What can Neuroscience teach us about the Mind?
Neuroscience has vastly expanded our knowledge of the brain, revealing biological detail at every scale, from ion channels and synaptic transmission to the dynamics of large neural populations. A central goal of modern neuroscience is to link these biological mechanisms to behaviour and, ultimately, to psychological function, often with the implicit assumption that doing so amounts to understanding the mind. But what can neuroscience actually teach us about the mind? Many behaviours can already be described and predicted without any reference to biological function. By identifying the neural correlates of a behaviour, do we genuinely deepen our understanding of it? What does a biological mechanism add to psychological explanation and where does it fall short of providing one at all? These questions have only grown more pressing in the age of AI: should we understand a system by what it does, its behaviour and output, or by how it works on the inside, through its internal mechanisms?
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Speakers:
Professor Lisa Bortolotti, University of Birmingham
Professor Zoe Kourtzi, Cambridge University
Professor John Krakauer, Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon & Johns Hopkins University
Professor Christopher Summerfield, Oxford University
Professor Daniel Yamins, Stanford University
ABSTRACTS
Zoe Kourtzi - Adaptive computations for flexible cognition in the human brain
Successful interactions in complex environments entail making optimal decisions about the present and predictions about the future. Extracting the key features from our sensory experiences and deciding how to interpret them is a computationally challenging task that is far from understood. Accumulating evidence suggests that the brain may solve this challenge by combining sensory information and previous knowledge about the environment. Combining behavioral, multimodal ultra high-field neuroimaging and interventional methods, we investigate the role of learning and experience-dependent plasticity in optimizing decisions. We demonstrate that inhibitory plasticity mechanisms in cortico-subcortical circuits translate sensory experiences to decisions about the present scene and predictions about upcoming events. Our findings reveal multimodal plasticity (neurochemical, myelination, functional) mechanisms that interact to shape the optimization of decisions and predictions in the human brain.
The event is free and open to all.
SWC/GCNU Student Symposium Team
The Student Symposium is organised jointly by PhD students of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit of University College London. This is the sixth instalment of an annual discussion-based event that aims to bring together neuroscience researchers from the UK and abroad to engage with current and future problems in neuroscience.