Why and How Consciousness Arises

thank you very much show them up in great numbers for what's going to be I know a very very interesting lecture because I heard it about a year and a half ago in Amsterdam whenever professor Soames give the same or a similar presentation we'll have to wait and see and I thought we need to get this guy to New York because it it was such a fascinating talk about essentially consciousness but also psychoanalytic theories and neurobiology and professor Soames is an expert in this field he's professor of neuropsychology in fact in the department of neurology at the University of Capetown and where if the hospital is called quote obscure I mean they pronounce it differently but this is how it should be pronounced and it's actually the English language University the the Afrikaner university is still emboss which ii also pronounced a little bit differently and he's been extremely productive it's written 350 papers he's written eight books and is actually working now on on this topic for the lay public that he is writing and he's one of his major achievements also is doing the revised translation of the entire works of Freud who has been just finishing up and has been working on for the last 20 years which is obviously as you know I mean it's for 24 volumes 250 pages each so you can imagine how big a undertaking that is and you can do that because he's fluent in German and in English because he grew up in a little part of South Africa where people also speak German has an interesting history that part of the world so we've been able to do that which you know obviously is you it's going to come out very soon it's going to be highly recommended that you probably take a look at this revised edition of the all the works the complete works of Freud so anyway he's a very accomplished researcher is a very accomplished writer and he's a very accomplished speaker so I'm very glad you're here from the UK working for seven weeks so not such a long term fortunately for us but thank you very much for coming here we were very much looking forward to you though thank you very much dr. Khan the talk you heard me giving in in Amsterdam as overlaps only very slightly with what I'm going to talk about today and in fact Freud will hardly be mentioned the the the the topic while it's on the screen is consciousness and the phrase why and how consciousness arises you will see in a moment why I'm using that phrase and as dr. Khan told you I'm busy writing a book in fact I've spent the last seven weeks in splendid isolation in the English countryside so my this is the my coming out of that back into the into the world and I'm going to try to distill everything that I've written in that book into these well 45 minutes or so which is a kind of an impossible task so I want to start by giving you these two references the the work I'm doing on consciousness I'm doing together with this chap here called Freeston who's a computational neuroscientist in England with a background in physics in fact he is also though one of you is a psychiatrist and that's my one excuse for talking to psychiatrists on this topic although as you will see it does actually it does actually touch on on what psychiatry is all about in unexpected and and interesting ways but I'm putting these two references here because I have to tell you in advance it is truly impossible to answer the question why and how consciousness arises in 45 minutes so if you're wanting to get a slightly better grip on the topic do please read one of those two papers the user's a sort of summary also I should tell you that the the reason that I'm wanting to talk to you on this topic even though it's not strictly speaking psychiatry and even though it's such a theoretical paper it's because I'm terribly excited about it you know I really believe if you will forgive me that we are pretty close to cracking what is called the hard problem of consciousness and this is supposed to be the most difficult problem in science today so you're my guinea pig audience that's why it's not the same talk as I gave before because we've made progress but since then and you're my guinea pig audience in the sense that I'm going to be giving this paper in June in Interlaken at the annual consciousness there is a thing called the Association for the scientific study of consciousness or something like that and they invited me to give this paper there in June and so this is a trial run to see is it possible to address this topic in such a short period of time so there's there's a sort of a summary and start heart telling you what the hard problem of consciousness is then I have to say something about metaphysics you know it's a philosophical problem in part one can't avoid philosophy entirely then I will address this question is consciousness not a cognitive function that you that might be a very bizarre question to ask but you'll see that it has been seriously suggested that it's not and then I will explain why this problem arises it arises out of the fact that cognition is largely unconscious and then I will show you why I believe we need to shift our focus toward effect that if we're going to crack the hard problem of consciousness we need to deal with the most elemental form of consciousness which is affective feeling and I think that we've been led astray in our attempts to solve this problem precisely by looking at two elaborated specifically human cognitive forms of consciousness and that we cost a very different light on the problem if we reduce it to it - it's more basic forms I'll then say something about the functions of effect basically in relation to homeostasis and then start in the last two points to go back to cognition and to address the question as to how cognition relates to effect in terms of consciousness so that's a sort of a summary and I'll start now with the first point the hard problem what is the hard problem well it was for me in a journal in fact this journal the one at the top there the Journal of consciousness studies which is why we published our paper there it was it was published by philosopher named David Chalmers and this is what he wrote it's undeniable that some organisms or subjects of experience but the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information processing we have visual or auditory experience the quality of deep blue the sensation of middle C how can we explain why there is something it's like to entertain a mental image or experience an emotion it's widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis but we have no good explanation of how and why it so arises and there you have that how and why which which gives me my title so there's the hard problem as formulated by David Chalmers in 1995 this something it is like to the quality of conscious experience how on earth