Neuroscientist Kate Jeffery discusses how the brain represents the world. This episode is is part of a short series Mind Bites made in association with Nicholas Shea's AHRC-funded Meaning for the Brain and Meaning for the Person project. That website is open for comments and discussion of the topic of this podcast.
This is mind Bytes, a series for philosophy.
Bytes with me, David Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
When I cycled to central London this morning, I followed my usual path, but had to take a detour at one stage because of roadworks.
How does the mind represent space?
How are we able to navigate our way around?
Are there maps in our brains?
Kate Jeffery is a behavioural neuroscientist at University College London.
She studies how rats find their way around.
Kate Jeffrey, welcome to mind Bites.
Hello.
The topic we're going to focus on is concepts and representation.
What is a concept?
Well, a concept probably means different things to different people, but the way that I think about it is that it's an internal representation that the brain has made of something that's out there in the real world.
So it doesn't involve the idea that you are able to reflect on that concept.
So I can reflect on my concept of philosophy, or I can reflect on my concept of a microphone, because I'm conscious.
Well, the way that I think about it in my research is not reflecting on the representation so much as just having a representation.
And even that's been quite a controversial idea in psychology for a long time, the idea that the brain actually has an internal representation of the world, instead of just operating directly on it.
But it's become apparent in the last few decades because we've been able to look into the brain with our electrodes and so on, and we can see that there's very clearly operation of internal representations, and I like to think of those as concepts.
And the word representation in ordinary speech is a picture or some kind of map of something which involves an interpreter.
But again, does a representation in the brain require an observer?