3 minute read
You can grasp a hand. You can also grasp a concept.
One is literal. One is metaphorical. Our brains know the difference, but would we be able to understand the latter without the former?
Previous studies have suggested that our understanding of metaphors may be rooted in our bodily experience. Some functional MRI, or fMRI, brain imaging studies have indicated, for example, that when you hear a metaphor such as "she had a rough day," regions of the brain associated with tactile experience are activated. If you hear, "he's so sweet," areas associated with taste are activated. And when you hear action verbs used in a metaphorical context, like "grasp a concept," regions involved in motor perception and planning are activated.
A study by University of Arizona researcher Vicky Lai, published in the journal Brain Research, builds on this research by looking at when, exactly, different regions of the brain are activated in metaphor comprehension and what that tells us about the way we understand language.
Humans Love Talking in Metaphors
Humans use metaphors all the time; they're so ingrained in our language we often don't even notice we're doing it.
In fact, researchers have found that on average, people use a metaphor every 20 words, said Lai, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the UA. As director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory in the UA Department of Psychology, Lai is interested in how the brain processes metaphors and other types of language.
Her latest study used EEG, or brainwave studies, to record electrical patterns in the brain when participants were presented with metaphors that contained action content, like "grasp the idea" or "bend the rules."
Study participants were shown three different sentences on a computer screen, each presented one word at a time. One sentence described a concrete action, such as, "The bodyguard bent the rod." Another was a metaphor using the same verb: "The church bent the rules." In the third sentence, the verb was replaced with a more abstract word that conveyed the same meaning as the metaphor: "The church altered the rules."
When participants saw the word "bent" used in both the literal and metaphorical context, a similar response was evoked in the brain, with the sensory-motor region being activated almost immediately – within 200 milliseconds – of the verb being presented on the screen. That response differed when "bent" was replaced with "altered."
Lai's work supports previous findings from fMRI studies, which measure brain activity changes related to blood flow; however, the EEG, which measures electrical activity in the brain, provides a clearer picture of just how important the sensory motor regions of the brain may be for metaphor comprehension.
"In an fMRI, it takes time for oxygenation and deoxygenation of blood to reflect change caused by the language that was just uttered," Lai said. "But language comprehension is fast – at the rate of four words per second."
Therefore, with an fMRI, it's hard to tell whether the sensory motor region is truly necessary for understanding action-based metaphors or if it's something that's activated after comprehension has already taken place. The EEG provides a much more precise sense of timing.
"By using the brainwave measure, we tease apart the time course of what happens first," Lai said.
In the study, the near-immediate activation of the sensory motor region after the verb was displayed suggests that that region of the brain is indeed quite important in comprehension.
Exploring the Power of Language
Lai's current research extends understanding of how humans comprehend language and will help foundationally with some of the other questions her lab is exploring, such as: Can metaphoric language be used to improve people's moods? What role might language play in healthy aging? And, can metaphors aid in the learning of abstract concepts? Lai recently presented ongoing research on the use of metaphors to aid in the teaching, learning and retention of science concepts at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco.
Lai's fascination with metaphors stems from an early love of literature, which evolved into an interest in linguistics. As a linguistics master's student in Taiwan, she collected and studied hundreds of Mandarin Chinese metaphors. That eventually led her to psychology and her work at the UA.
"Understanding how the brain approaches the complexity of language allows us to begin to test how complex language impacts other aspects of cognition," she said.
This article has been republished from materials provided by the University of Arizona. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.
Showing posts with label neuroscience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neuroscience. Show all posts
Friday, September 13, 2019
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Can Neuroscience understand free will?
by Brian Gallagher
In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral philosophy gets teased. On YouTube, the show released a promotional video, “This Is Why Everyone Hates Moral Philosophy,” that gets its title from a line directed at Chidi, a Senegalese professor of moral philosophy who suffers from chronic indecision: The pros and cons of even trivial choices have long paralyzed him. We see him, as a precocious boy, urged to get on with picking teammates for a soccer game. Flustered, Chidi explains, “I have to consider all the factors: athletic strategies, the fragile egos of my classmates, and gender politics! Should I pick a girl as a gesture toward women’s equality, or is that pandering? Or do I think it’s pandering because of my limited male point of view? I’m vexed!” The kids waiting to play shake their heads, facepalming. A friend later insists he “fix his brain.” An M.R.I., courtesy of a neuroscientist named Simone, shows he’s fine. “Wow, there are actual answers here—data you can observe, and learn from,” Chidi says. “Yeah, man! Science is all about getting answers,” Simone replies. “You philosophers can spend your entire life mulling over a single question. That’s why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.” Both of them chuckle and she adds, “No offense.”
This is mock-hate, born of love. Before Mike Schur, the show’s creator, started shooting scenes, he paid a visit to the UCLA moral philosopher Pamela Hieronymi for insight. She’s interested in the sort of control humans have over our intentions and emotions, and how it might differ from control over our actions. Her favorite thought experiment comes from a 1983 paper, “The Toxin Puzzle,” by Gregory Kavka. A delightful head-scratcher, it invites you to imagine that an eccentric billionaire has offered you a deal: If you merely intend to drink a toxin tonight, at midnight, that will make you painfully ill for a day, he will wire you a million dollars—it’ll be in your bank tomorrow morning. A sophisticated and reliable brain scanner will determine whether you really formed the intention to imbibe the toxin. After you have the funds in your bank account, you’re free to decide not to drink it. An easy way to become a millionaire, no? Just intend to drink it for the scanner and, once you have the cash, switch your intention.
The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break.
This is absurd, of course, and that’s Kavka’s point: We don’t have that sort of control over ourselves. If you intend to drink it (for the sake of the scanner) but also intend, later, to not drink it (to avoid the sickness), you’re really intending to not drink it. Our intentions are only “partly volitional,” Kavka says. “One cannot intend whatever one wants to intend any more than one can believe whatever one wants to believe. As our beliefs are constrained by our evidence, so our intentions are constrained by our reasons for action.” The sense that you have of being in control, of having free will, is just that—a sense. And it can break.
Clinical neuroscientists and neurologists have identified the brain networks responsible for this sense of free will. There seems to be two: the network governing the desire to act, and the network governing the feeling of responsibility for acting. Brain-damaged patients show that these can come apart—you can have one without the other.
Lacking essentially all motivation to move or speak has a name: akinetic mutism. The researchers, lead by neurologists Michael Fox, of Harvard Medical School, and Ryan Darby, of Vanderbilt University, analyzed 28 cases of this condition, not all of them involving damage in the same departments. “We found that brain lesions that disrupt volition occur in many different locations, but fall within a single brain network, defined by connectivity to the anterior cingulate,” which has links to both the “emotional” limbic system and the “cognitive” prefrontal cortex, the researchers wrote. Feeling like you’re moving under the direction of outside forces has a name, too: alien limb syndrome. The researchers analyzed 50 cases of this condition, which again involved brain damage in different spots. “Lesions that disrupt agency also occur in many different locations, but fall within a separate network, defined by connectivity to the precuneus,” which is involved, among other things, in the experience of agency.
The results may not map onto “free will” as we understand it ethically—the ability to choose between right and wrong. “It remains unknown whether the network of brain regions we identify as related to free will for movements is the same as those important for moral decision-making, as prior studies have suggested important differences,” the researchers wrote. For instance, in a 2017 study, he and Darby analyzed many cases of brain lesions in various regions predisposing people to criminal behavior, and found that “these lesions all fall within a unique functionally connected brain network involved in moral decision making.”
Nevertheless, the fact that brain damage affects moral behavior only underscores the reality that, whatever the “will” is, it isn’t “free.” The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break. In a 2016 paper, Darby noted that people who have behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia “develop immoral behaviors as a result of their disease despite the ability to explicitly state that their behavior is wrong.” This complicates how moral responsibility should be understood, he explains. People can be capable of acknowledging wrongdoing and yet be incapable of acting accordingly. Responsibility can’t hinge on any simple notion of “reason responsiveness,” Darby says, which is a view of how free will can be compatible with determinism—the idea, in the case of behavior, that brain activity causes feelings, intentions, and actions, moral or not.
It’s still not clear whether lay people tend to lean toward “compatibilism” or not. Experimental philosophers have been trying to find out for years, but haven’t landed on a consensus. A recent study explains why: “People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will,” the researchers found. After conducting a series of studies probing people’s philosophical intuitions, the researchers concluded that people seem to be flexible in their views. They don’t have “one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism,” the researchers concluded. “Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility.”
The concept of free will doesn’t make any sense to me. As Kavka’s thought experiment shows, we don’t have much control over our thoughts. Take this article I’m writing: The words I’m committing to print pop into my mind unbeckoned. It’s less me choosing them and more them presenting themselves to me. The act of writing feels more like a process of passive filtration than active conjuration. I’m also convinced that humans can sensibly hold one another morally responsible even if we jettison the idea of free will. The reason is that, as a social mechanism, it has salutary effects. Generally, if people know that they will be held to account for moral violations, they will be less likely to commit them; and if they don’t know what the moral rules are, they will be motivated to learn them. Indeed, in the study on compatibilism, the researchers found that “participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will.”
In any case, the mystery of free will isn’t going away anytime soon. In March, a group of neuroscientists and philosophers announced that they’ve received $7 million to study the nature of free will and whether humans have it. Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University, is leading the project. “As a scientist, I don’t know what it entails to have free will,” he said in an interview with Science. That’s a philosophical puzzle. But once Maoz’s philosopher colleagues agree on a definition, he can get to work to see if it occurs in humans. “This is an empirical question. It may be that I don’t have the technology to measure it, but that is at least an empirical question that I could get at.”
Maybe, as Chidi said looking at his M.R.I. results, there will be answers there, data we can observe and learn from. Perhaps free will won’t forever be an issue philosophers mull over for a lifetime. Whatever the result, there’s always the ironic answer to the question of whether we have free will: “Of course we do. We have no choice.”
In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral philosophy gets teased. On YouTube, the show released a promotional video, “This Is Why Everyone Hates Moral Philosophy,” that gets its title from a line directed at Chidi, a Senegalese professor of moral philosophy who suffers from chronic indecision: The pros and cons of even trivial choices have long paralyzed him. We see him, as a precocious boy, urged to get on with picking teammates for a soccer game. Flustered, Chidi explains, “I have to consider all the factors: athletic strategies, the fragile egos of my classmates, and gender politics! Should I pick a girl as a gesture toward women’s equality, or is that pandering? Or do I think it’s pandering because of my limited male point of view? I’m vexed!” The kids waiting to play shake their heads, facepalming. A friend later insists he “fix his brain.” An M.R.I., courtesy of a neuroscientist named Simone, shows he’s fine. “Wow, there are actual answers here—data you can observe, and learn from,” Chidi says. “Yeah, man! Science is all about getting answers,” Simone replies. “You philosophers can spend your entire life mulling over a single question. That’s why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.” Both of them chuckle and she adds, “No offense.”
This is mock-hate, born of love. Before Mike Schur, the show’s creator, started shooting scenes, he paid a visit to the UCLA moral philosopher Pamela Hieronymi for insight. She’s interested in the sort of control humans have over our intentions and emotions, and how it might differ from control over our actions. Her favorite thought experiment comes from a 1983 paper, “The Toxin Puzzle,” by Gregory Kavka. A delightful head-scratcher, it invites you to imagine that an eccentric billionaire has offered you a deal: If you merely intend to drink a toxin tonight, at midnight, that will make you painfully ill for a day, he will wire you a million dollars—it’ll be in your bank tomorrow morning. A sophisticated and reliable brain scanner will determine whether you really formed the intention to imbibe the toxin. After you have the funds in your bank account, you’re free to decide not to drink it. An easy way to become a millionaire, no? Just intend to drink it for the scanner and, once you have the cash, switch your intention.
The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break.
This is absurd, of course, and that’s Kavka’s point: We don’t have that sort of control over ourselves. If you intend to drink it (for the sake of the scanner) but also intend, later, to not drink it (to avoid the sickness), you’re really intending to not drink it. Our intentions are only “partly volitional,” Kavka says. “One cannot intend whatever one wants to intend any more than one can believe whatever one wants to believe. As our beliefs are constrained by our evidence, so our intentions are constrained by our reasons for action.” The sense that you have of being in control, of having free will, is just that—a sense. And it can break.
Clinical neuroscientists and neurologists have identified the brain networks responsible for this sense of free will. There seems to be two: the network governing the desire to act, and the network governing the feeling of responsibility for acting. Brain-damaged patients show that these can come apart—you can have one without the other.
