Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available good afternoon and welcome my name is Heather Mitchell and I am here to introduce and welcome Antonio Damasio who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series dr. Damacio is here to discuss his latest book self comes to mind constructing the conscious brain it is time to debunk the long-standing idea that consciousness is separate from the body what we think of as self is actually a biological process created by the brain consciousness is a dynamic unpredictable faculty that is instrumental in defining and explaining who we understand ourselves to be dr. DiMaggio is a professor of neuroscience and the director of the USC brain and creativity Institute his earlier books include dick hearts air emotion reason and the human brain the feeling of what happens body and emotion in the making of consciousness and looking for Spinoza joy sorrow in the feeling brain please join me in welcoming dr. Damacio to Microsoft thank you let me start by apologizing for my voice I have a horrible laryngitis it's very painful it doesn't taste good although it was acquired in Japan last week and doesn't taste of sushi at all so I'm delighted to be here in spite of the laryngitis and I will talk to you about research on consciousness and on the self it's always a pleasure to talk here I missed the room where I've spoken before that had all the people logging in and appearing on the wall this is a much bigger room but I missed the little icons at any rate always a pleasure to come here and I don't think I need to disguise myself and make things easier than they are I'll just make them very difficult because you guys can perfectly well cope with it so here we go I thought I would give you a very brief summary of main ideas in this book and the the talks name is neural self and I'm trying to make here the immediate bridge between the self that we conceive of psychologically which we all have a sense of of the very often not a perfect sense and the fact that it is neroli based that it is something that is being generated by a living organism in the brain of a living organism provided that brain is totally hooked and interactive with the body without which none none of this makes any sense now it is because we have a self that we can make sense of consciousness and consciousness I have to tell you and I say that in the book is an incredibly treacherous term I you know I used to think that the best thing is not even to talk about consciousness because you're bound to get into a minefield and people start coming with their definitions of consciousness and they're either lay view or scientific view but highly concerned with their field of study and it's very difficult to make a conversation work once you use those terms and yet there's no other way of doing it but confronting the issue and what I'm going to do is just define the same way that I do in the book define the term in when I talk about consciousness I don't mean self-consciousness in a very broad sense of high-level human consciousness only and I don't mean consciousness in the very late term sense of that you will use if you talk about say climate warning warming or climate change is as finally got into the consciousness of Western societies which is a metaphorical use of the sense and I'm not talking about for example self consciousness when I say that John got very embarrassed because Mary was staring at him and therefore he got self-conscious which again is a semi metaphorical use what I'm talking about is a process a state of mind in fact which is highlighted by three fundamental neural processes one which is wakefulness another which is mind and another which is self and of course I better define for you what I mean by these three things wakefulness I think is very easy for you to follow because it's of course is exactly the kind of thing that you acquire when you wake up in the morning and the kind of thing that you give up for certain when you go to sleep mind we need to spend a little more time in defining but I can give you a rapid definition from my perspective which is the representation of objects and events present inside and outside the organism in both perception and in recall and it's a very direct simple but I think actually rather complete definition because it means that minds are about representing objects and about representing actions and events and those actions don't need and objects don't need to be exclusively on the outside which is the way they generally taken to mean but they can be inside your own body this is very key and they can be indirect perception right now you obviously are looking at me so you have in your mind representations of me visually and of me in terms of my voice but this could all be in recall you could later tonight be thinking about this and suddenly picture in your mind the the sight of me here at the podium or my horrible voice or both all of that is in fact constituting the mind which is flowing in time as a set of representations of many different sensory stripes and the currency of our minds is images I will I can to talk about it right now but our brains the brains certainly of humans and the brains of many species in fact going all the way down to relatively modest species our brains have the capacity of making neural maps which means that they can represent the constitution of objects topographically and I'm not just talking about the visual Constitution but the Constitution when you touch something and appreciate its texture or its shape or the representation for example of the sound properties in a voice or in the kind of noises that an object makes and neural maps are that currency of our minds and once neural maps are appreciated in consciousness they can be properly called images so you can say that minds are a flowing process of images which are at heart neural maps generated by the brain of an organism that is interacting and moving about in the in the environment now there was something missing at the bottom of that slide that says that feelings of the body are a particular class of images and in keeping with the fact that I said that the representations that are in the mind correspond to objects and events both outside and inside the organism I'm now adding