Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  If we accept the interpretation, according to which the decision originator in the brain is actually present at the unconscious layer, and the conscious layer is informed about the decision only in retrospect, it might be connected to a supposedly strange approach called “epiphenomenalism.” According to this approach, conscious thinking that derives from free will has no effect on actions, and it is a type of by-product of brain activities that does not correlate with our behavior in practical terms of causality. If we feel that conscious thinking is the “big brother,” here is even a “bigger brother” in the brain who outlines the behavior channel through an unconscious pattern, and the “big brother” of conscious thinking is informed only in retrospect—although it attempts to ascribe the initiation of the action to itself in an illusionary pattern.

  A strange possibility that arises from these controversial findings is a technology that will enable us to monitor the readiness activity in the brain in almost real time. Then, we will be able to know, before the person himself, what this person would like to do in a few seconds and respond to it—for example, uttering a sound that will characterize activity that prepares the lifting of the right hand before the person knows he wishes to lift his right hand. In such a way, the natural order of things will become disrupted, and the direction of the arrow of time will be inverted, so that the effect will come before the cause. In other words, the implications of a future act will be known before the person “voluntarily” decides to perform it.

  The hierarchic direction of the chain of command is being questioned. Does consciousness determine the policy and the source of orders, or is it only a junior commander that receives reports in retrospect and falsely believes that it holds the general’s baton? Is our free will only a pawn in the chessboard of our brain whose moves are dictated by processes concealed from our consciousness? Is the approach that sees man as a creature of free will just naive, delusional humanism?

  When it comes to reflexive behaviors, such as withdrawing our hand upon touching a blazing object, there is no doubt the decision to withdraw our hand was not taken at a hierarchic scale topped by areas of consciousness. The same is true for the tapping on the kneecap, which makes our leg jump—a reaction due to activity at the spinal cord level that does not involve the brain. Is it possible, however, that the same process also takes place with respect to more fundamental decisions? Could it be that the royal gown of consciousness is only a version of the king’s new clothes?

  There are numerous methodological objections regarding Libet’s experiments, so the validity of the findings is controversial.

  A more comforting possibility is that the conscious layer that is led by free will has a power of veto with respect to decisions that are formed without it, which means its signature is required in order to execute an action.

  The “Inner Boundaries” of Knowing

  Subliminal thinking processes that take place below the threshold of consciousness are a central layer of our cognitive activity. “The knowing unconsciousness” is a kind of a twilight zone to which information is streaming and from which information is passed to the conscious areas, and it is an active, vibrant area. It often processes data at a higher speed than conscious processing. This is why, for example, at times of emergency, drivers press the brakes before they are aware of the need for an urgent stop.

  The brain probably processes supraliminal information (which crosses the threshold of consciousness) and subliminal information (below the threshold of consciousness) in a similar way. Contents from these two lanes, which meet the brain cells, cause similar effects.

  Our brain is proficient at hearing the unheard and seeing the unseen—in the sense of input processing at the unconscious layer.

  Subliminal stimulations shape many of our decisions as an input whose impressions, or shades, do not appear on the canvas of consciousness. As a result, part of our behavior is not navigated by consciousness. The navigator is often our subconscious.

  Thus, sometimes our brain is affected by a state of mind characterized by anxiety and concern whose cause is a mystery to our consciousness.

  Brain Priming

  Priming means exposing our brain to information that does not cross the threshold of consciousness. Subconscious priming creates an emotional charge that, in its turn, channels our consciousness to select a certain interpretation of reality or a certain behavioral pattern.

  An experiment was conducted during which the participants saw words on a screen for a particularly brief period of time, so the content of the words would not cross the threshold of consciousness. Some of these words had a violent message, while others had a peaceful message. When the participants left the room after watching the words on the screen, they came across a mock situation. The participants who were exposed to the words with the violent messages tended to react according to a more violent pattern of behavior compared to those who were exposed to the words carrying the peaceful message. We are exposed to unconscious influences more than we would like.

  In a similar experiment, students listened to a supposedly random list of words, most of which were related to old age: elderly, hoariness, lonely, wrinkles, etc. After the experiment ended, the students walked from the lab to the elevator more slowly than usual. They behaved like old people, although they were unaware of this change in their behavior. The words caused behavioral suggestion that was concealed from their consciousness.

  The Role of the Unconscious with Respect to Thinking

  “The dark matter” in the universe, which is concealed from our eyes, can be compared to the subconscious (which is concealed from the eyes of our consciousness). But, while we estimate the share of the dark matter as one-quarter of the mass of the universe, our subconscious constitutes the central processing layer in the brain.

