Chis Frith
Making Up The Mind
How the Brain Creates our Mental World
Blackwell 2008

FrithMind 160

Part III: Culture and the brain
Chapter 7: Sharing Minds – How the Brain creates Culture
The problem with translation

We spend most of our time living in a mental world created by our brains - even when we are assaulted by the real world around us. For most of the time I'm oblivious to the physical world around me. (But) I am not daydreaming in a private world of my own. I am reading books and newspapers. I have entered someone else's mental world.

Without doubt our brains most remarkable achievement is to permit communication between minds. The purpose of writing this book is to transfer ideas from my mind into yours. Sending ideas from one mind to another seems vital, almost a compulsion, for us. But if each mind is a private place, then this process of communication is impossible - isn't it?

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I have in my mind some idea I want to communicate to you. I do this by turning my meaning into spoken words. You hear my words and turn them back into an idea in your mind. But how can you ever know that the idea in your mind is the same as the idea in my mind? There is no way you can get into my mind and compare the ideas directly.

And yet even at this moment we are having this regular interchange about the problem of meaning. Our brains have solved this impossible problem of communication.

The problem of words and meanings is a more complex version of the problem of movements and goals. When I see a movement, I read the intention behind it. But movements are ambiguous. Many different goals can lead to the same movement… Words are just as ambiguous in their relationship with meanings. The same word can mean different things.

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Many different meanings can lead to the same words. So how do we choose the best meaning? The key point is that this is the same problem that our brains have solved long ago in order to perceive the physical world. The meaning (in this case, the cause) of the signals that strike our senses is ambiguous in the same way. Many different objects in the world can lead to the same sensory signals. What looks like a complex pattern of lines in two dimensions could be a simple cube in three dimensions.

As we have seen, our brain solves this problem by using guesses about the world to predict what will happen next as react upon the world. The errors in our prediction enable us to refine our guesses until we have a good model of what is out there in the world. In the same way we (or rather our brains) guess what someone's goal may be and then predict what they will do next. We guess what someone is trying to communicate to us and then predict what she will say next.

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So how do we start with our guessing? Making guesses about what people are like before we have any information about them is pre-judging them. It is prejudice. Prejudice is in fact crucial for our brains to function. (Long before numerous scientists became Bayesians, prejudice had already been rehabilitated by Hans Georg Gadamer in this development of hermeneutics (the theory of understanding). Rather than closing us off, he suggests, our prejudices (prior knowledge) open us up to what is to be understood.)

Prejudice enables us to start our guessing - and it doesn't matter how accurate the guesses, as long as we adjust our next guess in response to the error. Prejudice has been built in by evolution.

When our brain watches people moving, it expects them to achieve their goals with the minimum of effort. This is an innate prejudice. We are innately predisposed to be prejudiced. All our social interactions begin with prejudice the content of these prejudices has been acquired through our interactions with friends and acquaintances and through hearsay. I talk quite differently with my work colleagues than with nonscientists. Our prejudices begin with stereotypes. The first clue I can get about the likely knowledge and behaviour of someone I know nothing about is from their gender. Even children as young as three have already acquired this prejudice. They expect boys to play with trucks and girls to become nurses.

Social stereotypes provide the starting point for our interactions with people we don't know. They enable us to make our initial guesses about the person's intention. But we know that the stereotypes are very crude. The guesses and predictions we make from this limited knowledge will not be very good. Once we notice that someone is different in some way from our friends and acquaintances, our brain expects that communication will be more difficult. We will have less in common. Our brain is less certain about what knowledge we share. So it is more difficult to predict what the other person will do when say.

Of necessity, the way we communicate will be subtly altered when we try to communicate with someone different from us. My predictions work best for people who are exactly like me. What will he do next? This is the problem with prediction. I predict what you are going to do on the basis of what I would do if I were in the same situation. So if you are different from me, my prediction may be wrong. We are very good at recognizing our own actions, because we can predict what will happen next. My predictions work best for people who are exactly like me.

Boe: culture, traditions, language, communication between "friends".

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(One) of the many illusions that my brain creates is my sense of self.
I experience myself as an island of stability in an ever-changing world. I am very different from others, but I can't help reflecting changes in others mood. I can't help imitating them.

Empathy - automatically share the emotion that we are experiencing. This makes me more like you. Our brains automatically imitate the actions that we see other people performing. Watch two people having an engrossing conversation and you see them gradually synchronising their actions. Crossing and Iuncrossing their legs simultaneously. Leaning towards each other at just the same moment. When we interact with someone, we imitate them. We become more like them.

