After Phrenology After Phrenology Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain Michael L. Anderson A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2014 Michael L. Anderson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected]. This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited, Hong Kong. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, Michael L., 1968– author. After phrenology : neural reuse and the interactive brain / Michael L. Anderson. p. ; cm. “ A Bradford book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02810-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Brain — physiology. 2. Neuropsychology— methods. 3. Cognition— physiology. WL 300] QP376 612.8’2— dc23 2014013237 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my father Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii Part I: Brains 1 1 Neural Reuse and the Need for a New Approach to Understanding Brain Function 3 1.1 Neural Reuse in the Evolution of the Brain 6 1.2 Neural Reuse and Some of Its Cognitive Effects 16 1.3 Reuse Is Not Always Explained by Conceptual Metaphor Theory or Concept Empiricism 26 1.4 Neural Reuse Does Not Go Away, No Matter How Small the Brain Region 29 1.5 Neural Reuse, Evolution, and Modularity 36 Interlude 1: On the Importance of Neural Teamwork 45 2 Interactive Differentiation and the Search for Neural Coalitions: Neural Reuse in the Functional Development of the Brain 49 2.1 From Interactive Specialization to Interactive Differentiation 50 2.2 The Role of “ Search ” in Functional Development 53 2.3 Initial Evidence for a Search Mechanism in Functional Development 61 2.4 Biological Mechanisms Underlying Neural Search 65 2.5 IDS Interpretation of Some Established Findings 70 Interlude 2: You Are Not Your Connectome! Sorry, Understanding the Brain (or People) Will Not Be That Simple 77 3 Neural Reuse in Contemporary Cognitive Science 81 3.1 ACT-R and the Persistence of Modular Approaches to Cognition 81 3.2 Classic and Contemporary Parallel Distributed Processing 84 viii Contents 3.3 Neural Reuse for Learning and Development 95 3.4 Whither the Concept of Local Function? 103 Interlude 3: The Dynamic Brain: What Your Brain Is Doing When It’ s Not Doing Anything 109 4 Do Brain Regions Have Personalities of Their Own? Toward a Dispositional Neuroscience 113 4.1 Network State Identification via Functional Connectivity Analysis 114 4.2 Multidimensional Functional Representations for Neuroscience 117 4.3 From Behavioral Description to the Specification of Underlying Functional Dispositions 128 4.4 From Interpretable Dimensions to Neural Personalities 137 4.5 The Kind of Intelligibility Being Offered Here 150 Interlude 4: The Eyes Have It: Unraveling the Brain by Tugging on a Retinal Thread 153 Part II: Bodies 159 5 Brains and Their Bodies 161 5.1 Reconstructive Perception 163 5.2 Seeing and Looking 166 5.3 The Vocabulary of Perception 172 5.4 Perception and Control: Caching and Catching 182 5.5 Embodiment and Symbolic Processing 187 5.6 Knowledge and Practice 192 Interlude 5: Network Thinking 205 6 Embodiment, Computation, and Control 209 6.1 Connectionism, Pattern Competition, and Control 210 6.2 Action Selection as Affordance Competition 217 6.3 Toward an Interactive Account of Higher Cognition 223 6.4 Mathematics as Symbol Pushing 232 Interlude 6: Is Our Brain as Good as It Gets? 2 39 Part III: Beings 243 7 Languaging with an Interactive Brain 245 7.1 Language Is Social 250 7.2 Language Evolved 259 7.3 Language Is Leverage 265 7.4 How to Study Language and the Brain 272 Interlude 7: What Mindedness Is 281 Contents ix 8 A Functionalist Neuroscience for the Twenty-First Century 289 8.1 Ram ó n y Cajal’ s Functionalist Neuroscience 290 8.2 Embodied Cognition and the Brain 295 8.3 The Road from Here 300 Appendix: Twenty-Three (Hundred) Open Questions after Phrenology 305 A.1 Learning, Neural Search, and Neuromodulation 305 A.2 Function-Structure Mapping 307 A.3 The Various Uses of Modeling 308 A.4 The Cognitive Ontology 310 A.5 Embodied and Interactive Accounts of Math, Language, and “ Higher ” Cognition 312 References 315 Index 373