Extended Consciousness

Extended Consciousness

Much of human memory is unconscious, and it never becomes conscious – though that does not mean that it does not influence consciousness. Most of what we do consciously, in our moment-to-moment lives, depends upon implicit (unconscious) memory systems, which exert their effects on us without us even realizing it. Our every conscious moment is shaped by unconscious events, derived from a personal and biological past of which we usually have no inkling. “Inherited” memories determine the form of the basic-emotion command systems. The “good” and “bad” objects mentioned above determine the contents of those systems. This is the core of a system of implicit learning. Some people (Joseph DeDoux, for example) call the motivational core of this type of memory system “emotional memory”

These are unconscious influences on consciousness, derived from the past. Consciousness itself is extended beyond the immediate present by our capacity to “replay” interactions with objects (good, bad, indifferent) in our mind's eye. This is explicit (conscious) remembering, the most important variety of which (from our subjective point of view) is called “episodic memory” - memory for “personal” events (the other main variety of explicit memory is “semantic memory” - memory of facts as opposed to events).

Episodic memory supplements our immediate experience of core consciousness (self-object couplings derived from current perception) with reminiscences of past moments of consciousness with the fact that you were there and felt something. This is what makes it familiar, a (past self-object couplings). The reactivation of such couplings of the self (inner consciousness) with stored information derived from past events (outer consciousness)seems to be the task, above all, of the hippocampus. Episodic memory links traces of past events (registered primarily in the posterior cortical networks) with the fact that you were there and felt something. This is what makes it familiar, and familiarity is also fallible – hence the déjà vu phenomenon – and perhaps also the problem of “false memories”).

Through complex interactions between our genes and the maturational environment, we develop a personal version of the world – an inner world – that is uniquely our own. Photo by Elena.

Core of Awareness

The Core of Awareness

The brain is an organ that promotes our survival as biological creatures. It does this by mediating between the inner needs of our bodies and the dangers and delights of the outside world – the location of all the objects that satisfy our inner needs.

The brainstem is the anatomical core of the brain and, in evolutionary terms, its oldest part. Within the brainstem there are a number of nuclei that regulate our vegetative, visceral life. They control heartbeat, respiration, digestion, and the like. The design of these circuits is “hard-wired”, and the basic design is shared by all mammals. These circuits are so crucial to life that if there were to be even minor variations in their structure and connectivity, we would not survive. They have been preserved so long through evolutionary history precisely because they work so well. While this is a fascinating brain regin if you are a neurologist, these circuits have little directly to do with the mind – whose business it is to mediate between such things and the perceptual-motor world outside.

The mind begins where these systems end. Just above these circuits, in the upper part of the brainstem, lies a set of structures that participate in the regulation of visceral as well as mental life, in one particular way. They govern the activational tone (or “state”) of the brain, which we perceive subjectively as the background medium of our conscious awareness – the “page” onto which the ever-changing contents of perception (and thought) are written. This page is never really blank, even during sleep.

The inner source of consciousness reflects the current state of our bodies. To be more precise, it reflects the current state of our inner needs, This infuses the background “tone” of conscious awareness with a particular quality of feeling. The inner surface of consciousness, if its tone were to be conveyed in words (which it is not), would say something like: “I exist, I am alive, and I feel like this.”

I exist, I'm alive and I feel like this. Photo by Elena.

External sources of awareness

The other aspect of “core consciousness” derives from the world around us. The stimuli that inscribe representational “contents” onto the page of consciousness are registered primarily in the posterior part of the forebrain, in a series of structures dedicated to the reception, analysis, and storage of information about the world. The structures combine myriad stimuli arriving from our various sense organs into the recognizable “objects” that constitute the physical world as we know it. A unit of consciousness – a moment of awareness – consists in a coupling of these two things: a momentary state of the core self in relation to its concurrent surround of objects. The essence of consciousness is therefore a relationship: “I feel like this in relation to that.” This relationship reflects the fact that our inner needs can only be satisfied by things that exist beyond ourselves. Our feelings (the inner sources of consciousness) are therefore always defined in relation to the objects of our needs (the outer sources of consciousness).

It does not require a great leap of imagination to see why things are arranged like this. This is what consciousness is for. It tells us how we feel about things. The things in question are basically, things like: “I feel hungry. I want one of those; I feel sexually aroused, perhaps she/he will oblige; I feel scared, I think I'll get out of here.” If consciousness did not require feelings, we would get along fine without it. The reception, analysis, and storage of information – and the programming, regulation and verification of action – do not depend on consciousness. Computers can (and do) perform such functions, and we perform most of them unconsciously most of the time. Conscious awareness, in its essence, then, imparts value.

