The Brain is the Map of the Mind

I dwell in Possibility– – Emily Dickinson

So What?

Why learn about the world with no immediate practical application?

I’ve said that there is value in writing to learn and photographing to see. What’s the value of learning? Of seeing?

Knowing how to bake bread or bake beans is clearly useful and there’s no question of practicality. Science, even at its most exploratory, seems useful as long as it promises more powerful manipulation of nature. Sometimes the possibility of science is obvious, as in understanding the role of an enzyme in energy metabolism to affect cellular function. Even when the connection is unclear, learning more seems to have potential value even if the present result is impractical. All information has value and there are no dead ends, only detours. Learning broadly is often necessary preparation for learning more narrowly and usefully

Is philosophy of mind of any use? Is it as useful as neuroscience itself? Might thinking about the nature of the mind at least contribute to the usefulness of information about brain structure and function? Why explore the relationship between mind and brain? Why worry about the apparent contradictions between deterministic physical models and subjective free will?

If I can’t tell whether the world is real or an illusion, does it matter? Is the mind made of ectoplasm attached to the brain by a neural-spiritual interface? These questions have been around for centuries. Every year we learn more about the brain. Do we know any more about the mind? Is what we’ve learned potentially useful?

I’d like to convince you that understanding how mind is generated from brain is a useful way to improve brain function. For me, this is a fundamental reason why brain science is important. Learning about the brain should be a path to deciding better.

Learning From Experience, Teaching the Brain

In the *Consolations of Philosophy“, Alain DeBotton writes, ”In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge." We know what art is and we know that art helps us learn to see. Philosophy, in the broadest meaning of love of knowledge is a similar direct path from experience to knowledge.

Ignoring the question and pretending that knowledge and brain are independent domains is to miss an opportunity to understand what it means to “know” and therefore try to improve the everyday use of knowledge.

So what have you learned personally from your years of mental experience? TYou’ve made good, profitable decisions about the world. You’ve made mistakes of course. Better yet, how often have you thought that you were right, absolutely sure you were right, and later learned that the true state of the world was not at all what you thought?

The stock market serves as a wonderful lab for training the mind to decide better if approached mindfully. There’s profit in correctly identifying an undervalued stock that subsequently rises in value. On the other hand, buying into hype and choosing a company close to failure is exactly the kind of pain that Schopenhauer was referring to as leading to knowledge. What is it that has improved from years of experience in the market that we call “knowledge”? Is it mind that has better judgement now? Is it the brain that can now choose more accurately under conditions of uncertainty?

The Brain Makes Maps

We are beginning, just beginning I think, to understand how knowledge is stored and retrieved in the brain. The insights go back to the beginnings of brain physiology, when recordings of single neurons in awake, behaving animals began to be possible. It was obvious from the start that you and I don’t perceive the world directly and whole, but broken down into very small elements. Our retinas are the light sensing neural arrays at the back of the eye. Like the individual pixels that make up the sensor array in a camera, each photoreceptor senses the light from a small part of the visual scene. The whole picture is represented, but its been deconstructed into a mosaic in which each element has been disconnected from every other element.

Somehow that array of light intensity is reconstructed into a sensory impression that we experience subjectively as seeing the world. What’s reconstructed is more than just a visual sensory impression, the seen world has meaning. Its as if there are little call outs from the objects- blue book, time, moving fly making that buzzing noise, so annoying …

The way in which sensory input is organized into coherent perception remains one of the fundamental questions in neuroscience. In the visual system, the brain starts abstracting local features like color form and edges from the map of intensities sensed at the eye. These features are mapped from visual space into brain maps, creating a neural representation of features in the scene. At higher levels, features become maps of objects with meaning like books and flies. The maps of words for these objects are separate, but can be called on when the fly or the book needs to be mentioned.

The brain is a set of maps, spatially orgainized, each representing different sensory streams or, on the action side, control of different parts of the bodies and movement of them through space. To catch a fly requires the map of visual space containing the fly to be registered with the map of arm and hand movement. The connections and coordinating systems to do all of that are known. In fact, simpler versions of them can be studied in frogs who need project a sticky tongue out into visual space for fly catching activities. Lunch in this case.

