Monthly Archives: October 2015

States of Mind at the Wellcome Collection

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YellowPinkBlue by Ann Veronica Janssens

From October 2015 until October 2016 the Wellcome Collection in London is curating an exhibition called States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness.  It has been launched with a brilliant piece of installation art by Ann Veronica Janssens (until 3rd Jan 2016).  In YellowPinkBlue the entire gallery space is invaded by coloured mist, to focus attention on the process of perception itself so that one becomes subsumed by the experience of seeing.  I’m excited to be contributing in various ways to States of Mind, via the Sackler Centre (more on that soon). To start with, here is the text I wrote for Janssen’s remarkable piece.

What in the world is consciousness?

Right now an apparent miracle is unfolding. Within your brain, the electrochemical activity of many billions of richly interconnected brain cells – each one a tiny biological machine – is giving rise to a conscious experience. Your conscious experience: right here, right now, reading these words.

It is all too easy to go about our daily lives, having conscious experiences, without appreciating how remarkable it is that we have these experiences at all. Ann Veronica Janssens’s piece returns us to the sheer wonder of being conscious. By stripping away many of the features that permeate our normal conscious lives, the raw fact of experiencing is given renewed emphasis.

People have wondered about consciousness since they’ve wondered about anything. Hippocrates, the Greek founder of modern medicine, rightly identified the brain as the organ of experience (though Aristotle didn’t agree). In the Renaissance, Descartes divided the universe into ‘mind stuff’ (res cogitans) and ‘matter stuff’ (res extensa), giving birth to the philosophy of dualism and the confounding ‘mind–body’ problem of how the two relate. In the 19th century, when psychology first emerged as a science, understanding consciousness was its primary objective. Though largely sidelined during the 20th century, the challenge of revealing the biological basis of consciousness is now firmly re-established for our times. Janssens’s piece reminds us of the important distinction in science between being conscious at all (conscious level: the difference between being awake and being in a dreamless sleep or under anaesthesia) and what we are conscious of (conscious content: the perceptions, thoughts and emotions that populate our conscious mind). There is also conscious selfhood – the specific experience of being me (or you). Each of these aspects of consciousness can be traced to specific mechanisms in the brain that neuroscientists, in cahoots with researchers from many other disciplines, are now starting to unravel. There are many exciting ideas in play, ranging from the dependence of conscious level on how different parts of the brain speak to each other, to understanding conscious content as determined by the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of ambiguous and noisy sensory signals. Crucially, these ideas have allowed consciousness science to progress from the philosopher’s armchair to the research laboratory.

Besides the allure of basic science, there are important practical motivations for studying consciousness. Neurological and psychiatric disorders are increasingly common and can often be framed as disturbances of conscious experience. Consciousness science promises new approaches and perhaps new treatments for these scourges of modern society. New theories and experiments can also shed light on consciousness in newborns and in non-human animals, adding critical information to important ethical debates in these areas. But above all, consciousness science carries the promise of understanding more about our place in nature. Following Darwin and Copernicus, a biological account of conscious experience will help us see ourselves as part of, not apart from, the rest of the universe.

Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience
Co-Director, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex

A first draft of a digital brain: The Human Brain Project’s new simulation

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Today, Henry Markram and colleagues have released one of the first of a raft of substantial new results emerging from the controversial Human Brain Project (HBP). The paper, Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry, appears in the journal Cell.

As one of the first concrete outputs emerging from this billion-euro endeavour this had to be a substantial piece of work, and it is. The paper describes a digital reconstruction of ~31,000 neurons (with ~8 million connections and ~37 million synapses) of a tiny part of the somatosensory cortex of the juvenile rat brain. What is unique about this simulation is not the number of neurons (31,000 is pretty modest by today’s standards), but the additional detail included. Simulated neurons are given specific morphological, chemical, and electrical characteristics, and are precisely positioned in 3D space so that they form biologically realistic connections. This level of detail is at the heart of the HBP strategy, and it underlies the claim that the simulation is a ‘reconstruction’ of neural tissue, not just an abstract model of neuronal connectivity.

So how good is it? Certainly, the simulation detail is extremely impressive, as is the wealth of experimental data that is accounted for. Particularly striking is the ability to predict both general features of neocortical dynamics – like the existence of ‘soloist’ and ‘chorister’ neurons – as well as to inspire specific new experiments that further validated the simulation. It is also promising that Markram & co managed to interpolate their sparse experimental data in order to fully specify the model, without losing the fidelity of the model to the real ‘target’ system.

The authors admit this is a ‘first step’ and the results are certainly intriguing. But the real question is whether the aggressively ‘bottom up’ approach of the HBP will, by itself, yield the transformational understanding of neuroscience that it has promised. Modelling work in science – whether computational or mathematical – is about finding the right level of abstraction to best explore and understand some natural principle, or test some specific hypothesis.  A model that relies on incorporating as much detail as possible could lead to a simulation that is almost as hard to understand as the target system. Jorge Luis Borges long ago noted the tragic uselessness of the perfectly detailed map in his short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’.

For this reason alone, its hard to be confident that the HBP approach — impressive as it is at the level of a tiny volume of immature cortex — will scale up to deliver real insights about how brains, bodies and environments mesh together in generating complex adaptive behaviour (and perception, and thought, and consciousness). And on the other hand, as detailed as the current simulation is, it still neglects very basic and undoubtedly important aspects of the brain – including glial cells, vasculature, receptors, and the like. This goes to show that even the most detailed simulation models still have to make abstractions. In the present model decisions about what is included and excluded seem to be made more according to practical criteria (what is possible?) than theoretically principled criteria (what are we trying to explain with this model?).

Can the HBP be extended both downwards (to encompass the so-far excluded but potentially critical details of neuronal microstructure) and upwards (to a whole brain and organism level, including sensorimotor interactions with bodies and environments)? The jury is still out. So let’s applaud this Herculean effort to simulate a tiny part of a tiny brain, but let’s also keep in mind that the HBP won’t solve neuroscience all by itself, and only time will tell whether it will play a significant role in unravelling the properties of the most complex object in the known universe.

The original article is here: Markram et al (2015). Cell 163:1-37.
Some of the above comments appear in a New Scientist commentary by Jessica Hamzelou, published 08/10/2015:  Digital version of piece of rat brain fires like the real thing.