Because I can mirror-write, I had to read the article in The Psychologist (citation below) by McIntosh and Della Sala on the skill. They look at much of the evidence for two theories: mirror-writing has a motor source, and it has a perception source. Of course, I could not help but compare their picture with my own experience. I am left-handed and dyslexic so I have always thought that my mirror-writing skill stems from one or both or these conditions.

This article puts forward the idea that some mirroring is natural for all children learning to write. They have not been required to differentiate mirror images until faced with writing. They learn the shape of letters separately from learning their direction and so there is a shortish time period where mirror-writing is somewhat common.

There is little truth in the idea that mirror-writing is more common in left-handers. Mirror-writing in childhood does of course correlate with age, but the true underlying factor here is the stage of acquisition of writing, with occasional mirror-writing as an intermediate stage between no writing and correct writing …. Specifically, it implies that the general shape of a letter is learned more rapidly than the direction for writing it. The key to understanding this may be to regard mirror-writing not as intrinsically errorful, but as a feat of action generalisation. It is a neat trick for a child to produce a perfect mirrored-form, which they have never been taught, as readily as the correct form that they have been shown repeatedly. For most actions, this mirror-generalisation would be useful, because anything that we do one way may need to be done in reverse at another time. … Writing, however, belongs to an unusual, evolutionarily recent, class of actions that have a culturally set directionality, and for which this generalisation is unhelpful. Acquiring the correct direction for writing in one’s culture may be a matter of stamping out the unwanted alternative after having learned the general shape of the action.

It seems that mirror-writing has a motor cause. Most mirror-writers cannot read their mirror script, me included. Reading mirror-writing is a separate skill. Much of the discussion in this article has to do with people changing hands from their dominate one or using both hands simultaneously. I had never done any mirror-writing with my (non-dominate) right hand so, of course, I stopped reading and tried. It does not seem to work for me. Of course, I have to take into consideration that I have never done anything with my right voluntarily – why start in my 70s. It may be that the ability to mirror-write may actually be quite common but most people have simply never tried to do it.

But I do think that my dyslexia may be involved. I associate my type of dyslexia with a life long problem with identifying whether two images are the same or mirror images from memory (as opposed to have both images in my visual field at the same time or one immediately after the other). Another problem that I have always had is telling whether a turn is clockwise or counter-clockwise without picturing the numbers on a clock and match that image with the motion. Am I going up the numbers or down? Nothing in this article seems to definitely confirm or reject the idea that some types of dyslexia have an affect on mirror perception or motor patterns.

RD McIntosh, & S Della Sala (2012). Mirror-writing The Psychologist, 25 (10), 742-746

Joachim Krueger has a posting in the PsychologyToday blog (here). Where he attempts to use a logical construction to disprove the conclusions of DM Wegner (2002) The illusion of conscious will.

He summarizes Wegner’s conclusion as follows:

“According to this (Wegner’s) view, the brain prepares and executes both action and the conscious intention of acting at the same time. Conscious will is thereby correlated action without having any causal power. The correlation is due to the common cause of brain activity. If conscious will does not (ever) cause action, it is a dead end in the stream of causation. Conscious will is, as it were, an organism without offspring in the great genealogical tree of nature. Just as future generations are begotten by other organisms that mate, future actions are caused by other brain activities that are not causally dependent on conscious will.”

Krueger attempts to prove that this is illogical. The language is a bit messy here but the argument can be made clear. If a particular brain activity, and only that brain activity, causes both the ‘conscious will’ and the ‘action’, than if either the ‘action’ or the ‘conscious will’ do not happen, it follows that the brain activity did not happen. So either ‘action and ‘conscious will’ both happen or neither happens. Therefore either ‘conscious will’ is part of the casual chain or is epiphenomenal.

What do we make of this? First, the experimental evidence is that the action and conscious will do not always happen together, they can be separately under unusual circumstances. This little logical argument does not take this into consideration and therefore does not accurately describe the situation. It can be experimentally arranged to have ‘conscious will’ without ‘action’ and to have ‘action’ without ‘conscious will’.

Second, just because ‘conscious will’ is not in this particular casual chain does not mean that it is not in some other causal chain. (I would agree that it is fairly certain that consciousness has functions because it is too biologically costly to be a frill. In other words, it is extremely improbable that consciousness is epiphenomenal.) There are other brain activities: for example, the ‘conscious will’ feeling in consciousness may mark memories as being memories of intended actions as opposed to unintended actions. Such a marking would be causal in learning outcomes of actions etc. To learn from our actions we need to remember whether there was either or both a feeling of agency and a feeling of intent. Just because consciousness is not essential in causing intended actions does not make it useless or epiphenomenal, if it records the nature of the action.

