Antonio Damasio: The Brain - Creativity, Imagination, and Innovation / Ross Institute Summer Academy

thank you very much very happy to be here I will start by saying something about ways of knowing because the whole connection to Jonas Salk I think Courtley J's in definitely in our case comes from a certain notion of what it is to know and and of course many people associate knowing with collecting facts some people associate knowing with collecting facts and reflecting on them some people are so associated in a very straightforward manner with science with a scientific method where you have a hypothesis where you test the hypothesis you discuss it but in the end whether you're having the sort of classic simpler ways of knowing or the formally arranged ways of knowing through the scientific method whether you're dealing with poetry or the novel or film or music or painting you are making what I'd like to call approximations to what is so we do not have any ability to to get to revelations of what things are beneath the surface what individuals are beneath their surface and their behavior what we can do is have approximations to what things are and some approximations we do via the Arts by collecting facts and reflecting on them and some we do by formal scientific method which of course used to be very simple and now it's very complicated when you come to the level of understanding how the brain works which is but obviously interests us the most we have extremely complex methods that require incredible amounts of machinery that has been designed for the purpose and requires incredible amounts of collaboration because there's not it is not possible any longer for a scientist to the lone scientist that we have come to admire over the history of science somebody who sits in in an office with the desk thinks and comes up with great discoveries the reason being that most of the great discoveries that could be achieved that way have actually been made which is good and and they have been explored and validated through other methods and now almost everything that needs to be discovered needs requires certainly through the scientific method a very very complicated machinery which does not mean that the lone scientist thinker does not have a role to play in society and in knowing and I think he and she does because there's quite a lot that can be achieved by putting together ideas and reflecting on them and in judging their validity and deciding whether or not they fit or there's something terribly wrong with them and this can be done by lone individuals there is not necessary to have a very complex mr scanner in order to reflect intelligently on the world so there's this this very complex picture that we're dealing with in terms of the world of knowing so the fundamental methods that we use are methods that come from psychology and psychologists sort of became speciated in one particular kind that is very relevant to us and that's neuro psychology and neuropsychology evolved especially in the 70s and Beyond by having numbers of tasks that aim at certain processes there are already pretty hooked into neural structure and one has a sense of which systems and parts of the brain are related for example to things like memory or attention or language and so forth so we have a number true and tried tasks that have measurable standards in that allow you to make evaluations both of normal individuals as well as of individuals with brain damage with brain disease that can be studied in normal living conditions then in terms of the modern ways of studying the brain clearly and of course we have all the classical things available in the electroencephalograph II can be extremely sophisticated today and give you information that it was not giving you in in days past but the fundamental tools are there of structural magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging and basically what this does is in one case look at the structure and literally penetrate the structure of the brain all the way down to fiber systems and give you neuroanatomy but give you a newer anatomy that can be related to function either through lesion probes or through a variety of functional probes and then you have functional imaging in which you use proxies such as several blood flow to measure what amount of blood flow is going on in a particular part of the brain in a particular system and that gives you the idea gives you the dynamic aspects and it's very interesting because the this basically the monster you know the the scanners are not evolving that fast and they probably have evolved to about the most that they can do in terms of the basic raw technical capability but what is evolving very much is the ways of analysis or in the days of the kinds of data that can be captured from the scanning and can really allow you in honestly interesting manipulations in terms of studying how part of the brain connects to another what is the direction of the connectivity what are the distributions of the fiber systems and when you enrich that with the lesion method in other words when rather than studying normal individuals as we are here we study somebody that has had for example a stroke and has an area of damage that is circumscribed and well defined you can then study the consequences of that area of damage which really functions like a natural experiment she was not done by an experimenter but it's there as if it had been and so you can study the consequences what happens if there's damage here what will they do in other parts of the brain what will it do in the systems that it is naturally connected to and what if it does things in systems that are elsewhere in the brain all of that can now be inquired and can be studied which is of course an extremely powerful way of getting into the understanding of these systems and of course all of this there's one part of the entire group which is known as the darn size neuroscience pavilion that is directly with the Imaging Center which hana directs and where she has very active collaborations with a part of USC which is the deter B School of Engineering where you have all of these face engineers that are developing pulse sequences and developing new modes of analysis in collaboration with her there are two tools that are