It’s a small conceptual step to suggest that valuation of stock, reading another person’s motivation, and understanding calculus are all brain maps of various types. They are simplified representations that model aspects of the real world. The maps are not strictly spatial, but reflect our models of how the physical world is laid out and how it can be manipulated. As simple models, they are not perfectly accurate just as a geographical map is not the terrain itself but rather a useful representation for navigation.

The Mind Mapped

Learning is the act of making better brain maps. The more accurate the model of the world is in the brain, the better it will navigate the world itself. Misconceptions, inaccuracies and the unknown are all bad or missing parts of the map that will make decisions more prone to error. A fully accurate and comprehensive map isn’t ever possible. By their very nature, maps are restricted representations of the world. The world itself is too big and complex to deal with directly.

The exploration of the relationship between mind and brain is for me an effort to create a more accurate map of deciding. We feel like we are creatures split in two. Our ethereal minds seem to inhabit and be constrained by physical bodies. A more accurate map would show just the brain working away and our subjective mental experience as a view into what that brain is doing. It becomes easier to discard distinctions like “rational decision making” and “intuition” when the underlying brain structure and function is the map of mind.

The Connectedness of the Abstract

IslandBars and Card

Yesterday I visited the Metropolitain Museum of Art in NYC to see the Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe just to soak in this important period of the arts in the US. There was a small associated gallery with some of Stieglitz’ photography collection. The photographs brought to mind once again how much photography was competing with painting until technical advances in film and printing gave photography the kind of technical image perfection that we now think of “photographic”. I’ve always yearned for the painterly results that the early techniques porduced. Our technical abilities have now advanced to the point that Flickr has thousands of well composed, perfectly exposed images that were hard to achieve in the predigital era.

There was another small photography gallery at the Met which was more inspiring to me, After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection. The images were all ones that addressed culture and political power. What struck me was the choice of a test wall installation as the closer for the gallery. I’d never seen his work before, but I believe he is on to something in presenting mulitple images in multiple sizes of multiple subjects that relate to each others in a way that a single image cannot.

I’ve begun printing images again and have been looking at how images relate when prints are placed in relation to each other. So far, it suggests why these images get created and how they are connected.

The Future of the Library Is Service Not Place

Reading Mark Bernstein’s discussion of the future of books reminded me of my research methods in my academic days and a shocking recent discovery about the future of a library.

I never learned the classic index card source method. I would grab a new legal pad and scribble some information at the top of a page to link the notes to some source, generally a book. I’d then just write and write and write on the page, flipping to a fresh page as needed. It was a crazy mix of my my own thoughts and information directly from the source. The raw material. Since I never had the patience to actually copy quotes or information, I only wrote enough to recapture and document the dissuasion going on between the source and myself in that notes page.

I remember now that I’d often read a book cover to cover with excitement and then take a second, leisurely stroll through it to have that conversation with the author. Other times it was a page flipping attack on a book to see whether a particular subject was to be found in its pages. Researching obscure topics lead to a lot of attacks on a lot of books. Often I’d go from one end of the shelf of the library to the other, flipping systematically through every plausible source.

When it was time to write, I’d outline a section and decide what sources were relevant. Then I’d have the sources physically piled up in front of me, my notes to my left and a new pad for writing on the right. The process was to write, reference material by pulling the source and my notes and write some more. Of course revisions included pulling all of the physical sources together again.

This method was perfectly suited both to my poor memory, distractibility and the library environment. I didn’t work in my dorm room or, later, my office. The library was where I read, researched and wrote. As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, I loved setting aside the time to begin the preparation of a manuscript or grant so that I could spend those hours lost in the stacks of Welch Medical Library.

Once out of college and focused on neuroscience, the system worked just as well as long as the Xerox machines were working. I probably spent more time dragging bound journals down to the basement and flipping pages to copy than I did reading or writing. I developed a commitment to never cite research that I hadn’t read and, generally, didn’t have a physical copy of to refer to. In fact, hidden in a couple of the book chapters I wrote are indirect references to sources, such “Jones (1936) as summarized in Smith (1994)”" when I couldn’t get a copy of Jones to read directly or it was written in another language. Sadly, as abstract services became electronic, it became a very, very common practice for papers to cite research that the author had clearly never read critically based solely on the research as inaccurately described in the paper’s abstract.

Imagine my surprise when I learned last month that Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins was going to close the doors of its historic building. Of course library services were not going away, it was decided that a better use of resources would be to enhance electronic services and campus delivery of books rather than keep a building open for the 106 visitors a day who circulated around the stacks of journals which were almost all available on line anyway.

