We must actively frame semantic pictures if we hope to improve our usage through other means than brute trial and error, but it is easily possible to lean upon portraits that are quite badly mistaken or shortsighted.
—— Mark Wilson
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that looking at the concept of neural function through the lens of cognition alone risks cognitive myopia: it leads neuroscientists to focus only on mechanisms with cognitive functions that process behaviorally relevant information when conceptualizing “neural function”. Cognitive myopia tempts researchers to neglect neural mechanisms with noncognitive functions which do not process behaviorally relevant information but maintain and repair neural and other systems of the body. Cognitive myopia similarly affects philosophy of neuroscience because scholars overlook noncognitive functions when analyzing issues surrounding e.g., functional decomposition or the multifunctionality of neural structures. I argue that we can overcome cognitive myopia by adopting a patchwork approach that articulates cognitive and noncognitive “patches” of the concept of neural function. Cognitive patches describe mechanisms with causally specific effects on cognition and behavior which are likely operative in transforming sensory or other inputs into motor outputs. Noncognitive patches describe mechanisms that lack such specific effects; these mechanisms are enabling conditions for cognitive functions to occur. I use these distinctions to characterize two noncognitive functions at the mesoscale of neural circuits: subsistence functions like breathing are implemented by central pattern generators and are necessary to maintain the life of the organism. Infrastructural functions like gain control are implemented by canonical microcircuits and prevent neural system damage while cognitive processing occurs. By adding conceptual patches that describe these functions, a patchwork approach can overcome cognitive myopia and help us explain how the brain’s capacities as an information processing device are constrained by its ability to maintain and repair itself as a physiological apparatus.
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Notes
Perhaps cognitive myopia is more problematic in philosophy of neuroscience than in neuroscientific practice as a whole. Philosophers often narrowly focus on cognitive, computational and behavioral neuroscience research. An exception is Craver and Robins (2009) and Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2009) on biological clocks.
Patchwork approaches share this broadly naturalistic approach to concepts with a growing number of philosophers that focus on the practical roles that concepts play in scientific measurement (Chang 2004), problem solving (Nersessian 2008), experimentation and modeling (see Feest and Steinle 2012; Rouse 2015).
The historical analyses of the information concept in neuroscience by Garson (2003) and Christen (2006, ch. 3) show that this emphasis on functional value both preceded and remained more important than the purely quantitative and non-semantic notion of “information” from Shannon’s information theory.
I thank Daniel Burnston and an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this point.
I restrict this claim to environmental information here because I focus on clear cases of noncognitive functions. Neural structures representing information about the organism itself may present interesting intermediate cases. For example: in the hypothalamus, neural circuits maintain energy homeostasis by representing the energy requirements of the body based on gastrointestinal signals with different time-scales (Beutler et al. 2017).
Neuromodulators are signaling molecules that influence the conductance properties of many neurons over long periods of time. In the intact animal, some combination of neuromodulators is necessary to initiate CPG rhythm generation (Marder 2012).
Sometimes the term “gain control” appears in explanations of how neurons adapt their responses to variations in sensory input (e.g. contrast or luminance in the visual system, cf. Heeger 1992). As will become clear below, this multiplicative effect to enhance narrow information processing is better described as neural gain modulation, whereas gain control refers to the divisive and switch-like effect to prevent circuit damage.
Further constraints can be added by including other infrastructural functions such as the role of microglia cells to remove amyloid plaques when stimulated in the gamma frequency (Iaccarino et al. 2016). Plaque removal enables and constrains learning and memory mechanisms because it prevents onset of neurodegenerative diseases.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify why causal role theories are insufficient to overcome cognitive myopia.
Patchwork approaches thus differ from holist theories which posit a unified theory or essentialist theories that posit a universal referential relation to a natural kind to explain how concepts acquire their meaning. Patchwork approaches are better suited to analyse how concepts behave in scientific practice, where exploratory concept formation and changes of reference occur frequently (see Haueis 2018, chs. 2 and 3 for historical examples).
The fact that cortical microcircuits as a whole execute both cognitive and infrastructural functions makes them multifunctional structures (McCaffrey 2015). I discuss the issue of multifunctionality further in the conclusion.
An example is the effect of global changes of neural gain on attention and learning (Eldar et al. 2013). Unlike the enabling condition of local gain control, it has a graded influence on task performance. Unlike operative conditions such as FEF eye gaze control, however, it affects many cognitive tasks at once.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Daniel Burnston, Mark Oliver Casper, David Colaço, Carl Craver, Lena Kästner and Joseph McCaffrey as well as two anonymous reviewers for helping me to clearly articulate the ideas in this paper. I thank participants of the Neural Mechanism Online Seminar, the ISHBB conference in Sao Paolo, the OHBM conference in Vancouver and members of the Research Group for Neuroanatomy and Connectivity at the MPI for Cognitive and Brain Sciences Leipzig for valuable feedback on presentations of this material. An earlier version of this paper appeared as chapter 4 of my PhD dissertation “Meeting the Brain on its own Terms. Exploratory Concept Formation and Noncognitive Functions in Neuroscience” (Otto-von-Guericke University Madgeburg). I thank Holger Lyre and Henrik Walter for their excellent supervision of this project.
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Haueis, P. Beyond cognitive myopia: a patchwork approach to the concept of neural function. Synthese 195, 5373–5402 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01991-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01991-z