The Human Mind Project Final Report

The Human Mind Project Final Report

humanmind.ac.uk

The Human Mind Project Final Report

Part One: Philosophy of The Human Mind Project Rick Rylance.................................................................................................................... 1 Colin Blakemore........................................................................................................... 2 Charles Fernyhough.................................................................................................. 4 Baroness Onora O’Neill............................................................................................ 5 Mattia Gallotti................................................................................................................ 6

Part Two: Outcomes of The Human Mind Project Rationale.......................................................................................................................... 7 Context.............................................................................................................................. 8 Process............................................................................................................................... 9 Grand Challenges.....................................................................................................11

Part Three: Activities of The Human Mind Project Events.............................................................................................................................. 18

Part Four: Appendix ............................................................................................................................................. 33

Part One: Philosophy of The Human Mind Project

Opening statement Rick Rylance Dean of School of Advanced Study Interdisciplinary study of the brain and the way in which it establishes the foundations of human behaviour is of major current interest among research funders internationally.

At the same time there is accelerating interest in how best to stimulate and support interdisciplinary research.

In my view supporting such research is most stretching when it draws upon fields some distance apart, and I know from my own experience of working with clinical neurologists that bringing together a scientific knowledge of the brain and humanistic knowledge of the mind and behaviour is very stretching. There are not only intellectual and methodological challenges but also those relating to peer review and publication. It is not uncommon to appear too science-orientated for humanities journals and referees, and too humanistic for those in the natural sciences. The Human Mind Project assembled an exceptionally distinguished group of advisors and participants on an international scale and through their work it has opened up an opportunity to pioneer interdisciplinary enquiry in ways that will be of significance to research funders in developing their support mechanisms for ‘Grand Challenge’ work of this kind.

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Why The Human Mind Project?

Professor Sir Colin Blakemore THMP Project Leader The overarching aim of The Human Mind Project has been to identify timely opportunities for new interdisciplinary approaches to research and education concerning the nature, mechanism and products of the human mind. A key feature of the project has been to provide and identify forums for leading experts from a wide range of disciplines – arts and humanities as well as the sciences – to develop novel conceptions of long-standing questions about the mind and its relationship to the brain, and through a consultative process to define crucial challenges for future research, teaching and applications. Perhaps the most significant goal of The Human Mind Project is to build capacity to tackle novel fields of inquiry, a key research theme for the research councils and HEFCE (now Research England).

Why are these questions and issues so important? There would surely be widespread agreement that alongside questions about the origin and fate of the universe and the nature of matter, defining the nature of the mind is one of the most significant challenges to scholarship. Understanding how we perceive, think, feel, remember, make decisions and act is central to philosophy, anthropology, psychology, law, psychiatry, social science and cognitive neuroscience. Questions about mental function permeate virtually every discipline in the humanities as well as the fine and performing arts. But the traditional structures of academia, and especially the arts and humanities/science divide, impede the integration of knowledge.

The foundations of our present disparate understandings of the human mind stretch from the origins of philosophy 2,500 years ago, to the cutting edge of cognitive and computational neuroscience. But studies of mental states and processes have largely been confined to conventional disciplines, and there has been surprisingly little convergence of effort around issues shared by the many different disciplines. For instances, questions about the nature of memory are fundamental in epistemology, historical research, film-making, literature, as well as cognitive science, animal behaviour and neuroscience. Yet there is still very little interdisciplinary discussion about this shared field of interest. Each discipline has developed its own lexicon, its own research questions, its own theories. Indubitably there are as yet unidentified opportunities for rich new veins of interdisciplinary research on the topic of memory.

This is just one of many such topics of converging interdisciplinary interest that has been broached in the project and can be taken forward by proving more opportunities and mechanisms for interdisciplinary collaboration.

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There are large lessons to learn from the public criticism by the scientific community of the €1bn European Human Brain Project, set up in 2013 ‘to understand the human brain by simulation and ultimately to emulate its cognitive capabilities by computational technologies’.

The resultant independent review1 concluded that ‘ambitions for whole brain simulation are premature’ and that approaches to this problem ‘should be developed and carefully validated by interdisciplinary collaborations that involve cognitive and systems neuroscientists’.

We would go further and suggest that no model of ‘human cognitive capabilities’ could be complete without those capabilities being fully defined and that the contribution of the arts, humanities and social sciences is crucial. Identifying opportunities for truly interdisciplinary effort and forging new ways of working on the basis of the full range of expertise gathered together is exactly what The Human Mind Project has been aiming to achieve. Work on this aim was coordinated around the Grand Challenges, solicited and refined after widespread public consultation. The results and recommendations appear in the rest of this report.

1 http://www.fz-­‐juelich.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/PORTAL/DE/pressedownloads/2015/15-­‐03-­‐19hbp-­‐recommendations.pdf;jsessionid=3915C94B7BAA70A47A69D5E9E2B25238?__blob=publicationFile The Human Mind Project 3

The experiential dimension of the human mind Charles Fernyhough THMP Advisory Board Member I sense a growing concern about whether the neurosciences, divorced from other modes of inquiry, can hope to achieve a full account of human experience. Biological explanations of psychological phenomena are only as good as the descriptions of experience to which they are tied, descriptions that are in turn necessarily shaped by personal, social and cultural interpretations.

The challenge is to conduct excellent scholarly research that integrates these different levels of explanation without a reductionist agenda. Cognitive neuroscience has been very effective at describing the neural underpinnings of some cognitive processes, but it has not been very good at capturing subjective experience. Having an account of inner experience – the thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories and perceptions that found our senses of self and identity – is after all a primary task of psychology, and certainly of psychiatry. I am an advocate of slow neuroscience: taking the time to combine the power of neuroscientific methods such as brain imaging with careful descriptions of what is going on in a person’s mind. We need to give these approaches a proper go, and try to persuade the institutions involved that meaningful interdisciplinary research takes time, and therefore resource. After all, it’s how we experience the world – how things look and feel to us, the emotions that found our moral and ethical judgements – that ultimately makes us human.

I believe that such endeavours must be interdisciplinary. Practically speaking, interdisciplinarity needs a clearly defined problem or issue, and the right kind of people.

That means researchers who are willing to step outside the comfortable bounds of their discipline and enter a state of negative capability – as I do when I collaborate with colleagues on a medieval religious text, for example, or when my colleagues in literary studies try to understand a problem from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. It’s not just about the humanities influencing the science or vice versa; it’s about creating new problem spaces that could not have existed otherwise.

Charles Fernyhough is Director and PI of Hearing the Voice, an interdisciplinary study of the experience of auditory verbal hallucinations based at Durham University and funded by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award.

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Baroness Onora O’Neill THMP Advisory Board member The new sciences of neurobiology and genetics, not to mention Artificial Intelligence, are offering new opportunities to understand the human world. Many of them put pressure on older conceptions of human nature that were developed by work in history, philosophy and the social sciences. Consequently interdisciplinary discussion of competing ways of understanding and investigating human nature is indispensable if we are to grasp what needs to be adjusted in the light of recent findings, and what needs to be retained if we are to understand ourselves and how we fit into the natural world.

