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Consciousness: V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy IIT Madras
Consciousness: V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy IIT Madras
Consciousness
V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy
IIT Madras.
SEGMENT #1
Sensory
information
Science explains
Fear
Processing
Science explains
What is
this?
A Tree?
Science is not sure about…
What is
this?
ME?
Still a big mystery for science- The real
“Me”
A curious question!
➢Think of the colour “blue”
https://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-
dress/
Please check the link
➢There is something fundamentally private
about consciousness.
➢That poses a serious obstacle to
Consciousness research.
“Relativity” by MC Escher
Consciousness and Matter
➢Human brain – conscious??
➢Gradations of consciousness
▪ Healthy adult
▪ Dead Human
▪ Human in COMA
▪ Human in deep sleep
▪ Human in light grogginess
➢Primates are intelligent, but are they
conscious?
History of consciousness
➢ Rene Descartes & Disciples
➢ Mind and Body
➢ Mind
▪ “A Substance that has no spatial extension”
▪ Capable of power of thought
➢ Body
▪ Has spatial extension
▪ Incapable of thinking
➢ Thus Mind and body - different substances
▪ Mind body problem
➢ Interaction between mind & body
▪ Pineal gland
▪ Presided over by God!
History of consciousness
➢William James –
➢Consciousness- Selection agency
▪ Selects among conscious thoughts
▪ Whole brain acts together to form
conscious thoughts
History of consciousness
➢JB Watson
➢Behaviourist approach
➢Brain
▪ I/O box
▪ Produces behaviour in response to environmental
stimuli
➢Any mention of internal brain states –
deliberately avoided
History of consciousness
➢Cognitive Revolution
▪ Tried to explain mental processes in the language
of mathematics, computer metaphors and
neurobiology
➢Artificial Intelligence
▪ Intelligence is at its root, mechanical
▪ A set of clearly defined rules can express it
▪ When the rules are sufficiently complex, the
machine/agent exhibits intelligence
All this while consciousness still
unexplained?
➢Behaviourism
▪ Refused to have anything to deal with
consciousness
➢Cognitive science
▪ Consciousness = another mental process
➢Artificial intelligence
▪ Consciousness = A computation of the brain
machine
Am I a
Then what is free will? Zombie?
➢ Marvin Minsky
▪ Nothing like “free will”
▪ It is all based on set of laws
society teaches us (input to
machine)
▪ Humans are just a machine
sufficiently complex
➢ What we feel about ourselves
are delusions?
➢ Free will or No free will?
▪ Debate still continues…..
SOME CURIOUS EXPERIMENTS
Seeing – consciously or otherwise
➢ Wilder Penfield
▪ Classic brain stimulation
experiment
▪ Phosphenes
▪ Neural stimulation without
visual stimulus resulted in
phosphenes
▪ Thus what we see need not be
what our eyes “see”
➢ TMS – transcranial magnetic
stimulation
▪ Was able to tamper with retinal
vision
“I see phosphenes…”
Afterimage experience
Afterimage experience
Why did the birds change colour?
➢ Close your left eye, focus on the “+”with your right eye
➢ Come close to the screen,
➢ At a point, black spot disappears and green fills that space
➢ Repeat the same by focusing the black dot with your left eye,
making sure right eye is closed,
➢ At a point near to screen, “+” disappears and yellow fills the
space
Other filling experiments
➢V S Ramachandran and Richard Gregory
▪ Filling in is an active dynamic process probably
driven by the neural dynamics of visual cortex
➢Can be seen as an artificial version of the
visual deficit called “Scotoma”
Scotoma
➢Local blindness caused by small lesions
➢Darkness in the lesion affected visual field
➢Or filling effects in the same area
Blindsight
➢Scotoma patients guess
correctly most times the
things that are place in
their blind visual field.
➢This means
▪ We are not aware but we
are perceiving
▪ But how can vision be an
unaware process?
How does blind sight occur?
➢ Information is reaching certain parts of brain for sure
➢ But for some unknown reason, not accessible to
consciousness.
