Hemeroteca.Read more interviews of the 'Contra' of EL MUNDO
(Barcelona, 1930) Neuroscientist, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Instituto de Investigaciones Cerebrales.
In his new book,
The Magic Loom of the Mind
(Ariel), he reviews his life and that of neuroscience.
Why is the brain so fascinating?
Because it is an organ with very complex, delicate and versatile functions - to a great extent still mysterious - that has emerged from biological evolution to adapt the organism to its physical and social environment.
Is the brain what makes us human?
Undoubtedly the functions of the human brain, especially logical thinking and language, radically distinguish us from other animals.
But what makes us more human is the future prospects of those functions.
Only the human with his brain can see himself and his environment in the future: only the human can predict, invent, create, pre-adapt and imagine what is to come.
Only the human has
memory of the future
Is the brain a perfect machine?
No. Make mistakes.
But, unlike other machines, you can anticipate, prevent and correct them.
The prefrontal cortex is one of the most interesting parts of the brain and to which you have dedicated years of study.
In it lies our ability to know and memorize.
Why do you call that part the “organ of freedom?” Freedom or free will is the ability to choose between options for action and for the information that is to initiate and guide action.
That information can be in the environment or in the brain itself in the form of memory or knowledge.
The range of selections of information and action is potentially infinite, ranging from the most genetic, like instinct, to the most sublime, like spirituality.
The prefrontal cortex is the brain structure that has the greatest access to information and action.
That is why it can coordinate both in the service of free decision, and that is why I call it the
organ of freedom
.
Imagine that a complex novel plan is like a symphony.
The prefrontal cortex is the composer of that symphony and also the conductor of the orchestra that performs it.
Both in the creation and in the execution of the symphony, the composer-conductor coordinates the voices of the different instruments in a complex temporal organization with an aesthetic objective.
Likewise, the prefrontal cortex coordinates the other cortices and other brain structures in the conceptualization and conduction of the plan to its objective.
Without prefrontal cortex there is no plan, no music.
Is free will something innate to the nature of our brain?
Free will is not, but the brain structure that will sustain it is.
This structure develops from birth in the form of neural networks scattered throughout the cerebral cortex - overlapping and
interconnected
that I call
cognits
.
They are memories and knowledge.
They are formed in the course of life through nerve fibers and the contacts they establish between neurons, as Cajal guessed in Barcelona in 1882. He says in his new book that our brain is subject to the theory of chaos.
Does that mean that coincidences and small details can greatly influence our way of thinking or acting?
And doesn't that interfere with free will?
Free will is influenced by a vast multitude of tiny and random events, inside and outside the brain.
These events can bias our decisions unconsciously, so that an apparently free decision can be biased, if not determined, by those events.
But these
chaotic
influences
simply tell us that absolute freedom does not exist, something that common sense also tells us;
that it is relative, and that the degree of freedom varies enormously between different individuals and according to the conditions in which they find themselves.
The idea of absolute freedom is as absurd as the idea that we can fly, like Icarus, with feathers glued to our arms.
Are we our brain or our emotions? We are not, but we are endowed with both, one in the service of the other.
The brain is the seat of cognition and emotion, and it serves us for the innumerable expressions of both.
You have spent much of your life studying memory.
Are we our memory?
We are not, but we are well endowed with it.
In fact, all systems, within the central nervous system, have memory of one kind or another depending on their function: phyletic (innate) or individual (acquired), visual, auditory, tactile, etc., episodic, semantic (knowledge) memory. ), kinetics, etc.
And let's not forget the
memory of the future
in the frontal cortex. Is the memory true to the facts?
Sometimes yes and sometimes no.
Ask a judge or jury yourself.
Borges said that imagination is made of memory and that without memory it cannot be imagined.
Is that so?
Yes it is, and very well said.
With a psychologist we have an article, in a very good neuroscience magazine, entitled: Past makes future. What do we need to know about the brain and when will we know?
Where do you want me to start and how would you tell them?
Many are the things that we do not know, and I do not see the date when we will know them all.
In the last century we have learned a lot about the cognitive functions of the brain, which I have worked on the most (attention, perception, memory, intelligence and language).
I describe it in my book.
Now, I will tell you, progress is upward rather than downward.
I explain.
When it comes to finding out the ultimate causes of physical phenomena, the de rigueur scientific method is reductionism, investigating smaller and smaller mechanisms and particles, descending towards the molecule, the atom, the cell.
Whereas when it comes to finding out the causes and nervous mechanisms of mental phenomena, one must go upwards, where the relationship is the minimum parameter of definition;
it is the terrain of the neural network, of association, and of abstraction.
Using my favorite analogy, reductionism towards cells and molecules in cognitive neuroscience is like trying to understand what the letter says by studying the chemical composition of the ink. Are there biologically better brains than others, or have they simply been more and better stimulated?
Both things are true, he says in 'On the magic loom of the mind' that he decided to become a doctor after Manolete's death, out of the impulse to have wanted to save his life.
Are you bullfighting?
What do you like - or dislike - about bullfighting?
Many years have passed since I witnessed a bullfight.
I liked the show, but I have always deeply disliked the suffering of an animal.
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