Connectionists: how the brain works?

[james bower]

Also add Will Rall - who for years was criticized for building passive dendritic models, even though he clearly believed that this was foundational work for considering active properties - and he was right.  However, the care with which he considered the actual structure of biological systems was clearly manifest in his very early work with Gordon Shepherd on mitral cells in the olfactory bulb.  This collaboration between an experimentalist and a theorist is still a model of mutual respect and admiration for each other and for the subject at hand.  It is also the first case I know of, where modeling of whole neurons made a real, and unexpected PRE-diction (that mitral cell dendrites were electrically coupled).

Add to the syllabus for the new introductory graduate course in neuroscience a careful study of this collaboration and its results.  

So, I think it is worth asking what has happened?  Of course, my young children (9,7) are of the opinion that all the music in the 60s was great largely because nobody plays the crap anymore.  So in looking back at the sophistication and insights of the folks mentioned one has to be aware of this effect.  HOWEVER,  my strong sense over the last 30 years is that we have lost a great deal of the rigor and especially, perhaps the breadth necessary for real insight.  While there are many reasons to suspect such impressions, especially in those with gray hair, I think several unfortunate trends have contributed:

	1) funding sources pushing prematurely at all of us to abandon basic research for something that looks applied
	2) a continuing trend in our graduate schools to train technicians with narrow expertise rather than provide and allow the kind of breadth necessary for insight
	3) the ability to collect massive amounts of data and bang away at it, instead of thinking. (a kind of scientific ADD)
	4) the ongoing routing out of senior faculty at academic institutions who can provide this kind of perspective - but instead are increasingly under the gun to either become overpaid administrators or get grant funding like they did when they were junior faculty
	5) I hate to say it, but a kind of self centered laziness that i would say is characteristic in particular of ‘my generation”
	6) the over weighting of training programs, summer schools, funding opportunities driven by the belief that moving neuroscience forward mostly requires an influx of people trained in physics, engineering etc.  With them often comes, Okhams razor. 
	7) finally, I have very serious concerns about “cognitive neuroscience” (formerly perhaps physiological psychology) coupled to human imaging studies and the effect it is having on simplifying how we all think about brains and behavior (not to mention its effects on new field like “neuro-economics" and “neuromarketing").  Mankind has spent many thousands of years using complex patterns as a framework to organize our thinking about human behavior.  For thousands of years we had patterns in the night sky (constellations) coupled to the movement of the planets as a framework to explain human behavior (Astrology).  In the 1800’s instead of stars, we used bumps on the head (phrenology).  Now, we have the most marvelous device of all, something that makes patterns directly on images of the human brain (brain imaging).   Somehow now it all comes down to things like ‘executive function’, ‘motivation circuits’, ‘attention' (whatever that is), etc. all with their corresponding red, blue and green patterns.   How different is this really in substance from astrology or as others have pointed out as well, phrenology?  And what relationship do these images REALLY have to neuronal function (of course, it has no direct relationship that anyone has been able to understand).  

For all these reasons, I worry deeply about the drift towards the abstract and the simple - and away from the complexity, where for absolutely certain, the answer lies as the ancient ones appeared to know.

:-)

Jim




On Mar 19, 2014, at 10:36 PM, Levine, Daniel S <levine at uta.edu> wrote:

