YouSaid · the spoken record

Karl Friston

lines on the record: 90
first: 2020-05-28
most recent: 2020-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Very delicately structured, deeply structured, dynamic ensemble activity that is not like rewiring a broken computer or plugging in a peripheral interface adapter, it is much more like getting into the weather patterns or come back to your magic soup getting into the active matter and meaningfully relate that to the outside world. So I think there are enormous challenges there.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine you had some very aggressive satellites that could produce signals that could perturb some little parts of the weather system. And then what you're asking now is, can I meaningfully get into the weather and change it meaningfully and make the weather respond in a way that I want it to? You're talking about chaos control on a scale which is almost unimaginable. So there may be fundamental reasons why BCI. As you might read about it in a science fiction novel, Aspirational BCI may never actually work in the sense that to really be integrated and be part of the system is a requirement that requires you to have evolved with that system. You have to be part of”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Information exchange between A Brain and some augmented or artificial interface and then we come back to interestingly when I was talking about before which is if you're talking about function in terms of inference and I presume we'll get to that later on in terms of the free energy principle but at the moment there may be fundamental reasons to assume that is the case we talk about ensemble activity we're talking about basically For example, let's Paint the challenge facing brain computer interfacing in terms of controlling another system that is highly and deeply structured, very relevant to our lives, very nonlinear, that rests upon the kind of non equilibrium steady states and dynamics that the brain does, the weather.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't want to be deflationary because much of my deflationary comments has probably lodged out of ignorance than anything else. But generally speaking, the bandwidth... Brain computer interfaces as we currently know them. We're talking about bits per second. So that would be like me only being able to communicate with any world or with you using very, very... Very slow Morse code. And it is not even within an order of magnitude near what we actually need for an inactive realization of what people aspire to when they think about curing people with paraplegia or replacing sight. Despite heroic efforts. So one has to ask is there a lower bound on the kinds of recurrent”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And after a few weeks, they take it for granted, they integrate it, they imbibe the assimilate this new sensory information into the way that they literally feel their world, but now equipped with this sense of magnetic dick direction. So that tells you something about the brain's plastic potential to remodel and its plastic capacity to suddenly. Tries to explain the sensory data at hand by augmenting the sensory sphere and the kinds of things that you can measure. Clearly that's purely for entertainment and understanding or the nature and the power of our brains. I would imagine that most BCI is pitched at solving clinical and human problems such as locked-in syndrome, such as paraplegia or replacing lost sensory capacities like blindness and deafness. So then we come to the more negative part of my ambivalence.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Its own aspirations, and there have been enormous advances within limits. Advances in terms of our ability to understand how the brain, the embodied brain, Engages with the world. I'm thinking here of sensory substitution, augmenting our sensory capacities by giving ourselves extra ways of sensing and sampling the world, ranging from sort of trying to replace lost visual signals through to giving people completely new signals. So one of the, I think, most engaging examples of this is equipping people with a sense of magnetic fields so you can actually give them magnetic sensors that enable them to feel through, say, tactile pressure around their tummy. where they are in relation to the magnetic field of the Earth.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, absolutely. Deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease is now a standard treatment and also a wonderful vehicle to try and understand the neuronal dynamics underlie movement disorders like Parkinson's disease. Even interest in magnetic stimulation stimulated with magnetic fields and will it work in people who are depressed for example. Quite a crude level of understanding what you're doing, but there is historical evidence that these kinds of brute fort interventions do change things. It's a little bit like banging the TV when the valves aren't working properly, but it still works. There is a long history. Brain computer interfacing or BCI, I think is a beautiful example of that. It's sort of carved out its own niche.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambivalent, my senses ambivalent. So it's a mixture of good and bad, and I acknowledge that freely. So the good bits, if you just look at the legacy of that kind of reciprocal but invasive your brain stimulation, I didn't paint a complete picture when I was talking about sort of the ways we understand the brain prior to neuroimaging. It wasn't just lesion deficit studies. Some of the early work, in fact, literally 100 yards from where we're sitting at the Institute of Neurology was done by stimulating the brain of, say, dogs and looking at how they responded, either with their muscles or with their salivation. And imputing what that part of the brain must be doing, by stimulate it, then I vote this kind of response. Then that tells me quite a lot about the functional specialization. So there's a long history.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“would evidence that particular topic, that particular thing that you wanted to put on the map. And they normally are characterized in terms of literally these blobs or these sort of, the way looking at this is a certain statistical measure of the degree of activation crosses a threshold in crossing that threshold in the spatially restricted part of the brain, it creates a blob. And that's basically what cystical parametric mapping does. It's basically mathematically finesse blobology.