Scientist Konstantin Anokhin, who heads the laboratory of neurobiology of memory at the Institute of Normal Physiology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, is one of the main experts in Russia on the mechanisms of brain function, memory and consciousness. The organizers of the Brainstorms symposium invited him to discuss with Marina Abramovic 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 the new language for describing consciousness, the evils of British mechanicalism 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 brain is the same as believing that television programs are created in the television.
I think that this comparison is nothing more than a beautiful metaphor, paying tribute to the repose of days long gone. Behind it is an ancient thought, dating back to Descartes: our mind is not a product of the brain, which is just a tool that ensures the influence of consciousness on the body. In my opinion, these statements 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 television, is tantamount to believing that man, unlike other animals, is of 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 conviction that our thoughts and desires arise outside of our brain , and he only serves as a television receiver for them.
Even at the beginning of the 20th century, many spoke about the existence of a certain vital force or entelechy as the main essence of living things. 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 find 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 break down a very complex phenomenon into its component parts, they really take away the sense of mystery and magic from it. In neurobiological studies of what has been called the soul for centuries, the same trend is observed. And this is a proven path of human knowledge - scientific knowledge of the world.
However, I also see a certain danger in this movement. Reductionist neuroscience, which studies cells, synapses, and neurotransmitters, has made huge strides. But it does not provide answers to seemingly simple questions: what is the red color of a red rose from the point of view of brain function? Or how a thought leads to an action, such as bending a finger. Scientists continue today to search for the correct scientific language and methodology in order to describe such distinctive features of the whole. I think that in this regard, contacts with art may be very important for science, which is based on capturing certain unique properties of the whole - a work of art.
Have you explored various meditative practices or states of altered consciousness? After all, with the help of the same holotropic breathing, for example, you can see something that a person could never see. That is, you come into contact with something that could not have happened in your previous life experience. Are these states just hallucinations?
Lectures by Konstantin Anokhin:
About the latest research demonstrating the possibility of recording mental processes in the brain of humans and animals.
About the issues being studied in the Laboratory of Neurobiology of Memory.
No, I don't deal with such issues. They generally lie outside the boundaries of science, as methods of working with testable hypotheses. However, modern neuroscience can study what happens in the human brain during such conditions. For example, when a person takes mescaline or LSD and experiences hallucinations. Based on brain activity, researchers are already learning to reconstruct what a person sees. For example, in recent work by Jack Gallanta and collaborators at the University of Berkeley in California, 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 them to reconstruct the video sequence that a person sees using brain activity maps. These and other similar approaches are called “brain reading” methods. The next stage is to learn to read dreams. And this is 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 they work with are people who have many years of experience in meditation practice, and not those who have felt an altered state after a few sessions.
What experiment have you been dreaming of for a long time?
I'm very interested in how the human brain works when it's at its limits. In both art and science, truly amazing things happen when an artist or scientist tries to solve an impossible problem, sets a goal that is beyond his strength, overcomes this barrier and surpasses himself. Perhaps at this moment events begin to occur in the brain that may be very different from the ordinary processes that we simulate in the course of ordinary psychological experiments that do not change the personality of the subject. Therefore, I would really like to see what happens in the brain at moments when a person rises 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, from Eastern masters in the field of meditative practice.
Konstantin Anokhin and Marina Abramovich at the Brainstorms symposium.
Do you subscribe to Richard Dawkins's idea that we are just machines controlled by genes? Do you believe in free will?
No, I think Dawkins is being a classic mechanist on this issue. In this he can be compared with many representatives of the Anglo-Saxon mechanistic tradition - for example, with the famous brain researcher of the early last century, Charles Sherrington. In their scientific activities, 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 mind, they naturally end their philosophical path with various 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.
For you, are the soul and the psyche the same thing?
In Greek or English it is the same thing. But in different cultures this concept has different meanings. For example, in Russian psychology, psyche is a concept that is rather connected with the English term mind - mind. It seems to me that these are all rather etymological problems or disputes about the “true” meaning of this or that word. They will gradually go away as we begin to understand the essence of the processes occurring in the brain. It does not matter what humanity has named some phenomena without yet clearly understanding their nature. In this regard, I am not a supporter of the common scientific practice of always starting with definitions. A precise definition is often the outcome of scientific research, rather than a condition for its initiation.
During your discussion, I got the impression that you are not talking about science, but about something that cannot be strictly analyzed, about metaphysics. There was a certain uncertainty felt - yours and your colleagues'. Do you believe that we will ever learn to talk clearly about the brain and consciousness?
I think so. What humanity is experiencing now is a unique moment in the grand historical perspective. Science, which until now had been studying the world around us and partly our own body, has moved on to studying who we ourselves are with all our inner world. My belief is that the study of the brain is now entering a phase where it is transforming a huge number of humanities 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 covered by 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 nevertheless cannot be reduced 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 of the brain that is neither mental nor physical.
After all, all these humanitarian problems are a 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 an era of storm and stress, a search for, as you rightly say, a new language. A very complex language in the sense that, by describing physical processes at the quantum level, as Bohr believed, we are not describing reality itself, but essentially how we perceive this reality. That is, the patterns and framework of human cognition turn out to be part of our description of the surrounding world. At the same time, we must be modest: It is unknown how many hundreds of years the process of man’s scientific knowledge of himself will last. Let us remember how in mathematics scientists struggle 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 in them he found a certain metaphor to describe what cannot be conveyed in ordinary human language. A description of not a simple, linear and continuous reality, but a reality in which all the edges are broken and curved. Perhaps the language of art is also such a complementary tool for understanding the soul and mind.
Konstantin Anokhin - professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, head of the department of systemogenesis at the Institute of Normal Physiology named after. PC. Anokhina and head of the Russian-British laboratory for the neurobiology of memory. The lecture is devoted to the latest research into the physiology of memory, the mechanisms of storage, retrieval and reproduction of information, the ability to remember, and the dependence of memory processes on circumstances.
Transcript of lectures by Konstantin Vladimirovich Anokhin:
At a symposium at MIT called “The Future of the Brain,” expressing the consensus 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, uniting a huge number of biological disciplines under a single conceptual framework: biology itself, its various branches, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, virology, then further - molecular medicine, including including molecular biology of the brain among all branches, in the same way it is expected that the sciences about the brain and mind developing in the 21st century will be a cementing factor, unifying and providing objective grounds 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 gained specific information about how the brain does this, in the field of human behavior in economic situations, which is now called neuroeconomics. In the field of 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 . They will all 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 happened 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 at its joints, that is, to divide it into natural components so that after this analysis we can return naturally to synthesis. By the way, in the mouth of Socrates, Plato called this ability dialectic, contrasting this with 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.
Today we have reason to think that Plato made a major mistake in dividing nature into joints. Great minds make great mistakes. He separated the brain and the mind, he separated the body and the soul. Following this, this 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 the immortal soul, an unextended spiritual substance that only man possesses. This means that animals are automata, they are able to behave without the participation of the soul and mind, but man has a soul, it determines his actions. And these two worlds are difficult to combine, because this is a world of spatial and non-spatial phenomena.
Here, in fact, we are in at least a 400-year tradition and inertia of perception of the world, divided into these two parts - the brain and the mind. And what is happening today in the brain sciences, why this is an important moment, erases this line and shows that the work of the brain is also the work of the mind, that the brain works as a huge population of millions, tens of millions, maybe sometimes hundreds of millions synchronously activating, turning on along with some activity of nerve cells. These groups of cells, functional systems, are stored as the structure of our individual experience. And our mind is the manipulation of these groups.
Thus, one group is capable of causing another group to act, and the properties of these huge groups are not just physiological properties, but those subjective states - thoughts, emotions, experiences that we experience. In this regard, our brain and mind are one.
By the way, the ideas are as ancient as Plato’s ideas about separateness, because Aristotle adhered to precisely the concept of the unity of the brain and mind, or soul and body.
Actually, the biological program for unifying the brain and mind, returning mind to nature, was formed by another great thinker of the 19th century, Charles Darwin. And this is very important. He connected back the mind of animals and the mind of man, introducing the evolutionary idea, he wrote down 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 there.
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 the mind, and about the soul and thinking, as deeply as about biology in general and about evolution. And, as you can see, he wrote down in 1938, surprisingly, a month and a half before his famous recording, when he was struck by the idea of natural selection, dictated by reading Malthus. He wrote this down in August 1938: “The origin of man is now proven, these thoughts fermented within him.
And after this metaphysics should flourish, because he who 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. The mind is a function of the brain that arose in evolution. It was needed for adaptation, and we do not differ from animals in the cardinal properties of the presence of a soul or mind and their absence in animals. We must create a new theory of how the brain generates the processes of thinking, consciousness, and 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 to be a property of the human soul was 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 drive, 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 Ian Hacking wrote, to secularize the soul, that intractable core, of Western thought and practice, was influenced by the works of several of its prominent pioneers: Ebbinghaus in Germany, Ribot in France , Korsakov in Russia, from philosophy to objective research in philosophy. And then, more importantly, to studies of memory in the working brain. Memory in the mid-20th century began to be studied not as a phenomenon located outside the human brain and a product of the human brain, but also 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 memory mechanisms into three questions, three problems.
The first is how memory is formed in the brain? Second, how is memory stored in the brain over many 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 memory formation. And here, over the past few decades, research has moved from observing behavior at the moment of memory formation in humans and animals, to how memory is stored due to the work of the genome of nerve cells?
