Neuropsychology | Reality Bending Lab

Podcast 'Learn Bayesian Stats' with Dominique Makowski

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The ‘Learning Bayesian Statistics’ Podcast

I had the chance of being invited to talk about R, Python, Reality Bending and much more! It was my first experience of that kind, so thanks a ton to the host of the podcast Alex Andorra. Listen to it here:

https://www.learnbayesstats.com/episode/55-neuropsychology-illusions-bending-reality-dominique-makowski

We're recruiting a Research Assistant!

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’re recruiting a Research Assistant!

In the context of a new collaboration between Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) and Future Cities Laboratory, myself and Dr Panos Mavros are recruiting a Research Assistant in psychology/neuroscience (bachelor/master) to contribute to an exciting new research project that combines a neuroscientific approach to studying the interaction between beauty and the perception of urban spaces.

Perfect for psychology graduates interested in joining a cool team and learning skills like EEG, physiological techniques, advanced statistics and more!

Apply through this portal
More info here

Pyllusion has been published

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pyllusion has been published!

Pyllusion is a package for Python that implements a systematic way to manipulate and generate illusions using a set of parameters.

For instance, the famous Müller-Lyer illusion below, which causes the observer to perceive the 2 segments of being different lengths depending on the shape of the arrows, can be generated wit the following lines of code:

mullerlyer = pyllusion.MullerLyer(illusion_strength=30)
mullerlyer.to_image()

To understand more about the parametric approach being implemented in the Pyllusion package, we recommend reading our paper, which includes a hands-on example on how to generate some classic illusions (such as the Delbeouf Illusion), and discusses how Pyllusion contributes to address conceptual and methodological issues in illusion science.

import pyllusion

delboeuf = pyllusion.Delboeuf(illusion_strength=3)
delboeuf.to_image()

Don’t forget to keep a look out for our repo for more exciting open-source projects!

What visual agnosia might feel like

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Name One Thing In This Photo

Can you name one thing in the image above? It all looks familiar, but something is off. The image makes “sense” overall; there are well-defined shapes and objects, that seem to be placed in a plausible - albeit chaotic - fashion, like some random rubbish thrown in the corner of a room. Even the colors, the lightning, the quality, is coherent, and helps making it believable. And yet, chances are you cannot name one single element that composes it.

This image, after appearing on twitter in April 2019, surfaced on reddit with the caption “This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can’t quite recognize anything”, and became subsequently viral. However, the author of the caption later admitted that he made this description up.

So where does the image come from?

One can trace back the original publication to an instagram account, which author declared having made the image using ArtBreeder.com. This website gives access to an AI algorithm (Generative Adversarial Networks - GAN), commonly used in the processing and generation of images (one mindblowing example can be found on thispersondoesnotexist.com, which generates realistic pictures of non-existing people). There were even some attempts to reverse engineer the process to retrieve what the original image could have been like.

After all, it seems like there is no intelligent design behind this image. No clever neuropsychologist carefully crafting a meaningful experience. Just one of these lucky accident.

Nonetheless, it’s still an intriguing image, falling in this uncanny abyss of things that we recognize as familiar, but slightly too alien for our sense-seeking brains to dissolve in meaning. Could it tell something about brain processes? Surely, but brain disorders? Maybe.

The “occipital stroke” hypothesis mentioned above suggests, by its formulation, a lesion to the primary visual cortices. However, as neuroscientists know, these brain regions, located at the extreme back of the brain, are mostly supporting lower level aspects of visual processing, and their damage is usually related to alterations of a somewhat different nature than of that above, such as vision loss, visual hallucinations, visual deformations, loss of color, movement, stereoscopy, etc.

However, there is another neuropsychological disorder, referred to as “visual agnosia”, in which patients experience difficulties to recognize visually presented objects, despite preserving an intact vision. In fact, it is more an umbrella term for different subcategories of deficits, and the image above could be reminiscent of visual agnosia of the associative type, which corresponds to a a specific impairment in the assignment of meaning to a stimulus that is accurately perceived (and can be visually described). This symptom is often related to injuries in the left occipito-temporal region, located on the ventral “what” stream of the brain (as opposed to the so-called “where” dorsal stream).

Ivan Seal’s Art

From there, the youtuber Solar Sands helped me discover the artist Ivan Seal, which work is somewhat akin to the image above. They are not purely abstract renditions, or depictions of impossible entities, but plausible objects that sit in this awkward space, deep between boring reality and total weirdness.

Thanks for reading! Do not hesitate to tweet and share this post and don’t forget to join me on X 🐦 @Dom_Makowski

What is Reality Bending?

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As you know, reality bending is my primary research direction. However, it is not (yet) a well-established scientific topic, nor is it clearly defined. In fact, it is not defined at all, hence the purpose of this article.

