Theory of Mind and Mirror Neurons

I had written in this blog in November 2013 about mirror neurons. My wife and I had played with our new born granddaughter and found she could imitate simple finger and hand movements within a few weeks of her birth.

http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2013_11_01_archive.html

I got so excited documenting this phenomenon that I threw the baby out with the bath water – figuratively that is! There is a lot more to mirror neurons than learning finger and hand movements by imitation. There is some evidence to suggest that mirror neurons can explain one of the most essential features of being human. You see someone in pain, and you wish to help. You give someone something, say a toy. You see it makes them happy and you are pleased. Humans relate to each other and understand innately that they are like one another – with similar thoughts, similar emotions, similar beliefs and desires. No one teaches us all this in any detail, but we all understand this. Psychologists refer to this understanding we have of each other as the “theory of mind”. Visit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Where would we be without a theory of mind? Cannibals or worse? Would a human society be possible in the absence of this phenomenon?

This suggests that one can play games with babies and children to see how they respond to human emotions, real and simulated. Do they tend to be happier with someone who seems to be happy? Do they show signs of being depressed if the care giver appears to be depressed? Psychologists invent games of this kind all the time. The Wikipedia article referred above describes a fascinating game (the Sally-Anne game) for relatively older children, not babies. The article also reports that children with autism perform poorly in this game, which tests for the child having a theory of mind. However, children with Down’s syndrome do well in this test, as is to be expected by anyone who has known children with Down’s syndrome.

Another thought was triggered by the following:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2013/aug/23/mirror-neurons

It seems that the phenomenon of “adaptation” sets in when a child watches you do something a lot of times. I understand this as follows: if you want a baby to imitate you, don’t demonstrate the action many times before expecting imitation. Imitation comes early on in the experiment. Once the child imitates you, adaptation will still occur (the child will stop imitating you!), but it will take a bit longer to take place. It appears, in other words, that imitated actions seem to be better remembered.

Srinivasan Ramani 

Online democracy

The cell phone is probably the most potent instrument available to a leader serving his people, but there are few leaders who use the cell phone to its full potential. The Corporator of Ward 153 (Jayanagar, Bangalore), Gangambika, http://www.ichangemycity.com/corporators/gangambika
is one of the few exceptions I know of. In addition to her own time and effort, her well-equipped office helps citizens get their problems attended to. Her assistant is available practically whole day to take complaints over the cell phone. Street lights have not come up, call Arun!  Drinking water pipe is leaking and flooding the road? Call Arun! Whatever Arun can fix, he does fix very quickly. This practice is so good that I hope all Corporators will adopt it. I am sure that Arun is a very smart person and knows who to call for handling which complaint. And when he calls, they seem to listen to him and get the problem sorted out fast.

How do you find if there is an Arun supporting your Corporator? Look up the following URL to get a phone number of your Corporator and ask if he/she has an assistant who you can talk to when you have a routine complaint. You can also directly login complaints on this site. 

http://www.ichangemycity.com/corporators?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=Bangalore-Corporators&gclid=CLXDxK2e9rwCFYyu4god3jgAwg

What else can one do to make people’s problems more visible to government? The UK website here will give you many ideas:

http://www.ukcod.org.uk/UK_Citizens_Online_Democracy

Another site worth visiting for ideas ishttp://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/information/feedback-complaints

Last weekend, I heard Amir Khan telling us in his weekly program Satyameva Jayate that police often refuse to register first information reports (FIRs), even though the law does make it obligatory for them to register people’s FIRs. I would love to see a media house set up an independent website to register Citizen’s First Reports (CFR). The site can authenticate the person by asking him/her for his/her cell phone number and sending a one-time password to enable log in. It may ask for a postal address for the record. The person registering the complaint would get a copy over email and by post, and the report would be forwarded to an address on which the government agrees to receive them. The complainant may be given the option of releasing the complaint to be made visible over the web, hiding the address and name of the complainant if necessary.

Would such a web-based facility exclude the vast majority who do not access the Internet? No, it need not. NGO’s and political parties can provide facilities to citizens to file CFRs. In addition to a PC and connectivity to the Internet, their volunteers can play a significant role in helping the weaker sections claim their rights for police protection from goondas by reporting crimes effectively and in time.
  

