01 INSIDE THE MIND: RODRIGO QUIAN QUIROGA

WHAT MAKES US HUMAN AND CREATIVE?

As part of his extensive research, Dr Rodrigo Quian Quiroga contemplates this question and is discovering some curious answers. A professor and non-fiction author, specialising in visual perception and memory, his books include, ‘Borges and Memory,’ ‘The Forgetting Machine,’ and, most recently, ‘Neuroscience Fiction.’ Rodrigo received his undergraduate training in physics from the University of Buenos Aires and was awarded his PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Luebeck. He currently holds a Research Chair and is Director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience at the University of Leicester. A recipient of numerous awards and honours including the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, a Young Investigator Award from the American Epilepsy Society, he was also named one of 10 UK RISE Leaders in Science and Engineering in 2014. Both his non-fiction literature and research articles make evident how neuroscience and the creative arts can be fused to help us learn about our cognitive functions. Here, Rodrigo shares his insights into creative arts, neuroscience, and the concept of reality.

Dwaynica Greaves: I’d like to begin by asking about your path into Neuroscience as you took an interesting route, through Physics and Mathematics. Do you remember the first time you became fascinated by or discovered questions only Neuroscience might answer?

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga: I’ve always been puzzled and intrigued by how the brain works, ever since childhood. So, when I was offered the chance to start working in neuroscience, I took it. I didn’t believe my background in physics and maths would hinder this transition as knowledge of these fields could be very useful for analysing brain signals. This led me to conduct my PhD on signal processing. As a postdoc, I transitioned fully into neuroscientific research and started working on a technical problem called spike sorting; identifying the activity of each neuron from recordings inside the brain. To do this you have to use mathematical processing algorithms to identify which activity corresponds to which neuron. I tried this using a couple of methods which I knew from my background in maths and physics. As a result, I came up with new ideas and when I put everything together, I developed a method that enabled me to see neurons which hadn’t been seen before, so my alternative research background was a huge advantage.

DG: And this interdisciplinary approach seems to have continued in your role as director of The Centre for Systems Neuroscience at the University of Leicester. The centre cites a crossover between art and science as one of its research interests. How did this crossover become a focus for the Centre?

RQQ: It wasn’t, as I would say in neuroscientific terms, a ‘top-down’ decision to start this link with art. I coincidentally had more interactions with artists, which led me to think - since I have the opportunity to collaborate, I will put effort into doing so, as we can learn a lot from artists. The first example of that was when I was re-reading the work of José Luis Borges. I realised that he could give new insights into the questions I was asking myself about how the brain works. This could occur for many other authors, for example, I think it's a pity that in the study of visual perception we don't read what Rembrandt had to say as he knew a lot about how we see and perceive things. It's a completely different type of information to what we are accustomed to in neuroscience, which is why I believe it can bring refreshing and alternative views to our problems.

DG: Continuing on from your mention of José Luis Borges, in your explorations of his work, you refer to his curiosity/insight into neuro-scientific principles and describe how ‘even without … scientific knowledge, Borges’s intuitive description is sharp,’ (Quiroga, 2010). In what way, if any, has his writing impacted your work? Do you believe that Borges provided neuro-scientific insight intuitively which would be more difficult to access through pure scientific research?

RQQ: One problem we have as scientists is that we tend to focus on our specific fields of expertise, as it’s already very time-consuming to keep track of discoveries in our own fields. This is why we tend to be overly specialised in specific topics, but it sometimes results in us missing the bigger picture. I think it's important to always keep sight of the bigger picture because it makes us aware of why the issues we're continuously working on are important. Also, it brings different aspects to our research so, if we broaden our field of knowledge, we have a lot to gain. In the particular case of Borges, I remember reading ‘Funes the Memorious’ which is about a man who cannot forget. Borges was speculating what life would be like if we were unable to forget anything. He realised that to think we have to forget, which is counterintuitive, as forgetting involves abstractions and, if we are not able to envisage abstractions, we aren’t able to think at all. So, on discovering ‘concept cells,’ I continually wondered about the purpose of these neurons and Borges’ story popped into my head. As a result, I realised if we didn’t have concept cells we wouldn't have representations of concepts, irrespective of specific details, we wouldn't be able to think, and that's what Borges was exploring in his speculations. I found it very interesting that his conclusions corresponded with what my data was showing. This led me to contact his widow to find out whether there were any works in neuroscience that inspired his ideas, and she granted me access to his personal library. I found he was reading books that were not classic scientific literature so, I decided to read what he read. It was at that point I decided to add this same principle to my work and to branch out into other fields such as the arts for insights in my research.