The first steps in this regard were taken by a young German who began studying memory at a young age... Ebbinghaus, he came across the book “Objective Psychology” by Lunt, who described objective psychological studies of perceptions, and thought that maybe human memory can be used in the same way... you can explore in the same way? And he composed a small number of nonsense syllables, which he wrote on tablets, shuffled these tablets and showed them to himself, then, after a while, testing his ability to remember them at different intervals. And one of the first things that 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 the same level for weeks or even months, as Ebbinghaus discovered. Thus, Ebbinghaus made a fundamental discovery - he showed that the processes of memorization 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, working in Göttingen at the end of the 19th century, began to wonder what happens at the boundary of this transition from one phase of memory to another? Is this an active process? And they showed that if, at the moment of memorization and the 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 and interferes with it. They called it retrograde interference, the influence of new information backwards on a process that occurs in the brain.
Based on this, they decided that in the brain, when memorization occurs, a very active process takes place, 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 stage 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 the concussion, which again suggests that the impact on the active process does not allow recent information to be remembered . By the way, the same things happen during seizures.
It became clear that, firstly, memory can be studied objectively. The second is that in the formation of memory there are certain phases associated with active processes in the brain and nervous system, and, accordingly, these active processes in the nervous system can be objects of study in order to understand how memory is formed.
Then there was a fairly long period when there were no fundamental discoveries in this area, because it is extremely difficult to study these processes in humans. You won’t artificially injure or create a concussion in a person in order to check what he remembers and what he doesn’t? You cannot, or at least in those years it was impossible, to look into what happens in the human brain during these processes. And therefore, the next radical step in this program of reduction of the psyche, reduction of the soul, by the movement of molecules in brain cells was taken when the American psychologist Carl Danton showed that everything is the same in animals. This is, if you like, a wonderful illustration of Darwin's program for returning intelligence to nature.
He showed that rats remember a lot of things. This was known before him in many studies. Then he showed the next 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-term attack of convulsions with an electroconvulsive shock, then if these convulsions are inflicted immediately after the animal has learned something, it will not able to remember this information for a long time. He has short-term memory, but long-term memory is not formed. That is, this is the transition that was discovered by Ebbinghaus, it exists in animals, and it is also susceptible to influencing nervous activity.
But it turned out that, just as in the experiments of Müller and Pilzecker, if this electroconvulsive shock is postponed, for example, by 15 minutes after the training session, then it does not affect the developing memory in any way. This means that these processes are universal. And 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 it will remember what it learned, as long as the seizures are given immediately after training. This means that this is a universal biology of the process.
But then the question arose: if we now have the tools to model memory and its consolidation in the brain of animals, we can ask the following question - what are the mechanisms, what happens in brain cells? This was the heyday of molecular biology. And several groups of scientists immediately thought 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 some changes must occur 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 the work and their DNA.
To test this, the Swedish scientist Holger Heeden did various and very beautiful experiments. For example, he taught rats to get to a feeder with food by... balancing on a thin, stretched, inclined string. And the animals learned a new skill, the vestibular skill, and the motor skill of walking on this string. Or, for example, to get food with a paw, which animals do not prefer to get it out of the cylinder, and among rats there are just like among us, left-handed and right-handed, he looked at what kind of animal it was, and then gave it the opportunity to get it only with the opposite paw. Again the animals learned.
It turns out that when animals learn these and other tasks, their brains experience a surge in gene expression, 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 the long-term form that Ebbinghaus discovered. That is, everything coincides here again.
But in biological research, purely correlative research, especially in animals where biological processes can be manipulated, tends to be followed by causal questions. 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 for new information to be remembered? This may be the accidental accompaniment of one process to another. And to test this, very quickly several groups of researchers, for example, Flexner's group in the USA, began to inject animals, when they are learning a new task, with an inhibitor of protein or RNA synthesis, that is, to interfere with this wave, a surge, of gene expression that accompanies the learning process.
It turned out that animals learn normally, no old forms of behavior that have already been developed are disturbed 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 to long-term memory and storage of this memory for a week, months, this memory is absent in animals. That is, interference with the functioning of the genome and obstruction of the synthesis of RNA molecules and proteins during learning prevents the formation of long-term memory. This means that long-term memory really depends on the functioning 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 moment 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 second in Germany and Poland, simultaneously discovered such genes. In a group that worked in our country, we specifically looked for these genes together with employees at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics. And what helped us find them was 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 cell differentiation?
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 of 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 an animal finds itself in a situation that is new to it and it remembers it, an explosion of expression of this gene occurs in the brain.
Moreover, as you can see from the fields of this expression, this expression concerns a huge number of nerve cells. Located in a variety of brain structures. As it turned out later, the places of expression very much depend on what kind of subjective individual experience the brain is currently acquiring. For some forms of memory these are certain zones of expression, for others they are different. We'll come back to this more 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, translated into certain chemical molecules acting on the membrane of a neuron or 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 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 turns out to be activated in a number of learning situations, they form complex protein complexes with each other, capable of influencing a huge number of regions in the genome of a nerve cell. These regions are regulatory regions of other genes. In other words, the signal coming to the nerve cell during learning, through many, many inputs, goes to the bottleneck of activation of several transcription factors, and then their effect branches out 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 work program under the influence of the learning situation.
Why was this scheme interesting? Firstly, it turned out that memory formation goes through two phases of protein synthesis and gene expression. The first is immediately after training, 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 early gene products on the genome. The so-called late genes.
Second, since the structure of early genes, their regulatory regions, as well as their ability to act on certain regulatory regions of other genes have been well studied in cell biology, it has become possible to decipher the other two questions. So, first of all, we found out what genes these are? Second, moving back from such genes, here is shown, for example, one of the early genes. You see that on the regulatory site of this gene, represented by this sequence, a mass of transcription factors are grouped, among which there are phos and juna, which I talked about, there are genes that have other names, there is a transcription factor that have 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 landed on their regulatory sites, what signals caused the binding of regulators to their regulatory sites, which of the cell’s second messengers 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, American neuroscientist Eric Kendel from Columbia University, received the Nobel Prize for deciphering this cascade.
These studies have many interesting implications. They turned out to be unexpected. For example, it turns out that defects in some of these elements of the cascade not only cause learning disabilities 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 to be congenital diseases. Now we understand that in reality these are disorders that lead to deficiencies in early learning opportunities, the formation of memory in a child in the first weeks and months of their life. And it is precisely because of this that mental development is impaired.
And the consequences for this are also different. It is one thing when, for medical reasons, this child can 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 become clear in deciphering these cascades is that they are eerily, indeed, reminiscent in their constituent parts of those cellular processes that occur during the differentiation of nerve cells in the developing brain. They often use the same signaling molecules, and some of these molecules were first discovered during development, and then it turned out, like, for example, various neurotrophins, that they are also signaling molecules during learning.
And other molecules, such as the glutamate and NMDA receptors that accept it, were initially studied in connection with learning and then turned out to play a critical role in the time-dependent activity of the neural connection stage of development. The same applies to various second messenger protein kinases, and, finally, transcription factors and target genes.
The picture we get is that when we look at development and learning, we see very similar molecular cascades. This means that each episode of development closely resembles an episode of learning, or that in the adult brain developmental processes never end. 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 occurs 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 a 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 capable of acting on the transmission of signals between nerve cells that are capable of regulating 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 processes that occur after the processing of information in neural networks associated only with their storage, we will not notice their effects on our behavior, they will not have the side effects of excitation, inhibition, changes in the processes of our perception or attention . But they will be able to modulate the processes of memorizing information for a long time. And such drugs are now being sought.
Thus, questions of the molecular biology of memory, which arose from studies of the biological basis 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 the restructuring of the learning neuron, its molecular, protein phenotype.
We also know from research in recent years, something that I have not talked about 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, preserving its properties of a nerve cell of a certain type at the time of development.
Let's finish this fragment here. I think I'm talking 42 minutes, right? Do we have some time for questions?
Question:(hard to hear) I have a question. ...theory, ..to be unconsciously...
Answer: Maybe. I'll talk about this in part two.
Question: Thank you. And then the second question. How finite is our memory...
Answer: None of the experimental attempts to determine the size and limits of memory resulted in limits. For example, in one of the experiments conducted by the Canadian psychologist Stanling, it was studied how many faces students 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 was new? It turned out that the first thing is that the accuracy of reproduction 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 photographs, for example, were reproduced with an accuracy of up to 80 percent.
Please note that here, of course, it is important what was done; here there was memory for recognition, and not active reproduction. But, nevertheless, this is a different form of memory.
Question: Good afternoon
Answer: Good afternoon.
Question: RSUH student, if you allow me, I would like to ask the following question. In the introductory part of the lecture, you talked about such a new problem as the science of the brain and the science of the mind. This, of course, is related to the issue you are working on, artificial intelligence. Over time, it seems to me, intelligent forms of life should become adaptive, revolutionary, developing, which, in general, can lead to getting out of control. How much is this issue being studied now and when might it become relevant? And secondly, that 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 will become, well, perhaps the same creatures as we are now, because once upon a time this is also not far off and this scenario is possible. Thank you.
Answer: I'm afraid of making a mistake in my forecast. In general, the experience of recent years shows that the progress that is being made in this area, in the field of research of the brain and mind, by the way, is not to the same extent in the field of artificial intelligence, progress there is slower, but, nevertheless, so amazing and unpredictable, that any forecasts may turn out to be a mistake in just a few years. But my prediction will be as follows.
