BI 223 Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology Motifs in Neuroscience

[00:00:03] Speaker A: I think that the ecological neuroscience, hopefully in 20 years, will be a neuroscience that acknowledges the substantive role of the body and the environment in our cognitive abilities. I've come to the realization that philosophy teaches a few things. Defining concrete things is easy. So I have my phone here and if we talk about this phone, it's very easy. You know, it's an iPhone. Whatever has this. This defining abstract terms like the notion of phone, it's virtually impossible to me. Actually. I hate the discussions on affordances and on representations. Hate them. [00:00:57] Speaker B: Me too. But I host them and I'm going to keep hosting. This is brain inspired, powered by the transmitter. Vicente Raja is a research fellow at University of Murcia in Spain, where he is also part of the Minimal Intelligence Lab run by Paco Cavo where they study plant behavior. He is also external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. Vicente is a philosopher first and foremost, as you'll hear him say, but he's also a cognitive scientist and he specializes in applying concepts from ecological psychology to understand how brains and organisms, including plants, get about in the world. We talk about many facets of his research, both philosophical and scientific. Maybe the best way to describe this conversation is as a tour among many of the concepts in ecological psychology, like affordances, ecological information, direct perception, resonance, and how those concepts do and don't and should or shouldn't contribute to our understanding of brains and minds. We also discuss Vicente's use of the term motif and to describe scientific concepts that allow different researchers to study roughly the same things, even though they have different definitions for those very same things. Toward the end of the episode, we touch on his work studying plant behavior. I wish we had more time to talk about that, but hopefully he'll come back on as we talk about in a later joint discussion with a few other people more about ecological psychology and its relation to neuroscience. But that is in the future, hopefully. I link to all of his papers and the information in the show notes@BrainInspired Co Podcast 223Support Brain Inspired through Patreon to, among other things, get full episodes like the full episode version of this conversation, go to BrainInspired Co to learn how. And away we go. Vicente, so you just told me that you're visiting in. You just got to Mexico to do like a three month stint there and I was. I'm going to ask you to repeat what you're doing there because I just asked you and you told me and I thought, oh man, I wish I'd pressed record. So what are you doing in Mexico? [00:03:39] Speaker A: So I'm here in a research visit. I'm visiting the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, which is unam. It's kind of the biggest university in the country. And I'm invited by some group of people here that work on embodied cognition, affordances, ecological psychology, all that kind of stuff. So I will be doing some philosophical work there, writing some stuff. But I'm also, in the last few years I've developed a workshop which is basically workshop on how to use complexity science and dynamical systems theory to study behavior. But the twist is that it is kind of a gentle introduction for psychologists and philosophers. Right. So it's kind of for those people that don't have the mathematical tools and that actually they don't need them. Right. Because what they need is to, when they read a paper that use these tools, they are able to, to engage with it and to understand. So that's, that's a thing that I'm going to be here for four weeks and then you have some other works on. On that. On that camp. Yeah. [00:04:55] Speaker B: So that's the kind of complexity science and dynamical systems side of your multifaceted work. So you're not doing any ecological psychology thing or there's got to be some ecological psychology within that realm. [00:05:09] Speaker A: There's some ecological. Okay, psychologist. I'm basically here to complain to my friends that what they mean by affordance is not an affordance. [00:05:21] Speaker B: Oh my gosh, you know, it's interesting. So I recently had Zach Pitko on my podcast and I don't know if you heard or listened to that one, I don't care. But shortly after that, so I had Louis Favela on a few months ago and he wrote this book, the Ecological Brain, and he's a cognitive scientist and ecological psychologist and philosopher. And he wrote to me after I had Zach on, because Zach and I were talking about his and his group's effort to head up an ecological neuroscience project, multi year project that's now funded or whatever. Anyway, Louis emailed me afterwards and, and said, you know, there's some curious things that he said, maybe we could, it'd be fun to have a discussion. He brought your name up and I thought, oh, this is great because you, you had been on my list for like couple years. Actually, I didn't tell you that offline, but you've been on my list a long time. I have a long list, but you've been on there a long time. And so this gave me like the perfect opportunity to, to invite you and you Queued me up by. By saying, like the idea that you have to convince your friends that they have the concept of affordances all wrong. Your neuroscience friends or your cognitive science? I'm not sure which one you said. [00:06:34] Speaker A: I mean, no, they. It's kind of. They are. They are philosophers and cognitive scientists, and they probably think that my concept of affordance is wrong. [00:06:45] Speaker B: Right. [00:06:46] Speaker A: So that's part of the discussion there. And I think that part of it relates to some work I've done about the notion of motif and how these concepts work. Right. But yeah, I mean, I guess with regard to affordances, I'm kind of an orthodox ecological psychologist. [00:07:08] Speaker B: Does that mean you follow the letter of Gibson? Is that what orthodoxy is in ecological psychology? [00:07:13] Speaker A: I mean, there are probably. There are ways to follow the letter of Gibson because the theory of affordance is. He kind of. I mean, he kind of. He dies before he finishes it. So there are some open doors there. Right. But I think the core of ecological psychology is that there's ecological information, which is a property of stimulation, that specify affordances. Right. And that to perceive an affordances entail detecting that information. [00:07:48] Speaker B: That's his version or is that your version? [00:07:51] Speaker A: I think that's his version. I think that's the version of the following ecological psychology. So the main figures after him, like Michael Tarvey, Claire Michaels, you know, all the big figures. And to me, it's kind of the orthodox view. Right. An affordance, whatever it is, some people say it is a relation, some people say it is a disposition. There's kind of a metaphysical discussion there. But what is important is that if you perceive an affordancy, there must be ecological information that specify it. [00:08:27] Speaker B: That is the. The necessary, that's the requirement for it to be enough. So that's kind of odd because that then you can't have a neuroscience. So first of all, we're gonna, eventually, hopefully we're gonna have you and Louis on with Zach and someone else and kind of have a bigger discussion. So I don't want to spend the whole time talking about this. But it's odd to pin the necessity of, when you use a term, to pin it on the source from which you must derive it, if that makes sense. [00:08:59] Speaker A: It's more the source that makes you able to perceive it. Right. [00:09:06] Speaker B: It's the ecological information. [00:09:09] Speaker A: Yes. If you want to put it this way, in ontological terms, no matter if you want to characterize it as a relation or as a disposition. And affordances is some property of the environment with respect to an organism, such that the organism can do something about that environment. Now, how is the organism able to perceive the affordance? The ecological hypothesis, the core ecological hypothesis, is that we are able to perceive affordances because there are some properties of stimulation that we call ecological information that actually specify that affordance in the environment. Actually, I mean, I'm not going to quote Gibson a lot, but. [00:10:03] Speaker B: Yes, you are. Come on, you guys all do that. [00:10:06] Speaker A: But there's a line in which he says something like what is important is not if affordances exist or not, but if there's information that specify them. So that's kind of the core thing. And. But I'm not sure if this is an end or a But I also think that the notion of affordances has taken over from ecological psychology long ago and now it's a different thing. But the affordances I want to work with are still the ones in the ecological camp. Right. Although I understand that affordance is now bigger than the ecological framework. [00:10:57] Speaker B: How did it get bigger? Were neuroscientists like, ah, so affordances are the behaviors that we can enact based on the environment, and therefore, you know, is it that simple? Like where it just gets reassigned to some other locus of interest? [00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think this happens sometimes with some concept. Right. I mean, I could say the main example is the concept of meme. Right. Meme is kind of a work related to gene, but for culture. And now we use meme in terms of whatever bits of things. Right. [00:11:32] Speaker B: So it now meme is a gif or something. [00:11:35] Speaker A: Yeah, kind of. But I think actually the notion of affordance