What do we know for sure about the brain

If I was going to list everything we knew for sure about the brain, it would be a very, very long list. Instead of trying to do that, I am going to focus on things we know relevant to my last post, which was quite negative about the new "brain mapping" initiative, and which generated a lot of criticism
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201304/why-brain-mapping-is-stupid-idea). The title of the post then, should maybe be less “What do we know about the brain?” and more “What are some first principles we can use to understand how the brain operates?”

Why the Brain Mapping project is a Stupid Idea

It was just announced that President Obama wants to start spending one hundred million dollars to "map the brain", and that his oft-times rival Eric Cantor thinks it’s a great idea. But it is a terrible idea, because I can tell you, right now, about half of the big lessons they will learn. Plus, for about a million dollars, I could probably gather a group of experts together to tell you about half of what remains. I'm not sure what, exactly, would be left after that, but I'm sure it would be comparatively cheap to figure out. 

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:

"But what about the brain?"

I received an email inquiry a few days ago from Eric Haaland, who has studied with John Shook. We met during the neuropragmatism conference in DC last summer, and he is hoping to be a kinesiology grad student next semester with Tom Stoffregen at the University of Minnesota. He gave me permission to post his email, lightly edited, to the blog along with a reply. He said....


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I have been reading as much Holt and Skinner as I can find recently as well, and I knew that you were one I could get useful information from.  I know that they both insisted that the [mind] is not 'internal' to the organism, that there is no 'internal' - there is only organism as a process over time.  But I'm failing to put their interpretations of education into descriptive terms.  As animals, we are obviously learning beings, beings that have an innate understanding of our sensorimotor repertoire and how to manipulate the world around us to achieve goals (i.e. affordance perception); but this still seems to fall into the neural network, brain-activation paradigm, which I don't think is the case.

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)

A Brief Introduction to Ecological Psychology

The deep origins of Ecological Psychology lie in the philosophies of Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and New Realism. But that is a much longer story...


The first key paper of the modern science is probably a paper on perceptual learning (Gibson and Gibson, 1955), in which it was proposed that perceptual learning involved better discriminating stimuli. That is, this type of learning does not involve gaining more sophisticated mental processes, but rather more sophisticated sensitivity to the details of the world. Discussion generated by this paper, and further related works, were guided by a search for the 'discriminated thing' needed to fill in the perceptual-learning theory. The most obvious candidate would be something like the stimulation created by the retinal image... but the problem with the retinal image were already well known: The retinal image is not specific to the properties of the world, and therefore it cannot provide a firm basis for accurate perception. Gibson's prior work on optic flow was working towards a solution, but something more radical was needed.