In the Theater of Consciousness

Apparently Meta has asked some of their employees to read this book.

Gross.

I get it - a paycheck is a paycheck, and rent will fuck you. Although I do hope you’re here to learn to do fun hypnosis things and not drink repurposed kool-aid. Maybe try it as a hobby.

Err. Hypnosis. Not the kool-aid.

Anyway, for whatever reason you’re here, this book is really damn good so far. It’s enjoyable, easy to digest, and fun.

Prologue

• Things fall in and out of awareness all the time - often coming back temporarily when pointed out.
• A lot of processing happens outside of awareness…
  • Labeling the word focus as a noun
  • All the alternative meanings of the word focus
• We can usually accurately describe ‘focal’ consciousness - what we experience in the moment.
• The book will include subjective demonstrations. Yay!

The Metaphor

• The spotlight of attention - we either see the actors or their shadows
• The brain’s function appears to be distributed and decentralized - there are many parallel structures
• Only a fraction of this appears to support conscious awareness
  • Consciousness seems to be for “Accessing, disseminating, and exchanging information, and for exercising global coordination and control.”

Part I - Carving Nature at the Joints

…

Ch1 - Treating Consciousness as a Variable

• Breakthroughs in science happen when we realize something can change - as a variable. (EG - gravity coefficients.)
• Contrastive phenomenology - comparing subjective reports plus objectively verifiable methods

The Challenge

• Consciousness may not be solvable - but it would be foolish to give up.

Consciousness: A Big Problem

• They argue the biggest leaps in science happen when we tackle the biggest problems. The smaller pieces will eventually fit into place.

Teasing out the Essentials

• Consciousness - uniquely, has been difficult to define as a variable.
• 1890s - William James’s Principles of Psychology (a groundbreaking book for the time)
  • He correctly guessed many of the basics.
  • It had one major flaw - the mind was only capable of conscious events. Unconscious events were “just physical.”
  • 19th century contemporaries generally agreed.
• Pierre Janet and Freud (*gag* Freud) began to infer unconscious processes
• Post-1910 behaviors perspectives wanted to do away with conscious experiences because they were too complex to measure.

The Cognitive Unconscious

• There is plenty of evidence for unconscious routines
• Norman Dixon and Anthony Marcel demonstrated subliminal priming effects on wordlists
  • Two word combos are too much - you can’t just flash “Buy Pepsi” and expect it to work.
• Initial language learning is mostly passive.
• We have better tools than ever for investigation (circa 1997), but clear thinking is still required

Contrastive Phenomenology - The Experimental Method

• They have two images of two PET brain scans - one while learning to play Tetris, and one after a four week binge. The one 4 weeks in shows much less activity.
  • In the study - they tried to keep everything constant except for the amount of conscious activity.
  • Nerve cells in a neuron communicate 1000x a second (reminder, this is from 1997 and I’m not a neuroscientist…)
    • Those cells take in flow from 10k dendrites at a time
    • Local blood capillaries expand to service the cell
    • Glial cells dispose of dead cells / trash
  • PET scans show blood flow
• Multiple explanations are possible for this - learning, effort, more widespread activity, new vs old skills, activity location changes. The point is - they can actually measure and test something.

The author is reasonably confident of the following:

1. Conscious sensory areas show more activity
2. Discrimination tasks involve more neural firing
3. Supraliminal compared to subliminal stimulation shows more activity

They can check against: 4. Cases of brain damage where someone lost consciousness 5. If two identical streams of input are processed, and people are only aware of one 6. Hypnotically suggested perception blocking

Demonstration: The “Phenomenology” in contrastive Phenomenology

• Conscious vs automatic - try turning this book upside down and reading it
  • You’ll notice you put a lot more conscious effort into it
  • More activity would show up on a PET scan
• This does not give us an instant answer - but a tool for investigation

Comparing Conscious and Unconscious Qualia

• Cognitive linguist George Lakoff argues qualia can be explained.
• EG - an artist currently working on a painting is probably aware of the colors they’re working with, but the color comparison they made two weeks ago has faded out of awareness, but is still likely stored.
• Those past moments still influence us, outside of awareness, as “unconscious qualia”
• If you can understand the difference between conscious and unconscious qualia, you can test it

I think the big point they were trying to make in this section is that qualia can be unconsciously stored - it’s not just a byproduct of awareness.

The Two-Channel Experiment: A Primary Source of Evidence about Consciousness

• In 2-channel experiments - two dense streams of data are presented simultaneously
  • One must end up out of awareness. (It sucks trying to focus on two things at once.)
  • EG - having two screens, one with basketball and one with football. Or just be like me and zone both out.
• These experiments give us evidence about the content of consciousness

This is just fun - Donald E Broadbent had two speaker tell their own stories simultaneously to one participant, one for each ear. They’d ask the participant to repeat what one of the storytellers recited.

