Notes following the last Reith lecture from Vilayanur S. Ramachandran.
This dates from early May 2003.As is well known, the “readiness” potential appears to precede the conscious decision to act. This, Professor Ramachandran suggests, is an evolutionary development to accommodate the natural delays in the brain and thereby ensure a simultaneity of experience. His implication is that it is advantageous that our sensation of willing an action coincides with the experience of the initiation of that action, in other words, that we appear wilful to ourselves.
Why might a sensation of wilfulness be advantageous? It may be that it encourages us to be wilful in some way, choosing action rather than passivity or reviewing, perhaps, more options for action than we might otherwise have done.
I propose that this sensation of wilfulness is advantageous because it is emotionally stimulating. The heightening of emotion will encourage us to action and thus achievement. Perhaps we see this emotional precursor to action in others, before we see it in ourselves. After all, it is absolutely in our interests to know the precise moment when someone is angry enough to hit us.
Self analysis is not a notable feature of the average human and I believe it is a general principle that we learn truths about ourselves by observing others first. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that reaction is a more basic process than pro-active action. Correctly identifying another’s anger is more immediately useful than recognising our own. Even now we find ourselves in the midst of anger before we recognise the fact.
In some way, we learn from others that decisive actions are initiated only once a certain emotional state has been achieved. The emotional states of others are clearly affect by external events, threats of danger, promises of reward.
So, the seeming coincidence of an intention to act immediately and the initiation of that action facilitates our sense of being able to act by appearing to be an event of significance (a Hebbian co-firing event).
We can predict our own emotional trajectory and thus the moment when we are most likely to act.
The following is a quote from the Q&A session after one of the Beeb lectures. (One, in fact, I didn't hear.)
JIM HURFORD: I'm a linguist at Edinburgh. You have been talking about consciousness and people often talk about self-consciousness. Now you've been talking as if there's a subject of consciousness in the brain - and what one is conscious of is some object of consciousness elsewhere. And it would seem that your analogy of the little chap looking at the screen would rule out the possibility of self-consciousness. Do you agree with that?
RAMACHANDRAN: Well, one of the things that I think about self-consciousness is usually people think that the reason you developed self- consciousness and introspection is to allow you to model the behaviour of other people. You know, if you know what it is to feel anguish, you can better judge somebody else's anguish. I think it's the other way around, personally. I think what happened was your brain developed the capacity to model other people's behaviour very, in a very sophisticated manner using for example the mirror neuron system. Then you apply that same algorithm to your own body so you see yourself as a person in that representation you have created, and that is the origin of self-awareness. But there is a great deal more work to be done before we can, you know, give you a specific answer to that question.
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