ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Read Montague - Behavioral Neuroscientist
What does "normal behavior" look like? To find out, Read Montague is imaging thousands of brains at work.

Why you should listen

Until recently, the world's curiosity about our brains seemed to focus on abnormal behavior. Which of course left a big question unanswered: Do we even know what "normal behavior" is? Through the landmark Roanoke Brain Study, Read Montague is hoping to find that out, exploring the everyday tasks of brains -- making decisions, understanding social context, and relating to others -- by neuroimaging some 5,000 people, ages 18-85, over a period of many years.

Montague's teams in Virginia and in London lead fascinating research in computational neuroscience (how the brain's "machinery" works), offering insight into the relationship between the social and cognitive functions. For instance, a recent study from his group found that in small social groups, some people will alter the expression of their IQ in reaction to social pressures -- revising, in almost all cases, downward.

More profile about the speaker
Read Montague | Speaker | TED.com
TEDGlobal 2012

Read Montague: What we're learning from 5,000 brains

Filmed:
763,896 views

Mice, bugs and hamsters are no longer the only way to study the brain. Functional MRI (fMRI) allows scientists to map brain activity in living, breathing, decision-making human beings. Read Montague gives an overview of how this technology is helping us understand the complicated ways in which we interact with each other.
- Behavioral Neuroscientist
What does "normal behavior" look like? To find out, Read Montague is imaging thousands of brains at work. Full bio

Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.