DG: Fascinating to hear how one can link ideas discussed in literature to scientific hypotheses and to see that, across different fields, we ask similar questions. On the topic of books, you once said in an interview on ‘Brain Science,’ (Campbell, 2018) that you ‘enjoy writing more publicly accessible books as it allows for speculative thought.’ Do you believe creative works such as novels or fine art, to be a form of speculative thought which can usefully feedback into scientific research? Are there any difficulties in fusing these two fields?

RQQ: Non-scientific literature definitely impacts my research; I have a book out this week called ‘Neuroscience Fiction,’ which presents collective insight into neuroscience gathered from science fiction films and stories. I definitely think the arts can impact research and that it would be a pity for scientists to ignore this influence. However, I do think that the link between these two fields is difficult, because we tend to seek the opposite. The arts naturally seek subjectivity, as eliciting emotions is a very personal thing. The view of an artist is also very subjective, for example, a painter puts their own feelings into their work. They want to give the viewer a personal perspective of an external reality, it’s figurative; each viewer will have their own perspective and interpretation of the art. In contrast, science looks for objective facts. If I make a discovery which is different from the discoveries of every single other person, there is nothing general to extract from that. Through studying physics, I see examples such as the law of gravity. The same law applies to all objects, no matter your perspective, all things will fall due to gravity. Nevertheless, I think there is a lot to be gained from these interactions.

DG: I definitely agree that there’s a great deal to be gained from these interactions, and our knowledge across fields can continually be strengthened through our ability to fuse and formulate hypotheses. Those things which, perhaps, appear somewhat unreal can become increasingly real and tangible through scientific analysis. I’d like to explore an example of your research collaborations in more detail. In 2016, you conducted collaborative research which culminated in the paper ‘Where is the ball? Behavioural and neural responses elicited by a magic trick,’ (Caffaratti, Navajas, Rey, Quian Quiroga, 2016) You have said of this study, with magician Hugo Caffaratti, that ‘magicians have been answering similar questions that we have in the lab, and they have an intuitive knowledge of how the mind works. Hugo will likely bring a fresh new view on how to address questions we deal with in neuroscience.’ Did a fresh new view emerge? If so, please tell us about that new view.

RQQ: Initially, I had an increase in interactions with magicians, especially a famous magician who was a very brilliant, curious person. When I spoke to him about the brain, he was very intrigued and offered his own perspective. Through learning about the way he performs tricks and sees magic, I realised that he was implicitly applying neuroscientific principles. Magicians are masters at manipulating attention. If you were to speak to a magician about attention it would be as if you were speaking to a scientific expert. Misdirection is one of the key principles of magic theory, and all it is, is the manipulation of attention. The most interesting thing I realised was that magicians understand very well that humans can process very little information from the world. We believe we see, pay attention, and remember everything but we can’t. What we see, remember, and are conscious of, is a construction. Magicians understand this very well. Although I know these things, through studying neuroscience and reading scientific papers, to see it in practice was a revelation.

DG: And another collaboration, with artist Mariano Molina, explored ‘The Art of Visual Perception.’ Your findings on the centre of gaze and the potential for an artist to guide attention patterns in a viewer chimes with studies in cognitive stylistics on how to guide a reader’s attention in literary works. In your personal opinion, do you believe this type of knowledge helps or hinders creativity?

RQQ: To answer this question, I have to quote Dr Ramachandran a neuroscientist in San Diego, who has researched a lot into science and arts. He said, ‘this is like saying if you know the rules of poetry and rhyme you will not enjoy Shakespeare’s writings.’ The fact that I know how perception works does not mean I can’t enjoy creativity. For me it gives a deeper layer of understanding which leads to greater enjoyment. Dr Livingstone has a beautiful book where she made this leap between visual arts and visual perception, when exploring the works of Rembrandt. One of my favourite Rembrandt paintings is called ‘Philosopher in Meditation.’ In the painting there is a philosopher by a window in a very dark place, like an ivory tower, but there's a very bright light coming from the window and illuminating him and his surroundings. But on the left side of the margin, 20% of the painting is painted black. It makes you wonder, why did Rembrandt waste so much canvas painting black? Why is it next to the window? Well, because the black creates a huge contrast to the brightness of the sun coming from the window and this contrast lights up the room. Therefore, we conducted a simple experiment where we cropped this black margin. We were investigating whether people will see this picture differently with and without the margin, we quantified this using an eye tracker. Our findings revealed that the way people saw the painting did indeed differ, Rembrandt’s methods of altering perception did work. This is why I believe that these findings do not undermine Rembrandt’s creativity, but gives you a new tool to appreciate his creativity and show how brilliant he was.

