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Check out this story: Neural manifolds: Latest buzzword or pathway to understand the brain?

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Juan Gallego runs the Neocybernetics Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, affiliated with the neuroscience of disease and neuroscience programs, and the centre for restorative neurotechnology.

Juan has worked a lot on neural manifolds - the mathematical objects neuroscience is using more and more to describe how big populations of neurons coordinate their activity to do useful things. In fact, he recently gave a short talk that he titled The Manifold Manifesto, because he was asked to be provocative. And he was provocative, suggesting that manifolds are real - as real as chairs and tables are, that they have causal power, and they might be a target of evolution. Of course he talked about his own and others work to support those claims. So today we discuss many of those themes, through the lens of his own and others work, and we talk about what keeps him up at night about the possible limits of using manifolds to connect brain activity with behavior and mental phenomena.

He's not just a manifold person, though. Juan is more broadly interested in motor control and how brains do it.

We also discuss his work in patients with spinal cord injuries, who don't have enough nerve connections to their muscles to actually move, but have enough nerve connections that some signal gets through. Juan and his colleagues can detect that little bit getting through, and use it to infer what behaviors the patients intend to do, and they can use that information to control actions in a computer simulation. The hope is that this will translate to controlling prosthetics to give spinal cord injury patients their mobility again.

• Neocybernetics Lab.
• @juangallego.bsky.social
• Related papers
  • A neural manifold view of the brain.
  • A neural implementation model of feedback-based motor learning.
  • Conjoint specification of action by neocortex and striatum.
  • Integrating across behaviors and timescales to understand the neural control of movement.

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Tom Griffiths directs both the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at Princeton University. He's been on brain inspired before to talk about his previous book Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, which he co-wrote with Brian Christian. Today he's here to talk about his new book, The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind. In this book, Tom explains how the three pillars of logic, neural networks, and probability theory complement each other to explain cognition, arguing we are on the doorstep to settling what mathematical principles - the so-called "laws of thought" - underly our cognition. So we discuss a little bit about a lot of things, including the concepts themselves, the people who have generated and worked on those concepts. I should also mentioned, Tom recorded a bunch of his interviews with people he writes about, and he's edited and polished those into a podcast called the Cognition Project, which I have enjoyed after reading the book, and I think you'd enjoy it either before or after you read the book.

• Computational Cognitive Science Lab
• Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence
• Social: @cocosci_lab; @cocoscilab.bsky.social
• Book:
  • The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind.
• Podcast: The Cognition Project

0:00 - Intro 3:20 - Tom's approach 7:19 - 3 pillars of the laws of thought 28:24 - Logic and formal systems strip away meaning 39:04 - Nature of thought 50:35 - Kahneman and Tversky 1:015:12 - Enabling constraints and inductive bias 1:12:51 - Hidden layers, probability, and hidden markov models 1:20:47 - Conscious vs nonconscious 1:23:43 - Feelings 1:31:26 - Personal

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

How does brain activity explain your perceptions and your actions? That's what neuroscientists ask. 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 with different terms, concepts, underlying assumptions, and targets of explanations.

So what happens when neuroscientists are inspired by ecological psychology but don't necessarily want take on, or are ignorant of, the fundamental principles underlying ecological psychology?

This happens all the time, like how AI was "inspired" by the most rudimentary understanding of how brains work, and took terms from neuroscience like neuron, neural network, and so on, as stand-ins for their models. This has in some sense re-defined what people mean by neuron, and neural network, and how they function and how we should think of them.

Modern neuroscience, with better data collecting tools, 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 - 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 turn is that we neuroscientists don't have ready-made theoretical tools to deal with the less constrained massive amounts of data 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 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.

Matthieu de Wit is an associate professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, who runst 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 University of Murcia in Spain, and he's been on before to talk about ecological psychology and neuroscience.

With their deep expertise in ecological psychology, they are keenly interested in how neuroscience write 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 adop...