My unseen companion is a tireless lover of life, when I am haunted by self pity,
My decision maker despite my earnest dispute,
Clear leader, that I must stumble behind.
I stop, awed at his easy ability discerning the path.
Author to my agonised actor, he says suddenly,
"Here. Here is where you tread next. Just here."
"But, of course."
"And here is what you must say."
Ungraciously, I take my part, and still fail to see
That it comes from beyond that event horizon,
Towards which I daily dismiss all the stuff of my life, the good and the bad,
And from whence is returned, new-formed, its next instalment.
He, my dark heart, unfathomable
And I, self-styled, actor,
We, step precisely and with perfect timing,
Through the fleeting, endless entrance to our life.
On dark days, though, he leaves me stranded.
Beached and bereft on my island bed, I scour the concealing surface.
Briefly I may glimpse that inchoate leviathan of ancient fears and nameless tatters
Billowing beneath, reminding me that I have no idea of his reach or parts.
What cold glint is in his little eye?
Where my trusty author now?
Does he still thrill to the sleek, living line of narrative,
Or, rather, the myriad senseless terminations of chaos?
And there we are. It is his will be done,
Decided by things I have no conception of, but,
But, if we are to move deftly across the world’s stage
Will needs to see my rehearsals, feel my agonising, to sweeten his script.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN, a neuroscientist, is Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego; Author, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, and coauthor, Phantoms in the Brain.
What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the "turning inward" aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.
It has been suggested by Horace Barlow, Nick Humphrey, David Premack and Marvin Minsky (among others) that consciousness may have evolved primarily in a social context. Minsky speaks of a second parallel mechanism that has evolved in humans to create representations of earlier representations and Humphrey has argued that our ability to introspect may have evolved specifically to construct meaningful models of other peoples minds in order to predict their behavior. "I feel jealous in order to understand what jealousy feels like in someone else" — a short cut to predicting that persons behavior.
Here I develop these arguments further. If I succeed in seeing any further it is by "standing on the shoulders of these giants". Specifically, I suggest that "other awareness" may have evolved first and then counterintutively, as often happens in evolution, the same ability was exploited to model ones own mind — what one calls self awareness. I will also suggest that a specific system of neurons called mirror neurons are involved in this ability. Finally I discuss some clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and make some testable predictions.
There are many aspects of self. It has a sense of unity despite the multitude of sense impressions and beliefs. In addition it has a sense of continuity in time, of being in control of its actions ("free will"), of being anchored in a body, a sense of its worth, dignity and mortality (or immortality). Each of these aspects of self may be mediated by different centers in different parts of the brain and its only for convenience that we lump them together in a single word.
As noted earlier there is one aspect of self that seems stranger than all the others — the fact that it is aware of itself. I would like to suggest that groups of neurons called mirror neurons are critically involved in this ability.
The discovery of mirror neurons was made G. Rizzolati, V Gallase and I Iaccoboni while recording from the brains of monkeys performed certain goal-directed voluntary actions. For instance when the monkey reached for a peanut a certain neuron in its pre motor cortex ( in the frontal lobes) would fire. Another neuron would fire when the monkey pushed a button, a third neuron when he pulled a lever. The existence of such Command neurons that control voluntary movements has been known for decades. Amazingly, a subset of these neurons had an additional peculiar property. The neuron fired not only (say) when the monkey reached for a peanut but also when it watched another monkey reach for a peanut!
These were dubbed "mirror neurons" or "monkey-see-monkey-do" neurons. This was an extraordinary observation because it implies that the neuron (or more accurately, the network which it is part of) was not only generating a highly specific command ("reach for the nut") but was capable of adopting another monkey's point of view. It was doing a sort of internal virtual reality simulation of the other monkeys action in order to figure out what he was "up to". It was, in short, a "mind-reading" neuron.