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, well, circumscribed, well defined. You entities of, well, from the free energy point of view. entities of anything but from the point of view of the analysis, the cartography of the brain, these are the entities that constitute the evidence for this functional segregation. You have segregated this function in this blob and it is not outside of the blob. And that's basically if you were a map maker of America and you did not know its structure. The first thing were you doing constituting or creating a map would be to identify the cities, for example, or the mountains or the rivers. All of these uniquely spatially localizable features, possibly topological features, have to be placed somewhere because that requires our mathematics of identify what does a city look like on a satellite image or what does a river look like or what does a mountain look like what would it what data features”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would appear in a popular book it would not appear in a worthy specialist journal. But it's the fond word for the study of literally little blobs on brain maps showing activations. So the kind of thing that you'd see in the newspapers on ABC or BBC reporting the latest finding from brain imaging. Interestingly though, the maths involved in that stream of analysis So seriously, they're actually called Euler characteristics and they have a lot of fancy names in mathematics.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aware. So you've got these two complementary measures either indirect via the blood flow or direct via the electromagnetic signals caused by neural activity. These are the two big imaging devices. And then the second level of responding to your question, what are the, from the outside, what are the big ways of using this technology? So once you've chosen the kind of neuroimaging that you want to use to answer your questions, and sometimes it would have to be both, then you've got a whole raft of analyses, time series analyses usually, that you can bring to bear in order to answer your questions or address your hypothesis about those data. And interestingly, they both fall into the same two camps we were talking about before, this dialectic between”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is in and of itself the neural activity and start to see the succession or cascade of hierarchical recurrent message passing evoked by particular stimulus. But the problem is you're looking at electromagnetic signals that have passed through an enormous amount of magic soup or spaghetti of connectivity and through the scalp and the skull and it's become spatially very diffuse. So it's very difficult to know where you are. So you've got this sort of catch 22. You can either use an imaging modality. It tells you within millimeters which part of the brain is activated, but you don't know when. Or you've got these electromagnetic EEG MEG setups that tell you to within a few milliseconds when something has responded.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is slightly compromised in terms of the resolution. So the deployment of these little micro vessels that water the garden to enable the activity, the neural activity to play out, the spatial resolution is in order of a few millimeters. And crucially, the temporal resolution is the order of a few seconds. So you can't get right down and dirty into the actual spatial and temporal scale of neuronal activity in and of itself. To do that, you'd have to turn to the other big imaging modality, which is the recording of electromagnetic signals as they're generated in real time. So here the temporal bandwidth, if you like, or the temp, the low limit on the temporal resolution is incredibly small. Talking about nanoseconds, milliseconds. And then you can get into the phasic fast responses.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that means that you have to supply the right amount of blood flow, the right amount of nutrient, which is rapidly absorbed and used by neural cells that don't have the same capacity that your leg muscles would have to basically spend their energy budget and then claim it back later. So one peculiar thing about cerebral metabolism, brain metabolism, is it really needs to be driven in the moment, which means you basically have to turn on the taps. So if there's lots of neural activity in one part of the brain, a little patch of a few millimeters, even less possibly, you really do have to water that piece of the garden now and quickly. And by quickly, I mean within a couple of seconds.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wires, essentially, external processes that are enshrouded by mylin sheaths, and these give the error when you dissect them they look fatty and white and so it's called white matter as opposed to the actual neuropill which does the computation constituted largely by neurons and that's known as grey matter. So the grey matter is a surface or a skin that sits on top of this big ball. Now we are talking magic soup, but it's big ball of connections like spaghetti. Very carefully structured with sparse connectivity that preserves this deep hierarchical structure but all the action takes place on the surface on the cortex of the onion.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also, I think it's just an anatomical quite a useful metaphor. All the action, all the heavy lifting in terms of neural computation is done on the surface of the brain. And then the interior of the brain is constituted by fatty.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that interplay accounts for several careers of world-renowned scientists. Yes, absolutely. So this is known as neurovascular coupling. It's exactly what you said. How does a neural activity, the neural infrastructure, the actual message passing that we think underlies our capacity to perceive and act? How is that coupled to the vascular responses that supply the energy for that neural processing? So there's a delicate web of large vessels, arteries and veins, that gets progressively finer and finer in detail until it perfuses at a microscopic level the machinery where little neurons lie. We were talking before using the onion as a metaphor for a deep hierarchical structure.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fall into two camps. You've got Sometimes hemodynamic blood related signals, so these metabolic and or hemodynamic signals are basic proxies for elevated activity and message passing and neuronal dynamics in particular parts of the brain. Characteristically though, the time constants of these hemodynamic or metabolic responses to neural activity are much longer than the neuroactivity itself.