Brain and mind academia Konstantin Anokhin. Brain and mind. Question: Good afternoon

Konstantin Anokhin - Professor, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Head of the Department of Systemogenesis, Institute of Normal Physiology named after A.I. PC. Anokhin and head of the Russian-British laboratory for the neurobiology of memory. The lecture is devoted to the latest research on the physiology of memory, mechanisms for storing, retrieving and reproducing information, the ability to memorize, and the dependence of memory processes on circumstances.

Just like the science of genes, molecular biology has created a single language, bringing together a huge number of biological disciplines under a single conceptual base: biology proper, its various branches, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, virology, and then further - molecular medicine, including including molecular biology of the brain among all branches, just as it is expected that the sciences of the brain and mind that develop in the 21st century will be the cementing factor that unifies and provides an objective basis for all types of human intellectual activity, everything related to it. Starting from human development and our personality, education, learning, language, culture, and moving into areas that have not yet learned concrete information about how the brain does it, to the field of human behavior in economic situations, which is now called neuroeconomics. In the field and human behavior in general in social systems. And in this sense, sociology, history, jurisprudence, art, because all art is, on the one hand, what the human brain generates, and, on the other hand, how our human brain perceives something as a work of art . All of them will depend on this new synthesis, the science of the brain and mind.

But this synthesis may seem natural to many of you. I want to contrast it with what it was before, so that it is clear where we are and what phase we are moving into?

Plato wrote in one of his "Dialogues" about the importance of the ability to divide nature into joints, that is, to divide it into natural components so that after this analysis we can naturally return to synthesis. By the way, in the mouth of Socrates, Plato called this ability dialectics, opposing this to the inability of some cooks to cut the body into different parts, despite the joints, this leads to a meaningless set of parts that are very difficult to synthesize later.

Here we have reason to think today that Plato made a big mistake in dividing nature into joints. Great minds make great mistakes. He separated brain and mind, he separated body and soul. Following this, such a division, the division of brain and mind, took root after the work of another great philosopher, René Descartes. According to Descartes, the whole world can be divided into two fundamental parts.

The first is an extended material substance, res extensa - these are our bodies, this is our brain, these are the bodies of animals, what animals have. And the second is an immortal soul, not an extended spiritual substance, which only a person possesses. This means that animals are automata, they are able to behave without the participation of the soul and mind, while a person has a soul, it determines his actions. And these two worlds are hardly compatible, because this is the world of spatial and non-spatial phenomena.

Here, in fact, we are in at least 400 years of tradition and inertia in the perception of the world, divided into these two parts - the brain and the mind. And what is happening today in the sciences of the brain, why this is an important point, blurs this line and shows that the work of the brain is the work of the mind, that the brain works as a huge population of millions, tens of millions, maybe sometimes hundreds of millions synchronously activated, included together with some activity of nerve cells. These groups of cells, functional systems are stored as a structure of our individual experience. And our mind is the manipulation of these groups.

Thus, one group is able to call another group into action, and the properties of these huge groups are not just physiological properties, but those subjective states - thoughts, emotions, experiences that we experience. In this respect, our brain and mind are one.

By the way, the ideas are as old as Plato's ideas about separateness, because Aristotle adhered to the concept of the unity of the brain and mind, or soul and body.

In fact, another great 19th-century thinker, Charles Darwin, formed the biological program for the unification of the brain and the mind, the return of the mind to nature. And this is very important. He connected back the mind of animals and the mind of man, introducing an evolutionary idea, he wrote in his notebook, which was called "M" - metaphysical, he began it under the influence of a conversation with his father, and wrote down his thoughts about behavior and mind.

By the way, after deciphering these notebooks published in the 80s, we begin to understand how deep Darwin was, and how deeply he thought about the brain and mind, and about the soul and thinking, as deeply as about biology in general and about evolution. And, as you can see, he recorded in 1938, surprisingly, by the way, a month and a half before his famous recording, when the idea of natural selection dictated by reading Malthus hit him. He wrote it down in August 1938: “The origin of man has now been proven, these thoughts wandered in him. And after that, metaphysics should flourish, because whoever understands the baboon will do more for metaphysics than Locke.” This is a biological research program. This is a program that shows that our brain and mind are one. Intelligence is a function of the brain that has evolved. It was needed for adaptation, and we do not differ from animals in the cardinal properties of the presence of the soul or mind and their absence in animals. We must create a new theory of how the brain generates the processes of thinking, consciousness, psyche, based on these evolutionary principles.

And so, in fact, the 20th century witnessed one of these radical programs. When what was considered for many centuries as a property of the human soul, memory, and, by the way, back in the early 20th century in psychology textbooks, you could see the following definition: "Memory is a property of the soul." So what was considered a property of our soul, and this is our personality, our memory, our subjective experience, was translated into the study of how biological processes move, shape our memory and how it works in the brain.

In other words, in the 20th century the science of memory, which arose, as the historian of science Jan Hacking wrote, to secularize the soul, that unyielding core, of Western thought and practice, was influenced by the work of several of its outstanding pioneers Ebbinghaus in Germany, Ribot in France , Korsakov in Russia, from philosophy to objective research in philosophy. And then, more importantly, to the study of memory in the working brain. Memory in the middle of the 20th century began to be studied not as a phenomenon outside the human brain and a product of the human brain, but as processes occurring inside the human brain when it remembers or retrieves memories.

In objective neurobiological studies of memory, it is customary to divide the question of the mechanisms of memory into three questions, into three problems.

First, how is memory formed in the brain? Second, how is memory stored in the brain over the years? And third, how is memory selectively retrieved when needed? One of the first questions that was subjected to objective research was the question of the formation of memory. And here, research over the past few decades has moved from observing behavior at the time of memory formation in humans, animals, to how memory is stored due to the work of the genome of nerve cells?

The first steps in this regard were made by a young German who had begun to study memory at a young age ... Ebbinghaus, he came across the book "Objective Psychology" by Lunt, who described objectively psychological studies of perceptions, and thought that perhaps a person's memory can be used in the same way ... you can explore in the same way? And he composed a small number of meaningless syllables that he wrote on the tablets, shuffled these tablets and showed them to himself, then, after a while, testing his ability to remember them at different intervals of time. And one of the first things he discovered was that memory, at the moment of memorization, goes through two phases. The first is a short phase during the first minutes after receiving new information, where we are able to store almost all the information received.

Then there is a sharp decrease in the volume of filled information, but the information remaining after this period is stored for a very long time. It can be stored at a constant level for a week or even months, as Ebbinghaus discovered. Thus, Ebbinghaus made a fundamental discovery - he showed that memorization processes are uneven and have two phases. The first is short-term, where a lot of information is stored, and the second, long-term, where the amount of information is small, but it is maintained for a long time.

Very quickly, inspired by the work of Ebbinghaus, two other German psychologists Müller and Pilzecker, who worked in Göttingen at the end of the 19th century, asked themselves the question, what happens at the border of this transition from one phase of memory to another? Is it an active process? And they showed that if at the moment of memorization and transition from short-term to long-term memory a person is given a new task that he must remember, then this new task interferes with the memorization of old information, interferes with him. They called it retrograde interference, the influence of new information back on the process that occurs in the brain.

Based on this, they decided that in the brain, when memorization occurs, there is a very active process, and it requires the maximum amount of resources. If the brain is given another task at this time, then the second task overlaps the first, and does not allow the memory to form. It is very interesting that if these second tasks are given a little later, after 15-20 minutes, then this does not happen. From this they drew the important conclusion that memory passes in the brain during this transitional phase into a stable storage phase.

Neurologists very quickly confirmed this with their observations that in cases of disorders associated, for example, with concussions, with concussions, memory is lost for a short time preceding this concussion, which again indicates that the impact on the active process does not allow recent information to be remembered. . By the way, the same thing happens with convulsive seizures.

It became clear that, first, memory can be examined objectively. The second is that in the formation of memory there are certain phases associated with active processes in the brain, the nervous system, and, accordingly, these active processes in the nervous system can be objects for study in order to understand how memory is formed.

