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466ource" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ca391e62-a595-41a7-9709872eb3d6bea1_source.jpg?w=560" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99702" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ca391e62-a595-41a7-9709872eb3d6bea1_source.jpg?w=560" alt="CA391E62-A595-41A7-9709872EB3D6BEA1_source" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ca391e62-a595-41a7-9709872eb3d6bea1_source.jpg 590w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ca391e62-a595-41a7-9709872eb3d6bea1_source.jpg?w=150&h=100 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ca391e62-a595-41a7-9709872eb3d6bea1_source.jpg?w=300&h=199 300w" sizes="(max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px" /></p> 467<div class="article-block article-text"> 468<div class="mura-region mura-region-loose"> 469<div class="mura-region-local"> 470<p>The short piece below first appeared in <em>Scientific American</em> (<a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-psychedelic-research-can-and-cannot-tell-us-about-consciousness/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Observations</a>) on October 26, 2018. It is a coauthored piece, led by me with contributions from Michael Schartner, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Suresh Muthukumaraswamy, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Adam Barrett. Since its appearance, both Dr. Kastrup and Prof. Kelly have responded. I attach links to their replies after our article, offering a few comments in further response (entirely my own point of view). These comments just offer additional clarifications – I stand fully by everything said in our <em>Sci Am</em> piece.</p> 471<hr /> 472<p>Itâs not easy to strike the right balance when taking new scientific findings to a wider audience. In a recent <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/misreporting-and-confirmation-bias-in-psychedelic-research/">opinion piece</a>, Bernardo Kastrup and Edward F. Kelly point out that media reporting can fuel misleading interpretations through oversimplification, sometimes abetted by the scientists themselves. Media misinterpretations can be particularly contagious for research areas likely to pique public interestâsuch as the exciting new investigations of the brain basis of altered conscious experience induced by psychedelic drugs.</p> 473<p>Unfortunately, Kastrup and Kelly fall foul of their own critique by misconstruing and oversimplifying the details of the studies they discuss. This leads them towards an anti-materialistic view of consciousness that has nothing to do with the details of the experimental studiesâours or others.</p> 474<p>Take, for example, their discussion of our <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46421">recent study</a> reporting increased neuronal âsignal diversityâ in the psychedelic state. In this study, we used âLempel-Zivâ complexityâa standard algorithm used to compress data filesâto measure the diversity of brain signals recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Diversity in this sense is related to, though not entirely equivalent to, ârandomness.â The data showed widespread increased neuronal signal diversity for three different psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin and ketamine), when compared to a placebo baseline. This was a striking result since <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133532">previous studies</a> using this measure had only <a href="https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/niw022/2957408">reported <em>reductions</em></a> in signal diversity, in global states generally thought to mark âdecreasesâ in consciousness, such as (non-REM) sleep and anesthesia.</p> 475<p>Media reporting of this finding led to headlines such as âFirst evidence found that LSD produces âhigherâ levels of consciousnessâ (<em>The Independent</em>, April 19, 2017)âplaying on an ambiguity between cultural and scientific interpretations of âhigherââand generating just the kind of confusion that Kastrup and Kelly rightly identify as unhelpful.</p> 476<p>Unfortunately, Kastrup and Kelly then depart from the details in misleading ways. They suggest that the changes in signal diversity we found are âsmall,â when it is not magnitude but statistical significance and effect size that matters. Moreover, even small changes to brain dynamics can have <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133532">large effects on consciousness</a>. And when they compare the changes reported in psychedelic states with those found in sleep and anesthesia, they neglect the important fact that these analyses were conducted on different data types (intracranial data and scalp-level EEG respectivelyâcompared to source-localized MEG for the psychedelic data)âmaking quantitative comparisons very difficult.</p> 477<p>Having set up the notion that the changes we observed were âsmall,â they then say, âTo suggest that brain activity randomness explains psychedelic experiences seems inconsistent with the fact that these experiences can be highly structured and meaningful.â However, neither we nor others claim that âbrain activity randomnessâ <em>explains</em> psychedelic experiences. Our finding of increased signal diversity is part of a larger mission to account for aspects of conscious experience in terms of physiological processes. In our view, higher signal diversity indicates a larger repertoire of physical brain states that very plausibly underpin specific aspects of psychedelic experience, such as a blending of the senses, dissolution of the âego,â and hyper-animated imagination. As standard functional networks dissolve and reorganize, so too might our perceptual structuring of the world and self.</p> 478<p>âIn short, a formidable chasm still yawns between the extraordinary richness of psychedelic experiences and the modest alterations in brain activity patterns so far observed.â Here, their misrepresentations are again exposed. To call the alterations modest is to misread the statistics. To claim a âformidable chasmâ is to misunderstand the incremental nature of consciousness research (and experimental research generally), to sideline the constraints and subtleties of the relevant analyses and to ignore the insights into psychedelic experience that such analyses provide.</p> 479<p>Kastrup and Kellyâs final move is to take this presumed chasm as motivation for questioning âmaterialistâ views, held by most neuroscientists, according to which conscious experiences âand mental states in generalâare underpinned by brain states. Our study, like all other studies that explore relations between experiential states and brain states (whether about psychedelics or not), is entirely irrelevant to this metaphysical question.</p> 480<p>These are not the only inaccuracies in the piece that deserve redress. For example, their suggestion that decreased âbrain activityâ is one of the more reliable findings of psychedelic research is incorrect. Aside from the well-known stimulatory effects of psychedelics on the excitatory glutamate system, early reports of decreased brain blood flow under psilocybin have not been well replicated: a subsequent study by the same team using a different protocol and drug kinetics (intravenous LSD) found only <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/113/17/4853">modest increases in brain blood flow</a> confined to the visual cortex. In contrast, more informative dynamic measures have revealed more consistent findings, with network disintegration, increases in global connectivity and increased signal diversity/entropy appearing to be particularly reliable outcomes, replicated across studies and study teams.</p> 481<p>Consciousness science remains a fragile business, poised precariously between grand ambition, conflicting philosophical worldviews, immediate personal relevance and the messy reality of empirical research. Psychedelic research in particular has its own awkward cultural and historical baggage. Against this background, itâs important to take empirical advances for what they are: yardsticks of iterative, self-correcting progress.</p> 482<p>This research is providing a unique window onto mappings between mechanism and phenomenology, but we are just beginning to scratch the surface. At the same timeâand perhaps more importantlyâpsychedelic research is demonstrating an exciting potential for clinical use, for example in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28443617">alleviating depression</a>, though larger and more rigorous studies are needed to confirm and contextualize the promising early findings.</p> 483<p>Kastrup and Kelly are right to guard against overplaying empirical findings by the media. But by misrepresenting the explanatory reach of our findings in order to motivate metaphysical discussions irrelevant to our study, they risk undermining the hard-won legitimacy of a <a href="https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2015/1/niv001/2757109">neuroscience of consciousness</a>. Empirical consciousness science, based firmly on materialistic assumptions, is doing just fine. And unlike alternative perspectives that place themselves â<a href="https://rowman.com/isbn/9781442232389/beyond-physicalism-toward-reconciliation-of-science-and-spirituality">beyond physicalism</a>,â it will continue to shed light on one of our deepest mysteries through rigorous application of the scientific method.</p> 484<hr /> 485</div> 486<p>You can read Dr. Kastrup’s response <a href="https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2018/10/setting-record-straight-with-robin.html">here</a>, and Prof. Kelly’s <a href="https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2018/10/further-response-to-psychedelic.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>. In the spirit of constructive clarification I will offer a few additional comments on the parts of the work I was involved in: the signal diversity study and the general interpretation of how empirical work on the brain basis of psychedelic research speaks to metaphysical debates about the nature of consciousness. These comments relate mainly to Prof. Kelly’s critique.</p> 487<p>(With respect to <a href="https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2018/10/setting-record-straight-with-robin.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Kastrup’s comments</a> I will simply offer, as he no doubt knows, that relating fMRI BOLD to neural activity, in terms of global baseline and regionally differentiated metabolics, functional neuronal connectivity, and so on – remains an area of extremely active research and rapid methodological innovation.)</p> 488<p>1. Prof Kelly notes that we do not provide ‘exact N’s for the data segments we used to compute measures of signal diversity. This is because they varied substantially between drug condition, participant, and analysis method. We do however clearly state that “[a]nalyses were performed using non-overlapping segments of length 2 sec for a total length between 2 min and 10 min of MEG recording per participant and state” (<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46421" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Schartner et al</a> 2017, p.5)”
488 These numbers indeed lead to a total number of segments ranging from ~3,500 to ~27,000 per participant and per state (since we have 90 channels/sources per segment). These large numbers provide stable statistical inference (e.g., by the central limit theorem). Also, as we mentioned (above) the absolute scores on the diversity scale are not as meaningful as effect size and statistical significance. I’d also like to add that in our paper we go to great lengths to establish that our reported diversity changes do not trivially follow from well-known spectral changes in the drug conditions – this is part of the unavoidable computational sophistication of the method, when done properly.</p> 489<p>2. When Prof. Kelly says that “relatively simple neuroimaging methods can easily distinguish between wakeful and drowsy states and other commonplace conditions” I do not disagree at all. Our paper was specifically interested in signal diversity as a metric of brain dynamics (and as mentioned above we take care to de-confound our diversity results from spectral changes). Also, we do not claim these diversity changes fully explain the extraordinary phenomenology of psychedelic states. However, I do believe that they contribute helpfully to the incremental empirical project of mapping, in explanatorily satisfying ways, between mechanism and phenomenology. I defend the general approach in this 2016 <em>Aeon</em> article: <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one">‘the “real” problem of consciousness’</a>.</p> 490<p>3. I also agree the measures of signal diversity we apply are only part of the story when mapping between experiential richness and brain dynamics. My lab (and others too) have have worked hard on developing empirically adequate measures of ‘neural complexity’, ‘causal density’, and ‘integrated information’ which are theoretically richer – but unfortunately, at least so far, not very robust when applied to actual data –
490 and are substantially more computationally sophisticated. See here for a recent <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.09373" target="_blank" rel="noopener">preprint</a>. We have to do what we can with the measures we have, while always striving to generate and validate better measures.</p> 491<p>4. I do not buy the claim that near-death-experiences provide an empirical challenge to physicalist neuroscience (as argued by Prof. Kelly). See my previous blog post on this issue (‘<a href="https://neurobanter.com/2014/01/21/near-death-experiences-the-brains-last-hurrah/">the brain’s last hurrah</a>‘).</p> 492<p>5. No need to impute me with a bias towards physicalism! I explicitly and happily adopt physicalism as a pragmatic metaphysics for pursuing a (neuro)science of consciousness. I can do this while remaining agnostic about the actual ontological status of consciousness. The problem with many alternative metaphysics – in my view – is that <a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/02/01/conscious-spoons-really-pushing-back-against-panpsychism/">they do not lead to testable propositions</a>. Dr Kastrup and Prof Kelly are of course entirely entitled to their own metaphysics. I was merely objecting to their usage of our psychedelic research in support of their metaphysics, because I think it is entirely irrelevant. I simply do not accept that there are any “evident tensions between physicalist expectations and the experimental results [from psychedelic neuroimaging]”.</p> 493<p>6. Finally, we can hopefully all agree on the importance of forestalling, as far as possible, media misinterpretations. This is true whatever one’s metaphysics. And it’s why, when our diversity paper first appeared, I felt compelled to pen an immediate corrective right here in this blog (‘<a href="https://neurobanter.com/2017/04/19/evidence-for-a-higher-state-of-consciousness-sort-of/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Evidence for a higher state of consciousness? Sort of</a>‘).</p> 494</div> 495</div> 496<hr /> 497<p>After posting, I realized I had not specifically responded to Bernardo’s <a href="https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2018/10/the-fix-is-worse-than-problem-reply-to.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">initial reaction</a> to our <em>Sci Am</em> piece. There is some overlap with the above points, but please anyway allow me to correct this oversight here.</p> 498<p>1. <em>Clearing the semantic fog</em>. I hope I have made clear my intended distinction between ‘fully explain’ and ‘incrementally account for.’ Again my <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one"><em>Aeon</em> piece</a> elaborates the strategy of refining explanatory mappings between mechanism and phenomenology.</p> 499<p>2. <em>Metaphysical claims</em>. Our work is consistent with materialism and is motivated by it, but empirical studies like this are not suited to arbitrate between competing metaphysical positions (unless such positions state that there are no relations at all between brains and conscious experiences). Empirical studies like ours try to account for phenomenological properties in terms of mechanisms – but in doing so there is no need to make claims that one is addressing the (metaphysical) ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/misreporting-and-confirmation-bias-in-psychedelic-research/">Kastrup and Kelly have written</a> that “the psychedelic brain imaging research discussed here has brought us to a major theoretical decision point as to which framework best fits with all the available data” – where ‘physicalism’ is one among several (metaphysical) ‘frameworks’. I continue to think the research discussed here is irrelevant to this ‘decision point’, unless one is deciding to reject frameworks that postulate no relation between consciousness and the brain. The fact that the research is about psychedelics rather than (for example) psychophysics is neither here nor there.</p> 500<p>3. <em>What the researchers fail to address</em>