Checking the Welch Medical Library website today, I see that the plan has been scuttled and instead there will be a larger discussion about the library. Despite such rearguard actions, the future of the library is clear. Libraries will be a service, not a place.

Mark closed his discussion about the future of books this way, “If our books are not as good as they can be, we can make them better. If we know how to make them better, and we want to make them better, why would we not?”

I submit that the books (and journal articles) are only one part of this transition. The real change is in the environment of these books, migrating from physical form to distributed digital information. It’s chaotic now, with way too many devices and contexts for retrieving and collecting information. I find myself redeveloping my stack of of sources, my legal pads of notes and my writing pad over and over again every six months, but where the sources are in a dozen forms that partially overlap, notes in half a dozen systems (text files, Findings, Tinderbox), and writing in yet another half dozen programs.

We call it “workflow”, but that’s a symptom of the world in transition. If we’re smart, we’ll be choosing and developing tools that together create a more powerful version of the library carrel. And valuing scholarship, not just the ability to weave a few sources into an entertaining yarn.

Portfolio Review

Reclining

Reclining
Florence, Italy

I was inspired by Zack Arias to look back on my photographic output of the last few years and try to put together a portfolio, perhaps as prints. I’ve been working on editing and rating photos lately to put together some photo books to give as gifts. That turns out to be a real motivator for me to bring photography more into my life.

I thought that I might cut the process short by just finding the photos in my aperture library that were tagged by FlickrExport as being uploaded. Flickr tells me that since I started uploading in late 2005, I’ve posted 628 images. Using the Archive Thumbnail View I could survey my body of work on screen quickly and see the number of images for each year. It looks like this:

Flickr Portfolio
Year Flickr Images
2006 112
2007 168
2008 182
2009 66
2010 49
2011 38

So in 2008, my Flickr posting peaked at about an image every other day. I was surprised the pattern. Based on a review of image counts within Aperture, it looks like it has to do both with decreased numbers of shots taken and processed plus a waning of intrest in Flickr’s social side. A few years ago, I was active in several groups and anticipated the views and feedback.

I’m pretty confident that I can use the Flickr tags through 2008. But I’ll need to do a broader reivew for the last few years to identify promising images and process them.

Photographing to See

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand

Perfect Practice

Creative pursuit, whether art or science, is a method for improving the brain. If “Deciding Better” means developing more accurate models of reality to guide choices, then the getting better must involve more than just acquisition and reflection.

The best practice for an activity is the activity itself. You don’t expect to become a better tennis player by playing the tuba. You become better at tennis either by practicing the game or breaking the skills and capacities of the game into components and improving each. There’s then practice to put the components back together into an improved tennis game.

Simply playing the game over and over will get you only so far. At some point there’s more to be gained by breaking down the activity into component parts and spending focused time on each one. Jogging is nothing like tennis, but ithelps a tennis player by building endurance for long games. Jogging avoids the risk of injury from fatigue that would come from playing long sessions of the game over and over.

The Practice of Art

If you’re a photographer, you have probably heard the advice that you should always carry a camera. Usually the reason given is that without a camera, you can’t do what a photographer does, thus you can’t be a photographer. I’ve heard similar directives to always carry a pen and a notebook in order to be a writer.

The advice is fair enough. But I believe it’s backwards. Rather than bringing a camera in order to be a photographer, you first must to decide to be a photographer and therefore need a camera. Always going out with a camera easily becomes just a habit. After all, I have nice cell phone camera capable of taking higher quality images than my first DSLR of a decade ago. I pull up the photo roll on the phone and mostly see images of food I’ve prepared or been served in restaurants plus snapshots of friends and family. I don’t see photographs

I take out my notebook and create hastily scribbled thoughts and half formed concepts. That’s not the art of writing and it’s not even practicing.

I wasn’t practicing to be a photographer when I captured images of my bread last week. I wasn’t practicing to be a writer when I wrote, “Scientists ask why. Science is a long term project to understand a problem or phenomenon.” in my notebook last week. I was cooking, eating, socializing and reflecting. Capturing ideas is not practicing. I was more the tennis player with a tuba.

The Nature of Practice

What did Winogrand mean when he said that he took photographs in order to find out what something will look like photographed?