The Human Mind Project has aimed to set out the steps needed for this much needed dialogue to begin. It has brought together a wide range of expertise, and its meetings and public consultations have ensured that many voices have helped to frame the Grand Challenges laid out in the report. As a cross-disciplinary study of the mind and its manifestations it has stressed the contributions the arts and the humanities have made to the understanding of our species, so serves as a useful corrective to the ambitious (but in the end overly narrow) conception of the Human Brain Project that has attempted to understand the human mind by modelling all synaptic connections in the brain. Only by having a conception of the mind’s influence in culture and society, and of the distinctive ways in which it ushers norms and values onto the stage of human action, can we hope to do justice to the mental capacities the project seeks to illuminate.

Large projects like these can succeed only if they keep the public informed and take explicit account of public needs, concerns and interests in shaping future research. This perspective has been important for the Human Mind Project, as it is for the All European Academies project on challenges currently posed to science as a trusted source of evidence and expertise. I hope the Human Mind Project will contribute to further research that is both scientifically-driven and public-facing.

Onora O’Neill combines work in political philosophy and ethics with public activities. She has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2000. She has served as president of the British Academy, chaired the Nuffield Foundation and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and has served on the Medical Research Council and the Banking Standards Board.

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The challenge of interdisciplinary working Mattia Gallotti THMP Manager Project coordination and leadership in academia require different skills and qualifications.

As a trained philosopher with a background in the social sciences, and a keen interest in the governance of academic structures, I did not know what to expect of the management of an interdisciplinary research programme when I took up the role. There is a variety of management tasks which require portable skills that can be applied to all sorts of projects, across the public and the private sector, including monitoring progress and reporting, coordinating a team up and down, and overseeing the organisation of events. But the leadership of a complex research platform with a distinctive interdisciplinary nature is a different matter.

‘Interdisciplinarity’ is the name of the game here. It means joining forces with people haunted by the same theoretical preoccupations, who nevertheless speak different academic languages and operate in different niches. There is a clear tendency to join forces in the research world, now more than ever, because the prospects are appealing. You join forces on the assumption that you will achieve more than the sum of the parts. But when it comes to the study of the mind, it is still largely unclear what ‘more’ can be achieved through interdisciplinary investigation. This question – How can we articulate a useful framework for undertaking research on the mind across the board? – became my driving motivation in developing The Human Mind Project’s profile and aspirations.

Perhaps lack of consensus is evidence that interdisciplinarity does not work. I am inclined to think the opposite: if there is no clarity, as it often is the case before a major scientific revolution occurs, it is because we have not clarified the most fundamental questions that ought to be tackled. Without a fairly good understanding of the direction that we want to take, attempts to come up with testable hypotheses are likely to fail. So, I realised, we are (or at least I am) back to philosophy, the sort of analysis that clears the field from ambiguity before any empirical project can be undertaken. It takes effort and courage to go back to square one, but the journey has turned out to be a beautifully enriched one.

We have to try (hard) and imagine what it is like, what it takes, really, for someone with a different background and expertise to inhabit another intellectual world, to make different assumptions and form thoughts and questions in alternative, hopefully complementary, ways. The effort creates a common ground that facilitates mutual understanding and the unfolding of new routes to knowledge.

Mattia Gallotti is the LSE Fellow in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Part Two: Outcomes of The Human Mind Project

Rationale Of the ‘known unknowns’ that face science, the nature of the human mind is arguably the deepest mystery. In many fields, from cosmology to inherited traits, the scientific approach has transformed rich narratives, based on personal experience and speculation, into compelling, lawful accounts of mechanisms, open to empirical test.

When it comes to the mind, the path from hand-waving to evidence-based consensus is an unprecedented challenge. The task is daunting, but at least it starts with general agreement on certain points. First, the mind has something to do with the brain. Second, tackling the problem requires fusion of expertise and research effort across many disciplines. Third, understanding the mind would tell us something really interesting and important about what makes us human.

The proliferation of university departments and institutes of ‘mind and brain’ around the world, as well as the establishment of very large and targeted programmes, aiming to provide comprehensive accounts of the organisation of the human brain, signal a growing consensus that science has the tools and the conceptual frameworks to understand the relationship between neuronal architecture and the mental world. But are the sciences of the brain up to the job of accounting for the mind?

Collaborations across the whole spectrum of the mind and brain sciences are central to so many enterprises nowadays, inside and outside academia. Yet they encounter the archetypal problem: persuading humanities scholars to think experimentally, by looking for ways to isolate out individual components in experimental designs.At the same time, persuading scientists to see the bigger picture can be challenging. Learning about the big picture often requires time and patience, while learning how to take the big picture apart experimentally step-by-step, and then reassemble it, is not something we do naturally.

One concern, above all, is that the terms of reference of most of the scientific initiatives in this area pay little attention to evidence from outside the mainstream of cognitive science. Another is that more information does not mean better understanding:2 the fundamental challenges to be tackled are often too narrowly defined and poorly contextualised, thus missing the bigger picture. The result is a form of self-reinforcing, empirical myopia in the definition of the problems to be solved, and simplistic approaches to those over-simplified questions.

2 http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21714978-cautionary-tale-about-promises-modern-brain-science-tests-suggest.

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Context The Human Mind Project has sought agreement on the fundamental questions – the ‘Challenges’ – about the nature of mind, about how it should be studied, and about how the necessary integration of expertise might be achieved. It comprised a large and diverse advisory board with experts from virtually all disciplines concerned with the study of the mind and its products, led by a steering group of eight members and coordinated by a team from the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

Interdisciplinary research is not easy, as highlighted in recent influential publications, such as the Crossing-Paths report of the British Academy, and a recent special issue of Nature: ‘Done correctly, it is not mere multi-disciplinary work – a collection of people tackling a problem using their specific skills – but a synthesis of different approaches into something unique’.3 While mutually beneficial interdisciplinary collaboration needs balanced and appropriate input from all the participants, people from outside the natural sciences ought to be prepared to take the lead in their interaction with neuroscientists.

The Project aimed to encourage all scientists concerned with research into mind and brain to acknowledge more fully, and engage more proactively with, the contribution made by the arts, humanities and social sciences, to defining the richness and complexity of human mental life and experience. Our approach is that the neurosciences must inevitably be topdown, not just bottom-up, for two related reasons.

Firstly, scientists too often assume the human mind is shaped by biology and stocked by culture. On this story, distinctively human neurocognitive processes – causal reasoning, episodic memory, theory of mind, imitation, language – have been fashioned by genetic evolution. However, as recent research suggests, many distinctively human neurocognitive processes are built by and through enculturation. We learn from others how to think about causes, to reflect on the past and imagine the future, to represent thoughts and feelings, copy others, and harness for communication mental equipment that evolved for other things. If this is right, the developments studied in the humanities and social sciences are at least as important as those studied by the natural sciences when it comes to what shapes the human mind.

