Monday, May 18, 2009

Looking Inside.

Understanding consciousness today may be akin to gazing at the sea from Hellenic shores and predicting a round earth; we can approach the correct answer, but may well be millennia from confirming our theories. As each season passes handfuls of new imaging studies are published that provide sometimes astonishing and counterintuitive glimpses into the mind.

The standard view of consciousness, the one formed by experience rather than study, posits that human consciousness is the driving force behind our navigation of the world. That it is our conscious self that makes decisions, avoids conflicts and pursue goals. That when we sleep at night, our consciousness, and thus our Self, rests, while perhaps unnecessary and irrational- spurious- activity takes hold in the world of our dreams. This consciousness is one that is thoroughly humanized and embraces our belief in the uniqueness of experience and the primacy of the agency of (hu)man.


Yet, to me, it is becoming ever more clear that much of what we usually term as consciousness may be more of an illusion of control that aides evolutionary impulses. In this view, consciousness, rather than being the defining function of the brain, is merely another tool in the arsenal of human biology that allows us to navigate complex and dangerous ecosystems.

To move (somewhat) away from abstraction I’d like to discuss four recent articles which covered various new findings in brain imaging and physiology.


The first indicated that the perception of fatigue may be induced by a potential decrease in energy supply to the brain rather than an actual or impending lack of energy to the muscles. The experiment showed that by rinsing the mouth with sugars cyclists could improve their endurance. It is well known that the brain relies almost exclusively on glucose for metabolism while muscles have many potential sources of energy. How this ties into consciousness may be very interesting. We usually assume that the sensations that our conscious self receives are objective assays of physiology, yet in this case it seems clear that the brain/body senses an impending decrease in brain energy supply and sends the signal to our Self that our muscles are about to give. We, it seems, are fooling ourselves.


A second study, which was in reality a case study, indicated that we see more than we see. A man with two obliterated occipital lobes, the parts of the brain that receive direct visual input from the eyes, was able to navigate an obstacle course without sight, and could recognize the emotions on faces he could not see. He didn’t believe that he could do either of these tasks. His consciousness lost the ability to see, but the organism that he was retained certain of those abilities. There is no doubt that the ability to recognize emotion and avoid obstacles are intricately linked with our conscious perception of the physical world. And a child born blind would be unable to complete either of these tasks. Yet once we are up and running and fully wired as adults it seems that there is a lot that we see that We don’t see. Again, consciousness is the primary intermediate in ‘wiring’ the brain- linking a smile to happiness and a frown to despair, and recognizing that an object with density and hard edges should be avoided by our feet- yet it seems that once our conscious self has completed this wiring, our brain takes over some of these tasks, Us unawares.

When studying consciousness, and defining it the while, many have used attention as a surrogate for consciousness. In this view, when we pay heed to a certain aspect of our environment we are tuning our consciousness in on a given object. A recent study has suggested that attention, or concentration, has a physiologically defined set of parameters in the brain. It turns out that, and again here we return to the prefrontal cortex, when a startling stimulus passes through our field of vision we are biologically drawn to that stimulus. But if we concentrate hard enough we can maintain our attention away from that startling stimulus, this concentration manifests itself as cycling gamma waves in the prefrontal cortex. Two interesting corollaries to this idea include 1) the ability to induce this gamma wave cycling in mice with genetically engineered neurons and 2) the thought that meditation can enhance the conscious ability to concentrate. Whether this latter concept is a conscious induction of concentration or a basal training of consciousness is likely better answered by a Buddhist monk or urban yuppie. As an aside it is interesting to note that the author of a book on the subject, a Ms. Gallagher, said. “Multitasking is a myth, you cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” Given some of the above information and some to follow, I wouldn’t be so certain that multitasking is a myth. Perhaps expending consciousness on a many tasks simultaneously is impossible, but I’m not convinced that attention is the only player in ‘tasking,’ perhaps the main and the most efficacious, but certainly not the only.


The final set of studies that really set me on this particular writing binge involved scanning the brains of musicians during scripted verses improvisational playing. A certain area of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (here we go again), that is involved in planning and self control is deactivated prior to act of improvisation while activity in the medial prefrontal cortex was induced (inducted?). Interestingly activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain is often seen when a person is retelling a first person narrative story. A second study was done contrasting brain activity between improvisational melody and improvisational rhythm in classically trained pianists. Interestingly the same area of the brain, Broca’s area, that is involved in speech production saw a burst of activity in these musicians. Apparently (to me) these musicians already had a developed musical grammar and where creating new sentences according to that defined grammar on the fly. In this set of studies we see that a certain act, musical improvisation, can rely on various mental activities. I’m sure we would ascribe the same level of consciousness to playing a set piece and a improvising a new melody, yet it is clear that that consciousness that is extant is not precisely present in a the execution of the act, but at a different level of control, the level that ‘deactivates’ planning and ‘activates’ narration and personal expression.