Lacking essentially all motivation to move or speak has a name: akinetic mutism. The researchers, lead by neurologists Michael Fox, of Harvard Medical School, and Ryan Darby, of Vanderbilt University, analyzed 28 cases of this condition, not all of them involving damage in the same departments. “We found that brain lesions that disrupt volition occur in many different locations, but fall within a single brain network, defined by connectivity to the anterior cingulate,” which has links to both the “emotional” limbic system and the “cognitive” prefrontal cortex, the researchers wrote. Feeling like you’re moving under the direction of outside forces has a name, too: alien limb syndrome. The researchers analyzed 50 cases of this condition, which again involved brain damage in different spots. “Lesions that disrupt agency also occur in many different locations, but fall within a separate network, defined by connectivity to the precuneus,” which is involved, among other things, in the experience of agency.
The results may not map onto “free will” as we understand it ethically—the ability to choose between right and wrong. “It remains unknown whether the network of brain regions we identify as related to free will for movements is the same as those important for moral decision-making, as prior studies have suggested important differences,” the researchers wrote. For instance, in a 2017 study, he and Darby analyzed many cases of brain lesions in various regions predisposing people to criminal behavior, and found that “these lesions all fall within a unique functionally connected brain network involved in moral decision making.”
Nevertheless, the fact that brain damage affects moral behavior only underscores the reality that, whatever the “will” is, it isn’t “free.” The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break. In a 2016 paper, Darby noted that people who have behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia “develop immoral behaviors as a result of their disease despite the ability to explicitly state that their behavior is wrong.” This complicates how moral responsibility should be understood, he explains. People can be capable of acknowledging wrongdoing and yet be incapable of acting accordingly. Responsibility can’t hinge on any simple notion of “reason responsiveness,” Darby says, which is a view of how free will can be compatible with determinism—the idea, in the case of behavior, that brain activity causes feelings, intentions, and actions, moral or not.
It’s still not clear whether lay people tend to lean toward “compatibilism” or not. Experimental philosophers have been trying to find out for years, but haven’t landed on a consensus. A recent study explains why: “People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will,” the researchers found. After conducting a series of studies probing people’s philosophical intuitions, the researchers concluded that people seem to be flexible in their views. They don’t have “one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism,” the researchers concluded. “Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility.”
The concept of free will doesn’t make any sense to me. As Kavka’s thought experiment shows, we don’t have much control over our thoughts. Take this article I’m writing: The words I’m committing to print pop into my mind unbeckoned. It’s less me choosing them and more them presenting themselves to me. The act of writing feels more like a process of passive filtration than active conjuration. I’m also convinced that humans can sensibly hold one another morally responsible even if we jettison the idea of free will. The reason is that, as a social mechanism, it has salutary effects. Generally, if people know that they will be held to account for moral violations, they will be less likely to commit them; and if they don’t know what the moral rules are, they will be motivated to learn them. Indeed, in the study on compatibilism, the researchers found that “participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will.”
In any case, the mystery of free will isn’t going away anytime soon. In March, a group of neuroscientists and philosophers announced that they’ve received $7 million to study the nature of free will and whether humans have it. Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University, is leading the project. “As a scientist, I don’t know what it entails to have free will,” he said in an interview with Science. That’s a philosophical puzzle. But once Maoz’s philosopher colleagues agree on a definition, he can get to work to see if it occurs in humans. “This is an empirical question. It may be that I don’t have the technology to measure it, but that is at least an empirical question that I could get at.”
Maybe, as Chidi said looking at his M.R.I. results, there will be answers there, data we can observe and learn from. Perhaps free will won’t forever be an issue philosophers mull over for a lifetime. Whatever the result, there’s always the ironic answer to the question of whether we have free will: “Of course we do. We have no choice.”
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking
By Veronique Greenwood
Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.
From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when it finally came out in 1976, did not look like a best-seller. But sell it did. It was reviewed in science magazines and psychology journals, Time, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978. New editions continued to come out, as Jaynes went on the lecture circuit. Jaynes died of a stroke in 1997; his book lived on. In 2000, another new edition hit the shelves. It continues to sell today.
In the beginning of the book, Jaynes asks, “This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? And where did it come from? And why?” Jaynes answers by unfurling a version of history in which humans were not fully conscious until about 3,000 years ago, instead relying on a two-part, or bicameral, mind, with one half speaking to the other in the voice of the gods with guidance whenever a difficult situation presented itself. The bicameral mind eventually collapsed as human societies became more complex, and our forebears awoke with modern self-awareness, complete with an internal narrative, which Jaynes believes has its roots in language.
It’s a remarkable thesis that doesn’t fit well with contemporary thought about how consciousness works. The idea that the ancient Greeks were not self-aware raises quite a few eyebrows. By giving consciousness a cultural origin, says Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, “Jaynes disavows consciousness as a biological phenomenon.”
But Koch and other neuroscientists and philosophers admit Jaynes’ wild book has a power all its own. “He was an old-fashioned amateur scholar of considerable depth and tremendous ambition, who followed where his curiosity led him,” says philosopher Daniel Dennett. The kind of search that Jaynes was on—a quest to describe and account for an inner voice, an inner world we seem to inhabit—continues to resonate. The study of consciousness is on the rise in neuroscience labs around the world, but the science isn’t yet close to capturing subjective experience. That’s something Jaynes did beautifully, opening a door on what it feels like to be alive, and be aware of it.
Jaynes was the son of a Unitarian minister in West Newton, Massachusetts. Though his father died when Jaynes was 2 years old, his voice lived on in 48 volumes of his sermons, which Jaynes seems to have spent a great deal of time with as he grew up. In college, he experimented with philosophy and literature but decided that psychology, with its pursuit of real data about the physical world, was where he should seek answers to his questions. He headed to graduate school in 1941, but shortly thereafter, the United States joined World War II. Jaynes, a conscientious objector, was assigned to a civilian war effort camp. He soon wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney General announcing that he was leaving, finding the camp’s goal incompatible with his principles: “Can we work within the logic of an evil system for its destruction? Jesus did not think so ... Nor do I.” He was sent to prison, where he had plenty of time to reflect on the problem of consciousness. “Jaynes was a man of principle, some might say impulsively or recklessly so,” a former student and a neighbor recalled. “He seemed to draw energy from jousting windmills.”
Jaynes emerged after three years, convinced that animal experiments could help him understand how consciousness first evolved, and spent the next three years in graduate school at Yale University. For a while, he believed that if a creature could learn from experience, it was having an experience, implying consciousness. He herded single paramecia through a maze carved in wax on Bakelite, shocking them if they turned the wrong way. “I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness,” he recounts in his book. “Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all.” Many creatures could be trained, but what they did was not introspection. And that was what tormented Jaynes.
Meanwhile, he performed more traditional research on the maternal behavior of animals under his advisor, Frank Beach. It was a difficult time to be interested in consciousness. One of the dominant psychological theories was behaviorism, which explored the external responses of humans and animals to stimuli. Conditioning with electric shocks was in, pondering the intangible world of thoughts was out, and for understandable reasons—behaviorism was a reaction to earlier, less rigorous trends in psychology. But for much of Jaynes’ career, inner experience was beyond the pale. In some parts of this community to say you studied consciousness was to confess an interest in the occult.
In 1949, Jaynes left without receiving his Ph.D., apparently having refused to submit his dissertation. It’s not clear exactly why—some suggest his committee wanted revisions he would not make, some that he was irked by the hierarchical structure of academia, some that he simply was fed up enough to walk. One story he told was that he didn’t want to pay the $25 submission fee. (In 1977, as his book was selling, Jaynes completed his Ph.D. at Yale.) But it does seem clear that he was frustrated by his lack of progress. He later wrote that a psychology based on rats in mazes rather than the human mind was “bad poetry disguised as science.”
It was the beginning of an odd peregrination. In the fall of 1949, he moved to England and became a playwright and actor, and for the next 15 years, he ricocheted back and forth across the ocean, alternating between plays and adjunct teaching, eventually landing at Princeton University in 1964. All the while, he had been reading widely and pondering the question of what consciousness was and how it could have arisen. By 1969, he was thinking about a work that would describe the origin of consciousness as a fundamentally cultural change, rather than the evolved one he had searched for. It was to be a grand synthesis of science, archaeology, anthropology, and literature, drawing on material gathered during the past couple decades of his life. He believed he’d finally heard something snap into place.
The book sets its sights high from the very first words. “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!” Jaynes begins. “A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.”
To explore the origins of this inner country, Jaynes first presents a masterful precis of what consciousness is not. It is not an innate property of matter. It is not merely the process of learning. It is not, strangely enough, required for a number of rather complex processes. Conscious focus is required to learn to put together puzzles or execute a tennis serve or even play the piano. But after a skill is mastered, it recedes below the horizon into the fuzzy world of the unconscious. Thinking about it makes it harder to do. As Jaynes saw it, a great deal of what is happening to you right now does not seem to be part of your consciousness until your attention is drawn to it. Could you feel the chair pressing against your back a moment ago? Or do you only feel it now, now that you have asked yourself that question?
Consciousness, Jaynes tells readers, in a passage that can be seen as a challenge to future students of philosophy and cognitive science, “is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.” His illustration of his point is quite wonderful. “It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”
Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, though, is that knowledge and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control. You can tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious thought—you just know, once you pick them up. And in the case of problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an answer. Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk. Jaynes told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching ice moving on the St. John River. Something that we are not aware of does the work.
The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend to give it credit for. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes, “it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but were not conscious at all.”
Jaynes believes that language needed to exist before what he has defined as consciousness was possible. So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters in The Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only do what is suggested by the gods. When something needs to happen, a god appears and speaks. Without these voices, the heroes would stand frozen on the beaches of Troy, like puppets.
Speech was already known to be localized in the left hemisphere, instead of spread out over both hemispheres. Jaynes suggests that the right hemisphere’s lack of language capacity is because it used to be used for something else—specifically, it was the source of admonitory messages funneled to the speech centers on the left side of the brain. These manifested themselves as hallucinations that helped guide humans through situations that required complex responses—decisions of statecraft, for instance, or whether to go on a risky journey.
The combination of instinct and voices—that is, the bicameral mind—would have allowed humans to manage for quite some time, as long as their societies were rigidly hierarchical, Jaynes writes. But about 3,000 years ago, stress from overpopulation, natural disasters, and wars overwhelmed the voices’ rather limited capabilities. At that point, in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, bits and pieces of the conscious mind would have come to awareness, as the voices mostly died away. That led to a more flexible, though more existentially daunting, way of coping with the decisions of everyday life—one better suited to the chaos that ensued when the gods went silent. By The Odyssey, the characters are capable of something like interior thought, he says. The modern mind, with its internal narrative and longing for direction from a higher power, appear.
The rest of the book—400 pages—provides what Jaynes sees as evidence of this bicamerality and its breakdown around the world, in the Old Testament, Maya stone carvings, Sumerian writings. He cites a carving of an Assyrian king kneeling before a god’s empty throne, circa 1230 B.C. Frequent, successive migrations around the same time in what is now Greece, he takes to be a tumult caused by the breakdown. And Jaynes reflects on how this transition might be reverberating today. “We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past,” he writes, in awe of the reach of this idea, and seized with the pathos of the situation. “Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now-silent deities, taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.”
It’s a sweeping and profoundly odd book. But The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was enormously appealing. Part of it might have been that many readers had never thought about just what consciousness was before. Perhaps this was the first time many people reached out, touched their certainty of self, and found it was not what they expected. Jaynes’ book did strike in a particular era when such jolts were perhaps uniquely potent. In the 1970s, many people were growing interested in questions of consciousness. Baumeister, who admires Jaynes, and read the book in galley form before it was published, says Jaynes tapped into the “spiritual stage” of the ascendant New Age movement.
And the language—what language! It has a Nabokovian richness. There is an elegance, power, and believability to his prose. It sounds prophetic. It feels true. And that has incredible weight. Truth and beauty intertwine in ways humans have trouble picking apart. Physicist Ben Lillie, who runs the Storycollider storytelling series, remembers when he discovered Jaynes’ book. “I was part of this group that hung out in the newspaper and yearbook offices and talked about intellectual stuff and wore a lot of black,” Lillie says. “Somebody read it. I don’t remember who was first, it wasn’t me. All of a sudden we thought, that sounds great, and we were all reading it. You got to feel like a rebel because it was going against common wisdom.”
It’s easy to find cracks in the logic: Just for starters, there are moments in The Iliad when the characters introspect, though Jaynes decides they are later additions or mistranslations. But those cracks don’t necessarily diminish the book’s power. To readers like Paul Hains, the co-founder of Aeon, an online science and philosophy magazine, Jaynes’ central thesis is of secondary importance to the book’s appeal. “What captured me was his approach and style and the inspired and nostalgic mood of the text; not so much the specifics of his argument, intriguing though they were,” Hains writes. “Jaynes was prepared to explore the frontier of consciousness on its own terms, without explaining away its mysterious qualities.”
