109. Roberto Bottini: Cognitive maps, visual impairment, and image spaces

Roberto Bottini is an Associate Professor at the University of Trento. We talk about his recent work on unusual cognitive maps in blind people, image spaces, metaphors, and he gives me some advice for writing successful grant applications.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: Roberto's background
0:03:20: Start discussing Roberto's paper on altered grid cells in visually impaired people: theoretical background
0:16:28: Methods & results: walking on a clock face / altered grid cells: fourfold symmetry
0:47:48: Start discussing Roberto's paper on cognitive maps and image spaces (TiCS)
0:52:05: Egocentric and allocentric perspectives
0:55:27: Metaphors and analogies
1:00:08: Tips for grant applications
1:14:18: A book or paper that more people should read
1:18:38: Something Roberto wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:20:30: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Roberto's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bottini-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bottini-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bottini-twt

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References
Aronov, ... & Tank (2017). Mapping of a non-spatial dimension by the hippocampal–entorhinal circuit. Nature.
Bisiach & Luzzatti (1978). Unilateral neglect of representational space. Cortex.
Bottini & Doeller (2020). Knowledge across reference frames: Cognitive maps and image spaces. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Casasanto (2009). Embodiment of abstract concepts: good and bad in right-and left-handers. Journal of experimental psychology: General.
Constantinescu, ... & Behrens (2016). Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code. Science.
Derdikman, ... & Moser (2009). Fragmentation of grid cell maps in a multicompartment environment. Nature neuroscience.
Eichenbaum (2014). Time cells in the hippocampus: a new dimension for mapping memories. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Gardenfors (2004). Conceptual spaces: The geometry of thought.
Gentner (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive science.
He & Brown (2019). Environmental barriers disrupt grid-like representations in humans during navigation. Current Biology.
Horner, ... & Burgess (2016). Grid-like processing of imagined navigation. Current Biology.
Jaynes (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Park, ... & Boorman (2021). Inferences on a multidimensional social hierarchy use a grid-like code. Nature Neuroscience.
Sigismondi, ... & Bottini (2024). Altered grid-like coding in early blind people. Nature Communications.
Stangl, ... & Wolbers (2018). Compromised grid-cell-like representations in old age as a key mechanism to explain age-related navigational deficits. Current Biology.
Tolman (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review.
Whittington, ... & Behrens (2022). How to build a cognitive map. Nature Neuroscience.

Chapters

• 0:00 Roberto's background
• 3:20 Start discussing Roberto's paper on altered grid cells in visually impaired people: theoretical background
• 16:28 Methods & results: walking on a clock face / altered grid cells: fourfold symmetry
• 47:48 Start discussing Roberto's paper on cognitive maps and image spaces (TiCS)
• 52:05 Egocentric and allocentric perspectives
• 55:27 Metaphors and analogies
• 1:00:08 Tips for grant applications
• 1:14:18 A book or paper that more people should read
• 1:18:38 Something Roberto wishes he'd learnt sooner
• 1:20:30 Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Transcript

[This is an automated transcript that contains many errors]

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] Anyway, so, I mean, I guess we'll be talking about grid cells and knowledge and image spaces. I guess first specifically one paper of yours from kind of visual side, visual impairment side, and then a bit more broadly before we do that, I was just curious uh, what exactly is a PhD in anthropology and epistemology of complexity?

Roberto Bottini: Yeah, when I finished university, I actually studied clinical psychology. University, and then I started working for a while, but then I always wanted to be a philosopher since the beginning. But then when when I wanted to do philosophy at the university, like my family, my parents were not very happy with that.

Is that what kind of job you're going to do afterwards? And then I thought that the psychology was a good solution, possible solution. Uh, But then.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: focus, because it has a more obvious job.

Roberto Bottini: Exactly. But then afterwards, I was looking for a PhD and I found this PhD that's on the paper was highly interdisciplinary. And I [00:01:00] think it really met with my, with what they wanted to do, which was to have an interdisciplinary perspective on the human mind and do some philosophical research.

Then in the middle of my PhD, I actually switched to cognitive science and experimental cognitive science. Then postdoc on that and then a postdoc in psycholinguistics. And then only in my third postdoc, I started doing a cognitive neuroscience. For two, three years and then at the end, I was lucky enough to to get the first ESC starting grant and open my lab.

And now what we do is mostly cognitive neuroscience, but I have changed a little bit of different fields before getting here,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. So, so the anthropology and I mean, it was epistemology of complexity. I'm not even sure what that means, but that's uh, did you actually do that or was it more a that was just the title of the program and you ended up, it

Roberto Bottini: No, I did. My thesis, my PhD thesis [00:02:00] was like one third philosophical, one third anthropological and one third experimental. During my PhD, I also went to the Amazon forest, for instance, to study a population there. Uh, And then I read a lot of philosophy and the epistemology of complexity relate mostly to the work of the philosopher Edgar Morin.

In in France the people in that founded those PhD program were both pupils of of Edgar Moran and yeah, and epistemology is always the type of philosophy that I liked the most, right? Is about knowing about knowledge, right? How do we know about stuff? How do we organize knowledge?

And it's easy to translate that into psychological or experimental question, but not super easy, but sometimes it is.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: is going to the Amazon rainforest as cool as it sounds? Or is it, I mean, I also had early on some book discussions and we discussed the [00:03:00] Humboldt biography and his, you know, exploration of the Amazon was such miserable. The entire time it just sounded horrible, just being like eaten by mosquitoes all day, every day.

Roberto Bottini: Let's say it wasn't so horrible for me, you know, it was much better.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But you're not doing anything like that anymore, right? I mean,

Roberto Bottini: No. No,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That was enough. Um, Yeah, so, as I mentioned Or, you know, I guess some of the main people we'll be discussing is grid cells in visually impaired people. I think in your case, actually also blind people, I think, you know, I, in my batches, actually, I did something, I did a study on blind people or visually impaired people.

And then I learned that a lot of technically blind people, are not blind, but they can see different kinds of things. So I will get into a little bit of detail of that later, but yeah, maybe do you want to just kind of introduce kind of broadly, like why study like basically how did this project come about?

Why visual impairment

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. You know, I think it's important to give a little bit of context about the genesis of this paper and [00:04:00] of the bigger project of which this paper is part of. So I think that the majority of all these papers. of the audience knows what is a cognitive map, but if you want to let to give a very quick and broad definition of it is I would say that these are low dimensional representation of relational knowledge.

That is the broadest definition that comes to my mind. And we know that the beginning when we refer to cognitive map, we refer mostly to spatial relationships from the very foundational work of Tolman, which was behavioral work with uh, uh, IS. Basically, the idea was to have a coordinate system and allocentric representation of the surrounding environments that allow you to find what you are looking for and to remember what things are and be able to go back home if you need.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And take

Roberto Bottini: and then, And then after a while people discover the neural basis of that or what is hypothesized to be the neural [00:05:00] basis and the central role as the hippocampal intrarenal system or the hippocampal formation with the discovery of spatially tuned cells. a lot of them actually. So, for instance, place cells in the hippocampus proper, the fire for a specific location, grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, the fire for multiple locations, but with a beautiful regular hexagonal tiling.

And then a lot of other, in the entorhinal cortex, you find border cells, you find velocity cells you find object vector cells, head direction cells. Right. And these were believed to be and I believe to be the building blocks of cognitive maps and basically of a coordinate system that allow us to orient ourself in space.

And in fact, at the beginning scientists thought that they had discovered the GPS of the brain, then something interesting happens. And actually shortly after people realized that these cells. We're doing much more [00:06:00] than spatial navigation, and actually, we're representing relationships and relational knowledge in different domains of knowledge, even abstract domains and certainly non spatial domain by the the first example probably was time.

