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#9 - Roshan Cools - Brain mechanisms of cognitive control and motivation
46 Plays4 years ago
How does willpower work and how do underlying factors such as cognitive control and motivation influence it? We talk to Dr. Roshan Cools about her research.
We cover many topics ranging from reward and the role of dopamine as well as cognitive enhancers such as ritalin or adderall and if they are actually effective or not.
We also touched upon how UX design could impact cognitive control and how you should think about it.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's up, everyone? This is Ajmar Savary and welcome to another podcast episode. Today, we talk to Roshan Kools about the brain mechanisms of cognitive control and motivation. We cover many topics ranging from reward and the role of dopamine, as well as cognitive enhancers, such as Ritalin or Adderall, and if they are actually effective or not. Enjoy.
00:00:36
Speaker
Hey everyone, and welcome to another podcast episode. If you're new here, my name's Ajmal. I'm a neuroscientist and entrepreneur. On this podcast, we explore the links between science, technology, business, and the impact they have on all of us.
00:00:51
Speaker
Our guest today is Roshan Kools. Roshan is a professor of cognitive neuropsychiatry at the Radbaud University Medical Center and principal investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. Roshan is interested in willpower. How does it work and how do underlying factors such as cognitive control and motivation influence it? Her research goes even further and looks into how these factors are modulated by dopamine and serotonin.
00:01:16
Speaker
For her work, she has received the James McDonald Foundation Scholar Award and the Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. She was also awarded the Dutch VIDI and VICI grants, as well as the Human Frontier Science Program grant. She is currently a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the Academia Europia, member of the Advisory Council for Science, Technology, and Innovation,
00:01:42
Speaker
and a board member of the Rathenau Institute. The list goes on and on.
Cognitive Control and Its Connections
00:01:47
Speaker
In this conversation, we talk about her research and how many of the topics of cognitive control overlap with memory and decision making. We cover many topics ranging from reward and the role of dopamine, as well as cognitive enhancers such as Ritalin or Adderall, and if they are actually effective or not. We also touched upon how UX design could impact cognitive control and how you should think about it.
00:02:10
Speaker
enough background. Let's get into it, shall we? So, Roshan, welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're super busy. And I mean, the pandemic hasn't made work actually easier at all, or the amount of work. We do all work from home now, that's true. But
00:02:34
Speaker
To the more people I talk or try to talk, let's say, it seems like their amount of work has actually increased rather than decreased. Might has to do with the tools they have to use, just a new environment they have, everyone needs to get used to, right? That's right. I think it fluctuates. It fluctuates for me anyway.
Pandemic's Impact on Work and Life
00:02:54
Speaker
So when it first happened, I was completely overwhelmed, not least because the kids were at home.
00:03:00
Speaker
And of course, and I didn't sort of draw a conclusion about having to cut down on any of the work that was, you know, it was possible to continue everything we do normally, just virtually. And then there was a month of this real nice sort of time where I could finally spend time with my kids, have a good reason. Yeah. And now I'm back to, I guess, you know, yeah.
00:03:27
Speaker
the kids are being taken care of and it's okay, it's okay. I can spend a little bit more time thinking and writing and I suppose the meetings are a little bit more efficient. So yeah. That's good. Yeah, I don't mind the current situation. It'll be good if we go back to seeing each other. Yeah, I think so too. But anyway.
00:03:53
Speaker
Thanks for the invite. I'm really happy to give it some prior time.
00:04:01
Speaker
It's been quite some time since, I mean, the last time I've seen a talk of yours, and actually the first time I've seen you was when you gave the lecture in neuroimaging two of the master's program, the hemodynamics. And friends of mine have also been in your lab. So I have been familiar with what you are studying and what your research is about, but
00:04:28
Speaker
I've been looking forward to this for a while because I always wanted to talk to you about what you're working on. There was just never the time.
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, this is a great opportunity. Yes.
Understanding Cognitive Control
00:04:40
Speaker
So this is supposed to be about the science of cognitive control and motivation. And I already asked a few friends of mine what they would see as cognitive control. And in all honesty, they had no idea what that term entails. Could you explain a bit what the cognitive control entails and how it needs the motivation?
00:05:06
Speaker
So it is a really ill-defined term, actually. And in some sense, it's a bit old-fashioned. So it was introduced a few decades ago already. But I think it refers to that set of processes, mental processes, that allow us to obtain our goals by
00:05:30
Speaker
among other things, resisting distractions and impulses and temptations. So it's kind of an umbrella term to refer to things that happen between knowledge and action. It bridges, it's the thing that allows us to bridge knowledge and action.
00:05:51
Speaker
And the funny thing is that having worked on this for so long doesn't really help to define it better. But then a friend of mine and colleague just wrote this fantastic book, really on cognitive control. And it's for a lay audience or I should say an academic lay audience. So basically for students
00:06:18
Speaker
from any background, but with an interest, I suppose, in science. And he does such a fantastic job in 400 pages to really also basically reactivate in me why it is so cool to study cognitive control.
00:06:37
Speaker
And, um, and you're also asking about motivation, how it links to motivation. Yeah. Right. But first, what, what, what is that book? Because the reader, the listeners most likely. Yeah. So I, so I read it just before it's, um, so it's about to come out and it's called, uh, on task, basically how we, how we can stay on task and how we get things done. Yeah. That's the title.
00:07:01
Speaker
But it's a, it's a really, uh, sort of accessible book that's going to come out, I think in a few months. So it's not, it's not quite out yet. And the author is David, David Batter. Batter is B A D R E. Um, and he's a, he's a professor at, at Brown University in Princeton. But I was really, really so impressed.
00:07:26
Speaker
by that book and sort of contextualizing, putting it in the context of various other constructs of interest like motivation, like learning and episodic memory and future thinking and all those kinds of things that we might end up talking about today too.
00:07:48
Speaker
Oh, wow. This is, well, this would have been one of my last questions actually, but it's great that you bring that up. I'm sure there are some other books as well, but sorry for interrupting you. You wanted to also say how motivation links into cognitive control. Yeah. So given that when we talk about cognitive control, we talk about the processes that allow us to obtain our goals that already implies how important motivation is, right? How we kind of, what's the drive?
00:08:16
Speaker
What motivates us to obtain our goals?
Cognitive Control, Motivation, and Effort
00:08:20
Speaker
And so those two are really closely related and intertwined. And whereas, let's say, a few decades ago, most researchers of cognitive control would focus on the question, how do we implement it? How do we implement control? So how do we resist distraction? How do we maintain our goals?
00:08:45
Speaker
you know, our capacity to exert control. I would say in the last maybe five to seven years, people or five to eight years, people have started to shift their attention, not just to, uh, how do we exert control, but how do we motivate ourselves to exert control? How do we decide, how do we decide whether it's worth our effort to exert control? So it's really sort of shifted attention to, um,
00:09:16
Speaker
To the question of our willingness to exert control or decision making about whether or not to control because I think many failures many failures of control.
00:09:28
Speaker
arise, for example, in ADHD or in addiction, or they arise not just because we can't exert control, we cannot, but because we do not assign value to exerting control. That's a slightly different thing. And it's not laziness, but it's about this ability to make the decision to focus and resist distraction. Is it possible?
