Other people. Everyone is interested in other people. Everyone has relationships with other people, and they're interested in these relationships for a variety of reasons. Good relationships, bad relationships, annoying relationships, agnostic relationships, and what I'm going to do is focus on the central piece of an interaction that goes on in a relationship. So I'm going to take as inspiration the fact that we're all interested in interacting with other people, I'm going to completely strip it of all its complicating features, and I'm going to turn that object, that simplified object, into a scientific probe, and provide the early stages, embryonic stages of new insights into what happens in two brains while they simultaneously interact.
他人。每個人都對別人感興趣。 每個人跟別人都有關係, 而且因為各式各樣的原因 他們都對這些關係感興趣。 好的關係,壞的關係, 惱人的關係,失去信任的關係, 而我將要做的,就是集中探討在 一段關係上互動的核心 我將以「我們都對與人互動感興趣」 的事實作為啓發 我將要徹底脫掉它複雜的外表 我要轉換這個東西,這個精簡的東西 將它變成一個科學的探針,為你展示 兩個腦袋同時互動的時候,帶給我們的 一些初步的、原始的啟發
But before I do that, let me tell you a couple of things that made this possible. The first is we can now eavesdrop safely on healthy brain activity. Without needles and radioactivity, without any kind of clinical reason, we can go down the street and record from your friends' and neighbors' brains while they do a variety of cognitive tasks, and we use a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging. You've probably all read about it or heard about in some incarnation. Let me give you a two-sentence version of it. So we've all heard of MRIs. MRIs use magnetic fields and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain or your knee or your stomach, grayscale images that are frozen in time. In the 1990s, it was discovered you could use the same machines in a different mode, and in that mode, you could make microscopic blood flow movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain. Okay, so what? In fact, the so what is, in the brain, changes in neural activity, the things that make your brain work, the things that make your software work in your brain, are tightly correlated with changes in blood flow. You make a blood flow movie, you have an independent proxy of brain activity.
但在此之前,讓我告訴你 這些事情是如何達成的 首先,我們現在可以安全地竊聽 健全腦袋的運作 不需要針頭和放射物質 不需要任何醫療理由,我們只要走到街上 當你的朋友和鄰居正在做各式各樣的認知活動時 用一種叫做「功能性磁力共振造影 (fMRI)」的方法 紀錄他們腦袋的活動 你們可能都讀過或聽過「影像化」 讓我用兩個句子來描述它 我們都聽過「磁力共振造影 (MRI)」。磁力共振造影使用磁場 和無線電波,它們可以照下你的大腦 或你的膝蓋,或你的肚子的快照 一些凝結在時空中的黑白影像 1990 年代,人們發現可以在不同模式中 使用同一個儀器 在那個模式下,你可以製作從腦內 成千上萬個據點微觀血液流動的影片 好,那又怎樣?事實上,那個「那又怎樣」就反映你腦內 神經的活動,那些使你的大腦運作 使你大腦中的軟體運作的東西 與腦中血流的改變有著密切關係 你製作血液流動的影片,你就有一個獨立的 大腦活動估算
This has literally revolutionized cognitive science. Take any cognitive domain you want, memory, motor planning, thinking about your mother-in-law, getting angry at people, emotional response, it goes on and on, put people into functional MRI devices, and image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity. It's in its early stages, and it's crude by some measures, but in fact, 20 years ago, we were at nothing. You couldn't do people like this. You couldn't do healthy people. That's caused a literal revolution, and it's opened us up to a new experimental preparation. Neurobiologists, as you well know, have lots of experimental preps, worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this. And now, we have a new experimental prep: human beings. We can now use human beings to study and model the software in human beings, and we have a few burgeoning biological measures.
這簡直徹底改變了認知科學 選擇任何一個你想到的認知領域,記憶、 動作規劃、 想一想你的岳母、 對人生氣,情緒反應,諸如此類的 將人放進 fMRI 設備中,並且 想像這些變量如何與大腦活動相關 這個測量工具,在某個層面上,還在早期發展階段當中 但事實上,20 年前,我們什麼都沒有 你不能這樣測量人類。你不能測量健康的人類 事實上這的確是一場革命,它為我們提供了 一個新的實驗對象。眾所皆知,生物神經學家 有很多的實驗對象 像是蠕蟲、齧齒(鼠)類動物和果蠅這樣的東西 現在,我們有新的實驗對象: 人類 現在,我們可以使用人類來研究和模擬 人類當中的軟體運作,我們有幾個 發展迅速的生物實驗方法
Okay, let me give you one example of the kinds of experiments that people do, and it's in the area of what you'd call valuation. Valuation is just what you think it is, you know? If you went and you were valuing two companies against one another, you'd want to know which was more valuable. Cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago. If you want to compare oranges to windshields, what do you do? Well, you can't compare oranges to windshields. They're immiscible. They don't mix with one another. So instead, you convert them to a common currency scale, put them on that scale, and value them accordingly. Well, your brain has to do something just like that as well, and we're now beginning to understand and identify brain systems involved in valuation, and one of them includes a neurotransmitter system whose cells are located in your brainstem and deliver the chemical dopamine to the rest of your brain. I won't go through the details of it, but that's an important discovery, and we know a good bit about that now, and it's just a small piece of it, but it's important because those are the neurons that you would lose if you had Parkinson's disease, and they're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally every drug of abuse, and that makes sense. Drugs of abuse would come in, and they would change the way you value the world. They change the way you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice, and they make you value that over everything else.
