How the Brain Does Consciousness: Biological Research Perspectives

Now here's an interesting one, in conjunction with another study I read not long ago, showing that less complex inputs reach conscious awareness faster than more complex ones.

Expectations Speed Up Conscious Perception

The human brain works incredibly fast. However, visual impressions are so complex that their processing takes several hundred milliseconds before they enter our consciousness. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main have now shown that this delay may vary in length. When the brain possesses some prior information − that is, when it already knows what it is about to see − conscious recognition occurs faster.
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Other research has revealed that our brains are constantly making predictions and comparing input with those predictions.

Even when our eyes make their constant unconscious shifting movements, our brains are unconsciously imagining what they should see immediately prior to each shift.

This process, no doubt, makes it easy work to identify "red flags" that need special attention, and allows conforming input to be processed much more quickly.
 
The more I read "Human", the more it seems to me that a deeper understanding of the brain is going to draw in many sorts of unexpected topics.

I don't have my copy with me right now, but I think it was Comides and Tooms (?) who explored the evolutionary advantages of aesthetic sensibilities.

From my POV, it boiled down to an argument that the nuts and bolts of aesthetic sensitivity is one aspect of our innate curiosity, which allows us to learn from each other and to "store information in the environment". In many situations, it helps us choose the right sort of things to be highly curious about.

Critters who are attracted to the natural world, the opposite sex, and displays of skill -- and, I would add, any thing they feel they don't understand but should -- and who automatically pay close attention to them because they enjoy the experience, are more likely to succeed.

Of course, the textook example of enviro-storage is language. Becoming verbal is a biological developmental phase*, but the particular language we learn is offloaded from the genome and onto, well, brains, to put it simply.

The human brain is built for an environment of other brains, and if it doesn't have them, it won't develop correctly.

I think eventually it may be possible to describe culture entirely in terms of brains and physical environment.

Then again, it may not. I don't think there's a definitive answer yet on whether everything bubbles up from the substrata, or if each level of macrostructure adds inputs that cannot be detected at lower levels.


*It's been shown that if other verbal brains aren't available, a group of brains will spontaneously invent its own language, which will follow the general rules that apply to all human languages on Earth.
 
Every post you make in this thread becomes more and more illucid. What the hell is an "enviro-storage?" Not a single paper in pubmed uses the term, so what "biological research" are we supposed to use to discuss all this?

I don't think there's a definitive answer yet on whether everything bubbles up from the substrata, or if each level of macrostructure adds inputs that cannot be detected at lower levels.
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You seem to have a firm idea of how the brain works, but, unfortunately, it's an idea which appears rooted in pop psychology without any real neuroscience behind it. Would you like me to try and correct you, or leave you alone to stew?
 
Beelzebuddy said:
What the hell is an "enviro-storage?" Not a single paper in pubmed uses the term, so what "biological research" are we supposed to use to discuss all this?
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I didn't see that term used in anything I read, either. Wasn't quoting there.

The concept of storing information in the environment is in Gazzaniga's "Human". I've left it somewhere, but if you want larger citations &/or references to the cited studies, I can post that sometime tomorrow.
 
Piggy said:
Of course! As long as it's on-topic, corrections are a good thing.
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Err, you've already rejected current biological research on consciousness (that it doesn't exist) as not being on topic.

piggy said:
Be my guest, but please, if you do, do it on some other thread, if you don't mind.

This particular thread is about brain research and consciousness. It's just got to be that way, or else we're going to get on endless tangents.
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You followed it up with a couple of posts saying you were totally sure it existed as a real, discrete (not discreet, btw) phenomenon.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
Err, you've already rejected current biological research on consciousness (that it doesn't exist) as not being on topic.
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If there's biological research on consciousness and the brain which indicates that consciousness doesn't exist, I don't know why that would not be relevant to this thread.
 
Piggy said:
If there's biological research on consciousness and the brain which indicates that consciousness doesn't exist, I don't know why that would not be relevant to this thread.
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...ok.

Ultimately, no one has found any indication of anything we call "consciousness" in the brain. Some of its components maybe. Attention, that's a real biological thing. Self-awareness, there's bits of brain that seem to relate to that. Memory, well, memory probably plays a much bigger role than most people realize. When you do something and don't remember it, people tend to call that "unconscious' or "subconscious" action, when in fact it was just your episodic memory not giving a crap about this particular commute or brushing of your teeth. Doesn't mean you weren't "conscious" while you were doing it.

