Chapter 1:

Introducing Cognitive
Neuroscience
 Mind and Brain:
An Empirical Example
• Wilder Penfield (1891-1976)

• Direct electrical stimulation of cortex

• Produces "mental" sensations of thinking, perceiving

etc., rather than a sense of the brain being stimulated
• "a star came down and towards my nose", "those fingers
and my thumb gave a jump", "I heard the music again; it
is like the radio"
 Mind and Brain:
Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

· Cognitive neuroscience aims to provide a brain-based account

of cognitive processes (thinking, perceiving, remembering
etc.)

· Made possible by technological advances in studying the

brain that are safer and less crude than, say, Penfield’s
method
 Historical Foundations
• Do mental experiences arise in the
heart (e.g. Aristotle) or brain (e.g.
Plato)?
• How can a physical substance
(brain/body) give rise to mental
experiences? = MIND–BODY
PROBLEM
- Dualism – (e.g. Descartes)
- Dual-aspect theory – mind and body are
two levels of explanation of the same thing
(e.g. like wave–particle duality)
- Reductionism – mind eventually
explained solely in terms of
physical/biological theory
- These issues still relevant to
modern cog-neuro
Historical Foundations
 Historical Foundations (cont.)

• Early anatomists believed

ventricles important
• Cortex was often
schematically drawn (top)
or misrepresented like
intestines (bottom left) until
18th century
• Gall and Spurzheim (1810,
bottom right) provide an
accurate depiction
 Phrenology
• Different parts of cortex serve
different functions

• Differences in personality
traits manifest in differences in
cortical size and bumps on
skull

• Crude division of psychological

traits (e.g. "love of animals")
and not grounded in science
 Functional Specialization without Phrenology
• Although phrenology is discredited, the notion that different
regions of the brain serve different functions has stood the
test of time
• Termed FUNCTIONAL SPECIALIZATION

• Modern cognitive neuroscience uses empirical methods to

ascertain different functions
• It does not assume that each region has one function or each
function has a discrete location (unlike phrenology), but does
assume some degree of specialization of neurons in particular
regions
 Functional Specialization: Broca’s Observations
Reprinted from Friederici (2002)
• Patient with left frontal
lesion (tan) who could
not speak but had
otherwise good
cognitive abilities

• Suggested a specialized
language faculty in the
brain
 Functional Specialization: After Broca
• Wernicke later observed a patient with poor speech comprehension,
but good production

• Suggests at least two language faculties in the brain (comprehension

v. production) that can be independently affected by brain damage

• Note that the faculties were inferred from empirical observation

(unlike phrenological faculties)

• This inference can be made without necessarily knowing where in the

brain they are located

• This approach later became known as COGNITIVE

NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
Minds without Brains: The Computer Metaphor
• Much of twentieth-century psychology was concerned with
observations of behavior, rather than observations of the
brain during behavior

• This led to models of cognition that don’t make direct

reference to the brain, e.g. the information-processing
models popular from the 1950s onwards

• The models were inspired by thinking of the mind as a

series of routines, like those found in computers
Minds without Brains: The Computer Metaphor
(cont.)
• Connectionist models are mathematical (computational) in
nature but don’t involve serial processing and discrete
routines

2015 version (DNN)

1986 version (PDP)
The Return of the Brain: Cognitive Neuroscience
• 1970s: structural imaging methods (CT, MRI) enable precise
images of the brain (and brain lesions)

• 1980s: PET adapted to models of cognition developed by

psychologists

• 1985: TMS is first used (a non-invasive, safer equivalent of

Penfield’s earlier studies)

• 1990: level of oxygen in blood used as a measure of cognitive

function (the principle behind fMRI)
 The Methods of Cognitive
Neuroscience
• Temporal resolution

• Spatial resolution

• Invasiveness

Adapted from Churchland and Sejnowski

(1988).
The Methods of Cognitive
Neuroscience (cont.)
 Challenges to Cognitive Neuroscience

(1) It is possible to study the mind without studying

the brain (or cognitive theories don’t make
predictions about the brain)

(2) Functional imaging tells us WHERE cognition

occurs, not HOW

(3) Cognitive neuroscience is a new form of

phrenology
Challenge (1): Studying the Mind without
the Brain
• Analogies often drawn between computer software (mind)
and hardware (brain) (e.g. Coltheart, Harley)

• BUT brain provides causal constraints on the nature of

cognition (they are not truly independent)

• Complete understanding of the complexity of the mind

requires both hardware and software, and their interactions
(and on and on)..
 Challenge (2): WHERE not HOW
• BUT, do reaction time experiments just tell us WHEN
cognition occurs and not HOW?

• The thing that is measured (e.g. local blood oxygen v.

reaction time) is merely data, and it is a theory (rather
than data) that explains HOW

• Modern AI comes to help, and with the new field such as

cognitive computational neuroscience (CCN), the problem
of early (purely ‘where’) is not a limitation any more.
Challenge (3): The New Phrenology?
• Uttal (2001) has argued that
functional imaging is the new
phrenology

• Stories in the popular press

worsen these concerns

• Important to consider
computational processes
rather than simple localization,
and also to consider how brain
systems interact. This may
avoid a new phrenology
 Assignment for today

• Subscribe to any neuroscience

newsletter website (such as
ScienceDaily) with your email add, etc,
and get daily updates of scientific news

• Answer Zuvio Qs (debugging

experimental reasoning)