“For some reason, the universe needs creatures who are able to understand it”: neuroscientists - about what secrets our brain hides
Miscellaneous / / June 22, 2023
To understand how our main organ works, you need to be a biologist, a poet, a mathematician and a detective.
Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis spent "Big Biological Lecture Hall" - a series of lectures on modern biology and its prospects. Within its framework, on May 31, 2023, a discussion took place on the challenges and problems of cognitive neuroscience - the science of the brain. Tatyana Chernigovskaya, Alexander Asmolov and Olga Svarnik talked about how this direction is developing and what to expect from it in the future.
Recording a discussion posted on the channel Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis, and we made an outline of it.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya
Professor and Head of the Laboratory for Cognitive Research, St. Petersburg State University.
Alexander Asmolov
Doctor of Psychological Sciences, Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Education.
Olga Svarnik
Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences and Head of the Department of the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis.
What are the biggest challenges for neuroscientists?
In the study of the brain, scientists found themselves in a paradoxical situation. It seems that the more reliable information about the work of our main body appears, the less clear the overall picture becomes.
A lot of knowledge has been accumulated, but scientists are not sure that they can correctly answer the main questions: how and why does our brain. Moreover, researchers seem to have far more questions than answers.
The brain is the most complex system
This is the first and most serious challenge. Scientists have proven that no system can study another if the second is more complex than the first. If the second one is easier, no problem. But today, researchers do not know of any system that would be more complex than the brain. Therefore, it is more difficult to study it than any other object of our world. At least that's what neuroscientists think.
There is some madness in doing brain work at all because of the seemingly hopeless nature of this story. Why are we doing this anyway? First, because it's interesting. And secondly, and hundredthly - because it is interesting and impossible to resist.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya
The brain is useless to study only with the help of tools
What is a brain? Seems like a very simple question. On the one hand, in any anatomy textbook we will find the answer. On the other hand, if you ask neuroscientists about this - especially those who have been doing research for a long time, they will answer: “I don’t know.”
The brain is, of course, a physical object that has a precisely measurable weight and volume. We can say that this is an organ that consists of many neurons. It was once believed that there were about 100 billion of them. Today, having received the results of new studies, neuroscientists have settled on more modest numbers: 85-86 billion.
But this number, although more accurate than scientists previously assumed, does not help in any way to understand how our main organ works. It does not explain how we see the world, how we make decisions, what motives prompt us to make this or that choice.
Maybe these neurons have joined together in a giant network. In a system that is much more than the simple sum of its parts. But neither counting neurons, nor other results that scientists obtain using a variety of ultra-modern devices, do not help to understand how our world works. thinking.
Moreover, instrumental studies will not show how the process of creativity occurs. No one has yet figured out how to find out where brilliant ideas come from in the minds of scientists, how inspiration comes to artists or musicians. And in general - what is inspiration, how is it measured? Spectrometers and scanners cannot determine this in any way.
The more we know, the less we understand. Suppose I have the best CT scanner in the world, which is not yet, but which I imagined. He will give me many tons of numbers. And what to do with them? Then interpretation begins, and here is the danger.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya
There are numbers, there are a lot of them. There are new studies that also need to be studied and built into a single model. But the problem is that so far there is no theory of the brain that would unite all the results obtained. It has yet to be created. And this is one of the main tasks of modern neuroscientists.
The brain has more possibilities than we can imagine.
One of the seemingly simple questions: how small children learn to speak? There is plenty of material for research, because babies are everywhere. Every healthy child starts talking sooner or later. But how the brain copes with this task is not fully known to scientists.
Yes, the baby hears how adults communicate. But he does not receive much verbal information. According to the calculations of some researchers, it would take a child about 120 years to learn to speak in the same way as those around them. Moreover, many of the adults around him speak with errors. They may not build sentences very correctly, they may not pronounce words very clearly.
It would seem that there are too many errors. But the child in a short time still masters speech rules. As a result, he easily understands those around him and can tell them whatever he wants.
His brain manages to deduce from this chaotic and corrupted input not just anything, but the laws of language.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya
Perhaps our brains have some kind of language modules built in from birth - they help to learn grammar. Or maybe there are no innate structures - it's just that the brain can process information much faster than it seems to researchers.
But there is no definitive answer to the question of how people learn to speak. It is only known that neural networks use a completely different learning principle than a person.