Then there was a rather long period when there were no fundamental discoveries in this area, because it is extremely difficult to study these processes on a person. You will not artificially injure or create a concussion to a person in order to check what he remembered, what not? You will not be able, or at least in those years it was impossible to look into what is happening in the human brain during these processes. And so the next radical step in this program of mental reduction, reduction of the soul, by the movement of molecules in the brain cells was taken when the American psychologist Carl Danton showed that everything is the same in animals. If you like, this is a wonderful illustration of Darwin's program to bring intelligence back into nature.

He showed that rats remember a lot of things. This was known before him in many studies. Then he showed the following thing. What if rats, after they have learned some new task, are given an interfering effect, for example, by causing them to have a short seizure with electroconvulsive shock, then if these seizures are applied immediately after the animal has learned something, it will not able to remember this information for a long time. He has short-term memory, and long-term memory is not formed. That is, this is the transition that was discovered by Ebbinghaus, it is in animals, and it is also affected by nerve activity in the same way.

But it turned out that, just as in the experiments of Muller and Pilzeker, if this electroconvulsive shock is postponed, for example, for 15 minutes after a training session, then it does not affect the forming memory in any way. Hence, these processes are universal. Indeed, over the next 20-30 years, it turned out that they can be observed in all animals capable of learning, from primates to invertebrates, for example, grape snails. You can induce seizure activity in a snail by injecting special drugs that cause seizures, and he will remember what he learned, if it is seizures that are applied immediately after learning. So this is the universal biology of the process.

But then the question arose, if we now have the tools for modeling memory and its consolidation in the brain of animals, we can ask the following question - what are the mechanisms that happen in brain cells? This was the heyday of molecular biology. And several groups of scientists thought at once that what is stored for a long time as information in the cells of the body must be associated with genetic information, because proteins are destroyed very quickly, which means that there must be some changes in the activity of genomes that associated with the DNA of nerve cells and changes in its properties.

And a hypothesis arose that, perhaps, the formation of long-term memory, look what a leap from the heart, is a change in the properties of the activity of the genome of nerve cells, a change in the properties of work and their DNA.

To test this, the Swedish scientist Holger Hiden did various and very beautiful experiments. For example, he taught rats to get to the feeder with food by ... balancing on a thin stretched inclined string. And the animals learned a new skill, a vestibular skill, and a motor skill to walk on that string. Or, for example, to get food with a paw that animals do not prefer to get it out of the cylinder, and among rats it is the same as among us, left-handed and right-handed, he looked at what kind of animal it was, and then gave him the opportunity to get it only with the opposite paw. Again, the animals learned.

It turned out that when animals learn these and other tasks, there is a surge in gene expression in their brains, there is an increase in RNA synthesis and an increase in protein synthesis. And this happens precisely in this phase immediately after the acquisition of new information and its transition to a long-term form, which was discovered by Ebbinghaus. That is, here again everything coincides.

But in biological research, as a rule, after purely correlative research, especially when it concerns animals, where biological processes can be manipulated, causal questions also follow. Not only does RNA and protein synthesis increase simultaneously with learning, that is, genes are expressed, it is important to ask - are they needed in order to remember new information? This may be an accidental concomitance of one process to another. And to test this, very quickly several groups of researchers, for example Flexner's group in the US, began to inject animals, when they are learning a new task, with an inhibitor of protein or RNA synthesis, that is, to prevent this wave, burst, of gene expression that accompanies the learning process.

It turned out that animals learn normally in this case, no old forms of behavior already developed are violated in them, moreover, they are able to remember what they have learned for a short time. But, as soon as it comes to the long phase of transition into long-term memory and storage of this memory for a week, months, this memory is absent in animals. That is, interference in the work of the genome and an obstacle to the synthesis of RNA and protein molecules at the moments of learning does not allow the formation of long-term memory. This means that long-term memory really depends on the work of the genome of nerve cells. And then it is very important to understand the questions, what kind of genes are turned on in nerve cells, what triggers them at the time of learning, and what are their functions? How does this translate into what we are able to experience ourselves as subjective ... our subjective experience?

In the mid-80s (70s) two groups of researchers, one in the Soviet Union and the other in Germany and Poland, simultaneously discovered such genes. In a group that worked in our country, we were looking for these genes together with employees at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics. And we were helped to find them by the hypothesis that the processes occurring in the brain at the time of the formation of a new experience, perhaps, involve the same cellular principles and mechanisms that are involved in the processes of development of the nervous system, the establishment of connections and differentiation of cells?

And, having discovered the work of one of the developmental regulator genes that encodes a protein that controls the work of many, many other genes, the so-called "transcription factor", we decided to look, here this expression is shown in red, you see, yes, in red in the cerebral cortex in 19 day-old rat embryo. We decided to see what happens in the adult brain with the work of this gene?

It turned out that animals that are in a familiar environment and do not learn anything new practically do not express this gene, nerve cells do not contain the products of this gene. But as soon as the animal gets into a situation that is new to him and she remembers it, an explosion of expression of this gene occurs in the brain.

Moreover, as you can see, by the fields of this expression, this expression concerns a huge number of nerve cells. It is located in various structures of the brain. As it turned out later, the places of expression depend very much on what subjective individual experience is being acquired by the brain at the moment. For some forms of memory, these are one zone of expression, for others, they are different. We will come back to this when we talk about memory mapping.

In the meantime, let's look at a simplified diagram of what happens in the cells of the nervous system when learning occurs? Stimuli, being translated into certain chemical molecules that act on the membrane of a neuron, nerve cell, transmit signals through the cytoplasm of the cell to the nucleus. And this is where the genes that I showed are activated, one of them on the previous slide, this is the c-Fos transcription factor.

Transcription factors differ in that the proteins they synthesize - this is the appearance of proteins in the cytoplasm - do not remain in the cytoplasm, but return back to the nucleus. And in the case of the genes of the c-Fos and c-Jun families, the second gene, which also turned out to be activated in a number of learning situations, they form complex complexes of proteins with each other, capable of influencing a huge number of sites in the genome of a nerve cell. These regions are the regulatory regions of other genes. In other words, the signal that comes to the nerve cell during learning, through many, many inputs, goes into the bottleneck of activation of several transcription factors, and then their effect branches and changes the program of the whole cell, because some of these genes are targets regulated by transcription factors. factors, increase their activity, and some are suppressed. If you like, the cell rearranges its program of work under the influence of the learning situation.

Why is this scheme interesting? First, it turned out that the formation of memory goes through two phases of protein synthesis and gene expression. The first is immediately after learning, when Ebbinghaus saw it, and then the so-called early genes are activated. But, after this, there is a second wave of activation after the action of the products of early genes on the genome. The so-called late genes.

Secondly, since the structure of early genes, their regulatory regions, as well as their ability to act on certain regulatory regions of other genes were well studied in cell biology, it became possible to decipher the other two questions. So, we, the first - found out what these genes are? Second, moving backwards from such genes, for example, one of the early genes is shown here. You can see that in the regulatory region of this gene, represented by this sequence, a lot of transcription factors are grouped, among which there are phos and juna, which I spoke about, there are genes that have other names, there is a transcription factor that has other names, for example, crepe .

And it turned out that, moving back along this chain, asking a question during training, early genes were activated, what caused them, what signals sat on their regulatory regions, what signals caused the regulators to bind to their regulatory regions, which of the secondary messengers of the cell transmitted these signals , and finally, which receptors were activated?

It was possible to decipher the sequence of signals from the nucleus, from the membrane to the genome of the nerve cell, which work during learning. And one of the pioneers in this research, the American neuroscientist Eric Kendel of Columbia University received the Nobel Prize for deciphering this cascade.

These studies have many interesting implications. They were unexpected. For example, it turned out that defects in some of these elements of the cascade not only cause learning disorders in adult animals, but also cause diseases associated with mental development disorders in children. This is an amazing thing. Because such diseases, for example, Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, were considered for a long time as congenital diseases. Now we understand that in reality these are violations that lead to shortcomings in the possibility of early learning, the formation of memory in a child in the first weeks, months of their life. And it is precisely because of this that mental development is disturbed.

