1 00:00:01,420 --> 00:00:05,880 I would say. 2 00:00:23,200 --> 00:00:34,810 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. 3 00:00:35,650 --> 00:00:40,190 Then I'll open the floor to any specific questions you'd like. 4 00:00:40,220 --> 00:00:48,250 That's Professor Hussain for a brief period, then hand over to Ben Morgan from the Humanities and again after his talk, 5 00:00:48,250 --> 00:00:51,160 offer the chance if you want to ask any specific questions to Ben. 6 00:00:51,820 --> 00:01:01,270 After that, we will head over to the drinks and corner for a short break, after which we will open a general session. 7 00:01:03,340 --> 00:01:10,209 So our first speaker today is Professor Masood saying he was professor of clinical 8 00:01:10,210 --> 00:01:14,230 neurology at UCL and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, 9 00:01:15,970 --> 00:01:20,200 and he was the London deputy director of the UCL Institutes for Cognitive Neuroscience. 10 00:01:20,620 --> 00:01:25,959 He is now the holder of a principal fellowship by the Wellcome Trust and is Professor 11 00:01:25,960 --> 00:01:30,190 of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford and a Fellow of New College. 12 00:01:31,600 --> 00:01:38,110 His research focuses on inattention, disorders of memory, impulsivity and apathy. 13 00:01:39,520 --> 00:01:42,340 He's developing techniques to examine attention, 14 00:01:42,580 --> 00:01:48,880 short term or working memory and decision making in healthy people and in patients with neurological disorders. 15 00:01:49,990 --> 00:01:51,129 And in doing so, 16 00:01:51,130 --> 00:01:57,250 he's beginning to understand some of the brain mechanisms that are disrupted when people don't pay attention or forget information rapidly, 17 00:01:57,400 --> 00:02:00,610 when they make impulsive decisions or can't motivated to act. 18 00:02:01,090 --> 00:02:06,760 And that research is helping to develop treatments for conditions in which phenomena like that become disabling, 19 00:02:07,030 --> 00:02:12,460 such as in Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease, or in developmental disorders like ADHD. 20 00:02:13,630 --> 00:02:18,010 And today, he's going to talk to us about the neuroscience of unconscious memory. 21 00:02:18,750 --> 00:02:25,640 That's. Thank you very much, Simon, and thank you so much for the invitation. 22 00:02:28,550 --> 00:02:35,270 It would be fair to say that neuroscience thinks it's got a long way, but I think in neuroscience, 23 00:02:35,270 --> 00:02:40,370 in this room would be agreeing with me when I say that actually we're in we're really 24 00:02:40,370 --> 00:02:46,220 at an infancy in our understanding of memory despite over 100 years worth of work. 25 00:02:46,790 --> 00:03:00,080 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. 26 00:03:00,770 --> 00:03:07,850 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. 27 00:03:08,630 --> 00:03:16,570 And he's now had the fortune to meet a woman who seems to be deeply amnesic. 28 00:03:17,690 --> 00:03:23,150 He sees her every day, but she has no recollection of meeting him every day. 29 00:03:23,540 --> 00:03:37,460 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. 30 00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:42,740 So one day when he goes to shake her hand, he has a pin in his hand. 31 00:03:42,800 --> 00:03:47,540 This is that pin. And when he shakes the hand, he pricks her skin. 32 00:03:48,320 --> 00:03:53,330 She's a little bit surprised, but brushed it off. He apologises, and that's all there is to it. 33 00:03:54,710 --> 00:04:01,310 But the next day, when he sees her again, she also doesn't recognise him. 34 00:04:01,790 --> 00:04:07,790 He goes to shake his hand. But at that moment she withdraws it subconsciously. 35 00:04:08,240 --> 00:04:11,720 Somehow she's registered that this is not a hand you want to touch. 36 00:04:13,130 --> 00:04:23,720 And probably this is one of the first bits of evidence that priming can occur in individuals who are deeply amnesic. 37 00:04:24,350 --> 00:04:31,430 They have no conscious awareness of meeting this doctor, and yet they know there's something wrong about shaking his hand. 38 00:04:32,720 --> 00:04:42,500 And that kind of work really has led to this general scheme about the fractionation of long term memory. 39 00:04:42,510 --> 00:04:48,860 This is not about short term or working memory, and long term memory has been thought of, if you like, 40 00:04:48,980 --> 00:04:58,400 to consist of explicit memory, perhaps with conscious recall or implicit memory without conscious recall. 41 00:04:59,090 --> 00:05:04,490 And even within the explicit memory system, there appears to be fractionation. 42 00:05:05,930 --> 00:05:09,620 There is what we would refer to as episodic memory. 43 00:05:10,250 --> 00:05:14,180 Recollection for what you did yesterday. 44 00:05:14,180 --> 00:05:19,310 With whom? At what time? Where, putting all those bits of information together. 45 00:05:19,880 --> 00:05:26,450 And there's also semantic memory, the understanding of facts, bits of knowledge. 46 00:05:26,750 --> 00:05:34,370 You know, Paris is the capital of France. You know that a few weeks ago there was a very unusual events that occurred there. 47 00:05:34,700 --> 00:05:38,120 You know, all those facts and this is thought to be semantic memory. 48 00:05:39,540 --> 00:05:44,630 Finally, in the implicit memory section, we have things that go under the name of procedural memory, 49 00:05:45,320 --> 00:05:50,210 how you learn to ride a bike, drive a car, that kind of thing, which I'm not going to deal with today, 50 00:05:50,990 --> 00:05:56,480 but I am going to do today, is to focus on this issue about priming, which is Simon mentioned, 51 00:05:56,930 --> 00:06:05,960 is enhanced identification in some way of objects or words or in fact, any other kind of material you might have seen previously. 52 00:06:08,030 --> 00:06:13,040 And that somehow facilitates your response to that item. 53 00:06:15,690 --> 00:06:26,010 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. 54 00:06:26,290 --> 00:06:30,090 Now, I don't know if you can make out anything here. These are fragmented stimuli. 55 00:06:30,810 --> 00:06:38,340 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. 56 00:06:40,180 --> 00:06:45,460 Yes. And then if you go all the way, it becomes very evident what these stimuli are. 57 00:06:46,330 --> 00:06:58,899 And these kind of stimuli have been used a lot in research in amnesia and pioneered really by Elizabeth Warrington and Larry Weiss. 58 00:06:58,900 --> 00:07:02,770 Class Vice Krantz was the professor of psychology at Oxford. 59 00:07:03,400 --> 00:07:12,340 Warrington was a neuropsychologist. She's still neuropsychologist at the National Hospital for Neurology Queen's Square. 60 00:07:12,760 --> 00:07:19,510 And they did a series of pioneering experiments, actually, in a number of brain syndromes, but particularly in memory. 61 00:07:20,860 --> 00:07:30,640 Now, I've taken the original figures here from the publications in 1970, so just concentrate on the dotted line for a minute. 62 00:07:31,240 --> 00:07:38,410 What they're showing here is that if I repeatedly expose you to stimuli like this with other other types of stimuli as well, 63 00:07:39,040 --> 00:07:42,430 you become better and better at identifying what that is. 64 00:07:42,970 --> 00:07:46,060 That's a plane we don't have to go to the more fully fledged, 65 00:07:46,600 --> 00:07:53,709 less fragmented form to recognise this is a plane and with time only a few trials actually we get very, 66 00:07:53,710 --> 00:07:58,750 very good such that we don't make any errors at all in identifying what this item 67 00:07:58,750 --> 00:08:03,970 is and what Elizabeth Warrington and Larry Weiss grants found was that actually, 68 00:08:04,540 --> 00:08:13,420 rather surprisingly, individuals who are deeply amnesic, shown in the solid line here have a very similar time course of learning. 69 00:08:13,810 --> 00:08:20,110 They can learn this material, even though they have no conscious recall of seeing these objects. 70 00:08:20,830 --> 00:08:29,710 They learn them very, very quickly. And an hour later, when we were exposed to such material, we still show a learning benefit. 71 00:08:29,770 --> 00:08:34,630 We don't have to see quite the fully fledged one. We can see a fragmented one to recognise what it is. 72 00:08:35,410 --> 00:08:40,690 And interestingly, the amnesic amnesic patients are also capable of doing this. 73 00:08:41,860 --> 00:08:51,550 So they retain this material over a delay of one hour, even though they cannot consciously recall having seen these items. 74 00:08:52,270 --> 00:08:56,500 In fact, they went on to do this heroic experiment. 75 00:08:56,620 --> 00:09:06,040 They waited 72 hours, 83 days between the learning period and retesting and found that these these amnesic 76 00:09:06,040 --> 00:09:13,570 patients still benefited from having been exposed to these fragmented stimuli previously. 77 00:09:14,980 --> 00:09:19,060 So something is still retained in amnesic patients. 78 00:09:19,630 --> 00:09:25,660 Something is more primitive in the way of the pin with the patients that it was composed of. 79 00:09:25,660 --> 00:09:33,130 So and now we're also seeing this in these fragmented figures and in the pioneering series of experiments, 80 00:09:33,820 --> 00:09:38,979 Warrington and Vice Krantz also went on to look at a few other ways of studying this. 81 00:09:38,980 --> 00:09:44,710 They used fragmented words. So what we are doing here is plotting free recall. 82 00:09:45,190 --> 00:09:50,950 How many words can you remember from the list that you saw and even healthy people? 83 00:09:50,980 --> 00:10:01,540 The controls have some difficulty in remembering, but as you might imagine, the amnesic individuals are very severely affected with recognition. 84 00:10:02,380 --> 00:10:07,060 In other words, did you see this item before or not? So yes, no recognition. 85 00:10:07,570 --> 00:10:10,870 Actually, we are boosted by that kind of test. 86 00:10:11,500 --> 00:10:16,030 So the amnesic, but there's still a discrepancy. 87 00:10:17,320 --> 00:10:20,379 However, if you test them just simply on sharing the fragmented words, 88 00:10:20,380 --> 00:10:29,740 you find that actually they've benefited hugely comparably to healthy individuals in terms of their memory for those words. 89 00:10:30,490 --> 00:10:36,220 So again, an interesting dissociation between when you directly asked, can you remember something? 90 00:10:36,430 --> 00:10:46,270 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, 91 00:10:47,170 --> 00:10:49,900 but we're easily at the most fragmented level. 92 00:10:53,700 --> 00:11:04,290 And they also did this with something called word stem completion, which became a very important way to study, to recall, if you like. 93 00:11:04,310 --> 00:11:08,550 So this is a very similar kind of experiment to the one I just showed previously. 94 00:11:09,180 --> 00:11:10,530 Now there are three conditions. 95 00:11:11,100 --> 00:11:21,720 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. 96 00:11:21,930 --> 00:11:27,540 Just tell me which words you remember or a yes no recognition task. 97 00:11:28,380 --> 00:11:34,140 Is this one of the words you saw previously or not? Or the words them completion task? 98 00:11:34,170 --> 00:11:43,650 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. 99 00:11:44,580 --> 00:11:46,680 Okay. And when when they did this, 100 00:11:46,680 --> 00:11:57,060 they again found a similar kind of results that when individuals were simply simply asked to remember or recall what items they saw. 101 00:11:58,110 --> 00:12:02,310 The amnesic patients were severely affected. 102 00:12:03,000 --> 00:12:12,900 Similarly, for recognition, yes or no, but on word completion with this prompt, if you like, they were just as good as healthy individuals. 103 00:12:13,810 --> 00:12:21,810 Okay, so this is the kind of evidence that has led to the idea that our memories are not just one monolithic thing, 104 00:12:22,050 --> 00:12:33,780 that they are, in fact fractionated. And indeed, as I say, any hit episodic memory can be severely affected with priming of this kind, 105 00:12:34,320 --> 00:12:41,220 either in terms of the fragmented figures or in terms of word completion being relatively preserved. 