  Nowadays, most brain researchers believe that most brain processing functions take place in the unconscious layers. Studies that attempted to estimate the relative part of consciousness in determining our behavior showed that its part is rather low—some say as low as 5 percent of our actions, which means that 95 percent is determined in the unconscious layer. The lion’s share of the plots in our brain is written anonymously in the subconscious layers.

  Some underestimate the relative part of consciousness even more and claim that it can be compared to the area taken by a bonfire at the heart of Australia (metaphorically speaking, the entire area of the Australian continent around the bonfire of consciousness represents the unconscious layers of our soul life).

  “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” (William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure).

  The volume of our knowledge is larger than the volume of our consciousness. We know more than we know we know. Some of the information in our brain is inaccessible to the conscious self.

  Our secretive brain is constantly active. Most inferences inferred by our brain are unconscious inferences, concealed from the eye of consciousness. Our consciousness suffers from agnosia (lack of knowing) with respect to a great part of the information that exists in our brain.

  Information processing in the brain partly takes place in a mode of lack of cognitive awareness, and it has served as the basis for numerous magnificent brainchildren in the history of human culture.

  An “exotic” example of a behavioral outcome that is based on information processing at the unconscious layer is “blindsight.” The term, which sounds like an oxymoron, refers to patients who suffer from damages in the occipital lobes of the cortex, which is in charge of processing visual input that is transferred from the retina through the paths of vision. A functional damage in this area leads to “cortical blindness”; people who suffer from it become blind, since this brain area, which is in charge of visual awareness, is damaged. People who suffer from this damage consciously claim they are blind and cannot see anything. When they are asked to guess the name of an object presented to them, however, their guess is correct in a way that cannot be attri
buted to random guessing. A plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that a certain visual input is led through the paths of vision, also, toward other brain areas that do not produce “sight awareness.” This information, which is contained at the unconscious levels of processing, affects the behavior of the subjects and the way they read the world.

  Visual input of a person who suffers from the “blindsight” syndrome is not exposed to the sun of consciousness, and it is active at the unconscious layers of visual input processing.

  “Forced memory” is a phenomenon that resembles the blindsight syndrome to some extent. It can also be found among people whose memory was damaged as a result of certain brain injuries, and they find it hard to recall certain events. When they are asked, however, to “guess” the details of a certain past scenario out of several possible scenarios, they manage to guess the correct scenario at a ratio that exceeds random probability.

  This could be called “the zombie within us”—it is a well-known fact that certain cognitive skills (such as implicit memory and blindsight) exist even without a conscious experience; they are, rather, in a mode of “zombie” information processing.

  Numerous pieces of evidence show that the zombie component is a central one, and some even claim it is the main component of our human essence.

  The Traits of Consciousness

  The spectrum of hypotheses regarding the nature of consciousness is broad.

  The creation story of human consciousness as we know it today, and the time that it first appeared in the skulls of our forefathers, is shrouded in mystery with regard to chronology. As far as the geographical location is concerned, however, it is common to relate it to the African savanna.

  Some claim that consciousness, as a trait that emerges from the brain, is a by-product of brain complexity that was created “unexpectedly.”

  It is agreed that the brain is essential for the creation of consciousness. But is it also a sufficient condition? In other words, is it all about the material essence of the brain?

  A person’s thoughts accompany him wherever he goes. They are rooted in his physical body, but, on the structural level of the brain’s galaxy, there is no sign of intelligent life.

  Thomas Huxley said that the sudden emergence of consciousness out of the interaction between neurons is as surprising as the appearance of the genie following the rubbing of Aladdin’s magic lamp.

  Perception and consciousness impressions dance the tango within our brain. According to one of the hypotheses, we receive sensory impressions all the time, but we become conscious only once we refer what we receive to our inner categories of experience.

  Some brain researchers relate consciousness to a permanent brain resonance of forty hertz, and once a rhythmic correlation between different brain areas that process input from the senses is created, a unification of various shreds of input is made and a moment of consciousness is born.

  The mode of consciousness is determined by the activity of routes originating at the brain stem. The content of consciousness, which is mostly formed in the cortex, derives from the routes that channel the sensory input of the external world of phenomena and the internal physical input to the brain.

  Representation maps of our internal physical condition, which represent various indexes—such as glucose level, level of hunger and fullness, muscle tonus, level of fatigue or wakefulness, and in parallel- the representation maps of the external world of phenomena—are all hidden in our brain. The interface points between the various maps create linkage that connects, at every given moment, the sum of internal indexes to the sum of outer world phenomena. The self-world couplings serve as the bedding on which our perception of experience sprouts.