We do not yet have creatures capable, as artificial intelligence, of - first: solving the same problems that humans solve, even approximately, especially in the conditions of changing adaptive situations.
Scientists at DARPA, the US defense agency, launched a new artificial intelligence program a couple of years ago, saying that they would stop funding all research on classical artificial intelligence schemes because they believed that in the context of solving adaptive problems, the biological brain was superior to the best existing one. forms of artificial intelligence built on current architectures by millions to billions of times. Can you imagine the difference?! It's not a matter 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 millions and billions of times? Well, maybe this is the foreseeable future, at least several groups of universities and the IBM company have begun researching a new architecture, where its elements both learn and are able to calculate, that is, similar to what the nervous system actually does, where there is no separate memory storage, and separately - information elements.
I think artificial intelligence has another difficult problem. That until now all the systems that we create, the initial condition of their behavior are put into them by the human creator, that is, it is not capable of generating these initial conditions itself. She had no evolution. But this is also overcome in models of artificial life, evolutionary work, where they start with very simple nerve networks. Then they are allowed to develop in the environment, gradually solving adaptive problems. And even the adaptive tasks themselves arise for this intelligence, new ones that were not intended by the creators.
So maybe in the next 10 to 15 years we will see significant progress in these areas. Whether they will reach the subjective experience and 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 instantly learning languages, instantly acquiring skills by a person, which... many contacts?
Answer: From what we know about learning in humans and animals, it is a process that consists of separate, repeated 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 the child, who generates new hypotheses regarding the surrounding world and the sounds that he perceives, tries them, discards them, affirms them, builds a scheme.
Transferring the results of such training, which, by the way, is historical in the sense that each child undergoes it in his own way, mechanically, into the head of another person or even into artificial intelligence, is an impossible task today. It is impossible to learn a new language at once, just as it is impossible to simultaneously acquire 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 any more questions?
Question: Novikov Dmitry, gymnasium 1529, I wanted to ask, I heard that there are drugs that help improve memory development, there are 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 that have been known for centuries, usually herbal preparations. Others are chemicals. For example, drugs from the amphetamine group, which regulate signal transmission processes in nerve cells, were used to stimulate the abilities of memory, attention, and learning back during the Second World War, by both sides, the German, the English, and the American.
In the 50s there was a boom in their attempts to use them, for example, by students to improve their ability to remember large amounts of information while preparing for exams. And now milder versions of these drugs, such as Ritalin, for example, are circulating around... at least in American universities, and some students use them. But it became clear that they had side effects.
That, firstly, they do not specifically affect memory, they affect, rather, processes associated with... they are psychotropic, not mnemotropic, they affect processes associated with perception, attention, concentration, etc.
Second. You can develop an addiction to them, which is very unpleasant. The younger this happens, the more dangerous it can be. Nowadays, drugs are being created that can act on signals transmitted already inside the nerve cell. Some of these cascades that were discovered were 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 older people, especially with neurodegenerative diseases, but some of them may be used in the future as cognitive stimulants. At least in recent years, there has been active discussion about the use of such cognitive or mnemotropic drugs by healthy people. Regarding the responsibility of use, there are special ethical commissions that discuss whether this is permissible or not? But the trend here is clear. Such memory vitamins.
Break? We have 10 minutes.
Fine. Yes, let's do it.
In parting, I wanted to say the following: you see, the questions that were asked related to certain technologies, that is, the ability to manage memory, the ability to obtain a large amount of information at once, the ability to transfer and master a language in a short time, the ability to receive safe and effective pills to improve memory. That's all true. 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 García Márquez said: “Life is not about the days that are lived, but about the days that are remembered.” And studying the mechanisms of the brain and memory - to a large extent, for scientists studying this issue, it is not a problem of creating new technologies, although this is important, but a problem of following the ancient oracle, which instructed - know yourself!
Let's pay attention to this too. Thanks a lot.
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Konstantin Anokhin - professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, head of the department of systemogenesis at the Institute of Normal Physiology named after. PC. Anokhina and head of the Russian-British laboratory for the neurobiology of memory. The lecture is devoted to the latest research into the physiology of memory, the mechanisms of storage, retrieval and reproduction of information, the ability to remember, and the dependence of memory processes on circumstances.
Transcript of lectures by Konstantin Vladimirovich Anokhin:
At a symposium at MIT called “The Future of the Brain,” expressing the consensus 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, uniting a huge number of biological disciplines under a single conceptual framework: biology itself, its various branches, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, virology, then further - molecular medicine, including including molecular biology of the brain among all branches, in the same way it is expected that the sciences about the brain and mind developing in the 21st century will be a cementing factor, unifying and providing objective grounds 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 gained specific information about how the brain does this, in the field of human behavior in economic situations, which is now called neuroeconomics. In the field of 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 . They will all 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 happened 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 at its joints, that is, to divide it into natural components so that after this analysis we can return naturally to synthesis. By the way, in the mouth of Socrates, Plato called this ability dialectic, contrasting this with 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.
Today we have reason to think that Plato made a major mistake in dividing nature into joints. Great minds make great mistakes. He separated the brain and the mind, he separated the body and the soul. Following this, this 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 the immortal soul, an unextended spiritual substance that only man possesses. This means that animals are automata, they are able to behave without the participation of the soul and mind, but man has a soul, it determines his actions. And these two worlds are difficult to combine, because this is a world of spatial and non-spatial phenomena.
Here, in fact, we are in at least a 400-year tradition and inertia of perception of the world, divided into these two parts - the brain and the mind. And what is happening today in the brain sciences, why this is an important moment, erases this line and shows that the work of the brain is also the work of the mind, that the brain works as a huge population of millions, tens of millions, maybe sometimes hundreds of millions synchronously activating, turning on along with some activity of nerve cells. These groups of cells, functional systems, are stored as the structure of our individual experience. And our mind is the manipulation of these groups.
Thus, one group is capable of causing another group to act, and the properties of these huge groups are not just physiological properties, but those subjective states - thoughts, emotions, experiences that we experience. In this regard, our brain and mind are one.
By the way, the ideas are as ancient as Plato’s ideas about separateness, because Aristotle adhered to precisely the concept of the unity of the brain and mind, or soul and body.
Actually, the biological program for unifying the brain and mind, returning mind to nature, was formed by another great thinker of the 19th century, Charles Darwin. And this is very important. He connected back the mind of animals and the mind of man, introducing the evolutionary idea, he wrote down 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 there.
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 the mind, and about the soul and thinking, as deeply as about biology in general and about evolution. And, as you can see, he wrote down in 1938, surprisingly, a month and a half before his famous recording, when he was struck by the idea of natural selection, dictated by reading Malthus. He wrote this down in August 1938: “The origin of man is now proven, these thoughts fermented within him.
And after this metaphysics should flourish, because he who 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. The mind is a function of the brain that arose in evolution. It was needed for adaptation, and we do not differ from animals in the cardinal properties of the presence of a soul or mind and their absence in animals. We must create a new theory of how the brain generates the processes of thinking, consciousness, and 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 to be a property of the human soul was 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 drive, 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 Ian Hacking wrote, to secularize the soul, that intractable core, of Western thought and practice, was influenced by the works of several of its prominent pioneers: Ebbinghaus in Germany, Ryabot in France , Korsakov in Russia, from philosophy to objective research in philosophy. And then, more importantly, to studies of memory in the working brain. Memory in the mid-20th century began to be studied not as a phenomenon located outside the human brain and a product of the human brain, but also 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 memory mechanisms into three questions, three problems.
The first is how memory is formed in the brain? Second, how is memory stored in the brain over many 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 memory formation. And here, over the past few decades, research has moved from observing behavior at the moment of memory formation in humans and animals, to how memory is stored due to the work of the genome of nerve cells?
The first steps in this regard were taken by a young German who began studying memory at a young age... Ebbinghaus, he came across the book “Objective Psychology” by Lunt, who described objective psychological studies of perceptions, and thought that maybe human memory can be used in the same way... you can explore in the same way? And he composed a small number of nonsense syllables, which he wrote on tablets, shuffled these tablets and showed them to himself, then, after a while, testing his ability to remember them at different intervals. And one of the first things that 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 the same level for weeks or even months, as Ebbinghaus discovered. Thus, Ebbinghaus made a fundamental discovery - he showed that the processes of memorization 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, working in Göttingen at the end of the 19th century, began to wonder what happens at the boundary of this transition from one phase of memory to another? Is this an active process? And they showed that if, at the moment of memorization and the 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 and interferes with it. They called it retrograde interference, the influence of new information backwards on a process that occurs in the brain.
Based on this, they decided that in the brain, when memorization occurs, a very active process takes place, 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 stage 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 the concussion, which again suggests that the impact on the active process does not allow recent information to be remembered . By the way, the same things happen during seizures.
It became clear that, firstly, memory can be studied objectively. The second is that in the formation of memory there are certain phases associated with active processes in the brain and nervous system, and, accordingly, these active processes in the nervous system can be objects of study in order to understand how memory is formed.
Then there was a fairly long period when there were no fundamental discoveries in this area, because it is extremely difficult to study these processes in humans. You won’t artificially injure or create a concussion in a person in order to check what he remembers and what he doesn’t? You cannot, or at least in those years it was impossible, to look into what happens in the human brain during these processes. And therefore, the next radical step in this program of reduction of the psyche, reduction of the soul, by the movement of molecules in brain cells was taken when the American psychologist Carl Danton showed that everything is the same in animals. This is, if you like, a wonderful illustration of Darwin's program for returning intelligence to nature.