500. I do not agree with the premise that there is an inconsistency between the dream state and the psychedelic state in terms of neural evidence. As noted above, measures of brain dynamics and activation are being continuously refined and innovated and it is overly simplistic to characterise the relevant dimensions in terms of gross ‘level of activity’. Also, dreams and psychedelia are different. The point about ‘randomness’ I have addressed already (diversity is not presented as an exhaustive explanation of psychedelic phenomenology).</p> 501<p>4. <em>A surprising claim</em>. I respectfully refrain from addressing these points about the MRI/MEG studies since I was not involved with them. <em>This does not mean I condone Bernardo’s comments</em>. I will only repeat that brute measures of increased/decreased brain activity are less informative than more sophisticated measures of neural dynamics and connectivity, and studies are accumulating to more precisely map brain changes in psychedelic states.</p> 502<p>5. <em>The issue of statistics</em>. It is not meaningful to compare, quantitatively, ‘magnitudes’ in changes in subjective experience with magnitudes of statistical effect size as applied to (for example) our diversity measures. We made this point already in our <em>Sci Am</em> piece. I find it quite natural to suppose that a massively meaningful change in subjective experience might have a subtle neuronal signature in the brain (and as I have said, diversity/randomness is only a small part of any full ‘explanation’ anyway).</p> 503<p>6. <em>A non-sequitur</em>. I <em>do</em> think its misleading to speak of a “formidable chasm” between “the magnitude of the subjective effects of a psychedelic trance and the accompanying physiological changes” for the reasons given in point 5 above.</p> 504<p>7. <em>Final thought</em>s. I indeed hope we can all agree that psychedelic research is interesting, exciting, valuable, evolving, clinically important, and generally highly worthwhile. I hope we can also agree, as mentioned above, that forestalling media misrepresentations is important. On other matters I doubt there will be full agreement between my views (and those of my colleagues) and Bernardo’s and Edward’s. They are certainly entitled to their metaphysics. I simply wish to point out (i) our studies <em>do</em> help build explanatory bridges between neural mechanism and psychedelic phenomenology, and (ii) they <em>do not</em> provide any additional reasons to entertain non-physicalist metaphysics.</p> 505<p>And with that, I’m afraid I’ll have to draw a line under this interesting discussion – at least for my involvement. I hope it generates some light amid the heat.</p> 506<p> </p> 507 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 508 509 <footer class="entry-meta"> 510 <span class="cat-links"> 511 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/brain-imaging/" rel="category tag">brain imaging</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/neuroscience/" rel="category tag">neuroscience</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/opinion/" rel="category tag">opinion</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/psychedelics/" rel="category tag">psychedelics</a> </span> 512 513 <span class="tag-links"> 514 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/materialism/" rel="tag">materialism</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/neuroimaging/" rel="tag">neuroimaging</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/psychedelics/" rel="tag">psychedelics</a> </span> 515 516 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 517 </article><!-- #post-99701 --> 518 519 520 521<article id="post-99688" class="post-99688 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-consciousness category-neuroscience tag-reading-open-access-resources"> 522 <header class="entry-header"> 523 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/09/03/resources-for-newcomers-to-consciousness-science/" rel="bookmark">Resources for newcomers to consciousness science</a></h1> 524 525 <div class="entry-meta"> 526 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/09/03/resources-for-newcomers-to-consciousness-science/" title="11:31 pm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2018-09-03T23:31:57+00:00" pubdate>September 3, 2018</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 527 528 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/09/03/resources-for-newcomers-to-consciousness-science/#comments">2</a></p> 529 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 530 531 <div class="entry-content"> 532 <figure class="entry-thumb">
533 <a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/09/03/resources-for-newcomers-to-consciousness-science/"><img width="150" height="92" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/screen-shot-2018-09-04-at-00-24-35.png?w=150" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/screen-shot-2018-09-04-at-00-24-35.png?w=150 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/screen-shot-2018-09-04-at-00-24-35.png?w=300 300w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" data-attachment-id="99689" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2018/09/03/resources-for-newcomers-to-consciousness-science/screen-shot-2018-09-04-at-00-24-35/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/screen-shot-2018-09-04-at-00-24-35.png" data-orig-size="2626,1608" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="Screen Shot 2018-09-04 at 00.24.35" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/screen-shot-2018-09-04-at-00-24-35.png?w=560" /></a> 534 </figure><!-- .gallery-thumb --> 535 <p>Want to know more about consciousness science? What follows is a personal, subjective collection of resources intended for people without much or any prior training in neuroscience, psychology, or philosophy, who want to gain a foothold in the exciting field of consciousness science <a class="more-link" href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/09/03/resources-for-newcomers-to-consciousness-science/">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a></p> 536<div id="atatags-370373-6ab5c58a62c6f"> 537
537<script type="text/javascript"> 538 __ATA = window.__ATA || {}; 539 __ATA.cmd = window.__ATA.cmd || []; 540 __ATA.cmd.push(function() { 541 __ATA.initVideoSlot('atatags-370373-6ab5c58a62c6f', { 542 sectionId: '370373', 543 format: 'inread' 544 }); 545 }); 546 </script>
546 547 </div> </div><!-- .entry-content --> 548 549 <footer class="entry-meta"> 550 <span class="cat-links"> 551 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/neuroscience/" rel="category tag">neuroscience</a> </span> 552 553 <span class="tag-links"> 554 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/reading-open-access-resources/" rel="tag">reading; open-access; resources</a> </span> 555 556 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 557 </article><!-- #post-99688 --> 558 559 560 561<article id="post-99678" class="post-99678 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-consciousness category-neuroscience category-opinion tag-integrated-information-theory tag-panpsychism"> 562 <header class="entry-header"> 563 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/02/01/conscious-spoons-really-pushing-back-against-panpsychism/" rel="bookmark">Conscious spoons, really? Pushing back against panpsychism</a></h1> 564 565 <div class="entry-meta"> 566 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/02/01/conscious-spoons-really-pushing-back-against-panpsychism/" title="5:58 pm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2018-02-01T17:58:30+00:00" pubdate>February 1, 2018</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 567 568 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2018/02/01/conscious-spoons-really-pushing-back-against-panpsychism/#comments">17</a></p> 569 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 570 571 <div class="entry-content"> 572 <p><img data-attachment-id="99679" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2018/02/01/conscious-spoons-really-pushing-back-against-panpsychism/univerxx/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/univerxx.jpg" data-orig-size="1024,576" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="univerxx" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/univerxx.jpg?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99679" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/univerxx.jpg?w=560" alt="univerxx" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/univerxx.jpg 1024w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/univerxx.jpg?w=150&h=84 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/univerxx.jpg?w=300&h=169 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/univerxx.jpg?w=768&h=432 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></p> 573<p>So today I’d been planning to write about a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393218300368" target="_blank" rel="noopener">new paper from our lab</a>, just out in <em>Neuropsychologia</em>, in which we show how people without synaesthesia can be trained, over a few weeks, to have synaesthesia-like experiences – and that this training induces noticeable changes in their brains. It’s interesting stuff, and I will write about it later, but this morning I happened to read a recent piece by Olivia Goldhill in <em>Quartz</em> with the provocative title: “<a href="https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility</a>” (<em>Quartz</em>, Jan 27, 2018). This article had come up in a twitter discussion involving my colleague and friend <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/hakwan-lau-lab">Hakwan Lau</a> about the challenge of maintaining the academic credibility of consciousness science, with Hakwan noting that provocative articles like this don’t often get the pushback they deserve.</p> 574<p>So here’s some pushback.</p> 575<p>Goldhill’s article is about <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/">panpsychism</a>, which is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, present to some degree everywhere and in everything. Her article suggests that this view is becoming increasingly acceptable and accepted in academic circles, as so-called ‘traditional’ approaches (materialism and dualism) continue to struggle. On the contrary, although it’s true that panpsychism is being discussed more frequently and more openly these days, it remains very much a fringe proposition within consciousness science and is not taken seriously by many. Nor need it be, since consciousness science is getting along just fine without it. Let me explain how.</p> 576<p><em><strong>From hard problems to real problems</strong></em></p> 577<p>We should start with philosophy. Goldhill correctly identifies David Chalmers’ famous ‘<a href="http://consc.net/papers/facing.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hard problem of consciousness</a>‘ as a key origin of modern panpsychism. This is bolstered by Chalmers’ own increasing apparent sympathy with this view, as Goldhill’s article makes clear. Put simply, the ‘hard problem’ is about how and why physical interactions of any sort can give rise to conscious experiences. This is indeed a difficult problem, and the apparent unavailability of any current solution is why those who fixate on it might be tempted by the elixir of panpsychism: if consciousness is ‘<a href="http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/20140167">here, there, and everywhere</a>‘ then there is no longer any hard problem to be solved.</p> 578<p>But <a href="https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix008/3796583">consciousness science has largely moved on from attempts to address the hard problem</a> (though see IIT, below). This is not a failure, it’s a sign of maturity. Philosophically, the hard problem rests on conceivability arguments such as the possibility of imagining a philosophical ‘zombie’ – a behaviourally and perhaps physically identical version of me, or you, but which lacks any conscious experience, which has no inner universe. Conceivability arguments are generally weak since they often rest on failures of imagination or knowledge, rather than on insights into necessity. For example: the more I know about aerodynamics, the less I can imagine a 787 Dreamliner flying backwards. It cannot be done and such a thing is only ‘conceivable’ through ignorance about how wings work.</p> 579<p>In practice, scientists researching consciousness are not spending their time (or their scarce grant money) worrying about conscious spoons, they are getting on with the job of mapping mechanistic properties (of brains, bodies, and environments) onto properties of consciousness. These properties can be described
