Mystery of the Mind

good afternoon my name is Paul Louis I'm the president of the New York psychoanalytic Institute and I was asked to pinch-hit in introducing this afternoon's program by Edna sofyan and Frances levy who unfortunately were not able to be here today because of other commitments I've also been asked to remind you that publications by some of the once's on the panel for sale in the back there and you can see they have books popped up and I will introduce the moderator for this afternoon's discussion and he will in turn introduce the other panelists and he is quake Pia's piee os as you can see on the second page who is a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor in the health center at Williams College he is former senior staff psychologists at the Austin wigs Center and contributing editor of psychoanalytic dialogues so please like this and I'm delighted to be part of this panel and together with very distinguished researchers author and scientists let me begin by just introducing the participants and then I thought what we could do is say a little bit about touch on some of the work that you're all doing and then move to our topic which is supposed to be around consciousness which will probably inevitably moved also to a discussion of the unconscious and other ideas about psychology psychopathology in other areas so starting my left I'd like to introduce Ned block he's silver professor philosophy and psychology at New York University he's a former Guggenheim Fellow and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences he is co-editor of the nature of consciousness philosophical debates next is Joseph LeDoux he is University professor and Henry and Lucie Moses professor of science and the Center of neural science in the Department of Psychology at New York University he's director of an ni MH Conti Center for Neuroscience of fear and anxiety and author of the emotional brain mysterious underpinnings of motional life and synaptic self how our brains become who we are next is Richard hire his professor of psychology at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine he's used brain imaging with pets and MRI for the last 20 years to study intelligence his most speculative work using brain imaging suggests a neurobiological basis for consciousness and a possible link to the neurological basis of intelligence and finally the least Patrick McGrath is a novelist whose work touches on the subject of mental illness he's the author of the grotesque spider asylum martha peek and port welcome all so why don't we begin by just saying a little bit about the work we've done the current current work and how it might link to some of the other we may find links and to each other and begin our discussion so let me start with your work and I'm a philosopher and part of a growing movement in philosophy to think about philosophical issues that connect with the sciences and so I've worked on a quite a few different issues in the sciences that for example I did a project on intelligence like us or higher and I did a project on mental imagery for about the past ten years I've been working on consciousness and I'm especially interested in the relation between mental states and their neural basis and I'm right now writing a book on the neural basis of consciousness so I work on and memory in the brain I do most of this work through studies of rats and we try to figure out exactly how it is that an emotional experience that a rat has is acquired and stored in the rats brain and the reason we do it in rats is because we can get into the detailed circuitry underlying all of this processing and go down down beyond the circuit into the cells and the molecules and then perhaps learn something about the molecules that may help us come back up to the level of behavior and perhaps even help treat people who have disorders but we're not strictly focused on the development of drugs or anything like that because we have other approaches where we try to use behavioral manipulations to alter fear and fear memory and change these as well so I think it's important to realize that neurosciences is not strictly speaking a reductionistic science where you start at the top with behavior and go down to molecules and genes because their interactions to each step along the way so genes can tell you about behavior and behavior can tell you about genes and every step in the middle can inform the other levels so the idea is not to reduce so much but to integrate across these various levels I don't study consciousness per se and most of my work is emphasize the unconscious nature of emotional processing and maybe we can get around to that but I think it's you know I am of course interested in conscious being a conscious person and so I have written a little bit about it mostly in a speculative way because again I don't personally study so what are the odds that the guy from California is everyone wearing a tie on the East Coast 100% I left California yesterday was 75 degrees I I grew up in Buffalo so I'm not completely unused to this I've been using brain imaging to look at how the brain works during various cognitive processes about 12 years a resident from our medical school came to see me he was an anesthesiologist and he said can you help me do a brain imaging experiment to understand what anesthetic drugs do and I said you mean you don't know what anesthetic drugs do he said well we use these every day every day I turn consciousness on and I turn consciousness off I start by turning it off and then it will we turn it back on and we don't have a clue how we do it what I do is I give an anesthetic drug and then we measure heart rate we measure brainwaves we measure temperature but none of that stuff's predicts anything about how deeply someone is unconscious so I stick them with a needle and if they don't jump I tell the surgeon to go ahead I was kind of shocked at this and with that resident whose name is my calc Iyer who's now faculty member derv ein we have done a series of brain imaging experiments on normal volunteers when they undergo various levels of anaesthetic drugs to experimentally manipulate states of consciousness and look to see what the brain looks like in those different states and we are interested in using this information to try to explicate the neural circuitry of consciousness and then I have an interest in whether that neurocircuitry overlaps with other studies we're doing on human intelligence and the neural circuitry of intelligence but more about all that later well in in my line the unconscious is probably more central and consciousness per se I think there wouldn't be any literature if characters in novels didn't behave in inexplicable or irrational or unpredictable ways we're left with the great questions as to why Madame Bovary cheats on her husband or why heathcliff believes in ghosts or why captain ahab gives up chasing whales in general and go and chase is one whale in particular these are the the mysteries of mind that without which literature I think is would be very Dias indeed my own work focuses on sort of the mind in crisis the mind that is failing to properly assimilate what reality or the world is is telling it and probably the most vivid example in my own work is a 1919 oval called spider which is the first-person account of a man suffering from schizophrenia and the the story roughly goes that after a long period in an institution he's returned to the place he grew up which is the East End of London and returning to a halfway house in this neighborhood and seeing those familiar streets smelling those familiar smells the sort of construction of his own cast his own narrative of his of his life which centers on on the great tragedy of his life which was the death of his mother when he's returned to the place where this tragedy occurred his memories begin to collapse then it turns out that it's a false structure of memory that this man spider has constructed in order to explain to himself the circumstances of his mother's death and to place responsibility for that death upon his father and as these structures collapse he begins to face the possibility that responsibility for his mother's death does not lie with his father but that elsewhere and I made a curious discovery without doing any theoretical work on this that that as this character's memory collapse so did his identity which had been very fragile to begin with but it sort of fractures and splinters as he is robbed of his own his own biography and so the relationship of self and memory began to appear very much more sort of intimate than I first imagined and in this way a mystery of the mind was at least partially full revealed through the writing of the fiction just a bit about the work I'm principally a psychotherapist most of my time has spent listening to people and the troubles they bring and of course much of my both training and also the way I work with people's attending to non-conscious processes and trying to understand pathways to symptoms and how that's related to unconscious processes in terms of my writing though I've been over the last six or seven years very interested in nonlinear self-organizing systems and have moved to looking at building on the work of Stephen Wolfram and several people with the cellular automata these computer simulated Turing machines which basically are arrays of cells that operate by simple transition rules but then over time a very complex demonstrated complex behaviors and trying to link that back to them what we're learning about neural networks the brain and how they two are circuits and so what my work is moving toward is trying to find actually a bridging language from complexity theory or nonlinear dynamic systems and these which really kind of graph theory into the neuroscience is trying to find its psychological language that can bridge it so that really psychologists and people thinking about the mind can begin to add what they know about the mind to the discussion of the neuroscience of the mind in these language networks systems and how these systems evolve and change over time so that that's principal my work is both but it does sound us at least to members have done a fair amount unconsciousness and I think part of the agenda was to begin there but it variability will lead back to discussing unconscious processes as well so I don't net if you want to say something about some of your your work unconsciousness and your thoughts about it and maybe others saying we can join in on um well since the title of the session is involves the notion of a mystery maybe I should say something about what I think the chief mysteries of consciousness are I think the probably the biggest mystery that least of all Vic's mystery that is talked about in philosophy sometimes called the explanatory gap and the the issue is how can we possibly explain why the neural basis of a given conscious experience is the neural basis of that experience rather than some other one or even none and it's fair to say that nobody really has a clue about the answer to this question you know often for questions that people are puzzled by at least you can come up with some hypothetical answer but I don't think there's even a hypothetical answer to this question anybody's ever proposed so I think this is really one of the biggest challenges to to face you know the science of consciousness at the same time I don't think it's hopeless and I think that we have a kind of a set of ideas for at least sort of trying to see what the problem is not if not ideas that will help us in the solution from work that a number of philosophers have done the the key distinction is the distinction between a concept and the the the thing that the concept is a concept of a concept being a piece of representational machinery that we use in thinking and so the idea if you want to sort of get a physical istic picture of what consciousness is that at least allows you to stink this explanatory gap a good way to think about it is we've got a mentalistic concept of consciousness that we get from our own experience and then we have various brain oriented concepts of consciousness and if a physical istic point of view is right these are both concepts of the same thing just as the concept of water that we all get from ordinary life and the concept of water we get from chemistry namely you know combination of hydrogen and oxygen molecules arranged in a certain way those are two different concepts of the same thing or to take another example temperature something we're all familiar with in our daily life but the physicists tell us that at least in the case of a gas or a liquid the temperature of a gas or a liquid is the average kinetic energy of the molecules