It's easy to go from space to time and in the hippocampus, you can find place cells that are also time cells, and this is the work of uh, uh, HMBAR. So these are cells that fire for a specific moment in time as they fire for a specific position in space. But then I think that, at least from my view, from my knowledge of the literature, the big change and revolution happened around 2016, 2017, when we had the Constantinescu paper from Tim Berens lab in science, where they show in humans, the grid like coding underlies also conceptual navigation in a two dimensional conceptual [00:07:00] space.

And then shortly after, there was this important paper by Dmitry Aronov in Nature, showing that clay cells fire for specific sound frequency in a sound space, and grid cells had multiple firing fields, so they fired for different sound frequency, mirroring exactly what they do. during spatial navigation, right?

And then from that point, I think it became clear that these neurocognitive machinery that we find in the hippocampal and tornado system, they represent relational knowledge across different domains. Now, getting to our main question, one question is how did we get there, right? And one hypothesis that has been proposed is that Evolutionary, like the cognitive, neurocognitive processes that we [00:08:00]evolved to represent space and to navigate the physical environment have been true evolution recycled to navigate memory, to plan things, to organize conceptual knowledge.

And this is a, is an idea that can be that's we could call like neural recycling. Some people would call that neural recycling or neural adaptation or phylogenetic exaptation, right? There are different ways to talk about that. But the idea is that something in this case, like a cognitive function or a cognitive brain structure, that have evolved for a specific function has been recycled through evolution because evolution doesn't throw anything away, right?

And if there is something that can reuse in a smart way for a new function, we would do that. And so it's being reused for other function. And in this case for more abstract representation or high level cognition. And from this point of [00:09:00] view, space as a primary role, as a sort of primacy, right?

Before these things evolved to navigate space and then they are used for something else. But that is not the only hypothesis, right? Another hypothesis could be that actually these neurons, they were not spatial and to start with, and they are just, but they are memory cells, so to speak.

Right. That's the evolved to represent knowledge, relational knowledge, and they are good both to represent spatial relationship and non spatial relationship just happened that we discovered them in a spatial task first, but there is no primacy of of space. Now, these are two different stories that are kind of just so stories if you want, but because it's hard to test it, right?

You can, it's harder to do experiment through the evolutionary time. But, and then we get to to this paper, it is possible that [00:10:00] something similar happens during ontogeny. So during the development of the individual. So it is possible that. infants, we are talking about humans, but it could be translated also to other species.

We start using these neurons to create a cognitive maps of the physical environment to understand and think about spatial relationship. And then during development, when they start thinking about more abstract Aspects of experience or encoding relationship in different dimension.

Spatial relationship are very basic, right? Is one of the first things that probably we learn as babies and then slowly these spatial cognition, spatial cognitive structure, neuro cognitive structure are recycled to represent navigation in memory more generally or to structure knowledge.

more generally. [00:11:00] And we call that the scaffolding hypothesis or the spatial scaffolding hypothesis, because space, to some extent, scaffold abstract knowledge. If that is the case, and then maybe you see where I'm going, then it is possible that people that learn to navigate space in a different way would also navigate concepts.

In a different way, and that's what brought us to the idea of studying blind people. And there is also an alternative hypothesis to that, which is very similar to the evolutionary one, but just in ontogenetic terms. And that is that actually, there is no scaffolding, right? These neurons, they are memory neurons, and they are good to represent relation in space and non spatial knowledge.

But there is no interdependence between the two and certainly space. doesn't have a primary rule, doesn't have a primacy with respect to other dimensions or more abstract dimensions [00:12:00] of knowledge.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Could you maybe just elaborate a little bit on why would testing blind people help tease apart those two options?

Roberto Bottini: Right. The idea is that blind people, because they they cannot see they would develop strategy. of navigation of the environment and spatial representation that are different compared to the one of sighted people. And they may find it easier to do certain stuff or to represent spatial relational knowledge in a way, and a little bit more difficult maybe to represent spatial relational knowledge in another way.

Like to be more precise blind people we know from some, mostly from behavioral studies, behavioral experiments that they are impaired compared to sighted people in allocentric representation of of space and spatial relationship, whereas the egocentric representation, most of the time in most of the experiments is it's [00:13:00] fine.

That could be due because indeed they have an experience of space that is different compared to ours. With vision, you can have, you can grasp special relationship at a glance to some extent, especially in a big environment where you think about bigger environment or things that are far away from you.

It's a kind of you, you can grasp relationship synchronically, whereas for.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: if you're, you know, you're standing on the, like the seventh floor looking over a city or something,

Roberto Bottini: Exactly.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: see the entire or the road. I mean, depending on where you are, different buildings, all that kind of stuff, which I guess as a blind person, you have to, it's more of an experiential thing than just seeing it in one glance.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. And it's much more diachronic the experience, right? And sequential

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Diachronic means what?

Roberto Bottini: are a sequential, right? You learn, you, you move around the space and then you learn that the location of the different [00:14:00] objects is a much more sequential way. And then at the end, of course, you can integrate. all this knowledge into a more general and abstract if you want allocentric representation, but it's more difficult for them.

And you can get that from like anecdotes or what they tell you about their own experience usually is like this and also from experiments that shows that they are more impaired in allocentric representation compared to egocentric representation. And so these two ads seemed like a a good starting point because hippocampal and torino cognitive maps are believed to represent like allocentric representation of space with respect to a more egocentric representation that are mostly associated with the parietal cortex.

So, yeah, our idea was that if we find some differences in the way [00:15:00] cognitive maps are represented in the media temporal lobe in blind people, if we find some differences in the if we find that grid coding in them is altered during spatial navigation, then we can test whether this translates or generalize To conception navigation, where in principle there is no how could you say barriers or difficulties for for them right?

To think about sound space or a social space that we know could, is represented from using grid-like coding. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And I guess, interestingly there, you don't, for example, when it's like a social relationship, you know, who's the. father of whatever it is. That kind of thing, I guess there, you also don't have, you know, with spatial stuff, as we mentioned earlier, you can have this difference between sighted people, non sighted people, but I guess for these kinds of abstract relationships, sighted people don't have that either because it's abstract, right?

So,

Roberto Bottini: Exactly. Exactly. So, [00:16:00] so if we find the same differences, both in spatial and conceptual navigation in sighted and blind, then I think it would be like important evidence in support to these scaffolding hypothesis. And that can help us yeah, disentangling the genesis of and the development of cognitive maps in humans.

And those who try to understand better the relationship between spatial and conceptual. Navigation.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay. So, let's maybe start actually the segment with the patients or the, not patients, but the blind people, visually impaired people. So. When did they go blind or when did they have the visual impairment? And like how much could they see what was exactly that kind of

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. Yeah. We selected the participants so that they the criteria was that they have to become have become completely blind before the age of three, and therefore, they should have no visual memory. So some [00:17:00] of them, they are congenitally blind. Some of them are born without eyes for instance, or with very small eyes, like micro ophthalmia.

Other, they have become blind after a few hours or a few days after birth, because of a higher concentration of too high concentration of oxygen in the incubator, and then burns the retina. This is a retinopathy of prematurity. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But so it meant

Roberto Bottini: And I don't know either.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Completely blind. Not I mean, the, some of the people I talked to, they could see sometimes like shapes or they could think, see, move things, move from left to right or.

Roberto Bottini: No, they don't have pattern vision. Some of them have light sensitivity. So they can tell you whether the light is on or off, for instance. It's just a small percentage. But they cannot use vision functionally to navigate. that is the most that is the most important thing for [00:18:00] this experiment.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And so then. The task, which is a

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. So,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: What did they do?