Meanwhile, over the last four decades, the winds have shifted, as often happens in science as researchers pursue the best questions to ask. Enormous projects, like those of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Brain-Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, seek to understand the structure and function of the brain in order to answer many questions, including what consciousness is in the brain and how it is generated, right down to the neurons. A whole field, behavioral economics, has sprung up to describe and use the ways in which we are unconscious of what we do—a major theme in Jaynes’ writing—and the insights netted its founders, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith, the Nobel Prize.
Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, has conducted experiments to investigate how aware we are of things we are not focused on, which echo Jaynes’ view that consciousness is essentially awareness. “It’s not unreasonable to have a view that the only things you’re conscious of are things you are attending to right now,” Schwitzgebel says. “But it’s also reasonable to say that there’s a lot going on in the background and periphery. Behind the focus, you’re having all this experience.” Schwitzgebel says the questions that drove Jaynes are indeed hot topics in psychology and neuroscience. But at the same time, Jaynes’ book remains on the scientific fringe. “It would still be pretty far outside of the mainstream to say that ancient Greeks didn’t have consciousness,” he says.
Dennett, who has called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind a “marvelous, wacky book,” likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt. “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk,” he says. Particularly, he thinks Jaynes’ insistence on a difference between what goes on in the minds of animals and the minds of humans, and the idea that the difference has its origins in language, is deeply compelling.
“[This] is a view I was on the edge of myself, and Julian kind of pushed me over the top,” Dennett says. “There is such a difference between the consciousness of a chimpanzee and human consciousness that it requires a special explanation, an explanation that heavily invokes the human distinction of natural language,” though that’s far from all of it, he notes. “It’s an eccentric position,” he admits wryly. “I have not managed to sway the mainstream over to this.”
It’s a credit to Jaynes’ wild ideas that, every now and then, they are mentioned by neuroscientists who study consciousness. In his 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, sympathizes with Jaynes’ idea that something happened in the human mind in the relatively recent past. “As knowledge accumulated about humans and about the universe, continued reflection could well have altered the structure of the autobiographical self and led to a closer stitching together of relatively disparate aspects of mind processing; coordination of brain activity, driven first by value and then by reason, was working to our advantage,” he writes. But that’s a relatively rare endorsement. A more common response is the one given by neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland, an emerita professor at the University of California, San Diego. “It is fanciful,” she says of Jaynes’ book. “I don’t think that it added anything of substance to our understanding of the nature of consciousness and how consciousness emerges from brain activity.”
Jaynes himself saw his theory as a scientific contribution, and was disappointed with the research community’s response. Although he enjoyed the public’s interest in his work, tilting at these particular windmills was frustrating even for an inveterate contrarian. Jaynes’ drinking grew heavier. A second book, which was to have taken the ideas further, was never completed.
And so, his legacy, odd as it is, lives on. Over the years, Dennett has sometimes mentioned in his talks that he thought Jaynes was on to something. Afterward—after the crowd had cleared out, after the public discussion was over—almost every time there would be someone hanging back. “I can come out of the closet now,” he or she would say. “I think Jaynes is wonderful too.”
Marcel Kuijsten is an IT professional who runs a group called the Julian Jaynes Society whose membership he estimates at about 500 or 600 enthusiasts from around the world. The group has an online members’ forum where they discuss Jaynes’ theory, and in 2013 for the first time they hosted a conference, meeting in West Virginia for two days of talks. “It was an incredible experience,” he says.
Kuijsten feels that many people who come down on Jaynes haven’t gone to the trouble to understand the argument, which he admits is hard to get one’s mind around. “They come into it with a really ingrained, pre-conceived notion of what consciousness means to them,” he says, “And maybe they just read the back of the book.” But he’s playing the long game. “I’m not here to change anybody’s mind. It’s a total waste of time. I want to provide the best quality information, and provide good resources for people who’ve read the book and want to have a discussion.”
To that end, Kuijsten and the Society have released books of Jaynes’ writings and of new essays about him and his work. Whenever discoveries that relate to the issues Jaynes raised are published, Kuijsten notes them on the site. In 2009 he highlighted brain-imaging studies suggesting that auditory hallucinations begin with activity in the right side of the brain, followed by activation on the left, which sounds similar to Jaynes’ mechanism for the bicameral mind. He hopes that as time goes on, people will revisit some of Jaynes’ ideas in light of new science.
Ultimately, the broader questions that Jaynes’ book raised are the same ones that continue to vex neuroscientists and lay people. When and why did we start having this internal narrative? How much of our day-to-day experience occurs unconsciously? What is the line between a conscious and unconscious process? These questions are still open. Perhaps Jaynes’ strange hypotheses will never play a role in answering them. But many people—readers, scientists, and philosophers alike—are grateful he tried.
Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.
From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when it finally came out in 1976, did not look like a best-seller. But sell it did. It was reviewed in science magazines and psychology journals, Time, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978. New editions continued to come out, as Jaynes went on the lecture circuit. Jaynes died of a stroke in 1997; his book lived on. In 2000, another new edition hit the shelves. It continues to sell today.
In the beginning of the book, Jaynes asks, “This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? And where did it come from? And why?” Jaynes answers by unfurling a version of history in which humans were not fully conscious until about 3,000 years ago, instead relying on a two-part, or bicameral, mind, with one half speaking to the other in the voice of the gods with guidance whenever a difficult situation presented itself. The bicameral mind eventually collapsed as human societies became more complex, and our forebears awoke with modern self-awareness, complete with an internal narrative, which Jaynes believes has its roots in language.
It’s a remarkable thesis that doesn’t fit well with contemporary thought about how consciousness works. The idea that the ancient Greeks were not self-aware raises quite a few eyebrows. By giving consciousness a cultural origin, says Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, “Jaynes disavows consciousness as a biological phenomenon.”
But Koch and other neuroscientists and philosophers admit Jaynes’ wild book has a power all its own. “He was an old-fashioned amateur scholar of considerable depth and tremendous ambition, who followed where his curiosity led him,” says philosopher Daniel Dennett. The kind of search that Jaynes was on—a quest to describe and account for an inner voice, an inner world we seem to inhabit—continues to resonate. The study of consciousness is on the rise in neuroscience labs around the world, but the science isn’t yet close to capturing subjective experience. That’s something Jaynes did beautifully, opening a door on what it feels like to be alive, and be aware of it.
Jaynes was the son of a Unitarian minister in West Newton, Massachusetts. Though his father died when Jaynes was 2 years old, his voice lived on in 48 volumes of his sermons, which Jaynes seems to have spent a great deal of time with as he grew up. In college, he experimented with philosophy and literature but decided that psychology, with its pursuit of real data about the physical world, was where he should seek answers to his questions. He headed to graduate school in 1941, but shortly thereafter, the United States joined World War II. Jaynes, a conscientious objector, was assigned to a civilian war effort camp. He soon wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney General announcing that he was leaving, finding the camp’s goal incompatible with his principles: “Can we work within the logic of an evil system for its destruction? Jesus did not think so ... Nor do I.” He was sent to prison, where he had plenty of time to reflect on the problem of consciousness. “Jaynes was a man of principle, some might say impulsively or recklessly so,” a former student and a neighbor recalled. “He seemed to draw energy from jousting windmills.”
Jaynes emerged after three years, convinced that animal experiments could help him understand how consciousness first evolved, and spent the next three years in graduate school at Yale University. For a while, he believed that if a creature could learn from experience, it was having an experience, implying consciousness. He herded single paramecia through a maze carved in wax on Bakelite, shocking them if they turned the wrong way. “I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness,” he recounts in his book. “Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all.” Many creatures could be trained, but what they did was not introspection. And that was what tormented Jaynes.
Meanwhile, he performed more traditional research on the maternal behavior of animals under his advisor, Frank Beach. It was a difficult time to be interested in consciousness. One of the dominant psychological theories was behaviorism, which explored the external responses of humans and animals to stimuli. Conditioning with electric shocks was in, pondering the intangible world of thoughts was out, and for understandable reasons—behaviorism was a reaction to earlier, less rigorous trends in psychology. But for much of Jaynes’ career, inner experience was beyond the pale. In some parts of this community to say you studied consciousness was to confess an interest in the occult.
In 1949, Jaynes left without receiving his Ph.D., apparently having refused to submit his dissertation. It’s not clear exactly why—some suggest his committee wanted revisions he would not make, some that he was irked by the hierarchical structure of academia, some that he simply was fed up enough to walk. One story he told was that he didn’t want to pay the $25 submission fee. (In 1977, as his book was selling, Jaynes completed his Ph.D. at Yale.) But it does seem clear that he was frustrated by his lack of progress. He later wrote that a psychology based on rats in mazes rather than the human mind was “bad poetry disguised as science.”
It was the beginning of an odd peregrination. In the fall of 1949, he moved to England and became a playwright and actor, and for the next 15 years, he ricocheted back and forth across the ocean, alternating between plays and adjunct teaching, eventually landing at Princeton University in 1964. All the while, he had been reading widely and pondering the question of what consciousness was and how it could have arisen. By 1969, he was thinking about a work that would describe the origin of consciousness as a fundamentally cultural change, rather than the evolved one he had searched for. It was to be a grand synthesis of science, archaeology, anthropology, and literature, drawing on material gathered during the past couple decades of his life. He believed he’d finally heard something snap into place.
The book sets its sights high from the very first words. “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind!” Jaynes begins. “A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.”
To explore the origins of this inner country, Jaynes first presents a masterful precis of what consciousness is not. It is not an innate property of matter. It is not merely the process of learning. It is not, strangely enough, required for a number of rather complex processes. Conscious focus is required to learn to put together puzzles or execute a tennis serve or even play the piano. But after a skill is mastered, it recedes below the horizon into the fuzzy world of the unconscious. Thinking about it makes it harder to do. As Jaynes saw it, a great deal of what is happening to you right now does not seem to be part of your consciousness until your attention is drawn to it. Could you feel the chair pressing against your back a moment ago? Or do you only feel it now, now that you have asked yourself that question?
Consciousness, Jaynes tells readers, in a passage that can be seen as a challenge to future students of philosophy and cognitive science, “is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.” His illustration of his point is quite wonderful. “It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”
Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, though, is that knowledge and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control. You can tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious thought—you just know, once you pick them up. And in the case of problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an answer. Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk. Jaynes told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching ice moving on the St. John River. Something that we are not aware of does the work.
The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend to give it credit for. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes, “it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but were not conscious at all.”
Jaynes believes that language needed to exist before what he has defined as consciousness was possible. So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters in The Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only do what is suggested by the gods. When something needs to happen, a god appears and speaks. Without these voices, the heroes would stand frozen on the beaches of Troy, like puppets.
Speech was already known to be localized in the left hemisphere, instead of spread out over both hemispheres. Jaynes suggests that the right hemisphere’s lack of language capacity is because it used to be used for something else—specifically, it was the source of admonitory messages funneled to the speech centers on the left side of the brain. These manifested themselves as hallucinations that helped guide humans through situations that required complex responses—decisions of statecraft, for instance, or whether to go on a risky journey.
The combination of instinct and voices—that is, the bicameral mind—would have allowed humans to manage for quite some time, as long as their societies were rigidly hierarchical, Jaynes writes. But about 3,000 years ago, stress from overpopulation, natural disasters, and wars overwhelmed the voices’ rather limited capabilities. At that point, in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, bits and pieces of the conscious mind would have come to awareness, as the voices mostly died away. That led to a more flexible, though more existentially daunting, way of coping with the decisions of everyday life—one better suited to the chaos that ensued when the gods went silent. By The Odyssey, the characters are capable of something like interior thought, he says. The modern mind, with its internal narrative and longing for direction from a higher power, appear.
The rest of the book—400 pages—provides what Jaynes sees as evidence of this bicamerality and its breakdown around the world, in the Old Testament, Maya stone carvings, Sumerian writings. He cites a carving of an Assyrian king kneeling before a god’s empty throne, circa 1230 B.C. Frequent, successive migrations around the same time in what is now Greece, he takes to be a tumult caused by the breakdown. And Jaynes reflects on how this transition might be reverberating today. “We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past,” he writes, in awe of the reach of this idea, and seized with the pathos of the situation. “Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now-silent deities, taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.”
It’s a sweeping and profoundly odd book. But The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was enormously appealing. Part of it might have been that many readers had never thought about just what consciousness was before. Perhaps this was the first time many people reached out, touched their certainty of self, and found it was not what they expected. Jaynes’ book did strike in a particular era when such jolts were perhaps uniquely potent. In the 1970s, many people were growing interested in questions of consciousness. Baumeister, who admires Jaynes, and read the book in galley form before it was published, says Jaynes tapped into the “spiritual stage” of the ascendant New Age movement.