does this arise out of physical processes so I think we have to look to we have to touch on some philosophical problems and I'm not going to obviously give you an overview of the whole thing but I believe that the problem is so hard because of the way in which traumas formulates it if you ask the question how does subjective experience arise from physiological processing in the sense as if physiological processing produces consciousness you know like the liver produces bile then you're on a on a hiding to nothing a consciousness I don't think we should think of it as something produced by the brain and this is the dual aspect monist philosophy that I just need to quickly introduce you to if you look at yourself in the mirror you see in the mirror Marx owns the body and you feel yourself internally to be Marx owns the mind these are two manifestations of one and the same thing it's not the one doesn't produce the other they're just two different perspectives on the same thing that's mark songs seen from the outside this is Mark solves being him from the inside they are observational perspectives it's not a causal relationship it's a perspectival relationship that of course begs the question then what is the underlying thing if Mark Psalms is both the body is seen from the outside and a mind seen from the inside then if these are just appearances what is Mark Psalms himself what is the underlying monist unity and that's where we come up not with something spooky but with the idea of function that there's some sort of functional organization which manifests from the outside in our physiological functioning and manifests from the inside in our psychological functioning and what we need to do is to find one unitary explanation of these two manifestations of consciousness that's what we're looking for a sort of an abstraction I can illustrate with reference to this these are from an optogenetic image of some amygdala neurons in a mouse that is busy experiencing fear so this is a fear memory looked at from the outside and then there's the mouse's actual experience from the inside scary experience you know so from the outside there you have a fear memory and from the inside here you have the experience of a fear memory these are two different ways of looking at the same thing so which one is the memory itself these are just two perspectives on memory itself memory is an extraction we have functional accounts of memory and the memory in question is this apparently but you can you get it down there there's there the point that goes up over there emotional responses that's an abstraction it's a certain kind of memory fear memory and we are this is a very very high levels super simplistic functional model of memory but it's this kind of thing that we're looking for we want a functional model which explains memory both in its external manifestations and in its experiential manifestations and we have laws about memory like miller's law which has to do with their with with it's the size of short-term memory you can only hold roughly seven bits of information in mind and you can explain that physiologically you can experience it psychologically these two manifestations of one law the same applies to rebo's law which has to do with the temporal gradient in forgetting and so on there's two different ways in which you can look at the physical or psychological manifestations of memory but what you want is a functional account the underlying laws so what we need is something like that in relation to consciousness you might think but this is why I now have to ask this question is consciousness not a cognitive function because why is it so difficult why why can't we find the function of consciousness in other words in for the infer the underlying laws why is this such a special problem why don't we treat it in the same way as we do visual perception or memory or language and all the rest of cognition well the reason we don't is because David Thomas says we can't David Chalmers says that that consciousness is not a problem that can be solved with functional explanations so I'm quoting him again that same paper that I cited earlier the famous paper from 1995 in which he in which initially formulated the hard problem of consciousness he writes the easy problems are easy but that's by the way he means correlations between brain processes and mind processes you can you can correlate experiences with their physiology but that doesn't explain how the physiology turns into an experience and as I said that's the wrong way of thinking about it so he says the easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions to explain a cognitive function we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function the methods of cognitive science are well suited for this sort of explanation and so are well suited to the easy problems of consciousness by contrast the hard problem is hard precisely because it's not a problem about the performance of functions the problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained what makes the hard problem hard and almost unique by the way I don't know how you can say almost unique but there you go what makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions to see this note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience they may still remain a further answered question why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience a simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open why doesn't all this information processing go on in the dark free of any inner feel and this relates to the whole argument about philosophical zombies and so on that you can have a machine that performs all the functions computerized machine you know there's Turing machines that perform all the functions of human cognition and pretty darn well and increasingly these days pretty much better than us in many respects and they're not conscious so what is the consciousness add the consciousness is something which isn't accounted for by the explanation of the function the function can be performed without consciousness this is what Thomas is saying and I think that there's merit to that you if you think about this fourth point which is in fact cognition is not intrinsically conscious and a major discovery of the of the last 20 years of the 20th century or rediscovery if you'll forgive me for putting it that bearing in mind I'm a psychoanalyst was that you know most of our mental functions are in fact performed unconsciously and most of cognition does not require consciousness in fact when you look at how much we can do unconsciously in in in regard to cognition it really has led seriously to the question what on earth is the consciousness for because it's not clear what it's at what it adds it's not clear that it does anything and I'm speaking