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According to Francis Crick’s astonishing hypothesis, “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”. This strongly reductionist statement suggests that an understanding of mind and cognition will straightforwardly follow from an understanding of the biology of the nervous system. In contrast the enactivist (or situated and embodied cognition) movement in the cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence communities has argued that mind itself does not reside solely within the brain but only rightly emerges from the interaction of brain/body and environment.

To date the latter idea has had little impact on the neuroscience community and a ‘stand alone’ brain view of cognition and behaviour has become increasingly entrenched. For example while 50 years ago your local GP was likely to suggest a change in environment to treat the vast majority of mental illnesses now they will almost certainly prescribe one of a vast number of new designer pharmaceuticals that target an increasing variety of identified neural pathways.

I believe that recent experimental innovations in the neurosciences mean that this state of affairs is beginning to radically change. Closed-loop experimental paradigms, virtual reality in mice and fish, and well circumscribed sensory-motor systems are becoming more widespread. Consequently, in vivo electrophysiology and optogenetics of behaving animals is quickly becoming an achievable gold standard. This work places the interaction of the brain/body and environment at the heart of accounts of brain function.

In this talk I will start by describing the intuitions about the role of the brain/body/environment interactions in accounts of cognition that were developed by evolutionary roboticists ( an AI methodology developed here at Sussex). I will describe my current work developing these intuitions in collaboration with several experimental laboratories using closed-loop technologies to argue that brain/body/environment interactions are necessary for accounts of neural function. I will finish by describing how, in agreement with the enactivist movement, this work strongly suggests we are not just our brains but who we are only rightly emerges from the interaction of our brain/body and environment.

By: Luke Scott
Last updated: Tuesday, 18 March 2014