BI 232 How Should Neuroscience Integrate with Ecological Psychology?

[00:00:03] Speaker A: What's really powerful about these concepts like affordance, perceptual system, organism environment, system, is that they sort of, yeah, reorient you as you try to understand the phenomenon. And if you just use them as a buzzword, like if you don't, if you don't, if you don't use the concept of affordance to sort of tie the organism and the environment together, but just, I don't know, talk about affordance representations, you've lost an opportunity to use these resources to help you do better in your explanations. [00:00:43] Speaker B: You know, I see what Matthew is doing, what Vicente is doing, hopefully what I'm doing as being ecological neuroscience in the sense of maintaining the principles of ecological psychology. So affordances qua Gibsonian ecological psychology, not just affordances qua anything that affords, you know, doing things in the world. [00:01:06] Speaker C: There are some properties of the environment that are meaningful for organisms that are specified by stimulus information. Therefore you don't need to appeal to mental powers to deal with them. That's the cool thing and that's what you miss if you take affordances, but you don't take at least ecological info and you know, the organism environment Scale. [00:01:36] Speaker B: I'm all about pluralism, I'm all about pragmatics, but you know, some fights I want to win and some fights I want to win because I want to say that I'm on the side of reality. [00:01:53] Speaker D: This is brain inspired, powered by the transmitter. How does brain activity explain your perceptions and actions? That's what neuroscience asks. How does the interaction between brain, body and environment explain your perceptions and actions? That's what ecological psychologists ask, sometimes leaving the brain out of the equation altogether. These different approaches to perception and action come come with different terms, concepts underlying assumptions and targets of explanation. So what happens when scientists working in one field are inspired by and start to use the same terms as a different field? This happens all the time. Like how AI was quote, unquote, inspired by the most rudimentary understanding of how brains work and started taking the terms from neuroscience like neuron, neural network and so on as stand ins for their models. And this has in some sense redefined what people mean by neuron and neural network and how they function and how we should think of them. So what happens when neuroscientists are inspired by ecological psychology but don't necessarily want to take on or are ignorant of the fundamental principles underlying ecological psychology? These days in neuroscience, let's call it modern neuroscience. With better data collecting tools, modern neuroscience has taken a turn toward more naturalistic experimental paradigms. To study how brains operate in more ecologically valid situations than what has mostly been used in the history of neuroscience, which is highly controlled tasks and experimental setups that arguably have very little to do with how organisms evolved to interact with the world to do cognitive things. One problem with this more naturalistic turn is that we neuroscientists don't have the theoretical tools to deal with the less constrained massive amounts of data that the new approach affords. This has led some neuroscientists to seek those theoretical concepts elsewhere. One of those places that offers those theoretical tools is ecological psychology, developed by James and Eleanor Gibson in the mid 20th century and continued since then by many of the adherents of the concepts introduced by ecological psychology. Those concepts are very specific with regard to how and what to explain regarding perception and action. Okay with me today are Matthieu DeWitt, an associate professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania who runs the Econ Lab, as in ecological neuroscience. Luis Favela is an associate professor at Indiana University. He's been on before to talk about his book the Ecological Brain. And Vicente Raja is a research fellow at the University of Murcia in Spain, and he's been on before to talk about ecological psychology and neuroscience. We with their deep expertise in ecological psychology, these three people are keenly interested in how neuroscience writ large adopts various facets of ecological psychology. Do neuroscientists have it right? Do they need to have it right? Is there something being lost in translation? How should neuroscientists adopt ecological psychology for an ecological neuroscience? So that is what we are discussing today. More simply or more broadly, this is also a story about what it's like doing research that is not part of the current mainstream approach. In this case being an ecological psychology minded person or adherent working in the heavy deep long shadow cast by the computational mechanistic neurocentric dominant paradigm in neuroscience currently. Okay, a little bit long winded there, but I wanted to set up the discussion. You can find more about Luis, Mathieu and Vicente in the show notes at BrainInspired co. Podcast 232@braininspired co. You can also learn how to support Brain Inspired through Patreon to get access to the full archive of all episodes and listen to the full length of all the episodes and so on. Thank you to my Patreon supporters. As always, I hope you enjoy our discussion. Okay, Mathieu, Vicente, Louis. So we have two veterans of the podcast, friends of the show if you will. And Mathieu, you're new to this, so we're glad to have you. Nice to see you all here. So I cannot tell you how frequently I have heard neuroscientists recently on my podcast and off even my old one of my old dissertation, someone on my dissertation committee, I visited her. She's. She has retired and she's like, single neuron computational background. And she's like, I love Gibson. And there's like. So a lot of neuroscientists have been singing the praise of Gibson and ecological psychology. The term affordances will loom large in our discussion today because, like, everybody see seems to be dropping affordances. Part of that is because of the silo I've created for myself, but I just hear it out in the wild in the neurosciences as well. And there's recently this big Simons foundation grant to do what is being called ecological neuroscience. And so I have here three ecological psychology experts who have interests have written about neuroscience as well. Because the brain, as we know, has been sort of ignored. And you've all written about this been ignored in ecological psychology for a long time. I mean, I actually have a physical copy of Louis book here, but Vicente and Mathieu have written about this and Matthieu runs a sort. Do you call it ecological neuroscience? Mathieu in your lab? [00:08:04] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, I do. Yeah. [00:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:07] Speaker D: Okay, so we want to talk about all things surrounding this, maybe rise in a bent toward ecological psychology in the neurosciences and sort of from the ecological psychology expertise perspective. But first, how do you guys know each other? You've all. I think you've all written papers together and have come across each other in some form or fashion. Louis, do you want to. Do you want to start with just what the relationship is between you three? [00:08:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:08:38] Speaker B: So thanks, Paul, for having us on and giving us a venue to talk about what I used to think of as fringe ideas, but with your intro, it makes me think maybe it's not so fringe. So I think I might have to move on. I might have to move on because I only do fringe things. But, yeah, so I met Vicente in grad school. So we both went to University of Cincinnati for grad school, and I met him there. And we both had the same primary advisor, Tony Chimero. So we were both definitely corrupted by the ecological psychologists and the dynamicists as well. So we had a big dynamical systems group of people at the time. And then Matthieu, I came across in various articles that he was writing about ecological neuroscience, and he. He guest edited an issue on Gibsonian neuroscience for the journal Ecological Psychology. And I was like that's a guy that I need to get to know. And so I believe we corresponded by email and we met at conferences and, and got to know each other there. So that, that's how I view the intersection. [00:09:44] Speaker C: Yeah, it's kind, kind of that. When I arrived in Cincinnati in 2014 during my first year I think was Louis last year and, and well the fact that we had the same advisor and the same interest well put us together in some ways. And also he helped me a lot. I was a first year grad student coming from Spain to the US So he helped me a lot to navigate the, the travels of US grad school. And Matthew and I met. I'm. I'm not completely sure exactly when was ICPA 2019 was earlier than that. Something like that. Right. [00:10:24] Speaker A: I think 2019 at ICPA in, in the Netherlands. It's pretty sure that that's what it was. [00:10:30] Speaker C: Yeah, ICPA is the, is the, is the International Conference for Perception and Action which is kind of the main ecological psychology conference. It was in the Netherlands and we met there and of course we shared interest for the neurosciences and the brain and that stuff. And yeah, after that we have written things together and remain. We have remained in contact during all these years. [00:10:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't have too much to add other than that. I'm really excited that we sort of have this community within ecological psychology of people that are really excited about trying to think through what it might mean to do. Yeah, ecological neuroscience. [00:11:16] Speaker D: Well it's interesting that you just phrased it as in that symposium, ecological psychologists trying to think about how to integrate neuroscience into ecological psychology. But like that grant that I just mentioned is a bunch of neuroscientists sort of being inspired by ecological psychology. And so as a neuroscientist myself, I've often complained about like the world of artificial intelligence taking on terminology from neuroscience like calling their artificial units neurons, things like that. And it sort of takes the reality of the brain into this abstract space and it's almost like co opting words that sound cool to make your. The only like the research that you're doing sound like it's like really like a brain when it's not at all. And so part of what I want to discuss is like this co opting of terms like affordances within the neurosciences, like just kind of picking and choosing what they want and sorry I'm being long winded but part of the background there is that in the neurosciences there is this turn recently, fairly recently toward more naturalistic kinds of tasks which lends itself well to an ecological psychology kind of perspective. But all of a sudden, you know, if you have your experimental animals behaving in these more naturalistic ways, more naturalistic environments, performing more ecologically valid kinds of tasks, then you are bound to come across Gibson's work and ecological psychology and those sorts of endeavors. And then, oh, there's this term affordances. And, and even within the ecological psychology world, the term affordance is not a settled definition, for example. