Caltech Together: Silicon Valley
“What Makes a Person? Modeling Traits and States from Psychological and Neuroscience Data”
by Ralph Adolphs, Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology
Personhood matters deeply to us personally (no pun intended), serving as the very foundation for our ethical and legal rights. Yet, we do not understand what constitutes a person, or where its boundaries lie.
What are the fundamental computations the brain performs that give rise to differences between individuals? Could we engineer this into AI in the future? Could we build a scientific model of what goes on in our minds that makes us who we are? I will argue that answering these questions requires a synthesis of two scientific disciplines: psychology and neuroscience.
In my lab at Caltech, we leverage both disciplines to chart the taxonomy of our minds. We explore “states,” like emotions, that can vary day by day, as well as “traits,” like personality, that define who we are over time. States and traits can be studied by neuroscience—directly within the physical brain rather than in the mind.
Integrating these approaches reveals three critical insights. First, states like emotions can be isolated. They have neural mechanisms that we can dissect and manipulate. For example, specific brain regions like the amygdala are necessary for fear. Second, traits are complex. Enduring traits like personality can be predicted to some extent through patterns of brain activity but they defy easy mechanistic dissection. One reason for this difficulty—the third point—is that the states and traits in our current psychological inventory need a rigorous data-driven overhaul.
We routinely talk about states like fear, happiness, sadness and anger; and traits like stubbornness or shyness. But all these terms predated modern science and are unlikely to fit neatly into a future science of the mind. Truly understanding personhood, whether in humans, animals, or AI, will require us to fundamentally revise our very picture of what a mind actually is.
About the Speaker
Ralph is the Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he also chairs the Institutional Review Board (ethics and regulatory oversight of all studies in human participants).
He studied chemistry and biology as an undergraduate at Stanford, and obtained his PhD at Caltech investigating how owls can hunt prey by sound alone (advisor: Mark Konishi).
He switched to human neuropsychology as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Iowa (advisor: Antonio Damasio) where he first became interested in emotions.
Since 2004 his lab at Caltech studies human emotion and social behavior, work that encompasses recordings from the brains of neurosurgical patients, brain imaging studies of autistic people, and collaborations with colleagues who work in animal models or engineer artificial agents.
His forthcoming book presents a new theory of emotions (“The new science of emotion: how brains represent what matters in the world”, Princeton University Press, 2027).
Ultimately, Ralph aims to build a new science not only of emotions, but of the mind—one that could explain how consciousness arises in humans and animals, and how we could engineer minds into AI.
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