very important one is known as brain Fox which actually Honda developed in the 1990s and gives you a way of creating a 3d volume of the brains actually very beautiful and then there's another one called brain sweet sweet su ite not in I think you put in your coffee and and that is being actively developed and again it can be applied to both normal brains and abnormal brains but so much for tools that you can use there are the sort of the more than parts of the scientific trade and now I'm going to change over to another aspect of my talk which is tell you what goes on in terms of the actual research programs and I'm going to start with one that I consider sort of most emblematic of the Institute and this is a large program on brain development this ought to be interesting for you in this room because what you're dealing with this with intermediate consequences of brain develop when you are in school such as Ross so you're dealing with brains of individuals that are not quite mature but there are considerably mature of course they're not children anymore and what we want to study is how those brains have been put together and their influences that go all the way from the genome to the environment in which those brains of those individuals have appeared before and after birth and there are two big arms to this program on brain development and one is something that started several years ago in fact starting around the year 2000 and it came from an observation if there is damage that can occur for example perinatally can occur for example some child that is premature and you have damaged that very often is very small and in days in which there was not enough recognition of these conditions and certainly not scanners available for routine study the damage could fall into certain parts of the brain and have consequences later on now it turns out that if you have damaged for example in the language area and if the damage occurred is very early there is an almost complete compensation of that kind of damage to the best of our knowledge and this might not be 100% true but if the damage occurs in systems like the system of the frontal lobe especially in certain parts of the frontal lobe that are more medial what happens is that the damage is there but it has consequences that will be felt as the child grows up and becomes an adolescent and one of the worst effects that you can have is a disturbance to the emotional system that does not allow the child to process for example guilt the same way that normal children do and does not allow the child to recognize that something wrong has happened and there's a tremendous amount of censure going around that person and so this is a very serious problem and there could be other problems of this kind and this is one of the things that we are studying in great detail by starting large numbers of children that have damaged that can even occur in neutral so prior to the child being born or occur shortly thereafter and that can have these consequences and that can be very different depending on what part of the brain gets affected and right now one of the things people that are dealing mostly with this group of studies besides Hama is young neuroscientist by the name of Jessica this nav ski and jessica is actually studying the the chemical signature of some of these lesions in these very young brains and this is something that is being done together with Children's Hospital of Los Angeles CH LA which is part of the USC hospital system and is one of the leading hospitals for children in the nation and it's you know these are studies that we have great hopes for it would be for example important to recognize these effects early decide quite early which ones are going for example which locations of lesion are going to produce nasty consequence if and when that is decided find out ways in which you can reduce the negative impact of those lesions so you can see the impact that this can have it's going to take of course time to put all this picture together but it's something that is well on its way and we're now beginning to have a pretty good solid experience and the collaboration is excellent and we're very hopeful for the results that we will get here then on brain development as well but side by side with this aspect that has to do with brain pathology with something that really went wrong and probably will go wrong especially in prematurity and in some cases of twinning we have one that has to do with people that are to the best of our knowledge entirely normal from the get-go and this has to do guess what with music and it is something that is totally vital to the mission of the Institute and gives it for use and what it is is a study of how children that are subject to a very intense musical training beginning as early as age six how that intense musical training will change the organization of their brains presumably for the better but we don't know that's why we have to find out I don't think I have many doubts but I should and that's why we're going to do the right test in Venezuela this dr. Abreu who is of course a musician created this form of Education called el sistema and basically what he wanted was to go to the very poor neighborhoods investing as well and where children were obviously being co-opted into a life of crime to bring them into music training and into orchestras and musical groups and this has been an absolutely amazing success and there's a poster boy for this success and that's Gustavo Dudamel the chief music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic who is now acknowledged at age thirty as one of the leading conductors of the day and it has been fully anointed by Pierre Perez and by Claudio Abbado and by Daniel Barenboim and he is really quite brilliant in fact he can you can can die we have seen him conduct everything from Mozart's that the Ponte operas to [Music] extensive Mahler symphonies and he conducts the entire thing without a score he doesn't even have a score the other day we were at a rehearsal with him and with yo-yo ma for the door jack cello concerto and he was it was only about two-thirds of the way into the into the rehearsal which was going without a hitch that he suddenly stopped and he went first furious speed to the point where they