Welcome to the psychological annual In the Right Place, and we're extremely pleased to have this year.
Professor Jonathan Hall from the Institute for Research Communication of Brazil was one of the very first university to fight with the regime,
to study the dual basis of warfare, which I think is which is probably the value of the seminar setting a lot of this area.
And you will find that he's well personally and through his vision, more specifically on the origin of evidence on the basis of more sentiments.
Professor, thank you very much, Guy Julian, for this kind of station.
For me, it's an honour to be here talking to you.
I hope to put some interesting ideas.
And as you see, my work is is a very experimental one.
And of course, you try to make it conceptually palatable and make sense to a larger audience.
Of course, there would be a lot of technical stuff and I hope not to burden you too much.
But since I'm incorrect, most experimentalists that supply as you see that here.
So please do not and not feel uncomfortable in interrupting me in the case if either
my Brazilian English doesn't allow of you to understand or if if I'm too hermetic.
And at some point you can interrupt me.
Although I think it's safe for have questions at the end it could work better.
So I present some I'll cover some of the earlier studies we did.
Trying to address a very complicated issue is how the brain represents morality.
This is a very broad question, but I think in the past decades we have advanced advances significantly to try and do the same.
Of course, this just the beginning of the path. It's very preliminary work, I must say, whether covered in our initial work.
So just to give you a more and more like a chronological idea also of how have been thinking and and focus more on the more recent
evidence for the newer basis of prosocial antisocial behaviour presenting also illustrating that with some clinical studies in patients.
So this is just the outline. So in the first by time cover it is more conceptual, the issue of morality.
Then revise the functional imaging and some of the lesion studies which point to which brain regions are and how they the they assemble into
to prove to enable morality then recover the altruism and decision making some paradigms and decision paradigms and some patient studies.
And at the very end, I covered a topic that we've been working for only one year now.
It's a very, very initial thing, but I think it's a very interesting thing, which is brain decoding,
how you can decode brain states in brain states related to to morality and to moral emotions.
So it is clear that we are more creatures.
We have lots of Baltimore issues, but Peralta didn't appear from out of the blue.
In our species, Morales evolved from several proto morality, if you wish, that can be observed in several other social species.
For example, in several primates, they show complex social behaviours such as forming coalitions, sharing foods and keeping score of cooperation.
Have you reciprocity rules? But it is in humans that morality evolved to what's more most complex states.
That's the biological probably the last biological major change in our species
occurred in the upper Palaeolithic period around 80 to 1000 100,000 years ago.
But after that was a big discussion also on how the biological nature of interact with this civilisation and the forming of social values adopted by,
you know, social groups and how they interacted to bring about the our present more nature.
So in humans, we observe this very complex moral manifestation,
such as symbolic thinking and division of labour, economic exchange, the development of cultural norms.
It's not surprising then,
that the brain sizes in humans suffered a huge increase in terms of values from the earlier hominid species to the more of a human's.
So you from 460 to 1.5 litres of brain capacity, the volume of the brain is a very costly organ, consumes 20% of our energy in the resting state.
So we need powerful brains, actually, to to you to be able to be moral.
Of course, nothing. Our brain is not doing only morality, but it's a it's a core phenomenon for our nature.
So we humans, we care about lots of types of rewards and motivations which are on the basis of our immediate interests.
Now, however, our species is unique in terms of carrying both very complex social and moral feelings, many of them.
So we're able to admire or to engage interactions which are far from being far from us, from observing, like in our immediate interests.
Some, some, some of them are very complicated. For example, attaching to football teams, for example, is a very, very strange thing, isn't it?
Or religious symbols or whatsoever.
A music that's for those who have done all these things would be Venus, as human as the father of bossa nova wants.
So morality from a scientific perspective.
So our take on on addressing morality from a scientific perspective is very different from the philosophical
perspective which which aims to define which are the universal principles that should guide human conduct.
So which is the assembly of principles that should guide human conduct?
Whereas a scientific view aims, at least at this point, to document the changes in moral behaviour,
in how in brain regions response or interact in and choose to evolve to to enable moral behaviour.
So there's stuff based on functional imaging and lesion studies.
So let's put this the vision very clear because these are the studies that provide
the major differences in the major the major dimensions of mission and behaviour.
So that's the aim of science to tease apart and to be reductionist.
There's no other way than to be to the solution,
but also with being careful not to get lost in the midst of the trees because
overproduction is of course is also a dangerous thing in the end is to better understand
our moral nature and to provide alleviation for neuropsychiatric disorders and
other mental disorders which actually impair moral behaviour and also impair puts.