106 00:12:42,780 --> 00:12:54,580 And the credibility of this kind of fractionation has really been established further by anatomical distinctions between these memory systems. 107 00:12:55,200 --> 00:13:07,650 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. 108 00:13:08,400 --> 00:13:17,610 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. 109 00:13:17,910 --> 00:13:26,970 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. 110 00:13:27,630 --> 00:13:30,840 So this is the top. This is the bottom. This is the side. 111 00:13:31,020 --> 00:13:36,810 And we're talking about this structure here right in the depth of the brain. 112 00:13:37,380 --> 00:13:41,400 And we can image that now with MRI. 113 00:13:41,820 --> 00:13:51,140 And what we're talking about is this the hippocampus now focal damage to the hippocampus is relatively rare. 114 00:13:51,150 --> 00:13:55,650 It does occur. But of course, in the current era, 115 00:13:56,070 --> 00:14:05,160 the disease that's really important in terms of damage to episodic memory and the hippocampus is Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's disease. 116 00:14:05,160 --> 00:14:07,770 Eventually much of the brain degenerates. 117 00:14:07,920 --> 00:14:16,560 But it's interesting that one of the earlier areas which takes the biggest hit is the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe system. 118 00:14:18,060 --> 00:14:24,270 So the episodic memory system can be damaged in patients with amnesia, 119 00:14:24,990 --> 00:14:30,570 but they still retain this priming from the visual material I showed you previously. 120 00:14:32,670 --> 00:14:41,370 What about the converse? In neuroscience, one of the most interesting things is if you can show what's called a double dissociation. 121 00:14:41,970 --> 00:14:46,950 So in this case, we have one group of individuals who have episodic memory impaired. 122 00:14:47,970 --> 00:14:55,860 But this kind of priming intact is the converse available in a different kind of group of individuals? 123 00:14:56,760 --> 00:15:01,530 And it turns out that there is this is a single unusual case. 124 00:15:01,830 --> 00:15:07,470 And what we're showing you here is in the early days of MRI scanning, so here are the eyes. 125 00:15:08,610 --> 00:15:11,760 This is the right side of the brain, which is the left side of the brain. 126 00:15:12,060 --> 00:15:20,310 And this individual has had the occipital lobe resected because they had intractable epilepsy, 127 00:15:21,300 --> 00:15:28,540 epilepsy which was not amenable to treatment with medication in this patient. 128 00:15:29,430 --> 00:15:35,790 And as recognition was just as good as in control individuals. 129 00:15:36,090 --> 00:15:46,110 So their episodic memory system was intact, unlike the amnesic patients who were also tested in this study. 130 00:15:46,950 --> 00:15:52,530 So we know that already amnesic patients are going to be bad at this kind of recognition. 131 00:15:52,600 --> 00:16:03,370 Task. But what was interesting here is that they also looked at the words stem completion task I mentioned before and here are controls. 132 00:16:03,370 --> 00:16:10,419 Let's just look only at the unattached bars here and the healthy people could do this task very well. 133 00:16:10,420 --> 00:16:20,830 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. 134 00:16:21,670 --> 00:16:31,510 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, 135 00:16:32,320 --> 00:16:37,630 the word stems, prying them so that they could finish off the the rest of the five letter word. 136 00:16:38,440 --> 00:16:48,070 But interestingly, marks here shows no or very little in the way of facilitation by those word stems. 137 00:16:48,670 --> 00:16:59,050 So unlike the amnesic individuals and unlike healthy controls, the word stems did not really help this individual to perform well, 138 00:17:00,040 --> 00:17:09,370 although they still had very good recognition memory in terms of was this an item from the list you've seen before or not? 139 00:17:10,060 --> 00:17:16,420 So here we have that double dissociation. Some people can have episodic memory damaged, 140 00:17:16,750 --> 00:17:28,870 the priming intact was others like this case here can have priming apparently not present but episodic memory intact. 141 00:17:30,490 --> 00:17:35,500 Okay so these are in patients and they're they're interesting unusual. 142 00:17:35,920 --> 00:17:41,590 But what about you and me and the work by two living and chapter in their colleagues is really 143 00:17:41,830 --> 00:17:48,549 suggested that priming can occur in healthy people and they've done various sorts of experiments. 144 00:17:48,550 --> 00:18:01,940 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, 145 00:18:02,150 --> 00:18:09,950 climate, avocado, etc. And then they tested their memory either by a yes or no recognition. 146 00:18:09,980 --> 00:18:16,190 So that gives you another list of words, half of which had appeared previously and half of which were completely novel. 147 00:18:17,330 --> 00:18:21,650 And then they also tested them with this word fragment completion task. 148 00:18:22,280 --> 00:18:26,030 So this is a bit like that word stem completion task. 149 00:18:26,510 --> 00:18:32,660 I will help you a little bit by putting in a few of the letters and see whether that prompts you, 150 00:18:33,410 --> 00:18:39,650 whether that primes you into correctly identifying the word that you'd seen in the previous list. 151 00:18:40,640 --> 00:18:44,450 And remember, these are healthy young individuals. 152 00:18:45,320 --> 00:18:49,670 So these are their data. This is the probability of getting it right. 153 00:18:50,150 --> 00:18:54,710 And this is the retention interval here. So this is one hour or seven days. 154 00:18:55,790 --> 00:19:00,740 Now let's just do the recognition. So this is simply saying, was this word on the list or not? 155 00:19:01,070 --> 00:19:04,430 At one hour, the scoring about 55%. 156 00:19:05,180 --> 00:19:09,560 Seven days later, as you might expect, the recognition is poorer. 157 00:19:09,740 --> 00:19:17,900 It's nearer the 20% mark. But interestingly, if we look at the word fragment completion study here, 158 00:19:19,070 --> 00:19:28,250 these healthy individuals are able to use these prompts just as well, one hour and seven days. 159 00:19:29,030 --> 00:19:37,850 So they're primed by previous encounters, and that priming survives a delay of a whole week, 160 00:19:38,810 --> 00:19:45,710 unlike the recognition memory, which is clearly degraded over time, the conscious recognition memory. 161 00:19:47,270 --> 00:19:51,190 And just I'm sure you've heard this one's octopus, this one incident. 162 00:19:51,190 --> 00:19:55,220 This must be boogie man. But you wouldn't know that from just seeing this here. 163 00:19:57,570 --> 00:20:01,610 Okay, so this stuff is really about taking in words, sensory information. 164 00:20:02,210 --> 00:20:10,400 And what's emerged here is that there might be something more than simply perceptual priming, and that's been called conceptual priming. 165 00:20:11,630 --> 00:20:17,360 In some ways, it's similar to what one might call semantic priming, understanding, meaning. 166 00:20:18,230 --> 00:20:22,160 And Schachter and his colleagues did it in this way. 167 00:20:22,160 --> 00:20:28,010 They would present sentences like this. The haystack was important because the cloth ripped. 168 00:20:28,640 --> 00:20:33,650 And of course, most of us confronted by such sentences, would think, What on earth is that mean? 169 00:20:34,520 --> 00:20:43,160 Or This one, the notes was sour because the seams split and we're still thinking, What on earth is that referring to? 170 00:20:43,640 --> 00:20:49,550 But if we were given a couple of words, we might make sense of these sentences. 171 00:20:49,790 --> 00:20:53,020 In this case, parachute and bagpipe. 172 00:20:55,100 --> 00:21:01,790 Try this one. The person was unhappy because the hole was close to the hole closed. 173 00:21:03,620 --> 00:21:06,380 So apparently that one is pierced is okay. 174 00:21:07,650 --> 00:21:14,840 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. 175 00:21:15,470 --> 00:21:16,760 But what about the second time? 176 00:21:17,780 --> 00:21:26,870 So if after delay, people were presented with this kind of sentence, you'd find that actually you could make sense of it. 177 00:21:26,870 --> 00:21:34,160 You could understand what it referred to because you've seen these queuing words before, parachute with the first one, for example. 178 00:21:35,060 --> 00:21:43,940 And what Schachter and his team showed was that people who were deeply amnesic nevertheless 179 00:21:44,390 --> 00:21:50,540 showed facilitation in solving these kind of sentence problems even after one week. 180 00:21:51,500 --> 00:21:59,719 So again, they retained the memory of what was associated with the sentence. 181 00:21:59,720 --> 00:22:07,160 This sentence made sense, had meaning when associated with this word. 182 00:22:07,550 --> 00:22:15,620 Okay, you could argue about whether this is really about completely about concepts or could it all be explained by perception. 183 00:22:15,920 --> 00:22:23,900 But this is the kind of evidence that's been used to suggest that actually priming goes beyond pure perceptual memory. 184 00:22:26,840 --> 00:22:30,650 Actually, I thought this is quite a nice little anecdote to tell you. 185 00:22:30,920 --> 00:22:39,860 So many of you might know that Sigmund Freud and William Freeze were had a very sort of tempestuous relationship over the years. 186 00:22:40,400 --> 00:22:47,300 And one day Freud announced to police that he had a momentous new discovery. 187 00:22:48,020 --> 00:22:51,590 He'd worked out that all humans were essentially bisexual and. 188 00:22:52,460 --> 00:23:00,170 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. 189 00:23:02,970 --> 00:23:08,670 Interestingly, once Freud accepted it, he said, it's painful to have to surrender one's originality in this way. 190 00:23:09,210 --> 00:23:15,260 We've all been there. It happens in academia when you think you've come up with the novel idea, 191 00:23:15,270 --> 00:23:21,360 but actually find it's been done 100 years ago by somebody else and to come more up to date. 192 00:23:23,310 --> 00:23:31,920 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. 193 00:23:32,050 --> 00:23:38,550 It was the first Beatles hit, performed solo, which went to number one. 194 00:23:39,150 --> 00:23:44,190 But as soon as it came out, the producers of the Chiffons, he said, Fine, 195 00:23:44,190 --> 00:23:53,010 but that's really stretching your memory back to 1962, actually suggested that it sounded very much like the tune. 196 00:23:53,910 --> 00:24:06,690 This went to court, proceeded for five years before the judge finally decided that actually George Harrison had performed subconscious plagiarism. 197 00:24:07,590 --> 00:24:14,070 And at that point, the damages were more than $10 million, which is quite a lot in the 1970s. 198 00:24:14,470 --> 00:24:22,770 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. 199 00:24:22,980 --> 00:24:30,270 So instead. And interestingly, the title of that album was All Things Must Pass. 200 00:24:30,270 --> 00:24:33,510 And in this case, half a billion dollars didn't pass because of this. 201 00:24:34,170 --> 00:24:38,400 So the question is, can things like this subconscious plagiarism really exist? 202 00:24:39,030 --> 00:24:43,290 And I guess it can. What about in the experimental setting? 203 00:24:44,220 --> 00:24:46,860 Is there evidence of unconscious priming? 204 00:24:47,970 --> 00:24:59,310 Can we be primed by previous encounters that we're not even conscious of possible that George might have been conscious of the Chiffons. 205 00:24:59,520 --> 00:25:02,580 So how about if we could control it? Well, 206 00:25:02,850 --> 00:25:09,600 one of the most deeply impressive ways of looking at the unconscious state in someone 207 00:25:09,600 --> 00:25:14,820 who is conscious or comatose in any way is something called the neglect syndrome. 208 00:25:15,650 --> 00:25:18,720 And here is a patient who has this syndrome. 