How the Brain Does Consciousness: Biological Research Perspectives

[Piggy]

You mean "perceiving them," I presume. There is a difference, you can perceive things and act on them without paying attention to either, it's how you can drive and carry on a conversation without running off the road.

Perception and attention are not mutually exclusive. In studies of visual masking, exposure to visual input at subliminal time frames, and so forth, the brain is both attending to and perceiving things which the subject is not consciously aware of.

Of course, the nail in the coffin of the notion that attention = consciousness = attention is Terry Schiavo.

Her brain damage was such that she could not have possibly been consciously aware of anything. And yet she had not lost all attention functions -- she could track motion, turn toward light, turn toward sound, and so forth.

 

[Piggy]

You failed to post a citation, but I suspect no, it doesn't. It objectively distinguishes between low level perception and high level perception.

No, I did not fail to post a citation. It's there. You can look up Koch's piece yourself.

If you'd like Koch's citations for the original publications, here they are:

Leopold, D.A., & Logothetis, N.K. (1996). Activity changes in early visual cortex reflects monkeys' percepts during binocular rivalry. Nature, 379, 549-553.

Logothetis, N.K. (1998). Single units and conscious vision. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci., 353, 1801-1818.

Blake, R., & Logothetis, N.K. (2002). Visual competition. Nat. Rev. Neurosci., 3, 13-21.

Kim, C.-Y., & Blake, R. (2005). Psychophysical magic: Rendering the visible "invisible." Trends Cog. Sci., 9, 381-388.

Now, you can insist on ignoring consciousness and focusing instead on the processes involved in conscious awareness, but as I've said, this is tantamount to denying that running exists or that oceans exist on the basis of adhering stubbornly to a lower level of granularity.

But thank goodness there are people who are doing research into conscious awareness because the field is robust, productive, and useful.

Anyone who undergoes anesthesia benefits, as do people with locked-in syndrome, and so forth.

If you want to hold firm to your bizarre claim that neither you nor I nor anyone reading this thread nor anyone else in the world is actually conscious, obviously there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise, but that is certainly not the view of the neurobiologists who are conducting this research, so there's no point in discussing it with you any further.

You can just keep on believin', brother. Good luck with that.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Are you finished multiposting? I'd reply but I don't want to interrupt you.

 

[Piggy]

Are you finished multiposting? I'd reply but I don't want to interrupt you.

I know some folks get aggravated at the way I break up posts, but I have a similar reaction to posts that attempt to deal with multiple issues at once. It's just how my brain works, I don't know why.

But anyway, yes, I'm done with my replies, so fire away.

ETA: But I'm serious about not continuing the discussion about whether or not consciousness exists. That's a waste of time.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

You can define an ocean - the large bodies of salt water that exist between continental shelves. You can define running, and even subtype it into jogging vs sprinting, each of which have a well-characterized patten of motion, with structural and locomotive pattern generators developed explicitly for them.

But you can't define consciousness, except in the vaguest wishy-washy terms. Any attempt to actually put objective words to it so far has fallen flat, so you've been using "simple observation" instead, as if that means a danged thing, and trying to equivocate away the specifics where possible. This isn't a scientific discussion, it's the semantic equivalent of chasing a greased pig.

Proving consciousness exists is even simpler -- wake up.

So consciousness is being awake? Is that what you're saying consciousness is?

Of course, the nail in the coffin of the notion that attention = consciousness = attention is Terry Schiavo.

So consciousness is NOT attention? Can we agree on this? Because you keep tossing up attentional phenomena as evidence of consciousness.

Her brain damage was such that she could not have possibly been consciously aware of anything. And yet she had not lost all attention functions -- she could track motion, turn toward light, turn toward sound, and so forth.

Except that's not attention at all, that's reflex. Schiavo was a brainstem with hair and a feeding tube. Attention is purely a cortical phenomenon.

FYI: Attention, what we know and don't know about it.

Anyone who undergoes anesthesia benefits, as do people with locked-in syndrome, and so forth.

Do people under anesthesia exhibit consciousness? What if they wake up (it happens!), but later have no memory of it (also happens)?

If you want to hold firm to your bizarre claim that neither you nor I nor anyone reading this thread nor anyone else in the world is actually conscious, obviously there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise

I disagree, I'm always open to changing my mind. But first you're going to need to define consciousness. Tell us what you mean. Waving your hands and repeating "running ocean running observing" doesn't do it, and you've vacillated all over the map over the course of this thread, so I can't infer from your description what meaning "consciousness" takes this particular minute.

What
is
consciousness?