00:09:56
Speaker
Right. Is it possible to frame it as in so cognitive control is more as in how to, yeah, how to stay on task, how to allocate those resources and the motivation more like why do it in the first place? Yeah. So that's how I think about it. And the motivational aspect in that sense is really related to.
00:10:18
Speaker
what we sometimes refer as meta control. It's like the sort of the layer above the layer above exactly. It's like, how do we control whether to exert control? Yeah. Yeah.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. And how does, you know, my focus in my studies was always a bit more, you know, perception and motor control. And with the perception part, attention was also a big topic always. How is an attention a factor in cognitive control? How is that taken into account?
00:10:56
Speaker
are very much so. So the whole literature on cognitive controls, I would say intertwined with the literature on attention, selective attention, divided attention. In fact, many of our studies have addressed this kind of dilemma that we exert all the time between whether to focus or selectively attend to some
00:11:27
Speaker
sort of information and ignore other information versus the disability of divided attention to, you know, kind of broaden our attentional span or focus, widen our attentional focus. And there's this tension, right, between selective focus and divided attention. And how do we kind of balance those two aspects of attentional, I guess,
00:11:56
Speaker
cognitive control is really about controlling attention and memory. So they're very intertwined, all those concepts.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And when I was talking to Alan, Alan Senfi, this was also, I found that very interesting when he was talking about decision making, how basically the memory, attention and also that cognitive control played a huge role into what you are going to end up doing.
00:12:29
Speaker
and where in these processes things can, well, let me just say in air quotes, can go wrong, where you then on paper would make the decision that is not the best one, but it's not really your fault because the machinery is not set up to be 100% perfectly rational. It's just these heuristics being at play. And then depending on how you,
00:12:57
Speaker
or you as in how the situation is set up, either tweaking the attention bit or tweaking the memory bit, how that can, well, how they can manipulate the outcome of the decision. I thought this was very fascinating. And how cognitive control plays into this was, yeah, I think is super important because it's
00:13:21
Speaker
I mean, I think it's such an important part of our culture nowadays. And I think a lot of people might not even realize this, but
00:13:30
Speaker
What do you think? Do you think our culture puts maybe too much emphasis on the ability of perfect cognitive control? And what I mean is, I mean, you have all these self-help books that you can do it, slogans, and just work hard and it's going to be fine. You're in charge, it's your control, everything's under your control. Do you think that that goes together?
00:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'm, I'm not surprised there is that, that emphasis, uh, right now, because of course the amount of information. It's so huge, right? We're sort of overwhelmed by messages all the time from, I don't know how many apps, you know, I can't keep up with the app from my.
00:14:25
Speaker
from the schools of my kids, from the soccer club, then from my rowing society. It's not so surprising to me that we feel this urge to somehow control all this information and remain focused on the task, to be able to complete the task that we set ourselves to obtain our goals. And I think the ability to direct our behavior at our goals
00:14:53
Speaker
is really key for getting anything done. And I think this is what you're referring to. It's only one side of the coin. Clearly, if we focus on one particular task the whole time, that comes at a cost. And there's many aspects to that cost of cognitive control. So one of them is that it's
00:15:22
Speaker
intrinsically costly, it's effortful, so it's tiresome. And the other one is, and one other aspect is that it's opportunity costly. So if we, for example,
00:15:36
Speaker
continue to talk in this meeting for too long, then there's all kinds of missed opportunities, right? So we somehow have to strike a balance between continuing to focus on what we do now and to let go of that focus and flexibly switch or shift attention to things that at least we're not attending to right now that might turn out to be relevant in the future.
00:15:59
Speaker
And this is what people refer to as the opportunity costs of cognitive control. And the question is, how do we sort of set the threshold to shift attention away from focusing on the current task? And I think this dilemma between focus and flexibility
00:16:19
Speaker
or another way to really refer to the same thing between selective attention and divided attention. That's a sort of meta-control challenge that we've studied a lot in the lab that I'm really interested in. Because ultimately, I think adaptive, the ability to adapt our behavior, it doesn't depend only on our ability to focus and resist distraction, but also on letting go of that focus at the right time. If we don't let go and
00:16:49
Speaker
adapt flexibly, then we're going to be suffering from too much costs, opportunity costs. The cost is going to be too high. And yeah, I mean, we can speculate about what that will do to our state of mind, but unlikely to be very healthy. Right. And I mean, I find it very interesting that you mentioned opportunity cost because it's in a lot of
00:17:14
Speaker
computational models, this is also taken into account as a type of, and then you have the different discounting factors as in how much of time for the opportunity costs can you discount as in, and then there are the famous marshmallow experiments and all of those things where how long can you hold out to control yourself?
00:17:39
Speaker
And I find that quite interesting. And how are there specific mechanisms that in the brain already take care of this opportunity cost or they try to account for it? There are some ideas out there and one of them has to do with
00:18:07
Speaker
dopamine system.
Decision-Making and Rewards
00:18:09
Speaker
Dopamine, of course, has been implicated perhaps most clearly in reward function, reward anticipation, reward prediction. One way to conceptualize of the opportunity cost, to think of the opportunity cost is in terms of the number of rewards you might miss out on.
00:18:33
Speaker
So in some theories, indeed, computational theories, the opportunity cost is equal to the average reward rate of the environment. So the higher the reward value of all alternative possibilities, alternative to the action that you're engaged in right now, the higher the cost of continuing to focus on the current task. So the higher the reward value
00:19:03
Speaker
of all alternative tasks, the higher the cost, the opportunity cost, of the current task. Because the longer you focus on the current task, the more likely you are to miss out on obtaining reward for those other tasks. So you kind of have to make yourself do the, it's more like you have to force yourself to stay on that current task because there's so many potential other ones that could be more rewarding, is this roughly it?
00:19:33
Speaker
I think the challenge is to sort of weigh up the benefits of the current task against the benefits of alternative tasks. And what is the optimal choice? I think depends on the benefit of the current task. In relation to the benefits that you might achieve from shifting attention away from the current task to all possible
00:20:01
Speaker
alternative tasks to allow at least all other opportunity for engaging in other tasks. Yeah, that's interesting. So it's kind of you, I mean, it makes sense for this type of meta way of allocating those resources, you kind of have to know how much a different task would
00:20:28
Speaker
would get you as a reward into the system. That's interesting. And that's a computational challenge, right?
00:20:37
Speaker
So it's unlikely that we, our brain can compute the sort of exact reward value of all alternative tasks. Clearly that's kind of an untractable problem. Um, so one way that the brain might solve this is by, uh, instead of working with the exact precise reward value of
00:21:02
Speaker
alternative tasks is to just accumulate reward over time and compute some kind of average reward rate. Um, and, and, and, and compare the reward that you might get from your current action or your current task against sort of average reward that you've obtained in the past in this environment. Um, yeah. Right. And that's, that's where the memory comes in, right? Because I mean, you have to keep track of it.
