EXPeditions

Anil Seth - The neural correlates of consciousness

The question of how consciousness happens is probably one of the biggest mysteries that still remain in science and in philosophy.
About Anil Seth"I'm a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex.My research is into the brain basis of consciousness, the nature of perception, and what it means to be a self."
One of the biggest mysteries
The question of how consciousness happens is probably one of the biggest mysteries that still remain in science and in philosophy. Consciousness is, on the one hand, the most familiar phenomenon – we all know what it is to be a conscious person. But exactly how conscious experiences depend on the physical material processes in our brains and in our bodies is, for many people, still a complete mystery.
Key Points
• How conscious experiences depend on the physical material processes in our brains and in our bodies is still a mystery.• Studying the difference between wakefulness and consciousness, and trying to understand if there’s any residual consciousness in the vegetative state, is one of the more important applications in medicine today.• Neuroscientists try to build explanatory bridges between what happens in the brain, in the body, and what happens in our conscious experience. We try to look for for what have been called neural correlates of consciousness• According to the global workspace theory, we become conscious of some sensory information when that sensory information activates a broad network of brain regions in the frontal and the so-called parietal regions of the brain.• The mechanisms that underlie the conscious experience appear to be widely shared in the animal kingdom. There may be a lot of creatures out there who lack the cognitive flexibility that we humans have, but have the capacity to experience suffering.

Bassem Hassan - Does DNA alone shape our brains?

Bassem Hassan, Scientific Director and Deputy General Director at the Paris Brain Institute, examines what we all have in common: our individuality.
About Bassem Hassan"I’m the Scientific Director of the Paris Brain Institute, and my research concerns how the brain develops.
I am a neurobiologist and the Research Director at Inserm, a public scientific and technological institute dedicated to biomedical research. My passion is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of the development and differentiation of the nervous system. My lab studies the genetic mechanisms that regulate the development of the nervous system."
Why we are all different
The idea that our DNA is not the beginning and end of what makes our brains the way they are can be understood through thought experiment, and asking whether the data exists to answer that question. Monozygotic twins in humans and genetically identical individuals in any other animal species, for example shrimp-like species, literally have exactly the same DNA. Yet, remarkably, despite the fact that monozygotic twins or clones of a certain species of animal are more similar to each other than they are to everybody else, they’re not actually identical, even in their external appearance. They have the same DNA but they are not identical to each other. That alone tells us that our DNA encodes our development and much of what happens to us in life, but it does not determine it. The alphabet encodes all the words in a different language but it doesn’t determine what those words are – and new words appear and disappear all the time in different languages.
This tells us that even if you have an immutable set of instructions to play with, the forming elements, and then the instructions that those elements form, are not deterministic. They are not predictable with 100% accuracy. So that’s the difference between encoding and determining something. A blueprint determines, say, the electrical wiring circuit of an apartment. If I give you the blueprint, you will make an electrical circuit of that apartment exactly the way it is now. The blueprint of DNA encodes the information necessary for the brain wiring programme to run itself.
Key Points
• Our DNA encodes our development and much of what happens to us in life, but it does not determine it.• Many of the processes that are encoded in the DNA have randomness built into them.• Our innate tendencies shape the environment we choose to live in, and the environment we live in then feeds back on our innate tendencies in this ever-continuing interactivity.

Daniel Glaser - Neurons and the human brain

Daniel Glaser, a neuroscientist affiliated with the University of London in the Institute of Philosophy, gives us a rundown on neurons.
About Daniel Glaser"I’m a neuroscientist who has looked at visual perception in the brain and Head of Special Projects in public engagement at The Wellcome Trust.
I work on making connections between science and people who are not scientists. I am affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and work at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Google."
What is a neuron?
If we unpack the word neuroscience, we can see it is composed of “neuro” and “science”. The latter refers to the scientific explanation, the principally biological story that we’re telling in neuroscience as opposed to psychology or other domains. “Neuro” refers to neurons, a class of cell within the body whose purpose is to transmit information.
Almost all neurons have a cell body, which is similar to the body of most other cells, but with physical elements that are often elongated as if they were wires. They also have inputs and outputs through which they send information and do some sort of – we might venture to say – computation: they add inputs up, compare them, and if they are satisfied with the answer, they fire an output. I say fire because neurons use electrical signalling to send information along these wires or axons. Chemistry, as well as electricity, is also part of the story. The neurons are each connected by a chemical junction. This chemical “soup” within which the neuron is bathed affects its processing so it can get signals and information from hormones and chemicals in the area.
Key Points
• A neuron is, in essence, a biological signalling device.• What the cortex is doing is layer upon layer of model-making, of prediction, of trying to simulate the world in order to manipulate it better.• Humans run simulations of what we think the systems within us are going to do. The brain predicts what will happen to our body after we do something, even though the effect has not occurred yet.