Together these studies provide many interesting inroads into the meaning and nature of consciousness. Alternatively we see that: Our conscious mind is not the sole arbiter of objective information from other parts of the body but rather may sometimes be privy only to filtered information deemed adequate of conscious analysis; The brain filters and analyzes information unconsciously, garnering perhaps many things in an image or scene that we are unaware of, and when our conscious ability to recognize that image or scene is obliterated our unconscious mind still moves forward; Attention is a definable and physiological phenomenon that is amenable to study and modification, and that attention does not eliminate ‘extrinsic’ information but rather pushes it into the non-attended-to parts of brain function; Our conscious mind can act as a gateway to unleashing aspects of our unconscious mind, in the form of self expression and improvisation.

As a coda I would like to introduce the idea of dreams as the antithesis of consciousness, which is not to say the opposite. Dreams, sometimes remembered transiently or longer but often not, are sometimes thought to be the arbiter of importance of memory, combing through our minds to remove unneeded, nascent information while solidifying certain data that were repeatedly stimulated. Interestingly, there are drugs that agonize inhibitory neurotransmitters to produce amnesia and sleep (you may know Ambien). These drugs can have the unwanted effect of producing a waking sleep that includes people doing all kinds of untoward (and sometimes entirely quotidian) activities that are never registered to their memories. These drugs lead to an increase in stage II sleep but may entirely eliminate or significantly decrease REM sleep. A question: are these users of Ambien conscious during their woken sleep if it escapes entirely the purview of their memory. And what is to be made of the lack of REM sleep and the inability to remember entire, seemingly (to the outsider) conscious episodes of life.

A clear, defining expose on consciousness is yet impossible, but we can, using current technology, start to foment an image of our active mind through inference and experimentation, much as our forebears looked at the changing night sky and triangulated a planetary earth.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Natural Born Killers?

Riffing off the recent spate of publications regarding the dig of Homo floresiensis. The existence of an alternative hominid, or perhaps I should say another alternative hominid, in the path of sapient manifest destiny weighs heavily on our species own judgments of self.

We ought to consider the implications that the conquest of our ecological niche, at the expense of alternative homonid existence, has on our affection for foreign species, primate or otherwise. It is by now almost certain that Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis were contiguous in time and place over most of Europe extending to the Caucasus. It is now, to me, not unlikely that a similar interaction took place in Indonesia with our now deceased, diminutive friends. As research in this field of study progresses it will become ever more clear that neanderthalensis and floresiensis were sentient by any definition of the word and human by many definitions of the word. Art was in the domain of the Neaderthal, tools in the arsenal of the Floresian. Yet, historical reconstruction neglected, the interactions of modern sapiens with semi-intelligent or intelligent non-sapiens primates did not result in the preservation of those other species. Was there cultural transmission? Was there despair at the extinction of those other hominids? Was it a willed extinction? None of these questions can be answered, but we must face the reality that we prevailed, and are prevailing, in the niche that primates occupy on this earth.

But what to make of this? I will refrain from here waxing (wrong)philosophical about the necessity of a genetic ‘mean streak’, an evolutionary obliviousness. But there are a lot of people immune from reason, and maybe we have to conclude that maybe that’s what got us here in the first place.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Standing against followers in his own party

Among the exchanges in the final presidential debate on Wednesday was one that illuminates a recurring asymmetry in how people align within our two-party politics. McCain challenged Obama to describe an instance where he stood up to the Democratic leadership:

MCCAIN: You have to tell me one time when you have stood up with the leaders of your party on one single major issue.

OBAMA: First of all, in terms of standing up to the leaders of my party, the first major bill that I voted on in the Senate was in support of tort reform, which wasn't very popular with trial lawyers, a major constituency in the Democratic Party...I support charter schools and pay for performance for teachers. Doesn't make me popular with the teachers union. I support clean coal technology. Doesn't make me popular with environmentalists. So I've got a history of reaching across the aisle.

The list is not short for lack of further content. Obama was not popular with civil libertarians when he voted to legalize illegal wiretapping and give immunity to the enabling phone companies. His support for faith-based initiatives does not please secularists. His promise to violate Pakistani sovereignty under certain conditions does not encourage those who oppose invasions (though few such people seem to be around anymore).

In these cases Obama is not crossing the Democratic Party leadership. He's crossing major constituencies of his party's loyal base. That's the asymmetry. Over the summer, Republican social conservatives harangued the McCain campaign for not throwing meat to the bible-thumpers. And now the civilized wing of the Republican party is pushing back against McCain's new eclecticism and Palin's airheadedness. Conservative constituencies stay loud and make demands upon their leaders. The Democratic hordes stay complacent and docile, talking every four years about how this election, this time, is too important to demand more than a lesser evil. It's truly difficult to find mainstream critiques of Obama from his left.

