A Biological Basis for the Unconscious?

Today, the question of how people make decisions is an animated and essential one, capturing the attention of everyone from neuroscientists to lawyers to artists. In 1956, there was one person in all of New York known for his work on the brain: Harry Grundfest. An aspiring psychiatrist who was born in Austria in the 1930's, Eric Kandel took an elective in brain science during medical school and found himself studying alongside Grudfest at Columbia University. 


“What is it you want to study?” Grundfos asked Kandel. “I want to know where the id, the ego, and the super-ego are located in the brain,” Kandel replied. Grundfest looked at him as if he was crazy. “I haven’t got the foggiest notion whether these constructs exist," he said. "But the way to approach the brain is to study it one cell at a time. Why don’t you study how the cells work?”

That’s exactly what Kandel did, earning a Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine in 2000 for his discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system, which showed that memory is encoded in the neural circuits of the brain. But Kandel’s fascination with Freudian psychology remained a constant driving force throughout his career.

It wasn't clinical practice or theory that interested him. He turned down a cushy position as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard early in his career so that he could continue to work in the lab. There he discovered that learning gives rise to anatomical changes in the brain, inferring that psychoanalysis, if it was effective, must have lasting and structural effects on the brain. (This is what we mean we talk today about “rewiring” the brain.)

Recent studies by Helen Mayberg back up this conclusion. Through imaging, Mayberg found a particular area, Brodmann Area 25, that was hyperactive in the brains of patients who were depressed. After undergoing therapy, patients who reported a change in their symptoms showed a corresponding change in this abnormality. 

Likewise, a famous 1971 experiment by Benjamin Libet shook up the scientific community by unearthing biological mechanisms that underlie decision-making, which has traditionally been seen as an abstract concept. Libet asked subjects to press a button wearing electrodes attached to their heads. Before they'd consciously decided to move their hand to press the button, an electrical potential appeared in their brains. "That means the decision was made unconsciously," says Kandel. "Do you think Freud would have been surprised about that? He said from the very beginning, much of our mental life is unconscious." 

What's the Significance?

To Kandel, the research reflects a larger truth: that consciousness and decision-making, what we know of as the human mind, arises in the brain: "All mental functions, from the most trivial reflex to the most sublime creative experience, come from the brain."

People find reductionism threatening, he says, only if they perceive it as a challenge to their spirituality or humanist values. But reductionism is not inconsistent with either as a philosophy. As a "theory of everything," it would be a failure. As a theory of biology, it's been a resounding success. 

When the English physician William Harvey was trying to understand how the body works, he found that the heart functioned not as the seat of the soul, but as a pump to move blood through the body. "Does that make it any less magical? Do I have less respect for your heart or my heart because I realize how it functions?" asks Kandel.

The answer is of course, no. The study of the brain is about adding another dimension to our understanding of human experience, not undermining the extraordinary complexity of human thought, creativity, and emotion. In that way, it's a compelling example of our ability to reflexively know ourselves.

Original Source: http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-importance-of-magical-thinking

Neuroscience, Philosophy and Consciousness

Human beings are part of nature. They are made of flesh and blood, brain and bone; but for much of the time they are also conscious. The puzzling thing is how the intricate sequences of nerve cells and tissue that make up a person's brain and body can generate the special subjective feel of conscious experience.

Consciousness (What is human consciousness?) creates, in each of us, an inner life where we think and feel; a realm where we experience the sights, sounds, feels, tastes and smells that inform us of the world around us.

To many philosophers the central problem of consciousness is, how can the facts of conscious mental life be part of the world of facts described by the natural sciences?

The 17th-century philosopher, René Descartes, thought they couldn't and argued that, in addition to our physical make up, creatures like us had a non-material mind, or soul, in which thinking took place. For Descartes, only humans were subjects of experience. Animals were mere mechanisms. When they squealed with what we mistakenly took to be pain, it was just air escaping from their lungs.

Today we take other animals to be conscious; although we are not sure how far down the phylogenetic scale consciousness extends. Most problematically of all, if consciousness was immaterial, how could the immaterial soul move the physical body, or feel pain in response to physical injury?

The difficulty of understanding such material-immaterial interactions is the reason most contemporary philosophers reject Descartes' mind-body dualism. Surely it is the brain that is responsible for controlling the body, so it must be the brain that gives rise to consciousness and decision-making. So how does consciousness arise in the brain? Science still has no answer.

To a large extent consciousness has been dethroned from the central role it used to occupy in the study of our mental lives. Freud persuaded us that there is more going on mentally than we are consciously aware of, and that sometimes others can know more about what we are thinking and feeling than we do. Now we are also learning more and more from neuroscience and neurobiology about how much of what we do is the result of unconscious processes and mechanisms. And we are discovering that there are different levels of consciousness, different kinds of awareness, and that much of our thinking and decision-making can go on without it. So a more pressing question might be, what is consciousness for? Is it just a mere mental accompaniment to what is going to happen anyway? In that case it may be our sense of self and self-control that is most in need of revision.

It's also worth remembering that the only convincing example of consciousness we have is our own. Are the people around me really conscious in the way I am, or could they be zombies who act like humans?

Conscious awareness is bound up with our sense of self, but our sense of self is bound up with awareness of the body. The sense of agency and ownership of our limbs is very much part of who we are and how we operate in the world. But it can also go missing after brain injury. In rare cases of brain lesion people can experience sensations in their own hand but not think the hand or the experience belongs to them.

Wittgenstein once said that no one could have an experience and wonder whose experience it was. An experience I feel has to be my experience and it is conceptually impossible to think otherwise. However, when something goes awry in the injured brain the conceptually impossible becomes possible for certain patients. So the nature of consciousness and how we experience it depends on the proper functioning of the brain. We can be aware in moving our bodies that it is our own body we are moving, and we may still have a feeling of being the agent of that movement, but it may not be our conscious decisions that initiate those movements.

The sense of ourselves as consciously deciding everything we do is surely an illusion: but a persistent one. Equally, the idea that consciousness is unified and must be that way comes under increasing pressure in contemporary neuroscience. There are levels of consciousness and perhaps splits in conscious awareness. Can we have consciousness and lack awareness of it? Do we always know what our experience is like, and is experience always as it seems? Much recent experimental evidence from neuroscience suggests that this may not be the case. So it is a fruitful time for philosophers and neuroscientists to work together, to revise previous models and provide new accounts of how we perceive things and why our experience patterns in the way it does.

There may be no single answer to what consciousness is, but we may still be able to find ways to explain what is going on in the brain. This would help resolve why our conscious experience takes the shape and form it does, and elucidate what happens to consciousness when one of the interacting systems that make possible the self-knowing mind breaks down. These phenomena provide vital clues about the neural correlates of consciousness and are a step on the road to understanding why things work as they do.

Getting at the elusive nature of our own experience and freeing ourselves from faulty interpretations is a tricky business. Many disciplines are needed if we are to make a real breakthrough.

By Barry Smith

Original: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/04/consciousness-neuroscience-self-philosophy From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/