“We do have the resources to reconstitute the body; the mind,

though, will remain a gooey mess“ – Looney Tunes: Back in Action

Consciousness
V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy
IIT Madras.
SEGMENT #1

CONSCIOUSNESS AND BRAIN

 Contemporary Neuroscience – A
success?

➢Current science can present a theory of

“How Brain works”
➢The broad framework of brain’s working can
be presented
➢Single neuron recordings to gene knockout
enable us to do that.
 Science explains

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”

➢Is your blue or my blue??

➢Are we talking about the same thing?
A very popular social media puzzle

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?

Red & Cyan are complementary

Green & Magenta are complementary
 The curious spot of blindness

➢Close your left eye

➢Fixate your right eye on the Star on the left
➢Come close to monitor step by step
➢The black dot does vanish at a point
➢This is the “Blindspot”
 What fills the blind spot?

➢ 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

➢ The subject starts seeing one object after other

➢ The transition frequency of visual experience matched the
frequency of sweeping wave transitions found in V1 using
FMRI recordings
➢ Monkey experiments confirmed similar results in monkey
brain too
Dieter, Kevin Conrad, and Duje Tadin. "Understanding attentional modulation of binocular rivalry: a framework based on biased
competition." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5 (2011).
 Being aware of touch
➢ Proprioception- The sense of
feeling our body
➢ Skin- the largest sensory organ, is
the prime source of tactile
information
▪ Skin has receptors for light touch,
vibration etc
▪ Hair is a prime tactile information
source for animals like rodents
➢ Another tactile information source
▪ Muscle and joints
➢ These together gives
▪ Proprioception = “position sense”
 Can skin be eyes?
➢ Paul Bach-y-rita’s sensory
substitution experiments
➢ Optical image converted to tactile
signals and given to subjects to feel
them
➢ Initially they had their attention at
the tactile sensor
➢ Once trained, the tactile
information started to get
perceived like vision
➢ The tactile sensor seemed like a
new set of eyes
▪ Resolution was low, but good
enough to work with
 Tactile vision same as blind sight?
➢Daniel Dennet remarks that tactile vision may
be perhaps the same thing felt by blindsight
patients
➢Since awareness is weak, it is difficult to label
the perception as ‘vision’ or ‘tactile’
➢What if there is nothing like ‘vision’ or ‘touch’?
▪ but rather just one awareness whose intensities
and nuances are experienced as different forms of
sensory experience

“Consciousness Explained” by Daniel Dennet

 End of
Segment #1 of
The Lecture on
Consciousness
 Segment #2

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

Subjects note the position of the dot in

this dial to note the time they felt
conscious about the stimulus
 Brain does a time travel??
➢ Libet explains the curious
result by
➢ “Subjective referral backwards
in time” phenomenon
▪ Brain might be used to the delay
that happens during skin
stimulus reaching the brain
▪ Hence while entering
consciousness, it might be
referring a little backwards in
time to compensate this
 Conclusion by Libet
➢Cortical activity due to sensory stimulus must
persist for a minimum duration to produce a
conscious sensation
▪ “Neuronal Adequacy”
➢Once neuronal adequacy is achieved,
subjective timing of experience is referred
backwards in time
 What might be the role of
consciousness in willed action?
➢ Sensory stimulus gives the trigger to do certain
actions
➢ Free will, - if we go by the popular understanding
of the term - chooses whether each stimulus
requires an action
➢ We can expect consciousness to insert itself
between sensory input and motor action to filter
the stimuli
➢ Isn’t this universally true?
▪ There are people who cannot do this
Is it problem with decision making?
➢No, it is much bigger than that
➢Francois L’Hermitte had patients who were
▪ Slaves to the sensory world
▪ If a stimuli in their immediate environment
prompts an act, they do it without second
thoughts
▪ Environment dependency syndrome
➢Mostly due to damaged Pre Frontal Cortex
(PFC)
 How is goal oriented task achieved?
➢ PFC chooses the goal oriented tasks
➢ It initiates the movement with the help of
supplementary motor area (SMA) and Motor cortex
➢ SMA gets activated when movement is initiated by
the subject at his will than in response to external
stimuli
➢ SMA activity then progresses to M1 (primary motor
cortex) and then the action happens
➢ But this simple explanation is unfortunately
shattered by the experiment by Grey Walter
 Grey Walter’s Experiment
➢His subjects had electrodes implanted in SMA
➢The activity here controls the slide show on
the screen
Direct Control(subject
does not know)

Subject believes that slides

change when he presses button
 Grey Walter’s Experiment
➢ If sense of will was born first
▪ Subject would be conscious about their intent
▪ Would observe slide moving
▪ Even though it is not by their button push
➢ What happened was not that, but
▪ The slide projector seemed to anticipate their intentions and
moved before the subjects intended
▪ Seems like the SMA activity started first which reflected in slide
show
▪ The subject became conscious about the ‘intent’ only once the
motor cortex activity reached neuronal adequacy
➢ Subjects became aware of their intent a bit late??
➢ Let us check this a bit more rigorously
 Distortions in doership
➢ How do we expect a willed action to take place??
➢ Let us assume there are 3 main players
▪ Willed action
▪ Motor cortical activity
▪ Actual movement
➢ What order do we naively expect them to act?
Motor Actual
Willed
cortical Movement
action (W)
activity (C) (M)

➢ Libet did an experiment to see what is the real

order.
 Neurobiology of movement
initialization
➢ Bereitshafts potential (Readiness potential), BP
▪ Brain’s preparation to move
▪ Slow build-up of activity in SMA
▪ Only observed during self-initiated movement
▪ Not seen when motion is in response to external
stimulus
➢ For Libet’s experiment
▪ BP- represents C (motor cortical activity)
▪ EMG(electromyogram) – measures electrical activity of
muscles – represents M (actual movement)
▪ Willed action(W) – measured by Libet’s moving dot on
dial
 Surprising order of doership
➢Surprisingly the order was not as expected

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