00:21:29
Speaker
Yeah, but then memory is a complicated concept too, right? There's multiple types of memory, multiple systems of memory, where one of them is very explicit and declarative. And most people think of memory as this kind of thing where you, as episodic memory or maybe working memory, when you have to remember or retrieve a phone number or something, it's very constant, but there's also a type of procedural or non declarative memory, the kind of memory that we build when we're learning to ride a bike or the
00:21:59
Speaker
memory when we learned that whenever you enter the bathroom, you raise your right hand in order to turn on the light. That kind of memory is like habit memory. And so the question is, and then there's yet a third form of memory that's like maybe Pavlovian memory, where
00:22:19
Speaker
we've learned over the course, probably of generations, over the course of evolution, that when you anticipate to get a reward, it's adaptive to make an approach response. That's also a form of memory. It's just sort of innately pre-programmed memory. And the question is whether that average reward rate accumulation that we were just referring to,
00:22:42
Speaker
that might correspond to an opportunity cost. Which type of memory that impacts? Does that require a kind of declarative memory or working memory that we use when we remember a phone number? Or is it the kind of memory that we build when we, similar to the one that we build when we learn how to ride a bike or press the right button when you enter your bathroom? Or is it akin to the kind of memory
00:23:10
Speaker
That's more Pavlovian. That's kind of more, yeah, automatic. I'm not really allowed to say that, but it's more automatic. Yeah. Right. Right. But just my gut feeling would say that it would make sense that it's depending on the task or the situation that it's all of them. Right. If you, if you make, if you want to decide between something very, let's say abstract as in, do I want to, um,
00:23:39
Speaker
write on my book or do I want to be interviewed for a podcast? That's then a very high level. Or if I want to, I don't know, decide between a chocolate bar and some gummy bears, that can be some very, very sensory, very low level. Yeah. All of them play a role in our decisions. All of them. And they interact and they trade off and they also work together sometimes so they can
00:24:09
Speaker
work synergistically to promote behavior or promote a decision when the two, the three systems are in line, for example. So when the current context requires that you make a decision in order to maximize reward, then the sort of innately pre-programmed Pavlovian system is congruent, is going to tell you to do the same thing.
00:24:33
Speaker
So I already have to apologize in advance. I might be jumping around between questions because everything you say, I immediately get an idea of what needs to ask. So you talked about the modeling before, and now you gave some examples of how these cognitive models, let's say, can be used to understand mechanisms in the brain, predict behavior,
00:25:00
Speaker
Um, but, uh, it's been quite some time ago. I still remember I was in the car and I turned on the radio and you were interviewed on the radio at that moment. It was, it was, I was, I was, I couldn't believe it at that moment. It was just complete chance. And you were, and you, you just, uh, started your, um, a professor position in, uh, um, I think I hope I still get this right. New psychiatry.
00:25:26
Speaker
Yeah, the chair is called cognitive neuropsychiatry. Cognitive neuropsychiatry, exactly. And what I thought was very interesting is how you were talking about these cognitive models and how trying to use that approach can help with
Challenges in Psychiatric Treatments
00:25:45
Speaker
with the DSM and how that relates. And just to, I wrote this down, I always forget. So the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. So now all the listeners also know what that stands for. And why I thought that was so interesting was
00:26:06
Speaker
When I heard about the DSM for the first time, and also, of course, that it goes through multiple iterations, it's, and please correct me if I get this wrong, I'm not a psychiatrist, it's kind of like a list of symptoms which then help you to categorize the mental disorder, but that still is very dependent on the doctor, the psychiatrist, making the assessment.
00:26:34
Speaker
And I thought what's very interesting is how you explain how these cognitive models can help with the diagnosis in a, well, let me say, a bit more number driven way. Quantitative. Quantitative way, yes. Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:55
Speaker
So first I should say, but maybe you finish your question. No, no, this is, it's not really a question. Do I remember this correctly? And this has been quite some time ago, so I have no idea how the field has developed since then. No, I think so. So first I should say I am not a psychiatrist, right? I'm a neuroscientist, cognitive neuroscientist, but I study mechanisms that might inform
00:27:21
Speaker
our understanding of psychiatric problems. What I was referring to when I was referring to the DSM, it's the handbook that's used to indeed classify people, helping them, helping clinicians to make a diagnosis and make predictions.
00:27:47
Speaker
prognosis and that in turn guides treatment. The problem that I guess the problem that I must have highlights is in that interview and that exists. It's a major problem in psychiatry and also neurology actually.
00:28:08
Speaker
is that there's huge variability in, in the effect, the efficacy, the effects of treatment. So this is true in psychiatry, but not, but also in neurology. So for example, in Parkinson's disease, um, which gets treated with dopaminergic drugs like L-dopa and dopamine receptor agonists. Uh, they, they work actually quite well for some motor symptoms, but the effects on cognitive function are very variable. So some people.
00:28:37
Speaker
will respond well and the drugs will, for example, increase cognitive flexibility. So it will remediate some of the mental rigidity that people with Parkinson's disease can exhibit. But that same medication, but first of all, it doesn't do that in all people. So there's variability between individuals. But there's also variability between different behaviors. So that same medication that can remedy
00:29:07
Speaker
this mental rigidity and motor rigidity that can actually contribute to some psychiatric problems in PD in Parkinson's disease like addiction to the medication or gambling. So people might develop hyper gambling, even they might develop sort of pathological gambling, they might
00:29:29
Speaker
develop this, what people call punting, this sort of stereotypical hobby, this form of compulsive behavior, hypersexuality. So that's a really sort of salient example of side effects of medication that is needed to treat some other symptoms. And this is very clear in the context of Parkinson's disease, but we see the same thing in ADHD, schizophrenia,
00:29:58
Speaker
huge and depression, of course, antidepressants. They work in some people, they definitely work in some people, but they also do not work at all and can have side effects, serious side effects. So that's the major problem that not just we, but many people try and address. And the observation is that the DSM doesn't really help. So in the sense that you might get a diagnosis of depression,
00:30:23
Speaker
And I think many psychiatrists will probably agree that a particular person will suffer from depression. Um, so exhibit a particular combination of symptoms and that's helpful. I mean, you need that kind of handbook and classification for clinical purposes, also for insurance purposes and, uh, and, and to have some kind of guidance of, of treatment, but it's just not predictive. It doesn't predict whether a treatment will work. And I've talked about.
00:30:52
Speaker
pharmacological treatment, but the same thing holds for cognitive treatments, behavioral cognitive behavioral therapy or other types of therapy. So that's the challenge that this field of, I guess, computational psychiatry or cognitive psychiatry is hoping to address by beginning to identify what cognitive and neural brain mechanisms
00:31:21
Speaker
might predict drug efficacy. So that's kind of over and above the diagnosis or irrespective of the diagnosis, which kind of behavioral or neural aspects do predict whether someone will benefit or not from a drug.
00:31:37
Speaker
Um, and so we can begin with simple tests, computer tests and identify some car. Yeah. Quantify some kind of behavior like working memory or even I blink rate, you know, I blink rate is, uh, seems to be predictive of, of dopamine in the brain. Yeah. And we see what we see is that the amount of dopamine in the brain we can measure with pet predicts how, how, how effective a dopamine drug is.
00:32:08
Speaker
So, for the kind of anti-Parkinson drugs like bromocryptine or primipexyl, or there's all kinds of, or kuberkoline, these are drugs that increase dopamine receptor stimulation. Sorry, that's a whole mouthful, but the kind of drugs that help Parkinson, they increase this brain-substanced dopamine.
