I would say.
So we're going to use the same format today as in the previous seminars, which is that Professor Hossain will give us the scientific perspective.
Then I'll open the floor to any specific questions you'd like.
That's Professor Hussain for a brief period, then hand over to Ben Morgan from the Humanities and again after his talk,
offer the chance if you want to ask any specific questions to Ben.
After that, we will head over to the drinks and corner for a short break, after which we will open a general session.
So our first speaker today is Professor Masood saying he was professor of clinical
neurology at UCL and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery,
and he was the London deputy director of the UCL Institutes for Cognitive Neuroscience.
He is now the holder of a principal fellowship by the Wellcome Trust and is Professor
of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford and a Fellow of New College.
His research focuses on inattention, disorders of memory, impulsivity and apathy.
He's developing techniques to examine attention,
short term or working memory and decision making in healthy people and in patients with neurological disorders.
And in doing so,
he's beginning to understand some of the brain mechanisms that are disrupted when people don't pay attention or forget information rapidly,
when they make impulsive decisions or can't motivated to act.
And that research is helping to develop treatments for conditions in which phenomena like that become disabling,
such as in Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease, or in developmental disorders like ADHD.
And today, he's going to talk to us about the neuroscience of unconscious memory.
That's. Thank you very much, Simon, and thank you so much for the invitation.
It would be fair to say that neuroscience thinks it's got a long way, but I think in neuroscience,
in this room would be agreeing with me when I say that actually we're in we're really
at an infancy in our understanding of memory despite over 100 years worth of work.
So without further ado, let me start off by taking you back to 1911, and we're going to make the acquaintance of Edwards, who's a Swiss neurologist.
He's been trained at the subject here. He's been at the feet of Shaqiri, who is thought to be the founder of European neurology.
And he's now had the fortune to meet a woman who seems to be deeply amnesic.
He sees her every day, but she has no recollection of meeting him every day.
It's a new introduction to the doctor. So he begins to wonder whether there is anything in her memory that might survive the injury that she's had.
So one day when he goes to shake her hand, he has a pin in his hand.
This is that pin. And when he shakes the hand, he pricks her skin.
She's a little bit surprised, but brushed it off. He apologises, and that's all there is to it.
But the next day, when he sees her again, she also doesn't recognise him.
He goes to shake his hand. But at that moment she withdraws it subconsciously.
Somehow she's registered that this is not a hand you want to touch.
And probably this is one of the first bits of evidence that priming can occur in individuals who are deeply amnesic.
They have no conscious awareness of meeting this doctor, and yet they know there's something wrong about shaking his hand.
And that kind of work really has led to this general scheme about the fractionation of long term memory.
This is not about short term or working memory, and long term memory has been thought of, if you like,
to consist of explicit memory, perhaps with conscious recall or implicit memory without conscious recall.
And even within the explicit memory system, there appears to be fractionation.
There is what we would refer to as episodic memory.
Recollection for what you did yesterday.
With whom? At what time? Where, putting all those bits of information together.
And there's also semantic memory, the understanding of facts, bits of knowledge.
You know, Paris is the capital of France. You know that a few weeks ago there was a very unusual events that occurred there.
You know, all those facts and this is thought to be semantic memory.
Finally, in the implicit memory section, we have things that go under the name of procedural memory,
how you learn to ride a bike, drive a car, that kind of thing, which I'm not going to deal with today,
but I am going to do today, is to focus on this issue about priming, which is Simon mentioned,
is enhanced identification in some way of objects or words or in fact, any other kind of material you might have seen previously.
And that somehow facilitates your response to that item.
So in a moment, in the modern era, we haven't used pins to look at priming in amnesia, but these kinds of stimuli extended.
Now, I don't know if you can make out anything here. These are fragmented stimuli.
Probably not at the moment. If I make them less fragmented, some of you may be starting to make guesses about what these things are.
Yes. And then if you go all the way, it becomes very evident what these stimuli are.
And these kind of stimuli have been used a lot in research in amnesia and pioneered really by Elizabeth Warrington and Larry Weiss.
Class Vice Krantz was the professor of psychology at Oxford.
Warrington was a neuropsychologist. She's still neuropsychologist at the National Hospital for Neurology Queen's Square.
And they did a series of pioneering experiments, actually, in a number of brain syndromes, but particularly in memory.
Now, I've taken the original figures here from the publications in 1970, so just concentrate on the dotted line for a minute.
What they're showing here is that if I repeatedly expose you to stimuli like this with other other types of stimuli as well,
you become better and better at identifying what that is.
That's a plane we don't have to go to the more fully fledged,
less fragmented form to recognise this is a plane and with time only a few trials actually we get very,
very good such that we don't make any errors at all in identifying what this item
is and what Elizabeth Warrington and Larry Weiss grants found was that actually,
rather surprisingly, individuals who are deeply amnesic, shown in the solid line here have a very similar time course of learning.
They can learn this material, even though they have no conscious recall of seeing these objects.
They learn them very, very quickly. And an hour later, when we were exposed to such material, we still show a learning benefit.
We don't have to see quite the fully fledged one. We can see a fragmented one to recognise what it is.
And interestingly, the amnesic amnesic patients are also capable of doing this.
So they retain this material over a delay of one hour, even though they cannot consciously recall having seen these items.
In fact, they went on to do this heroic experiment.
They waited 72 hours, 83 days between the learning period and retesting and found that these these amnesic
patients still benefited from having been exposed to these fragmented stimuli previously.
So something is still retained in amnesic patients.
Something is more primitive in the way of the pin with the patients that it was composed of.
So and now we're also seeing this in these fragmented figures and in the pioneering series of experiments,
Warrington and Vice Krantz also went on to look at a few other ways of studying this.
They used fragmented words. So what we are doing here is plotting free recall.
How many words can you remember from the list that you saw and even healthy people?
The controls have some difficulty in remembering, but as you might imagine, the amnesic individuals are very severely affected with recognition.
In other words, did you see this item before or not? So yes, no recognition.
Actually, we are boosted by that kind of test.
So the amnesic, but there's still a discrepancy.
However, if you test them just simply on sharing the fragmented words,
you find that actually they've benefited hugely comparably to healthy individuals in terms of their memory for those words.
So again, an interesting dissociation between when you directly asked, can you remember something?
And when you're shown this sort of fragmented material which presumably has cued some system in your brain to be able to recognise this word,
but we're easily at the most fragmented level.
And they also did this with something called word stem completion, which became a very important way to study, to recall, if you like.
So this is a very similar kind of experiment to the one I just showed previously.
Now there are three conditions.
So in this case, they got the amnesic and healthy people to learn five letter words, and then they tested these their memory either with free recall.
Just tell me which words you remember or a yes no recognition task.
Is this one of the words you saw previously or not? Or the words them completion task?
So in this case, you might get the letter A. And if you've seen that word before, you might more likely say chair rather than say charm.
Okay. And when when they did this,
they again found a similar kind of results that when individuals were simply simply asked to remember or recall what items they saw.
The amnesic patients were severely affected.
Similarly, for recognition, yes or no, but on word completion with this prompt, if you like, they were just as good as healthy individuals.