Srinivasan Ramani

Kris Gopalakrishnan’s gift for the creation of a Centre for Brain Research

Kris Gopalakrishnan’s gift of Rs 225 Crores (say about US$35 million) for the creation of a Centre for Brain Research is an important development in India. Not merely because some of the profits from a technology based industry are made available for advanced research, but also because of the excellent choice of the subject. There are many in this country who can throw money at some field or the other of their choice, but few have the penetrating vision that selects the science whose time has come. Naturally, a philanthropist would be guided by advisors in making such a choice.  If this decision was steered by his advisors, I must congratulate Kris Gopalakrishnan for having chosen obviously excellent advisors. The choice of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) as a partner in this effort is also a very good choice. The fact that IISc has already invested in a Centre for Neuroscience is a promising indication of IISc’s interests and capabilities.

Better understanding of the nature of knowledge and information, and understanding the brain that understands all that, – these are two big challenges in front of humanity today. Investing on these is the privilege of visionaries. The decision will have a significant impact on the scientific and economic future of India.

There is yet another reason why Gopalakrishnan’s contribution is very important; it demonstrates that there are Indians willing to make significantly large donations to promote education and research without looking for a profit. It is a common to see some panelist or other on TV discussions argue for the idea that education should be as open a sector as selling any other commodity or service! There is a profit motive in mind of the companies that sell their products and services, right? Why don’t you let them sell education as well? I think that such an argument is foolish.

I believe that private organizations should be free to provide educational services. However, if they are to confer degrees and qualify for tax-exemption, they should be not-for-profit institutions. I am sure that India has a large enough body of donors, who over the years would endow a thousand universities. They will structure these institutions such that they will administer themselves, and keep out the corrupt and the incompetent. Society should ensure that educational institutions should meet high standards and are managed in academic matters by their own faculties with the cooperation of a small set of eminent persons of high standing. That an institution should have high standards surely does not mean that it should obey every little instruction coming from the Govt. It is possible to create and run accreditation mechanisms that are free of exploitation or micro-management by Govt.

Equally, Society should allow contributions to universities at different stages of development to be deducted from the income tax of the contributor, as long as it is below a certain (say 50%) percentage of the total income tax payable by him that year. 

History shows that private donors have played a great role over the centuries in creating universities of great reputation. India needs to make sure that Indian donors are not turned away from doing great service to society by mindless control of politicians and bureaucrats.

Srinivasan Ramani

Ramani’s Education and the Pedagogy of MOOC Courses

I took a couple MOOC courses during the Fall Semester, 2013. Both were edx.org courses

1. Computational Neurodynamics, Prof Wulfram Gerstner https://www.edx.org/course/epflx/epflx-bio465x-neuronal-dynamics-1024
2. Fundamentals of Neuroscience, Part I, Prof David Cox
   https://www.edx.org/course/harvardx/harvardx-mcb80-1x-fundamentals-925

I thought I did not need an introduction to neurosciences, because I have been interested in neurosciences over the last forty years and have read on and off the subject. This interest has remained platonic as I hesitated to get involved seriously, I will write that story in another blog posting! Now that I am retired, I can spare more time for such involvement and I thought I would feel less like an amateur if I did an edx course in the subject.  To answer your question – yes, I did find that my decision to take the two courses was a wise one. I enjoyed them immensely. You do surely feel a bit more like a serious scholar when you know that it is the inside of the neuron that is negative at rest. To learn about sodium – potassium ion pumps and how they create concentration gradients across the membrane is illuminating.

The other course, on Neurodynamics, was different. “Very European” in its style of teaching, very mathematical and demanding.  A bit more like a graduate course. Not having seen even a mirror image of a page on partial differential   equations in forty years, I had to scramble a bit and slog to catch up. However, I did learn a lot from this course. I got 52% overall in computational Neurodynamics. The results of the final exam on Fundamentals of Neuroscience, Part I, came today (27 Jan 2014): 85.87%

52% isn’t much, but look at it this way – not many guys one third my age would have got even 1/3^rd more than my marks! So, 52% is not a bad performance, considering that anyone my age could be losing 1 cc of neural matter per year.  

I thank EPFL and Harvard, along with Professors Gerstner and Cox for their excellent work.

Let me come to serious comment now. What do I want to share with you about my MOOC experience? One expectation I had started with was to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of MOOC courses. Given my badly interrupted interest in neurosciences, I had no trouble with motivation at all. I was having a great time. My retired state made its own contribution – I had all the time that was needed. A few sundry degrees I had earned a long time ago, including a Ph. D, had their own utility – I don’t run away when someone says “phase plane analysis”. Did I get what I wanted? Yes, what I got was precisely what I had wanted – knowledge learnt with the confidence that a Guru had overseen my learning and had formally tested me!