209 00:25:19,350 --> 00:25:25,499 So she has a right hemisphere stroke and her left arm is paralysed. 210 00:25:25,500 --> 00:25:29,190 But I'm asking her here to find some interesting stories in the newspaper. 211 00:25:31,960 --> 00:25:34,240 This is the Daily Mail. So it's actually a challenge for all of us. 212 00:25:34,720 --> 00:25:45,010 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. 213 00:25:46,030 --> 00:25:52,750 She doesn't have any pure sensory loss, what we would call this a visual field defect. 214 00:25:53,440 --> 00:25:56,500 She just simply attends to one side of space. 215 00:25:56,980 --> 00:26:04,959 And at it's extreme, these kind of patients, they're asked to copy objects like this mecha, 216 00:26:04,960 --> 00:26:11,800 a cube may ignore to fill in the left hand side following their right sided stroke, 217 00:26:12,190 --> 00:26:17,890 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. 218 00:26:18,340 --> 00:26:24,550 This is a nice series of paintings by an Austrian painter who unfortunately suffered one of these kinds of stroke. 219 00:26:25,060 --> 00:26:28,200 This is a self-portrait relatively early on after the stroke. 220 00:26:28,300 --> 00:26:37,270 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. 221 00:26:37,840 --> 00:26:42,580 As time progressed, he got better and you can see more elements on the left coming along. 222 00:26:43,300 --> 00:26:47,980 And he did eventually recover from this. So the self-portrait is not much better by the end. 223 00:26:48,610 --> 00:26:58,810 But here we have some an individual who is not aware that he's missing elements from the left side of space. 224 00:27:00,070 --> 00:27:03,930 And we can also measure this in various different ways. To show you this, we're interested. 225 00:27:03,940 --> 00:27:08,170 So, for example, here is another patient being asked to find the letters C, 226 00:27:08,530 --> 00:27:15,160 which were embedded amongst these distractor letters, posing cues on the screen every time he finds one. 227 00:27:15,850 --> 00:27:19,210 The computer will put a little across that. What he's doing that. 228 00:27:19,420 --> 00:27:24,340 I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the anatomy of these kinds of syndromes, 229 00:27:24,340 --> 00:27:31,540 because they're far more common and far more profound for the right hemisphere of damage in humans. 230 00:27:32,050 --> 00:27:39,580 And they involve either parts of the parietal lobe or the temporal parietal junction where the parietal lobe meets the temporal lobe, 231 00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:44,950 or interestingly, the inferior parts of the right frontal lobe. 232 00:27:45,910 --> 00:27:55,210 It's quite interesting because in most of us these are homologous areas for zones which look after language in the left hemisphere. 233 00:27:56,260 --> 00:28:03,160 So this tends to be pretty much a right hemisphere syndrome. So let this patient finish. 234 00:28:17,980 --> 00:28:25,930 And you can see that he is unaware of many of the items which are not left hand side of space. 235 00:28:27,520 --> 00:28:32,950 Interestingly, although he is unaware we can show that his brain is aware. 236 00:28:33,520 --> 00:28:41,290 So these are some studies we performed now 14 years, 15 years ago in the UCL. 237 00:28:42,100 --> 00:28:48,669 Grant Reece was the lead investigator here and we were studying the visual 238 00:28:48,670 --> 00:28:55,329 responses in patients like these when they were presented with items in this case, 239 00:28:55,330 --> 00:29:01,330 let's say a bird on the left and one on the right, and even when they missed this item on the left, 240 00:29:01,930 --> 00:29:08,890 one could nevertheless see that the early visual areas in the brain. 241 00:29:10,270 --> 00:29:17,950 I should say that visual pathways from the eyes extend right back to the occipital lobes. 242 00:29:18,310 --> 00:29:27,640 And there we have the primary visual cortex. We can see that in primary visual cortex and in surrounding visual areas, 243 00:29:27,940 --> 00:29:40,530 there is nevertheless activation when this item is presented, even though the patient has no conscious perception of that item. 244 00:29:41,710 --> 00:29:45,850 So this has meant various things. But one of the interesting things is, of course, 245 00:29:45,850 --> 00:29:55,480 that just simple activity in these early visual areas does not seem to be sufficient to support conscious perception of information. 246 00:29:55,990 --> 00:29:59,740 We might need more than just sensory areas to do this. 247 00:30:01,570 --> 00:30:09,760 Interestingly, this extends into what one might call unconscious perception in terms of preferences. 248 00:30:10,060 --> 00:30:14,650 So this was a study performed by John Hamilton, Peter Halligan and John Marshall. 249 00:30:15,040 --> 00:30:20,350 In fact, they performed it here in the Radcliffe Infirmary many years ago in 1988. 250 00:30:20,470 --> 00:30:29,530 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. 251 00:30:29,770 --> 00:30:34,780 Here's a house here and one here. Which one would you prefer to live in now? 252 00:30:35,350 --> 00:30:45,070 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. 253 00:30:45,250 --> 00:30:52,360 But actually these were their choices. So they chose the bottom one 80% and the top one 20%. 254 00:30:53,320 --> 00:30:58,959 And when asked why they were unable to explain why, they might say something like, 255 00:30:58,960 --> 00:31:02,440 Well, this looks preferable to me, I think this would be more comfortable. 256 00:31:03,010 --> 00:31:07,990 But they wouldn't say the obvious thing, which is actually this one is on fire and I'd rather not live there. 257 00:31:08,800 --> 00:31:14,890 Okay, so this is an interesting example of unconscious perception. 258 00:31:16,030 --> 00:31:24,940 And to extend this a little bit further, it was a busy ad in Italy from this rather important landmark study. 259 00:31:25,060 --> 00:31:32,320 It's gone down in the annals of psychology, and neuroscience is a fantastic experiment performed. 260 00:31:32,590 --> 00:31:35,499 Here is the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, 261 00:31:35,500 --> 00:31:43,360 and some of you may know that is an old postcard I bought 20 years ago or something, but it's a magnificent cathedral. 262 00:31:43,960 --> 00:31:55,870 And what Dizzy did was to ask his Milanese patients who knew the city very, very well to think about the square. 263 00:31:56,350 --> 00:31:59,890 So they're not in the square. They're just simply thinking about the square. 264 00:32:00,940 --> 00:32:09,520 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. 265 00:32:09,850 --> 00:32:15,370 But tell me about the things you remember in that square and in cartoon form. 266 00:32:15,640 --> 00:32:19,330 This is what they recollected. 267 00:32:19,330 --> 00:32:26,890 So they might mention the streets going off the square on that right hand side or the bookshops or the cafes and restaurants. 268 00:32:27,490 --> 00:32:30,610 And they would tend to neglect the items on their left. 269 00:32:31,000 --> 00:32:37,270 Remember, this is not in direct vision. This is simply from memory of that square, which they knew very well. 270 00:32:38,320 --> 00:32:49,450 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. 271 00:32:50,200 --> 00:32:56,230 So let's flip your vantage point. You're not going to be looking at the cathedral. 272 00:32:57,130 --> 00:33:02,620 Tell me what you remember then. So now the other side of the square and they're looking at the cathedral. 273 00:33:02,980 --> 00:33:10,030 Right. And they reported again streets to the right or shops and restaurants on that right hand side. 274 00:33:11,230 --> 00:33:16,780 But remember, those places were exactly the ones that had been neglected previously. 275 00:33:17,580 --> 00:33:28,110 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. 276 00:33:29,130 --> 00:33:34,590 So this means that in some way all that information is really intact. 277 00:33:35,250 --> 00:33:39,990 The memory for that story is completely intact because usually in these individuals. 278 00:33:40,380 --> 00:33:51,810 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. 279 00:33:52,110 --> 00:33:55,680 It's almost like an analogue screen, cinema screen, if you like. 280 00:33:56,190 --> 00:34:00,690 And to try and remember it in visual memory. That's what's being done. 281 00:34:00,690 --> 00:34:07,530 It's being cast onto this screen, and whatever is on the left of your vantage point is being missed. 282 00:34:08,790 --> 00:34:15,300 So that's very interesting and busy. I call it representational neglect, not just simply perceptual neglect, 283 00:34:15,600 --> 00:34:24,930 but this was neglect in terms of the representation when it's been retrieved from memory. 284 00:34:26,520 --> 00:34:29,549 Perhaps more directly, though, is this rather nice experiment. 285 00:34:29,550 --> 00:34:40,230 I like this one quite a lot, which has shown that there might be semantic priming in these individuals in the absence of awareness. 286 00:34:41,250 --> 00:34:48,420 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. 287 00:34:48,660 --> 00:34:54,360 On the other side is a scrambled nonsense image, right? 288 00:34:54,900 --> 00:34:59,219 And then soon afterwards, two items come along. 289 00:34:59,220 --> 00:35:05,850 And this is what we call a forced choice experiment. You're asked to say, which object did you say previously? 290 00:35:06,690 --> 00:35:10,190 And most of us would have no difficulty in saying it was the apple. All right. 291 00:35:11,130 --> 00:35:17,880 But in patients with neglect like this, patients with visual neglect, under these circumstances, 292 00:35:18,900 --> 00:35:25,920 these individuals were a chance at deciding whether they'd see this object or this object previously, 293 00:35:26,490 --> 00:35:33,240 remember, because the neglecting items on the left, they really do not consciously remember that item. 294 00:35:33,690 --> 00:35:41,940 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. 295 00:35:43,800 --> 00:35:47,640 The neat part of the study was to take it one step further. 296 00:35:47,970 --> 00:35:54,060 So in this case, the first screen you and I see what the patient sees is exactly the same. 297 00:35:54,300 --> 00:35:58,530 There is an object on the left hand side and there's a scrambled image on the other. 298 00:35:59,160 --> 00:36:11,340 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. 299 00:36:11,370 --> 00:36:14,820 That's all we have to do. So that would be nonsense words or real words. 300 00:36:15,390 --> 00:36:24,120 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, 301 00:36:24,540 --> 00:36:31,950 whether this is a real word or not, depending on whether the item that has come previously is semantically related. 302 00:36:32,400 --> 00:36:40,860 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. 303 00:36:41,190 --> 00:36:45,150 Then if let's say we saw a bed beforehand and then a tree. 304 00:36:45,420 --> 00:36:49,890 So this is it's only a few tens of milliseconds in terms of advantage, 305 00:36:50,160 --> 00:36:56,220 but it shows that if there is a semantic relationship between an item you've been exposed to previously, 306 00:36:56,640 --> 00:37:00,570 that can speed up your decision making at this point here. 307 00:37:01,410 --> 00:37:09,150 And what these investigators showed was that actually that can happen in these neglect patients. 308 00:37:09,390 --> 00:37:13,650 So although they may be completely unaware that they've seen this apple before, 309 00:37:14,340 --> 00:37:24,090 that apple subconsciously has had the ability to facilitate their judgement about whether this is a word or non word. 310 00:37:24,510 --> 00:37:32,550 So there must be some sort of semantic relationship here and it must have also got through into these brains of patients with neglect. 311 00:37:32,940 --> 00:37:39,990 And as I showed you before, from the functional imaging data, even though someone fails to be aware of something, 312 00:37:40,800 --> 00:37:45,150 we nevertheless have evidence that the brain is aware of that information. 313 00:37:46,530 --> 00:37:52,500 Okay. So this is a interesting thing. It's an unusual syndrome, but what about healthy people? 