Michael A Arbib

University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Department of Psychology

TA builds on the state of mind (SoM) framework to offer the novelty-seeking model (NSM). The model relates curiosity to creativity but this commentary focuses on creativity: (i) It assesses the SoM + NSM model of creativity-in-the-lab, showing that the focus on semantic networks is inadequate. (ii) It discusses architectural design to sketch ideas...

Pantomime is a unique form of communication, which we improvise “on the fly” to transmit information when unable to use language, for example during intercultural contacts or when the use of language is blocked or constrained, as in the case of some medical conditions or the game of charades. Pantomimic communication has been investigated from a nu...

The search for a single interdisciplinary language for science, philosophy and religious studies is doomed to failure. Rather than the coarse granularity of these three fields, we focus on scholarly domains and demonstrate that even translation between a pair of domain languages may be impossible. Each domain language must support description of ob...

Two paradoxes lie at the heart of the essay “A Dialogue on Affordances, Atmospheres, and Architecture” by Tonino Griffero and myself: "the cognitive scientist and the neuroscientist seek an objective account of subjective experience; whereas the architect consciously attends to the design aspects of a building even if they primarily affect the inha...

This dialogue on how the key notions of atmosphere and affordance contribute to architecture illuminates both differences and similarities between Tonino Griffero’s first-person phenomenology of atmosphere and those aspects of Michael Arbib’s cog/neuroscience (cognitive science and neuroscience) that address the experience and design of architectur...

Interfaces book series, issue no. 5. Open access edition available online at www.newprairiepress.org/ebooks/51 —————— ABSTRACT: Interfaces 5 was born to home the dialogue that the neuroscientist Michael A. Arbib and the philosopher Tonino Griffero started at the end of 2021 about atmospheric experiences, striving to bridge the gap between cognitive...

The present paper provides an integrative theory of actions and motor programs for skill in tool use, construction, and language. We analyze preconditions for action as well as making their effects (postconditions) explicit, emphasizing the “how” of action details as well as the “what” of motor programs, aided by conceptual analysis of several brai...

This article is the final report of the ABLE (Action, Brain, Language, Evolution) mini-workshop on “Construction, Tools and Language” held at Emory University, Atlanta, November 2019. The paper approaches tool use, construction and language within a new framework for comparative biology and psychology studies that builds on neuroethological studies...

Professor Mary Hesse, ScD FBA died on Sunday 2 October 2016. This document has two parts: The Obituary posted on the website of the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science, https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/news-events/news-archive/mary-hesse; and my Tribute (by video) to the celebration of her life hosted at Peterhouse College of Cambrid...

Each brain enlivens a body in interaction with the social and physical environment. Peter Zumthor’s Therme at Vals exemplifies the interplay of interior with surroundings, and ways the actions of users fuse with their multimodal experience. The action–perception cycle includes both practical and contemplative actions. The author analyzes what Louis...

After demonstrating that a building is a system of systems , we examine the symbolism of certain libraries. A cognitive account of wayfinding uses the Seattle Public Library to analyze getting lost in buildings—which we contrast with waylosing as in exploration. Cognitive map s in the brain represent places and the means to find one’s way between t...

Neuromorphic architecture, buildings with “brains,” revisits Le Corbusier’s “a house is a machine for living in” in cybernetic terms. It relates to smart architecture and artificial intelligence and is informed by neuroethology . The interactive space Ada had sensors for vision, audition, and a sense of touch mediated by floor panels. Ada could use...

The atmosphere of a building is the pervading mood it provides, and can be considered a non-Gibsonian affordance. Atmosphere may frame our experience of a building, but over time our perception of the atmosphere may change. This chapter explores atmosphere in relation to motivation and emotion and the role of the limbic system of the brain. Emotion...

This chapter approaches aesthetics anew by considering empathy and Einfühlung , “feeling ourselves into” a work of art or architecture. The key neuroscience is the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys that inspired the discovery of mirror systems in humans. Unsupervised , supervised , and reinforcement learning , each based on a different rule fo...