You can just keep on believin', brother. Good luck with that.

I ain't the one runnin' on faith here, friend.

 

[Piggy]

Sorry, dude. You're asking for a formal definition where none is yet to be had. Establishing such a definition would be a major milestone of the research.

If you're going to let that fact override your own direct observation of the fact that you cycle through various states of consciousness in any given day, and the fact that everyone else appears to do the same, and that these states are consistently associated with specific neural states, well, you're on your own.

 

[Piggy]

So consciousness is being awake? Is that what you're saying consciousness is?

See the OP. For the purposes of this thread, dreaming -- which is extremely similar neurologically to waking awareness -- is also included.

Also, "being awake" is way too broad, since non-conscious behavior of the brain is also part of "being awake".

So consciousness is NOT attention? Can we agree on this? Because you keep tossing up attentional phenomena as evidence of consciousness.

Consciousness and attention are not identical, that is clear. It is also clear that attention is one of the processes involved in waking consciousness, along with memory, perception, and so forth.

Is attention involved in dreaming? I can't answer that, although I'd be interested in seeing research on the topic.

Except that's not attention at all, that's reflex. Schiavo was a brainstem with hair and a feeding tube. Attention is purely a cortical phenomenon.

OK, I can live with that.

Do people under anesthesia exhibit consciousness? What if they wake up (it happens!), but later have no memory of it (also happens)?

Depends on the anesthesia. We've seen one study cited on this thread which observed the effects of anesthesia that caused consciousness to cease.

When I had my heart operation, they didn't knock me out altogether, so I was not unconscious, but I certainly wasn't in the same state of consciousness I'm in right now.

If you wake up during an operation, then of course you're conscious. There are also cases of people being locked-in during surgery -- they're conscious, but cannot speak or move.

If you're having an experience of something, you're conscious. If you're not having an experience of anything, you're not.

Being able to recall our conscious states really has no bearing on the matter, unless of course you believe that the things we don't remember actually never happened.

 

[Piggy]

Btw, regarding observational definitions, if we were actually to accept the notion that phenomena which only have observational definitions do not really exist, then we would have to believe that the aurora borealis did not exist prior to our modern understanding of light and atmosphere.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Man, forum ate my post. Ah well.

To sum up: oceans, the act of running and now the aurora borealis can all be observed directly. Consciousness can't. We can only observe the actions of people and theorize that something like consciousness is causing those actions.

Better comparative observations include the soul, the id, and body thetans, all of them equally valid theories for why people do what they do.

 

[Piggy]

To sum up: oceans, the act of running and now the aurora borealis can all be observed directly. Consciousness can't.

This is ludicrous. Unless you're saying that there's no difference in your experience when you fall asleep, start dreaming, stop dreaming, wake up, go under anesthesia, come out of anesthesia, and so forth. In which case, it's still ludicrous.

 

[Piggy]

Except that's not attention at all, that's reflex. Schiavo was a brainstem with hair and a feeding tube. Attention is purely a cortical phenomenon.

FYI: Attention, what we know and don't know about it.

Actually, I have to come back to this b/c it's been bothering me.

Attention is not purely a high-level process.

When you see a bright light, or a fast motion, or hear a loud noise, for instance, the attentional process begins non-consciously as your brain directs your head and eyes to move toward the source.

TS had some of her attentional mechanisms intact, but none of the mechanisms underlying conscious awareness.

And btw, would you care to elaborate on the article that you've linked to the abstract of, there, and its significance and relevance to the issue of consciousness?

Anyway, things are crazy busy for me still, but I'll try to continue posting more research as soon as I can.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

This is ludicrous. Unless you're saying that there's no difference in your experience when you fall asleep, start dreaming, stop dreaming, wake up, go under anesthesia, come out of anesthesia, and so forth. In which case, it's still ludicrous.

Oh, I'm sure there is. But you're positing a mechanism behind the subjective experience of it and then calling it an objective theory. Which is ludicrous.

Subjective experience can't be easily falsified. The phenomena you attribute to consciousness, someone else may attribute to the touch of God's hand upon their soul, and someone else might attribute to chi flowing through their body. It's not like running, the ocean, or the aurora borealis. It's not observable, measurable, or falsifiable.

When you see a bright light, or a fast motion, or hear a loud noise, for instance, the attentional process begins non-consciously as your brain directs your head and eyes to move toward the source.

TS had some of her attentional mechanisms intact, but none of the mechanisms underlying conscious awareness.

