Introduction to Brain and Behavior

Professor Ark Verma

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Lecture 02
A Brief History of Cognitive Neuroscience Continue
Hello and welcome to the second lecture of the course Introduction to Brain and Behavior I am
doctor Ark Verma I am assistance professor of psychology in the Indian Institute of Technology
Kanpur. I work at a department of Humanities and Social Sciences and also with the program in
cognitive sciences. We started talking about some of the preliminary ideas some of the basic
setting of how cognitive neuroscience basically starts. And in the last lecture we have talked a
little bit about what were the basic findings what were the basic new discoveries that led to the
formation of this interesting field called cognitive neuroscience.

(Refer Slide Time: 00:49)

In today’s lecture we will take this story a little bit further will talk a little bit about psychology
and how the development and the advancements in phycology sort of come together to basically
compliment this field of cognitive neuroscience.
(Refer Slide Time: 01:08)

Now in 1869 a Dutch ophthalmologist Francis Donders devised the method or came up with the
method of subtraction which would be useful in inferring the time that what the brain spends in
you know different mental operations. The idea was basically very simple, the idea was that say
for example if the brain is doing a slightly complicated task let us say a task that is made up of
two steps. Let us take an example that is used by Gazzaniga himself is that let us say if we are
taking a task which involves identification of the color of light. So if there is this task and we can
kind of try and understand that this task at least has two parts, first is identification of detection
of that there is light and second is detection of the color of the light.

So if we take a task like this and from this task we subtract the time taken into taken for
identification of just the presence of the light basically, we would end up with the time that the
brain actually spends in identifying the color. So the idea is if there is a task which has two parts,
we also have a way of knowing the time spend in one of the parts. Ans we subtract this time
from the more complicated task we will basically be able to isolate the time spend in the single
task.

This is this is very simple and it has been as you see that this was discovered back in 1869 by
Francis Donders and it is a relatively simpler method which has been since used across the board
across many many domains of cognitive psychology, basically all domains of cognitive
psychology that have to do reaction time measurements. Basically, to infer the amount of time
the brain or let us say the amount of time we spend in performing particular mental operations.

This method because of its simplicity became very popular with psychologist and it started a new
trend, it started a trend were psychologist were basically more confident. And there were saying
that okay now we have find a way, using which we can measure the time spend in particular
mental operations. This had to have huge consequences and it basically led to the formation of an
entirely new branch in the psychology in the discipline of psychology refer to as experimental
psychology varying the researchers now and again basically tried to measure the time spend in
various different kinds of mental operations. And by different permutations and combinations
also could arrive at particular models, models of memory, models of information processing,
etcetera in the coming years.

(Refer Slide Time: 03:57)

So this is one of the very significant developments, now let us moving a little further towards the
other side from this particular finding. Most of psychology in around in end of the 19th century
beginning of the 20th century was basically driven by a couple of philosophical approaches
couple of philosophical endeavors which were pretty old. But had you know come into relevance
when people were talking about the brain and the mind and how the mind would function. These
two approaches were called rationalism and empiricism respectively.
And let us look a little bit into what each of these things mean and what consequences could they
have for people trying to understand how the human brains functions. Now rationalist basically
philosophers like Leibniz, etcetera, they believed that all knowledge could basically be derived
through reasoning and analysis of whatever facts and experiences are there in front of us. They
believed in analyzing peoples believe systems peoples given knowledge’s in terms of you know
different kinds of reasoning and analysis and believed that due to this because of this analysis
they could come across the correct or the true set of believes.

So this is basically more in terms of the analytical tradition where is the other tradition which
was also very popular and sort of say that around a same time was that of empiricism. Now
empiricist like John Locker etcetera basically believed in the fact that knowledge is mainly
derived through a sensory experience. So anything that us as organisms or the brain as an organ
have to learn is derived from sensory experience. So you can basically say that sort of resembles
this old Greek saying of Tabularasa where it is believed that the brain is born as a blank slate.
And the idea is that every experience that the brain undergoes after let us its birth or probably
some would argue that you know even few months before the birth all the experience that the
brain through it learns something out of those experiences. The mechanisms of learning we can
talk about later. But the brain does learn through this sensory experience and in that sense
whatever knowledge that the brain is capable of gathering in time is basically coming out of the
analysis of this sensory experience.

