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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5881861923?omn=85945744831
Meeting ID: 588 186 1923

Topic description / abstract:

What enables us to assess and respond to transitory circumstances in a timely, energy efficient, and context-relevant manner? One way locomotive organisms including humans achieve such behaviour relies on embodied cognitive mechanisms tied to neural organisation and bodily morphology. In this talk, I outline an evolutionary account of how these contextual mechanisms could emerge through selection pressures, focussing on predation risk. The mechanisms would be plausibly conserved but, as I show, they are susceptible to functional impairment with ordinary use under extraordinary conditions. Such impairment could manifest in ways consistent with a typically identified dysregulation associated with the construct of fear, commonly considered to have an evolutionary basis. The apparent consistency between the general impairment and the specific dysregulation is significant for understanding the role of evolutionarily conserved mechanisms in some psychiatric conditions. Understanding this role is important for the design and interpretation of model organism studies in translational research. While the account partly resonates with recent analyses in evolutionary psychiatry on organism-environment mismatch and defensive dysregulation, it identifies a distinct cause of vulnerability.

Biographical note:

Adam Linson is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computing & Communications at the Open University (UK). He is also Co-Director of the Innogen Institute (connecting life science innovation and policymaking), based jointly at the Open University and the University of Edinburgh. He develops neurobehavioural models of how perceptual uncertainty is resolved under stress and time pressure, in relation to impaired or enhanced cognitive flexibility. His research focus is Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which he studies using multiple methods that connect theoretical neurobiology, psychiatry, evolutionary ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. His work also links to other fields including cognitive science and music psychology. He was previously an Anniversary Fellow in Computing and Philosophy at the University of Stirling, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, the UCL Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI, Austria).