangements – the arrangements themselves are part of the process – of numbers.

Literature in the brain [a place-holder and pointers]

It's – wires hooked up to brains– been done. In the case of film, Uri Hasson did that at the turn of the millennium.
Reading for pleasure vs critical reading:https://t.co/g59XRQFnQp
Metaphor in the brain:https://t.co/CTnnUuZVzs

— Bill Benzon, aka The Danish Space Laser (@bbenzon) August 9, 2021

See this post as well: Art in the Brain and the Default Mode Network (DMN).

Study language in context so we can understand how it is a function of the whole brain

Uri Hasson, Giovanna Egidi, Marco Marelli, Roel M. Willems, Grounding the neurobiology of language in first principles: The necessity of non-language-centric explanations for language comprehension, Cognition, Volume 180, November 2018, Pages 135-157, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.018

Abstract: Recent decades have ushered in tremendous progress in understanding the neural basis of language. Most of our current knowledge on language and the brain, however, is derived from lab-based experiments that are far removed from everyday language use, and that are inspired by questions originating in linguistic and psycholinguistic contexts. In this paper we argue that in order to make progress, the field needs to shift its focus to understanding the neurobiology of naturalistic language comprehension. We present here a new conceptual framework for understanding the neurobiological organization of language comprehension. This framework is non-language-centered in the computational/neurobiological constructs it identifies, and focuses strongly on context. Our core arguments address three general issues: (i) the difficulty in extending language-centric explanations to discourse; (ii) the necessity of taking context as a serious topic of study, modeling it formally and acknowledging the limitations on external validity when studying language comprehension outside context; and (iii) the tenuous status of the language network as an explanatory construct. We argue that adopting this framework means that neurobiological studies of language will be less focused on identifying correlations between brain activity patterns and mechanisms postulated by psycholinguistic theories. Instead, they will be less self-referential and increasingly more inclined towards integration of language with other cognitive systems, ultimately doing more justice to the neurobiological organization of language and how it supports language as it is used in everyday life.

Coupled dynamics in human interaction

Uri Hasson and Chris D. Frith. Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 317, Issue 1793, May 2016.

Abstract: When people observe one another, behavioural alignment can be detected at many levels, from the physical to the mental. Likewise, when people process the same highly complex stimulus sequences, such as films and stories, alignment is detected in the elicited brain activity. In early sensory areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to the low-level properties of the stimulus (shape, motion, volume, etc.), while in high-order brain areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to high-levels aspects of the stimulus, such as meaning. Successful social interactions require such alignments (both behavioural and neural), as communication cannot occur without shared understanding. However, we need to go beyond simple, symmetric (mirror) alignment once we start interacting. Interactions are dynamic processes, which involve continuous mutual adaptation, development of complementary behaviour and division of labour such as leader–follower roles. Here, we argue that interacting individuals are dynamically coupled rather than simply aligned. This broader framework for understanding interactions can encompass both processes by which behaviour and brain activity mirror each other (neural alignment), and situations in which behaviour and brain activity in one participant are coupled (but not mirrored) to the dynamics in the other participant. To apply these more sophisticated accounts of social interactions to the study of the underlying neural processes we need to develop new experimental paradigms and novel methods of data analysis.

This is from a theme issue, ‘Attending to and neglecting people’ compiled and edited by Riitta Hari, Lauri Nummenmaa and Mikko Sams. Another article: Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Ralph Adolphs. What does the interactive brain hypothesis mean for social neuroscience? A dialogue (May 2016).

Abstract: A recent framework inspired by phenomenological philosophy, dynamical systems theory, embodied cognition and robotics has proposed the interactive brain hypothesis (IBH). Whereas mainstream social neuroscience views social cognition as arising solely from events in the brain, the IBH argues that social cognition requires, in addition, causal relations between the brain and the social environment. We discuss, in turn, the foundational claims for the IBH in its strongest form; classical views of cognition that can be raised against the IBH; a defence of the IBH in the light of these arguments; and a response to this. Our goal is to initiate a dialogue between cognitive neuroscience and enactive views of social cognition. We conclude by suggesting some new directions and emphases that social neuroscience might take.

From the article itself:

In order to understand cognition, we need to partition cognitive systems. In particular, we need to partition them into those parts that should be analysed as inputs to the system, those that are the outputs from the system, and those that are actually implementing the cognition. We do the same thing with computers running programs: there is a causal interaction with the world that can be treated as input, there is processing internal to the computer, and there is causal interaction with the world that can be treated as output.

The IBH follows the more dynamical systems view that much of situated cognition has adopted [5,6], and claims that this partitioning does not reflect how cognition actually takes place in the world. Unlike the classical computer metaphor, there is a more or less continuous stream of causal interaction between brain and the world, and, in the case of the social world, ‘outputs' from a brain influence ‘inputs' (i.e. one person influences another) in such a tightly coupled way that it becomes impossible to distinguish input from output. Instead, say advocates of the IBH, one should treat the whole system (two or more people interacting) as a single, dynamically coupled system. Cognition is constituted by the events in my brain, the events in the other person's brain, and the causal relations between them: the whole system matters.

Reading the Human Swarm 9: What about the brain?

There is at least one place where Moffett mentions the brain, in the beginning of Chapter 12, “Sensing Others”, where he mentions the work of Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist who investigates neural activity of people intereacting with one another through conversation; in this case, they were watching a film and chatting together. When that happens their brain activity becomes synchronized.