got relatively late to the neuroscientists. Right. I think some of the earlier people working on it are probably Mel Goodale with the two paths, and Paul Cisek on the affordance hypothesis, the affordance competition hypothesis. I think they both worked in the early 2000s, but before that, I think the popularity of the notion of affordance grows in the late 80s, both in robotics with Rodney Brooks to some extent, and I would say even more in design with Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things. [00:12:29] Speaker B: Oh, he brings up affordances in that book. [00:12:34] Speaker A: The whole idea is that we should design our objects, making their affordances explicit. Right. But right there he's already not dealing with perception, ecological information, Gibson, whatever stuff. It's just, you know, is that what's an affordance? An opportunity of interaction with our environment. So we should design our things such that the affordances are clear. Right. There are typical examples. Is that when is that if you want your door, it's called the Norman door. Right. If you Want your door to be easy to deal with. If you need to push it, don't put a handle, right? Because the handle will afford to pull and then you will need to put a thing pull, right? So take the tag pull off and just make the only action available to be to push and then you will push. That was kind of the idea. [00:13:46] Speaker B: Okay. All right, so maybe we'll come back to Affordances later, but because we're going to hopefully have a broader discussion on the topic, let's leave it for now. One of the things that you said while you were discussing that is essentially the notion of, I don't know if it's exactly the same thing as semantic drift, but it's people co opting words and using them in slightly different ways and then all of a sudden it's out of its original meaning, it leaves its original meaning. And then you have to do like etymology and historical work to remember to really go back to what it really means. But, but I want to talk about your work with motifs. So you came up with this concept, as far as I know, you came up with it of a motif which is a word which means some things, but you co opted the word motif for your own philosophical purposes. Right, but. So you were talking about this kind of semantic drift notion and the words change their meaning. And I wondered, because a motif here, I'll define it and then you can correct me, but I'm reading your. This is a quote from one of your papers. Motifs are highly unconstrained, open ended concepts that support equally open ended families of explanations. And so it's like loosely kind of related to paradigms in science and to perspectives almost, but it's different. And I want you to tell me why you felt the need to formulate a new concept, motifs, what that buys us and why you felt the need to do that. [00:15:24] Speaker A: Good question. I'm still thinking about it. In my theoretical work. This is the thing I've been thinking the most in the last couple of years or so. And I keep thinking, so I think this starts with a realization which is that most of the core concepts in the cognitive sciences are somewhat vague. So first example, affordance. I just told you I come here to tell my friends that their notion of affordance is wrong, but they think my notion of affordance is the wrong one. And we talk about it and we kind of mean the same thing, right? We, we all mean kind of opportunities of interaction, but not really. The other main example is representation, right? The notion of representation. People disagree, both representationalists and Anti representationalists disagree on what a representation is. Right. So you can have two guys here that agree that the brain has representations and they mean different things. Totally different, right. So I was thinking about what those concepts are, right. And what role they play. Because there's this idea, I think that it's kind of an intuitive idea that, okay, if we don't want to have discussions about concepts in science, we need to make them more precise, right? As soon as we make them a good definition, then it's over. And first, this seems to never work. [00:17:11] Speaker B: Never, never. [00:17:14] Speaker A: And actually, when you make the word whatever concept really precise, it starts to lose its appeal for other people. Right? Like other people don't really mean that thing. Right. Again, example, affordance. So I'm going to criticize myself here when I say I'm an orthodox ecological psychologist who like affordances to be this. I know that by doing that, many people who work on affordances don't care about me anymore. So thinking about that, I thought, so it seems like these concepts are good or part of the virtue of the concept is actually to be imprecise, to be vague, right. To be open enough as to accommodate different views. And with that, you know, everyone can use the same word and to talk, to talk about it, but at the same time, you know, they can do slightly different things, different explanations. Right. When I was thinking about that, I had also kind of a historical point of view here. I'm writing a book, and for that I've been reviewing some of the history of neurophysiology. And you see kind of that there are kind of overarching questions since the mid-19th century to now, like how. How stimulus and experience relate to each other, what's the mechanism? Or, you know, should we understand the functional organization of the brain as organized or as this, or as holistic or, you know, or modular or holistic kind of thing. So I think these questions remain and some of the answers are relatively similar even if they use different words, right? So Helmholtz answer, and let's say Friston answer is very similar. They don't use exactly the same words, but it's kind of thing. There's some form of internal inference that takes something that is not fully meaningful, but with the prior knowledge and that stuff becomes meaningful. So I was thinking, it seems like, you know, there are some bits of explanation that are used both synchronically by different people, meaning slightly different things, but also diachronically through the history of, of the cognitive sciences, say. Right. And then I thought what kind of thing is that? And I like music. I sing in a heavy metal band. I play guitar. So, you know, like, music is something that is very present in my day by day. And I say, oh, you can do something like that with musical motifs, right? They are kind of small patterns of things that can be played in different. Let's say, in different melodies. Like, you can play an ascendant scale in different melodies. The melody can be different, but kind of the. So to speak, the vibe of the. Of the ascendant melody is the same. [00:21:05] Speaker B: In both different variations. Yeah, yeah. [00:21:08] Speaker A: So it's kind of. It has its meaning, it plays different roles, but when you listen to it. Oh, it's. It's still a repetition or it's still, you know, like, like, like, like the, the tritone. Right. Like you. You can hear it even if it plays different roles in different melodies. So that's why I took that name for these concepts that are used in different explanations, some of them more similar, some of them more different, they are vague enough as to accommodate them, but at the same time they kind of retain some meaning there. Right. So when we say representation, we disagree, but we kind of mean that there's something inside that stands for something outside kind of thing. Right. And when we say affordance, we also disagree, but we all mean there's some possibility, some opportunity to do an action out there. [00:22:13] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [00:22:14] Speaker A: So that's kind of the main idea there. And this is kind of the descriptive part of it, you know, me trying to understand these concepts. But then there's a normative part which is, I think this is good for them. I mean, I think these concepts are strong in the field and they remain precisely because of their vagueness. [00:22:46] Speaker B: How is that normative? What do you mean normative in that sense? [00:22:51] Speaker A: Because I am saying they are good. So I'm evaluating them as good, not just saying, oh, these things are here. No, I think this is good. I think actually the main concepts that do this kind of thing, you know, that. That take all the punches because they are flexible enough, but they are also able to. To go out there to other fields are like this. And actually, as it usually happens when I finish that, it's like, oh, such a cool idea. Right, yeah, right, right, right. [00:23:28] Speaker B: Immediate. You had. Were you on a walk or something? And you're like, oh, my God, I've gotta get this down. Yeah, yeah. [00:23:34] Speaker A: But then you. You discovered that you are not the first one who goes for that good idea. Right. So. So I, I then discovered this historian and philosopher of Biology called Hans Jorg Reinberger that has, yeah, it's, it's kind of, it's. I mean he's, he's relevant. But I didn't cross. [00:23:59] Speaker B: Hey, perhaps he wasn't vague enough in his work to be remembered over time. [00:24:04] Speaker A: But, but, but he talks about the, the, the, the epistemology of the imprecise, which is basically he refers to these concepts that are imprecise enough that they kind of remain in the field for a long time and they are able to move to other fields. And his main example is the notion of gene. Okay, so he says genes are imprecise. There are different definitions of exactly what. [00:24:35] Speaker B: A gene is, but they're useful still. The concept is useful. Exactly. [00:24:39] Speaker A: And they can be used in other fields. Right. So my notion of motif and the