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit. But anyway, so I started that rant by, by saying it's interesting that in that symposium you were discussing how ecological psychologists could take on neuroscience, whereas now neuroscientists are thinking, how can we take on ecological psychology? Is that. I don't know. How do you guys think about that? [00:13:32] Speaker B: I think Vicente, I don't want to speak for him, but I think he might differ from me in that he might see more, quote, unquote, I'm putting up air quotes. He might see more work that's neuroscience Y in the history of ecological psychology. People doing things like the study of tau, for example, and looking at nervous system as it correlates with things like that. So I don't see as much of a presence of neurophysiology and neuroscience in the past in ecological psychology. So I think it is a much, you know, newer thing. At least it's. It hasn't been at the scale. But. But again, I don't want to speak for Vipenter or Matthieu, but they might seem more neuro in the, in the past than I have. [00:14:15] Speaker C: Yeah. When Matthew was talking about this ecological Neuroscience Symposium 2019, not all reactions were good. I don't know if, if you remember that, but we had some, some heated discussions on whether we should even care about the brain there. Right. But I think the general field was not very interested in the brain for reasons. Right. But there are people that I think have been doing that. I can think of Rud van der van der Belle and Audrey van der Meering, Norway, and some other people, you know, people working with Tao. There are people in Mexico doing some stuff in the. In the early 2000 merchant and some other people there. [00:15:09] Speaker B: So. [00:15:09] Speaker C: But yeah, it's true that, that as ecological, as an ecological psychologist and I guess the few of us as psychological psychologists that we're trying to talk about the brain in the, in the ecological psychology community, the main reactions were like, some of them were good, Some of them were, to put it not too hard, skeptical on the thing Yeah, I [00:15:37] Speaker A: think I would agree with that. I remember very well somebody in the audience saying like, you know, you can have perception action without a nervous system. You know, why study the nervous system? And vitante. I, I loved your answer. You said, yeah, yes, 100 but, but we do have a brain, you know, and it's, and it's doing something. I, I, I, I might add to that, to what you said. Yeah. At the time. I, I think, I mean it sort of depends, depended on who you would ask. I think there were a fair amount of people who were quite excited about we're trying to, us trying to do this. And Now, I mean, ICPA 2023, there was also a symposium on neuroscience. There was what, for me, what struck me was that there were even sort of ecological neuroscience like talks not within a symposium, but as regular submission. And I took that as a sign saying like, it doesn't have to be something special anymore almost. It could also just be a regular part of the conference. My impression is that the excitement or the interest is growing within the community of ecological psychology. [00:17:00] Speaker D: It baffles me why would there be such resistance to incorporating the brain in the brain, behavior, brain, body, environment, system that ecological psychology is concerned with? I don't understand. Is it just that, is it a reaction to neuroscientists who think that the brain is the end all and therefore you kind of like it. There's like this sort of artificial polarization, like well, we need more people on this side of the tug of war or something like that. I don't get it. [00:17:29] Speaker A: I think one way to think about it is sort of as a political move, at least initially. So you know, like, and, and other people have, you know, have said similar things also in writing. But you know, during the cognitive revolution, you know, there was sort of a turn towards, you know, internal processing for many psychologists and ecological psychologists, I think, you know, wanted to sort of say, but hey, don't forget the environment. You don't. And, and yeah, so maybe you can understand it in that way to, to say almost. Well, let's just, Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, that I don't know, I can't look in the, you know, I can't know what other, what people who are critical of this within the ecological community really think, but that's maybe one way to think about it. And I also think there's a risk of sort of forgetting about the rest of the body and the environment if you focus sort of that much on the brain when it comes to cognition, perception, action. [00:18:48] Speaker B: Vicente and I had very similar training in ecological psychology. And for us, I thought that it was heavily history focused, so. Or at least contextualize historically. And so, you know, one might look at ecological psychology, like right now, 2026, and say, oh my God, look how much we know about what brains do and what the nervous system does, and we know so much. And how could anyone ignore that or not, you know, pay attention to that when studying intelligent action? Well, historically, the reason was, and I'm picking, backing what Matthew said, you know, with the cognitive revolution and everyone just so excited about computers and, you know, we were going to solve the black box problem. We were gonna, you know, make leaps and bounds from, you know, evil behaviorism. You know, by the way, there's this article, one of my favorite article titles is I believe it's Louise Barrett and it's why Behaviorism is not Satanism. And so I think that situating where ecological psychology was originating in that context, I think it was very. Matthew put it as political. There was reason to have a hard line stance because everyone else had been drinking giant cups of computational Kool Aid. And the ecological psychologists were like, yeah, but what about the environment? Exactly. As Matthew said, what about the environment? What about bodies in the world? And so they really had a hard line stance, I think, to push against that and really stress what others weren't. And maybe that kind of just became imbued in the culture. So people, you know, we. Even when I took a class on perception, you know, taught by an ecological psychologist, you know, one of the first classes they said was like, you know, brains don't exist and this is the place where representations come to die. And I was like, this is going to be an interesting seminar, you know, and I was coming to it, like, why are you killing brains? What's wrong with representations? And after a few months of taking the class, I was like, oh, I get why you're not focusing on. On brains and not on representation. [00:21:00] Speaker D: Yeah. I mean, my point was. So you, you mentioned the computational list, Kool Aid, and it does seem like the echo. There's ecological psychology, Kool Aid as well. But sorry, Vicente, it sounded, it looked like you were going to jump in there. [00:21:14] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's compatible with what Matthew and Louis said. You know, there's a political reason, there's a historical reason, there's at least some form of epistemological justification that has to do with maybe with a negative claim and with a positive claim. The negative claim is that you Cannot explain behavior as the product of just a neural mechanism. So you cannot explain psychology from physiology kind of thing. There's a very, a very cool sentence by Tolman that says in order for a physiology to explain a psychology, you first need to have a psychology to explain. So in order for some physiological mechanism to explain the behavior we exhibit, we need a good theory of what that behavior is. Right? And that's kind of the negative claim, more maybe positive claim that I've heard from people like the late Michael Tarvey or the late Dave Lee is that if a perception is a natural phenomena, you should be able to find loss at the perceptual scale, right? So there has to be some regularities that happens where perception happens and not in inner mechanisms that gives you how perception will develop in time. And that scale, the scale where you need to find those losses, the ecological one as perception is part of the exchanges between organism and environment kind of thing. So there, there were these two epistemological points. I'm not sure to, to what degree those, those, those epistemological justifications were at the get go or were, you know, like justifications a posteriori of, of the, of the state of ecological psychology ignoring the neuro physiological detail. [00:23:22] Speaker B: There's this, this great quote which is not very flattering by Carl Prebram, who I think of him as a theoretical biologist. But this was in the 80s, soon after Gibson's last book was published, which was 79 I believe. And he says some include neural variables and constraints, you know, when trying to explain perception and action. Whereas Gibson tends to leave the organism, if not empty, apparently stuffed with foam rubber. Dennett made similar kinds of comments. He's like, you know, the Gibsonians treat the brain, if they're not treating it like foam rubber, they're treating it as this piece of wonder tissue. It's like it's so miraculous how it works. And you know, we can only describe it poetically, like resonating with a field of affordances. And it's all, you know, this is gonna be more, you know, mere humanities and poetry, but that's that. But the Gibsons aren't doing real psychology. They couldn't be because they're not studying the brain. So, you know, it's not without cause as you, you just said. You know, I claimed that, you know, some are drinking the computationalism Kool Aid and yes, guilty as charged. I have tasted of the Gibsonian Kool Aid and it tastes pretty good, especially when it's hot outside. I like it. But you know, you Kind of, you know, to use a word that's not very. Doesn't have positive associations. But, you know, I can see why you want to indoctrinate the youth in a way, right? Like, you want them to internalize the teachings and the beliefs so they're not so quickly, you know, swayed. And I think that's what we've seen with, you know, the way that, you know, some ecological psychologists have been trained. So, you know, Mutente and I in grad school, we had to go through Socratic seminars with the. With our professors who were, you know, turvy students. Turvy was, you know, James Gibson student. There's this tradition where, you know, we would get like 4 or 500 pages of reading a week, and then we'd go in and there'd be like maybe four to six of us in a half circle around the professor, and he would just go through one at a time and grill us on anything in the reading. And, you know, his, you know, the response by him and his colleagues was, you have to internalize these concepts. You have to internalize the history so that, you know, you can understand our framework. To use a philosophy of science term, I use it loosely, but a paradigm, right? A paradigm has concepts and methods and theories, and it all kind of goes together. And I felt like that's how my education was in ecological psychology. I don't know if Vicente feels the same way or what Matthew's training was like. [00:26:03] Speaker C: I feel the similar way. The Socratic hours were the most brutal experience in my PhD. It's incredible, but I mean, but it's. I look at them like now, like, say, okay, it was. [00:26:17] Speaker B: It was cool. [00:26:18] Speaker C: I'm. I'm happy I learned these things, right? [00:26:21] Speaker A: I think the sort of. The organisms coming back to this stuff with foam rubber point. I mean, Gibson's 1966 book, the Census Considered as Perceptual Systems was, you know, was about physiology to a large degree. Not so much neurophysiology, although that was also included, but a lot. A lot about physiology. So, yeah, I sort of don't think that's right. And. But the other thing I wanted to add about the indoctrination, I feel like you have to indoctrinate students with something. You know, you have to, like, you have to start somewhere. You have to learn, you know, what the. How the science is being done. And I think ecological psychology is as good as starting point. You know, actually personally think is a better starting point, especially now that we're bringing in, you know, attempting to understand the contributions of, of the nervous system. So. Yeah, I don't see that as a negative thing. [00:27:29] Speaker D: It's interesting. I mean, you have to start with something. And my training in neuroscience, I don't, you know, it was never explicitly stated. [00:27:36] Speaker C: It's. [00:27:36] Speaker D: But there's just an assumption to a lot of, For a lot of neuroscience training. Well, yeah, okay. It's. Your brain is a computer network and if you describe the network properties, the computer, like the computational properties, you're. [00:27:50] Speaker B: You're done. [00:27:50] Speaker C: Right. [00:27:51] Speaker