I’d like to introduce some comments on the brain on a different theme: The brain is built from the inside? By thinking that through we can appreciate the (conjectural) neural underpinnings of some findings Moffett has introduced: societies are more likely to form through fission rather than merger; the development of factions; and the distinction between group and society.

Brains are built from the inside

First, what does that mean: the brain is built from the “inside”? Automobiles, for example, aren’t built from the inside. They are designed by engineers and then constructed, to design, by teams of workers, from the “outside”. The same is true of computers. We design them and then build them. Software is like that as well. In these cases, and many more, what is being designed and constructed is one thing, over there, if you will, while the team doing the designing and constructing is another thing, over here.

Brains aren’t like that. Brains and nervous systems are embedded in animals and the process through which an animal comes into being is a biological process of development and growth that starts with a single fertilized cell. There is no separation between a design-build team and the thing being constructed. They are one and the same. It is in that sense that I am asserting the brains are built from the inside. There is no external agent doing the constructing.

While it is common to use computing as a source of metaphors for mind and brain (brain as wetware, mind as software), much of that usage doesn’t hold beyond casual conversation. It is easy to give a computer new capacities by loading a new software package, but nothing like that is possible for humans. We can learn new skills, but that takes time, hours, months, years, depending on the skill. In contrast, a software upload takes whatever time is required for the installation, seconds, minutes, maybe hours; but once the software is installed, the new capacity if fully there and ready to use. Conversely, software can be quickly uninstalled, or simply erased, without damage to the computer itself; but no such thing is possible for knowledge and skills a person has learned. Once the knowledge or skill has been acquired it is more or less permanent, though it may degrade over time if not used.

Implications

Let’s begin with the observation that new societies rarely arise from the merger of existing ones (pp. 283-285). Rather, they arise from the fissioning of existing societies. Thus the members of the societies that result after the split already know one another. They’d grown up together and lived with one another for years. When any one of them was maturing, and thus their brain was developing, the other members of the society where automatically incorporated into their neural representation of the world.

Similarly, as societies become larger, the scope of individual contacts relative to membership in the society as a whole becomes smaller, making internal cohesion more difficult. We can conjecture that this is a function of the capacity of single brains to maintain highly detailed individualized (“face-to-face”) representations of others. Factions develop, Moffett argues (243 ff.). At first they’re amicable, in time, though, that frays. The society must then split in order to maintain peace, peace in two new societies.

Then we have the distinction Moffett makes between a group and a society. Members of groups recognize one another as individuals and interact with one another in individualized ways. Societies do not. Societies divide between the world into US (members of a society) and THEM (non-members). Ants do not recognized one another as individuals, but they do recognize other members of their society (coloney); they do so by scent. Humans typically live in societies consisting of multiple (face-to-face) grounds and use markers of various kinds – hair styles, body markings, clothing, language – to recognize and interact with society members who are not in their local group. They interact with non-group society members through stereotyped social roles. The neural requirements (again, my conjecture) of interaction governed by markers and roles are lower than those governed by detailed individual knowledge. The existence of markers and roles thus allows people to form societies that are larger than face-to-face groups without making burdensome neural requirements.

A concluding note on identity is a different sense

Identity is an important theme in the book where it is about an individual’s link to their group and society. There’s another aspect of identity which Moffett doesn’t deal with and which I’d like to link to the brain, but that would require more of an argument than I can undertake here.

The argument that needs to be made is that our nervous system affords us open-ended awareness of the world. I suspect that’s a joint product of the active nature of the nervous system and the emergence of language. On that active nature, the nervous system doesn’t passively take the world in, but rather actively probes the world through continuously projecting expectations – think, for example, of the model William Powers developed almost a half century ago in Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). Thus perception is a process of verifying those projections (or, to use a more current language, updating Baysian priors).

The emergence of language leads to an endless curiosity about everything: What’s that? How does it work? Where’d it come from? Living becomes thus becomes a dialog with the world. And the question, Where did WE come from? will arise in that process. The answer initially takes the form of myth, of stories about origins. And those stories, in effect, establish the link between a society and world. That too is a matter of identity.

Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism 2

As the title indicates, this post is a follow-up to my previous post, Literature, Criticism, and Pluralism. This post has been prompted both by my own after thoughts and by remarks by Terence Blake.

Caveat: This is quick and dirty. I’m more interested in sketching out a quick scheme than in working out details.

Let’s start with a simple diagram depicting relationships between three Realms of Being:

The Common Sense Realm is the world of consensus reality; we hold it more or less in common with all (adult) inhabitants of our society. The Literary Realm is the world of literary texts of all kinds, high, low, and mid-cult, adults, children, young adults, whatever. The Realm of Literary Criticism is that of formal written commentary on those texts. An arrow between two realms indicates some relationship between the two. The Realm at the head end of the arrow has access to the Realm at the tail end.

Thus LCR (Literary Criticism Realm) has access to both CSR (Common Sense Realm or Common Sense) and LR (Literary Realm). Note that the arrow between CSR and LR is double-headed, indicating that each has access to the other. The texts in LCR are largely about objects (informally understood), persons, and events in CSR while the texts in LR physically circulate in CSR and people comment informally on those texts in CSR.