this little wrinkle that when you have images of your own body some of those images can be can become feelings but they are in fact representations of body state representations for example of pain or pleasure or many of those fundamentals that are literally on the border of mind and the appearance of sentience the appearance of consciousness is really the bottom rung of consciousness now what about self which was the second constitutive component of the process of consciousness in a very basic way I can define it as the organization of images as a function of the homeostatic needs of the organism now you will see that this definition is something that doesn't is not traditional at all and what I'm taking into account here is an evolutionary perspective I'm looking at the function itself as an particular organization of images and I'm saying that the organization of those images is a function of something that is absolutely critical for the organism which is organizing life organizing the management of life according to AMI aesthetic needs and this is something that I'm going to introduce right now it's something that some of you may ask later on and we can go into greater depth and the question is as follows why is it that we have minds to begin with and why is it that we have consciousness why is it that that prevailed in evolution what's the advantage and to make a long story short the advantage is to generate a better regulation of life and this is very important because very often people think of mind or self or consciousness is something that appears from the top down and is generated without any kind of connection to the fundamental problems of a living organism and I think this is nonsense I think that the only reason why something as strange and complex his mind and consciousness would have prevailed in evolution is if it would have a tremendously important role to play in inducing part of our survival or optimizing our survival and in great part as well aiming at something that we certainly at the human level all seek reactively which is wellbeing in other words we don't just seek to survive we seek to survive with well-being that's part of the organization of life that each individual and societies create for themselves so the self in strict biological terms for me is this ability of organizing the images that are flowing in a mind according to this principle of biological need according to the fact that the main problem that we face as individuals is the management of the needs of life management inside a living organism we deal with that the same way that amoebas or bacterial cells and other unicellular creatures deal with they have to manage life they have to manage this life process in a way that is compatible with procuring sources of energy incorporating sources of energy transforming them excreting waste products and guiding behavior so that it can be conducive to survival and eventually to well-being and the big difference between those simple cells and our very complex organisms including the human organisms is that in the simple cells all of the management has been prescribed by your genome and your genome is telling you exactly what to do in certain circumstances so if something happens if X happens you're supposed to do this but there is not conscious that is something that the genome is setting for you and it was set by natural selection and the situation that we have is quite different in the sense that we now have a way of being aware of the fact that such regulation processes are occurring and we have a way of optimizing those regulation processes any relation to images since I told you about neural maps and images and the Constitution of mine you may say well but why do we even have minds in the first place and the answer is that when you have neural maps you have a possibility of optimizing responses in relation to both the inside and the outside so for example if you have the possibility of representing a predator in great detail you have the possibility also of responding to the presence of the predator with a better response likewise if you have an opportunity in the environment if their opportunity is better represented visually auditorily or in terms of touch or smell you have a possibility of generating a better response so all of this hierarchy of incredibly complex processes in our brain have a very good reason to stay on they have prevailed because once there were organisms that presented that variety those organisms would have been more successful would have been selected and therefore the brains that were so organized would have a possibility of continuing on in further generations now let me just go back to say that so you have that self as organization of the mind and then in later stages because you can say that that first self is a sort of minimal self something that we definitely share with lots of animals but what we normally talk about itself is more complex in there i define it as an assembly of a neural surrogate of the organism toward which images are oriented thus operating as a protagonist and perceiver because we all know when we talk about say myself or yours we're thinking about something more than just this organization of the mind to satisfy our needs of life regulation we have something that indicates of humans at least also includes the history of our past includes the anticipation of our future and something much more complex that eventually culminates in personhood and in identity and that's the process that is much more complex we'll get into that in a minute so this is to launch me in this division of the self into three stages the proto self the core self in the autobiographical self the proto self and the core self is something that we share with numerous species so for example if you ask me if fish or lizards or Birds for that matter have proto selves and core selves I would say it's quite likely that they do I cannot guarantee you because they will not tell us but for a variety of reasons we can go into they have as a very likely possibility not only minds which is fairly patent that they do but they have proved yourself in core self levels that is minimal cells what they tend not to have except in species that are very very close to us like for example higher primates