Roberto Bottini: right. So, so in order to you know, to get to the objective we needed to demonstrate first that there is a difference between sighted and blind people during spatial navigation before going into the conceptual navigation part. And and especially in grid like coding. And one thing that I would like to mention is that we didn't have any animal model because there is no study still, there is no study that test congenitally blind rodents.

for instance, or any other mammals what matters and measure grid cells. There are studies with congenitally blind rats and place cells or head direction cells. And in both cases, they develop rather normally in in rats. Although the fighting field is less precise compared to to seeing animals.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But I guess rats also don't use vision as much as humans do. Right. I mean, don't they use their [00:19:00] whiskers quite a lot and smell that kind of stuff more than.

Roberto Bottini: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Indeed. Even if we had an animal model it is not granted that the, what is works for for rights, then it's the same in humans because they can use or factory cues to create an allocentric map of the environments, whereas humans cannot do that. do that, like most of the cases, at least maybe some people can.

So we started with the spatial navigation and then we had another problem because the main, the large majority of spatial navigation experiments in fMRI, we wanted to use fMRI to study grid like coding. They use virtual reality, but with blind people, of course, visual virtual reality, it's out of the table.

Creating an auditory virtual space is technically is very difficult. And also it, we didn't go for that because the scanner is noisy. The fmri scanner is noisy, so it might have been [00:20:00] difficult, and therefore we got inspired by a couple of paper in 2016, like one from Aidan Horner, the other from Jakob Belmond, that detected grid like coding during imagined navigation.

So when the basically participants, they, in some cases, they had to close their eyes, like in the Horner, paper and then imagine to navigate a very simple environment. So we set up to do that, and then we had to decide which environment to to navigate. And we end up with this idea of navigating a clock environment.

We did that for two reasons, but basically because the clock gives you like a perfect configuration if you go from one number to the other number. In a straight line in which you create different trajectories of the sample, the space with with very good periodicity. And that was ideal for the type of analysis that we wanted to do it's a directional coding analysis.[00:21:00]

And second is an environment that is very familiar both to blind people and sighted people, because blind people they know how a clock they know the shape of the clock and how the numbers are distributed. They have tactile clock, the haptic clock. Clock in Braille that they can some of them use in order to tell the at the time and also the majority of blind people, certainly all the blind people that come to do our experiments, they they go around with the white cane, right?

And when you do the training to use the white cane and to orient yourself also like in the city or in the street, you know, They use in most of the time, like a military direction. They say nine o'clock, six o'clock, three o'clock it's on. So it's,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So that's really

Roberto Bottini: was something that was familiar.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it's really interesting because I, when I wrote the task, I thought like, why would blind people know what a clock face looks like? You know, like it just made no sense to me because it's you [00:22:00] know, like why? But okay. So there actually is. That's really interesting.

Oh, I would never have guessed that they would know what a clock face looks like because I mean, yeah.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah no. Instead they do. And it's actually familiar to both populations. So we and yeah, so the task you know, we did a leader training before entering the FMRI, but not even too much because a clock is a familiar environment. And we told them, well, imagine to be in a big clock and to move from one number to the other.

And so, they hear the starting number and then the ending number. So from two to eight. for instance, and they have to imagine to walk from one number to the other. And then in order to make sure that they were doing the task correctly, then we gave them a third number like four, for instance, and they have to say whether according to the trajectory that they were.

Doing the third number was on the left or on the right, so we make sure that they have to solve the task specially basically in order to answer this question. And then we we have two main [00:23:00] questions for these experimental question in this case, and one was, of course, to look at grid coding.

and see whether it was altered in some way in them. But then also we have a more general question, which was to look at the human navigation network in general, like beyond the media temporal lobe, beyond the hippocampal interior system and see whether to what extent it is resilient to visual deprivation, because that also was a question that was still out there.

And and you could expect some differences because of course sighted people usually navigate their environment based on vision. Which is something that of course blind people don't do. And so we have one part of the experiments in which we contrasted these spatial navigation, clock navigation tasks with a mathematic task in which participant, they hear the same numbers like number one, two and three, but they have to do mathematical operation on on that.

So the stimuli were exactly the same in both condition. But [00:24:00] the the process was different in one case, patient navigation, in the other case, mathematics. And that was the first type of analysis that we did. We looked at the contrast between navigation versus mathematics and we found the human navigation network in a scientist people.

So with Pali Pocampo region, frontal region, parietal region occipital region so the occipital place area. was active in in doing that, although also sighted people, they were blindfolded, they were not, there was nothing to see there that was active and the map of the congenitally blind people looked exactly the same.

There was really no difference that showing that these human navigation system, which basically. process spatial information during navigation across different reference frames, allocentric and allocentric. This network is highly resilient to visual deprivation. The only difference that we found was [00:25:00] that blind people activated more the right inferior parietal lobe during navigation compared to sighted people.

And that makes sense under the that they might use. in general more egocentric strategy, or they can leverage, they leverage more egocentric representation during the task compared to certain people. So that was the first result. And then we went on and looked into the internal cortex. And that's where we find some surprise. So in, not in the sighted people, in sighted people, we replicate you know, this finding that is now, it's been replicated several times in which we found a six fold modulation of the fMRI signal in the entorhinal cortex, according to the hexagonal representation of of grid cells.

And then we try other, try the other control periodicity, like eightfold, fourfold, sevenfold, fivefold, and nothing works. So it was very specific [00:26:00] for the hexagon. In the blind, instead, we couldn't find this sixfold activity. And what we find instead was fourfold. So, which was indicative of a greed that was squared like a 90 degree periodicity instead of a 60 degree periodicity. So to some extent, we matched what what was one of our prediction. And therefore, that's the six fold. Symmetry would be highly reduced or maybe even absent in in blind people. That's, you know, similar results have been found with older population, like older adults like Mathia Ang as a paper showing that the grid coding is reduced.

And also in older adults, usually what's impaired most is the allocentric representation and not the egocentric representation or with a four that is a, so that was a mesh. But we found these [00:27:00]fourfold symmetry that we did not predict. And then we say, okay, let's look a little bit into that.

Let's characterize this finding as much as we can with the data that we add. And so the first interesting thing is that this is not the first time that a fourfold symmetry emerged in humans. And it has been found for instance, in when humans engage in the virtual navigation in virtual reality of a hairpin maze right, which

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what may so happen, but yeah, but what is the, so what's the, yeah, in this context,

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. It is a maze in which you enter and then you go up and then you turn and then you go down and then you turn again and then up again and then down and then up again. So basically the type of movement that you can do in this maze is just 90 degree. Like you go either up, down, left or right.

And that is a that was used. Maybe, I mean, to my know, for the first time in a famous paper [00:28:00]with rodents in the Moser lab the first author is Do Dickman. And they found that the special periodicity of grid cells broke down, breaks down in in this condition. And when to Brown did that in FMRI with humans.

They found that compared to the navigation of open field in the air P maze the six foot symmetry went down. So that there was no six months, six foot symmetry, but it was a significant for the symmetry. And the interesting thing that they found is that the average greed orientation of the grid system of the participants.

in the Alpine maze was aligned with the two main axes of the environment north, south and east, west. And so we say, okay, let's see whether that's true or in our case, even though we didn't have any barrier, we didn't have any maze, but it was like if you want a sort of open field [00:29:00] navigation

uh,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: mean, to, To, to just clarify for someone correctly in the previous tasks, they're basically restricted to some extent, the movements they could make. And then they find it, if you restrict it in this one particular way, then, you know, everything adapts to the environment, but here you didn't do that.