> Jim et al.,
>  
> To pioneers who understood more about complexity than we often give them credit for I'd add Warren McCulloch.  McCulloch and Pitts are clearly well known for their theorem about networks of all-or-none neurons.  And yet in about 1969 just before his death I met McCulloch as a graduate student who was just beginning to migrate from pure math into neural modeling.  I asked him what area of math I should study in order to be an effective modeler, and he advised me to read a book by a Russian named Minorsky on nonlinear oscillations.
>  
> Best,
> Dan Levine
>  
> From: Connectionists [connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of james bower [bower at uthscsa.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 9:33 PM
> To: Geoffrey Goodhill
> Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
> Subject: Re: Connectionists: how the brain works?
> 
> Geoffrey,
> 
> Nice addition to the discussion actually introducing an interesting angle on the question of brain organization (see below)  As you note, reaction diffusion mechanisms and modeling have been quite successful in replicating patterns seen in biology - especially interesting I think is the modeling of patterns in slime molds, but also for very general pattern formation in embryology.  However, more and more detailed analysis of what is diffusing, what is sensing what is diffusing, and what is reacting to substances once sensed — all linked to complex patterns of gene regulation and expression have made it clear that actual embryological development is much much more complex, as Turing himself clearly anticipated, as the quote you cite pretty clearly indicates.   Clearly a smart guy.   But, I don’t actually think that this is an application of Ochham’s razor although it might appear to be after the fact.  Just as Hodgkin and Huxley were not applying it either in their model of the action potential.   Turing apparently guessed (based on a lot of work at the time on pattern formation with reaction diffusion) that such a mechanism might provide the natural basis for what embryos do. Thus, just like for Hodgkin and Huxley, his model resulted from a bio-physical insight, not an explicit attempt to build a stripped down model for its own sake.  I  seriously doubt that Turning would have claimed that he, or his models could more effectively do what biology actually does in forming an embrio, or substitute for the actual process.  
> 
> However, I think there is another interesting connection here to the discussion on modeling the brain. Almost certainly communication and organizational systems in early living beings were reaction diffusion based.  This is still a dominant effect for many ‘sensing’ in small organisms.  Perhaps, therefore, one can look at nervous systems as structures specifically developed to supersede reaction diffusion mechanisms, thus superseding this very ‘natural’ but complexity limited type of communication and organization.  What this means, I believe, is that a simplified or abstracted physical or mathematical model of the brain explicitly violates the evolutionary pressures responsible for its structure.  Its where the wires go, what the wires do, and what the receiving neuron does with the information that forms the basis for neural computation, multiplied by a very large number.  And that is dependent on the actual physical structure of those elements.
> 
> One more point about smart guys,  as a young computational neurobiologist I questioned how insightful John von Neumann actually was because I was constantly hearing about a lecture he wrote (but didn’t give) at Yale suggesting that dendrites and neurons might be digital ( John von Neumann’s The Computer and the Brain. (New Haven/London: Yale Univesity Press, 1958.)  Very clearly a not very insightful idea for a supposedly smart guy.  It wasn’t until a few years later, when I actually read the lecture - that I found out that he ends by stating that this idea is almost certainly wrong, given the likely nonlinearities in neuronal dendrites.  So von Neumann didn’t lack insight, the people who quoted him did.  It is a remarkable fact that more than 60 years later, the majority of models of so called neurons built by engineers AND neurobiologists don’t consider these nonlinearities.  The point being the same point, to the Hopfield, Mead, Feynman list, we can now add Turing and von Neumann as suspecting that for understanding,  biology and the nervous system must be dealt with in their full complexity.
> 
> But thanks for the example from Turing - always nice to consider actual examples.   :-)
> 
> Jim
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mar 19, 2014, at 8:30 PM, Geoffrey Goodhill <g.goodhill at uq.edu.au> wrote:
> 
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> A great example of successful Ockham-inspired biology is Alan Turing's model for pattern formation (spots, stripes etc) in embryology (The chemical basis of morphogenesis, Phil Trans Roy Soc, 1953). Turing introduced a physical mechanism for how inhomogeneous spatial patterns can arise in a biological system from a spatially homogeneous starting point,  based on the diffusion of morphogens. The paper begins:
>> 
>> "In this section a mathematical model of the growing embryo will be described. This model will be a simplification and an idealization, and consequently a falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for discussion are those of greatest importance in the present state of knowledge."
>> 
>> The paper remained virtually uncited for its first 20 years following publication, but since then has amassed 8000 citations (Google Scholar). The subsequent discovery of huge quantities of molecular detail in biological pattern formation have only reinforced the importance of this relatively simple model, not because it explains every system, but because the overarching concepts it introduced have proved to be so fertile.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Geoff
>> 
>> 
>> On Mar 20, 2014, at 6:27 AM, Michael Arbib wrote:
>> 
>>> Ignoring the gross differences in circuitry between hippocampus and cerebellum, etc., is not erring on the side of simplicity, it is erring, period. Have you actually looked at a Cajal/Sxentagothai-style drawing of their circuitry?
>>> 
>>> At 01:07 PM 3/19/2014, Brian J Mingus wrote:
>>>> Hi Jim,
>>>> 
>>>> Focusing too much on the details is risky in and of itself. Optimal compression requires a balance, and we can't compute what that balance is (all models are wrong). One thing we can say for sure is that we should err on the side of simplicity, and adding detail to theories before simpler explanations have failed is not Ockham's heuristic. That said it's still in the space of a Big Data fuzzy science approach, where we throw as much data from as many levels of analysis as we can come up with into a big pot and then construct a theory. The thing to keep in mind is that when we start pruning this model most of the details are going to disappear, because almost all of them are irrelevant. Indeed, the size of the description that includes all the details is almost infinite, whereas the length of the description that explains almost all the variance is extremely short, especially in comparison. This is why Ockham's razor is a good heuristic. It helps prevent us from wasting time on unnecessary details by suggesting that we only inquire as to the details once our existing simpler theory has failed to work.
>>>> 
>>>>> On 3/14/14 3:40 PM, Michael Arbib wrote:
>>>>>> At 11:17 AM 3/14/2014, Juyang Weng wrote:
>>>>>>> The brain uses a single architecture to do all brain functions we are aware of!  It uses the same architecture to do vision, audition, motor, reasoning, decision making, motivation (including pain avoidance and pleasure seeking, novelty seeking, higher emotion, etc.).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Gosh -- and I thought cerebral cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum were very different from each other.

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