Society has a risk, for example, antisocial behaviours.
So for the whole past century all the attention has been, you know, the spotlights of morality has been the frontal lobes.
In a famous case of Phineas Gauge and then all the work might as well get in the mat-su
when when they saw the evi case more recently and we brought this discussion back to,
to the, to the real science. So that's what ours that's was our starting point to study morality with functional imaging.
So can we study more identify with functional imaging.
So just little brackets about functional imaging.
So a few words on that. In the past two decades, functional imaging,
especially if memory is provided because a tremendous advance in our understanding of several cognitive abilities and and morality included.
So it's non-invasive and allows for multiple experimental designs in conditions and you can repeat experiments.
We would not know risks for the volunteers.
So this was a major development.
So functional imaging in special fMRI for those who are not familiar is based on acquisition of of series of images from the brain.
And over time, each and each sets of C 30 slices over the brain is collected in style in about 2 seconds.
So and then we repeat this over time. And during this time we can perform tasks.
And with a signal we're measuring, the brain is actually the oxygenation oxygenation after haemoglobin.
So when you have a when I move my hands,
my contralateral motor cortex is more active and that causes a recruitment of arterial blue bloods in the mature blood has oxygenated haemoglobin,
which has a higher, slightly higher signal than the deoxygenated haemoglobin.
And this can be picked up by the correct appropriate imaging sequences in memory.
So in the end we were measuring transient changes in oxygenation in the brain induced by my watts, whatever test you're doing.
So there is no real baseline state in the brain.
That's very important. We always comparing one condition to the other,
although we can measure networks and synchronisation among regions in the resting states, as you might have heard.
But if you compare conditions between them, there is no true baseline.
We're always comparing the one condition to the other.
So this is just a quick example of see, someone is looking at this cross, central cross and they would see a screen like this.
And after several trials repeating that, we do a statistical test for the signal and we come up with these so called activation maps,
in this case, localising activation in the primary visual cortex.
So that's the basis of memory. So that was the first study we did on moral judgements.
So our first take on on mapping morality in the brain,
we're very crude with very simple way was just asking people in the scanner to make silence and mentally judge statements like
those telephones never read for statements like those 300 innocent men and compare what's what is different between them.
So they have to mentally judge that there's right or wrong.
And then afterwards we compared the moral condition to the factual condition, and that's the first picture we got from the group results.
So this is activation on the interior part of the frontal lobes, the so-called frontal polar cortex,
which is actually one of the regions that is more developed in humans.
So it has a huge expansion in our species compare species compared to other primates.
We also found activation in other regions, sex, for example, again to your temporal region that you can see there.
And the stuff was amazing, the lateral part of the brain at the time.
We had no explanation for that. But you already told us that the story was not so simple, as you know, the frontal lobe story.
What's. Of course, these first studies there were uncontrolled for several aspects.
For example, emotional valence was clearly different, was higher in the moral condition than the in a control condition.
So further experiments aim to fuse the subparts to a control.
Then in the next experience for Emotional Valence. Again, it finds its temporal activation.
In this case, the reason Coleman asks is that superior temporal samples.
It's a multi-model region which integrates it's known to integrate several perceptual channels modalities into to bring able to to,
for example, the perception of body movements or gestures engaged in this region.
And we also got, again, the ventral parts of the frontal lobe when it compared equivalence situations with equivalent emotional valence,
but with which difference in terms of moral content.
Just I forgot to say that our definition of moral saliency or moral content was
based on the Kobe and Kohlberg definition of issues not too related to rights,
responsibilities or values. So we had a moral morality score for each kind of stimuli similar.
So we had ratings on that. Okay.
So at this time, most okay.
It's still, well, lively and widely held belief that the frontal lobes, they have to do only with their executive or active functions.
So one question that was raised was that are these are the frontal lobes engaged just because you're making active moral judgements,
you are, you know, actively trying to discriminate or to weight these situations.
So we did we designed this study, which was a passive, totally passive study in which we showed pictures which were which were previously
scored or reason for mind by a separate set of subjects in terms of moral contents.
So that sense of pictures which have high and moral contents and or negatively valence and also
features which are evoked also negative emotions but very low to relatively low moral content.
So we we presented the these pictures, two subjects, of course,
the neutral pictures as well scrambled and then just store them to pay attention to the pictures.
And we showed them one after the other.
And what do we got to is that if we look at the pictures which are emotionally negative together, irrespective they are of a moral or a non moral.
We got sort of bilateral amygdala responses and bracing responses, all these babies of two brain regions which respond to emotional arousal.