Roberto Bottini: No, we didn't do that. And they could move more or less freely, imagine to move more or less freely in this environment. But nevertheless, we found the same thing. So that's the average grid orientation, the main grid orientation of sighted participants. It was spread across all the 360 rotational spaces.

So some participants have these main orientations and other participants like another less 30 degrees, another 15 degrees and so on. The blind, no. Basically all the blind people, they have the same grid orientation as they were anchoring Their map to a particular landmarks. And in this case to the axis of the environment, the main axis of of the [00:30:00] environment, which indeed they are very salient, right?

Because the 6 12

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah the quarter hours basically. Yeah 

Roberto Bottini: yeah. And so that was something that characterized these these findings. And then the other thing that we did was to say, okay maybe that could be related to the fact that blind people are using a more egocentric representation or leveraging more on that egocentric representation during navigation.

And and since we have found that in the previous experiments, like independent analysis, that blind people activated more this inferior parietal level, the right inferior parietal level, then we correlated that activity with the strength of the fourfold symmetry. And what we found is that blind people, congenitally blind people, that activated more parietal cortex during navigation.

They also have a higher fourfold symmetry. [00:31:00] And interestingly, they also have a higher accuracy during the task. And also we take the same blind people. After or before the experiments, I don't know, you know, into a tennis court and we did a path integration experiment in the tennis field with them.

They were blindfolded and so on. And the activity of the parietal cortex in the scanner predicted. The accuracy in this real world path integration, patient navigation task. So suggesting that there is a of course this is all correlation. It's not it's not causation investigation, but suggesting that the paral cortex have a role in in the currency of spa navigation, especially in blind people.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. So as a, as a, as a tennis fan uh, I've, you know, I know the Italian resurgence in tennis recently, you know, very [00:32:00] big in tennis. So I'm not surprised that even neuroscience labs have tennis courts now.

Roberto Bottini: We proceeded that, right, because Cinder was not so good when we did the experiment. So we squared one.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Blank. Yeah. It's, he had one, one good guy, like 10 years ago, cup, forgetting his name. Anyway. Um, Uh, But not as good as Senna. Anyway, the I wanted to ask about the fourfold. I mean, yeah, the main finding, I guess, in that sense. And I was just curious, is it any coincidence that a square, like a hexagon is, I believe one of three, I don't know what the right term is, but shapes that tiles the environment perfectly, right?

It's like triangle square and hexagon can tile an environment perfectly, but a Pentagon can't. Or can it? I don't think it can. I think you, you have like holes in there somewhere. I was just curious, is that it [00:33:00] seems to me like it's not a coincidence that you've, even if you don't fight hexagonal patterns, you find a different kind of grid that actually perfectly can tile the environment.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But what's the difference in terms of mathematics of packaging if you want between a square of or an hexagon. But certainly is a regular shape. And and I think that several different computational models of grid cells, they probably would work the same or similarly with.

hexagonal tiling or square tiling. But unfortunately, the short answer is that I don't know exactly what what triggered these fourfold representation. In the paper, we made some speculation based on this characterization of our results, the fact that there is a anchoring of the grid orientation to the main axis of the environment.

[00:34:00] And this correlated activity with parietal cortex. And we said that maybe, and also we have a questionnaire in which we test whether blind people use more egocentric coordinate egocentric frame of reference during the navigation compared to sighted people. And that is the case. So we thought that maybe these propensity there are two ways.

I think like one is that the propensity to navigate space egocentrically And to adopt like a more root like navigation, more than a survey like navigation of the environment make them usually thinking about spatial navigation in terms of sequentially and successive turns. And they, many of them told me that they largely prefer 90 degree turns, but that's of course is it makes sense, right?

Because they are the easier to memorize. You can put a label on that easier, like left, right, front [00:35:00] behind, and they are easier 90 degrees than a 60 degree turns or 75 degree turns. So if that's the habitual way in which they think about the environment, It is possible that in the long term, that's shaped this the firing field of of grid cells and the four, the basic representation of cognitive maps to a 90 degree compared to a 60 degree.

And that emerges also in our experiments. The other possible explanation instead is that these emerge because of the particular environment that we asked them to navigate that have this main, very highly salient axis. And because of their egocentric perspective, that's made them rely more on these egocentric axes compared to to say to the participants.

And maybe in a different environment, we wouldn't find something like that. But yeah, we need to do other experiments to figure out that.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:36:00] Yeah, I guess. So just briefly I looked, I just checked that what I said was correct. And I mean, of the regular shapes, triangles, squares, and hexagons are the only ones that can tell it infinitely. You can have, you can combine different shapes and you can have irregular ones that can do it. But

Roberto Bottini: Oh, okay. I

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And the tennis player was Fabio Fornini.

Roberto Bottini: For me.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I guess it's also like, um, also what you Once you talked about the directions, I mean, I guess it's, it doesn't feel like a coincidence in the sense that we don't have a, I mean, we have a word diagonal, but we don't, we can't specify, you have to specify which diagonal you mean, whereas you, as you said, front, back, left, right, it's basically.

Very specific. 

Roberto Bottini: Yep.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Another question I had was so this is something that I've you know, as someone who's not from the field have not paid too much attention to. But so this is what I mean is like the specifics within the brain region of the signal that people find. And I think I read in your paper that in the sighted people, you only found the hexadirectional [00:37:00] coding in the right entorhinal cortex, but not on the left.

I was on the right. Okay. Sorry. Thank God. Okay. But I basically will ask, is that usually found? Because that's the kind of detail I usually don't pay attention to. You know, whether it's left or right. Is that, I'm happy to remember the entorhinal cortex. I was just curious. Is that something that's typically found or

Roberto Bottini: It it depends that we looked first into the bilateral internal cortex because we didn't have any specific prediction for hemisphere. And then we looked for specific hemisphere correcting for multiple comparisons statistically. We did not necessarily predicted that in the left. But the other two papers that investigated imagine the navigation in in humans, they both find 64 symmetry in the left hemisphere and not in the right hemisphere.

So I don't know why, but at least it's consistent with the literature in imagine navigation. But then in, in other papers, people find it right. Lateralize in other [00:38:00] paper, like bilateral. I, I don't know. I don't know about

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Yeah. Um, Okay. So going back to the kind of broad introduction we had, what does that tell you about the scaffolding?

Roberto Bottini: Right. So now we are finishing to collect the data of the conceptual navigation experiment with both sighted and blind in this experiment, we asked them to navigate a sound space. in which the two dimension that they are navigating is duration and frequency of sounds. We did a pilot with sighted people and we found the extra directional coding in in this sighted control.

And now we, and then after that, we run a a old bunch, a new band, a batch of sighted people and the blind people. We increased the number of blind people that we are testing. We hope we will get to 30 people compared to the 19th of the previous experiment. And then we'll see, they'll see there are [00:39:00] different, possibility. So either we will found a six foot symmetry in both sighted and blind in conceptual navigation, right? So there will be indistinguishable and then we'll speak against the scaffolding hypothesis, because actually it shows us we were discussing before that when it comes to conceptual navigation.

There are no barriers. There is no problem for the fact that you cannot see because you are just conceptually thinking about a non spatial dimension that both sighted and blind people can think about. Then there will be no distortion of your grid representation. Another possibility is that we find a reduced grid like coding in blind people, compared to sighted people, exactly as we find during spatial navigation.

And that will speak in favor of of the scaffolding hypothesis, at least to some extent. But maybe we will not find the fourfold. Because and then we would think that maybe it's something that [00:40:00]emerges because of the type of environment that we have used in the first experiment are and that probably will be the most surprising and maybe theoretically interesting.