And the language—what language! It has a Nabokovian richness. There is an elegance, power, and believability to his prose. It sounds prophetic. It feels true. And that has incredible weight. Truth and beauty intertwine in ways humans have trouble picking apart. Physicist Ben Lillie, who runs the Storycollider storytelling series, remembers when he discovered Jaynes’ book. “I was part of this group that hung out in the newspaper and yearbook offices and talked about intellectual stuff and wore a lot of black,” Lillie says. “Somebody read it. I don’t remember who was first, it wasn’t me. All of a sudden we thought, that sounds great, and we were all reading it. You got to feel like a rebel because it was going against common wisdom.”
It’s easy to find cracks in the logic: Just for starters, there are moments in The Iliad when the characters introspect, though Jaynes decides they are later additions or mistranslations. But those cracks don’t necessarily diminish the book’s power. To readers like Paul Hains, the co-founder of Aeon, an online science and philosophy magazine, Jaynes’ central thesis is of secondary importance to the book’s appeal. “What captured me was his approach and style and the inspired and nostalgic mood of the text; not so much the specifics of his argument, intriguing though they were,” Hains writes. “Jaynes was prepared to explore the frontier of consciousness on its own terms, without explaining away its mysterious qualities.”
Meanwhile, over the last four decades, the winds have shifted, as often happens in science as researchers pursue the best questions to ask. Enormous projects, like those of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Brain-Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, seek to understand the structure and function of the brain in order to answer many questions, including what consciousness is in the brain and how it is generated, right down to the neurons. A whole field, behavioral economics, has sprung up to describe and use the ways in which we are unconscious of what we do—a major theme in Jaynes’ writing—and the insights netted its founders, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon L. Smith, the Nobel Prize.
Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, has conducted experiments to investigate how aware we are of things we are not focused on, which echo Jaynes’ view that consciousness is essentially awareness. “It’s not unreasonable to have a view that the only things you’re conscious of are things you are attending to right now,” Schwitzgebel says. “But it’s also reasonable to say that there’s a lot going on in the background and periphery. Behind the focus, you’re having all this experience.” Schwitzgebel says the questions that drove Jaynes are indeed hot topics in psychology and neuroscience. But at the same time, Jaynes’ book remains on the scientific fringe. “It would still be pretty far outside of the mainstream to say that ancient Greeks didn’t have consciousness,” he says.
Dennett, who has called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind a “marvelous, wacky book,” likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt. “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk,” he says. Particularly, he thinks Jaynes’ insistence on a difference between what goes on in the minds of animals and the minds of humans, and the idea that the difference has its origins in language, is deeply compelling.
“[This] is a view I was on the edge of myself, and Julian kind of pushed me over the top,” Dennett says. “There is such a difference between the consciousness of a chimpanzee and human consciousness that it requires a special explanation, an explanation that heavily invokes the human distinction of natural language,” though that’s far from all of it, he notes. “It’s an eccentric position,” he admits wryly. “I have not managed to sway the mainstream over to this.”
It’s a credit to Jaynes’ wild ideas that, every now and then, they are mentioned by neuroscientists who study consciousness. In his 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, sympathizes with Jaynes’ idea that something happened in the human mind in the relatively recent past. “As knowledge accumulated about humans and about the universe, continued reflection could well have altered the structure of the autobiographical self and led to a closer stitching together of relatively disparate aspects of mind processing; coordination of brain activity, driven first by value and then by reason, was working to our advantage,” he writes. But that’s a relatively rare endorsement. A more common response is the one given by neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland, an emerita professor at the University of California, San Diego. “It is fanciful,” she says of Jaynes’ book. “I don’t think that it added anything of substance to our understanding of the nature of consciousness and how consciousness emerges from brain activity.”
Jaynes himself saw his theory as a scientific contribution, and was disappointed with the research community’s response. Although he enjoyed the public’s interest in his work, tilting at these particular windmills was frustrating even for an inveterate contrarian. Jaynes’ drinking grew heavier. A second book, which was to have taken the ideas further, was never completed.
And so, his legacy, odd as it is, lives on. Over the years, Dennett has sometimes mentioned in his talks that he thought Jaynes was on to something. Afterward—after the crowd had cleared out, after the public discussion was over—almost every time there would be someone hanging back. “I can come out of the closet now,” he or she would say. “I think Jaynes is wonderful too.”
Marcel Kuijsten is an IT professional who runs a group called the Julian Jaynes Society whose membership he estimates at about 500 or 600 enthusiasts from around the world. The group has an online members’ forum where they discuss Jaynes’ theory, and in 2013 for the first time they hosted a conference, meeting in West Virginia for two days of talks. “It was an incredible experience,” he says.
Kuijsten feels that many people who come down on Jaynes haven’t gone to the trouble to understand the argument, which he admits is hard to get one’s mind around. “They come into it with a really ingrained, pre-conceived notion of what consciousness means to them,” he says, “And maybe they just read the back of the book.” But he’s playing the long game. “I’m not here to change anybody’s mind. It’s a total waste of time. I want to provide the best quality information, and provide good resources for people who’ve read the book and want to have a discussion.”
To that end, Kuijsten and the Society have released books of Jaynes’ writings and of new essays about him and his work. Whenever discoveries that relate to the issues Jaynes raised are published, Kuijsten notes them on the site. In 2009 he highlighted brain-imaging studies suggesting that auditory hallucinations begin with activity in the right side of the brain, followed by activation on the left, which sounds similar to Jaynes’ mechanism for the bicameral mind. He hopes that as time goes on, people will revisit some of Jaynes’ ideas in light of new science.
Ultimately, the broader questions that Jaynes’ book raised are the same ones that continue to vex neuroscientists and lay people. When and why did we start having this internal narrative? How much of our day-to-day experience occurs unconsciously? What is the line between a conscious and unconscious process? These questions are still open. Perhaps Jaynes’ strange hypotheses will never play a role in answering them. But many people—readers, scientists, and philosophers alike—are grateful he tried.
Saturday, July 16, 2016
The Neuroscience of Suffering – And Its End
via Psychology Tomorrow
It was 1972, and Gary Weber, a 29-year old materials science PhD student at Penn State University, had a problem with his brain. It kept generating thoughts! – continuously, oppressively – a stream of neurotic concerns about his life, his studies, whatever. While most human beings would consider this par for the course, par for the human condition (cogito ergo sum), Weber wouldn’t accept it. He was a scientist, a systematizer, a process guy. He liked to figure out how things worked, and how they could be tweaked to work more efficiently. And at that moment his brain wasn’t very efficient. It expended a lot of energy going over and over the same anxieties and cravings and storylines. “Most of these thoughts had no purpose,” he said. “They were not going to cure cancer.”
It so happened that shortly after he recognized the problem, in one of those little life coincidences that some people like to call “synchronicities,” Weber picked up a slim volume of poetry on his way out of the library. He sat down on the green grass in front of the University admin building, unpacked his lunch and idly opened the book. He read:
“All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.”
This is the first line of a famous Zen poem – Song of Zazen – written in the 18th century by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hakuin Ekaku. Weber knew nothing of Zen. Still, within seconds of reading Ekaku’s words, according to Weber, “the entire world just opened up. I mean it literally opened up. For what must have been thirty or forty minutes, I dropped into this magnificent expansiveness – a vast empty space without any thoughts whatsoever.”
Weber had had what in Zen is called a “kensho” – an awakening, a glimpse into the unconditioned, a mystical phenomenon described in different ways by countless texts and countless teachers in countless traditions. It was a profound experience, but like so many such experiences, it didn’t last. Weber’s thoughts returned – as insistent and clamorous as ever. But now Weber knew another way was possible. He was determined.
For the next 25 years, as Weber finished his PhD, married and raised two kids and made his way through a string of industry jobs – eventually culminating in a senior management position running the R&D operations of big manufacturing business – he got spiritual. He read lots of books, he meditated with Zen teachers, mastered complicated yoga postures, and practiced what is known in Vedic philosophy as “self-enquiry” – a way of directing attention backwards into the center of the mind. To make time for all this, Weber would get up at 4am and put in two hours of spiritual practice before work.
Although he says he never had the sense he was making progress, Weber kept at it anyway. Then, on a morning like any other, something happened. He got into a yoga pose – a pose he had done thousands of times before – and when he moved out of it his thoughts stopped. Permanently.
“That was fourteen years ago,” says Weber. “I entered into a state of complete inner stillness. Except for a few stray thoughts first thing in the morning, and a few more when my blood sugar gets low, my mind is quiet. The old thought-track has never come back.”
Now of course, the fact that Weber is telling this story at all would seem to contradict this rather dramatic claim. Conventional wisdom tells us that talk is the verbal expression of thinking; separating the two makes no sense. And yet, this is the experience Weber reports. And at the time he didn’t care if it was theoretically impossible. What he cared about was that in an hour he needed to go to work, where he was supposed to run four research labs and manage a thousand employees and a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and he had no thoughts. How was that going to work?
“There was no problem at all,” Weber says, which he admits may say more about corporate management than about him. “No one noticed. I’d go into a meeting with nothing prepared, no list of points in my head. I’d just sit there and wait to see what came up. And what came up when I opened my mouth were solutions to problems smarter and more elegant than any I could have developed on my own.”
Over time, Weber figured out that it wasn’t that all his thoughts had disappeared; rather a particular kind of self-referential thinking had cut out, what he calls “the blah blah network.” Scientists now refer to this as the “default mode network” (DMN), that is, the endlessly ruminative story of me: the obsessive list-maker, the anxious scenario planner, the distracted daydreamer. This is the part of the thinking process we default to when not engaged in a specific task.
“What’s fascinating to me,” Weber says, “is I can still reason and problem solve, I just don’t have this ongoing emotionally-charged self-referential narrative gobbling up bandwidth.”
But the real surprise for Weber is what disappeared along with the “me” narrative: any sense of being a separate self, and with it all mental and emotional suffering. He has a theory about this: “If you look at the self-referential narrative it’s all ‘I, me, mine.’ When that cuts out, the ‘I’ goes with it. Now, for me, it’s very quiet and peaceful inside – there’s no sense of wanting things to be other than they are, and no ‘I’ to grab hold of ‘I want, I desire, I lust.’” Although his case is extreme, Weber’s experience is in line with research showing that more DMN activation correlates with more unhappiness – ‘A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind’, as the title of one well-known paper puts it.
Weber has even found the changes have carried over into his emotional life:
“I still get angry, but it’s different now. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I feel the energy come up, but it doesn’t go anyplace. There’s no chasing somebody down the highway. The anger dissipates immediately – it doesn’t carry forward. You don’t lose the typical neural responses – thank goodness – what you lose is the desire leading up to them, and, once the response passes, you don’t make up a story about what happened that you repeat again and again in your head. Those storylines are gone.”
Like other scientists before him who’ve experienced similar transformations – the neuroscientist James Austin, the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, to name two examples – Weber got interested in what was going on his brain. He connected with a neuroscientist at Yale University named Judson Brewer who was studying how the DMN changes in response to meditation. He found, as expected, that experienced meditators had lower DMN activation when meditating. But when Brewer put Weber in the scanner he found the opposite pattern: Weber’s baseline was already a relatively deactivated DMN. Trying to meditate – making any kind of deliberate effort – actually disrupted his peace. In other words, Weber’s normal state was a kind of meditative letting go, something Brewer had only seen a few times previously, and other researchers had until then only reported anecdotally.
And here we come to a subtle but important difference of opinion between Weber and Brewer. For Weber, true letting go means arriving at a state of “no-thought” where the mind is permanently stilled of any kind of “bandwidth-gobbling” inner monologue. Creative thoughts, planning thoughts – these are fine, and are, according to Weber, in fact served by completely different parts of the brain. The real suffering happens in the endless and exhausting internal monologue. Thus, he argues, working to extinguish these kinds of thoughts should be the explicit goal of practice, something he says other contemplative traditions also emphasize.
By contrast, further study has suggested to Brewer that the thoughts themselves – even a certain amount of the self-referential kind – may not actually be the problem; the real problem is our human tendency to fixate and grip and get “caught up” in these thoughts. Some of his subjects attained dramatic reductions in DMN activity while still thinking in a self-referential way. They just weren’t attached to their ruminations. One subject described watching his thoughts “flow by.” As Buddhists have long argued, you don’t need to eliminate the self-thinking process, you just need to change your relationship to it.