of the liquid so we've got two concepts a physical istic concept average kinetic energy and an ordinary concept temperature and they pick out the same thing so the idea is that if we're going to understand the physical basis of consciousness we're going to have to find a physical concept that picks out the same thing as our ordinary mentalistic concept and a colleague of mine at NYU - Tom Nagel has a nice analogy using for this he says we're in the position now that a pre-socratic philosopher would have been in in understanding how matter and energy could be forms of the same thing you need to understand how mattered energy could be probably most people in this room don't understand that but we know because we know so that least that there is a science of these things we we have an idea of how we could find out those concepts and see that those concepts were concepts of same thing and that's what we unfortunately don't yet have but we have a lot of we have you know definitely we have investigations that have told us a lot about what it is about the brain that underlies our conscious experience we're not there yet but I think there is room for for for optimism well among those kind of correlates to consciousness that I'm aware of is the work of Gerald Edelman I think Juergen fel did some work on memory and they're talking what for my reading anyway what comes out of it is that moments of synchronization across across widely distributed you know in diverse areas of the brain orally with moments of consciousness so there was a study that Gerald Elliman did where they were subjects we put in a binocular rivalry study where they wear lenses one lens was red the other was blue on a computer screen they saw bars that were horizontal blue bars and vertical red bars you know and so perceptually what happens hello okay hi I'm Craig Pierce nice to meet you yes sure let me introduce our last panelist John Franco bas T is professor of philosophy of nature and science at the Pontifical Lateran University and director of the Vatican project sto Q science theology and ontological quest just in today I think there may be welcome we've started our discussion on touching unconsciousness but let let me just have finished that study I was mentioning so the subjects were put in this they viewed on a computer screen vertical blue bars red horizontal bars and what happens subjectively for the subjects is that the percept alternates they see blue bar blue bars and they're asked to press a key when they when the percept on them indicating their moment of consciousness are becoming aware of a change in the percept and what element reported at those moments of becoming aware and pressing the key there was massive synchronization across different areas widely distributed as the cortex and this is related to his idea of reentry and how it is that these these networks for brief moments stabilize in these synchronized States then it's a washing away of it again until the next moment of consciousness so that's what I understand to be in there are several other studies that also speak of synchronization either in phase or in hurts just cycles per second craig so could I just cut in and ask you one thing Ned you I mean you're talking about the the sort of the physicalist aspect of consciousness here which you're going to say will one day map correspond to whatever the mentalist concept what would for you is the mentalist concept of control I think that's a really important question and you know I think one of the what what are the points that my colleague Tom Nagel makes is that you need clarification on both sides it's not just that we need to find something in neuroscience that picks out the thing that are very well understood mentalistic concept of consciousness picks out we need more work on the mentalistic concept and you know I think one thing that anybody discovers when they just begin to think about this is that when people use the word conscious they mean many different things one thing they often mean is self consciousness another thing that they often mean is some kind of excess and a third thing that people mean is experience itself that it's what it's like to have an experience of red as opposed to green so I think that Clair getting clear and this is actually one place that philosophers can help and I have done a lot of work getting clear about just what we're talking about just from an ordinary point of view trying to think of cases and make some distinctions is really important let me just go back to what what what you said um this phenomenon you mentioned called binocular rivalry the general phenomenon is and you can do this at home if you if you use up some paper towels and get those little um you know cardboard tubes and you stick one on one and put on the other eye and put very different things in the two ends you'll find that your experience oscillates it's a lot like a Necker cube except it's it's binocular and of course the interesting thing is to look in the brain and see what's changing your percept is changing but your nothing in your eyes your eyes you see the stimulation to your eyes are staying constant and what's found is there are some parts of the brain change more than others and you know one really nice experimental result is one done by Nancy kanwisher at MIT where she put a face in one eye and a house in the other eye and found that the person's experience goes back and forth face house face house and the key differences are in some areas and the bottom of the temporal lobe called she calls the fusiform face area and another place she calls the parahippocampal place area and those go on and off in fact you can be 85% accurate in telling whether a person is experiencing a face more a house use just using the scanner and Anora and a naive observer can do it just with a little bit of training 85 percent accuracy which is really pretty impressive that doesn't say that that's where consciousness is no and I think this point that you mentioned about Adelman x' work about oscillation and especially focusing on oscillations involving the top of the brainstem a little thing called the thalamus those seem to be really crucial for the background of conscious experience so very likely the fusiform face area of the parahippocampal place area is a big part of the content the basis of the contents of consciousness but then there's a background that makes those those contents conscious and that probably do with oscillations involving the thalamus would you say larger but wealthy as that was saying the when you see when you're seeing house the house area lights up when you're seeing face that lights up but those again are as you said correlates of conscious it doesn't say that's the the causal fact a number of studies using similar kinds of stimuli show that for example if you present those kinds of stimuli and free vision then you get certain areas of the brain that light up and whereas if you mask the stimuli fewer areas a lot of in other words if the stimulus is prevented from entering consciousness you still get that face area and the house area for faces and houses but when the stimulus is actually in consciousness other areas especially in the prefrontal cortex and other regions tend to come on board and that's you know I think a lot is pointing towards some kind of prefrontal involvement of much or how everybody feels about that but there's a lot pointing in that direction and if that's true that raises some interesting questions for the evolution of consciousness because that part of the brain is the part that that differs most in the human brain and other primates and probably doesn't even exist in other mammals so you know I saw that part of the topic here was to talk about machine consciousness but if we can't even you know be confident about other animals how can we go to a machine can I say something so I'm a bit of a skeptic about the point that Joe just made I think that prefrontal involvement is probably connected not with the experience itself but with our cognitive access to it so what I think is that these lower animals that have say you know have a visual system not that different from our own but not much frontal cortex we're probably having experiences but they're not they don't have a kind of cognitive system that we do but then that gets into the question that you raised is access the answer is that the experience or right I forget what the third one was but yeah let me say actually but somebody else about the the formal cortical oscillations now I hadn't realized until you mentioned Alki that I read a paper of his a while ago maybe you're a part of it maybe you enjoy to other on it which I thought was a terrific paper explaining tell me which one it is before I admit it's for was a one that to review paper on what's in common to different anesthetics and you know there needn't be anything in common two different anesthetics they all might you know work on some piece of the neural circuitry of consciousness but has it happened I thought when I read this article I was blown away because what this article says look as it happens they all really seem to come down to her almost everything almost all things that we use as anesthetics seem to knock out a common that's something common to them which is this form of cortical circuit that's a really impressive result in my view well we mike has written a couple of reviews of all this work but we have collaborated on the the individual studies of different anesthetic drugs looking for the common neural circuitry the idea being if you can find what is in common among drugs that allegedly work in different ways on different neural pathways you'll find you know there's this basic circuitry but kind of the interesting concept here is if you find the neural circuitry of anesthetic drugs and what turns unconsciousness up but turns unconsciousness on is that the same as turning consciousness off so can you look at what parts of the brain are the last parts of the brain to turn off just as someone slips out of consciousness and then you can ask the question are they the same parts of the brain that turn on as the person regains consciousness and I'm not so sure it's the same brain areas based on on this work do you tell us more no but maybe you can send me a reference not Mike is preparing I think a new review on this that I think is startling and he's been doing some some rat work actually trying to in to introduce some anesthetics in particular parts of the brain to test some of these ideas experimentally remember there's correlational studies and then there are experimental studies one of the nice things about certain kinds of brain imaging is you can do experiments in live human beings without hurting them and when we bring humans in and anesthetize them in two different states it's kind of interesting in the very first study we published in 1995 there were some individuals we tested people in three different states same person three different days once when fully awake once when fully anesthetized and once when they got enough anesthetic drug so they were barely conscious he's a Tom can you hear me Tom we go yeah anybody know this state and the question is what does the brain look like what does the brain look like in that state when you're deeply uh nested iced and unconscious your brain is more turned off than during non-rem sleep but not quite as much as when you're in a coma but if you think about it that's just where you want to be for surgery yeah but when you're in this barely conscious state there are certain brain areas that are more active than when you're awake now are those the brain areas kind of struggling to maintain consciousness and they're interesting brain areas they have to do with dopamine in the reward system so we can learn a lot about the neural basis but that really begs the question of what's the relationship between the neural basis and the actual experience and it's somewhere between determinism and dualism there's going to be an e equal MC squared answer and I don't think it'll be in the chaos models because they're too complicated they're not elegant whatever the solution turns out to be it has to be an e equal MC squared type solution you know an equation that's no longer than two inches well I think because the world is elegant science that science reveals everything that science reveals is essentially elegant Freud's ideas have a certain elegance about them they may be right they may be wrong but they're elegant I just am so excited that we're having this conversation in the psychoanalytic building I'm sure if Freud were alive today he would doing you'd be doing brain imaging experiments and many writers and novelists would be coming to him asking