Simple things like associating simpler ideas with each other to form more complex idea or say
for example a body of knowledge. In around in the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th
century was basically driven by a couple of philosophical approaches couple of philosophical
endeavors which were pretty old. But had you know come into relevance when people were
talking about the brain and the mind and how the mind would function. These two approaches
were called rationalism and empiricism respectively. And let us look at little bit into what each
of these things mean and what consequences could they have for people trying to understand
how the human brain functions.

Now rationalist basically philosophers like Leibniz, etcetera, they believed that all knowledge
could basically be derived through reasoning and analysis of whatever facts and experiences are
there in front of us. They believed in analyzing peoples believe systems peoples given
knowledge’s in terms of you know different kinds of reasoning and analysis and believed that
due to this because of this analysis they could come across the correct or the true set of believes.

So this is basically more in terms of the analytical tradition where is the other tradition which
was also very popular and sort of say that around a same time was that of empiricism. Now
empiricist like John Locker etcetera basically, believed in the fact that knowledge is mainly
derived through a sensory experience. So anything that us as organisms or the brain as an organ
have to learn is derived from sensory experience. So you can basically say that is sort of
resembles this old Greek saying of Tabularasa where it is believed that the brain is born as a
blank slate. And the idea is that very experience that the brain undergoes after let us its birth or
probably some would argue that you know even few months before the birth all the experience
that the brain through it learns something out of those experiences. The mechanisms of learning
we can talk about later. But the brain does learn through this sensory experience and in that sense
whatever knowledge that the brain is capable of gathering in time is basically coming out of the
analysis of this sensing experience.

Simple things like associating simpler ideas with each other to form a more complex idea or say
for example a body of knowledge. We could take a very simple example which would be
something like say for example if I take aspirin my headache goes away. Gradually even if I did
I not know that aspirin is you know what is the chemical composition of aspirin or what kind of a
drug is it or how does it function by just simple association I can at least deduce a fact that okay
there this medicine called aspirin. If I have a headache I can take this medicine and get relief
from my headache. So that is that is one of the you know ideas.

So these two philosophical approaches had a very significant impact on the methodology that
were evolving in contemporary psychology at that time. And basically were you know suppose
to have a great influence on how psychology and neuroscience would move further from there.
As I said will talk a little bit more about on what was going on in psychology at the time and this
consent of associationism as I mention which partly derives from this empiricist ideas. It gained
a lot of impetus and were study by several researchers and it was as a very popular idea.

Now say for example first studied by Herman Ebbinghaus the gentleman who first devised a lot
of experiments on memory.
(Refer Slide Time: 10:44)

Herman Ebbinghaus was basically demonstrated that mental faculties like memory can be
experimentally measured and he demonstrated that the brain could you know maintained a small
amount of information only for a brief period of time. Similarly psychologist at that time like
Gustav Fechner and Ernest Weber they were demonstrating that mental experiences actually
came around in the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century was basically driven by
a couple of philosophical approaches couple of philosophical endeavors which were pretty old.
But had you know come into relevance when people were talking about the brain and the mind
and how the mind would function.
(Refer Slide Time: 11:33)

These two approaches where called rationalism and empiricism respectively. And let us look at
little bit into what each of these things mean and what consequences could they have for people
trying to understand how the human brain functions.

Now rationalist basically philosophers like Leibniz, etcetera, they believed that all knowledge
could basically be derived through reasoning and analysis of whatever facts and experiences are
there in front of us. They believed in analyzing peoples believe systems peoples given
knowledge’s in terms of you know different kinds of reasoning and analysis and believed that
due to this because of this analysis they could come across the correct or the true set of believes.

So this is basically more in terms of the analytical tradition where is the other tradition which
was also very popular and sort of say that around a same time was that of empiricism. Now
empiricist like John Locker etcetera basically believed in the fact that knowledge is mainly
derived through a sensory experience. So anything that us as organisms or the brain as an organ
have to learn is derived from sensory experience. So you can basically say that is sort of
resembles this old Greek saying of Tabularasa where it is believed that the brain is born as a
blank slate. And the idea is that every experience that the brain undergoes after let us say its birth
or probably some would argue that you know even few months before the birth all the experience
that the brain through it learns something out of those experiences. The mechanisms of learning
we can talk about later. But the brain does learn through this sensory experience and in that sense
whatever knowledge that the brain is capable of gathering in time is basically coming out of the
analysis of this sensory experience.

