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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-08-31
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQH6CQ_qqY0
there you are everything that is you your entire personality your character your hopes and dreams your memories and emotions your creativity your personality everything about you your political beliefs your beliefs your religious beliefs there's even thought is looking into the neural correlate of religious belief everything about you that makes up you it's all here in this organ the most complex system of which we know but
is this you is this everything many people think yes many near the history of neuroscience actually shown that yes me even studies now are showing that if you change this right you change scientists have made just found a way to remove junk food cravings from the brain for example so if you do something to this new change your mind yourself changes my answer to this is
this all you are is going to be a resounding no you are brain yourself but more than that your brain that exists in the body and that body moves around it's capable of motion and it moves around in an external world and interacts with that environment movement it turns out may be essential for the mind may be necessary for the mind and movement actually affects the
mind and affects yourself that's a view called embodied cognition how we're now beginning to study that I'll begin by talking about the brain and movement at the level of the brain up from the perspective that I study the brain which is called complex systems next I'll talk about them human mind and notice here I just type thing Google the human mind and I typed in images
of what came up pictures of the head or the brain not pictures of the foot or the hand or the elbow or a fingernail pictures of the head or the brain because normally we think that's where the mind that's where you are that's where you exist the mines here if it exists anywhere at all finally the end I'll talk about all tile this together with functional
movement fitness and exercise they only give you one of the punch lines of this talk right up front the brain is a dynamical system Adam is an emergent self organizing prop embodied process that happens because of movement that's what the mind is no perhaps one of the most striking examples that movement that brings me involved for movement in the in the first place for the organism
is something called the C. support this is a baby sees part of a tadpole and the flames around as a Die brain of three hundred neurons some of these nuns taken sensory information as Sumner ons produced motor outputs and swims around until the ceasefire looks like this and if its hatches itself to a coral reef and what's the first thing that it does after attach itself
is it digested eats its own central nervous system it eats its own brain because it never needs to move again not our brains are much more complex our brains are called a complex system and I we study the brain through these properties called self organization emergence pattern formation accordingly coordination dynamics this is the glass brain from Adam Ghazali's lab and this is the person playing a
video game in real time and you could see the brain functions by sending electrochemical signals across these axonal pathway is in what are called large scale bring networks Cebu so think this part of the brain does this and this part of the brain does that %HESITATION but now we know that cognitive process he's like attention and language and creativity impressed actually happened through large scale brain
networks %HESITATION and you could see these read parts of the brain lighting up for fractions of a second third corps needing a very dynamic ways these are local knowns producing global properties Scott Kelso the founder of the center for complex systems and brain sciences where I study actually metaphorically likens this to a good old fashion square dance these red parts are dancing with each other for
a second then one part dances with another part that elect I go then dances with another party lest I go in the synchronize and a D. synchronize and if the disability to synchronize anti synchronize like a jazz quartet for example the cognition happens to your mind happens so what does it mean to be a complex system a complex system is a system composed of many many
many different parts all interacting in the highly coupled so our brains actually eighty billion neurons and each one of those nuances connected to thousands of other neurons totaling one hundred trillion about about connections and each one of those neurons is following local rules then they're all following local rules and they produce global properties this is what it means to be the whole is greater than the
sum of the parts that's what the phrase really means lo these neurons are following locals for example dry fire or exciting next neuron or do I and not fire or inhibit the next neuron and each one of them following local rules produces these self organized properties so it's our great example these ants are all following local rules and they can self organize to produce global things
like a bridge across the gap there's no one and that's a civil engineer or has a concept of abrasion okay guys it's time to build the bridge the bridge is a spatial pattern that just happens that emerges another example of these is the starlings visa starlings are producing this phenomena called memory ation each starlings following local rules don't fly so close to me I will fly
so close to you you flap your wings this weight off my mind this way for example and it produced these beautiful you see a wave you're going from one side to the other life is movement these beautiful patterns that can actually find a single danger from one side to the other I just the starlings this this swarm if you will is constantly changing shape your brain
is also constantly changing shape because of the movements of neurons and phenomena called neuroplasticity another great example we've all the actually been part of a in a sports arena is the wave this is a well thought a fascinating phenomenon the way doesn't exist in any one person it's a pattern when the mood in the timing is right that spontaneously self organizes as no one person organizing
to wave it just happens I noticed that when it comes around is sort of in slaves you and makes you a part of it so we studied these patterns of movement and something called coordination dynamics which you looks at the coordinated movements in between living things this is a scientific field of study one of the central models here is called the Haagen Kelso boots model is
the mathematical model that supermodel but it describes and explains very well and makes predictions about the real world in the movement between things one example of the finger wagging experiment where you can do this for yourself if you go like this and then you increase the speed you'll see that they switch from anti phased in favor and is nothing you can do about it involuntary and
is a phase transition that happens this model explains the movie between your fingers but also between movements of of that more complicated movements between limbs of a ballet dancer where they put centers on a ballet dancer and studied them very impactful emotional movements only between fingers in between limbs but also between people in between brains are the social coordination or them to the the coordinated the
dynamics between people in economies for example have been studied so what do you think about the mind as a pattern of movement embodied pattern of movement classically this are or the historically one view is called materialism this is a view %HESITATION was championed by actually Francis Crick one of the co discoverers of DNA who wrote a book called the astonishing hypothesis and the funny thing about
