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Michael L. Anderson is a professor at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, at Western University. His book, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain, calls for a re-conceptualization of how we understand and study brains and minds. Neural reuse is the phenomenon that any given brain area is active for multiple cognitive functions, and partners with different sets of brain areas to carry out different cognitive functions. We discuss the implications for this, and other topics in Michael's research and the book, like evolution, embodied cognition, and Gibsonian perception. Michael also fields guest questions from John Krakauer and Alex Gomez-Marin, about representations and metaphysics, respectively.
0:00 - Intro
3:02 - After Phrenology
13:18 - Typical neuroscience experiment
16:29 - Neural reuse
18:37 - 4E cognition and representations
22:48 - John Krakauer question
27:38 - Gibsonian perception
36:17 - Autoencoders without representations
49:22 - Pluralism
52:42 - Alex Gomez-Marin question - metaphysics
1:01:26 - Stimulus-response historical neuroscience
1:10:59 - After Phrenology influence
1:19:24 - Origins of neural reuse
1:35:25 - The way forward