What else did I learn? Well, the courses followed the “hydraulic model” of knowledge transfer – there were buckets of it in the videos and other course material. It did flow smoothly into my head. But many of us believe that the essence of modern education is to inspire – to show what is great about subject, how stupid we had been in knowing so little about it 50 years ago and the speed at which we are learning now. Education has to demonstrate the addictive qualities of new knowledge. Some of us say that a good teacher has to be a proselytizer. We all know a few of them. For instance, they take god-fearing mechanical engineers and make them into cosmologists or something like that! I would not accuse either one of my two fall courses of having converted me or anyone else I know. The course on Neuroscience came with its bonus points though. It took us through videos into the world of museums, aquariums and the like. Very interesting and enjoyable, but a little too civilized and restrained; not much of proselytizing.  I will throw in two examples of their week-end videos and a lab-session video. Separated by the safety of a hundred or more years, we could see the skull of man who had a crowbar (or tamping rod, or whatever) fly into an eye and fly out through his skull taking out a good part of his frontal cortex with it. Read more at https://www.countway.harvard.edu/menuNavigation/chom/warren/exhibits.html

The man lived on for fourteen years more, earning a living. This story clearly said something about the nature of the brain, did it not?

I also learnt how to choose a Fugu restaurant and what I should be prepared for, if I go to such a restaurant!

The lab-session video showed how you could feed signals to a cockroach leg (they had anesthetized the insect before cutting out the leg). The instructor said that they will save the insect and that it will regrow its leg! The noise (or music) from an iPhone was carried through an earphone cable cut in the middle to feed it to the severed leg. The young lady who had lent her iPhone for the experiment played Shakira's waka waka song on it and the insect leg performed suitably!  More than the neural science involved, I hope that the students participating in the demo were stimulated to think about and debate the world view science creates in our minds.  When I was asked to write a summary off what I had learnt in six words, I found myself writing something like "our brains are bio-chemical computers". Not false, perhaps, but is that the whole truth? 

Coming back to MOOC courses in general, one thing was clear to me. This type of courses are fantastic for graduate students in developing countries like India – good with English, highly motivated and hungry for the knowledge.

However, we need to look for other models of MOOC pedagogy for a much bigger population of Indian learners. Students in high schools who need excellent supplementary education. They are a younger lot who need to enjoy their supplementary education and get the kind of inspiration only very good teachers can provide. Those who create videos for this group of students should be experts in pedagogy in addition to being subject experts. They should know how to attract student attention and hold it. Mohan Agashe, well-known Indian actor and Film Director, has said something like this:

“As a doctor, I learnt that anesthesia is essential in surgery. Now, while making educational videos, it is abundantly clear to me that you cannot provide education without something like an anesthetic – entertainment”.     

I would surely hate to see kids being educated without the anesthetic of entertainment! It is almost not worth it!

There is also another way to look at pedagogy for technology enabled education for school students. Many teachers deal purely with cognition and problem solving. They forget the heart! A class hour is long remembered if there is a human element in it. For instance, take the story about the young fellow who lived with his family in a logger’s hut outside the city limits of the nearby small town. There was a library in that town which served the residents. Every Saturday, the boy would accompany his parents to the town and visit the library, while they picked up the weeks groceries.  The librarian bent the rules enough to lend the boy a book or two at a time.  The boy grew up to become a scientist and earned a Nobel Prize at a young age. (Guess who? Test your web-search skills to locate the name)!

How can we proselytize successfully if we don’t attend to matters of the heart?

Srinivasan Ramani 

Pioneer of Technology for Education – ANUP K. RAY

Over a hundred of us involved in research for Technology for Education had gathered for our annual conference on Dec 20 2013. The Conference was hosted by IIT Kharagpur this time.  We took some time off to honour Prof A K Ray who is a pioneer in the field and to celebrate his reaching seventy.

I must share his story, which sets an excellent example to young engineers learning new technologies. It was the technology of television that had beckoned Anup Ray as he completed his under-graduate work at the Jadavpur University in 1964. There was a lot of research in progress in the field, and the promise of the technology was great. Anup Ray went to work with Phillips starting with work in the camera division in Holland. He then went on to do a PhD at the Essex University, working on the Human Perception of Color in Images.

Visionaries could look ahead and see great potential for educational applications of the TV technology. Anup Ray was not alone. Dr Vikram Sarabhai and Prof Yashpal had already started using satellite broadcasting to low cost terminals for educational TV. Mr. Deodhar who was Chairman, Electronics Commission, in the eighties, wrote a book named “the third parent” http://www.psdeodhar.net/pdfs/thirdparent.pdf.