this is simply this that a person's mental activities are Harley due to the behavior of the nerve cells we'll cells and them atoms in the minds of the molecules that make them up that's it that's all you are that's all yourself really is now I'm really not talking about them I'm gonna leave aside the soul of the spirit offer now for two reasons mainly one because
even within one traditional world view there's a lot of disagreement about what constitutes a soul or spirit arm and also now everything about you your entire personality is really being explained in terms of physics chemistry and biology it's very reductionist thick and that's a little bit of a problem is all explained now I'm going to put a question mark on this because the jury is still
out one view of materialism is actually called cognitivism or computational ism and this is where the brain maybe you've heard of this has been likened to a computer and the mind is a software program running on that computer Marvin Minsky one of the founders of artificial intelligence actually said mines are simply what brains do notice there's no mention of movement and is no mention of the
body in there missing maybe if this is true actually something like the matrix will one day be possible and we can download our consciousness and from our brains and then upload them in something called mind uploading into a computer achieving some sort of computational immortality that would be really cool the problem with this is the brain simply isn't digital one for many reasons one reason is
that drum neuroplasticity the brain can change itself and a dead end and change its structure and function based on something called as I mentioned before neuroplasticity so the latest sexiest view in cognitive science and feels like natural philosophy is something called in body mind or embodied cognition Angola Albano explains here because he is a pioneer in the field he explained it so eloquently we've been looking
for consciousness in the wrong place we've been looking for it inside of us for me that's a that's a sort of profound mistake a little bit like trying to find the dancing in the musculature of the dance or trying to find %HESITATION the value of money in the chemical composition of the dollar bill so long it's the wrong kind of place to look idea that I've
had in my work is that instead of of %HESITATION thinking about consciousness is something that happens innocence in our brains or anywhere else when we try to think of consciousness is something that you do or an act or perform in our dynamic involvement with the world around us so what he's really saying is that we can't give an account of the mind anymore without giving an
account of the body and how it moves so all those processes at the beginning that I was mentioning like decision making %HESITATION the ability to do the right or wrong thing perception attention language memory a motion all those cognitive process he's had a lot to do we now know with how you treat and how you move your body that's really one of the punch lines here
the fact that you have a body enables and changes your mind how you use your might your body might actually change the way you think let me give you some empirical examples of this locally here in South Florida FIU there's a study showing that good handwriting or find penmanship was actually a good predictor of better grades later on likewise poor penmanship predicted worse grades even playing
a guitar piano or musical instrument has been known now well study to affect of the brain in the nervous system the cognitive processes that the brain produces posture we now know that how you stand and how you've sit and your how you hold your body actually can affect your perception of the external world another study just came out showing that the rhythm of your briefing can
actually affect fear and anxiety in places like the hippocampus in the brain and the amygdala this is a lot to do with from the called the biggest nerve the vagus nerve is the tenth vagal a detent nerve no offense cranial nerve that connects the brain and the guy in there the brain gut axis has a lot to do with something called vagal tone we now know
that vagal tone actually people with higher legal tone have decreased levels of anxiety and stress because the vagus nerve up regulates the parasympathetic nervous system the rest and digest it's involved in calming the mind are you all doing all kinds of exercise differ moving patterns can actually affect and increase your vagal tone is now becoming a very well study phenomenon here's something funny giving the middle
finger I think a very giving the middle finger just a funny this study actually came all showing how extending your middle finger affects your perception of other people not only how they perceive you but how you perceive them one final examples called the rubber hand allusion to slough wells buffet fascinating phenomena where rubber hand is placed looks like you're coming from your body and your real
hand is here hidden from your view so looks like you have the right you're seeing the rubber hand coming from your body and the rubber hand in the real hinders stroked simultaneously the brain starts to adopt the rubber hand has its own so much so that as you can see here the present it's the rebranded struck by hammering the person actually feels pain this is even
been extended to are the whole entire body using things like virtual reality where you can feel like you have another body likewise there's also a disorder called somatic paraphernalia where %HESITATION or alien Hanson where a person actually feels like the body parts don't actually belong to them so James Gibson are famous American psychologist interested in perception and vision actually said we must perceive in order to
move but we must also move in order to perceive so that's how I want you to think of the mine as a process as an embodied process as a flow so you're not a brain but your brain that exists in a body and that body moves around and performs actions in an external world in an environment which then affect perception which then affect your cognitive process
he's in this cycle in what's called the action perceptions cycle out give you some quotes this review as you can see there's a cycle was the flow as I said William James one of the founders of American psychology and %HESITATION found of American philosophy called pragmatism invented the term the stream of consciousness you may have heard of that consciousness there does not appear self chopped up
in debates it is nothing jointed it flows Francisco Varela who wrote a book called the embodied mind said cognition depends upon the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacity and one of my favorites Plato said lack of activity destroys the good condition every human being while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it movement is important for your
well being and we now know that because we're measuring that in the brain so now we have this idea of in body mind and you understand this I given body cognition we had to send a given body mind in hand a pun intended it's my contention that the there's a similar paradigm shift going on in the fitness industry which has moved away from those days of
like body building an Arnold Schwarzenegger lifting weights and moved more toward all functional movements how the body actually moves around in the external world focusing on strength and flexibility and mobility in a very very different way what I'm calling embodied fitness let me give you several examples of this five examples actually one is ito port how he's become very very famous known very well known all
around the world he goes all around the world teaching this moment kind of pattern all of these have actually been branded forms of moving they're selling are quite frankly they're selling and the becoming very very popular he created something called the movement culture also something called animal flow which is created down here in South Florida actually in Miami by Mike Fitch and I think this encapsulates