And the consequences for this are also different. It is one thing that for medical reasons this child may receive certain drugs that improve these learning abilities; another thing was to consider that this is a congenital disease that is not treated after birth.

Another unexpected thing that gradually began to emerge in the deciphering of these cascades is that they terribly, indeed, resemble in their constituent parts those cellular processes that occur during the differentiation of nerve cells in the developing brain. They often use the same signal molecules, moreover, some of these molecules were initially discovered during development, and then it turned out, like, for example, various neurotrophins, that they are signal molecules at the moments of learning.

And other molecules, such as the glutamate and NMDA receptors that accept it, were first studied in connection with learning, and then it turned out that they play a critical role in the time dependent on the activity of the neural networking stage in development. The same was true for various second messenger protein kinases, and, finally, for transcription factors and target genes.

As a result, we get the picture that when we look at development and learning, we see very similar molecular cascades. This means that each developmental episode closely resembles a learning episode, or that developmental processes never end in the adult brain. Each act of cognition for us is a small episode of morphogenesis and subsequent development. But pay attention - which one? - under cognitive control, as opposed to what happens during embryonic development. In other words, our knowledge, our psyche, our mind, determining the processes of acquiring new knowledge, are also triggers for the differentiation of cells that store this knowledge.

And, finally, one more important consequence. The fact that memory has molecular mechanisms and many of them are associated with processes that occur not between cells, but inside the cell, when the signal is transmitted from the membrane to the genome, means that in addition to psychotropic drugs that appeared in psychiatry in the 50s and are able to act on the transmission of signals between nerve cells that are able to regulate our perception, emotions, pain, behavior, and so on.

And in the future, we will have, and are beginning to appear, mnemotropic drugs that have a completely different effect. Since they act and will have to act on the processes that occur after the processing of information in the nervous networks associated only with their storage, we will not notice their effects on our behavior, they will not have side effects of excitation, inhibition, changes in our perception or attention processes. . But they will be able to modulate the processes of storing information for a long time. And such drugs are now being sought.

Thus, the questions of the molecular biology of memory, which arose from studies of the biological foundations of information storage in the brain, led to the following decisions: that the formation of long-term memory is based on the activation of a universal cascade of early and late genes, leading to a restructuring of the learning neuron, its molecular, protein phenotype.

We also know from recent studies, which I have not mentioned yet, that memory storage throughout life is carried out due to epigenetic rearrangements, that is, the state of the chromatin of nerve cells changes. The state of epigenetic memory in a neuron changes, the state of cell differentiation, stored as a result of learning, is possible for as long as the state of cell differentiation, which preserves its properties of a certain type of nerve cell at the time of development.

Let's finish this piece. I think I'm talking 42 minutes, right? Do we have some time for questions?

Question: Thank you. And then the second question. How finite is our memory...

Answer: None of the experimental attempts to determine the amount and limits of memory did not lead to limits. For example, in one of the experiments conducted by the Canadian psychologist Stanling, it was investigated how many faces the students under test were able to remember. And they were shown different photographs with a short interval, and then, after some time, showing two photographs, they were asked to find out which one was shown and which one is new? It turned out that the first thing is that the fidelity is high and does not depend on the volume, that is, everything was limited only by the fatigue of the students. Up to 12 thousand photos, for example, were reproduced with an accuracy of up to 80 percent.

Pay attention, here, of course, it is important what was done, here there was a memory for recognition, and not active reproduction. But, nevertheless, it is a different form of memory.

Question: RSUH student, if you allow me, I would like to ask the following question. In the introductory part of the lecture, you spoke about such a new problem as the science of the brain and the science of the mind. This, of course, is also related to the issue you are dealing with, which is artificial intelligence. Over time, it seems to me, intelligent forms of life should become adaptive revolutionary developing, which, in general, can lead to get out of control. How much is this problem being studied now and when can it become relevant? And secondly, by creating such new forms of intellectual life, as you think, we will be ready for the development of such events when these new intellectual forms of life become, well, perhaps, the same creatures as we are now, because once upon a time this is also not far off and such a scenario is possible. Thank you.

Answer: I'm afraid to make a mistake in the forecast. In general, the experience of recent years shows that the progress that is being made in this area, in the field of brain and mind research, by the way, is not to the same extent in the field of artificial intelligence, where progress is slower, but, nevertheless, so amazing and unpredictable, that any forecasts may turn out to be a mistake in a few years. But my prediction is as follows.

We do not yet have creatures capable of, as artificial intelligence, to - first: solving the same problems that a person solves, even approximately, especially in conditions of changing adaptive situations.

DARPA, the U.S. defense agency, launched a new AI program a couple of years ago, saying they were ceasing to fund all classical AI research because they thought the biological brain was superior to the best existing brain when it comes to solving adaptive problems. forms of artificial intelligence built on current architectures, at times from a million to a billion times. Can you imagine the difference?! It's not a question of speed of operations. It is a question of the ability to generate new solutions in a dynamically changing environment.

When will this barrier be overcome a million and a billion times? Well, maybe this is the foreseeable future, at least several groups of universities and IBM have begun research on a new architecture, where its elements both learn and are able to calculate, that is, similar to what a real nervous system does, where there is no separate memory storages, and separately - information elements.

I think that artificial intelligence has another difficult problem. That until now all the systems that we create, the initial condition of their behavior are invested in them by the creator of man, that is, she is not able to generate these initial conditions herself. She didn't have evolution. But even this is overcome in models of artificial life, evolutionary work, where they start with very simple neural networks. Then they are allowed to develop in the environment, gradually solving adaptive tasks. And even the adaptive tasks themselves arise for this intellect new, which were not laid down by the creators.

So maybe in the next 10-15 years we will see significant progress in these areas. Whether they will reach the subjective experience and the human psyche is a very difficult question, I think not.

Question: ... Marina ... gymnasium 1529. If today we know the mechanisms of human learning, then how do you assess the possibility of instant learning of languages, instant acquisition of skills by a person who ... many contacts?

Answer: From what we know about learning in humans and animals, it is a process that consists of separate, repetitive acts. In each of them, a certain unit of new knowledge is acquired. In order to master a language, we cannot do it in one leap. This requires thousands or tens of thousands of repetitions in a child who generates new hypotheses about the world around him and the sounds that he perceives, tries them, discards them, asserts, builds a scheme.

Transferring the results of such learning, which, by the way, is historical in the sense that each child goes through it in his own way, mechanically into the head of another person or even into artificial intelligence, is an impossible task today. One-time learning a new language is impossible in the same way as the one-time acquisition of the experience of five years of a child's life.

Question: Dmitry Novikov, gymnasium 1529, I wanted to ask, I heard that there are drugs that improve memory development, are there results, and what processes in the brain do they stop?

Answer: Such drugs exist. They have been known for a long time. Some of them are remedies known for centuries, they are usually herbal preparations. Others are chemicals. For example, drugs from the amphetamine group, which regulates the processes of signal transmission in nerve cells, were used to stimulate the ability to remember, pay attention, and learn during the Second World War, moreover, by both sides, both German and English, and American.

In the 50s there was a boom in their attempts to use them, for example, and students to improve the ability to remember large amounts of information while preparing for exams. And now, softer versions of these drugs, like Ritalin, for example, go to ... at least American universities, and some students use them. But it became clear that they have side effects.

That, firstly, they do not specifically affect memory, they rather affect the processes associated here ... they are psychotropic, not mnemotropic, they affect the processes associated with perception, attention, concentration, and so on.

Second. They can develop addiction, it is very unpleasant. The earlier this happens, the more dangerous it can be. Now drugs are being created that are able to act on signals that are already transmitted inside the nerve cell. Some of these cascades that have been discovered are patented. Drugs are being sought that can selectively modulate these properties of memory, without affecting the psychotropic component, that is, the psychogenic component.

The market for such substances is still very small, they are created mainly for the treatment of memory impairment in the elderly, especially in neurodegenerative diseases, but some of them may be used in the future as cognitive stimulants. At least in recent years, there has been an active discussion about the use of such cognitotropic or mnemotropic drugs by healthy people. On the responsibility of use, there are special ethical commissions that discuss whether this is acceptable or not? But the trend is clear. Such memory vitamins.