about memory and language and navigation problem-solving all sorts of things can be done even reading with comprehension even recognizing in a familiar base and so on it's easy to demonstrate experiment today that all of these cognitive and cortical functions can be performed brilliantly without the without the experimental subject even knowing that they that they have experienced anything here is a famous review paper by barge and shortened from you great city the unbearable automaticity of being where they review the literature the cognitive science literature showing how our cognition is basically automatic but it all runs of course without us necessarily having to be there and the famous most famous example probably is Benjamin libbets studies where he showed that even even the the the celebrated freewill the decision to perform an action is in fact preceded by cortical activity before long before 300 milliseconds before that you think that you've come to the conscious decision to you to do this so as I say in cognition in cognitive science today the question is very seriously asked why do we have consciousness at all what is it's not necessary for cognition so it's not entirely surprising that Chalmers comes to the conclusion from studying cognition studying these functions of cognition that it doesn't explain consciousness because those same functions can go on without consciousness and I thought I would just show you one or two dramatic slides to make the point this is a child three years old with a condition known as hydron encephalo not hydrocephaly hide ran and set early no no cortex born like that so she has an intact brainstem that there's little flaps of cortex there which are completely non-functional completely gliders she has actually has no cortex whatsoever and yet she's conscious she wakes up in the morning she goes to sleep at night she's conscious in that sense but also she's reactive she's emotionally reactive she responds to things like in this foot slide here her baby brother was put on her chest and she goes like that you know a happy feeling even though she has no capacity to have any kind of cognitive image little an understanding of what's going on still she has the feeling still she has the conscious experience and this is just one slide I could show you millions to demonstrate that these children are emotionally responsive they are in other words there's this conscious intentional behavior even though they have absolutely no cortex so this leads me to my next point which is that I agree with Chalmers that we can't we at least puzzling looking for the function of consciousness in relation if our model example is a cognate form of consciousness and by the way the model example in consciousness studies has been vision the main focus has been since Crick's time on vision let's try and understand what's going on in the cortex when you have in conscious vision versus non conscious vision and in the difference between the two is the so called neural correlates of consciousness and then let's drill down into that and then we'll understand what consciousness does what it's for and how it works and it has been singularly unsuccessful and I say again the reason for that is because cognition is not an intrinsically conscious function and cortex is not intrinsically conscious so we're looking in the wrong place we're looking at the wrong type of mental functioning if we wanting to understand consciousness we should in fact rather be looking at effect than cognition and he has the one mention of Freud Freud I thought was best person to quote in this regard because he's as I said famously responsible for making us aware of how much of our mental life is unconscious and yet even Freud says the following it's surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it that is that it should become known to consciousness thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions feelings and effects are concerned now this is not an appeal to Authority I'm just wanting to make you aware that even Freud was of the view I could have appealed to the Oxford English Dictionary by definition a feeling is felt it makes absolutely no sense to speak of this mental function called feeling without reference to consciousness so if you wanting to understand the elemental form the foundational form the basic form of consciousness start with those mental functions which are intrinsically conscious then start with those that are intrinsically unconscious you're going to get lost so I say this is where we start to cost an entirely different light on the problem I think that it's entirely reasonable to ask the question what is the function of effect because the function of effect has to explain why it feels like something unlike vision and and cognition in general which as I said does not necessarily have to feel like something feelings do have to feel like something everything that feelings do they because you feel them so he has a slide just to remind you of something of the history of how how we got this problem wrong we thought of cortex as the organ of consciousness this comes from classical German neuro functional neuroanatomy of the 19th century we thought of the of consciousness is streaming in through our senses which project ultimately onto cortex cortex is where all of our sensory qualities reside and so this was thought of as the organ of consciousness if you lesion visual cortex you lose visual consciousness if you lesion auditory cortex you lose auditory consciousness and so on but in fact as I showed you with the Hydra and cephalic kids and in fact decorticate animals you see the same thing you can remove the whole of cortex and the animal remains conscious and emotionally responsive as do human beings and this we knew since 1949 when mcgoon and Moretti first identified the reticular activating system which was a huge surprise as I said this standard view was that cortex is the organ of consciousness consciousness streams in through our senses and yet what Magoon and maritza showed was that consciousness in fact is an endogenous property of the brain that's generated from deep within this inside as the center in cephalic core as they called it and later called the reticular activating system consciousness is generated in the upper brainstem it does not fly in through your senses and when they discovered this they were in a bit of a a bit of a tease because this threw everything out the window that we always understood about consciousness and so they fudged that by drawing a distinction which is still with us today between what's called the level of consciousness and the contents of consciousness so the contents were still attributed to the cortex the qualities of consciousness and it's level that sort of volume control switch was attributed to