Andrea Marín: "We have a friendly and talking humanoid robot"

Andrea Marín (Barcelona, 2001) is a psychology graduate and one of the technicians researching at the Barcelona Neuroscience Institute, where she works with cutting-edge equipment to conduct research on brain behavior.

You have a robot.

— It is a humanoid robot with a human appearance, friendly, it can speak and we can give emotional expressiveness to its eyes so that the interaction is more realistic. 

And what do you use it for?

— Now we will start a project to see what differences there are when we interact with a robot or a human. This is very interesting, because robots will surely integrate more and more into society. We can find robots in health centers, in shops... We don't know what might happen, and it's important to study it.

What do we know for now?

— That among humans there is a synchronization of activity. With robots, no. If we put a helmet on two people who are talking and use neuroimaging techniques, we see that when humans interact, some networks synchronize. 

So……

— They are activated, for example, the same decision-making networks. 

By studying this, can we know the risks of technology?

— Scientists limit ourselves to explaining what happens. That is to say, we can explain how certain things affect the brain. But how it is decided to act is no longer our concern.

When you say brain research I think of dead people.

— I do research with people like you and me. 

You live.

— Exactly. The UB's cognitive neuroscience unit has a series of laboratories investigating human behavior from many perspectives. We support these investigations into cognition.

Cognitive processes are…

— All phenomena that occur within the mind and make us functional: decision-making, feeling emotions, using memory, executive functions that allow us to move...

And you also do research with babies, right?

— The baby lab, yes. 

How is it?

— We have in mind an image of a white, cold laboratory, of people in lab coats and little human. But it is not like that. It is a beautiful space, with excellent and warm researchers. They have a great time, and for us it is very important, because it is a very relevant age window to understand human development.

Any example of what you study?

— Right now we are conducting a study with eight-month-old babies that aims to study statistical learning patterns of the brain in babies who, obviously, do not speak.

I don't know if I understand...

— For example, we take babies who are exposed only to Catalan and others who are exposed to Catalan and Spanish, and we present them with words that do not exist but that phonetically are based on this language. 

So suddenly they hear something that means nothing, like ashudder.

— Exactly, and they wear a helmet and we can see –after processing a lot of data– if they identify that that word is invented, if they identify that it belongs to one language or the other…

Do babies quickly distinguish languages?

— They are capable of distinguishing Catalan and Spanish at a very young age, despite being very similar languages. An impressive thing is that babies, before their brain specializes, are capable of speaking any language. They could perfectly make the sounds of Japanese. But then the brain configures and specializes according to what they hear.

Work also on pain perception.

— A very interesting example is a study on neuropathic pain. What is being investigated is whether, by applying neuromodulation protocols on brain regions involved in pain perception, this perception can be modulated. And now an interesting project on musical anhedonia is beginning.

Anhedonia…

— It is a rare but fascinating phenomenon: people who, despite correctly perceiving music, do not experience emotional pleasure when they hear it. This helps us better understand how the brain relates emotion, reward, and perception.

And how is memory studied?

— I did a study, for example, to see how we react to stimuli from things that do not exist. 

How is this done?

— AI allows it. For example, we showed a cat and a lizard and then an AI-generated image of a cat mixed with a lizard. And you can see if there are different activity patterns. 

How do we react to things we haven't seen?

— The strangest phenomena can also involve more emotional processes, and this makes us remember them more. A cat, on the other hand, can cause us false memory and make us think: I have seen this image before. With AI we can ask ourselves new questions and we can understand the processes the brain uses.

If I tell you that the right hemisphere of the brain is creativity and the left is logic, what do you think?

— We call them neuromemes. It sounds fun, but the brain is more complex, and nowadays we know that most functions are the product of interconnectivity between areas. It is absurd to think that some functions live only in one part of the brain. It is an old way of understanding it. 

What do you think is good for our brain?

— I'm no one to say this, but from what I've seen, I'd say that if you're lucky enough not to live in a very stressful socioeconomic context, the best thing to do is to do things you enjoy. There are a thousand tips now on how to train your memory, how to stay slim... and I have the impression that filling ourselves with too much information can be counterproductive. The most important thing is to do things we enjoy. 

What do you like about the brain?

— It is one of the most complex and wonderful structures we have. I love its ability to reorganize and adapt. It is the plasticity that is so talked about, and which I even find a beautiful poetic analogy for what we are. And I like to think that it is an infinite field, a collaborative project. One day we will stop doing what we do and new generations will come and continue to study it. I find it beautiful.

What surprises you?

— One thing I discuss a lot with colleagues, after studying the brain so much: how irrational we are.