D: And, and I don't. So I don't think that's ever stated, but something like ecological psychology, I think it takes a little more care to unfold and, or, or cultish Socratic hours or something. Something like that, that, that you were, you guys were describing. But there, you know, reading your own works and others in, in who, who approach it or who, who drink the Kool Aid. That's a terrible phrase for that sounds negative. But there, there seems to be a wide range of what's sort of acceptable as ecological psychology. There's like radical embodiment versus a more, a more light kind of ecological psychology. So I don't really understand what that range is. I know there's a lot of disag ecological psychologists, like what counts, what doesn't. Do we need to focus on affordances or resonance or direct perception and how to account, you know, for these various Gibsonian terms. Maybe one place to start before we get on to like how. How neuroscience should really incorporate ecological psychology. I'm wondering, do you guys agree on what ecological psychology is or do you have disagreements with that broad picture? [00:29:10] Speaker C: Do we agree on anything? I mean, I think we, we. We can. We disagree on a lot of stuff. I think that we probably all of us agree in something like maybe, I don't know. [00:29:24] Speaker B: We'll see. [00:29:27] Speaker C: You know, the key to perceive is to detect ecological information that specifies some properties of the environment, some of them being affordances. At least something like that. It would be a minimal commitment. I don't know. [00:29:43] Speaker A: I'm on board with that one. But I might add one which is viewing the organism environment system or the brain body environment system sort of as the unit of analysis. To me, on your question, I mean, you started, Paul, with asking like, how broad can. Can it be what counts as ecological psychology? Maybe me, I feel like I would love for, you know, people to join the club, but I feel like there's. Yeah, I see one step, one stipulation, which is, you know, viewing the brain body environment system as, as the unit. I feel like A lot of the other ones will fall out of that. I feel like maybe ecological information falls out of that. Maybe anti representation, anti computationalism might fall out of that. Because the way I see it, you know, a neurocentric explanation of a cognitive ability sort of begins and ends with. Yeah, describing that, you know, that, that, that, that, that artificial neural network or that biological neural network and what's happening in it. But if you place that within the wider context of a physical body acting in an environment and all those parts can be constituents of the explanation of the cognitive ability and kind of must be, I think, I don't know, I don't see how you can then have a sort of purely computational representational explanation of the cognitive ability. So yeah, I think brain body environment system, organism environment system as the unit, the target of analysis is a big one. [00:31:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with both of them. I think taking organism environment system as the quote unquote, proper scale of investigation. [00:31:45] Speaker D: Well, there's scale but there's target. Right? I mean, what's the explanandum here or whatever the. It's one perspective. So I don't know, maybe, maybe there's just a disagreement on like what, what it is we're trying to explain even. Sorry to cut you off there, Louis. [00:32:02] Speaker B: No, no, that's okay. Yeah, I mean all of these have room to be pressed on and be clarified. Yeah, so the target of investigation is that particular spatial temporal scale at which organisms are doing things that at least intuitively we call intelligent acts of some way. I think, you know, we might use terms like cognition pretty broad to include intelligence in general. But yeah, it is the organism environment scale. I actually wanted to say that I would say organism environment and not brain body environment in the sense that I think my, you know, my understanding of Gibson is he wanted to give a theory of perception full stop. What is it that, you know, how we can understand perception action from what a cockroach does to, you know, a gerbil to a chinchilla to a chimp to me. Right. What is it that's similar to us? And there are things like perceiving directly perception action is continuous, the use of affordances and that all this happens at the point at which the organism and environment meet. So I try to use it pretty broad to include the non brained organisms or at least those that don't have big brains either. So yeah, so I would say that to be an ecological psychologist, you got to buy some degree of organism environment system. As Matthew said and Asante said, you have to Buy into the notion of ecological information and the role of specificity. And all this ties to what I think is, you know, maybe the most popular idea to come out of ecological psychology, which is afforded sins and affordances for Gibson, only makes sense within that framework. It's a really technical framework that, you know, there's ways to tie with the laws of physics and, you know, optics and all this kinds of stuff. And people use the term affordances that basically looks nothing like what Gibson talked about. They just mean basically an opportunity to do something in the world. So, you know, this cup affords grasping, but there's no commitment to direct perception. There's no commitment to where the, you know, the most important causal starting point is. Because for the, you know, cognitiveist, you could say, oh, yeah, I definitely study affordances. I just study how they're represented and computed in my mind. And that actually looks a lot like what this big Simons foundation grant looks like to me. So I actually, I just pointed it up while we were chatting. And there's a line where they say, this project, the Simons Collaboration on Ecological neuroscience, or seen, will establish a new paradigm. They call it a new paradigm, ecological neuroscience, that moves beyond conventional theories of sensory motor processing. And then skip a little bit later, it says the, you know, this proposes that one of the brain's core functions is to encode affordances rather than encoding all environmental causes or only rewarding stimuli. And I think, you know, that they're so quick to jump to the computational language, which makes sense because that's how I think neuroscientists get trained. You look at your standard textbook and they use computational language. And so I think that's where these people on this project are coming from. But, you know, to be honest, it makes me cringe a bit because, you know, I see what Matthew's doing, what event is doing, hopefully what I'm doing as being ecological neuroscience in the sense of maintaining the principle of ecological psychology. So affordances qua Gibsonian ecological psychology. Not just affordances qua anything that affords, you know, doing things in the world. And in that way, yeah, of course, you could give a Gibsonian story, you can give a computational story. You could even give a, I don't know, a ghost story. How do ghosts interact with the world? Does the wall of Horde passing through? I guess. I don't know. But you're not Gibsonian if you're not committed to the kinds of things that we said, the principles, direct perception, ecological information, and things like that. [00:36:02] Speaker D: I remember that phrase, encode Encoding affordances, from what you just read off. And I thought is that an oxymoron from an ecological psychology perspective? Is it. Are they antithetical? Can you. Is an affordance as you understand it something that can be encoded? It doesn't seem to even. It's a full stop. [00:36:22] Speaker B: Right. [00:36:23] Speaker D: That doesn't make sense as a phrase. [00:36:24] Speaker B: Correct. [00:36:26] Speaker C: I mean, I have two issues with that phrase. The first one is that what encoding means there? [00:36:33] Speaker D: Sure. [00:36:33] Speaker C: Which is an issue in itself. And then that. Yeah, I mean, I think there are two levels here. Has to level have to do with the sociology of science too a little bit. One is like affordances have obviously. The concept itself has obviously grown beyond the ecological approach. There's no control to it. There's actually works at least since the early 2000, like Paul Csek, that is already doing the affordance competition hypothesis, which is already kind of cognitivist flavor on it. And in that sense you cannot stop that and look, you know, like good for them. They got a lot of money to do this. So cool. That said, if as an ecological psychology, you ask me, would you do ecological neuroscience that way? I would say no. I think as Louis said that, you know, there are some core principles that makes ecological psychology the way it is. Therefore, in an ecological neuroscience should maintain them. But not because, I mean, to me it's not about the purity of it. Right. It's not like, okay, we have to read the Gospel of San Jimmy as he intended it. But I think affordances are interesting because they can be directly perceived because there's ecological information that specifies them. If not affordances are like any other property out there, like, I don't know, shape or hate or whatever other thing that you at the end of the day need to encode and to infer. And that's to me the cool thing about affordances. I mean the really core of the strength of the ecological approach that Bill Warren calls the information hypothesis is that there are some properties of the environment that are meaningful for organisms that are specified by stimulus information. Therefore, you don't need to appeal to mental powers to deal with them. That's the cool thing and that's what you miss if you take affordances. But you don't take at least ecological info and the organism environment scale using [00:39:17] Speaker A: it in that way. You're using it as a buzzword. The concept affordance. Vicente, I was reading your paper about the forgotten tales yesterday. The forgotten tales. And I think what's really powerful about these concepts like affordance, perceptual system, organism Environment system is that they sort of reorient you as you try to understand the phenomenon. They provide resources. Vicente, you talked about them as resources that can help, you know, cognitive neuroscientists solve these seemingly intractable problems of perception and motor control and such. And if you just use them as a buzzword, like if you don't, if you don't, if you don't use the concept of affordance to sort of tie the organism and the environment together, but just, I don't know, talk about affordance representations, you sort of, you're not actually, you know, like you've lost an opportunity to use these resources to help you, you know, do better in your explanations. [00:40:29] Speaker B: I think so. You know, Vicente and I and Matthew have been using the term like information and ecological information and some listeners might be like information. That's a computational term, right. And I think ecological psychologists are, you know, banging their head on the wall every time they have to explain what they mean by information. And so, you know, information in the ecological sense. When we talk about ecological information as a starting point, at least it's, you know, the energies in the environment. And we don't mean anything like salt. Well, at least I don't think we do. I don't want to speak for, for everyone, but I don't think, you know, we don't mean like, you know, chakra energies and my spirit power animal in the environment that guides me. We mean things that like physics would study, which is like reflective properties of light, acoustic, you know, properties of sound and even olfaction and you know, the spread of molecules in the air and things like this and they hold lawful relationships in that you have that particular organism, environment, system and those affordances, those abilities in the world will manifest if you have the right, you know, kind of relationship. And so that's all based on this ecological. And I'm putting, you know, air quotes again, information in that the environment is filled with this energy. I don't know. Yeah, you