00:16
Other people. Everyone is interested in other people.
0
474
2809
00:19
Everyone has relationships with other people,
1
3283
2123
00:21
and they're interested in these relationships
2
5406
1592
00:22
for a variety of reasons.
3
6998
1855
00:24
Good relationships, bad relationships,
4
8853
2012
00:26
annoying relationships, agnostic relationships,
5
10865
3146
00:29
and what I'm going to do is focus on the central piece
6
14011
3424
00:33
of an interaction that goes on in a relationship.
7
17435
3303
00:36
So I'm going to take as inspiration the fact that we're all
8
20738
2336
00:38
interested in interacting with other people,
9
23074
2425
00:41
I'm going to completely strip it of all its complicating features,
10
25499
3832
00:45
and I'm going to turn that object, that simplified object,
11
29331
3894
00:49
into a scientific probe, and provide the early stages,
12
33225
4150
00:53
embryonic stages of new insights into what happens
13
37375
2449
00:55
in two brains while they simultaneously interact.
14
39824
3650
00:59
But before I do that, let me tell you a couple of things
15
43474
2293
01:01
that made this possible.
16
45767
1699
01:03
The first is we can now eavesdrop safely
17
47466
2781
01:06
on healthy brain activity.
18
50247
2711
01:08
Without needles and radioactivity,
19
52958
2577
01:11
without any kind of clinical reason, we can go down the street
20
55535
2863
01:14
and record from your friends' and neighbors' brains
21
58398
3127
01:17
while they do a variety of cognitive tasks, and we use
22
61525
2538
01:19
a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging.
23
64063
3734
01:23
You've probably all read about it or heard about in some
24
67797
2325
01:26
incarnation. Let me give you a two-sentence version of it.
25
70122
4378
01:30
So we've all heard of MRIs. MRIs use magnetic fields
26
74500
3484
01:33
and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain
27
77984
2029
01:35
or your knee or your stomach,
28
80013
2361
01:38
grayscale images that are frozen in time.
29
82374
2045
01:40
In the 1990s, it was discovered you could use
30
84419
2321
01:42
the same machines in a different mode,
31
86740
2659
01:45
and in that mode, you could make microscopic blood flow
32
89399
2346
01:47
movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain.
33
91745
3300
01:50
Okay, so what? In fact, the so what is, in the brain,
34
95045
3200
01:54
changes in neural activity, the things that make your brain work,
35
98245
3832
01:57
the things that make your software work in your brain,
36
102077
2010
01:59
are tightly correlated with changes in blood flow.
37
104087
2489
02:02
You make a blood flow movie, you have an independent
38
106576
1973
02:04
proxy of brain activity.
39
108549
2339
02:06
This has literally revolutionized cognitive science.
40
110888
3034
02:09
Take any cognitive domain you want, memory,
41
113922
1991
02:11
motor planning, thinking about your mother-in-law,
42
115913
2141
02:13
getting angry at people, emotional response, it goes on and on,
43
118054
3715
02:17
put people into functional MRI devices, and
44
121769
3089
02:20
image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity.
45
124858
3383
02:24
It's in its early stages, and it's crude by some measures,
46
128241
2849
02:26
but in fact, 20 years ago, we were at nothing.
47
131090
2568
02:29
You couldn't do people like this. You couldn't do healthy people.
48
133658
2359
02:31
That's caused a literal revolution, and it's opened us up
49
136017
2488
02:34
to a new experimental preparation. Neurobiologists,
50
138505
2818
02:37
as you well know, have lots of experimental preps,
51
141323
3760
02:40
worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this.
52
145083
3141
02:44
And now, we have a new experimental prep: human beings.
53
148224
3397
02:47
We can now use human beings to study and model
54
151621
3761
02:51
the software in human beings, and we have a few
55
155382
2950
02:54
burgeoning biological measures.
56
158332
2835
02:57
Okay, let me give you one example of the kinds of experiments that people do,
57
161167
3887
03:00
and it's in the area of what you'd call valuation.
58
165054
2677
03:03
Valuation is just what you think it is, you know?
59
167731
2135
03:05
If you went and you were valuing two companies against
60
169866
2804
03:08
one another, you'd want to know which was more valuable.
61
172670
2736
03:11
Cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago.
62
175406
3879
03:15
If you want to compare oranges to windshields, what do you do?
63
179285
2690
03:17
Well, you can't compare oranges to windshields.
64
181975
2356
03:20
They're immiscible. They don't mix with one another.
65
184331
2255
03:22
So instead, you convert them to a common currency scale,
66
186586
2351
03:24
put them on that scale, and value them accordingly.
67
188937
2706
03:27
Well, your brain has to do something just like that as well,
68
191643
3436
03:30
and we're now beginning to understand and identify
69
195079
2488
03:33
brain systems involved in valuation,
70
197567
2137
03:35
and one of them includes a neurotransmitter system
71
199704
2632
03:38
whose cells are located in your brainstem
72
202336
2632
03:40
and deliver the chemical dopamine to the rest of your brain.
73
204968
3175
03:44