Okay, so this is the kind of evidence that has led to the idea that our memories are not just one monolithic thing,
that they are, in fact fractionated. And indeed, as I say, any hit episodic memory can be severely affected with priming of this kind,
either in terms of the fragmented figures or in terms of word completion being relatively preserved.
And the credibility of this kind of fractionation has really been established further by anatomical distinctions between these memory systems.
So it's now widely accepted, I think, that the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe memory system is really very important for episodic memory.
Some would argue for that conscious recall of items from the past, although that's debated whether it needs to be really conscious or not.
And what we're talking about, just to give you a grounding in terms of the anatomy, is this is a section through the brain like this.
So this is the top. This is the bottom. This is the side.
And we're talking about this structure here right in the depth of the brain.
And we can image that now with MRI.
And what we're talking about is this the hippocampus now focal damage to the hippocampus is relatively rare.
It does occur. But of course, in the current era,
the disease that's really important in terms of damage to episodic memory and the hippocampus is Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Eventually much of the brain degenerates.
But it's interesting that one of the earlier areas which takes the biggest hit is the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe system.
So the episodic memory system can be damaged in patients with amnesia,
but they still retain this priming from the visual material I showed you previously.
What about the converse? In neuroscience, one of the most interesting things is if you can show what's called a double dissociation.
So in this case, we have one group of individuals who have episodic memory impaired.
But this kind of priming intact is the converse available in a different kind of group of individuals?
And it turns out that there is this is a single unusual case.
And what we're showing you here is in the early days of MRI scanning, so here are the eyes.
This is the right side of the brain, which is the left side of the brain.
And this individual has had the occipital lobe resected because they had intractable epilepsy,
epilepsy which was not amenable to treatment with medication in this patient.
And as recognition was just as good as in control individuals.
So their episodic memory system was intact, unlike the amnesic patients who were also tested in this study.
So we know that already amnesic patients are going to be bad at this kind of recognition.
Task. But what was interesting here is that they also looked at the words stem completion task I mentioned before and here are controls.
Let's just look only at the unattached bars here and the healthy people could do this task very well.
They could use those words stems to complete the rest of the word and performed really well in terms of recalling what words they'd seen previously.
And so too did the amnesic patients. Just as I showed you in the Warrington and Vice Scripps studies, they too could use those words stems,
the word stems, prying them so that they could finish off the the rest of the five letter word.
But interestingly, marks here shows no or very little in the way of facilitation by those word stems.
So unlike the amnesic individuals and unlike healthy controls, the word stems did not really help this individual to perform well,
although they still had very good recognition memory in terms of was this an item from the list you've seen before or not?
So here we have that double dissociation. Some people can have episodic memory damaged,
the priming intact was others like this case here can have priming apparently not present but episodic memory intact.
Okay so these are in patients and they're they're interesting unusual.
But what about you and me and the work by two living and chapter in their colleagues is really
suggested that priming can occur in healthy people and they've done various sorts of experiments.
I'll show you a few of them just to give you an idea. So they got a group of people to study a series of works that gave them 96 words from octopus,
climate, avocado, etc. And then they tested their memory either by a yes or no recognition.
So that gives you another list of words, half of which had appeared previously and half of which were completely novel.
And then they also tested them with this word fragment completion task.
So this is a bit like that word stem completion task.
I will help you a little bit by putting in a few of the letters and see whether that prompts you,
whether that primes you into correctly identifying the word that you'd seen in the previous list.
And remember, these are healthy young individuals.
So these are their data. This is the probability of getting it right.
And this is the retention interval here. So this is one hour or seven days.
Now let's just do the recognition. So this is simply saying, was this word on the list or not?
At one hour, the scoring about 55%.
Seven days later, as you might expect, the recognition is poorer.
It's nearer the 20% mark. But interestingly, if we look at the word fragment completion study here,
these healthy individuals are able to use these prompts just as well, one hour and seven days.
So they're primed by previous encounters, and that priming survives a delay of a whole week,
unlike the recognition memory, which is clearly degraded over time, the conscious recognition memory.
And just I'm sure you've heard this one's octopus, this one incident.
This must be boogie man. But you wouldn't know that from just seeing this here.
Okay, so this stuff is really about taking in words, sensory information.
And what's emerged here is that there might be something more than simply perceptual priming, and that's been called conceptual priming.
In some ways, it's similar to what one might call semantic priming, understanding, meaning.
And Schachter and his colleagues did it in this way.
They would present sentences like this. The haystack was important because the cloth ripped.
And of course, most of us confronted by such sentences, would think, What on earth is that mean?
Or This one, the notes was sour because the seams split and we're still thinking, What on earth is that referring to?
But if we were given a couple of words, we might make sense of these sentences.
In this case, parachute and bagpipe.
Try this one. The person was unhappy because the hole was close to the hole closed.
So apparently that one is pierced is okay.
Now it's unlikely that when you first confront it, the first time you see those sentences, you work out what they're referring to.
But what about the second time?
So if after delay, people were presented with this kind of sentence, you'd find that actually you could make sense of it.
You could understand what it referred to because you've seen these queuing words before, parachute with the first one, for example.
And what Schachter and his team showed was that people who were deeply amnesic nevertheless
showed facilitation in solving these kind of sentence problems even after one week.
So again, they retained the memory of what was associated with the sentence.
This sentence made sense, had meaning when associated with this word.
Okay, you could argue about whether this is really about completely about concepts or could it all be explained by perception.
But this is the kind of evidence that's been used to suggest that actually priming goes beyond pure perceptual memory.
Actually, I thought this is quite a nice little anecdote to tell you.
So many of you might know that Sigmund Freud and William Freeze were had a very sort of tempestuous relationship over the years.
And one day Freud announced to police that he had a momentous new discovery.
He'd worked out that all humans were essentially bisexual and.
At that moment. Police reminded him that he'd actually told Floyd that two years previously, at which he'd pooh poohed it and said, Don't be silly.
Interestingly, once Freud accepted it, he said, it's painful to have to surrender one's originality in this way.
We've all been there. It happens in academia when you think you've come up with the novel idea,
but actually find it's been done 100 years ago by somebody else and to come more up to date.
George Harrison Many of you might know this on My Sweet Lord came up with a song in 1971 and it was a big hit.
It was the first Beatles hit, performed solo, which went to number one.
But as soon as it came out, the producers of the Chiffons, he said, Fine,
but that's really stretching your memory back to 1962, actually suggested that it sounded very much like the tune.
This went to court, proceeded for five years before the judge finally decided that actually George Harrison had performed subconscious plagiarism.
And at that point, the damages were more than $10 million, which is quite a lot in the 1970s.
I don't think George helped his case by saying that he didn't really take it from he said fine, he'd taken it from Oh, happy day, the gospel.
So instead. And interestingly, the title of that album was All Things Must Pass.
And in this case, half a billion dollars didn't pass because of this.
So the question is, can things like this subconscious plagiarism really exist?
And I guess it can. What about in the experimental setting?
Is there evidence of unconscious priming?
Can we be primed by previous encounters that we're not even conscious of possible that George might have been conscious of the Chiffons.
So how about if we could control it? Well,
one of the most deeply impressive ways of looking at the unconscious state in someone
who is conscious or comatose in any way is something called the neglect syndrome.
And here is a patient who has this syndrome.
So she has a right hemisphere stroke and her left arm is paralysed.
