Metaphors and Oscillatory Dynamics at SPP

This weekend I attended my first conference of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. I had some wonderfully creative interactions with very interesting people:

1.Michael Anderson of Franklin and Marshall presented very innovative work on the functional architecture of the brain using graph theory. Our later discussions lead to a number of unique insights, including the connection between the spatial/topological social organizations that favor the spread of defection and neural organizations that promote the spread of entrained neural firing (leading to epilepsy). We also discussed various manufacturing and transportation metaphors for information processing in the brain. Briefly, sensory input (raw materials) are often locally processed, becoming value added products (parts) which are then transported to more central areas along the corpus callosum where they are combined with other products, then outputted to the rest of the body (exported). These ideas both originated from some interesting new data on the white matter pathways in the brain that are soon to be published in PLOS Biology.

2.Tony Chemro, also of Franklin and Marshall, had many interesting things to tell me about oscillators and entrainment, two of my favorite topics. In addition to a very stimulating conversation about whether you can do anything (including complex social cognition and behavior) with enough responsive oscillators, he pointed me to the work of Richard C. Schmidt, Doug Eck, Mari Jones and others who work on rhythmic behavior and oscillatory dynamics.

3.George Ainslie, a specialist in the area of intertemporal choice (decision making about the future), and I discussed the oscillatory dynamics underlying addiction, in particular the speeding up of the period of the oscillators underlying approach behavior. He also described the delicate balance that must be achieved in imagining of positive future outcomes: too little (not reinforcing enough) or too much joy (so reinforcing that the individual only daydreams) can both lead to decreased motivation to engage in the actual pursue that of that goal. We discussed the importance of properly yoking the positively reinforcing ‘images’ of success to process of making progress towards that final goal.

4.Richard Samuels suggested to me an interesting parameter to add to my SIMPLE model (described in the first chapter of my dissertation, downloadable from my research page). In the present model, agents can store energy inside their somatic boundaries, where they are unavailable to others, or in their local environment, where they are partially available to others. Dr. Samuels suggested that an interesting modification to make would be to create a parameter that specified the accessibility (to others) of somatically stored resources. In other words, this parameter could specify the likelihood that other entities can ‘take’ energy belonging to another agent. This kind of approach could be used to model many kinds of predator/prey, host/parasite and intraspecies exploitation interactions in SIMPLE.