One of the problems of logical arguments such as this one is that once ‘brain activity’ becomes B, ‘conscious will’ becomes C and ‘action’ becomes A, it is difficult to notice when the meaning of these terms subtly change. When a particular brain activity becomes any/all brain activity the logic evaporates. It is suddenly not the same B. One has to be careful at every step of the logic that there is not a sleight-of-hand with the meaning of the elements.

ScienceDaily has an item on a paper by Beckman, Gropel and Ehrlenspiel, Preventing Motor Skill Failure through Hemisphere-Specific Priming – Cases from Choking under Pressure. (here)

Groups of right-handed athletes (soccer players, judo competitors, badminton players) performed with and without pressure. Half of each group squeezed a ball with their left hand before the pressure session and the other half squeezed a ball with their right hand. All the players were right handed. The squeezing was done in order to prime one of the cerebral hemispheres – left hand for right hemisphere and right hand for left. In general, performance under pressure was not as good as pressure-free. There is an element of ‘choking’ under pressure. The results were that squeezing with the left hand gave better pressure performance than with the right hand.

For skilled athletes, many movements, such as kicking a soccer ball or completing a judo kick, become automatic with little conscious thought. When athletes under pressure don’t perform well, they may be focusing too much on their own movements rather than relying on their motor skills developed through years of practice … “Rumination can interfere with concentration and performance of motor tasks. Athletes usually perform better when they trust their bodies rather than thinking too much about their own actions or what their coaches told them during practice,” Beckmann said. “While it may seem counterintuitive, consciously trying to keep one’s balance is likely to produce imbalance, as was seen in some sub-par performances by gymnasts during the Olympics in London.”

Previous research has shown that rumination is associated with the brain’s left hemisphere, while the right hemisphere is associated with superior performance in automated behaviors, such as those used by some athletes, the study notes. The right hemisphere controls movements of the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere controls the right side. The researchers theorized that squeezing a ball or clenching the left hand would activate the right hemisphere of the brain and reduce the likelihood of the athlete’s choking under pressure. The study focused exclusively on right-handed athletes because some relationships between different parts of the brain aren’t as well understood for left-handed people, according to the authors.

Conscious thinking is slow and limited compared to automatic action. Here is the abstract:

When well-learned motor skills fail, such as when elderly persons fall or when athletes “choke under pressure,” it is assumed that attention is directed toward the execution of the action. Research findings suggest that this controlled execution and subsequent inferior performance depend on a dominant left-hemispheric activation. In a series of 3 experiments, we tested whether increasing right-hemispheric activation by the use of hemisphere-specific priming extenuates motor skill failure. We compared the performances of a sample of experienced athletes in different sports (soccer, tae kwon do, and badminton) in a pressure-free situation with that performed under pressure. As expected, the hemisphere-specific priming extenuated a performance decrease after pressure induction when compared with a control condition. The results suggest that hemisphere-specific priming may prevent motor skill failure. It is argued that this hemispheric priming should be task dependent and can be understood as a functional regulation of the activation in the hemispheres.

A occasional commenter, Quen_tin, has a very different way of seeing things to myself. His comments are appreciated, always serious and never rude. But I can feel his frustration in the beginning of his last comment. “Sorry but… What exactly are you talking about ??? Mental entities that are not conscious ? Thoughts we are not aware of ? I think your concepts are ill-defined.”

So I feel that it is time to give an overview of my guesses as to how consciousness works. I have avoided taking my guesses too seriously because the science is so fluid. And this blog was started to follow the science rather than put forward a complete theory of my own. But on the other hand, there seems no piecemeal way to explain my problems with Quen_tin’s comments.

The philosophical ideas that I find most comfortable are Thomas Metzinger’s (pdf).

The present theory develops a detailed story about precisely what properties representations in a given information-processing system must possess in order to become phenomenal representations, ones the content of which is at the same time a content of consciousness. Let us start with what I call the “minimal concept of consciousness” and then proceed to enrich it. Phenomenologically, minimal consciousness is described as the presence of a world. This minimal notion involves what is called (1) the globality-constraint (a world-model that is available as a world model), (2) the presentationality-constraint (experience of presence in that world, now), and (3) the transparency-constraint (unavailability of earlier processing stages). … The presence of a world. The phenomenal presence of a world is the activation of a coherent, global model of reality (Constraint 1) within a virtual window of presence (Constraint 2), a model that cannot be recognized as a model by the system generating it within itself (Constraint 3). Please note how all that such a system would experience would be the presence of one unified world, homogeneous and frozen into an internal Now as it were.

Then the self is introduced. …one could say that you are the content of your PSM (phenomenal self-model ). A perhaps better way of making the central point intuitively accessible could be by saying that we are systems that constantly confuse themselves with the content of their PSM (phenomenal self-model ). And Mezinger carries on to elaborate a picture of consciousness that seems very reasonable to me.