said there, Matthew, want to, want to add to that? [00:41:51] Speaker C: I mean, yeah, there's these non magical energies we talk about, right, that are light, airwaves, chemicals. I think the main point about ecological information is that those energies by interacting with the layout of the environment end up having a structure. And that structure is related to the layout of the environment there. And then as you navigate through the environment, you are in contact with a changing structure that can inform you about what is around you. The last time I was here, I was trying to use a metaphor of a tensor. I don't know if. Paul, I'm not going now, but yeah. So it's like we are surrounded by an structured environment that. That affects the structure of the light and the air and the. And the chemicals around us. And that structure that is in contact with us can tell us things about our. [00:43:15] Speaker A: Maybe I can. Maybe I can give an example to make it concrete. I. I use it when I teach my undergraduate students about ecological psychology. The notion of sort of a texture gradient, of the idea that in natural environments, things have texture. So, for example, I don't know. And the texture, sort of like in natural environments, sort of tends to not change in strange ways. Concretely speaking, you know, if you go to some kind of beach, the sand on that beach will typically, you know, not in a systematic way, become bigger or smaller, coarser or less coarse. You know, across the beach, within that beach, the sand has a certain, you know, coarseness. Maybe another beach, it's a different coarseness. And that is something that you can rely on to, for example, get information about how large something is. I think this is an example coming from Gibson 1966, I think, where, you know, there are different objects and they occlude more or less of the texture. And given that the texture is sort of. Does not systematically change within that natural situation, the amount of texture that is occluded by an object relative to the amount of texture that is occluded by another object could tell you something about the relative size of those two objects. I don't know if I'm. If I'm making sense here, but it's because in the natural environment, sort of there's this regularity in textures that then allows you to know something about relative size. As an example. [00:45:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I wanted to add something to both Matthieu and Vicente. Why does the Kidsonian care about the structure of the environment? And where's that coming from? Why do we care about that? And a lot of this stems from what we call generally poverty of the stimulus arguments. And so for the cognitivist, the idea is that the environment is just meaningless. You know, energy that just stimulates you. And so you have, you know, an example. You enter a lit room, you have a light source, the photons bounce off the surface, they hit your. Your eyel, your retina, they give me optic nerve. And then there's all this processing and all this heavy processing, this computing, this transforming into representations is necessary to make that stimulus to the retina meaningful. And how do you know that a certain angle in the distance. I'm Using my hand to make little triangle shapes. How do you know that an angle means that something's pointing towards you or something is indented? Well, you don't know based on the information in the light alone. So you have to have sort of stored memory. Oh, this kind of angle in the distance means something's far away. And you have these rules that you appeal to. And Gibson and others argued, well, that seems to be a lot of heavy processing going on. And how is it that other organisms with simpler nervous systems seem to be able to navigate in these environments? And how do they do that? Well, they do it because they're offloading what would be internal processing to just sampling the structure. As Vicente and Matthieu would say, the structure of the environment is informationally rich, so it can guide successful intelligent behavior. And there's no need to do heavy transformations. We've heard this as like inferential steps. So when we say that perception is direct or we don't mean what might be called naive realism, that necessarily. Well, I don't know if I want to go into that debate, but yeah, I know everyone here is kind of cringing a little bit, but so I'll say a little simpler. So what do we mean by direct perception? We mean that there is minimal to no transformations needed to extract meaningfulness from the energies in the environment. So contrary to the poverty of the stimulus arguments, which actually the environment is rich with structured stimulation, especially if you're [00:47:57] Speaker A: allowed to move through the environment, that's sort of like required to discover, you [00:48:03] Speaker B: know, affordances, rec perception. None of these things make sense without dynamics. So you're moving in the environment. There is no, you know, for the Gibsonian, affordances are not perceived in slices of time. They don't. There's no affordance in this capture, this snapshot. They appear as you move. I think Matthew was talking about, you know, different reflective properties based on, you know, surface textures. Another example is parallax, right. Where you would say you're driving in a car and you look next to you on the, on the ground and the road is moving super duper fast. But you look, the further you look out in the distance, things are moving slower. This is a kind of cue to distance, but it only reveals itself in movement. Yeah, I don't know if you guys wanted to add anything to that. [00:48:50] Speaker A: Well, I would, I would quickly say that it. Then it's not a cube, it is information. [00:48:55] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [00:48:57] Speaker D: So maybe stepping back, I'm kind of picturing five years down the road, there's going to be a bunch of computational neuroscience, glossy papers in science, nature neuroscience, et cetera, about encoding affordances and the mechanism underlying affordance, encoding that sort of vernacular. And so let's say five years from now, you know, computational neuroscientists sort of absorb this term affordance and make it their own and sort of pick and choose what they want from it and discard the rest of the stuff that they find frivolous. And in some sense, that's just how terms evolve through semantic drift, whether there's resistance from the originators or not. But I kind of want to. Okay, so let's say that exists, right? And it's. I don't know, who cares? That's how things kind of naturally evolves. Like, why do we care? Like what, what's really at stake here if it goes that way? So that's kind of big picture. And I'm curious, like, well, what, how would it go better? Like, what would an ecological neuroscience success like a successful paradigm in ecological neuroscience? Like what, what would. How would a neuroscientist go about embracing some of the more fundamental concepts, et cetera? So those are kind of two opposing things. One's disaster and one's success, right? [00:50:26] Speaker C: What's at stake, I think, if that happens? I think Matthew said something on those lines before. Like, it's a missed opportunity. You know, it's a, I think ecological psychology when you, I don't say you buy the whole pack, but you buy a couple of things. You know, the two or three things we've been saying here, it's an actual alternative. It's a different way to do, to look at the problem, a problem that is, that has been more, More or less stuck in the last decades, I would say, right? [00:51:00] Speaker D: What's the wait? What problem is stuck? What is the problem that's stuck? [00:51:03] Speaker C: How we are able to perceive in the first place. To me, the approach, I mean, I've said a couple of decades because I didn't want to go too deep, but what I teach in my history and philosophy of psychology class is that the problem is stuck for a cup, for a few centuries, actually. But the point is, when you start from the point of view that Louis was pointing out to, like, of the poverty of stipulation, that is that the stimulus is just not good enough to enable perception and to control behavior, you are forced theoretically to say, and there are some mental powers that change that, right? Like some mental process that take this stimulus that is not good enough and that make it good enough by combining it with memory or with predictions or with whatever thing. And it is very difficult to justify where those mental powers come from. The typical justification is evolution, but it's often just the word evolution, right? It's not like it's not explaining how evolution is able to do that. Right. But my point is that if you start with the poverty of stimulation that requires that you get something that is not good enough and that you need to encode it into, enrich it in order to build up a mental model or an internal model of the external environment in order to behave in the proper way. You are in the same place that you were, but this time that internal model has affordances instead of objects or shapes or whatever other thing, right? So you have the opportunity to try to start from a different starting point that doesn't force you to posit mental powers that you don't know where, where they come from. And I think this is important and I understand that some, some other people think that this is not that important. That's. I think that's. That bothers me, right? The fact that I don't know where the hell your generative model or the priors of your generative model come from, that bothers me. It doesn't seem to bother many people. That's also thing, but it bothers me. So that's why I think you lose and the other side is what you would gain. I think a different way to try to do things that can be wrong, but I think, I think it's worth trying. [00:53:55] Speaker A: Do you guys agree with that? Disagree. [00:53:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree and I do. I like that pointed out, you know, Matthew's point about a missed opportunity. I think it is a missed opportunity for different conceptual tools to enrich, you know, the study of this phenomena that we purport to be the same phenomena we purport to be studying. You know, another thing that, that I think is an issue of, you know, what's at stake is that, you know, and I'm in a history and philosophy of science department, so I care about history. But, you know, I was reading recently that apparently there's a major drop in science PhDs and science Dissertations having any literature reviews. And so what they're becoming is just a collection of articles, you know, different studies, which is common, and then some kind of intro and conclusion that loosely ties them together. But apparently the trend is little to no literature review. And I think that's, that's horrifying because you're missing out on understanding why you do what you do. But maybe that's not necessary. But it also, I think for a practical reason, it might help you to see what problems have been dealt with in different ways and why reinvent the wheel? And you will do that if you don't understand your history. I'm just absolutely, you know, constantly shocked that I read these, you know, old people who are saying such things. You know, that sounds so contemporary. You know, I'm teaching a course on, you know, the location of the mind and you know, I'm doing a cross cultural one. And it's been shocking to me that, you know, from the ancient Egyptians up through Confucius that a lot of their teachings, they sound like embodied minds, embodied cognition. You know, intelligence is, you know, the living organism acting in the world and the body constrains, you know, their mind and this and that and social interactions. And that's just absolutely wild to me because my training has always been, you know, what I might call like a Platonic Cartesian training, right, where like, you know, the soul mind and you know, the main units to understand perception and intelligence. And now we know better, we know that the soul mind is in the brain and you know, and that's what, you know, where, that's where the action is at, you know, and we know better. And of course you would know better if that's