But when we contrast directly the moral pictures to the unpleasant no moral pictures,
we get again the ten frontal polar cortex and asks the superior came from
across the cortex region and also the anterior temporal lobe is not shown here.
They are engaged.
So this piece of piece of evidence asked of men started to tell us a different story about moral judgements is that if you face a moral,
a more morally relevant to silence situation, your brain is a red tuned to that as a network and these regions are engaged altogether.
In this study we did the also connectivity analysis and then we showed that this frontal region and these ultra frontal regions,
they are they are more connected to each other, functionally connected.
When you are presented these pictures with moral contents.
So developed this idea of moral sensitivity that we are attune in all we we are
actually like a red reader monitoring with our moral brain is active all the time.
And of course it's surface fluctuations over time.
The opinion text detects more relevant issues and later on to show that this architecture of
functional architecture of morality matches what is being studied now as this resting state networks.
Okay. So just to move on.
So to summarise, there were several studies over the last decades and in all of them using a lot of them reached sort of it was very similar.
They point to very similar arrangements. Or engagements of regions, irrespective of type of task, was at active task.
Perhaps it best if they use pictures, simple war judgements, difficult moral dilemmas and etc.
So we have this a more functional architecture of morality, which is extremely is remarkably stable.
It's not actually task dependent. That's, that's the take home message or it's okay.
So the next step was to organise this.
So why how are these regions? What do they do actually?
So why they are is it's just, you know, it's a whole network.
But each region must have a role in must have a combination of role roles with the other regions.
So we did a a careful in detail revision of the literature searching for cases in which patients developed changes in more behaviour.
And if you just, you know, just not looking at frontal lobes, for example, just looking for lesions leading to change more behaviour.
And the what we want to get from that is that it is far from, you know, it's it's not the frontal lobe system.
There are a lot of of of impairments which are induced by, for example, anterior temporal lobe damage, which is very common, for example,
in frontotemporal dementia and also trauma, car accidents, for example,
the damage to the frontal lobe and also then to your temporal lobes very often.
And these cases develop very sometimes very bizarre types of social behaviour, the loss of empathy and etc.,
and also damage to small structures in the subcortical regions such as the septal region and the hypothalamus and etc.
These regions are very delicate and they involved in awareness as well.
So big lesions in there of course lead to death.
But when patients survive one or when they have capricious strategic lesions, that they can develop extreme changes in behaviour.
For example, violent assaults and anger bursts and a sexual activity which is absolutely inappropriate in that century with tiny,
tiny changes in these subcortical regions.
So clearly the story goes away from the frontal lobes of the speech of morality.
And some morality seems to be a disciplined function of the brain, but it's not just, you know, everywhere.
So here's the fixed of the regions for which we have clear evidence,
both from functional imaging and from lesion studies, which are involved in moral behaviour.
So we can see that the from the polar cortex, the right course, the left foot, the frontal cortex, which is kind of less clear,
and the medial intellectual off the frontal and the ventral region of the brain in these regions near the ends, anterior temporal cortex.
But that's so.
And of course then the limbic regions, the supports, the limbic regions,
including the septal area in addition to the amygdala, hypothalamus and basal forebrain structures.
So that seems okay.
So this is a lot of the brain, but if you look at the regions whose lesions do not lead to moral impairments, it's a lot of the brain as well.
So one could say that the emergence of morally abnormal behaviours,
they arise from specialised combination of lesion, that combination in special regions.
It's not everywhere in the brain. Okay.
So if we look now at what these regions which lead tomorrow impairments what they are doing,
we can see we came up with the simplification schemes of very systematically,
but they are these four main components in terms of the kinds of abilities, concert and emotional abilities that these regions are parts.
And so between lots of perspective assessments.
So value is assessment of goals,
assessment of future rewards and etc. This concept conceptual social knowledge solvents forgot to say from the perspective assessments, frontal lobes.
Frontal lobes are absolutely important for for us to enable us to think about tomorrow.
Well, what are you going to do and to wait options in the future?
Conceptual social knowledge was an hypothesis at the time.
We did experiments to investigate this,
but it's clear that anterior temporal lobes are important in conceptual social knowledge patients which atrophy
with atrophy in these regions that they they progressively lose their ability to discriminate object categories,
and they also lose social information, social knowledge.
Then the more posterior regions like the A6 superior came from cortex and they are able they represent actually percent perceptual in sensory.
So for example, face, body expression, voice enables to capture, for example,
body posture and facial emotions very rapidly and integrate this into our behaviour.