579in many different ways, but include – for example – differences between normal wakeful awareness and general anaesthesia; experiences of identifying with and owning a particular body, or distinctions between conscious and unconscious visual perception. If you come to the primary academic meeting on consciousness science – the annual meeting of the <a href="http://theassc.org/">Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness</a> (ASSC) – or read articles either in specialist journals like <a href="https://academic.oup.com/nc" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Neuroscience of Consciousness</em></a> (I edit this, other journals are available) or in the g<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.61">eneral academic literature</a>, you’ll find a wealth of work like this and very little – almost nothing – on panpsychism. You’ll find debates on the <a href="https://osf.io/nbyuq/">best way to test whether prefrontal cortex is involved in visual metacognition</a> – but you won’t find any experiments on whether stones are aware. This, again, is maturity, not stagnation. It is also worth pointing out that consciousness science is having increasing impact in medicine, whether through <a href="http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/198/198ra105.long" target="_blank" rel="noopener">improved methods for detecting residual awareness following brain injury</a>, or via <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19050712" target="_blank" rel="noopener">enhanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying psychiatric illness</a>. Thinking about conscious spoons just doesn’t cut it in this regard.</p> 580<p>A standard objection at this point is that empirical work touted as being about consciousness science is often about something else: perhaps memory, attention, or visual perception. Yes, some work in consciousness science may be criticized this way, but it is not generally the case. To the extent that the explanatory target of a study encompasses phenomenological properties, or differences between conscious states (e.g., dreamless sleep versus wakeful rest), it is about consciousness. And of course, consciousness is not independent of other cognitive and perceptual processes – so empirical work that focuses on visual perception can be relevant to consciousness even if it does not explicitly contrast conscious and unconscious states.</p> 581<p>The next objection goes like this: OK, you may be able to account for properties of consciousness in terms of underlying mechanisms, but this is never going to explain why consciousness is part of the universe in the first place – it is never going to solve the hard problem. Therefore consciousness science is failing. There are two responses to this.</p> 582<p>First, wait and see (and ideally <em>do</em>). By building increasingly sophisticated bridges between mechanism and phenomenology, the apparent mystery of the hard problem may dissolve. Certainly, if we stick with simplistic ‘explanations’ – for instance by associating consciousness simply with activity in (for example) the prefrontal cortex, everything may remain mysterious. But if we can explain (for example) <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17588928.2013.877880" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the phenomenology of peripheral vision in terms of neurally-encoded predictions of expected visual uncertainty</a>, perhaps we are getting somewhere. It is unwise to pronounce the insufficiency of mechanistic accounts of some putatively mysterious phenomenon before such mechanistic accounts have been fully developed. This is one reason why frameworks like <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/surfing-uncertainty-9780190217013?cc=gb&lang=en&" target="_blank" rel="noopener">predictive processing</a> are exciting – they provide explanatorily powerful, computationally explicit, and empirically predictive concepts which can help link phenomenology and mechanism. Such concepts can help <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one">move beyond correlation towards explanation</a> in consciousness science, and as we move further along this road the hard problem may lose its lustre.</p> 583<p>Second, people often seem to expect more from a science of consciousness than they would ask of other scientific explanations. As long as we can formulate explanatorily rich relations between physical mechanisms and phenomenological properties, and as long as these relations generate empirically testable predictions which stand up in the lab (and in the wild), we are doing just fine. Riding behind many criticisms of current consciousness science are unstated intuitions that a mechanistic account of consciousness should be somehow intuitively satisfying, or even that it must allow some kind of instantiation of consciousness in an arbitrary machine. We don’t make these requirements in other areas of science, and indeed the very fact that we instantiate phenomenological properties ourselves, might mean that a scientifically satisfactory account of consciousness will never generate the intuitive sensation of ‘ah yes, this is right, it has to be this way’. (Thomas Metzinger makes this point nicely in a <a href="https://samharris.org/podcasts/the-nature-of-consciousness/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent conversation with Sam Harris</a>.)</p> 584<p>Taken together, these responses recall the well-worn analogy to the mystery of life. Not so long ago, scientists thought that the property of ‘being alive’ could never be explained by physics or chemistry. That life had to be more than mere ‘mechanism’. But as biologists got on with the job of accounting for the properties of life in terms of physics and chemistry, the basic mystery of the ontological status of life faded away and people no longer felt the need to appeal to vitalistic concepts like ‘elan vital’. Now of course this analogy is imperfect, and from our current vantage it is impossible to say how closely it will stand up over time. Consciousness and life are not the same (though they may be more closely linked than people tend to think – <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one" target="_blank" rel="noopener">another story!</a>). But the basic point remains: instead of focusing on a possibly illusory b
584ig mystery – and thereby falling for the temptations of easy big solutions like panpsychism – the best strategy is to divide and conquer. Identify properties and account for them, and repeat. Chalmers’ himself describes something like this strategy when he talks about the ‘mapping problem’, and with tongue-somewhat-in-cheek I’ve called it ‘<a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the real problem of consciousness</a>‘.</p> 585<p><em><strong>The lure of integrated information theory</strong></em></p> 586<p>A major boost for modern panpsychism has come from Giulio Tononi’s much discussed – and fascinating – <a href="http://integratedinformationtheory.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">integrated information theory of consciousness</a> (IIT). This is a formal mathematical theory which attempts to derive constraints on the mechanisms of consciousness from axioms about phenomenology. It’s a complex theory (and <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.44">apparently getting more complex all the time</a>) but the relevance for panpsychism is straightforward. On IIT, any mechanism that integrates information in the right way exhibits consciousness to some degree. And the ability to integrate information is very general, since it depends on only the cause-effect structure of a system.</p> 587<p>Tononi actually goes further than this, in a crucial but subtle way. For him, the (integrated) information that counts is based not only what a system has done (ie., what states it has been in), but on what a system could do (i.e., what states it could be in, even if has never or will never occupy these states). Technically, this is the difference between the empirical distribution of a system and its maximum entropy distribution. This feature of IIT not only makes it hard (usually impossible) to calculate for nontrivial systems, it pushes further towards panpsychism because it implies an ontological status for certain forms of information – much like John Wheeler’s ‘<a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/02/it-from-bit-wheeler/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">it from bit</a>‘. If (integrated) information is real (and therefore more-or-less everywhere), and if consciousness is based on (integrated) information, then consciousness is also more-or-less everywhere, thus panpsychism.</p> 588<p>But this is not the only way to formulate IIT. Several years ago, Adam Barrett and I <a href="http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1001052" target="_blank" rel="noopener">formulated a measure of integrated information which depends only on the empirical distribution of a system</a>, and now <a href="http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005123" target="_blank" rel="noopener">many competing measures exist</a>. These measures can be applied more easily in practice, and they do not directly imply panpsychism because they can be interpreted as explanatory bridges between mechanism and phenomenology (in the ‘real problem’ sense), rather than as claims about what consciousness actually <em>is</em>. So when Goldhill writes that IIT “shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience” this is only true for the strong version of the theory articulated by Tononi himself. Other views are possible, and more empirically productive.</p> 589<p><em><strong>Back to science</strong></em></p> 590<p>This leads us to the main problem with panpsychism. It’s not that it sounds crazy, it’s that it cannot be tested. It does not lead to any feasible programme of experimentation. Progress in scientific understanding requires experiments and testability. Given this, it’s curious that Goldhill introduces us to Arthur Eddington, the physicist who experimentally confirmed Einstein’s (totally crazy-sounding) theory of general relativity. Eddington’s immense contribution to experimental physics should not give credence to his views on panpsychism, it should instead remind us of the essential imperative of formulating testable theories, however difficult such tests might be to carry out. (Modern physics is of course now facing a similar testability crisis with string theory.) And <a href="https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">outlandish speculations about how quantum entanglement might lead to universe-wide consciousness</a> have no place whatsoever in a rigorous and empirically grounded scie
590nce of consciousness.</p> 591<p>I can’t finish this post without noting that the current attention to panpsychism, especially in the media, has a lot to do with the views of some particularly influential figures in the field: Chalmers and Tononi, but also Christof Koch, whose <a href="https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/ResourceMetadata/SCBCFD" target="_blank" rel="noopener">early work with Francis Crick was fundamental in the rehabilitation of consciousness science in the late 1990s</a> and who continues to be a major figure in the field. These people are all incredibly smart and have made extremely important contributions within consciousness science and beyond. I have learned a great deal from each, and I owe them intellectual debts I will never be able to repay. Having said that, their views on panpsychism are firmly in the minority and should not be over-weighted simply because of their historical contributions and current prominence. Whether there is something about having made such influential contributions that leads to a tendency to adopt countercultural (and difficult to test) views later on – well that’s for another day and another writer.</p> 592<p>At the end of her piece, Goldhill quotes Chalmers quoting the philosopher John Perry who says: “If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administration.” Perhaps the problem lies in <em>only thinking</em>. We should instead complement <em>only thinking</em> with the challenging empirical work of explaining properties of consciousness in terms of biophysical mechanisms. Then we can say: If you work on consciousness long enough, you either become a neuroscientist or you become a panpsychist. I know where I’d rather be – with my many colleagues who are not worrying about conscious spoons but who are trying, and little-by-little succeeding, in unravelling the complex biophysical mechanisms that shape our subjective experiences of world and self. And now it’s high time I got back to that paper on <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393218300368" target="_blank" rel="noopener">training synaesthesia</a>.</p> 593<p>(For more general discussions about consciousness science, where it’s at and where we’re going, have a listen to <a href="https://samharris.org/podcasts/113-consciousness-and-the-self/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">my recent conversation with Sam Harris</a>. Make sure you have time for it though, it clocks in at over three hours â¦)</p> 594 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 595 596 <footer class="entry-meta"> 597 <span class="cat-links"> 598 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/neuroscience/" rel="category tag">neuroscience</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/opinion/" rel="category tag">opinion</a> </span> 599 600 <span class="tag-links"> 601 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/integrated-information-theory/" rel="tag">integrated information theory</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/panpsychism/" rel="tag">panpsychism</a> </span> 602 603 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 604 </article><!-- #post-99678 --> 605 606 607 608<article id="post-99614" class="post-99614 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-brain-imaging category-consciousness category-neuroscience category-psychedelics"> 609 <header class="entry-header"> 610 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2017/04/19/evidence-for-a-higher-state-of-consciousness-sort-of/" rel="bookmark">Evidence for a higher state of consciousness? Sort of.</a></h1> 611 612 <div class="entry-meta"> 613 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2017/04/19/evidence-for-a-higher-state-of-consciousness-sort-of/" title="10:51 pm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2017-04-19T22:51:28+00:00" pubdate>April 19, 2017</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 614 615 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2017/04/19/evidence-for-a-higher-state-of-consciousness-sort-of/#comments">3</a></p> 616 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 617 618 <div class="entry-content"> 619 <div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99616" style="width: 369px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99616" data-attachment-id="99616" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2017/04/19/evidence-for-a-higher-state-of-consciousness-sort-of/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square.jpeg" data-orig-size="661,657" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"4.9","focal_length":"17.4","shutter_speed":"0.016666666666667"}" data-image-title="Hoffman_Bicycle_Day_-_full_square" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square.jpeg?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-99616" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square.jpeg?w=359&h=356" alt="Hoffman_Bicycle_Day_-_full_square" width="359" height="356" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square.jpeg?w=359&h=357 359w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square.jpeg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square.jpeg?w=300&h=298 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hoffman_bicycle_day_-_full_square.jpeg 661w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 359px) 100vw, 359px" /><p id="caption-attachment-99616" class="wp-caption-text">Bicycle Day Celebration Blotter. By YttriumOx CC BY-SA 3.0</p></div> 620<p>On April 19 1943, seventy-four years ago to the day, Albert Hoffman conducted his now famous self-experimentation on the psychological effects of LSD, a compound he had been the first to synthesize some years earlier. Now called â<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide" target="_blank">bicycle day</a>â in honour of how Hoffman made his way home, it led to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide" target="_blank">some remarkable descriptions</a>:</p> 621<p>“… Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux …”</p> 622<p>In the decades that followed, academic research into LSD and other psychedelics was cast into the wilderness as worries about their recreational use held sway. Recently, however, the tide has started to turn. There is now gathering momentum for studies showing a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27210031" target="_blank">remarkable clinical potential for psychedelics</a> in treating recalcitrant psychiatric disorders, as well as experiments trying to understand how psychedelics exert their distinctive effects on conscious experience.</p> 623<p>In a <a href="http://rdcu.be/rrO4" target="_blank">new paper published in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a> on this bicycle day anniversary, we describe a distinctive neuronal signature of the psychedelic state: <em>a global increase in neuronal signal diversity.</em> So â is this evidence for a âhigher stateâ of consciousness? And could it account for the nature of psychedelic experience? Let me answer these questions by summarizing what we did.</p> 624<p>Our study analyzed data previously collected by <a href="https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/r.carhart-harris" target="_blank">Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris</a> (Imperial College London) and <a href="https://unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/profile/s-muthukumaraswamy" target="_blank">Dr. Suresh Muthukumaraswamy</a> (then Cardiff, now at Auckland). These were magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain-imaging data from healthy volunteers either in a