So if I might take a whack at this knot, I would propose discarding the term "consciousness" entirely. It's just a bad, bad term, made worse over the years by generations of armchair philosophers, crank psychologists, and college sophomores, who have ideas which make, like, total sense to them despite not having any rooting in actual biology.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
So if I might take a whack at this knot, I would propose discarding the term "consciousness" entirely.
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I'm sorry, but since there's a lot of contemporary research on the topic, much of which as been cited, no, I'm not going to scuttle this thread based on that post.

This thread is about research on the brain related to consciousness. If you'd like to start a thread arguing against the notion that consciousness is worthy of scientific exploration, great.

I've got no objection to the discussion of any studies that really do indicate some problem in the trajectory of research into the observable phenomenon of conscious awareness. But that discussion will have to be grounded in brain research in order to fit within the topic described in this thread's OP.
 
So, if we're not allowed to talk about consciousness not existing, how do we discuss its nonexistence? "Problems in the trajectory of research into the observable phenomenon of conscious awareness" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
So, if we're not allowed to talk about consciousness not existing, how do we discuss its nonexistence? "Problems in the trajectory of research into the observable phenomenon of conscious awareness" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
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Do you have any research on the brain you'd like to discuss?
 
Beelzebuddy said:
...ok.

Ultimately, no one has found any indication of anything we call "consciousness" in the brain. Some of its components maybe. Attention, that's a real biological thing. Self-awareness, there's bits of brain that seem to relate to that. Memory, well, memory probably plays a much bigger role than most people realize. When you do something and don't remember it, people tend to call that "unconscious' or "subconscious" action, when in fact it was just your episodic memory not giving a crap about this particular commute or brushing of your teeth. Doesn't mean you weren't "conscious" while you were doing it.

So if I might take a whack at this knot, I would propose discarding the term "consciousness" entirely. It's just a bad, bad term, made worse over the years by generations of armchair philosophers, crank psychologists, and college sophomores, who have ideas which make, like, total sense to them despite not having any rooting in actual biology.
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I can't help but notice you haven't actually posted any links to any research regarding the nonexistence of consciousness.
 
Malerin said:
I can't help but notice you haven't actually posted any links to any research regarding the nonexistence of consciousness.
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I think what Dynamic is trying to point out is that there isn't any research regarding the existence of consciousness, as piggy is treating the issue, either.

Plenty of research has been done on specific aspects of brain function that collectively one might label "consciousness." But I defy you to find a single credible study, of anything, that lends itself to any rational conclusions resembling the sweeping suppositions piggy is making on this thread about "consciousness" in general.

The approach being taken here reminds me of how very intelligent people, ages ago, developed scientific theories about substance ( that whole wind, water, fire, earth thing) based on "research" into how things reacted with each other. If you restrict yourself to high level observations, you can come up with just about any old crazy theory explaining the cause of those observations -- and who is to say otherwise? How could you prove that there were more than 4 elements before we had instruments capable of illuminating the inconsistencies in such a theory?

Except, we have those instruments. We know how neurons work. We have decades and decades of research on how biological neural networks in animals function. Heck, we can simulate a rat's neocortex. We know how vision works at the neuron level, we have promising ideas about how memory works at the neuron level, but hey -- lets just ignore all that, because it involves "computer science," and focus on the research that will never shed nearly as much light on the issue because we don't want to hurt our brains thinking about it.

Trying to learn about human brain functioning using the kind of research being referenced here is like trying to figure out the workings of an internal combustion engine by watching a car drive around.
 
Piggy said:
Do you have any research on the brain you'd like to discuss?
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I would like to discuss vision and recall.

The vision system can be roughly modeled as a set of filters, with each layer operating on the output of the previous one. At some point, signals from the brain are also input, meaning the network goes from being feedforward to being recurrent.

Does the research give any insight into what layer of filtering that recurrence occurs? We know it isn't at the top layer, because our recall of visual perception is not even close to the detail of actual perception. But it would be interesting to know at what layer our memory of an object starts to excite the associated filters. Is it somewhere in the LGN, or not until the visual cortex proper?
 
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