all you read, if that's the only history that, that you know. So, so what's at stake? I think potentially a lot of wasted time and money on people's parts. If they don't know the history, they don't know what has, you know, what hasn't worked in the past. And then also, you know, missed opportunities for more tools and interesting things like new hypothesis. [00:56:36] Speaker A: I would, I would add that potentially. What's that 6 so, so if so, you know, bring it more into an applied domain or clinical domain, let's say, yeah, you have some kind of psychiatric disorder from, you know, from a mainstream perspective, from what would you try to intervene with? You would try to intervene, you know, with neural processes. Presumably if you broaden it up, if you broaden sort of the constituents of cognition, perception, action up to potentially also include things outside of the brain, in the rest of the body, in the environment, you have a lot more places where you could intervene and you could intervene perhaps in ways that don't, you know, don't produce side effects. I don't know, pharmacological treatment likely going to produce a side effect. But if you have just as much success in interventing, intervening somewhere in the environment, you don't have that side effect. So I, I think it's also. What's also at stake is, is, you know, applications, clinical applications or educational applications, all kinds of applications. If you think differently, if you, if you unders. If you, if you think that cognition, perception, action as a product of brain, body environment interactions, you're going to think really differently about how to. Yeah. How to intervene in practical ways, possibly with less side effects. [00:58:26] Speaker B: Matthew, when you bring up the clinical aspect, it makes me think this is not necessarily Gibsonian lesson at first, but I'll tie it to be a Gibsonian lesson. So when we think of things like neurodegenerative disorders, already calling it neurodegenerative. Right. It's just focusing on the neural scale. When we think of things like Alzheimer's and things like that, dementia, we think we want to intervene. What are the synapses that we can alter to correct this? So there are these towns in the Netherlands where they structure the town in a way that it has a lot of reminders for people with dementia and Alzheimer's. And this could be young people who have it, but the old people as well. And what they find is that with just these environmental cues, they have a pretty, you know, pretty healthy lifestyle. You know, they're able to engage with the world, you know, remember things and this and that. And this is a more environmental scale kind of, you know, intervention. And this required a shift in theoretic theoretical perspective. Right. If you think that these diseases and conditions are by definition only between your ear, um, why would. Then, you know, why do anything else? That, I mean, that totally makes sense, but it doesn't seem to be the case with a lot of these conditions that are paradigmatically like brain condition. [00:59:50] Speaker D: But I couldn't. [00:59:51] Speaker C: You. [00:59:51] Speaker D: Wouldn't a neuroscientist be able to say, well, yeah, you redesigned the town so that your brain can actually do what it needs to do. [01:00:00] Speaker B: Right. [01:00:01] Speaker D: So I think a neuroscientist could defend that to death. Right. So, yeah, okay, sure, change your. Put the reminders up in town, but that's because your brain is dysfunctioning. It needs. Needs the reminders. So you put the reminders up there, and then the rest of your brain that is functioning well can actually use those reminders to move about the town. [01:00:19] Speaker A: But how, how did you, how did you discover. How did you figure out that this is a good approach, like changing your environment? You figured it out because you, [01:00:33] Speaker D: you [01:00:33] Speaker A: considered, yes, this brain, which is critical for memory and such, but in this wider context. So the neuroscientist, I think it's safe to say that the neuroscientist who takes this stipulates that cognition must be a neural process is much less likely to notice these other ways of intervening. I think there are also arguments to say to push back against that idea that well really you're just helping the brain. But ultimately the cognition is still purely a brain process. It's sort of just, what's the word? There's remediation happening or some kind of compensation happening to sort of support that cognitive ability, which is still 100 tied to the brain. I suppose neuroscience neuroscientists could say that, but I think there are arguments against that. But also I think practically it's. You're less likely to sort of find good interventions if that's your attitude. [01:01:42] Speaker C: I think I have a kind of a cynical approach to that. Or maybe I'm just an Spaniard cliche and I take things easy, you know, like relaxed. But I'm okay with that. Actually. I think it kind of. [01:02:00] Speaker D: You're okay with what? You're okay with what? [01:02:03] Speaker C: With a neuroscientist coming. But in the end it is encoding right Kind of thing. But in the end is this in two ways. One of them is almost to me a game of survival kind of. Right. It's not like we ecological psychologists think neuroscientists are head to head in terms of funding, spaces, time, everything. So as far as you let me make the town that way, you can call it whatever. Right? [01:02:39] Speaker B: Right. [01:02:40] Speaker C: If I can still intervene in the environment, put your name and that goes with almost anything. If I'm able to get you to look for variables of ecological information in your day by day experiments, I don't care if you afterwards say then they are represented here or here. Right. I think that's already a good step. Then maybe we can talk about that. They are not represented. But when we get to that river, we will cross that bridge at the beginning. I mean, I don't mind if they have their stories because I have mine too. But if I'm able to move a little bit to create better environments to make them to look for ecological information, well, I think these are good steps towards the right way to do things. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time fighting about the narrative. [01:03:42] Speaker B: I think, I think you're being pretty diplomatic today. [01:03:45] Speaker D: I am almost diplomatic standard. [01:03:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're being pretty diplomatic. But do you think that there's a matter of fact though about like, you know, like, is it only a brain centric phenomenon? You know, take dementia or something like that. And then from this, like, you know, people supposedly built this town, they think it's not a brain centric phenomenon. It's also an embodied, situated. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. [01:04:14] Speaker D: Well, what it sounded like to me was that he was just being very pragmatic to let the naive neuroscientists think whatever the hell they want. It doesn't really matter as long as you build in some ecological information. If they can do, if, if we, if you guys can convince them to do that, it doesn't matter what they think. So that's sort of my take on [01:04:35] Speaker C: whose story is that. [01:04:38] Speaker D: But, but then, but then, Louis, you're asking about the actuality. So we're talking about two different things, right? So one is like a pragmatic concern about, about doing the science that's necessary to ultimately answer the questions that you guys want to answer versus what's actually real. Like what is the target? I think that. Is that what you were getting at, Louis? [01:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I just, I'm all about pluralism. I'm all about pragmatics. But you know, some fights I want to win and some fights I want to win because I want to say that I'm on the side of reality. And I think that, [01:05:20] Speaker A: yeah, I, I [01:05:21] Speaker B: just, I, I think it's a matter of fact that, you know, these conditions, dementia, et cetera, et cetera, they need some reconceptualization. If the fact is that they are benefiting from these kind of non neural directed intervention, I think that says something about it. And yeah, you could tell a neuro story as well. I mean, I could also tell, I could tell a lot of different stories about, you know, how it works. But I want to be right. I don't know, I don't want to play nice all the time. You know, I want to say, you know, Gibson is right in some because that's the way the world is. Even though your methods work, my worry is that, you know, we're approaching the study of mind, cognition, intelligence too much from an engineering business perspective. Right? What can we, you know, behaviorally, what can we optimize? You know, and it doesn't really matter what we throw at it as long as we can optimize our outputs so we get more people who, you know, report well being and they can remember their phone number and their child's name if they do this intervention as opposed to that one. Doesn't matter what the ontology is, you know, who really cares, as long as it works. But I Don't know. I mean, it just, I mean, don't we want to say how the world is? Yeah, I don't know. I just, Yeah. I kind of want to push Vicente a little bit more to be less, less easygoing. [01:06:44] Speaker C: Yes. I mean, I, I, I want us, I want to talk about how the world is. And I tried to do it actually, but I was more thinking in the scenario Paul was talking about more generally. I think there are two attitudes, [01:07:04] Speaker B: let's [01:07:04] Speaker C: say in the real politics of science. One is like going there and say, which has been the attitude of ecological psychologists to some degree, to go to a neuroscience department, say, you need to close all this down because you are, you are wrong. So close this now or give it to me and I'm going to do the right thing. I think this, I mean, I think they are wrong. Just in case it's not clear. But I don't think this is a good strategy to develop an ecological neuroscience, even for us. Because I think there's some expertise out there that we don't have and that we should integrate. So it is better to go there, to try to find common ground in which you can sneak in some of the right things. [01:08:10] Speaker B: But we felt it, we felt it, we felt it. But would you be willing to give up commitment to say, direct perception? [01:08:19] Speaker C: No. [01:08:20] Speaker B: So, no, no. [01:08:21] Speaker D: But this, this is like the rest of the world, like kind of tiptoeing around the all powerful United States right now, right? Don't piss them off because they, they have the encoding models or whatever. [01:08:34] Speaker C: No, it's more like, like, I mean when I do experimental work, do need to go to a lab that is not mine. For instance, to the B mobile lab at the Technical University of Berlin. And I cannot spend there the two months I have to run an experiment fighting about if they encode it, you know what I mean? So I think there are, of course, I think there are wrong people, but I think, I think you need to play smart at some point, right? Even afterwards when you get a beer, you can say, and you are wrong. I'm sorry, I don't know if we [01:09:20] Speaker A: can say, that's fine, I suppose I agree, but I mean, I'm like sympathetic to that, but I just think that you're not going to be able to understand the neural contributions to perception, action, you know, if you don't take that seriously, I just don't know if you don't take seriously that it happens in an active body with particular morphology, et cetera, in an environment, [01:09:56] Speaker D: what does taking it seriously mean? Because you can always say like, yeah, of course you're in a body, but yeah, so I'm an embodied neuroscientist because yeah, I realize the brain is in a body and we're performing naturalistic tasks. [01:10:09] Speaker C: So. [01:10:09] Speaker D: Sorry to interrupt, but what does taking it seriously mean? [01:10:12] Speaker A: Well, I think looking for non neural contributions to the task, to the phenomenon that you're trying to understand. So what is it about the body that might simplify the cognitive task just by virtue of