by Paul Singh
Several of nature’s own brutal experiments with the human brain (such as through accidents and strokes) show that consciousness is nothing but a brain function. Consciousness cannot and does not exist as something independent of the brain as most religions, theologians, dualist philosophers, and some scientists believe. As a practicing physician, I have personally encountered hundreds of victims of stroke on hospital rounds over the years. Some of these cases are rather interesting and clearly show that human consciousness is a brain phenomenon. The impairment of one aspect of consciousness always corresponds to the part of the brain that controls that function. Often other parts of the brain eventually take over some of the missing functions and the lost function returns in a limited way. Regaining such function depends on the extent and location of the damage in the brain.
I have been fortunate to have had two patients in my private practice to study, both females in their twenties, who lost half of their brain, one of them due to infection in-utero and the other one due to brain infection when she was a teenager. The one who lost half of her brain in utero was able to recover more than 75 percent of lost brain function, but the other patient who had one half of the brain surgically removed as a teenager had only modest recovery of her deficits. This shows that the brain’s plasticity is not unlimited.
There are some rather dramatic examples of strokes that are documented in the neurological literature. Some of these are particularly worth mentioning because they show that there is no free will, consciousness, or self independent of the brain. They are illusions in that they are constructs of the human brain. Some outstanding examples are the alien hand syndrome, phantom limb syndrome, and the Capgras syndrome. There are neural networks in the brain that are known as the “ownership module.” When sensory, visual, and propioceptive pathways synchronize with the motor planning part of the cortex that supplies nerves to the limb (which is what a healthy brain does), we get the impression that we own and control a particular limb of our body. If a stroke causes a disruption in the ownership module, then we no longer believe that we control the movement of a certain part of our body. In alien hand syndrome, the patients believe that their hand is not moving with their command but moving on its own. These are perfectly intelligent people and their intellect tells them that their belief makes no sense and yet that is what they believe.
The opposite of alien hand syndrome is the phantom limb syndrome, in which the lesion or disruption is in the motor pathways going to the limb or in the motor planning part of the cortex itself. This happens when a stroke kills the nerve conduction to that limb and paralyzes the muscles in the limb while the ownership module remains intact. The same syndrome can result in patients who have had a limb amputated. The patient continues to feel the missing limb and even continues to experience the pain in the limb, a limb that does not exist. Patients can also itch or move that limb but unfortunately they can only do this in their mind. But such mental manipulation does not really help alleviate the pain they feel in their missing hand. The neuroscientist Ramachandran was able to fool the patient’s brain with phantom limbs by using the patient’s other arm in front of the mirror at certain angles and giving his patient’s brain the impression that their missing arm really existed. They could then scratch or move their intact arm by sending a visual signal to the brain that the missing limb had been scratched. Through the mirror image, the missing limb appears to be actually present to the eye. Patients were thus able to actually alleviate their itch or pain by scratching or moving that missing limb by fooling the brain. This has been one of the great medical breakthroughs of the last two decades. All these experiments and various aspects of the experiments have confirmed over and again that there is no one coherent consciousness in the brain and that such a feeling is an illusion constructed by the brain.
The Capgras syndrome also illustrates the way consciousness is inseparably connected to the brain and, more importantly, the way parts of the brain have their own independent consciousness, showing, once again, that there is no one coherent consciousness. In this syndrome, a lesion occurs in the emotional part of the patient’s brain, the brain region that gives emotional significance to face recognition, while the face recognition area in the brain is intact. Such patients believe that their relatives and loved ones are imposters. A similar lesion in other patients can make them believe that the house they live in is not their real house or they may believe that their sofa, for example, has also been replaced with an exact replica. They often insist on going back to their own home. When they are walked around the block and then brought back to their home, their brain temporarily believes that they are in their real home. However, the brain goes back to the same feeling very quickly and they believe that this house is not theirs although it looks like theirs.
The classic case is that of a British musicologist, Clive Wearing, who had a legion in his hippocampus and was unable to be conscious of anything in the environment for more than 20 seconds at a time. He could not create new memories. This confirms that our consciousness of anything is inextricably tied to our memories. If the memories are gone, the consciousness disappears simultaneously. And memories are created and stored by the brain over time; they are not supernatural. There are numerous cases of hippocampus lesions in the scientific literature that have affected patients’ consciousnesses in different ways depending on the type, size, and location of injury in the hippocampus area.
Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is a remarkable example of how organic brain conditions can lead to altering or even shutting down aspects of consciousness altogether. Patients with this disorder can suddenly switch their consciousness from one person to another, their name can change, their age can change, and they can switch from being an adult to being a child in a second. People with a history of post-traumatic stress often experience these different personalities in their dreams, although such dreams can be experienced by anyone with lesser traumas. Since no one is immune to traumatic experience, almost anyone can have such dreams. I have seen several patients in my practice who have reported to me dreams that freeze them in time in childhood, where they have no consciousness of their current status such as having been married with children and so on. I have hypothesized that the etiology of multiple personality disorders may lie in traumatic life experiences. Magical explanations of one independent coherent consciousness, therefore, do not explain such disorders of consciousness, unless one believes there is a separate self which fragments into a multitude of other selves—which seems nonsensical.
Idiomotor effects, often observed in daily life, are essentially subconscious automatic motor controls that show the disconnect between what we consider our consciousness and our motor movements. They are also reminders that consciousness is not independent of the brain. This shows that there is no single coherent consciousness that is independent of the brain. In fact the brain’s function is always automatic; it is just that it is somewhat easier to see this more clearly in examples of idiomotor behaviors. For example, many of us have experienced arriving at our destination after driving for a long time, changing several highways and taking many exists and not remembering a thing about how we got there. Our brains have been “trained” to automatically perform that seemingly simple but very complex task. How often we look for a lost key and then just after we have already given up on the idea of ever finding that key or wallet again, the answer suddenly pops up in our mind. This happens because our brain was working on this problem subconsciously without consulting the “ghost” that we believe lives somewhere inside of us.
Another example of idiomotor control is the Ouija board where a group of people put their hands on a planchette that is on a board with numbers and letters and ask the spirits to answer some questions. The practitioners don’t realize that they all subconsciously contribute to the moving of the planchette ever so slightly so that it ends up pointing in some direction. The moving planchette is the resultant vector of individual subconscious mechanical for
ces which make the planchette move in one direction or the other.
Water dousing is another example where several studies have now shown that the douser sub-consciously moves the rods when he comes to a spot where he has a good reason to believe that there is water underneath the ground. Water dousers use forked sticks to locate underground water. When dousers have been tested, however, and their eyes are covered so they can’t see where they are, they are unable to locate the water. This shows that any success they have is not due to any paranormal ability but rather to clues they were picking up from the environment. When they have no access to these clues, their powers fail. Their subconscious has nothing to work with when their eyes are blinded.
It also turns out that facilitated communication with disabled children that became very popular in the 1980s could also be explained by the facilitator’s moving the disabled child’s hand subconsciously over the letter board. All intuitions are subconscious phenomena. For example, our internal states or social cues that we all use all the time are subconscious processes. A fifteenth-century Indian mystic, Namdev, talks in his poetry of how a mother is always aware if something has gone wrong with her infant in the crib even when she is in a different room. He claims that even a cow is aware of her calf in trouble when the calf wanders off on a prairie. Mystics present these examples as some sort of magical spiritual power, but they are wrong. It is simply the mind working subconsciously and the brain reporting its internal states to us, keeping us in touch with external reality. If you have a premonition that someone is going to have an accident today and it happens, it is not because you have psychic powers but because you made an educated guess based on your knowledge of the character, and the habits of the driver—or maybe you just made a lucky guess. The brain automatically makes such complicated calculations without us having any conscious awareness of it at all.