Neurons in the anterior cingulate will respond to the patient being poked with a needle; they are often referred to as sensory pain neurons. Remarkably, researchers at the University of Toronto have found that some of them will fire equally strongly when the patient watches someone else is poked. I call these "empathy neurons" or "Dalai Lama neurons" for they are, dissolving the barrier between self and others. Notice that in saying this one isn't being metaphorical; the neuron in question simply doesn't know the difference between it and others.
Primates (including humans) are highly social creatures and knowing what someone is "up to" — creating an internal simulation of his/her mind — is crucial for survival, earning us the title "the Machiavellian primate". In an essay for Edge (2001) entitled "Mirror Neurons and the Great Leap Forward" I suggested that in addition to providing a neural substrate for figuring out another persons intentions (as noted by Rizzolati's group) the emergence and subsequent sophistication of mirror neurons in hominids may have played a crucial role in many quintessentially human abilities such as empathy, learning through imitation (rather than trial and error), and the rapid transmission of what we call "culture". (And the "great leap forward" — the rapid Lamarckian transmission of "accidental") one-of-a kind inventions.
I turn now to the main concern of this essay — the nature of self. When you think of your own self, what comes into mind? You have sense of "introspecting" on your own thoughts and feelings and of " watching" yourself going about your business — as if you were looking at yourself from another persons vantage point. How does this happen ?
Evolution often takes advantage of pre-existing structures to evolve completely novel abilities. I suggest that once the ability to engage in cross modal abstraction emerged — e.g. between visual "vertical" on the retina and photoreceptive "vertical" signaled by muscles (for grasping trees) it set the stage for the emergence of mirror neurons in hominids. Mirror neurons are also abundant in the inferior parietal lobule — a structure that underwent an accelerated expansion in the great apes and, later, in humans.. As the brain evolved further the lobule split into two gyri — the supramarginal gyrus that allowed you to "reflect" on your own anticipated actions and the angular gyrus that allowed you to "reflect" on your body (on the right) and perhaps on other more social and linguistic aspects of your self (left hemisphere) I have argued elsewhere that mirror neurons are fundamentally performing a kind of abstraction across activity in visual maps and motor maps. This in turn may have paved the way for more conceptual types of abstraction; such as metaphor ("get a grip on yourself").
How does all this lead to self awareness? I suggest that self awareness is simply using mirror neurons for "looking at myself as if someone else is look at me" (the word "me" encompassing some of my brain processes, as well). The mirror neuron mechanism — the same algorithm — that originally evolved to help you adopt another's point of view was turned inward to look at your own self. This, in essence, is the basis of things like "introspection". It may not be coincidental that we use phrases like "self conscious" when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you. Or say "I am reflecting" when you mean you are aware of yourself thinking. In other words the ability to turn inward to introspect or reflect may be a sort of metaphorical extension of the mirror neurons ability to read others minds. It is often tacitly assumed that the uniquely human ability to construct a "theory of other minds" or "TOM" (seeing the world from the others point of view; "mind reading", figuring out what someone is up to, etc.) must come after an already pre- existing sense of self. I am arguing that the exact opposite is true; the TOM evolved first in response to social needs and then later, as an unexpected bonus, came the ability to introspect on your own thoughts and intentions. I claim no great originality for these ideas; they are part of the current zeitgeist. Any novelty derives from the manner in which I shall marshall the evidence from physiology and from our own work in neurology. Note that I am not arguing that mirror neurons are sufficient for the emergence of self; only that they must have played a pivotal role. (Otherwise monkeys would have self awareness and they don't). They may have to reach a certain critical level of sophistication that allowed them to build on earlier functions (TOM) and become linked to certain other brain circuits, especially the Wernickes ("language comprehension") area and parts of the frontal lobes.
Does the mirror neuron theory of self make other predictions? Given our discovery that autistic children have deficient mirror neurons and correspondingly deficient TOM, we would predict that they would have a deficient sense of self (TMM) and difficulty with introspection. The same might be true for other neurological disorders; damage to the inferior parietal lobule/TPO junction (which are known to contain mirror neurons) and parts of the frontal lobes should also lead to a deficiency of certain aspects self awareness. (Incidentally, Gallup's mirror test — removing a paint splotch from your face while looking at a mirror — is not an adequate test of self awareness, even though it is touted as such. We have seen patients who vehemently claim that their reflection in the mirror is "someone else" yet they pass the Gallup test!)