do you have any result dr. Freud that will help me expand my unconsciousness because isn't that if there were a pill that worked on neuro circuits and notice I say pill because I don't want to use the pejorative word drug but if there were a pill or a medicine that worked on neuro circuits in the brain that would cause more bubbling up of the unconscious into consciousness I'd like that idea would you as a novelist sign up to take this well I think all that work was largely done in the 19th century when you have the great flowering of the gothic novel and in a way Freud comes along just as a sort of a look the you know the last great goth assist to to build on the work that have been done by Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe and I mean if you have any doubt about that just look at the titles of the three case studies the Rat Man The Wolfman the psychotic dr. Schreiber that's a gothic cry sure but I didn't hear you answer the question would you take with you would you take this pill to expand your unconsciousness on the idea that it might make you even a better knob oh sure you would yeah would you pay ten would you would you pay $10,000 for yeah now you know we don't have a pill but we have it as you know technology that can that can temporarily disable certain parts of the brain it's called transcranial magnetic stimulation you take this coil and you put it on somebody's head and you can aim it pretty precisely and knock something out so if we could knock out a substantial part of the of what would be needed to let the unconscious bubble up I don't think Freud would think that was necessarily a good idea job every eight of people it might be good for creativity but you nut might not be able to handle what bubbles up from your unconscious that would be a kind of I think the common psychoanalytic view wouldn't it I think distance we need better definitions of consciousness we have to talk about definitions of unconscious - I think is important it's like pornography hard to define but you know it when you say but a lot of it's not going to bubble up even if it could because it the parts of the brain involved in certain emotions for example don't necessarily communicate directly with chordal cortical areas that might give you access to that information so for example no amount of probing is going to pull a memory out of the amygdala and put it into the hippocampus so that it could be consciously accessed through prefrontal cortex this came up in the false memory debates so some of my work was sometimes used to argue that unconscious emotional memories stored in the amygdala as bodily response patterns that are released by external stimuli with enough therapy and work could be made consciously accessible and therefore by putting that memory into the hippocampus and I tend to think of it as you know it's like you know Swahili in Japanese it's like a different code because the circuitry is very different the information being represented in those parts of the brain are very different and it just it doesn't it's not going to be easily translated from one to the other so there's there aspects of the unconscious that are simply inaccessible because there's no circuitry that makes it accessible then there are other parts that would be more like what Freud called the preconscious which is potentially accessible but not being accessed or difficult to access and then other things that might fall into the category of repression that were conscious that have been made unconscious and now kind of locked up and that I think is what you're talking about in terms of allowing to bubble up yeah I think it's a really very important distinction and it's true that I've read it anyway Joe it's particularly true of your work when you write about I think in one of your books you said 90% of what's going on is unconscious I think I say well something some some very high number I think a lot of people in the psychoanalytic community felt this was finally vindication right you see we've said all along most of what's happening is happening unconsciously and I think that's a blurring of non conscious with our traditional understanding of the unconscious the idea that the unconscious is it's an active repudiation a disavowal of something both known but not want to know if forcing through various forms of Defense that's a very different form than what you're describing and your definition of unconscious you're including language access to language understanding language and speech forming works all those things are happening unconsciously the way you write about it but I think that is often because if you're it all sympathetic to psychoanalysis and often the way it gets bashed in terms of its lack of scientific evidence what a scientist says a lot of what's happening is unconscious it does it is a there's a wish to kind of jump on that and say oh you see but I think it's important to keep those distinctions cleared I don't think Freud traditionally was speaking of just not a non conscious aspects of brain function Eve or even the mind Nick actually it's worse than what you're saying I mean what given with you know Joe's story sounds like it really is incompatible with Freudian theory because if it's really true that the the reason the amygdala representations can't get to the hippocampus and globally broadcast across the brain is that they're in a code that these more cognitive parts of the brain don't understand then it's a little hard to see how the mechanisms of repression could possibly work on them but say we have to realize that there are multiple memory systems right so the amygdala storing it let's say let's take a particular situation where a person is traumatized in some way so the amygdala be storing sensory cues and other aspects of that relevant to that trauma that later could reactivate a flight flight type of response simply on the basis of Pavlovian conditioning so the the cues are there the cue is presented the body responds again at the same time though during the trauma other parts of the brain like the hippocampus will be storing a cognitive representation of that experience including the fact that it was awful and really bad and stuff but in a kind of cold cognitive way now when the stimulate later appear it's can activate both systems one giving rise to this cognitive memory the other the unconscious emotional memory and both of these will then be fused in consciousness as a single new experience that can be restored in various ways now if the two get back to the the Freudian aspect of this though what we now know is that some aspects of what have been thought of in terms of simple not simple but just repression might have a biological basis which is in a traumatic stressful situation stress hormones are released that negatively impair the hippocampus but positively facilitate the amygdala so you're forming a stronger unconscious memory while at the same time a weaker conscious memory so that you could then have a very poor understanding of why you react fearfully to certain events but at the same time have very strong emotional reactions to those events now the problem is if the hippocampus didn't store it consciously during the experience it can't be consciously retrieved later now of course there's a gray ground in between because it takes a while for these hormones to have their effects so there's always probably at least some hippocampal storage and that's where the therapeutic process may be able to reach in and and try to pull things out but you're dealing with features and fragments of the experience at that point and that's where the opportunity for false memories come about because you have incomplete information that was stored about the experience in the first place but the reason I think this is incompatible with the Freudian picture is there's no mechanism of repression there's nothing cognitive that is saying I don't want to know about this it's really important is it's only a matter of a strong amygdala emotional signal and a weak cognitive one in the hippocampus I'm giving the boring neurobiological first and there are there are studies where is there room for repression well they're psychological studies have directed forgetting and so forth where you can teach people to not have access to things that we don't want them to have access but it does it it's exactly where I'd like to actually see the research go and thinking about in terms of defense that is it study what is what are the neurobiological correlates of self-deception something we we all know about the people practice on a regular that is leaving oneself about something you also know what are the neural correlates for that and that would be getting close to ideas of active repression or disavowal of something and of course we know the area the research on self-deception is large but I don't think it's moved into anywhere in terms of neuroscience there's not neuroscience interested in that topic and that seems to me be very interesting and particularly as compared to consciousness because as a different form of would be different form being not conscious of something that you are at the same time conscious of and think about what the correlates might be so what of the can you tell us a bit about the conscious and unconscious states that have been stationed brain systems and so forth the drugs that render you unconscious tend to work in the deeper areas of the brain the arousal areas tend to turn those off turns off connections through the thalamus to the frontal lobes in some ways not a great surprise the circuits are very much like the sleep circuits but the real question is understanding the flipside of these circuits in terms of maintaining what we call consciousness these circuits I think are somewhat independent of memory circuitry so I don't think you need to talk about memory at all in a discussion of consciousness as a matter of fact one of the things I learned in that very first conversation I had with my calc IRA that I related to you as an anesthesiologist he gives two types of drugs in every surgery he gives an anaesthetic to render the person unconscious and he gives a memory blocking drug should the person spontaneously regain consciousness with no warning during surgery which does happen from time to time this memory disrupting drug will be sure the patient has no memory of the event and doesn't sue and this is this is common neural a common anesthesiology practices if after the reports of people remembering this has been going on for jokes sometimes at about them a long time what's the memory blocking go I don't know Elliot that's written relative of valium I don't know if it's just valley it's all done Nate can I need to circle back to something you said that wasn't him all Taylor clear to me we're talking about trauma and the repression of traumatic experience and from my reading of the treatment of PTSD at least at Judith Herman's account there is an eliciting of the trauma story as a central period of central phase of treatment when not only the event itself is is brought into consciousness but the context the bodily sensations the emotional aspect of it and the meaning of it is is is is brought out in therapy and when that experience has been so you know fully developed presumably with amygdala and hippocampus elements involved in that reproduction of the experience then that is assimilated into the self and then some sort of healing occurs I don't know why that is in conflict with with Freudian theory of repression my point was extremely simple and you know I'm not saying that it is in conflict I'm saying that there's there is a certain problem about the connection to the Freudian story and that is on his version for any story and that is that the the amygdala speaks a different language from the rest of the or at least the cognitive part of the brain if the amygdala speaks a different language it's a little hard to see how there could be a more cognitive part of the brain that says gosh that thing and the amygdala is so awful I don't want to think about it everybody cuz that's the emotional storage is it yes but the trouble is the hippocampus doesn't understand it right but what the hippocampus but what repression is doing suppressing the cognitive representation so a thought can activate an emotion very easily but it's not very good at turning it off and that's an asymmetry that we know understand it all I remember an emotion yes you can remember an emotion in two ways one cognitively yeah you know that such and such happened to me God that was awful and I really wish I could forget that and that's where the repression could come in because it's you know it's cognitive control over a cognitive memory what repression is