好吧,讓我給你們一個人們正在做的實驗例子 而這是在一個被你們所稱為估算的領域 估算就是你所想的那種,你知道嗎? 如果你去估算兩家互相對抗的公司 你會想知道哪一家比較有價值 人類文明早在數千年前就發現估算的關鍵 如果你想比較橘子和擋風玻璃,你會怎樣做? 嗯,你不能比較橘子和擋風玻璃 它們是不能相提並論的。他們不能彼此混在一起 於是,你將它們轉換為貨幣單位 把它們放進這個單位,再以此衡量它們的價值 嗯,你的大腦必須做類似的事情 而我們現在將開始瞭解並辨別出 大腦系統用作估算的部分 其中包括神經傳遞物質系統 這些細胞位於你的腦幹 它向大腦的其他部位傳遞多巴胺(dopamine) 我不講細節,但這是一個很重要的 發現,我們現在又多了解多一些 雖然只是當中的一小部分,但它有重要的意義,因為 如果你有帕金森氏症,你就是因為失去了這些神經元 而且在每次的藥物濫用中,這些神經元 都會被威脅到,這是有原因的。 濫用藥物會 進入我們的神經系統,然後他們會改變 你估算世界的方式。他們改變 你估算藥物選擇相關的訊號, 他們讓你覺得這些藥物比一切都重要
Here's the key feature though. These neurons are also involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas, and I put some symbols up here that we assign value to for various reasons. We have a behavioral superpower in our brain, and it at least in part involves dopamine. We can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea, for a mere idea. No other species can do that. In 1997, the cult Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet Hale-Bopp waiting to take them to the next level. It was an incredibly tragic event. More than two thirds of them had college degrees. But the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival using exactly the same systems that were put there to make them survive. That's a lot of control, okay?
這是關鍵的功能。這些神經元也是 在你為抽象概念分配價值時起作用 我在這裏放了一些我們會因為不同原因 為它們分配價值的符號 我們的大腦有一個操控行為的超級力量 而它至少有一部分與多巴胺有關 我們可以為一個想法放棄一切我們賴以為生的本能 只為一個的想法。沒有其他的物種可以這樣做 1997 年,邪教「天堂之門」集體自殺 因為他們斷言有一架飛船 隱藏在那時可見的「海爾-博普彗星」的尾巴 等著把他們帶到另一個境界。這是一件令人難以置信的悲劇 他們當中三分之二以上持有大專學位 但這裡的要點是,他們用那個令他們 生存的系統、那個完全相同的系統 去否定他們生存的本能。這裏需要大量的控制,是嗎?
One thing that I've left out of this narrative is the obvious thing, which is the focus of the rest of my little talk, and that is other people. These same valuation systems are redeployed when we're valuing interactions with other people. So this same dopamine system that gets addicted to drugs, that makes you freeze when you get Parkinson's disease, that contributes to various forms of psychosis, is also redeployed to value interactions with other people and to assign value to gestures that you do when you're interacting with somebody else.
在這個敍述裏我沒有提及一件事 一個顯而易見的東西,這是我這小小的演講中 餘下部分的重點,這就是其他人 這些相同的估算系統 在我們與其他人估算互動時會作出調動 所以這相同的多巴胺系統,這個會對藥物上癮的系統 使得你在得了帕金森病時動彈不得 誘發各種形式精神病的系統 亦是在你與其他人進行互動時 用以估算你們之間的互動 以及為各種姿勢分配價值的系統
Let me give you an example of this. You bring to the table such enormous processing power in this domain that you hardly even notice it.