Which mechanisms are these that underlie conscious awareness? Why did TS have have the beginning of the "attentional" process, and not the "conscious" process? Why would either concept be invoked by the optomotor reflex (what she actually had) at all? For something you claim to be unable to define, you sure seem to be an expert on what consciousness is and isn't.

And btw, would you care to elaborate on the article that you've linked to the abstract of, there, and its significance and relevance to the issue of consciousness?

Happy to. Basically, it says that attention is a high level process.

 

[Piggy]

Oh, I'm sure there is. But you're positing a mechanism behind the subjective experience of it and then calling it an objective theory. Which is ludicrous.

Subjective experience can't be easily falsified. The phenomena you attribute to consciousness, someone else may attribute to the touch of God's hand upon their soul, and someone else might attribute to chi flowing through their body. It's not like running, the ocean, or the aurora borealis. It's not observable, measurable, or falsifiable. .

Nothing is being attributed. You are burdening consciousness with baggage that doesn't belong to it, and which neurobiology is not at all concerned with.

We have two sets of observations.

We have observations of electro-chemical activity in the brain, and we have observations of conscious states and experiences.

The purpose of biological research into consciousness is to explore how those two sets of observations are correlated and, hopefully -- most would say eventually -- develop an explanatory framework for those correlations.

That's it.

At no time is consciousness conceived of as an entity like a soul, or as some mysterious substance like chi, or as some supernatural event like divine intervention. That's your own addition.

So yes, it is like running or the aurora borealis.

Before modern theories of light and a modern understanding of the atmosphere and the cosmos, we could only say that the aurora was "those colored lights that appear in the northern sky sometimes" or attribute it to divine action. We consider it explained in scientific terms when we can correlate the observed light with other observations about the natural world and understand the relationship between them.

Before modern understanding of the body, running was just "moving very quickly in a way that sometimes has both feet off the ground simultaneously" or something like that. Now we can explain it more completely by referring to muscle cells, neurons, tendons, ligaments, and so forth.

Now, to get back to the actual topic of this thread, perhaps you can explain how the studies cited thus far suffer from a lack of measurability, observability, and falsifiability?

ETA: The phenomena are not caused by consciousness, they are consciousness.

 

[Piggy]

Which mechanisms are these that underlie conscious awareness? Why did TS have have the beginning of the "attentional" process, and not the "conscious" process? Why would either concept be invoked by the optomotor reflex (what she actually had) at all? For something you claim to be unable to define, you sure seem to be an expert on what consciousness is and isn't.

The same mechanisms that have been researched in the studies cited thus far. TS could not have been conscious because the requisite real estate in her brain had been destroyed. I don't know of any neuroscientist who disagrees with that. Do you now disagree that certain areas of the brain are required for conscious awareness (such as the zones of the brain stem which you linked to) while others are not (such as the cerebellum)?

TS still had part of her attentional apparatus intact because her injuries did not wipe out all her brain tissue, and the tissue that was left was suffient to allow her to perceive motion, light, and sound, and to allow her brain to respond by directing her head and eyes toward it, which is fundamental to the attentional process.

 

[INRM]

Piggy,

So the Claustrum has connections to the Centromedian Nucleus.

BTW: What exactly is the ILN?

 

[Piggy]

Piggy,

So the Claustrum has connections to the Centromedian Nucleus.

BTW: What exactly is the ILN?

I'm not finding any descriptions on the Web that I like... either too terse or not very accessible....

Rita Carter's book on the human brain has a nice illustration showing their position.

The ILN are the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus -- that is, groups of neurons located within the lamina.

Here's an abstract regarding their role in visual awareness.

Let me see if I can dig up some clearer descriptions and either link or quote them later today.

Btw, here's one discussion of the thalamus and consciousness, but I can't vouch for it.

 

[Piggy]

I'm trying to find the PDFs... they should be tucked back in some data-crevice somewhere at the office... but for now here's a description of some work from my field regarding attention v. conscious awareness.

One of the more frustrating (for advertisers) features of the Web is a phenomenon known as "banner blindness". That is, people look at banner ads but ignore them.

In one study, a group of people was asked to search a Web page for the current global population.

So they'd been primed to search for this particular information.

What's more, the information was prominently displayed and labeled in a large red box near the upper right of the page.

Using an eye tracking device, the researchers were able to establish that everyone in the group, at some point, looked right at this box. And yet an extremely small percentage of them found the answer to the question they'd been asked!

The vast majority of them instead concluded that the information was not on the page and began clicking links.

So how is it that these people's brains could be primed for the stimulus, and their eyes could look directly at it, but they were never aware that they had actually seen it?

This happens because the non-conscious modules of the brain do a lot of work before anything is handled by the modules that enable conscious awareness.