314 00:37:55,090 --> 00:38:06,470 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. 315 00:38:06,760 --> 00:38:11,800 So unconscious priming, healthy people, you need to do something that we call masking. 316 00:38:12,520 --> 00:38:19,210 So here is an experiment from our own lab, which was really led by Trevor Cheng and Clive Rosenthal. 317 00:38:19,930 --> 00:38:23,080 And when they came up with this experiment, I really thought this wasn't going to work. 318 00:38:23,350 --> 00:38:26,860 And I'll show you why in a minute. But surprise, surprise, it did. 319 00:38:27,370 --> 00:38:33,220 So this is what you have to do. We give you a list of 40 words. 320 00:38:33,370 --> 00:38:38,420 These are completely visible to you. You study them and you make an anonymous judgement. 321 00:38:38,440 --> 00:38:41,440 You decide whether this is a living thing or not. 322 00:38:41,680 --> 00:38:44,830 All right. 40 minutes. And then there's a five minute delay. 323 00:38:45,220 --> 00:38:49,900 And then we're going to flash up on the screen some of the words you saw. 324 00:38:50,290 --> 00:38:56,440 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. 325 00:38:57,310 --> 00:39:01,270 But and here's the big catch. These words are masked. 326 00:39:01,540 --> 00:39:05,080 First of all, they only appear for 11 milliseconds. 327 00:39:05,350 --> 00:39:13,290 So 100th of a second. So they're very brief. But to make sure that you cannot really read these words, we must them. 328 00:39:13,300 --> 00:39:15,070 So we forward and backward mask them. 329 00:39:15,310 --> 00:39:23,770 And masking means really scrambling the screen so that you it's a bit like a snowstorm, but not quite scrambling the screen. 330 00:39:23,770 --> 00:39:27,580 So there's a scramble before the word and there's a scramble after the word. 331 00:39:28,030 --> 00:39:32,380 And this really makes sure that you you don't know what this word is. 332 00:39:32,590 --> 00:39:38,020 You have no awareness what this is. And we can show that by asking you to report what was the word you saw. 333 00:39:38,410 --> 00:39:42,130 And people really have no idea what this word was. All right. 334 00:39:42,460 --> 00:39:45,460 So this is done with visible words. 335 00:39:45,610 --> 00:39:51,459 You encode the material with visible words. And we're going to test your memory with invisible words, if you like. 336 00:39:51,460 --> 00:39:54,760 And you'd think this is daft. How can you possibly do this? 337 00:39:55,210 --> 00:40:02,440 Well, Trevor and Clive were able to show, and I won't go into the details of what these measures mean, 338 00:40:02,800 --> 00:40:07,900 that actually people are able to discriminate between old words presented here 339 00:40:07,940 --> 00:40:12,430 once you've seen before and completely new ones much better than by chance. 340 00:40:13,180 --> 00:40:22,060 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. 341 00:40:22,420 --> 00:40:32,410 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. 342 00:40:32,500 --> 00:40:35,680 If it was old, you're much more confident than if it's new. 343 00:40:37,660 --> 00:40:45,190 So that's quite heroic in itself. They decided to take this one step further and that's to do the converse. 344 00:40:45,640 --> 00:40:49,960 So now what they did was to get people to study 40 invisible works. 345 00:40:50,530 --> 00:40:57,610 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? 346 00:40:58,540 --> 00:41:03,640 So you have no conscious recognition of these words or recall of these words. 347 00:41:04,450 --> 00:41:11,740 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, 348 00:41:12,430 --> 00:41:18,550 was this one of the words you saw before? This time at retrieval, the words are visible. 349 00:41:19,060 --> 00:41:22,600 So this time these words are completely visible to you. 350 00:41:22,600 --> 00:41:26,950 And you simply asked, was this a word you've seen before in that list or not? 351 00:41:27,610 --> 00:41:36,910 But remember, at encoding, these were these were masked so that you have no conscious awareness of the identity of these words. 352 00:41:37,810 --> 00:41:43,000 And again, what they found was that people are able to do this a better than chance. 353 00:41:43,810 --> 00:41:52,410 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. 354 00:41:54,120 --> 00:41:58,650 The final bit in this heroic study, which I really didn't believe was going to work out, 355 00:41:59,040 --> 00:42:07,920 was when they decided to test memory for words which were invisible at encoding, using words which were invisible at retrieval. 356 00:42:09,000 --> 00:42:15,990 Okay, so the words here are words you cannot recognise when they're presented on the screen in front of you. 357 00:42:16,290 --> 00:42:24,090 And the words here are also words you cannot recognise because they flash by and you have no conscious awareness of what these words. 358 00:42:26,280 --> 00:42:33,810 And yet despite that, what they found, where people were able to discriminate at above chance between old and new items. 359 00:42:35,210 --> 00:42:43,820 So this is surprising, but maybe not so surprising if we think back in terms of what we found out about patients, 360 00:42:44,390 --> 00:42:47,750 they were unaware of information on one side of space. 361 00:42:48,050 --> 00:42:54,440 Nevertheless, that information got into the brain and somehow primed, both perceptually and semantically. 362 00:42:55,070 --> 00:42:58,070 And here what we're showing is a similar effect. 363 00:42:58,100 --> 00:43:03,380 You have to work really hard to give it a similar effect in healthy brains, but this is possible. 364 00:43:04,910 --> 00:43:13,340 So these are the sorts of behavioural studies that have suggested that priming can occur with consciously and unconsciously in our brains. 365 00:43:13,550 --> 00:43:21,050 What about the physiology? And I'm going to show you a few just a few examples of this kind of work. 366 00:43:21,560 --> 00:43:27,410 So in terms of visual stimuli, Gordon Bayliss and Ed Rose, also in Oxford, 367 00:43:27,710 --> 00:43:38,810 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, 368 00:43:41,180 --> 00:43:47,000 what they found was that there were some neurones. Just to orient you here this time along here. 369 00:43:47,300 --> 00:43:55,280 This is the firing rate of a neurone that there were some neurones which fired with a particular type of stimulus. 370 00:43:55,400 --> 00:44:00,650 So here's that neurone firing with that stimulus and who say you won't find that stimulus. 371 00:44:01,040 --> 00:44:08,240 But if you repeated the same stimulus, what we call match trials, the firing rate of that neurone would reduce. 372 00:44:09,290 --> 00:44:13,340 It wasn't working in the way of the pure sensory neurones. 373 00:44:13,910 --> 00:44:21,080 If it was just simply responding to that stimulus, it would say without anything else, it would still be responding here. 374 00:44:21,410 --> 00:44:26,870 But if they used another item, then they might get firing in that in that neurone. 375 00:44:27,560 --> 00:44:31,520 And to cut a long story short, what they found was that with successive presentations, 376 00:44:31,760 --> 00:44:38,810 some overall in this population, the neuronal discharge reduced with successive presentations. 377 00:44:41,560 --> 00:44:46,870 So repeated exposure to the same stimulus led to reduced firing. 378 00:44:47,530 --> 00:44:51,610 And if you like, an analogue of that can also be shown in humans. 379 00:44:51,700 --> 00:44:55,690 This is a study performed by MIT Krug in the 1990s. 380 00:44:56,080 --> 00:45:00,850 And here the study is really measuring event related potentials. 381 00:45:01,720 --> 00:45:08,470 These are potentials recorded over the human scalp from electrodes just placed on the scalp. 382 00:45:09,580 --> 00:45:12,850 And this kind of system. 383 00:45:12,850 --> 00:45:16,150 So here's the nose, the side use of the back of the head. 384 00:45:17,230 --> 00:45:24,250 And the first presentation of a stimulus might provoke the kind of activity we seeing here. 385 00:45:24,460 --> 00:45:29,980 So just arranging these these squiggles really come from the different electrodes. 386 00:45:30,130 --> 00:45:34,330 So this is the front of the head. This is the back of the head, right and left. 387 00:45:34,990 --> 00:45:38,650 And averaged over the presentation of many stimuli. 388 00:45:39,070 --> 00:45:44,590 What they found was that activity could be evoked by a visual stimulus being presented. 389 00:45:45,130 --> 00:45:49,960 But if that stimulus was represented, there was far less activity. 390 00:45:50,560 --> 00:45:56,920 Very similar to what I just showed you previously with the neurones in monkey visual cortex, in particular cortex. 391 00:45:57,620 --> 00:46:10,210 And some researchers have suggested that actually what's happening here is that there is effectively a sharpening of the representation. 392 00:46:10,540 --> 00:46:19,210 And by sharpening, they mean that when you first present a stimulus, many different neurones might actually be involved in responding to it. 393 00:46:19,570 --> 00:46:26,500 With repeated presentation, there is effectively a drop out of some of the neurones which are redundant, 394 00:46:26,500 --> 00:46:29,410 which aren't necessary to encode that information. 395 00:46:30,700 --> 00:46:39,370 Only a small number might be really required to encode the properties of this umbrella after repeated exposure. 396 00:46:42,390 --> 00:46:51,900 Interestingly, this the same kind of evidence has been shown using functional imaging, ephemeral function, functional magnetic resonance imaging. 397 00:46:52,410 --> 00:46:57,240 And I'm just going to show you one example here for what's called repetition priming. 398 00:46:57,480 --> 00:47:00,780 It's turned out to be a really useful tool in many different ways. 399 00:47:01,410 --> 00:47:11,010 Here again, this is from the lab of Schecter. What they found was with repeated exposure to the same stimulus, there was less activity. 400 00:47:11,010 --> 00:47:16,950 So these areas of activity are really showing you the areas which show repetition, 401 00:47:16,950 --> 00:47:22,410 priming, reduction in activity with repeated exposure to the same stimulus, 402 00:47:23,880 --> 00:47:32,460 both in prefrontal cortex in front of the brain, but also posteriorly in areas in the occipital cortex and in the fusiform gyrus. 403 00:47:32,490 --> 00:47:36,000 This is flipping the brain so that we're not looking at the under surface. 404 00:47:36,010 --> 00:47:39,750 This is the front, this is the back, this is the surface in the fusiform gyrus. 405 00:47:40,050 --> 00:47:48,240 So with first presentation you can see quite strong activation, but with repeated exposure there is suppression. 406 00:47:48,660 --> 00:47:56,520 Repetition priming seems to be something that it's widespread and with repeated presentation of the same stimulus. 407 00:47:57,570 --> 00:48:02,540 As such a repetition. Priming has been used in many ways. 408 00:48:03,320 --> 00:48:09,740 I think this is quite a nice one from my colleagues back at UCL, the beginning of the 2000, 409 00:48:10,310 --> 00:48:14,570 they were trying to crack the problem about what we call object constancy. 410 00:48:15,050 --> 00:48:20,690 So how is it that we know different exemplars of the same category of object chairs? 411 00:48:21,110 --> 00:48:25,040 Well, let's say cats really belong to that group. 412 00:48:25,580 --> 00:48:27,800 It's quite a difficult problem in many, many ways. 413 00:48:28,130 --> 00:48:35,300 What they tried to do is to examine this in a physiological way by presenting either real objects or not object, 414 00:48:35,600 --> 00:48:41,450 and then looking for the areas in the brain which show this kind of repetition, priming, 415 00:48:41,960 --> 00:48:48,770 reduced activity, and instead of just looking at whether objects can reduce the priming. 416 00:48:49,220 --> 00:48:54,500 They also showed the same objects at different sizes or from different viewpoints. 417 00:48:54,950 --> 00:49:01,160 So although they're the same object, they're invariant in terms of how we would say that is the same object. 