He showed that rats remember a lot of things. This was known before him in many studies. Then he showed the next 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-term attack of convulsions with an electroconvulsive shock, then if these convulsions are inflicted immediately after the animal has learned something, it will not able to remember this information for a long time. He has short-term memory, but long-term memory is not formed. That is, this is the transition that was discovered by Ebbinghaus, it exists in animals, and it is also susceptible to influencing nervous activity.
But it turned out that, just as in the experiments of Müller and Pilzecker, if this electroconvulsive shock is postponed, for example, by 15 minutes after the training session, then it does not affect the developing memory in any way. This means that these processes are universal. And 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 it will remember what it learned, as long as the seizures are given immediately after training. This means that this is a universal biology of the process.
But then the question arose: if we now have the tools to model memory and its consolidation in the brain of animals, we can ask the following question - what are the mechanisms, what happens in brain cells? This was the heyday of molecular biology. And several groups of scientists immediately thought 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 some changes must occur 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 the work and their DNA.
To test this, the Swedish scientist Holger Heeden did various and very beautiful experiments. For example, he taught rats to get to a feeder with food by... balancing on a thin, stretched, inclined string. And the animals learned a new skill, the vestibular skill, and the motor skill of walking on this string. Or, for example, to get food with a paw, which animals do not prefer to get it out of the cylinder, and among rats there are just like among us, left-handed and right-handed, he looked at what kind of animal it was, and then gave it the opportunity to get it only with the opposite paw. Again the animals learned.
It turns out that when animals learn these and other tasks, their brains experience a surge in gene expression, 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 the long-term form that Ebbinghaus discovered. That is, everything coincides here again.
But in biological research, purely correlative research, especially in animals where biological processes can be manipulated, tends to be followed by causal questions. 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 for new information to be remembered? This may be the accidental accompaniment of one process to another. And to test this, very quickly several groups of researchers, for example, Flexner's group in the USA, began to inject animals, when they are learning a new task, with an inhibitor of protein or RNA synthesis, that is, to interfere with this wave, a surge, of gene expression that accompanies the learning process.
It turned out that animals learn normally, no old forms of behavior that have already been developed are disturbed 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 to long-term memory and storage of this memory for a week, months, this memory is absent in animals. That is, interference with the functioning of the genome and obstruction of the synthesis of RNA molecules and proteins during learning prevents the formation of long-term memory. This means that long-term memory really depends on the functioning 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 moment 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 second in Germany and Poland, simultaneously discovered such genes. In a group that worked in our country, we specifically looked for these genes together with employees at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics. And what helped us find them was 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 cell differentiation?
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 of 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 an animal finds itself in a situation that is new to it and it remembers it, an explosion of expression of this gene occurs in the brain.
Moreover, as you can see from the fields of this expression, this expression concerns a huge number of nerve cells. Located in a variety of brain structures. As it turned out later, the places of expression very much depend on what kind of subjective individual experience the brain is currently acquiring. For some forms of memory these are certain zones of expression, for others they are different. We'll come back to this more 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, translated into certain chemical molecules acting on the membrane of a neuron or 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 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 turns out to be activated in a number of learning situations, they form complex protein complexes with each other, capable of influencing a huge number of regions in the genome of a nerve cell. These regions are regulatory regions of other genes. In other words, the signal coming to the nerve cell during learning, through many, many inputs, goes to the bottleneck of activation of several transcription factors, and then their effect branches out 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 work program under the influence of the learning situation.
Why was this scheme interesting? Firstly, it turned out that memory formation goes through two phases of protein synthesis and gene expression. The first is immediately after training, 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 early gene products on the genome. The so-called late genes.
Second, since the structure of early genes, their regulatory regions, as well as their ability to act on certain regulatory regions of other genes have been well studied in cell biology, it has become possible to decipher the other two questions. So, first of all, we found out what genes these are? Second, moving back from such genes, here is shown, for example, one of the early genes. You see that on the regulatory site of this gene, represented by this sequence, a mass of transcription factors are grouped, among which there are phos and juna, which I talked about, there are genes that have other names, there is a transcription factor that have 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 landed on their regulatory sites, what signals caused the binding of regulators to their regulatory sites, which of the cell’s second messengers 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, American neuroscientist Eric Kendel from Columbia University, received the Nobel Prize for deciphering this cascade.
These studies have many interesting implications. They turned out to be unexpected. For example, it turns out that defects in some of these elements of the cascade not only cause learning disabilities 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 to be congenital diseases. Now we understand that in reality these are disorders that lead to deficiencies in early learning opportunities, the formation of memory in a child in the first weeks and months of their life. And it is precisely because of this that mental development is impaired.
And the consequences for this are also different. It is one thing when, for medical reasons, this child can 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 become clear in deciphering these cascades is that they are eerily, indeed, reminiscent in their constituent parts of those cellular processes that occur during the differentiation of nerve cells in the developing brain. They often use the same signaling molecules, and some of these molecules were first discovered during development, and then it turned out, like, for example, various neurotrophins, that they are also signaling molecules during learning.
And other molecules, such as the glutamate and NMDA receptors that accept it, were initially studied in connection with learning and then turned out to play a critical role in the time-dependent activity of the neural connection stage of development. The same applies to various second messenger protein kinases, and, finally, transcription factors and target genes.
The picture we get is that when we look at development and learning, we see very similar molecular cascades. This means that each episode of development closely resembles an episode of learning, or that in the adult brain developmental processes never end. 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 occurs 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 a 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 capable of acting on the transmission of signals between nerve cells that are capable of regulating 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 processes that occur after the processing of information in neural networks associated only with their storage, we will not notice their effects on our behavior, they will not have the side effects of excitation, inhibition, changes in the processes of our perception or attention . But they will be able to modulate the processes of memorizing information for a long time. And such drugs are now being sought.
Thus, questions of the molecular biology of memory, which arose from studies of the biological basis 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 the restructuring of the learning neuron, its molecular, protein phenotype.
We also know from research in recent years, something that I have not talked about 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, preserving its properties of a nerve cell of a certain type at the time of development.
Let's finish this fragment here. I think I'm talking 42 minutes, right? Do we have some time for questions?
Question: (hard to hear) I have a question. ...theory, ..to be unconsciously...
Answer: Maybe. I'll talk about this in part two.
Question: Thank you. And then the second question. How finite is our memory...
Answer: None of the experimental attempts to determine the size and limits of memory led to limits. For example, in one of the experiments conducted by the Canadian psychologist Stanling, it was studied how many faces students 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 was new? It turned out that the first thing is that the accuracy of reproduction 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 photographs, for example, were reproduced with an accuracy of up to 80 percent.
Please note that here, of course, it is important what was done; here there was memory for recognition, and not active reproduction. But, nevertheless, this is a different form of memory.
Question: Good afternoon!
Answer: Good afternoon.
Question: Student of the Russian State University for the Humanities, if you allow me, I would like to ask the following question. In the introductory part of the lecture, you talked about such a new problem as the science of the brain and the science of the mind. This, of course, is related to the issue you are working on, artificial intelligence. Over time, it seems to me, intelligent forms of life should become adaptive, revolutionary, developing, which, in general, can lead to getting out of control. How much is this issue being studied now and when might it become relevant? And secondly, that 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 will become, well, perhaps the same creatures as we are now, because once upon a time this is also not far off and this scenario is possible. Thank you.
Answer: I'm afraid of making a mistake in my forecast. In general, the experience of recent years shows that the progress that is being made in this area, in the field of research of the brain and mind, by the way, is not to the same extent in the field of artificial intelligence, progress there is slower, but, nevertheless, so amazing and unpredictable, that any forecasts may turn out to be a mistake in just a few years. But my prediction will be as follows.
We do not yet have creatures capable, as artificial intelligence, of - first: solving the same problems that humans solve, even approximately, especially in the conditions of changing adaptive situations.
Scientists at DARPA, the US defense agency, launched a new artificial intelligence program a couple of years ago, saying that they would stop funding all research on classical artificial intelligence schemes because they believed that in the context of solving adaptive problems, the biological brain was superior to the best existing one. forms of artificial intelligence built on current architectures by millions to billions of times. Can you imagine the difference?! It's not a matter 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 millions and billions of times? Well, maybe this is the foreseeable future, at least several groups of universities and the IBM company have begun researching a new architecture, where its elements both learn and are able to calculate, that is, similar to what the nervous system actually does, where there is no separate memory storage, and separately - information elements.
I think artificial intelligence has another difficult problem. That until now all the systems that we create, the initial condition of their behavior are put into them by the human creator, that is, it is not capable of generating these initial conditions itself. She had no evolution. But this is also overcome in models of artificial life, evolutionary work, where they start with very simple nerve networks. Then they are allowed to develop in the environment, gradually solving adaptive problems. And even the adaptive tasks themselves arise for this intelligence, new ones that were not intended by the creators.
So maybe in the next 10 to 15 years we will see significant progress in these areas. Whether they will reach the subjective experience and 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 instantly learning languages, instantly acquiring 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, repeated 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 the child, who generates new hypotheses regarding the surrounding world and the sounds that he perceives, tries them, discards them, affirms them, builds a scheme.
Transferring the results of such training, which, by the way, is historical in the sense that each child undergoes it in his own way, mechanically, into the head of another person or even into artificial intelligence, is an impossible task today. It is impossible to learn a new language at once, just as it is impossible to simultaneously acquire 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 any more questions?