epistemology of the imprecise and I'm sure other people thinking on these terms, I think we point to the same phenomenon. There are concepts that are highly relevant in a field that they are usually core to a field, but they are so because they are flexible, vague and encompassing enough as to be, as to being able to accommodate the different sensibilities in the field. [00:25:19] Speaker B: There's so much to say about this. So. Well, first of all, did I now, I can't remember his name, the epistemological, what's, what was the term? [00:25:30] Speaker A: Reinberger. [00:25:30] Speaker B: Reinberger. [00:25:32] Speaker A: The epistemology of the imprecise. [00:25:34] Speaker B: The epistemology of the imprecise. Did he find it good? Like the way that you find it good? Because the reason why I ask is because there's so much spilled ink on terms like representation where people are just going at it. And it's one of the unfortunate, I think, aspects of philosophy often is that people start to quibble over these words. Right. And so it's vague enough that people can argue ad infinitum about it. Right. And then that argument itself might sort of boost itself. Longevity. Right. It's, it's solidifies it as a thing with the recognition that none of us, no two of us are using it in the exact same way. So, so that imprecision is sort of anti scientific in one sense, where you want to operationally define things so you can quantify things. And yet like. So another so representation was one example that you gave a motif of encoding, the motif of the input output systems and the motif of algorithms. Like all three of these things in the modern computational approach to understanding brain function, you consider those motifs and especially encoding and algorithms. I don't know, it's normative, but what's the opposite of normative? Normative in a bad way. It could be considered. [00:26:58] Speaker A: It's also a normative thing. But bad things, it's big enough to. [00:27:05] Speaker B: Be good and bad. [00:27:06] Speaker A: What I mean, I think that's, that's the, I think, you know, that, that there are, there are benefits to have this kind of concepts that help communication between slightly different theories, blah, blah, blah. Right. But there are also downsides, right. And one of them is that we are going to continuously argue about it and it will never end. As a philosopher, this is my day by day, right? [00:27:40] Speaker B: Right. But even here's another phenomenon. So the word encoding jumps out at me. I remember being in graduate school and using the word some brain activity encodes some aspect of stimulus or something, right. And I was told by one of my advisors, Carol Colby, like, don't. How does it encode it? Don't use that word like you're using it without even thinking about what it means. And I think these terms become so ingrained, these motifs, right, that they are just used. And so it's often called filler terms. They are used just almost to just complete a sentence and get onto the new thing. Like you don't even need to know what you're saying. It's just a term that's used in the field. It means something vague about a relation. And let's just put a period on so we can get onto the data or something like that. And that sort of can drive you crazy if you start paying attention to the filler terms that are used. [00:28:38] Speaker A: Yes, yes. So I think there are many things here, but yes, I mean, motifs are used by filler as filler terms because they held communication. Right. Even if it means different things. When I read encoding, so when I read, I don't know, whatever cell encodes that, I know what they kind of mean, right? So that's why it is used. It's true that if you decide to say no, let's go and try to see what we mean by that. That's maybe a never ending theoretical enterprise, right? But concepts are like that. This. Maybe it's a pessimistic view of the philosopher. In me, more than anything, I'm a philosopher, right. At the end of the day, my PhD is in Philosophy and I do many things, but I'm a philosopher and I've come to the realization that philosophy teaches a few things and one of them is that defining concrete things is easy. So I have my phone here and if we talk about this phone, it's very easy. It's an iPhone, whatever has this, this defining abstract terms like the notion of phone, it's virtually impossible. Right. There's always something that is going to have a phone that you don't reflect in your definition. And there's that kind. And these notions, these motifs are always abstract. Right. Because they don't talk about a particular situation, but they have to talk about many situations. And it works like this. So to me, actually, I hate the discussions on affordances and on representations. Hate them. [00:30:44] Speaker B: Me too. But I host them and I'm going to keep hosting them. [00:30:49] Speaker A: So I think coming to this kind of philosophy of science stance on how concepts in science work is me making peace to, you know, making peace with those discussions and not engaging them. Like, hey, look, you all are right, right? [00:31:09] Speaker B: You're all right. They love to hear that. [00:31:14] Speaker A: So. So yeah, I think another benefit of the notion of motif and of this epistemology of the imprecise is to realize that maybe some of our concepts are not perfectly defined. And that's okay. That's how we do science. That might not be compatible with our ideal science, the pure science things, but this actually what. Yeah, exactly. It's actually what we do every day. Right. And whenever we get into the lab to do our own experiment, we need to make decisions that put the motif in operational terms. Right, right. And that's how we work. [00:32:05] Speaker B: A motif is a concept, but a concept isn't necessarily a motif. [00:32:10] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:32:11] Speaker B: Okay. [00:32:11] Speaker A: So. And motifs to me are the, those, those core concepts that define or, you know, or constrain just to use the thing, a paradigm. So I think with the motif. [00:32:31] Speaker B: Wait, what, what constrains a paradigm? [00:32:34] Speaker A: Motif or a set of motifs? [00:32:37] Speaker B: Set of motif. Okay. I was about. Because I was going to ask you, does a motif, is it necessarily within a paradigm? But what you're saying is that it constrains a paradigm. [00:32:46] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think in this, in this historical exploration, I think there are a few questions. I, I ended up on 5, but I'm sure that there, there can be some room there. But there are kind of a few questions that, that when you answer them, you have a paradigm. And that every paradigm in the sciences of the mind has an answer for those questions. So structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, whatever. So the questions are, what is the relationship between stimuli sensation and experience? Is brain function modular or distributed? What is the mechanism? What are the methods? And what's the scope? [00:33:47] Speaker B: What do you mean, scope? [00:33:48] Speaker A: Yeah, kind of the scope for the sciences of the mind, according to behaviorism, is overt behavior. Right. [00:33:57] Speaker B: Behavior. Okay. The thing to explain the realm of. [00:34:02] Speaker A: Well, according to Wundt, it was experience. Right. It was just subjective experience. Guillain James says something like, let's, you know, let the limits of the science, let's the limit of psychology to be as vague as the limits of mind. And let's include over behavior, experience, memory, habits. Right. All the things. So what's the scope? It's also part of it. So I think that if you answer to these five questions in one way, you have structuralism. If you answer in a different way, you have functionalism, you have gestalt, you have behaviorism, you have cognitive psychology. Right. And the concepts that answer those questions are almost always, if not always, motifs. [00:34:59] Speaker B: Ah, okay, that's interesting. [00:35:02] Speaker A: So let's think of cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience. The question one, what is the relationship between stimuli, sensation, experience? Well, there are two motifs that play are all there, which I think are the input output and the encoding. So you have experience because you encode a simulation. Right. Kind of thing. There's still no clear answer about the modularity versus holism thing, but we are there, I think. What's the mechanism? Some form of algorithm? There are many different ones, but it's kind of an algorithm. Maybe nowadays a lot of people think it's a Bayesian algorithm or an algorithm that somehow implements some Bayesian processing. Right. What are the methods? Well, brain imaging, blah, blah. And what's the scope? Everything. Right. So I think that many of the notions of the concepts that answer those big questions that actually constrain the general direction of a paradigm or of a framework, if you don't want to call it a paradigm, are motifs. [00:36:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I should say we're using paradigm here in the Kunian sense of like the norms of a given set of scientific practices in a given period in history, how scientists go about their business trying to answer and explain questions and phenomenon that they're trying to explain. And a revolution in the Kun sense is when paradigms shift from one type of paradigm to another. And therefore what you're saying is when a revolution and a scientific revolution in the Kuhnian sense happens, those questions that are the structure of the paradigm, the answers to those questions get replaced by different motifs. [00:37:27] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:37:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Nice and clean. I wonder if it really works that way. I guess you're working on that. [00:37:36] Speaker A: History of science usually disproves theories, but at least, I mean some, I would say that at least some of the changes in the sciences of the mind, even if not using the notion of motif, whatever, are consciously changing answers to Those questions. I think William James consciously resists some aspects of unconscious inference and this puts him into radical empiricism. That is actually what. There's a thing to say that the ecological psychology is radical empiricism made science kind of thing. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Okay. [00:38:29] Speaker A: But even, you know, I've always heard, I've heard this, this story a lot. I, I wasn't there, so I'm not completely sure on how true it was. But there was a point in the, in the, in the late 50s, early 60s in which, if I remember, well, Kuhn was in Harvard or mit and Chomsky and others were in the other one. Right. So I don't know which one was. And they were having beers together on Fridays, so. So when Chomsky et al start thinking about the cognitive revolution, they are all. They are already familiar with Kuhn's ideas, so. So call it a revolution. You know, there's kind of, kind of a self awareness of, oh, we are changing some of the things here. [00:39:21] Speaker B: Well, that's also marketing, which is another aspect of motifs. Right. It can be like totally intentional to take a term that is, that has three different related, but maybe definitions and therefore it's kind of vague and just say, well, that gets funded a lot. I want to use that term, which is. Mechanism is one of those these days. Right. The term. Did you say, what is the book that you're working on? Is it about motifs? [00:39:48] Speaker A: No, it's a book that I was planning to finish two years ago, then one year ago, and now I'm still finishing it. It's on ecological neuroscience. I think it is going to be at least the draft it's called for me right now, the other neuroscience, a brain for the embodied mind. [00:40:12] Speaker B: That's cool. [00:40:13] Speaker A: And it's basically, can we do something like a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience or not? Right. So I've been working a lot of. I mean, I've been working a lot in radical embodied cognitive science. Tony chimero was my PhD advisor. Right. And after that I've worked with Michael Anderson on ecological neuroscience of some sort. So, yeah, so that's, that's kind of my, the thing I do and the book I want to finish soon, I don't know. [00:40:51] Speaker B: So I was hoping you'd give me an estimate so I could add like three years to it, which is going to be the reality when it'll be finished. [00:40:57] Speaker A: I mean, I hope to have the final draft, let's say in the next six months. [00:41:05] Speaker B: Okay. Year and a half, we'll see it. [00:41:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess, I guess I mean, in the optimistic route, of course. [00:41:16] Speaker B: What is the title of this? So this is related to something else I wanted to talk to you about. Embodiment and cognitive Neuroscience, the Forgotten Tales. I mean, this has to be. Is this going to be like a chapter in the book or something? [00:41:32] Speaker A: It's not going to be a chapter, but yes. [00:41:35] Speaker B: I mean, some of the same. Yeah. [00:41:38] Speaker A: The book has. Right now we'll have, I think 10 chapters and three interludes. And one interlude which is trying to understand the myth of the cave upside down. [00:41:52] Speaker B: What does that mean? [00:41:53] Speaker A: Okay, so you know the myth of the cave. [00:41:58] Speaker B: No, Plato's cave, where there are people sitting in a cave and they think that their shadows are real. Right. Until. But they're really just seeing shadows. [00:42:07] Speaker A: So the main idea is that they are there, they are trapped, they are constrained and they look to a wall, people behind with a fire, passing shadows, and they only see the shadow there. Eventually one of the prisoners free himself and starts going up and get out of the cave, contemplates the actual things and then looks at the sun, which is kind of the illustration of the ideas of the idea of good and whatever thing. Right. Someone can ask, what's the important bit of it? What's the important bit of the myth of the cave? Well, it's to realize that the prisoner goes up or the realization of the prisoner when he looks to the sun and sees whatever. Right. I think the embodied version of it says. No, no, no. The important thing is that when the prisoner is free, it starts moving around and it's the movement what allows him to go through the ladder of new knowledge. Right. So it's when you can move around, when you have a body and you can move around, it's actually when you can start gathering knowledge about your environment. Right. And then you can get there to whatever is there to be perceived and how to get it. Right. Which are the two aspects that I talk in that paper. So these are kind of an old tale about the. I mean you can read the myth of the cave as an old tale about the importance of embodiment and movement and action for knowledge. [00:44:14] Speaker B: See, when even fables are vague enough, you can give them any meaning you want. [00:44:20] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:44:21] Speaker B: The motif of the cave of Plato's cave. Right. Well, so yeah. Okay, but what if they're free to move, but they're bound into like a certain end of the cave so they still only see the shadows? How does that. [00:44:36] Speaker A: Well, no, I mean. I mean the thing is that those that only see the shadows are not free to Move at all. [00:44:42] Speaker B: Right, I know, but I'm saying what if they were. [00:44:45] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:44:47] Speaker B: So I don't want to ruin. I don't want to nitpick and ruin your. [00:44:51] Speaker A: No, no, no. I mean, actually, this is. This is what happens in the media, because after seeing the sun, the prisoner comes back in and tells the peoples there, hey, look, there's this. And they are. No, no, no, you are, you are. You are absolutely crazy. So. So I guess then you stay there. [00:45:14] Speaker B: Okay, all right, fair enough. Well, anyway, so the paper that I was referencing, so it seems like you're trying to do in that paper what it seems like. I'm not sure if it's becoming a more popular thing. I mentioned Louis Favela. He wrote the book the Ecological Brain, trying to sort of reconcile the ecological psychology approach with neuroscience. Like trying to take some of what modern neuroscientists are doing and say, look, it's not that different. You can incorporate these notions and it might actually help your neuroscience if you refocus your attention on these concepts and motifs from ecological psychology. So in this paper you're saying, like, look, we can incorporate these. You don't have to get rid of your precious modern neuroscience. There are some forgotten tales of embodiment that, that can reorient or fix some problems in notions of modern neuroscience. So can you just briefly describe those? So don't throw away the, the. The cognitive sciences. It's okay. But reformulate a few things. Right? [00:46:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So. So at least from the point of view of ecological psychologists, there's an outstanding problem in science. Right. Which is like how you get, from whatever stimulus, you get to know that there's a chair there, that I can open the door, whatever thing. Right. To know your environment perceptually. Mainstream cognitive neuroscience inherits the notions from cognitive psychology, solves that by appealing to some form of prior knowledge. Right. So you get a stimulus that is generally not enough as to explain experience. And you kind of, through a set of internal computations, you combine the stimulus with prior experience, memory, whatever thing. And at the end you have a representation. [00:47:28] Speaker B: This is the basis of Helmholtz unconscious inference. [00:47:32] Speaker A: It's kind of the same thing. [00:47:33] Speaker B: Predictive processing, free energy principle, like all these predictive sorts of approaches. Yeah. [00:47:40] Speaker A: So the issue is that it's very difficult to explain where that prior knowledge comes from. I would say it is impossible. The usual answer is evolution. But I mean, you can say that for everything, Right? It's evolution. [00:48:00] Speaker B: That's what I call it. But that's what is used in Ecological psychology as an explanation of, of where that information, how that, how the tuning happens. Right. How the. [00:48:10] Speaker A: Not the information. Exactly. Okay, so we can talk about it. But yeah, I mean, I think evolution could support both sides, right? So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really not a good justification. And actually, I think recently in the field of AI, you see how they are realizing the issue, right? Some people call it structural knowledge, some more people call it core knowledge, but they are realizing that for the models to work, they have this prior knowledge there. But, but how, but why do we have that one? Right? Like, like this is. I think, I think this is an issue that is outstanding in the, in the characterization of perception in mainstream cognitive neuroscience. [00:49:06] Speaker B: I think the biggest term in AI right now speaking to that is inductive bias. Yeah, right. I just want to. In case people aren't familiar with Liz Belke's core knowledge and, you know, all that. So. [00:49:17] Speaker A: But yeah, yeah, so ecological psychology has a solution for that, right? Maybe not the best one, but