00:32:31
Speaker
But what we see is that that drug works better in people with low levels of dopamine than in people with already optimized high levels of dopamine. And so what is currently being thought is that
00:32:48
Speaker
we might be able to predict whether someone will benefit from a dopamine treatment if we know exactly how their dopamine system works at baseline before the drug. So you can dose appropriately if it's going to do anything at all. Yeah. And so we see that now across the group. So we see across the group a correlation between how much dopamine someone has in their brain and how effective these drugs are.
00:33:15
Speaker
But the next challenge clearly is whether we can do this on an individual basis. And we're not there yet. So I just want to make that warning right away. We're not there yet. But there does seem to be this link between how much dopamine you have in your brain and how much effective experience of a drug. Now, your question was about cognitive models and computational models.
00:33:47
Speaker
What we think is that this kind of dopamine can be approximated by, I would say, behavioral cognitive predictors. So we can measure using, for example, reward learning tasks or motivational tasks. That's a challenge, at least, of our current program to see whether we can use or exploit or leverage those cognitive models
00:34:15
Speaker
to get a proxy of how much dopamine is in the brain so that we can ultimately predict a drug efficacy or treatment efficacy. Yeah. That's sort of the ultimate ambition of this program. Yeah. So it's almost like you first get the diagnosis using the DSM and then to get the treatment right, you would try to have a specific battery of tasks or let's say experiments ready to then see whether
00:34:46
Speaker
with a worked out cognitive model how that applies to this one patient and then kind of adjust accordingly. Because as you said, for some people the dopamine treatment works, for some it doesn't. And this way you can already tell, okay, there is a very high likelihood that additional dopamine is not going to do anything for this patient. We should go...
00:35:10
Speaker
Route B and not route A. Yeah. And the obvious question you might ask is why not just measure dopamine directly in the brain? And the answer to that is that's invasive. So a PET scan is required, which requires injection of a radioactive drug. And it's also very expensive, I mean. So there will never be a clinical application of PET to predict drug effects. So what we want is to build a sort of proxy model consisting of behavioral, cognitive, maybe physiological, eyeblink rate predictors.
00:35:40
Speaker
and then use machine learning to see how we can optimally combine these various kind of pragmatic variables to account for as much of the variability in drug efficacy as possible. And so we're in the midst of this, right? So right now we've sort of scanned with PET 100 volunteers and obtained every possible proxy measure you can think of, of dopamine.
00:36:06
Speaker
And we're sort of in the process of now combining them to see, yeah, to work towards that proxy model. And these proxy measures include, I blink rate, how often you blink your eyes. Also trait impulsivity, so personality measures. The sample is too small to really say something about genetics. So of course we can get DNA, but I think those contributions are going to be really small.
00:36:36
Speaker
working memory capacity, the ability to learn from reward, how sensitive you report yourself to be to reward for this punishment, but also how you behave on a smartphone. So what we also see is, this was actually done by a postdoc in my group, Andrew Westbrook, who's currently at Brown also,
00:37:01
Speaker
But from the people who underwent this dopamine PET scan, he also collected smartphone use for a few weeks and he was able to show a very reliable link between dopamine in the brain and how many times they clicked social apps on their smartphone. Oh, wow. Yeah. So, and there's a really striking association. Of course, this needs replication and reproducing, but it suggests that that contributes to
00:37:30
Speaker
you know, that we can get a handle of how efficient the dopamine system is by getting those more pragmatic measures from behavior. Yeah, exactly. Because I can imagine, you know, health insurance is sure they want to help people with their treatment, but they also want to be cost effective. And PET scans are insanely expensive.
00:37:56
Speaker
And to make that part of the treatment, I don't see it as feasible as something they would agree to. No, exactly. And also, I mean, you wouldn't want to undergo it because of the radioactive load, right? That's also right. Yeah. One PET scan is, I think, it's totally safe. There's very little risk to it, but still, I think people would.
00:38:21
Speaker
prefer to not have to undergo it. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing to, at least to me, this is just a personal perception. It's one thing to get an x-ray, but another thing to be told, we're going to inject you now with a radioactive substance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd rather have the x-ray. Yeah, yeah. So this holds not just for people.
00:38:51
Speaker
I guess, so the study we're doing now, many of the studies we're doing now focus on very commonly used dopaminergic drugs like methylphenidate and Ritalin, right, for ADHD. But the same principle that we just discussed holds, of course, for depression and antidepressant. So it's very unclear which person would benefit from, let's say, a dopaminergic antidepressant or a serotonergic. And there's many different
00:39:21
Speaker
many different types of antidepressants, I guess, similar to the fact that there's many different types of antibiotics. And the problem is that with antidepressants, you only know whether they work after a few weeks. So you first have to sort of try them for a month and then only conclude based on subjective sort of ratings, does it work or not? It'd be nice if we can quantify that and provide a bit more guidance early on.
00:39:50
Speaker
We all know how introspection is not the most reliable variable you can measure. It's good to feel better, sure, but it's hard to also see a progression if things get better. Yeah. Although I have to say one thing.
00:40:10
Speaker
There is that of course this is though the subjective thing that is hard to measure is the thing that people go to the psychiatrist for. So the quantitation of the problem is not the aim in itself. Cannot be the aim in itself because the aim ultimately of psychiatry is to help people feel better. And that I think is the ultimate sort of problem of neuroscience or the challenge.
00:40:40
Speaker
frame and more positively of neuroscience to somehow help us understand the basis and the factors that contribute to this subjective experience.
00:40:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And so just to make a link to something I hear often, and I think this is, well, actually, before I say it, I'm curious on your take on it. So I often hear that, you know, curiosity-driven science is useless. It gets very harsh, I mean, and nowadays media.
00:41:14
Speaker
environment you hear most of the time, the extremes and nuances out the window. So I often hear curiosity-driven science is useless. We need application, we need application, we need application.
Curiosity-Driven Science vs. Application Focus
00:41:28
Speaker
And do you think, because the field of computational psychiatry is, in my mind, brand new. And do you think this is an example of why curiosity-driven science is actually not useless?
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah, so you're saying quite a lot. I think it's true that there's a bit of shift of attention, I think, with people in general wanting to see kind of justification of basic science. I do think
00:42:12
Speaker
There is some nuance out there. So more and more people, also politicians are recognizing that the knowledge base is kind of key for any societal impact on the long term. So that we should make sure that also curiosity driven signs, basic signs, fundamental signs is funded sufficiently. So, um,
00:42:43
Speaker
So yeah, I think it's a little bit more nuanced. I think computational psychiatry is a sort of nice in-between example, because on the one hand, there is theoretically a promise of computational psychiatry to have impact on people's mental health. But I think we have to be really careful. Like the example I just gave of a proxy model
00:43:14
Speaker
ultimately predicting drug efficacy. Before we can apply that and actually use it in the clinic, we're going to be many, many years ahead. I don't think it's realistic that we're going to apply this within the next five years. And that is because
00:43:38
Speaker
because the problems people suffer from and because they are so multidimensional, they're so extremely complex. So maybe I can get a proxy model of dopamine, but that's not going to solve the subjective problem. Right. So we're and it's a huge problem, right? This relationship between the mind and the brain. So and I think most people in this budding field of computational psychiatry really are driven
00:44:07
Speaker
most researchers are driven to understand the mechanisms of psychiatric disorders, psychiatric abnormalities and their treatment. And so they're trying to decompose this subjective experience into things that we can quantify with an ultimate aim to maybe advance mental health, but not in the direct, like we can't really promise anyone that we're gonna have some
00:44:36
Speaker
uh, delivery within the next three years, I think, I think that's not realistic. So for the actual practitioner, I mean, right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's so complex. So yeah, exactly. I mean, it is very complex and, uh, it's not like you just develop some software that someone can use. This is really, this, this has, this is impacting people health and there should be very, and there are very stringent rules on, on, uh,
00:45:04
Speaker
What is allowed, what is not allowed, and the battery of tests that have to be done with any type of treatment have to be checked first before it just gets pushed out as something new and, oh, this works just fine. Exactly. So if your serious clinical trialing has to be done, then we have to be careful also for the sort of abuse of these.