the brainstem and this was thought of in quantitative terms you know like the Glasgow Coma Scale you measure how much consciousness there is out of 15 whereas what cortex does is provide the contents and the qualities of now this is a nonsense it's just not true the it's just not true that what the upper brainstem produces is only a level of consciousness and I've already showed you the dramatic example of the of the Hydra and cephalic little girl and I've made reference to decorticate animals decorticate mammals decorticate neonates they grow up fine they have full-blown lives they raise kids you know it's incredible how much you can do instinctually and emotionally without cognitive consciousness without cope without without without cortex now I said that I was going to touch on psychiatric matters and this is where I touch on them perhaps it's easiest to make my point to you as psychiatrists by reminding you that many of your mainstream medications are in fact you you're acting on the neuromodulatory systems which are reticular activating system circuits your antipsychotics act on this this neither cortical means a limbic dopaminergic system which has its source cells here in the ventral tegmental area part of the reticular activating system same applies to your antidepressants which act on the on Wraith nuclei you know these four so cells are in the Wraith so you your your fiddling with serotonin you're in fact fiddling with reticular activating system the same applies to noradrenaline which has its source cells in the nucleus locus coeruleus complex these things that you guys tinker with our feelings there are states of mind these are emotional disorders that you are treating you're not treating levels of consciousness in a purely quantitative sense at all so what we're talking about in terms of what the reticular activating system contributes is not just a level it's not just quantitative it's not just volume control it is it has content and quality of its own and this content and quality we call effect and this of course is much more ancient than cortex this is where consciousness began and as I said you can't speak of the feeling of an effort with had been conscious and what Magoon and maritza studies showed us from the get-go although they didn't know that they were talking about effort was that this is the foundational form of consciousness in the sense that if these structures are lesions all consciousness goes but it doesn't work the other way around you can remove all of cortex you still have consciousness you remove the tiniest piece in fact in the para brachial complex over there you remove two cubic millimeters of tissue and you have cava so this is where consciousness comes from and consciousness is fundamentally effective I've had on more time I would be going into riddles of evidence about this I've just given you you know the highlights and the dramatic pictures of course you all know about stimulation studies deep brain stimulation of these structures there was the famous study in the late 90s of the woman who had she was having deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's and accidentally the electrode went into substantial Niagra and she went into a massive the suicidal depression on this on the operating table just like that with absolutely no psychiatric history so there's lots and lots and lots of evidence that what these structures generate is affect not just a level of consciousness here are some famous pet images from DiMaggio showing some of the basic emotions what you see is where all the heat is it is in the brain stem in subcortical structures cortex in fact is deactivated during all manner of affective states and here's of course the most dramatic example orgasm orgasm is a very strong affective state and you'll cut your cortex shuts down and you have this exquisitely a qualitative feeling called orgasm and it's not just a level I hope you agree with me so what we're dealing with here is effects a foundational form of consciousness upon which all other forms of consciousness depend and if we want to understand how and why consciousness arises therefore we need to understand how and why effect arises and this makes it a much simpler problem I'm sure you all I've already mentioned his name I'm sure you're all familiar with the work of demacia probably done more than just about anybody else to clarify what the role of effect is in the life of the mind he draws attention to these red nuclei which are body monitoring nuclei best known of course is the hypothalamus but their descent from these circumvent Rick Euler organs peribronchial New York is already mentioned area press tremor nucleus of the torus and so on these structures which are monitoring the state of the body in relation especially the hypothalamus to basic homeostatic needs in other words we need to be maintained within very narrow ranges physiologically in relation to all sorts of bodily needs and also emotional needs these emotional circuits do the same sort of thing they all are homeostatic functions and that it's the maintaining of oneself within settling points within preferred States within states which are which are viable for our survival this is what effect is for so I'm coming now to the question of what is the mechanism of consciousness via the question what is the mechanism of effect and I've told you that effects were basically deviations from homeostatic settling points now of course we also have vegetative homeostatic functions there plenty of like blood pressure is then clinically in notorious example you don't know anything about what's going on with your blood pressure but the ethic what effect adds is the capacity to feel your state and so that you can feel your way through a situation in terms of what you're going to do about it so for example suffocation alarm you know you feel it most of the time your your blood gases are regulated automatically but when you're in a state of air hunger you know all about it and there's this intense effect suffocation alarm air hunger and it says do something and this is what ethics are for they tell the animal that's included you better do something mate if you don't get out of this state you're gone and the same applies to thermo regulation the same applies to hunger the same applies thirst that's what ethics are for they have an obvious function they have an obvious place in nature they obviously do something they're not just fluff that's added on and this is why I say that there's my excuse for talking to us psychiatrist sources to remind you that what you you with is absolutely fundamental to life you know that this is this is what the mind is for it's for feeling so that we know how we're doing in relation to our basic biological needs in states of uncertainty so there are they are how