But I'm asking her here to find some interesting stories in the newspaper.
This is the Daily Mail. So it's actually a challenge for all of us.
But you can see that all her interest, all her attention is really on the right here and she is neglecting the left side of space.
She doesn't have any pure sensory loss, what we would call this a visual field defect.
She just simply attends to one side of space.
And at it's extreme, these kind of patients, they're asked to copy objects like this mecha,
a cube may ignore to fill in the left hand side following their right sided stroke,
or if they're asked to copy a fly like this, might do a perfect copy on the right, but ignore elements on the left.
This is a nice series of paintings by an Austrian painter who unfortunately suffered one of these kinds of stroke.
This is a self-portrait relatively early on after the stroke.
You can see that he's neglected the left side of his face and also crammed in his self-portrait on the right hand side of the sheet of paper.
As time progressed, he got better and you can see more elements on the left coming along.
And he did eventually recover from this. So the self-portrait is not much better by the end.
But here we have some an individual who is not aware that he's missing elements from the left side of space.
And we can also measure this in various different ways. To show you this, we're interested.
So, for example, here is another patient being asked to find the letters C,
which were embedded amongst these distractor letters, posing cues on the screen every time he finds one.
The computer will put a little across that. What he's doing that.
I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the anatomy of these kinds of syndromes,
because they're far more common and far more profound for the right hemisphere of damage in humans.
And they involve either parts of the parietal lobe or the temporal parietal junction where the parietal lobe meets the temporal lobe,
or interestingly, the inferior parts of the right frontal lobe.
It's quite interesting because in most of us these are homologous areas for zones which look after language in the left hemisphere.
So this tends to be pretty much a right hemisphere syndrome. So let this patient finish.
And you can see that he is unaware of many of the items which are not left hand side of space.
Interestingly, although he is unaware we can show that his brain is aware.
So these are some studies we performed now 14 years, 15 years ago in the UCL.
Grant Reece was the lead investigator here and we were studying the visual
responses in patients like these when they were presented with items in this case,
let's say a bird on the left and one on the right, and even when they missed this item on the left,
one could nevertheless see that the early visual areas in the brain.
I should say that visual pathways from the eyes extend right back to the occipital lobes.
And there we have the primary visual cortex. We can see that in primary visual cortex and in surrounding visual areas,
there is nevertheless activation when this item is presented, even though the patient has no conscious perception of that item.
So this has meant various things. But one of the interesting things is, of course,
that just simple activity in these early visual areas does not seem to be sufficient to support conscious perception of information.
We might need more than just sensory areas to do this.
Interestingly, this extends into what one might call unconscious perception in terms of preferences.
So this was a study performed by John Hamilton, Peter Halligan and John Marshall.
In fact, they performed it here in the Radcliffe Infirmary many years ago in 1988.
And what they did was to study patients like this, right hemisphere patients who had visual neglect, and they would present them with two choices.
Here's a house here and one here. Which one would you prefer to live in now?
If this was a simple chance type of choice, you might say the top one on 50% of the time and the bottom one on the rest of the occasions.
But actually these were their choices. So they chose the bottom one 80% and the top one 20%.
And when asked why they were unable to explain why, they might say something like,
Well, this looks preferable to me, I think this would be more comfortable.
But they wouldn't say the obvious thing, which is actually this one is on fire and I'd rather not live there.
Okay, so this is an interesting example of unconscious perception.
And to extend this a little bit further, it was a busy ad in Italy from this rather important landmark study.
It's gone down in the annals of psychology, and neuroscience is a fantastic experiment performed.
Here is the Piazza del Duomo in Milan,
and some of you may know that is an old postcard I bought 20 years ago or something, but it's a magnificent cathedral.
And what Dizzy did was to ask his Milanese patients who knew the city very, very well to think about the square.
So they're not in the square. They're just simply thinking about the square.
What he asked them to do is to say, Imagine that you're standing at the door of the cathedral and looking back, looking back at us.
But tell me about the things you remember in that square and in cartoon form.
This is what they recollected.
So they might mention the streets going off the square on that right hand side or the bookshops or the cafes and restaurants.
And they would tend to neglect the items on their left.
Remember, this is not in direct vision. This is simply from memory of that square, which they knew very well.
The very important part of the experiment was the next bit in which Busy said, okay, now imagine that you on the other side of the square.
So let's flip your vantage point. You're not going to be looking at the cathedral.
Tell me what you remember then. So now the other side of the square and they're looking at the cathedral.
Right. And they reported again streets to the right or shops and restaurants on that right hand side.
But remember, those places were exactly the ones that had been neglected previously.
From the original vantage point and now the things that have been reported from the vantage point of the door of the cathedral were being neglected.
So this means that in some way all that information is really intact.
The memory for that story is completely intact because usually in these individuals.
But when it comes to trying to describe, recollect, imagine that square, then it depends on the vantage point at which the square was being viewed.
It's almost like an analogue screen, cinema screen, if you like.
And to try and remember it in visual memory. That's what's being done.
It's being cast onto this screen, and whatever is on the left of your vantage point is being missed.
So that's very interesting and busy. I call it representational neglect, not just simply perceptual neglect,
but this was neglect in terms of the representation when it's been retrieved from memory.
Perhaps more directly, though, is this rather nice experiment.
I like this one quite a lot, which has shown that there might be semantic priming in these individuals in the absence of awareness.
So this is the kind of study that was done. So you're sitting in front of a computer screen and on one side an object comes up.
On the other side is a scrambled nonsense image, right?
And then soon afterwards, two items come along.
And this is what we call a forced choice experiment. You're asked to say, which object did you say previously?
And most of us would have no difficulty in saying it was the apple. All right.
But in patients with neglect like this, patients with visual neglect, under these circumstances,
these individuals were a chance at deciding whether they'd see this object or this object previously,
remember, because the neglecting items on the left, they really do not consciously remember that item.
And in this case, it wasn't sufficient in any way to allow them to say whether they could recognise this item had been shown previously.
The neat part of the study was to take it one step further.
So in this case, the first screen you and I see what the patient sees is exactly the same.
There is an object on the left hand side and there's a scrambled image on the other.
But after that there is a word. And our job is to decide rapidly with a button press whether that word is a it's a real word or it's a non word.
That's all we have to do. So that would be nonsense words or real words.
So the task is very, very simple. And what is found, if you and I do this, is that we're much faster at responding,
whether this is a real word or not, depending on whether the item that has come previously is semantically related.
So in this case, Apple is semantically related to Tree, and we'd be much faster deciding whether a tree is a word or or a non word.
Then if let's say we saw a bed beforehand and then a tree.
So this is it's only a few tens of milliseconds in terms of advantage,
but it shows that if there is a semantic relationship between an item you've been exposed to previously,
that can speed up your decision making at this point here.
And what these investigators showed was that actually that can happen in these neglect patients.
So although they may be completely unaware that they've seen this apple before,
that apple subconsciously has had the ability to facilitate their judgement about whether this is a word or non word.
So there must be some sort of semantic relationship here and it must have also got through into these brains of patients with neglect.
And as I showed you before, from the functional imaging data, even though someone fails to be aware of something,
we nevertheless have evidence that the brain is aware of that information.