not going to do is get rid of the emotional memory itself stored in the amygdala which can be retired we know that people with phobia for example or PTSD can be completely healed and functioning perfectly well but some irrelevant stress comes along like the death of the mother and and the phobia or the trauma comes all back in full force so these memories are living in in the brain at a time when they're not being accessed I mean we sometimes say fear is forever because it can always be brought back and uh yes but it's the point about his theory yeah that is problematic for the for daeun picture is that the only way you get access to one of these disturbing memories is via its cognitive representation and that is linked in a sort of I guess a brute way with the amygdala representation if you haven't got that cognitive representation young hippocampus are somewhere in the core frontal cortex or the hippocampus has put it if you haven't got it you can't link to the amygdala representation so what about a spontaneous emotional memory flooding consciousness would that not be the amygdala will somehow unguessed if something consciousness rigor is it yeah I guess I mean the stories you'll get that that flood of emotion right but the question is can you through the process of psychoanalysis elicit a flawed amygdala emotional organization answer on his theory only if there's also a cognitive representation that links to it so if you haven't got that remember his story was that tends to go away in a traumatic event so if you haven't got that I mean I guess the the compatibility with Freudian theory depends that cognitive representation not being completely fragmented and destroy that one that this is sort of a sidetrack but I think it's relevant so those of you who therapists probably know that it's pretty easy to treat folks like a snake phobia or fear of heights and so forth through cognitive behavioral exposure therapy in a relatively small number of sessions whereas through psychoanalysis that you know could take much much longer and one of the the biological explanation of that is that the part of the prefrontal cortex involved in extinction which is part of exposure therapy talks directly to the amygdala whereas the lateral prefrontal cortex where you have working memory and you put things in the forefront of the mind and you access your long-term memories and yury evaluate them and you restore them and all that doesn't talk to the amygdala at all so no amount of talking about it is going to change the emotional representation in the amygdala only by doing it's it's a process of learning by doing you expose the person to the stimulus and have them go through various behavioral activities that change the way they interact with that stimulus and I was recently talking to vessel van de Kock who obviously many of you will know as a trauma therapist who has built this concept we wrote about this in the American Journal of Psychiatry after 9/11 that the through animal research which shown that learning by doing is much more effective in getting rid of fear than simply passively being responding to the fear stimulus and so he's been developing these role acting and drama therapy things that he finds very effective as a way of treating PTSD because the person is actively engaged in personally changing what they're doing rather than simply talking about it's involving the whole body and the whole mind in a positive engagement experience would you like to jump in I am had a chance I have not be hard I am eating because it is very interesting but I am a little a li I'm in a little different position this sense that as a researcher I work and I work at a lot about another another type of approach because you are speaking about the relationship with the consciousness in brain state and you use terms and like coding like circuitry like information and so sorry I on the other side that is for me the problem is how the brain manipulates information what is the relationship between information as we use in biology or neuro neuropsychology and the notion of information is use this computer and how the complex dynamics of brain chaotic dynamics originally this meeting was also for Kimiko commentary about Freeman book you know Walter Freeman approach is treat already with the discovery of the chaotic dynamics in the brain and so one of the most puzzling and a fashion a fascinating problem for me but for many other physicists is our carers can manipulate information and I was possible to use chaotic dynamic and networks chaotic dynamic system on neural networks Buzzard on chaotic dynamics I like easy it is the brain for solving for instance quantity with the problems of memorization because you know that the enormous amount of memory of nation storing that is possible for instance in brain but also the same problem we have in genetics when we use my idea that old information is in the new genetic code we need at the beginning an informational approach to the genetics made a very simple calculus migas sciences also mathematics at least art science and so very simple calculus you know because you know that we have 10 power 17 cells in our adult body okay and so all of them derives from one only cell before cutting it that is and so you know he's very simple when you study formation theory at school that if I have here assistant then I need the one bit for putting the system here a one bit for choice between two thun thun to be two different line and so two bit for one choice and then four bit for two choices the 8-bit to power three for a choice so when we pass from one to 10 power 17 we need an amount of information if his formation is cut in this way over to power 10 power 17 that is a number that cannot be calculated at all no bun no no matter in the universe carrying body all this information so it is obvious that information as is computed in biological system and also in brain is absolutely different from information as we are acquainted with with Shannon theorem information so and so my approach as a scientist that is a going to the scientists in this field and as if you'll also very philosopher science is is this that is we are consciousness that is something subjective you asking for please give me a definition of consciousness it is like to ask a physicist please give me a definition of energy you cannot give because is a primitive is a primitive notion that as you use energy physically you cannot explain energy in physics by you suppose that exists so that in psychology as you as as far as you have to do with with consciousness you cannot define consciousness because it is a primitive for the distinction between physiology and neurology and psychology otherwise are the same and so also when for instance I brought with me is the last number of time because it seems possibly prepared for our meeting so it's got a lot of things over here there is a very very simple mistake that is made over an album on all the in the papers here that is because it is obvious that it is obvious now it's obvious that each mental state is related with the never state so me and so it surely brain states have some causal influence on the mental state and this is now in scientific evidence the mistake is this that is to come to confuse necessary condition I am a philosopher science a logician to even necessary condition with sufficient condition because it is evident that they each a major psychological state each conscious state as a correlate in the in the brain also the more mystic one and I am a priest and so I work at all so a lot about the psychology of mystic experience of saints and so on and for cut Catholics the same Catholic and I am also East Italian as a philosophy is absolutely obvious that also the more spiritual experience that you have as a physical basis because my approach not only as a philosophy Aristotelian but also is a scientist as you computer scientist the Li the brain state is not only matter the brain state is mattering for energy and information and energy and information and information is a metaphor that is cannot be distinguished from energy ins of matter only if you consider a classic Turing machine that is the computer according the mechanistic approach of the Turing machine I don't know if all the people is acquainted with this notion but because effectively for implementing the calculus of a Turing machine I need a stable stationary system from the physical standpoint that is I need essentially linear a dynamic system and otherwise you can you cannot predict the final state and there are a lot of bibliography on this topics that all the classical mechanical physical classical mechanics the Newtonian mechanics you can simulate by a Turing machine that is by classical computer because our two two ways two different connotation of the same denote item like the morning star in the in the meaning star denoted the same object that is Torinos plan Takeshi famous but if you work with new linear systems a stable and non stationary like a chaotic system is like the brand dynamics is like a lot of metabolic system are you have this strange phenomenon that without absolutely violating the principle local energy conservation you have a system that can generate information that is the the part of the genetic code there is not a code because they could in informatics in information theory means something related with the Turing machine so it's not a code that this is not preview the branching until the adult okay it's not a code in a technical sense so the secret is this that the organism growing up generate information through the relationship also with environment and the same is in the brain that is the brain the ability of brain is to produce a surplus of information but the surplus of information is not some spirit okay despite the probably a very presence also the source it is way demonstrative it is the spirit okay no no no after if we have time but but what is what is I I wrote a one year ago a nice paper I could do tonight hey is from information to spirit and then but disciplines of information is ready with the capability of the system to generate information that is not given in the initial conditions and so the correlate of consciousness or the subjective you're cautious is not only the energetic flow okay that is the secretly that we can reveal by brain imaging like a tester if I put a tester in this on this computer for measuring the energy xing exiting from each each transistor i have an information flow i make the image of the on this computer imagine like our colleagues and neurophysiologists may that is they put the test that as there is Electrical ography pet and Sun Sun Sun all the system and magnetic resonance and so on hey but did they give us in this way the energetic flow of the brain and it's very nice to see how this energetic flow is related with the conscious state and that is expressed by D by the passion that is about the person which brain you are observing but data correlate of this subjective state is the information manipulated by the brain and so we're in a chaotic system good information and the Gothic system as a a de capability or information storing that effectively human brain seems to have but we don't know how in that for instance in this in this in this discussion about information and what I appreciate a lot is that it is completely overcome and the old approach or the grandmother self is to suppose that the brain memorize the information like their discovery computer in some physical space that I have with the cell for in recovering for remembering my name my grandmother my sister and so on now is in the dynamics between hippocampus meeting limbic system okay- info card and so on and cortex and is completely agree what we we expect from the standpoint of the galaxy's dynamics approach and for information processor processing in the complex system and so I want to stop here every otherwise I just picked before they don't speak now I speak too much it's a highly girly blue okay but the godís is them are stable far from equilibrium this is nice and and and so I agree in a lot of disturbed reasons also when you spoke about synchrony synchronization this is a this is phenomena that we can simulate very easily with the curvy system that is in the laboratory and with properties very very nice that we can correlate easily also what with what neurophysiology is find in the in the brain by studying the real brain so I want to stop and and only for saying what is my approach what is my approach is completely study of brain of caution that means not only the energetic flow ok the energetic imaging of the brain but also the information processing the brain formations president brain is not the information processing