or cetaceans or wolves is an autobiographical self and what I mean by an autobiographical self is a level that is more complex and that is built gradually in a biological system on the core self in all the proto self which takes into account not just the here and now the moment that is being lived but also what has come out come on before as a narrative in your history and what we anticipate for the future and only anticipation of the future I have to say that humans are quite particular and quite unique we do you know we live constantly in a in a permanent present that on the one hand looks at the past and on the other looks at the future that we have planned and that we have aspired to but that we have committed to memory so therefore we are we are caught in between past and present except that that past and present change all the time because right now we all have 15 minutes more than we had when this whole lecture started and there's already a past that was present 15 minutes ago and there's more that is being incorporated moment by moment as we move into the future let me just say that it is out of the autobiographical self that we generate most of the things that we hold through endear in terms of our humanity so I think the ability to generate an expansion of memory of expression of reasoning the force to generate language and eventually the forces that led to creativity they all came out of the presence of the autobiographical self and when we talk today about the instruments of culture with which we navigate our social life those would not have been possible had we not developed an autobiographical self and it's fairly obvious that the species that don't have an autobiographical self or don't have much of it have not had the possibility of generating in generating a culture whereas we have precisely because we expanded all these other functionalities in a very rich way so let me just say that this first stage of the proto self actually is contrary to what even myself used to think about 10 years ago brought out from the operations of the brainstem as far as I can see now and it is of course when you think of the brain you very often think of consciousness and you consider the cerebral cortex which is easily the most distinctive aspect of the human brain and many people including myself a very long time thought well it's out of this several cortical mantle that we're going to generate this amazingly complex process which is consciousness and the self that really gives mind the conscious level well my view right now is that that is only true for the very high levels of self the one that I call autobiographical self and that the proto self is actually being generated out of the brainstem here now this may sound quite controversial and some people may be a little bit annoyed at this because this part of the brain the brainstem actually is extremely similar in design to the one that you can find in reptiles so a lizard or a frog will have a brainstem that is of the same model so you say well so are they likely to have anything like our consciousness and the answer is of course not they they are conscious in kind they have mind processes they have conscious processes as far as one can ascertain but it doesn't make any difference because what we are talking about in the human consciousness is a combination of what goes on here in rich dialogue with what goes on in the cerebral cortex so what I'm saying is not that human consciousness comes straight out of the same brainstem that exists in reptiles I'm saying that comes out of a particular way of wiring the brainstem of human but she pushes in the reptile model with a cerebral cortex that is hugely different from that of any other species and of course much larger in capacity as well and the what I'm talking about so that the location of course is here as you can see is what I'm talking about is this region over here that is particularly important and that is the tegmentum of the brainstem particularly at the level of the midbrain and it is very important to know that we have quite a lot of information about what this part of the brain is doing you know I'm not just dreaming about this and looking at these brains and sort of bringing ideas to you we know that when you damage this part of the brainstem in front of the red section you actually do not alter consciousness at all but when you damage this part of the brainstem behind it the one that is in red you do alter consciousness quite severely in humans for example you end up in states like vegetative state or coma whereas here you end up with something called locked-in and you also know that when you do the damage lower than this you actually do not alter consciousness so there is quite a lot of selectivity in terms of the parts of the brain that are related to consciousness or not and this operates at the level of the brainstem it operates at the level of the several cortex as well now what is really fascinating and I think for people like you who are at least on occasion interested in circuitries is that we're now learning more and more about the circuitry's that are contained in this small part of the brainstem and it is quite by the world and I've just marked some of the kree key players here one which is the area post Rima another the nucleus tractus solitarius another the para brachial nucleus another the periaqueductal gray superior colliculus the hypothalamus and you see the levels at which they are midbrain pons medulla now the critical issue functionally speaking of this region is that it is located totally between the body proper and the cerebral cortex and the main function of this region traditionally in terms of the accounts that people have offered is that this is the conduit for signals from the body proper to the several cortex so signals from everywhere in the body whether we're talking about say the viscera or about the chemistry's in the bloodstream or about the muscular system go through this region in order to get to the cerebral cortex and constitute representations in the ceremony or text now this is sort of the traditional view the view that is becoming more and more entrenched now is that not only is there a connection upward to the cerebral cortex but there are multiple connections downward to the