418 00:49:01,670 --> 00:49:05,809 And they look for those areas of the brain which didn't really mind about the 419 00:49:05,810 --> 00:49:09,890 size of the object on the screen or the viewpoint from which it was looked at. 420 00:49:10,460 --> 00:49:18,800 And what they found was that actually this blue area here also in the fusiform gyrus, again, was showing the brain flipped over here. 421 00:49:19,190 --> 00:49:25,700 This blue area here is both a viewer view and a size independent. 422 00:49:25,940 --> 00:49:31,550 It doesn't care whether you've stretched the image or whether you're looking at the chair from a completely different direction. 423 00:49:32,150 --> 00:49:37,370 That evokes the same degree of repetition, priming. 424 00:49:37,370 --> 00:49:38,900 It's the same degree of suppression. 425 00:49:38,990 --> 00:49:52,280 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. 426 00:49:53,360 --> 00:50:00,590 It's quite interesting. And the final bit from that study was that actually for the same object category, it's a chance. 427 00:50:00,890 --> 00:50:04,910 There was only really one region which was of interest, and this was again, 428 00:50:04,910 --> 00:50:16,340 this left prefrontal area and inferior frontal gyrus which showed repetition priming across different stimuli for the same object category. 429 00:50:17,030 --> 00:50:23,570 This area has become very, very interesting to many different people because the idea is developed that this 430 00:50:23,780 --> 00:50:28,940 might be the area that's really interested in conceptual or semantic priming, 431 00:50:29,300 --> 00:50:35,480 whereas those areas we were talking about in the back of the brain might be far more interested in perceptual priming. 432 00:50:38,380 --> 00:50:43,810 Last thing I wanted to show you was a test of that and how neuroscience has moved to try and look at this. 433 00:50:44,260 --> 00:50:48,550 So here individuals were exposed to different kinds of activity. 434 00:50:48,970 --> 00:50:53,260 And your job here is to say whether it's a living thing or a non-living thing, 435 00:50:53,260 --> 00:51:01,540 anonymous judgement that was previously and the manipulation was some of these items were repeated, whereas others were novel. 436 00:51:02,620 --> 00:51:14,650 So again, you can do imaging experiments in this kind of to show which areas reduce activity with repeated exposure to the same stimulus. 437 00:51:15,100 --> 00:51:20,740 And interestingly, it's a similar pattern. So there are areas in the back of the brain which are more interested in visual simile. 438 00:51:21,040 --> 00:51:25,720 And there also is also this area in the left prefrontal cortex, 439 00:51:26,170 --> 00:51:33,460 which she seems to be particularly interested and which is less active when you repeat a stimulus. 440 00:51:34,120 --> 00:51:41,500 And these investigators went on to use something called transcranial magnetic stimulation to an S, 441 00:51:41,860 --> 00:51:50,770 which is effectively a way of disrupting brain function in healthy individuals for a short time. 442 00:51:51,340 --> 00:52:01,030 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. 443 00:52:01,510 --> 00:52:10,450 And what they found was that after receiving a train of these magnetic pulses over the left, inferior frontal lobe, 444 00:52:11,110 --> 00:52:20,290 when they put those individuals into the scanner, the the extent of repetition priming was really negligible. 445 00:52:21,140 --> 00:52:27,860 But the signal in terms of the areas in the back of the brain still continued unchanged. 446 00:52:28,850 --> 00:52:32,660 This didn't happen with the controlled stimulation. 447 00:52:33,110 --> 00:52:37,760 There was no effect really on the repetition of suppression either in front of the back of the brain. 448 00:52:38,420 --> 00:52:45,740 And interestingly, with this left frontal transcranial magnetic stimulation, what happened was there was also a change in behaviour. 449 00:52:46,250 --> 00:52:53,930 So normally we much faster to make those responses. But whether something is viable or not live if we've been exposed to previously. 450 00:52:54,500 --> 00:53:03,110 And that continues in the control group, but not in those who have this transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left, 451 00:53:03,590 --> 00:53:09,890 inferior frontal, which many people wonder might be the sort of. 452 00:53:11,010 --> 00:53:15,370 Very good, very semantic priming. So let me just close. 453 00:53:16,620 --> 00:53:25,410 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. 454 00:53:26,040 --> 00:53:34,230 And this has really led to the idea that actually memory systems, human memory systems, are really fractionated. 455 00:53:35,470 --> 00:53:40,210 The studies of our music have been particularly influential and helpful in this way. 456 00:53:41,670 --> 00:53:45,420 I think I've shown you some examples of unconscious priming that occur. 457 00:53:46,030 --> 00:53:50,410 In individuals who have the neglect syndrome, but also in healthy people. 458 00:53:50,950 --> 00:54:00,370 And finally, there is some physiological evidence, both from urine recordings to imaging, if it arrived in healthy people, 459 00:54:01,030 --> 00:54:07,090 that there might be a physiological correlate to what we're seeing in terms of behavioural priming. 460 00:54:08,070 --> 00:54:32,510 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. 461 00:54:32,630 --> 00:54:38,060 I take a gentle temperature fiction that more or less cover some of the rage in me. 462 00:54:39,200 --> 00:54:45,050 He has the victim theme as it is the violence of another intense, 463 00:54:45,950 --> 00:54:58,940 phenomenological philosophy with recent developments in the cognitive science, which is one that is covered with multiple projects. 464 00:54:59,330 --> 00:55:04,070 He has an account of manuscript transmission from the late medieval, 465 00:55:04,190 --> 00:55:12,950 mystical texts the Sister Catherine produced for the 13 times through to the 17th century and also under working title, fiction and other minds. 466 00:55:13,370 --> 00:55:16,670 He's engaged in an investigation in collaboration with NAMI. 467 00:55:17,180 --> 00:55:24,620 It's a terrific restatement of the way that fiction models and matches a complex understanding of human sexual interaction. 468 00:55:26,030 --> 00:55:32,690 And today, he's going to be looking at some of the implications of research on finding the models of identity, 469 00:55:33,110 --> 00:55:42,320 which choice is especially important, such as those either go under the title Existential Choices Primate Models of Human Identity. 470 00:55:43,130 --> 00:55:51,190 And thanks very much, SIMON and thank you very much for inviting me and to myself for such a stimulating talk. 471 00:55:51,200 --> 00:56:01,339 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 472 00:56:01,340 --> 00:56:09,140 of the ways of thinking about individual identity and taking responsibility for your actions that one has if one's coming from the humanities. 473 00:56:10,070 --> 00:56:16,580 And I'm taking, as my key example a piece of gore, 474 00:56:16,580 --> 00:56:21,680 just because I think that there is how much one course in question and however much different aspects 475 00:56:21,680 --> 00:56:28,069 and of methodologies from the last 50 years have called in question ideas of individual responsibility. 476 00:56:28,070 --> 00:56:32,209 There's still some everyday sense in which we would like to think that we are in control of our own choices. 477 00:56:32,210 --> 00:56:36,650 And some there's some everyday appeal of something like their authenticity, which is in the end committed, 478 00:56:36,650 --> 00:56:40,490 if not to Google, and then further back to various religious ideas of living the good life. 479 00:56:40,610 --> 00:56:51,680 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, 480 00:56:52,100 --> 00:56:54,410 could anything survive of this model? 481 00:56:54,620 --> 00:56:59,670 If we take seriously the stuff about all the things that are happening at a personal level to control our behaviour? 482 00:56:59,690 --> 00:57:02,840 So is a piece of cake a go at the beginning? 483 00:57:02,870 --> 00:57:07,339 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. 484 00:57:07,340 --> 00:57:15,919 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. 485 00:57:15,920 --> 00:57:20,780 So the typical in the concept of anxiety basic $0.44. 486 00:57:21,080 --> 00:57:24,680 On the other hand, what I'm speaking about is very plain and simple, 487 00:57:24,680 --> 00:57:31,940 namely that truth is for the particular individual only as he, as he in himself produces in action. 488 00:57:32,810 --> 00:57:35,150 Truth has always had many like claimants. 489 00:57:35,300 --> 00:57:42,380 But the question is whether a person will, in the deepest sense, acknowledge the truth, will allow it to permeate his whole being, 490 00:57:42,830 --> 00:57:49,040 will accept all its consequences and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and injured his case for the consequence. 491 00:57:49,160 --> 00:57:58,309 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. 492 00:57:58,310 --> 00:58:02,390 And he's saying whatever may be in some sense objectively true, 493 00:58:02,630 --> 00:58:10,100 it's always going to be about how we establish our own relationship to that thing or state of affairs or moral view. 494 00:58:10,460 --> 00:58:14,180 And nothing is true if we haven't gone through this process of making it our truth. 495 00:58:15,140 --> 00:58:17,930 And in a modern neuroscientific vein, 496 00:58:18,590 --> 00:58:26,600 Multichain Friedman was working in Berkeley and wrote the book How Brains Make Up Their Minds also has a kind of solipsistic, 497 00:58:26,600 --> 00:58:31,250 individualistic take on things which you grounded in your neuronal populations anyway, he says, 498 00:58:32,270 --> 00:58:37,280 every choice we make in everyday life is a way of grasping sort our parts of the world. 499 00:58:37,430 --> 00:58:41,240 We all cohabit, but in our terms, in accord with our unique experiences. 500 00:58:41,250 --> 00:58:48,320 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. 501 00:58:48,380 --> 00:58:51,500 So this is, as it were, my starting point. 502 00:58:51,920 --> 00:59:00,379 And and I think it's there because of my sense that in in the way many people live their lives, 503 00:59:00,380 --> 00:59:04,550 the fact that our choices are now is is important to how we structure our lives. 504 00:59:05,480 --> 00:59:09,160 However much Anita or Derrida has told us, this is all nonsense, right? 505 00:59:09,690 --> 00:59:17,110 Of course, that in the continental philosophy tradition, there is. Tradition, which was calling it in question, albeit in interesting ways. 506 00:59:17,120 --> 00:59:22,149 So this is just a little bit to say that Nietzsche got there first and then the priming 507 00:59:22,150 --> 00:59:25,200 experiments came along and confirmed what Nietzsche had been saying all along. 508 00:59:25,210 --> 00:59:30,340 So this is this is a bit in and there was actually an interesting new book on nature and put into neuroscience. 509 00:59:32,410 --> 00:59:37,270 So this is a bit of German in German and translated quickly and it's Nietzsche 510 00:59:37,270 --> 00:59:44,110 basically saying that the we think we will and make our own decisions but 511 00:59:44,110 --> 00:59:48,100 in fact that's some sort of retrospective effect where a number of different 512 00:59:48,190 --> 00:59:51,910 plural souls acting below the surface make decisions and make things happen. 513 00:59:52,300 --> 00:59:58,120 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, 514 00:59:58,120 --> 01:00:00,370 of course, very often because we've done this awful thing. 515 01:00:00,670 --> 01:00:06,510 But in sense it's not the thinking and it's actually taking these decisions, whether this is on the left. 516 01:00:06,520 --> 01:00:11,580 So I just translate actually rather than waste time again, the German. 517 01:00:11,590 --> 01:00:20,860 So the person willing making a decision believes with a certain amount of certainty that will actually somehow belong together. 