Results is that we will find four, four symmetry in blind people also during conceptual navigation. That's it.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. . About your, the current study I was a little bit surprised when you said that your abstract task was about using sound because it seems to me that's also something where blind people. You know, use it differently than maybe other people in a quite direct way.

I don't know whether that's true for all blind people, but at least stereotypically, you know, I mean, they have to use the hearing more. Yeah, I was just curious why, I mean, yeah. Why not use something where it's, you know, a bit more abstract where it kind of is should be more similar to the way that they actually gain the knowledge and that kind of stuff.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. We thought about using like a social space, [00:41:00] for instance. Like the one using the park paper, like natural neuro science 2021. I think. The problem is that is, it's hard to learn in that experiment. They have to test. They trained 100 people, and then they ended up testing only 20 of them because they could make it through the training.

And we cannot do that, right? We have to use all the congenitally blind people that we find, and they are really willing to enter in the scanner so that the test should not be too difficult. And also if you use dimensions that are not spatial, but they are physical to some extent, like perceptual actuation and impeach in this case, you can really control very well.

The the level that you subminister to the person that is that beach and that other sound is that other beach, right. And parametrically change it perfectly. Whereas when it goes to a more abstract dimension, Then you really have to rely on the learning [00:42:00] of the participants that really have clear in mind how they are at the different levels of the dimension for instance, popularity or and kindness, some social dimension that you can use, and that can make the measurement more noisy and in a situation in which we cannot afford to put 50 people in the scanner because it's very hard.

to find congenitally blind people that are willing to come to Trento where I am, stay here for three days a night and do several experiments.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, it's also not like a super highly populated area, right? It's not like you're in the middle of london or something and you have 10 million people around you Yeah

Roberto Bottini: exactly. So that is the reason.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Okay. , I mean, I guess we've already Especially in your kind of introduction to the paper talked a lot about allocentric and egocentric You Perspectives. Yeah, I mean, yeah, maybe I'll just do you want to, again, just kind of introduce the ticks paper by [00:43:00] cognitive maps and image spaces and kind of what the overall gist of that paper was.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. That's, that is a paper that I wrote. It's connected with the grant that I got the ERC grant that I got in 2018. And it's basically a sort of manifesto of that of that grant. And since I have written the grant and before starting all the experiments, I say, okay, let's write an opinion paper that summarize it, and then I make some prediction and let's see whether they will burn out.

Then they will be met by by the experiments and Yeah. And so I contacted Christian do that. I knew him from before we met at some conferences as a you know, a great scientist, very nice guy, and of course, like a great expert of a cognitive maps and the EPO company and Rina system.

And I was not, right. I was coming from a very different perspective which is the one of metaphor theory, embodied cognition cognitive linguistics, but in reading and in getting introduced [00:44:00] to the literature on hippocampal cognitive maps, I would say, well, that's, there is a, another line of research, another part of the literature that is 30 years that is thinking about more or less the same thing.

So how do we use space to think about non spatial concept and the spatially abstract concept. But we now without thinking about hippocampus and internal cortex, the brain, the neural locus for us was the parietal cortex. And indeed, the spatial schemas that we were investigating and thinking about were egocentric spatial schemas, not allocentric spatial schemas.

So time is a paradigmatic example for that. We think about time and temporal relationship according to a mental timeline. So for us, the past is on the left and the future is on the right, or the future is in front and the past is on the back. And you can test that in very simple [00:45:00] experiments in the lab.

If you have to classify sentences as related to the future or related to the past. you are faster when the key for the past is on the left and the key for the future is on the right compared to the opposite response code. But also if you outside of the lab, if you look people, if you look at people, when they are talking most of the time they make gestures like co speech gestures.

Like we Italian are famous for doing that, but actually everyone does that. Um, And,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: don't do it as well. We're very primitive justice. Yeah.

Roberto Bottini: And when you look at that and people are talking about temporal relationship, the gesture on the left, when they say, well, before I did that, and then afterwards, I am going to do that. And then the gesture on the right. And most of the time they are not aware that they are doing this, but their hands, they reflect basically the mental schema that they are doing.

 And these mental [00:46:00] schema are also experience dependent, so they can be changed by experience. That's also connect with the idea that space is a kind of a scaffold for more abstract knowledge in the sense that if you have a different spatial experience, the, in a relevant way, then you will also have a different mental timeline, for instance.

So for people that read from right to left, so they have a different type of orthography than the past is on the right. And the future is on the left. And there are several other example like like these, for instance, balance, which is a very abstract construct to some extent. So what you like, what you don't like, what is good and what is bad.

It's also specialized in our mind. Like a right is good. Left is bad. And there are these experiments in that shows this bias. So for instance, if you have two CV in front of you, like on your desk, and they are basically equal and you have to choose which [00:47:00] one to, you want to give the the job to, you have a slightly slightly more chances to choose the one on the right and the same for some abstract art.

It's this equivalent in many ways. We have this bias to prefer the one that are on the right. And this is have been tested again several times and replicated several times this rightward bias for balance unless. unless you are a lefty. You, if you are a left handed, then you have the opposite bias.

And the strongest your leftness is then the more you tend to prefer things that are on on the left side. So again, it's it's using space or to organize. It is abstract knowledge to some extent, but in a way that is highly egocentric and and anything. Well, maybe I thought that maybe these two like hippocampal cognitive map and these egocentric schemas for [00:48:00] abstract knowledge, they are just two faces of the same coin.

Basically they are just two different manifestation of the propensity of our mind and of our brain to use space to represent a structure. Knowledge in general and when it's a space it's also itself a metaphor to say low dimensional schematic representation of relational knowledge.

I think that is the definition that is the best one which doesn't necessarily. take into account the scaffolding hypothesis doesn't give necessarily a primacy to space itself and to spatial experience itself, because that can be true in some cases and maybe not in other cases. But in general, these low dimensional representation that's maybe good for yes, structuring, knowledge, generalization, reasoning, planning and maybe ultimately also to, they are highly related to declarative knowledge, our ability to travel in [00:49:00] time.

And as we travel in space, like mental time, travel, mental space, travel. And so on and so forth. So that is and so I teamed up with with Christian just to to have his supervision and support. So that's I was writing not too much stupid things about cognitive maps and the hippocampus because at the time it was not my focus and it was a great collaboration.

And after that we actually did several other studies together and we keep collaborating very well together.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned, you know, there's this whole other literature that kind of Looks very similar things because what I always find kind of funny about the spatial navigation stuff is that in a very similar the way the whole memory stuff and the spatial navigation stuff also ran in parallel for decades, right?

With you know, the very famous papers on both sides that kind of, I mean, now is being integrated and hasn't integrated, [00:50:00] but for a long time, it feels to me, didn't really do that. Um, So it's kind of funny that special navigation. I mean, I guess probably just because it's done in rodents initially, right?

So it's that just makes it quite different. But I don't know it's kind of interesting that social navigation has two entire line of research that it could have liked connected with very early on, but so I didn't 

Roberto Bottini: actually this tradition, Bo burned out because the was, was supported by some empirical papers that we just published. And and indeed we found that during. conceptual navigation of a conceptual space. You have like allocentric representation in terms of grid coding and cognitive maps in the hippocampal formation.

But then you have a egocentric representation in the parietal cortex showing that these as in the Navigation of the physical environment allocentric and egocentric combines to some extent, and they are in order to [00:51:00] give you a representation of integrated representation of the environment that the possibility to navigate that happens also during conceptual navigation.

 And also we just finished a paper that we are about to submit in which we find also this coexistence of the allocentric and egocentric reference frames during mental time traveling. So that's the ability to project yourself in the future and to project yourself in the past and to think about a temporal relationship is mediated by the egocentric representation in the parietal cortex and egocentric representation in the medial temporal lobe.