624normal waking state, or after having taken LSD, psylocibin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) or ketamine (which in low doses acts as a psychedelic â in high doses it has an anaesethetic effect). MEG data combine a very high temporal resolution, with a much better spatial resolution than EEG (electroencephalography), allowing us to compute some relatively sophisticated mathematical measures of signal diversity. The participants in our study had passed strict ethical criteria, and were asked simply to rest quietly in the scanner during the experiment. Afterwards, they were asked various questions about what they had experienced.</p> 625<p>With Carhart-Harris and Muthukumaraswamy, and with <a href="http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~abb22/" target="_blank">Dr. Adam Barrett</a> and first-author <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/322796" target="_blank">Michael Schartner</a> of the <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sackler/" target="_blank">Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science</a> here at Sussex, we chopped up the MEG data into small segments and for each segment calculated a range of different mathematical measures. The most interesting is called â<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4946695/calculating-lempel-ziv-lz-complexity-aka-sequence-complexity-of-a-binary-str" target="_blank">Lempel Ziv (LZ) complexity,</a>â which measures the diversity of the data by figuring out how âcompressibleâ it is. A completely random data sequence would be maximally diverse since it is not compressible at all. A completely uniform data sequence would be minimally diverse since it is easy to compress. In fact, because of these properties the algorithm for computing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch" target="_blank">LZ complexity is widely used to compress digital photos</a> into smaller files, in an optimal way.</p> 626<div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99638" style="width: 1316px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99638" data-attachment-id="99638" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2017/04/19/evidence-for-a-higher-state-of-consciousness-sort-of/lsd_lz/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png" data-orig-size="1306,976" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="LSD_LZ" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99638" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png?w=560" alt="LSD_LZ" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png 1306w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png?w=150&h=112 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png?w=300&h=224 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png?w=768&h=574 768w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/lsd_lz.png?w=1024&h=765 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1306px) 100vw, 1306px" /><p id="caption-attachment-99638" class="wp-caption-text">Changes in LZ complexity under LSD, as compared to the waking state. Data are source localized MEG. Image from Suresh Muthukumaraswamy and appears in Figure 3 in the paper.</p></div> 627<p>We found that MEG signals had a reliably higher level of LZ â and hence signal diversity â for all three psychedelic compounds, with perhaps the strongest effects for LSD. The fact that we found the same pattern of results across all three psychedelic compounds is both striking and reassuring â it means our results are not likely to have arisen by chance.</p> 628<p>Intuitively, these findings mean that the brain-on-psychedelics is less predictable, more random â and more <em>diverse</em> than in the normal waking state.</p> 629<p>Our data can be thought of as evidence for a âhigherâ state of consciousness only in this very specific way, and only in the context provided by other studies where a loss of consciousness has been associated with a <em>reduction</em> of neuronal diversity. For example, studies in our lab have <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133532" target="_blank">shown reduced LZ complexity (reduced diversity) for both anaesthesia</a> and for (non-dreaming) <a href="https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/3/1/niw022/2957408/Global-and-local-complexity-of-intracranial-EEG?searchresult=1" target="_blank">sleep</a>. (Interestingly, levels of LZ returned to ânormalâ during REM sleep when dreams are likely.) Whatâs striking about our results, in this context, is that <em>increases</em> in quantitative measures of conscious level, compared to the waking state, have never been found before.</p> 630<p>Interpreting our data in terms of conscious level also make sense since measures of signal diversity, like LZ, c
630an be thought of as approximations to related quantities like the âperturbation complexity indexâ (PCI). This measure captures the diversity of the brainâs response to an electromagnetic stimulus: think banging on the brain (but using transcranial magnetic stimulation which applies a sharp electromagnetic âbangâ), and listening to the echo. Studies using PCI, pioneered by <a href="https://www.cifar.ca/profiles/marcello-massimini/" target="_blank">Prof. Marcello Massimini</a> at the University of Milan, have found a remarkable sensitivity to changes in conscious level, and even an ability to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23946194" target="_blank">predict residual consciousness in devastating neurological conditions like coma and the vegetative state</a>. The differences between LZ and PCI are subtle, having mainly to do with whether they measure simple diversity or a mixture of diversity and âintegrationâ in brain dynamics.</p> 631<p>More generally, measures of diversity are related to influential theories which associate consciousness with â<a href="http://integratedinformationtheory.org/" target="_blank">integrated information</a>â or â<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21893526" target="_blank">causal density</a>â in the dynamics of the brain. While these theories specify <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21893526" target="_blank">even more complicated mathematical measures</a> of conscious level, the fact that we see measurable increases in diversity so reliably across conscious states gives some support to these theories. Our results are also consistent with Robin Carhart-Harris’ ‘<a href="http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full" target="_blank">entropic brain</a>‘ theory, which proposes that the psychedelic state is associated with greater entropy or uncertainty in neural dyamics.</p> 632<p>In this broader theoretical context, whatâs interesting about our results is that they show that a measure of conscious <em>level</em> â previously applied to sleep and anesthesia â is also sensitive to differences in conscious <em>content</em>, as in the contrast between the psychedelic state and normal wakefulness. This helps shed some new light on <a href="http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(16)30002-X?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS136466131630002X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue" target="_blank">an old debate in the science of consciousness</a> â the relationship between conscious level (how conscious you are) and conscious content (what youâre conscious of, when youâre conscious).</p> 633<p>Taking this research forward, we plan to understand more about how specific properties of neural dynamics relate to specific properties of psychedelic experiences. In the present study, we found some tentative correlations between changes in signal diversity and the degree to which people reported experiences like âego dissolutionâ and âvividness of imaginationâ. However, these correlations were not strong. One possible reason is that the subjective reports were taken outside the scanner, likely some time after the peak effect of the drug. Another possibility â which we are currently looking into â is that more fine-grained measures of information flow in the brain, like <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/8/3293.long" target="_blank">Granger causality</a>, might be needed in order to closely map properties of psychedelic experience to changes in the brain.</p> 634<p>Overall, our study adds to a growing body of work â much of which has been led by Carhart-Harris and colleagues â  that is now revealing the brain-basis of the psychedelic state. Our data show that a simple measure of neuronal signal diversity places the psychedelic state âaboveâ the normal waking state, in comparison to the lower diversity found in sleep and anesthesia. Taking this work forward stands to do much more than enhance our understanding of psychedelics. It may help expose how, why â and <em>for whom</em> â psychedelics may help alleviate the appalling suffering of psychiatric disorders like depression. And in the end, it may help us figure out how our normal everyday conscious experiences of the world, and the self, come to be.</p> 635<p>After all, everything we experience â even when stone cold sober â is just a kind of â<a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/11/21/the-real-problem/">controlled hallucination</a>.â Our perceptions are just the brainâs âbest guessâ of whatâs going on, reined in by sensory signals. Itâs just that most of the time we agree with each other about our hallucinations, and call them reality.</p> 636<hr /> 637<p><em>âIncreased spontaneous MEG signal diversity for psychoactive doses of ketamine, LSD and psilocybinâ by Michael Schartner, Robin Carhart-Harris, Adam Barrett, Anil Seth and Suresh Muthukumaraswamy is published in Scientific Reports (7): 46421, 2017. It is freely available <a href="http://rdcu.be/rrO4" target="_blank">here</a> as an open-access publication. I am the corresponding author.</em></p> 638<p><em>The study has been extensively covered in the media. Particularly good pieces are in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/19/brain-scans-reveal-mind-opening-response-to-psychedelic-drug-trip-lsd-ketamine-psilocybin?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other" target="_blank">The Guardian</a> in the <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128192-psychedelic-drugs-push-the-brain-to-a-state-never-seen-before/" target="_blank">New Scientist </a>and in <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/article/psychedelic-drugs-found-to-cause-a-higher-state-of-consciousness" target="_blank">Wired</a>. There is also a highly active <a href="https://redd.it/669k31" target="_blank">Reddit thread</a>, which on the day of publication was consistently on the Reddit homepage. </em></p> 639<p><em>I would like to specifically acknowledge Michael Schartner and Adam Barrett in this post. Michaelâs Ph.D. â awarded just a few months ago â was all about measuring signal diversity in various different c
639onscious states (sleep, anesthesia, psychedelia. Michael was primarily supervised by Dr. Barrett who devoted his considerable mathematical expertise to the project. Very many thanks are also due to Robin Carhart-Harris and Suresh Muthukumaraswamy for generously engaging with this collaboration.</em></p> 640<p><em>Carhart-Harris, Muthukumaraswamy and colleagues have published a number of other important studies on the neural basis of the psychedelic state. See <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27071089" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27085214" target="_blank">here</a> – or just look on <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=robin+carhart+harris" target="_blank">PubMed</a>.</em></p> 641 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 642 643 <footer class="entry-meta"> 644 <span class="cat-links"> 645 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/brain-imaging/" rel="category tag">brain imaging</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/neuroscience/" rel="category tag">neuroscience</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/psychedelics/" rel="category tag">psychedelics</a> </span> 646 647 648 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 649 </article><!-- #post-99614 --> 650 651 652 653<article id="post-99601" class="post-99601 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-consciousness category-neuroscience"> 654 <header class="entry-header"> 655 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/11/21/the-real-problem/" rel="bookmark">The real problem</a></h1> 656 657 <div class="entry-meta"> 658 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/11/21/the-real-problem/" title="10:52 pm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2016-11-21T22:52:33+00:00" pubdate>November 21, 2016</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 659 660 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/11/21/the-real-problem/#comments">1</a></p> 661 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 662 663 <div class="entry-content"> 664 <p><a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one" target="_blank"><img data-attachment-id="99602" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/11/21/the-real-problem/aeon_cover/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png" data-orig-size="1252,788" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="aeon_cover" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99602" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png?w=560" alt="aeon_cover" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png 1252w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png?w=150&h=94 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png?w=300&h=189 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png?w=768&h=483 768w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/aeon_cover.png?w=1024&h=644 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1252px) 100vw, 1252px" /></a><strong>What is the best way to understand consciousness?</strong> In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into âmind stuffâ and âmatter stuffâ. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesnât rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Its key is to recognise that explaining <em>why consciousness exists at all</em> is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis â to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable.</p> 665<p>This is the start of an <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one" target="_blank">essay</a> I recently wrote for the website <a href="https://aeon.co/" target="_blank">aeon.co</a>, which publishes an essay a day, focusing on ideas and culture. The basic