518 01:00:20,860 --> 01:00:25,839 So if I will something that I control the action that results from it. And in doing this, 519 01:00:25,840 --> 01:00:31,840 Nietzsche says the person willing is essentially taking over the feeling of pleasure that the parts 520 01:00:31,840 --> 01:00:36,310 of the personality that actually did the action have from having successfully done something. 521 01:00:36,580 --> 01:00:41,020 So it's taking over the kind of the upper executive part of ourselves is taking over the 522 01:00:41,020 --> 01:00:46,629 pleasure of the Underworld's or the Under Souls who actually did the work of Nietzsche. 523 01:00:46,630 --> 01:00:51,400 Those this idea that our body is just a gazelle south of New Zealand. 524 01:00:51,400 --> 01:00:53,620 It's like an apartment block of lots of different souls. 525 01:00:53,620 --> 01:00:58,720 So he's essentially he's having a kind of lots of sub personal processes which are all just getting on with their business. 526 01:00:59,050 --> 01:01:03,640 And then this figure called the ego consciousness occasionally takes decision responsibility for 527 01:01:03,640 --> 01:01:11,860 decisions which they like and and says in a kind of parody of Louis the 14 letters in one this in one. 528 01:01:11,860 --> 01:01:17,230 So we misguidedly think take responsibility for things that we haven't the central control haven't done. 529 01:01:17,860 --> 01:01:22,329 And then he say what's happening here is that what happens in all happy political situation communities 530 01:01:22,330 --> 01:01:26,680 is that the ruling classes take responsibility for things they haven't done that they left the means to. 531 01:01:27,640 --> 01:01:34,450 So this is basically Nietzsche saying that we can't trust consciousness in the conscious account of why or how we did things. 532 01:01:34,770 --> 01:01:39,640 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. 533 01:01:39,970 --> 01:01:43,270 And it's just kind of nothing, but it's our own ideological account of ourselves. 534 01:01:43,270 --> 01:01:53,589 And this has come back in the primary picture. And what's that Nietzsche was asking us to do is rethink underlying assumptions 535 01:01:53,590 --> 01:01:58,270 and actually get rid of the very distinction between free will and unfree will, 536 01:01:58,540 --> 01:02:05,740 basically, because he thinks that and this is a sort of Walter Freeman point, that actually reality is just very chaotic and very messy. 537 01:02:06,100 --> 01:02:11,259 And that and the order we impose on it as to whether or not something is part of a 538 01:02:11,260 --> 01:02:15,340 causal chain will always depend on the perspective from which we're looking at it. 539 01:02:15,550 --> 01:02:20,500 So there's any number of causal stories you could tell about events, and causality isn't just there. 540 01:02:20,500 --> 01:02:24,830 It depends on everywhere the job that we want to get done with a particular facet of what we want to analyse. 541 01:02:25,180 --> 01:02:28,600 So we're just trying to say that causality is our conceptual tool. 542 01:02:28,600 --> 01:02:32,320 It's not somebody who's just inside the universe because the universe is happening in so many different directions, 543 01:02:32,980 --> 01:02:36,850 on so many levels, that that would be kind of to simplify issues too much. 544 01:02:36,850 --> 01:02:43,809 So, however, and this is the other reason for continuing time with Nietzsche and the argument is that in 545 01:02:43,810 --> 01:02:48,780 the same way that Chicago had said truth is because I made it my truth in some part of me, 546 01:02:48,810 --> 01:02:53,170 I've to it's consciously own things. Nietzsche comes along and says, Well, 547 01:02:53,620 --> 01:02:59,890 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. 548 01:03:00,610 --> 01:03:01,540 Nevertheless, 549 01:03:02,110 --> 01:03:09,879 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. 550 01:03:09,880 --> 01:03:13,209 And if it's not consciousness, then is it something else? And is that a twisted? 551 01:03:13,210 --> 01:03:16,500 He basically says, Well, then maybe it's something called the body, which is gain. 552 01:03:16,690 --> 01:03:21,999 So there's some sense in which what is being called the apartment block of undersold in beyond good and 553 01:03:22,000 --> 01:03:27,670 evil in that which was to which was written to support the way there is some different non-conscious, 554 01:03:27,670 --> 01:03:32,610 but nevertheless unified sense of the human body is a kind of a form of self that drives us. 555 01:03:35,920 --> 01:03:41,700 So he's saying tools and that understanding and spirit of tools and toys. 556 01:03:41,750 --> 01:03:44,680 It's all part of his critique of the conscious self and understanding. 557 01:03:44,680 --> 01:03:49,270 Understanding and spirit of tools and toys behind them is something that Nietzsche was calling the self. 558 01:03:49,270 --> 01:03:55,780 So here he's trying to use the word self to get away from from conscious and self understanding. 559 01:03:56,020 --> 01:04:03,160 And it might be there in its kind of usage of self that you'll give it to the self. 560 01:04:03,580 --> 01:04:08,610 Also those with the eyes of the senses. It also listens with the ears of the spirit. 561 01:04:09,310 --> 01:04:12,550 The self is always this and with compassion. 562 01:04:13,090 --> 01:04:22,940 And forces and conquers and destroys its dominance and is also the dominator of the ego behind your thoughts and feelings. 563 01:04:22,960 --> 01:04:28,090 My brother stands a very powerful and ordering figure. 564 01:04:29,080 --> 01:04:35,800 An unknown white man called the self in your body is where this self begins. 565 01:04:36,700 --> 01:04:40,140 Your body is this. So for this order. 566 01:04:41,590 --> 01:04:47,470 So what I want to set up is the kick in hope that we can consciously reiterate our lives. 567 01:04:47,830 --> 01:04:54,970 Nietzsche's critique. But having done his pity, he nevertheless wants some sense that we control our lives in his idea. 568 01:04:56,060 --> 01:05:06,260 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, 569 01:05:07,040 --> 01:05:11,310 thus that this is a parody of Luther's German translation of the Bible. 570 01:05:11,730 --> 01:05:18,150 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. 571 01:05:18,450 --> 01:05:25,830 When you're looking for a vocabulary that could replace naive self understanding, what a nice emphasis on on consciousness. 572 01:05:26,280 --> 01:05:32,430 He looks interestingly to religious vocabularies, which he parodies in parts exploits to explain this, 573 01:05:32,580 --> 01:05:36,540 to appeal to or to reference the sorts of social practices that may be 574 01:05:36,540 --> 01:05:40,230 historically of these places where people didn't rely too much on consciousness. 575 01:05:40,240 --> 01:05:48,000 So when when one of my one of one kind of strand of my argument to it. 576 01:05:48,180 --> 01:05:50,069 So for that group in terms of the room, 577 01:05:50,070 --> 01:05:58,080 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, 578 01:05:58,390 --> 01:06:01,920 we're looking at ways of dealing with this problem or retaining responsibility. 579 01:06:02,280 --> 01:06:07,109 Then some sense of the the places that historically or the sorts of practices historically we 580 01:06:07,110 --> 01:06:11,520 have developed for living a life that isn't consciousness centred may sometimes be useful, 581 01:06:11,670 --> 01:06:19,710 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. 582 01:06:20,730 --> 01:06:27,750 So there's some sense in which religious practices may be a thing to look at, amongst others. 583 01:06:28,260 --> 01:06:31,709 And the other thing I want to make sure is that when we if we're going to do some critique 584 01:06:31,710 --> 01:06:39,390 of the idea of consciously owning our choices that we have to keep as our argument, 585 01:06:39,390 --> 01:06:43,980 some understanding that responsibility is something that human beings do, 586 01:06:43,980 --> 01:06:48,420 that very often the argument goes, well, we thought that responsibility meant only consciously my choices. 587 01:06:48,630 --> 01:06:51,810 I can't own my choices. Therefore, responsibility doesn't exist. 588 01:06:52,080 --> 01:06:55,500 And that just seems to be wrong. That responsibility is a social practice. 589 01:06:55,500 --> 01:06:58,740 It is something we we recognise people around us who we think are responsible. 590 01:06:59,010 --> 01:07:06,150 So therefore we just get used to just describing what we call responsibility and turn on seeing how that works. 591 01:07:06,390 --> 01:07:13,440 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. 592 01:07:13,650 --> 01:07:19,530 It's obviously not that, but I think we have to acknowledge that taking responsibility is something that human beings already do. 593 01:07:19,560 --> 01:07:24,810 We just have to try to connect humanity with understandings and in the neuroscience that helps us explain it. 594 01:07:27,480 --> 01:07:34,380 So basically I'm encouraging us to try and look again at the sort of cultural practices of being responsible. 595 01:07:36,950 --> 01:07:43,399 Depends on and this is the sort of ordinary language I think is essentially saying if we look at how we talk about responsibility, 596 01:07:43,400 --> 01:07:46,910 where we go to to to find examples of responsible behaviour, 597 01:07:47,300 --> 01:07:52,910 then we will find we might find ways of helping us rethink once we've given up this rather naive 598 01:07:52,910 --> 01:07:56,930 view that being responsible means being self transparent and being entirely control of my choices. 599 01:07:56,930 --> 01:08:02,930 And so just because I like it, this is an appeal of this plea for excuses, which, as the title suggests, is, again, 600 01:08:02,930 --> 01:08:08,240 it's a reflection on questions of responsibility and and how we think about how we can be agents are and actions. 601 01:08:09,320 --> 01:08:17,030 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. 602 01:08:17,840 --> 01:08:21,799 It's probably unfair on kick off, but for the moment I said Well that's already being questioned. 603 01:08:21,800 --> 01:08:29,870 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. 604 01:08:30,200 --> 01:08:31,759 And I'm saying that when we do that, 605 01:08:31,760 --> 01:08:39,590 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. 606 01:08:39,980 --> 01:08:46,100 We shouldn't simply we shouldn't then give up on the idea of responsibility altogether. 607 01:08:46,340 --> 01:08:53,660 Take a sort of historical view to the ways in which so far human beings have managed responsibility for themselves. 608 01:08:55,370 --> 01:09:00,800 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. 609 01:09:02,090 --> 01:09:08,569 I try to give a model of making and owning decisions which draws on neuroscientific and social 610 01:09:08,570 --> 01:09:13,070 psychological literature so that whatever version of kind of post capability and responsibility we have, 611 01:09:13,070 --> 01:09:17,750 it has to be compatible with a naturalistic concept. How the brain seems to make decisions. 612 01:09:20,480 --> 01:09:24,080 I think when we're looking at how these accounts thrive in experiments, 613 01:09:24,080 --> 01:09:30,920 I think we have to have a properly thought within a logical account of where incident happens. 614 01:09:30,920 --> 01:09:35,360 And essentially next time I'm going to be saying the group that I'm particularly is we're going to be 615 01:09:35,360 --> 01:09:40,370 following a bit that they they just don't do quite enough of putting human beings in niches with other people. 616 01:09:41,060 --> 01:09:45,799 There's not enough of kind of putting a brain in a wider ecology when when they're thinking about their experiments. 617 01:09:45,800 --> 01:09:51,780 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. 618 01:09:51,780 --> 01:09:57,589 So essentially and sometimes I kind of, I say, well, the problem is they haven't read Heidegger well enough, 619 01:09:57,590 --> 01:09:59,870 but that argument isn't going to really play with people so much. 620 01:09:59,870 --> 01:10:04,960 Didn't happen to Darwin, but enough because if you go back to Darwin, he's all about things being connected in an emergency. 