[!NOTE]

You can do this in hypnosis too - but, as expected, it often reduces hypnotic response. Graham Old has a bit to say about it…

In 1985, Kirsch, Matthews and Mosher examined the ‘double induction’ spoken of previously. The procedure usually involves two hypnotists speaking into a subject’s ears (one speaking to the left, one speaking to the right). This had been promoted by Bandler and Grinder as superior to traditional hypnotic inductions … In fact, it seems that the double induction may actually decrease hypnotic responsiveness in some subjects!

Old, Graham. Hypnosis with the Hard to Hypnotise: How to do Inductions with Resistant Clients, Analytical Subjects and Others who may be Difficult to Hypnotise (The Inductions Masterclass Book 6) (pp. 131-132). Plastic Spoon. Kindle Edition.

Since these are my notes, and I’m reasonably certain I’m going to stick these on the site when I’m done, I’ll mention this. While the induction may be more confusing and generally less effective, if you’re messing around with a friend, this is a fun way to improvise as a ‘tist and playful subjects often get a kick out of it. Try it!

Man. You should just read this book.

• There are a few example exercises in here related to primary and secondary streams. Reading capitalized words, what you missed when they’re all capitalized, what happens when the words are scrambled, changing the words a bit but not the meaning (interfering with the previous pattern,) entirely changing the meaning (removing interference,) adding SCARY words

Takeaways:

• Donald Norman found that they could have the secondary storyteller get away with saying the same word 35 times and the person repeating the primary stream wouldn’t notice.
• If you can make accurate reports about an ‘attended stream,’ the information is likely conscious.
• Structure and Cohesion helps mask a secondary stream.
• The sound of your name in an ‘unconscious stream’ will break the conscious stream and make you pay attention to it. (Important events force themselves to surface.)
• These are testable ways to check for awareness.
• Putting influential words in the ‘unconscious’ stream does shift meaning of the conscious stream
• Conscious and unconscious events interact - they are not isolated from one another.

Holy crap - they mention the “Mommy and I are one” thing that was creepy AF mentioned in The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis. (Ch8, section 8.5.4 - I’m not particularly impressed by it but it’s there if you want to read some of the ‘weird’ garbage from psychoanalysis.)

Consciousness as a State: Wakefulness and Coma

• Uh - you can lose a lot of gray matter from the cerebral hemispheres and still maintain consciousness. (Kinda makes me think of the Skull Gun.) A small amount of damage to the core of the brain locks someone in a coma.
• The reticular formation is required for consciousness.
• A small amount of damage to either or both thalami will also have similarly catastrophic results.
• Each thalamus has a nuclei - hooked up with a spot on the cortex.
  • … Yeah I’m not going to remember OTOH what these things are plugged into. The sensory inputs, motor cortex, and some mirroring of the prefrontal cortex. I’m not up on my neuroanatomy.
  • Connections from the eyes, ears, and skin also plug into the thalami. If I’ve got this right - they come back out of the thalami and plug into the sensory cortex. Oh yeah, auditory input too. (Don’t read my notes for quality information on this, I feel like I just walked into someone’s modular synth setup and it’s gonna take me 3 hours to figure out how to patch the oscillator output.)
  • Inside each thalami are few small structures called intralaminar nuclei (ILN.) There’s a shitton of connections between this and the cortical dome, which are responsible for triggering cortical arousal, and are the ‘signature of waking consciousness.’
  • You need at least one for waking consciousness. (I’m willing to bet you shouldn’t think of the second one as a spare part though - seems important.)
• Holy shit - you can survive after a hemispherectomy.
• After all these gruesome and uncomfortable details - they’re willing to present this as a “contrastive case.” 😅 You need at least one ILN to be conscious.
• Neuroscientists are still digging into this - as this doesn’t seem to explain the full complexity of consciousness and awareness. They cite some ongoing research at the time of writing.

Are Animals Conscious?

Very likely. Uhhh - not sure what they’re stating directly about reptiles though…

• Mammals get a cool midbrain in the mammalian package deal - which include an ILN.
• Reptiles have a reticular formation - which is required for wakefulness.

Their argument is - by inferences we can make through brain structure and behavior - yeah, they’re probably conscious.

Human Uniqueness

• Humans have brains complex enough to pursue long term goals - which seems unique.
• That being said - we aren’t the only conscious species on earth.

But Is It The Real Thing?

