23/04/2009 by admin.

The time has come to put forward the ideas that I (tentatively) favour. Tentativeness is important for me in the current state of knowledge. We cannot say, with any sort of completeness, what the cells in the brain actually do, especially the glia cells – maybe something to do with calcium movements and voltages that are not action potentials. Our picture of synapses is also somewhat foggy, especially the mechanics of how the number and strength of synapses changes as the brain forms memories and learns. The connections of neurons has only started being mapped. Some of the main highways are known but not the details. And so it goes. A wholly new aspect of the brain could appear out of left field any day and change the understanding of the brain overnight. So I must be tentative. Nevertheless it is constructive to speculate, and fun as long as it is not taken too seriously. In the next post, I will speculate, but first I give some history.

Every once in a while, we can experience a culture shock within our own culture. We find that some idea that we took to be a vague and sloppy metaphor, is a literal truth to many others. In my late teens (in the 1950s) I took a psychology course in high school. The material was not always believable but like a good student I learned it and gave it back in exams. That did not mean I had to accept it. Being a good student, I usually accepted what I was taught. However, I just could not believe 1950’s psychology. I became aware that the other students had no trouble accepting the material. It fit with their world. That was a culture shock. Shortly after this I first heard about dyslexia and realized that it explained my reading and writing difficulties. I made the assumption that the reason I had no feeling of comfort with Freud’s ideas was because I was ‘made differently’. The thing that was most unbelievable was that there was a ‘conscious mind’ and a separate ‘unconscious mind’ or ‘subconscious mind’. It was inconceivable to me that I had two separate minds. I had one and what was more, if I had to choose between a conscious or an unconscious mind then I would have to choose unconscious. This attitude on my part was because I thought of mind as the thing that thinks. As there was no trace of any mechanisms of thought in my consciousness, my thinking must happen elsewhere. I could not feel any metaphorical gears or levers or other mechanisms doing any thinking work in my consciousness, the only conscious awareness was of the finished final products. Pop, there’s another thought, nicely related to the last one. Even some puzzles done in a fixed stepwise fashion had no feeling of ‘how’ each step was accomplished. I had consciousness and I had a mind but not a conscious mind.

I became less sure that I was made so differently from everyone else when I questioned them and found that others did not see anything odd about what I said or did. They also could not describe any conscious thought processes either but just finished thoughts. I might be made different in terms of dyslexia but probably not in terms of conscious experience.

Sometime, about 40 years ago, in the 1970s, I sat on the top step of the stairs and tried to figure out how I knew when I was conscious. I realized that the answer was memory. If I could remember being conscious, I believed I was conscious at that time. If there was a gap in my memory, I believed I had been unconscious during that gap. If I was conscious, I had a memory and if I had a memory, I had been conscious. Introspection did not show me consciousness, memory of introspection did. I formed the tentative belief that consciousness was like the leading edge of memory and not really separate from memory. This is not particularly helpful because memory is almost as mysterious as consciousness, maybe more.

I took ‘Biological Basis of Behavior’ from the Open University and began reading papers and books on the subject of consciousness.

About 30 years ago, in the 1980s, I had an argument with a friend about whether it would be possible to draw a one-to-one mapping between a biological account of the brain, a psychological account of behavior, and a philosophical account of the mind. I thought that if you had the right three accounts, they would fit together and I tried to produce such a mapping. It had a lot of holes but I felt it showed that the enterprise would someday be possible. I have re-read it a couple of times since I wrote it and noted where more reading or thinking was required. The mapping is a sort of on-going project.

What started me creating this blog was the explosion in material on functioning of the brain. I thought of my friends who were not aware that a revolution as big as the Copernican revolution, or the Darwinian one or the quantum mechanical one, was just about to happen in neuroscience. It was going to be hard for people to change the way they thought about their minds. I could try to give them (and me) a head start in little incremental posts. I was already following the science and therefore just needed to write the posts.

The next post will be on my tentative model and then a summary of the first 100 posts.

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30/12/2008 by admin.

This blog has been going for a little over 6 months; it is coming to a new year; so I intend to do a little housekeeping. The object is a make it easier for my visitors to find what they want among the posts. I have made a list of general ideas/questions that I am trying to investigate, and then, for each heading, I list the posts that apply to that idea.

Purpose of the blog

The aim of this blog is to prepare people for the revolution that is going to happen soon in neuroscience. The very first post (1 Jun aims ) outlined the scope of the blog. The aims are enlarged on later in (10 Aug scientific shocks). To give an indication of the type of material that was intended in the blog an early post gave a list (12 Jun what do we know about consciousness) and another gave probable functions (2 Jul does sconsciousness have a function). Putting consciousness in context was the purpose of  (9 Oct one way to look at consciousness).