00:45:30
Speaker
right? Because you don't want any sort of company or whatever practitioner or anyone to go, well, let me just measure your smartphone use for the next three weeks and then I'll sort of
00:45:45
Speaker
demonstrate that you will benefit from a cognitive enhancing drug. And so it's easy to also come up with a number of ethical challenges there. So we have to be quite careful to implement this prematurely. Right, right. So you would say that, sure, the applied science is important, but curiosity driven,
00:46:11
Speaker
comes first because it's, if you, if you think, well, I'm wondering if that is how you see it because it's, if you always think of the application at first, I don't know if that would, if that would limit the exploration.
00:46:28
Speaker
if it would always go that direction, it would limit exploration. But I'm very much in favor of this sort of dual route. So I don't think the great innovations of today all follow a linear model where you start with fundamental science and then we sort of the applications sort of magically appear. I do think it's a sort of two-way interaction. Yeah.
00:46:50
Speaker
And, you know, you see a lot of emphasis on co-creation these days, and I think that's very valuable. But I do think there's also value in pure fundamental science, so just a path, sort of a path of a trajectory of science that's not taking into account possible applications.
00:47:16
Speaker
But I don't think all innovations have to start with a fundamental science for sure. I think there's many, many examples of where, you know, discovery is, is driven by the market or, you know, the applicable problem first and then the research is done. Yeah. And it can be an economic one, uh, or, or, or a societal problem. Um,
00:47:48
Speaker
You mentioned that you wouldn't want companies to use this type of proxy already to get your dopamine level out to then maybe recommend you the right dosage of Ritalin, let's say, to have more cognitive control. I'm curious what you think about, and you mentioned social media directly.
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah. Right. And you mentioned
00:48:18
Speaker
Wouldn't you say that is already happening, even though they might not directly measure your dopamine levels, but they, I mean, they're hijacking our cognitive control. Aren't they? I mean, the more, the more you, I see lots of people going to the office and they have social media open all the time. Yeah. And then there's a ding and another ding and it drives me crazy, but.
00:48:48
Speaker
Yeah, they get their, I mean, maybe this is abuse a little bit, but they get their reward hit. And don't you think those companies are already making use of these types of ways to, of, well, of let's say mechanisms of cognitive control and using that against people having cognitive control? Let me think, try and understand what you're saying. So, um,
00:49:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's not just companies, right? It's our educational system. It's your neighbor. We leverage the reward system and rewards, whether they're social media or drugs or money or whatever short term, they can hijack the cognitive control system. Yes.
00:49:47
Speaker
Uh, I guess the point we were making earlier is that this is not, we have to be a bit nuanced about this because it's not always a bad thing. So for example, imagine you're waiting for a train and, um, Waiting or focus, or it's not always a good thing, right? Because if the train hasn't arrived in five minutes and then it hasn't arrived in 10 minutes and then it hasn't arrived in 15 minutes at some point, you need to give up control. So that's one example of sort of how, where control is not adaptive or.
00:50:17
Speaker
If you send me an email and I haven't replied in the same day and then I haven't replied the next day and then I haven't replied the day after that, actually the longer I haven't replied, the more likely is that I won't reply at all.
00:50:31
Speaker
So waiting for my email is not really adaptive. So in this, the sort of the narrow definition of control as waiting and resisting distraction, resisting giving up persistence is not always the best thing. And that's exemplified by these train and waiting for email examples.
00:50:51
Speaker
Similarly, there's a question of in our world where things change so fast, there's so much information, but that information flow is fast and also reflects the increase in the changeability of the world. I mean, it's a sort of vicious circle, of course, because of the information things change. But because the world is changing faster,
00:51:22
Speaker
might well be the case that is actually more adaptive to be a little bit less focused than we used to be 50 years ago. So that it's adaptive in order to adapt flexibly to those fast changes that we do process a little more information in unpredictable messages. So we have to, I think, be nuanced about this and
00:51:45
Speaker
And clearly in order to get anything done, we need to resist and pre-commit and just turn off our social media. But whether they are sort of bad in principle and whether the tendency to provide information, it's not in principle a bad thing, of course.
00:52:13
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say, oh, all social media is bad because I don't think that's the case. It also provides contact points for a lot of people that are just using these platforms as a means of communication and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.
00:52:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's just sometimes, you know, I see they make use of certain principles. For example, where they take into account certain delays and they know how that is going to impact your behavior. They use noise for the unpredictability to make sure you don't, you're dopamine. Well, let's just say dopamine now.
00:53:03
Speaker
your reward response does not habituate to the exact timing. You know, it's similar to how, in some ways, slot machines are designed. Yeah, and video games, like these never-ending video games, or of course, also...
Cognitive Control in Video Games
00:53:21
Speaker
building on this this tendency to seek and to persist seeking and seeking reward and and and they also but but I think video games are another really interesting example where they are very interesting trigger trigger nuance because because the best video games are those that
00:53:43
Speaker
maximize our sense of progress. They don't necessarily maximize our sensitivity to reward or to don't maximize because if we, we're not just driven by, by maximizing reward, right? If we were driven by maximizing reward, we would be most motivated by the tasks that are easiest because we get reward all the time, but we're not. We get really bored. If we, if we respond, if we, you know, at the lowest level of the video game, it's not interesting to get a reward and get points when we can do it.
00:54:13
Speaker
We're most motivated when we make progress, when we change our ability. And I think that's a really interesting sort of domain, actually. And curiosity itself is also a function of that progress, learning progress. And in that sense... And you have to allow for the curiosity as well, right? It's because if you have too much cognitive control, there is no curiosity.
00:54:41
Speaker
Or am I mixing two things up? Focus. Yes, I don't know yet. I think curiosity requires kind of a dynamic balance between focus and flexibility. But yeah, maybe that's an orthogonal issue, an independent issue. But I guess you're right that, for example, these video games are hijacking the motivational system.
00:55:05
Speaker
in quite an adaptive way. Yes. And that I find, I mean, I really like video games, but I have stayed away from them on purpose because I know as soon as I start, I will have a very hard time to stop. And I mean, the PhD didn't finish itself. And that's why I didn't install any of them on my computer because they are so good. They are so good.