Okay. So this is a interesting thing. It's an unusual syndrome, but what about healthy people?
Well, actually one can try and do similar things, but you have to work much harder to make sure that items really go on unrecognised.
So unconscious priming, healthy people, you need to do something that we call masking.
So here is an experiment from our own lab, which was really led by Trevor Cheng and Clive Rosenthal.
And when they came up with this experiment, I really thought this wasn't going to work.
And I'll show you why in a minute. But surprise, surprise, it did.
So this is what you have to do. We give you a list of 40 words.
These are completely visible to you. You study them and you make an anonymous judgement.
You decide whether this is a living thing or not.
All right. 40 minutes. And then there's a five minute delay.
And then we're going to flash up on the screen some of the words you saw.
And also, we can throw in some novel words. And we're going to ask you whether you've seen these words before or not.
But and here's the big catch. These words are masked.
First of all, they only appear for 11 milliseconds.
So 100th of a second. So they're very brief. But to make sure that you cannot really read these words, we must them.
So we forward and backward mask them.
And masking means really scrambling the screen so that you it's a bit like a snowstorm, but not quite scrambling the screen.
So there's a scramble before the word and there's a scramble after the word.
And this really makes sure that you you don't know what this word is.
You have no awareness what this is. And we can show that by asking you to report what was the word you saw.
And people really have no idea what this word was. All right.
So this is done with visible words.
You encode the material with visible words. And we're going to test your memory with invisible words, if you like.
And you'd think this is daft. How can you possibly do this?
Well, Trevor and Clive were able to show, and I won't go into the details of what these measures mean,
that actually people are able to discriminate between old words presented here
once you've seen before and completely new ones much better than by chance.
So you could. So somehow, even though you cannot read these words, you are able to decide whether it's old on you better than by chance.
All right. And if we ask them and the sort of subjective rating was this old or new and how confident you are, that also mirrors that confidence.
If it was old, you're much more confident than if it's new.
So that's quite heroic in itself. They decided to take this one step further and that's to do the converse.
So now what they did was to get people to study 40 invisible works.
So this time around, we switch things around. So you're going to study words flashed on a screen that you can't read, right?
So you have no conscious recognition of these words or recall of these words.
And you could imagine that the participants who were asked to be involved in this thought this was also dark because they were asked later,
was this one of the words you saw before? This time at retrieval, the words are visible.
So this time these words are completely visible to you.
And you simply asked, was this a word you've seen before in that list or not?
But remember, at encoding, these were these were masked so that you have no conscious awareness of the identity of these words.
And again, what they found was that people are able to do this a better than chance.
So even though they're not aware of the words, they so they can make this discrimination about whether this is a new or an old word from this.
The final bit in this heroic study, which I really didn't believe was going to work out,
was when they decided to test memory for words which were invisible at encoding, using words which were invisible at retrieval.
Okay, so the words here are words you cannot recognise when they're presented on the screen in front of you.
And the words here are also words you cannot recognise because they flash by and you have no conscious awareness of what these words.
And yet despite that, what they found, where people were able to discriminate at above chance between old and new items.
So this is surprising, but maybe not so surprising if we think back in terms of what we found out about patients,
they were unaware of information on one side of space.
Nevertheless, that information got into the brain and somehow primed, both perceptually and semantically.
And here what we're showing is a similar effect.
You have to work really hard to give it a similar effect in healthy brains, but this is possible.
So these are the sorts of behavioural studies that have suggested that priming can occur with consciously and unconsciously in our brains.
What about the physiology? And I'm going to show you a few just a few examples of this kind of work.
So in terms of visual stimuli, Gordon Bayliss and Ed Rose, also in Oxford,
were one of the first to show that if you record from the monkey visual system and they were recording really from the temporal lobe here,
what they found was that there were some neurones. Just to orient you here this time along here.
This is the firing rate of a neurone that there were some neurones which fired with a particular type of stimulus.
So here's that neurone firing with that stimulus and who say you won't find that stimulus.
But if you repeated the same stimulus, what we call match trials, the firing rate of that neurone would reduce.
It wasn't working in the way of the pure sensory neurones.
If it was just simply responding to that stimulus, it would say without anything else, it would still be responding here.
But if they used another item, then they might get firing in that in that neurone.
And to cut a long story short, what they found was that with successive presentations,
some overall in this population, the neuronal discharge reduced with successive presentations.
So repeated exposure to the same stimulus led to reduced firing.
And if you like, an analogue of that can also be shown in humans.
This is a study performed by MIT Krug in the 1990s.
And here the study is really measuring event related potentials.
These are potentials recorded over the human scalp from electrodes just placed on the scalp.
And this kind of system.
So here's the nose, the side use of the back of the head.
And the first presentation of a stimulus might provoke the kind of activity we seeing here.
So just arranging these these squiggles really come from the different electrodes.
So this is the front of the head. This is the back of the head, right and left.
And averaged over the presentation of many stimuli.
What they found was that activity could be evoked by a visual stimulus being presented.
But if that stimulus was represented, there was far less activity.
Very similar to what I just showed you previously with the neurones in monkey visual cortex, in particular cortex.
And some researchers have suggested that actually what's happening here is that there is effectively a sharpening of the representation.
And by sharpening, they mean that when you first present a stimulus, many different neurones might actually be involved in responding to it.
With repeated presentation, there is effectively a drop out of some of the neurones which are redundant,
which aren't necessary to encode that information.
Only a small number might be really required to encode the properties of this umbrella after repeated exposure.
Interestingly, this the same kind of evidence has been shown using functional imaging, ephemeral function, functional magnetic resonance imaging.
And I'm just going to show you one example here for what's called repetition priming.
It's turned out to be a really useful tool in many different ways.
Here again, this is from the lab of Schecter. What they found was with repeated exposure to the same stimulus, there was less activity.
So these areas of activity are really showing you the areas which show repetition,
priming, reduction in activity with repeated exposure to the same stimulus,
both in prefrontal cortex in front of the brain, but also posteriorly in areas in the occipital cortex and in the fusiform gyrus.
This is flipping the brain so that we're not looking at the under surface.
This is the front, this is the back, this is the surface in the fusiform gyrus.
So with first presentation you can see quite strong activation, but with repeated exposure there is suppression.
Repetition priming seems to be something that it's widespread and with repeated presentation of the same stimulus.
As such a repetition. Priming has been used in many ways.
I think this is quite a nice one from my colleagues back at UCL, the beginning of the 2000,
they were trying to crack the problem about what we call object constancy.
So how is it that we know different exemplars of the same category of object chairs?
Well, let's say cats really belong to that group.
It's quite a difficult problem in many, many ways.
What they tried to do is to examine this in a physiological way by presenting either real objects or not object,
and then looking for the areas in the brain which show this kind of repetition, priming,
reduced activity, and instead of just looking at whether objects can reduce the priming.
They also showed the same objects at different sizes or from different viewpoints.
So although they're the same object, they're invariant in terms of how we would say that is the same object.
And they look for those areas of the brain which didn't really mind about the
size of the object on the screen or the viewpoint from which it was looked at.
And what they found was that actually this blue area here also in the fusiform gyrus, again, was showing the brain flipped over here.
This blue area here is both a viewer view and a size independent.
It doesn't care whether you've stretched the image or whether you're looking at the chair from a completely different direction.