Anup Ray returned to India heading a Dept at the Technical Teachers Training Institute in Chandigarh. In 1987 he moved to Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, as Professor of Educational Technology and set up a full-fledged Centre for Educational Technology. Serious production of educational videos for nationwide use began. Soon IIT Delhi would start up-linking educational videos to a satellite for broadcast.  

He moved to IIT Kharagpur in 1997 where he established the largest and most diverse Centre for Educational Technology in India. He created and led the program named Electronically Networked - Life Long Learning which trained over 12000 professionals in the field of ICT over five years. It depended upon centrally produced video lectures which were used by tutors and facilitators at a large number of Centres. This model enabled discussions by local groups, introducing a networking element.

Anup Ray introduced the first Video on Demand service at IIT Kharagpur in 2001. His team created a variety of tools for video classrooms. Anup Ray has served as a consultant to UNESCO and has also served on several company boards.

Over the last ten years, Prof Ray has played valuable roles in the NPTEL programme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Programme_on_Technology_Enhanced_Learning) and other national programmes related to technology for education. Going beyond technology, he has worked for years in the recent past on pedagogy.

What an exciting way to enter a new field in its salad days, focus on its socially valuable uses and to serve India with all one has learnt? A dream for every engineering/science student to live for!

Srinivasan Ramani 

You don’t need to be even a month old to learn to play

A five year old grand-niece described her brother’s behavior over the phone to me some time ago. I had asked how he was, and she said “all he does is to drink milk, sleep, do susu, kakka and then cry”. The boy was six or seven months old at that time. I was a bit disturbed. Here is a bright mind unable to communicate satisfactorily with others, play, socialize etc. due to the time it takes for development to give him these abilities. And here I was, unable to go to his rescue! We have not learnt much to make the life of infants more interesting over the million plus years as humanity evolved.

Recently, I got a chance to try out some simple ideas related to this problem. My wife Usha and I were waiting for our grandchild to be born. Our daughter had enrolled us in a course for grandparents-to-be, where we were taught, predictably, to change diapers and to swaddle the baby.  Incidentally, I hate to see a baby being swaddled. Subduing a child, tying it up hands and feet to make it “more manageable”, is downright cruel. If you start a society for babies’ rights, do sign me on!

Having been duly certified as grandparents, we waited for the great occasion and were delighted when the baby arrived. The kid was staring at our faces within a few days, making it difficult for us to believe the traditional wisdom that the ability to see beyond 12 inches will take months to develop! It would be great to play with the baby, we thought; but, how do you play with a one-week old? The table of steps in development listed in any good book on child development tells the basic story. I do agree with this basic story. The brain is not fully developed when the baby is born. It is going to take months and years of development to reach its full potential.

However, the point I wish to make here is that play, learning and socialization do not have to wait for six or nine months. We don’t need to speed up these to make the child ready for school early, or any such stupid reason. However, we should not under-estimate the child’s interest in interacting with people. Instead of being straight-jacketed by swaddling and being dumped on its back in a cradle, it is fun to let the baby wave its arms and legs. Of course, the baby soon tries to put its fist into its mouth and could possibly hurt itself with its fingers, but the risk is low. The baby learns quickly to avoid whatever causes her pain. If you are fortunate enough to have time to play with the baby, do it; but at least don’t constraint her by tying her up.  

Let us come back to play. The first thing we tried was to stick our tongue at the baby when she was three weeks old. We figured that this might help the baby several months later to learn to make speech sounds. Well, it hardly took a day! The baby was sticking her tongue out whenever we demonstrated the maneuver. We smiled and laughed and expressed our pleasure at her achievement. We also tried to share that excitement with her, by picking her up and giving her a hug. A few days went by and before she was one-month old she learnt to imitate Usha showing her one finger as if to say “one”. She did this repeatedly, leaving no doubt in any one’s mind. Of course, she was not exactly learning mathematics! This was just fun and socialization. A way to do something outside the “drink milk, sleep, … “ routine! The simplest of games, but one that could be played with someone less than a month old.

 
The next step was quite accidental. I was doing simple exercises, raising my hands, doing bends and abs while the baby watched me from her grandma’s lap. I could not avoid going closer to the baby and showing her hand-raising exercises. I was getting my exercise, while she had the pleasure of watching grandpa acting crazy! This went on for a few days, and Usha joined in, showing hand raising exercises to the baby. I honestly did not expect anything to happen. The baby was just a month plus one or two days old. The exercise involved lifting hands, which are obviously much heavier than a finger. I did not know if her muscles were strong enough for this. Worst of all, I thought this involved considerable hand-eye coordination – to look at someone else doing the exercise and then symmetrically raising both hands. No problem! The baby lifted her hands and imitated Usha! She did that about ten times within five minutes, as I clicked a number of pictures. The game was getting better.