Simple things like associating simpler ideas with each other to form more complex idea or say
for example a body of knowledge. We could take a very simple example which would be
something like say for example if I take aspirin my headache goes away. Gradually even if I did
I not know that aspirin is you know what is the chemical composition of aspirin or what kind of a
drug is it or how does it function by just simple association I can at least deduce a fact that okay
there this medicine called aspirin. If I had a headache I can this medicine and get relieved from
my headache. So that is that is one of the you know ideas.

So these two philosophical approaches had a very significant impact on the methodology that
were evolving in contemporary psychology at that time. And basically were you know suppose
to have a great influence on how psychology and neuroscience would move further from there.
As I said will talk a little bit more about on what was going on in psychology at the time and this
concept of associationism as I mention which partly derives from this empiricist ideas. It gained
a lot of impetus and were study by several researchers and it was as a very popular idea as I am
saying.

(Refer Slide Time: 15:04)

Now say for example, it was first studied by Hermann Ebbinghaus, the gentlemen who first
devised a lot of experiments on memory. Hermann Ebbinghaus basically demonstrated that
mental faculties like memory can be experimentally measured and he demonstrated that the brain
could you know maintain a small amount of information only for a brief period of time.
Similarly a physiologist at that time like Gustav Fechner and Ernst Weber, they were
demonstrating that mental experiences actually corresponded to or could correspond to amount
or the degree of physical stimulation just like exposure to light or sound etcetera.

And they were basically demonstrating that these mental experiences could actually be measured
objectively and would be in some kind of a relationship with degree of the stimulation that was
provided. Similarly Edward Thorndike was also one of these you know very famous researchers
at that time scientist at that time who wanted to study this whole concept of associationism, but
basically took to a studying this particular concept with animals more often and not.

And derived very interesting insights from this experiments with animals. The most important of
them being that animals or even say for example you could extrapolated humans as well. If they
engage in a particular behavior and that particular behavior leads to particular leads to rewarding
outcomes or pleasurable outcomes. Those behaviors would basically be established as habits. So
if you do something and that action or that behavior that you do is met with the reward it will
eventually be you know establish as one of the things that you would like to do again and again.

And may or may not form or may you know form part of our habit. So some of these things are
happening around that time in early 20th century.

(Refer Slide Time: 17:15)

Now this idea of associationism or the idea of the idea that animals form these associations and
they could basically explain some of the rudimentary forms of animal behavior was taken to
study humans by John B Watson, who was also is one of the most famous names in psychology.

And John Watson with his experiments with both animals and humans actually proposed that
psychology should be you know only concerned with behaviors or things that can be objectively
measured. So John Watson actually established the school of psychology called behaviorism. I
have talked about this in one of my earlier lectures. But just to give you a flavor that behaviorism
or this feel that John Watson was establishing basically believed that psychology should only be
concerned with things that can be measured with behaviors that can be manipulated and
objectively demonstrated.

And any talk of other kinds of mental processes like insights and you know intelligence and
emotions and those kind of things need to be kept out of psychology, at least the logic at that
point was that because we cannot measure and manipulate these things, psychology would be
doing disservice to itself if it continues to grapple with those kind of questions. Coming back
experiments and a lot of insights were gained about human behavior about how human learn to
behave in particular manners through the use of this principles of associationism and you might
be aware of terms like conditioning etcetera.

Now this whole concept of that the human brain learns is rather fanciful unless you actually look
at the human brain and see if there are changes happening in the brain corresponding to the
learning that is happening or corresponding to the experience that is being played out. So Donald
Hebb, around middle of the 20th century onwards basically discovered through his experience of
working with patience of brain injury that the human brain is the main determinant of human
behavior, all and although it was sort of known.
(Refer Slide Time: 19:32)

In 1949, he publishes a book called The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological

Theory, where in he actually elaborates the biological basics of learning from experience. So this
is one of the early evidences of the fact that the brain as an organism actually changes in
response to the experience and this is this was a very interesting finding because it is sort of
demonstrated and established the fact that the brain does learn.

