‘All models are wrong but some of them are useful’ George E.P. Box
I tend to exaggerate the degree of epistemic humility and a radical skepticism that I apply to science, life, the self, and choosing food. I like to think of those as endearing features unless, of course, you are waiting for me to choose food. My self-deprecation can be exasperating, for instance, when I am trying to self-fashion a respectable scientific persona.
I was born and raised in the suburbia of Lisbon from a lovely working class family, and thanks to socialized higher education I was able to study Medicine. After graduating as an MD and having promised intergenerational social mobility to my parents, I escaped to Vienna to do a PhD in the Evolution of Language. Since then, I have been collecting postal addresses and fields of science, step by step, towards my true passion.
Hierarchies, Brains, History and the self devouring snake of Recursion
I often think that scientists develop general theories of human thinking that describe their idiosyncratic cognition style. It is understandable to think that the way ‘my’ mind works must be representative of everyone else’s; after all, I am a perfectly good human specimen. In that spirit, my grand cognitive theory and animal spirit is the Ouroboros, the self-devouring snake. The symbol of the self-generating universe. The Ouroboros represents the strange loop that allows the unbounded creation of infinity from parsimonious first principles. In cognitive science, this operation is called Recursion, and its availability in humans is a crucial component of language, mathematics, and all creative activities that allow us to boldly go where no one has gone before.
One of the things recursion is useful for is generating hierarchies. Think of fractals, growing outwards without a bound. Most hierarchies we create are fractal-like, containing similar properties across different levels. I think that John thinks that Sue thinks that this allows us to always add an extra level to an existing structure (I think). One of my research interests is to investigate the cognitive and neural bases underlying the generation of hierarchies. In other words, how do we represent and generate fractals? I have conducted behavioral, developmental, clinical, and fMRI experiments to tackle this question using language, vision, music, and action hierarchies (see Research).
Hierarchical cognition is also useful for understanding the historical dynamics of social systems. Hierarchies enable an efficient organization of information. When we trust the informational content of a hierarchy, we accept its recommendations. This reduces our cognitive effort. However, what happens when this trust breaks? Here, I investigate the mechanisms underlying the maintenance and breakdown of social systems and how this process is influenced by information processing bottlenecks. I map the feedback loops between environment, cognition, and social outcomes (see Research).