were and he consulted in and then he had a little conversation with yo-yo and we continued on so it's really quite remarkable and this is one person that comes from an absolutely broken home terrible conditions and is this absolutely brilliant successful young men so to make a long story short we have this mutual agreement between the brain creativity Institute and the Los Angeles Philharmonic which created because of Dudamel created a thing called the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles and where all of these children are being recruited nor all from the most terrible neighborhoods but you know that we have neighborhoods that can compete with Venezuelan neighborhoods so we definitely are going have children from these different backgrounds and the idea is to study what will happen with this children and we're going to have of course psychological measures but also all of these non-invasive scanning measures and we have wonderful cooperation from the group and in fact the study is started everything is signed and the studies are beginning September 1st on this large-scale group so we have great hopes for this because we're totally convinced that this is an enormous influence on human behavior and that you can produce great responses and it certainly has been shown that that's that's the case because we do believe in control groups there's going to be actually a control group just in case it's a very very tricky we're going to compare the highly cooperative ensemble playing of these kids with competition which never emphasizes competition except in the individual ability to play the instrument with a competitive sport and who knows what will there's some people at the at the the orchestra that said oh my god if what if it turns out the footballer is not actually better than the musicians there well so be it it will be what will be you know but in the meantime we're also doing other fun things such as studying formally how for example musicians you know hannah has been doing the study of musical prodigies so she literally has collected the brains all these smart musicians like yo my and Daniel Barenboim and Midori and all of these people she has the brains of all these people in a vet the vet is of course you know in informatics but they're there and they can appear in 3d and some of them are very beautiful brains very sexy brains and we were studying we were doing a lot of individual studies as well that can have an intriguing payoff for example there is a remarkable blind singer mezzo soprano by the name of Lori Rubin who has actually had some great successes in New York and in LA and she's blind from birth there is no question is that she activates visual cortices quite systematically during auditory processing so there's no question that you own those cortices are not being used for vision but they are being activated by music processing in ways that actually have to do with another set of studies that is going in our lab which has to do and this is relevant for the issue of imagination with how you bring together information in the brain right now you're looking at me and you're hearing me you would you definitely have the both your visual impressions of me of the podium and the auditory impressions of my voice they're fully integrated if they were not fully integrated the effect would be the kind of effect in you know old movies when the projection system and the sound went separated and you know the lips were not in sync with the voice and of course that doesn't happen so you have a way of fully integrating this and if you don't know much about neurophysiology and if you don't know much about neuroanatomy what you would imagine is that these things are landing in the same place and that you have some kind of pool where auditory and visual information are being integrated you know they're in there well it turns out that that's not the case there in fact the brain honors a complete distinction between the points of the structure where the voice processing is landing and the visual processing is landing it's almost like different cities you know they're they're literally in brain distance terms miles away here you have vision here you have audition going on and not only that there are no direct connections from one to the other so there's no way of having visual fibres talk directly to the auditory fibres and create across integration so it turns out that the integration is actually made via an extremely complicated system of connections that first diverge from the arrival point of the sensory input and then concentrate in another point at all points in fact it's not only one and there is then feedback that goes to the origins of those connections so this is an extremely complex system in one that is in a way counterintuitive because you would you would expect all this integration to be produced by a machine that would bring it all together and that's not the way nature designed the machine so it's very important to understand how this process is going and so we have a series of very beautiful experiments that were led by Casper Meyer we have done experiments in with three modalities vision with sound and with touch and we are revealing exactly where the hooks take place in the brain and how they the kind of connectivity that you need and also something very interesting the kind of ambiguities that can be created so for example there's certain stimuli there are so ambiguous that the brain cannot really make the separation quite clearly when you cross from one modality to the other why is this important from the point of view of imagination and creativity is that you want to understand when when you think about the creative powers the creative powers are really about the manipulation of images and imaging in the broad sense of the term is not about visual images only but about images of sound images of touch images that we have of our own body and images that of course you can have in the olfactory system and in the taste system but it is images in the sense that they are patterns so the brain is giving you access to all these perceptions of the world outside and of the world inside thanks to the making of patterns in maps and we're talking literally about maps this is all cartography you have