Whatever the exact case, both men agree that a reduction of activity in the DMN is central to the elimination of suffering. That it is being discussed at all marks an important advance in the scientific study of meditation in particular and spiritual practice in general. The Mind and Life conferences, the big NIH grants, the explosion of studies on mindfulness – all have generated enormous insights. They’ve demonstrated how positive emotions can be trained, and reactivity softened, and concentration increased, and attentional clarity boosted. Many researchers have shown unequivocally that stress and suffering can be dramatically reduced by meditation and by mindfulness in life. But they have not yet shown why this is so.
Have Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the reduction of suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a specific region, but a more general deactivation, a neurological letting go that parallels the experiential one? Brewer: “Even in novices we saw a relative deactivation across the brain – like the brain was saying, Oh thank God I can let go. I don’t have to do stuff, I don’t have to do all this high energy maintenance of myself. One interpretation of that – and there are many others – is that the brain knows what it needs to do. It’s a very efficient machine; we just have to stop getting in the way.”
This kind of neurobiological perspective is a movement towards what Brewer calls “evidence-based faith,” where science may be able to help teachers and practitioners fine-tune the approaches they take to practice. Contemplatives may recoil at the idea, but for Brewer, addressing suffering is the priority, a project science can help with. As proof-of-concept, Brewer has just published two studies [here and here] that show how meditators can watch live feedback from their brains inside the fMRI and use it to decrease their DMN activation in real-time. And he’s just received an NIH grant to study how this could work for non-meditators – more quickly, and hopefully, one day, more affordably. “The aim is to see if neurofeedback can give regular folks feedback on subtle aspects of their experience …stuff they wouldn’t notice otherwise,” he says.
Weber agrees, “Right now we can get folks off the street and within one or two runs in the Yale fMRI they can produce this deactivated state. The more glimpses the brain gets, the more time it spends there, the more it can stay there. It’s like riding a bike. With this technology you may not have to spend twenty-five years practicing like I did. It’s much more efficient.”
Like the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths with a psychotherapeutic twist, Weber has it down to a terse progression: “I had suffering, it came from my attachments. My attachments cause me to slip over into the narrator. If I stop that, I lose my suffering. We have the tools to do this. They require no scriptural texts or philosophy. All it takes is persistence and curiosity. The old ego-motivated human existence, our 75,000 year-old operating system with its need to gratify our desires and exploit the environment and have six of this and ten of that – that can all fall away. It’s time for an upgrade.”
It was 1972, and Gary Weber, a 29-year old materials science PhD student at Penn State University, had a problem with his brain. It kept generating thoughts! – continuously, oppressively – a stream of neurotic concerns about his life, his studies, whatever. While most human beings would consider this par for the course, par for the human condition (cogito ergo sum), Weber wouldn’t accept it. He was a scientist, a systematizer, a process guy. He liked to figure out how things worked, and how they could be tweaked to work more efficiently. And at that moment his brain wasn’t very efficient. It expended a lot of energy going over and over the same anxieties and cravings and storylines. “Most of these thoughts had no purpose,” he said. “They were not going to cure cancer.”
It so happened that shortly after he recognized the problem, in one of those little life coincidences that some people like to call “synchronicities,” Weber picked up a slim volume of poetry on his way out of the library. He sat down on the green grass in front of the University admin building, unpacked his lunch and idly opened the book. He read:
“All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.”
This is the first line of a famous Zen poem – Song of Zazen – written in the 18th century by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hakuin Ekaku. Weber knew nothing of Zen. Still, within seconds of reading Ekaku’s words, according to Weber, “the entire world just opened up. I mean it literally opened up. For what must have been thirty or forty minutes, I dropped into this magnificent expansiveness – a vast empty space without any thoughts whatsoever.”
Weber had had what in Zen is called a “kensho” – an awakening, a glimpse into the unconditioned, a mystical phenomenon described in different ways by countless texts and countless teachers in countless traditions. It was a profound experience, but like so many such experiences, it didn’t last. Weber’s thoughts returned – as insistent and clamorous as ever. But now Weber knew another way was possible. He was determined.
For the next 25 years, as Weber finished his PhD, married and raised two kids and made his way through a string of industry jobs – eventually culminating in a senior management position running the R&D operations of big manufacturing business – he got spiritual. He read lots of books, he meditated with Zen teachers, mastered complicated yoga postures, and practiced what is known in Vedic philosophy as “self-enquiry” – a way of directing attention backwards into the center of the mind. To make time for all this, Weber would get up at 4am and put in two hours of spiritual practice before work.
Although he says he never had the sense he was making progress, Weber kept at it anyway. Then, on a morning like any other, something happened. He got into a yoga pose – a pose he had done thousands of times before – and when he moved out of it his thoughts stopped. Permanently.
“That was fourteen years ago,” says Weber. “I entered into a state of complete inner stillness. Except for a few stray thoughts first thing in the morning, and a few more when my blood sugar gets low, my mind is quiet. The old thought-track has never come back.”
Now of course, the fact that Weber is telling this story at all would seem to contradict this rather dramatic claim. Conventional wisdom tells us that talk is the verbal expression of thinking; separating the two makes no sense. And yet, this is the experience Weber reports. And at the time he didn’t care if it was theoretically impossible. What he cared about was that in an hour he needed to go to work, where he was supposed to run four research labs and manage a thousand employees and a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and he had no thoughts. How was that going to work?
“There was no problem at all,” Weber says, which he admits may say more about corporate management than about him. “No one noticed. I’d go into a meeting with nothing prepared, no list of points in my head. I’d just sit there and wait to see what came up. And what came up when I opened my mouth were solutions to problems smarter and more elegant than any I could have developed on my own.”
Over time, Weber figured out that it wasn’t that all his thoughts had disappeared; rather a particular kind of self-referential thinking had cut out, what he calls “the blah blah network.” Scientists now refer to this as the “default mode network” (DMN), that is, the endlessly ruminative story of me: the obsessive list-maker, the anxious scenario planner, the distracted daydreamer. This is the part of the thinking process we default to when not engaged in a specific task.
“What’s fascinating to me,” Weber says, “is I can still reason and problem solve, I just don’t have this ongoing emotionally-charged self-referential narrative gobbling up bandwidth.”
But the real surprise for Weber is what disappeared along with the “me” narrative: any sense of being a separate self, and with it all mental and emotional suffering. He has a theory about this: “If you look at the self-referential narrative it’s all ‘I, me, mine.’ When that cuts out, the ‘I’ goes with it. Now, for me, it’s very quiet and peaceful inside – there’s no sense of wanting things to be other than they are, and no ‘I’ to grab hold of ‘I want, I desire, I lust.’” Although his case is extreme, Weber’s experience is in line with research showing that more DMN activation correlates with more unhappiness – ‘A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind’, as the title of one well-known paper puts it.
Weber has even found the changes have carried over into his emotional life:
“I still get angry, but it’s different now. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I feel the energy come up, but it doesn’t go anyplace. There’s no chasing somebody down the highway. The anger dissipates immediately – it doesn’t carry forward. You don’t lose the typical neural responses – thank goodness – what you lose is the desire leading up to them, and, once the response passes, you don’t make up a story about what happened that you repeat again and again in your head. Those storylines are gone.”
Like other scientists before him who’ve experienced similar transformations – the neuroscientist James Austin, the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, to name two examples – Weber got interested in what was going on his brain. He connected with a neuroscientist at Yale University named Judson Brewer who was studying how the DMN changes in response to meditation. He found, as expected, that experienced meditators had lower DMN activation when meditating. But when Brewer put Weber in the scanner he found the opposite pattern: Weber’s baseline was already a relatively deactivated DMN. Trying to meditate – making any kind of deliberate effort – actually disrupted his peace. In other words, Weber’s normal state was a kind of meditative letting go, something Brewer had only seen a few times previously, and other researchers had until then only reported anecdotally.
And here we come to a subtle but important difference of opinion between Weber and Brewer. For Weber, true letting go means arriving at a state of “no-thought” where the mind is permanently stilled of any kind of “bandwidth-gobbling” inner monologue. Creative thoughts, planning thoughts – these are fine, and are, according to Weber, in fact served by completely different parts of the brain. The real suffering happens in the endless and exhausting internal monologue. Thus, he argues, working to extinguish these kinds of thoughts should be the explicit goal of practice, something he says other contemplative traditions also emphasize.
By contrast, further study has suggested to Brewer that the thoughts themselves – even a certain amount of the self-referential kind – may not actually be the problem; the real problem is our human tendency to fixate and grip and get “caught up” in these thoughts. Some of his subjects attained dramatic reductions in DMN activity while still thinking in a self-referential way. They just weren’t attached to their ruminations. One subject described watching his thoughts “flow by.” As Buddhists have long argued, you don’t need to eliminate the self-thinking process, you just need to change your relationship to it.
Whatever the exact case, both men agree that a reduction of activity in the DMN is central to the elimination of suffering. That it is being discussed at all marks an important advance in the scientific study of meditation in particular and spiritual practice in general. The Mind and Life conferences, the big NIH grants, the explosion of studies on mindfulness – all have generated enormous insights. They’ve demonstrated how positive emotions can be trained, and reactivity softened, and concentration increased, and attentional clarity boosted. Many researchers have shown unequivocally that stress and suffering can be dramatically reduced by meditation and by mindfulness in life. But they have not yet shown why this is so.
Have Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the reduction of suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a specific region, but a more general deactivation, a neurological letting go that parallels the experiential one? Brewer: “Even in novices we saw a relative deactivation across the brain – like the brain was saying, Oh thank God I can let go. I don’t have to do stuff, I don’t have to do all this high energy maintenance of myself. One interpretation of that – and there are many others – is that the brain knows what it needs to do. It’s a very efficient machine; we just have to stop getting in the way.”
This kind of neurobiological perspective is a movement towards what Brewer calls “evidence-based faith,” where science may be able to help teachers and practitioners fine-tune the approaches they take to practice. Contemplatives may recoil at the idea, but for Brewer, addressing suffering is the priority, a project science can help with. As proof-of-concept, Brewer has just published two studies [here and here] that show how meditators can watch live feedback from their brains inside the fMRI and use it to decrease their DMN activation in real-time. And he’s just received an NIH grant to study how this could work for non-meditators – more quickly, and hopefully, one day, more affordably. “The aim is to see if neurofeedback can give regular folks feedback on subtle aspects of their experience …stuff they wouldn’t notice otherwise,” he says.
Weber agrees, “Right now we can get folks off the street and within one or two runs in the Yale fMRI they can produce this deactivated state. The more glimpses the brain gets, the more time it spends there, the more it can stay there. It’s like riding a bike. With this technology you may not have to spend twenty-five years practicing like I did. It’s much more efficient.”
Like the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths with a psychotherapeutic twist, Weber has it down to a terse progression: “I had suffering, it came from my attachments. My attachments cause me to slip over into the narrator. If I stop that, I lose my suffering. We have the tools to do this. They require no scriptural texts or philosophy. All it takes is persistence and curiosity. The old ego-motivated human existence, our 75,000 year-old operating system with its need to gratify our desires and exploit the environment and have six of this and ten of that – that can all fall away. It’s time for an upgrade.”
Man Missing Most Of His Brain Challenges Everything We Thought We Knew About Consciousness
via IFLScience
Back in 2007, scientists reported that a French man in his mid-40s had walked into a clinic complaining of a pain in his leg. As a child, he’d had this same problem as a result of the ventricles in his brain filling with cerebrospinal fluid, so the doctors decided to scan his brain to see if this was again causing his limb-related lamentations. To their astonishment, they found that his ventricles had become so swollen with fluid that they’d replaced virtually his entire brain, leaving just a thin cortical layer of neurons.
Yet miraculously, the man was not only fully conscious, but lived a rich and unhindered life, working as a civil servant and living with his wife and two kids, blissfully unaware of the gaping hole in his brain. His ability to function without so many of the key brain regions previously considered vital for consciousness raises some major questions about existing theories regarding how the brain works and the mechanisms underlying our awareness.
For example, neuroscientists have often asserted that a brain region called the thalamus, which relays sensory signals to the cerebral cortex, is indispensable for consciousness. This is because research has indicated that damage to the thalamus often causes people to fall into a coma, while one team of scientists were even able to manually “switch off” an epileptic patient’s consciousness by electrically stimulating this brain region.
Similarly, researchers have shown that it is possible to cause people to lose consciousness by using electrodes to manipulate the activity of a brain region called the claustrum, which receives input from a wide variety of brain areas and communicates extensively with the thalamus.
Back in 2007, scientists reported that a French man in his mid-40s had walked into a clinic complaining of a pain in his leg. As a child, he’d had this same problem as a result of the ventricles in his brain filling with cerebrospinal fluid, so the doctors decided to scan his brain to see if this was again causing his limb-related lamentations. To their astonishment, they found that his ventricles had become so swollen with fluid that they’d replaced virtually his entire brain, leaving just a thin cortical layer of neurons.