讓我舉一個例子 你在這個領域有一種這樣巨大的 處理能力,你幾乎很難注意到它
Let me just give you a few examples. So here's a baby. She's three months old. She still poops in her diapers and she can't do calculus. She's related to me. Somebody will be very glad that she's up here on the screen. You can cover up one of her eyes, and you can still read something in the other eye, and I see sort of curiosity in one eye, I see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other.
讓我舉幾個例子。這裡是一個嬰兒 她三個月大。她仍然在她的紙尿褲上排泄,亦不能做微積分 她與我有關。有人將會因為她在這螢幕出現顯得非常高興 你可以掩蓋了她的一隻眼睛,但仍可以讀取 她另一隻眼中的訊號,我在她的一隻眼中 看到的好奇心,在另一隻眼睛看到一點驚喜
Here's a couple. They're sharing a moment together, and we've even done an experiment where you can cut out different pieces of this frame and you can still see that they're sharing it. They're sharing it sort of in parallel. Now, the elements of the scene also communicate this to us, but you can read it straight off their faces, and if you compare their faces to normal faces, it would be a very subtle cue.
這裡有幾個其他例子。他們正在共享一個時刻 我們甚至做了一個實驗,您可以剪出 此框架的不同部分,但仍然可以看到 他們正共享一個時刻。他們好像在同時分享這個時刻 現在,那背景當中的某些元素也向我們 傳達這個訊息,但你可以從他們的臉上直接感受得到 如果你將他們的臉與正常的臉對比, 它只是一個非常微小的訊號
Here's another couple. He's projecting out at us, and she's clearly projecting, you know, love and admiration at him.
這裡是另一對情侶。男方面向我們 而女方清楚地表示,你知道吧, 她對他的愛戴和欽佩
Here's another couple. (Laughter) And I'm thinking I'm not seeing love and admiration on the left. (Laughter) In fact, I know this is his sister, and you can just see him saying, "Okay, we're doing this for the camera, and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face." (Laughter) He'll kill me for showing that.
這裡是另一對組合。(笑聲) 我想我在左側的男孩身上還沒看到愛戴和欽佩。(笑聲) 事實上,我知道這是他的姐姐,你可以想像 他說,「好吧,我們都只是在相機前擺姿勢吧 事後你偷了我的糖果,你又打我的臉。」(笑聲) 他會因為我展示這張相片而殺了我
All right, so what does this mean? It means we bring an enormous amount of processing power to the problem. It engages deep systems in our brain, in dopaminergic systems that are there to make you chase sex, food and salt. They keep you alive. It gives them the pie, it gives that kind of a behavioral punch which we've called a superpower.
好吧,那麼這意味著什麼呢? 它意味著我們用大量的處理能力的來解決問題 它涉及我們大腦深層的多巴胺系統 令你追逐的性、 食物和鹽 它們使你活著。它給它們一個圓餅,它使 我們的行為充滿活力,我們稱之為一個超級力量
So how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe? And the short answer is games. Economic games. So what we do is we go into two areas. One area is called experimental economics. The other area is called behavioral economics. And we steal their games. And we contrive them to our own purposes. So this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game. Red person is given a hundred dollars and can offer a split to blue. Let's say red wants to keep 70, and offers blue 30. So he offers a 70-30 split with blue. Control passes to blue, and blue says, "I accept it," in which case he'd get the money, or blue says, "I reject it," in which case no one gets anything. Okay? So a rational choice economist would say, well, you should take all non-zero offers. What do people do? People are indifferent at an 80-20 split. At 80-20, it's a coin flip whether you accept that or not. Why is that? You know, because you're pissed off. You're mad. That's an unfair offer, and you know what an unfair offer is. This is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world. That just gives you an example of the kind of thing that these games probe. The interesting thing is, these games require that you have a lot of cognitive apparatus on line. You have to be able to come to the table with a proper model of another person. You have to be able to remember what you've done. You have to stand up in the moment to do that. Then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back, and you have to do something that is interesting, which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay. That is, you have to decide what that other person expects of you. You have to send signals to manage your image in their mind. Like a job interview. You sit across the desk from somebody, they have some prior image of you, you send signals across the desk to move their image of you from one place to a place where you want it to be. We're so good at this we don't really even notice it. These kinds of probes exploit it. Okay?