This pattern has stayed true for at least the last 12 years. The long-term implications are difficult to foretell, but the short-term effects will start to take the shape of a string of disappointments, starting within Obama's first 100 days.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The Allure of Mystery

Obama has been consistently labeled as dangerous and unknown by the McCain campaign. They, I believe, seek to play on the Bradley effect and hope that a phrase like “thief in the night” and constant bombardment of xenophobic associations will arise subconsciously in November 4th.

This may work.

But to me, examined with full conscious intent, this only heightens my anticipation of a potential Obama presidency. You see I have recently been wary that rather than a van guard politician bringing youth and change to a nation, Obama was in fact what he so often seems: a gifted, if bland, politician recently converted to rank and file Washington politics. But the more I am told of Ayers the more I see potential in Obama. Ayers is interesting not as someone who founded the Weather Underground (of which I know exceedingly little), but rather as a leftist academic who attempts to achieve change in a huge urban education system. If Obama indeed is influenced by these views (rather than those of, say, say the republican president of Northwestern), then I think there is a great potential for significant and monumental change in this country.

And we have recently been given abundant verdict on the failure of our current, in a very large sense, direction.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Race effects

As the election approaches I'll be interested to see whether the Bradley effect, the gap between poll numbers and actual election results in races where one candidate is black, is in play. The gap has been a factor in a striking number of major races, especially through the 1980s and '90s, but has not been as clearly at work in more recent elections (though a number of those featured black Republicans, cases where many other weird effects are probably at work).

The Bradley effect is an index of the extent of subjective racism or overt prejudice, but also the degree to which prejudice is masked by political correctness--the result is race-anxious voters who don't want their anxiety to be known. If the Bradley effect is negligible this year on the way to an Obama win, it will be taken by a lot of people as one more sign that we are indeed a colorblind nation. The thing is that this elides over the objective component of racism, or "systematic" or "institutional" racism, in the admittedly tired vernacular of the left. I've written up some of my thoughts on the objective side of racism and the Obama campaign, and what I'll be particularly interested to see is how a possible Obama win will be integrated into the liberal narrative on race in America. It's a narrative that's been in flux--when Stephen Colbert chose colorblindness ('I don't see race. People tell me I'm white and I believe them, because police call me sir'...) as one of his tropes, he presumed a similar relationship to reality as he found with truthiness. But, especially as Obama went from a player in the primaries to the Democratic nominee, it feels like liberals really believe we're all judging each other according only to the content of our characters.

What's difficult to tell is whether the lack of a Bradley effect signifies more the eclipse of subjective racism, or the consolidated triumph of the ideology behind political correctness. If one is concerned about maintaining the appearance of a non-racist these days, it's much more important to observe PC strictures than it is to actually do or say anything that ameliorates racial inequality or anything like that. Similarly, Don Imus' nappy-headed ho comment arguably constituted, in the popular perception and as a matter of near-consensus, a greater violation of the American idea of racial harmony than did the racialized patterns of suffering left by Hurricane Katrina or the persecution of the Jena 6. In other words, in America these days racially-tinged gaffes are taken as truer indications of racism (or its absence) than any phenomena or patterns that require statistics or insight, rather than just one's ears, to notice.

One of the additional ironies of the Bradley effect is that it's measurement is made complicated by the fact that blacks are typically under-represented by traditional polling means, because of a relative deficit of stable addresses, phone lines, etc. It's almost like the continuing effects of objective racism make it harder to develop measures that might convince people that racism is behind us.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Top Lines of the Debate - A few are skewed ramblings!

by Nick Casady

M: Bailout - Let's call it a rescue!!!

M: Senator Obama, his cronies, his friends who gave out loans that would never be paid back.

O: Gotta Correct senator Mccain not suprisingly

M: Get rid of the Cronyism

M: What were the categories health? They are all important. Present day retireeess reach across isle russ fiengold ronald regan millions of new jobs clean coal tech, we can overcome, barak is putting 700 billion in the hands of terrorist organizations.

M: Not the overhead projector that Obama asked for

M: Nailing Jello to the wall. Lost 700,000 300,000 by small buisness. Obama will increase taxes 50%

Gold plated cadillac fantasy's i'm not looking for hair plugs

Did we hear the size of the fine (Acts like a weasel!)

We don't have time for on the job training my friend.

M: Requires a cool hand at the tiller

President Regan my hero

You know my hero is teddy roosevelt. Walk softly and carry a big stick!

I get follow ups too

O: The guy who sang bomb bomb bomb Iran