Conclusion
In conclusion, only scientific skepticism and critical thinking which are direct products of our neocortex, can free us from the many superstitions we are all prone to. Absence of one of these two elements can lead us astray. Religion and superstition are the products of our emotional brain. However, we can filter our emotions through the higher parts of our brains to test our beliefs to see if they are facts or fiction. Developing emotional intelligence is a very difficult process. It does not come to us naturally but is a skill that can be developed through practice. Just as it takes time to become a piano player, it takes a long time to develop critical thinking skills. The most important thing in life for anyone to learn is that our universe is very mysterious and that we cannot know everything. What we do know, however, is that if we commit ourselves to the process of learning, we will be less likely to go wrong. We may be uncertain but we will know things that are more likely to be true instead of believing what we wish to be true. We need to employ scientific principles in our effort to understand the world. Science is not a set of conclusions; it is a process that involves honesty, skepticism, and critical thinking
Science also shows us that natural effects have natural causes only. We cannot be absolutely certain whether there is nothing supernatural above the natural world but we have no access to such information. The only sensible thing to do then is to be satisfied with uncertainty and accept the limitations of human knowledge. Otherwise we will all end up becoming philosophers with individual opinions about reality and then fight among ourselves like Kilkenny cats, as we have done for thousands of years with no end in sight and no improvement in human knowledge
It is fair to say that brain science today is at the stage the theory of evolution was before the discovery of molecular biology and DNA. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were still many unanswered questions about the theory of evolution but the path was clear. We just needed more data to confirm or refute what we already knew. A huge quantity of data from molecular biology and genetics has piled up since then that has convinced all reasonable people that the theory of evolution by natural selection is almost certainly true. We will, of course, never be absolutely certain whether the theory of evolution is true because science does not claim to know anything with absolute certainty. It only claims to know things with high probability. Similarly, more and more evidence is now piling up in neurological and brain-related disciplines to convince us that there is just the brain and no supernatural consciousness, self, or free will. I suspect that within 100 years from now the state of brain science will be at the level that the theory of evolution is today. I further suspect that by then we will have created consciousness in our laboratory that will demonstrate conclusively that consciousness cannot exist independently of the brain. One word of caution is that although consciousness is just a property of the brain, it does not logically follow that the ultimate reality which underlies consciousness is comprised of matter and energy. Most likely it is, but we simply don’t know yet. Science has concluded thus far that matter and energy (and perhaps energy more than matter) is the foundational reality of our universe. But if that is the case, science also acknowledges that we still don’t know the true nature of matter and energy. We don’t know for sure what matter is made of (and matter, we should note, comprises only about four percent of the universe) and we certainly don’t understand, at least not yet, the remaining 96 percent of our universe which is dark matter and dark energy. Undoubtedly, however, advances in science will someday provide us with answers to these questions. In any case, we do not need to rely on philosophical speculation and religious superstitions. Those are things of the past when we did not know better.
Further Reading:
Damasio, A. Descartes’ Error. New York: Avon, 1994.
Dewdney, A. K. 200% of Nothing: An Eye-Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Math Abuse and Innumeracy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 1996.
Donald, M. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: Norton, 2001.
Ekman, P. Emotions Revealed. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.
Evans, Jonathan. Bias in Human Reasoning: Causes and Consequences. London: Psychology Press, 1990.
Galinsky, A. D., and J. A. Whitson. “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception.”Science 322 (5898): 115—17.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. The Ethical Brain. New York: Dana Press, 2005.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. The Mind’s Past. London: University of California Press, 1998.
Gilovich, Thomas. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press, 1991.
Grandlin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Hinshaw, Stephen. Origins of the Human Mind. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2010.
Kida, Thomas E. Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The Six Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006.
Maslow, Abraham H. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper Collins, 1954.
Novella, Steven. “Body Snatchers, Phantom Limbs, and Alien Hands.” NeuroLogica blog. February 21, 2011. http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/body-snatchers-phantom-limbs-and-alien-hands/.
Novella, Steven. “A Neurological Approach to Skepticism.” NeuroLogica blog. June 30, 2008. http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/a-neurological-approach-to-skepticism/.
Novella, Steven. Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2012.
Specter, Michael. Denialism:How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Spellman, Frank R., and Joni Price-Bayer. In Defense of Science: Why Scientific Literacy Matters. Lanham, MD: Government Institutes, 2011.
Taper, Mark L., and Subhash R. Lele. The Nature of Scientific Evidence: Statistical, Philosophical and Empirical Considerations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science 185 (1974): 1124—31.
Winograd, Eugene, and Ulric Neisser, eds. Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of Flashbulb Memories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Exploring Consciousness using Science
It is first necessary to avoid defining consciousness in a way that obstructs scientific comprehension. Giving consciousness imaginary attributes such as something residing in us like a non-physical ghost or speculating about some cosmic form of consciousness that controls the entire universe does not help us understand anything. On the other hand, it opens up many doors for a variety of nonsensical statements by philosophers, most of which are inconsistent with the others. Suffice it to say that our personal subjective experience is at the very heart of what we define as consciousness.
No one has a problem with this fundamental core definition although it does not fully capture everything that is essential about consciousness. At least this is a partial definition that almost everyone will agree with. So why not start there? Insulating consciousness from any possibility of scientific explanation has kept philosophers and theologians busy for many centuries. Making consciousness seem to be an impenetrable mystery isn’t that hard for those who are most ignorant about it.