That evokes the same degree of repetition, priming.
It's the same degree of suppression.
So presumably the neurones here are interested in qualities of the chair, regardless of the viewpoint it's being shown or the size of that chair.
It's quite interesting. And the final bit from that study was that actually for the same object category, it's a chance.
There was only really one region which was of interest, and this was again,
this left prefrontal area and inferior frontal gyrus which showed repetition priming across different stimuli for the same object category.
This area has become very, very interesting to many different people because the idea is developed that this
might be the area that's really interested in conceptual or semantic priming,
whereas those areas we were talking about in the back of the brain might be far more interested in perceptual priming.
Last thing I wanted to show you was a test of that and how neuroscience has moved to try and look at this.
So here individuals were exposed to different kinds of activity.
And your job here is to say whether it's a living thing or a non-living thing,
anonymous judgement that was previously and the manipulation was some of these items were repeated, whereas others were novel.
So again, you can do imaging experiments in this kind of to show which areas reduce activity with repeated exposure to the same stimulus.
And interestingly, it's a similar pattern. So there are areas in the back of the brain which are more interested in visual simile.
And there also is also this area in the left prefrontal cortex,
which she seems to be particularly interested and which is less active when you repeat a stimulus.
And these investigators went on to use something called transcranial magnetic stimulation to an S,
which is effectively a way of disrupting brain function in healthy individuals for a short time.
And they used TMS either over that left frontal area or they used it over a control site, in this case, the primary motor cortex.
And what they found was that after receiving a train of these magnetic pulses over the left, inferior frontal lobe,
when they put those individuals into the scanner, the the extent of repetition priming was really negligible.
But the signal in terms of the areas in the back of the brain still continued unchanged.
This didn't happen with the controlled stimulation.
There was no effect really on the repetition of suppression either in front of the back of the brain.
And interestingly, with this left frontal transcranial magnetic stimulation, what happened was there was also a change in behaviour.
So normally we much faster to make those responses. But whether something is viable or not live if we've been exposed to previously.
And that continues in the control group, but not in those who have this transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left,
inferior frontal, which many people wonder might be the sort of.
Very good, very semantic priming. So let me just close.
I think I've covered very, very quickly. I'm giving you some idea of the evidence that's been used for both perceptual and conceptual priming.
And this has really led to the idea that actually memory systems, human memory systems, are really fractionated.
The studies of our music have been particularly influential and helpful in this way.
I think I've shown you some examples of unconscious priming that occur.
In individuals who have the neglect syndrome, but also in healthy people.
And finally, there is some physiological evidence, both from urine recordings to imaging, if it arrived in healthy people,
that there might be a physiological correlate to what we're seeing in terms of behavioural priming.
Okay, so I'll stop. So I look at this physical passenger jet, and I know you have wide ranging requests from many pieces of media and psychoanalysis.
I take a gentle temperature fiction that more or less cover some of the rage in me.
He has the victim theme as it is the violence of another intense,
phenomenological philosophy with recent developments in the cognitive science, which is one that is covered with multiple projects.
He has an account of manuscript transmission from the late medieval,
mystical texts the Sister Catherine produced for the 13 times through to the 17th century and also under working title, fiction and other minds.
He's engaged in an investigation in collaboration with NAMI.
It's a terrific restatement of the way that fiction models and matches a complex understanding of human sexual interaction.
And today, he's going to be looking at some of the implications of research on finding the models of identity,
which choice is especially important, such as those either go under the title Existential Choices Primate Models of Human Identity.
And thanks very much, SIMON and thank you very much for inviting me and to myself for such a stimulating talk.
So I'm going to be trying to respond to what I've come across of some of the primary literature and putting it on a collision course with some
of the ways of thinking about individual identity and taking responsibility for your actions that one has if one's coming from the humanities.
And I'm taking, as my key example a piece of gore,
just because I think that there is how much one course in question and however much different aspects
and of methodologies from the last 50 years have called in question ideas of individual responsibility.
There's still some everyday sense in which we would like to think that we are in control of our own choices.
And some there's some everyday appeal of something like their authenticity, which is in the end committed,
if not to Google, and then further back to various religious ideas of living the good life.
So I wanted to start with a piece of paper about how we living in the truth is this process of living the truth for ourselves in order to then say,
could anything survive of this model?
If we take seriously the stuff about all the things that are happening at a personal level to control our behaviour?
So is a piece of cake a go at the beginning?
I'm not going to be hitting you with many quotations like this, although there's a few in German from Nietzsche, which I'll translate.
But so I'm going to start with some themes of the money come concentration and then it should be easy from there on in.
So the typical in the concept of anxiety basic $0.44.
On the other hand, what I'm speaking about is very plain and simple,
namely that truth is for the particular individual only as he, as he in himself produces in action.
Truth has always had many like claimants.
But the question is whether a person will, in the deepest sense, acknowledge the truth, will allow it to permeate his whole being,
will accept all its consequences and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and injured his case for the consequence.
So this is basically all responding to big scale Hegelian models of how a kind of truth is beyond us and kind of just the course of history.
And he's saying whatever may be in some sense objectively true,
it's always going to be about how we establish our own relationship to that thing or state of affairs or moral view.
And nothing is true if we haven't gone through this process of making it our truth.
And in a modern neuroscientific vein,
Multichain Friedman was working in Berkeley and wrote the book How Brains Make Up Their Minds also has a kind of solipsistic,
individualistic take on things which you grounded in your neuronal populations anyway, he says,
every choice we make in everyday life is a way of grasping sort our parts of the world.
We all cohabit, but in our terms, in accord with our unique experiences.
So even from a neuroscientific point of business, there's still this idea that choices would in some sense be ours in an important individual way.
So this is, as it were, my starting point.
And and I think it's there because of my sense that in in the way many people live their lives,
the fact that our choices are now is is important to how we structure our lives.
However much Anita or Derrida has told us, this is all nonsense, right?
Of course, that in the continental philosophy tradition, there is. Tradition, which was calling it in question, albeit in interesting ways.
So this is just a little bit to say that Nietzsche got there first and then the priming
experiments came along and confirmed what Nietzsche had been saying all along.
So this is this is a bit in and there was actually an interesting new book on nature and put into neuroscience.
So this is a bit of German in German and translated quickly and it's Nietzsche
basically saying that the we think we will and make our own decisions but
in fact that's some sort of retrospective effect where a number of different
plural souls acting below the surface make decisions and make things happen.
And then some exactly part of us which one takes responsibility for us and for it feels really good because we've done this clever thing,
of course, very often because we've done this awful thing.
But in sense it's not the thinking and it's actually taking these decisions, whether this is on the left.
So I just translate actually rather than waste time again, the German.
So the person willing making a decision believes with a certain amount of certainty that will actually somehow belong together.
So if I will something that I control the action that results from it. And in doing this,
Nietzsche says the person willing is essentially taking over the feeling of pleasure that the parts
of the personality that actually did the action have from having successfully done something.
So it's taking over the kind of the upper executive part of ourselves is taking over the
pleasure of the Underworld's or the Under Souls who actually did the work of Nietzsche.
Those this idea that our body is just a gazelle south of New Zealand.
It's like an apartment block of lots of different souls.