In parting, I wanted to say the following: you see, the questions that were asked, they concerned certain technologies, that is, the possibility of memory management, the possibility of obtaining a large amount of information at once, the possibility of transferring and mastering the language in a short time, the possibility of safe and effective pills to improve memory. It's all like that. But, since we are on the Culture channel, I would like to say about the other side that the knowledge of our memory is our knowledge of ourselves. Because, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez said: "Life is not the days that are lived, but those that are remembered." And the study of the mechanisms of the brain and memory - to a large extent for scientists who study this issue, is not the problem of creating new technologies, although this is important, but the problem of following the ancient oracle instructing - know yourself!

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Transcript of lectures by Konstantin Vladimirovich Anokhin:

But this synthesis may seem natural to many of you. I want to contrast it with what it was before, so that it is clear where we are and what phase we are moving into?

By the way, the ideas are as old as Plato's ideas about separateness, because Aristotle adhered to the concept of the unity of the brain and mind, or soul and body.

And after that, metaphysics should flourish, because whoever understands the baboon will do more for metaphysics than Locke.” This is a biological research program. This is a program that shows that our brain and mind are one. Intelligence is a function of the brain that has evolved. It was needed for adaptation, and we do not differ from animals in the cardinal properties of the presence of the soul or mind and their absence in animals. We must create a new theory of how the brain generates the processes of thinking, consciousness, psyche, based on these evolutionary principles.

In other words, in the 20th century the science of memory, which arose, as the historian of science Jan Hacking wrote, to secularize the soul, that unyielding core, of Western thought and practice, was influenced by the work of several of its outstanding pioneers Ebbinghaus in Germany, Ryabo in France , Korsakov in Russia, from philosophy to objective research in philosophy. And then, more importantly, to the study of memory in the working brain. Memory in the middle of the 20th century began to be studied not as a phenomenon outside the human brain and a product of the human brain, but as processes occurring inside the human brain when it remembers or retrieves memories.

In objective neurobiological studies of memory, it is customary to divide the question of the mechanisms of memory into three questions, into three problems.

Moreover, as you can see, by the fields of this expression, this expression concerns a huge number of nerve cells. It is located in various structures of the brain. As it turned out later, the places of expression depend very much on what subjective individual experience is being acquired by the brain at a given moment. For some forms of memory, these are one zone of expression, for others, they are different. We will come back to this when we talk about memory mapping.

Let's finish this piece. I think I'm talking 42 minutes, right? Do we have some time for questions?

Question: (badly heard) I have a question. … theory, ..unconsciously being…

Answer: Maybe. I will talk about this in the second part.

Question: Thank you. And then the second question. How finite is our memory...

Pay attention, here, of course, it is important what was done, here there was a memory for recognition, and not active reproduction. But, nevertheless, it is a different form of memory.

Question: Good afternoon!

Answer: Good afternoon.

So maybe in the next 10-15 years we will see significant progress in these areas. Whether they will reach the subjective experience and the human psyche is a very difficult question, I think not.

Question: Thank you.

Answer please. Break? Do we think it's a break or do you have more questions?

Question: Dmitry Novikov, gymnasium 1529, I wanted to ask, I heard that there are drugs that improve memory development, are there results, and what processes in the brain do they stop?

Good. Yes, let's do it.

Let's pay attention to this as well. Thanks a lot.

Transcript of lectures by Konstantin Vladimirovich Anokhin:
At a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called "The Future of the Brain", expressing the common opinion of many. And there is every reason to think that in the 21st century, in the science of the 21st century, the science of the brain and mind will occupy the same place as the science of genes and heredity occupied in the 20th century. And there is a very specific thought behind this.

But this synthesis may seem natural to many of you. I want to contrast it with what it was before, so that it is clear where we are and what phase we are moving into?

By the way, the ideas are as old as Plato's ideas about separateness, because Aristotle adhered to the concept of the unity of the brain and mind, or soul and body.

In objective neurobiological studies of memory, it is customary to divide the question of the mechanisms of memory into three questions, into three problems.

Let's finish this piece. I think I'm talking 42 minutes, right? Do we have some time for questions?

Question:(badly audible) I have a question. … theory, ..unconsciously being…

Answer: Maybe. I will talk about this in the second part.

Question: Thank you. And then the second question. How finite is our memory...

Answer: None of the experimental attempts to determine the amount and limits of memory did not lead to limits. For example, in one of the experiments conducted by the Canadian psychologist Stanling, it was investigated how many faces the students under test were able to remember. And they were shown different photographs with a short interval, and then, after some time, showing two photographs, they were asked to find out which one was shown and which one is new? It turned out that the first thing is that the fidelity is high and does not depend on the volume, that is, everything was limited only by the fatigue of the students. Up to 12 thousand photos, for example, were reproduced with an accuracy of up to 80 percent.

Pay attention, here, of course, it is important what was done, here there was a memory for recognition, and not active reproduction. But, nevertheless, it is a different form of memory.

Question: Good afternoon!

Answer: Good afternoon.

Question: RSUH student, if you will allow me, I would like to ask the following question. In the introductory part of the lecture, you spoke about such a new problem as the science of the brain and the science of the mind. This, of course, is also related to the issue you are dealing with, which is artificial intelligence. Over time, it seems to me, intelligent forms of life should become adaptive revolutionary developing, which, in general, can lead to get out of control. How much is this problem being studied now and when can it become relevant? And secondly, by creating such new forms of intellectual life, as you think, we will be ready for the development of such events when these new intellectual forms of life become, well, perhaps, the same creatures as we are now, because once upon a time this is also not far off and such a scenario is possible. Thank you.

Answer: I'm afraid to make a mistake in the forecast. In general, the experience of recent years shows that the progress that is being made in this area, in the field of brain and mind research, by the way, is not to the same extent in the field of artificial intelligence, where progress is slower, but, nevertheless, so amazing and unpredictable, that any forecasts may turn out to be a mistake in a few years. But my prediction is as follows.

So maybe in the next 10-15 years we will see significant progress in these areas. Whether they will reach the subjective experience and the human psyche is a very difficult question, I think not.

Question:….Marina… Gymnasium 1529. If today we know the mechanisms of human learning, then how do you assess the possibility of instantaneous learning of languages, instant acquisition of skills by a person who…many contacts?

Answer: From what we know about learning in humans and animals, it is a process that consists of separate, repetitive acts. In each of them, a certain unit of new knowledge is acquired. In order to master a language, we cannot do it in one leap. This requires thousands or tens of thousands of repetitions in a child who generates new hypotheses about the world around him and the sounds that he perceives, tries them, discards them, asserts, builds a scheme.

Question: Thank you.

Answer: Please. Break? Do we think it's a break or do you have more questions?

Question: Novikov Dmitry, gymnasium 1529, I wanted to ask, I heard that there are drugs that improve memory development, are there results, and what processes in the brain do they stop?

Answer: Such drugs exist. They have been known for a long time. Some of them are remedies known for centuries, they are usually herbal preparations. Others are chemicals. For example, drugs from the amphetamine group, which regulates the processes of signal transmission in nerve cells, were used to stimulate the ability to remember, pay attention, and learn during the Second World War, moreover, by both sides, both German and English, and American.

Break? We have 10 minutes.

Good. Yes, let's do it.

Let's pay attention to this as well. Thanks a lot.

At a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called "The Future of the Brain", expressing the common opinion of many. And there is every reason to think that in the 21st century, in the science of the 21st century, the science of the brain and mind will occupy the same place as the science of genes and heredity occupied in the 20th century. And there is a very specific thought behind this.

Just like the science of genes, molecular biology has created a single language, bringing together a huge number of biological disciplines under a single conceptual base: biology proper, its various branches, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, virology, and then further - molecular medicine, including including molecular biology of the brain among all branches, just as it is expected that the sciences of the brain and mind that develop in the 21st century will be the cementing factor that unifies and provides an objective basis for all types of human intellectual activity, everything related to it. Starting from human development and our personality, education, learning, language, culture, and moving into areas that have not yet learned concrete information about how the brain does it, to the field of human behavior in economic situations, which is now called neuroeconomics. In the field and human behavior in general in social systems. And in this sense, sociology, history, jurisprudence, art, because all art is, on the one hand, what the human brain generates, and, on the other hand, how our human brain perceives something as a work of art . All of them will depend on this new synthesis, the science of the brain and mind.