Page 170: Communication is more than just speaking - But how does predicting what someone will do next solve the problem of communication? However good my guesses and my predictions, however similar I become to you, I can never directly compare the meaning in my mind against the meaning in your mind. So how can I check if they are the same or not?

Remember, there's nothing special about the problem of minds. When I look at a tree in the garden, I don't have the tree in my mind. What I have in my mind is a model (or representation) of that reconstructed by my brain. This model is built up through a series of guesses and predictions. In the same way, when I'm trying to tell you something, I can't have your idea in my mind, but my brain, again through guesses and predictions, can construct a model (a representation) of your idea in my mind. Now I have two things in my mind: my idea and my model of your idea. I can compare them directly. If they are similar, then I have probably communicated my idea to use successfully. If they are different, I certainly haven't.

I can know that my communication has been unsuccessful when my prediction about what you will do next is not quite right. But the process does not stop there. If I know that my communication has not been successful, I can then change the way I communicate. I should also have a clue as to how I should change the way I communicate. I compare my idea and my model of your idea and I see that they are different. This is the prediction error. But I can also look at the nature of the error. Where precisely are the differences between my idea and my model of your idea? The nature of the prediction error tells me how to change my communication: which points I should emphasise and which points are not important. I don't just choose my words because of what they mean; I choose my words to suit the person I'm talking to. The more I talk to someone, the better an idea I get of what words will suit - just as I get a better idea of how to perceive the world around me were more I look at it.

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Communication, when we confront each other face-to-face, is not a one-way process from me to you. The way you respond to me alters the way I respond to you. This is a communication loop. In addition it is not just me who is trying to predict what you will say next on the basis of my model of your idea. You will also have a model of my idea in your mind. You are also trying to predict what I will say next. You also will alter what you say to indicate that your model of my meaning is not quite working to predict what I'm going to say.

This is the big difference from my interactions with the physical world. The physical world is utterly indifferent to my attempts to interpret it.

When two people interact face-to-face, their exchange of meaning is a cooperative venture. The flow is never just one way. Even when my aim is to communicate an idea to you, inevitably the idea that it's finally communicated will have been coloured by you. Meaning is like a gravitational field. The moon goes round the earth, but the movements of the Earth has also authored by the presence of the moon.

In a successful communication the point is reached where my model of your meaning matches my own meaning, and I no longer need to show you that there is a problem. And, critically, at the same time, you too have reached that point where there is no discrepancy between your model of my meaning and your own meaning. At this point of mutual agreement communication has been achieved.

By building models of the mental world, our brains have solved the problem of how to get inside the minds of others. And it is this ability to make models of the mental world that has created the great gap between humans and all other species.

Without the ability to build and share mental models of the world, there would be no such things as language and culture.

Our ability to make models of the mental world opens up an entirely new way of changing the behaviour of others. In the physical world, behaviour is changed by rewards and punishments. We stop doing things that cause pain. We repeat actions that lead to pleasure. We can alter the behaviour of others using pain and pleasure - this is how we train animals.

But in the mental world behaviour is changed by knowledge. I will take an umbrella with me, not because it is raining now, but because I believe it is going to rain later this afternoon. And we can use knowledge to change the behaviour of others. The sharing of experiences is not just words. When I tell you of my experience, your brain will change as if you had the same experience.

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In the very distant past our ancestors too were alone, constructing their models of the physical world, but unable to share them with others. At that time truth had no relevance for these models. It did not matter whether the model was a true reflection of the physical world. All that mattered was that the model worked by predicting what would happen next. But once we can share our models of the physical world, then we discover that other people's models are slightly different from our own.By putting together the models of many people,we can construct a new model that is better than any model produced by a single individual. And our knowledge of the world is no longer derived from a single lifetime - knowledge passes from one generation to the next.

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Our brains ability to communicate ideas from one mind to another can bring horror as well as benefit. We all know how easy it is to be deceived by false beliefs. Our mental currency consists of beliefs created by our brains.

Science progresses by making models of the world, making predictions on the basis of these models, and using the errors in these predictions to construct better models. Now science is revealing that our brains use the same principles to acquire knowledge about the world. We are also beginning to understand how our brains can make models of the mental world. It is by sharing these mental models that the program of science becomes possible.