Secondly, what a purely brain’s-eye approach to the mind ignores is that in order to discover mental capacities, we have to have some idea of what we are looking for. This task is difficult because personal experience gives us all sorts of private accounts of what the mind is capable of. Any scientific explanation of the mind brings with it a compelling ‘folk’ narrative of what it is like to have a mind, and what minds do – which is part of our self-conception.

But this self-conception varies across times, places and cultures. Not every part of it should be incorporated into a full scientifically respectable picture of the mind. However some of it surely must, otherwise we remove everything cognitive and affective from the cognitive sciences at large.

3 Editorial (2016), Mind meld, Nature 525: 289–90.

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This is where we need a broader perspective, taking into account discussions and theories of mental life, and the traces of mentality, in art and history, social science and philosophy. Since our mental classifications change across time, we need an adequate historical understanding; since they are shaped by social forces, we need input from the sciences of society; and since some of our conceptions and self-conceptions are conceptually contentious and prone to confusions, we need philosophical clarity and rigour.

Process How do we identify, describe and classify the mental phenomena we aim to understand?

Once the relevant phenomena are more richly laid out and described, the concepts, principles and methods that make brain science so successful in its own domain, able to answer the questions neuroscience can raise in its own terms, may not be able by itself to provide a satisfactory account of the mind. So a second urgent question is: how do we delineate and foster other research programmes that have promising approaches, and what kinds of cooperation across research programmes will be most productive?

We have called on researchers from across all areas concerned with research into the mind, along with policy-makers and funders, commercial organisations and charities, governmental and non-governmental bodies, to take part in what might be called the crowdsourcing of ideas about the mind – defining ‘Grand Challenges’ for the future study of the mind, which are ripe for novel forms of interdisciplinary research on a grand scale.

An ambition of The Human Mind Project is that the identification of Grand Challenges might help to establish novel directions of travel in the study of the mind, thus encouraging funding bodies to support directly new and exciting areas of integrated research, in ways that will discourage their ‘capture’ by dominant disciplines and will reward closer working between the sciences and the humanities. In the first exercise of its kind to be conducted across the mind and brain sciences, we established a form of inclusive dialogue with all interested parties, providing them with a ‘hub’, housed in Senate House, University of London, that offered interactive and accessible content to enable engagement by a wide range of audiences.

The dialogue evolved and unfolded in a closely orchestrated three-step process held during the last phase of the Project in spring 2017. The first step was a Grand Challenges Public Consultation, which lasted for one month, between May and June 2017 and aimed to collect questions from experts and learners in higher education, in the form of responses to the following two queries: What important questions about the mind are raised in your work or research? What new questions about the mind do you think are key for the future of your work or research? Over 130 questions were submitted for consideration through the digital platform of The Human Mind Project, from which a final selection of 16 questions was made and used as a basis of an innovative group conferencing exercise implemented at The Human Mind Conference, held in Cambridge in late June 2017.

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The Human Mind Conference brought together an impressive audience of 140 experts and practitioners from across the humanities and the cognitive sciences to discuss key aspects of mental life. Two dedicated, ground-breaking workshops – Grand Challenges Sessions – were designed to facilitate the exchange of evidence, opinion and aspiration among all interested parties, including conference speakers and participants, in order to set new agendas for interdisciplinary enquiry and suggest new funding platforms. Criteria were developed to help the selection of the Grand Challenges. These criteria were broadly in the following interlinked categories: Quality; Tractability; Innovation; Interdisciplinary potential; Language; Collaboration and Community; Impact.

Quality covered such areas as specificity; substantiveness; theoretical and practical importance; potential for ongoing generation of research. Tractability included, for instance, focus or scope (the balance between ambition and manageability); testability; clarity of research question. The criterion of Innovation included not only originality and invention but also invited consideration as to whether the question was inspirational or provocative.

The key criterion of Interdisciplinary potential covered both the general – areas of fruitful convergence – as well as the specific, such as reciprocal methodologies. The Language criterion was used to filter questions, so that consideration was given to clear terms (and a recognition that the same terms are used in different ways); clarity of expression; an emphasis on inter-translatability; and the quality of formulation: was the question understandable from different perspectives? The criteria of Collaboration and community was used to cultivate research communities which are culturally independent, and which occupy a multidisciplinary space. Impact is largely self-explanatory. Questions should be relevant to real-world problems; of human and non-academic interest.

A final series of recommendations emerged, drawn together and systematised by the academic leadership of the Project.

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The Grand Challenges On the occasion of the Grand Challenges Final Workshop, held in London in December 2017, a panel of representatives of the Advisory Board and the Steering Group gathered to discuss and finalise the complete list of Grand Challenges of The Human Mind Project, as follows: 1. To identify a common interdisciplinary framework for the integrated study of the mind 2. To understand which mental capacities are distinctively human and which occur in other species 3. To respect subjective experience in the scientific study of the mind 4. To provide a general account of the human mind in the face of individual differences, differences in our cultural and historical contexts, and environments 5. To understand the range and the causes of imagination and the importance of the dimension of time to the human mind 6. To accommodate the individual and social dimensions of the human mind and how they relate to one another 7. To provide an account of the mind that respects the impact of the body and its internal workings have on it 8. To delineate the workings of emotion, cognition, and social processing, and characterise their relation to one another 9. To characterise the distinctive contribution that language makes to the human mind and its outputs 10. To cast light on the distinctiveness and origin of artistic production and aesthetic response 11. To map out any consequences for our thinking and practice brought about by revisions to our ordinary concepts of mind in the light of neuroscientific findings 12. To chart the distinctive contributions that biology and culture make to the traditionally and non-traditionally developing mind

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Elaborations of the Grand Challenges 1. To identify a common interdisciplinary framework for the integrated study of the mind The arts, humanities and the sciences each address different facets of the mind, its processes, its products, what enables creatures like us to have mental capacities and how they are put to work, as well as how they influence one another, how they interact, and the special qualities that we value in being sentient creatures with experiences and histories. Can all of these aspects of the human mind be addressed within one inclusive framework within which all of these different can be respected and related. What would an integrated explanation of the mind look like? Can thinking typical of the human and social sciences seamlessly merge with the concerns, methods, and levels of descriptions of the cognitive and life sciences? Thought must be given to models of integration, to horizontal and well as vertical connections between disciplines and to how information from different levels and scales of inquiry can both mutually constrain one another and enhance the possibility of breakthrough research.

2. To understand the extent to which mental traits that are considered to be distinctively human, such as language and mind reading, can be built upon low-level processes found in other species To what extent is our biology or our evolutionary history responsible for the widespread flourishing of human culture in its many manifestations? Is there something distinctive about the architecture of the human mind that depends on, or has given rise to the forms of cultural exchange that mark us out as a species? To answer this question, we must draw on the expertise of a number of different disciplines in the arts, humanities and the sciences, some of which will focus on cultural transmission, some of which will focus on the transition of means and mechanisms that enable this to happen. Will there be a way to connect these two intertwined and evolving accounts to highlight the opportune way patterns of development occurred both across species and within the species and across particular groups?