orbit in a computer a one of the most intriguing mystery for a scientist to play for physics today is to study how a linear system can generate the manipulating information and the brain is surely one of the topics for the best study in this in this field and then stop can I ask a question yes I'm not sure how much about I understood but so your view is that you can only have consciousness in a system in which information is created yes and if I understood right I'm not sure if I did a newtonian system can't create information because after all in a Newtonian system the laws of nature combined to form a computable function of this current state to a state at any later time and then so is it your view that if this were a Newtonian world we could not have a conscious creature yes been there when the only possible theory coming of conscience is compatible with the Newtonian approach I'm asking if we did have a Newtonian world and there could be no consciousness absolutely not so yeah so consciousness requires these non Newtonian but life before I think HM is three before in life and then psychology or requires a non Newtonian physics indeed then this is the state of art of musics today you said at the beginning that you think information is created when a single cell develops into a whole creature yes and I thought what is the argument that the information isn't all in the in the genome or some combination between the genome and maybe the amniotic environment yes indeed then that is there is not the protein there because the DNA is very Hayes is a very limited system okay for implementing a bit that is 0-1 state I need some material support and this calculated that in the DNA or humans more no more than some some tenants Amanda doe megabyte can be implemented so it's to you for just for for defining the possibility of all the information is stored there and so is in the complex dynamics in the interaction between the nonlinear process drivin as a is low variable okay in the because the the stability of DNA is the secret service capability of driving okay the chemistry reactions in the in the cell and so in the complex dynamics generated by the interaction between the DNA and the rest and the environment so that they overcoming completely the false dichotomy between genetics and ambiental is okay you remember and then the beginning of last century the American school zone against the Russian school Jeanette Jeanette is against abandoned the interests okay no true because Disney continuous interaction between the dynamics of driving by DNA in the rest of environment that the determination is great the information is great but information is created it seems something strange that is is impregnated represent so just to get straight is the so is this Calculon I haven't seen your numbers but is this calculation accepted by scientists who are not affiliated with the church yes Norman all of the people in are now sorry all the people I've ever known a scientist they were Christmas nor do people who are physicists okay accepted this that the in a chaotic system you have there is the name of self-organizing system self-regulating system but those can be Newtonian systems no absolutely not as a netherland dynamics and even dynamics means that you are your system is a completely predictable that is you remember the third principle in the dynamics is a liberal principle action-reaction okay so that all the information that you have at the beginning were votes at the end but for this reason is predictable if they you work with the nonlinear when the national complexity what means means exactly this that you cannot reduce the only one model completely predictable they and in an amputee system if you should take a Celtic attractor okay he has him as a stable point okay each each possible point of the trajectory in the face pecks that is each each point or the trajectory in the first place can potentially become a stable point of the dynamics on the contrary in a classical Newtonian dynamics a one stable point is the equilibrium state the minimum of energy have a different topic I'd like to bring up if we could you know we often take pre consciousness as the big problem we have to solve I think there's a bigger problem that we face the consciousness is part of which is something that you say which is the self and consciousness is obviously an important part of the self but it's not the whole self much of who we are as people operates unconsciously as well and I just like to get back to the topic of the self that maybe you have some more to say about that from your novels well this was the this was a novel in which I watched self fragmenting it it seemed that by by the by the study of schizophrenia that one could see by the sort of a pathology of the self you know you what the what the you know the structure of the self was and you seem to be implying that the as the conscious memories were being fragmented but if we take if we take for example a patient with early Alzheimer's disease who is losing conscious memory but they're still walking around and they're still recognizable as the same person there's a lot that's you know underneath consciousness that maintains who we are even though you know we the the person that we we know internally is beginning to change to the outside world a person can look pretty normal because self is being maintained even though consciously they're falling apart I think one would begin to detect the signs I mean the the I suppose the sort of the the operating idea that I had was that we are constituted by to a large extent by our memories that gives a sense of what our biography is we carry that narrative within that narrative we play the role of protagonist in our own life some variation usually I think of hero or victim and we probably flip-flop around between those various roles that we see ourselves playing and what was of great interest in studying a man suffering from schizophrenia was that as the world was systematically and radically contradicting his story about himself and the role that he had played in that story so he was unable to to sustain the sort of an in the integrity or the cohesiveness of a self that could operate in the world and so it big the system began to break down the hallucinations became more frequent and more disturbing the sort of somatic distortions became increasingly wild and grotesque his inability to interact socially became more pronounced so he became an isolated lonely pathetic figure sort of mumbling to himself and there were various other sort of symptoms of this of this sort of breakdown of the self one of which was a noir factory hallucination that a smell of gas was coming off of him which required him first of all to wrap his body in which there were no organs left in in newspaper and string after which he put on all of his clothes at the same time and you may have seen this on the streets of New York people who are wearing all of their clothes over a layer of newspaper entirely isolated socially mumbling to themselves chain-smoking and they are they are other but the point of the novel was to say there is a you know there it can be mapped it can be you can track how an individual can get to this place and and in that way I was trying to sort of say you know as you know a psychotic condition like this is comprehensible within you know this chaos is comprehensible and manageable within the you know the orderly structure of a novel did you study schizophrenia in order to read this I grown up the son of a psychiatrist so I'd had it at the at the dinner table for a number of years my father actually ran the largest top security mental hospital in England a place called Broadmoor fir for many years so so I come by it honestly and then I read for thee I did some work in mental hospitals and then read and I was looking for something that would give me an imaginative sort of opening into schizophrenic experience and and it came from a book of Lang's the divided self where he described the experience of schizophrenia as being dying of thirst in a world wed and that seemed to capture it and sort of opened the door into what it must be like to be locked into this sort of bizarre system of first of all have you know hallucinations of the world is perceptually disordered your memories are crumbling your self is losing all stability and cohesion and all around you is that which you need is is you know that the comfort of others and you're not able to gain access to it so you become more and more isolated more more lonely more and more crazy and you walk through the world and we see them on the streets of us it isn't it was just an attempt to to to make sense of that that that condition of your psychotic arrangement may I ask you a question that's related to this issue so um I mean this is something that I haven't looked into and I'm curious but I know that when people talk about the neural basis of the self they send you talking about quite different things so one thing that people often talk about is a sense of ownership of experience which some people locate and part of the parietal lobe but there are certainly lots of other things that make up self or ass at least a sense of self so do you have any views about what the neural basis of the self alright well that's right maybe you have some ideas about oh my little epic self was all that good it you know BAE the basic point there was that we took we often talk about nature nurture as if those were different things but those are really two ways of doing the same thing which is wiring synapses so all of the things you have in your brain that determine your behavior from genetics only are expressed through synaptic connections that develop as you are growing in early life and then experience does the same things or each time you learn something you're also changing synapses so the synapse is kind of the bottleneck of the self of the person but the whole of the whole mind not just so mind right yes but I'm talk about something more specific to the self right well for me self is more like what you might call personality so it's it's not talking about something really quite different which is not just the personality but what makes us have a self and the so you can imagine a creature that has a personality but at least doesn't have a sense of ownership of experience of being the creator of that your action as itself well I'm not you I'm not afraid of yours is much more comprehensive it includes aspects the the wiring through experience what you come in with and then what's who you are it's better to experience through the wiring in these networks becomes who you are but that's far more comprehensive than the idea of it I might recognize as myself William James that Eric self every time two people meet at least six people their person that as you know yourself as other people think of you and as the other person is thinking of you at this moment and so but the all of those things are a part of who you are and I think this is you know we don't have a theory of the brain at this point that could explain how an individual has a personality and how that personality shapes what they do we we have understandings of emotion of memory even to some extent of consciousness but we don't really understand what the self is of the person people lose consciousness and then they regain consciousness they often ask where am I they virtually never ask Who am I but I think this is a hint the self is a memory it's a very complex set of memories that include genetic memories of who you are as a member of a species as well as who you are as a person than all the things that have made you up we can have there could be disagreements about how to for instance I'm thinking of cases of psychopathology in terms of personality there are disagreements how to slice up various appearance but there's general agreements you can classify various forms of personality disorders what interests me is with the level of variation of both experience how these networks can come together the possible I think this is part of what you were getting at it's an infinite number of possibilities you talked about the wiring up of these networks how actually there are probably a dozen in psychosis to their various pathologic there's a limited number of pathological forms of the human mind and how that interests me in terms of the vastness of the network and how they break down very relatively small number of ways and try to understand that link one of the the problems in neuroscience and trying to get to these more complex issues is we tend to study you know vertically within a single system rather than horizontally across system so you know we can study long-term potentiation in the