But this synthesis may seem natural to many of you. I want to contrast it with what it was before, so that it is clear where we are and what phase we are moving into?

Plato wrote in one of his "Dialogues" about the importance of the ability to divide nature into joints, that is, to divide it into natural components so that after this analysis we can naturally return to synthesis. By the way, in the mouth of Socrates, Plato called this ability dialectics, opposing this to the inability of some cooks to cut the body into different parts, despite the joints, this leads to a meaningless set of parts that are very difficult to synthesize later.

Here we have reason to think today that Plato made a big mistake in dividing nature into joints. Great minds make great mistakes. He separated brain and mind, he separated body and soul. Following this, such a division, the division of brain and mind, took root after the work of another great philosopher, René Descartes. According to Descartes, the whole world can be divided into two fundamental parts.

The first is an extended material substance, res extensa - these are our bodies, this is our brain, these are the bodies of animals, what animals have. And the second is an immortal soul, not an extended spiritual substance, which only a person possesses. This means that animals are automata, they are able to behave without the participation of the soul and mind, while a person has a soul, it determines his actions. And these two worlds are hardly compatible, because this is the world of spatial and non-spatial phenomena.

Here, in fact, we are in at least 400 years of tradition and inertia in the perception of the world, divided into these two parts - the brain and the mind. And what is happening today in the sciences of the brain, why this is an important point, blurs this line and shows that the work of the brain is the work of the mind, that the brain works as a huge population of millions, tens of millions, maybe sometimes hundreds of millions synchronously activated, included together with some activity of nerve cells. These groups of cells, functional systems are stored as a structure of our individual experience. And our mind is the manipulation of these groups.

Thus, one group is able to call another group into action, and the properties of these huge groups are not just physiological properties, but those subjective states - thoughts, emotions, experiences that we experience. In this respect, our brain and mind are one.

By the way, the ideas are as old as Plato's ideas about separateness, because Aristotle adhered to the concept of the unity of the brain and mind, or soul and body.

In fact, another great 19th-century thinker, Charles Darwin, formed the biological program for the unification of the brain and the mind, the return of the mind to nature. And this is very important. He connected back the mind of animals and the mind of man, introducing an evolutionary idea, he wrote in his notebook, which was called "M" - metaphysical, he began it under the influence of a conversation with his father, and wrote down his thoughts about behavior and mind.

By the way, after deciphering these notebooks published in the 80s, we begin to understand how deep Darwin was, and how deeply he thought about the brain and mind, and about the soul and thinking, as deeply as about biology in general and about evolution. And, as you can see, he recorded in 1938, surprisingly, by the way, a month and a half before his famous recording, when the idea of natural selection dictated by reading Malthus hit him. He wrote it down in August 1938: “The origin of man has now been proven, these thoughts wandered in him.

And after that, metaphysics should flourish, because whoever understands the baboon will do more for metaphysics than Locke.” This is a biological research program. This is a program that shows that our brain and mind are one. Intelligence is a function of the brain that has evolved. It was needed for adaptation, and we do not differ from animals in the cardinal properties of the presence of the soul or mind and their absence in animals. We must create a new theory of how the brain generates the processes of thinking, consciousness, psyche, based on these evolutionary principles.

And so, in fact, the 20th century witnessed one of these radical programs. When what was considered for many centuries as a property of the human soul, memory, and, by the way, back in the early 20th century in psychology textbooks, you could see the following definition: "Memory is a property of the soul." So what was considered a property of our soul, and this is our personality, our memory, our subjective experience, was translated into the study of how biological processes move, shape our memory and how it works in the brain.

In other words, in the 20th century the science of memory, which arose, as the historian of science Jan Hacking wrote, to secularize the soul, that unyielding core, of Western thought and practice, was influenced by the work of several of its outstanding pioneers Ebbinghaus in Germany, Ribot in France , Korsakov in Russia, from philosophy to objective research in philosophy. And then, more importantly, to the study of memory in the working brain. Memory in the middle of the 20th century began to be studied not as a phenomenon outside the human brain and a product of the human brain, but as processes occurring inside the human brain when it remembers or retrieves memories.

In objective neurobiological studies of memory, it is customary to divide the question of the mechanisms of memory into three questions, into three problems.

First, how is memory formed in the brain? Second, how is memory stored in the brain over the years? And third, how is memory selectively retrieved when needed? One of the first questions that was subjected to objective research was the question of the formation of memory. And here, research over the past few decades has moved from observing behavior at the time of memory formation in humans, animals, to how memory is stored due to the work of the genome of nerve cells?

The first steps in this regard were made by a young German who had begun to study memory at a young age ... Ebbinghaus, he came across the book "Objective Psychology" by Lunt, who described objectively psychological studies of perceptions, and thought that perhaps a person's memory can be used in the same way ... you can explore in the same way? And he composed a small number of meaningless syllables that he wrote on the tablets, shuffled these tablets and showed them to himself, then, after a while, testing his ability to remember them at different intervals of time. And one of the first things he discovered was that memory, at the moment of memorization, goes through two phases. The first is a short phase during the first minutes after receiving new information, where we are able to store almost all the information received.

Then there is a sharp decrease in the volume of filled information, but the information remaining after this period is stored for a very long time. It can be stored at a constant level for a week or even months, as Ebbinghaus discovered. Thus, Ebbinghaus made a fundamental discovery - he showed that memorization processes are uneven and have two phases. The first is short-term, where a lot of information is stored, and the second, long-term, where the amount of information is small, but it is maintained for a long time.

Very quickly, inspired by the work of Ebbinghaus, two other German psychologists Müller and Pilzecker, who worked in Göttingen at the end of the 19th century, asked themselves the question, what happens at the border of this transition from one phase of memory to another? Is it an active process? And they showed that if at the moment of memorization and transition from short-term to long-term memory a person is given a new task that he must remember, then this new task interferes with the memorization of old information, interferes with him. They called it retrograde interference, the influence of new information back on the process that occurs in the brain.

Based on this, they decided that in the brain, when memorization occurs, there is a very active process, and it requires the maximum amount of resources. If the brain is given another task at this time, then the second task overlaps the first, and does not allow the memory to form. It is very interesting that if these second tasks are given a little later, after 15-20 minutes, then this does not happen. From this they drew the important conclusion that memory passes in the brain during this transitional phase into a stable storage phase.

Neurologists very quickly confirmed this with their observations that in cases of disorders associated, for example, with concussions, with concussions, memory is lost for a short time preceding this concussion, which again indicates that the impact on the active process does not allow recent information to be remembered. . By the way, the same thing happens with convulsive seizures.

It became clear that, first, memory can be examined objectively. The second is that in the formation of memory there are certain phases associated with active processes in the brain, the nervous system, and, accordingly, these active processes in the nervous system can be objects for study in order to understand how memory is formed.

Then there was a rather long period when there were no fundamental discoveries in this area, because it is extremely difficult to study these processes on a person. You will not artificially injure or create a concussion to a person in order to check what he remembered, what not? You will not be able, or at least in those years it was impossible to look into what is happening in the human brain during these processes. And so the next radical step in this program of mental reduction, reduction of the soul, by the movement of molecules in the brain cells was taken when the American psychologist Carl Danton showed that everything is the same in animals. If you like, this is a wonderful illustration of Darwin's program to bring intelligence back into nature.

He showed that rats remember a lot of things. This was known before him in many studies. Then he showed the following thing. What if rats, after they have learned some new task, are given an interfering effect, for example, by causing them to have a short seizure with electroconvulsive shock, then if these seizures are applied immediately after the animal has learned something, it will not able to remember this information for a long time. He has short-term memory, and long-term memory is not formed. That is, this is the transition that was discovered by Ebbinghaus, it is in animals, and it is also affected by nerve activity in the same way.

