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Jan Lauwereyns
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The Anatomy of Bias: How Neural Circuits Weigh the Options Hardcover – 19 April 2010

by Jan Lauwereyns (Author)
5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
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An integrative account of the neural underpinnings of decision making, emphasizing the ways in which some information sources are given more weight than others. I will recklessly endeavor to scavenge materials from these various fields with the single aim of producing a coherent, but open-minded account of attention, or bias versus sensitivity, or how the activities of neurons allow us to decide one way or another that, with a faint echo of Hamlet in the background, something appears to be or not to be. -- from The Anatomy of Bias. In this engaging, even lyrical, book, Jan Lauwereyns examines the neural underpinnings of decision-making, using "bias" as his core concept rather than the more common but noncommittal terms "selection" and "attention." Lauwereyns offers an integrative, interdisciplinary account of the structure and function of bias, which he defines as a basic brain mechanism that attaches different weights to different information sources, prioritizing some cognitive representations at the expense of others. Lauwereyns introduces the concepts of bias and sensitivity based on notions from Bayesian probability, which he translates into easily recognizable neural signatures, introduced by concrete examples from the experimental literature. He examines, among other topics, positive and negative motivations for giving priority to different sensory inputs, and looks for the neural underpinnings of racism, sexism, and other forms of "familiarity bias." Lauwereyns -- a poet and essayist as well as a scientist -- connects findings and ideas in neuroscience to analogous concepts in such diverse fields as post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theory, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, and experimental economics. With The Anatomy of Bias, he gives readers that rarity in today's world of proliferating and ever more narrowly focused technical research papers: a work of sustained, rational thinking, elegantly expressed.
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  1. ISBN-10
    026212310X
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0262123105
  3. Edition
    First Edition
  4. Publisher
    MIT Press
  5. Publication date
    19 April 2010
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    18.42 x 2.54 x 23.5 cm
  8. Print length
    288 pages
  9. See all details
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Review

"Jan Lauwereyns brings together concepts that are generally treated as disparate, and traces the historical evolution of their relation to one another and to current research. The significance of this contribution will be partly as a stimulus to new ideas (for my own part, reading this book prompted a great deal of thought -- not just about relationships between concepts, but ideas for possible new experiments), as well as its achievement in situating current ideas about decision firmly in their historical intellectual milieu. Anatomy of Bias is the kind of book that will change people's thinking -- and lives."--R.H.S.Carpenter, Professor of Oculomotor Physiology, Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience, Cambridge University

About the Author

Jan Lauwereyns is a Professor in the Graduate School of Systems Life Sciences at Kyushu University in Japan and Adjunct Research Associate in the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has published articles in journals including Nature, Journal of Neuroscience, and Trends in Cognitive Science as well as poetry, fiction, and essays.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ MIT Press; First Edition (19 April 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 026212310X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262123105
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 18.42 x 2.54 x 23.5 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 3 ratings

About the author

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Jan Lauwereyns

Jan Lauwereyns
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Jan Lauwereyns (1969) is a poet, essayist, and scientist. Born and raised in Belgium, he was trained as a cognitive psychologist at the University of Leuven (PhD, 1998). He went on to specialize in neurophysiology, performing postdoctoral research at Juntendo University in Japan and at the US National Institutes of Health. His research focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms of attention and decision making. Lauwereyns lives in Fukuoka, Japan, where he is Professor in the Graduate School of Systems Life Sciences, Kyushu University. In addition to his scientific writing, Lauwereyns has published innovative poetry and fiction in Dutch, English, and Japanese. For his creative work in Dutch, he has received several important accolades, including most notably the VSB Poetry Prize 2012.

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Top review from United Kingdom

S. G. Raggett
5.0 out of 5 stars Time to decide
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 November 2010
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Jan Lauwereyns deals with the problem of how brains make choices, particularly where different stimuli point to different responses, or where there is a choice between a small short-term reward and a larger reward deferred into the longer-term. These are conflicts that are often evaded in academic discussions of choice and free will. The author discusses effort-related decisions in respect of the influence of neuromodulators. He speculates whether there are signals in the brain to inhibit previously discarded courses of action, or whether the decision depends in a more straightforward way on the strength of dopamine support for the chosen action. At any rate some form of weighting mechanism involving neuromodulators seems to be involved. The author also refers to a study that showed activity in the emotional processing areas of the brain when moral decisions were involved. This is suggested to carry with it the possibility that concepts such as fairness could create a dopamine-based bias in favour of fair decisions. What is only hinted at is the extent to which dopamine activity is registered in subjective consciousness giving rise to a balancing of subjective impulses.
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5.0 out of 5 stars A New Take on Plasticity and Great Prelude to Tse...
Reviewed in the United States on 17 April 2013
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Lauwereyns, back in 2011, might have been seen as a very bright and creative scientist with a new twist on plasticity-- preforming nanosecond "darwinian like" competitions just prior to a decision. But, he'd then be written off with a trend that died as ho-hum, so what, our brains can learn, big deal.

Not so at all! If you pick up Tse's astonishing book--  The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation -- and then read Jan's book in tandem, or before or after Tse, you'll be amazed at Jan's prescience and anticipation of Tse's revolutionary ideas about everything from consciousness to choice.

Consider plasticity not as it was seen in a learning context a few years ago, but as "pre-firing" neuron states that (kindof) "sim" the decision. As in, you are "thinking" before choosing, but those thoughts are "soft" (as in plastic or pliable) and the spike conditions are not energized immediately. Jan looks at these as tendencies, but he presages Tse's essential message-- about coincidental signals-- almost exactly!

If you briefly allow the word bias to be similar to the word weights, the two authors taken together have started a trend in looking "above and before" spiking oscillations in a way that will be mined for decades. If you read these two books, you'll be on the cutting edge of what's about to revolutionize the "layers" above and below, before and after, the well established dynamical systems models of spike patterns. Adding Buzsaki  Rhythms of the Brain  completes the proposed picture at a meta level-- showing how oscillations can be both physical, and collectively symbolic in the energy states of the wave functions themselves.

Not an easy or "fun" read-- but enlightening on every page if you invest the energy to get the central, startling, and innovative message. NOT a "learn the past or current" technology book-- more of a "here's what's coming."

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