665idea is to chart a pragmatic path for the scientific study of consciousness, respecting but not directly targeting the deep metaphysical mysteries so eloquently exposed by Chalmers’ famous distinction between the <a href="http://consc.net/papers/facing.html" target="_blank">‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems</a>. Much of what I say has been said before (e.g., in the tradition of <a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/VARNAM" target="_blank">neurophenomenology</a>) but I hope to bring things together in a new way and with a distinctive empirical angle. Anyway, best <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one" target="_blank">make up your own mind</a> – I’d be keen to hear what you think!</p> 666 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 667 668 <footer class="entry-meta"> 669 <span class="cat-links"> 670 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/neuroscience/" rel="category tag">neuroscience</a> </span> 671 672 673 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 674 </article><!-- #post-99601 --> 675 676 677 678<article id="post-99561" class="post-99561 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-consciousness category-drama category-neuroscience tag-ethics tag-radio-play tag-vegetative-state tag-virtual-reality"> 679 <header class="entry-header"> 680 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/07/01/at-the-edges-of-awareness/" rel="bookmark">At the edges of awareness</a></h1> 681 682 <div class="entry-meta"> 683 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/07/01/at-the-edges-of-awareness/" title="11:22 am" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2016-07-01T11:22:18+00:00" pubdate>July 1, 2016</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 684 685 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/07/01/at-the-edges-of-awareness/#comments">1</a></p> 686 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 687 688 <div class="entry-content"> 689 <p><strong>Imagine this</strong>. Following a brain injury you lie in a hospital bed and from the outside you appear to be totally unconscious. You donât respond to anything the doctors or your family say, you make no voluntary movements, and although you still go to sleep and wake up there seems to be nobody at home. But your âinner universeâ of <a href="https://neurobanter.com/2014/01/21/eight-key-questions-for-consciousness-science/">conscious awareness</a> still remains, perhaps flickering and inconsistent, but definitely <em>there</em>. How could anyone else ever know, and how could you ever communicate with your loved ones again?</p> 690<p>Two new radio dramas, <em><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07j68n9" target="_blank">The Sky is Wider</a></em> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07j7j65" target="_blank"><em>Real Worlds</em></a>, engage with these critical questions by drawing on the cutting edge of the neurology and neuroscience. Recent advances have enabled researchers to not only diagnose âresidualâ awareness following severe brain injuries, but also to open new channels of communication with behaviourally unresponsive patients. The key medical challenge is to distinguish between the so-called â<a href="http://www.msktc.org/tbi/factsheets/Vegetative-And-Minimally-Conscious-States-After-Severe-Brain-Injury" target="_blank">vegetative state</a>â in which there truly is no conscious awareness, from â<a href="http://www.msktc.org/tbi/factsheets/Vegetative-And-Minimally-Conscious-States-After-Severe-Brain-Injury" target="_blank">
690minimally conscious</a>â or â<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome" target="_blank">locked-in</a>â conditions where some degree of consciousness persists (even normal consciousness, in the locked-in state), even though there are no outward signs.</p> 691<div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99566" style="width: 599px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99566" data-attachment-id="99566" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/07/01/at-the-edges-of-awareness/untitled/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png" data-orig-size="959,730" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="Untitled" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-99566" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png?w=589&h=449" alt="Untitled" width="589" height="449" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png?w=589&h=448 589w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png?w=150&h=114 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png?w=300&h=228 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png?w=768&h=585 768w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/untitled.png 959w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 589px) 100vw, 589px" /><p id="caption-attachment-99566" class="wp-caption-text">Brain activity during mental imagery, in a behaviourally unresponsive patient and in a control subject. Source: MRC via <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/feb/03/vegetative-state-patient-communication" target="_blank"><em>The Guardian</em></a></p></div> 692<p>Linda Marshall Griffithâs drama <em><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07j68n9" target="_blank">The Sky is Wider</a></em> takes inspiration from an âactive approachâ in which the neurologist asks questions of the patient and monitors their brain activity for signs of response. In a <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/313/5792/1402" target="_blank">classic study</a> from about 10 years ago, Adrian Owen and his team asked behaviourally unresponsive patients to imagine either walking around their house or playing tennis, while their brains were scanned using functional MRI (which measures regional metabolic activity in the brain). These questions were chosen because imagining these different behaviours activates different parts of the brain, and so if we see these selective activations in a patient, we know that they have understood and are voluntarily following the instructions. If they can do this, they must be conscious. It turns out that <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811915010964" target="_blank">between 10-20% of patients</a> behaviourally diagnosed as being in the vegetative state can pass this test. Equally important, this same method can be used to establish simple communication by (for example) asking a patient to imagine playing âtennisâ to answer âyesâ and walking around a house to answer ânoâ.</p> 693<p>These developments represent a revolution in clinical neurology. Current research is increasing the efficiency of active approaches by using the more portable electroencephalography (EEG) instead of bulky and expensive MRI. âPassiveâ techniques in which residual consciousness can be inferred without requiring patients to perform any task <a href="http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/198/198ra105.long" target="_blank">are also rapidly improving</a>. These methods are important because active approaches may underestimate the incidence of residual awareness since not all conscious patients may understand or be able to follow verbal instructions.</p> 694<p>Alongside these scientific developments we encounter pressing ethical questions. How should we treat patients in these liminal states of awareness? And given a means of communication, what kinds of questions should we ask? <em>The Sky is Wider</em> explores these challenging ethical issues in a compelling narrative which gives dramatic voice to the mysterious conditions of the vegetative and minimally conscious states.</p> 695<hr /> 696<p> </p> 697<p>In <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07j7j65" target="_blank"><em>Real Worlds</em></a>, Jane Rogers takes us several years into the future. Communication with behaviourally unresponsive patients is now far advanced and is based on amazing developments in âvirtual realityâ. The clinical context for this drama is the â<a href="http://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/locked-in-syndrome/" target="_blank">locked-in syndromeâ</a> where a patient may have more-or-less normal conscious experiences but completely lack the ability to move. In <em>Real Worlds</em>, a locked-in patient transcends these limitations by controlling a virtual reality avatar directly using brain signals. These avatars inhabit virtual worlds in which the avatars of different people can interact, while the ârealâ person behind each may remain hidden and unknown.<
697/p> 698<p>This drama deliberately inhabits the realm of science fiction, but there is solid science behind it too. The development of so-called â<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface" target="_blank">brain computer interfaces</a>â (BCI) is moving fast. These interfaces combine brain imaging methods (like EEG or fMRI, or sometimes more âinvasiveâ methodsâ in which electrodes are inserted directly into the brain) with advanced machine learning methods to perform a kind of âbrain-readingâ. The idea is to infer, from brain activity alone, intended movements, perceptions, and perhaps even thoughts. These decoded âthoughtsâ can then be used to control robotic devices, or virtual avatars. In some cases, a personâs own body might be controlled via direct stimulation of muscles. Progress in this area has been remarkably rapid. In a landmark but rather showy example, the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis used a BCI to allow <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WO71e0XLqs" target="_blank">a paralysed person to âkickâ the first ball of the 2014 football world cup</a>, through brain-control of a robotic avatar. More recently, brain-reading methods have allowed <a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/nature17435" target="_blank">a paralysed man to play Guitar Hero</a> for the first time since his injury.</p> 699<p>The other technology highlighted in <em>Real Worlds</em> is virtual reality (VR), which â thanks to its enormous consumer potential â is developing even more rapidly. All the major technology <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/22/facebook-oculus-rift-acquisition-virtual-reality" target="_blank">and AI companies are getting in on the act</a>, and VR headsets are finally becoming cheap enough, comfortable enough, and powerful enough to define a new technological landscape. Here at the <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sackler/" target="_blank">Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science</a> at the University of Sussex, we are exploring how VR can help shed light on our normal conscious experience. In one <a href="http://www.anilseth.com/#!videos/c13bs" target="_blank">example</a>, we use a method called âaugmented realityâ (AR) to project a âvirtualâ body into the real world as seen through a camera mounted on the front of a VR headset. This experiment revealed how our perception of what is (and what is not) our own body can be easily manipulated, indicating that our experience of âbody ownershipâ, which is so easy to take for granted, is in fact continuously and actively generated by the brain. In a second example, we developed a method called â<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49LyorS19qw" target="_blank">substitutional reality</a>â in which a VR headset is coupled with panoramic video and audio taken from a real environment, manipulated in various ways. The resulting experiences are much more immersive than current computer-generated virtual environments and in some cases people cannot distinguish them from actually ârealâ environments.</p> 700<div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99590" style="width: 1013px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99590" data-attachment-id="99590" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/07/01/at-the-edges-of-awareness/vr/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vr.png" data-orig-size="1003,531" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="vr" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vr.png?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99590" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vr.png?w=560" alt="vr" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vr.png 1003w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vr.png?w=150&h=79 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vr.png?w=300&h=159 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/vr.png?w=768&h=407 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1003px) 100vw, 1003px" /><p id="caption-attachment-99590" class="wp-caption-text">A ‘virtual reality’ hand, part of a <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393213002789" target="_blank">Sackler Centre study</a> to explore the mechanisms underlying experiences of body ownership. VR programming by Dr. Keisuke Suzuki.</p></div> 701<p>Just as in the first drama, <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2079601-virtual-real