So he's essentially he's having a kind of lots of sub personal processes which are all just getting on with their business.
And then this figure called the ego consciousness occasionally takes decision responsibility for
decisions which they like and and says in a kind of parody of Louis the 14 letters in one this in one.
So we misguidedly think take responsibility for things that we haven't the central control haven't done.
And then he say what's happening here is that what happens in all happy political situation communities
is that the ruling classes take responsibility for things they haven't done that they left the means to.
So this is basically Nietzsche saying that we can't trust consciousness in the conscious account of why or how we did things.
This thing, things going on in the background when we happen to like what's happened, what's been done, we'll take responsibility for it.
And it's just kind of nothing, but it's our own ideological account of ourselves.
And this has come back in the primary picture. And what's that Nietzsche was asking us to do is rethink underlying assumptions
and actually get rid of the very distinction between free will and unfree will,
basically, because he thinks that and this is a sort of Walter Freeman point, that actually reality is just very chaotic and very messy.
And that and the order we impose on it as to whether or not something is part of a
causal chain will always depend on the perspective from which we're looking at it.
So there's any number of causal stories you could tell about events, and causality isn't just there.
It depends on everywhere the job that we want to get done with a particular facet of what we want to analyse.
So we're just trying to say that causality is our conceptual tool.
It's not somebody who's just inside the universe because the universe is happening in so many different directions,
on so many levels, that that would be kind of to simplify issues too much.
So, however, and this is the other reason for continuing time with Nietzsche and the argument is that in
the same way that Chicago had said truth is because I made it my truth in some part of me,
I've to it's consciously own things. Nietzsche comes along and says, Well,
the only things it's a load of bunkum is just taking responsibility for things that you can't be said to have done in any conscious way.
Nevertheless,
Nietzsche has still thinks that there must be some sense in which we can become agents of our own life or take responsibility for our own life.
And if it's not consciousness, then is it something else? And is that a twisted?
He basically says, Well, then maybe it's something called the body, which is gain.
So there's some sense in which what is being called the apartment block of undersold in beyond good and
evil in that which was to which was written to support the way there is some different non-conscious,
but nevertheless unified sense of the human body is a kind of a form of self that drives us.
So he's saying tools and that understanding and spirit of tools and toys.
It's all part of his critique of the conscious self and understanding.
Understanding and spirit of tools and toys behind them is something that Nietzsche was calling the self.
So here he's trying to use the word self to get away from from conscious and self understanding.
And it might be there in its kind of usage of self that you'll give it to the self.
Also those with the eyes of the senses. It also listens with the ears of the spirit.
The self is always this and with compassion.
And forces and conquers and destroys its dominance and is also the dominator of the ego behind your thoughts and feelings.
My brother stands a very powerful and ordering figure.
An unknown white man called the self in your body is where this self begins.
Your body is this. So for this order.
So what I want to set up is the kick in hope that we can consciously reiterate our lives.
Nietzsche's critique. But having done his pity, he nevertheless wants some sense that we control our lives in his idea.
This is an appeal to the body. It's also interesting and you have noticed from my translation maybe that the niches idiom is odd,
thus that this is a parody of Luther's German translation of the Bible.
And so when Mitchell is trying to work out where we go next, once we've called in question a number of views about selfhood.
When you're looking for a vocabulary that could replace naive self understanding, what a nice emphasis on on consciousness.
He looks interestingly to religious vocabularies, which he parodies in parts exploits to explain this,
to appeal to or to reference the sorts of social practices that may be
historically of these places where people didn't rely too much on consciousness.
So when when one of my one of one kind of strand of my argument to it.
So for that group in terms of the room,
is that if we're if we're taking on board the sort of priming story about how we are not consciously in control of everything we do,
we're looking at ways of dealing with this problem or retaining responsibility.
Then some sense of the the places that historically or the sorts of practices historically we
have developed for living a life that isn't consciousness centred may sometimes be useful,
or maybe places we can return to kind of work out what's left of responsibility if some naive idea of the conscious choice is thrown out the window.
So there's some sense in which religious practices may be a thing to look at, amongst others.
And the other thing I want to make sure is that when we if we're going to do some critique
of the idea of consciously owning our choices that we have to keep as our argument,
some understanding that responsibility is something that human beings do,
that very often the argument goes, well, we thought that responsibility meant only consciously my choices.
I can't own my choices. Therefore, responsibility doesn't exist.
And that just seems to be wrong. That responsibility is a social practice.
It is something we we recognise people around us who we think are responsible.
So therefore we just get used to just describing what we call responsibility and turn on seeing how that works.
So we may just be that we had a naive account of what that was, namely some super unconscious, self transparent way of relating to our actions.
It's obviously not that, but I think we have to acknowledge that taking responsibility is something that human beings already do.
We just have to try to connect humanity with understandings and in the neuroscience that helps us explain it.
So basically I'm encouraging us to try and look again at the sort of cultural practices of being responsible.
Depends on and this is the sort of ordinary language I think is essentially saying if we look at how we talk about responsibility,
where we go to to to find examples of responsible behaviour,
then we will find we might find ways of helping us rethink once we've given up this rather naive
view that being responsible means being self transparent and being entirely control of my choices.
And so just because I like it, this is an appeal of this plea for excuses, which, as the title suggests, is, again,
it's a reflection on questions of responsibility and and how we think about how we can be agents are and actions.
So what I've done so far is I've set up the kick, the idea and gold standard of completely consciously owning your own truth.
It's probably unfair on kick off, but for the moment I said Well that's already being questioned.
But even in the niche in tradition, the question comes to want some sense of how we can nevertheless be agents of our own lives.
And I'm saying that when we do that,
we are going to have we shouldn't just because because a very narrow version of conscious be any good decisions gets thrown out the window.
We shouldn't simply we shouldn't then give up on the idea of responsibility altogether.
Take a sort of historical view to the ways in which so far human beings have managed responsibility for themselves.
So what I'm trying to do, and it is, as it were, working progress and I'm not going to give lots of finished answers.
I try to give a model of making and owning decisions which draws on neuroscientific and social
psychological literature so that whatever version of kind of post capability and responsibility we have,
it has to be compatible with a naturalistic concept. How the brain seems to make decisions.
I think when we're looking at how these accounts thrive in experiments,
I think we have to have a properly thought within a logical account of where incident happens.
And essentially next time I'm going to be saying the group that I'm particularly is we're going to be
following a bit that they they just don't do quite enough of putting human beings in niches with other people.
There's not enough of kind of putting a brain in a wider ecology when when they're thinking about their experiments.
And that seems to be and that means that you then get some full senses of how decisions are going to be made on your own sort of stuff.
So essentially and sometimes I kind of, I say, well, the problem is they haven't read Heidegger well enough,
but that argument isn't going to really play with people so much.
Didn't happen to Darwin, but enough because if you go back to Darwin, he's all about things being connected in an emergency.
And, and finally when we're kind of developing our naturalistically informed account
of decision making and we've been properly phenomenological or cultural
about it just to make sure that we're not leaving behind everyday practices of taking responsible everyday practices or taking responsibility,
but realise that what we're trying to make sense of is the things that we already recognise as taking responsibility.
And we didn't have to suddenly call that one question because we've got hundreds of years of people knowing what it means to be responsible.