hippocampus but when you know when a person is learning something or having some experience networks all over their brain are changing but we're not studying that sort of lateral aspect of how the brain is working we do research on a very narrow slice of an experience and some you know minor not minor but some fraction of what's going on so a person is a set of perceptions memories emotions conscious experiences unconscious states and all kinds of things but we don't know how all that fits together this is where brain imaging has really pushed neuroscience ahead because brain imaging for the last 20 years has had techniques that assess the whole brain simultaneously so when many scientists started using brain imaging in the early 1980s they felt the need to have an opera or a hypothesis about what part of the brain would light up in a particular task much to their surprise even if that part of the brain did light up so did many others and there were actually brain imaging papers published early on where the pictures those nice brain pictures with the color blobs were doctored to remove all the blobs for which there was no AA priori hypothesis now this wasn't because the scientists were trying to suppress that no on a conscious level they were just saying hey you know we don't know how to interpret this I did some collaborations with cognitive people early on and they just could not get their hands around the idea that brain areas other than the narrow system they were interested in would also light up and they to this day it's it's hard to integrate all that information and so in some ways the scientific model of only talking about what you have an a priori hypothesis that is what you have a theory about the technology has really superseded that so now we're really forced in a post hoc way to pretend like you had the operatory hypothesis I think probably most people are still ignoring those other blobs I think it's fair to say and the other thing that got ignored early on that's beginning to get some attention is the fact that if a part of the brain would light up in an experiment you had to ask the question does it light up to the same degree in every subject in that experiment and typically it doesn't there are vast individual differences in the brain I'm vast and correlating the amount of activation or the amount of deactivation equally important to individual differences is really quite important and now scible with with these beasts and everything you might comment on that I know from participating in a few of these studies that the by setting if you raise the threshold high enough the whole brain is active right so you keep lowering the threshold till you see only what you want to show what you're talking about lowering a statistical threshold right and you want to know is this part of the brains statistically more active than the rest of the brain and you're right it's at some point the brain is always active there's no part of the brain that's not active or in any experiment the only question is whether the activity is related to something in your experiment and not and don't they do that lower the threshold based on not with the individuals Jim but the whole group is doing doesn't it taken as a group of subjects and that's beyond my boys it's context always individual noise and you throw it out because you know this gets me at the whole rant about that is the way cognitive psychology approaches the world is by looking for what's common among people and ignoring what's different so you might have a very intensive effort to understand learning in memory in general and at the end of that the test for me is can you tell me why a particular child learns faster than another child in school so that's when we'll know we understand something about learning and memory it's true that neuroscience is science of the ordinary and we have no understanding of individual differences very few cognitive psychologists very few ever address the concept of intelligence they will talk about learning they will talk about memory and intelligence in some ways is nothing but individual differences in learning and memory but you can go to a lot of cognitive psychology textbooks and find no entropy in the index for intelligence there's something about this that is just a little scarier and of course intelligence inter has to be related to the integration of the different parts of the brain it's the integration that really counts I think so can you tell us about this thing that you mentioned that you say that there's some relation between intelligence and conscious what would that be well on a conceptual level we talk about individual differences in intelligence is there anyone in this room who thinks they're not smarter than somebody else in this room so that just cuts right away any criticism that we don't know what intelligence is and it's hard to measure and hard to define nonsense you all know what it is and you all know you're smarter than at least somebody so however you define it's okay with me so think about consciousness now we have different definitions of consciousness let's just talk about awareness where we have individual differences in intelligence I think everybody would agree with this let's ask the question can you have individual differences in consciousness so what's consciousness all-or-none are you awake or asleep so looking around this room right now I perceive individual differences in consciousness some of you right now are more conscious than others and I can tell some of you are literally nodding off and some of you are listening very intently so can we measure individual differences in consciousness like you're talking about attention look I would say awareness I'll go with awareness now if you have two children you know there are individual differences two or more children you know they're individual differences in consciousness if you have one child you may not be sure if you have two or more children and you take them when you know when they're young over here to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and you spend a couple hours and you go home and you say what did you see what did you enjoy and one kid will talk about all kinds of stuff even stuff that you didn't point out and the other kid will say well now that was really boring I didn't really see anything but one has absorbed information and the other hasn't is it because the one child is more conscious than the other is there something about that child's brain that is integrating the stimulation of the museum oh yes I saw something on television that reminds me of this is is that brain working different then the person will go through the museum and just not really remember anything now there is there is some evidence for what I just said by the way I'm sorry I didn't hear interest of course counts but you can ask the question why are some people interested in something and other people are not so and interest alone doesn't do it look I love to watch Nova and television I fall asleep within eight minutes almost every time my wife doesn't like Nova she wakes me up she's not that interested but she's watching and I'm sleeping so it's complicated and of course age has a big effect on this I'm just making a simple point that I think there are individual differences in consciousness and if we could measure those as reliably as we measure individual differences in intelligence I believe those two measures would be highly correlated I think that the the line of thought you mentioned is one that is crying out for distinction between different senses of the word conscious and different notions of consciousness now if by consciousness we mean self-consciousness I see no reason to think that those two kids you describe different self-consciousness I see no reason to think that the kid who absorbs less information is any less aware of himself or something like that if what you're talking about is experience like the vividness of experience I see no reason to believe those two kids differ in the vividness of their visual experience they're both looking at paintings one of them is paying attention the other one isn't but they might be you know one you know you could take a kapil patient like the famous a chimp who when you get back so this is a guy who had his hippocampus destroyed many years ago and he still if you ask him where the bathroom is in his apartment he tells you where it was before his operation so if he was in that museum he and you came back and you said well what did you see me zoom he'd say what museum but there's no reason to think that his experience would be any less vivid than anybody else's so here's a nice owner so here's what we have to get to what we mean by consciousness it sounds to me like what you're really talking about is some conglomeration of attention and interest not anything I would call consciousness we did an experiment I'll just very quickly and then I'll be quiet but we we did an experiment where we showed people videos very very boring videos okay and we only showed well I'll just keep it simple we showed boring videos and we did brain imaging while they watch the video they were told just watch the video you don't remember anything you don't say anything just watch the video we tested these subjects on their IQ independently people at the high IQ had a lot of brain activation in a particular part of the brain while they're watching boring videos the compared to the the average IQ people what part of the brain was it was at the frontal lobe no hippocampus no it was it was the early visual processing areas of the brain so smart people while they were watching very boring movies had more activation in early visual processing I think smart brains work differently and I think it it works differently not just in the frontal lobes that we're all like to talk about with intelligence but a very early stage of processing so the answer to your question is is as an empirical question suppose a person has twice the number of neurons in their visual processing area and another person and the to walk through the museum and at the end of the day will it be the person with twice the neurons in their visual processing area that has a richer experience in some way you can have that early vision knocked out in time I'm sorry what are you saying it twice I'm saying that's an empirical question what can you be can one person be twice as conscious as another I you can be twice as intelligent as someone can you be twice as conscious and California I'd stick to two times you know these patients that have a lot of their early visual cortex not doubt do not seem to be any less intelligent than other people you can say that about any part of the cortex that's knocked out uh no um there are some parts of the cortex would be not can be knocked out and it can really have an effect you know frontal parts are knocked out it can have really big effect people with frontal lobotomies typically don't have a decrease in IQ that's um says something about IQ I just something about the iPhone oh my bottom it's a pretty drastic manipulation of the brain pretty drastic informational approach to themself is that because you you put the location ethically of consciousness or mind and not in the information the energetic flow as such but the information flow it is interesting for instance now me in this computer are two different energetic system that is he has these sorts of energy I am my source of value so we are two different physical system nevertheless because we communicate in which we exchange information we one one only information system is the famous network now one only information system so according to information approach to the self is not the mind in the brain but the brain in the mind that is the mind is Ren is located in the continuous information exchange between brain and the rest of the body in between the brain but in the rest of the Union the environment and in this sense it becomes a little more easy the approach in all this in this time this number of time it is remember they are then the simple problem of consciousness of Chalmers that is the problem of conscious as a problem of self-awareness and in the problem of self-awareness means that I consider myself in some sense as a war FA even to I cannot see my body ok the classical no positivistic evidence it is what is the what is the self is my body because it's the only body that they cannot observe completely ok and so a nevertheless in the notion of self-awareness with the respect of consciousness at this typical that the self our net means that I consider myself as a wall in some sense I even - I cannot objectify myself as a agreed as an object and it is interesting that if you consider the