multiple regions that offered input to the brain so rather than having something which connects unidirectionally you have something that connects be directionally where signals go up in signals return but then there's something even more important and that is that each of these regions not only receive signals but also transform signals so it can offer something additional to what has been conveyed and each of these regions have the possibility of responding to the body and have the possibility of interacting among themselves so what you have is a connectivity where you have massive recursiveness in the components and you have massive recursiveness in relation to each component in the body so one of the things that you will find in self comes to mind is an idea that this puts the traditional view of the relations between body and brain it is somewhat different footing and my footing is that I think that the traditional separations between body and brain become extremely problematic when you look at this organization it's almost as if there is no possibility of drawing a sharp border between body and brain because because body constantly gets represented at all of these levels and these levels have the possibility of responding to the body and I want you to think that this is a very unusual situation for example when I send now for example with my being here give you the possibility of representing me visually in your visual cortices there is no way that your visual cortices are going to have a way of responding to the origin of this neural map which is me standing here however when my body or any of our bodies sends a representation to the brain the brain has a possibility of modifying the very representation that was sent in this is completely different completely symmetric in relation to all the other processes and I think that is one of the you know if if this alone would get people to think about a different way of relating body and brain I'd be very happy and I would consider the book successful because that's one of the points and just to say that my current thinking is that this is the level not only at which you generate the proto self but at which you generate some of the most fundamental feelings of our entire organism which I call now primordial feelings and what do those feelings give you those feel is giving give you and direct online representation of what is going on in the body and give you the direct information that there is a living body in your organism that there is existence and it gives you the flavor of that existence a long arrange that at one extreme has pleasure and that the other has pain and that is what I call primordial feelings now I have to tell you that in the past I have thought and I was partially correct that feelings for example feelings of emotions would be generated in a structure called the insular cortex which exists of course at cortical level and which is represented here this is a an MRI and through a transparency we're getting from the outside to a deeper level at which we see the insula in all its glory and this is a structure that you see here and sure enough we have very good evidence that this idea which I presented some 15 years ago is correct that the insula is involved in generating feelings of emotion so if you are happy or sad or angry or compassionate if you're watching pornographic movies or drinking wine or you're undergoing the action of drugs of abuse or of the drawls of the drugs the insula is responding very actively and there's no doubt that the insula is a very strong platform for feelings at cortical level but the point that I want to hammer in is that this smaller structure within the brainstem is actually the first platform for such feelings and they're everything that is happening in the world of the brainstem which is small but incredibly complex is then being re represented at the level of the insular cortex okay now the second stage and I want to come as close as possible to the end of the story the second stage of that self that is so critical to generate our minds is the core self and for me the core self is generated as a pulse sort of moment by moment so for example when you as an organism have an interaction with an object suppose each of you right now and the object which happens to be me object an event because I'm talking at the same time that interaction is going to modify the fundamental primordial feeling state that is being generated in your organism and that modification is going to be made because for example right now I am talking I'm moving in all of these different movements are generating changes to your organism because your brain is picking up on movement on sound on visual impressions and so forth not only that there is a constant reaction at emotive level to whatever is going on outside the world you may not be terribly aware of that emotive reaction and that's a good thing but it's there and their constant reactions because in anything that is said or heard anything that you see anything any idea that your process is going to have an emotive component it's going to modify the state of your emotional reactivity so your organism in relation to any object or event is changing constantly and it is in the relationship that you is established between your organism at state zero and your organism at state one after that change has been accomplished that you generate this very special relationship which is going to be the source of the core self and you know you have an object that acts on the purpose of it a variety of levels and that modifies primordial feelings that in change in turn generate relative processes that are too long to explain now that include perspective feelings of knowing a sense of ownership and agency and that eventually creates a lien see for the object instead that is how you create the core self now the last stage which I referred to is the autobiographical self and that occurs when all the objects and events that are in our autobiography generate pulses of core self which are subsequently linked in LinkedIn to a larger current pattern and what I'm talking about here is the following if I now you know I could be asking you to look at a variety of pictures and then we have nothing to do with your history and you would simply