at least I'm going to be humble. We have an alternative. [00:49:35] Speaker B: Okay, that's good. [00:49:36] Speaker A: It might be right or wrong, right? Which is like, we think that stimulation is rich enough that if you understand it properly and if you study it deeply, you will find the variables of stimulation that carry the knowledge you need. Right? So you don't need to add knowledge to that thing. It is already there. Right. [00:50:08] Speaker B: But you have to receive it. [00:50:10] Speaker A: You have to receive it. Right. And of course, there's an evolutionary story about our senses and our organism. Right? But here is where ecological psychologists use the metaphor of the radio. And here the notion of tuning resonance gets into it. Right. There's a difference between getting some input that you can manipulate so that you can add new information to it. Like I press the A key here and there's an A. But then I can do a lot of things. I can make the A bigger italics, new font, new color, whatever. Right? All those things, all those things are not in my input, Right? Those are things that are in the memory of my computer and that I add there. And I can actually, with the new models, I can ask a question and chat, GPT answers, whatever thing which is. Right, right. Radios are not exactly like that. So the, your radio, I mean, the old ones, I'm still old enough as to, you know, I, I used to go to bed with, with a small radio under, under the pillow. [00:51:46] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:51:51] Speaker A: Everything, all the information that the radio broadcasts is in the signal. So whatever song is there, it is in the signal. There are some processing the radio needs to do for it to sound. Right. [00:52:10] Speaker B: It has to amplify. It has to. [00:52:11] Speaker A: Yeah, whatever. But the song that the signal brings won't have new notes. Right. [00:52:21] Speaker B: So it doesn't take in the frequencies, transform it into a different kind of signal and then put it back together as like the song in a stream of dynamic stream or whatever, which is the story of how the input stimulus, the input computer metaphor, output metaphor for how brains work, the modern dominant paradigm. [00:52:46] Speaker A: In neuroscience, essentially, and importantly, all the relevant information is in the signal. Right? All the words. The radio speaker is talking, talking. All the notes of that song, all the lyrics are in the signal. The radio doesn't need to get any memory and say, oh, oh, yeah, so this was a G flat. So I'm going to put a G flat. [00:53:13] Speaker B: The radio doesn't need to go fishing either. [00:53:15] Speaker A: Exactly, that's true. So no, I mean a radio doesn't. [00:53:22] Speaker B: Need to do anything. Right. So there's no. It has no agency, essentially. [00:53:26] Speaker A: Yes, right, exactly. [00:53:28] Speaker B: So there would be. There's no. Because the radio is something that we built. So there. So I'm trying to play devil's advocate here and say, yeah, you know, I totally understand that it is, it's a metaphor, you know, for what we're talking about, but it doesn't change. So maybe I'll. Yeah, never mind. I won't even use the example because that is like philosophical nitpicking there. No, you used a radio and that doesn't count because. [00:53:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, actually I think there are discussions within ecological psychology on why the radio is not a good. Of course there are. And what is that? We are kind of. We should be some form of self tuning radios kind of thing. [00:54:09] Speaker B: Right, sure. Autopoetic radios. Yeah. [00:54:13] Speaker A: I think the core of the radio example is not that much in what the radio does, but it's about information. Is that. No, no, it's because the information is in the signal. So whatever the radio does doesn't need to bring more prior knowledge. Right. That would be a thing. And that's the core of the ecological approach. Right. There's information enough in the stimulus when you look at it in the proper way and that might not be easy, that you don't need to supplement that information or to enrich it through some form of mental gymnastics. Right. That would be n. What does it mean for a cognitive neuroscientist? Right. Well, maybe before putting the person in the fmri, think about what your stimulus is. Think if it is doing the right thing. Think if you have the knowledge of the stimulus enough as to know that these are the variables you need to be using. [00:55:36] Speaker B: Analyzing, like the properties that you're analyzing, the features that you're analyzing. [00:55:40] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Right. So there are examples, like there's this very cool experiment, experimental setup that was done by Jody Coulomb at Western University in London, Ontario in Canada. They basically built up a wooden tray so they put. They could put actual objects within the FMRI instead of pictures. And they found that one of the classical effects of showing the same picture a lot of times, which is the repetition suppression effect, that is some activity we don't care where suppresses after you repeat the same picture of an apple five times. Right. Doesn't happen with real objects. Right. [00:56:40] Speaker B: Real objects presented in the same light and in the same everything, all the controls. [00:56:44] Speaker A: Okay, so the point being is that this is an example that when you use a picture of an object and you assume it is going to have the same effect that the actual object, you are not thinking about your. About your stimulus enough kind of thing. [00:57:04] Speaker B: So the picture and the object have different. What would be called. I'm sorry, so these ecological psychology terms always trip me up because it has its own set of terms. Would be called the ambient Energy Array. [00:57:18] Speaker A: Array, different. [00:57:19] Speaker B: I got it. I got it. [00:57:23] Speaker A: To some extent, yes. See, this is one of the issues of having very precise concepts. [00:57:31] Speaker B: Yeah. But it's still like so fucking vague to me. Like the ambient Energy array, is it just energy array? What is it? Ambient array. [00:57:39] Speaker A: There are different ambient arrays for different energies here. Energy can sound spooky, but it's actually light or maybe kind of. [00:57:50] Speaker B: That's the thing is they often sound very spooky. And then when you actually get to know them, they're not. [00:57:55] Speaker A: But yeah, so the ambient array, the ambient optic. Right. Which is the one. Yeah, the optic array just means that, you know, the, the illumination of. At different points of the same environment will actually depend on the, on the, on the layout of that environment and the position of lights. Right. If you have a sofa there, I'm sure there's less light under the sofa than on top of it. Right. There's a structure of light with more light here, less light here, some qualities of that light, depending on the materials where it bounces. Right. So there's a reverberating structure that we call array, that's the optic. And then when you move within that structure, some things remain the same, some things change. And the things that remain the same we call invariant. And those are bits of ecological information. And things that change can also be bits of ecological information in a different way. [00:59:14] Speaker B: So I think the other scary thing about that is that it sounds like there's an infinity of things going on because there are essentially an infinite number of photons bouncing around. And it sounds very complicated that to directly perceive the array as if it's a thing, but really lots and lots of different shades as you move through it. And it's like you were having it. Sounds to me. This is my hang up. I think it sounds like you're having to perceive all of those differences, but in actuality what you're looking for is the invariant aspects of those perceptual stimuli. Right? [00:59:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And the array is more kind of the description of the environment, right? So you never perceive the array. Right? You are in. You are within that array. And when you move around, some things change. Some other. I. To me it's like I think this, I've tried to explain this to some people and it was never a good example. I'm going to try it one more time. [01:00:31] Speaker B: Give me one of your worst examples. That's a good idea. [01:00:35] Speaker A: People don't like it, but to me it makes sense. Think of a tensor, right? A 3D matrix, right? A tensor that has a lot of values there. When you put your eyes within it and you walk through the tensor, the numbers change, but some of them might not. There might be some pattern invariant patterns there. [01:01:01] Speaker B: If you're along the eigenvector, people are totally lost, man. Okay. [01:01:09] Speaker A: To me, like having your eyes within the array is like having your eyes within a tensor of values of light. [01:01:20] Speaker B: I mean, maybe a more concrete or relatable example would be. It sounds like what you're talking about is like being in the matrix and seeing the, the code fly by, right? Or something like that. That's essentially what you're describing as being. I'm not saying you have to correct your example, I'm just saying. And that was the question. Yeah, yeah, but. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, sorry. [01:01:44] Speaker A: The point being though, like the optic array and optic flow and all these concepts. Actually optic flow is also a concept that Gibson made. He didn't invented it, but it. He was a very important figure for its popularity in the 1950s and is still one of the central concepts in vision psychology, right? [01:02:06] Speaker B: Is that the story of the landing, did he employ optic flow to account for how pilots land planes? [01:02:18] Speaker A: Parts of it. Right. So the main idea here is that one. One of the forgotten tales of embodiment is actually that you need to pay attention to the environment, real attention. Right. That the environment is a variable as important as the brain. So you should be using the same tool, not the same tools. Right. But putting the same amount of effort to understand what can be out there to be perceived. Right. And there are something, I mean it's, there are several examples. One of, one of my favorite ones is a paper 2022, I think, by Doris Sao and Thomas Tsao. I'm sure I'm not saying it in the, in the, in the right way, so. So I apologize. But yeah, yeah, basically they, they describe what could be. And they are explicit on that. They say, here is a mathematical translation of J.J. gibson's optical array. And they describe what information could be in that array that allow us to segment objects and track them. So to know that an edge is an edge between objects and not within an object and that kind of stuff. Right. And they need to use differential topology to do that. Right. So some of the details there go over my head, but there are, there are some properties of that array that you can uncover if you use these mathematical tools that are the ones that actually specify the edges between objects. So a system that is able to detect that property, which is actually a non diffeomorphic whatever. So there are names. Right. Only need that thing in light in the array to be able to segment an object and to track it. But look, to do so, you need to use differential topology to study the stimulus. [01:04:59] Speaker B: It's like sticking your head inside a tensor. [01:05:03] Speaker A: But the point is that it's not easy and it requires effort, right? [01:05:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:11] Speaker A: So one of the efforts is that is to pay attention to estimation, design your experiments paying attention to that. [01:05:21] Speaker B: So the effort is on the experimenter side. But the idea is that if we had a system that was tuned to perceive those properties, and this is sort of the idea of resonance that we'll get into. But if we had a system that was tuned to perceive those important properties of the stimulus, then we don't have to do any work. Essentially, then our brains don't have to do any work because they're tuned to the right things. [01:05:49] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it's not that we don't need to do any work. Right. But the work changes. Right. The work is not to rebuild that internal model of the environment so as to do that. Right. The, the work of the, the brain, as Michael Tarvey said, is to bring light to the muscles. [01:06:12] Speaker B: Okay. [01:06:13] Speaker A: Right. To bring the right bits of light to the muscle so you can move with respect to those bits of light. [01:06:22] Speaker B: It sounds Like a project of an efficient accounting for the way that brains work. That seems like way more efficient. Right. If you're going to be tuned to the right properties. [01:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:35] Speaker B: Not that there's no work to do, but it would be more efficient than deconstructing and then reconstructing entire stimuli at every infinitesimal moment. [01:06:45] Speaker A: Yeah, but. But for that you need to start, or at least I think you need to start acknowledging that the structure out there is rich enough. If you begin with the poverty of stimulation, you are doomed to do some reconstruction. But if you accept that the stimulus is reached, that the structure out there somehow gets inside. Right. And the retina is not this magical organ that breaks all structures that the brain needs to put together there again, if something remains, the brain still needs to do some things. Right. Might need to filter to whatever. Right. Like radius do. But maybe what it doesn't need to do is to reconstruct the world again inside, moment by moment, the whole time. [01:07:54] Speaker B: So I want to make sure that we get to one of your favorite topics here, the topic of resonance. Okay. So I sort of want to guide us into this because it's interesting how each individual people who not latch onto but advocate ecological psychological concepts, each have kind of their favorite motif within ecological psychology, if I can call it motif, and some that they can do without. And for instance, in Louis Favela's book the Ecological Brain, he argues, like you, that he hates the concept of representation. Cognitive science should get rid of the term representation that causes so much strife, even though maybe you're kind of okay with it, because it's. Because if you have that, that laid back, pluralistic kind of everything's okay attitude. But Louis argues that we should throw out, let's get rid of the concept of resonance in ecological psychology because it has a lot of baggage and people, maybe people are really get upset by it, et cetera, maybe it's one of the scarier terms. And then you come along and for example, in this collection of brief essays I think that Damian Kelty Stephen put together, I'm not sure he's the first author in it, Alternative Metaphors for the Brain, alternative to the computer metaphor for the mind and brain or for the brain and yours is resonance. And you think so you're trying, you're a champion of the notion of resonance in ecological psychology. So. Well, you kind of waffled there a little bit, but yeah. So, all right, I'll read your words again, the definition of resonance here, and then we'll kind of get into why you, why you prefer it or why you favor it? So resonance, it's a process by which the same ecological information that constrains organism environment dynamics also constrains neural dynamics. And so this is exactly what we've already been talking about, Right. That if you have, let's say in the topological edge detector that you mentioned from Torresau and others. So that is specified in the environment. And the idea is that resonance is the idea that your neural dynamics are specifying that same variable, essentially. And that's all it is. [01:10:29] Speaker A: Short answer is kind of yes. But yeah, I can elaborate a little bit more on that first, I think. Yes. I wrote my first paper on resonance in 2018, and as far as I know, the. The only other paper on resonance was 1983. [01:10:55] Speaker B: So the only paper on what? Ecological. The concept of ecological resonance. Yeah, 1983. [01:11:03] Speaker A: Yes. So it's been a concept relatively forgotten in the ecological approach. There are historical reasons for that. And I think. I mean, Louis and I. Louis. Louis. Louis Favela and I are very good friends. He. He actually was a last year PhD student in Cincinnati when I got there during my first year, he helped me a lot. And we have talked about this. Right. And I think it's true that especially within ecological psychology, the notion of resonance have always sound a little bit spooky. [01:11:41] Speaker B: That's just another one that's spooky. It's not. [01:11:46] Speaker A: Because of a few reasons. Right. Because most ecological psychologists have been behavioral scientists with little or no interest in the brain. [01:11:58] Speaker B: Right, right. [01:12:00] Speaker A: Which I understand and respect, actually. I think there are. The science of behavior is a science in itself where you can find regularities and laws and that stuff. So that's good. Right. So, but then you can ask, what is the role of legs on it? What is the role of arms and what is the role of the brain on it? Right. But yeah, so ecological psychologists historically haven't been very interested in physiology and in neurophysiology. Right. And that made all the references to neurophysiology a little bit. Yeah, spooky. Right. Also, I understand why they didn't want to talk about neurophysiology a lot because it seemed at some point that the physiological scale was going to fully explain away the behavioral scale. Right. [01:13:01] Speaker B: And the behavior was so precious that they didn't want it to be explained away or something. [01:13:05] Speaker A: They were intimidated, I think they think, and I do agree that there are some things that happen in behavior that cannot be reduced to physiology. So they were kind of fighting against that reductionism. They were behavioral scientists. So references to the brain were kind of not well received. And Gibson talks about resonance a few times. [01:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's what Louis point too, is like, especially later in his career. I think it was later in his career. I think he uses the term like, sort of relegates it to the background because a substitute term is sort of tuning. [01:13:49] Speaker A: Not really, so doesn't really happen like that. So he talks a lot about resonance and tuning in his 1966 book, which is about the senses. So it's the physiology book, so to speak. And talks very little in the 1979 book, which is the last book, which is about the environment. [01:14:13] Speaker B: Okay. [01:14:14] Speaker A: So it makes sense that it features more in the physiology part than in the environment part. And he sometimes call it a metaphor, some other times not. Right. I think it is a motif. But. [01:14:30] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, But. [01:14:32] Speaker A: But importantly, he takes. And I think Louis wants to. To do away with it because it's spooky. But it's spooky for. For. For the ecological psychologist in him because Gibson takes the notion of resonance and tuning directly from Lashley. So it's. And he's explicit on that. [01:14:56] Speaker