Thinking, Behaving, and Monkeys with Joysticks

I hope that the "thought" experiment I suggested last week stands on its own. The point was, at the least, to make people wonder how strong the causal relationship is between 'thinking about moving' and 'moving', and wonder if they might be very different phenomenon. Here I hope to demonstrate how the standard assumptions about the relationship between thinking and behaving can lead to some pretty awkward descriptions of phenomenon, and how a more embodied approach might do better. (Full disclosure, I'm still struggling with this, and will do a good, but definitely not great job.) Our case study come from the work of Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, who does ridiculously cool 'neuro-engineering' work down at Duke University. Our awkward descriptions of that work come from an interview on the Diane Rehm Show, aired on National Public Radio. There, Dr. Nicolelis describes research that culminates in a monkey moving a cursor on a computer screen via implants that detect neuronal activity in its brain. Here, roughly, is how the study works:

Modeler's Hippocratic Oath

This will be familiar to some people already. In an essay put out in 2009 Emanual Derman and Paul Wilmott write a manifesto aimed at the financial modelers, but with points that can apply to any modelers. The highlight of the article is the Modeler's Hippocratic Oath. Of course, the original Hippocratic oath was the medical doctors pledge (to the Greek gods) to do no harm (sort of). What would it look like if modern modelers were forced to make such a pledge? Maybe something like this:

Eight steps in Neuro-muscular Integration

In the early 1930's E. B. Holt was a lecturer at Princeton. He had retired from Harvard several years earlier and moved up to Maine to live the isolated philosopher's life. A friend named Herb Langfeld, who had been a Harvard colleague, convinced Holt out of retirement to come teach at Princeton, where he was much beloved by the students (undergraduate and graduate, including J. Gibson). While in Maine, Holt had deepened his interest in physiological psychology, and was desperately trying to tackle the biggest questions regarding how a physical body could do mental processes. This lead to his long, and difficult book Animal Drives and the Learning Process. It also lead to a chapter in a festschrift for Beritoff, a Russian physiologist, entitled "Eight steps in neuro-muscular integration." These works are great early examples of epigenetic thinking about behavioral development, it is contemporary with Kuo's earliest work, and anticipates Schneirla, Lehrman, and Gottlieb by decades.

It is not necessary... to assume the existence of any "inherited" pathways as a basis for reflex conditioning or learning. The very first and simplest reflex paths are learned, that is, conditioned (prenatally) according to the reflex-circle principle; and the earliest muscular contractions, as required for the starting of reflex-circles, are the early random movements of the foetus.... and this fact leads one to question whether the important role so universally ascribed to "heredity", at this point, is anything more than an old myth. (Holt, 1936, p. 27)

How is that Psychology? - Rat Pup Huddling

In a past-life I was going to be an agent based modeler, working with Jeff Schank at UC Davis. He spent many years modeling rat pup huddling... in a psychology department. My main interest in the work was that it showed how a group of organisms could perform very complex behavior, even when no individual organism knew what it was doing, or had access to sufficient information to coordinate what it was doing. As I'll talk about below, this is a special case of the phenomenon where groups of simple and dumb systems can produce intelligent actions.