There is something even more remarkable than our ability to share our mental models of the world and create composite and better models. This is the ability of a few extraordinary individuals to transmit their experiences to us across time. To transmit their experiences even though we can never meet them face-to-face and close the communication loop.

By making models of the minds of others (in the same way that it makes models of the physical world), my brain enables me to enter a shared mental world. By sharing my mental world with others, I can also learn from their experiences and adopt the models of others that are better than my own. From this process, truth and progress can emerge, but so can deception and mass delusions.

Me and my brain: We are embedded in the mental world of others just as we are in bedded in the physical world. What we are currently doing and thinking is moulded by whomever we are interacting with.

But this is not how we experience ourselves. We experience ourselves as agents with minds of our own. This is the final illusion created by our brains.

The Convention of distinguishing between me and my brain: When objects are perceived and actions are performed without thought or awareness, then I say that my brain does it. But for conscious experience and conscious actions and decisions, then I say that "I" do it. This "I" that deliberately does things is also created by my brain.

So is there an area in my brain that corresponds to this “I”? This would be the area of the brain that decides what to do and then tells the rest of the brain how to do it. If there is such a place, then it is the source of the top-down control signals that can activate the face area of the brain so that I can demand in seeing your face when there is no face actually there.

stimulus driven action
willed action: the parts of the brain where free choices are made - the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

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If we look at the person and the brain in isolation, then the frontal cortex is the ultimate source of control. But people and their brains are rarely found in isolation. Isolation is bad for them. The human brain is essentially tuned for interactions with other people. Concepts like will, responsibility, and even meaning arise from these interactions.

Conveying meaning from one mind to another depends upon interaction. We each predict what the other will say and adjust our predictions until we reach mutual agreement. As a result the final meaning agreed-upon depends on both people and therefore will be slightly different depending on whom we are talking to. Meaning arises from the interactions between brains.

If we want to understand the neural basis of these interactions, it is no good looking at just one brain. We need to study to brains as they interact this programme of research is only just beginning.

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When we think about how our brain works, we often fall into the trap of creating another small brain inside the brain we are trying to explain- the homunculus.

Psychologists have done much hard thinking to try to get rid of this homunculus inside the brain. Rather than a single area that makes choices, perhaps there is a network of areas that apply constraints in order to determine the final choice. These constraints come from many sources: our bodies - there are some actions that are physically impossible to perform; our emotions - there are actions that we may regret. Above all, there are constraints from the social world - there are actions that are “not done”.

But I am hardly aware of these constraints. For me it seems as if I am fully in control of my actions. This is why it is so hard to get rid of the idea of a homunculus. It is the dominant part of my experience that I am in control. There is a physical world in which I act and in this physical world there are other agents like me who are also in control of themselves. This is my brain's final illusion: to hide all those ties to the physical and social world and create an autonomous self.

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Consciousness: I have emphasised how much my brain knows and does without me being aware of it. My brain makes me afraid of things I'm not aware of seeing and can control complex limb movements without my knowing what I'm doing. There seems very little left for consciousness to do. So, rather than asking how subjective experience can arise from activity in neurons, I ask the question, “What is consciousness for?” Or more particularly, “Why does my brain make me experience myself as a free agent?” my assumption is that we get some advantage from experiencing ourselves as free agents.

In comparison with other animals, people do many strange things. We speak. We use tools. We sometimes behave altruistically. And, most strangely overall, we sometimes behave altruistically to strangers. One explanation is that we all have a strong sense of fairness. This is where all touristic punishment comes in. (Ernst Fehr, Simon Gächter)

One important result of our experiences of being free agents is that we recognise that other people are free agents just like us. And we believe that free agents are responsible for their actions. Already by the age of three, children make a strong distinction between deliberate acts and events in which the outcome occurs by accident. When people do something by accident, we do not consider that they are behaving badly. When people are forced to do something against their will, we do not consider that they are behaving unfairly. Only deliberately undertaken, freely chosen acts can be unfair. Free riders don't just behave unfairly. They deliberately behave unfairly. And it is only the deliberately wicked whom we wish to punish.

There is an intimate relationship between our experience that we are free agents and our willingness to be altruistic, feeling pleased when we are behaving fairly ourselves and feeling upset by the unfairness of others. For these feelings to arise it is crucial that we experience ourselves and others as free agents. We believe that all of us make deliberate choices. Otherwise I willingness to cooperate would fall apart. This final illusion created by our brain - that we are detached from the social world and free agents - enables us to create together a society and culture that is so much more than any individual.

Chris Frith
Neuroscience