And finally, but not less importantly, the basic instincts of motivation, emotions which which are we could see,
let's freefall inside of your anger or attachments, pleasure or pain for which the limbic, the subcortical regions are absolutely fundamental.
So just putting this back into the brain, we could actually summarises the central motive stage.
That's an idea that Eliot Stellar came up in the fifties based on stimulation of hypothalamic and neighbouring regions,
which if you stimulate electrically these regions, you can induce several types of emotional states, very strong ones.
But you have free floating, they have no objects. No, they are.
They are decontextualised. So the central altered states,
congressional society attachment and etc. in the subcortical subcortical regions there the social
features and social functional features in the temporal lobe and then the frontal cortex.
And here we have Dr. Jordan Grafman model of the prefrontal cortex,
which he calls the structured event knowledge, which is a representational model of the frontal cortex.
Instead of being the frontal cortex being somewhat a structure which is operating or acting
on knowledge represented in other areas only like a managerial thing or executive thing.
It's actually representing information, especially sequentially information so represents a sequence of actions,
abstracts or mortuary actions and all these things, all these regions, they must work together, so just come back to that.
So they must work together in a non-hierarchical way.
They must be synchronised.
So for a complex, more emotion, for example, or evaluation, you have to have you have to integrate these regions and probably this improved.
We need to seek evidence for that yet.
But we suspect that this mechanism operates in the same way that Volf singer proposals for for example for visual binding binding.
If you have a perception visual perception of motion in an object and, you know,
shape and motion at the same time which occur in different brain procedure regions, but they are synchronised in the game of dance.
So it's a temporal synchronisation only electrophysiology can can actually tell us about this,
but it's very likely that these regions act together by temporal binding.
Okay. So what are the implications, what these lines of evidence to to our understanding of market nation?
So we believe that they provide potentially an improvement over these hierarchical models of control of top down control or bottom up control.
Such as, for example, somatic markers.
So viscera putting out in, you know, inducing us to be in certain states.
And then from there we react in certain ways more reason, the reason suppressing emotions and enabling us to act morally.
So these classical hierarchal models such as the masculine model they were there, is still very popular because they are they are very intuitive.
So in these for example, in this model, though, we have this the more basic regions of primitive brain like ocular occupying.
So the reptile brain, which is the emotional brain, and then we have a further cover,
we see the pattern mammalian brain which allows represented by the limbic structures.
We actually have the, the, actually the emotions, not only the self preservation mechanisms and then the cortical is going to be the rational
and the cortex would actually control the beasts we have inside us in our limbic system.
So we can we have to suppress these urges that come from the depths of our of brain to be to act.
To act appropriately so. And this view is actually wrong anatomically.
You know, it's not because of, you know, it's it's outside or discussion of morality,
but the the functional architecture of the brain and evolution of the brain doesn't work at all in layers.
So what happens in, for example, in our development of our species that are several nuclei,
some cartoon nuclei which are considered to be primitive, they grew together with the cortical structures.
They grew. They grow like you. Radziwill In radical, radical radio networks, they grow together.
So there are there are several elementary exponents studies looking at these regions supporting maybe growing our species,
even in more than several points, growing areas.
So, so again, so functional integration instead of top down control would be one possibility to fix better explained.
Of course, this has been tested experimentally to explain all moral behaviour as well as several other cognitive abilities.
So it's just one example how emotions like compassion could emerge.
So if you suppose that you are visiting an orphanage and then you see this sad girl.
So then you activate your asks because of the body posture in the face, facial expression,
etc. and you can, you know, she is, for example, ten is ten years old.
And you can also actually engage.
Conceptual representations, for example, of of helplessness.
And one less it's this abstract concept of representations in your frontal lobes,
especially the poles of the full cortex, allows you to immediately think about the future of this girl.
So, okay. The chance of adoption small at this age.
So while that's the future of this of this children in this child and etc.
And finally then engage your subcortical regions, which might enable you to feel attachment, feelings of affection.
All these things happen together, and they have this network activity which actually enables us to feel compassion.
So there was no localisation, but you have a combined activation.
So I just want to point to this quickly.
We are still, you know, starting to do these kinds of experiments.
But I think it's an interesting and interesting idea that can be combined.
So there was a lot of research now showing that several regions of the brain depicted here,
but this work was conducted by Marcus Vehicle showing these regions they active one way of doing nothing.
When you just rescue, of course, we are never resting.
We are just having our own inner thoughts.
But these efforts are strongly engaged, one in doing this and one once you are required to do some some specific task.
These regions actually deactivate. So they is evidence.
There was a lot of evidence for that. It turns out that these regions are exactly or they are very, very close to the Mark Ignition Network.