Yet miraculously, the man was not only fully conscious, but lived a rich and unhindered life, working as a civil servant and living with his wife and two kids, blissfully unaware of the gaping hole in his brain. His ability to function without so many of the key brain regions previously considered vital for consciousness raises some major questions about existing theories regarding how the brain works and the mechanisms underlying our awareness.
For example, neuroscientists have often asserted that a brain region called the thalamus, which relays sensory signals to the cerebral cortex, is indispensable for consciousness. This is because research has indicated that damage to the thalamus often causes people to fall into a coma, while one team of scientists were even able to manually “switch off” an epileptic patient’s consciousness by electrically stimulating this brain region.
Similarly, researchers have shown that it is possible to cause people to lose consciousness by using electrodes to manipulate the activity of a brain region called the claustrum, which receives input from a wide variety of brain areas and communicates extensively with the thalamus.
Friday, October 16, 2015
Is the world real, or is it just an illusion or hallucination?
via hopesandfears.com
Is this real life? How do we know that we are not hallucinating it all? What if we're plugged into a Matrix-style virtual reality simulator? Isn't the universe a giant hologram anyway? Is reality really real? What is reality?
We asked renowned neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, technology theorists and hallucinogen researchers if we can ever tell whether the "reality" we are experiencing is "real" or not. Don't worry. You're going to be ok.
Jessica L. Nielson, Ph.D.
Department of Neurosurgery, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC)
"What is our metric for determining what is real? That is probably different for each person. One could try and find a consensus state that most people would agree is "real" or a "hallucination" but from the recent literature using imaging techniques in people who are having a hallucinatory experience on psychedelics, it seems the brain is hyper-connected and perhaps just letting in more of the perceivable spectrum of reality.
When it comes to psychosis, things like auditory hallucinations can seem very real. Ultimately, our experiences are an interpretation of a set of electrical signals in our brains. We do the best to condense all those signals into what we perceive to be the world around us (and within us), but who is to say that the auditory hallucinations that schizophrenics experience, or the amazing visual landscapes seen on psychedelics are not some kind of bleed through between different forms of reality? I don't think there is enough data to either confirm or deny whether what those people are experiencing is "real" or not."
Sean Carroll
Cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity, research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology
"How do we know this is real life? The short answer is: we don't. We can never prove that we're not all hallucinating, or simply living in a computer simulation. But that doesn't mean that we believe that we are.
There are two aspects to the question. The first is, "How do we know that the stuff we see around us is the real stuff of which the universe is made?" That's the worry about the holographic principle, for example -- maybe the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is actually a projection of some underlying two-dimensional reality.
The answer to that is that the world we see with our senses is certainly not the "fundamental" world, whatever that is. In quantum mechanics, for example, we describe the world using wave functions, not objects and forces and spacetime. The world we see emerges out of some underlying description that might look completely different.
The good news is: that's okay. It doesn't mean that the world we see is an "illusion," any more than the air around us becomes an illusion when we first realize that it's made of atoms and molecules. Just because there is an underlying reality doesn't disqualify the immediate reality from being "real." In that sense, it just doesn't matter whether the world is, for example, a hologram; our evident world is still just as real.
The other aspect is, "How do we know we're not being completely fooled?" In other words, forgetting about whether there is a deeper level of reality, how do we know whether the world we see represents reality at all? How do we know, for example, that our memories of the past are accurate? Maybe we are just brains living in vats, or maybe the whole universe was created last Thursday.
We can never rule out such scenarios on the basis of experimental science. They are conceivably true! But so what? Believing in them doesn't help us understand any features of our universe, and puts us in a position where we have no right to rely on anything that we did think is true. There is, in short, no actual evidence for any of these hyper-skeptical scenarios. In that case, there's not too much reason to worry about them.
The smart thing to do is to take reality as basically real, and work hard to develop the best scientific theories we can muster in order to describe it."
Fredrick Barrett
Instructor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
"With psychedelics or "classical (serotonergic) hallucinogens", individuals can often distinguish between perceptual disturbances, visualized experiences (it feels as if I was in another place, or I had traveled to another time, but I realized my physical body was still "here"), and whatever is happening "outside" in the "real" world. However, in psychosis (for instance, in the midst of a psychotic break in a person who has schizophrenia), hallucinations are quite clearly defined as something that an individual believes is real, persistent, and seemingly independent and autonomous in the world.
The "hallucinations" of schizophrenia and psychosis are accepted as real, and individuals with schizophrenia often do not have insight into the nature of their hallucinations as being "not real" to the rest of us. This highlights a bit of a misnomer in the name of the drug class "hallucinogens", in that the experiences with these compounds are not taken as consensual reality in the same way that psychotic hallucinations are taken as "real".
How or Why can we tell the difference between reality and what is perceived during the acute effects of psychedelics? I'm not sure science has definitively answered that question ... but I think it may have to do with access to the insight that you've consumed a substance that can have these effects. It also may have to do with the transient effect of many perceptual disturbances and visualizations that can occur with hallucinogens. Maybe if the subjective effects of hallucinogens acted more like every-day perceptions (i.e. they weren't so extraordinary) or if they were more fixed or persistent (i.e. they didn't shift, warp, or morph so often) they would seem more real to the individual experiencing them."
George Musser Jr
Contributing editor for Scientific American magazine, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT 2014–2015, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory and Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time--and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything
"The holographic principle doesn’t mean the universe isn't real. It just means that the universe around us, existing within spacetime, is constructed out of more fundamental building blocks. "Real" is sometimes taken to mean "fundamental", but that's a very limited sense of the term. Life isn't fundamental, since living things are made from particles, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s a higher-level phenomenon. So is spacetime, if the holographic principle is right. I talk about the holographic principle at length in my book, and I discuss the distinction between fundamental and higher-level phenomena in a recent blog post.
The closest we come in science to "real" or "objective" is intersubjective agreement. If a large number of people agree that something is real, we can assume that it is. In physics, we say that something is an objective feature of nature if all observers will agree on it - in other words, if that thing doesn’t depend on our arbitrary labels or the vagaries of a given vantage point ("frame-independent" or "gauge-invariant", in the jargon). For instance, I'm not entitled to say that my kitchen has a left side and a right side, since the labels "left" and "right" depend on my vantage point; they are words that describe me more than the kitchen. This kind of reasoning is the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories it inspired.
Could we all be fooled? Yes, of course. But there's a practical argument for taking intersubjective agreement as the basis of reality. Even if everyone is being fooled, we still need to explain our impressions. An illusion, after all, is entirely real - it is the interpretation of the illusion that can lead us astray. If I see a smooth blue patch in the desert, I might misinterpret the blue patch as an oasis, but that doesn’t mean my impression isn't real. I'm seeing something real - not an oasis, but a refracted image of the sky. So, even if we're all just projections of a computer simulation, like The Matrix, the simulation itself has a structure that gives it a kind of reality, and it is our reality, the one we need to be able to navigate. (The philosopher Robert Nozick had a famous argument along these lines.)"
Karl Friston
Institute of Neurology, University College London, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Scientific Director, Fellow of the Royal Society
"First, you pose an extremely interesting question about how do we know we are hallucinating. Strictly speaking, one never has insight into a true hallucination, if one does, these are generally referred to as pseudo-hallucinations, which are not unrelated to illusions. The very distinction between illusions and hallucinations is itself fascinating. This is because it suggests we have the capacity to represent our own representations – or representational validity. This speaks to all sorts of deep philosophical issues; for example, auto epistemic closure (in the sense of Thomas Metzinger), metacognition, self-awareness, lucid dreaming and so on.
The very fact that we can infer are perceptual influences are false speaks to a hierarchical composition of mind and perception; in which not only do we have perceptual influences but also inferences about those inferences (CF metacognition). The implications for self awareness are clear. This is why people like Allan Hobson are so fascinated by lucid dreaming. This provides a wonderful test bed to compare situations in which dream reality is perceived as real and when one becomes aware of the fact that it is a dream. Neurobiologically, this seems to rest on frontal lobe activity, suggesting, again, a hierarchical aspect to our fantastic organ (i.e. the brain – that generates fantasies that are checked against reality).
The usual notion that perception is just hallucination grounded by sensations is somewhat subverted by the fact that we can, on occasions, know that our perceptual inference is false."
Rich Oglesby
Creator and editor of Prosthetic Knowledge
"There is a well known phrase: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” (often associated with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, although it was actually a quote from Father John Culkin, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York). This makes sense from an anthropological perspective - to put it crudely, whilst early humans evolved the ability to speak, the controlled sounds and utterances gained meaning to each other through localized consensus. Fast forward to the twentieth century and industrial nations, one can discover technologies that we can recognize their purpose yet have differences to our own, depending on our cultures and others - for example, the differences with electricial sockets or which side of the road you drive from one country to another. This was noted in William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition which he labelled 'mirror-world'. Technology alsocan become taken for granted and familiar over time unless we find ourselves taken out of our habituated situation - nothing so easily reminds ourselves of change as a power cut, taking us back a couple of centuries.
In the past twenty years or so in the industrial world, the biggest impact on our experiences has been from the field of computing. While many focus on the internet as the biggest game changer, it neglects developments and permutations which other computing tech has reached - how the computer monitor tech has crossed over into television displays, graphics cards have altered how we work with colours transforming Pantone, photography and printing, sound cards and music sequencers, mp3 and Flac. Personal computing technologies have radically changed the way we make, define and experience the world we exist in. To describe the last twenty years, the best term I can think of is the Recon-Naissance, combining the terms reconaissance (the practise of gathering, formulating or expressing information) and renaissance (both 'rebirth' and revival of interest), it is the widespread outcome of ideas and production of post-WW2 investment in computational and telecommunication technologies. The Renaissance Man polymath has been replaced with the Renaissance Machine - the personal computer. The same PC could be used by scientist or businessperson, coder or student, in the office or in the warehouse, in the studio or in the bedroom. This has been most advantageous to the modern creative.
With the development of the smartphone ten years ago, modern computing became pocketable. With it, computing components became smaller. Due to commercial popularity, upgrade cycles changed from a year and a half to just one. Information creation and reception became domesticated. It became mainstream and more conveniently portable. Music, photography and video could be captured and seen on the same device, replacing the personal media player and the portable camera. Life could be documented and experienced 'en plein Hertz'.
But the developments of the smartphone benefitted a once neglected but now up-and-coming field: Virtual Reality. With small displays and accelerometers now refined and cheaper, and gave the opportunity to start ups to produce a new experiences with a new computing medium. Initially produced to complement video games, other startups are producing other narratives, such as 360 documentaries, animations and first person tools for creativity and design. Whilst the consumer implementation of these ideas are not truly available yet, the technology is being used by scientists, architects, artists and gamers with current developer builds. It would appear how we engage and relate with information will change again - the Recon-Naissance is still going strong."
Brad Burge
Director of Communications and Marketing: MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
"These aren't really scientific questions per se though they are fascinating and valuable to think about. I think it comes down to our definitions of both "hallucination" and "reality"—to what extent is any experience we have really "real"? That may be one the main things that hallucinations teach us, regardless of whether they're caused by drugs, neurological conditions, or intense meditation: to trust in our own experience, while always remembering that our experience is always our own."
Is this real life? How do we know that we are not hallucinating it all? What if we're plugged into a Matrix-style virtual reality simulator? Isn't the universe a giant hologram anyway? Is reality really real? What is reality?
We asked renowned neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, technology theorists and hallucinogen researchers if we can ever tell whether the "reality" we are experiencing is "real" or not. Don't worry. You're going to be ok.
Jessica L. Nielson, Ph.D.
Department of Neurosurgery, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC)
"What is our metric for determining what is real? That is probably different for each person. One could try and find a consensus state that most people would agree is "real" or a "hallucination" but from the recent literature using imaging techniques in people who are having a hallucinatory experience on psychedelics, it seems the brain is hyper-connected and perhaps just letting in more of the perceivable spectrum of reality.
When it comes to psychosis, things like auditory hallucinations can seem very real. Ultimately, our experiences are an interpretation of a set of electrical signals in our brains. We do the best to condense all those signals into what we perceive to be the world around us (and within us), but who is to say that the auditory hallucinations that schizophrenics experience, or the amazing visual landscapes seen on psychedelics are not some kind of bleed through between different forms of reality? I don't think there is enough data to either confirm or deny whether what those people are experiencing is "real" or not."
Sean Carroll
Cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity, research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology
"How do we know this is real life? The short answer is: we don't. We can never prove that we're not all hallucinating, or simply living in a computer simulation. But that doesn't mean that we believe that we are.
There are two aspects to the question. The first is, "How do we know that the stuff we see around us is the real stuff of which the universe is made?" That's the worry about the holographic principle, for example -- maybe the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is actually a projection of some underlying two-dimensional reality.