那麼我們如何可以量度,並安排上演一場 預先設定社交互動場景,把它變成科學探索的工具呢? 簡短的回答是遊戲 經濟遊戲。所以我們做的是進入兩個領域 一個領域被稱為實驗經濟學 另外一個領域被稱為行為經濟學。 我們偷取他們的遊戲。我們用它們謀劃自己的目的 所以,這裏展示一個稱為「最後通牒」的遊戲 紅色的人有一百美元,他可以與 藍色的人分享這一百元。譬如紅色的人想要留住 70 元 給藍色的人 30 元。這樣他提出和藍色的人以 70 對 30 分賬 控制權傳到藍色的人手裏,藍色的人說:「我接受」 在這種情況下他會拿到錢。藍色的人或者會說 「我拒絕這筆交易」。在這種情況下, 沒有一方獲得任何東西。明白嗎? 一個會作理性選擇的經濟學家會這樣說,嗯, 你應接受所有高於零的出價 人們實際會做甚麼呢? 人們對 80-20 分賬不感興趣 要決定是否接受 80-20 分賬的時候,人們大概會擲硬幣決定 為甚麼會這樣呢? 你知道,因為你被惹惱 你氣瘋了。這是不公平的出價 你知道甚麼是不公平的出價 這是我的實驗室,以及世界上許多實驗室都在做的實驗 這為你展示了這些遊戲嘗試探索的事情 的其中一個例子。有趣的是,這些遊戲 需要你運用大量的認知工具 你必須能夠對另一邊的人建構一個適當模型 你必須能夠記住你做過甚麼 你在那個時候你必須堅持才能完成任務 然後你要在訊號回來的時候更新你的模型 接著你必須做一些有趣的事情 你必須做一個帶有深度思考的分析 也就是說,你必須估計對方對你的期望 你必須為保持你在他們心目中的形象,而發出訊號 這就像一次面試。你坐在書桌一邊、某個人的對面 他們對你有一些看法 你把訊號發送到書桌的另一邊,把他們對你的看法 從一處移到另一處,一個你想要它到的地方 我們很擅長做這件事,有時候我們甚至察覺不到 我們這類探針就是要好好利用它。好嗎?
In doing this, what we've discovered is that humans are literal canaries in social exchanges. Canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines. When methane built up, or carbon dioxide built up, or oxygen was diminished, the birds would swoon before people would -- so it acted as an early warning system: Hey, get out of the mine. Things aren't going so well. People come to the table, and even these very blunt, staged social interactions, and they, and there's just numbers going back and forth between the people, and they bring enormous sensitivities to it. So we realized we could exploit this, and in fact, as we've done that, and we've done this now in many thousands of people, I think on the order of five or six thousand. We actually, to make this a biological probe, need bigger numbers than that, remarkably so. But anyway, patterns have emerged, and we've been able to take those patterns, convert them into mathematical models, and use those mathematical models to gain new insights into these exchanges. Okay, so what? Well, the so what is, that's a really nice behavioral measure, the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play. We can compute that during the game. And we can use that to sort of carve up the behavior.
這樣做時,我們發現人類 都是處於社交活動中的金絲雀 以往金絲雀曾經被用作礦井裏的生物感應器 當甲烷濃度上升,或二氧化碳濃度上升 或氧氣減少,這些鳥兒便會在人們昏倒 之前昏倒 -- 所以它能夠充當一個早期預警系統: 嘿,走出礦井。大事不妙。 人們來到書桌前,即使這些簡單直接的、 預先安排的社交互動 這些在人們之間來來往往的數字 已經足以觸動人們的神經 因此我們意識到,我們可以利用它,而且實際上, 我們做過,我們已經對數以千計人 做過這樣的實驗,數字可能達 五、 六千人。要是我們真的想利用它 作為生物探針,我們實在需要更多的參與者 更多更多的參與者。不過無論如何 我們已經看到一些趨勢,我們亦已經 能夠將這些趨勢轉換為數學模型 並使用這些數學模型以獲得有關 這些社交互動的新見解。好吧,那又怎樣? 嗯,這個「那又怎樣」是,這是非常好的行為測量 這個經濟學遊戲為我們帶來一個「最佳策略」的想法 我們可以在遊戲中計算 我們可以用這來... 嗯... 界定某一個行為
Here's the cool thing. Six or seven years ago, we developed a team. It was at the time in Houston, Texas. It's now in Virginia and London. And we built software that'll link functional magnetic resonance imaging devices up over the Internet. I guess we've done up to six machines at a time, but let's just focus on two. So it synchronizes machines anywhere in the world. We synchronize the machines, set them into these staged social interactions, and we eavesdrop on both of the interacting brains. So for the first time, we don't have to look at just averages over single individuals, or have individuals playing computers, or try to make inferences that way. We can study individual dyads. We can study the way that one person interacts with another person, turn the numbers up, and start to gain new insights into the boundaries of normal cognition, but more importantly, we can put people with classically defined mental illnesses, or brain damage, into these social interactions, and use these as probes of that. So we've started this effort. We've made a few hits, a few, I think, embryonic discoveries. We think there's a future to this. But it's our way of going in and redefining, with a new lexicon, a mathematical one actually, as opposed to the standard ways that we think about mental illness, characterizing these diseases, by using the people as birds in the exchanges. That is, we exploit the fact that the healthy partner, playing somebody with major depression, or playing somebody with autism spectrum disorder, or playing somebody with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, we use that as a kind of biosensor, and then we use computer programs to model that person, and it gives us a kind of assay of this.
