Amygdala, Priors, fMRI

hello everyone um I just wanted to jump on before the podcast starts just to give you a prior warning that unfortunately for a reason that I haven't been able to discern Ronnie's video is a little jumpy it's not particularly smooth so you would notice that anyway but I wanted to yep give you a heads up obviously if you find it too much don't watch the video but it's a wonderful conversation so please don't miss out uh and yeah you'll enjoy whether you're watching it or listening to it but yeah just wanted to to let you know okay enjoy the episode hello everyone and welcome back to active inference insights I'm your host as always darus parvey Wayne and today I'm thrilled to be able to speak to Ronald sladkey Ronnie is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Vienna Austria where he teaches courses on cognitive science and predictive processing his research focuses on the amydala as well as emotion processing and social cognition in the human brain brain in addition to this he has been part of a team developing realtime fmri or functional magnetic resonance imaging where people can learn to regulate their own brain States while they are inside the MRI scanner Ronnie welcome to the show thank you so much for joining me it's it's uh really exciting to have a proper full fully fledged neuroscientist on the show thank you it's really a pleasure to be here so you you know part of the reason why I wanted to have you on is because you wrote this fascinating paper grounding what you called the amigdala complex in active inference uh and I have plenty of questions about that but before we actually go there I thought an interesting starting point is that you one very rarely meets people who teach active inference and predictive processing um at least in my experience within universities it's kind of like oh there's this little thing that started emerging and there are these kind of um esoteric people studying but let's not worry too much about that let's talk about reinforcement learning or or something a little bit more accepted what's the reception being like teaching predictive processing and active inference um within your courses okay that's that's a good question I mean I think uh it only works uh because of the master program that we have in Vienna so we have an inter disciplinary master program in cognitive science so I was one of the first students actually study this back in 2007 I think and so it's located at the philosophy faculty but it's interdisciplinary so we have some kind of core seminars and then are sent out to all the different institutes say Neuroscience or behavioral biology and we just take lectures there and do our exams there and then come back to the philosophy uh department and then try to integrate everything we've heard so there has always been this kind of curiosity to say okay um we take up students coming from different backgrounds with different Bachelor degrees so my bachelor is in was in computer science um um and then we basically want them to reflect on the paradigms that they are using so um back then uh the most recent Paradigm was actually for E cognition and and from there we kind of moved on and so they asked me to uh teach now the uh new trends in cognitive science uh um um seminar and this was then about predictive processing fantastic what um around what year did they ask you to do that so I mean I started with let's say predictive processing in about 2009 or something so actually was already inspired early on after reading uh on intelligence by Jeff Hawkins so I stumbled on this book it was yeah a little bit outside the typical Canon on incognitive science but I stumbled on it and I thought this idea very interesting this idea of predictive coding and um then yeah um the interest actually grew in 2009 2010 and uh I was kind of familiar with the early uh writings of Carl Christen and from there on I started to tell people hey guys you know this is I think the next big Paradigm and at…