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, well, you can answer that question from two perspectives. Basically, it's the modality. What kind of signal are you measuring? And they can range from, and let's limit ourselves to sort of imaging based non-invasive techniques. So you've essentially got brain scanners, and brain scanners can either measure the structural attributes, the amount of water, the amount of fat, or the amount of iron in different parts of the brain, and you can make lots of inferences about the structure of the organ of the sort that you might abduce from an x-ray, but a very nuanced x-ray that's looking at this kind of property or that kind of property. So looking at the anatomy, not invasively, would be the first sort of neuroimaging that people might want to employ. Then you move on to the kinds of measurements that reflect dynamic function and the most prevalent of the”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. The structure Sorry, I'm just noting you were accusing me of using lots of long words, and then you introduced one there, which is deep, which is interesting, because deep is the sort of millennial equivalent of hierarchical. So if you put deep in front of anything, not only are you very millennial and it's very trending, but you're also implying a hierarchical architecture. It is a depth, which is, for me, the beautiful thing”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“by looking at these functionally selective responses. But that wasn't the whole story. So there's this sort of near phrenology, but finding bumps and hot spots in the brain that did this or that. The bigger question was, of course, the functional integration, how all of these regionally specific responses were orchestrated, how they were distributed, how did they relate to distributed processing and indeed representations in the brain. So then you turn to the more challenging issue of the integration, the connectivity. And then we come back to this beautiful, sparse, recurrent hierarchical connectivity that seems characteristic of the brain and probably not many other organs.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they're over there. If I do this, then this part of the brain lights up. And that became doable in the early 90s. In fact, shortly before with the advent of positron emission tomography, and then functional magnetic resonance imaging came along in the early 90s. And since that time, there has been an explosion of discovery, refinement, confirmation. There are people who believe that it's all in the anatomy. If you understand the anatomy, then you understand the function at some level. And many, many hypotheses were predicated on a deep understanding of the anatomy and the connectivity. But they were all confirmed and taken much further with neuroimaging. So that's what I meant by we've made an enormous amount of progress in this century indeed in relation to the previous century.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, disadvantages reverse a bit, come back to your notion that the brain is a magic soup. But that was actually a very prominent idea at one point, notions such as Lashley's law of mass action inherited from the observation that for certain animals, if you just took out spoonfuls of the brain, it didn't matter where you took these spoonfuls out. They always showed the same kinds of deficits. So, you know, it was very difficult to infer functional specialization pure on the basis of lesion deficit studies. But once we had the opportunity to look at the brain lighting up, it's literally its sort of excitement neuronal excitement when looking at this versus that, one was able to say, yes, indeed, these functionally specialized responses are very restricted and they're here.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answer questions about human anatomy, but I think most people assume that most of the important principles are conserved in a continuous way from, well, yes, worms right through to you and me.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, clearly, the further away you go from a human brain, the greater the difference is. But not as remarkable as you might think. So people will choose their level of approximation to the human brain depending upon the kinds of questions that they want to answer. So if you're talking about sort of canonical principles and microcircuitry, it might be perfectly okay to look at a mouse. Indeed, you could even look at flies, worms. If on the other hand, you wanted to look at the finer details of organization of visual cortex and V1, V2, these are designated sort of patches of cortex that may do different things indeed do. You probably want to use a primate that looked a little bit more like a human because there are lots of ethical issues in terms of the use of non-human primates to”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps movement, processing, visual movement processing was located in this functionally segregated area. And you could then go and put invasive electrodes in animal models and say, yes, indeed, we can excite activity here, we can form receptive fields that are sensitive to or defined in terms of visual motion, but at no point could you exclude the possibility that everywhere else in the brain was also very interested in visual motion.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think enormous progress has been made in the past 20 or 30 years. So this is beyond incremental. At the advent of brain imaging, the very notion of functional segregation was just a hypothesis based upon a century, if not more, of careful neuropsychology looking at people who had lost via insult or traumatic brain injury, particular parts of the brain, and then saying, well, they can't do this or they can't do that. For example, losing the visual cortex and not being able to see or losing particular parts of the visual cortex or regions known as V five or the middle temporal region noticing that they selectively could not see moving things. That created the hypothesis that”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are circumscribed so now basically we're talking about some people have perhaps unkindly called a neocartography. This is a phrenology augmented by modern day neuroimaging, basically finding blobs or bumps on the brain that do this or do that and trying to understand the cartography of that functional specialization.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certain parts of the brain that may be specialized for certain kinds of processing, for example visual motion, our ability to recognise or to perceive movement in the visual world, and furthermore, that specialized processing may be spatially or anatomically segregated, leading to functional segregation, which means that if I were to compare your brain activity during a period of viewing a static image, and then compare that to the responses of fluctuations in the brain when you were exposed to a moving image, say a flying bird we would expect to see restricted, segregated differences in activity, and those are basically the hot spots that you see in statistical parametric maps that test for the significance of the responses.