these visual cortices or the auditory cortices or the somatosensory cortices are in fact extended maps with different stripes and regions and they are mapping what is going on in a particular modality with a particular sub modality as well so for example right now I'm looking at you and I'm seeing shapes the shapes of your bodies faces heads and so on but I'm also seeing color I am also seeing depth and the positions that you have in space all of this is being mapped and I insist on the word mapped through a variety of Stations of the nervous system beginning at the retina so at the retina level we already have these maps being formed except that in my retina right now and all of this is upside down and I'm actually creating a map that is inverted of all of you and then that map gets rectified and placed right-side up and is then conveyed through a variety of stations at least three stations up to the point in the visual cortex where it is then distributed again two maps that operate on color maps that operate on depth maps that operate on movement because you are for example doing this your chin and I'm picking up on that and that requires a map there is in a specific area of the occipital parietal region that is doing that of course this happens also within the auditory system so when we talk about creativity we talk about the powers of imagination imagination is the manipulation of these images that of course occurs naturally just bubbles up it's part of our natural standard operating mode but that then can be educated and there can be indicated by you of course some people will be born with an amazing imaginative capacity which means they're constantly creating images breaking down things combining and recombining in order in interesting ways but some people will not do that that much but you can incite them to do that by the way you play with them with drawing the way you make them listen the way you make them break what is it appearing to them through the auditory or the visual route but it's all about imagination and then about directing that imagination for a certain purpose that's what creativity is all about is how you have a certain purpose that you want to achieve and then you use your imagination to try to get to a way of constructing a particular result that you have in mind sometimes the result that you hardly see in your mind's eye but still it is there or you see in your mind's ear if you are a composer and trying to create an auditory space take somebody like Picasso or like Mozart to go to two people that are really extreme in the production extreme in the abilities that they had and that they showed from very early age and in the case of Picasso until very late age as well almost undiminished those people probably have something particular about their respective auditory and visual systems the majority of people probably don't have that what they have is an enormous amount of training an enormous amount of ability to cope with with the material and then a lot of things that are very important for creativity which have to do with the social situation in which you are with the way your emotional system operates the kind of knee do you have to produce something in a certain context you have in our society this tendency to declare people geniuses so you see in prodigies you see a young person who has been subject to very good music training and who does very well and you have the children and then the young adults are considered off the scale prodigies and so on well I don't think we can say that the prodigies are that prodigious or that rare because we have not subject people to the same kinds of education I think one of the things that el sistema is going to show in other such because now there's going to be a mushrooming of el system is all over the place is that lots of people can achieve that provided there is the right social context provided there is the motivation and provided the training is effective so back to the imagination here und those are the basic tools with which you write creativity you have to have those tools and they're all over the brain social context and the kind of emotional need the kind of emotional operation that is there to motivate you to stay on track stay on task and achieve a certain results and of course you it's very dangerous to try to reduce things like creativity to just one or two or three ingredients because it's always much more complex than that obviously you you need to have a certain degree of native intelligence or developed intelligence in order to be able to do something there is of worth to other people but but the basic tokens are there but you cannot fail to incorporate images and imagination in the process of whatever modality it is and basically these are the modalities that you have to deal with you basically have five domains on which you can operate and the integrations of those domain and of course these days things are actually much more complex and interesting because the domains have been much more mixed in fact ever since the development of cinema which is an incredibly interesting art you have this great combination of artistic forms you have of course the inheritance from novel from the novel and poetry you have the inheritance from painting and then you have the auditory inheritance that comes from music you know not even when people sometimes say well what about silent movies well the silent movies were never silent because whenever you went to a silent movie I never did but I read the descriptions people were somebody was banging on the piano in Oregon so there was a soundtrack and of course these days soundtracks are absolutely vital to the to the movie it's actually quite quite astounding that people don't give more value to what goes on in the soundtrack all the way from the way the sound is being built in in the in the film into the film and as well the score which is absolutely critical and I think people are very aware of that so now you have all of these combines of artistic creativity there's something very different biologically about music when you think about the visual system you have the retina you have the geniculate nucleus don't worry about where it is it's behind the eye and then you have the visual cortex so basically