simply process them at a minimal self level or in a core self level but if I would turn to you or to one of you individually and would start asking you about who you are and what you have been living through before and where you were born and what how do you decide to have your career you would very rapidly switch into a mode that is the mode of autobiographical self I'm sorry let me try to stop this and what you would be doing then is generating very rapidly an avocation in memory of components of your past narrative of your past biography in giving each of them a pulse of core self and integrating them into a vaster canvas which is the one that has to do with your narrative your biography and it's no longer about the here and now but rather about how each here and now is put in the perspective of past and future I'm going to skip that and I'm going to in order to see if I can get to the end without breaking out completely I'm going to just tell you about two different spaces in which we organize this autobiographical self and obviously when we think about for example our past when we think about our history we are creating representations generating representations in our minds and those representations can appear in any sensory system and they will appear in terms of brain structure and for example auditory cortices like for example here or in visual cortices like for example here or in somatosensory cortices like there but in order for those representations to appear at that level it is necessary that they are guided by a system of memories that will allow those representations to be formed so if I ask you where were you born or when did you make your career choice which is your current career choice you will need to bring that back memories that are from way back where are those memories health and the answer is that it is in a very different space it's a space that includes for example the parietal cortex the temporal cortex the frontal cortices and it is there that you have the entire machinery with which you have coded and recorded those memories I'm sorry I cannot continue but if you give me a minute you can ask me questions and I'm gonna try to answer for those of you who come late I apologize they have a very bad laryngitis and there's nothing else I can do other than drinking tea so yes ma'am I'm sorry I cannot to you I've read your books I'm not sure one bottom charters so when I'm sure used to knoe a superbaby debt basically our genes are what they are and that we can't change them then we cannot change our genes well it's true that we cannot change our genes immediately thought of as you go but it's not true that for example the cultural effects that we create will not change our genes for example I discuss in the book something quite interesting is that human beings created the dairy industry didn't exist it was not created by our genes it was created by our by the fact that there was agriculture and there was farming and it was discovered that you could earn a certain products and create dairy products well at the beginning people reacted very badly to dairy products because our genome did not have the provision to metabolize dairy products well it so happens that today lots of people are born with mutations that allow you to metabolize dairy products there is something that has happened very rapidly over periods of thousands of years which means a very limited number of generations not a period of millions let alone billions of years so it is not 100% true that we cannot change our genome except that you don't change it from one generation to the next yes sir are you right one point you are discussing a single-celled organism since it doesn't behaviors deterministic and is there a connection between the determinism of an organism's behavior and whether or not it's conscious in it has us touch on the free will and is that something that neuroscience can give us some answers well here's how I would put it right it's perfectly clear that if you're dealing with a bacterial cell or an amoeba what you have is an organism whose life regulation is entirely controlled by the genome it's an environment he has been well adapted and it works perfectly fine it's you know very successful organisms extremely numerous by the way we have more bacteria in our bodies at any moment then we have cells that are actually components of our bodies I mean that's because they're so successful and they're doing a lot of very nice interesting jobs for us too so there's sort of extension of our bodies but there's very little freedom there in fact you could say there's none the bacteria will do by and large or the other cells singularly they do by and large what the genomes tell them to do in a certain circumstance what we have that is very new and remarkable is that because we are so complex we have invented these tools of culture for example moral systems justice systems social and political organization the arts religions science technology all of this play a homeostatic role but what is interesting is that there's an element of freedom in that they are they don't have to be in a certain way yet they there's a degree of freedom that is caused by the fact that they were decided upon when a number of individuals with selves their own consciousness their own perspective on the world got together to operate at a certain new level and this is of course the creation of culture and civilization and there is a remarkable degree of freedom now of course do we have all the freedom no because we're still being controlled in good part by the genomes that make our organisms function in a certain way and we cannot abandon that so you cannot touch that part of the you know that's a closed system and it's or it opens only very gradually over generations but we can operate at this other level within a certain measure of freedom so I think that consciousness at the highest level by bringing on the emergence of culture has been responsible by giving us not only knowledge without which we would have no clue as to our existence or the existence of the world or of others but it has given us a measure of intervention in the entire system of nature which can be either for the good or for the worse of course it depends on how we with some freedom will guide it well