I believe he was making the simple point that his intention was to be a photographer and learn what reality looked like reduced to a photographic print. And he learned through his career. Since he shared the images with us, we can look at them and also learn what the world looks like in a photograph. We too can learn how the world that Gary Winogrand saw looks in a photograph by looking at his work.

If he meant that he was after some simple transformation of reality into photograph, his photos would be of little interest to anyone, to Winogrand himself or to me. I believe that he meant to say that he took photographs to help him perceive the world in a way he couldn’t just by looking. Image capture is nothing more than framing and isolating a particular angle of view. You and I know there are tons of technical details, but they are all secondary to where you stand and where you point the camera. The first step is seeing and the second step is finding out what the world looks like in a photograph.

Can you learn to see without taking photographs or creating some kind of record, visual or written? Of course you can, but the feedback of creating is an enormous aid to learning. Without a camera the image never exists independently to see if you were right. It’s too easy to fool yourself into thinking you have the clear insight without the evidence of the art.

To learn to see as a photographer requires a decision to practice seeing. You have to put on the tennis shoes, choose the tennis racket and get to the court. It’s deciding to decide to learn what the world looks like in a photograph.

Perfect Practice

Vincent Versace, the photographer and teacher quoted Vince Lombardi in his Welcome to Oz : “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. You first have to practice at practicing.”"

We’ve learned from cognitive neuroscience that we can only do one thing at a time with our brains. Intention and planning rule the sensory and motor systems and squeezes everything else out. I recognize this as choosing to be present and active in the task. I’m not going to be photographing or writing while driving to the mall or surfing the web. Seeing with intention is a focused brain activity. I must choose to look..

More than this, to be a photographer, you have to choose to see what things might look like in a photograph. In addition to choosing to see, you have to choose the camera and you have to choose what to see. The two go together. If I choose to see African wildlife since I did after all book a safari and travel to Kenya, then I’ll need some quality telephoto lenses. If I choose to see what the streets of Florence look like on a rainy day, then a light and flexible camera is going to be my choice.

Searching for Questions

Occasionally, very rarely, I know what I’m after. I’m not on assignment for Geographic. I have no gallery looking for my characteristic work to place with clients. I’m just practicing to learn what things look like in photographs. I’m no different from Winogrand in the aim of photographing.

The tool can dictate the subject of the lesson. I have too many cameras. My excuse to my wife? “They do different things.” If I go out to see what things look like with my DSLR, tripod and macro lens, I’m going to see small things. And I’ll find out what small things look like in a photograph. If I drive downtown with my compact mirrorless camera that has the flip up, waist level screen and put a vintage Leica lens on it, I’m out to see what’s interesting at a human scale in a city. Like a runner who competes in both long and short distance events, I’m limiting myself by not focusing on seeing in a particular way. I respond to contexts, seeing where I am rather than going where I can see.

Artists and scientists like to set themselves problems to aid with this goal of focused learning. You should take Winogrand’s approach and find out what a thing looks like photographed. Keep in mind that it’s easier to get going when the question is more specific than “What does the world look like when photographed?” If you try to learn about a particular thing: a mountain, people in the city, or the suburban landscape, then the direction is clear and the components that need work become more obvious.

Wall Painting



Wall Painting, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Florence, Italy

I think of these images as “recompositions”. I love the color and form that the graffiti artist has left. I come along and capture it in context, bringing the environment itself into a relationship to the graffitti.

I trust my instincts when it comes to these captures. The wall is visually interesting so it’s worth recomposing into an image.

Not Through Here



Not Through Here, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

In late October when I was in Italy on business, I brought the Nikon D7000 and Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 zoom. I hadn’t brought the Nikon on a trip in some time. My travel kit was the Sigma D1 for a while and the Sony NEX-5 most recently. Both have large sensors but are small mirorless cameras. The LCD screen on the back of Sony was scratched so I took the Nikon.

Interestingly, I captured more images that were probably better overall than other recent trips. It’s not that I think quality is really different across these cameras. In fact the NEX-5 and D7000 have more or less the same sensor.

I think its the seeing. Walking the streets of Florence with a larger, highly controllable DSLR just made me see more. I’m in the same place with a camera or without a camera. But with the camera in hand, my tool brings the focus.

If you’re a photographer, go out with a camera not so that you can capture images. No, an iPhone is now good enough to capture images to record life. Carry the tool to decide to see and capture images. If you’re a writer, go out with a pen and notebook. Don’t carry the tool in case you have an idea, go out with the goal of getting an idea.