mind as something and something containing the body and so when for instance I with dialogue ok our minds are between us ok it becomes very very autumn some classical evolution see evolutionary psychology evidence that the recognition of my ID my self my eye ok depends on the relation feel my mother with the other not only by the lecture with the other I cannot I can discover myself ok the classical personality or the pseudo personality are dissolve of relationship with the world or with the other from which also then they start with the with the relation with myself derives and in this approach all becomes more easy to understand because the instead of putting the mind in the brain because probably you don't remember that to put the mind in the brain is something related with the plateau that it was Plato who is a dualistic so this for him and the mind is something completely different from body who put the mind in the body and unfortunately also the people who doesn't believe in a dualistic approach like I think all of us and we are will remain with this presupposition to put the mind in the body on the contrary is the mind that contains the body and in this sense the distinction between consciousness that is something related directly with the experience inside the body and the self awareness that is something related with the relationship with something outside the body otherwise before all other person becomes more easily understandable according to me this is only a suggestion and nevertheless sorry for remain the last time the last question he made because a the notion of the information creation also related with the problem of intelligence isn't in all the people I here I ever hear the equitation of Freeman but also all of us no famous book of rose or Roger Penrose okay shadow of mine and you know to the idea of a rose that intelligence is related with the quantum dynamics inside the brain but if you it is why because quantum dynamics like all the dynamics is a classic no Newtonian dynamic system in which there is a generation of information so because every physicist and the approach of every physicist to the problem of intelligence of life of self-organization is related with the generation of information classical physical system who display this property in the natural are chaotic nonlinear a stable system and phantom enemy so that I think that this must be considered when this we discuss about these topics in yes okay we are conscious it was me no because cannot be outside myself in some sense a relationship with another when I explain to my students I say okay then if you put if you have a child in the what is in Italian English and in the incubator ishe in Cuba Tricia that is a crib hanging Cuba sorry why it is necessary that the mother must interact in easily with this child and not is not sufficient the tubes by which there is a supportive metabolism because humans don't live of only matter but of matter information that is a human systems but generally any a any organism any animal is a not only open system from the standpoint of energetic exchange metabolism but also information exchange they are not the same the problem of recovering people from comma Y if I interact with some information that is able to stimulate is emotional deep state okay why because is information that I have to exchange with him include the brain Mandy could in my body that is mine is there any affection permissions the left is the ordering relation another another evidence that is not an evidence but it can can help call the driver Rose each of us change completely the matter of his body at least twice every year twice nevertheless we are the same why because they are reading or the part or the material part of what is the same so that our continuity in time is not related with math letter will matter and for pay attention in deficits today like for essential Inger borrow and so on say that the physics the modern physics till the last century was essentially physics of energy the new physics the physics more interesting today for the critical facilities is the physical information what is because the information is not the spirit okay it's physics but it's not done over outcome again why is not for every body is mine how does in a mind is it apart whoever it is if you need the party to happen long yes absolutely because my person myself is not my mind myself is my body but my body is not only metal is my information is not the information a matter means mass energy you remember e equal MC square okay that is I can change my mass in energy energy masses so that matter okay his energy and mass okay but in physics beside energy mass there is also information information is quantitative I can measure a process past a point based upon something that Professor given that the nature-nurture equation is really carry up through synaptic love and my question is how do you factor the synaptic develop physiologically into your concept of the processing this valid information and choose to in fact create consciousness you can't aghanim according to me consciousness means I cannot I can understand consciousness from the energetics and by only as a self control self control okay so is this query with the self-injection okay and we have a lot of experience in the brain so a what is nice in trained in synapses because when I as the physicist tried to simulate by neural net okay a real Neverland a net in the brain my simulation is only a rough approximation why because I am constrained for the limitation of actual mathematics okay to simulate a neural net with the fixer threshold okay that is I simulate the statistical elements okay with different weight sophistical weight but the threshold must be fix it otherwise there is no possibility even our actual my physical mechanics to study the stable point of this dynamics a what is interesting in brain is that the continuous change of the synapses means that these neural nets is with a continuous change of thresholding and if I simulate this I obtain a chaotic dynamics a chaotic dynamics so that there is a lot of literature about this huh anyway my question has to do with whether or not there is something beyond the physiology that again professor will describe in terms the processing transmission hey yes very sensor day evidence sorry what is your name Richard the evidence shown by M by M that is M the attention the attention the consciousness is related with the a very integrating activity in the brain okay in my model okay my approach is also Freeman also the people who deal we will deal with this problem from the cardig standpoint approach is a lady with the richness of the save the periods of account is an act that is more is a complex that is the ability of integrating the system a more what I observe with my tester on the brain is an integrative dynamics it means that this cycle because are always cycle ok circuitry ok this serie this cycle is a very higher order ok that is with many and I'm anyway ok many maximum and minimum points ok very complex very complex and this is typical of a guarded dynamics and Fatali because it often you when we speak about color dynamics in the human what is psychotic dynamics and which is the relationship with the Newtonian dynamics classical linear dynamics the classical linear dynamics and one only state of stable point ok minimum the minimum of energy okay when you see in all the Museum of Science for children you put many many balls in a in in a recipient and then you move and then you ask a tradition today well after some time all the balls are and in the end in the bottom or discretion and no discarded dynamics one only fixed point okay so if I make so sorry and then I open them okay if I make so okay how many fix it point are you obtained this is what Frank Gehry does to design building claims IV attention pay attention also the brain also the brain inside physically the brain in a my scalp here I'm a head is it as this for okay why because in this way I put the end of cortical exam it means that I continually change me and so I reach a normally the fixed point because if I suppose that in each fixed point there is a a bit of information okay how many um how many imagine a male put their step adapter questions guys are good so on your point of view what consciousness is is just what you get when you have a self control in nonlinear dynamic systems that what your yes is something lady with this from the physical standpoint public shutting up is it stomach they don't believe it analysis yes bad but pay attention so what is the difference yes because the stomach as nothing's not related with the whole nervous system but wait a minute so what is consciousness I thought your view was consciousness is what you get when you have a nonlinear dynamic system that self control it but you've not you know the stomach is a brain ok yeah we should be shy and having the brain higher in the brain not in the stomach abandon brain or better in the nervous in the central nervous system see and when way when we have other dynamics in C&S and CNS is a system that the biology constructed the exactly for every the more complex candidate dynamics that we can imagine in the world in the in the universe so the stomach isn't complex so we need a very complex non-linear dynamics Espinel but the store market doesn't get on you've got the stomach it doesn't control my leg we may wanna include other people huh yes question the earlene something doesn't seem to focus on more of classical my body my body problem yes and are you raised a very interesting past toward some kind of yes so they should get six when they were tore down what to Spinoza who looked at the universe and was able to understand it under it onion aspect and corporeal objects know what going and then you said that your colleague has that work in this I understand you can take that approach that we want to look at this body I spin assisting the investigating this is a holistic connections but what kinds of questions would you investigate I'm gay other aspects the Mentalist these if you take the view that this is these are two years in the same thing but what would you want to do XDA you know the others look I think one thing is to try to distinguish different concepts of consciousness and other aspects of the mind one thing that's very helpful in doing that is these some of these wonderful thought experiments that philosophers have come up with you know what the inverted spectrum thought experiment or you know there was about there's a whole bunch of them and so I think that is but I think mainly it's making distinctions about what's involved in the mod I think if you if you just use ordinary terms without trying to distinguish different ways that they're used I think you get nowhere because you know there have been many episodes in the history of science where people have used these very you know common sensical ordinary terms and then it turns out later that they have to be resolved into different concepts so just to take one example Aristotle famously used an idea that we translate with the notion of English words speed or velocity but he didn't distinguish between instantaneous velocity and average velocity and if you look at his writings you see that if you make that distinction a lot of the things he said were wrong in the 17th century the first people to scientifically study temperature or rather to study heat phenomena didn't distinguish between what we in English call temperature and heat so these are temperature and heat are really quite different things so you could have two two items that have the same temperature but contain different amounts of heat because they have different heat capacities with called heat capacities and there were so they went very wrong because they just used this vague ordinary idea that people had that's now translated as degree in heat similarly I think we need to make some you know use thought experiments to make distinctions among if all those exams because the philosophical progress on distinction really came from empirical observations well not from kind of untestable thought experiments um actually i think it's a combination of both they made a lot of observations but they didn't know so here's an example they they would make preparations the 17th century people in Florence who were they first did this because they were the first people to do this because they had the glassblowing technology to make these amazing thermometers so they would make preparations to which they would say this one has greater degree of heat than this one have greater than this and they had different tests you know they doing experiments they had tests so one test was would it melt paraffin if it had more