Why evolution invented consciousness (and how to make the most of it): Bjorn Grinde at TEDxLSE 2014

hello everybody you are your consciousness it's what you got without the capacity to experience life there's really nothing now experiences tend to come in in two different shades either good or bad or pleasure or pain and if they're good you are happy otherwise you are miserable and my point is that by understanding what this is all about we may be able to squeeze the brain into giving us more of the good things in life so I'll try to coach it through what I am my understanding of the brain and my first question then is who can be happy and the Rose is ruled out because plants don't have any nervous system which is required for feeling anything primitive animals are have nervous system like this round warm but it's very small it's like a few hundred neurons large and it's not sufficient to create happiness so that means that this capacity we have evolved some time in between the split off it is primitive animals and the present humans which can be happy ah another question we can ask ask is who is successful and success in biology means having lots of progeny or having lots of biomass for a species and is the rose is doing fine because people like to have it in the garden the roundworms are doing great because they're all over it is don't see them and the bad news is that humans are doing great too in fact we're doing so great that they are about to ruin this planet so my point then is that we should not try to opt for more biological success but we should opt for more happiness and the good news is that happiness is a very sustainable commodity so we started a nervous system it was generated by evolution for the purpose of orchestrating behavior and behavior generally means just moving the body somewhere so all nervous system are kind of built on the same type they have a sensory cell that react to something in environment and then the processing units and then an effector cell that attach the muscles and start the movements so why move and there's just two very simple answers so why an animal should need to move the one is to avoid what is bad from the genes and the other is to move towards what is good from the genes like this little wrong BOM is doing now and what evolution did this was a great idea by evolution it was a very success to create a nervous system so what evolution did eventually was to expand on the processing unit of the nervous system and it did so particularly in three lines of animal or three groups of animals in the anthropos and the mall looks and the vertebrates the thing is that then and it did it because by improving the processing it created more advanced formal behavior more ways responding to the environment and in one of these groups evolution hit a very peculiar idea at some point starting about 300 million years ago it devised feelings and basic it means that bad feelings out there for you to move away from something good feelings are there for you to move toward something which is the basic dichotomy of anaconda behavior and the fact that we can be happy to some accidental byproduct of this fluke of evolution so we may not quite sure when it started but its reasons to suggest that this start with the amniotes some 300 million years ago we study the shared ancestors of reptiles birds and mammals and the thing about feelings is to for the feelings to make any sense you need to feel them and feeling them means you need some sort of awareness and this awareness I think is what formed consciousness or evolved into consciousness of course the human form of consciousness has evolved a lot since the early reptiles we have lots of fancy functions like self-awareness and cognition and so on the basic this is the same it's about the requirement to be able to tune into feelings and then but then again consciousness is really kind of ripples on the ocean or brain activity it's not it's not a great thing at all it's just one thing at the evolution put into the UV over brain and most of the activity in the brain are unconscious and the thing is the conscious part is it's like information is only given on a need-to-know basis because consciousness is expensive for the brain it dis low very slow compared to unconscious decisions and it is can only deal with one thing at the moment you may think you can do two things then you just jump between the two things so consciousness is a is there for special purposes and should not just it's not required for other things so when I try to explain how the brain works I like to use the concept of brain modules and for me brain modules is just the functions evolutions added to the brain for the species to survive and I used to like this so to kind of compare that with this fancy pocket knife with all sorts of nice functions in it I guess had I been younger I probably would have compared to the die form it all sort of apps in it it's the same thing of course the brain is not as well organized as these things but it has the same purpose to that evolution added all sort of our functions for us to survive including then feelings and consciousness and the main name the most important modules for this talk is what I refer to as the mood modules they are the one that gave it a good or the bad in feelings so now when you do have emotions so any sort is generally based on two types of modules in the brain you have this one type of modules that generate the positive or negative aspects of the feelings and these totally different kind of modules that actually add its label meaning that if you have friendship and eating chocolate they both activate they get a good mood the reward part of the brain which is this we know is the same part of the brain actually while they of course they feel very different because there's a different flavor to it and the same it if you are like being rejected or filled fish go pain the bad part of the feeling is the same module pretty much so that makes it kind of easier to know what or just wanting firstly in order to it's kind of nice evolution is not really caring doesn't really care about you at all but it you happen to it happened to install you with a brain that by default is giving you positive sensations positive feelings from simply just because it is in the genes interest to reside within the body that has a positive and optimistic attitude to life so if everything is fine you feel good you're happy and you can see that in both humans and animals and say for other mammals the problem of course it is that everything is not always that great sometimes things are not good and the problem in modern society is that we have this problem with the punishment module of the brain and too many people are bothered by that and the one issue about this punishment module that gives you the bad feeling is that it has a very low threshold because it's so much more important for your genes that you run if you see a snake or run if you see a line then that you stop and pick up this app or the Apple will be around tomorrow but you will be dead unless you react to the dangers so punishment Fielding's have a low threshold and they also subconsciously triggered because you're not you should not be loved to turn them off that just would endanger your genes so you cannot easily turn them off that should be there it's like if you stand on top of cliff you should be afraid because otherwise your genes will be dead in the next second so the problem in my society in my country and in most Western country is that we about it by hyperactivity or unnecessary activity in certain types or punishment modules and that is particularly those concerned with physical pain with fear or with low mood and when you see that is see in the diagnostic setting I call that a chronic pain or anxiety or