But it turned out that, just as in the experiments of Muller and Pilzeker, if this electroconvulsive shock is postponed, for example, for 15 minutes after a training session, then it does not affect the forming memory in any way. Hence, these processes are universal. Indeed, over the next 20-30 years, it turned out that they can be observed in all animals capable of learning, from primates to invertebrates, for example, grape snails. You can induce seizure activity in a snail by injecting special drugs that cause seizures, and he will remember what he learned, if it is seizures that are applied immediately after learning. So this is the universal biology of the process.

But then the question arose, if we now have the tools for modeling memory and its consolidation in the brain of animals, we can ask the following question - what are the mechanisms that happen in brain cells? This was the heyday of molecular biology. And several groups of scientists thought at once that what is stored for a long time as information in the cells of the body must be associated with genetic information, because proteins are destroyed very quickly, which means that there must be some changes in the activity of genomes that associated with the DNA of nerve cells and changes in its properties.

And a hypothesis arose that, perhaps, the formation of long-term memory, look what a leap from the heart, is a change in the properties of the activity of the genome of nerve cells, a change in the properties of work and their DNA.

To test this, the Swedish scientist Holger Hiden did various and very beautiful experiments. For example, he taught rats to get to the feeder with food by ... balancing on a thin stretched inclined string. And the animals learned a new skill, a vestibular skill, and a motor skill to walk on that string. Or, for example, to get food with a paw that animals do not prefer to get it out of the cylinder, and among rats it is the same as among us, left-handed and right-handed, he looked at what kind of animal it was, and then gave him the opportunity to get it only with the opposite paw. Again, the animals learned.

It turned out that when animals learn these and other tasks, there is a surge in gene expression in their brains, there is an increase in RNA synthesis and an increase in protein synthesis. And this happens precisely in this phase immediately after the acquisition of new information and its transition to a long-term form, which was discovered by Ebbinghaus. That is, here again everything coincides.

But in biological research, as a rule, after purely correlative research, especially when it concerns animals, where biological processes can be manipulated, causal questions also follow. Not only does RNA and protein synthesis increase simultaneously with learning, that is, genes are expressed, it is important to ask - are they needed in order to remember new information? This may be an accidental concomitance of one process to another. And to test this, very quickly several groups of researchers, for example Flexner's group in the US, began to inject animals, when they are learning a new task, with an inhibitor of protein or RNA synthesis, that is, to prevent this wave, burst, of gene expression that accompanies the learning process.

It turned out that animals learn normally in this case, no old forms of behavior already developed are violated in them, moreover, they are able to remember what they have learned for a short time. But, as soon as it comes to the long phase of transition into long-term memory and storage of this memory for a week, months, this memory is absent in animals. That is, interference in the work of the genome and an obstacle to the synthesis of RNA and protein molecules at the moments of learning does not allow the formation of long-term memory. This means that long-term memory really depends on the work of the genome of nerve cells. And then it is very important to understand the questions, what kind of genes are turned on in nerve cells, what triggers them at the time of learning, and what are their functions? How does this translate into what we are able to experience ourselves as subjective ... our subjective experience?

In the mid-80s (70s) two groups of researchers, one in the Soviet Union and the other in Germany and Poland, simultaneously discovered such genes. In a group that worked in our country, we were looking for these genes together with employees at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics. And we were helped to find them by the hypothesis that the processes occurring in the brain at the time of the formation of a new experience, perhaps, involve the same cellular principles and mechanisms that are involved in the processes of development of the nervous system, the establishment of connections and differentiation of cells?

And, having discovered the work of one of the developmental regulator genes that encodes a protein that controls the work of many, many other genes, the so-called "transcription factor", we decided to look, here this expression is shown in red, you see, yes, in red in the cerebral cortex in 19 day-old rat embryo. We decided to see what happens in the adult brain with the work of this gene?

It turned out that animals that are in a familiar environment and do not learn anything new practically do not express this gene, nerve cells do not contain the products of this gene. But as soon as the animal gets into a situation that is new to him and she remembers it, an explosion of expression of this gene occurs in the brain.

Moreover, as you can see, by the fields of this expression, this expression concerns a huge number of nerve cells. It is located in various structures of the brain. As it turned out later, the places of expression depend very much on what subjective individual experience is being acquired by the brain at the moment. For some forms of memory, these are one zone of expression, for others, they are different. We will come back to this when we talk about memory mapping.

In the meantime, let's look at a simplified diagram of what happens in the cells of the nervous system when learning occurs? Stimuli, being translated into certain chemical molecules that act on the membrane of a neuron, nerve cell, transmit signals through the cytoplasm of the cell to the nucleus. And this is where the genes that I showed are activated, one of them on the previous slide, this is the c-Fos transcription factor.

Transcription factors differ in that the proteins they synthesize - this is the appearance of proteins in the cytoplasm - do not remain in the cytoplasm, but return back to the nucleus. And in the case of the genes of the c-Fos and c-Jun families, the second gene, which also turned out to be activated in a number of learning situations, they form complex complexes of proteins with each other, capable of influencing a huge number of sites in the genome of a nerve cell. These regions are the regulatory regions of other genes. In other words, the signal that comes to the nerve cell during learning, through many, many inputs, goes into the bottleneck of activation of several transcription factors, and then their effect branches and changes the program of the whole cell, because some of these genes are targets regulated by transcription factors. factors, increase their activity, and some are suppressed. If you like, the cell rearranges its program of work under the influence of the learning situation.

Why is this scheme interesting? First, it turned out that the formation of memory goes through two phases of protein synthesis and gene expression. The first is immediately after learning, when Ebbinghaus saw it, and then the so-called early genes are activated. But, after this, there is a second wave of activation after the action of the products of early genes on the genome. The so-called late genes.

Secondly, since the structure of early genes, their regulatory regions, as well as their ability to act on certain regulatory regions of other genes were well studied in cell biology, it became possible to decipher the other two questions. So, we, the first - found out what these genes are? Second, moving backwards from such genes, for example, one of the early genes is shown here. You can see that in the regulatory region of this gene, represented by this sequence, a lot of transcription factors are grouped, among which there are phos and juna, which I spoke about, there are genes that have other names, there is a transcription factor that has other names, for example, crepe .

And it turned out that, moving back along this chain, asking a question during training, early genes were activated, what caused them, what signals sat on their regulatory regions, what signals caused the regulators to bind to their regulatory regions, which of the secondary messengers of the cell transmitted these signals , and finally, which receptors were activated?

It was possible to decipher the sequence of signals from the nucleus, from the membrane to the genome of the nerve cell, which work during learning. And one of the pioneers in this research, the American neuroscientist Eric Kendel of Columbia University received the Nobel Prize for deciphering this cascade.

These studies have many interesting implications. They were unexpected. For example, it turned out that defects in some of these elements of the cascade not only cause learning disorders in adult animals, but also cause diseases associated with mental development disorders in children. This is an amazing thing. Because such diseases, for example, Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome, were considered for a long time as congenital diseases. Now we understand that in reality these are violations that lead to shortcomings in the possibility of early learning, the formation of memory in a child in the first weeks, months of their life. And it is precisely because of this that mental development is disturbed.

And the consequences for this are also different. It is one thing that for medical reasons this child may receive certain drugs that improve these learning abilities; another thing was to consider that this is a congenital disease that is not treated after birth.

Another unexpected thing that gradually began to emerge in the deciphering of these cascades is that they terribly, indeed, resemble in their constituent parts those cellular processes that occur during the differentiation of nerve cells in the developing brain. They often use the same signal molecules, moreover, some of these molecules were initially discovered during development, and then it turned out, like, for example, various neurotrophins, that they are signal molecules at the moments of learning.

And other molecules, such as the glutamate and NMDA receptors that accept it, were first studied in connection with learning, and then it turned out that they play a critical role in the time dependent on the activity of the neural networking stage in development. The same was true for various second messenger protein kinases, and, finally, for transcription factors and target genes.

As a result, we get the picture that when we look at development and learning, we see very similar molecular cascades. This means that each developmental episode closely resembles a learning episode, or that developmental processes never end in the adult brain. Each act of cognition for us is a small episode of morphogenesis and subsequent development. But pay attention - which one? - under cognitive control, as opposed to what happens during embryonic development. In other words, our knowledge, our psyche, our mind, determining the processes of acquiring new knowledge, are also triggers for the differentiation of cells that store this knowledge.