degree of heat would melt paraffin another test was how much try to get more quantitative how much ice would a certain hot thing melt now we now know those tests measure different things in order to melt paraffin it has to have a high temperature above the melting point of paraffin in order to melt a lot of ice it has to have a large heat capacity even something with a low temperature could melt but not very low but you know above 32 but a lot of heat capacity something at 40 degrees with a lot of heat capacity lot of ice so experiments are no good without the theoretical and conceptual structures and it's really I think a combination the foster Pat Churchland uses the term coevolution these different levels have to evolve together you only get progress at the by combining different theoretical levels on different conceptual levels the real difficulty with your question is we don't really know how to make testable or observable observable observations on the mental part brain imaging is easy you know we can do brain imaging all day long you know somebody once said if somebody once said it if schizophrenia turns out to be a twisted molecule and we develop a drug to untwist the molecule you still have to ask the patient if they feel better and you know we can do brain imaging we can see what parts of the brain are involved or the circuitry and so on but as many many people have pointed out that doesn't necessarily get us closer to understanding the essence of awareness or conscious experience and it may be it's like gravity gravity is something that we can study we know it's a property of matter but we don't have a clue what about matter produces gravity well we know the mind has something to do with the brain we actually know a lot about the brain but what the mind is is we don't really have the concepts yet it may be so it might be like like it's a proper study for a scientist yeah it's the studying psychology that's what psychology as opposed to an improper study or no study at all is that it if there's no possibility of arriving at the concept of mind or self or consciousness then presumably you can't test it you can't run experiments you can't impair if you do anything with it you like to market to the right and lots of parts of it we can study that I think that's the answer right but without knowing how that part well we may never say nor is it even if we never understand consciousness we can help people quite a bit with their problems by understanding some of the parts well that's I mean we can certainly try towards you know my answer that is we have people who study what happened in the first 5 milliseconds of the Big Bang you know if they can do that we can study consciousness I mean that emotions can influence every aspect very much like I think what we're talking about here we're some kind of a normal functioning brain but even within the normal functioning brain I think you can still ask a question of their individual differences and conscious awareness in that particular experiment you might wonder whether he wasn't you might have might have been worth it just here you might have been doing a lot experiments about I think this is programs hover mistreated of mine and if I follow the trajectory of the discussion we began at the explanatory gap and everybody don't know anything about content lis nobody has as yet seem to have a pocket-sized or theorize or whatever an acceptable explanation of consciousness and so what the discussion in one part has been about is as he says the aspects that can be studied and pointing to the fact that throughout the history of science that methodology is also limitations welcome to function within that framework the framework said you posture would then lead us where we began which is what miss you the mom so having funded an impression of the possibility of building any kind of bridge even if it's a theoretical one that might close yeah I think you're suggesting something possible understand yeah that hasn't really fully explained his theory but he's got a very elaborate theory of consciousness and some of his other colleagues of theories as well that I think advancing we feel whether they're right or not I think you'd be willing to maybe read maybe not but I think there's a lot of progress yeah I just have a great I talked about that a little progress to I think one has to watch out for a certain you know a mistake I think that Francis Crick is very well spelled out which is the temptation to think that if you're going to try to explain something mysterious like consciousness you've just got to use something else mysterious like quantum mechanics or chaos to explain it it's not clear you're going to get anywhere that way I actually think the regular you know neuro scientific approaches are making examines you know it's true that the glut the explanatory gap hasn't been closed but that doesn't mean we're not any closer to closing it did you say that we were is over if we were a pre-socratic level scientific but probably against again because cultures and such is absolutely subjective it cannot be objectified in any way so it is a it is impossible to reduce consciousness to everything else but a gap a veneer for jumping the gap is precisely to locate consciousness or mind in information because information is related also in computer with the a classical the classical capability of mind related with the also mentalistic approach that is rationality reasoning okay but also for instance I quote whose distinguishes recovering a very older distinction because I call cycle quote also the Scholastic means middle-aged philosophy but I quoted a lot his model the decision between a thinking a thought that is thought what means it is reasoning that is I reason on symbols already given exactly like computer a computer may need to be programmed so that I gave to give it the symbols of his calculation otherwise he cannot calculate at all but a human intelligence creative intelligence is related with not the thought rats in ancient Latin but with intellect intellect national anthem means thinking that is to invent new symbols to invent a new logic to invent a new theory ok this invention that generally is is explained is not explained because it seemed casual ok I and I dream and I'm back it's not true because any any person working on knows that for inventing a new theory muscle learn it must study a lot a lot a lot a lot so it's not as valid okay thinking is related with the ability of a system of ratifying the basic symbols of his calculation inventing a new geometry inventing a new a new formal system and so I repeat and I want and don't want to repeat myself but he's related with generation before mesh and so I think this is not to solve the gap okay but to put the solution of the gap that for me we remain forever because in something that cannot be reduce it that all I can quote also the different logical theorems that demonstrate this but I don't want this also because there is a lot of bibliography on this ok and then so sorry is a deformation is deformation manipulation generation the real point in which the gap is in mentalistic and the neurophysiological approach can be solved or can be treated there's a practical way why don't study consciousness I wouldn't I would focus on mechanism of anesthetic drugs and how they term consciousness off and how consciousness reappears when the effects of those drugs stop I think if we know something about the mechanism of unconsciousness to the point where we can manipulate it fairly successfully I think from that we'll have some data to hone our ideas about consciousness I would want to study more about how as I started to say well you know how multiple systems interact during complex things like an emotional episode how memories are being laid down simultaneously in multiple systems and in fact you know whether there is a different code in these different structures that prevents them being in talking to one another early in the discussion you referred to emotional reactions on our left in experiments and I became quite puzzled because it's extraordinary use of the term and I wonder what you determine so is that as it pointed out a common language terms often get us in trouble when we do science and so I started out doing rat research to study emotion in the in the sense that you probably mean but I quickly realized that what I was doing was studying something very different I was studying how in the case of fear which is what I study what I'm looking at is how the brain detects danger and responds to danger and this is a fundamental system that is in the nervous system of every living creature bacteria in a swim in a petri dish will move to the other side if you squirt acid in their people and the swimming pool move to the other side if you throw acid in so the question is are get out smaller power how are these systems operating and what's what's common it's a crude that's too big a distinction but within rats and people their fundamental systems that work basically the same so we can do an experiment in the rat using Pavlovian very simple and have the rat develop a phobia to a stimulus we can do the same thing in a person we can take out the amygdala in the rat and the rat will learn this response we can study people who have amygdala damage and they can't learn it we can record activity in the cells of rats and the amygdala changes in the human brain we can do functional imaging and the amygdala changes during this kind of learning so what we're looking at is how the brain whether it's a rather human detects in response to danger now when you take that ability to detect and respond to danger and put it into a brain that can be conscious of its own activities then you have fear in the sense of emotion which is I think what you're talking about so I'm not really studying emotion in the traditional sense of the term in fact I think the only way we've made any progress in studying emotion is by ignoring the conscious aspects of emotion love iane response fear response each class it's two very simple and so I guess the question I have to you is more complex state and crises of spirit well yeah when you do brain research it really helps if you have a stimulus and a response it's very easy to study the brain in that way so that's that's what we do if the study depression is very hard because you can't turn it on and turn it off you don't know where to start and where to stop with the stimulus you go into the ear you trace it through the ear into lobotomy we get to the amygdala the amygdala then connects up with the systems to control the responses you got to have a stimulus and response to make progress it's a sad state of where we are in in science but at least we've been able to do that but you know it's not that it's irrelevant to humans because you know the PTSD victim who's having you know a terrible anxiety reaction to a backfiring car is exhibiting one of these kinds of Pavlovian conditioning responses and all of our associations to emotional stimuli is Pavlovian conditioning it mean it may sound like a kind of trivial term for all of this but our reactions to a stimulus because of some bad thing that happened in the association with that stimulus is simply Pavlovian conditioning ah I don't mean to be critical of anybody in terms of one previous hive I think you did exactly what you were here to do to bring your discipline perspective so it seems to me will be fascinating since the theme is mystery they'd like to have an additional panel people who bring other perspectives to do that question than beyond your disciplines this is the third or fourth and the seer has already said don't you can count on others that's funny because if we think itself as a distribute itself the body second self in the Luminess it's not smoking of language one there's another dimension about the self in terms of that or loyalty that brings want to sacrifice their life possible with you but it seems to me you move in disgust have you questioned what the function of your language was we would have gone back to thoughtful more psychoanalysts would have had this a heyday because maybe Freud had external hairy principles for most of the things that have been discussed and they actually work and so it would have been interesting to integrate them and also semiotician would have been helpful makers relationship between form and content has to do with the form of the information right it's very relevant yeah you

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Keywords: philoctetes, roundtable, neuroscience, brain, mind, joseph, ledoux

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Length: 130min 24sec (7824 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2007