00:55:33
Speaker
And by now, the expansion and the development of technology is insane. And also when it comes to the game industry, it's expanding to an insane degree.
00:55:51
Speaker
Yeah. But you're right. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing because we do hear a lot from using those principles from game design into other ways of
00:56:07
Speaker
you know, maybe making learning and education more attractive. And then you have like these serious games that are being investigated now also by universities looking into this thing. Can we maybe make use of this? It's not all bad. No, definitely not. No, no, no, no. So what we learn about cognitive control and motivation and dopamine system, I think, yeah, can certainly be used
00:56:35
Speaker
both in the clinic in psychiatry, maybe on the longer term, but also in AI and the game industry. But in all cases, we have to be aware of the
00:56:49
Speaker
public values, I guess, to say it in the general sort of the ethics of it. Yes. I mean, there also needs to be a meta level of how we need to reassess these things. One thing is the application and then it needs to be, how are we going to make use of it? Or how is it being abused? Yeah. And how can it be regulated?
00:57:14
Speaker
What kind of rules do we need? I'm curious if that is going to happen. If it's some type of rules for, I don't know, um, methods of cognitive control hijacking or curious how that would happen.
00:57:29
Speaker
You know, there's this institute, the Rathenau Institute in Netherlands, and I think all countries have an institute like that. In this case, it's a research institute. Well, it's also doing research, but it's an institute with the mission of the institute is to stimulate.
00:57:46
Speaker
public and political opinion on science, technology and innovation. And it's focused on exactly this, also on advising the government and the public on issues of regulating what comes out of science and technology innovation. So I was on the board for that until very recently. It was a very fascinating kind of domain that
00:58:15
Speaker
we don't often think about understanding the brain and the consequences of that for many different sectors.
00:58:24
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I mean, in all honesty, I would have never thought of these things because you're just so focused on trying to understand the mechanisms. And then you're so excited of, oh, I found another piece of the puzzle. Of course, plenty more questions popped up. But then, yeah, you move on to the next one. And then all of a sudden you hear somebody saying, oh, somebody is thinking of using this for X and Y. I'm like, oh, I didn't think of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:58:54
Speaker
And I think that is our task, right? To also share the nuance, the complexity of it all. Yeah, share the enthusiasm, but also the complexity.
00:59:04
Speaker
Yes, exactly. I have a question that I wanted to ask for a while. And actually, I get asked this a lot. And it's about, and as you mentioned, dopamine, you mentioned Ritalin and also ADHD, I get asked about brain doping all the time. And I mean, people ask me, well, when do you think this will become the new normal?
00:59:34
Speaker
And I already tried to tell him, like, we consume an insane amount of coffee. Doesn't count this already as doping? Because it's a drug. And I'm wondering, you know, what of all of these cognitive enhancers?
00:59:56
Speaker
is hype and what is actually real when it comes to their levels of enhancement. And you mentioned already that the levels of dopamine, and it also varies there a lot.
01:00:10
Speaker
I hear some people, my first experience actually with these things was, I never heard of these before until I was in the United States on campus and they were talking about Adderall all the time. And I was like, what's Adderall? And they told me that, oh, it makes you very focused. And I was already skeptical. I'm like, what do you mean this makes you very focused?
01:00:31
Speaker
And then some people said, oh, this looks great. Some people said, this doesn't do anything. And that's then the Metal Fenedate component that you mentioned. And Ritalin is the more popular version. Yeah, well, Edroll is.
01:00:46
Speaker
Works actually quite similar as atomoxetine. The way it works in the brain is quite similar, but Adderall or atomoxetine blocks primarily the noradrenaline reuptake, although it also has effects on dopamine in the cortex. And methylphenidate blocks primarily the dopamine transporter, but also has effects on noradrenaline. So actually, their effects are quite similar, apart from one thing. So methylphenidate also acts on striatal dopamine, the reward system.
01:01:16
Speaker
And Adderall has less of an effect on straddle though. But both act in the cortex to enhance focus. This is true. This is true. But the degree to which it does this varies between individuals and depends on how much dopamine you have in the system. But it also very much depends on what task you want to complete. So we've seen, for example, Sean Fellin, he was supposed to talk in my lab, he now is in the UK, but
01:01:44
Speaker
He did maybe, you know, I remember him. I remember him. Yeah. Yeah. Very funny. Actually, it was great to have him around, but he did this study with Ritalin with methylphenidate and showing that it, um, in, in this particular sample of subjects, it indeed enhanced focus, but it impaired flexibility. So he basically compared performance on two very similar working memory tasks. And in one task, um, people had to memorize some pictures and then they had to
01:02:14
Speaker
You know, these disappeared from the screen, so they had to keep them in their memory. And then some sort of distractors were presented, and these distractors, they had to ignore them. And then at the end of the trial, another picture was presented, and they had to indicate for that picture whether that was one of the stimuli they had to remember originally. One of the pictures they had to remember originally.
01:02:35
Speaker
And what we find is that Ritalin really helps people just resist the distractor in the middle. So they do not get distracted. They get less distracted than people on placebo without Ritalin. But when he does, he did almost exactly the same task, but now the distractor was actually relevant. So they had to replace the original pictures with these new pictures. So now they had to flexibly switch, update their working memory.
01:03:03
Speaker
with these new pictures. And now Ritalin impaired performance, because they couldn't, they were just too focused. Their sort of memory representations were inflexible. They were too focused. So these are two sides of the same coin, right? And Ritalin, in his hands, really biased the system towards more focus, less flexibility. So the take-home of this is that drugs like methylphenidate, they can help when you need to pay attention in class.
01:03:33
Speaker
And you need to, you know, finish reading this book or study for your exam. But if you need to sort of be able to respond and switch flexibly, for example, on outside of school or when interacting with people or being socially adaptive or something, then it might not work. So it really depends on what you.
01:03:54
Speaker
what you need to do, whether it helps or not. But I would say in a considerable proportion of people, it does help. We can show it helps. It helps to focus and it helps concentration.
Focus vs. Flexibility: The Case of Ritalin
01:04:11
Speaker
But not in other, not in everyone. Yeah, I guess the open question is whether
01:04:24
Speaker
And that's something we're addressing now is whether these drugs also help metacontrol. Remember in the beginning of our conversation, we were talking about metacontrol and our ability to sort of adapt our cognitive system to the demands of the task. So be focused when we need to focus and be flexible when we need to be flexible. Clearly this switches. Sometimes the world is really changeable. We need to be flexible. Sometimes the world requires us to finish our PhD.
01:04:51
Speaker
right to not be folk flexible messages all the time and we need to switch between the states we need to sometimes choose to be the one and the other and the question we're trying to address now is whether drugs like methylphenidate help with that method control whether they help us adapt to the changes in the environment and that's I don't know yet I think probably
01:05:17
Speaker
It might, but we'll see. And I think that is the key question, right? That is, in the end, what we need to do is identify what the world requires of us and then behave accordingly. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's super interesting. Yeah. What people told me back then in the States when they were using Adderall for their focus, they already told me how they are going about it. And they said, yeah, I locked myself in my room. I tried to turn all other
01:05:46
Speaker
apps off, my phone is off, because they explain it does help you with focus, but if your focus shifts onto something else, which can happen, they mentioned, then you will be focused on that. And if that thing is not your studies, then, well, you're in a rabbit hole for eight hours straight, which I thought was quite funny.