A different way to look at consciousness

Some posts have been specifically written to help people come to grips with a different way of viewing their mental life. These posts hardly contain any quotes or links to scientific material. I have used some descriptions of my own way of seeing myself: (6 Jun living without a conscious mind) (10 Jul decisions) (15 Aug who is watching) (18 Oct why make problems) (15 Nov metaphors for consciousness) (30 Nov metaphor) (15 Dec a few definitions)   

Some posts look at more specific problems in understanding consciousness

·        The question of how qualia or the quality of our experience is produced has been a problem, especially for philosophers. (13 Jun why not) (21 Sep the wrong questions)  

·        Consciousness includes awareness of fringe events. (25 Oct a certain feeling) (12 Nov fringe consciousness) (3 Dec confidence)  

·        There is also a problem of what to do about free will. M Gassaniga has put forward the idea of an interpreter that makes sense of our actions. (26 Jul the interpreter) Other posts on this subject:  (17 Sep the problem of free will) (15 Oct a feeling of will) (31 Oct virtual agency) (3 Nov Llinas) (6 Nov more Llinas) (18 Nov decisions without frontal lobe activity)  

·        A spatial construction is basic to consciousness. (19 Aug  the 3D world) (30 Sep built-in sat-nav)

·        There is one is probably one mechanism for various types of awareness. (4 Sep shared workspace) (8 Sep what goes on in dreams) (3 Oct consciousness in Zen meditation) (21 Nov default network) (9 Dec hypnosis) Thinking can be different when it does not have to be tied to awareness of the thinking. (27 Sep eureka)  

·        An important question is how we live in the present when it takes time for the brain to process information and render it part of consciousness. (24 Jun living in the present) Changizi explains some visual illusions by projection into future (26 Aug living in the present 2) It affects tennis refs (9 Nov prediction).  Not only does it take time to produce conscious experience, the process is like frames of a movie, so it is discontinuous rather than being continuous. (19 Jul watching the movie)

Old ideas that get in the way

There are ways of thinking that interfere with understanding the brain. (12 Dec a different angle)  

·        Some people take the metaphor between computers and brains a little too seriously. (19 Jun brain-computer metaphor)

·        Many people are resistance to there being a continuity between our brains and those of other animals. (4 Aug are animals conscious?) (23 Aug a birds eye view) (28 Oct dogs) (24 Nov Occams razor and rules of thumb) (12 Dec hangover from the Great Chain of Beings)  (27 Dec not just a few animals)

·        I have encountered a strict identification of language with consciousness that I think is counterproductive. (7 Aug the inner voice) (24 Sep unconscious meaning).

·        A leftover from Freudian theories is a distrust of unconscious thinking. (6 Oct bad press for unconscious)

·        The idea that the neo-cortex is the only part of the brain involved in producing consciousness is counter production. The thalamus as well as the cortex is important in producing consciousness (11 Sep Grand Central Station)  (21 Dec thalamus waves)

Some ‘how’ hypotheses

There are some hypotheses that seem very convincing. So far we have taken a quick look at the following:

·        Bayesian calculations create consciousness. (2 Jun is the brain bayesian) (24 Dec  Friston’s law ) looked at the possibility put forward by K Friston.

·        R Rensink has a hypothesis that there are two aspects of consciousness, the big picture without detail and the focus with a few items in detail. (29 Jul change)

·        R Llinas puts forward a hypothesis that the thalamus controls consciousness (6 Dec yet more Llinas)   

·        My own hypothesis for many years has been massively parallel overlapping feed back loops within the cortex and between the cortex and the thalamus. (4 Jul ambiguous perceptions) (14 Sep feedback)

Miscellaneous bits and pieces

(23 Jul smell is different),  (30 Aug do grandmother cells fly?), (12 Oct metaphor to embodiment), (22 Oct the homunculus problem), (27 Nov not inside us)  

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19/12/2008 by admin.

Many people come to look at the brain from some variation on a particular set of preconceived attitudes.

1. Most and all important thinking happens in the neo-cortex.
2. There are two independent thinking systems: unconscious and conscious.
3. There is a big divide between how humans think and how animals think.
4. Introspection is a trustworthy means to understand ‘conscious thought’.
5. Without human language it is not possible to have concepts.
6. It is impossible to have morality and responsibility without free will and impossible to have free will without a ‘conscious mind’.

All of these notions are probably false. They may not be but they certainly can be mistaken. The important thing is to keep an open mind when interpreting research results. It hampers us to carry Freud, Descartes, Chomsky and others like millstones around our necks.

The more reasonable way to look at things can be laid out.