I won't go through the details of it, but that's an important
74
208143
2442
03:46
discovery, and we know a good bit about that now,
75
210585
2157
03:48
and it's just a small piece of it, but it's important because
76
212742
2230
03:50
those are the neurons that you would lose if you had Parkinson's disease,
77
214972
3275
03:54
and they're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally
78
218247
2016
03:56
every drug of abuse, and that makes sense.
79
220263
2232
03:58
Drugs of abuse would come in, and they would change
80
222495
2336
04:00
the way you value the world. They change the way
81
224831
1789
04:02
you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice,
82
226620
3199
04:05
and they make you value that over everything else.
83
229819
2514
04:08
Here's the key feature though. These neurons are also
84
232333
3021
04:11
involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas,
85
235354
3501
04:14
and I put some symbols up here that we assign value to
86
238855
2041
04:16
for various reasons.
87
240896
2720
04:19
We have a behavioral superpower in our brain,
88
243616
2689
04:22
and it at least in part involves dopamine.
89
246305
1753
04:23
We can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea,
90
248058
4189
04:28
for a mere idea. No other species can do that.
91
252247
4005
04:32
In 1997, the cult Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide
92
256252
3606
04:35
predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship
93
259858
2215
04:37
hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet Hale-Bopp
94
262073
3785
04:41
waiting to take them to the next level. It was an incredibly tragic event.
95
265858
4272
04:46
More than two thirds of them had college degrees.
96
270130
3485
04:49
But the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival
97
273615
3723
04:53
using exactly the same systems that were put there
98
277338
2866
04:56
to make them survive. That's a lot of control, okay?
99
280204
4042
05:00
One thing that I've left out of this narrative
100
284246
2089
05:02
is the obvious thing, which is the focus of the rest of my
101
286335
2234
05:04
little talk, and that is other people.
102
288569
2159
05:06
These same valuation systems are redeployed
103
290728
2996
05:09
when we're valuing interactions with other people.
104
293724
2492
05:12
So this same dopamine system that gets addicted to drugs,
105
296216
3271
05:15
that makes you freeze when you get Parkinson's disease,
106
299487
2524
05:17
that contributes to various forms of psychosis,
107
302011
3077
05:20
is also redeployed to value interactions with other people
108
305088
3920
05:24
and to assign value to gestures that you do
109
309008
2896
05:27
when you're interacting with somebody else.
110
311904
2574
05:30
Let me give you an example of this.
111
314478
2577
05:32
You bring to the table such enormous processing power
112
317055
2967
05:35
in this domain that you hardly even notice it.
113
320022
2624
05:38
Let me just give you a few examples. So here's a baby.
114
322646
1467
05:40
She's three months old. She still poops in her diapers and she can't do calculus.
115
324113
3730
05:43
She's related to me. Somebody will be very glad that she's up here on the screen.
116
327843
3353
05:47
You can cover up one of her eyes, and you can still read
117
331196
2376
05:49
something in the other eye, and I see sort of curiosity
118
333572
2755
05:52
in one eye, I see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other.
119
336327
3597
05:55
Here's a couple. They're sharing a moment together,
120
339924
3179
05:59
and we've even done an experiment where you can cut out
121
343103
1318
06:00
different pieces of this frame and you can still see
122
344421
3007
06:03
that they're sharing it. They're sharing it sort of in parallel.
123
347428
2504
06:05
Now, the elements of the scene also communicate this
124
349932
2463
06:08
to us, but you can read it straight off their faces,
125
352395
2235
06:10
and if you compare their faces to normal faces, it would be a very subtle cue.
126
354630
3503
06:14
Here's another couple. He's projecting out at us,
127
358133
3347
06:17
and she's clearly projecting, you know,
128
361480
2888
06:20
love and admiration at him.
129
364368
2263
06:22
Here's another couple. (Laughter)
130
366631
3635
06:26
And I'm thinking I'm not seeing love and admiration on the left. (Laughter)
131
370266
5150
06:31
In fact, I know this is his sister, and you can just see
132
375416
2560
06:33
him saying, "Okay, we're doing this for the camera,
133
377976
2513
06:36
and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face." (Laughter)
134
380489
5702
06:42
He'll kill me for showing that.
135
386191
2106
06:44
All right, so what does this mean?
136
388297
2797
06:46
It means we bring an enormous amount of processing power to the problem.
137
391094
3350
06:50
It engages deep systems in our brain, in dopaminergic
138
394444
3648
06:53
systems that are there to make you chase sex, food and salt.
139
398092
2818
06:56
They keep you alive. It gives them the pie, it gives
140
400910
2894
06:59
that kind of a behavioral punch which we've called a superpower.
141
403804
2904
07:02
So how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged
142
406708
3654
07:06