depression and that's a big problem is its affects diagnostically are close to the half of the population during a lifespan and 10 to 20% every year has a diagnosis of bull depression or anxiety disorder this is a big problem and it's why although my country supposedly is very happy I don't think we are that happy in Norway so then the question of how to improve happiness is very easy in this respect is just to kind of reduce the activity in the punishment module and you can add that you can also kind of try to increase the activity and remote reward modules noting where the shoe pinches for most people in Western country is that the punishment module is kind of too active so so far that would be easy the problem of course is that these modules are more or less controlled by your subconscious and conscious brains you're not they're not easily accessed by you but you do however have some options you can exercise and I know everybody knows that you can exercise your muscles and grow big biceps if it is pushing of iron like this woman got two gold medals now in the Olympics after pushing a lot of iron you can also exercise your brain modules brain models that are activated often will grow and be more active and then deliver more content for your consciousness so back to this kind of analogy or consciousness being the surface on the ocean of sub consciousness then the what forms your conscious experiences are like bubbles rising up from these deeper waters and then fusing on the top to kind of create one immediate unified experience of life I mean your experience is unified you don't you cannot if you see an orange you cannot say I only want to see the shape not the color I want to want to feel the texture and not smell the orange label so it's getting to a unified surface layer with the bubbles and some bubbles never reach that is the subconscious kind of generate all sorts of starting input to your conscious experiences some reach the surface some do not and then if I add to this then the picture including these brain modules here in Nice colored circles you can see that some modules are kind of higher Pro close to the surface others are deeper down and some are big delivering lots of content to the conscious experiences others are smaller and having less impact on your daily life but at the point in the kind of surprising thing is that even from this spot here up at the surface of the waters your is possible to access at least the impact on most of these modules that are in the unconscious brain and it's particularly possible if we have a way of measuring the content if you can measure what's going on there you cannot learn by biofeedback training to impact on it for example with the heart rate if you can monitor the heart rate and give biofeedback signal back to the person you can learn to change your heartbeat which is not in the kind of evolutionary in place because the gene certainly does not want it to stop the heartbeat it's kind of put that out except more conscious activity because it should be going on automatically so the kind of exercise that I like to promote is first starting with trying to calming down what's going on in the brain and I'll do that with sorts of meditative techniques and doing so mint calming lick and the activity in the brain also to some extent means turning off the punishment feelings and the punishment modules so if you can manage to go there from here you already have a more pleasant brain to deal with and it also means that it learn to kind of control that you learn to tune things down a bit then add it to that I've ever once in this kind of calm down state you can try to focus on certain of these subconscious modules that you think are not that good for example many people suffer from anxiety due to that this fear module has grown too big and these modules they come it kind of on and off switches so what happens then if you exercise the on switch a lot like you always get the worked up by the stress of job by the stress or the affairs in life and by so on you will kind of exercise the unbuttoned and the whole inside the module will grow and you will have a lower threshold for feeling inside the affair or an asado that sort of negative feelings and it doesn't feel very good because they are meant to be bad this meant to be a punishment element to this so what you can do then is try to exercise the off switch instead and that's kind of tricky because it's in the subconscious part of the brain but it's possible and we know as I said before this it seems to be possible to reach out and touch on most of these modules in the brain and you can do that for example by by using words by using imagery and even by using certain muscles for example it's been shown that if you force your mouth into a smile without really smiling that's enough to send signals back into the brain saying oh yeah this person is happy because it's smiling and that impacts on your mood and in the same way if you just say to yourself I am happy I'm happy then eventually it has a small impact on your brain and happy it does exercise you're positive you reward model part and similarly with imagery I have a colleague and also will show that the you know the pupils or the eyes they're supposed to expand in darkness and contract in light and as of course it's a reflex thing but given that these people can actually change the size of the pupils just by thinking about something dark or thinking about something light and this means is possible to impact on modules that are really meant to be completely likely just to reflex the pattern in the brain the trick is then to find ways to to do that and for what we would want to happen we're kind of getting there it's kind of measurement how to measure the activity and inside the module or how they measured activity in the off button for that and that's it people are starting to work on that but likely things like brain scans or electrodes on the brain measuring brain activity in those ways still that's not practical for for biofeedback training but it is possible to use meditative techniques and then to add in as your mandrel in your sentences words like I feel good I was like I don't worry there's nothing to worry about I feel happy and use those where while in a meditative state to kind of push small buttons on these modules to exercise them and I think that has a potential I think is possible to go that way so for the future I kind of see that will have both apps for happiness exercise actually we designed one that's hopefully will be out for iPhone pretty soon and also kind of brain gyms very not just do running but you can also hook up with this biofeedback machines that can see our today I'll train the off button for my anxiety problem or well train just to be elevating my mood a little bit and that sort of thing and I thinking sometimes sometime in the future we will have that and the nice thing about having that is that then happiness is really a quite cheap commodity people can exercise themselves a good life and I don't I'm not going to need all this other artifacts and things that spend their money on and people can even be happy whatever circumstances they are in this is a tradition dating back to like Dede the monks of the Buddhist orders but particular India Tibet use this sort of happiness exercises to some extent and they claim they can be happy in a single cell in in Lhasa even just by exercising the brain so I think is possible and I wish a good luck with the exercises so thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 53,485

Rating: 4.5066867 out of 5

Keywords: UK, English, Health, TEDx, tedx talks, TEDxLSE, tedx, ted x, Education, Pscyhology, Lifestyle, ted talks, tedx talk, ted talk, ted, Science

Id: LUxsOgXjqUs

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 16 2014