It has recently been shown that if a conscious awake human patient has his parietal lobe stimulated during neurosurgery, he will sometimes have an "out of body" experience — as if he was a detached entity watching his own body from up near the ceiling. I suggest that this arises because of a dysfunction in the mirror neuron system in the parieto-occipital junction caused by the stimulating electrode. These neurons are ordinarily activated when we temporarily "adopt" another's view of our body and mind (as outlined earlier in this essay). But we are always aware we are doing this partly because of other signals (both sensory and reafference/command signals) telling you you are not literally moving out of yourself. (There may also be frontal inhibitory mechanisms that stop you from involuntarily mimicking another person looking at you). If these mirror neuron-related mechanisms are deranged by the stimulating electrode the net result would be an out-of-body experience. Some years ago we examined a patient with a syndrome called anosognosia who had a lesion in his right parietal lobe and vehemently denied the paralysis. Remarkably the patient also denied the paralysis of another patient sitting in an adjacent wheelchair! (who failed to move the arm on command from the physician.) Here again was, evidence that two seemingly contradictory aspects of self — its the individuation and intense privacy vs. its social reciprocity — may complement each other and arise from the same neural mechanism, mirror neurons. Like the two sides of a Mobius strip, they are really the same, even they appear — on local inspection — to be fundamentally different.
Have we solved the problem of self? Obviously not — we have barely scratched the surface. But hopefully we have paved the way for future models and empirical studies on the nature of self, a problem that philosophers have made essentially no headway in solving. (And not for want of effort — they have been at it for three thousand years). Hence our grounds for optimism about the future of brain research — especially for solving what is arguably Science's greatest riddle.
The self-model, in its most up-to-date form, must exist in the short-term memory, "hovering on the brink of amnesia". Here it MUST be refreshed, minute by minute, if it is to continue. Here it is forced to re-assess itself. Here it must be stripped down to the few elements that short-term memory can handle. Here it is that we "know what we know", that we "know who and how we are." Here, also, it can be interefered with by external narratives, hijacked by malicious others.
The self-model is a learned trick. It is a piece of cultural software. It has no dedicated neural wiring, I propose. This makes it fascinatingly shaky as a process. It would imply its absence in severely culturally deprived people e.g. feral children. It would imply different versions may exist in different cultures, e.g. amongst Budhists, Capitalists, or Hunter-Gatherers for instance. It is Memetically evolved to its cultual task.
What are those tasks? How might it be to have someone elses self model?
Psychologist Paul Broks described some Oliver Sacks-type case studies of people who had lost aspects of consciousness, such as the sense of continuity through time: One patient had a strong sense of identity and autobiography but believed that she had ceased to exist. "Am I dead?" she asked. This condition, Cotard's syndrome, was due to a neurological decoupling of feelings and thoughts. Thinking that one exists was not enough: the notion had also to be felt--"I feel I think, therefore I am." Another Cotard's patient believed that her voice was all that was left of her. She was "just a voice, and if that goes, I won't be anything." We all have an inner voice, a stream of sub-vocal speech. It keeps the story going and helps sustain the illusion there's "someone home." One man, recovering from a stroke that had virtually abolished his capacity for speech, including self-talk, described the condition of total wordlessness as being like confinement to a continuous present. But these words you are now reading, whose are they? Yours or mine? The point of writing is to take charge of the voice in someone else's head. This is what I am doing. My words have taken possession of the language circuits of your brain. I have become, if only transiently, your inner voice. Doesn't that mean, in a certain sense, that I have become you (or you me)? It's a serious question. Written text is a primitive but powerful form of virtual reality.
We have a neurological apparatus that is used during dreaming. Did it evolve for this purpose alone or does it serve some other purpose as well, a purpose for which its evolution might make more sense?