social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe?
143
410362
2698
07:08
And the short answer is games.
144
413060
2691
07:11
Economic games. So what we do is we go into two areas.
145
415751
4404
07:16
One area is called experimental economics. The other area is called behavioral economics.
146
420155
3336
07:19
And we steal their games. And we contrive them to our own purposes.
147
423491
4078
07:23
So this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game.
148
427569
2967
07:26
Red person is given a hundred dollars and can offer
149
430536
1845
07:28
a split to blue. Let's say red wants to keep 70,
150
432381
3723
07:32
and offers blue 30. So he offers a 70-30 split with blue.
151
436104
4086
07:36
Control passes to blue, and blue says, "I accept it,"
152
440190
2851
07:38
in which case he'd get the money, or blue says,
153
443041
1956
07:40
"I reject it," in which case no one gets anything. Okay?
154
444997
4307
07:45
So a rational choice economist would say, well,
155
449304
3392
07:48
you should take all non-zero offers.
156
452696
2056
07:50
What do people do? People are indifferent at an 80-20 split.
157
454752
3762
07:54
At 80-20, it's a coin flip whether you accept that or not.
158
458514
3524
07:57
Why is that? You know, because you're pissed off.
159
462038
2891
08:00
You're mad. That's an unfair offer, and you know what an unfair offer is.
160
464929
3609
08:04
This is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world.
161
468538
2704
08:07
That just gives you an example of the kind of thing that
162
471242
2544
08:09
these games probe. The interesting thing is, these games
163
473786
3738
08:13
require that you have a lot of cognitive apparatus on line.
164
477524
3707
08:17
You have to be able to come to the table with a proper model of another person.
165
481231
2928
08:20
You have to be able to remember what you've done.
166
484159
3213
08:23
You have to stand up in the moment to do that.
167
487372
1420
08:24
Then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back,
168
488792
3350
08:28
and you have to do something that is interesting,
169
492142
2972
08:31
which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay.
170
495114
2597
08:33
That is, you have to decide what that other person expects of you.
171
497711
3333
08:36
You have to send signals to manage your image in their mind.
172
501044
2954
08:39
Like a job interview. You sit across the desk from somebody,
173
503998
2853
08:42
they have some prior image of you,
174
506851
1369
08:44
you send signals across the desk to move their image
175
508220
2751
08:46
of you from one place to a place where you want it to be.
176
510971
3920
08:50
We're so good at this we don't really even notice it.
177
514891
3385
08:54
These kinds of probes exploit it. Okay?
178
518276
3767
08:57
In doing this, what we've discovered is that humans
179
522043
1807
08:59
are literal canaries in social exchanges.
180
523850
2331
09:02
Canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines.
181
526181
3397
09:05
When methane built up, or carbon dioxide built up,
182
529578
3560
09:09
or oxygen was diminished, the birds would swoon
183
533138
4186
09:13
before people would -- so it acted as an early warning system:
184
537324
2326
09:15
Hey, get out of the mine. Things aren't going so well.
185
539650
2980
09:18
People come to the table, and even these very blunt,
186
542630
2954
09:21
staged social interactions, and they, and there's just
187
545584
2990
09:24
numbers going back and forth between the people,
188
548574
3016
09:27
and they bring enormous sensitivities to it.
189
551590
2199
09:29
So we realized we could exploit this, and in fact,
190
553789
2689
09:32
as we've done that, and we've done this now in
191
556478
2556
09:34
many thousands of people, I think on the order of
192
559034
2694
09:37
five or six thousand. We actually, to make this
193
561728
2165
09:39
a biological probe, need bigger numbers than that,
194
563893
2224
09:42
remarkably so. But anyway,
195
566117
3674
09:45
patterns have emerged, and we've been able to take
196
569791
2004
09:47
those patterns, convert them into mathematical models,
197
571795
3836
09:51
and use those mathematical models to gain new insights
198
575631
2689
09:54
into these exchanges. Okay, so what?
199
578320
2131
09:56
Well, the so what is, that's a really nice behavioral measure,
200
580451
3313
09:59
the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play.
201
583764
3319
10:02
We can compute that during the game.
202
587083
2484
10:05
And we can use that to sort of carve up the behavior.
203
589567
2953
10:08
Here's the cool thing. Six or seven years ago,
204
592520
4330
10:12
we developed a team. It was at the time in Houston, Texas.
205
596850
2550
10:15
It's now in Virginia and London. And we built software
206
599400
3394
10:18
that'll link functional magnetic resonance imaging devices
207
602794
3207
10:21
up over the Internet. I guess we've done up to six machines
208
606001
4035
10:25
at a time, but let's just focus on two.
209
610036
1981
10:27
So it synchronizes machines anywhere in the world.
210
612017
3058
10:30
We synchronize the machines, set them into these
211
615075
3169
10:34
staged social interactions, and we eavesdrop on both
212
618244
1983
10:36