701ity-could-be-an-ethical-minefield-are-we-ready/" target="_blank">ethical questions</a> risk outpacing the science and technology. As VR becomes increasingly immersive and pervasive, its potential to impact our real lives is ever more powerful. While benefits are easy to imagine â for instance in bringing distant relatives together or enabling remote experiences of inaccessible places â there are also legitimate concerns. High on the list would be what happens if people become increasingly unable to distinguish the real world from the virtual, whether in the moment or (more plausibly) in their memories. And what if they progressively withdrew from ârealityâ if the available virtual worlds became more appealing places to be? Of course, simple dichotomies are unhelpful since VR technologies are part of our real worlds, just like mobile phones and laptop computers. Jane Rogersâ <em>Real Worlds</em> explores these complex ethical issues by imagining VR as a future treatment – perhaps ‘prosthesis’ would be a better word â for the disorders of consciousness like those encountered in <em>The Sky is Wider</em>.</p> 702<p>Together, these dramas explore the human and societal consequences of existing and near-future clinical technologies. With artistic license they ask important questions that scientists and clinicians are not yet equipped to address. Ultimately, I think they convey an optimistic message, that we can understand and treat â if not cure â severely debilitating conditions that may otherwise have remained undiagnosed let alone treated. But they also lead us to consider, not just what we <em>could</em> do, but what we <em>should</em> do.</p> 703<hr /> 704<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07j68n9" target="_blank"><em>The Sky is Wider</em></a> (written by Linda Marshall Griffiths) and <em><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07j7j65" target="_blank">Real Worlds</a></em> (written by Jane Rogers) were produced by Nadia Molinari for BBC Radio 4. I acted as the scientific consultant. The original ideas were formulated during a 2014 Wellcome Trust â<a href="https://wellcome.ac.uk/what-we-do/our-work/broadcast-and-film">Experimental Stories</a>â workshop in a conversation between myself, Nadia, and Linda.</p> 705 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 706 707 <footer class="entry-meta"> 708 <span class="cat-links"> 709 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/drama/" rel="category tag">drama</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/neuroscience/" rel="category tag">neuroscience</a> </span> 710 711 <span class="tag-links"> 712 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/ethics/" rel="tag">ethics</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/radio-play/" rel="tag">radio play</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/vegetative-state/" rel="tag">vegetative state</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/virtual-reality/" rel="tag">virtual reality</a> </span> 713 714 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 715 </article><!-- #post-99561 --> 716 717 718 719<article id="post-99544" class="post-99544 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-consciousness category-drama category-neuroscience category-opinion tag-memory tag-neurodegenerative-disease tag-nick-payne tag-self"> 720 <header class="entry-header"> 721 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/05/09/the-science-of-selfhood/" rel="bookmark">The science of selfhood</a></h1> 722 723 <div class="entry-meta"> 724 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/05/09/the-science-of-selfhood/" title="11:43 am" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2016-05-09T11:43:23+00:00" pubdate>May 9, 2016</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 725 726 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/05/09/the-science-of-selfhood/#comments">1</a></p> 727 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 728 729 <div class="entry-content"> 730 <p><img data-attachment-id="99548" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/05/09/the-science-of-selfhood/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg" data-orig-size="1200,800" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"copyright":"Johan Persson"}" data-image-title="lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200&#215;800" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99548" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg?w=560" alt="lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg 1200w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg?w=150&h=100 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg?w=300&h=200 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg?w=768&h=512 768w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/lorna-zoe-wanamaker-by-johan-persson2-1200x800.jpg?w=1024&
730h=683 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><em>Zoë Wanamaker as Lorna in Nick Payne’s </em>Elegy<em>.</em></p> 731<p>âThe brain is wider than the sky,<br /> 732For, put them side by side,<br /> 733The one the other would contain,<br /> 734With ease, and you besidesâ</p> 735<p>Emily Dickinson, <em>Complete Poems</em>, 1924</p> 736<p><strong>What does it mean to be a self? And what happens to the social fabric of life, to our ethics and morality, when the nature of selfhood is called into question?</strong></p> 737<p>In neuroscience and psychology, the experience of âbeing a selfâ has long been a central concern. One of the most important lessons, from decades of research, is that there is no single thing that is the self. Rather, the self is better thought of as an integrated network of processes that distinguish self from non-self at many different levels. There is the bodily self â the experience of identifying with and owning a particular body, which at a more fundamental level involves the amorphous experience of <em>being</em> a self-sustaining organism. There is the perspectival self, the experience of perceiving the world from a particular first-person point-of-view. The volitional self involves experiences of intention of agency, of urges to do this-or-that (or, perhaps more importantly, to refrain from doing this-or-that) and of being the cause of things that happen.</p> 738<p>At higher levels we encounter narrative and social selves. The narrative self is where the âIâ comes in, as the experience of being a continuous and distinctive person over time. This narrative self â the story we tell ourselves about who we are â is built from a rich set of autobiographical memories that are associated with a particular subject. Finally, the social self is that aspect of my self-experience and personal identity that depends on my social milieu, on how others perceive and behave towards me, and on how I perceive myself through their eyes and minds.</p> 739<p>In daily life, it can be hard to differentiate these dimensions of selfhood. We move through the world as seemingly unified wholes, our experience of bodily self seamlessly integrated with our memories from the past, and with our experiences of volition and agency. But introspection can be a poor guide. Many experiments and neuropsychological case studies tell a rather different story, one in which the brain actively and continuously generates and coordinates these diverse aspects of self-experience.</p> 740<p>The many ways of being a self can come apart in surprising and revealing situations. For example, it is remarkably easy to alter the experience of bodily selfhood. In the so-called â<a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16809-body-illusions-rubber-hand-illusion/" target="_blank">rubber hand illusion</a>,â I ask you to focus your attention on a fake hand while your real hand is kept out of sight. If I then simultaneously stroke your real hand and the fake hand with a soft paintbrush, you may develop the uncanny feeling that the fake hand is now, somehow, part of your body. A more dramatic disturbance of the experience of body ownership happens in <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521400224X" target="_blank">somatoparaphrenia</a>, a condition in which people experience that part of their body is no longer theirs, that it belongs to someone else â perhaps their doctor or family member. Both these examples involve changes in brain activity, in particular within the âtemporo-parietal junctionâ, showing how even very basic aspects of personal identity are actively constructed by the brain.</p> 741<p>Moving through levels of selfhood, autoscopic hallucinations involve seeing oneself from a different perspective, much like âout of bodyâ experiences. In akinetic mutism, people seem to lack any experiences of volition or intention (and do very little), while in schizophrenia or anarchic hand syndrome, people can experience their intentions or voluntary actions as having external causes. At the other end of the spectrum, disturbances of social self emerge in autism, where difficulties in perceiving othersâ states of mind seems to be a core problem, though the exact nature of the autistic condition is still much debated.</p> 742<p>When it comes to the âIâ, memory is the key. Specifically, autobiographical memory: the recollection of personal experiences of people, objects, and places and other episodes from an individualâs life. While there are as many types of memory as there are varieties of self (for example, we have separate memory processes for facts, for the short term and the long term, and for skills that we learn), autobiographical memories are those most closely associated with our sense of personal identity. This is well illustrated by some classic medical cases in which, as a result of surgery or disease, the ability to lay down new memories is lost. In 1953 Henry Moliason (also known as the <a href="https://www.psych
742ologytoday.com/blog/trouble-in-mind/201201/hm-the-man-no-memory" target="_blank">patient HM</a>) had large parts of his medial temporal lobes removed in order to relieve severe epilepsy. From 1957 until his death in 2008, HM was studied closely by the neuropsychologist Brenda Milner, yet he was never able to remember meeting her. In 1985 the accomplished musician <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/09/24/the-abyss" target="_blank">Clive Wearing</a> suffered a severe viral brain disease that affected similar parts of his brain. Now 77, he frequently believes he has just awoken from a coma, spending each day in a constant state of re-awakening.</p> 743<p>Surprisingly, both HM and Wearing remained able to learn new skills, forming new âproceduralâ memories, despite never recalling the learning process itself. Wearing could still play the piano, and conduct his choir, though he would immediately forget having done so. The music appears to carry him along from moment to moment, restoring his sense of self in a way his memory no longer can. And his love for his wife Deborah seems undiminished, so that he expresses an enormous sense of joy on seeing her, even though he cannot tell whether their last meeting was years, or seconds, in the past. Love, it seems, persists when much else is gone.</p> 744<p>For people like HM and Clive Wearing, memory loss has been unintended and unwanted. But as scientific understanding develops, could we be moving towards a world where specific memories and elements of our identity can be isolated or removed through medical intervention? And could the ability to lay down new memories ever be surgically restored? Some recent breakthroughs suggest these developments may not be all that far-fetched.</p> 745<p>In 2013, Jason Chan and Jessica LaPaglia, from Iowa State University <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/110/23/9309.abstract" target="_blank">showed that specific human memories could indeed be deleted</a>. They took advantage of the fact that when memories are explicitly recalled they become more vulnerable. By changing details about a memory, while it was being remembered, they induced a selective amnesia which lasted for at least 24 hours. Although an important advance, this experiment was limited by relying on ânon-invasiveâ methods â which means not using drugs or directly interfering with the brain.</p> 746<p>More recent animal experiments have shown even more striking effects. In a ground-breaking 2014 study at the University of California, using genetically engineered mice, <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature13294.html" target="_blank">Sadegh Nabavi and colleagues</a> managed to block and then re-activate a specific memory. They used a powerful (invasive) technique called optogenetics to activate (or inactivate) the biochemical processes determining how neurons change their connectivity. And elsewhere in California, Ted Berger is working on the first prototypes of so-called â<a href="http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/scibytes/hippocampal_prosthesis_do_scientists_have" target="_blank">hippocampal prostheses</a>â which replace a part of the brain essential for memory with a computer chip. Although these advances are still a long way from implementation in humans, they show an extraordinary potential for future medical interventions.</p> 747<p>The German philosopher Thomas Metzinger believes that â<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/being-no-one" target="_blank">no such things as selves exist in the world</a>
747â. Modern neuroscience may be on his side, with memory being only one thread in the rich tapestry of processes shaping our sense of selfhood. At the same time, the world outside the laboratory is still full of people who experience themselves – and each other – as distinct, integrated wholes. How the new science of selfhood will change this everyday lived experience, and society with it, is a story that is yet to be told.</p> 748<p><em>Originally commissioned for the Donmar Warehouse production of <a href="http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/whats-on/donmar-warehouse/on-now/2016/elegy" target="_blank">Elegy</a>, with support from The Wellcome Trust. Reprinted in the programme notes and in Nick Payne’s published script.<br /> 749</em></p> 750 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 751 752 <footer class="entry-meta"> 753 <span class="cat-links"> 754 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/drama/" rel="category tag">drama</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/neuroscience/" rel="category tag">neuroscience</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/opinion/" rel="category tag">opinion</a> </span> 755 756 <span class="tag-links"> 757 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/memory/" rel="tag">memory</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/neurodegenerative-disease/" rel="tag">neurodegenerative disease</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/nick-payne/" rel="tag">nick payne</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/self/" rel="tag">self</a> </span> 758 759 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 760 </article><!-- #post-99544 --> 761 762 763 764<article id="post-99431" class="post-99431 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-art category-consciousness category-opinion tag-consciousness tag-exhibition tag-states-of-mind tag-wellcome-collection"> 765 <header class="entry-header"> 766 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/02/04/tracing-the-edges-of-consciousness/" rel="bookmark">Tracing the edges of consciousness</a></h1> 767 768 <div class="entry-meta"> 769 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/02/04/tracing-the-edges-of-consciousness/" title="5:25 pm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2016-02-04T17:25:28+00:00" pubdate>February 4, 2016</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 770 771 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2016/02/04/tracing-the-edges-of-consciousness/#respond"><span class="no-reply">0</span></a></p> 772 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 773 774 <div class="entry-content"> 775 <p><img data-attachment-id="99433" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/02/04/tracing-the-edges-of-consciousness/states-of-mind-main/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/states-of-mind-main.png" data-orig-size="800,450" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="States-of-mind-main" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/states-of-mind-main.png?