So one could suppose that we are you know, when you're in a relaxed state and, you know, say walking or not doing a specific task,
we are indeed, we engage these networks and they enable us to be monitoring all the social reality and the more implications.
And we have some.
So, okay, just this exercise, if you think about one of the best, happiest moments of your life or one of the worst or most episodes in your life.
So what happens and this is exactly what we did in this in this study.
So we studied 50 normal volunteers while they were thinking about ultimate graphical episodes,
which are related to family related shoots with significant others in spite of their positive or negative episodes emotionally.
So what you see up there, the blue,
is what the regions of the brain which are active in the resting states compared to a seven back seven max like counting,
subtract and sadness from, say, 100.
And it's a mathematical task and it takes a lot of resources, cognitive resources.
So if you cannot compare rest. To cutting back.
That leaves the divisions. Yes. However, if you compare one, entertain and pleasant, rational memories,
that's that's what you get the right thing and the big thing, which is that overlapping with the rest information.
And here is the of the negative memories.
So it's it's actually the same sense of regions is very similar has small difference between positive and negative.
But there's a great overlap between being a fugitive from the sky in the filter of emotional states in the resting brain.
I skipped through this and then I move to the new remains of altruistic decisions.
So these are more ex more recent experiments.
So one question would be was at the time.
So if we have this more cognition, that's where it's engaged.
It's it's one thing. It's a discipline thing. It doesn't matter what kind of emotion you're feeling, this same sort of thing.
So we designed this study to evoke specific moral emotions.
We designed scenario scenarios which could evoke, for example, guilt.
Your mother calls you a one night stand, and she was not feeling well.
When you did not take her seriously, you might say she died.
Okay, so this evokes guilt to most people, this imagery pass or statements, you know, inducing indignation.
We had also compassion, embarrassment that the our what we learned from this study was there was no specific signature for any more emotion.
But if you put together prosocial more emotions, emotions that enable us to act more prosocial,
including guilt, compassion, embarrassment, to care about our own mistakes or prevent mistakes towards others.
We see that the cheer PFC, which is the prompt, proper polar vortex,
is highly activating these emotions as well as the superior vests and again the same we see in moral judgements.
However, when we look at order of blame such as indignation and disgust, we see activation of the lateral lateral off the frontal cortex,
which was the region that is highly evolved in, in for example, in disgust and in even perceptual disgust.
If you feel bad taste, you engage the lateral actor frontal cortex.
So close the clusters of emotions, of social emotions evoke different patterns.
But there are some. If you cluster them differently, then we can find commonalities.
So, for example, if you look at the empathic emotions, the guilt and compassion, these emotions, what do they have in common?
Both of them care about others, and we care about them.
And we care about the well-being of others.
So when you look at them, you see these basic forebrain hypothalamic regions, which at the time we had trouble to interpret.
But the striking came out more clear in more recent experiments as usual.
So I show this. This is a work by my colleague Rollins on.
And the purpose of this study was to look at these and shear temporal region, which with which we didn't have much evidence for that.
What is this anterior temporal cortex doing exactly? So his idea was that it was a story, some kind of social, conceptual knowledge.
But for that, use this kind of experiments.
So people were presented with social, with social functional concepts.
For example, stingy general scholar grief.
And compared to other concept of abstract concept, which are animal functions, useful deficiencies, dangerous findings.
So what do we get? Is ism sheer temporal superior to the temporal cortex?
So this region seems to be specialised to for these see traits or social concepts
which which are very important for our ability to judge situations in an abstract way.
So this is a further study in which we have the same social concepts, but then in the context of action.
So you acted strangely or generously towards your best friend.
So when you do that, you get again the same activity on the on the sheer temporal cortex here because it's
semantic social semantics and it doesn't care about what kind of emotion is involved.
However, if you look then at the limbic sort of supports though in the frontal regions,
then these regions that are specific for they react differently for different more emotions evokes such as guilt and indignation,
as we saw before, with a more precise design.
Okay, I skip through this and I move to the one to this study, the charitable donation study.
So so far we only talking about moral cognition studies using abstract scenarios and or pictures and things like that.
So the aim of this study was actually to put morality, you know, on the rolls and sort of have some reality on that.
Even in the in the in the context of in a veritable social context of an MRI scanner.
So in this study, we had people, volunteers recruited, and they could when they would,
they were told that their decisions could could lead to monetary gains for themselves.
If it was real money, they could leave, put as much as $120.
They made these decisions anonymously, and they were told that they could keep all the money for themselves or they could donate,
depending on the test trial to different causes.