of the interacting brains. So for the first time,
213
620227
1666
10:37
we don't have to look at just averages over single individuals,
214
621893
3607
10:41
or have individuals playing computers, or try to make
215
625500
2897
10:44
inferences that way. We can study individual dyads.
216
628397
2763
10:47
We can study the way that one person interacts with another person,
217
631160
2785
10:49
turn the numbers up, and start to gain new insights
218
633945
2564
10:52
into the boundaries of normal cognition,
219
636509
2515
10:54
but more importantly, we can put people with
220
639024
2732
10:57
classically defined mental illnesses, or brain damage,
221
641756
3337
11:00
into these social interactions, and use these as probes of that.
222
645093
3551
11:04
So we've started this effort. We've made a few hits,
223
648644
2350
11:06
a few, I think, embryonic discoveries.
224
650994
2449
11:09
We think there's a future to this. But it's our way
225
653443
2812
11:12
of going in and redefining, with a new lexicon,
226
656255
2560
11:14
a mathematical one actually, as opposed to the standard
227
658815
4022
11:18
ways that we think about mental illness,
228
662837
2578
11:21
characterizing these diseases, by using the people
229
665415
2067
11:23
as birds in the exchanges. That is, we exploit the fact
230
667482
3007
11:26
that the healthy partner, playing somebody with major depression,
231
670489
4244
11:30
or playing somebody with autism spectrum disorder,
232
674733
2910
11:33
or playing somebody with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
233
677643
3850
11:37
we use that as a kind of biosensor, and then we use
234
681493
3219
11:40
computer programs to model that person, and it gives us
235
684712
2644
11:43
a kind of assay of this.
236
687356
2470
11:45
Early days, and we're just beginning, we're setting up sites
237
689826
2131
11:47
around the world. Here are a few of our collaborating sites.
238
691957
3410
11:51
The hub, ironically enough,
239
695367
2309
11:53
is centered in little Roanoke, Virginia.
240
697676
2889
11:56
There's another hub in London, now, and the rest
241
700565
2269
11:58
are getting set up. We hope to give the data away
242
702834
4009
12:02
at some stage. That's a complicated issue
243
706843
3673
12:06
about making it available to the rest of the world.
244
710516
2994
12:09
But we're also studying just a small part
245
713510
1847
12:11
of what makes us interesting as human beings, and so
246
715357
2267
12:13
I would invite other people who are interested in this
247
717624
2041
12:15
to ask us for the software, or even for guidance
248
719665
2569
12:18
on how to move forward with that.
249
722234
2219
12:20
Let me leave you with one thought in closing.
250
724453
2341
12:22
The interesting thing about studying cognition
251
726794
1942
12:24
has been that we've been limited, in a way.
252
728736
3732
12:28
We just haven't had the tools to look at interacting brains
253
732468
2943
12:31
simultaneously.
254
735411
1200
12:32
The fact is, though, that even when we're alone,
255
736611
2470
12:34
we're a profoundly social creature. We're not a solitary mind
256
739081
4111
12:39
built out of properties that kept it alive in the world
257
743192
4373
12:43
independent of other people. In fact, our minds
258
747565
3948
12:47
depend on other people. They depend on other people,
259
751513
2870
12:50
and they're expressed in other people,
260
754383
1541
12:51
so the notion of who you are, you often don't know
261
755924
3652
12:55
who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people
262
759576
2688
12:58
that are close to you, people that are enemies of you,
263
762264
2406
13:00
people that are agnostic to you.
264
764670
2545
13:03
So this is the first sort of step into using that insight
265
767215
3776
13:06
into what makes us human beings, turning it into a tool,
266
770991
3295
13:10
and trying to gain new insights into mental illness.
267
774286
1978
13:12
Thanks for having me. (Applause)
268
776264
3121
13:15
(Applause)
269
779385
3089
Translated by Joseph Geni
Reviewed by Morton Bast

▲Back to top

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Read Montague - Behavioral Neuroscientist
What does "normal behavior" look like? To find out, Read Montague is imaging thousands of brains at work.

Why you should listen

Until recently, the world's curiosity about our brains seemed to focus on abnormal behavior. Which of course left a big question unanswered: Do we even know what "normal behavior" is? Through the landmark Roanoke Brain Study, Read Montague is hoping to find that out, exploring the everyday tasks of brains -- making decisions, understanding social context, and relating to others -- by neuroimaging some 5,000 people, ages 18-85, over a period of many years.

Montague's teams in Virginia and in London lead fascinating research in computational neuroscience (how the brain's "machinery" works), offering insight into the relationship between the social and cognitive functions. For instance, a recent study from his group found that in small social groups, some people will alter the expression of their IQ in reaction to social pressures -- revising, in almost all cases, downward.

More profile about the speaker
Read Montague | Speaker | TED.com