Architects design spaces that offer perceptual cues, affordances , for our various effectivities . Lina Bo Bardi’s São Paulo Museum demonstrates how praxic and contemplative actions are interleaved —space is effective and affective . Navigation often extends beyond wayfinding to support ongoing behavior. Scripts set out the general rules for a part...

Le Corbusier’s distinction between engineering and architectural aesthetics introduces the challenges of balancing the practical and the aesthetic, and introduces his dictum, “A house is a machine for living in.” Here, beauty is just one aspect of the emotional impact of a building. Early visual processing in the frog is action-oriented , while in...

The IBSEN model of Imagination in Brain Systems for Episodes and Navigation explores how the architect’s experience is brought to bear in the design of architecture by building on the VISIONS model of understanding a visual scene and the TAM-WGM model of navigation. IBSEN develops the idea that a building provides both views from various viewpoints...

This chapter offers two case studies of the architectural design processes to present design as an exercise of the imagination rooted in memories emerging from prior experience. The case studies emphasize how their specific memories influenced the creativity of each architect in different ways. Neuroscience does not limit the styles of different de...

Exemplifying the EvoDevoSocio perspective , the chapter argues that hands, rather than voice, scaffolded the emergence of language, and that early humans did not have language (they had “protolanguage”) and yet their brains were little different from ours—early humans had “language-ready” brains, but not “language-using” brains. The mirror system h...

Understanding our brains can enrich our understanding of the ways we act and interact in a complex world, and how our experience of the built environment helps shape who we are and yet can be shaped by us in turn. This book presents action-oriented perception, memory, and imagination as keys to unlocking the neuroscience of the experience and desig...

The article offers a multi-author conversation charting the future of architecture in light of the apparent tension between Baukultur, which combines the culture of building and the building of this culture, and the rapid changes brought about by digital technology, embracing cybernetics and artificial intelligence. The article builds on a discussi...

Citation Info: Arbib, M. A. (2021). The aboutness of language and the evolution of the construction-ready brain (updated draft of January 2021). The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Evolution. A. Lock, C. Sinha and N. Gonthier, Eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (In press.) Abstract: The chapter presents the hypothesis that early Homo sapiens were la...

Although we spend more than ninety percent of our lives inside buildings, we understand very little about how the built environment affects our behavior, thoughts, emotions, and well-being. We are biological beings whose senses and neural systems have developed over millions of years; it stands to reason that research in the life sciences, particul...

Reprint of the article originally appearing in: Interaction Studies 19: 1-2 370-387 (2018)

This is the abstract of Michael A. Arbib’s talk for the ANFA 2020: Conference Sensing Spaces, Perceiving Place. It is based on Chapter 10 of the book When Brains Meet Buildings: A Conversation between Neuroscience and Architecture, Oxford University Press 2021 To see the video (15 minutes) of the talk, please follow the link https://www.youtube.co...

This hybrid of review and personal essay argues that models of visual construction are essential to extend spatial navigation models to models that link episodic memory and imagination. The starting point is the TAM–WG model, combining the Taxon Affordance Model and the World Graph model of spatial navigation. The key here is to reject approaches i...

"From Affordances to Atmosphere" provides extracts from the March 2020 Draft of Chapters 2 and 4 of Michael Arbib's book "When Brains Meet Buildings," to be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. From Chapter 2, "An action-oriented perspective on space and affordances," it includes: 2.1. In an art gallery: From wayfinding to contemplation 2...

"From Affordances to Atmosphere" provides extracts from the March 2020 Draft of Chapters 3 and 4 of Michael Arbib's book "When Brains Meet Buildings," to be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. From Chapter 3, "A look at vision," it includes: 3.4. Schemas for vision: Scene perception as a form of "construction" Schemas within and beyond v...

NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego held a highly successful Intersession on “Neuroscience For Architecture, Urbanism & Design” on August 12-15, 2019. Participants came from around the world, and many of the organizers and speakers were members of Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture’s Board of Directors or Advisory Council. To make...