Question: Dmitry Novikov, gymnasium 1529, I wanted to ask, I heard that there are drugs that help 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 that have been known for centuries, usually herbal preparations. Others are chemicals. For example, drugs from the amphetamine group, which regulate signal transmission processes in nerve cells, were used to stimulate the abilities of memory, attention, and learning back during the Second World War, by both sides, the German, the English, and the American.
In the 50s there was a boom in their attempts to use them, for example, by students to improve their ability to remember large amounts of information while preparing for exams. And now milder versions of these drugs, such as Ritalin, for example, are circulating around... at least in American universities, and some students use them. But it became clear that they had side effects.
That, firstly, they do not specifically affect memory, they affect, rather, processes associated with... they are psychotropic, not mnemotropic, they affect processes associated with perception, attention, concentration, etc.
Second. You can develop an addiction to them, which is very unpleasant. The younger this happens, the more dangerous it can be. Nowadays, drugs are being created that can act on signals transmitted already inside the nerve cell. Some of these cascades that were discovered were 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 older people, especially with neurodegenerative diseases, but some of them may be used in the future as cognitive stimulants. At least in recent years, there has been active discussion about the use of such cognitive or mnemotropic drugs by healthy people. Regarding the responsibility of use, there are special ethical commissions that discuss whether this is permissible or not? But the trend here is clear. Such memory vitamins.
Fine. Yes, let's do it.
In parting, I wanted to say the following: you see, the questions that were asked related to certain technologies, that is, the ability to manage memory, the ability to obtain a large amount of information at once, the ability to transfer and master a language in a short time, the ability to receive safe and effective pills to improve memory. That's all true. 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 García Márquez said: “Life is not about the days that are lived, but about the days that are remembered.” And studying the mechanisms of the brain and memory - to a large extent, for scientists studying this issue, it is not a problem of creating new technologies, although this is important, but a problem of following the ancient oracle, which instructed - know yourself!
Let's pay attention to this too. Thanks a lot.
Recent studies of the physiology of memory, mechanisms of storage, retrieval and reproduction of information. The ability to remember, the dependence of memory processes on the proposed circumstances.
Transcript of the 2nd lecture by Konstantin Vladimirovich Anokhin, aired on the Kultura TV channel as part of the project:
I would now like to continue the story about memory, but turn to the other side of memory. After all, memory is not a property of molecules, or even a property of contacts between nerve cells that change as a result of experience. Yes, it depends on the work of the genome of nerve cells, as we saw last time, but memory, like other psychological functions of the brain, is a derivative of the simultaneous work of millions and millions of nerve cells. And to understand what memory is, we must understand how these systems of nerve cells that store traces of memory are arranged.
Interestingly, the study of the molecular biology of memory has unexpectedly shed light on the problems of how memory works in the whole brain. Because it has been known for quite some time that human memory is divided into several different systems. Some forms of memory are highly dependent on consciousness, some are unconscious, and we automatically reproduce these skills, such as those acquired through long-term learning. Among the memory that is accessible to our consciousness, we can distinguish memory associated with events and facts, that which we voluntarily extract from our past experience, and this is called semantic memory. We can remember entire episodes of the past in their sequence and unfolding - this is called episodic memory.
And research by clinicians has found that in humans, with certain brain damage, some forms of memory may suffer, but not other forms. For example, when the structure of the brain called the hippocampus, pictured here, is damaged, the person's ability to remember new information is impaired, memory of the several years preceding this damage is impaired, but surprisingly many of the abilities to develop skills are preserved. And then in such patients, several of whom have been studied in detail by neuropsychologists and psychologists, a strange state arises when they learn some things, but have absolutely no memory that they acquired these skills.
For example, our famous psychiatrist and one of the pioneers of the study of memory, Sergei Sergeevich Korsakov, wrote, describing memory impairment syndromes in humans, that these patients seem to remember nothing in this state, but, being in the clinic, the Korsakov clinic, the clinic that carries it name, during their stay they study the layout of the rooms, the location of the dining room and are able to find their way in these rather confusing labyrinths of the clinic corridors. Similarly, clinic patients with damage to the hippocampus, without remembering that they learned anything, are able to solve complex maze problems of moving from one point in a maze to another, or reading words backwards, or solving puzzles, while denying that they ever they saw it.
Some forms of memory, such as priming, are unconscious but nonetheless capable of influencing our subsequent perceptions and behavior. Priming is the property of the nervous system to remember certain sensory characteristics of the surrounding world or effects on the brain, reacting to them unconsciously, as if they were familiar, compared to something that was not there. For example, if a person is read words that end in different ways, and then, after some time, is given a word that begins and has several endings, then he will most likely finish it in the way in which he saw the word in the first test.
Interestingly, priming, for example, is not impaired when the hippocampus is damaged, and the patient does not remember that he was shown these words, but completes them exactly as needed. There are even some studies showing that when under anesthesia during surgery, if a person is read this sheet, then when he wakes up from the anesthesia, he will complete the words with an ambiguous ending in the way that he heard the words under the anesthesia.
How do all these memory systems work in the brain? Can we see traces of memory in the brain? Can we see traces of memory itself in the brain? It turns out that the same methods that have been used to study memory in animals, to study the molecular biology of memory, are suitable for visualizing the memory trace in the whole brain. Because the work of genes at the moment of memorization occurs only in individual cells. Yellow here shows nerve impulses running through many neuron networks, and red shows the activation of a gene in one of the neurons of a huge network, which, in fact, continues far, far away and stores millions of cells associated with memorizing new information.
So, if we could see all the cells that turned on this gene when the animal encountered something new, for example, a girl mouse saw a boy mouse she liked. And this is a whole complex of sensations that for mice is largely associated with smell, visual and other things, can we see the light of this memory? It turns out we can.
And neurophysiologists have long had a dream: if they could make the brain transparent and watch the work of nerve cells in this brain, like the work of light bulbs in a large electrical network, using gene probes that detect the activation of genes that turn on in neurons during memory formation, we are, in fact, identifying such an electrical network. All that remains is to visualize it. And the methods of physics and optics in brain research make it possible to do this too.
Here in this picture you see the hippocampus of a mouse that found itself in a new situation and remembered it. At this time, in those neurons that were involved in the formation of such a trace, the genome was activated, and the gene transcription factors that I talked about last time were turned on.
We can use different techniques, antibodies to these proteins, or other molecular probes to see these individual nerve cells throughout the entire hippocampus, a structure that we know from observations of memory damage in humans is critical for the formation of a memory trace. We can begin to look at this huge network of nerve cells, and explore the patterns of its formation during a variety of tasks of learning, memory, recollection, asking questions, what happens in the brain when a memory of one form or another form is formed? What happens when a memory is retrieved in a working brain? Does this somehow affect the properties of old memory?
These studies yielded some surprising results. One of the unexpected discoveries was that the genes that seemed to be needed to remember new information at the moment of learning - remember the first phase of the transition from short-term to long-term memory and the blockade of protein synthesis that interferes with this? - seemed to be after Once the memory has moved into long-term storage and there has been a surge in genome activity, it is fixed. And subsequent influences on the brain are not able to somehow change or erase or affect the old memory; it is now stably stored in networks of differentiated neurons.
However, when we and other authors began to investigate what happens in the brain at the moment of retrieving such an old memory, an unexpected fact turned out to be that for some reason very similar molecular mechanisms are activated in the brain at the moment of retrieving the old memory, similar to those that activated at the moment of memorization.
So what does it look like? If memory were similar to computer memory, to a certain CD-rom on which we record information, then recording information requires integrating it into the optical medium of the disk - this is consolidation. After this, the information is stored on this disk and is not subject to any influences that interfere with the moment of recording, that is, the disk is stable, and you can retrieve this information as needed.
Imagine a situation: every time you read information from this CD-rom, it changes in its content, and rewriting processes occur there, in general, independent of the reading you are interested in. The discovery of activation of genes in the brain of animals at the time of retrieval of an old long-formed memory is very similar to this unusual situation. It turns out that every time memory is removed, or in a significant number of cases when memory is removed, some changes occur on our disk, some kind of overwriting occurs there.
What is the significance of this rewrite? We can use the same technique that the researchers used in the 60s, we can try to prevent newly synthesized proteins - the products of the work of certain genes - from being formed, because we will introduce protein synthesis blockers, and see what happens to the old memory? Predictions that first come to mind are that nothing should happen. Perhaps these changes in the functioning of nerve cells that we see in an animal retrieving memory are due to the fact that it remembers something additionally, on top of the old memory, most likely.
But let's see what happens in the experiment? Two experiments are shown here. In one, the chickens were learning a task where they were given a bead, they happily pecked at this bead as a potentially edible item, it was bitter, it was coated with a substance like quinine. They spit it out and never want to peck it again if you give them this bead. They remember it perfectly and distinguish it from other beads, which they happily peck.
And then we do the following. After some time, when the memory has already been consolidated, when it has passed into durable storage, we return to this situation again, and this time we only show the same bead that was at the time of learning. Naturally, they don’t peck at her. Why? Because they remember it and reject it with indignation, that is, they retrieve the memory. There is no new learning or new bite happening here. But extraction is happening. And at this moment, or a little earlier, we introduce substances to the chickens that disrupt the ability to synthesize new proteins. So if there was a spike in gene expression like you saw on the previous slide, we'll take it down. And we are wondering what the consequences will be?