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-99433" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/states-of-mind-main.png?w=560" alt="States-of-mind-main" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/states-of-mind-main.png 800w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/states-of-mind-main.png?w=150&h=84 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/states-of-mind-main.png?w=300&h=169 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/states-of-mind-main.png?w=768&h=432 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></p> 776<p>As a scientist, consciousness has always fascinated me. But understanding consciousness is not a project for science alone. Throughout history, philosophers, artists, storytellers, and musicians have all wondered about the apparent miracle of conscious awareness. Even today, while science might give us our best shot at figuring out the brain â the organ of experience – we need, more than ever, a melding of the arts and sciences, of contemporary and historical approaches, to understand what consciousness really <em>is, </em>to grasp what we mean by, as Mark Haddon eloquently puts it, âLife in the first person.â</p> 777<p>This quote comes from Haddon’s beautiful <a href="http://wellcomecollection.org/states-mind" target="_blank">introductory essay</a> to a major new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curated by Emily Sargent, <a href="http://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/states-mind-tracing-edges-consciousness" target="_blank">States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness</a> “examines perspectives from artists, psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists to interrogate our understanding of the conscious experience”. Its a fantastic exhibition, with style and substance, and I feel very fortunate to have been involved as an advisor from its early stages.</p> 778<p><strong>Whatâs so special about consciousness? </strong></p> 779<p>Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious aspect of our existence. Conscious experiences define our lives, but the private, subjective, and <em>what-it-is-likeness</em> of these experiences seems to resist scientific enquiry. Somehow, within each our brains the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. <em>Your</em> conscious experience: right here, right now, reading these words. <em>How does this happen?</em> <em>Why is life in the first person?</em></p> 780<p>In one sense, this seems like the kind of mystery ripe for explanation. Borrowing again from Mark Haddon, the raw material of consciousness is not squirreled away deep inside an atom, its not happening 14 billion years ago, and its not hiding out on the other side of the universe. Itâs right here in front of â or rather <em>behind</em> â our eyes. Saying this, the brain is a remarkably complex object. Itâs not so much the sheer number of neurons (though there about 90 billion). It’s the complexity of its wiring: there are so many connections, that if you counted one every second it would take you 3 million years to finish. <em>Is it not possible that an object of such extraordinary complexity should be capable of extraordinary things?</em></p> 781<p>People have been thinking about consciousness since theyâve been thinking at all. <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/sacred.html" target="_blank">Hippocrates</a>, the founder of modern medicine, said: âMen ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears … Madness comes from its moistness.â (Aristotle, by the way, got it wrong, thinking the brain hadnât much to do with consciousness at all.)</p> 782<p>Fast forward to Francis Crick, whose â<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Astonishing-Hypothesis-Scientific-Search/dp/0684801582">astonishing hypothesis</a>â in the 1990s deliberately echoed Hippocrates: âYou, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions ⦠and so on ⦠are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated moleculesâ. Crick, who I was lucky enough to meet during my time in America, was working on the <a href="http://www.klab.caltech.edu/news/crick-koch-05.pdf" target="_blank">neurobiology of consciousness</a> even on the day he died. You will see some of his personal notes, and his perplexing plasticine brain models, in <em>States of Mind.</em></p> 783<div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99458" style="width: 398px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99458" data-attachment-id="99458" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/02/04/tracing-the-edges-of-consciousness/l0080096-descartes-view-of-posterior-of-brain/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg" data-orig-size="5463,6904" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"credit":"Wellcome Images","caption":"L0080096 Descartes: view of posterior of brain","copyright":"
783Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons","title":"L0080096 Descartes: view of posterior of brain"}" data-image-title="L0080096 Descartes: view of posterior of brain" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="<p>L0080096 Descartes: view of posterior of brain</p> 784" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-99458" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg?w=388&h=490" alt="L0080096 Descartes: view of posterior of brain" width="388" height="490" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg?w=388 388w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg?w=776 776w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg?w=119 119w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg?w=237 237w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0080096.jpg?w=768 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 388px) 100vw, 388px" /><p id="caption-attachment-99458" class="wp-caption-text">Descartes: view of posterior of brain, from D<em>e Hominem. </em>Wellcome Collection</p></div> 785<p>A major landmark in thinking about consciousness is of course Descartes, who in the 17<sup>th</sup> Century distinguished between âmind stuffâ (<em>res cogitans</em>) and âmatter stuffâ (<em>res extensa</em>), so giving rise to the now infamous mind-body problem and the philosophy of dualism. Its a great thrill for to see an original copy of Descartesâ <em>De Homine</em> as part of this exhibition. Its modern incarnation as David Chalmersâ so-called âhard problemâ has recently gained enough cultural notoriety even to inspire a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/feb/01/the-hard-problem-tom-stoppard-review-dodges-big-question" target="_blank">Tom Stoppard play</a> (though for my money Alex Garlandâs screenplay for <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/" target="_blank">Ex Machina</a></em> is the <a href="https://neurobanter.com/2015/02/21/ex-machina-a-shot-in-the-arm-for-smart-sci-fi/" target="_blank">more perspicuous</a>). The idea of the hard problem is this: Even if we knew everything about how the operations of the brain give rise to perception, cognition, learning, and behaviour a problem would still remain<em>: why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all? Why is life in the first person?</em></p> 786<p><strong>Defining consciousness</strong></p> 787<p>How to define consciousness? One simple definition is that for a conscious organism there is <em>something it is like</em> to be that organism. Or, one can simply say that consciousness is what disappears when we fall into a dreamless sleep, and what returns when we wake up or start dreaming. A bit more formally, for conscious organisms there exists a continuous (though interruptible) stream of conscious scenes â a phenomenal world â which has the character of being subjective and private. The material in <em>States of Mind</em> can help us encounter these ideas with a bit more clarity and force, by focusing on the <em>edges</em> â the liminal boundaries â of consciousness.</p> 788<p>First there is <em>conscious level</em>: the difference between being awake and, letâs say, under general anaesthesia. Here, neuroscience now tells us that there is no single âgeneratorâ of consciousness in the brain, rather, being consciousness depends on highly specific ways in which different parts of the brain speak to each other. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jehtAN8pj8" target="_blank">Aya Ben Ronâs film</a> of patients slipping away under anaesthesia is a beautiful exploration of this process, as is the whole section on ‘SLEEP | AWAKE’.</p> 789<p>Then there is <em>conscious content</em>: what we are conscious of, when we are conscious. These are the perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that populate our ever-flowing stream of awareness. Here, current research is revealing that our perceptual world is not simply an internal picture of some external reality. Rather, conscious perception depends on the brainâs best guesses, or hypotheses, about the causes of sensory data. Perception is therefore a continuously creative act that is tightly bound up with imagination, so that our experience of the world is a kind of âcontrolled hallucinationâ, a fantasy that â usually, but not always â coincides with reality. The material on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia" target="_blank">synaesthesia</a> in <em>States of Mind</em> beautifully illuminates this process by showing how, for some of us, these perceptual fantasies can be very different â that we all have our own distinctive inner universes. You can even try <a href="https://neurobanter.com/2014/11/27/training-synaesthesia-how-to-see-things-differently-in-half-an-hour-a-day/" target="_blank">training yourself to become a âsynaestheteâ</a> with a demo of some of our own research, developed for this exhibition. Many thanks to Dr. David Schwartzman of the Sackler Centre for making this happen.</p> 790<div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99477" style="width: 526px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99477" data-attachment-id="99477" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/02/04/tracing-the-edges-of-consciousness/dsc_0001/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dsc_0001.jpg" data-orig-size="730,485" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"3.5","camera":"NIKON D3200","created_timestamp":"1454495594","focal_length":"18","iso":"560","shutter_speed":"0.066666666666667","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="dsc_0001" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dsc_0001.jpg?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-99477" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dsc_0001.jpg?w=516&h=343" alt="dsc_0001" width="516" height="343" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dsc_0001.jpg?w=516&h=343 516w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dsc_0001.jpg?w=150&h=100 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dsc_0001.jpg?w=300&h=199 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/dsc_0001.jpg 730w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 516px) 100v
790w, 516px" /><p id="caption-attachment-99477" class="wp-caption-text">Alphabet in Colour: Illustrating Vladimir Nabokov’s grapheme-colour synaesthesia, by Jean Holabird.</p></div> 791<p>Finally there is <em>conscious self</em> â the specific experience of <em>being me</em>, or <em>being you</em>. While this might seem easy to take for granted, the experience of being a self requires explanation just as much as any other kind of experience. It too has its edges, its border regions. Here, research is revealing that conscious selfhood, though experienced as unified, can come apart in many different ways. For example, our experience of being and having a particular body can dissociate from our experience of being a person with name and a specific set of memories. Conscious selfhood, like all conscious perception, is therefore another controlled hallucination maintained by the brain. The section BEING | NOT BEING dramatically explores some of these issues, for example by looking at amnesia with Shona Illingworth, and with <a href="http://www.owenlab.uwo.ca/" target="_blank">Adrian Owenâs seminal work on the possibility of consciousness even after severe brain injury</a>.</p> 792<p>This last example brings up an important point. Besides the allure of basic science, there are urgent practical motivations for studying consciousness. Neurological and psychiatric disorders are increasingly common and can often be understood as disturbances of conscious experience. Consciousness science promises new approaches and perhaps new treatments for these deeply destructive problems. Scoping out further boundary areas, studying the biology of consciousness can shed new light on awareness in newborn infants and in non-human animals, informing ethical debates in these areas. Above all, consciousness science carries the promise of understanding more about our place in nature. Following the tradition of Copernicus and Darwin, a biological account of conscious experience will help us see ourselves as part of, not apart from, the rest of the universe.</p> 793<div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99491" style="width: 475px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99491" data-attachment-id="99491" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2016/02/04/tracing-the-edges-of-consciousness/l0079940-neuronal-theory-11312/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg" data-orig-size="1908,2049" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"credit":"Wellcome Images","caption":"L0079940 Neuronal Theory - 11312.","copyright":"Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons","title":"L0079940 Neuronal Theory - 11312."}" data-image-title="L0079940 Neuronal Theory &#8211; 11312." data-image-description="" data-image-caption="<p>L0079940 Neuronal Theory &#8211; 11312.</p> 794" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-99491" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg?w=465&h=499" alt="L0079940 Neuronal Theory - 11312." width="465" height="499" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg?w=465&h=499 465w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg?w=930&h=999 930w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg?w=140&h=150 140w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg?w=279&h=300 279w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/l0079940.jpg?w=768&h=825 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 465px) 100vw, 465px" /><p id="caption-attachment-99491" class="wp-caption-text">Santiago Ramon y Cajal, distinguishing the reticular theory (left) from the neuron doctrine (right). From the Instituto Cajal, Madrid.</p></div> 795<p>Letâs finish by returning to this brilliant exhibition, States of Mind. What I found most remarkable are the objects that Emily Sargent has collected together. Whether its Descartesâ <em>De Hominem</em>, Ramon y Cajalâs delicate ink drawings of neurons, or Francis Crickâs notebooks and models, these objects bring home and render tangible the creativity and imagination which people have brought to bear in their struggle to understand consciousness, over hundreds of years. For me, this brings a new appreciation and wonder to our modern attempts to tackle this basic mystery of life. Emily Dickinson, my favourite poet of neuroscience, put it like this. âThe brain is wider than the sky, for – put them side by side –