And we proposed we chose causes, some of them that could be very controversial.
For example, abortion, euthanasia, you know, arm gun control and the National Rifle Association, for example, and things like that.
So by doing that,
we wanted to see if people would sacrifice money to help certain causes or to oppose certain causes that are designed to test in design.
Allowed us also to look at opposition because depending on the payoffs,
if they wanted to keep the money, they the money would be donated by the funds to the organisation.
So they also could sacrifice to oppose Cosatu's opposition for example, or they could donate possibly costly for example, or they can just win money.
There are some trials that the organisation that in moves or when they could just win money.
So these participants on average they donated 40% of the whole state and that ranged from 20 to 80%, a big range across people.
But these are the functional imaging results. So why do we see this sort of conjunction analysis?
So what we see here are the brain regions which are active either when they are winning
money with no consequences for the for the organisation and or when they are donating money.
So we see here there is a battle to resolve.
The mental area is the source of the department project neurones to the central stream.
Just region this region here. So this is basically the reward system of our brains.
So when people win money, that's everybody knew that there were several studies and at the time,
using financial rewards, you activate a reward system.
But this study was the first to demonstrate that when you are donating money, you activates also the the reward system of the brain.
So is helping only like a reward response or do we see certain specificity in brain systems?
So that's that was done by comparing directly the donation condition to the R to the reward condition.
And then by doing that, we saw activation this very deep area to some general cortex.
And that's kind of spot there back there, which is the septal regions.
So these regions, they are, they are, they are very intimately related to bonding behaviours in several species.
They are very dense, they have very dense presence of receptors for oxytocin aggression.
So they are related to very basic attachment mechanisms.
So what this tells us is that probably the basic attachment mechanism that's, you know,
allows several species of mothers to attach food to two pups, for example, or a pair bonding.
They acts in our species to allow us to attach to very complex causes and principles or ideologies.
So when people oppose situations, then they engage in lateral fight.
The frontal cortex, which was. The region that we saw that's evolved in disgust and indignation.
So that's the correlate.
So it tells us that it's a culturally mediated social aversion to engage the same systems as aversion to bad tastes, for example.
And when you just look at costly decisions, if you're either if you're closing or you're donating,
and then in this situation, we get back the the frontal polar vortex that we saw before for moral judgements.
So this region is more strongly engaged when you have to make a real decision, which is costly.
Okay. So this other experiment done by my colleague Frank Krueger was American nomics experiments.
I want to show this quickly because I think it's very informative in this topic.
Here we had two people interacting, each one in a different scanner, and they were doing like a prisoner's dilemma game, but it was iterative.
So each one, you know, made decisions the first time that the other one could reciprocate the cooperation,
etc., and then they switched the roles and okay.
So basically to summarise, when we analyse the patterns of interaction between the subjects,
the vast majority of them, the press, 22 pairs of people cooperated.
Most of the time there were only two pairs who actually started to fight and actually lost all the money.
They started to fight and punish each other, each other. Okay, so we decided to separate from the analysis and what we see here.
So the whole people in general cooperative because they took profits from this corporation.
However, there were two different parents. About half of them developed a kind of conditional cooperation life.
And they only cooperated if the if the, you know, of the gains of this specific interaction were or good for both.
So in certain instances, the payoff for the first decision maker was very high.
And in this person, the fact factors still, they were able to pick up cooperation again.
And they all the other half had unconditional cooperation.
They cooperated every single time, irrespective of the bond who's involved in a given trial.
So here we showed that of the regions of the brain which are most synchronised
are co activated in their brains when they are making cooperation decisions.
So the behaviour is exactly the same. They are cooperating with the other one.
But these are the conditional co-operators or the trust based co-operators, and here is the conditional.
So what we see here, although they are making the same decision to cooperate, these guys are actually in the reward system, the weaker regions.
So probably they are focusing on the expected gains, financial gains, whereas the other ones are activated.
A central region, which is the region related, which is related to Ponzi mechanisms.
So in this case, the brain is telling us something that cannot be observed in the behaviour in a given trial.
So this is more recent data is still some data, but do we want it to look, you are very interesting now in the central region.
So it is really central to the to be a core region to enable us to feel for others a very basic region.
And in this study, we had scenarios which are affiliates of they describe you interacting in in positive or negative ways towards your kin.
And we had scenarios, control scenarios, which are all also social and emotional, but they don't involve kin interactions.
And the results I just want to show this quickly.
We see very strong activations here in the in this this was really not the hypothalamus and septal region.
So this this region is is really involved and these kinds of affiliates of behaviours or affiliates of feelings in this case.
