Decoding Representation in Neuroscience

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Check out this series of essays about representations:

What are we talking about? Clarifying the fuzzy concept of representation in neuroscience and beyond

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

What do neuroscientists mean when they use the term representation? That's part of what Luis Favela and Edouard Machery set out to answer a couple years ago by surveying lots of folks in the cognitive sciences, and they concluded that as a field the term is used in a confused and unclear way. Confused and unclear are technical terms here, and Luis and Edouard explain what they mean in the episode. More recently Luis and Edouard wrote a follow-up piece arguing that maybe it's okay for everyone to use the term in slightly different ways, maybe it helps communication across disciplines, perhaps. My three other guests today, Frances Egan, Rosa Cao, and John Krakauer wrote responses to that argument, and on today's episode all those folks are here to further discuss that issue and why it matters. Luis is a part philosopher, part cognitive scientists at Indiana University Bloomington, Edouard is a philosopher and Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, Frances is a philosopher from Rutgers University, Rosa is a neuroscientist-turned philosopher at Stanford University, and John is a neuroscientist among other things, and co-runs the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab at Johns Hopkins.

• Luis Favela.
  • Favela's book: The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment
• Edouard Machery.
  • Machery's book: Doing without Concepts
• Frances Egan.
  • Egan's book: Deflating Mental Representation.
• John Krakauer.
• Rosa Cao.
  • Paper mentioned: Putting representations to use.
• The exchange, in order, discussed on this episode:
  • Investigating the concept of representation in the neural and psychological sciences.
  • The concept of representation in the brain sciences: The current status and ways forward.
  • Commentaries:
    • Assessing the landscape of representational concepts: Commentary on Favela and Machery.
    • Comments on Favela and Machery's The concept of representation in the brain sciences: The current status and ways forward.
    • Where did real representations go? Commentary on: The concept of representation in the brain sciences: The current status and ways forward by Favela and Machery.
    • Reply to commentaries:
      • Contextualizing, eliminating, or glossing: What to do with unclear scientific concepts like representation.

0:00 - Intro 3:55 - What is a representation to a neuroscientist? 14:44 - How to deal with the dilemma 21:20 - Opposing views 31:00 - What's at stake? 51:10 - Neural-only representation 1:01:11 - When "representation" is playing a useful role 1:12:56 - The role of a neuroscientist 1:39:35 - The purpose of "representational talk" 1:53:03 - Non-representational mental phenomenon 1:55:53 - Final thoughts