So what I'm going to be drawing on a bit is one of these super useful arguments in behaviour
we target outputs in behavioural and brain science is where you get someone makes
the statement and then all the people who might be quite good in that field come and
reply to it and therefore you kind of get a sense of what's going on in the moment.
I'd already been following the work of John Barnes on priming and then last last year he and Julie Wang published this
thing where they try and put some of their priming stuff together in order to come up with a theory of human nature,
essentially a theory of the human personality, and try to have the selfish goal,
autonomously operating motivational structures as the proximate cause of human judgement and behaviour.
And both backgrounds have been doing this sort of work since 1990s and it's so social psychological research
into priming and automaticity and they're very interested in the way history is group and it's very interesting
the way in which behaviour is driven by situational cues operating below the threshold of consciousness and it's
kind of the things that matter was talking about where you show people words and it affects their behaviour.
Like you show them the word bingo and they walk more slowly when you show them the word rude and then
they have an argument with the person they happen to meet in the corridor and this sort of thing.
So the questions then are addressing in this new ask home are as follows The environment is a rich source of multiple,
oftentimes simultaneous cues, many of which are linked to different, often competing behavioural impulses.
How are these parallel environmental influences funnelled into the necessarily serial behaviour of a single individual?
So they've noticed the way in which we behave because the situation makes us behave in
that way and the situation may be trying to make us behave in a number of different ways.
And if we how, how do we reconcile the different problems that we're not even aware of that are kind of forcing
some personal processes to kick into action or make us be rude or be all at the same time.
So that in us then than other characteristics of an evolutionarily ancient system that could integrate multiple,
sometimes competing influences into overt behaviour expressed at the level of the individual organism,
particularly in the absence of overarching conscious processing to integrate and prioritise these goals.
So they're basically saying this, this sort of situationally prompted behaviour, predates consciousness.
It's kind of, it's something that other mammals would share or lack of share.
And however this sort of conflict in overdetermined situations is managed, it can't just be black consciousness,
otherwise all other animals will be failing to be able to kind of manage their lives and even much more carried out ways.
And it's also telling a story that is kind of even makes the evolutionary sense
that there must be ways in which live below the threshold of consciousness,
before consciousness, these sorts of problems are being managed.
And then that those are the questions. That's why hang a bar.
And then obviously this is also something asked by some of the responses in the talking asking why is it that we have to do one thing at a time?
It seems to be that whatever happens we're going to have some sense that human behaviour is in lots
of cases we're multitasking and sometimes I'm have to choose between talking to my mom on Skype,
picking the kids that I might be able to do both at the same time,
and lots of situations in which we don't this, this kind of idea of serial behaviour.
One boy doing one thing just seems to be I'm pushing things that are somewhat unhelpful.
Anyway, the what's, what the article then draws together is lots of ways in which we are constantly doing,
you know, at a level we're not aware of things that make sense.
So this kind of intentional behaviour which we do not consciously intend and lots of
our interaction with other people and with our environment is driven by these forms,
purposive but nevertheless unconscious behaviour and to describe this.
But, and when I use the term goal, which is some sense of some prime sensible response to something that's happened.
So intentional behaviours honed by evolution, prompted by cues in the situation we're currently negotiating and for which we don't need.
In the same way that the message research is saying we respond to something and have no idea that we've been primed,
the situation primes us to act in a particular way. The evolutionary honed behaviour kicks in and we're not aware that we're doing it.
So it's important that we do not need consciousness for these things to happen.
And then what? One of the things that's fine, but I think that adding to the discussion is basically borrowing from the metaphor of the selfish gene.
They come up with this idea of the selfish goal, which basically means that once a goal has kicked in,
it just wants to fight or wants a form of behaviour which that a goal has kicked in,
then it is just interested in in that piece of behaviour being followed through,
regardless of whether it's in the long term interests of the individual or whatever else.
And so you're going to have a, you're going to have a number of, as it were,
our behaviour would be driven by these responses kicking in and then just trying to push through to the end and competing with each other to be,
to be the form of behaviour that dominates what we're doing at any particular moment.
So this is very much like Nietzsche's apartment block of Endosomes or of these kind of underlings
doing things in the background of which the rules are not if there is such a thing as no.
So in this one bar count goals or as in forms of prime behaviour, are competing with other goals concurrently operating for dominance.
And this is a version, as it were, one level of, of what we already know from then,
that it's a account of the choices in the machine of consciousness.
Therefore then it's more of a consciousness. There's various threads of what we're paying attention to,
what we're dealing with any one moment which are kind of competing for it to be the same thing that we really are consciously reflecting on.
And in the past, when world this is actually happening, a let down,
there's a number of goals that are competing toward a number of forms of behaviour, competing to dominate the things that will actually be doing.
And, and, and one of them is likely in their account to the dominant, although again, as the responses to the article pointed out,
maybe they'll be kind of compromises when in fact when they would actually
have to be the sort of fighting it to the death that they sometimes suggest.
So this seems to be useful because the way it challenges a number of familiar assumptions.
So one of the things is that unconscious goal,
conflict resolution is possible so that it's just and more and more and more information about the way the.
Lots and lots of intelligent work and the depth of what goes on in the background that we don't need to know something about.
So, uh, yeah, I mean,
and even means that things that were previously associated very much with our conscious endeavours can happen without even knowing it.
Then we can. We can be primates to exercise more self-control in ways that we don't necessarily know or aren't aware of.
If it's a context which is there, if we've been helped to prime to to be to not have that piece of cake or whatever,
then we can without even being aware that we're exercising dietary self control, this goal can come to dominate.
And even when we're pursuing conscious goals, we won't necessarily know how much that's affecting how we interact with the environment.
Because one of the things about the goal, but I want to describe it,
which in fact it's interestingly we kind of heideggerian phenomenology is that the thing
that we're currently doing will certainly be ah will affect how the world appears to us.
So the world is disclosed through the tasks that we're currently interested in.
So obviously I will I will, I notice read traffic lights more in the car than when I'm on the sidewalk.
As a simple example, I'm not I don't react to the red of a red traffic light when I'm on the sidewalk in a way I would if I'm driving.
And then another thing that that bar and van want to see is that this model of goals
kind of operating in the background with us without our conscious processing means.
Working memory is also something which must be there available in the background.
It doesn't we don't have to think of working memory as something which is necessarily conscious and this is an off colour.
But I'm going to people have been making since the early 2000.
So that's the a quick kind of summary of the sorts of things that so but one is doing a sort of survey article of
the ways in which that and other research on priming might feed into a remodelling of how we think about decisions.
So I'm just kind of doing a kind of mental summary of someone's message. Summary with the points is then to bring us back to thinking about this,
this more familiar model of how in the humanities people might want to take it.
Think about taking responsibility for that.
Um, so what about, um, basically making the point that we don't drive our own behaviour and this has kind of been,
you know, it must be pretty clear now for an hour and a half that we don't drive our body.
Our central claim here is that an individual comprises multiple goals,
each of which exerts a selfish influence on how that person sees the world and behaves in it,
guiding judgements and behaving in the service of the current goal,
but not necessarily in the service of the individual's actual overall best interests.
So that's the first thing that I'm saying. So when we're thinking about and taking responsibility in the golden way and having truth for us,
then who or what is it that would be taking the truth for who?