The paper marshals data, primarily from comparative primatology, to support the hypothesis that early Homo sapiens were language-ready in the sense that they had brains that could have supported language had it already been developed but were not language-using. The approach sees protolanguage emerging from complex recognition and imitation of manu...

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Berwick and Chomsky (2015) is marred by unwarranted assumptions, faulty logic, and a willful refusal to take alternative theories seriously. Part 1 demonstrates that the authors’ commitment to Minimalism and their assumption that language evolved for thought prior to its use for communication are counterproduc...

It has been argued that variation in gesture usage among apes is influenced either by differential sampling of an innate ‘gesture space’ (Hobaiter and Byrne in Anim Cogn 14:745–767, 2011) or through the ‘mutual shaping of behavior’ (Halina et al. in Anim Cogn 16(4):653–666, 2013) referred to as ontogenetic ritualization. In either case, learning mu...

Despite wide evidence suggesting anatomical and functional interactions between cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia, the learning processes operating within them —often viewed as respectively unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning— are studied in isolation, neglecting their strong interdependence. We discuss how those brain areas form...

The present chapter argues for the general utility of coordinated control programs as a setting for the study of motor control in terms of programs involving the dynamic interweaving of activation of perceptual and motor schemas rather than a stereotypical list of movements. The notions of "virtual finger" and "opposition space" are introduced for...

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys (LCA-...

The paper introduces a Special Issue of Interaction Studies which includes 21 papers based on presentations and discussion at a workshop entitled “How the Brain Got Language: Towards a New Road Map.” Unifying themes include the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in monkeys, apes and humans, and an EvoDevoSocio framework for appr...

Computational modeling of the macaque brain grounds hypotheses on the brain of LCA-m (the last common ancestor of monkey and human). Elaborations thereof provide a brain model for LCA-c (c for chimpanzee). The Mirror System Hypothesis charts further steps via imitation and pantomime to protosign and protolanguage on the path to a "language-ready br...

A theory of evolving the language-ready brain requires a theory of what it is that evolved. We offer the TCG (Template Construction Grammar) model of comprehension and production of utterances to exhibit hypotheses on how utterances may link to “what language is about.” A key subsystem of TCG is the SemRep system for semantic representation of a vi...

While structured as an autobiography, this memoir exemplifies ways in which classic contributions to cybernetics (e.g., by Wiener, McCulloch & Pitts, and von Neumann) have fed into a diversity of current research areas, including the mathematical theory of systems and computation, artificial intelligence and robotics, computational neuroscience, li...

The paper introduces a Special Issue of Interaction Studies in which 21 papers based on presentations and discussion at a workshop entitled "How the Brain Got Language: Towards a New Road Map." Unifying themes include the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in monkeys, apes and humans, and an EvoDevoSocio framework for approachin...

Co-Authors: Francisco Aboitiz; Judith M. Burkart; Michael Corballis; Gino Coudé; Erin Hecht; Katja Liebal; Masako Myowa-Yamakoshi; James Pustejovsky; Shelby Putt; Federico Rossano; Anne E. Russon; P. Thomas Schoenemann; Uwe Seifert; Katerina Semendeferi; Chris Sinha; Dietrich Stout; Virginia Volterra; Sławomir Wacewicz; and Benjamin Wilson. * * *...

While structured as an autobiography, this memoir exemplifies ways in which classic contributions to cybernetics (e.g., by Wiener, McCulloch & Pitts, and von Neumann) have fed into a diversity of current research areas, including the mathematical theory of systems and computation, artificial intelligence and robotics, computational neuroscience, li...

This paper shows how computational modeling of the macaque brain may ground hypotheses on the brain of LCA-m (the last common ancestor of monkey and human) and elaborations thereof on the path from a mirror system for manual action to a "language-ready brain" in Homo sapiens. Keywords: Action Pattern Reorganization; Computational comparative neurop...