B: Explain that. Can you? Yeah, explain. Yes. [01:15:00] Speaker A: So lastly, who is a neurophysiologist that works in the 1920s series, he's the first one who. Maybe not the first one, but, you know, kind of the main figures that put the notion of Ingram, you know, the location of memory in physical. [01:15:21] Speaker B: Trace of memory. [01:15:22] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. In the brain. He's a professor of Donald Hebb. Right. So you can see that. And lastly, at the end of his experimentation, Right. At the end of his career or at some point after devoting a rough time to find the traces of. [01:15:46] Speaker B: Being frustrated that he couldn't. Right. Because he's taking bigger chunks of the brain out. Bigger chunks. Can't find anywhere. [01:15:53] Speaker A: And he basically says, the only thing I see is, is that somehow that information resonates through the brain. Right. As a whole. Right. It's not. [01:16:06] Speaker B: Because he could not localize it. Yeah. By. By taking local patches out. He never found the little locus of memory in the brain. [01:16:12] Speaker A: So. Yeah. So Gwen, Gibson talks about resonance. He uses it in the same way. Right. That information resonates through the brain. Right. It's not localized in one part, but it's kind of the brain is constrained as the brain dynamics kind of engage or are coupled to that information in a more systemic way kind of thing. Right. The thing is that Gibson refers to that as resonance tuning. They are synonyms to some degree. They are. Of course, if you go Deep into the exact physical meaning they are not. So coupling resonance entrainment are a slightly different thing, but the way Gibson uses them are kind of the same thing. And to be fair, the way in which tuning is used in neurophysiology since then. Right? [01:17:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:17:14] Speaker A: Why does it mean that this cell is tuned to that stimulus, that somehow in the dynamics of the activity of that cell, you can see the stimulus reflected, so you can correlate it in some way. [01:17:30] Speaker B: If a neuron responds way more to one stimulus than the other, then it's more tuned to that first stimulus. [01:17:38] Speaker A: Exactly. So yeah, so Gibson means that it's not spooky, but what he claims is it's not localized parts of the brain tuned to simplistic stimulation is the systemic level of the brain tune to ecological information, which are these more complex patterns there. Right. So if you can describe a behavior in which one of these ecological information variables, one of these complex patterns, constrains the behavior itself. The ecological resonance hypothesis claims that you should find that variable also in the brain. So you should find some part of the, of the, of the brain activity in which that variable and not all or, and maybe other things. Right. But that variable is there. Right. And in this way, the way I see it, we don't need to burn the neuroscience labs like some ecological psychologists wanted before, right? Yeah. Because we are not doing something that different. When I do experiments, I take a mobile eeg, I record activity doing something there. I define what the ecological variable we know that constrains the activity. And then I try to find it in the erp. So I try to take the ERP in a non very localized way. I explore the whole signal. I try to encompass more things. But virtually what changes is not that I don't use eeg, is that I use mobile eeg. So I allow for more noise if you want to. But then the stimulus variable I use is the real difference there. Right. [01:19:57] Speaker B: So is the complaint or the criticism from like the computational perspective that well, you're. Well, of course you can find something that correlates with the signal that you're using, but you're looking for the wrong signal. I mean, so I say that because that would also be the criticism of, from ecological psychologists for the computational people. Like of course you can find correlations for your computation because you're looking for them. So you can find anything that you're looking for to a certain degree. [01:20:31] Speaker A: Not only that, is that you can use whatever stimulus and you can postulate whatever algorithm that that will solve it. Right. Or you can say no, because I'm able to decode this thing from this because my generative model does that. [01:20:50] Speaker B: Right. [01:20:52] Speaker A: So, yeah, I think at some point these two paradigms are incommensurable, but there's. [01:21:03] Speaker B: A lot more overlap than people I think are aware of. Is that also your. [01:21:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that the ecological neuroscience, hopefully in 20 years won't be exactly the mainstream cognitive neuroscience today, neither the ecological neuroscience I'm doing, but will be a neuroscience that acknowledges the substantive role of the body and the environment in our cognitive abilities. Meaning that we'll devote a lot of efforts to have experimental paradigms in which you can move the body in which it features in a naturalistic way. Right. [01:21:46] Speaker B: I mean, part of that is just technological. I mean, that's already kind of happening as we have better tools. [01:21:52] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, part of it is that most of the work I do, most of the experimental work I do now is to bridge collaborations with people doing mobile eeg because they have some technology and some experience on how to deal with this kind of data when you have brain imaging with people moving around that we ecological psychologists don't. But I think we have other tools like our understanding of stimulus movement that can inform. Right. So, yeah, there's a technological part there for sure, and there's a theoretical part too, which has to do with. One more time with what we do. Right. See how I'm saying we need to be doing it will be a near science that will be doing this, doing people that moves in naturalistic environments, blah, blah, blah. Right. And then call it encoding if you want to. Right. But you are already doing the. The right thing. I would say have your. [01:23:01] Speaker B: Have your stupid terms. You're actually doing what we've been telling you to do this whole time. Is that the. [01:23:05] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:23:07] Speaker B: So when, let's say, let's say ecological psychology becomes better known and better accepted and there's like a real appreciation for it. So as though as like a paradigm grows, Right. It becomes more open to attack and criticism because there are more people looking at it. So let's say it happens. Let's say there's a revolution and ecological psychology overtakes the dominant paradigm. Now, what do you see as the biggest gap that. Where people can justifiably attack ecological neuroscience? I mean, most of the attacks come from the spookiness of it or, you know, that sort of thing. I mean, to my thinking, it's just that, like, all it accounts for is perception and movement and it doesn't account for like, the vast richness of our mental cognitive activity. I mean, I don't mean to put those thoughts in your head when I asked you the question, but what do you think? [01:24:15] Speaker A: No. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So one thing is that I understand why some people can think, oh, this is spooky, or this is. Ecological psychology is not important enough. And people have jobs, so they don't have time to read about ecological psychology as much as to have that. So that's always part of it. I think the main issue is what some people call the. I don't like this too much, but to use the word that this used is the scaling up, Right? [01:24:52] Speaker B: The what? [01:24:52] Speaker A: I think this scaling up. [01:24:56] Speaker B: Scaling up, yeah. [01:24:58] Speaker A: So I, I think ecological psychology is a. Is a good theory, is a strong theory for perception action in natural environments. But if you want ecological psychology to be a general psychological theory. [01:25:17] Speaker B: It's not a theory of everything, right? [01:25:19] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:25:20] Speaker B: Okay. [01:25:20] Speaker A: You need to account for more things. [01:25:23] Speaker B: Is computationalism a theory of everything? I think it is. [01:25:27] Speaker A: I think computationalism is because it has less constraints than ecological psychology. Ecological psychology has a very strong constraint with the notion of specification. If you perceive something, there has to be some stimulus variable there and that's super strong and works well for catching things, but might not work that well for reading a book. So what's the invariant of a book in Spanish or a book in English? Are you the same environment? So there are some things we do as psychological beings that seems that ecological psychology doesn't have the tools to deal with most of the practitioners of ecological psychologies. If you talk to the psychologists, they are doing more kind of the perception action stuff still. And there are many things to do there. There are super cool course on rehabilitation and sports and that kind of stuff. So this. But if you talk to the philosophers, most of them are doing kind of how to include social. [01:26:43] Speaker B: How to import it. Yeah. [01:26:45] Speaker A: How to include I have my days. [01:26:47] Speaker B: How to scale up in those terms. Is that what you're. Is that another way to say it? The philosophers are trying to figure out how to scale it up. Okay, you have. Sorry, I was, I just cut you off. You have your days. [01:26:56] Speaker A: I have my days. I have days in which I say, oh, yeah, we should have a psychology, a