I propose that it is also the apparatus we use to interpolate between sensed data during our waking period. It is well known that our sensation of a continuous and smooth external reality is made possible through interpolated meta-sensation (sensation generated entirely from internal resources, memory, habit and hard-wired psychology etc.). This meta-sensation must NOT be interesting, however. Afterall, its job is to allow attention to focus elsewhere whilst maintaining an IMPRESSION of seemless continuity in the background. Its material is the very stuff of archetypes, stereotypes, habitual behavior and physics, in other words, the unremarkable.
So, if this truly is the same machinery, how does this dull, "Prosaic Apparatus" create the startlingly unreal (at times) quality of dreams during REM sleep? Well, its waking function is very short term. It fills a gap between moments only. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it extrapolates rather than interpolates. It can't know the future. It can only extend the present.) In dreams, on the other hand, it is seemingly cut free, untethered by the sequences of realworld input. Sequences which are, incidentally, entirely self-consistent with themselves. Such inputs perform the function of a series of course corrections. Further, they, perhaps, fine-tune the extrapolating process, prompting better-judged stereotypes etc. When dreaming, however, the prosaic apparatus extrapolates and then extrapolates from this extrapolation, and so on.
Is there any "input" during dreaming? Clearly memories figure here. Memories from all periods of our life, but generally with a strong bias to the recent. (More to go here.)
Can we deduce an ancillary purpose for dreaming based on this model of the apparatus existing primarily for waking purposes? Well, it would be advantageous if the apparatus could safely fill larger gaps in our perception of external reality freeing up more time for focussing on more productive matters. Maybe dreaming is an opportunity for the Prosaic Apparatus to practise being unremarkable. It fails when it goes so wildly wrong as to wake us up in a sweat.
This concept of the Prosaic Apparatus sits alongside another concept. This one is about the kinds of perceptual errors that people can make, i.e. Type1 and Type2. Type1 errors are committed by people who see things that aren't there. They are generally creative, credulous and tend to cry wolf. Type2 errors are committed by people who fail to see things that are there. They are generally pedantic, cynical and tend to be eaten by wolves. Evolution favors the former, though the evolutionary risk is a brain chemistry that may occasionally lapse into complete fantasy in some people.
The particular nature of a person's Prosaic Apparatus must surely be reflected by the type of perceptual faults they make, though the nature of the reflection is not at all obvious. Perhaps it is reasonable to assume that a predisposition to Type 1 faults lies with those who have fanciful or disturbing meta-sensations. The question is, is this because they attempt to go too long without a "real input" course correction ?
Before we can proceed with this line of argument we must now ask in more detail what is going on between such course corrections. What is it that individuals are "focussing on"?
This is from the a New Scientist article on how Ritalin works-
"It probably helps the animal focus on what's new and not be distracted by what's familiar," says Candice Drouin, who led the team at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "That's what happens in children with ADHD: they pay attention to too many things."
A remarkable observation is how few things we can actually hold continuously in our conscious thoughts at one time. (Five things is the answer.) Intriguingly this also corresponds to the limiting level of our intentionality, i.e. "I think that you know that they suspected that he was aware of what the law said on these matters." or whatever.
There is a great, though flawed, article in the latest NS on this and religion, convincingly correlating the level of intentionality to frontal lobe grey matter volume, and looking at the neurology of this part of the brain we discover that it has 6 layers (5 interfaces?)
"Theorists such as Jeff Hawkins have posited that these layers, particularly in the neocortex, form part of a laminar memory system of classification and lateral association which underpins human cognitive function. Although new, it brings an intriguing perspective on the unusual structural consistency of the most physically large cortex of the brain."
Now, for a self-model to work it must be useable immediately. Perhaps it must contain no more than 5 elements. The great morass of material contained in the unconscious regions of the brain, memories, learned responses, hard-wired responses etc. etc. are too numerous to be a "self" in any way that is experienced, BUT, I believe that elements "bubble up" all the time and are in some way offered for selection to create a revised self-model. In a sense, our (unique!) unconscious is the pallette our (latest) self-model is painted with.