Flowers near York Council Chambers (1907-1950). The Township of York held council meetings above this branch of the Canadian imperial bank of commerce from 1907 to 1950. A plaque, installed in December 1973, commemorates the 180th anniversary of the founding of the township. Photo by Elena.

Dreams and Hallucinations

Dreams and Hallucinations

Dreams are hallucinations that we all experience – hallucinations that have been regarded by many as a “normal” form of psychosis. Freud was especially interested in dreams because he believed that, if he could understand their mechanism, he would be able to comprehend something fundamental about mental illness. Other forms of hallucination and delusion, primarily in schizophrenia, exist. The brain mechanism of dreaming (perhaps not surprisingly) overlap a great deal with those of consciousness, emotion, and memory.

Difficulties Investigating Dreaming

Dreams are notoriously difficult to investigate scientifically. All scientists are concerned with methodological questions regarding how brain mechanisms of dreaming have been investigated. Attention is drawn to the dangers of using inappropriate methods to investigate complex psychological states, and to the advantages of using more than one scientific method to study a difficult and elusive subject. In the past, one of the failing of psychoanalysis was its overreliance, despite the great complexity of its subject matter, on a single method for reaching its conclusions, but this has begun to change somewhat in recent years. Checking the findings of one method against those of another makes it possible to minimize the bias associated with a single method. Today's review of the dreaming brain draw mostly on findings from neurophysiological work on animals, sleep studies and function-imaging studies in neurologically intact humans, and clinical and experimental investigations of patients with focal brain lesions.

Dreams... Photo by Elena.

REM Sleep

Any discussion of the brain mechanisms of dreaming cannot begin before the phenomenon of Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM) sleep has been introduced, because REM sleep has become widely known as “dreaming sleep”. However, it is a mistake to equate the two phenomena. Indeed, the conflation of REM sleep with dreaming is one of the most substantial errors that has arisen from methodological impropriety in this field.

When the REM state was discovered in the 1950s, the scientists involved (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953; Dement & Kleitman, 1957) immediately suspected that it might be the physiological correlate of dreaming. This was because the REM state involves a period of physiological arousal in the context of otherwise quiescent sleep, just as the dream state involves conscious mental activity in the context of otherwise unconscious sleep. During REM, it is not only the eyes that are active. An electroencephalogram (EEG) – which provides a measure of the electrical activity in the brain – made during REM would suggest that although you are sleeping, your brain is in a state of heightened activation akin to full wakefulness. There is also activation of other bodily systems. You begin to breathe differently, your heart rate increases, and your genitals (in both males and females) become engorged. One is thus highly excited in several ways during REM sleep. By contrast, however, skeletal muscle tone drops dramatically (with the exception of the musculature controlling eye movements). This effectively paralyzes the sleeper, and it apparently prevents him or her from acting out dreams. This cycle appears more or less every 90 minutes in humans, sot that we spend some 25% of our sleeping hours in the REM state.

Taking into account the fallibility of human memory in general, let alone memory for dreams (which are particularly difficult to recall), it would have been unreasonable for early investigators to expect to obtain a 100% dream recall rate from REM sleep awakenings. 

A French neuroscientist, Michel Jouvet (1967), carried out the first key studies by performing a series of ablation experiments. Although REM sleep occurs in a remarkably wide variety of animals, cats were the main targets of this research – partly because their brains are so similar to ours, but no doubt also because they sleep for so much of the day. Jouvet made a series of slices through the neuraxis of the cat, starting at the highest level of the frontal lobes and moving progressively downward toward the brainstem. He then systematically investigated the effects on the sleep cycle. He wanted to ascertain the key lesion site that would obliterate REM sleep. To his amazement, he found the brainstem, and the REM state would still remain intact and would punctuate sleep with the same monotonous regularity.

The critical incision occurred only in the middle regions of the primitive brainstem, at the level of the pons. Subsequent investigators confirmed that REM sleep can only be obliterated entirely by creating fairly large lesions in the pons (Jons, 1979). In short, these studies demonstrated that, whatever REM sleep was, it was causally generated by structures in the pontine brainstem. The implications of this finding were enormous. Since the forebrain is the seat of all our higher mental functions (i.e., representational cognition), the early investigators concluded that REM sleep (read: dreaming) is an entirely “mindless” activity.  This raised serious questions for any psychological theory of the causation of dreams, not least among them being the Freudian theory that dreams are caused by wishful states of mind. The following quotation is from one of the most influential papers in the field

If we assume that the physiological substrate of consciousness is the forebrain, these facts completely eliminate any possible contribution of ideas (or their neural substrate) to the primary driving force of the dream process.