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so, well, most imaging human neuroimaging that you might see in science journals. That speaks to the way the brain works, measures brain activity over time. So that's the first thing to say, that we're effectively looking at fluctuations in neuronal responses, usually in response to some sensory input or some instruction, some task. Not necessarily. There's a lot of interest in just looking at the brain in terms of resting state endogenous or intrinsic activity, but crucially at every point looking at these fluctuations either induced or intrinsic in the neural activity and understanding them at two levels. So normally people would recourse to two principles of brain organization that are complementary. One functional specialization or segregation. So what does that mean? It simply means that there are”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structure defined by the sparsive connections that lends the architecture a hierarchical structure that tells one a lot about the kinds of representations and messages so coming back to your earlier question is this about the representational capacity or is it about the anatomy well one underwrites the other you know if one simply thinks of the brain as a message passing machine a process that is in the service of doing something then the the circuitry and the connectivity that shape that message passing also dictate its function”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be best understood a little bit like an onion, you know, that there is a concentric, sometimes referred to as centripetal by people like Marcel Mesulam, hierarchical organization to the brain. So you can think of the brain as in a rough sense like an onion and all the sensory information and all the afferent outgoing messages that supply commands to your muscles or to your secretory organs come from the surface. So there's a massive exchange interface with the world out there on the surface and then underneath there's a little layer that sits and looks at the exchange on the surface and then underneath that there's a layer right the way down to the very center to the deepest part of the onion. That's what I mean by a hierarchical organization. There's a discernible”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely, in virtue of the fact that there is a sparsity of connectivity, not necessarily of a qualitative sort, but certainly of a quantitative sort. So they are. It is demonstrably so that the further apart, two parts of the brain are, the less likely that they are to be wired, to possess axonal processes, neuronal processes that directly communicate one message or messages from one part of that brain to the other part of the brain. So we know there's a sparse connectivity. And furthermore, on the basis of anatomical connectivity and tracer studies, we know that sparsity underwrites a hierarchical and very structured sort of connectivity.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see it's not a magic soup. Of course, is what I used to think when I was before I... Studied medicine and the like. So a lot of those terms imply each other. So hierarchies, if you just think about the nature of a hierarchy, How would you actually build one and what you would have to do is basically carefully remove the right connections that destroy the completely connected soups that you might have in mind. So a hierarchy is in and of itself defined by a sparse and particular connectivity structure. I'm not committing to any particular form of hierarchy.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one speaks to the other I was actually answering in a dull-minded way from the point of view of purely its anatomy and its structural aspects. I mean, there are many marvelous organs in the body. Let's take your liver, for example. Without it, you wouldn't be around for very long. And it does some beautiful and delicate biochemistry and homeostasis. evolved with a finesse that would easily parallel the brain, but it doesn't have a beautiful anatomy. It has a simple anatomy, which is attractive in a minimalist sense, but it doesn't have that crafted structure of sparse connectivity and that recurrence and that specialization that the brain has.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Molecules that constitute that ensemble. I'd look at their collective behavior. On the other hand, if you go to coarse grain, you're going to miss some basic canonical principles of connectivity in architectures. I'm thinking here this bit colloquial, but there's current excitement about high field magnetic resonance imaging at seven tests now. Why? Well, it gives us for the first time the opportunity to look at the brain in action, at the level of a few millimeters that distinguish between different layers of the cortex that may be very important in terms of evincing generic principles of cort chronicle micro circuitry that are replicated throughout the brain that may tell us something fundamental about message passing in the brain and these density dynamics or neuronal or ensemble population dynamics that underwrite our brain function.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you commit to a view of the brain as a machine that's performing a form of inference and representing things, there are Understanding, that level of understanding is necessarily cast in terms of probability densities and ensemble densities, distributions. And what that tells you is that you don't really want to look at the atoms to understand the thermodynamics of probabilistic descriptions for how the brain works. So I personally wouldn't look at the molecules or indeed the single neurons in the same way if I wanted to understand the thermodynamics of some non equilibrium steady state of a gas or an active material, I wouldn't spend my life looking at the individual.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there are lower bounds on that. It's a really interesting question. And it would determine the sort of scientific career you'd pursue if you believe that knowing every dendritic connection, every sort of microscopic, synaptic structure right down to the molecular level was going to give you the right kind of information to understand the computational anatomy. Then you'd choose to be a microscopist and you would study little cubic millimeters of brain for the rest of your life if on the other hand you were interested in holistic functions and a sort of function anatomy of the sort that a neuroscientist would understand you'd study brain lesions and strokes looking at the whole person so again it comes back to at what level do you want understanding I think there are principled reasons not to go too far.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was certainly in a better position than we were last century. How far we've got to go, I think, is almost an unanswerable question. So you'd have to set the parameters, what constitutes understanding, what level of understanding do you want. I think we've made enormous progress in terms of broad brush principles, whether that affords a detailed cartography of the functional anatomy of the brain and what it does right down to the microcircuitry and the neurons. That's probably out of reach at the present time.”
2020-05-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #99 – Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source