many there are how many aesthetic functions which work automatically and then there are those where you need to be able to feel your way through the situation to know is it going badly am i getting further from where I need to be that's what unpleasurable feelings are that's the red arrow am i getting back to where i need to be that's pleasurable feelings that's the blue arrow and where you want to be is on the black line which is your homeostatic settling point in other words feelings are a sort of an alarm mechanism they're telling you that you're not where you want to be you're not where you need to be and you're going in the wrong direction or you going in the right direction this is the basic DiMarzio view of what effects are for what their function is and as I keep saying I think this costs an entirely different light on the question of how and why consciousness arises now I'm speaking about basic bodily effects things like suffocation alarm thirst hunger and the like but the same applies also to emotions these are obviously not as immediately life-threatening or life-sustaining as are those bodily effects but they function according to the same basic principles fear is probably a good example you know fear is therefore very good biological reasons that you feel oh my god I'm an danger this thing this predators coming for me and there's a prediction that's built into you as to what you need to do what you need to do is freeze or you need to flee these are instinctual responses but that's not enough life is far more complicated than to be dealt with just in terms of either our freeze or roughly you need to learn from experience and so the feeling of your way through the situation enables us to elaborate these automatic instinctual responses and this is how all of these basic emotions work they too are ultimately there for our survival and our reproductive success emotions of very important things they do something and you can't just say well like DiMaggio says about vision I mean not DiMarzio sorry Thomas says about vision blue and red you know these qualia of what it is like to see it wouldn't make any difference if you saw red where I see blue they don't do anything you know you could say I could call it blue and you call it red it doesn't make any difference it's just it's just fluff but imagine if the same were to apply to these things imagine if instead of feeling fear you feel separation distress and then as that lines coming from you you cry mama and you hug her you know you'll be dead so what emotions do what they compel us to do their causal consequences are easily understood within a natural scientific biological frame of reference sir I'm ready zipping along quite well is my watch right is it five post wealth excellent okay so what and please note the word that I used under point six was surprised this is a reference to the whole computational neuroscience frame that my co-author colfra stone works with surprises or it means that you're moving outside of the predicted state that you need to stay in in relation to these core homeostatic settling points you need to be in that state if you're outside of that's that it's called surprise and the main thing is you need to minimize surprise you need we have predictions as to what you need to do and that's what I said freezing and fleeing or built-in predictions and then you have to elaborate through learning from experience what else might I do what else might I fear and what else should I fear what else can I do these are predictions as to what to do to get back into that zone of comfort and survival which which in this instance is free freedom from fear but the same applies to all of the basic ethics so the feeling is a surprise you had really heading in the wrong or the right direction that's what feelings are for and the predictions are to remove surprise to suppress surprised to get you back into your the the homeostatic lee desirable state so the point I'm leading up to is the one on my on the screen my point number said which is that the function of cognition is to suppress surprise that we have built-in cognitions as it were their reflexes and and instincts and drives but then we need to learn from experience through feeling our way through life's problems we need to learn ways of suppressing surprise learn ways of minimizing prediction error so now this obviously is completely Greek I mean literally so I'm not going to begin to be able to explain this to you and again I refer you to the to the publications that I had on the screen at the beginning but I just want to give you the basic sort of scheme the basic scheme is so the letter Q there on the right hand side of the screen refers to the fact that we have internal models we have a predictive model and we're born with our phenotype is comes with a predictive model and then you have to update this model in terms of your understanding of how to meet your needs in the world M is the motor States the things that we do we have predictions as to if I do such-and-such then going to the top to see the sensory states then I should feel this that should be the consequence so you're a generative model q on the right leads to predictions as to what I must do in the outside world in order to have the sort of change in my sensorium that I expect and if all goes well then you have something like an automatic function a function which automatically meets your needs because you've predicted what you need to do in order to get into the feeling state that you need to be in and if all goes well that's hunky-dory if it doesn't you have error and that's what the e stands for error E is prediction error and when there's an error that means you need to update your model so Q is the model ears error and learning from experience comes from errors where prediction errors where what you do in the world doesn't lead to the outcome that you expected the sensory outcome here I'm speaking of is feeling States fundamentally we're talking fundamentally of feeling States the word sensory refers to feelings and again remember the big mistake that we've made in consciousness studies is to be two extra cept of two cognitive to cortical about at all cuz the sensations that matter most to us are these life-sustaining feelings effects that I've been talking to you about throughout this lecture now precision the bottom the Omega the bottom right of the screen this is what the upper brainstem this is where those neuromodulatory systems that you guys tinker with with your psycho pharmacological agents they act on what in computational neuroscience is called precision that this is just arousal that's modulation of neurotransmitter and this is consciousness itself consciousness is the feeling of your way through the updating of prediction areas as you try to meet your needs in the