01:06:10
Speaker
It is really interesting, and I think it's going to be interesting to see whether these different drugs, like Adderall or Ritalin, behave differently in this sense. So maybe Adderall, which works mainly in the cortex on norogenin, might really potentiate focus at the expense of flexibility.
01:06:28
Speaker
But maybe methylphenidate, because it acts on this tridyl dopamine reward system, which is sensitive to what is the most relevant strategy, maybe that will help to adapt to optimize meta control. So be focused when you need to be focused, but flexible when you need to be flexible. But we'll see. That's a hypothesis. Yeah. Oh, that's super interesting. I'm already looking forward to our next conversation when you can tell us some more about that.
01:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, well, that'll take a few years, I'm afraid. Well, we can have more until then. I have a few more questions for you, but these are more from people that work in the industry that I often get asked from about neuroscience and those things. But you're clearly the cognitive control expert, so I just pass these questions along now to you.
UX Design and Cognitive Effort
01:07:20
Speaker
So one thing that happens in
01:07:24
Speaker
to people that I often interact now are often designers, user experience designers, user interface designers. And one thing that they always say is that the experience needs to be very good. And you have these user experience books and guides out there that say things like, don't make me think. And you often hear this about Apple's software being very intuitive.
01:07:54
Speaker
How does that play together with cognitive control? Does that kind of really mean there is no cognitive control necessary in those moments? If the user interface is done so well? Or has nothing to do with each other?
01:08:15
Speaker
Let's see, because in these examples that you give or that are given to you, this concerns applications that require people to give me an example. For example, they want to make use of, let's say, a website. There's a web interface and they have to set something up, maybe use this tool to
01:08:40
Speaker
I don't know, do their video processing or things like this. And a lot of companies put a lot of emphasis on trying to make these tools as, of course, usable, but also not only visually appealing because you have these two extremes. One, you have the insanely technical part where it doesn't matter where the buttons are. You should be happy that they are somewhere. And they're the ones that think about
01:09:07
Speaker
It needs to look beautiful, but then they forget about this also needs to serve a function, a purpose. And what you often hear is how things should be made so people, the users don't have to think through it. They don't have to search things. They are like taken by the hand, but not being told, but by how it is set up.
01:09:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So I think it does relate a little bit to cognitive control and in particular the cost of cognitive control, which is effort, right? A sense of effort. So what we see is that on average people avoid demand. They avoid mental demand. So, so I think for for companies that want their websites or apps to be used, they want to keep their user
01:10:05
Speaker
engaged and they want to prevent them from disengaging, get disengaged on the website. You know, if, if the user has to sort of engage in reading a set of instructions or, you know, trial error, find out what's the, what's the way to get to their goal, then they might long have sort of been distracted by a message from their soccer app or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So, so minimizing cognitive effort. I recognize that and it works.
01:10:33
Speaker
Yeah. Excuse me. Although, of course, there are going to be users who try and, what's the word, make a hobby of understanding websites and then they will be motivated by experiencing progress in understanding the websites. But I think most people are not really driven to
01:11:02
Speaker
I also don't think so. Unrevil how websites work. No, I don't think so. Yeah, I agree with you. And so if there is a cognitive control element to it, is there maybe an easy way how designers can test for that rather than just it's being used and it's being not used?
01:11:22
Speaker
Is there a potential way of a type of measure of our proxy that helps them identify, okay, I'm asking for too much right now from the user? Could they use iBlinks?
01:11:43
Speaker
Uh, yeah. So what you're asking really is, is there a proxy of engagement, uh, and arousal and I think engagement. And, uh, so that's a really good question. I think when we talk about engagement, so, so we've talked mostly about dopamine, but, but I think there's multiple components to multiple neurochemical systems that contribute. And I think noradrenaline, the ingredient of Adderall really.
01:12:12
Speaker
is also very important. And it's noradrenaline that's most commonly associated with task engagement in the sense that's relevant here. So a common proxy of noradrenaline function is not so much I-blink rate, but rather pupil size. So I think pupil size would be an interesting proxy to consider there where the larger the pupil response
01:12:41
Speaker
had a sustained pupil response, the greater the task engagement. And it's funny, actually, because we're just in the middle of analyzing a data set where we're trying to disentangle two hypotheses of the pupil size. One is that it's greater with greater engagement. And I think that's a really
01:13:07
Speaker
salient hypothesis. Many people believe that. And the other is that it rather predicts error likelihood, how good you will be in a task, predicting sort of reward versus error likelihood, I guess. So it's funny because we're in the middle of doing that study right now.
01:13:29
Speaker
But anyway, I think for answering your question, I think pupil size would be the primary candidate for assessing arousal engagement. But it's still interesting that you mentioned that study. When you know what the result will be or have some type of an indicator,
01:13:51
Speaker
I know a lot of people that would like to know about it because I can also pass this on. Something else that I often also get asked is in
01:14:05
Speaker
How can people improve their cognitive control if they don't want to take any drugs or have access to them?
Enhancing Cognitive Control Without Drugs
01:14:15
Speaker
Is there maybe an air quotes again, normal way that they can do this? A non-chemical way? A non-chemical way, yeah.
01:14:27
Speaker
Well, okay, so there's two answers. Yeah, this also ties in with, I guess, trying to get rid of bad habits that I also often get asked about because I think, okay, I just have to brute force my way into stopping doing this and then it's going to be fine, but that's not what's happening, right?
01:14:51
Speaker
Um, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's a complicated question, you know, but there's multiple answers. And one is that people, there's a whole literature on cognitive training. So where people have attempted to, or have assessed the, the, the degree to which, for example, training and working memory tasks for a task for many weeks.
01:15:16
Speaker
transfers to other performance on other tasks? Because that's the key question, right? Many people have shown that if you train on a working memory task for many weeks, then of course, after like 10 weeks of training, you're performed better on that specific working memory task. That's not so interesting. What's interesting is to see whether that sort of training will transfer or generalize to other tasks and real life, preferably.
01:15:44
Speaker
There's little evidence for that, I should say. And that's possibly because the right parameters of the training have not been identified yet. That's one answer. I do believe that it must be possible to expose people to controllable situations.
01:16:08
Speaker
in order to bias them towards exerting control at the right moment. But this is a hypothesis, so it's not been tested. There's not much empirical evidence for it that way around. There is empirical evidence for this phenomenon of learned helplessness that if people have been exposed in the past to uncontrollable situations, so situations where they were not able to exert control,
01:16:35
Speaker
Then this generalizes and people fail to act, fail to exert control in situations where they can. This is a typical symptom of depression, learned helplessness. So given that we know that uncontrollable behavior, sort of giving up in an uncontrollable situation transfers to controllable situation, I think we must be able to do the other way around. Expose people to controllable environments,
01:17:05
Speaker
in order to motivate them to exert control, self-control in situations that are controllable. Do you see what I mean? I see what you mean. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's a bit of a theoretical point and I think it hasn't been definitely not tested in a clinical trial situation or, uh, but I, I'd be really keen to, to look at that. And I think here yet another neuro modulator plays a role namely serotonin. Yeah.
01:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, but, yeah. No, this would, I mean, I can see how, and you're right, self-learn, not self-helplessness, learn helplessness is really, it's a big part, it's a big part of depression and it unfortunately generalizes.
01:17:55
Speaker
way too well. And I agree. I mean, if it goes from one side of a situation that feels you have no impact on it to then that feeling into even situations where you can have an impact, but you think it just makes no difference, the other way around, there should also be something. It can't just be a one-way street.
01:18:25
Speaker
So I'd be very curious how that would be possible. I mean, I hear and now you have all the hype with the meditation apps and meditation in general, where I hear people also say this helps them with exerting more cognitive control when it matters because they, I mean, there are different types of meditation.
01:18:46
Speaker
techniques, certainly, but the mindfulness meditation, for example, I hear often people saying, mentioning the experience of because when their mind starts to wander and they notice, the goal is to just bring it back. Not to be upset that the mind started to wander, but just to bring it back, and that is the practice.
01:19:13
Speaker
And they seem to benefit from that. Having a clinical trial for this would be very interesting. So Esther Artes, when she's independent, she's a colleague here at the DCCN, but maybe you know her. Yeah, I talked to her last week.
01:19:31
Speaker
Oh, you did? Oh, good. Yeah, okay. Well, well, she's done this, this really well controlled mindfulness work. Okay. And unlike many other studies, she looked at the effects of mindfulness training in the context of a study where she also had a control training. So people were so the effect that she found cannot be accounted for, for example, by increased attention or increased expectation because people
01:19:57
Speaker
because of this really good control condition. And so she did find some interesting effects, suggesting that mindfulness training can
01:20:08
Speaker
potentiate control. She didn't talk about that. Well, we talked about something else last week. It was the EMCABE Cafe, which happened last week. But I still wanted to talk to her also about this work that she has been doing. Yeah. And that was mindfulness in the context of food intake control.
01:20:28
Speaker
All right. So cognitive control applied to food, and this was together with Lenica, actually. So Lenica Jansi, you just mentioned before the interview that you know her. She was a PhD student at the time working with Esther, and I was sort of peripherally involved. It was really Esther's Feini project at the time. Well, I'm looking forward to hopefully having her on the podcast as well.
01:20:53
Speaker
Yeah, you should. She's great. Yes. No, I'm very curious to learn more about that. Which pressing questions in your field from your perspective do you think still need to be investigated?
Meta-Control Research and Conclusion
01:21:08
Speaker
And that should be really on the priority list at the moment.
01:21:12
Speaker
Yeah, so I think it's very much the question I just touched on, which is this question of meta control. How do we decide when it's the right time to exert control?
01:21:25
Speaker
and versus not exerting control and which mechanisms underlie that. So my strong hypothesis is that striatal dopamine has a key role in this kind of meta decision about whether or not to exert control. And there's a number of meta parameters like the controllability of the environment, but also the volatility, so the changeability of the environment.
01:21:50
Speaker
that are coded and probably the cortex that in turn control these neuromodulatory systems. So I'm really interested in the top-down control of these neuromodulatory systems and then how we can influence it. So I just said how I'm currently testing this idea that methylphenidate might optimize metacontrol. If so, then that has clear implications for cognitive enhancements and the potential of cognitive enhancements. Not just with drugs, but also with training because that means that
01:22:20
Speaker
optimized sort of meditation or cognitive training should be focused on this meta control. So expose people to dynamic changes in the controllability of the of the environment or the volatility of the environment and then help them to adapt their strategy.
01:22:37
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And they can also, I think this is what's great is that it's, you're right. It's not only on a pharmacological level, but also, and even not necessarily training, but you can also have something in between where you then know, okay, I would be, normally the models would tell me it'd be very susceptible to this. And right now I have to finish the PhD or some other task. I should do X and Y control my environment to optimize it for.
01:23:05
Speaker
the task that I need to or want to complete and that being either something flexible or something very focused. I think that's very exciting.
01:23:18
Speaker
It's exciting and it also has some implications for how we perceive certain neuropsychiatric disorders. So for example, if, if, uh, if we take this meta control seriously, then we might, uh, reconceptualized problems like ADHD as sort of a normative adaptation to the way they perceive their environment. So maybe because they have been exposed to a very volatile environment, they're
01:23:48
Speaker
their environment is changeable. They perceive their environment is changeable in that context. Their distractible behavior is optimal. Distractable, flexible behavior is optimal if the world changes all the time. So that really also has implications for how we conceptualize of psychiatric disorders, I think. And I think it's really interesting also from the sort of more
01:24:20
Speaker
kind of philosophical, I guess, stoic perspective on life in general, that the key to success and happiness is to know whether to control and change stuff and whether you should just accept things the way they are. Yes, exactly. You're right. That's a very stoic approach, but it's hard to follow.
01:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, it is. Well, it's hard to know. That's the challenge, right? Hard to know when things are changeable and when they're not. Yes, exactly. Changeable. And then X accordingly. Exactly. That's in the next part. Yeah. You already mentioned this book at the beginning from David Batter. But are there other books out there which you would recommend to people who are interested in learning more?
01:25:13
Speaker
that are maybe not too scientific, or maybe too scientific. Everything goes. I would stick to this book by David, although it hasn't been published yet, but it will be published soon. So I think people should keep an eye out. And of course, there's many, many books.
01:25:32
Speaker
that. And of course, Danny Kahneman's two system books really interesting for many people. And there's this illusion of control book, which is also by Weichmann, I believe it's Wagner, Wagner, that's really interesting. There's a whole bunch of books, but but, you know, if I want the audience to the listener to take one book, then I would say, you know, wait for David's book, and then
01:26:00
Speaker
It's called on task and how to get things done. Yes. I would, yeah. Okay. I will, I will highlight that one for sure. And, um, you have to actually go or almost to your next meeting and well, I want to thank you so much for your time and this great conversation. I, uh, I learned a lot.
01:26:19
Speaker
For sure. It was fun. And I have three more pages of questions I keep for next time. And you actually just added 10 more at least just during this conversation. I guess that's a good sign. Yes, yes. And if people want to find you or reach out to you, where can they find you? How can they reach out?
01:26:42
Speaker
Um, I have an email address. They can email me, but, uh, maybe, maybe the, the one other ways on, on Twitter. So my handle is cools control. All right. I will add that. Yeah. And my email address actually can also be found on my website. It's a Roshan cools.com.
01:27:02
Speaker
and the website. Okay. I will add all of that to the show notes so people don't have to write any of this down or need to need a hard time finding it. It will be all right underneath. Well, Roshan, I can only say thanks again, also for your time. And yeah, to everyone listening, have a great day. Yeah. You too. Thanks so much.
01:27:23
Speaker
Hey everyone, just one more thing before you go. I hope you enjoyed the show and to stay up to date with future episodes and extra content, you can sign up to the blog and you'll get an email every Friday that provides some fun before you head off for the weekend. Don't worry, it'll be a short email where I share cool things that I have found or what I've been up to. If you want to receive that, just go to achmal.com. A-D-J-M-A-L dot com. And you can sign up right there. I hope you enjoy.