DG: And that collaboration also resulted in your study, ‘How do we see art: an eye-tracker study (Quiroga, Pedreira, 2011). From a neuro-scientific standpoint, how does a viewer’s experience of visual creative works e.g. films or fine art, compare with their visual experience of the real world? Are there any key differences?

RQQ: When you see what is in front of you, you believe you can see everything but you don’t, you only see a minute piece of information. You are just focusing on a few points and creating a construction, which we call the visual scene. Now, one of the differences between a painting and photograph of the same landscape is that in the painting the artist may in principle be guiding your eye towards a specific area of that painting. Through painting techniques, they can guide your attention to a specific element of that painting, or they may try and guide you eye away from a specific element. Therefore, in comparison to reality, a piece of art has a subjective interpretation, canvas and eye of the artist. As the viewer you are not just looking at this landscape you are looking at how the artists sees the landscape, and are feeling the emotions the artist wants to convey in this landscape. Therefore, it is not looking at an objective reality, but a subjective reality. Ultimately, I cannot define art, I don't know what art is, but one component I think is important in art is the ability to transmit emotions. By playing around with emphasis, enhancement and expressionism an art piece can go beyond reality. This ability to transmit these emotions one of the aspects that differentiates art from reality.

DG: As mentioned earlier, your new book is called ‘Neuroscience Fiction’ (Quiroga 2020). In its second chapter, ‘Can Androids feel?’ you refer to the concept of ‘qualia’, relevant to creativity as it might reveal how memory impacts subconscious thought to influence creative ideas. Could you briefly define this concept, and explain ways in which creative thought may be stimulated?

RQQ: Qualia is something that philosophers talk about, but if you ask five philosophers to define it you will get ten different answers. It’s easiest to give a notion of what qualia is with examples. An example could be the feeling of the redness of a rose, it’s when you feel the full richness of something. When linking qualia with creativity, I can only delve into the concept of creativity because as scientists when we meet art, we constantly ask ourselves ‘what is art?’ Creativity is a very important component as you do not need to make art to be creative. Creativity is about creating links between parts and things. You can be creative in science, for example, in Neuroscience Fiction I speak about Newton discovering gravity. He was not creative solely because he came up with the exact formula for gravity, but because he realised that there was a connection between the apple that fell from the tree and the moon that orbits around the earth, they respond to the same phenomenon. Thoughts such as these are creative because you are making a connection between two disparate things. It's very hard to link these two things because they are not typically related, but creativity is about finding the meaningful link between concepts. To think like this, you have to learn how to extract concepts, to make the link between the apple and the moon you cannot be distracted by details such as size and colour. This is why it’s important to have many representations in your concept cells as you will be able to extract a high level of meaning to things.

DG: So true; creative thought exists in science, as it does in the arts. As we look at scientific developments we think of artificial intelligence (AI). In the first chapter of ‘Neuroscience Fiction,’ you state that “the barrier that separates artificial and human intelligence is becoming increasingly vague.’ When we use AI to create e.g. a magic trick, or digital reproductions of art, do you believe that this creativity is a manifestation or independent form of human intelligence? What, do you believe, are the benefits and disadvantages of AI creativity?

RQQ: I think that AI is still very far from reaching human intelligence. The question we must ask is ‘how do we define intelligence?’ A computer beating us at chess or recognising images quicker than humans does not mean they are more intelligent than us. You would not say that a car is more intelligent than humans because it can move faster than us. Yes, there are things that machines can do better than us but the key component of human intelligence is our ability to generalise, extract inferences, and develop common sense. We know how to behave in completely new situations, we don't need to be trained repeatedly for every new experience. This is down to our ability to transfer knowledge we have gained from similar situations and/or previous experiences; the best AI algorithms cannot do this. Maybe in a few years people will develop new algorithms that may come close to human intelligence (there has been huge progress), but to date, this has not been fully achieved. You can have an AI programme that creates beautiful paintings, but you will still be missing the key ingredient, which is transmitting an emotion. How can you transmit an emotion if you don’t have any emotions? If an AI algorithm in a few years from now is able to feel emotions and translate this into a piece of art then yes, maybe we can start calling this art. However, now they can only create replicas; they can learn the rules of how Mozart composes his symphonies and try to come up with a composition that follows the rules, but they won’t be able to convey their feelings.