in this most recent of all sensory channels you go from the periphery the retina to the central nervous system in two stops so imagine a TGV with only one stop before you get to the terminus okay pretty good if you go into the auditory system first of all you don't start here you start here in the year and you then have to go across across six stations before you get to the auditory cortex what this is telling you very blatantly is that these two senses evolved very differently at very different points in evolution and based on very different sources of input and in one case you have to go plodding Lee over all these steps and change the signal and create new adaptations and new computations and in the other you go literally fast speed from one place to the terminus not only that in the case of vision you literally bypass all the structures of the brain that have to do with life regulation and emotion in fact all the emotions that we draw from looking at a beautiful room or building or person or painting we draw them by secondary effect from the visual image on the emotive systems the emotions we draw from music are coming directly from the sound processing at the level of life regulatory systems because the whole thing lens in the brainstem okay and whereas one is is a teller sense and you're relying on photons hitting the retina in the other you're relying on something as primitive as one thing hitting another which is what happens when sound waves hits the tympanic membrane and then communicating to through three little particles back into the window where you have the cochlea and where you get the first transformation from sound to electrical impulses so it's a very different in other words think of it this way the engineers were different and different engineers were put on the auditory problem and on the visual problem and of course if you go through the problem of how we sense our internal organs it's still another problem in another engineer and another age that lo and behold came before the hearing age so you really have these successions of Ages of evolution of the senses and it would stand to reason there are imaginative powers as they are based on these different processes are going to be very different as well they have a different take on reality now I'm looking at your face and I get a very full description of your face complete with the glasses and your shirt and so on today it's an incredibly detailed representation of you as a body ok when I hear music or when I hear somebody you know something knock and knock outside the door of this office or when you hear this you don't see this desk and you don't see the pen what you hear is something that is produced by the interaction of the pan with the wood in the desk so your head you're dealing with the secondary effect that was produced on this object so this is just to call attention to the fact that these are very different things and the the brain is going to handle them differently and there is this incredible closeness of the auditory process to the regulatory organs here that the the great beauty is this is that the place where the cochlear nucleus is play is located in the brainstem is just about the same level as the nuclei that are running for example our circulatory system our lungs our digestive systems our metabolism all the regulation that is vital for life and the basic emotional systems for example the regulation of pain the regulation of pleasure is all there so my poetic take on this and I have have written a little bit about this in one of these days I'll write more is that music has direct line into the emotions and into into life regulation and I'm very convinced that this is the reason why music is so universal and it's so widespread and just make any difference whether you you know if you have Mozart or Beethoven you could be in China you could be here you could be in the moon and it's it works and provide you have human beings that I have the basic conception that we have and we do so I think you're gonna have that that effect what affects people visual is is slightly different and this of course is independent of all schools and styles and so on which is another another layer another story but there's something here you cannot take visual arts and sound arts and say well they're on the same level they're not there they're very different I mean they can't be on the same level in our estimation of course there's no reason why you should like painting more than music or vice versa but they are different quantities the different different stuff okay we are very interested in understanding the phenomena of feeling feeling in the broad sense of the term so feelings that go all the way from feelings of pain to feelings of pleasure to feelings of the emotions since around 1990 we have done a variety of studies on fundamental emotions all the way from the basic emotions like fear joy to complex social emotions like compassion and admiration and gratitude which are by the way things that we are studying now and we've been studying across culturally so for example we have in our group one of our a young faculty Mary Helen Moore Dino yang she's doing cross cross-cultural study of emotions of the social-emotional type in China in the US and in Asian Americans but beyond the issue of the emotion which is really about action and about generating a pattern of behavior the issue of how you feel the emotion of how you feel a certain physical state is I think the crux of Studies on consciousness with all the different shades of what we can have when we take the complex phenomenon of consciousness and one of the things that we're quite interested in is number one at system's level the fact that the sources of emotion of emotional feelings is not necessarily in the cerebral cortex alone and this has been the traditional take but actually in rather in the brain stem so if you look at a central nervous system you have of course a spinal cord then we have this sector which is the brainstem that goes all the way up to the hypothalamus hypothalamus not hippocampus and then you have the big expense of the several cortex the several cortex of course the modern part of the brain the one that makes us be human in the sense of our capabilities of our instrumentalities