BI 152 Michael L. Anderson: After Phrenology: Neural Reuse

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

Michael L. Anderson is a professor at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, at Western University. His book, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain, calls for a re-conceptualization of how we understand and study brains and minds. Neural reuse is the phenomenon that any given brain area is active for multiple cognitive functions, and partners with different sets of brain areas to carry out different cognitive functions. We discuss the implications for this, and other topics in Michael's research and the book, like evolution, embodied cognition, and Gibsonian perception. Michael also fields guest questions from John Krakauer and Alex Gomez-Marin, about representations and metaphysics, respectively.

• Michael's website.
• Twitter: @mljanderson.
• Book:
  • After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain.
• Related papers
  • Neural reuse: a fundamental organizational principle of the brain.
  • Some dilemmas for an account of neural representation: A reply to Poldrack.
  • Debt-free intelligence: Ecological information in minds and machines
  • Describing functional diversity of brain regions and brain networks.

0:00 - Intro 3:02 - After Phrenology 13:18 - Typical neuroscience experiment 16:29 - Neural reuse 18:37 - 4E cognition and representations 22:48 - John Krakauer question 27:38 - Gibsonian perception 36:17 - Autoencoders without representations 49:22 - Pluralism 52:42 - Alex Gomez-Marin question - metaphysics 1:01:26 - Stimulus-response historical neuroscience 1:10:59 - After Phrenology influence 1:19:24 - Origins of neural reuse 1:35:25 - The way forward