In what way are mental capacities that are distinctively human related to those found in other species? A story of the mind is a story of what makes us human. At the same time, many of our mental capacities overlap with those of other non-human creatures. In what sense, then, are we continuous in evolution with non-human primates, and in what ways do we diverge? The focus of such research is often on what makes our species unique. What accounts for the divergences or development of these capacities in the human mind?

3. To respect subjective experience in the scientific study of the mind Furnishing an account of the neurobiological mechanisms of the brain seems to provide no clear indication of how the subjective experiences of the conscious mind could be accommodated. How is an account of subjective experience to be integrated with other sources of information and other models of mind? How can we give a place to the conscious experiences of the subject in the scientific study of the mind?

Choice of entry points is critical in studying the mind. Explanations of mental phenomena often start with general abstracted principles and result in accounts of the brain at the bottom level. But if one begins with an enquiry into some relevant phenomenon – 12 The Human Mind Project

say, desires, considering how rich the phenomenon is, then the tendency to explain it reductively will fall away. So could subjective experience be front-loaded into the study of the mind and thus help full explanations to put aside reductivism? Could this enable us to keep the target of explanation still in mind – the experiences we undergo – and yet appeal to the neurobiological account of mechanisms and the inputs to help explain why our subjective experiences take the shape and form they do in a variety of conditions given the processes of the brain and the range of inputs and outputs?

4. To provide a general account of the human mind in the face of individual differences, differences in our cultural and historical contexts, and environments How should differences between individuals influence the study of mind? Cognitive research has long been characterised by a universalistic attitude, one that focuses on the search for universal human mechanisms and processes of cognition. But more research in psychology and neuroscience is highlighting the role of individual differences, rather than similarities. Is this likely to put general explanations of the human mind under pressure? This is another key question to address when formulating the interdisciplinary framework with which to study the human mind.

How can the mind be studied given that it and its contexts are always changing? Each mental act is situated at a time, in a particular society and culture. There is a lack of historical explanation in scientific approaches to the mind, despite the recognition that psychological phenomena have developed and changed over time. To what extent can we find generalisations through empirical investigation that apply across different contexts? This is part of the over-arching question of how we can integrate distinct though complementary explanations of mental phenomena.

How do people generate and maintain coherent, unified, concepts? What enables us to generate the resources of thought that structure our thinking and guide our actions? These may be shared across groups as well as within communities, or forged by local circumstances and development. Shared beliefs have typically led to cohesive communities, and it is important to discover how these shared conceptual resources have functioned to structure societies and how their role can be diminished in increasingly diverse and secular societies, and with what costs to standards of evidence and the fixing of beliefs.

5. To understand the range and causes of imagination and the importance of the dimension of time to the human mind How important is the dimension of time to the human mind? We are creatures not limited to experience of the here and now. We build up and layer memories of the past and use these to expand our thinking and planning about the future. The expansion of the mind beyond the immediately present environment is distinctive of a fully realised human consciousness and loss of it puts at risk our sense of self and our place within a larger world. How exactly is this dimension of time within the human mind to be studied and charted? How does our experience of time change in forms of mental illness? Can an altered temporal dimension to our experience indicate a radically altered mind? What can we learn here from psycho-pharmacology?

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What is the range and causes of human imagination? What would the lack of a capacity to visually imagine deprive us of, and what does it enable us to do? Imagination means creativity and innovation, the opening up of new possibilities and a renewed sense of progress. An imaginative mind is a mind that thinks outside the bounds of its immediate surroundings not just in abstract terms, but through visual imagery, auditory imagery, olfactory imagery, etc. Would an explanation of the roots of imagination in terms of neural activity be achievable at all? If so, what would it add to our common sense understanding of an imaginative mind?

6. To accommodate the individual and social dimensions of the human mind and how they relate to one another How do individuals in groups make decisions? Groups can be smart, even when individual decisions are not optimal. Networked publics can also generate results that single agents cannot achieve individually. A lively debate is currently taking place inside and outside academia on issues around citizen science and crowdsourcing, group decision-making and collective reasoning. A recurrent question in these discussions is how collaborative forms of intelligence emerges from the interaction of individuals. Are the decisions of people aggregated, or do we simply influence one another’s thinking by our presence? What are the limitations of the wisdom of crowds?

7. To provide an account of the mind that respects the impact of the body and its internal workings have on it What constraints and possibilities does embodiment create for cognitive systems? The study of the mind cannot be divorced from the body and the way embodiment enables workings of the mind. Few would doubt that cognition is embodied in ways that were only partially acknowledged and theorised about in past explanations of the mind. More is now known of how the embodied mind contributes non-symbolic, sensory-motor primary elements to the working of language and meaning. But understanding of what being embodied brings to a mind, what it actually is for the mind to be embodied and move in the world – it is still a matter of debate. Further research is needed to understand the constraints that our bodies and movements place on the range and richness of human emotion and thought.

To what extent are mental processes continuous with bodily processes? There has been a lot of talking about forms of ‘extension’ or embodiment of the mind in recent years. The question is often about the role of organs, bodily states, artefacts and (digital) tools, in contributing to, perhaps enhancing mental processing beyond the brain. But what extent can we legitimately talk of a continuity between mind, brain, and body, more generally? What is meant by gut instinct? How is the way we process information being transformed, not only by brain and bodily organs, but also by new forms of intelligence, artificial and social?

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8. To delineate the workings of emotion, cognition, and social processing, and characterise their relation to one another How does emotion interact with cognitive and social processing? At one time affective states were thought of as disruptive of reasoning and social organisation. Things have changed, and nowadays researchers discuss how to ‘emote’, that is, embody, a view of the nature of the mind which has traditionally given pride of place to cognition over emotion. The question as to how take emotion into serious consideration and give it a more fundamental place in understanding the mind remains a critical one across the arts, humanities, social and cognitive sciences. Emotions shape our sense of things, so how is the way we process information, individually and socially, being transformed by them?

9. To characterise the distinctive contribution that language makes to the human mind and its outputs How does linguistic and non-linguistic expression relate to conscious experience and thought?

The capacity for language transforms individual human experience and shapes much of our thinking. At the same time, the emergence of both spoken and written language, and its relation to the development of the mind, is an unsettled question, which can be given increasing precision by a project on the scale envisaged with the contribution from the disciplines involved. If much of human thought depends on language, what kind of thought or thinking is independent of language? Which aspects of our experience are codified or categorised in language, and which are not? What demarcation does the acquisition of language mark within the mind, and between kinds of minds?

10. To cast light on the distinctiveness and origin of artistic production and aesthetic response Are there distinctive mental activities involved in artistic production and aesthetic response?

Minds like ours generate artefacts, practices, music, books, sculpture, and a variety of other mind-creations that convey or communicate something to other minds. What is distinctive about these expressive and communicative acts of mind, how did they emerge in our ancestors, and what has led us to respond selectively to them? Traces of the mind’s activity and our appreciation of them mark out a distinctive space of practice and experience. Does it co-opt existing mental traits or are these distinctive traits that have been cultivated because they are valued for their own sake? What mental faculties do the visual and musical arts, literacy and story-telling employ and empower?

