John Mazziotta - How Brain Scientists Think About Consciousness

John the question of Consciousness and the so-called Mind Body problem have been with us for centuries if not longer uh philosophers theologians deal with this regularly and from fascinating thinking as a brain scientist particularly an expert in imaging the brain how do you look at this problem of Consciousness well I look at it from a very practical point of view I think about operational definitions and relationships between a behavior that one can observe in a person versus the networks in the brain that are active when that behavior is playing out also look at it from the point of view of a clinician see a patient see a person who's awake and conscious while you meet them in the emergency room and watch them descend through a very stereotype series of states that ends up with coma and that is a different way of looking at it or a patient who's in the operating room who one second is fully awake and talking and joking with you and 10 seconds into an IV drug is absolutely unconscious by most definitions so my vantage point on this has to do with the very practical side of it but I think that um from a theoretical and and um more General vantage point there may be many things about Consciousness and cognitive interactions that generate Consciousness that um we're not going to be able to understand very well and uh that's just our ignorance about Neuroscience so the operational approach gives us some insights but it would be shortsighted to think that that's all there is let's follow some of these insights what are some examples in your practice either as a basic scientist or is a clinician that can elucidate give us give us real world examples of how you can see these elements of of Consciousness well if you take a very simple situation where the uh the fluid filled system inside the brain is obstructed it's a plumbing problem right it's obstructed but that's a really bad problem to have and a person will go if it happens rapidly enough from being awake and talking as we are to um being a little bit inattentive to being easily distractable they hear a noise in the hall and they start to uh not be able to keep their train of thought to being more agitated then even being combative then lethargic and then ultimately unconscious and that's a stereotyped pattern of behavior over what period of time might that occur that could happen in minutes oh wow or it could happen in the course of a couple of hours and if you relieve that pressure pressure basically undo the plumbing Problem by draining those fluid filed spaces patient wakes up wow so that's one way of looking at this alteration from now as you look at those different stages each each each element there is a very different kind of response a a a a lethargy inattentiveness and and and anger are three different kinds of reaction now H how how is the One symptom of increasing pressure causing different kinds of reactions well we don't know to be clear about the answer but uh you know as the pressure builds different structures will be affected in different ways and so if we could image a person during that descent into unconsciousness we'd have an idea of which structures are active in each type of behavior and we'd have a way to have a onetoone correlation to answer your question unfortunately those patients are critically ill and so we can't be doing experiments on them you could do that with a drug you could do it with anesthesia and slowly sedate a person what's fascinating though is what we commonly would feel to be the unity of our own Consciousness the feeling that I am an ie and I might see something or feel something but it's I who's in this control suddenly can be uh uh disintegrated into various components that the [Music] eye fractionalize so we have the eye that is this that controls my attentiveness or lethargy in an eye that becomes angry or or or or or Placid and so you have this this disintegration based upon different systems is that is that a is that a legit imit uh uh um uh inference from that data I think it is I mean I think that that's a logical extrapolation of that information whether that how that breaks down into the bigger Consciousness story remains to be seen But there are these dissociations from our volitional interactive Consciousness to behaviors that are happening because of structural differences in the brain what are some uh perhaps um so-called normal functions that we do uh learning very sophisticated tasks uh whether motor tasks or intellectual tasks can you can you follow a a line uh through Imaging that might differentiate someone who is uh a fast learner from a slow learner well all of these types of experiments are obviously interesting and and being performed at many centers around the world at the present time I think looking at issues like intelligence creativity uh ability to learn how we learn all of those things will be revealed maybe if not at this generation of Imaging at subsequent methodologies I think that you know we we do a lot of things in society that uh are taken for granted but have nothing to do with how the brain might want to learn you want to learn French when you're in seventh grade okay you're not going to know it for very long you may want to learn French when you're 11 months old we don't know yet you may want to learn mathematics with some sort of graphical presentations rather than symbolic some people may be really good at doing things that way others may be different but if we explore all of those issues in a systematic way and across the ages span I think we'll find that the intellectual capacity of humans may be far greater than we're able to get with today's approaches most of schooling education is an artifact of Industrial Revolution you know how how early could a child be out of the house so the parents could go to work has nothing to do with when the brain wants to learn how to add or how to read or learn another language but I think if we learn those rules and apply them we may have a whole whole new uh range of human capabilities there have been some studies done uh premature I'm sure that compare language learning in the East where they have characters China Japan with western style alphabets and those cultures uh young children must learn literally thousands of different very complex pictures uh ideographs and the thinking is that if you train to have learned that intricate GE ometry I know I've tried to learn in it as an adult and you know fingers and toes will count the number I can learn but you know children learn hundreds and thousands of these very quickly but the theory is that maybe that type of training will lead to other kind of like spatial skills in mathematics would be would be improved by having that experience yeah I think that may well be the case and and parts of the brain can do things under certain circumstances that you wouldn't expect so a a person who's blind from birth and learns Braille their visual cortex is providing information about what their finger is feeling and and so the real estate while there are zoning laws there are there are some rules that can be broken that that's a fascinating one let's explore that because let's say a person becomes blind it may be maybe a teenager can the brain be plastic enough to have the expansion of other modal ities at that point to where it expands so a blind person then would become more acute in in his or her um uh uh audition and hearing or or a sense of smell by by expanding the brain areas in in other areas yeah there these plastic changes will routinely occur when something from the periphery either sensory or otherwise is suddenly terminated and probably the best examples of that have to do with amputees amputate a limb and suddenly the brain has no information coming from that and the area committed to that limb will start to expand in the brain and as it expands patients may experience Phantom limb pain they'll they'll suddenly have symptoms when you touch their face that relates to the Phantom Limb and so they feel something when there's no limb there correct and it could be a pain or an itch or something and this is the brain reorganizing in a plastic way to try to understand what's going on to the sensory system and the motor outputs if you give the person a prosthetic arm far less likely to have this broad expansion and all of these other secondary problems because at least there's something there that uh relates to what is expected and of course the brain's in a in a box it doesn't know if it's you or me or who's doing what it has to somehow monitor all of that and make decisions when you reflect upon the the whole story of what uh uh of what the brain does is you see it you live it every day you you see thousands of of brains and all of its uh uh innumerable slices uh what does it make you reflect on uh what human beings are all about I think that's just an incredible richness of potential perhaps much of it untapped and that the complexity of the brain is is a Marvel in itself but it tells us that there's so much that we could do that we haven't done yet that we might try that is unexplored it's just tremendously exciting

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 15,312

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, consciousness, mind body problem, brain, science, neuroscience, mind, human brain, what is consciousness, closer to truth consciousness, cognitive science, mind-body problem, consciousness explained

Id: XWcsQxp4Hc4

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023