What knowledge from other fields of science helps neuroscientists
To solve the problems that have accumulated a lot today, tools and information from other areas of human knowledge are needed. Here are the main areas that are important for neuroscientists to understand:
- Processes of intrauterine development of a person. Need to learn how the brain is being formed baby, what information he is able to receive and process. For example, in order to understand how speech is formed, it would be good to know whether the baby is able to hear his mother and the people around him and how he perceives their voices.
- Child psychology. It is important to know how the child interacts with the world and how he learns new knowledge.
- Other areas of psychology. It is psychologists who will help to understand why, for example, a person cannot get to work before he sees the approach deadline. And why in this state he is productive, generates great ideas and works quickly. And if you are calm and not in a hurry, the result is noticeably worse. And this is just one of many mysteries.
- Linguistics. Knowledge of the laws of the language will allow you to understand how literate speech is formed.
- Training of neural networks. AI is a completely different kind of intelligence, not like ours. But it is worth knowing what methods of accumulation and processing of information exist and work effectively.
- Mathematics. In the study of the brain, accurate calculations and conclusions based on them are necessary.
- Humanities and art. It uses not an algorithmic type of cognition, as in the technical sections of knowledge, but a completely different one. The humanitarian spheres have their own rules, which are not translated into the language of formulas. Literature is a completely different type of interaction with the world than mathematics. And music, painting, dance generally create a special, non-verbal language. There are no words in it, but we understand each other at the level of images and emotions.
- Story. There are many interesting things in it, but it is worth paying special attention to the life and work of geniuses. Perhaps scientists will be able to understand exactly how their revolutionary ideas were born, what chain of thoughts and associations helped the creators create masterpieces. This will not help to repeat the process of creativity, but will clarify the mechanisms of the human brain.
- Philosophy. This is one of the most important sciences that neuroscientists cannot do without. You cannot study the brain without understanding who a person is, what he does on the planet, why he lives at all.
What question can the brain answer? So we open it and want to look inside. We do not see gerunds or Van Gogh's ideas. The neuron does not know that it is inside us. And the subtlest connections between different levels of consideration seem to me some kind of miracle, magic.
Olga Svarnik
Not every neuroscientist can be a specialist in all these areas. But to understand them, in order to understand how to analyze and apply the results obtained by specialized scientists, it is necessary for a brain researcher. And the work of neuroscientists is reminiscent of a classic detective investigation. Therefore, scientists have much to learn from the main heroes of the genre - like Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot.
What advances have neuroscientists already made?
Here is just one of many discoveries. It turns out that our brain is not divided into parts, each of which is responsible for its own sphere of life and does not interfere with the work of others, as previously thought.
In the information space, the idea of two different hemispheres was very popular. According to this theory, the left was responsible for logic, and the right was responsible for intuition, inspiration, emotions. But it turned out that everything is not so simple, and the brain is a single whole.
One piece of evidence for this hypothesis is that brain databases overlap. For example, the image of a coffee cup can simultaneously be in the sections “porcelain”, “beauty”, “drinks”, “what beats”, “everything with the letter H”. This is a very simplified example, but the brain works exactly the same way.
Now no one will talk about the places in the brain that are engaged in one thing - a spoon, another - a fork, and a third - a coffee cup. The idea of localizationism has been replaced, to put it very roughly, by the idea of connectionism.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya
But even here there are contradictions. On the one hand, the brain works as a single device. And if, for example, you put a person in a tomograph and give him speech tasks, then not one zone will be active, but many more. But, on the other hand, if only one area of the brain is damaged during an injury or operation, the person stops speaking. Therefore, the theory of connectionism is also far from complete.
What neuroscientists want to achieve in the future
Brain scientists are a bit poets. For example, they believe that each neuron of the brain is part of a single whole, but he does not know about it. Maybe every person, like a neuron, is also just a detail of something much larger than we can imagine.
To say that we are our brain is like saying, and I quote: any picture is just paint.
Alexander Asmolov
Maybe neuroscientists will help humanity figure out why the Universe needs us and what role we play in it. After all, the work of the brain is not limited to ensuring survival, finding food and creating comfortable conditions for yourself and others. The brain is able to solve problems much more seriously than everyday ones.
But nothing in nature doesn't just happen: if there is an ability, then there will certainly be where to apply it. Moreover, there will definitely be a need to use a unique skill.
Many years ago, I said to myself: the universe is getting bored. She wants to look in the mirror, she wants to talk to someone. For some reason, the universe needs beings who are able to understand it.
Tatiana Chernigovskaya
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