It turns out that if we test these animals after some time, after a day, for example, then the chickens that received only an injection of a protein synthesis inhibitor, but did not extract memory, are one control group, they remember everything perfectly. They have a recall rate of 90 percent, which means that the memory actually seems to be consolidated. Chickens that received only the bead, but did not receive protein synthesis blockers, also remember everything perfectly, this is natural, memory retrieval should not have any effect. If you read a CD-rom, then this should not in any way affect what is stored there.
But here is a combination situation. The chicken remembers what was associated with this bead against the background of the inability to re-synthesize proteins. Look what happens to memory? It is a combination of this group and this group, they together cause the animal to lose a memory that seemed to have formed long ago. And the same thing happens in other models. Now there are a lot of such studies in the world. And they show that this is a universal phenomenon, it exists among us. In other words, if you remember something old and at that moment there is interference with the memorization process, then this is a chance for you to forget this old thing. This is a completely non-trivial thing, not at all intuitive.
Why should we forget the old, or why, in fact, should every new memory be rewritten, what happens and replace the old memory trace? Memory scientists are now working to understand what this mechanism is, but it is clear that it is fundamental to the memory that has been discovered through these methods. Discovered by whom, neuroscientists.
In fact, it shows how often researchers of the same subject are unaware of or do not pay attention to what is being done in the study of that subject by other specialists. In fact, psychologists studying the properties of memory knew about something similar, albeit not in terms of “nervous mechanisms,” for a very long time.
The outstanding English psychologist Frederick Bartlett, who worked in Cambridge at the beginning of the 20th century, did experiments to study the processes of memory. He, for example, showed his subjects different pictures and asked them at intervals of time, weeks, for example, to draw what they remembered last time, and accumulated such pictures, one, two, third, fourth... or gave a complex story that was difficult to interpret, and asked to retell it at intervals of a week.
It turned out that as a result of such redrawings or stories, the story in the subject’s head or the image in the subject’s head can radically transform with each subsequent extraction, replacing the previous one. And, as in the case of these images, and in the case of such stories, the subject is absolutely sure that the story he is telling or the picture he is drawing was the same story or image that he saw for the first time. Bartlett wrote at the conclusion of his book that I have insisted throughout the book that the description of memories as fixed and lifeless is just a mistaken fantasy. And, as you see, he further writes that memory is not a repeated excitation of innumerable fixed fragments of traces, it is always a creative recreation or construction, consisting of our relationship to the entire active mass of reaction and experience of the past.
Neuroscience research in recent years shows that this is not only each subsequent retrieval of memory, it is an active reconstruction of versions of what was, but also the rewriting of a new version, which can suppress or extinguish the previous one. A process called “memory reconsolidation.”
Second unexpected discovery. Think of the vast functional system of cells that lies behind every trace of our memory. I showed you the imprint of such a trace in only one brain structure - the hippocampus in a mouse. In fact, such a trace involves dozens of other structures that form a single whole, and the number of neurons can reach tens and hundreds of millions.
Now try to imagine how you can destroy such a memory? How can this huge network be eliminated from our experience? This is a very difficult task in general. You can't destroy all the neurons one by one because they are distributed among other neurons, you would have to destroy the entire brain. This question has been raised among psychologists for quite some time.
And when two of the famous American psychologists conducted a survey of leading experts in the field of memory research, asking them the question, do they think that memory impairment is due to the fact that it is lost in the brain or that the ability to simply access this memory is lost? Most of the experts answered in the second way. Indeed, it seems that the most likely thing, when we look at such systemic mechanisms of memory, is to imagine that memory impairment is that we cannot put the system of these differentiated neurons back together. Perhaps, as happens with age and neurodegenerative diseases, some of the links in the small number of neurons that make up this system begin to lose connections. But not all at once, a very small percentage. And this leads us to the unusual idea that maybe even in the case of memory loss, a significant part of the trace, maybe 90, maybe 95, maybe 99 percent, remains in our brain. And perhaps we can see traces of such memories that have not completely disappeared, even if they are not retrieved to the level of behavioral awareness.
Well, we, in fact, did one of these experiments, trying to ask the brain this question using methods for identifying neurons that are involved in the neural networks of memories at the time of retrieval. We trained animals on a specific conditioned task and then disrupted that memory by administering protein synthesis blockers. When tested in these animals, they behaved in the same way as a normal animal - they were thrown into this situation, they showed no familiarity with it.
But we were interested in how the brain reacts to it, and whether there are signs that this situation may be familiar in the brain, although behaviorally and subjectively the animal does not recognize it. We looked at the brain's reaction to this situation in trained and untrained animals. It turned out that in the trained animals, the area of the brain that was associated with emotional reactions and executive actions, this situation in which we placed the animals was actually dangerous for them. They didn't remember it.
But the last time they were taught, they found themselves in this situation, they were given a short electric shock to their paws, not very strong, but unpleasant. And animals that find themselves in such a situation once, when placed in this situation again, begin to be afraid and even if nothing follows from the surrounding influences, they begin to freeze and hide - typical behavior of rodents in a situation of danger that cannot be avoided.
And this is determined by activity, this behavior, in particular, by the activity of the structure called “almond”, which is connected, on the one hand, with the emotional assessment of the situation, on the other hand, with the executive mechanisms of hiding behavior. It turned out that animals that had everything normal with memory have very high activity in their tonsils when they find themselves in this situation. They remember her with this tonsil. In animals whose memory we erased, as you can see, the tonsils are not activated. They actually walk around this cell, they are not afraid of it, they sniff and do not freeze. And there is no activity in these parts of the brain associated with such behavior.
However, when we looked at another brain structure, the hippocampus, which I already talked about, and which in humans and animals is associated with preserving memory traces, maintaining them for some time, it turned out that in different areas of the hippocampus, animals that fell into this the situation, both those who remembered it and the animals whose memory we erased showed the same activation of the hippocampus. In other words, these animals with green bars, they are not afraid of this situation, they do not seem to recognize it. But we see from the brain activity of the objective brain activity that their brain recognizes this situation. Only, look, it is not connected into a single integration of behavior with the areas that are responsible for fear. These areas are not activated. Together, we do not observe everything from the functional system that would be extracted and cause this animal to lie low and demonstrate all the behavioral signs of fear and memory.
But it turns out that this brain stores memory parts? If so, then maybe we can restore it? Bring back lost memory. And we showed that, in principle, this is possible in an experiment. These animals, these are chickens, were in the same problem, but in those experiments they were subjected to a different influence. They received a protein synthesis blocker while they were studying. And therefore, when they were tested after some time, the animals that interest us, the animals of this yellow, orange group, this gray and blue group - these are control animals - they do not peck, they do not avoid the beads, unlike chickens , which you saw on one of the previous slides, they actively peck at it with joy, because they forgot that it was bitter and dangerous.
But then we did the following thing. We moistened the beaks of these chickens with a bitter substance, quinine, which they experienced, this taste at the moment of pecking the old bead, there was no new learning. But, if you will, there was some component of the old experience that causes a strong emotional reaction. And then they began to look at different groups of chickens to see what happened at different time intervals after such a reminiscent effect? It turned out that if you look after half an hour, the chickens do not remember anything. If you look after three hours, they don’t remember, if you look after five hours, they don’t remember. But between 5 and 7 o'clock the memory slowly returns to them.
Please note that this is not a psychological memory of something forgotten, like - aha!.. it was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t remember, and now it came... This is a slow process. I can say that we have carried out such experiments with a wide variety of memory impairments and with recovery. And each time recovery occurs in this model during this critical interval from 5 to 7 hours.
After wetting the beak with quinine, a lot of time passed. They had already slept, they were doing completely different things, there is a slow process going on in the brain that is gradually reconstructing back the neural network associated with past experiences. Moreover, we know that if we make this reminder against the background of a protein synthesis blocker, that is, do not allow the nervous system to re-synthesize proteins and build some of its connections at the moment of this stimulus, then this memory return does not occur. So this process happens in the background, deep in the brain. This is the completion of connections and systems that were once destroyed. This process depends on the synthesis of new proteins. But we know a number of other properties of this process - it depends on synoptic activity and so on.
Obviously, in addition to the amazing property of memory for repair, this may have fundamental practical applications; if we learn to build up and return memory lost during neurodegeneration due to destruction of part of the nervous network, then we will have the opportunity to help many people who lose memory with age or with certain diseases.
And again, although my first slide about these facts was called “An Unexpected Discovery,” going back into the history of memory research, and especially the history of human memory research, we see that people who have been deeply involved in the problem of memory impairment have noticed this property. And Korsakov wrote in one of his works that most often amnesia is caused not by the loss of the ability to fixate, but by the loss of the ability to reproduce the fixed. And then he describes a number of cases in this work, showing that the patient, who seemed completely hopeless and at the time of being in the clinic did not remember anything that happened to him, after some time, a year or two later, with repeated studies and contacts with Korsakov, he spoke about the events that took place at the moment when he was in deep amnesia. He remembered. And this memory returned. And Korsakov, by the way, writes that in his opinion, this is one of the most interesting properties of memory loss syndrome that he discovered.
This property lay dormant and was not addressed by experimenters for more than a hundred years. And now we are beginning to actively study this process.