So kind of pushing this relationship and this yeah, this relationship between spatial navigation and conceptual navigation and showing that the old system, it's probably recruited and involved in structuring knowledge according to these neural geometry or low dimensional [00:52:00] representation, and not only the hippocampal interlinear system.

Yeah,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: kind of very broad question, but kind of wide in a sense, the question is a little bit like, why do we have these two separate systems? Or, I mean, yeah, but a different way maybe of asking it is also like, how do you, how do they interact? Or how do you go from one to the other and that kind of stuff?

Because, I mean, it seems to me kind of obvious that we perceive initially stuff from egocentric perspective and then you kind of build an allocentric perspective from that. Is that kind of roughly how it works or is that just a simplification?

Roberto Bottini: in uh, uh, we, we don't know exactly but one key to, to understand these the need of these two systems would be that in you know, when you think about the structure of a conceptual system, you need to have that time is a good, it's a good [00:53:00] example. If you think about a series of events, you need to have a representation of how the events are related with each other independently of the point of view that you assume, like a bird's view on history for instance, and knowing which event comes after which other events and before which other events and and so on.

But then when you retrieve. These event you do that from a point of view. It's related to assessing the information, keeping that in working memory and then manipulating this information so that, for instance, you can approach these time traveling by putting yourself within the sequence.

Right. And then thinking about what is in front of you or what is behind you, or just looking at the sequence from outside perspective, right? In both casings, however, you have a point of view. And when you start trying to maybe manipulate These these events or things [00:54:00] like you can engage in counterfactual thinking, for instance, what would happen if that would happen before?

And these other thing afterwards then you can use this more short lived and flexible egocentric representation that are related to assessing. These this information. So, so the dichotomy between a longer term representation and short term perspective to, in order to assess and manipulate I think it could be a key to see how these two systems are important also beyond spatial navigation.

Like a good example for that is the famous experiment that was done here in Italy in the seventies, I think, by Bisianch and Lutazzi of the Piazza Duomo, right, the Duomo Square of Milano, with neglect people with hemispatial neglect, that when you ask them to describe the piazza by looking at the Duomo, they have to imagine that they describe only one side of the piazza, right?

But when, then you say, okay, now, Imagine that [00:55:00] you have the Duomo behind your shoulder. They also describe one side of the piazza, but the other side, like showing that they have a general representation, an allocentric, stable representation of the piazza somewhere stored, but they can access only part of it.

So that could be a theoretical key to look at this., 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I just wanted to ask a little bit, I mean, you kind of mentioned it earlier already, but I was just wondering whether you could elaborate a little bit more on it. And maybe guess a bit, I don't know how much is known about this exactly, but about kind of what exactly people do when they use metaphors.

I mean, metaphors and analogies, right? As you said, the spatial. analogy, something like that. I mean, is the kind of I mean, to me, it seems like the obvious interpretation that is this kind of scaffolding hypothesis, where you say okay, we have this kind of way of dealing with stimuli of multiple dimensions or whatever, but we use this kind [00:56:00] of machinery to, to think about it is that kind of what's going on or yeah, maybe in general, kind of in relation to what we've been talking about, what exactly are we doing when we're using metaphors 

Roberto Bottini: yeah, that's a hard question. And I wanted to do some empirical research on that. I can, you know, imaging research and relating metaphorical thinking on with cognitive maps. But among the old things that we are doing many things that is one of the least, but we found. I find it particularly difficult to set up an experiment that would hit on the precise mechanism of low dimensional representation during metaphorical thinking without having confounds with high dimensional semantic processing basically. But yeah, but the idea more generally is that when you do when you engage in metaphor and analogy, and I know that there is [00:57:00] many people that, that share this idea. If you read, for instance, a team balance early. Theory, theoretical papers on cognitive maps. It appears clear that this is a mechanism for analogy, right?

To put into to generalize certain structure from one domain to another domain. And that's why like a tree structure, you can find it in when you talk about grammar, you can find it when you talk about genealogical relationships when you talk about a tree, how is how is structured the tree? And that is what is that? It it is a independent structural representation that is using the words of Tim Berners Lee, factorized from what it contains. It is you have the structure and then you can put in the structure, whatever it is, they can be words in a sentences, they can be your uncle, dad, mother and and so on.

But once you have the structure, then you [00:58:00] can predict, you can make prediction, you can find shortcuts, you can understand what's going on. The that structural domains potentially in terms of another one, the one that had the same structure. And that is basically what what an analogy is at least from a cognitive science perspective.

That is what Deadly Gettner which is probably the cognitive scientist that's most famous one to study analogy who tell us is generalizing. Structural representation from one domain to the other. However, when we do that, especially for linguistic metaphors. Then then there are a lot of distinctions that you could, that you should do.

It's hard because there are some metaphor that has crystallized in in language and probably you don't need to do this process no longer. Sometimes doing this transfer knowledge from one domain to the other domain actually is not so easy. And it works. much better when there is a superficial semantic [00:59:00] similarity between the two domains.

But then if the two domains are superficially and semantically similar, then probably you don't need necessarily to do this structural transfer from one to the other. So I think it's It's very interesting topic of investigation, but myself, I haven't found yet the way to attack this problem in a way that I like it and I say, okay, that's the right way to do that without any confounds and to to look into these this cognitive process but maybe other people will, right?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: no, I can see what, boy, that's difficult. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, just whilst you were talking, I guess, because you mentioned metaphors, and we earlier talked about literatures that were kind of parallel, I guess the Peter Gerdenfoss's book about conceptual spaces, in a sense, is another kind of separate kind of line of literature that, I mean, maybe it overlaps with the, and he also discusses metaphors quite a lot in his [01:00:00] book. Yeah, it seems like everyone's basically doing the same thing, which is from a slightly different angle, calling

Roberto Bottini: exactly. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, uh, yeah, I mean, So you, you mentioned your ESC grant earlier twice, and probably because I queued you up a little bit before we started recording, because I wanted to ask a little bit about it because yeah, I mean, you know, I'm. As a starting postdoc, this is the kind of stuff I'm starting to think about.

And yeah, when I saw your CV, it seems like you've done quite well for yourself in terms of getting money from the ERC in particular, with a starting and a consideration route back to back. So yeah, I don't hear, as I said, before we started recording, I don't have any like particular questions here. I'm just curious it seems you, you know, the odd thing about it this is any tips for getting these kind of grants. So,

Roberto Bottini: Yeah I can give some tips, but basically is that it's how I do. It's how I write the grant that I don't know to what extent they can generalize that they are good tips and maybe I've just been lucky. But in general, something that I do And when I talk with other people that maybe [01:01:00] are preparing this this type of grant they don't do or they struggle with is that I like to start from the general question, like a big theoretical question. And I like to phrase it in a way that is as simple as possible, not because the question itself is simple, but to find a way to communicate it in in a couple of sentences. And then of course it would be, is it's a question that I'm interested in, deeply interested in. And when I, I find it, and then I find the main hypothesis that I want to test, then I design the experiments.

Then I designed the five years of experiments, for instance, that are necessarily for the submission of a ERC grant. Whereas sometimes I, I talk with people and they tell me you know, I have A lot of ideas for for experiments and sound, but I don't know how to put them together right in a [01:02:00] coherent proposal in a And sometimes what I say, to them is you know, just start over you know, do not Worry too much about what you have already done and what and to put to fit Everything you like or everything you are good at You in this in this proposal.

But think about what you, what are your interests and what is the theoretical question that you find most important and that arguably is still on the table. And then you think you have a good idea in how to solve it. And then once you have this general framework and you talk with people and people tell you, Oh yeah, wow, that's interesting.