And that learning sort of stays on in terms of actual you know physical changes in the brain. So
more specifically Hebbian learning is a concept that you will hear of every now and then. But
Hebb, I will just give you a brief snippet of it actually means. So Hebb actually proposed that
several neurons can combine together as a single processing unit in response to certain kinds of
stimulation certain kinds of physical or you know chemical stimulation.

And basically what can happen is that, these unit of neurons 5, 6, 10, 20 whatever number of
neurons that are reacting to one kind of similar say, for example, there are 40 neurons that are
you know firing whenever you show them a particular picture and that picture could be of your
pet of your you know relative of a particular building or something. If these 20 neurons decide to
fire every time you show them the same picture, they will form a pattern of inter connectivity,
they will form a pattern of firing that will become sort of let us say that will become sort of
specific to this particular stimulus.
In sense, this can be equated to the fact that the circuit here of neurons will learn to recognize
this particular stimulus as let us say your pet named something or your relative or a particular
place. So this was also something that was very very revolutionary at that time and led to a
greater degree of advancement of what was known in or what was studied in psychology at that
time. Now this whole school of behaviorism it sort of remained very popular enterprise, it remain
a very popular pursuit of knowledge among psychologist from the early 20 th century to almost
middle of the 20th century 1950s and so on.

But counter evidences of various kinds started coming up since around the 1930s itself I
remember 1930 something Tolman basically found out that human brains are capable of
representing paths or representing. Tolman’s experiment was basically about rats and the idea
was that these rats could actually represent the entire path in the maze as what he referred to as
cognitive maps. And the fact that some information in the outside world or from the outside
world can be represented and stored in the brain irrespective of whether you know conditioned
learning is happening or not happening was a very sort of revolutionary finding at that time.

Similarly other people like Benay came up with the idea of forming a scale to measure
intelligence. They were some other interesting and important findings happening at around the
same time as well. So there were sort of counter evidences coming up which were you know
continuously signally that learning or conditioning cannot solely explain the entire you know
gamete of human behaviors.

But significant a very significant event sort of that led to the reversal of behaviorism and
formation of new philosophies and psychology sort of happened around 1956.
(Refer Slide Time: 23:30)

In September 11, 1956 more precisely then there was this Second Symposium of Information
Theory being held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and being attended by several
stalwarts like John von Neumann, Marvin Minsky and some of these others who were great
pioneers and scientist in a field of computation and Artificial intelligence and so on.

Now what happened in this symposium was and through the talks that were presented in these
particular symposium was that it sort of led to affirmation of the growing belief that human brain
sort of works in a very similar fashion to that of particular information processing machine. And
the information processing machine that was available for comparison at that time was the
earliest computers that had started coming up.

So the advent of computers at around this time and this whole shift from behaviorism to
believing that brain could actually process information in much the same way like the computers
were doing you know storing information, analyzing it, storing the output and then later on
giving the output, became very very important and became very very revolutionary at that time.
One of the significant papers that come around this time was George Miller’s classical paper
called The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, where it sort of explains how memory
sort of can be instantiated as or remembered as a system of process of information processing.
(Refer Slide Time: 25:01)

Now it was as I was saying becoming clear at this time that associationism or learning cannot
completely explain different facets of human behavior. A very interesting contribution to this
effect was made by Norm Chomski, who through his earlier works demonstrated that you know
the sequential predictability of speech follows from adherence to grammatical roles, roles that
are stored in the brain are somewhat biological innate and universal.

As supposed to probabilistic rules that would basically be derived through learning of you know
any kind. So these realizations basically led to an increase array of first in the direction where the
goal was you know the goal became to understand the functioning of this entire human brain as a
system not as separate parts doing separate things independently. But the idea was to understand
how this human brain is working you know as a system all parts working together to lead to a
these different mental functions these different mental processes that we talk about, such as, you
know seeing, hearing, perceiving you know or say for example, thinking, decision making,
failing emotions, language, and so on.

But also more as an integrated say more as an integrated whole is to how all of this comes
together and this whole you know conscious self-aware human being functions. So this is some
of the some of the early things that sort of lead to the development of this particular field called
Cognitive Neuroscience.
(Refer Slide Time: 26:54)

So this is something which is very very interesting and sort of acts as a precursor to a lot of what
we are going to study in this particular course.

Now before we move on to more you know to other things, I thought of very briefly recounting
some of the very early some of the every rudimentary methods that were available to
Neuroscientist at that time, which would enable them to sort of measure the activity of the brain
to measure how the human brain is going to function?