Now I want to switch. This switch is natural, because we have been talking all the time about memory as a property of large populations or systems, functional systems of nerve cells. In general, if we think about it, memory is only one of the characteristics of the operation of such systems. Memory is, after all, an artificially isolated aspect of brain function. And pay attention to another interesting feature - for you and me, perhaps our memories of the past are dear to us, like memories of past events. But for the evolution that developed the ability to learn and memory, and for the biological load of memory, another question is central. It could arise and develop in the evolution of living things if only it was beneficial for future behavior.
And now research shows that, indeed, despite the centuries-old tradition of referring to memory as imprints of the past, a more careful analysis shows that memory has, first of all, prospective functions, that the experience of the past is used to plan and imagine the future. And, for example, people, patients with memory impairment, turn out to be also unable to imagine new pictures or plan the future, just as they are unable to remember their past. When they are offered the task of imagining themselves, for example, on the shores of the southern ocean, on a beach with the rustling waves, under the rays of the hot southern sun, and constructing this picture. It turns out that the ability to engage in some kind of fantasy and, in general, to project something in the future, when the hippocampus is damaged, suffers just as deeply as the ability to remember something new or remember the past.
And this again brings us back to the study of the mechanisms of memory, to the interaction of memory with consciousness, with the subjective, with the imagination, a whole complex of processes that characterizes the work of functional systems. But unlike a trace of memory, a trace of the past, these processes are dynamic. In these processes, memory acts as a dynamic component.
The same thing, by the way, applies to consciousness. Consciousness is not a trace, but a process. If the most important thing can be said about the properties of consciousness, it is that it is a process. It exists for a time, it has a beginning, it has a duration, it has an end. These states change each other one after another, but we must study them if we now want to study them not outside, but inside the brain with objective, dynamic methods. This requires new approaches.
The photographic snapshots of the memory trace that I have shown in previous illustrations are not sufficient to understand the processes of subjective experience during the behavior itself at the moment of awareness. This requires recording the activity of individual nerve cells. And such methods appeared. They appeared quite a long time ago. At first they were imperfect, but they nevertheless made it possible to record how the brain works, and we now understand how the mind works in the waking brain, in the course of solving certain problems, in the course of thinking and behavior.
This video will now show the recording of the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain of a rabbit, which in an experimental chamber has been trained to solve a problem - pressing a pedal or pulling a ring in order to get a carrot from a feeder. There are two of these feeders and two pedals too. He has quite complex behavior. He learned it. This video is a real experiment, a recording of a real experiment, one that is carried out at the Institute of Psychology in the Laboratory of Neurophysiological Foundations of the Psyche.
And what rumbles is the work of a separate nerve cell. You see, this is a feeder, this is a pedal. I pressed the pedal and the feeder moved. The neuron is working. Listen, right here, right? Now he moves to another feeder and presses another pedal. And here you can see the activity of individual nerve cells.
These are the experiments and the results of these experiments are shown here, also in the Laboratory of Neurophysiological Foundations of the Psyche at the Institute of Psychology, which revealed the amazing properties of the work of nerve cells during behavior. It turned out that these nerve cells are extremely specialized in relation to certain elements of the animal’s subjective experience. Think about it, a single neuron is an ordinary cell, the same as a liver, skin, heart cell, it has a nucleus, it has a genome, it has cytoplasm, it synthesizes the same proteins or similar proteins, but in the brain the behavior of these cells is associated with subjective experience , deep subjective experience.
Here, look what it looks like. Here is one situation shown where a rabbit pulls a ring and gets food from a feeder, and he can do this from the left or right side. And here he presses the pedal, and gets food from the feeder on the left and right sides. And here is the activity of a single nerve cell during this behavior. Moreover, each stripe like this is one behavioral act from pressing the pedal to receiving food in the feeder. Then he repeats it, repeats it, repeats it, and we can see the pattern of the work of an individual nerve cell in connection with the execution of this act.
Here, for example, the activity of this neuron is synchronized and occurs at the moment when the animal pulls the ring, it pulls the ring, as soon as it has pulled it out to a sufficient length and the feeder clicks, it runs to the feeder, and the activity of this neuron ends. Look, this neuron works specifically when the rabbit pulls the ring on the right side or on the left side.
What is “ring pulling”? In general, a ring is an object that the animal has never seen. It is an object in his individual experience. He became acquainted with it as a means of obtaining food when he first got into this cage. But look, much more amazing things.
This neuron here, another neuron, so this shows four neurons from the rabbit's cerebral cortex. This neuron is active only when the animal pulls on the ring on the left side, and is not active when it pulls on the ring on the right side. What this says is that this neuron, and I say that in quotes, “recognizes” and “distinguishes” between the ring on the left side and the right side. This is not strange, because the rabbit learned this behavior first on the left, then on the right, these are two different pieces of his individual experience. But we see that by reading the work of brain neurons, we can read the elements of this past experience, subjective experience in the animal’s brain, we can see how subjective experience is structured and marked.
Pay attention to the following thing. That both the ring and the feeder are a means of obtaining the carrot's food, that is, both the ring and the pedal are a means of obtaining the carrot's food, which seem to work for the same thing, that is, it could be considered for an animal one and the same. But look, here there are several behavioral acts, this dark stripe of acts when the rabbit pulls the ring. Then the ring becomes ineffective. And he is offered to receive food from the feeder by pressing the pedal. And here a dozen or so such cyclic acts are shown when he presses the pedal. And here the effective ring returns back.
Look, this neuron not only works when you pull the ring on the left side, but it doesn't work when you press the pedal. It seems to be the same remedy, for a rabbit these are different things, but here the situation is exactly the opposite: this is the left side, this is the right side. This is a neuron that is activated by the act of pressing the pedal, and these are the acts of pressing the pedal, and these are the acts in which he pulled the ring to get food.
This neuron is of the right pedal, but not of any right ring, nor of the left ring. Well, and so on. This neuron is associated with food capture, for example.
We begin to see the subjective experiences, the subjective world of the animal, by looking into how its brain works, and we begin to understand the rules for constructing this experience if we look at how such neurons, in fact, systems of neurons in the brain, are formed during learning. We read this subjective world in the same way as we read the subjective world of both perceptions and human experience, if we had the opportunity to record the activity of individual brain cells in a person. This is a very rare opportunity, however, it exists. For some neurological diseases, thin microelectrodes are implanted into the brain of patients for therapy or to identify areas for subsequent therapy. And they walk around with them for some time, then they are removed, and a neurosurgical operation is performed there.
And there are several centers in the world where, during such therapy, scientific research is also carried out on how individual nerve cells behave in our brains when we are engaged in solving some problems or communicating with the outside world. For example, in this group of Itsek Fried in California, patients are shown recording the activity of an individual neuron, here in blue the same rasters are shown as... the activity of neurons during repeated presentations, like in a rabbit, only he is not presented with a task, but photographs for a short time time, the interval between small dotted lines is shown, between this peak of activation, a person sees some kind of photograph on the laptop screen. And hundreds of such photographs are shown to him. And they look, here is a neuron that has fallen under this microelectrode, how does it behave when shown different photographs?
It turns out that they behave in very interesting ways. For example, this neuron here is activated from hundreds of photographs that were shown only when a person sees various photographs of Jennifer Aniston, an American film actress. If he is shown photographs of other characters, other famous people, well, Julia Roberts, one of the famous basketball players, and so on and so forth, animals, a snake, a spider, a deer, architectural structures, bridges, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and so on, you see - the neuron is not active anywhere.
And these photographs, although they are all very different, look. The actress is in different projections, against different backgrounds, there is nothing physically common here like retinal excitation, there is a concept of this actress. The neuron fires every time. Except for those photos where Jennifer Aniston is, here, here, here... But where she is with her ex-husband Brad Pitt.
For this subject, just like for our rabbit with a pedal and a ring on the left and right side, there are categories of the world that are divided into... for this neuron into Jennifer Aniston, but not everything else, but, roughly speaking, Jennifer Aniston with right side, but not on the left side, Jennifer Aniston alone, but not with Brad Pitt. This is clearly an element of some individual experience and subjective experience of this subject, what feelings he has towards this actress and what feelings towards the couple of the actress and her husband, we can only try to reconstruct, knowing the history, but the fact that they are different, we see by the activity of these nerve cells.
So here I will show a short film that I will explain that...
Now, just a second, I'll explain first what's going on. This means that the subject is shown different videos at a given moment, very different, and the activity of one of the cells in the brain, in the hippocampus, is recorded. Here it is shown that the cursor is moving, which shows where the activity is, and here the total activity for the entire experiment is shown. You see, there is low activity, and you see, there are two peaks of activity, we will see with you what they are connected with. You will also see that... or you will hear that the neuron is rattling, so when it discharges and gives off individual impulses, you will hear such a characteristic crackling sound, and here there will be few of them, but here there will be a lot of them, and you will see why... It's connected.
The experiment consists of two parts. First, the subject is shown different objects and looks at what this neuron is activated by. And then, this is very important, he is asked to extract from his memory after the end of the experiment, what did he see? And then there are no external stimuli at all, there is only subjective experience, which he extracts, remembering that this happened, this happened, and again the same neuron looks. Look what's happening.
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This is during flashbacks.
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Where does this lead? Our ability to objectively record subjective experience through the activity of individual cells? I don’t know whether you noticed or not, but I think many people noticed that when this person remembered “The Simpsons,” his neuron first activated, and then he said “The Simpsons,” they noticed that there was a slight delay. Well, I can’t show it, but I’ll show it in a different way. I can’t just show a long film. Look, this is the moment of pressing the rabbit pedal. This is the action he performs. Look at the activity of a neuron, it begins long before it performs this action. Just as he is going to do it and intends to do it, the activity of the neuron indicates what he will do. In other words, you can tell what the rabbit is up to by the activity of this neuron even before he does it. You don't just see the subjective world and how it unfolds, you see it often ahead of behavior.