➢ First cortical stopover of visual information
▪ Primary visual cortex
▪ Site of damage for most blindsight cases
➢ Some branches directly connect to
▪ higher cortical areas,
▪ Superior colliculus
➢ Thalamus receives extensive feedback from cortex
▪ One of the prime suspect in consciousness related
phenomenon is thalamocortical interactions
➢ But finally, we still don’t know…
Binocular vision
➢ Two eyes receive two
slightly different images of
the world
➢ Brain combines them
➢ We perceive the three
dimensional world that we
see.
➢ Both eyes receive almost
similar image in usual case
➢ What if we artificially
constrain each eye to
receive different images???
Binocular Rivalry
NEURAL SUBSTRATES OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
Gamma oscillations and consciousness
➢ Visual stimulus excites neurons at
distant parts of the brain
➢ The how is an object identified as
one single entity?
▪ Temporal binding
▪ Synchronous firing of neurons that
responds to one single object
▪ Synchronized gamma oscillations
represents an object – may be it is
the factor that plays role in object
perception
➢ How do we deduct that?
Gamma oscillations and consciousness
➢ Study by Lucia Melony and
colleagues
▪ Brain responds to short timed stimuli
but subject does not become
conscious of it.
▪ When stimuli is presented for longer
time, there was long-range, transient
synchronization in EEG in the gamma
range, and the patient was conscious
▪ Deficits in synchronization in high
frequency bands found in psychiatric
disorders like Schizophrenia,
Parkinson’s disease, Autism, Epilepsy
Subjective timing Experiments of
Benjamin Libet
➢ Conditions required for subjects to feel conscious
sensation
▪ Stimulation currents need to exceed a threshold value
▪ Current has to be delivered for a minimum duration
▪ When stimulation is pulse train, when pulse frequency
is higher, only smaller current levels are required
➢ Liminal I – minimum intensity required – 0.5s
➢ Thus when stimulus is strong
▪ Needs 500ms to feel the conscious sensation
▪ But peripheral signal reaches cortex in 20ms
▪ Why so long to get conscious?
Subjective timing Experiments of
Benjamin Libet
First Result of Libets experiment
➢Delay between cortical stimulation and
corresponding subjective experience greater
than delay between skin stimulation and
corresponding subjective experience
➢Signal given directly at the brain took more
time to enter consciousness
Motor Actual
Willed
cortical Movement
action (W)
activity (C) (M)
Expectation
Motor Actual
Willed
cortical Movement
Action(W)
activity (C) (M)
Reality
What does this result say?
➢ The delay after which sensory stimulus was
perceived by consciousness was acceptable
➢ But in willed action the surprise is that
▪ Neuronal adequacy seems to exist for willed action too
▪ The cortical activity seems to reach a neuronal
adequacy for the subject to be conscious about the
intend to move
➢ This tears down our belief in self-hood!
➢ Seems like
▪ “Brain initiates the action, all by itself and is courteous
enough to inform us by the way about the proceedings
that were initiated right under the nose of the
conscious self”
Consciousness in short
➢According to Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman,
we are dealing with two domains
➢C and C’
▪ C- World of conscious experience and its contents
▪ C’-Objective world of stimuli
➢Problem of consciousness
▪ Working out links between C and C’
Consciousness-a global brain activity
➢ Word masking studies by Dahaene and co-workers
➢ Backwards masked visual words were presented,
stimulus remained subliminal
▪ Activity confined in primary visual cortex
➢ When words presented without masks
▪ Subjects conscious
▪ Widespread activity in visual, parietal and frontal areas
➢ Large specialized networks, subconscious by
themselves might be working together to achieve the
awareness through synchronization
▪ Bernard Baars’s ‘Global workspace’ theory
Physical theories of consciousness
➢ Susan Pockett and Johnjoe McFadden
▪ EM field generated by neural activity to be the
substrate for consciousness
▪ Synchronous activity-stronger EM field-stronger
consciousness
▪ This is consistent with proposals that ‘gamma range is
related to consciousness’
➢ A new set of Maxwell equations tailored for brain
activity?
▪ Doesn’t seem too far
➢ The distortion of our perception of space and
time that consciousness research has brought out
needs to be taken seriously