Yeah. That's a very good idea. Then you know that you are onto something and then you start designing your your experiments.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so, I mean, it sounds like a very kind of top down [01:03:00] approach, right? By just really I mean, also taking it the way, you know, the order a grant is written, where you start with the big stuff and then you go into specifics and then the experiments and that kind of stuff. I mean, is that genuinely also like how you come up with this stuff or is Because I mean, in a way often it's much more.

You know, you have a really cool experiment and sometimes it's difficult to explain why and I guess is that what you say? What most people do then you have this kind of experiment that's difficult to explain. So it's 

Roberto Bottini: Yeah, but also because it's the type of grant, right? It's a very rich grant. It's long, like five years and they want high risk, high gain projects, right? So you cannot propose an incremental work. You know, that's what I did for the last three years. I discovered that and that and then I want to change these and see what happened to change that and see what happened and so on.

That's not the type of work that they would be interested in. They want to found something that If it works [01:04:00] could be groundbreaking, that's usually the term that is used for for ESC and therefore you will have either a technical discovery technical advantage, right? If you propose to test like a new technique for instance, or most of the time theoretical advantage.

So to theoretical advancement clear theoretical advancement. And that I think it can be, it's easier to obtain if you think about the question first, and if you think about why is that important in terms of basic research and then you figure out the way to, to test it. You plan the experiments accordingly.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so if and if I understand it correctly, I think somebody said earlier is also that the study that we discussed with the blind people that was part of your starting ground 

Roberto Bottini: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. So, had you, as I think you said, you hadn't really done that kind of research before with the I don't know, had you done fMRI before at all, or just not that kind of [01:05:00] special

Roberto Bottini: No, I did, I did FMRI, I worked with blind people, but never worked at all with the hippocampus or special navigation or cognitive maps.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, so my question then is basically, how can you then sell that you are the right person to do this research and that you can supervise people to do it, right? Because especially ERC is you have a couple of PhD students, something like that.

Roberto Bottini: right, right. Yeah. But that is not a that is not a problem to match because I mean, if I I mean, I knew how to do neuroimaging. I knew how to do FMRI, so I knew how to. To use the tool. And I had a background in broadly speaking, this idea of using space to represent non spatial knowledge.

What I was showing you know, the big idea at the time was that the main hypothesis of the grant was that was this one of the neural recycling and the spatial scaffolding, right? That [01:06:00] we somehow reuse or recycle the neurocognitive machinery to navigate space, to navigate our knowledge and concepts.

This was still new, right? At the time, it was really the moment in which the first papers kind of supporting this view were coming out was 2017 when I wrote and submitted the grant. And then I had this sub question like do people that navigate space in a different way than navigate concepts in a different way?

Are we looking just at half of the picture here? Are we missing all the other half that is the egocentric representation? So let's put together these two literature, this one that I know. And the other one that I don't know to some extent, but of course, I have done my readings in order to write the grant.

And then another couple of questions like like this one was about high dimensional versus low dimensional representation, right? That was [01:07:00] another take. So big question. And then. Some sub question hypothesis but the still at the time they were not they were very new to some extent and original at least.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Yeah. So basically you had All the existing stuff around it. It's just like the very new stuff you hadn't done. But then again, no one, very few people had done it. So, and you could make the point that you could learn it or what did you already say, specify collaborators with that or.

in the grant itself or

Roberto Bottini: No, I didn't. I didn't. But again, they assume that if you know, How the brain works basically, if you know how to do fMRI experiments or MEG experiments, the fact that instead of focusing on parietal cortex or on the visual system of blind people, then you go and focus on the entorhinal cortex or the medial temporal lobe.

It's something that you can do the switch very very easily because it's not learning like a new, completely new [01:08:00] set of skills, basically.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And so that was a starting out the consolidated grant that I guess has it started or is it starting now? Something like that.

Roberto Bottini: It's starting in a month.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and well, okay. So what was, what are you proposing for that? If you can share it?

Roberto Bottini: Yeah, that is a that is something that, that's came out from the experiments of the first grant, and especially these paper that we just published. And we didn't talk about that now. And probably we won't, don't want to go into that because otherwise it's another podcast, but on the the fact that spontaneous eye movement reflects the neural geometry of a conceptual space.

And then we saw those results and then we saw some other results that also during navigation of conceptual space in fMRI we saw some eye movement signature. And then I had these other papers showing that You have a grid like coding for visual visual stimuli in following visual stimuli, but even when you [01:09:00] follow them with covert attention and not with the eye movement.

Then I started thinking also on the basis of a previous idea that I had before that maybe there is something here in the way attention cognitive maps and in general consciousness. Conscious assets interact with each other. And then basically the proposal is to look into what I call attentional code for memory and see whether relational knowledge, so not only the navigation of cognitive maps.

First of all, to test more rigorously whether the navigation of cognitive maps correspond to movement of attention in internal space you can go and movement of attention. They can be indexed very well by eye movement, at least in sighted people, because the oculomotor system and the attentional system are highly overlapping in the human brain.

And then take this idea and bring it beyond the maps, beyond [01:10:00] the cognitive maps and and looking at a combinatorial attention, the combination of attentional states, how they can index any type of conceptual relationship. Uh, That is that is the idea, generally speaking.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, so I, you know, Obviously, I don't know how these grant things work, right? I mean, that's part of what I'm asking. But I'm a little bit surprised that in a sense, I mean, what surprised me about it is that it seems very complex and abstract, a lot of it, and that people, you know, from what I've heard about grants, it's like, You know, people have to understand it pretty quickly and, you know, probably without spending hours of concentrated reading, but, you know, 15 minutes in the evening where they have to review it.

So I've been impressed that you managed to. I mean, it seems at least you managed to write that in a way that was easily understandable. And seemed doable also.

Roberto Bottini: Right. Right. Yeah. Somehow I did.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [01:11:00] So that's just a process of just trying again and taking it a top down approach from the beginning and then just rewriting and rewriting until it's simple enough or there's 

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. Because then you have a, so, and then you, I mean, maybe I explained these in a very abstract way. But then at the end, you know, one thing that helped me, I think that I was talking about something that everyone knows. which is attention. So I didn't have to explain to some extent was attention is, of course, there is the William James say that you know what is attention until someone asked you to explain it, and then you don't know what it is and so on.

But for reading the the abstract at nine o'clock in the evening, you can assume that people have an idea of what attention is. And for instance, what I was proposing, and that was a sentence in the grant, and it's my presentation is that to look at this phenomenon that is very well known, but we have a different eyes, right?

And so we have studied attention so far. [01:12:00] in its in terms of its selective property, right? Attention as a selection, you select these and these and these. I wouldn't say that actually we should look at attention in terms of the generative properties because in doing the selection and subdividing basically the information, chunking the information and so on, you find yourself with states that can be that have some characteristics.

I don't go into the details, but they can be combined. And then you can find yourself with a sort of language if you want to use a metaphor. So let's go beyond, you know, that's a way in which I would say that in which I said, let's go beyond the selective properties of attention generative. properties of of it.

And of course I had some pilot studies and data that shows that what I was proposing was not too risky and too preposterous, but but to some extent it has to be high risk, right? The idea and,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Hey, I mean, I guess that's specific to whatever [01:13:00] grant one is applying for, but the Those two are like that. Okay. Good. Yeah. I mean, for me, I don't know, you know, starting my postdoc like four months ago now, so I've, especially with the, yeah, well, I mean, you can apply for the starting grounds, I think from your second or third year on after

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. From the third, I think. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So it's, or there are like similar versions in different countries that do similar things, more or less, or smaller things. Like in, in Switzerland, where I'm right now, there's the MPC owner, which you can do from your second year onwards. You need one year of postdoc experience to apply which is for one post for one PhD student, I believe.