621 01:10:05,900 --> 01:10:11,930 And, and finally when we're kind of developing our naturalistically informed account 622 01:10:11,930 --> 01:10:14,910 of decision making and we've been properly phenomenological or cultural 623 01:10:15,020 --> 01:10:21,889 about it just to make sure that we're not leaving behind everyday practices of taking responsible everyday practices or taking responsibility, 624 01:10:21,890 --> 01:10:27,049 but realise that what we're trying to make sense of is the things that we already recognise as taking responsibility. 625 01:10:27,050 --> 01:10:32,990 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. 626 01:10:34,010 --> 01:10:42,700 So what I'm going to be drawing on a bit is one of these super useful arguments in behaviour 627 01:10:42,890 --> 01:10:46,440 we target outputs in behavioural and brain science is where you get someone makes 628 01:10:46,460 --> 01:10:49,790 the statement and then all the people who might be quite good in that field come and 629 01:10:49,790 --> 01:10:52,490 reply to it and therefore you kind of get a sense of what's going on in the moment. 630 01:10:52,850 --> 01:11:00,589 I'd already been following the work of John Barnes on priming and then last last year he and Julie Wang published this 631 01:11:00,590 --> 01:11:06,409 thing where they try and put some of their priming stuff together in order to come up with a theory of human nature, 632 01:11:06,410 --> 01:11:10,100 essentially a theory of the human personality, and try to have the selfish goal, 633 01:11:10,100 --> 01:11:15,140 autonomously operating motivational structures as the proximate cause of human judgement and behaviour. 634 01:11:16,160 --> 01:11:23,840 And both backgrounds have been doing this sort of work since 1990s and it's so social psychological research 635 01:11:24,500 --> 01:11:31,040 into priming and automaticity and they're very interested in the way history is group and it's very interesting 636 01:11:31,040 --> 01:11:37,759 the way in which behaviour is driven by situational cues operating below the threshold of consciousness and it's 637 01:11:37,760 --> 01:11:41,930 kind of the things that matter was talking about where you show people words and it affects their behaviour. 638 01:11:41,930 --> 01:11:46,190 Like you show them the word bingo and they walk more slowly when you show them the word rude and then 639 01:11:46,190 --> 01:11:48,890 they have an argument with the person they happen to meet in the corridor and this sort of thing. 640 01:11:52,040 --> 01:12:07,639 So the questions then are addressing in this new ask home are as follows The environment is a rich source of multiple, 641 01:12:07,640 --> 01:12:13,220 oftentimes simultaneous cues, many of which are linked to different, often competing behavioural impulses. 642 01:12:13,640 --> 01:12:19,310 How are these parallel environmental influences funnelled into the necessarily serial behaviour of a single individual? 643 01:12:19,310 --> 01:12:23,600 So they've noticed the way in which we behave because the situation makes us behave in 644 01:12:23,600 --> 01:12:27,650 that way and the situation may be trying to make us behave in a number of different ways. 645 01:12:28,160 --> 01:12:35,719 And if we how, how do we reconcile the different problems that we're not even aware of that are kind of forcing 646 01:12:35,720 --> 01:12:41,540 some personal processes to kick into action or make us be rude or be all at the same time. 647 01:12:43,790 --> 01:12:49,639 So that in us then than other characteristics of an evolutionarily ancient system that could integrate multiple, 648 01:12:49,640 --> 01:12:54,950 sometimes competing influences into overt behaviour expressed at the level of the individual organism, 649 01:12:55,190 --> 01:13:01,080 particularly in the absence of overarching conscious processing to integrate and prioritise these goals. 650 01:13:01,100 --> 01:13:08,810 So they're basically saying this, this sort of situationally prompted behaviour, predates consciousness. 651 01:13:08,990 --> 01:13:13,420 It's kind of, it's something that other mammals would share or lack of share. 652 01:13:14,120 --> 01:13:21,679 And however this sort of conflict in overdetermined situations is managed, it can't just be black consciousness, 653 01:13:21,680 --> 01:13:28,280 otherwise all other animals will be failing to be able to kind of manage their lives and even much more carried out ways. 654 01:13:29,300 --> 01:13:34,100 And it's also telling a story that is kind of even makes the evolutionary sense 655 01:13:34,100 --> 01:13:37,639 that there must be ways in which live below the threshold of consciousness, 656 01:13:37,640 --> 01:13:41,090 before consciousness, these sorts of problems are being managed. 657 01:13:42,920 --> 01:13:45,499 And then that those are the questions. That's why hang a bar. 658 01:13:45,500 --> 01:13:53,760 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? 659 01:13:53,780 --> 01:13:57,589 It seems to be that whatever happens we're going to have some sense that human behaviour is in lots 660 01:13:57,590 --> 01:14:02,690 of cases we're multitasking and sometimes I'm have to choose between talking to my mom on Skype, 661 01:14:02,870 --> 01:14:05,529 picking the kids that I might be able to do both at the same time, 662 01:14:05,530 --> 01:14:11,300 and lots of situations in which we don't this, this kind of idea of serial behaviour. 663 01:14:11,570 --> 01:14:15,980 One boy doing one thing just seems to be I'm pushing things that are somewhat unhelpful. 664 01:14:16,280 --> 01:14:27,020 Anyway, the what's, what the article then draws together is lots of ways in which we are constantly doing, 665 01:14:27,830 --> 01:14:31,860 you know, at a level we're not aware of things that make sense. 666 01:14:31,860 --> 01:14:36,110 So this kind of intentional behaviour which we do not consciously intend and lots of 667 01:14:36,110 --> 01:14:41,719 our interaction with other people and with our environment is driven by these forms, 668 01:14:41,720 --> 01:14:45,770 purposive but nevertheless unconscious behaviour and to describe this. 669 01:14:47,540 --> 01:14:55,640 But, and when I use the term goal, which is some sense of some prime sensible response to something that's happened. 670 01:14:57,200 --> 01:15:02,779 So intentional behaviours honed by evolution, prompted by cues in the situation we're currently negotiating and for which we don't need. 671 01:15:02,780 --> 01:15:08,000 In the same way that the message research is saying we respond to something and have no idea that we've been primed, 672 01:15:08,480 --> 01:15:14,450 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. 673 01:15:14,840 --> 01:15:18,890 So it's important that we do not need consciousness for these things to happen. 674 01:15:22,580 --> 01:15:31,160 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. 675 01:15:32,240 --> 01:15:38,420 They come up with this idea of the selfish goal, which basically means that once a goal has kicked in, 676 01:15:38,420 --> 01:15:43,340 it just wants to fight or wants a form of behaviour which that a goal has kicked in, 677 01:15:43,520 --> 01:15:47,690 then it is just interested in in that piece of behaviour being followed through, 678 01:15:47,690 --> 01:15:52,220 regardless of whether it's in the long term interests of the individual or whatever else. 679 01:15:52,440 --> 01:15:54,950 And so you're going to have a, you're going to have a number of, as it were, 680 01:15:54,950 --> 01:16:02,110 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, 681 01:16:02,660 --> 01:16:06,140 to be the form of behaviour that dominates what we're doing at any particular moment. 682 01:16:06,440 --> 01:16:12,889 So this is very much like Nietzsche's apartment block of Endosomes or of these kind of underlings 683 01:16:12,890 --> 01:16:20,860 doing things in the background of which the rules are not if there is such a thing as no. 684 01:16:20,930 --> 01:16:30,319 So in this one bar count goals or as in forms of prime behaviour, are competing with other goals concurrently operating for dominance. 685 01:16:30,320 --> 01:16:35,200 And this is a version, as it were, one level of, of what we already know from then, 686 01:16:35,210 --> 01:16:38,300 that it's a account of the choices in the machine of consciousness. 687 01:16:38,300 --> 01:16:42,560 Therefore then it's more of a consciousness. There's various threads of what we're paying attention to, 688 01:16:42,560 --> 01:16:49,010 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. 689 01:16:50,090 --> 01:16:54,860 And in the past, when world this is actually happening, a let down, 690 01:16:55,010 --> 01:17:00,860 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. 691 01:17:01,520 --> 01:17:13,099 And, and, and one of them is likely in their account to the dominant, although again, as the responses to the article pointed out, 692 01:17:13,100 --> 01:17:16,819 maybe they'll be kind of compromises when in fact when they would actually 693 01:17:16,820 --> 01:17:21,160 have to be the sort of fighting it to the death that they sometimes suggest. 694 01:17:21,170 --> 01:17:28,400 So this seems to be useful because the way it challenges a number of familiar assumptions. 695 01:17:29,720 --> 01:17:33,320 So one of the things is that unconscious goal, 696 01:17:33,650 --> 01:17:42,370 conflict resolution is possible so that it's just and more and more and more information about the way the. 697 01:17:42,430 --> 01:17:48,190 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. 698 01:17:48,370 --> 01:17:51,280 So, uh, yeah, I mean, 699 01:17:52,390 --> 01:18:00,510 and even means that things that were previously associated very much with our conscious endeavours can happen without even knowing it. 700 01:18:00,520 --> 01:18:08,020 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. 701 01:18:09,730 --> 01:18:14,889 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, 702 01:18:14,890 --> 01:18:21,550 then we can without even being aware that we're exercising dietary self control, this goal can come to dominate. 703 01:18:24,430 --> 01:18:32,169 And even when we're pursuing conscious goals, we won't necessarily know how much that's affecting how we interact with the environment. 704 01:18:32,170 --> 01:18:36,219 Because one of the things about the goal, but I want to describe it, 705 01:18:36,220 --> 01:18:41,379 which in fact it's interestingly we kind of heideggerian phenomenology is that the thing 706 01:18:41,380 --> 01:18:47,950 that we're currently doing will certainly be ah will affect how the world appears to us. 707 01:18:47,950 --> 01:18:50,740 So the world is disclosed through the tasks that we're currently interested in. 708 01:18:51,010 --> 01:18:56,940 So obviously I will I will, I notice read traffic lights more in the car than when I'm on the sidewalk. 709 01:18:56,950 --> 01:19:02,980 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. 710 01:19:05,740 --> 01:19:11,530 And then another thing that that bar and van want to see is that this model of goals 711 01:19:11,530 --> 01:19:15,640 kind of operating in the background with us without our conscious processing means. 712 01:19:15,730 --> 01:19:19,690 Working memory is also something which must be there available in the background. 713 01:19:19,720 --> 01:19:24,580 It doesn't we don't have to think of working memory as something which is necessarily conscious and this is an off colour. 714 01:19:25,210 --> 01:19:28,270 But I'm going to people have been making since the early 2000. 715 01:19:29,590 --> 01:19:37,690 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 716 01:19:37,690 --> 01:19:44,319 the ways in which that and other research on priming might feed into a remodelling of how we think about decisions. 717 01:19:44,320 --> 01:19:51,340 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, 718 01:19:51,580 --> 01:19:55,260 this more familiar model of how in the humanities people might want to take it. 719 01:19:55,410 --> 01:19:57,190 Think about taking responsibility for that. 720 01:19:59,100 --> 01:20:12,799 Um, so what about, um, basically making the point that we don't drive our own behaviour and this has kind of been, 721 01:20:12,800 --> 01:20:16,710 you know, it must be pretty clear now for an hour and a half that we don't drive our body. 722 01:20:17,470 --> 01:20:20,770 Our central claim here is that an individual comprises multiple goals, 723 01:20:21,250 --> 01:20:25,690 each of which exerts a selfish influence on how that person sees the world and behaves in it, 724 01:20:26,050 --> 01:20:28,990 guiding judgements and behaving in the service of the current goal, 725 01:20:29,200 --> 01:20:33,520 but not necessarily in the service of the individual's actual overall best interests. 