(Refer Slide Time: 27:28)

So let us look at some of these things, the electroencephalograph or the EEG, was one of the first
it was basically based on the insight that Helmholtz had provided earlier if you remember the
from the last lecture, that it was an electrical impulse that eventually carried out you know
messages from one end of the neuron to the other.

And as soon as this insight was available very shortly afterwards Richard Canton used a
galvanometer to measure this continuous spontaneous electrical activity from this cerebral cortex
and the skull surface of living dogs and apes. So the idea was that you could sort of measure this
you know continuous electrical activity in the brain, from the surface of the skull without
breaking open the skull or without sort of entering the brain in any form of invasive manner .

Now this was quite an achievement and it was finally unitize by Hans Berger, who was German
psychiatrist, to sort of develop a method for recording the same electrical activity from human
brains. And he published this firstly in 1929 and he called this visualized graphs as the
electroencephalogram. And this electroencephalogram became one of the first became actually
the first recordings of electrical activity of the human brain in a very non-invasive manner.

(Refer Slide Time: 28:55)

The other important technique that was available was the CAT scan, computer which is basically
the full for of which is Computerized Axial Tomography. Now Computerized Axial
Tomography basically built upon the principle of Alessandro Vallebona in 1930s, who
developed this technique of tomographic radiography wherein transverse sections of the skull
was taken and some kind of images were build up.

In 1961, William Oldendorf outlined this basic concept to be used in Computerized Tomography
wherein a series of transverse X-rays were to be taken and then they could be reconstructed into
a 3-d picture of the skull. Now finally, this was basically taken up by EMI, which was an
electronics company that own electronics company wherein this individual called Hounsfield
using mathematical who use mathematical techniques, and multiple 2-d X-rays.

He developed his first scanner and performed the first CAT scan in humans in late in 1972. So it
is around that time where this whole idea of CAT scan sort of crystalized and people could take
these scans of the human brain to sort of develop you know idea of what was the what did the
inside of the normal functioning human brain looked like.

(Refer Slide Time: 30:23)

Another technique that became very important was this idea of magnetic resonance imaging.
Magnetic resonance imaging was based on the principle of nuclear magnetic resonance, which
was earlier explaind by Isidor Rabi in 1938. Now many years later in around 1971 Paul
Lauterbur was working on some of these ideas and he came up with the invention that led to the
establishment of the first magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which was established at
University of New York at Stony Brook in 1973.
However, at this time it was still not being used for recording from humans which only happened
around again another 20 years later in the 1990s, where staff at the Massachusetts general
hospital established and demonstrated that an MRI of the human brain could be taken in again as
in non-invasive manner.

(Refer Slide Time: 31:14)

Finally, we can talk about functional magnetic resonance imaging which sort of build upon the
earlier idea of magnetic resonance imaging.

It was developed by Seiji Ogawa at the AT&T Bell Labs, who sort of figured out a way to use
blood oxygen level dependent contrast basically the amount of the oxygen levels in the blood are
manipulated and using that some kind of contrast pictures were taken which would be very high
resolution pictures of the brain. So the same method was later utilized in combination with clever
experimental paradigms.

Things that people like Michael Posner came up with later and a particular method was born that
could yield data of the young brain in a functioning condition and became you know the corner
stone or became the first aspects of this method called FMRI. We will talk about FMRI and
FMRI data in a lot of detail going further. So this is basically all that I wanted to say in today’s
lecture. There are just a couple of things I would like to you know give to you as take home
messages is that.
(Refer Slide Time: 32:27)

Along with whatever was happening in Neuroscience and the way people’s interest in the
functioning human brain was you know sort of increasing by the day. Lot of conquer and
developments in physiology contributed to the methodology and the philosophy of how
Cognitive Neuroscience would later you know adopt and used to work with. Secondly, a lot of
these technological advancements that are also happening on the side, played a major role in
providing us with the tools to measure the functioning human brain and to basically then may be
able to test several hypothesis about how the human brain would function or respond to
particular kinds of stimulation that we would be able to give it.
(Refer Slide Time: 33:19)

So I think that is all for today’s lecture this is probably wrapping off the history part of Cognitive
Neuroscience from the next lecture onwards we will start with completely different topic. Thank
you.