And yourself so it's, you know, a bit smaller, but yeah, it's still, it's the kind of thing that How should I put it? When I last year applied for my first fellowship, I, even though I'd like, it had been on my horizon that these things are coming, I was still, when I had to actually do it, it was way more work than I thought it was going to be.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: There are lots of things I'd never written about or even thought about. [01:14:00] So I guess this is my little attempt to kind of keep these things a little bit In the back of my mind, at least, and then still do it last minute, but yeah. Um, yeah. So at the end of each of my interviews, I ask my guests the same three questions.

And the first is, what's a book or paper you think people should read? It can be very old. It can be very completely new. It can be completely unknown. It can be the most famous paper. I don't really mind just yeah. Any recommendations for you thinks that. You know, people should spend a little bit more time on

Roberto Bottini: Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you like a book that was very important for me. It's kind of a hidden gem. It's very hidden that almost no one knows it. And those is not very popular in the academic field. There is a bit controversial, but I like it. So, and the book is, let's start with the title.

Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it's a [01:15:00] good start here or the author. It's also a good

Roberto Bottini: So the, okay. The author is Julian Janes, and the title is The Origin of Consciousness. In The Breakdown of Bicameral Mind.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, i've heard of that, but yeah, okay.

Roberto Bottini: heard of that? Okay. It's.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, but I don't know Yeah, sorry.

Roberto Bottini: So let me

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: i'll let you explain it. Yeah.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah, let me say something about that. So the premise is that most probably the majority of the book is wrong. And uh, it's a fantastic book is the work of a lifetime for you and James, which was an adjunct professor, I think, at Princeton.

The book was published in 70, 1978, 1977 and it is a essay on cognitive archaeology and Homeric psychology. And the history of the guy is very interesting because it came from behaviorism, and he wanted to understand consciousness. And then at a certain point, he said, Oh, no, but consciousness and then he [01:16:00] tried to go back biologically in the evolutionary scale to see, you which is the most simple organism that can have consciousness.

And he was doing experiments with plants, for instance, to see what the plants could learn. And so I said no I think that consciousness is actually something that we achieve a culturally, we are not born conscious, but we have to be some extent educated to be conscious. And also we need a language for for doing that.

And before he started our research, It is archaeological, basically, and and he came out with this idea that ancient population they have a different cognitive structure that he called the bicameral mind. Now, the book is fascinating. Again, it's un facifiable, of course, because you cannot go back in time and see what kind of cognitive architecture they had 3, 000 years ago, let's say.

And it's and I think at least from my perspective, it's fascinating. The main [01:17:00]psychoarchaeological hypothesis is wrong. But it's a fantastic reading. And then, and that is the hidden gem. I think there are 100 pages in this 600 pages book that are genuinely psychologically in which he goes through psychology and neuroscience is trying to explain what is consciousness and what consciousness is not.

It gives a clear definition of a rational definition of consciousness, which is coincident with what modern philosophy would call access consciousness with respect to phenomenological consciousness. And then he suggests that the way we come up with a conscious declarative representation is to construct an internal mind space basically, and in doing that, he anticipated by a decade, at least a lot of cognitive linguists.

He was talking about how space is represent as time is represented in a spatial way and how space is actually important [01:18:00] structural you know, it gives structure to to a lot of cognitive processes and so on. And I read that book. when I was a student, a university student, and I was fascinated by that.

At the beginning, I was fascinated by the archaeological part. I'd say, well, that is crazy. If it's like that, for real, that would be crazy. But then slowly, when I started understanding a little bit more, I got more and more taught by these these ideas that a few years later I found back. in in the literature that we discussed so far.

So, so yeah, it's a beautiful book and I will recommend to, to read it.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, great Um, the second question is what's something you wish you'd learned sooner? This can be from a work life in your private life, just something where you think, you know, it would have been nice if you'd learned that a bit sooner and maybe how you dealt with it or how you found that out. Or,

Roberto Bottini: yeah, that is easy coding coding and mathematics, trigonometry, linear algebra, this kind of [01:19:00] stuff. I had a very classic humanistic

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's quite common in Italy, right? Oh, I mean the one one other

Roberto Bottini: but I know.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I've talked about his career, Camillo Padua Schioppa, he also said he had a very humanistic kind of education in school.

Roberto Bottini: yeah. I mean, you can have some more technical one

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I

Roberto Bottini: also my background is in clinical psychology, right? I studied psychoanalysis a lot. And I learned statistics basically during my PhD, right? So it was it was a long run. I had to fill up a lot of gaps in it was a good run.

Like I, I am happy to have had these Interdisciplinary experience, which is something that a lot of. colleagues don't have. So, and that, I think it helped me a lot in, in, in the process that I was describing before, or starting from the big question and then going going down to precise. That's it.

But yeah a little bit more of a coding and mathematics that would have helped.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I guess he could have just said. [01:20:00] Remember how I said I studied psychology,

Roberto Bottini: Yeah

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's basically the same, you know, that would have made the same statement. Basically. Yeah. I think everyone who studied psychology was like, yeah, I just, that would have been useful. But, oh, well, the people that I talked to who, you know, on this podcast, because they are researchers and not people who want to do clinical stuff necessarily as their main profession.

I think those people, And I'm quite glad that they didn't have to do that. Um, Yeah, last question is yeah. Any advice for people, late PhD students, early postdocs? Basically people like me, anything you want to give me on the way.

Roberto Bottini: Right. I think that's the advice is to read a lot because when you are in these early stages of career, you I think it's important to create as much as possible, a line of research that is your own. And and so to have new [01:21:00] ideas and and the ideas they come, at least for me, they come out of reading, reading broadly, reading also outside of your also outside of your discipline.

Sometimes it helps, but also outside of the topic that you are working on, because then you can get, first of all, you can get interested in that something else, but also you can. Take again, right. Metaphorically or structurally or analogically some structure or ideas. methods, even that apply in a different subfield and then applied it to yours and then gain some knowledge.

So that is that is the my advice is read as much as possible. And of course, try to. To figure out general question or general research, but that really, truly interests you. That I think is the most important thing for me. For instance, I read a lot of essays of [01:22:00] popular books in neuroscience and so on.

Not because I'm going to learn particularly like something in some cases, I, you know, most of it, but just because in this book, If the authors is good, and there are many colleagues that are very good in doing that, they bring back the big question, right? They bring back that basically the reason why we do that, because otherwise our everyday life is trying to design the little details of the experiment, select the stimuli or decide which kind of analysis we would use or.

Coding up stuff and it's on and focused on very specific topic. That is easy to become auto referential. And yeah, forget about why you are doing that at the end, which is to understand human nature, which is to make progress in yeah, science and and generally [01:23:00] understand human nature.

And then sometimes I read the popular books to remind myself how cool it is what I'm doing and and why it is important that I do that.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, it's definitely easy to get lost in the details. But yeah, if you think you don't have time for reading podcasts are available,

Roberto Bottini: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: maybe that are quite as, I would hope that a book is more refined than a podcast where we basically just.

Roberto Bottini: Yeah. Yeah. As you were saying in, you were saying in the introduction is it's a different way to, to get information podcast useful in in a way that they they highlight parts that maybe are not highlighted in a book or in a paper. That's so,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is, yeah, this is very good. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. But I guess what I'm trying to do with my podcast, even though I never thought about it that way, is to have a thing that's complimentary to a popular science book, to a paper, to a representation, that kind of stuff. Yeah. [01:24:00] Um, Yeah, I think that's all my questions.

So thank you very much.

Roberto Bottini: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.