Hallucinations. Photo by Elena.

Mourning and Melancholia

Mourning and Melancholia

Failures in the process of mourning take many forms. In a famous paper called “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud contrasted the normal process of mourning with the pathology of melancholia (i.e. clinical depression). He argued that, in mourning, a person gradually comes to terms with loss by giving up (separating from) the lost love object, whereas in depression this cannot happen because the patient denies the loss. You cannot come to terms with a loss if you do not acknowledge that it has happened. Freud said that this was particularly apt to occur if the original attachment to the lost object had been a narcissistic one. In a narcissistic attachment, the separateness of the love object is not recognized, and it is treated as if it were part of the self.  Narcissism is contrasted with object love, which is a more mature form of attachment, where the independence of the love object is acknowledged. Freud showed that in melancholia, the patient denies the loss of the love object by identifying himself with it (by literally becoming that object in fantasy. The depression itself then results from the internalization of the feelings of resentment toward the object that has abandoned him. The narcissist attacks the internalized object with all the ruthless vengefulness of a lover scorned. 

This explanation seems to hold good for the third case of right-hemisphere syndrome that was investigated psychoanalytically. This case – Mrs, A (Kaplan-Solms & Solms, 2000, pp.173-179) – suffered severe spatial deficits, neglect, and anosognosia, but at the same time she was profoundly depressed. This is unusual for right-hemisphere patients, producing a paradoxical situation in which the patient was unaware of a loss (anosognosia) and yet simultaneously displaying severe depressive reactions to it. She was constantly in tears, lamenting the fact that she was such a burden to the medical and nursing staff, whose generous attention she did not deserve since she was not fit to live, and so on. The psychoanalytic investigation revealed that Mrs. A was, in fact, unconsciously very much aware of her loss, but she was denying it by means of the introjective process described by Freud. Unconsciously, Mrs. A did have an internalized image of her damaged, crippled self, and she attacked that image to the point of twice attempting to kill herself.

In this case, the patient was overwhelmed by feeling of the same type that the previous two patients managed (for the most part) successfully to suppress. In two final cases, the situation was more complicated still.

Mourning and Melancholia. Photo by Elena.

Consciousness in Nonhumans

Consciousness in Machines and in Nonhuman Mammals

When one starts thinking about the problem of consciousness, the question of whether or not a machine can be conscious begins to appear rather ridiculous. Some day this question might only be asked by people who are unfamiliar with the essential neuroscientific facts about consciousness. Consciousness has everything to do with being embodied, with awareness of one's bodily state in relation to what is going on around one. Moreover, this mechanism seems to have evolved only because bodies have needs. Consciousness is therefore deeply rooted in a set of ancient biological values. These values are what feelings are, and consciousness is feeling. It is therefore very difficult to imagine how, why, and where a disembodied machine would generate consciousness. This does not rule out the possibility of an artificial system with self-monitoring properties. But the self that it monitors would have to be a body (and preferably one with a long evolutionary history( if it is really going to generate feelings.

This argument has interesting implications, too, for the question of consciousness in other animals. It suggests that any animal with a brainstem designed roughly like our own – that is, a brainstem that modulates visceral processes and relays its output to cortex – is likely to experience consciousness. As it happens, all mammals have breainstems with nuclei that are structured and connected in roughly the same way as are those of humans – their brainstem nuclei even excrete the same chemicals (and deliver them to roughly the same places) as their human counterparts. There is therefore very good reason to believe that dogs, cats, dolphins, whales – even laboratory rats and mice – possess “core consciousness”. This implies that all mammals share our most basic (biologically rooted) values.

The same elementary things are likely to male a mouse and human being feel “good” and “bad”. We now that mice, no less than men, most probably feel pleasurable excitement when anticipating the consummation of a need, fear in the presence of an enemy, anger when prevented from having what they want, distress on being separated from loved ones, and so on. Recognizing these facts has profound ethical implications for humanity.

There are, however, “higher” levels of consciousness which involve neural structures that we do not share with other mammals. As a result, the nature of the cognitive aspects of their consciousness is likely to differ quite dramatically from our experience.

There is very good reason to believe that cats possess core consciousness. Photo by Elena.