• Aw ugh - some “the hard problem of consciousness” antfucking. I like the author’s take but I don’t really feel like entertaining the problem in the abstract holds much value. The feeling of profundity can always be a misattribution of whiteboard masturbation. (Sorry I’m just tired of these conversations. Maybe people call it the hard problem of consciousness because it’s hard to get people to come back to observable evidence. 25% chance that someone in book club is going to gently grill me for saying that.)

Part II - A Unified Image

Making ideas on consciousness cohesive from various models and perspectives.

Ch2 - The Theater Stage has Limited Capacity but Creates Vast Access

• Momentary consciousness is surprisingly limited
• Demo - try focusing on one number in this set with one eye closed
• The Fovea - hold up two fingers side by side and extend your arm - that’s the range of your fovea, where you can see a great deal of detail. The brain fills in the gaps for us. Similarly, the benefit of a small consciousness seems to be wide access.
• Like a stage - only a small part is illuminated in each moment.

The Model

(Diagram on p42)

1. Working Memory. The Stage - processes associated closely with conscious awareness. Verbal working memory as inner dialog. Visual memory is mostly out of awareness - do you remember your last drive back home? Working memory is quite limited.
2. The Players Onstage - the contents of conscious experience. Cooperation and competition between components. EG - you may start lip reading at a loud party. “…essentially, we can take in only one dense train of conscious contents at one time.”
3. The Spotlight of Attention
   1. Demo - memorize a set of numbers.
      1. Close your eyes for 10 seconds.
      2. Write the numbers down.
   2. With your eyes closed, you were probably aware of only one number at a time.
   3. William James coined this fringe consciousness - the numbers outside of immediate awareness are vague but there and can be recalled
   4. Another example - there are feelings of knowing. They are usually accurate, people give high confidence ratings about them, and they lack detail. They are often readily available.
4. Contexts Operate Behind the Scenes to Shape Events Onstage. EG - you know the context of text you’re reading right now. The call this to a degree the director - agency and observation. “Voluntary functions involve frontal cortex, and injury to frontal cortex often degrades executive control.” (They’ll explain more in CH7.)
5. The Audience. A stretch of the metaphor - a vast array of autonomous and specialized functions. Conscious efforts move to the audience after they automatized. (We learn, and these patterns become unconscious, no longer requiring focus.) Demo - read a few words without saying them to yourself. (It’s hard.)

Theater Diagrams

• Diagram on p48.
• Two important timescales
  • “Conscious perceptual integration” 1/10th sec - if things happen faster than this, it’s unlikely to be integrated.
  • Working memory - happens at the scale of seconds (EG - inner dialog)
  • Written circa 1997 - neuroimaging is improving, but does not yet have this temporal resolution.

Spontaneous Problem Solving - That Little Pause Before The answer Comes To Mind

• Demo Here’s three questions. Try to answer them.
• That ‘dead time’ before the answer comes to you.
• There are also sub-goals, for example, in mental arithmetic. (Diagram on P50.)
• Problems with sub-goals recruit through conscious awareness. Sometimes, a long rest is all that’s needed, but deliberate effort is often part of the equation.

Convergence and Divergence

• Where an idea/problem/question/whatever comes into consciousness, it is broadcast globally, handled individually by the actors. This is just a metaphor - but the book will cover it in more detail later.

Scientific Metaphors

• Science has long used metaphors to aid in understanding. The metaphor is not the theory - but the book will use them to aid in making understanding intuitive.

Limited Capacity and Vast Access - Two Views of the Same Mountain

• Psychologists often see the brain as a nervous system doing one thing at a time.

The Vast, Unconscious Brain

• Where psychologists see selectivity, brain scientists see widespread arousal and activity (less selection)
• Neurons get input through dendrites, the output goes to a single axon
• The cerebral cortex is huge. The architecture of the cortical mantle has six layers - organized into columns and clusters of columns. Think of a 6 layer array in 3d.
• Cortical neurons connect via “axonal cables,” wrapped in a myelin sheath. Layer 1 is wildly dense shows a large amount of inter-connectivity.
• Research suggests that visual awareness happens in the innermost layer of the visual cortex.
• The thalamus serves as a hub for the visual cortex. 6mil connections go across the corpus callosum.
• Consciousness does not look like a simplification but a broad increase in complexity.

Why is Conscious Capacity So Limited?

• A big brain is bothersome to birth (and maintain - resource wise.)

Consciousness - The Gateway to the Unconscious Mind

• Simply by paying attention, we remember a hell of a lot.
• Biofeedback is a thing we can do - eg - going into alpha. Entire populations of neurons become active at will. Using biofeedback requires conscious effort and focus. This is a remarkable degree of volitional control.

Learning as a Magical Process

• This suggests learning happens by directing consciousness towards the task or stimulus. We often intuit systems.

Did Evolution Discover Theaters First

• Consciousness appears to be more the rule than the exception in nature.