But we knew that there other things in life to share with the baby, like a walk (with her on the stroller) through the park. The baby enjoyed the stroller bumping over the rough sidewalks, the sun giving her an occasional jolt, and so on. Ten degrees centigrade, 45 mt walks, no sweat! Besides she could just sleep part of the time. We avoided showing off her prowess as an imitator to visitors. She is no performing pet! Slowly, the focus on imitating hand movements was lost and the baby forgot what she had learnt. But hopefully, she will remember in some way that she can play games and that learning is fun!

I had heard about mirror neurons that we seem to have in plenty along with monkeys! Much of the behavior involving our extremely complex hand and face muscles are built in. When we see others using their hands or their face muscles, the mirror neurons help us imitate what we see. So, the magic is not in “my” grand-daughter’s brain alone. It is a gift that she shares with every other human baby and with every monkey-baby as well! That does not make it any less exciting!

What next? We have returned home after our trip, but Skype is there to help us continue to play on and off with the baby. We are hoping to teach her a baby sign language – six or seven signs – Namaste, milk, monkey, hide, grandpa, grandma, thank you, etc. Not use of mere muscle, but a step to very meaningful things! We are not going to wait nine months for her to have the ability to say a few words. Ideas come far long before spoken words do!

Srinivasan Ramani

Bank Loans for Students – A Non-Starter

Please read my blog posting titled Fraud on banks by defaults on educational loans, published in April 2013:
http://www.obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2013/04/fraud-on-banks-by-defaults-on.html

A number of people have mentioned one peculiar feature of this posting. It bubbles with enthusiasm about the institution of a bank loan scheme for students, and about the Govt subsidy which ensures that socially disadvantaged students don’t have to pay interest on the loans. However, the title focuses on the possibility of defaults in repayment. Why was there this conflict of views? If you read that posting, you will notice I mention a meeting with a banking acquaintance who told me about the defaults that are said to be occurring in India. My choice of the title was influenced by his legitimate concerns. 

I don't blame bankers for looking at the world with conservative eyes. They are responsible to make sure that money lent out comes back. That is why I discussed measures to reduce defaults in repaying student loans. In the absence of bold measures, the student’s bank loan scheme will not work. My recent experience with a bank branch will tell you something about this.

Soon after writing my April posting I encouraged a number of people I know to look for a bank loan to finance their children through college. I accompanied a father and his daughter to a bank branch to see for myself how the system works. The family is an SCST family and the girl has received excellent marks – well above the minimum specified. She has done two years of college and wanted to borrow money for the third year. The first shock was that the bank told her that she would be able to borrow only Rs 17,000 or so, covering her college fee and the cost of books. A cheque directly in the name of the college would be issued. The girl asked if she could borrow some money towards her living expenses. The answer was no. She buys a monthly bus pass to go to college. Can she borrow the cost of this? No. Can she get the benefit of the Govt subsidy scheme to get a waiver of interest repayment? There was no direct answer, but she was told that she would have to pay 12% interest. She would have to leave all originals of important certificates with the bank and reclaim them later on repayment.

Well, her parents had pledged jewels in the past to educate her this far. The father works as a manual labourer. It was very clear to the father that the Govt scheme as run by the bank was worse than what the pawn shop offers him!

   

As I look back at this experience, I understand why the scheme is a non-starter.  The risk is with the manager who authorises loans with no collaterals, so he is stingy. The less he lends the safer it is for him. The financial return to the bank is zilch and any time the manager puts into this does nothing for his branch. The Govt officers who planned this scheme have not thought out how to protect the banks against defaults, and how to incentivise them. The Govt that spends Crores of rupees on systems like the Aadhaar card has not bothered to think how to link an Aadhaar ID to a bank loan, so that the borrower cannot scoff at repayment. His/her future credit worthiness can be easily linked to repayment of this loan. 

But, why bother with all this? There are plenty of influential people who have all forms of collateral, though they pay no taxes. The banks can oblige them by lending lots of money with no risk. All Govt subsidies ear-marked for this scheme can be easily “utilized”, without wasting time on poor students. Why bother with those who can barely qualify for Rs 17,000 loans while there are others who can borrow Rs 10 lakhs to send their sons and daughters to earn MBAs?

Don't bother if credit-offtake is poor and money rots in banks! Ask critics to first worry about grain in the Govt godowns first!  

Srinivasan Ramani