And, finally, one more important consequence. The fact that memory has molecular mechanisms and many of them are associated with processes that occur not between cells, but inside the cell, when the signal is transmitted from the membrane to the genome, means that in addition to psychotropic drugs that appeared in psychiatry in the 50s and are able to act on the transmission of signals between nerve cells that are able to regulate our perception, emotions, pain, behavior, and so on.

And in the future, we will have, and are beginning to appear, mnemotropic drugs that have a completely different effect. Since they act and will have to act on the processes that occur after the processing of information in the nervous networks associated only with their storage, we will not notice their effects on our behavior, they will not have side effects of excitation, inhibition, changes in our perception or attention processes. . But they will be able to modulate the processes of storing information for a long time. And such drugs are now being sought.

Thus, the questions of the molecular biology of memory, which arose from studies of the biological foundations of information storage in the brain, led to the following decisions: that the formation of long-term memory is based on the activation of a universal cascade of early and late genes, leading to a restructuring of the learning neuron, its molecular, protein phenotype.

We also know from recent studies, which I have not mentioned yet, that memory storage throughout life is carried out due to epigenetic rearrangements, that is, the state of the chromatin of nerve cells changes. The state of epigenetic memory in a neuron changes, the state of cell differentiation, stored as a result of learning, is possible for as long as the state of cell differentiation, which preserves its properties of a certain type of nerve cell at the time of development.

Let's finish this piece. I think I'm talking 42 minutes, right? Do we have some time for questions?

Question:(badly audible) I have a question. … theory, ..unconsciously being…

Answer:Maybe. I will talk about this in the second part.

Question:Thank you. And then the second question. How finite is our memory...

Answer:None of the experimental attempts to determine the amount and limits of memory did not lead to limits. For example, in one of the experiments conducted by the Canadian psychologist Stanling, it was investigated how many faces the students under test were able to remember. And they were shown different photographs with a short interval, and then, after some time, showing two photographs, they were asked to find out which one was shown and which one is new? It turned out that the first thing is that the fidelity is high and does not depend on the volume, that is, everything was limited only by the fatigue of the students. Up to 12 thousand photos, for example, were reproduced with an accuracy of up to 80 percent.

Pay attention, here, of course, it is important what was done, here there was a memory for recognition, and not active reproduction. But, nevertheless, it is a different form of memory.

Question: Good afternoon!

Answer: Good afternoon.

Question:RSUH student, if you will allow me, I would like to ask the following question. In the introductory part of the lecture, you spoke about such a new problem as the science of the brain and the science of the mind. This, of course, is also related to the issue you are dealing with, which is artificial intelligence. Over time, it seems to me, intelligent forms of life should become adaptive revolutionary developing, which, in general, can lead to get out of control. How much is this problem being studied now and when can it become relevant? And secondly, by creating such new forms of intellectual life, as you think, we will be ready for the development of such events when these new intellectual forms of life become, well, perhaps, the same creatures as we are now, because once upon a time this is also not far off and such a scenario is possible. Thank you.

Answer:I'm afraid to make a mistake in the forecast. In general, the experience of recent years shows that the progress that is being made in this area, in the field of brain and mind research, by the way, is not to the same extent in the field of artificial intelligence, where progress is slower, but, nevertheless, so amazing and unpredictable, that any forecasts may turn out to be a mistake in a few years. But my prediction is as follows.

We do not yet have creatures capable of, as artificial intelligence, to - first: solving the same problems that a person solves, even approximately, especially in conditions of changing adaptive situations.

DARPA, the U.S. defense agency, launched a new AI program a couple of years ago, saying they were ceasing to fund all classical AI research because they thought the biological brain was superior to the best existing brain when it comes to solving adaptive problems. forms of artificial intelligence built on current architectures, at times from a million to a billion times. Can you imagine the difference?! It's not a question of speed of operations. It is a question of the ability to generate new solutions in a dynamically changing environment.

When will this barrier be overcome a million and a billion times? Well, maybe this is the foreseeable future, at least several groups of universities and IBM have begun research on a new architecture, where its elements both learn and are able to calculate, that is, similar to what a real nervous system does, where there is no separate memory storages, and separately - information elements.

I think that artificial intelligence has another difficult problem. That until now all the systems that we create, the initial condition of their behavior are invested in them by the creator of man, that is, she is not able to generate these initial conditions herself. She didn't have evolution. But even this is overcome in models of artificial life, evolutionary work, where they start with very simple neural networks. Then they are allowed to develop in the environment, gradually solving adaptive tasks. And even the adaptive tasks themselves arise for this intellect new, which were not laid down by the creators.

So maybe in the next 10-15 years we will see significant progress in these areas. Whether they will reach the subjective experience and the human psyche is a very difficult question, I think not.

Question:….Marina… Gymnasium 1529. If today we know the mechanisms of human learning, then how do you assess the possibility of instantaneous learning of languages, instant acquisition of skills by a person who…many contacts?

Answer:From what we know about learning in humans and animals, it is a process that consists of separate, repetitive acts. In each of them, a certain unit of new knowledge is acquired. In order to master a language, we cannot do it in one leap. This requires thousands or tens of thousands of repetitions in a child who generates new hypotheses about the world around him and the sounds that he perceives, tries them, discards them, asserts, builds a scheme.

Transferring the results of such learning, which, by the way, is historical in the sense that each child goes through it in his own way, mechanically into the head of another person or even into artificial intelligence, is an impossible task today. One-time learning a new language is impossible in the same way as the one-time acquisition of the experience of five years of a child's life.

Question: Thank you.

Answer:Please. Break? Do we think it's a break or do you have more questions?

Question:Novikov Dmitry, gymnasium 1529, I wanted to ask, I heard that there are drugs that improve memory development, are there results, and what processes in the brain do they stop?

Answer:Such drugs exist. They have been known for a long time. Some of them are remedies known for centuries, they are usually herbal preparations. Others are chemicals. For example, drugs from the amphetamine group, which regulates the processes of signal transmission in nerve cells, were used to stimulate the ability to remember, pay attention, and learn during the Second World War, moreover, by both sides, both German and English, and American.

In the 50s there was a boom in their attempts to use them, for example, and students to improve the ability to remember large amounts of information while preparing for exams. And now, softer versions of these drugs, like Ritalin, for example, go to ... at least American universities, and some students use them. But it became clear that they have side effects.

That, firstly, they do not specifically affect memory, they rather affect the processes associated here ... they are psychotropic, not mnemotropic, they affect the processes associated with perception, attention, concentration, and so on.

Second. They can develop addiction, it is very unpleasant. The earlier this happens, the more dangerous it can be. Now drugs are being created that are able to act on signals that are already transmitted inside the nerve cell. Some of these cascades that have been discovered are patented. Drugs are being sought that can selectively modulate these properties of memory, without affecting the psychotropic component, that is, the psychogenic component.

The market for such substances is still very small, they are created mainly for the treatment of memory impairment in the elderly, especially in neurodegenerative diseases, but some of them may be used in the future as cognitive stimulants. At least in recent years, there has been an active discussion about the use of such cognitotropic or mnemotropic drugs by healthy people. On the responsibility of use, there are special ethical commissions that discuss whether this is acceptable or not? But the trend is clear. Such memory vitamins.

Break? We have 10 minutes.

Voice behind the scene:We need to record your farewell to the audience, can we do it?

-Good. Yes, let's do it.

In parting, I wanted to say the following: you see, the questions that were asked, they concerned certain technologies, that is, the possibility of memory management, the possibility of obtaining a large amount of information at once, the possibility of transferring and mastering the language in a short time, the possibility of safe and effective pills to improve memory. It's all like that. But, since we are on the Culture channel, I would like to say about the other side that the knowledge of our memory is our knowledge of ourselves. Because, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez said: "Life is not the days that are lived, but those that are remembered." And the study of the mechanisms of the brain and memory - to a large extent for scientists who study this issue, is not the problem of creating new technologies, although this is important, but the problem of following the ancient oracle instructing - know yourself!