Stafford Lightman - What is going on in the brain

Stafford Lightman, Professor of Medicine at the University of Bristol, examines the hormonal patterns of our brain and their effects.
About Stafford Lightman"I’m Professor of Medicine at the University of Bristol, and I research how the brain affects the body’s hormones, and vice versa.
I am a neuroendocrinologist and the Director of the Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience and Endocrinology. My work focuses on the mechanisms through which the brain recognises environmental stress and disease, and the pathways it uses to initiate appropriate responses in physiological regulation and gene transcription."
Our brain anticipates what’s going on
My particular interest is in how the environment affects the brain and how it allows us to adapt to changes by sensing what is going on in the environment around us. What’s fascinating about the brain is that it anticipates what’s going on in the world, and it adapts to the idea of what it is expecting to happen in the future. That means that it is in the best position to function in its optimal state when a particular situation arises. One of the most obvious aspects of this is the fact that when you wake up in the morning, your brain is functioning well. If you are woken up at about two in the morning and somebody asks you a complicated mathematical question, it might take more effort to answer as your brain wouldn’t be working at maximum function. But the second you wake up, your brain is functioning quite well.
The question of why at that particular time it can function well is very interesting to me. Along with my colleagues, I have studied the way synapses work – the way nerve cells talk to each other in areas of the brain which are important for memory, such as the area called the hippocampus. As rats are nocturnal, these studies would be done in the late afternoon, when a rat is normally waking up. We found that the synaptic plasticity at that time of day is very different from the time of day when a rat would normally be asleep.
Key Points
• The brain allows us to adapt to changes by sensing and anticipating what is going on in the environment around us.• If we alter the amount and the pattern of cortisol that the brain sees at different times of day, the hippocampus responds in a different way.• The pattern of cortisol is extremely important in memory response and emotional response.• The problems of neurodegeneration are becoming a major problem of human life, especially with longer lifespans.

Irene Miguel-Aliaga - The gut-brain connection

The gut is exposed to a great deal of internal information, such as nutrients and microbiota activity.
About Irene Miguel-Aliaga"I am Professor of Genetics and Physiology at Imperial College London. I study how our internal organs change and affect us.
I am a geneticist and I run the Miguel-Aliaga Laboratory at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial. My team and I research organ plasticity: how and why organs that we commonly regard as fully-developed change in size or function, in response to environmental or internal challenges, mainly focusing on intestines and their neurons."
The gut-brain connection
Historically, we had a very top-down view of intelligence from the perspective of how we make decisions, or how we know, sense, and integrate information that leads to behavioural or physiological adaptations. We thought that there is this very clever brain that’s getting information from our environment, and that leads to physiological changes, and some of those will involve the intestine. So the brain will tell the intestine to do things.
But we’ve also known now for a long time that when you look at the nerves that connect the brain with the gut, most of the information goes from the gut to the brain. So 70% of the fibres or the connections between the two will go from the gut to the brain. Anatomically, that almost tells you that there has to be very extensive crosstalk; maybe there’s more going from the gut to the brain than from the brain to the gut.
Key Points
• The gut is exposed to a great deal of internal information, such as nutrients and microbiota activity.• The gut sends many signals to the brain, including pleasant signals.• In reproducing female fruit flies, nerve cells in the gut fire up and increase food intake; these otherwise silent cells are found in both males and females.