726 01:20:34,480 --> 01:20:43,600 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, 727 01:20:43,990 --> 01:20:47,080 then who or what is it that would be taking the truth for who? 728 01:20:47,740 --> 01:20:54,129 If we've kind of if we fragmented into this apartment block of different unresolved and we've given up the 729 01:20:54,130 --> 01:21:00,700 idea that there's a super soul who's kind of ruling more than who who of what would be taking responsibility. 730 01:21:00,700 --> 01:21:06,069 And then the important point is that which makes the things all doubly difficult is 731 01:21:06,070 --> 01:21:12,370 not only are we a fragmentary agglomeration of evolutionary whole forms of behaviour, 732 01:21:12,670 --> 01:21:17,020 but we're very good at telling us so things about why we do things. 733 01:21:17,020 --> 01:21:24,280 So confabulation and self-deception mean that the first person view of our own behaviour is in no way a privileged one. 734 01:21:25,300 --> 01:21:32,890 So because of confabulation, self-deception, we think and understand what drives our behaviour and evolution doesn't particularly care. 735 01:21:32,890 --> 01:21:37,600 That we don't understand is sometimes actually of a benefit to know, not know why we've done something. 736 01:21:37,600 --> 01:21:43,600 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. 737 01:21:43,600 --> 01:21:51,790 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, 738 01:21:52,150 --> 01:21:57,460 many instances of self-deception can be seen as a result of the autonomous nature of all Google pursuits. 739 01:21:58,690 --> 01:22:03,400 So we started with kick taking responsibility for our own behaviour, owning our own truth. 740 01:22:03,670 --> 01:22:09,309 Now we've ended up with a situation where if we look at the sort of primary literature we've split into, 741 01:22:09,310 --> 01:22:12,610 I mean, it's not just memory that's fractionalised. 742 01:22:12,940 --> 01:22:18,160 All our activities have been driven by quite autonomous forms of kind of routines, 743 01:22:18,790 --> 01:22:24,879 and our ability to randomness and get ourselves in order is also being questioned 744 01:22:24,880 --> 01:22:30,160 because we're so good at giving the wrong reasons for why we did things. 745 01:22:32,800 --> 01:22:42,370 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. 746 01:22:42,400 --> 01:22:55,360 Myself may say responsibility from the plurality of of of the primary literature some possible problems with the bar one model. 747 01:22:55,780 --> 01:23:03,460 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, 748 01:23:04,410 --> 01:23:08,410 which I don't understand why it necessarily has to be the case. 749 01:23:09,250 --> 01:23:15,219 And obviously, the question of selfish routines and responses seems like it doesn't matter. 750 01:23:15,220 --> 01:23:19,720 And that's the most useful term that if inspired by reading some Dawkins and that's what it's there, 751 01:23:19,720 --> 01:23:26,650 but it basically just means forms of behaviour that have their own autonomy and momentum and there's no 752 01:23:26,650 --> 01:23:30,760 reason why they couldn't be connected to what I'm calling physical forms of togetherness through sex, 753 01:23:30,760 --> 01:23:33,249 touch and empathy of empathy, other forms of emotional contagion. 754 01:23:33,250 --> 01:23:39,640 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. 755 01:23:40,480 --> 01:23:48,640 So yes, to the kind of the momentum of these routines and then some personal operation. 756 01:23:48,880 --> 01:23:50,650 But I don't know why we have to call that selfish. 757 01:23:50,650 --> 01:24:00,160 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. 758 01:24:01,270 --> 01:24:07,239 So as well as getting rid of the idea that selfish is the only way of talking about the goals, then as I warned, 759 01:24:07,240 --> 01:24:13,000 I think that we basically need to get beyond the isolated brain subject model because I always am, if always in a niche. 760 01:24:13,000 --> 01:24:17,830 And you have to think that niche always in terms of when you're thinking about what the brain does. 761 01:24:19,520 --> 01:24:24,339 And so and then just a bit of the origin of species to remind us of this embeddedness 762 01:24:24,340 --> 01:24:29,799 of any particular creature in a set of relationships with other creatures, 763 01:24:29,800 --> 01:24:32,290 and also in a world and also with other concepts, topics. 764 01:24:32,290 --> 01:24:38,769 The structure of every organic being is related in the most essential yet often hidden matter to that of all manner, 765 01:24:38,770 --> 01:24:46,180 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. 766 01:24:47,200 --> 01:24:52,600 So we're always part of a wider network, which in phenomenological terms we would call being in the world with others. 767 01:24:54,190 --> 01:25:00,370 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, 768 01:25:00,370 --> 01:25:05,529 her own, taking over his truth himself needs to try to get us apart. 769 01:25:05,530 --> 01:25:07,330 We still want to the version of responsibility, 770 01:25:08,620 --> 01:25:16,810 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. 771 01:25:19,090 --> 01:25:25,989 And the idea that our own ability consciously to inhibit behaviours would be the way out of this problem 772 01:25:25,990 --> 01:25:30,700 doesn't work because it's not clear that our conscious account of what we're doing is going to be reliable. 773 01:25:31,600 --> 01:25:39,520 So this the kind of that critique of where of what drives our behaviour is premised on this kind of isolated, selfish. 774 01:25:39,520 --> 01:25:44,770 It's the kind of Cartesian subject slipped in is still informing the, the brain science. 775 01:25:45,490 --> 01:25:47,680 And so I'm saying well, I'm basically saying, well, 776 01:25:47,680 --> 01:25:54,430 if we try and put visuals together and then put some sort of being an ecological niche into our argument, 777 01:25:54,450 --> 01:26:05,080 will that help us get beyond the apparent impasse that we might want, that in everyday life the version of responsibility of the Guardian? 778 01:26:05,090 --> 01:26:15,640 So the science is telling us, in no way I'm so embarrassed, amenable to challenge the idea of individuals earning their behaviour. 779 01:26:16,570 --> 01:26:28,690 But essentially I think if we if we take, if we put ourselves back in a world, we can see a way beyond it. 780 01:26:30,370 --> 01:26:33,730 So our behaviour is driven by situational cues. 781 01:26:35,320 --> 01:26:42,309 This is the problem. We might inhibit cues, but conflicts between goals don't need us to be there. 782 01:26:42,310 --> 01:26:48,430 To be doing the inhibiting and the story we tell won't be accurate. 783 01:26:48,430 --> 01:26:53,290 It might be some sort of computation. I guess this is just summarising where we've got. 784 01:26:53,290 --> 01:26:57,100 So how could truth more into authenticity work then? 785 01:26:57,490 --> 01:27:04,569 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 786 01:27:04,570 --> 01:27:14,830 problems and essentially dissolve the social psychological literature on the ways in which we may confabulation of our own behaviour. 787 01:27:15,010 --> 01:27:20,260 But we are in many ways interestingly reliable about other people's behaviours and other people's self unself understanding. 788 01:27:20,830 --> 01:27:29,170 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. 789 01:27:30,220 --> 01:27:35,980 So essentially if we're if we don't have our individual on his or her own trying to own the truth, 790 01:27:35,980 --> 01:27:40,720 but we have a group of people helping you know each other well, hopefully helping each other to own the truth together. 791 01:27:42,160 --> 01:27:45,190 Then we're going to get further. And what's more, we're not going to have to reinvent the wheel, 792 01:27:45,190 --> 01:27:53,080 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. 793 01:27:53,170 --> 01:27:59,440 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. 794 01:28:00,610 --> 01:28:08,559 And so this is basically I just alighted on some work by Brazilian Carlsson, but there's quite a lot with the literature, 795 01:28:08,560 --> 01:28:12,219 which is basically about the ways in which other people know more about us than we know about ourselves, 796 01:28:12,220 --> 01:28:18,700 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, 797 01:28:18,700 --> 01:28:24,819 we're just doing it anyway. So bacteria and cults and we are astute judges of each other's personalities, 798 01:28:24,820 --> 01:28:28,540 likely due to the importance of interpersonal perception for our social species. 799 01:28:28,540 --> 01:28:33,639 So there's an evolutionary pressure not just to react quickly to situations, 800 01:28:33,640 --> 01:28:37,540 but also to be able to read other people and counting, not necessarily households. 801 01:28:37,540 --> 01:28:42,219 As a result, other people, especially those who spend a lot of time around us and who we are open to, 802 01:28:42,220 --> 01:28:51,210 almost inevitably become experts on our personality. And therefore, in order to kind of get beyond the first person privilege in a reliable way, 803 01:28:51,220 --> 01:28:57,370 you need some sort of interaction of self and other ratings of views of what of what we do. 804 01:29:00,850 --> 01:29:05,739 So we need both self and other ratings of a person's personality do not simply provide redundant information. 805 01:29:05,740 --> 01:29:13,780 Instead they capture different aspects. And so in a sense, we end up encouraging some versions of kind of practices, of sincerity, 806 01:29:13,780 --> 01:29:18,220 where it turns out also that whilst we're not very good at explaining our own behaviour, 807 01:29:18,610 --> 01:29:23,319 if we conducted a thought experiment where we say, what would someone else say about this? 808 01:29:23,320 --> 01:29:27,040 We're actually or how it's what's someone else's impression of us? 809 01:29:27,040 --> 01:29:33,129 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 810 01:29:33,130 --> 01:29:37,420 metacognition where they feed into some sort of scepticism of their own views. 811 01:29:37,870 --> 01:29:43,720 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. 812 01:29:44,560 --> 01:29:58,629 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, 813 01:29:58,630 --> 01:30:01,870 that even this critique of it is still possible to not think that he wants to do it. 814 01:30:01,870 --> 01:30:07,569 And indeed it's in lots of cultural traditions that we want to be there and take responsibility for our life. 815 01:30:07,570 --> 01:30:16,389 On the day of reckoning, the the kind of primary literature in interesting ways plays upon what it might mean 816 01:30:16,390 --> 01:30:20,140 to take responsibility because so much is happening at a level that we don't control. 817 01:30:21,160 --> 01:30:27,670 However, I think that if we if we feed into this primary, which is more sense of how human beings are doing things together, 818 01:30:28,120 --> 01:30:31,389 then these confabulation and self-deception problems which used to be there when 819 01:30:31,390 --> 01:30:35,140 we when we left on our own to try to make sense for behaviour can disappear. 820 01:30:35,660 --> 01:30:42,910 Essentially what is and this is trying to do is show how in the technological and or phenomenological reading of the basic starting point, 821 01:30:42,910 --> 01:30:49,540 namely of people embedded in a world with others, can encourage us to kind of show the actions that we might take, 822 01:30:50,170 --> 01:30:58,090 the debates that other people are provoking with that insistence. 823 01:30:58,120 --> 01:31:02,200 Right, right. Insistence that we take the primate insights seriously. 824 01:31:02,290 --> 01:31:13,970 Thank you very much, indeed. So while.