11. To map out any consequences for our thinking and practice brought about by revisions to our ordinary concepts of mind in the light of neuroscientific findings How and why are people motivated to act? Progress in the social and human sciences relies to a large extent on the interpretation of human actions. But motivation and agency, the sense that we are in control of our thoughts and actions, is still not well understood or agreed in neuroscientific explanations. If the research question is what turns bodily movements into voluntary and responsible courses of action, then one important challenge will be The Human Mind Project 15

to determine the right scale and the proper set of considerations to address the relation between agency, motivation and the brain. This gives rise to the questions of whether there could be a science of responsibility.

12.  To chart the distinctive contribution that biology and culture make to the traditionally and non-traditionally developing mind How does the human mind regulate its contents, operations, emotions and actions, and how does this capacity arise? To have a traditionally developing mind is to be in receipt of rich, compelling and interesting experiences. Bottom-up explanations focus on the stimulusresponse, reflexive machinery of the brain that govern its own workings and regulate its outputs. But the capacity of the mind to go beyond inputs, to develop reflective awareness of self and others, as well as of the world, features prominently in so much thinking across the humanities. The extent to which this capacity is possible at all, and the precursors to human mental functioning and self-regulation, are still not well understood. This is a key question if we are to find a common framework across disciplines to study the mind and its products.

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The Way Forward: Recommendations Our hope is that the Grand Challenges defined by The Human Mind Project will provide important questions about the mind that are potentially tractable, but only through novel forms of collaboration between disciplines, especially across the arts and humanities, and the sciences. According to Omenn’s analysis of the impact of Grand Challenges in such areas as mathematics, genomics, systems biology, cosmology and particle physics, and environmental science, ‘science is about asking questions and finding credible ways to answer them’.4 Simply posing questions, however exciting they might be, is not enough to answer them. One of the many necessities for interdisciplinary research to flourish is targeted facilitation. Steven Hill, Head of Research Policy at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (now Research England), asked how investment decisions could best mobilise interdisciplinarity in pursuit of grand challenges, such as the challenge of mental health.5 He analysed 355 research case studies, concerned in some way with mental health, in the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework. Sixty-three of the 150 or so fields of research considered in the REF contributed to these case studies, 75 per cent of which involved two or three disciplines. He then wrote: ‘we must be cautious about allowing specific disciplines to capture challenges as their own’, and he proposed to ‘organise investment around the challenges themselves, carefully constructed so that they are open to whatever disciplines or combinations of disciplines make sense’.

4 Omenn, G.S. (2006) ‘Grand challenges and great opportunities in science, technology, and public policy’, Science 314: 1696–1704.

5 Hill, S. (2016) ‘The grand challenges of research need careful investment’ HEFCE Blog http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2016/03/30/the-grand-challenges-of-research-need-careful-investment/.

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Part Three: Activities of The Human Mind Project

Workshops The Human Mind Project launch event 12 December 2013, Senate House, London Meanings of mind 23 May 2014, Senate House, London Theory of mind and the social mind 16 September 2014, European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP), Noto, Italy Computers and minds 21 November 2014, University of Edinburgh Social change in the brain age 10–11 September 2015, Institute for Advanced Study IUSS, Pavia Collective intelligence 14 October 2015, Nesta Headquarters, London Language, literacy, literature and the mind 9 March 2016, Senate House, London Emotion, memory and the mind 7–8 July 2016, Brighton Agency, morals and the mind 26–27 September 2016, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London Creativity and the mind 23 November 2016, Senate House, London The mind in practice Google Campus London, 17 March 2017 Interdisciplinarity and the mind 11–12 May 2017, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham Intelligence and the mind 11 December 2017, Senate House, London

Seminars Macrocognition in humans and insects 15 December 2015, Senate House, London Shakespeare and the mind 18 May 2016, Senate House, London Neuro and the readable mind 6 June 2016, Senate House, London The neural basis of real-world social interaction: connecting art, neuroscience and education 6 February 2017, Senate House, London Defending the nature/culture divide 2 March 2017, Senate House, London 18 The Human Mind Project

What’s so special about the human mind?

12 December 2013 | London, UK What makes the human mind so special?

And how can we best understand it?

The Human Mind Project was established to highlight the contribution of the arts and humanities to the study of human nature, and the importance of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to the study of the mind, integrating science and the humanities.

The launch of the Project coincided with major research programmes in the United States and Europe aimed at defining the structure and function of the brain. The launch event brought together leading figures from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence and evolutionary biology.

Speakers included Nicola Clayton (Cambridge), Robin Dunbar (Oxford), Annette KarmiloffSmith (London) and Deidre Wilson (London).

Meanings of mind 23 May 2014 | London To what extent do philosophical ideas about the nature, mechanism, and function of the mind relate to the way that the word is used by neuroscientists and cognitive scientists?

After its launch in December 2013, the first public event of The Human Mind Project addressed the meaning of mind – how the term is used by philosophers, and the extent to which philosophical ideas about the nature, mechanism and function of the mind relate to the way that the word is used by neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. This one-day intensive workshop brought together leading philosophers and scientists to discuss what they see to be the key questions facing the study of the mind. The overarching goal was to represent a range of philosophical opinion, from those who embrace naturalistic approaches to the mind to those who were sceptical, as well as to explore potentially fruitful topics for interdisciplinary research.

Speakers included: Tim Crane (Cambridge), Patrick Haggard (London), Jane Heal (Cambridge), David Papineau (London), Kim Plunkett (Oxford), Tim Shallice (London), Gabriella Vigliocco (London) and Michael Wheeler (Stirling).

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Theory of mind and the social mind 16 September 2014 | Noto, Italy The Human Mind Project joined the 2014 annual meeting of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) to explore how recent advances in social anthropology and neuroscience shed light on the social dimensions of the mind; and how to expand our understanding of the theory of mind, and the nature of cognition more generally.

How does recent research on the ‘social mind’ allow us to reconsider debates in the theory of mind? And how does shared cognition and agency allow us to reimagine the human mind?

Computers and minds 21 November 2014 | Edinburgh How does the advent of computing and AI impact on the human mind? As part of the 2014 Being Human Festival of the Humanities, The Human Mind Project brought together leading academics to discuss research at the interface of philosophy, computational neuroscience, robotics and AI. A one-day specialist workshop, held at the University of Edinburgh, explored computational theories of mind, the cognitive neuroscience of self-consciousness and body awareness, and the implications of the latest advances in artificial intelligence. This was followed by a public demonstration of robotics by Sethu Vijayakumar and a talk by Andy Clark (both Edinburgh) on ‘Being and Computing: Are you your brain, and is your brain a computer?’.

20 The Human Mind Project

Social change in the brain age 10-11 September 2015 | Pavia, Italy This two-day workshop and symposium brought together a diverse range of experts from philosophy and science, as well as public policy and creative industry, to discuss whether and how research on the mind can shed new light on the age-old issue: how can we deliver positive social change?