Writing to Create

I was a curious and excitable child, quiet but intense. I’m still that little kid; I hear something cool and burst with energy to tell someone about it. Its a good thing that I have these outlets on the Internet to report back on what I’ve learned. Maybe you’re reading this looking for similar discoveries.

As much as I see, I imagine that there must be even more. What I’m looking for may or may not exist. I have no real idea of the question. I have vague thoughts and conceptions that I can just imagine but can’t express.

All my life I’ve marveled at how the brain provides us with this rich internal experience. How do we become these infinitely varied and unique individuals? Our brains all look the same and work the same, but each of us is a complete universe looking out from behind a pair of eyes. I’ve learned from great thinkers like William James and John Searles. Years have been spent in concentrated and focused pursuit of answers. I’m an amateur. I know they learned things I need to know. Some of what I’ve read and understood, I agree with. Some common mistakes arise again and again.

When I read, I’m in dialog. I imagine I have something important to add to the conversation. The problem is that my thoughts are not yet fully formed. I see connections and possibilities that are easily dismissed. Uncertainty, free will and cognitive neuroscience combine in a stew, flavoring each other but not yet agreeing to be one.

Annie Dillard asked “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

I don’t write to curate my personal “brand”. I have a really good job at a great company. It pays me well to do things that I continue to be enthusiastic about even decades into my career as a Neurologist and drug developer. I almost never write about such things here. I’ve tried a few times, but it feels like work. I already know what I think and crafting the writing is not rewarding. If anything I confuse the world by having an online presence focused not on science but on art.

I do write at work to support and build the business. I take notes at meetings to assimilate and synthesize what I’ve heard. My scholarly output has a few highlights over the years: the vulnerability of neurons to injury demonstrated in the dish, the biological relevance of NAAG and GCP II, the development of a water soluble prodrug of propofol. I’ve done a lot of different things professionally and I don’t expect that I’m done yet.

The business writing is public. Those words have been set out to perform a task for me to talk to my collegues or my company’s customers. Drug development is an expensive, complicated undertaking and I contribute from my fund of knowledge or experience. Generally once I’ve organized my thoughts, the process of structuring prose and constructing arguments is straightfoward. Prose can be polished and tightened, but all to the end of expression and communication.

All art is secret. It springs from personal need and private thought. Eventually I put this grasping into physical form in words or image as search for what I believe I must know but can’t yet express.

Once I think I’ve crystalized that elusive idea, the writing is a test. In order to prove that I’ve really assembled the notion, the only way I can be sure that it’s real is to write it down and get it clear. Certainly if I find the words wandering and fighting me, I have to concede that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

A long time ago, I came up with the revision strategy of reading a confused paragraph and saying to myself, “What am I trying to say here?” Sometime’s I’ll get up, walk around and speak it out, the act of forming the words driving the idea into reality. If I can’t say it, I haven’t created the thought yet.

It may turn out that I have nothing to say. That unformed idea may be just confusion made of crossed wires and misperception. I may be lacking the insight to be seeing this old world in a new way. My insight may be cliched or simply obvious.

Worst is when my words fail to communicate the ideas. If I’m misunderstood or misinterpreted, I’ve failed. I have to allow that you may see the world differently. You’ll bring your own experiences and mental models. Art needs ambiguity to allow others to enter where the creator has been. When I experience art, I want to feel like the artist is speaking to me and inviting me to join.

All art is public and its ultimate test is truth. Art needs to work in the world. Why does that excited kid that puts his art into the world? To test its truth. I want to know whether I’m making sense. If my writing is dismissed, ignored or argued with, then I’ll have to conclude that it doesn’t contain enough truth because it doesn’t work for anybody else. You may not read what I meant to say, but if it says what you want then I’ve succeeded.

These worlds go out to you as a validation. These ideas on deciding seem to help me understand myself and my relationship to the world. But I’ll be more sure that I’ve gotten it right if you read this and at least nod or smile with me. I’ll feel even better if you stop reading here and start putting your own ideas down so that I can share your astonishment with the world, with yourself, with me.

Establishing the Zone



Establishing the Zone, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Glen, New Hampshire

I know that trees are curved surfaces, but I’m somehow surprised every time I register the fall of light across that dimension.