795 the one the other will contain, with ease, and you – beside.â</p> 796<p><em>States of Mind is at the Wellcome Collection in London from Feb 4<sup>th</sup> until October 16<sup>th</sup> 2016 and is curated by Emily Sargent. <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sackler/" target="_blank">Sackler Centre</a> researchers, in particular David Schwartzman and myself, helped out as scientific advisors. This text is lightly adapted from a speech I gave at the opening event on Feb 3<sup>rd</sup> 2016. Watch this space, and <a href="http://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/states-mind-tracing-edges-consciousness" target="_blank">visit the exhibition website</a>, for news about special events on consciousness that will happen throughout the year.<br /> 797</em></p> 798 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 799 800 <footer class="entry-meta"> 801 <span class="cat-links"> 802 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/art/" rel="category tag">art</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/opinion/" rel="category tag">opinion</a> </span> 803 804 <span class="tag-links"> 805 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/consciousness/" rel="tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/exhibition/" rel="tag">exhibition</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/states-of-mind/" rel="tag">states of mind</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/wellcome-collection/" rel="tag">wellcome collection</a> </span> 806 807 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 808 </article><!-- #post-99431 --> 809 810 811 812<article id="post-99369" class="post-99369 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-publication tag-consciousness tag-journal tag-neuroscience"> 813 <header class="entry-header"> 814 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2015/11/09/can-neuroscience-explain-consciousness-oupblog/" rel="bookmark">Can neuroscience explain consciousness? | OUPblog</a></h1> 815 816 <div class="entry-meta"> 817 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2015/11/09/can-neuroscience-explain-consciousness-oupblog/" title="11:09 am" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2015-11-09T11:09:34+00:00" pubdate>November 9, 2015</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 818 819 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2015/11/09/can-neuroscience-explain-consciousness-oupblog/#respond"><span class="no-reply">0</span></a></p> 820 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 821 822 <div class="entry-content"> 823 <p><a href="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg"><img data-attachment-id="99371" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2015/11/09/can-neuroscience-explain-consciousness-oupblog/oupneurons/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg" data-orig-size="1260,485" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="OUPneurons" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg?w=560" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-99371" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg?w=560&h=215" alt="OUPneurons" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg?w=660 660w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg?w=150 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg?w=300 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg?w=768 768w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg?w=1024 1024w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/oupneurons.jpg 1260w" sizes="(max-width: 660px) 100vw, 660px" /></a></p> 824<p>
824To help promote the new journal <a href="http://nc.oxfordjournals.org/" target="_blank">Neuroscience of Consciousness</a> I took part in a short Q&A with Oxford University Press to ask the question: Can neuroscience explain consciousness? Read on …</p> 825<p>Source: <a href="http://blog.oup.com/2015/11/can-neuroscience-explain-consciousness/#sthash.Vnpe7rEV.xptt">Can neuroscience explain consciousness? | OUPblog</a></p> 826<p>This piece was also taken up at <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/neuroscience/comments/3rmg7s/can_neuroscience_explain_consciousness/" target="_blank">Reddit</a> with some interesting comments.</p> 827 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 828 829 <footer class="entry-meta"> 830 <span class="cat-links"> 831 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/publication/" rel="category tag">publication</a> </span> 832 833 <span class="tag-links"> 834 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/consciousness/" rel="tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/journal/" rel="tag">journal</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/neuroscience/" rel="tag">neuroscience</a> </span> 835 836 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 837 </article><!-- #post-99369 --> 838 839 840 841<article id="post-99364" class="post-99364 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-art category-consciousness tag-art tag-consciousness tag-wellcome"> 842 <header class="entry-header"> 843 <h1 class="entry-title"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2015/10/29/states-of-mind-at-the-wellcome-collection/" rel="bookmark">States of Mind at the Wellcome Collection</a></h1> 844 845 <div class="entry-meta"> 846 <span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2015/10/29/states-of-mind-at-the-wellcome-collection/" title="12:06 pm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2015-10-29T12:06:57+00:00" pubdate>October 29, 2015</time></a><span class="byline"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://neurobanter.com/author/akseth/" title="View all posts by akseth" rel="author">akseth</a></span></span> </div><!-- .entry-meta --> 847 848 <p class="comments-link"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/2015/10/29/states-of-mind-at-the-wellcome-collection/#respond"><span class="no-reply">0</span></a></p> 849 </header><!-- .entry-header --> 850 851 <div class="entry-content"> 852 <div data-shortcode="caption" id="attachment_99365" style="width: 670px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-99365" data-attachment-id="99365" data-permalink="https://neurobanter.com/2015/10/29/states-of-mind-at-the-wellcome-collection/yellowbluepink/" data-orig-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png" data-orig-size="800,450" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-title="yellowbluepink" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-large-file="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png?w=560" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-99365 size-full" src="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png?w=560" alt="yellowbluepink" srcset="https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png?w=660&h=371 660w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png?w=150&h=84 150w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png?w=300&h=169 300w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png?w=768&h=432 768w, https://neurobanter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/yellowbluepink.png 800w" sizes="(max-width: 660px) 100vw, 660px" /></a><p id="caption-attachment-99365" class="wp-caption-text">YellowPinkBlue by Ann Veronica Janssens</p></div> 853<p>From October 2015 until October 2016 the Wellcome Collection in London is curating an exhibition called <a href="http://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/states-mind-tracing-edges-consciousness" target="_blank">States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness.</a> It has been launched with a brilliant piece of installation art by Ann Veronica Janssens (until 3rd Jan 2016). In <a href="http://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/states-mind-ann-veronica-janssens" target="_blank">YellowPinkBlue</a> the entire gallery space is invaded by coloured mist, to focus attention on the process of perception itself so that one becomes subsumed by the experience of seeing. I’m excited to be contributing in various ways to States of Mind, via the Sackler Centre (more on that soon). To start with, here is the text I wrote for Janssen’s remarkable piece.</p> 854<p><strong><a href="http://wellcomecollection.org/whats/what-world-consciousness" target="_blank">What in the world is consciousness?</a></strong></p> 855<p>Right now an apparent miracle is unfolding. Within your brain, the electrochemical activity of many billions of richly interconnected brain cells â each one a tiny biological machine â is giving rise to a conscious experience. Your conscious experience: right here, right now, reading these words.</p> 856<p>It is all too easy to go about our daily lives, having conscious experiences, without appreciating how remarkable it is that we have these experiences at all. Ann Veronica Janssensâs piece returns us to the sheer wonder of being conscious. By stripping away many of the features that permeate our normal conscious lives, the raw fact of experiencing is given renewed emphasis.</p> 857<p>People have wondered about consciousness since theyâve wondered about anything. Hippocrates, the Greek founder of modern medicine, rightly identified the brain as the organ of experience (though Aristotle didnât agree). In the Renaissance, Descartes divided the universe into âmind stuffâ (res cogitans) and âmatter stuffâ (res extensa), giving birth to the philosophy of dualism and the confounding âmindâbodyâ problem of how the two relate. In the 19th century, when psychology first emerged as a science, understanding consciousness was its primary objective. Though largely sidelined during the 20th century, the challenge of revealing the biological basis of consciousness is now firmly re-established for our times. Janssensâs piece reminds us of the important distinction in science between being conscious at all (conscious level: the difference between being awake and being in a dreamless sleep or under anaesthesia) and what we are conscious of (conscious content: the perceptions, thoughts and emotions that populate our conscious mind). There is also conscious selfhood â the specific experience of being me (or you). Each of these aspects of consciousness can be traced to specific mechanisms in the brain that neuroscientists, in cahoots with researchers from many other disciplines, are now starting to unravel. There are many exciting ideas in play, ranging from the dependence of conscious level on how different parts of the brain speak to each other, to understanding conscious content as determined by the brainâs âbest guessâ of the causes of ambiguous and noisy sensory signals. Crucially, these ideas have allowed consciousness science to progress from the philosopherâs armchair to the research laboratory.</p> 858<p>Besides the allure of basic science, there are important practical motivations for studying consciousness. Neurological and psychiatric disorders are increasingly common and can often be framed as disturbances of conscious experience. Consciousness science promises new approaches and perhaps new treatments for these scourges of modern society. New theories and experiments can also shed light on consciousness in newborns and in non-human animals, adding critical information to important ethical debates in these areas. But above all, consciousness science carries the promise of understanding more about our place in nature. Following Darwin and Copernicus, a biological account of conscious experience will help us see ourselves as part of, not apart from, the rest of the universe.</p> 859<p><em>Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience<br /> 860Co-Director, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex</em></p> 861 </div><!-- .entry-content --> 862 863 <footer class="entry-meta"> 864 <span class="cat-links"> 865 Posted in <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/art/" rel="category tag">art</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/category/consciousness/" rel="category tag">consciousness</a> </span> 866 867 <span class="tag-links"> 868 Tagged <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/art/" rel="tag">art</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/consciousness/" rel="tag">consciousness</a>, <a href="https://neurobanter.com/tag/wellcome/" rel="tag">wellcome</a> </span> 869 870 </footer><!-- #entry-meta --> 871 </article><!-- #post-99364 --> 872 873 874 <nav id="nav-below"> 875 <h1 class="assistive-text section-heading">Post navigation</h1> 876 877 878 <div class="nav-previous"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/page/3/" ><span class="meta-nav">←</span> Older posts</a></div> 879 880 <div class="nav-next"><a href="https://neurobanter.com/" >Newer posts <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a></div> 881 882 883 </nav><!-- #nav-below --> 884 885 886 </div><!-- #content --> 887 </div><!-- #primary --> 888 889 <div id="secondary" class="widget-area" role="complementary"> 890 <aside id="freshly_pressed-2" class="widget widget_freshly_pressed"><a href="https://wordpress.com/discover/" title="Featured on Freshly Pressed"><img src="https://s0.wp.com/i/badges/freshly-pressed-rectangle.png?m=1391188133i" width="200px" height="62px" /></a> 891</aside><aside id="search-2" class="widget widget_search"> <form method="get" id="searchform" action="https://neurobanter.com/"> 892 <label for="s" class="assistive-text">Search</label> 893 <input type="text" class="field" name="s" id="s" placeholder="Search" /> 894 <input type="submit" class="submit" name="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" /> 895 </form> 896</aside> 897 <aside id="recent-posts-2" class="widget widget_recent_entries"> 898 <h1 class="widget-title">Recent Posts</h1> 899 <ul> 900 <li>
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'.rootDomain' : location.hostname; 1220 cookieLib.setItem( 'ccpa_applies', applies, 24 * 60 * 60, '/', domain ); 1221 } 1222 1223 var maybeCallDoNotSellCallback = function() { 1224 if ( 'function' === typeof window.doNotSellCallback ) { 1225 return window.doNotSellCallback(); 1226 } 1227 1228 return false; 1229 } 1230 1231 // Look for usprivacy cookie first. 1232 var usprivacyCookie = cookieLib.getItem( 'usprivacy' ); 1233 1234 // Found a usprivacy cookie. 1235 if ( null !== usprivacyCookie ) { 1236 1237 // If the cookie indicates that CCPA does not apply, then bail. 1238 if ( '1---' === usprivacyCookie ) { 1239 return; 1240 } 1241 1242 // CCPA applies, so call our callback to add Do Not Sell link to the page. 1243 maybeCallDoNotSellCallback(); 1244 1245 // We're all done, no more processing needed. 1246 return; 1247 } 1248 1249 // We don't have a usprivacy cookie, so check to see if we have a CCPA applies cookie. 1250 var ccpaCookie = cookieLib.getItem( 'ccpa_applies' ); 1251 1252 // No CCPA applies cookie found, so we'll need to geolocate if this visitor is from California. 1253 // This needs to happen client side because we do not have region geo data in our $SERVER headers, 1254 // only country data -- therefore we can't vary cache on the region. 1255 if ( null === ccpaCookie ) { 1256 1257 var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); 1258 request.open( 'GET', 'https://public-api.wordpress.com/geo/', true ); 1259 1260 request.onreadystatechange = function () { 1261 if ( 4 === this.readyState ) { 1262 if ( 200 === this.status ) { 1263 1264 // Got a geo response. 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