Let's pay attention to this as well. Thanks a lot.

Scientist Konstantin Anokhin, who heads the laboratory of memory neurobiology at the Institute of Normal Physiology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, is one of Russia's leading experts on the mechanisms of the brain, memory and consciousness. The organizers of the Brainstorms symposium invited him to discuss with Marina Abramovich the question of the nature of genius, the place of creativity in the evolution of the brain and artistic intuition. T&P took the opportunity to talk with Anokhin about a new language for describing consciousness, the evils of British mechanism, and how art can help brain research.

Recently, a seminar was held in Moscow by the founder of transpersonal psychology. He believes that believing that consciousness is just a product of the activity of the brain is the same as believing that television shows are created on TV.

I think that this comparison is nothing more than a beautiful metaphor, paying tribute to the deaths of bygone days. Behind it is an old thought, coming from Descartes: our mind is not a product of the brain, which is just a tool that ensures the impact of consciousness on the body. In my opinion, these claims have long been refuted by science. To believe today that our consciousness is created outside of our brain, just as television programs are created outside of the TV, is tantamount to believing that man, unlike other animals, has an extraterrestrial origin. If your brain, filled with information about biological evolution and the unity of our genetic code with all other living beings on Earth, does not explode from the absurdity of this idea, then nothing prevents you from adding to it the belief that our thoughts and desires arise outside of our brain , and he only serves as a television receiver for them.

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, many spoke of the existence of a certain life force or entelechy as the main essence of the living. Then, with the discovery of the functions of DNA and the subsequent revolution in biology, the need for these terms disappeared. You are unlikely to meet them in the worldview of a modern enlightened person. At the same time, we may have lost some of the mystical appeal of these concepts, but we understand what is happening and how. When scientists decompose some very complex phenomenon into its component parts, they really deprive it of a sense of mystery and magic. In neuroscience studies of what has been called the soul for centuries, the same trend is observed. And this is the path of human knowledge that has justified itself - the scientific knowledge of the world.

However, I see a certain danger in this movement. Reductionist neuroscience, which studies cells, synapses, neurotransmitters, is making huge strides. But she does not give answers to seemingly simple questions: what is the red color of a red rose from the point of view of the brain. Or how thought leads to action, such as curling a finger. Scientists continue today to search for the correct scientific language and methodology for describing such distinctive features of the whole. I think that contacts with art, which is based on the capture of some unique properties of the whole - a work of art, may turn out to be very important for science.

Have you studied various meditation practices or states of altered consciousness? After all, with the help of the same holotropic breathing, for example, you can see what a person could never see. That is, you come into contact with what could not be in your previous life experience. Are these states just hallucinations?

Lectures by Konstantin Anokhin:

About the latest research demonstrating the possibility of registering thought processes in the brain of humans and animals.

About the questions investigated in the Laboratory of neurobiology of memory.

No, I don't deal with such matters. They generally lie outside of science, as methods of working with testable hypotheses. However, modern neuroscience can investigate what happens in the human brain during such states. For example, when a person takes mescaline or LSD and experiences hallucinations. By brain activity, researchers are already learning to reconstruct what a particular person sees. For example, in a recent work by Jack Gallant and staff at the University of California, Berkeley, they showed subjects short YouTube videos and analyzed their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. And then they built a mathematical model that allows using maps of brain activity to restore the video sequence that a person sees. These and other similar approaches are called "brain reading" methods. The next step is to learn how to read dreams. And this is already very close to reading visual hallucinations and what you are talking about. Currently, there are also laboratories, for example,. It is important to understand that those with whom they work are people who have many years of experience in meditation practice, and not those who, after several trainings, have felt an altered state.

What experiment have you been dreaming about for a long time?

I am very interested in how the human brain works when it is at its limits. In both art and science, truly amazing things happen when an artist or scientist tries to solve an unsolvable problem, sets a goal that is beyond his abilities, overcomes this barrier and surpasses himself. Perhaps at this moment events begin to occur in the brain that can be very different from the ordinary processes that we model in the course of ordinary psychological experiments that do not change the personality of the subject. Therefore, I would very much like to see what happens in the brain at moments of such an elevation of a person above himself. For example, such outstanding artists as Marina Abramovic during her performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which, as she herself says, dramatically transformed her personality. Or, for example, with Eastern masters in the field of meditative practice.

Konstantin Anokhin and Marina Abramovich at the Brainstorms Symposium.

Do you share Richard Dawkins' idea that we are just machines controlled by genes? Do you believe in free will?

No, I think that Dawkins behaves like a classic mechanist in this matter. In this he can be compared with many representatives of the Anglo-Saxon mechanistic tradition - for example, with the famous brain researcher of the beginning of the last century, Charles Sherrington. In their scientific activity, they decompose the object under study into components and see in it purely mechanical processes, like a machine. But not being able to deny the reality of consciousness and reason, they naturally end their philosophical path with different versions of dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, even mysticism. In my opinion, all this is a sad consequence of the lack of good philosophical and methodological training among some even very good scientists.

Are soul and psyche the same for you?

In Greek or English it's the same. But in different cultures, this concept has a different content. For example, in Russian psychology, the psyche is a concept that is rather connected with the English term mind - mind. It seems to me that all these are rather etymological problems or disputes about the "true" meaning of this or that word. They will gradually disappear as we begin to understand the essence of the processes taking place in the brain. It doesn't matter how mankind named certain phenomena, not yet clearly understanding their nature. In this regard, I am not a supporter of the common scientific practice to always start with definitions. An accurate definition is often the result of scientific research, and not a condition for starting it.

During your discussion, I got the impression that you are not talking about science, but about something that is not amenable to rigorous analysis, about metaphysics. There was a certain uncertainty - yours and your colleagues. Do you believe that we will ever be able to speak clearly about the brain and consciousness?

I think so. What humanity is now experiencing is a unique moment in a great historical perspective. Science, which until now has studied the world around us and partly our own organism, has moved on to the study of who we ourselves are with our entire inner world. My belief is that the study of the brain is now entering a phase where it is transforming a huge number of humanitarian problems and disciplines: sociology, politics, economics, creativity studies, understanding of what art is. Just as in the 20th century, molecular biology gave a new language and changed a huge number of areas not directly prescribed in it: evolutionary biology, medicine, oncology, immunology, microbiology.

Three philosophical theories of consciousness:

Dualism The founder of this theory is Rene Descartes, who argued that man is a thinking substance capable of doubting the existence of everything except his own consciousness.

emergent theory The theory that although consciousness is a property of some physical object (usually the brain), it is nevertheless not reducible to the physical states of the latter and is a special irreducible entity.

Two-aspect theory The theory that mental and physical are two properties of some underlying reality that is neither mental nor physical.

After all, all these humanitarian problems are the product of the activity of the human brain. One person creates a work of art - the brain works, others perceive this art - the brain works. And today, for the first time in human history, the brain is becoming, thanks to research in neuroscience, open to understanding these processes.

Of course, this is a complex process - perhaps as complex as the transition from classical physics to quantum physics at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the era of storm and stress, the search for, as you rightly say, a new language. A very complex language in the sense that when describing physical processes at the quantum level, as Bohr believed, we are not describing reality itself, but, in fact, how we perceive this reality. That is, the patterns and framework of human knowledge are part of our description of the world around us. At the same time, we must be modest: It is not known how many hundreds of years the process of scientific knowledge of man himself will last. Let's remember how in mathematics scientists fight for centuries to prove certain theorems. But I am sure that we have already embarked on this path.

Another difficulty of this path is that with the help of our language it is very difficult to describe such subtle processes as acts of one's own thinking or creativity, because it was provided by biological evolution for completely different purposes. But perhaps art is just the tool that will help us do this. It is no coincidence that Bohr, who struggled with his own classical model of the atom, realizing its limitations, paid such attention to art. For example, he was very inspired by the works of cubism, because he found in them a kind of metaphor to describe what could not be conveyed in ordinary human language. A description not of a simple, linear and continuous reality, but of a reality in which all facets are broken and curved. Perhaps the language of art is also such a complementary tool for understanding the soul and mind.