and is present in many of the species but certainly the most developed when you look at the brainstem it's been preserved for most of evolution from fish up with pretty much the same design it's a little bit enriched there are a few more elements but fundamentally this is the same structure and we have shown in our prior research that clearly several cortex especially a part of the cerebral cortex called the insular cord is vital as the platform to feel feelings which is different from where you have the emotions so if you go back 15 years 20 years people thought that there were emotional centers where you would provoke say laughter or crying and you would feel the results of laughter of crying all in the same place and this is completely wrong and we were instrumental in showing that in fact these are separate systems and that the system that allows you to feel is not the system that allows you to do the emotion that you can feel these are different parts and this is all the sorts of impact in our understanding of mental illness in our understanding of things such as depression and pain and drug addiction that's why it is so absolutely critical besides of course the pleasure of understanding what on earth is going on in our brains the interesting thing is that we have now shown there's a paper that came out this year in several cortex with me and Hannah and another colleague Dan for now in which we showed that besides the insula there's this old part of the brainstem that people have always preferred as too primitive to be of any consequence that is critical for our feelings of pain of pleasure and of emotions and this is very important because it connects with an idea that is anathema for many people people have wanted to preserve feelings for human beings and they did not want animals to have feelings and of course since the animals have these structures in spades it will be very convenient not to give them feelings and this of course anybody that has seen animals react with joy or paying to different conditions knows that this is complete baloney and that of course they have feelings even if you cannot ask them to confess to us with feelings they have but we have other ways of extrapolating that so this is a very important point of contempt but I think that we're winning the battle quite correctly and the final point to think that we are involved in right now which is a quest for the neuron level of the feeling systems so if you think about our cognition if you think about the kind of intellectual dialogues that we can have and we will be having when we sit down for the next session you think about work that is mental work but it's being carried out by large networks of neurons and depends critically on synapses depends critically on the fact that one synapse is connected to the next neuron and there's an action that leads to the operation of the next neuron so it stands to reason there when we feel and by the way feeling is a critical operation I mean what just think about what you would be without feelings of pleasure pain emotions whatever it would be zombies of no great consequence so we fortunately are not that so it's very important to understand where does that come from and where does that come from in our view is actually from the operation of the part of the neuron there is the axon for reasons that are in quite complicated to explain but this is part of a set of new hypotheses that we are studying right now so if you would ask me what is the thing that most excites you at the moment in terms of research besides all these other things that the Institute is doing and are very interesting what excites me is the possibility of exploring at the level of exons what one of the sets of operations that the axon does or does not do net serve as the the undergirding for sentience the Ender guardian for feeling sentience so that's a very important point and so I just would like to close with one comment make a big distinction between basic homeo dynamics and social homeo dynamics and this goes back to a conversation that bill and I were having yesterday during the discussion is that there's something quite odd about the fact that these regulations are happening in living creatures that don't even have brains so if you go to unicellular organisms that don't have brains those organisms have a home your dynamic process or they would die immediately those organisms furthermore have something like a social behavior as we were discussing for example something like bacteria and they don't have a brain so there's something that is already inherent in that life that is going to be more explicit once brains developed once nervous systems developed and the important point though is that even if those organisms have homeostasis or homeo dynamics and have this basic regulation and even some kind of sentience one thing definitely do not have is what this talk and mourning is about which is creativity for creativity you need to have something much more complex which is what I call social homeo dynamics or social homeostasis so it's something that requires a body of knowledge and consciousness in the full sense of the term so that you actually have a sense of the others in the absence of the objects you have a sense of how things are put together and then using those images that we talked about we can manipulate all this stuff and try to identify a problem and try to solve that problem whether that problem is the representation of someone in a painting or a piece of music or a building or piece of science okay so that's how I want it closed thank you you

Channel: Ross School

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Keywords: director, pd, consciousness studies, neurons, Professional Development (Organization Sector), mary immordino-yang, courtney ross, USC, biology, neuroscience, new york, david dornsife, central nervous system, University of Southern California, usc dornsife, imaging, Antonio Damasio (Author), brain science, ross, ross school, creativity, summer academy, education, school, damasio, brain, neuro-antonomy, systems, ross institute, Innovation (Award Discipline), east hampton, Professor (Occupation)

Id: HUZd66Lu4Y8

Length: 48min 45sec (2925 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2014