這是最酷的地方。六至七年前 我們發展出一個團隊。那個時候我們在德克薩斯州的休斯頓 現在我們在維珍尼亞及倫敦。我們研發 可以透過網絡連接不同磁力共振造影機器的軟件 我估計我們可以同時連接最多六台機器 不過現在還是聚焦在兩台好了 它可以讓世界上的任何兩台機器同步運作 我們令這些機器同步,令它們運行 預設的社交活動,接著我們竊聽那兩個 在互動的腦袋。所以,這是第一次 我們可以看到比每個人的平均數據更多的資料 又或者令個別參與者與電腦作賽,又或者嘗試 干擾他們。我們可以研究兩人的組合 我們可以研究一個人與另一個人互動的方式 當收集的數據愈來愈多,我們可以開始洞察出 正常認知的邊緣 但更重要的是,我們可以把 已被界定為患有精神科疾病,或者有大腦缺損的病人 放進這樣的社交活動場景,以此作為探針 我們已經開始努力嘗試,並已經找到一些線索 一些,我認為,很初步的發現 我們認為這種研究很有前景。但這是我們 踏進這個問題並以新的詞彙、 一種數學的方式、而非標準的方式重新定義精神科疾病 當我們想到精神科疾病時 並以雀鳥交換訊息的方法去描繪 這些疾病的病徵。換句話說,我們利用 一個正常的同伴,與患有嚴重抑鬱的病人交流 或者與患有自閉症的患者交流 又或者與患有注意力障礙及過度活躍症的患者交流 我們利用這種生物感應器,接著用 電腦程式去建構那個人的模型,就好像 做化驗報告一樣
Early days, and we're just beginning, we're setting up sites around the world. Here are a few of our collaborating sites. The hub, ironically enough, is centered in little Roanoke, Virginia. There's another hub in London, now, and the rest are getting set up. We hope to give the data away at some stage. That's a complicated issue about making it available to the rest of the world. But we're also studying just a small part of what makes us interesting as human beings, and so I would invite other people who are interested in this to ask us for the software, or even for guidance on how to move forward with that.
較早期的時候,當我們還在最初的階段,我們在世界不同地方 建立了實驗室。這是一些與我們合作的實驗室 諷刺地,那個交匯中心 在維珍尼亞州中細小的羅阿諾克市 現在,我們有另外一個交匯中心在倫敦,其他 都在建構中。在其後的階段,我們希望可以把數據 發放出去。把數據向世界其他地方公開 是一個複雜的問題 但是我們同時在一步步研究 甚麼使我們作為有趣味的人類。因此 我希望邀請其他同樣地對這個問題有興趣的人 向我們索取這套軟體,又或者向我們提供 一些可以推進這些研究的方向
Let me leave you with one thought in closing. The interesting thing about studying cognition has been that we've been limited, in a way. We just haven't had the tools to look at interacting brains simultaneously. The fact is, though, that even when we're alone, we're a profoundly social creature. We're not a solitary mind built out of properties that kept it alive in the world independent of other people. In fact, our minds depend on other people. They depend on other people, and they're expressed in other people, so the notion of who you are, you often don't know who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people that are close to you, people that are enemies of you, people that are agnostic to you. So this is the first sort of step into using that insight into what makes us human beings, turning it into a tool, and trying to gain new insights into mental illness. Thanks for having me. (Applause) (Applause)
最後,讓我跟你們分享一個想法 研究人類認知一個有趣的地方是 我們在某程度上都受到一些限制 我們從前沒有一個能同時監察 多個正在互動的大腦的裝置 然而,即使在我們獨處的時候 我們仍然是一種極度社交性的動物。我們並不是 建基於能夠生存於世上、與其他人隔絕 的獨立心靈。事實上,我們的心靈都 依靠著其他人。他們亦依靠著其他人 同時亦表現在其他人的身上 所以這個「你是誰」的概念,你經常不會 明白,直至你與那些跟你關係密切的人 那些你的敵人、那些你不相信的人 互動中看到自己 所以我們利用這個工具踏出第一步,去了解 甚麼使我們變成人類,並把它作為工具 使我們對精神科疾病有新的見解 謝謝讓我在這裡替你們演講 (掌聲) (掌聲)