or not thank you that's a very good question ok one here then one there I'm interested new perspective on complex machines that robots which certainly map their surroundings and which I really have a representation of their own selves in those maps so do us give to them a certain measure of either up here any three layers of self-consciousness excellent person did you hear the question in the back so that's a wonderful question I deal a little bit with it in this book and the answer is that sooner or later there will be machines that will have actually something like selves and consciousness in the set in all the senses that I outlined here if your question is however will they those machines experience consciousness the way we do my bet would be that they will not unless you make their bodies exactly like ours which should be of course an absurdity why would you and besides you couldn't because it would be so much more complex than you could in a much more direct machine however those machines will have certainly a level of pro to self and a level of proto self that is not generating primordial feelings or at least not our primordial feelings its generating the primordial feelings of that machine which don't have to be like ours because our feelings are related to the set of our flesh and those machines don't have flesh they have whatever Hardware you create for the machines in those machines what comes in fact is all the software with which you animate whatever hardware it is and in humans in living creatures in general it's both the software is written in the hardware and the to count very very strongly the other thing that is very important and this I talk about in the book is the following when you have create one of those robots you you you have a body where once you build it as an engineering object you have a very small risk of disease and death you have a risk of malfunction but you don't have a risk of disease and death in any way like that of say a human body why because our body is made up of trillions of single organisms called cells each of which has its own genome has its own life cycle and has its own risk of disease and death there's no such thing in the body of the robot that changes the game completely and it's something that is not normally appreciated oh that's why there's back in your world in your perspective what is the biggest unknown or the biggest mystery it's not just one and I I wouldn't even tell you about the biggest killer I don't know what the biggest is that and there's so many for example I tell you what I but I don't know for sure and I would like to know at what level does feeling begin we know for example that in order to construct a map that can represent me in your brain you need to have certain small circuits that are hooked up in larger circuits and then hook up in a map say in the visual cortex we know pretty much how that functions so in a way you can talk about a sort of protocol nation that begins at very low level in the operation of single neurons is there an equivalent in terms of proto of proto feeling is it's neuron already endowed with an ability to feel in which case the feelings that we have of say pleasure or pain are sort of scaling up through the structure of those proto feelings then emerging into a big time large-scale operation or not or does it come for example at the level of the brainstem that's a very important question and with no we're at the point of giving the answer in fact something that I presented as a question and I have to tell you that when I when I articulate this problem people look at me and they think I'm coming from the moon that I'm crazy but I don't think this is crazy this is absolutely essential if we're going to understand how this works ok ok let's organize this I think there was one other in the back end everyone goes to the phone ok no switch for you one expensive choice just American he defined self more as a social phenomenon in his view self does not predate the the formation of society how do you contrasty of you by saying that for me it does involve it does start much earlier you know that there's a tradition of course if you start from psychology or from sociology there is a tendency to start at very high level and work from outside in but if you start at the level of a cells that say if you do is something like an immune system phenomenon the immune system is constantly recognizing self from non-self in the sense that it recognizes an object from another object and responds accordingly so I think that I would start very early as I do and then work my way up to the social level the social level is generated out of many autobiographical selves but in fact it can even start early for example there's plenty of evidence that groups of bacteria can behave socially groups of bacteria can fight for territory or they can cooperate depending on the state of resources you know how things are in the environment so these notions I think it's very foolhardy to keep them only at one level I think in all likelihood you can find precursors all the way down into cells if not molecules sometimes okay okay so if you want to know when consciousness starts at the level of a human being very good question but nobody knows the answer chances are that a newborn has a protocell fins on the way to developing very rapidly a core self and by age two there's already the beginnings of an autobiographical self being generated your question on religion is very interesting I think that is a definitely a neural basis for religious feeling yes and for spirituality and it has to do with the fact that of course it can only occur in humans and can only occur in humans because you need to have a very robust sense of self you need to have a you need to have had a sense of loss and a sense of question regarding the universe in order to try to generate answers for those questions and a lot of those questions appear in the form of religious thinking that proceed in pre date a lot of the extensive developments of course of science that have given other accounts of the universe okay sorry about this folks there's nothing I can do I think I'm good

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Length: 53min 54sec (3234 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2016