We assess challenges to computational neuroscience in addressing two questions: How do structures of the brain of a modern adult human support the use of language? What may have been the “initial state” for early Homo sapiens, and how did cultural evolution yield the transition to humans with language-rich cultures? Keywords: protolanguage; languag...

We present a novel model, SCP1, of monkey sequence learning that takes the processes of stimulus recognition and motor planning seriously in addressing a robust dataset on list learning obtained through the Simultaneous Chaining Paradigm (SCP). Strikingly, SCP violates stimulus-response (S-R) mappings in that after several different lists are learn...

Given a neural system that equips an agent to attempt to carry out some learning task based on its own interaction with the “non-social” world, what extra neural machinery is required to enable learning to be facilitated by (repeated) observation of successful completion of that task by another agent? We provide one answer by exploiting an understa...

During my time as a Ph.D. student in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), around 1962 or 1963, the authors of a book on control theory [1] introduced me to two researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Michael Athanassiades and Peter Falb, who were writing a book on mathematical control theory. They, in turn, provided me w...

Motor tics are a cardinal feature of Tourette syndrome and are traditionally associated with an excess of striatal dopamine in the basal ganglia. Recent evidence increasingly supports a more articulated view where cerebellum and cortex, working closely in concert with basal ganglia, are also involved in tic production. Building on such evidence, th...

Values of the parameters of the model. The star indicates the values obtained with the genetic algorithm. Abbreviations of neural areas are summarized in S1 Table as well as in the caption of Fig 2. The other symbols used in the table are as follows: r: unit resting potential (Eq 3); τ: unit decay coefficient (Eq 1); wpre → post: connection weight...

Abbreviations used in the article. (EPS)

Average value of the peak amplitude of the activity (mean) and standard deviation (SD) for several areas of the model and for each movement state (NO-TIC vs TIC). (EPS)

The current state of knowledge portrays either a reductionist view of consciousness, for ex. , the seat of consciousness is characterized as quantum gravity affects in microtubules (of the cytoskeleton) or a more recent viewpoint is that consciousness is the result of a large-scale integration of information in the brain. The reductionist theories...

In “A manifesto for conscious cities: should streets be sensitive to our mental needs?” Palti and Bar [1] address the concern that busy city streets can cause stressful cognitive overload in users, and ask us to “rethink our ‘numb’ streets in ways that benefit their users psychologically.” However, their essay seems to focus more on the conscious d...

Many studies in neurolinguistics focus on the dorsal and ventral streams of the auditory system in language comprehension, but few address the production of language (whether spoken or signed). Moreover, almost no neurolinguistic studies addresses how language use is situated with respect to our perception of and action in the world around us, func...

The approach to language evolution suggested here focuses on three questions: How did the human brain evolve so that humans can develop, use, and acquire languages? How can the evolutionary quest be informed by studying brain, behavior, and social interaction in monkeys, apes, and humans? How can computational modeling advance these studies? I hypo...

The lay view of a robot is a mechanical human, and thus robotics has always been inspired by attempts to emulate biology. In this chapter, we extend this biological motivation from humans to animals more generally, but with a focus on the central nervous systems in its relationship to the bodies of these creatures. In particular, we investigate the...

The activity of certain parietal neurons has been interpreted as encoding affordances (directly perceivable opportunities) for grasping. Separate computational models have been developed for infant grasp learning and affordance learning, but no single model has yet combined these processes in a neurobiologically plausible way. We present the Integr...

We make the case for developing a Computational Comparative Neuroprimatology to inform the analysis of the function and evolution of the human brain. First, we update the mirror system hypothesis on the evolution of the language-ready brain by (i) modeling action and action recognition and opportunistic scheduling of macaque brains to hypothesize t...

Leading neuroscientists and architects explore how the built environment affects our behavior, thoughts, emotions, and well-being. Although we spend more than ninety percent of our lives inside buildings, we understand very little about how the built environment affects our behavior, thoughts, emotions, and well-being. We are biological beings whos...