The event featured a focused workshop with talks and commentaries on the meaning of evidence across the life and behavioural sciences, the mechanism and function of the social mind, and the view of human agency emerging from discussions of policy issues in the public sector. The workshop was followed by a symposium on the concept of ‘wellbeing’, and a public conversation on ‘The Brain in Social Action’.

Speakers included Colin Blakemore (London), Romina Boarini (OECD, Paris), Ian Carter (Pavia), John Dupré (Exeter), Vittorio Gallese (Parma), Andrea Moro (IUSS, Pavia), Andreas Roepstorff (Aarhus), Simone Schnall (Cambridge), Barry Smith (London), Dan Sperber (CEU, Budapest and IJN, Paris), Alex Willcock (VisualDNA), Jonathan Wolff (London).

Collective intelligence 14 October 2015 | Nesta, London The Human Mind Project joined forces with Nesta to hold a one-day workshop on recent research on collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence is now central in discussions about networked democracy, citizen science, group decision-making, e-health and crowdsourcing.

These discussions cut across a wide range of disciplines, from the social and cognitive sciences to public policy and information analysis, but the question remains as to how collaborative platforms emerge from the interaction of individuals. What makes groups smart? And how can networked publics generate results that single agents cannot achieve individually?

Speakers included: Bahador Bahrami (London), Licia Capra (London), Robin Dunbar (Oxford), Chris Frith (London), Paolo Gerbaudo (London), Hugo Mercier (Switzerland), Arnau Monterde (Barcelona), Geoff Mulgan (London) and Orestis Palermos (Edinburgh).

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Macrocognition in humans and insects 15 December 2015 | London Should explanations in cognitive science always begin from individualist assumptions?

In this talk, Bryce Huebner (Georgetown) argued that high degrees of relatedness can allow groups to function as unified information-processing systems, which are able to make adaptive decisions in ways that parallel individual decision-making. He claimed that as average relatedness falls, animals become less cooperative, and collective behaviour becomes more amenable to individualistic explanations. However, humans are an exception to this rule; and by examining how we think and act together, Huebner showed that we have found a novel way to overcome the evolutionary pressures that favour individual behavioural guidance.

Language, literacy, literature and the mind 9 March 2016 | London This workshop brought together scholars from the humanities and sciences to explore the place of language, literacy and narrative in human culture.

A story of the mind is a story of what makes us human: a story informed by the best science of the day and by a humanistic understanding of the contingencies of life and history.

What is the role of storytelling in this endeavour? Is there a connection between the emergence of both spoken and written language, and the development of the mind?

What sort of cultural instrument is literature? And what cognitive faculties does the use of literature employ, and empower?

Speakers included Sarah Churchwell (London), Greg Currie (York), Charles Ferneyhough (Durham), Laurie Maguire (Oxford), Evert Van Emde Boas (Oxford), Jacqueline Thompson (Oxford), Sophie Scott (London), Thomas Scott-Phillips (Durham).

22  The Human Mind Project

Shakespeare and the mind 18 May 2016 | London How can recent research on the mind illuminate Shakespeare’s depictions of it, and in what sense may literary and historical ideas contribute to our general understanding of the mind?

This seminar was linked with the Senate House Library Shakespeare: Metamorphosis exhibition, which ran to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and its associated season of events.

In tackling fundamental questions about literature and the mind and their relation to one another, Dr Miranda Anderson (Edinburgh) drew on recent cognitive approaches to literature, illustrated with examples from Shakespeare and various other Renaissance works. Her talk was followed by a conversation with Professor Paul Matthews (London), neuroscientist and author of The Bard on the Brain.

Neuro and the readable mind 6 June 2016 | London If we can ‘read’ the mind in the brain itself, what then?

The human body was made legible long ago.

But what of the human mind? Is it possible to ‘read’ the mind, for one human being to know what another is thinking or feeling, their beliefs and intentions? And if someone can read your mind, how about others – could the authorities, in the criminal justice system or the security services? Some developments in contemporary neuroscience suggest the answer to this question is ‘yes’.

While philosophers continue to debate the mind-brain problem, a range of novel technologies of brain imaging have been used to argue that specific mental states, and even specific thoughts, can be identified by characteristic patterns of brain activation; this has led some to propose their use in practices ranging from lie detection and security screening to the assessment of brain activity in persons in persistent vegetative states. In this talk, Professor Nikolas Rose (London) explored some of the epistemological and ontological mutations involved and considered some implications of this materialisation of the readable, knowable, transparent mind.

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Emotion, memory and the mind 7-8 July 2016 | Brighton The Human Mind Project teamed up with the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex to present this exploration of the human experience of emotion and memory.

What we remember, and how we remember it, constitutes the texture of human life. Just as emotions shape our sense of things, including ourselves and other people, so memories shape the sense of who we are and what we have become throughout history.

How do memory and emotions shape lived experience and identity? Are current approaches across the mind and brain sciences adequate for the task of explaining the complex nature of feelings, sensations, memory, and identity? Can we study memory and emotion in other species, are there collective memories, and have our emotional lives changed over time?

Speakers included: Nicola Clayton and Clive Wilkins (Cambridge), Giovanna Colombetti (Exeter), Thomas Dixon (London), Claire Langhamer (Sussex), Catherine Loveday (Westminster) and Nick Payne (playwright).

Agency, morals and the mind 26-27 September 2016 | London A multidisciplinary workshop brought together scholars from diverse disciplines to investigate agency and morality.

The sense of agency – the feeling that we are in control of our thoughts and actions – is a central feature of the human mind. The experience of agency influences the conscious selection and avoidance of courses of action, our sense of responsibility, interaction with other people and the way in which we address societal challenges. It also has crucial implications for what we deem to be right and wrong in human behaviour.

24 The Human Mind Project

This workshop explored how we define the relation between agency, moral responsibility and the brain. Can cognitive explanations shed light on the subjectivity and voluntariness of action? How can the science of evolution help us understand the nature of ethical constructs, and address the possibility of moral progress? What turns the mere control of bodily movements into conscious acts of morality or immorality?

Speakers included: Scott Atran (CNRS and Oxford), Molly Crockett (Oxford), Emma Flynn (Durham), Steve Fuller (Warwick), Patrick Haggard (London), Richard Holton (Cambridge), Keith Jensen (Manchester), Lucy O’Brien (London) and Catherine Wilson (York).

Creativity and the mind 23 November 2016 | London The Human Mind Project teamed up with Guerrilla Science to create this one-day event as part of the 2016 Being Human festival.

Creativity means innovation and positive change, the inventing of new worlds out of sparks of genius. A creative mind is a mind that generates ideas and solutions likely to make a breakthrough at the societal level. Creative activity evokes chaos and order, allowing us to establish new paths and patterns.

What is the creative mind? Is creativity a feature of our attitude towards things? How does the physical, social and cultural environment enable creative activity, and how can the environment be structured to enhance it? Is creative agency, and intelligence, a prerogative of the individual?