But what does it refer too? Is it some kind of Avatar: The Last Airbender thing? Or some Avengers-style superpower? Well… I sure wish it was 😁

Essentially, reality bending refers to the study of the internal and external determinants of subjective reality. In other words, we seek to understand the processes that modulate our conscious experience of reality. The word “bending” encapsulates the active nature of the mechanisms at stake. Indeed, being anything but stable, our perception of reality can be quite easily influenced, whether voluntarily or not, sometimes to extreme degrees of alteration.

Daumier, H. (1925), Don Quixote attacking the windmills.

Reality benders seek to unravel the structure and mechanisms of the sense of reality by studying natural instances of its distortion, or by directly inducing them through a variety of means.

Objective and subjective determinants of the sense of reality

Let’s take for example a guy watching some episode of his favourite TV show, Friends. As he swiftly moves from laughing to snivelling, we can confidently say that he is fully immersed in the show. He feels like he’s present in the show, from which the fictional characters feel very real: for a moment, his brain processes the perceived experience almost as if it was real.

What leads to this high sense of reality? First, there are objective characteristics of the experience (or rather, of the external source of the experience), i.e., characteristics of the environment. Here, it’s a realistic stimulus displayed on a flat screen. But one could wonder what would happen if the sensory input was richer (imagine being physically IN the show by means of some super virtual reality setup), or poorer (the same story presented as comic strips with the characters portrayed as stick figures).

However, while such manipulations could indeed be used to manipulate our immersion, there is also a subjective component contributing to our sense of reality, related for instance to the affective response, attentional engagement, or self-relevance, that will cause a stimulus to strum unique strings in each individual, depending on his history and state of mind.

Tell me your reality and I’ll tell you who you are

The fact that the sense of reality is, in the end, a subjective experience, means that is is intrinsically connected to the Self (i.e., our physical and mental identity). As such, aside from studying how our sense of reality is influenced by external and internal factors, but also investigate the reverse relationship, i.e., how the variability of our sense of reality can inform us about oneself.

Note that, although the focus is the subjective aspect of reality, it doesn’t mean that we deny the existence, or downplay the importance, of objective reality. Stating that most of our experience is “made-up” (i.e., is a construction of the brain) does not equate absolute relativism (more on that in another post). Objective truths and facts do exist, and are essential to seek.

Altered states of consciousness

Naturally, states in which our sense of reality is distorted (as compared to the consensual collective experience) are of particular interest as models or study-cases of our ideas and theories. They include long-term affections (e.g., neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia) or transcient states (induced by psychoactive substances or specific practices like meditation and trance).

Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to join me on X @Dom_Makowski 🤗

What is neuropsychology?

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The place of neuropsychology

Let’s make a simple experiment. Pick one young and brilliant neuropsychologist and ask “what is neuropsychology?”. In some cases, after a few seconds of hesitation, you could hear answers like “being a neuropsychologist means doing this or that”. In other cases, you might come across incomplete - or even false - responses, such as “neuropsychology is a tool”, “a method”, “a paradigm”, or even worse, “a point of view”.

That does not mean that our neuropsychologist is incompetent, far from it. But formally defining our field as a whole is not an exercise that we are used to do. Indeed, the training in neuropsychology usually comes in a fragmented way, little by little. A bit of cognitive neuroscience here, a bit of neuropsychological syndromes there, some cognitive tests administration over here, and some cortical neuroanatomy over there… Though we might, in fine, acquire a global vision and understanding of neuropsychology, verbalizing it is seldom necessary.

The definition of neuropsychology is actually quite complex to formalize, and can even be hotly debated. The jobs and positions that stem out of this field are many, and practitioners often tend to circumscribe neuropsychology to their own activity. For instance, a neuropsychologist that mainly does cognitive rehabilitation with psychiatric patients might have quite a different vision from another that does, day after day, presurgical cognitive assessments. And that is without mentioning the neuropsychologists pursuing an academic career, or even the ones that have moved to the private sector.

No problem, would argue the careful reader, if the definitions are too narrow, let’s take more general one. It’s not that simple. Indeed, neuropsychology occupies a very particular place in the network of science, as it is at the crossroads between social sciences, biological sciences and medical fields. Giving a definition that is too large would lose its essence in the nebulous depths of neuroscience and psychology, which would be not be accurate; neuropsychologists, whether they are clinical practitioners or not, have a common training, a specific theoretical grounding, as well as a unique interpretation and analysis framework underpinned by a scientifically rigorous method. Taking these elements into account, I will attempt to give a simple, comprehensive and informative definition of neuropsychology.