Now imagine that you do a simple thing, you take the activity of such a cell. Here it is shown how its activity increases, this histogram, by the time the pedal is pressed. And here is the moment of pressing the pedal, here it is, “press”. But imagine, as was done in experiments, that you remove the signal from this neuron when the rat presses this lever, and receives a feeder with reinforcement moving towards it, and send a signal from this neuron to the feeder even before the animal presses on the lever? You will get a paradoxical situation when the animal is about to press the lever to get reinforcement in the feeder, but before pressing it, it receives reinforcement. That is, what she wanted precedes, through the external control loop created by the experimenter, what she must do for this.
Rats begin to behave in this situation in surprising ways. They mechanically continue to press the lever for some time, although the feeder has already arrived. But after some time and very quickly, they realize the course of the relationships in the newly established situation and begin to launch the next movement of the feeder with reinforcement simply by the activity of their brain, having already stopped running up to the pedal. Animals begin to mentally control an external device through an electronic interface. This is the principle that was used as the basis for so-called brain-machine or brain-computer interfaces. It would not have been possible in such an embodiment if we had not understood the deep mechanisms of organizing the work of networks of neurons in the brain at the moment of thinking, behavior and actions that are ahead of activity.
Exactly the same things have been demonstrated in both monkeys and humans, because the principle of decoding is quite universal and consists only in removing the activity of a population of cells at the moment when the brain is about to perform some action, recognizing by activity that it is action is performed and transmit it to an external mechanical device. For example, as you can see in this film from an article illustrating the results of an article by Andrew Schwartz's group in the United States of America.
Here the monkey is behind this black curtain, and she is sitting in a chair so that her paws are tied to the arms of the chair, and she cannot get the tasty morsel that the experimenter is holding out to her. Instead, through activity that is removed from individual nerve cells in her brain, she can do this by triggering the movement of an artificial arm, a prosthesis. And notice now in this film that the experimenter is very sophisticated. He gives an apple in one place, and she must perform one complex action with her cells. The prosthesis has several degrees of freedom. It must be bent at the shoulder, elbow and also with the palm, then in the other, below. She must plan different actions for herself each time through this interface. She, of course, tries to stretch her head and tongue as far as possible... look, it’s difficult, she dropped it. Disappointed. More. Down, the other way.
In fact, we see how neurophysiological research allows the thought of movement to set in motion not only one's own organs and muscles, but also external devices. This is, first of all, a product of the fact that we begin to recognize mental processes and decode their content, that is, to penetrate deeply and objectively into the brain of humans or animals.
Shown here is a patient who has lost the ability to move due to a spinal cord injury. Here the arrow shows such a neural interface implanted into him, and with the help of this neural interface he plays a computer game here, mentally controlling the computer and the screen. Therefore, such interfaces are now called brain-computer interfaces.
In addition to methods of implanting electrodes into the human brain, there are other attempts to establish such contact between thoughts and signals generated by the brain during thinking and external devices. For example, non-invasive, not requiring the implantation of interface electrodes, also used, for example, as in this case, to help patients who lose the ability to move. His electroencephalogram is recorded, and as you can see, with the help of these thoughts he is able to contract the mechanical prosthesis.
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But this... these technologies will be used much more widely than in medicine. For example, today you can buy such a device, which is a miniature electroencephalograph that you can put on your brain and, using a radio transmitter, establish contact with a computer.
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For example, what a girl does with one of these interfaces at a computer games exhibition. Look, she is trying to mentally lift this ball, concentrating and...
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So some things from science fiction are quite recognizable in our research that we have seen today.
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Which of the shots from this opening of the film "Surrogates" are the results of scientific research and development, and which are fantasy? The lines between science fiction and science in the study of the brain and mind are now beginning to blur. And therefore, my words at the beginning of the story that the science of the brain and mind in the 21st century, in the opinion of many scientists, will change our society, will change our lives, they are already beginning to find quite material embodiment today.
Thank you.
QUESTION: For me, the lecture was not only interesting, but I also made an explanation for myself, even a discovery today. I have been interested in the problem of the unconscious for a very long time, and today I answered my question, when I learned about memory reconsolidation, I realized that Freud was partly right, that therapy of calling... a traumatic event from memory and experiencing it again, a video recording is obtained, that is, it , indeed, a therapeutic effect. But the question is this: psychoanalysts have great difficulty getting these traumatic facts out of our unconscious. Is it possible in the future somehow, with the help of such a wonderful trend in science, to help psychologists and psychoanalysts get hold of this traumatic factor? Thank you.
ANSWER: At the end of the last century, Freud wrote to his friend Fliess in one of his letters: “As you know, I am now working on a new theory of memory, according to which memory is not something given once and forever fixed, but changes with each retrieval . A process I call memory retranscription." I found this quote after we had labeled this process reconsolidation. But you see how close they are. And when we discovered this phenomenon in the mid-90s, the first thing that naturally came to mind was that this is very similar to what happens during psychotherapeutic sessions, only here we simplify the process, because during A psychotherapy session faces two complex tasks.
The first is to extract that memory, which is a needle that traumatizes the entire individual experience. And the second is to reorganize and rearrange the patient’s experience and memory in such a way that it loses points of conflict with all other elements of individual experience.
The second, perhaps, by the way, is much more difficult than the first. And so the idea immediately came to our minds that we could simplify this procedure, help it, because if we are talking about some traumatic memories with a known origin, then we can replace this complex two-step procedure with a simple technique - we can extract the traumatic memory, recalling it with various multimedia properties, multimedia, virtual reality and so on, against the background of drugs that interfere with the memory.
And such drugs, by the way, are known in humans, and they are quite harmless. These are often adrenergic receptor blockers, which are used to regulate blood pressure, or drugs that act on hormonal processes, they weaken the memory processes. It’s just never been clear what they are, why they can be used, although these properties have been studied long ago in animals. We proposed this procedure back in 1995-96. No one in our country has dealt with this.
But since the late 90s, very American psychologists began to actively engage in such research. It’s very interesting, it means there was a synthesis of neuroscientists and neurophysiologists in memory and psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and they, for example, imitated Desert Storm situations with different audiovisual properties for veterans with post-stress traumatic symptoms, and tried to disrupt this established stable pathological memory, simply reminiscent of these drugs. It works. And now a large number of studies are being conducted around the world, both in Europe and in the USA, and I think that we will soon have ones that use this technique. He's promising.
Scientific lecture from professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Konstantin Anokhin, who is the head of the department of systemogenesis at the Research Institute of Normal Physiology named after. PC. Anokhin and at the same time the head of the Russian-British laboratory for the neurobiology of memory. The lecture will discuss the physiology of memory, how information stored in the brain is stored and retrieved, and you will also learn what memory abilities exist and how the brain adapts to reality. The “Culture” channel project ACADEMIA presents a popular science lecture.
Konstantin Anokhin - professor, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, head of the department of systemogenesis at the Institute of Normal Physiology named after. PC. Anokhina and head of the Russian-British laboratory for the neurobiology of memory.
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KONSTANTIN ANOKHIN. "INSIDE THE BABYLON BRAIN LIBRARY"
Scientists and artists: eye to eye
Konstantin Anokhin confirmed that when we look into the eyes of another person, the activity of our brain changes noticeably. This phenomenon is the subject of study in neurosociology. But, as the scientist suggests, the experience of the participants in the performance does not fit into the framework of already studied processes and, perhaps, together scientists and artists will be able to understand what was happening in their heads in addition to the usual reaction to eye contact. The traditional and quite successful approach of science to understanding any objects is to decompose them into their component parts. This is how Konstantin Anokhin sees the scientific method. “In order to reassemble them and bring back the magic of the whole, science does not have good tools. And it seems to me that here we are entering the territory of art.” The scientist hopes that interaction with artists will allow scientists to understand “how the wine of consciousness is born from the water of the brain.” He said, citing family history, that in the 30s, on the initiative of Maxim Gorky, a group of scientists and artists was created who gathered in the writer’s mansion and tried to understand the nature of art and creativity from the point of view of science. Thus, Sergei Eisenstein, under the influence of these discussions, became interested in the application of Pavlov’s conditioning theory in cinema, and psychophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein became interested in the coordination of movements in ballet. Konstantin Anokhin believes that the science of those years was not ready for such a dialogue, but today, when we can spy on the work of the brain, it begins again.
Konstantin Anokhin: maybe joint work with artists will help to understand how the wine of consciousness is born from the water of the brain
The most remarkable thing about the past symposium was its openness and freedom of discussion. We are already accustomed to public lectures and discussions, where there are experts and the public: experts prepare speeches, the public listens and asks questions. Things didn't turn out quite like that at Brainstorms. At the press conference preceding the event, Tatyana Chernigovskaya admitted that at first she wanted, as usual, to prepare a speech, but then abandoned this idea - let the discussion proceed as it goes. Indeed, you can prepare reports and feel like an expert when it comes to issues that have already been studied. The symposium was conceived as a step into the unknown: for scientists - into the protected gardens of art, for artists - into the granite castle of science. And who here can call themselves an expert? And if so, then the public gets the freedom not only to listen, but also to participate. Judging by the applause that erupted from the audience every now and then, she more than liked this approach.