Anil Seth - How the brain accomplishes perception

Sensory information that comes into the brain is necessarily ambiguous and noisy. In order to make sense of these signals, the brain has to combine its prior expectations about the causes of these signals.
About Anil Seth"I'm a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex.My research is into the brain basis of consciousness, the nature of perception, and what it means to be a self."
How the brain accomplishes perceptionThere's a natural way to think about how the brain accomplishes perception, which is that the brain takes in sensory signals from the world and it reads out these sensory signals in the brain. In this view, perception is a kind of bottom-up or outside-in process in which the brain is extracting information from sensory input.
But this isn't how things are. Sensory information that comes into the brain is necessarily ambiguous and noisy. Imagine that you are a brain: you’re locked inside a bony skull, you have no direct access to what's out there in the world. All you get are electrical signals, and these electrical signals don't come with labels, they just arrive at the brain.
In order to make sense of these signals, the brain has to combine its prior expectations about the causes of these signals. These are prior beliefs about what's out there in the world, and it has to combine them with sensory signals to form its best guess about what's out there in the world. This is what we consciously see – it’s a best guess about what caused the sensory signals that the brain receives.
Key Points
• The brain extracts information from sensory inputs. In order to make sense of these electrical signals, it has to combine them with its prior expectations about the causes of these signals and form its best guess about what's out there in the world.• We have many more than five ways in which the brain senses the world. But, critically, none of these sensory channels relay the state of the world as it is. Perception in the brain is always a process of interpretation of these sensory signals.• Time is illusory in the same way that colour is illusory – the way in which we experience time is not a direct readout of what's actually happening in the world. Our experience of time is also a construction.• We all inhabit our own distinctive perceptual universes – we all have a unique, conscious experience of ourselves and of the world around us.This diversity is illustrated beautifully by people with synesthesia. Synesthesia means mixing of the senses.• I like to think of perception as controlled hallucination. It's a construction, but it is controlled by what's out there in the world. What we call hallucination, when people see things that other people don't, is a form of uncontrolled perception.

Bassem Hassan - How the brain forms and develops

Bassem Hassan, Scientific Director and Deputy General Director at the Paris Brain Institute, explains the development of the human brain.
About Bassem Hassan 
"I’m the Scientific Director of the Paris Brain Institute, and my research concerns how the brain develops.I am a neurobiologist and the Research Director at Inserm, a public scientific and technological institute dedicated to biomedical research. My passion is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of the development and differentiation of the nervous system. My lab studies the genetic mechanisms that regulate the development of the nervous system."
How our brains form
Brain development refers to the process of how our brain forms during its embryonic stages – to the entire process and the time that passes between the moment that we have a set of cells in the developing embryo that are fated to become the brain until the moment where that brain is ready to act and function.
We all start life as a fertilised egg that divides and grows and grows. At some point, some part of that growth becomes what we would call differentiated – has a specific potential, in this case, to become the brain, but not something else. So, the cells that are going to make your brain in embryonic development stop being able to make anything else and can only make your brain. At that point, it’s a sheath of cells which turns on itself and becomes something we call the neural tube. Now, the more frontal, or anterior, parts of this neural tube are what are going to become the brain. The back parts are going to become the spinal cord. So, the brain is this frontal part. From that moment on, this sheath of cells is now competent to form brain cells.
Key Points
• The relationship between brain plasticity and brain stability (homeostasis) is key to healthy brain development.• Humans are aging beyond what the brain has evolved to age, so we are starting to see degeneration in later years.• The blueprint for the brain – from its robustness to its core vulnerabilities, which will determine its susceptibility to brain diseases in later life – is actually built in during development.

Adam Phillips - On affection, friendship, love and hate

The reason affection is important is because a good life is an affectionate life, essentially.
About Adam Phillips 
"I was trained as a child psychotherapist and I worked in the NHS for 17 years. I am currently a psychoanalyst and a writer. Since 2003 I have been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud.I write one day a week and I tend to write about psychoanalytic topics. I don’t ever write about my patients, though, but mostly on topics like boredom, kissing, hatred, obstacles and a whole range of things that interest me on a personal level. These are essays in the literal sense, since they are experiments for pursuing certain kinds of ideas."
Why is affection important?
The reason affection is important is because a good life is an affectionate life, essentially. Affection, at least in English, is a very interesting word because it overlaps with a lot of other things that it’s different from. We know as children that it’s in some ways misleading to think of children and parenting as sexual. Clearly, there are erotic elements in it, but it’s presidingly an affectionate relationship, and in affection there is an acknowledgment of mutual vulnerability. Children begin, ideally, in an affectionate world. If you want to get a sense of the perils of this, you might think of tickling. Tickling as a process begins as an act of affection, but it very quickly tips over into something that is like torture, because in tickling there’s no climax. You can exploit somebody’s desire for affection in such a way that they suffer acutely. One of the things I think I want to address is what our fears of affection are, which are to do with the way in which it can be exploited. That is to say, somebody can seduce us by being initially affectionate when, actually, they have other desires that they’re using the affection as a means to. At its best, affection that is trustworthy is something that is genuinely heartening and fortifying. If people can rely on the affection of others and their own affection, they feel much closer and less threatened. They feel much more as if they’re in a shared world. The question is when and if the affection is going to turn into a different kind of seduction. At its best, affection is an end in itself. It’s a fundamental form of sensual solidarity between each other. It’s reassuring, it’s comforting and it’s not threatening. But the interesting question becomes, what has to happen for affection to become threatening? The answer to that is a version of when affection begins to turn into a form of non-mutual sexual desire.
Key Points
• One of the things about the initial affectionate relationship is that there’s mutual accommodation, that people are attuned to what the other wants and lives and is frightened of.• Once you exploit someone’s affection, you effectively exploit their innocence, you rob them of their innocence. Innocence means fundamental trust, unsuspicious trust.• Friendship is a very important period in a child’s life, when they begin to realise that there might be real pleasures outside the family circle.• It’s misleading to think we either hate each other or we love each other. Wherever there’s love, there’s hate. Wherever there’s hate, there’s love.