The first axiom that we need to discuss is the notion of science. Is neuropsychology its “own” scientific field, or is it a mere portion of another one, such as cognitive neuroscience or psychology, which differs from other specializations only through its object of interest? “By science”, says Schopenhauer in his PhD thesis with a baroque title (On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason), “we understand a system of notions, i.e. a totality of connected, as opposed to a mere aggregate of disconnected, notions.” This definition applies well to neuropsychology, that contains a set of theories, hypotheses, methods and proofs feeding from one another and creating a coherent ensemble. As such, neuropsychology is its own scientific discipline, although a singular one…

Indeed, what is the “bigger” box in which neuropsychology fits? While neuropsychologists are often initially trained in psychology, one could argue that the focus on the brain makes it more belonging to neuroscience. Well, the organization and structure of Science is a complicated issue. However, the particularity of the topographical location of neuropsychology is quite apparent.

On the one hand, neuropsychology belongs to a cluster of sciences interested a specific biological organ: the brain. As such, neuropsychology is an integral part of neuroscience. On the other hand, neuropsychology is interested in the productions of the brain (e.g., thoughts, feelings and behaviours) with a focus on the cognitive level (analyzing things in terms of cognitive processes and mechanisms), which makes it also belonging to psychology. Moreover, one could argue that neuropsychology, through its integration of the study of what we are biologically, and who we are mentally, has been connected to, and used as evidence in, philosophy of mind debates (for instance, famous neuropsychological cases studied by Sacks, Ramachandran or Milner have been widely discussed by contemporary philosophers). Finally, contrary to many other domains, neuropsychology has also an applied, practical component, that can be used in clinical practice. This clinical aspect, registering neuropsychology withing medical fields, takes multiple forms, such as assessment, diagnostic or therapeutic care, and can be used with a wide variety of patients and illnesses. These multiple facets make the wealth of neuropsychology, which offers an exceptional freedom of practice.

As we have seen, neuropsychology is located at the centre of colliding galaxies of knowledge, such as neuroscience, psychology, medicine and philosophy. However, the fast development of neuropsychology is gradually leading to the creation of subcomponents within itself, corresponding to different practices and theoretical steps. And these clusters are themselves growing. For instance, clinical neuropsychology was historically focused on diagnostic cognitive assessments, but has recently expanded on the treatment-side of things, with innovations like cognitive training and rehabilitation. This underlines neuropsychology as a rapidly evolving field, moving its potential towards yet uncharted territories.

The fourfold structure of neuropsychology

Neuropsychology is born from the convergence of cognitive neurology, with pioneers such as Broca and Wernicke (which made inferences about brain functioning based on the observations of patients with brain lesions) and psychologists such as Ribot (focusing on the organization and semiology of cognitive deficits). This history has shaped neuropsychology as a two-faced entity, with one experimental side dedicated to understand the relationship between brain and cognition (by using pathological cases or natural variability of neurocognitive characteristics), and one clinical aspect, focusing on bringing this knowledge to the benefit of the patients suffering from brain disorders.

However, beyond these two pillars of neuropsychology, recent advances have outlined a more theoretical level of neuropsychology, dedicated to a high-level integration of the data at hand to elaborate general theories and interfacing them with evolutionary or philosophical principles. Similarly, a computational facet, referring to the operationalization of the functioning in statistical terms, starts to emerge as a pseudo-independent aspect, propelled by the regain of interest and focus on the methodological and statistical aspects of psychology and neuroscience.

This structure is not fixed, but driven by the evolution of the field. It is possible that new poles will emerge, or differentiate over time, until maybe they separate from - or create new clusters within - neuropsychology.

The fourfold structure of neuropsychology.

The definition of neuropsychology

Neuropsychology is a theoretical and practical science investigating the relationship between 1) the structure and functioning of the brain, and 2) cognitive processes and their related derivatives, such as thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It is organised in four interconnected and overlapping dimensions:

Experimental neuropsychology studies the variability of the brain and cognition (whether from pathological origin or not) to test theories and models through empirical experimentation.
Clinical neuropsychology uses theories and models about mental functioning to better detect and assess disorders and deficits, leading to a precise diagnostic and an adapted treatment.
Computational neuropsychology transforms the data acquired through experiments and observation into logical or statistical models of mental functioning that are used to operationalize the processes at stake.
Theoretical neuropsychology integrates the evidence to elaborate and develop unifying theories to address fundamental questions about mental functioning.

Neuropsychology is located at the crossroads between neuroscience and psychology, at the interface between theory and practice. Its practitioners, the neuropsychologists, are bound by a specific training, by unique theoretical and historical references, and are endowed with an analysis and interpretation framework backed by a rigorous and scientific investigation methodology.

Thanks for reading! Do not hesitate to tweet and share this post, and leave a comment below 🤗

References

Nicolas, S., & Murray, D. J. (1999). Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), founder of French psychology: A biographical introduction. History of Psychology, 2(4), 277.
Schopenhauer, A. (1813). On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. PhD dissertation.

_{You can reference this post as follows:}

_{- Makowski, D. (2020, September 13). What is Neuropsychology?. Retrieved from https://dominiquemakowski.github.io/post/what_is_neuropsychology/}