The answer to that is that the world we see with our senses is certainly not the "fundamental" world, whatever that is. In quantum mechanics, for example, we describe the world using wave functions, not objects and forces and spacetime. The world we see emerges out of some underlying description that might look completely different.
The good news is: that's okay. It doesn't mean that the world we see is an "illusion," any more than the air around us becomes an illusion when we first realize that it's made of atoms and molecules. Just because there is an underlying reality doesn't disqualify the immediate reality from being "real." In that sense, it just doesn't matter whether the world is, for example, a hologram; our evident world is still just as real.
The other aspect is, "How do we know we're not being completely fooled?" In other words, forgetting about whether there is a deeper level of reality, how do we know whether the world we see represents reality at all? How do we know, for example, that our memories of the past are accurate? Maybe we are just brains living in vats, or maybe the whole universe was created last Thursday.
We can never rule out such scenarios on the basis of experimental science. They are conceivably true! But so what? Believing in them doesn't help us understand any features of our universe, and puts us in a position where we have no right to rely on anything that we did think is true. There is, in short, no actual evidence for any of these hyper-skeptical scenarios. In that case, there's not too much reason to worry about them.
The smart thing to do is to take reality as basically real, and work hard to develop the best scientific theories we can muster in order to describe it."
Fredrick Barrett
Instructor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
"With psychedelics or "classical (serotonergic) hallucinogens", individuals can often distinguish between perceptual disturbances, visualized experiences (it feels as if I was in another place, or I had traveled to another time, but I realized my physical body was still "here"), and whatever is happening "outside" in the "real" world. However, in psychosis (for instance, in the midst of a psychotic break in a person who has schizophrenia), hallucinations are quite clearly defined as something that an individual believes is real, persistent, and seemingly independent and autonomous in the world.
The "hallucinations" of schizophrenia and psychosis are accepted as real, and individuals with schizophrenia often do not have insight into the nature of their hallucinations as being "not real" to the rest of us. This highlights a bit of a misnomer in the name of the drug class "hallucinogens", in that the experiences with these compounds are not taken as consensual reality in the same way that psychotic hallucinations are taken as "real".
How or Why can we tell the difference between reality and what is perceived during the acute effects of psychedelics? I'm not sure science has definitively answered that question ... but I think it may have to do with access to the insight that you've consumed a substance that can have these effects. It also may have to do with the transient effect of many perceptual disturbances and visualizations that can occur with hallucinogens. Maybe if the subjective effects of hallucinogens acted more like every-day perceptions (i.e. they weren't so extraordinary) or if they were more fixed or persistent (i.e. they didn't shift, warp, or morph so often) they would seem more real to the individual experiencing them."
George Musser Jr
Contributing editor for Scientific American magazine, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT 2014–2015, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory and Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time--and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything
"The holographic principle doesn’t mean the universe isn't real. It just means that the universe around us, existing within spacetime, is constructed out of more fundamental building blocks. "Real" is sometimes taken to mean "fundamental", but that's a very limited sense of the term. Life isn't fundamental, since living things are made from particles, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s a higher-level phenomenon. So is spacetime, if the holographic principle is right. I talk about the holographic principle at length in my book, and I discuss the distinction between fundamental and higher-level phenomena in a recent blog post.
The closest we come in science to "real" or "objective" is intersubjective agreement. If a large number of people agree that something is real, we can assume that it is. In physics, we say that something is an objective feature of nature if all observers will agree on it - in other words, if that thing doesn’t depend on our arbitrary labels or the vagaries of a given vantage point ("frame-independent" or "gauge-invariant", in the jargon). For instance, I'm not entitled to say that my kitchen has a left side and a right side, since the labels "left" and "right" depend on my vantage point; they are words that describe me more than the kitchen. This kind of reasoning is the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories it inspired.
Could we all be fooled? Yes, of course. But there's a practical argument for taking intersubjective agreement as the basis of reality. Even if everyone is being fooled, we still need to explain our impressions. An illusion, after all, is entirely real - it is the interpretation of the illusion that can lead us astray. If I see a smooth blue patch in the desert, I might misinterpret the blue patch as an oasis, but that doesn’t mean my impression isn't real. I'm seeing something real - not an oasis, but a refracted image of the sky. So, even if we're all just projections of a computer simulation, like The Matrix, the simulation itself has a structure that gives it a kind of reality, and it is our reality, the one we need to be able to navigate. (The philosopher Robert Nozick had a famous argument along these lines.)"
Karl Friston
Institute of Neurology, University College London, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Scientific Director, Fellow of the Royal Society
"First, you pose an extremely interesting question about how do we know we are hallucinating. Strictly speaking, one never has insight into a true hallucination, if one does, these are generally referred to as pseudo-hallucinations, which are not unrelated to illusions. The very distinction between illusions and hallucinations is itself fascinating. This is because it suggests we have the capacity to represent our own representations – or representational validity. This speaks to all sorts of deep philosophical issues; for example, auto epistemic closure (in the sense of Thomas Metzinger), metacognition, self-awareness, lucid dreaming and so on.
The very fact that we can infer are perceptual influences are false speaks to a hierarchical composition of mind and perception; in which not only do we have perceptual influences but also inferences about those inferences (CF metacognition). The implications for self awareness are clear. This is why people like Allan Hobson are so fascinated by lucid dreaming. This provides a wonderful test bed to compare situations in which dream reality is perceived as real and when one becomes aware of the fact that it is a dream. Neurobiologically, this seems to rest on frontal lobe activity, suggesting, again, a hierarchical aspect to our fantastic organ (i.e. the brain – that generates fantasies that are checked against reality).
The usual notion that perception is just hallucination grounded by sensations is somewhat subverted by the fact that we can, on occasions, know that our perceptual inference is false."
Rich Oglesby
Creator and editor of Prosthetic Knowledge
"There is a well known phrase: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” (often associated with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, although it was actually a quote from Father John Culkin, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York). This makes sense from an anthropological perspective - to put it crudely, whilst early humans evolved the ability to speak, the controlled sounds and utterances gained meaning to each other through localized consensus. Fast forward to the twentieth century and industrial nations, one can discover technologies that we can recognize their purpose yet have differences to our own, depending on our cultures and others - for example, the differences with electricial sockets or which side of the road you drive from one country to another. This was noted in William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition which he labelled 'mirror-world'. Technology alsocan become taken for granted and familiar over time unless we find ourselves taken out of our habituated situation - nothing so easily reminds ourselves of change as a power cut, taking us back a couple of centuries.
In the past twenty years or so in the industrial world, the biggest impact on our experiences has been from the field of computing. While many focus on the internet as the biggest game changer, it neglects developments and permutations which other computing tech has reached - how the computer monitor tech has crossed over into television displays, graphics cards have altered how we work with colours transforming Pantone, photography and printing, sound cards and music sequencers, mp3 and Flac. Personal computing technologies have radically changed the way we make, define and experience the world we exist in. To describe the last twenty years, the best term I can think of is the Recon-Naissance, combining the terms reconaissance (the practise of gathering, formulating or expressing information) and renaissance (both 'rebirth' and revival of interest), it is the widespread outcome of ideas and production of post-WW2 investment in computational and telecommunication technologies. The Renaissance Man polymath has been replaced with the Renaissance Machine - the personal computer. The same PC could be used by scientist or businessperson, coder or student, in the office or in the warehouse, in the studio or in the bedroom. This has been most advantageous to the modern creative.
With the development of the smartphone ten years ago, modern computing became pocketable. With it, computing components became smaller. Due to commercial popularity, upgrade cycles changed from a year and a half to just one. Information creation and reception became domesticated. It became mainstream and more conveniently portable. Music, photography and video could be captured and seen on the same device, replacing the personal media player and the portable camera. Life could be documented and experienced 'en plein Hertz'.
But the developments of the smartphone benefitted a once neglected but now up-and-coming field: Virtual Reality. With small displays and accelerometers now refined and cheaper, and gave the opportunity to start ups to produce a new experiences with a new computing medium. Initially produced to complement video games, other startups are producing other narratives, such as 360 documentaries, animations and first person tools for creativity and design. Whilst the consumer implementation of these ideas are not truly available yet, the technology is being used by scientists, architects, artists and gamers with current developer builds. It would appear how we engage and relate with information will change again - the Recon-Naissance is still going strong."
Brad Burge
Director of Communications and Marketing: MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
"These aren't really scientific questions per se though they are fascinating and valuable to think about. I think it comes down to our definitions of both "hallucination" and "reality"—to what extent is any experience we have really "real"? That may be one the main things that hallucinations teach us, regardless of whether they're caused by drugs, neurological conditions, or intense meditation: to trust in our own experience, while always remembering that our experience is always our own."
Friday, August 21, 2015
Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter
via PBS.org
It’s not enough to have a brain. Consciousness—a hallmark of humans, mammals, birds, and even octopuses—is that mysterious force that makes all those neurons and synapses “tick” and merge into “you.” It’s what makes you alert and sensitive to your surroundings, and it’s what helps you see yourself as separate from everything else. But neuroscientists still don’t know what consciousness is, or how it’s even possible.
So MIT’s Max Tegmark is championing a new way of explaining it: he believes that consciousness is a state of matter.
By “matter,” he doesn’t mean that somewhere in the deep recesses of your brain is a small bundle of liquid, sloshing around and powering your sense of self and your awareness of the world. Instead, Tegmark suggests that consciousness arises out of a particular set of mathematical conditions, and there are varying degrees of consciousness—just as certain conditions are required to create varying states of vapor, water, and ice. In turn, understanding how consciousness functions as a separate state of matter could help us come to a more thorough understanding of why we perceive the world the way we do.
Most neuroscientists agonize over consciousness because it’s so difficult to explain. In recent years, though, they’ve tended to agree that a conscious entity must be able to store information, retrieve it efficiently, process it, and exist as a unified whole—that is, you can’t break consciousness down into smaller parts. These traits are calculable, Tegmark says. A case in point? We put labels on the strength of our current computer processing power. While they’re not human, some of our computers can operate independently, and we can use our knowledge of artificial intelligence to push these machines to new limits.
Tegmark calls his new state of matter “perceptronium.” From the Physics arXiv Blog on Medium:
Tegmark discusses perceptronium, defined as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware. This substance should not only be able to store and process information but in a way that forms a unified, indivisible whole. That also requires a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.
So if consciousness is a state of matter, he concludes, we might be able to apply what we know about consciousness to what we actually see:
...the problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?
In other words, quantum mechanics dictates that the world we see is just one of an infinite number of possibilities. But why? Tegmark doesn’t have an answer, but his ideas demonstrate that there might be a more dynamic relationship between consciousness and other states of matter—that our ability to perceive the world is both a means to an end and also an end (an “object”) in itself.
It’s not enough to have a brain. Consciousness—a hallmark of humans, mammals, birds, and even octopuses—is that mysterious force that makes all those neurons and synapses “tick” and merge into “you.” It’s what makes you alert and sensitive to your surroundings, and it’s what helps you see yourself as separate from everything else. But neuroscientists still don’t know what consciousness is, or how it’s even possible.
So MIT’s Max Tegmark is championing a new way of explaining it: he believes that consciousness is a state of matter.
By “matter,” he doesn’t mean that somewhere in the deep recesses of your brain is a small bundle of liquid, sloshing around and powering your sense of self and your awareness of the world. Instead, Tegmark suggests that consciousness arises out of a particular set of mathematical conditions, and there are varying degrees of consciousness—just as certain conditions are required to create varying states of vapor, water, and ice. In turn, understanding how consciousness functions as a separate state of matter could help us come to a more thorough understanding of why we perceive the world the way we do.
Most neuroscientists agonize over consciousness because it’s so difficult to explain. In recent years, though, they’ve tended to agree that a conscious entity must be able to store information, retrieve it efficiently, process it, and exist as a unified whole—that is, you can’t break consciousness down into smaller parts. These traits are calculable, Tegmark says. A case in point? We put labels on the strength of our current computer processing power. While they’re not human, some of our computers can operate independently, and we can use our knowledge of artificial intelligence to push these machines to new limits.
Tegmark calls his new state of matter “perceptronium.” From the Physics arXiv Blog on Medium:
Tegmark discusses perceptronium, defined as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware. This substance should not only be able to store and process information but in a way that forms a unified, indivisible whole. That also requires a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.
So if consciousness is a state of matter, he concludes, we might be able to apply what we know about consciousness to what we actually see:
...the problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?
In other words, quantum mechanics dictates that the world we see is just one of an infinite number of possibilities. But why? Tegmark doesn’t have an answer, but his ideas demonstrate that there might be a more dynamic relationship between consciousness and other states of matter—that our ability to perceive the world is both a means to an end and also an end (an “object”) in itself.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Field Theories of Consciousness
The following video is a lecture delivered by Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. It details some of his research on remote viewing and telepathy. Persinger has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.