the physicality of the body? What is it about the moving body and the environment that might make unnecessary, you know, trying to figure out how the brain, you know, sort of like computes or constructs something about the environment that. So I mean, isn't the onus, isn't [01:10:57] Speaker D: the onus there a little bit on you guys to come in and, and show like, actually like if your account, which is only an account of how the brain does this is like insufficient or has less explanatory power, then let me show you how to do this. And you. Isn't it on you guys to like run the experiments which I know you're doing. [01:11:17] Speaker B: That's you. [01:11:18] Speaker D: But the way you phrased it was like they need to, I mean they here not in an oppositional manner, but as a laid back Spaniard, they need to, they need to show that it's like, you know, part that the body is part of it or whatever. But maybe they're not concerned with showing that. Right, so isn't it the onus on the ecological psychologist minded person? [01:11:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I, I think we have a bit of a problem in, in that we are sort of like not with as many people and so like our progress is slower. And I think Vicente was saying we, we don't maybe have the full breadth of the technical experience that would be required to do some of this stuff. I'm sort of with Louis in somehow, you know, finding a way to convincingly show, right. That you must take the physical body, the non neural parts of it seriously and the environment seriously. But you know, yeah, doing that is, is sort of, it's really complicated and there's only so much time. So like right now I would do that mostly in sort of theoretical work and I, I'm really excited about certain directions in which the research could go and have zero expertise in doing that. So. So for example, I think robotics, soft robotics or embodied intelligence type work [01:13:03] Speaker B: will [01:13:03] Speaker A: be important to incorporate because it will allow us to build models of the, of the body. But I have no idea, you know, how to do that. We need collaborators. We're sort of interested in that to do in. Interested in doing robotics in that way. And I think the only way you can do that is by convincing them that sort of the conventional way is not going to get them there. So I'm not 100% in agreement I with Vicente and that it's okay or you know, to sort of not have debates. [01:13:42] Speaker B: Paul, your question kind of made my ulcer act up a little bit. Okay. Yeah, there are, there are probably a million neuroscientists, everyone, ecological psychologists. And so I guess, you know, one could say the onus is on us to motivate, taking our point of view. But you know, when I put my philosopher hat on, I don't care that there's a million neuroscientists to everyone neuro, you know, ecological psychologist with my philosopher hat, I can say that's a million wrong people for everyone because the theoretical commitments haven't been worked out. And so, you know, I just, I actually would like to, to have the argument made to me, why not be ecological about it and you know, give me a total, you know, account of the same phenomenon. And let's see, you know, let's put our on the table and you know, maybe some neutral observer, you know, will weigh the evidence. And what I think will happen is there's going to be just as much hand waving in the neurosciences as there are perceived in the ecological psychology literature. You know, Daniel Dennett uses this term, loans of intelligence and this idea that, [01:14:56] Speaker A: you know, [01:14:58] Speaker B: you might write a check but you can't cash it yet, but you will someday. You know, we don't know what mental representations are. We don't know, you know, where, you know, the, the prime mover in the mind is, you know, but we'll find it. We'll find it one day. And that's just, that seems to be an article of faith. And I want to do science and so, you know, show the evidence. So I, I guess I don't see it as a given that, you know, neuroscience has worked out their theoretical commitments to such a degree that they can readily dismiss ecological psychology and cherry pick what they want from it. I don't think they've made good arguments the other way. I think it's more a sociological trend as Vicente. It keeps coming back to. And I think that's absolutely crucial. And I think that's what's happening with this big grant. And sorry, Paul, I keep harping on it because it makes me lose sleep at night. But you Know, they get to get away with it, right? Because, you know, it's a huge funding body. These are very prestigious, excellent researchers. No way am I dismissing that they are excellent. I was looking at the list of people and I'm like, wow, I want to collaborate with these people, but you're not doing ecological neuroscience. And it kills me because I can't do the opposite. I can't call myself a computational neuroscientist with ecological commitments without no one understanding what I'm talking about. [01:16:19] Speaker D: There are going to be papers coming out from this grant, right, that, the Simons grant that Louis described. And I can see your ulcer, your collective ulcers, like, acting up. Like every paper that gets dropped and they're talking about the mechanism of affordances or whatever, or encoding affordances. And you can kind of be left in the dust or you can react or you can just, you know, develop a drinking. Drinking habit, you know, whatever you care to react to it. But I'm kind of like, curious, like how. What would be an effective way to engage, right, where you would actually enlighten or maybe without spiking the Kool Aid, Having people, you know, enjoy some of the Kool Aid, for example. [01:17:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know. I am indeed looking forward to seeing those papers when they appear. I guess in two, three years will start. Because right now we, to be honest, for this grant, for instance, we only have the press note, right, that says whatever, we will do. A foresight, but I don't know [01:17:29] Speaker B: what they are doing. [01:17:32] Speaker C: My guess is that I think one of the starting things that I'm going to look for is whether they just say word affordances. We speculate this is an affordance and then these are the neural codes for it, the neural correlates. Are they going to read all the works on affordances, the experimental work on affordances in the last 40 years? Are they going to engage with that world and with the ecological variables there and see whether there's something in the brain? So it is difficult to see. If I see a paper that says, you know, the affordance of the graspability of this is encode, whatever, to me it's even more important than the encoding part as a first step, then the encoding part will be important, but more important than that, because that's what I expect, even their theoretical framework. So I know that they will be looking for a code. I will be looking on how they define or how they describe that affordances, how they measure it, what's the stimulus. Will they even talk about information in in the, in the, in the ecological way or not. And then when I have that, that clear, we can talk about what's, what's the, what's the brain activity that is in that is engaging in that. Right. Like can be a manifold. Like, like Louis explains in he in his book, can be resonating in the different ways. You know, some people like me have been trying to operationalize. But to me the key will be even if this is weird, maybe this is my ecological spirit will come before the encoding will go with the setup and with the variables and with the literature they use to approach that. Because if they start saying Gibson said an affordance is this nothing happened in the, in the last 50 years and then I'm doing this, I think this is going to be a wrong starting point. And I'm sure eventually Louis, Matthew and I will write some papers on that. [01:20:04] Speaker A: I would be excited. So if this is, you know, if it's sort of, if it's sort of like, okay, let's increase sort of the, let's make it a more natural, more naturalistic and such, you know, let's have a be behaving animals in an environment. I think the data, you know, coming out that would would be really interesting material for us to work with potentially. So I, I would, you know, I would, I would hope that they would provide, you know, an environment where there is sort of like an ambient energy array, you know, that can be discovered by the organism. I would hope that it's not pictures that are being presented of mugs or something like that and that, you know, that they're not hanging in the bite board but that they're moving around and such. If you have then neural data and you know, movement data from the body and you know, like access to the, to the ecological information that was available. I mean that would be a treasure trove to perform some of the analyses that Louis, for example talks about in his book on that would be really exciting. So then it doesn't matter as much how they contextualize or interpret their data in terms of, or the results in terms of encoding. So I really hope that this will be an open science funded project. [01:21:40] Speaker D: That's exactly what I was going to get at is like whether with like the advent of a lot of open science, like let's say it's all available, like all the, all the data that they collect. But there is a risk that without, you know, consulting for, for example, with people like you guys, that they might not record what's necessary from the ecological information. Right? Because it's not part of their milieu, that it's not part of their target question anyway. So you, you might still be missing the key data to. Because I imagine a scenario where like one of you can go in and have access to the data and with your theoretical perspective and reinterpret and analyze what you need to analyze and basically do your own research on their experiments and say, but here, look, this is why ecological psychology is. Right, but that might not be available if you don't have the right information. [01:22:30] Speaker B: Right? [01:22:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, I mean if they have naturalistic behaviors, I'm sure they will have some form of multimodal neural movement, whatever the stimulus is, what might be tricky to get or if they have, you know, the same time series for the stimulus, what they, what do they use, what that. That will be. I think one of the things in which we might not have the things that we would like to. But I mean it's is the grant. Right. [01:23:00] Speaker D: Well, what do you need a head camera, a GoPro and like something that takes in olfactory chemicals. [01:23:06] Speaker C: Right? That would be cool. You can also use. I mean, I've been doing some things with, with, with virtual reality. That is not a perfect thing, but at least gives me a control for, for the, for the whole environment. So I know where every object and every part of the. Of the octaflow is at every moment. Of course it's not as good as actual thing, but, you know, but there can be some things in which you can have something. [01:23:35] Speaker B: So you guys have made some great points. I'm glad that Paul brought up the point that well, we could get the data, but then what about the experimental setup? And I think Matthew would be sent there pointing out that it's the, the structure of the experiment is crucial, absolutely crucial here for the, you know, ecological psychologists. Showing a picture of a cup. I think that's what Matthew said, a picture of a cup or a real cup. That is a radically different experiment from the perspective of meteorological psychologists. So, you know, one of my worries is that I'm going to read these papers that come out and I'm not a betting man, but if I was, I would bet this is going to be outcome. I'm going to read them and I'm going to ask myself, I'm going to pull out the last hairs on my head. Actually they're probably just on my chin. I'm going to pull out my chin hairs and I'm going to keep saying to myself, why do they keep calling it ecological? Why do they keep Saying they're studying affordances. Like, why there are infinite words in the English language. Use