The workshop aimed to inspire participants to flex their own creative muscles through a series of creative challenges and discussions with leading experts.

Speakers included Margaret Boden, Simon Colton (London), Berys Gaut (St Andrews) and Aura Satz (artist).

The Human Mind Project  25

The neural basis of real-world social interaction: connecting art, education and brains 6 February 2017 | London All of us interact with other people on a daily basis. Yet we know very little about how the brain supports dynamic social interactions.

The talk, by Dr Suzanne Dikker (Utrecht and New York), described a series of collaborative projects with scientists, artists, and educators, to investigate the brain basis of real-world face-to-face communication. For example, in partnership with a New York City high school, one research project followed a class of students throughout the school year and recorded their brain activity during regular class activities. In another, 2,500 museum visitors participated in the Mutual Wave Machine, an interactive art/neuroscience installation that translates brainwave synchrony between pairs of people into light patterns (more light = more synchrony).

Dr Dikker presented these and other projects and discussed whether a multidisciplinary approach might provide a promising new avenue for investigating social interactions outside the laboratory.

Defending the nature-culture divide 2 March 2017 | London Does new scientific research on development, epigenetics and geneculture co-evolution show that nature and culture cannot be separated? And what does this assumption mean for our understanding of body and mind?

Drawing on her work in the Philosophy of Life Sciences, Professor Maria Kronfeldner (Budapest) argued in defence of the natureculture divide. Despite their entanglement at the developmental, epigenetic and evolutionary level, nature and culture are understood as two channels of inheritance – that is, they are two bundle terms for two kinds of developmental resources.

26  The Human Mind Project

The mind in practice 17 March 2017 | Google Campus, London The Mind in Practice was a unique event that brought together universities and industry to discuss how knowledge of the capacities and limitations of the human mind could facilitate innovative practice and productive partnerships across researchers, designers, and commercial organisations.

The mind is not just the object of academic speculation about what makes us human.

From corporate storytelling to interaction design, machine learning and government apps, good technical innovation and good business depend on interacting minds creating value for the minds of their users. But how the design and implementation of new products and services is driven by knowledge about the mind continues to be an open question.

A series of flash presentations from an exciting line-up of speakers opened the event. Each speaker shared a story of a ‘creation’ – presenting their product or service as a case study, and revealing their own intuitions and understandings about the mind.

Speakers included Alastair Somerville (Acuity Design), Barry Smith (London), Daniel Ospina (Conductal), Mattia Gallotti (London), Kate Hammer (StoryFORM), Kate Simmons (Cancer Research UK), Lee Bryant (Post*Shift).

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Interdisciplinarity and the mind 11-12 May 2017 | Durham How does interdisciplinary research transform the way we think about the human mind? And how does human cognition itself affect the scope and direction of interdisciplinary research?

Interdisciplinarity is now widely recognised as central to the enhancement of teaching and scholarship. Many research projects and programmes achieve success by bringing together ideas and methods, voices and expertise from across different disciplines.

While thinking across disciplines is vital to knowledge production in some areas of research on the mind, there has been relatively little work on how such collaboration can transform conventional thinking about the mind.

This two-day workshop, hosted by the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, brought interdisciplinary theory and practice into dialogue with current research on the mind. Researchers and policy makers from across the academic spectrum discussed their experiences of collaborating across disciplinary boundaries; how we work on the mind in an interdisciplinary way; and what sorts of challenges and opportunities emerge in the course of a project aimed at synthesising diverse approaches. Explorations were undertaken into what cutting-edge research on the mind can teach us about our intellectual capacities to engage in interdisciplinary work. How does human cognition itself, its mechanisms and processes, affect the scope and direction of interdisciplinary research across the human, social and natural sciences?

Speakers included Kathryn Banks (Durham), Robert Barton (Durham), Colin Blakemore (London) Felicity Callard (Durham), Jill Cook (British Museum), Charles Fernyhough (Durham), Paul Fletcher (Cambridge), Carl Gombrich (London), Marta Halina (Cambridge), Steven Hill (HEFCE), Tom McLeish (Durham), Christian von Scheve (Berlin), Barry Smith (London).

28  The Human Mind Project

The Human Mind Conference 27-29 June 2017 | Møller Centre, Cambridge The Human Mind Conference was an international, interdisciplinary event bringing together a wide range of experts from across the humanities and the cognitive sciences to discuss key aspects of mental life and experience. The event provided a major statement on current knowledge in the study of the mind, and identified future directions of research for the years to come.

The conference brought together philosophers, psychologists, linguists and neuroscientists around four session topics.

• Brain and World: Perception and Consciousness • The Human Agent: Intention and Action • Self and Other: Social Cognition and Communication • The Subject’s Point of View: Intentionality and Emotion 1. Brain and World: Perception and Consciousness Speakers included Andy Clark (Edinburgh), Bob Kentridge (Durham), Uta Noppeney (Birmingham), Anil Seth (Sussex).

Amongst a wide-ranging discussion about perception and consciousness, Andy Clark offered his thoughts on perception, and how the concept of prediction is vital to understanding the rich, full-blooded, world-presenting perception of the kind that we humans enjoy. Bob Kentridge focused on the distinction between ‘sensation’ and ‘perception’ noting that the classical view of inferring properties of things in the world from the sensations that they elicit does not account for the unconscious perception of things rendered invisible. Anil Seth considered how the framework of prediction error minimisation (PEM) can help bridge from mechanism to phenomenology in the science of consciousness, advancing the view that PEM is an excellent theoretical framework to work with for this purpose.

2. The Human Agent: Intention and Action Speakers included: Richard Holton (Cambridge), Anthony Dickinson (Cambridge), Lucy O’Brien (London), Patrick Haggard (London), John-Dylan Haynes (Berlin).

Lucy O’Brien argued that the task of understanding intentions is not prior to the task of understanding actions. Patrick Haggard focused on individual responsibility for action, taking a neurocognitive perspective that suggests that an ‘implicit’ measure of agency, based on the

The Human Mind Project 29

perceived temporal association between an action and its outcome, reveals both predictive and retrospective agency processing in the human brain. Richard Holton, meanwhile, considered the question of ‘pleasure’ and its purpose, distinguishing two different kinds of desire or want: one which has its place in the stimulus-response system, and another which features in more cognitive goal-driven behaviour.

3. Self and Other: Social Cognition and Communication Speakers included Robyn Carston (London), Chris Frith, Cecilia Heyes (Oxford), Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen).

Cecilia Heyes argued that distinctively human cognitive mechanisms – including imitation, mindreading, and language are cognitive gadgets, embedded in cultural evolution. Chris Frith added that what we know most about the world, comes from observing others, but that this observation can be misleading, and thus so too can our understanding of the world.

Robyn Carston focused on the various senses that humans use to express themselves and communicate. Everything from ostensive eye gaze, to pointing and miming as well as the use of language itself, is vital. Dan Zahavi concentrated on second-person engagement, arguing that agents that directly interact with one another can achieve a form of interpersonal awareness that is qualitatively different and informationally richer than anything that can be achieved through recursive exercises or inferential mindreading.