world that is the function of of effect now these these equations up here or the other doing of called forest and as I say cannot begin to explain it all to you read the paper but the important thing is that it is possible to reduce how effect works two basic elemental mathematical equations abstractions which describe how these neuromodulatory nuclei function it's not something mystery it's not something outside of science it's not something that requires us to have something spooky about consciousness consciousness as a place in nature just like any other physiological function what I wanted to say is that this business the modulation the precision the Omega down there the modulation of our generative models the thing indicated by the letter Q there that this is what we speak of as reconsolidation it's the activation of memory traces in order to update them it's that rendering labile of memory traces you could say that this is what consciousness is at the cognitive level consciousness is the the the undoing of memory the turning of memory into consciousness the turning of prediction into uncertainty consciousness is a state of uncertainty that's the cortex in a state of flux there and as I say reconsolidation I'm just showing you the classical paper there to make that point that's that's what that's what cognitive consciousness is and that leads me to my last point which is that conscious cognition is predictive work in progress that the feeling of your way through life's problems in the outside world is is is what consciousness is for consciousness is not intrinsically cognitive consciousness is intrinsically effective it's feeling feeling your way through life's problems feeling your way through these attempts to meet your needs in the outside world in unpredicted contexts and conditions of uncertainty which makes it possible for us you can imagine the adaptive advantages of having such a capacity to not only do by reflex not only have automatically wrote fixed modes of response but the capacity to be able to learn from experience is is what it's all about and I will end with this comment which is that in in the end we have to remember that consciousness is tolerated consciousness conscious cognition is a bad thing it means that you've got a problem there's something out something that you don't know how to do there's something that you need to be salient because you can't predict it because you don't know what's going to happen it's a state of uncertainty the ideal is to be able to learn your way feel your way through that problem and then if it really works well your new solution then you were traumatized it and so the clarity of memory cortical types of memory thank God we have them for all the reasons that I've described to you but what we are aspiring to Islam bidam what we really want to do is not to have to feel our way through life's problems we want to be able to meet our needs exactly as they arise automatically and perfectly but thank God we never really get there so that ladies and gentlemen is my 45 minutes of how and why consciousness arises [Applause] thank you very much mark this this is an even better talk than I heard attempts to them so I'm very glad you did this and it's certainly more profound yes Antonio I I had a couple I'm gonna press back a little bit thought why am I not surprised okay so Damacio schema involves he breaks down emotion into emotions feelings and feeling the feelings right and so emotions are really the way to perceive experience so for your little girl with no brain no cortex it's the ability to see her brother and feel her brother on her chest the he calls emotions the physiologic response to that the smile the joy the mentalization is her conscious appraisal of that which you have no evidence for and in fact when you show DiMaggio's work you don't show just the brain stem activation in fact you show robust activation in the posterior cingulate which is very much a part of the cortex and in the insula which is also very much part of the cortex so I'm pushing back a little on the demacia scheme so consciousness even if you get to emotion doesn't necessarily get to the mentalization of that emotion which is actually where we want to be right so there are a number of points in in what you've just said and I'm going to touch on on each of them first of all one has to acknowledge that this is a minefield of of terminologies and and and and taxonomies and you know different people mean different things by these words effect emotion feeling et cetera and what you say about demacia is entirely correct Joseph LeDoux would be another example you know and and but Craig perhaps even more pertinent to the points that you are making so that's the first point is to say different people may use these terms differently I want to be clear that I'm speaking about feeling as the raw feeling state there doesn't have to be any understanding of what it is that you're feeling the feeling itself has motivate power the feeling itself has has causal the feeling is the consciousness so so having said that though the second point is that of course cortex does normally participate in normal mammalian emotion it's not that the cortex doesn't do anything and as I say I'm very happy to have cortex cortex enables us to be able to elaborate upon these fixed rudimentary effective patterns to be able to think your way through the problem and lay down a new memory a new prediction this is what memory is for memories for learning how to meet my needs in the world over and above what comes with the innate phenotypic sort of package deal so I don't want to minimize or deny the enormous additional advantages of cortical consciousness I need to make the point that it is effective it's driven by effect that's what makes the cognition conscious it's the feeling of your way through your memories or your learning or your problem-solving or whatever it may be no yeah yes I'm gonna transfer to stay away from the terminologies and try and get to the to the issue so now the point is if you lesion those areas that you're talking about anterior cingulate you can remove the anterior in fact it's done quite a lot in psycho surgery you see these papers are far from unconscious you can remove that you can remove the insula I mean demacia published the case of a bilateral obliteration by the P simplex encephalitis of the insula and it's a wonderfully comfortable interview with the patient you know in asking the patient about his feelings and of course he's full of feeling and the other great the thing that cited by so many LeDoux in particular the dorsal lateral frontal convexity you know you can remove those select full frontal convexity as you all know you get plenty of effect you know these patients are far from being unconscious in fact the common denominator