So we got supports of data from lesion, from this lesion study.
This study was done with the ensemble from the NIH.
So these are patients with the behavioural side of frontotemporal dementia.
This question typical of descriptions, they they have a dementia which starts earlier than the Alzheimer's one starts on the forties and
fifties or sixties in the typical have they typically develop impaired social functioning this type of.
If, for example, they decide to to have inappropriate sexual behaviour and decide to,
you know, start with teasing behaviours and that's the first manifestation of this disorder.
So we sent a sample of 21 patients with these and we were interested to see it was interesting to
see whether we could get evidence for these moral emotions being affected in a selective manner,
depending on the topography of the alpha atrophy or in this case, the hypo metabolism using pet imaging.
So what we see here are the regions which are dramatically hyper metabolic in relation to prosocial emotions.
So the task involves showing the scenarios as I described for and listening to,
they have to pick which emotional matches they would feel in that specific situation.
So the more impaired, the parents, the more enthusiastic the prosocial emotions such as guilt and embarrassment and professional activity,
the more hyper metabolism they have from the moral cortex in the softer regions and differently,
the more impaired they are in indignation, in disgust, the more atrophy they have in the amygdala, in the north shore medial region of the cortex.
So we can really discriminate these networks on the basis of all of this dysfunction in this patients.
Okay. So when I mentioned psychopathy, that's another kind of subjects we've been studying.
In our case in Rio.
It's very dangerous to study patients, you know, criminal individuals in prisons because, you know, system is not so safe, as you might imagine.
So we decided my colleague Ricardo Julia Villas-Boas, is a neuro psychiatrist,
but he sees, especially in the psychiatric institution, these individuals become normal.
And generally they are brought from their families because they are you know, they are destroying the family.
They are destroying the financial resources, creating a lot of problems.
And at some point, the families like you have to have a psychiatric consultation that they have that comes across.
Okay. So these are the what do we call the communities psychopaths?
Of course, not all of them are psychopaths. Many of them have other psychiatric disorders.
But then we have the assessment and we have a sample, increasing sample of these subjects.
Of course, they leave at some point, they never say, but we had an opportunity to study a number of them.
And psychopathy is has been studied before by separate investigators using manual tracing off of regions,
especially the frontal cortex and the in the temples.
And so most most of the studies showed volumetric small volumetric decreases in the frontal cortex,
but overall, their brains look pretty, pretty much normal.
So our aim here is to use a more advanced technique.
At the Times was the voxel based momentary to look at the whole brain instead of selecting regions.
And it turns out that the regions here, that the regions in yellow and red are the regions which are reduced.
They have quite the cortex, cortical reductions in these regions relative to a period sample of normal controls and the reduction
in the degree of criminality in these regions in the frontal fall from the fourth cortex in the east,
that's this is related to the severity of their scores in the psychopathy checklist.
So there seem to be a monotonic relationship between the atrophy in how, you know, how psychopathic they are.
So that's a come to the last parts of my talk.
So just speak about a few, a few slides on brain coding.
So comparing that pattern recognition methods in functional and spectral imaging and methods
to classify patients and classify brain states using this more modern techniques algorithms.
So the first just a little bit off of the theoretical grounds of this.
So discrimination, if we seek to, to, to find discriminatory formation using multivariate tools.
So instead of looking at one voxel and comparing.
Populations or conditions. We look at the combined effects of of several blocks in the brain using two main methods,
the linear discrimination analysis and the supports vector machines.
There are a number of researchers who have been doing a fantastic work on this in the past few years, trying to, for example,
look at some representational objects that can move like brain reading and called,
for example, for thinking of all the Hammer boys to thinking about a house and etc.
And we started to use these techniques actually in the sample of psychopaths to try to see if
the structural images could be used to discriminate between psychopaths in normal controls.
It turns out that we reach about 80% of all sensitivity and specificity in telling apart the normal control from the psychopaths.
Of course, this is not good enough for clinical applications, but it's it has ethical implications,
and it has in order to tell us that these kinds of imaging can be used for prediction.
And we all have a lot of implication in the future.
Okay. And now I jump to the neurofeedback parts of the story.
So this is the thing that we're most interested in.
Interested in now is can we train the same emotional, complex motion emotional states in the brain?
So can you can you make people train this? But but having some objective marker in the brain.
So in this study, this is actually pretty preliminary data that is shown here.
But we had we had volunteers choosing speaking as a as a show that they had the data before choosing autobiographical memories from their own lives.
Of course, autobiographical, which would be pleasant or unpleasant or very relevant ones.