Reviews the book, The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition by Gregory Hickok (see record 2014-10430-000 ). Mirror neurons are not mythical. These neurons, first observed in the monkey brain by the group of Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, fire both when the monkey executes an action and when it observes someone c...

The article offers an assessment of David Kemmerer's article ‘The Cross-Linguistic Prevalence of SOV and SVO Word Orders Reflects the Sequential and Hierarchical Representation of Action in Broca's Area’ in the context of the question, ‘How did biological evolution yield a language-ready brain?’ We argue that the path from praxic actions to grammat...

This chapter emphasizes the emergence of language phylogenetically from gestural/motor roots, showing how biological evolution went “beyond” mirror neurons to yield brains that could in turn support imitation, pantomime, and protosign, the last-named providing the scaffolding for protospeech and the human language-ready brain. The aim of this chapt...

This article is primarily an extended summary of a talk presented to the Seventh Conference of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies (NASS), Lund University, Sweden in May 2011, presenting the Mirror System Hypothesis, which emphasizes the role of imitation and manual gesture in the evolution of the language-ready brain. An Afterword offers p...

The present article responds to commentaries from experts in anthropology, apraxia, archeology, linguistics, neuroanatomy, neuroimaging, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, primatology, sign language emergence and sign language neurolinguistics on the book How the brain got language: The mirror system hypothesis (Arbib 2012). The role of complex imit...

Working Draft: 07-13: BODB, the Brain Operation Database, is a unique resource for keeping track of how models of neural processing, and other models of brain function, relate to empirical data, brain structures and general Brain Operating Principles (BOPs). Basically, the empirical data relevant to a model are structured as Summaries of Empirical...

The paper introduces dyadic brain modelling, offering both a framework for modelling the brains of interacting agents and a general framework for simulating and visualizing the interactions generated when the brains (and the two bodies) are each coded up in computational detail. It models selected neural mechanisms in ape brains supportive of socia...

Empirical neuroscience and computational neuroscience complement each other. The former benefits from explanations, predictions and suggestions from modeling, while model construction and validation rest on empirical data. We present principles for an integrated neuroinformatics framework which makes explicit how models are grounded on empirical ev...

We assess the challenges of studying action and language mechanisms in the brain, both singly and in relation to each other to provide a novel perspective on neuroinformatics, integrating the development of databases for encoding - separately or together - neurocomputational models and empirical data that serve systems and cognitive neuroscience.

We outline a framework for research on neuroscience which will benefit architecture, and topics in neuroscience which will be stimulated by innovations in the design of the built environment. We then use this framework of collaboration and influence to situate the research articles of this Special Issue supported by the Academy of Neuroscience for...

Winner-take-all models are commonly used to model decision-making tasks where one outcome must be selected from several competing options. Related random walk and diffusion models have been used to explain such processes and apply them to psychometric and neurophysiological data. Recent model-based fMRI studies have sought to find the neural correl...

The short answer to the question of How the Brain Got Language is “through biological and cultural evolution.” The challenge is to be more specific. I use the term “the language-ready brain” to suggest that the brain of early Homo sapiens was adequate to support language but that it required tens of millennia for humans to be able to exploit these...

One may think of music and language as patterns of sound, and this view anchors much of the research on these topics. However, one may also view the making of music and the use of language within the broader perspective of our interaction with the physical and social world and their impact on the inner world of the emotions. This chapter sets forth...

This chapter analyzes the similarities and differences of meaning in language and music, with a special focus on the neural underpinning of meaning. In particular, factors (e.g., emotion) that are internal to an agent are differentiated from factors that arise from the interaction with the external environment and other agents (e.g., sociality and...

This chapter focuses on the evolution of the language-ready brain, offering triadic niche construction as the framework in which to see the interaction between the environmental niche, the cognitive niche, and the neural potential latent in the genome at any stage of evolution. This framework enriches the presentation of the mirror system hypothesi...