We are not aware of a face as a mob of colors and angles and shades, but as a face. We are not aware of an onslaught of images and sounds, but rather "Jim saying my name". A lot of binding has to go on before anything can be made available to consciousness. (See the McGurk effect linked earlier.)

For most people with experience using the Web, a large red box at the upper right is processed by the pre-conscious modules as an ad.

Keep in mind that these modules make decisions based on partial information. When they get enough information to make a match -- e.g. that looks like a face, or that looks like an ad, or that looks like an animal -- they go with it unless some other information trumps the match -- e.g. that's a wallpaper pattern that looks like a face in dim light.

(This is why many advertisers go out of their way to make their ads appear to be articles, btw.)

So although their eyes perceived the box with the global population number and label in it, for most people the non-conscious modules that handled the signals from the eyes mismatched it as something that did not need to be moved along the chain, and so higher-level processing was never applied to it.

We can contrast this study with the case of a NASCAR driver who was able to avoid piling into a crash that he could not see, because of a curve, seemingly on "instinct".

Had he not taken evasive action before he could perceive the crash, he would have been part of it.

When he reviewed the car-cam tapes, however, he was able to comprehend consciously what he had not been aware of at the time -- the body language of the crowd.

Normally, the crowd is looking down the track toward the approaching drivers and cheering.

In the video, he could see that the crowd was instead looking up the track and not cheering. Non-conscious modules of his track-experienced brain paid attention to this -- even though his conscious brain was completely focused on his driving and ignoring the crowd -- and triggered responses that resulted in him slowing down on a "gut feeling".

So as we see, attention and consciousness are not equivalent. Which is why The Cognitive Neurosciences, for example, has different sections for "Attention" and "Consciousness".

 

[Beth]

You can define an ocean - the large bodies of salt water that exist between continental shelves.

But you can't define consciousness, except in the vaguest wishy-washy terms.

Consciousness can be defined as what animals are when they are not asleep. It's not a perfect definition but it is no more vague or wishy-washy than your definition of ocean above.

What is consciousness?

No one knows exactly. That is the question that some scientists are attempting to answer and Piggy is exploring in this thread.

To sum up: oceans, the act of running and now the aurora borealis can all be observed directly. Consciousness can't. We can only observe the actions of people and theorize that something like consciousness is causing those actions.

Consciousness can only be observed directly in oneself. Based on that observation, most people feel they can reasonably conclude that other people and animals are conscious when they observe that they are awake.

I do not understand the denial of the phenomenon of consciousness. Do you also deny the phenomenon of sleep? After all, if consciousness doesn't exist, why should being asleep be considered something different from being awake?

 

[Beelzebuddy]

I do not understand the denial of the phenomenon of consciousness.

Pulling this out because it's really the crux of yours and piggy's argument.

Science doesn't work this way. Religion works this way.

As a philosophical term, shorthand for, yknow, thinking and stuff, "consciousness" works fine. It doesn't need to have a real meaning, because philosophy isn't expected to have a real use.

As a scientific term, "consciousness" is meaningless drivel. It didn't have to be. Early neuroscientists firmly believed they'd quickly find a part of the brain that acted as a command and control center; the "seat of consciousness." They didn't. So some gave up, and the rest looked harder. Still didn't. Same thing, repeated a few times, and now we're down to these two guys who swear consciousness is just hiding under this next rock. Meanwhile consciousness hasn't had a jot of further definition from all their efforts, all we have are a few more (conflicting) views on what it isn't.

"Studying consciousness" is exactly the wrong way to go about the science. You aren't starting with empirical observations and deriving testable theories, you're starting from an untestable theory and trying to find observational gaps where the theory can be shoehorned in. You're arguing from what is sensible, instead of what is.

 

[Guybrush Threepwood]

We can contrast this study with the case of a NASCAR driver who was able to avoid piling into a crash that he could not see, because of a curve, seemingly on "instinct".

Had he not taken evasive action before he could perceive the crash, he would have been part of it.

When he reviewed the car-cam tapes, however, he was able to comprehend consciously what he had not been aware of at the time -- the body language of the crowd.

Normally, the crowd is looking down the track toward the approaching drivers and cheering.

In the video, he could see that the crowd was instead looking up the track and not cheering. Non-conscious modules of his track-experienced brain paid attention to this -- even though his conscious brain was completely focused on his driving and ignoring the crowd -- and triggered responses that resulted in him slowing down on a "gut feeling".

Can you provide the reference for this one? I'm particularly interested in how the study determined what he was aware of at the time of the crash.