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.