1. The whole of the forebrain and parts of the midbrain are important in normal thinking. In particular the cortex does not work without the thalamus and vice versa. The more ancient parts of the cortex, such as the hippocampus, are extremely important to thought and memory, not just the neo-cortex.
2. Being conscious of thoughts should not be confused with the actual thinking any more than being conscious of a tree should be confused with the actual tree. It may be that there is one undivided thinking process and that we are aware of some of the process but not all of it (or even most of it).
3. In evolutionary history, we have only recently, diverged from our sister species. There is no reason our brains differ in kind, rather than degree, from other animals.
4. Introspection may be largely an exercise in spin or self deception. We would not know if it was from within introspection.
5. There is non-verbal thinking even though some people resist and downplay the idea. You can think something and not be able to find words to express the idea.  
6. We make decisions and that should be sufficient for owning our actions and accepting responsibility for them. What that means morally and legally needs to be decided as it has been in the past. Conscious free will is a red herring.

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10/08/2008 by admin.

The world is in for another great scientific shock.

There was the Copernican revolution that gave us a new meaning for the word ‘revolution’. It took a while but people started feeling that they really were on the surface of a sphere, spinning around and orbiting a star. At first, the very thought made people dizzy and fearful. They might believe that the earth was round but they did not feel it. Now it is just how we think.

Then there was Darwin. Not everyone has digested that theory yet, but many people can now be comfortable with the feeling that we are one of the animals, not the opposite of animals, and feel a long, shared history with them. Darwinism along with plate tectonics has made us accustomed to the idea that the earth, and its life, has been slowly changing for an extremely long time rather than created as we see it now, in a short time. Now it is just how many of us think.

Next Newton’s universe of simple matter and energy, action and reaction, unfolding in a rigid, continuous space and time, was shattered by Einstein’s relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Most of us have not only failed to internalize these theories, we have not even managed to understand or really ‘believe’ them. There is an understanding gap between physicists and broadly well educated members of the public who cannot feel ‘they are living in’ the universe that the physicists describe.

It is time to get ready for the next shock. Science is shortly going to illuminate how the brain works and it is not going to be easy to assimilate. We will have to learn to see ourselves in a different way.

I hope this blog will help you prepare for the shock. That is why I am doing the blog.

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12/06/2008 by admin.

Any hypothesis of the nature of consciousness has to address several facts – at least these facts, as a minimum, and there probably are other constraints as well as these.

1. There is an intimate connection between memory and consciousness. We remember what we have been conscious of. We know we have been unconscious if there is a discontinuity in our memory of events. Memories ‘package’ experience in a form that closely resembles the conscious experience of events. We feel a flow of future projections to present conscious experience to past memories without any sharp change in the type of awareness.
2. Consciousness and dreaming have some commonalities but are quite different in their connection to perception and action. Dreams are not about reality and usually not result in action and usually are not remembered.
3. There is a time delay in the formation of a conscious experience which we do not perceive. It is as if we were automatons who, for no good reason, experience a continuous movie of our immediately past perceptions and actions. We feel our consciousness is a real time event when it is not. The best summary of the experimental evidence for the time delay that I have found so far is Roger Penrose’s review of the evidence.
4. Consciousness is not a completely faithful model of what is actually happening. Illusions and misinterpretations are frequent and somewhat predictable. We do not even have a completely accurate model of our own minds. For instance: there are blind sight and other knowing-without-awareness-of-knowing; there are phantom limbs and other awareness-of-the-nonexistent.
5. The way that conscious experience presents itself seems arbitrary and personal. Why is a particular wavelength of light seen as a particular colour? Is my red your red? Qualia (properties of perceptions) are an aspect of consciousness.
6. Consciousness happens at the same time as some pronounced activities in the brain, particularly reciprocal communication between the cortex and the thalamus, low amplitude but high frequency brain waves, activity in the reticular formation. There is a summary in Scholarpedia but it is fairly technical.
7. Our consciousness can be affected by various mental illnesses, drugs, stressful situations etc. We can also learn to modify our consciousness (with meditation for example).

We need a picture of consciousness that fits with and helps explain these facts.

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01/06/2008 by admin.

Does the world need another blog? Well, I think so or I would not be starting this one. We need to talk about consciousness from a different angle. So… I will put forward various views that I find worthy of discussion and then I will hope that others comment on my pieces and other comments.

Consciousness is a big subject:

What is it?…..Why do we have it? –or- What is its function?…..How did we get it? –or- How did it evolve?…..Where is it? –or- What is its neurobiology?…..What does it feel like?…..Other questions will, no doubt, follow.

It is also approached in different ways – by scientists, philosophers, therapists and artists.

But there is the hope that consciousness is quite simple to understand and with that hope, I blog.

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