Perhaps the stimulus for a self-model change might be contemplating moving into a new situation? Perhaps, it might happen when you haven't got a full set of 5 elements. In a state of happy repose, maybe, we empty our heads to re-boot?
Perhaps, this very simplicity and immediacy of the self-model is its weak point, the point where hackers can get in. (Derren Brown, Adolf Hitler etc.) Perhaps if people went around with a full set of 5 elements more of the time, their self-model would be harder to hi-jack. What do hypnotists say first when they want to hypnotise someone?........"Relax. Empty your mind..."
The sensation of self is actually the result of many processes; the (frenzied) self-model, the data compression processes of memory that create the underlying principles of narrative, Domasio's process of introspection on the emotional state wrought by bodily condition, mirror neurons duplicating others physical dispositions, hence emotions, hence feelings, etc.etc. We (wrongly) perceive all this as a single experience- the Self. This is the humunculus, the man within the man that does (experiences) the seeing etc. Fear (of death) transmutes the Self into Spirit and then we're truly stuffed.
I believe all manner of ills flow from this wrong perception of a singularity of self. How can we come to terms with the ebb and flow of these different "actors" in the "Community of Self"? As we age and some faculties fail and our store of experience rises, how tragic that some people think that they were only truly themselves aged 18 or whatever. When mentally ill, we are so sure of the absolute seemless continuity of this singular thing, that we seek to carry our "mad" thoughts into our less mad existences, unable to see them as the product of a somewhat different individual, creating spurious justifications out of thin air etc. The delusion is obvious to an outsider, but never to our less mad selves.
Great Art lays bare the truth behind the Lie of the Humunculus.
But Powerful Men succeed through creating him. They become disproportionately powerful (wilfull, effective) through building up a strong, singular, self. (Ayn Rand, Nietsche)
I've been reading Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens". This brilliant book creates, with enormous thoroughness, a convincing story of the nature and the component parts of what constitutes the conscious experience. He usefully creates the concept of a variety of selves, (core self, autobigraphical self etc.). The former is the experiencer of immediate sensations and feelings (I think I'm getting this right). The latter is what I have termed elsewhere the self-model, (the one I have proposed that is used as part of the simulations we run of the future.) What I feel he needs in this "autobiographical self" is an indication of how compact a thing it is. I contend that by containing just a few elements and by being kept "up to date" nearly every instant of the day the self-model or autobiographical self is able to be used very quickly and with reasonable accuracy. I claim that it is from the almost obsessive reassessment required in the maintenance of the efficacy of the self-model that the very particular sensation of consciousness derives.
Reading over the notes to the Quisnunc story, (unfortunately, I haven't been shamed into finishing it yet..) I was struck by the line that the Humunculus, to be successful, needed to continually forget who he was...
Domasio, in his book, describes a patient who has almost total amnesia. His short-term memory (60 seconds only) is fine, but nothing is retained after that. The startling thing is how happy and normal and obviously conscious this patient is.
Clearly, the self-model lives within this 60 second lifespan of short-term memory.
I wonder why the short-term memory lasts this particular amount of time? Perhaps, if its longer we don't so immediately need to process the data in the way that commends it to medum-term storage, i.e. we don't need to actively think about it so soon. If its shorter we may not be able to think about in its context accurately enough. We'd be continually fussing ourselves over isolated snippets of events whose relation to each other would be less apparent. Maybe the length of time knowledge is held in short-term memory is related to optimising the conscious experience.
By having a sufficiently short short-term memory we are forced into a near continual process of self-reflection and and thereby are given the option of near continual re-assessment. Too short and the self-model has too little useful detail. Too long and it may be out of date. (Remember, you may be trying to outrun a sabre-tooth tiger that, moments before, you were sure was going to be your winter coat.)
Maybe we are at our most alive when we are hovering on the brink of forgetting who we are.
Thoughts on the nature of self-consciousness. This is the "Hard Problem" in the study of the mind, but it is the one for which we are all equipped to study and comment.