is you remove these cortical regions which are so important for ethic what you get is more effect and so what you're actually seeing is how these cortical what their function is is in fact as I said earlier I mean as I said in my summary it is in fact to regulate effect it's in fact the managing of effort we are wanting in fact to damp down the effect this is what cortex adds so although it something and although it's an important part of normal conscious mentalization of ethics and so on I forget the exact term that you used nevertheless that the essential point remains which is that you don't need these things for consciousness you don't need these things for effect they are elaborations of ethic they are not fundamental ingredients of athletes and I think that our way of experiencing the thing in all of its complexity as with all science you know what we need to do is to break the thing down into its component parts analysis in a reduction to the basic components and then it costs the thing in a different light but of course you then need to add it all together again put it all together again to get the the real experiential lived life of the mind thank you for a fascinating lecture you don't spend much time talking about the positive emotions so let's take for example happiness seems to me happiness is a good is a good thing but from your model one might say well happiness represents the homeostatic deviation from Nirvana and that therefore you should try to get away from happiness back to a neutral state can you clarify that and what is the role of these positive emotions in the industry in this model that you provide right so let me the easiest way is to go back to this slide which shows there so the red arrow is negative effect and the blue arrow is positive effect red the red arrow means things are you getting you know that little game we play these kids where you blindfolded and you're trying to find somebody that you're getting hotter you're getting hotter you're getting colder you're getting colder works like that so you it's more and more unpleasurable one of the modalities of ethic means you're heading in the wrong direction during more hungry you're getting more thirsty more cold and then the pleasure of AHA drinking that's what you needed are eating that's what you are a nice warm duvet that's what I needed that's the pleasure which says you're heading in the right direction carry on this way that's good so it's that there's plenty of room for positive effects but even with the most extreme of positive ethics you know but I dare mention orgasms again eventually it's enough already you know that's called satiation and it's the same with chocolate even chocolate you know eventually it's like okay it's a it's not that we seek in Freud made a mistake in that respect by the way the Freud thought there was this continuum that we the pleasure principle we're aiming for more and more and more pleasure all the time it's actually a homeostatic mechanism like this it's an alternator and what we're really aiming for is satiation in other words need is met then you don't feel anything at all so the feelings both pleasurable and unpleasurable say correctly as use as you pointed out that you are not in your settling point you are not at the cessation point but pleasurable feelings certainly have an important function which say you're heading in the right direction and pleasure now there's one complication in fact there are many complications but are just one headline complication which which you haven't actually said but what I'm going to put these words into your mouth is that they are they are thrill-seeking and and risk-taking and novelty seeking and so on these kinds of behaviors are very difficult to fit in just this kind of simple homeostatic mechanism and that's where it's important to recognize that the different ethics work in different ways although they all homeostatic the most important one is what we call seeking it's a sort of foraging effect which is the default mode of our effective systems which is that you can't just rest on your laurels you're constantly having to be testing out new things trying out new things because the world is full of uncertainties so our understanding of how that system works this so called brain reward system which is a bad word for it because there's so many different types of reward but here in that's that dopaminergic seeking system or foraging system it's a matter of finding uncertainty in order to reduce it so it's actually looking for uncertainty in order to be able to reduce it and that's a sort of a paradoxical version of what nevertheless is the same thing probably the best way to think about that is that the same mechanism except the arrows go around the side rather than around that side mark it's great to have you here generating this conversation and I'd like to stretch what you're saying and get you to comment on it for a long time there's been a gulf between the conditions thinking in terms of the mind and the neuroscientists driving away on the circuits of the brain and I have felt for several years now that what you're talking about here offers a bridge between those two that we don't currently have and that if we were to pursue this more strongly we could indeed come up with a model of the mind which bridges between those two would you like to comment on that well yes I mean obviously what you say is music to my ears and I agree with every word so I have to suppress the desire to give a whole lecture or of agreement but I would just distill it down to this one essential point which is that I think that feelings of the bridge effect is the bridge and it's it's important for us to start with the most basic of ethics to properly understand that to remember that ethic the dawn of consciousness for me is the beginnings of a creature knowing its own state and it's this is not as I said something fluffy and I'm putting it this way because I know I mean I'm a psychoanalyst which is even worse than a psychiatrist secondly but see but the psychiatrist also you suffer all the time from it's not proper medicine then you know this is it's not real stuff and you know and so on and this is why I'm wanting to emphasize this point effect is absolutely fundamental it's extremely important aspect of our physiology of our biology of how we survive and reproduce that is what matters to each and every one of us our patients suffer from feelings even our surgical patients suffer from feelings that a feeling is absolutely fundamental but remember that we mustn't start with things like you know I mean even a word like happiness is a very it's a very cognitively abstracted elaborated thing we need to start with the most basic of effects in order to understand the dawn of consciousness we need to understand the biological