  It seems that, as the awareness of the outer world refers to objects that are external to our awareness and are represented in our perception, our awareness of the occurrences within our body is also nothing but a perceptual conceptualization product. The quality of the external world conceptualization depends on the mediation of the senses and the conceptualizing framework in the brain. The quality of our inner world conceptualization also depends on the information that is channeled in the inner senses—for instance, the sense of hunger or fatigue—and on the brain system that conceptualizes our inner world. Due to systemic limitations, both in the system that mediates the perception impressions and the system that conceptualizes the perceived information, we are prone to make mistakes with regard to the creation of world models that match external reality and the creation of world models that match our internal reality. We might, therefore, make mistakes regarding the motives behind our behavior or, even, regarding the perception of ourselves.

  It seems that our perception of the kingdom called the “self” is fluid. This was illustrated in the “rubber-hand experiment,” during which an artificial hand is assimilated in the body scheme and is perceived as part of our body once the senses fall into the trap of illusion.[19]

  The Cocktail of Experience

  How do different pieces of information merge into one coherent and unified experience, which is at the basis of our consciousness experience? According to common belief, it takes place as a result of signaling and reciprocal signaling between reality-representation maps, sensory-input maps and representation maps of the “internal weather” (our feelings, physiological functioning measurements, etc.).

  Some think that consciousness is formed out of the confrontation of perception impressions with our inner categories of experience. The perception impressions (the received stimulations) are confronted with “the world image,” which is retained in our long-term memory, and our consciousness is based on the insights created in this confrontation.

  Narrow Hips—the Perimeter of “Momentary Awareness”

  The different aspects of reality, around the time we are exposed to them, can be retained in our “working memory.”

  This type of memory, which is like the “screen of momentary awareness,” is sometimes called “memory at the time of performance.” Information is retained in it in quantities that change in accordance with the type of input. For example, we can represent, at any given moment, an average of four pieces of visual-spatial information, such as the order of touching bricks that are scattered around the room, and seven pieces of verbal information, such as the order of digits in a telephone number we wish to remember. Considering the extensive volume of data processing in our brain at any given moment, we might assume that most of the brain processing takes place in a layer that is not accessible to the conscious layer and thus is not represented on the screen of momentary awareness.

  Attention, at its different levels, takes place continuously. In an attempt to present a formula conceptualizing cognition as dependent upon attention, scientist Francis Crick suggested that the formula of cognition is attention multiplied by memory at the time of performance. Memory at the time of performance is the border zone between past and future, and, as such, it is actually the “representative of the present” in our existence.

  The Ethics of Consciousness

  The decision that certain modes of consciousness are worth experiencing—the ones that honor our essence as human beings and enable us to fulfill the human potential of each and every one of us—and, on the other hand, that other modes of consciousness are undesirable for the individual or society as one (for example, the mental dullness or catatonia that is experienced by drug addicts) is a controversial issue.

  This issue is mostly raised with respect to using psychoactive substances that affect our awareness.

  My Body on the Outside

  The “otoscopy” experience can be described as an experience during which a person feels as if he is watching his body from the outside, and that the observing entity he is identified with is floating above his material body. This is a description that is usually connected to near-death physical conditions. A similar description can also be attributed to people who suffer from an electrical brain disorder originating at the tempora
l lobes. In studies, such experiences were connected to abnormal changes in brain activity at the border areas between the temporal lobes and the parietal lobes.

  The Scope of Cognition Modes

  The scope of cognition modes starts with deep unconsciousness and ends with full wakefulness (which, I hope, is the current mode of most of my readers). The pendulum of attention moves between these ends, and its location depends on various factors, including emotional motivation, physical vitality, etc.

  These definitions are inherently problematic, since cognition and consciousness are subjective experiences; due to their essence, it is hard, sometimes, to estimate the level of their presence in another person.

  In the Absence of Consciousness—the Vegetative State

  Victims of brain injury might fall into a coma. In this state, their eyes are closed, and the movement of their limbs is a reflexive reaction. The lucky ones overcome this terrible condition; others pass away; and others come out of the coma but remain unconscious, which means they remain in a vegetative state. In this state, the differentiation between the two main components of consciousness is reflected. The two components are wakefulness, which exists among the patients in the vegetative state, and awareness, which is the component that is probably absent among patients in the vegetative state. It seems that they are in a state of unaware wakefulness as opposed the state of aware wakefulness that characterizes the brain of a healthy person.

  A cycle of sleep–wakefulness characterizes the existence wakefulness in the function of the vegetative brain. The eyes of such patients are alternatively open and closed, and they perform body movements that are probably reflexive and not task-oriented. The chances of overcoming a vegetative state lessen as time goes by. Today, it is believed that if a patient does not recuperate from a vegetative state within a year after brain injury or within six months after suffering brain damage related to oxygen supply to the brain, the recuperation chances are slim. Such patients are defined as suffering from a permanent vegetative state.