It is not that I have accepted this theory as the only possibility. However it is a possibility – and therefore, the phenomenal should not be beyond scientific explanation.

So the way I look at it is that there is a brain and that brain does stuff like action, perception, cognition, memory and whatever else we associate with mind or thought or mental processing. Mind is a function of brain, mind is what brain does. A small but very important function of the brain, or a small part of the mind-function, is consciousness. It is a model of the world including a model of the self that is available to much of the brain. It is connected with attention, working memory and short-term prediction. It is important to the working of the brain but does not do action, perception, or cognition. It does not do thought; it does awareness. It has no direct (as opposed to modeled) knowledge of the world or the self. Therefore introspection has no direct privileged knowledge.

Because it is the route to working memory, any thought process that requires the storage facility of working memory will have its interim steps appear in consciousness (not the thought processes but the sub-conclusions on the way to a final conclusion). It will have some of the appearance of the thought being consciously done because the interim steps appear in order in the stream of consciousness. But we still have only one unified brain/mind doing the thinking. We are never aware through consciousness of the thinking process, the ‘cogs moving’.

It is true that one of the reasons that I find this a comfortable way of looking at consciousness is a metaphysical choice, taken so long ago that it is lost in the fog of childhood. I believe in a ‘reality’ that is physical and material in nature, with a very concrete sort of belief. I find it impossible to believe in non-physical/non-material things. The disembodied, spiritual and such like are not entertained. I shy away from words that sit on the fence like ‘emergent’; they seem to want to be both physical and spiritual at the same time. So my only way of understanding consciousness is scientific.

At this point, I hear in my ear that some readers are saying to themselves, “but why is red the way it is?”. Where do the qualia come from? I don’t know how the brain does qualia. But I see it as a scientific question all the same. I do not buy that it is so mysterious that it cannot be understood. Why is red the way it is? Why not. How is red the way it is? Who knows. But I trust we will know someday.

Intentional binding is an interesting effect. The perceived interval between an voluntary action and its effect is shorter if there is a sense of agency involved. Berberian, Sarrazin, Blaye and Haggard (see citation) have investigated this effect.

They used an aircraft mockup with stages: conflict detection, command decision (how much to change heading), command implementation (set the heading), command engagement (go button – action), command result (confirmation of success/failure – effect), followed by interval estimation (between action and effect)and rating of feeling of agency. The decision, implementation and engagement can be automated or not, giving four situations: from all three under control to all three automated. The interval between action and effect was fixed at three different times. What was measured was how the interval estimation was affected by the level of automation, the length of the interval and the feeling of agency.

First, we observed a strong relation between measures of IB (intentional binding) and different levels of system automation. Second, our data revealed a gradual increase in temporal estimation with the increasing level of automation. The more the system was automated, the longer the action-effect interval was perceived. Third, the effect of automation level on intentional binding was dependent on the actual action-effect delays…Our findings confirm the interest of the intentional binding as implicit measure of agency. First, we provide evidence that quantitative changes in binding are strongly associated with progressive changes in actual level of control, and also with quantitative changes in explicit ratings of agency. Second, we replicate the basic binding effect in a situation with high face-validity, in which action-event sequences paralleled those that participants might meet in their everyday lives….Our results reveal a gradual increase of interval estimates with the increasing level of automation. In contrast, many previous studies of agency have relied on binary agency-attribution judgments…. our result suggests action selection, planning and intention realisation may all contribute to sense of agency. In this way, our results are consistent with recent arguments that sense of agency is based on cue integration….We propose that temporal contiguity is task dependent and that intentional binding occurs in a specific ‘‘window of opportunity’’ which may vary across tasks, and may also depend on the range of action-effect delays experienced in a given setting. Operant learning is similarly sensitive to the natural time delays of the system linking actions to effects, even for systems as familiar as one’s own body.

Measures of intentional binding are a useful addition to reports of a feeling of agency for future experimentation.

But what does this study say about the consciousness of agency? Agency is not an all or nothing feeling – it can be graduated. One way to look at this would be that knowledge of agency is important to learning. We have to be able to accurately assess cause and effect in order to learn to get the outcomes we want. Therefore our understanding and memory must connect those things that are causally connected and avoid connecting those that are not. One way to do this is to store the memories of the cause and the effect (temporarily at least) in the same ‘time slot’. This in itself may shorten the interval between action and effect in memory when we recall it to estimate the interval. If there is a need to bias memory with probability of agency, that is a very good reason for the need for a conscious feeling of agency when this is appropriate. Some unconscious process must calculate how appropriate it is, because this calculation is not part of the conscious feeling of agency.

Berberian B, Sarrazin J-C, Le Blaye P, & Haggard P (2012). Automation Technology and Sense of Control: A window on Human Agency PLoS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0034075