different ones. Like, you know, do your project study how, you know, animals engage in the world with things that are meaningful to them. Awesome. It'll probably illuminate work in ecological psychology to some degree. But why, dear God, why do you have to call it ecological neuroscience? And why do you have to say affordances? I don't get it. I'm sorry. I need to calm down. I'm calmed, okay? [01:25:04] Speaker D: I share that with, you know, I have my own, like, AI. The AI world. Right. Like, I was alluding to earlier, co opting terms and stuff. And it's. It's just you sit there and I too, you know, have very few hairs left on the top of my head or whatever. But. But it's. It's aggravating. But beyond just being aggravating, like, well, then it's like, you got to get over yourself. Not you, Louis, but me, talking to myself. Like, get over yourself and move on. And, you know, I had the thought like, well, maybe, maybe you guys should invent a new term and say, all right, well, I guess we're not studying affordances, if that's what they're going to call affordances. Let's create a new term or something. I don't know what the solution is, you know, aside from being frustrated. [01:25:45] Speaker B: I'm dating myself right now, but one of my favorite movies is Office Space. And one of the characters, his name is Michael Bolton, which is also the name of a singer, and he hates the singer. And his friend asked him, why don't you just change your name to Mike or something else? And he said, why should I be the one to change? He's the one that sucks. [01:26:05] Speaker D: I know, right? [01:26:07] Speaker B: Like, so we already know what ecological means. We already know what affordances are, and we're already doing work that's. That's integrated with neuroscience. Like, you know, why should we change? I'm not saying they suck, but, you know, I'm just jealous. But, yeah. [01:26:25] Speaker D: So I think, is Louis the most frustrated person or the most pessimistic with it or cynical? Would it be cynicism or pessimism that you would. [01:26:34] Speaker B: I prefer the term pugilistic, but I like pugilistic. [01:26:40] Speaker D: You're going to be continue to be invited to the parties, and Louis not. But Matthieu is creating his own party, right? Is that the take home here? [01:26:50] Speaker A: I gave a talk in Spain at the conference that Vicente organized. I was being accused by. Or accused. A member of the audience called Me, sort of like a romantic in the sense that I could. That I felt I could convince mainstream researchers of the importance, you know, of incorporating the body and the environment in their analyses of how the brain, you know, produces cognition. So I feel like, yeah, I'm. I'm probably. Maybe I'm in between Luian and Vicente, and Vicente seems fairly okay with, you know, having people do what they do. Louis. Louis is frustrated, I feel like, is saying, like, I don't think it's going to work. And I'm a romantic. I think if our arguments are strong enough, you know, we'll convince them and they'll join the party. But maybe I'm. Maybe I'm also a bit naive. I don't know, not to see. [01:27:57] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. Maybe a positive point I can make is that this might be a really great time to develop ecological neuroscience. And the reason I say that is in some ways doing ecological neuroscience is a very data heavy, computational heavy, technologically heavy task. [01:28:19] Speaker D: Are you talking about a real ecological neuroscience as you would have it done here? [01:28:24] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it's one that maintains, you know, core principles of ecological psychology. And, you know, the idea of saying, you know, in the 1970s, 1960s, to say, oh, you need to study the whole organism environment system. Good luck. Right. Like, that's really hard to do. But the lessons were picked up and this is what informed, you know, embodied approaches. So then in the 90s, you started seeing embodied cognition and things like that becoming important. And I think in the last five to 10 years, I'm seeing the word embodiment pop up in various neuroscience papers I read. And I was really thrilled to see this paper that was mentioning terms like optic flow. And they were really, you know, they were studying mice running on these little balls, and they were really concerned with having the environmental information structured in an ecological way. And by ecological, they meant a Gibsonian way. And I was like, wow, that's really awesome. Where I think neuroscience has excelled is in this tool development. So they've been really moving ahead on data analyses, computational power, all this kinds of stuff. And then we just see, I think in the behavioral sciences writ large, a lot of multimodal setup. Vicente has talked about that a number of times. Matthew does a multimodal setup as well in his lab. And so to do organism environment systems is to do a multimodal setup. And so I think there's this nice little point where we're getting at where, you know, neuroscience is giving us great tech. And then, you know, the ecological principles are getting To a point where we can, you know, do it better, we can do it more now. It's not just, you know, asking people to give verbal reports whether some, they can step on a, on a step, you know, or something like that and then basing, you know, our claims about ecological information on that. But no, we can measure skin conductance, eeg, F nerds, all this kinds of stuff and we can tell a more embodied pictures. My, my, you know, I'm putting my, my pugil stick down and I think maybe this is a nice, nice time in history to be an ecological psychologist that cares about brains. I don't want to speak for an intent there, Matthew, on that regard, but that's my, my maybe positive take. [01:30:37] Speaker C: I do agree, I do agree. I think we are in a situation in which we can do things that we couldn't. And yeah, I think we are in a good situation. [01:30:48] Speaker A: I agree. And I also think that there is an increase in people who are not necessarily maybe brought up in the ecological, that didn't have the Socratic hellscape meetings, but who are, who are, you know. Yeah, doing stuff like having mice run on balls. Yeah, there's an, there's an increase in people also that are a little further from the core of the community doing work that really fits with ecological principles. Yeah. [01:31:23] Speaker D: Matthieu has used this term escape hatch in some of his writing to refer to how neuroscientists sort of, I don't know if weasel out or get out of accepting what for more better or worse is called like radical, a radical embodied view of cognition. So Matthew, I just want you to speak to that a little bit on because we're talking about the dynamics between like how neuroscientists might or might not use the correct or incorrect forms of ecological psychology concepts. So what is this escape hatch that, that you've written about? [01:32:01] Speaker A: The way I would describe it is sort of like the fact that the brain, the body and the environment are extremely, extremely tightly integrated means that if you sort of wiggle anywhere in that system, it's going to show up, it's going to have an effect all across the system. And so as a concrete example, you know, in my lab I did a study looking at mental rotation and I wanted to manipulate the non neural body. So I did that by restricting hand movement. Even though hands were not strictly speaking involved in this task, it was a mental rotation task and restricting the hand movements had an effect on the ability to mentally rotate. And the escape hatch would be to say that, well, so your body is attached to your brain and by restricting your hand movements, that is going to have an effect on what is happening in the brain. And so you might want to make the case that that hand restriction is sort of causally involved in, or that those hands are constitutively involved in. In the mental rotation, given that if you restrict them, mental rotation abilities change. But what really happens is that that changes something about brain activity. And in the end, it's really the brain itself, maybe, you know, body and brain representations or something like that that are here, you know, are, that are, that explain the effects that we see on mental rotation. So it's sort of like it's, I think, related to what Vicente said in his Forgotten Tales paper that I reread yesterday. You know, the sort of. The dare. I'm back again. Some mainstream neuroscientists will sort of try to incorporate ideas from embodiment and then once it comes time to explain, they go right back to, you know, just talking about the brain. The escape hatch is not. Is like not, I think, there and back again. It's, it's people who will say, you're going there, that's crazy, or like, you don't need to go there because, you know, we can just talk about the brain. Any kind of effect in the body, any kind of thing that happens in the environment shows up in the brain. And we stipulate that it must be in the brain where the real cognition kind of happens. It's not necessary. There's sort of like a, I think, a thinking error there in the sense that, you know, like you have this wider system and you just point to one part of it to say, well, that's where the real, you know, that's where the real constituent of cognition is. But that's what I meant by the escape hatch. [01:35:12] Speaker D: So it's sort of like what I was describing earlier. Neuroscientists can always just say, well, that's fine about the body and the environment, but it's in the brain. So, yeah, it's a short version of that. [01:35:25] Speaker B: Paul, did you actually, I'm asking everyone in particular, did you see this recent Nature commentary? The group of authors, couple of them are philosophers, couple, you know, there's a computer scientist and a physicist. And basically what they're saying is the debate over AGI is done. We're there. There's a quote unquote cascade of evidence. And now it's. The issue is really now how do we deal with. And part of the paper included a response to criticisms and one of the Criticisms was, you can't have intelligence unless you're embodied. And the response was, sorry, I have to collect myself for this. The response was, look at Stephen Hawking. He is quadriplegic and, you know, he's told us so much about the universe and this and that, and I nearly. He doesn't have a body. Yeah, I mean, that's basically what they're saying he doesn't have. He's a floating head. And I nearly choked on my chocolate milk. I. I was just like, what is go. Is this. This is for real. This is a for real response. It. Stephen Hawking wasn't born in a wheelchair. [01:36:43] Speaker C: Right. [01:36:43] Speaker B: Stephen Hawking lived a life where he could ambulate and, you know, and all these things and, and, and, yeah. So this idea, you know, even in the. And I think this is key to, like, the AI world is like, well, it's just this center module of thinking that does the thinking. And in humans, that sensor modules, the brain, and that's what does the thinking. And you could basically cut off all your limbs. They will be nothing but scratches. But really what matters is the thinking in the head. And so. Yeah, I don't know. I was just curious if you guys had seen that. [01:37:18] Speaker C: I have. Yeah. [01:37:19] Speaker D: I mean, how you can. Can you send it to me when we're done here? [01:37:22] Speaker B: Maybe? Yeah. [01:37:23] Speaker C: I had a similar reaction when I read that. That, that part. There are other parts that are similar, but that one, like, like disembodied minds. Look at the. Stephen Hawking never had the body. [01:37:44] Speaker D: Well, that actually is a little bit related. Go ahead. [01:37:47] Speaker B: Sorry, I was just going to say. So, you know, it's bleeding. This view is bleeding out from the cognitive psychology to the neuroscience, the AI, and so the commitments just. Just kind of drip into the next field. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:38:03] Speaker D: All right, so I want to end on a little speculation here, if you'll allow me. All right, so in ecological psychology, there's, you know, a lot of the work has been done on catching a pop fly. Catching a fly ball, right. Determining whether you can fit through a doorway based on its width and the. The stimulus available in, in the environment, et cetera. So. And yet, you know, but we know our. Our mental world is rich and we can think of pink elephants. And so let's say I'm sitting in a room by myself and I have a paper and pencil, right? And I'm. And I'm writing a short story about a pink elephant. And then. And then at some point, I decide to stop writing a short story. I'm going to start writing a haiku or some, you know, some other task, right? And there's nothing in the environment that caused me to, to do this. Yes, I can, I can see the pencil moving. I'm holding the pencil, it's moving across the paper. So there is a body involved, there's movement involved. And yes there is ambient arrays of energy within my visual stream or visual availability. But, but somehow I internally like switch my task, right, from writing a short story to a haiku and you know, eventually those rich sort of mental capacities need to be explained. And that's part of, you know, I know that ecological psychology is, is more concerned with perception, right, and movement and moving through space and perceiving ambient energy arrays. But so here's, here's my speculative question to you guys and as Louis, you know, notes and argues that we need to start taking complex systems science seriously if we want to understand the brain's computation contribution to brain, body, environment, organism environment systems. Is the brain complex enough? Or here's the bottom line question without, maybe without setting it up so much, can we generate our own affordances? Can the brain generate its own affordances? And would that be some pathway into an account of the r. Our rich mental thinking apparatus and capacities? [01:40:28] Speaker B: Right. [01:40:29] Speaker D: Thinking of the brain and the mind as self organized complex system which can generate its own constraints which have then this top down sort of effect on the activity at the lower levels, etc. So thinking of the brain as like sort of a self organized, autopoietic, self constraint generating complex system. What trouble do I run into if I start to think about it in, in terms of that? Well, that's how we should think about thinking like. Well, the brain is just generating its own affordances. Does that sound ridiculous from your standpoints? [01:41:06] Speaker C: Well, there's, there's a paper that got a little bit of fame within philosophy was published in Mind, I don't know, a few years ago that was called Mental Affordances and it was not the brain but the mind at the end, kind of the same thing. Talking about that, I mean I wouldn't call that affordance because again I have, I think an orthodox view on what an affordance should be. I understand how in a, in a more liberal view of affordancy, some people might use it that way we don't [01:41:39] Speaker D: have to use the term affordance, but let's say constraints, whatever, like something available to process. [01:41:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:41:45] Speaker C: So I would say that there are kind of two questions there. I think. One is that are there mental events that have their origin internally kind of like the intention of changing from a story to a haiku is that something that generate. I generate within me. Is that intention there? I think intentions are tricky. Nobody really has a very good explanation on how they appear. I would say that we shouldn't discard that. The intention is the product of a complex system that includes things outside. Even if you are not aware of that. Right. Even some trigger while you write and the writing itself is kind of looping inside and makes you change. That's a possibility. I don't know if we have a lot to say about that. I'm actually writing about intentions right now, and I'm not sure if I'm making any sense. But the other question to me is whether this is a question for ecological psychology. [01:43:08] Speaker B: Right. [01:43:09] Speaker C: What's the scope of ecological psychology and a half days, three days per week? I think that ecological psychology is a theory of perception and that's it. And there are other things that we cannot explain there. I have two days every week because I don't work on the weekend as well. [01:43:30] Speaker B: Spaniard. [01:43:31] Speaker C: And that I think no, maybe we should have an ecological account of everything. Right. Of mental life. [01:43:40] Speaker D: Drinking. He's drinking again. [01:43:44] Speaker C: We'll see. I don't think we will have an account of mental life with only the resources we have now. We will probably need to implement other things within ecological psychology to do that. I think this can be the origin of a wider theory that accounts for those things. I just don't have an answer. [01:44:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I would completely agree that we don't have sufficient set of concepts to account for something like that. I think both concepts are more like affordances and information, but maybe also concepts related to characterizing brain contributions to these kinds of phenomena. The way I see, a lot of the concepts that we use to describe brain dynamics in the ecological neuroscience field are sort of like general concepts, more abstract. So not, not, not zoning, not zooming in on a specific affordance event, but more general like, you know, synergy, soft assembly, you know what, degeneracy, interaction, dominance. I mean, all kinds of concepts. What I'm thinking about a lot right now is are there ways to make it more specific? I think in the mainstream view there is this also general concept of computation and representation. And those are descriptions of neural processes as they relate to cognition. But those can be made nicely concrete in sort of like convincing ways. If you have a lesion in Broca's area, why do you have speech production issues? Because sort of the specific computations and representations that are hanging out over there are impacted but as far as I can tell, the neural concepts that fit better with sort of an ecological neuroscience story are not able at this point to go more specific, whether it be for perception action or for some of the sort of, you know, other things that you mentioned. Paul, like, you know, thinking about haikus or something like that. That's something that I. That I'm. That I think we're missing. So I think maybe we're missing. I don't think. Yeah, I think we're missing both sort of concepts that allow us to characterize brain contributions, but maybe also bigger, even more abstract concepts like affordances. I don't know if we can apply. I'm with Vicente, and I'm not sure if we can apply the affordance concept to haikus, but. And so what other type of ecological concept could work to help us explain that? I think in the end it should be this non representational, non computational view. The view that brain dynamics happen in physical bodies and environments. That must be a story about everything. Not just about perception action, but also about everything else that humans can do. But I don't think we have the concepts at all to, you know, to. To explain it ecologically. [01:47:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:47:28] Speaker D: Seven days a week. You think that. Do you think that. [01:47:30] Speaker A: Did you want to seven days a [01:47:31] Speaker D: week, respond, Just seven days a week? Yeah. I mean, so seven days. [01:47:34] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [01:47:36] Speaker A: Five, five, six. [01:47:39] Speaker D: Yeah, but I just. I was just pointing out the sort of definitiveness of. Yes, it does need to be a theory of everything. Not a theory of everything, but more. [01:47:47] Speaker B: More encompassing and I don't know. [01:47:49] Speaker D: You're okay with that? Sorry, Louie, I didn't mean to cut you off there, but. But Vicente, you're. [01:47:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:47:55] Speaker D: I mean, two days a week, you're. [01:47:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:47:57] Speaker C: Yes. I think that if it ends up being just a theory of perception, action and perception and the control of action, I think that's good enough. Ideally, I think it can be the origin of a setup, Wider theory that is able to encompass this other capacity. [01:48:25] Speaker D: Louie, what were you gonna. [01:48:26] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean, I. I generally agree with both of them. You know, I. My response is usually, well, why are we expecting ecological psychology to do more than it set itself out to do, which is perception action first and foremost, you know, Eleanor Gibson, St. Jimmy's wife, I think expanded the general framework to development, child development, things like that. So I think there are resources to go beyond, you know, just perception action. I'm hesitant when it goes beyond perception action and it compromises the core principles. Then I'm just like, well, it's just not ecological psychology anymore or it's just being inspired by ecological psychology and that's fine. But I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of these general approaches to intelligence and in general, like theological psychology, perhaps in activism, for example, body cognition, a constant critique is, you know, well, you're just talking about, you know, the basic ways of being in the world. But can you scale up. So the scaling up problem, can you scale this up to, you know, real cognition or higher order cognition or you know, something like that? And yeah, I don't know, you know, going back maybe, I'm not sure I don't have to, not with what ecological psychology set out to do. But I think if it is going to make connection with these more high order phenomena, say imagination or something like that, I think it'll more likely be that whatever theory is posited for accounting those phenomena will be consistent with ecological psychology and not necessarily be ecological psychology itself. So whatever the brain's doing, maybe there are some brain centric phenomena. Fine, give that account. You might need different words. You know, Matthew was talking about, you know, synergies, interaction, dominance, you know, all these different kinds of concepts that ecological psychologists tend to be friendly to. Those could probably scale up to the brain as well and don't have to compromise on, you know, the brain, body environments for perception. Action story that is being told. [01:50:47] Speaker D: I just realized. But we'll, we'll have to do this again in three years when, when those papers are coming out. That, that would be fun and to, to my question at the end and all of your responses. If only there was a single person we could ask about, like, hmm, who would that be? Who would solve this? Oh yeah, St. Jimmy, the only person that matters. [01:51:11] Speaker B: Thank you. Absolutely. [01:51:13] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:51:14] Speaker C: Read our gospel. [01:51:15] Speaker D: Read the gospel. That's right. Thank you for doing this and discussing these things. Obviously there's a lot more to discuss and it will be fun, I think, and hope to revisit these things moving forward once we see some of the results out of the new ecological neuroscience. [01:51:35] Speaker B: Yeah, and Paul, maybe we can have a firestorm debate with some of those people at some point. [01:51:40] Speaker D: That would be great. We will see, we will see if they, if they will agree to come on. And I mean, I should say, like that's how this conversation started or the setup for this conversation was we were going to have a little bit of back and forth but it didn't work out on the other end. So we've had some fourth and not back instead for now. So anyway, nice to see you all. Matthew, nice to meet you and thanks for coming on. [01:52:05] Speaker C: Thank you. [01:52:05] Speaker B: Thanks for having us. [01:52:06] Speaker A: Thanks for having me. Yeah. [01:52:14] Speaker D: 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 advanced 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 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 Donovan. Thank you for your support. See you next time. [01:52:58] Speaker B: Sam.