And they had to engage in these memories voluntarily.
We just cued them pleasant and pleasant and also asked them to think about affiliates of memories,
because we are interested in that affiliation and afterwards.
And we also have the autobiographical mutual episodes.
And the one of regret is that we collected the data, the subject is in the scanner,
would tell them what they think about the project their pleasant and they think about the as pleasant memories,
unpleasant and and so on mixed up with the neutral ones.
Then we developed a software system which can which can do this very quickly.
They can align the images through our general in our model calculates the difference between
the tasks through a future selection map and then train those voxels which survive this.
The statistics would support the virtual machine with some multivariate algorithm.
So in the end, what we have is, is a trained set of a network which can be used for prediction.
And this is done in a couple of minutes. So as long as soon as one finished acquisition period, that is run.
Then 2 minutes later, we start again. But this time we show people who show the subjects.
These frames here and the sort ring means that the person is is engaged, immersed into the space, which is actually nuts.
If it's not seated, it's not discriminating between the two states.
It's, you know, it's the split.
And the more the person achieves the desirable, I mean, the goal states could be the pleasant saved or the unpleasant state.
Misery becomes more perfect, so even more smooth.
So it's it's a very interesting feeling, actually.
If you understand it, you can you can see that ring is moves according to your imagination of two scenarios and I can show you.
Okay, that's actually my own dream. I was thinking here, this is our son from the desert.
So Francisco was in the hospital to us, imagined to see that very stressful design and then the pleasant one just for this plane.
He was looking at his own brain activity in a study that actually it did.
So these two scenarios and then I show a little movie for you to to give you an idea of how can you observe instead of showing,
you know, brain activity, which is very complicated, we can show we can transform very complex brain patterns in intractable.
This is an earlier version of the new feedback system we have.
And then you see that with the right thing, like the frontal cortex starting to build up.
So here the subject is imagining these are a few bits of scenarios and next thing you see actually the current implementation we have.
So this is unpleasant is projected backwards because it's projected to the subject in this manner.
The search only sees this screen here. So as you see this circle, the ring becomes, you know, in this case, perfect.
That's the best SVM projection so we can monitor,
so the subject can actually have a feedback on their own performance in the task and potentially train to achieve desirable states.
So I believe this is a very interesting tool that can can be used potentially for any kind, any kind of emotional states or morally relevant.
States attitudes and so on.
Okay. Just to conclude.
Yeah, that's Eduardo, another son. Of course, there are easier ways to reach the States, but we don't have objective markers.
So the big advantage of any such map is that we might have, you know, very objective markers.
On the top of that. We can train subjects to to reach some psychological states based on other populations, for example,
experts in in reaching very positive emotional states or, or tranquillity or meditative states.
For example, we have we can have these cool brain patterns and we can train the states to try to get to the same levels and have objective markers.
So to conclude and then in the last ten years,
it has found that there is a stable networks of neural components which are engaged in moral sentiments,
moral judgements in the decision making tasks in love with a big variety of tasks, types of tasks and stimuli, the integrations.
We believe that integration of consequence of subcortical networks can better accommodate how our brain operates,
especially in terms of moral condition that leads us beyond this cognition,
emotional dualism and suppression of one to the other,
and then might help help the health or improve understanding more complex motivations and emotions.
We find overlapping networks which represents moral sentiments, values and altruistic decisions.
Although we are all and we can also see some differences between these things.
That's I think the big challenge now is to find the soup of signatures for these
complex states would form of the central region of the frontal polar cortex.
So general cortex, a key, very key regions for the prosocial emotions and I would say for morality pattern recognition methods in neurofeedback,
they are able to predict categories of of all of patients, for example, and they are a window into the subjects of emotional states.
We can potentially train several types of states, such in gratitude, for example, the summation tolerance and so on, or decrease of anxiety.
And our growing ability to predict behaviour of course has deep implications for diagnostic
treatment of night neuropsychiatric disorders and also legal implication of ethical implications,
tailoring better behaviours, using all sorts of manipulation, pharmacology and surgical interventions.
Neurofeedback can you know it's fundamental about to understand the organisation of of these complex
neurocognitive networks and applications are as you might imagine very low can be very wide wide including,
you know, policymakers treating couples, for example, couples problems or organisational psychology and, and so on.
So I would just like to thank this is a group efforts.
Studies are very complex to depend on a lot of people working together from the computational side, from the neurological and MRI.
And I was thank my all of my collaborators from different places specially on violence.
Rowlandson this are people from lab from the institutes and I leave you with some nice pictures of Lowboy in Virginia.
Thank you.