general psychology that is psychological in. In its roots. So most times I'm, you know, perception action is difficult enough, right? [01:27:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:27:09] Speaker A: So. [01:27:11] Speaker B: Well, yeah, that's. I think a lot of the people, like psychologists are wary of ecological psychologists trying to become a theory of everything. And you know, like this is like a unified view of. Of everything. But, but on the. But people like you on some other days, you know, are like, well, this is just. The purview is just different that we' to explain subjective awareness. We're not trying to explain the rich cognitive mental leaps and bounds, you know, leaps and hurdles that we can go through or mental models. But, but often psychologists, ecological psychologists will deny like any form of mental models. Right. Because the model disappears because it can all be explained in this like really tight perception action loop. And I think that rubs people the. [01:27:59] Speaker A: Wrong way because that touches at the core of cognitive psychology. Right. I think internal models make no sense. And I honestly think that. [01:28:17] Speaker B: But what is an internal model? What do you mean by it? And what. That's another motif. [01:28:21] Speaker A: Right, right. But that's it, right. To build up a model is that you get something that has no organization through. No to little organization through your senses. And then by some internal activity, you organize it and then you have a model. And that internal activity needs to identify what is coming, to know what the goal is and to know how to combine those things to have the model. To know, to know, to know. You have to have a lot of knowledge inside already from the get go to be able to have an internal model. So to me, it is very difficult to understand how this can happen. I'm not saying that it is impossible. [01:29:22] Speaker B: With the evolution. Again, it's evolution, right? [01:29:25] Speaker A: Right. So it might be possible. I don't think with the things we know now, it is justified to postulate it. [01:29:35] Speaker B: The other thing you're forgetting is that mankind is made in God's image. And I'm sure God just did it. [01:29:40] Speaker A: No, I'm sure. Yeah. Or Chomsky. [01:29:47] Speaker B: Touche. Okay, Vicente, I want to make sure, because we're coming up on time here, that because we didn't talk at all yet about your work in studying plant behavior, which is like, well, is it spooky? Maybe I'm already really comfortable with it because maybe when people say plant behavior, they really think of it as like, okay, are they fully agential like humans? They're not like humans or animals. You can't say plant behavior. Is that the pushback that you, you get? So I'll just real quickly I'll point people to this work and I will have to. Hopefully you will come back on like in that conversation. But let's touch on this just briefly before I let you go, because you're studying like bean plants, I think, growing, spinning, whipping around. And it turns out that I'm going to cut to the conclusion of some of Your work from a while ago and you can tell me, update me on it. If you do that, you grow a plant in a room without anything in it, essentially it grows one way. When you just add a pole in the room and that's all you do to it, it grows in a different way. That's a really short way of saying what happened. But maybe you can add to that and then tell me what's going on. [01:31:04] Speaker A: Yeah, so sometimes I think I'm interested in. In things nobody cares or think they are absolutely crazy. You know, I like Judas Priest. Ecological psychology and plant intelligence. [01:31:22] Speaker B: Oh, my God. You like Judas Priest? Jeez, I can't go there. I can't do it. [01:31:28] Speaker A: But my point being is, yes, I think we work in Murcia at the Mint Lab, which is led by Paco Galvo. We work on plants behavior. What do we mean by that? Right. So it has to do with a little bit of realization, which is part of the realization I've been pointing here again and again, which is plants move. And it might be weird because I think we all now know plants move, but it's not that old of an idea. Actually, the first big book on that is by Darwin. It's called the Power of Movement in Plants. Talking, for instance, about things that Gibson got wrong. He claims in 1979, plants don't move. So this doesn't apply to plants. [01:32:30] Speaker B: All right, so that's good to hear an ecological psychologist say he got something wrong. The Godhead. [01:32:35] Speaker A: I mean, we can talk two hours about the things that I think he was wrong. Right. But most of the time I am in the position of defending what he did. Right. [01:32:48] Speaker B: You know what? Just a very quick story. When I was interviewing for postdocs many a handful of years ago, one of the people that I was interviewing said that his previous advisor, his advice to him was just say a bunch of crazy shit and eventually something's going to be right. Maybe that was Gibson. Right? [01:33:07] Speaker A: Maybe. And that's what we do with plant behavior. No, yeah, I'll cut that out. [01:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:17] Speaker A: Basically our work there is to see how plants move and to see whether the movement resembles to the movement in animals that we used to call a gentile intelligent. Right or not. Goal directing. And the one paper you are referring to, what we see is that the plants grow, making a kind of circular elliptical movement called notation. And it seems that the pattern of notation changes when support to climb is. Is. Is near them. They move around to find a support because in a couple or weeks they don't find one. They fall. Right. So they need to find one. So there's. There's. There's. It seems to. There. There's a goal there, which is to. [01:34:12] Speaker B: Find a pole as they're growing and developing. [01:34:14] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. [01:34:15] Speaker B: So, yeah, they're like looking for something to grapple onto specific types of plants, like bean plants, climbing plants are looking for something to grab onto. [01:34:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So the question here is like, do they just blindly move and when they stop in something, they go. Or they adapt the movement towards possible support. It seems that what the behavior shows is that the behavior is different when there's a support and when there's no support. So it seems there's some change that the presence of a possible support makes. [01:34:54] Speaker B: Without having touched it, without. I'm not sure what other kind of sensory deprivation, how else it was hidden, essentially. But there's something in. There's something that the plant is, I want to say, perceiving. These are the tricky terms. The plant is perceiving when something like that is present versus when it's absent without touching it, essentially. [01:35:17] Speaker A: Exactly. And we are actually analyzing now a new set of data on a replication experiment. And our data points even stronger to the fact that the shape of the notation changes. And actually it's kind of directed towards where the pole is. [01:35:42] Speaker B: Should I have Paco on, like to. Just because I feel like this needs more. We're just not devoting much time to it in this conversation. [01:35:50] Speaker A: But I think you should. Paco has a lot of ideas on these, a lot of examples, and he's super fun. So I'm sure you will have fun. But. Yeah, we do that. We are also critical of the field itself. Right. I think there's. There are two things. There's. There are lack of experimental control sometimes due to the. To the. To the passion itself. Right. And then there's. There's a lot of cognitivism in there. Right. Like the root brain and the roots. [01:36:33] Speaker B: Are like the brain of. Yeah, yeah. [01:36:35] Speaker A: And part of our thing is that why a brain? You know, why not roots? But what we know about evolution, we know one thing, that evolution finds different solutions to same issues. Right. [01:36:48] Speaker B: Well, there is convergent evolution as well. But yes, just whatever works. Evolution is just whatever. If it works, it exists. [01:36:56] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But yeah. And then we have discussions on whether plant behavior is independent of or to what extent independent from plant physiology. Even if it makes sense to have a thing as plant behavior and not just do plant physiology. So there are kind of the same discussions that I'm having when I'm talking to neuroscientists. I kind of have when I'm. When I talk about plant. [01:37:31] Speaker B: Oh, you're just like giving the. You like being an underdog, it seems. [01:37:36] Speaker A: Yeah, seems like that. That's my thing. [01:37:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I hope it doesn't get too popular because that means that you'll stop studying it, apparently. [01:37:44] Speaker A: I don't think this is going to be okay. [01:37:48] Speaker B: Vicite. I'm glad that you came on. I'm looking forward to our future conversations and thanks for spending so much time with me. [01:37:55] Speaker A: Thank you very much for having me. It's been fun. [01:38:06] Speaker B: Brain Inspired is powered by the Transmitter, an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives written by journalists and scientists. If you value Brain Inspired, support it through Patreon. To access full length episodes, join our Discord community and and even influence who I invite to the podcast. Go to BrainInspired Co to learn more. The music you hear is a little slow jazzy blues performed by my friend Kyle Doniphan. Thank you for your support. See you next time.