adaptive advantage of being able to know my state in terms of my own thermodynamics in as it were in terms of my own at entropic am I going to dissipate and disappear or am I going to survive I need to stay within this narrow range this is where I need to be if I'm not going to dissipate effect is as I say a sort of an alarm mechanism in relation to that then we elaborated from basic efforts basic bodily ethics like pain and and and and and and and suffocation alarm and so on to the emotional ethics which are also when you think about them in terms of are just briefly alluded to terms of thing like like fear and rage and lust and and so on separation distress nurture and care and so on these things are fundamental to the survival of the creatures who who are endowed with these things then we get these much higher cognitive elaborations of them but that is the bridge the bridge between neuroscience and psychology the bridge between ultimately even physics and consciousness is understanding this effect is not a very complicated thing and and yet it's at the heart of of both of our disciplines high think that that was really spectacular so you mentioned Joel are doing him and Richard Brown and Danny pine has produced series of papers on the mirror and I think there are two important points that they make one is the importance of language and the second is the limitations of translational research would you care to kind of comment on those so again you know I think that perhaps this is the best slide to illustrate the main points are making in relation to that it goes to your point also I mean of course I agree that the capacity to mentalize to cognize your ethics to reflect upon them to know it's me who's feeling this thing this is what it means to me that reminds me of the following you know and it makes me it project myself into the future and imagine different scenarios and if I do this it feels like that and all of that happens and as I say have said repeatedly it's I'm jolly glad it happens you know I'm very glad we have those things but that's really not the heart of ethics epic doesn't require all of those things those also the adults and so when Joseph LeDoux says prefrontal cortex s to read it out you know and and and and and Feldman Barrett all the more so you know that she literally thinks that the naming of the athlete the the bringing the the labeling of it is how it comes into being and until we give a name to the thing it doesn't exist and you know and that's why I put this example on the screen I mean can you not feel an orgasm without naming it you know it's it's ridiculous the idea that you have to have some sort of cognitive elaboration recognition appraisal of the effect in order for it to do its job I think is it's just not true suffocation alarm you know isn't is another example it's just when you have that feeling it's absolutely obligatory to act in a certain way the rewards and the punishments of these feelings are in and of themselves causal then of course we have cognitive elaborations of them but the cognitive elaboration is just that its elaboration it's not the fundamental thing Thanks so I'm particularly interested in genetics related and knowing that we know what we know now about the underlying genetic trait I guess could you comment a bit about the genetic basis of consciousness well the the brain stem mechanisms that we're talking about the sort of core may I by the way all of those basic emotion structures their limbic ones that are circuits that had on the screen earlier all of these ultimately project onto periaqueductal gray absolutely every effective system projects ultimately to periaqueductal gray so the sort of nexus the core of our affective brain is the upper brainstem is the midbrain and what goes on there is really has nothing to do with learning this these are absolutely hardwired structures that they are completely the same in every single vertebrate and they do the same thing then there's a cognitive elaborations of that I mean you forgive me for saying this and I know I'm making an extreme statement but to me cortex is like random access memory space there's there's really very little from the point of view of genetics that that we're going to learn about cortex the the the the the outstanding examples of this or you can remove the left hemisphere you know as long as you do it young enough everything shifts over to the right you know and vice versa these these things are incredibly adaptive you there's the famous study with ferrets where you redirect the optic nerve or the optic tracks from occipital cortex to temporal cortex and then temporal cortex sees you know I mean it just learns Odyssey this is what I mean by random access memory space so I think that the memory aspects the learning aspects we're talking about for brain functions and again these are not things to be sneezed at we are there are enormous ly importance in terms of the flexible adaptive capacities of species you are endowed with cortex but the the basic effect of mechanisms which are upper brainstem mechanisms or really have very little to do with cognition than with learning and you find those mechanisms in fish well the question the question is the definition of consciousness and I've equated it with effect and he says what about dreaming is dreaming a form of consciousness and yes of course it is and the this is the great interest of our dreams is that it's a conscious state that punctuates the unconsciousness of sleep and the question then arises what is why do we have to become conscious while we're asleep and if you define consciousness as I do is fundamentally an affective function and cognition in conscious cognition is an attempt to master the problem in other words to meet the need to to reduce to get rid of the error and I think that the learning process the consolidation mechanisms of what goes on during sleep that the reason we have to become conscious during sleep is because we're working our way through offline as it were through problems which have arisen during the day and there's a lot of evidence for the the view that memory consolidation is a very important part of what goes on during sleep and in particular during during dreaming sleep so the the feeling state of dreaming I think is fundamental to the consciousness of dreaming the affective dimension of dreaming is fundamental to what dreaming is all about it's working our way through problems off line which is if which is the safest place to do it rather than while you are move I'm leaving this on the screen so that you can ask yourself that question can we really have effect without experience

Channel: Icahn School of Medicine

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Length: 57min 49sec (3469 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019