Two links:
First, Field Theories of Consciousness at Scholarpedia
Second, Field Theories of Global Consciousness at Scholarpedia
"...the idea of a universal consciousness also resonates with notions such as Bohm’s implicate order, Jung’s collective unconscious, Radin’s conscious universe and the Gaia mind."
Two links:
First, Field Theories of Consciousness at Scholarpedia
Second, Field Theories of Global Consciousness at Scholarpedia
"...the idea of a universal consciousness also resonates with notions such as Bohm’s implicate order, Jung’s collective unconscious, Radin’s conscious universe and the Gaia mind."
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Lucid dreamers help scientists locate the seat of meta-consciousness in the brain
From ScienceDaily:
Studies of lucid dreamers show which centers of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves in dreams.
Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness.
The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualize what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Psychiatry in Munich and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and from Charité in Berlin have now studied people who are aware that they are dreaming while being in a dream state, and are also able to deliberately control their dreams. Those so-called lucid dreamers have access to their memories during lucid dreaming, can perform actions and are aware of themselves – although remaining unmistakably in a dream state and not waking up. As author Martin Dresler explains, “In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming. It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”
By comparing the activity of the brain during one of these lucid periods with the activity measured immediately before in a normal dream, the scientists were able to identify the characteristic brain activities of lucid awareness.
“The general basic activity of the brain is similar in a normal dream and in a lucid dream,” says Michael Czisch, head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. “In a lucid state, however, the activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex increases markedly within seconds. The involved areas of the cerebral cortex are the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, to which commonly the function of self-assessment is attributed, and the frontopolar regions, which are responsible for evaluating our own thoughts and feelings. The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception.” The findings confirm earlier studies and have made the neural networks of a conscious mental state visible for the first time.
Studies of lucid dreamers show which centers of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves in dreams.
Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness.
The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualize what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Psychiatry in Munich and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and from Charité in Berlin have now studied people who are aware that they are dreaming while being in a dream state, and are also able to deliberately control their dreams. Those so-called lucid dreamers have access to their memories during lucid dreaming, can perform actions and are aware of themselves – although remaining unmistakably in a dream state and not waking up. As author Martin Dresler explains, “In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming. It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”
By comparing the activity of the brain during one of these lucid periods with the activity measured immediately before in a normal dream, the scientists were able to identify the characteristic brain activities of lucid awareness.
“The general basic activity of the brain is similar in a normal dream and in a lucid dream,” says Michael Czisch, head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. “In a lucid state, however, the activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex increases markedly within seconds. The involved areas of the cerebral cortex are the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, to which commonly the function of self-assessment is attributed, and the frontopolar regions, which are responsible for evaluating our own thoughts and feelings. The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception.” The findings confirm earlier studies and have made the neural networks of a conscious mental state visible for the first time.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
DARPA's 'Cortical Modem' will plug straight into your BRAIN
From The Register:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a brain interface it hopes could inject images directly into the visual cortex.
news of the "Cortical Modem" project has emerged in transhumanist magazine Humanity Plus, which reports the agency is working on a direct neural interface (DNI) chip that could be used for human enhancement and motor-function repair.
Project head Dr Phillip Alvelda, Biological Technologies chief with the agency, told the Biology Is Technology conference in Silicon Valley last week the project had a short term goal of building a US$10 device the size of two stacked nickels that could deliver images without the need for glasses or similar technology.
The project was built on research by Dr Karl Deisseroth whose work in the field of neuroscience describes how brain circuits create behaviour patterns.
Specifically the work dealt in Deisseroth's field of Optogenetics, where proteins from algae could be inserted into neurons to be subsequently controlled with pulses of light.
"The short term goal of the project is the development of a device about the size of two stacked nickels with a cost of goods on the order of $10 which would enable a simple visual display via a direct interface to the visual cortex with the visual fidelity of something like an early LED digital clock," the publication reported.
"The implications of this project are astounding."
The seemingly dreamy research was limited to animal studies, specifically the real time imaging of a zebra fish brain with some 85,000 neurons, due to the need to mess with neuron DNA and the 'crude device' would be a long way off high fidelity augmented reality, the site reported.
DARPA's Biological Technologies Office was formed last April to cook up crazy ideas born at the intersection of biology and physical science. Its mind-bending research fields are geared to improve soldiers' performance, craft biological systems to bolster national security, and future the stability and well-being of humanity.
The project follows DARPA's upgrading of the heavy-set Atlas robot which was granted a battery allowing it to move about free of its electrical umbilical cord.
The agency also revealed biometric tracking that could identify users based on how they moved a mouse in what was dubbed a 'cognitive fingerprint' and slated as a possible replacement for password authentication.
Read the article in H+ magazine: http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/02/15/biology-technology-darpa-back-game-big-vision-h/
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a brain interface it hopes could inject images directly into the visual cortex.
news of the "Cortical Modem" project has emerged in transhumanist magazine Humanity Plus, which reports the agency is working on a direct neural interface (DNI) chip that could be used for human enhancement and motor-function repair.
Project head Dr Phillip Alvelda, Biological Technologies chief with the agency, told the Biology Is Technology conference in Silicon Valley last week the project had a short term goal of building a US$10 device the size of two stacked nickels that could deliver images without the need for glasses or similar technology.
The project was built on research by Dr Karl Deisseroth whose work in the field of neuroscience describes how brain circuits create behaviour patterns.
Specifically the work dealt in Deisseroth's field of Optogenetics, where proteins from algae could be inserted into neurons to be subsequently controlled with pulses of light.
"The short term goal of the project is the development of a device about the size of two stacked nickels with a cost of goods on the order of $10 which would enable a simple visual display via a direct interface to the visual cortex with the visual fidelity of something like an early LED digital clock," the publication reported.
"The implications of this project are astounding."
The seemingly dreamy research was limited to animal studies, specifically the real time imaging of a zebra fish brain with some 85,000 neurons, due to the need to mess with neuron DNA and the 'crude device' would be a long way off high fidelity augmented reality, the site reported.
DARPA's Biological Technologies Office was formed last April to cook up crazy ideas born at the intersection of biology and physical science. Its mind-bending research fields are geared to improve soldiers' performance, craft biological systems to bolster national security, and future the stability and well-being of humanity.
The project follows DARPA's upgrading of the heavy-set Atlas robot which was granted a battery allowing it to move about free of its electrical umbilical cord.
The agency also revealed biometric tracking that could identify users based on how they moved a mouse in what was dubbed a 'cognitive fingerprint' and slated as a possible replacement for password authentication.
Read the article in H+ magazine: http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/02/15/biology-technology-darpa-back-game-big-vision-h/
Sunday, February 15, 2015
The God Helmet - lectures by Todd Murphy
God and the Brain - The Persinger 'God Helmet', The Brain, and visions of God.
Reincarnation in Human Evolution - The New Science of Darwinian Reincarnation.
Enlightenment, Self, and the Brain. How the brain changes with final liberation
Psychic Skills & Miracles - technology used for telepathy and remote viewing
The Sacred Body. Kundalini, Subtle bodies, Chi, Yoga, and the brain.
Practical neurotheology - using Neuroscience for prayer and meditation
Michael Persinger's site: http://shaktitechnology.com/
Reincarnation in Human Evolution - The New Science of Darwinian Reincarnation.
Enlightenment, Self, and the Brain. How the brain changes with final liberation
Psychic Skills & Miracles - technology used for telepathy and remote viewing
The Sacred Body. Kundalini, Subtle bodies, Chi, Yoga, and the brain.
Practical neurotheology - using Neuroscience for prayer and meditation
Michael Persinger's site: http://shaktitechnology.com/
Scientists Have Discovered a Way For You to Take Total Control of Your Dreams
The news: In the 2010 film Inception, it's bad news to realize you're dreaming.
When Leonardo DiCaprio's character reveals to Ellen Page that their outdoor café chat isn't really happening, for instance, the world unravels: Page panics, her coffee starts vibrating and everything around them explodes.
But in real life, "lucid dreaming" — or realizing you're in a dream while it's happening — is a valuable and coveted state. And in a revolutionary new study, scientists may have discovered exactly how to make it happen.
Really. The results were published in Nature Neuroscience this weekend, and they're pretty fascinating. Twenty-seven healthy adult volunteers spent multiple nights sleeping in a lab in Germany, where they eventually entered the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep. About two minutes in, the researchers applied a weak 30-second electrical current directly to the frontal lobes of some of the patients. The others received a "sham current with no electricity."
The outcome was telling: For the subjects who received electricity, particularly at an output of 40 Hertz, lucid dreaming was reported 77% of the time. Another 58% reported lucidity when exposed to 25 Hertz, while lucid dreaming was never reported by any of the subjects who received zero electricity.
As none of the volunteers had a history of such dreams, the results, though self-reported, seem reliable. In addition, none were aware what type of stimulation they'd be receiving, nor was the electrical current strong enough to wake them on its own.
According to a 2009 study, the 30-40 Hertz range is a sweet spot for lucidity. This rate matches the brain waves typically measured during unprompted lucid dreams, which represent much higher brain function than a normal REM cycle.
Why this is important: Vox reports that these findings constitute a "major contribution to consciousness research." Not only are they conceptually intriguing, they may represent possible ways to treat mental health problems, like the "recurring nightmares" that accompany post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Gutenberg University philosopher Thomas Metzinger also points out that the transition from non-lucid to lucid dreaming is similar to "snapping back to attention after daydreaming," so the study could provide insight into waking life as well. Additionally, electricity has become increasingly common in brain treatments in general: The FDA recently approved "an electrical brain implant that treats tremors associated with Parkinson's disease."
Of course, this method is still in its early stages. Needless to say, don't try this at home. But all told, the possibilities are certainly exciting and may constitute an entirely new way of studying the brain and the physiological impact of dreams.
Christopher Nolan would be proud.
http://mic.com/articles/89269/scientists-have-discovered-a-way-for-you-to-take-total-control-of-your-dreams
The Mind, The Brain, and God
With all the research on mind/brain connections these days – Your brain in lust or love! While gambling or feeling envious! While meditating, praying, or having an out-of-body experience! – it’s natural to wonder about Big Questions about the relationships among the mind, the brain, and God. For instance, some people have taken the findings that some spiritual experiences have neural correlates to mean that the hand of God is at work in the brain. Others have interpreted the same research to mean that spiritual experiences are “just” neural, and thus evidence against the existence of God or other supernatural forces. These debates are updated versions of longstanding philosophical and religious wrestlings with how God and nature might or might not intertwine.What’s your own gut view, right now, as a kind of snapshot: Do you think that God is involved in some way in your thoughts and feelings? In your most intimate sense of being?
In this essay, we’ll explore what mind, brain, and God could be, how they might interact, and what studies on the neuropsychology of spiritual experiences can – and cannot – tell us...
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/the-mind-the-brain-and-god-part-i
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/the-mind-the-brain-and-god-part-ii
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/the-mind-the-brain-and-god-part-iii
In this essay, we’ll explore what mind, brain, and God could be, how they might interact, and what studies on the neuropsychology of spiritual experiences can – and cannot – tell us...
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/the-mind-the-brain-and-god-part-i
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/the-mind-the-brain-and-god-part-ii
http://www.wildmind.org/blogs/on-practice/the-mind-the-brain-and-god-part-iii
The World's Happiest Man is a Tibetan Monk
Matthieu Ricard, a 66-year old Tibetan monk and geneticist, produces brain gamma waves—linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory—never before reported in neuroscience, leading researchers to conclude that Ricard is the world’s happiest man. The secret to his success in achieving bliss? Meditation, he claims.
Meditating is like lifting weights or exercising for the mind, Ricard told the Daily News. Anyone can be happy by simply training their brain, he says.
To quantify just how happy Ricard is, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin attached 256 sensors to the monk’s skull. When he meditated on compassion, the researchers were shocked to see that Ricard’s brian produces a level of gamma waves off the charts. He also demonstrated excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, meaning he has an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, the researchers say.
During the same study, the neuroscientists also peeked into the minds of other monks. They found that long-term practitioners—those who have engaged in more than 50,000 rounds of meditation—showed significant changes in their brain function, although that those with only three weeks of 20-minute meditation per day also demonstrated some change.
To spread the word on achieving happiness and enlightenment, Ricard authored Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. Proceeds from the book go towards over 100 humanitarian projects.
“Try sincerely to check, to investigate,” he explained to the Daily News. “That’s what Buddhism has been trying to unravel — the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-worlds-happiest-man-is-a-tibetan-monk-105980614/?no-ist
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