Will Davies - Thinking beyond GDP to the measurement of happiness

Will Davies, Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths University of London, explores happiness vs. economic growth.
About Will Davies
"I’m a Professor in Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre.In my work, I explore the way in which economics influences our understanding of politics, society and ourselves."
Measuring what is valuable
Our idea of economic growth derives from a particular view of the world that privileges the market as the basis on which to distribute goods and on which we decide what’s valuable. In a market, the extent to which something is valued depends on how much someone is prepared to pay for it. Although we know that there are certain things that are far more valuable than anything that you can buy in a market, such as friendship, family and the experience of nature, the way that GDP – gross domestic product – is calculated is as an aggregate of all of the different prices of things that are paid for in a particular national economy.That means that there are various absurdities that have developed within the calculation of GDP that many environmental economists, feminists and other critics of GDP have pointed out. For instance, if I pay someone to drive something up the length of the country and back, then that counts as a contribution to GDP, even if it’s polluting the atmosphere and even if it wasn’t a worthwhile journey to make. Nevertheless, the fact that I paid for it to happen means that it will count as a positive benefit to GDP. Meanwhile, caring for my own children or going for a walk in the countryside – things that might be of far greater value – don’t make any kind of contribution to GDP one way or the other because they are not associated with a market value.Believing that gross domestic product is the most important economic indicator in our society has always had this limitation that it excludes lots of things that most people believe are valuable and includes lots of things that many people believe are not valuable. But the problem is, what do we use instead?
Key Points
• Gross Domestic Product is a very imperfect measure of what is valuable and could be replaced by more holistic indicators of what people care about.• We could measure value with indicators of happiness, such as objective well-being measures or subjective well-being measures.• The issue with measuring happiness is that it is a subjective and personal concept, so it is hard to decide how to collect this data and how to use it comparatively.

Lisa Appignanesi - The medicalisation of happiness

Lisa Appignanesi, Visiting Professor at King’s College London and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature talks to us about finding ”true” happiness.
About Lisa Appignanesi
"I’m a Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities at King’s College London. I’ve written books on anger, on love and trials of passions, and on women.I’m fascinated by the subject of emotions: extreme emotions, madness, Freud, the therapeutic and psychiatric professions."
Happiness has become medicalised
Much of our life has been colonised by the medical professions in the 21st century. Happiness itself has become medicalised, as has unhappiness. We become less tolerant of frustration. We think we immediately need to run to a medical psychiatrist or a therapist if we can’t cope with our daily life. We have medicalised our children. One of the interesting things that’s happened in this century is that children’s behaviour has been so grossly medicalised that we live in an era where all our attention is at a deficit because we have so much information being pumped at us through our various devices and through the World Wide Web. We’ve actually medicalised children’s attention deficit into a disorder.Attention deficit disorder first came into being when Ritalin® was discovered to have an effect on children’s attention; from being a very minor category of behaviour and psychiatric intervention, it became a rather large category. More and more children were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. We have to ask ourselves, in a time when we’re so concerned with the attention economy, do we want to target the child itself with a disorder which seems to be linked so much to this attention economy. It may not actually be a disorder of the child. It may be a disorder of society as a whole and needs intervention other than medical intervention.
Key Points
• Much of our life has been colonised by the medical professions in the 21st century. Happiness itself has become medicalised, as has unhappiness.• We’ve actually medicalised children’s attention deficit into a disorder. It may not actually be a disorder of the child. It may be a disorder of society as a whole and needs intervention other than medical intervention.• We may have more happiness if we pay attention to ways in which we can change the system or make it, rather than engaging with doctors.• Happiness is not only something that exists for a moment. You can be happy and still have bad moments. You can be happy and still have very difficult times in a relationship or in a set of relationships.