DG: Your answer reminds me of a dance piece I watched from Company Wayne McGregor entitled ‘Living Archive.’ The company performed a choreography that was formulated by AI using 25 years of Wayne McGregor’s archived work. When I think about that dance piece now, what you said made me realise, although the choreography was formulated by AI, human dancers with emotions had to convey the piece. Also, the original moves were choreographed by a human with emotions. Thinking about human cognition you once said in your ‘Brain Science’ interview that ‘we see very little’, that our wider scale perception and memory are a function of ‘constructions’ and ‘inferences’ by the brain, based on limited fractions of visual or memory data. Does this mean our experience of ‘reality’ is partly an illusion?

RQQ: A construction of the brain rather than an illusion. To call it an illusion implies that what we see doesn’t exist. We see glimpses of what things look like then we assume the rest through common sense. As scientists, we try to characterise how we process this information and create this construction. It is also very philosophical, as Emmanuel Kant said that it is not that we see reality as it is, what we have is reality and the observer of that reality. We have access to our own interpretation of reality; we cannot see reality as an objective thing we can only see our interpretation of reality. Our information on reality is coming through our eyes and our filters, and we cannot detach from that.

DG: As you mentioned earlier our ability to formulate connections and meaning is aided by our concept cells. I’d like to explore in more detail how concept cells aid perception. How might these cells bolster our ability to comprehend the world around us at speed? Are there ways in which they might confuse or delay our understanding, e.g. if they were to identify an image incorrectly?

RQQ: My answer to this question would be an example of an experiment I conducted where I showed participants pictures of different people and made them believe it was someone else in the picture. Findings revealed that their neurons responded to what they thought they saw. The physical stimulus was not what fired the neurons but the subjective perception that the participants had. Therefore, this shows that although our neurons fire when we see someone we recognise, if we are told that this is a picture of someone else these same neurons that would initially recognise this person, will not fire. These neurons respond to what the person believes he or she is seeing.

DG: Given that you will have employed both scientific method and creative techniques in the course of your work, how has your personal experience of this crossover of disciplines been? Have your experiences or techniques as a writer fed back into your scientific research?

RQQ: When I write a book, I let go of my imagination, which I cannot do as a scientist. People don’t invite me to talks to think about the future because I am supposed to talk about my experiments and explain to them how the brain works. However, when I write a book for the general public, nothing stops me from wondering what the world might be like in the next 30 years. Writing a book allows me to explore thoughts I cannot explore when conducting experiments, for example, I cannot study whether I can induce specific neurons in monkeys to make them think like us, but I can explore this when I write my books, as I did in Chapter 3 of Neuroscience Fiction. This impacts my research because ideas that I was initially playing around within the context of sci-fi films, has led me to be interested in researching the unique basis of human intelligence, in comparison to animals and AI. I can turn my wonderings into concrete scientific questions that lead to experimental design.

DG: And which wonderings occupy your mind most at present? You’ve spoken about your fascination with the ‘big problems’, those which are long-standing (Campbell, 2018). Which do you wish to tackle next?

RQQ: We’re all interested in the big problem, so it’s about realising that our problem is not just our problem, this is what we are lacking as scientists. If I want to understand how the brain sees, this is not solely my problem, this was Rembrandt’s problem too. Many of the things I was speaking to you about today, especially abstractions, Thomas Aquinas, Berkeley, John Locke, and Aristotle discussed too. Therefore, I like to get inspiration from philosophy, literature, and the arts. If I had to choose a big problem it would be: ‘What makes us human? What are the neural correlates of our human intelligence?’

References:

Caffaratti, H., Navajas, J., Rey, H. G., & Quian Quiroga, R. (2016). ‘Where is the ball? Behavioral and neural responses elicited by a magic trick.’ Psychophysiology, 53(9), 1441-1448.

Campbell, G. (2018, Jan 24). BS 141, ‘Rodrigo Quian Quiroga explores Perception and Memory,’ Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BXgM6nLdwc

Quiroga, R. Q., Reddy, L., Kreiman, G., Koch, C., & Fried, I. (2005). ‘Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain,’ Nature, 435(7045), 1102-1107.

Quiroga, R. Q. & Pedreira, C. (2011). ‘How do we see art: an eye-tracker study,’ Frontiers in human neuroscience, 5, 98. Quiroga, R. Q. (2010). In retrospect: Funes the memorious. Nature, 463(7281), 611-611

Quiroga, R. Q. (2020). NeuroScience Fiction: From ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ to ‘Inception,’ How Neuroscience Is Transforming Sci-Fi into Reality—While Challenging Our Beliefs About the Mind, Machines, and What Makes us Human. BenBella Books.