4. The Subject’s Point of View: Intentionality and Emotion Speakers included Huda Akil (Michigan), Frances Egan (Rutgers), Philip Gerrans (Adelaide), Mike Martin (London).

Huda Akil opened this session by discussing from a neurobiological perspective the way that emotions, mood, and temperament are elements that operate on different timescales from moment-to-moment. He also offered thoughts on the role of genetics and environmental factors. Philip Gerrans asked how psychological and neural mechanisms of emotions underlie the subject’s point of view on the world, whilst Frances Egan considered whether the cognitive sciences will ever be able to explain how thoughts and feelings represent the world, suggesting an alternative approach. Mike Martin discussed how philosophical discussions of emotion are usually untrue to our experience, exploring the way that emotion and experience fit together.

Grand Challenges at The Human Mind Conference In addition, there were two dedicated Grand Challenges Sessions, facilitated by decision analyst Professor Lawrence Phillips. In total 140 conference speakers and attendees worked together to produce a series of questions for interdisciplinary investigation and criteria for conducting interdisciplinary research.

30 The Human Mind Project

Intelligence and the mind 11 December 2017 | Senate House, London How is the way we process information being transformed by new forms of intelligence, artificial and social?

Every living being interacts with its surroundings, sensing and responding to signals from the environment. Now, the technology we use every day does this too.

What can we learn about the nature and functioning of human intelligence?

Experts from computer science and neuroeconomics, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of information were brought together to discuss the ways in which human beings have become so good at processing information quickly, extracting meaning from raw data, and building powerful narratives of who we are.

Speakers included S.M. Amadae (Helsinki, MIT and Swansea), Luciano Floridi (Oxford), Natalie Gold (Public Health England), Mary Morgan (London), Drazen Prelec (MIT), Paul Smart (Southampton).

The Human Mind Project  31

External events The Human Mind Project team were also invited to take part in several external events between 2015 and 2017.

Language Cognition and Society 10–12 December 2015 | Genova, Italy The Human Mind Project sponsored the 2015 meeting of the Italian Association of Cognitive Sciences. Colin Blakemore, Nicola Clayton and Mattia Gallotti spoke at the event on topics related to language, cognition and society.

ESOF 2016 Scientific Session 26 July 2016 | Manchester The Human Mind Project joined the EuroScience Open Forum 2016 for a dedicated session hosted by Science Europe: ‘Beyond the “Anthropocene”: where mankind and machines converge’.

A Penny for your Thoughts 25–26 September 2017 | London The Human Mind Project collaborated in an event on social cognition, organised by Simone Shamay-Tsoory and Uri Hertz and sponsored by the British Council’s UK-Israel SYNERGY Programme.

32 The Human Mind Project

Part Four - Appendix

Sums and distributions of scores assigned at the Human Mind Conference, Cambridge, 27 June 2017 Questions ranked by score sums

Question number

Questions were ranked by their total scores.

The graph below shows the sum of scores for each question. Blue histograms show the frequency of scores (y-axis) within the score categories.

16 11 10 5 3 13 7 15 12 8 1 6 14 4 2 9 0

1,000

2,000

3,000

Score totals

Question 16: How does culture shape emotion, and how does emotion interact with other mental processes? (3,079)

Question 11: How does the mind generate the story of itself? (2,973)

30

30

25

25

20

20

15

15

10

10

5

5

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

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(80, 100)

The Human Mind Project  33

Question 10: Under the hypothesis that the brain is a complex but entirely physical device, how should we understand agency and responsibility? (2,682)

Question 5: We become who we are: To what extent are we socially patterned and developed?

(2,666)

30

30

25

25

20

20

15

15

10

10

5

5

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

Question 3: Can the mind’s boundaries be extended through social relations and the use of artefacts?

(2,622)

Question 13: How can we scientifically investigate how the mind works in real world scenarios?

(2,610)

30

30

25

25

20

20

15

15

10

10

5

5

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

34  The Human Mind Project

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

Question 7: When we use the concept of ‘consciousness’, what do we really mean? (2,329)

Question 15: Can better theories of the brain inform working practices, and policies about the mind? (2,312)

30

30

25

25

20

20

15

15

10

10

5

5

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

Question 12: Can we account for the disparities between what we ‘think’ we do and what we ‘actually’ do? (2,286)

Question 8: On the assumption that most of mental activity happens unconsciously, how do we adapt our view of ourselves? (2,240)

30

30

25

25

20

20

15

15

10

10

5

5

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

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0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

The Human Mind Project 35

Question 1: What is left out of the paradigms, models, and concepts of brain activity, for understanding the mind? (2,238)

Question 6: How do we come up with heuristics to solve problems individually and relationally?

(1,959)

30

30

25

25

20

20

15

15

10

10

5

5

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

Question 14: Can Imaginative writing and art performance help to integrate the subjective qualities of human experience with the quantitative data of brain sciences? (1,691)

Question 4: Is there any analogy between the encoding strategies of networks of neurons, and the strategies used by colonies of insects and schools of fish? (1,650)

30

30

25

25

20

20

15

15

10

10

5

5

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

36  The Human Mind Project

(80, 100)

0

(0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

Question 2: If the brain is material, the mind is, too, isn’t it? (1,456) 35

Question 9: Identity is shaped by history and Zeitgeist.

What would it be like to be oneself, a thousand years ago? (1,172) 40

30 35 25

30

20

25

15

20

10

15

5

10

0

5 (0, 20)

(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

0

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(20, 40)

(40, 60)

(60, 80)

(80, 100)

The Human Mind Project  37

The School of Advanced Study is the UK’s national centre for the support and promotion of research in the humanities. Located at the heart of the University of London in Bloomsbury, the School provides an unrivalled scholarly community in which to pursue postgraduate study and research. Students learn from leading specialists in their fields, hone their research skills in highly regarded training programmes, expand their knowledge through an extensive calendar of events, and become part of a worldwide network of humanities scholars.

Funding opportunities include AHRC-sponsored London Arts and Humanities Partnership studentships, SAS studentships, and a number of subject-specific bursaries and awards.

The Human Mind Project, which ran from 2013-18, was an international, multidisciplinary effort aiming to facilitate innovative approaches to the study of the mind. The project highlighted the importance of developing comprehensive, cross-disciplinary understandings of the mind and brain, integrating the sciences and humanities.

The project was led by Colin Blakemore and Mattia Gallotti at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in collaboration with key scholars from five other UK universities, supported by a large and distinguished international advisory board from within and outside academia, covering a multitude of fields across the arts, humanities and natural and social sciences.

The Human Mind Project provided a forum for debate on research funding for research into the human mind, and to reach conclusions about its future. This was achieved through:

• a series of meetings, debates and conferences • a large consultative process including interaction with students and the wider public • an unprecedented ‘Grand Challenge’ exercise aimed at identifying opportunities for novel interdisciplinary research in the study of the mind.

The project was largely funded by the former HEFCE under its Catalyst scheme.

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