If we've kind of if we fragmented into this apartment block of different unresolved and we've given up the
idea that there's a super soul who's kind of ruling more than who who of what would be taking responsibility.
And then the important point is that which makes the things all doubly difficult is
not only are we a fragmentary agglomeration of evolutionary whole forms of behaviour,
but we're very good at telling us so things about why we do things.
So confabulation and self-deception mean that the first person view of our own behaviour is in no way a privileged one.
So because of confabulation, self-deception, we think and understand what drives our behaviour and evolution doesn't particularly care.
That we don't understand is sometimes actually of a benefit to know, not know why we've done something.
It makes us better lives. When we're when we're selling ourselves to our peers, we because we don't think we've been selfish when we have.
And so we can convince up here. And also so to the extent that human judgement and behaviour were driven by go before the central self even evolved,
many instances of self-deception can be seen as a result of the autonomous nature of all Google pursuits.
So we started with kick taking responsibility for our own behaviour, owning our own truth.
Now we've ended up with a situation where if we look at the sort of primary literature we've split into,
I mean, it's not just memory that's fractionalised.
All our activities have been driven by quite autonomous forms of kind of routines,
and our ability to randomness and get ourselves in order is also being questioned
because we're so good at giving the wrong reasons for why we did things.
So before I then kind of take the final plunge and connect the different bits of the argument, some, some of the in fact, in order to help.
Myself may say responsibility from the plurality of of of the primary literature some possible problems with the bar one model.
So I'm not sure that you necessarily need the word goals as opposed to some basically doing things for reasons not to be true and driven,
which I don't understand why it necessarily has to be the case.
And obviously, the question of selfish routines and responses seems like it doesn't matter.
And that's the most useful term that if inspired by reading some Dawkins and that's what it's there,
but it basically just means forms of behaviour that have their own autonomy and momentum and there's no
reason why they couldn't be connected to what I'm calling physical forms of togetherness through sex,
touch and empathy of empathy, other forms of emotional contagion.
There's no reason why we couldn't be primed to do something which is precisely about our embeddedness in the social world of human interaction.
So yes, to the kind of the momentum of these routines and then some personal operation.
But I don't know why we have to call that selfish.
All it seems to be, seems to be misleading and how it stops us being able to get out of the problems that this approach throws up.
So as well as getting rid of the idea that selfish is the only way of talking about the goals, then as I warned,
I think that we basically need to get beyond the isolated brain subject model because I always am, if always in a niche.
And you have to think that niche always in terms of when you're thinking about what the brain does.
And so and then just a bit of the origin of species to remind us of this embeddedness
of any particular creature in a set of relationships with other creatures,
and also in a world and also with other concepts, topics.
The structure of every organic being is related in the most essential yet often hidden matter to that of all manner,
to that of all other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence from which it has to escape, on which you get praise.
So we're always part of a wider network, which in phenomenological terms we would call being in the world with others.
Okay. So we started with kick off subject on his or her own and it was very much his own and kicked off the language completely on his own,
her own, taking over his truth himself needs to try to get us apart.
We still want to the version of responsibility,
but the Prime Minister seems to confirm a sort of niche in view of us being a multiplicity of different impulses that aren't necessarily controlled.
And the idea that our own ability consciously to inhibit behaviours would be the way out of this problem
doesn't work because it's not clear that our conscious account of what we're doing is going to be reliable.
So this the kind of that critique of where of what drives our behaviour is premised on this kind of isolated, selfish.
It's the kind of Cartesian subject slipped in is still informing the, the brain science.
And so I'm saying well, I'm basically saying, well,
if we try and put visuals together and then put some sort of being an ecological niche into our argument,
will that help us get beyond the apparent impasse that we might want, that in everyday life the version of responsibility of the Guardian?
So the science is telling us, in no way I'm so embarrassed, amenable to challenge the idea of individuals earning their behaviour.
But essentially I think if we if we take, if we put ourselves back in a world, we can see a way beyond it.
So our behaviour is driven by situational cues.
This is the problem. We might inhibit cues, but conflicts between goals don't need us to be there.
To be doing the inhibiting and the story we tell won't be accurate.
It might be some sort of computation. I guess this is just summarising where we've got.
So how could truth more into authenticity work then?
I think the basic thing you have to make effectively that truth is something we do with other people and that will solve all our
problems and essentially dissolve the social psychological literature on the ways in which we may confabulation of our own behaviour.
But we are in many ways interestingly reliable about other people's behaviours and other people's self unself understanding.
And often the way of my blindness and your insight into what I'm not very good at would kind of interestingly correlate to one another.
So essentially if we're if we don't have our individual on his or her own trying to own the truth,
but we have a group of people helping you know each other well, hopefully helping each other to own the truth together.
Then we're going to get further. And what's more, we're not going to have to reinvent the wheel,
because then we're going to look at cultural resources for how groups of people move out themselves, get a sense of control of their own life.
What we have lost is this heroic image of the kick marginal, high degree individual who runs on their own life or on their own.
And so this is basically I just alighted on some work by Brazilian Carlsson, but there's quite a lot with the literature,
which is basically about the ways in which other people know more about us than we know about ourselves,
which can be, as it were, the to counteract the sense that because the Prime Minister tells us we never know what we're doing,
we're just doing it anyway. So bacteria and cults and we are astute judges of each other's personalities,
likely due to the importance of interpersonal perception for our social species.
So there's an evolutionary pressure not just to react quickly to situations,
but also to be able to read other people and counting, not necessarily households.
As a result, other people, especially those who spend a lot of time around us and who we are open to,
almost inevitably become experts on our personality. And therefore, in order to kind of get beyond the first person privilege in a reliable way,
you need some sort of interaction of self and other ratings of views of what of what we do.
So we need both self and other ratings of a person's personality do not simply provide redundant information.
Instead they capture different aspects. And so in a sense, we end up encouraging some versions of kind of practices, of sincerity,
where it turns out also that whilst we're not very good at explaining our own behaviour,
if we conducted a thought experiment where we say, what would someone else say about this?
We're actually or how it's what's someone else's impression of us?
We're quite good at registering other people's impressions. So in fact there are ways in which people would be encouraged to do the sort of
metacognition where they feed into some sort of scepticism of their own views.
It seems that we have some awareness of how others see us. We do not always make use of this information and when judging our own personality.
So basically what I hope I've encouraged us to do is so we take seriously this Protestant sense that we can become forces of our own minds and niche,
that even this critique of it is still possible to not think that he wants to do it.
And indeed it's in lots of cultural traditions that we want to be there and take responsibility for our life.
On the day of reckoning, the the kind of primary literature in interesting ways plays upon what it might mean
to take responsibility because so much is happening at a level that we don't control.
However, I think that if we if we feed into this primary, which is more sense of how human beings are doing things together,
then these confabulation and self-deception problems which used to be there when
we when we left on our own to try to make sense for behaviour can disappear.
Essentially what is and this is trying to do is show how in the technological and or phenomenological reading of the basic starting point,
namely of people embedded in a world with others, can encourage us to kind of show the actions that we might take,
the debates that other people are provoking with that insistence.
Right, right. Insistence that we take the primate insights seriously.
Thank you very much, indeed. So while.