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Friday, April 26, 2013

You are not your brain

 By Gordy Slack
 Mar. 25, 2009 |


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Even if we had a perfect way of observing exactly what a brain was doing, we would never be able to understand how it made us have the kinds of experiences we do. The experiences just aren't happening inside our skulls. Trying to understand consciousness in neural terms alone is like trying to understand a car driving down the road only in terms of its engine. It's bad philosophy masquerading as science.

Maybe I'm naive but it seems kind of obvious that the brain is the mechanism that -- in the context of a person's life and environment -- gives rise to consciousness. That's not to say it is the same as consciousness, but that it is the mechanism from which consciousness emerges.

The brain is necessary for consciousness. Of course! Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn't "give rise" to driving; driving isn't something that happens inside the engine. The engine contributes to the car's ability to drive. Consciousness is more like driving than our philosophical tradition leads us to expect. To be conscious is to have a world. The fact is, you and I don't have what it takes to make a world on our own. We find the world, we don't make it in our brains.

The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience. But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion. It's a prejudice. Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world.

In fact, neuroscience is probably not in the best position to answer questions of consciousness and mind and experience. When we look for who and what we are in the brain alone, we lose the phenomena that interest us most.

Imagine that we find the Holy Grail of neurobiology, the patterns of neural activation that correlate perfectly with different events in our mental lives. We would still never understand or make sense of why those correlations exist. There is no intrinsic relationship between the experience and the neural substrates of the experience. We always need to look at what factors bring the two together. The environment, other people, our needs and desires -- all these things exist outside the brain and have to be seen as essential parts of our selves and consciousness. So we aren't just our brains, we're not locked inside our craniums; we extend beyond our skulls, beyond our skin, into the world we occupy.

Francis Crick did us a major service by taking seriously and publicizing the problem of consciousness. But in the journal Nature he wrote, "Scientists need no longer stand by listening to the tedious arguments of philosophers perpetually disagreeing with each other. The problem of consciousness is now a scientific problem."

I say, "Bravo!" Consciousness is a scientific problem! But Crick framed the problem in terms of an unquestioned set of philosophical dogmas; namely that the key to consciousness will be found in the brain, that that's literally where experience and thought take place. My book is not anti-science; it's a challenge to science to get serious. It's deluded to think we're free of philosophy.

Is your battle a turf war between philosophy and neuroscience?

Not at all. I think these are scientific questions. I want to help science take them over. But I think science is in philosophically troubled waters here and it's just not ready yet to go it alone.

You're arguing that all we'll learn about by studying the brain is the brain. We'll never learn from the brain what love is? Or what religion is? Or consciousness?

Right. And that the radically reductionist view is not only unfounded, but it's also ugly. And dangerous.

Dangerous, how?

There are practical dangers, like raising expectations too high for specific scientific programs. The motivation for proceeding along some line, or justification for funding it, may be based on the assumption that it will find the place where consciousness is happening.

Second, the question of consciousness is a problem for all of us -- not just for science. We all want to know how to understand humans and think about ourselves. And claiming that neuroscience is going to explain us to ourselves is false advertising. It's important that we not believe it.

But the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn't just misleading and wrong, it's ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns of his own skull and the world is just a sort of shared figment. Everything is made interior, private, rational and computational. That may not pose a practical danger, but it presents a kind of spiritual danger.

In that view, each of us is an island of intellect, alone. When you think of us as just interior neurological mechanisms, you see us as alienated from the world around us. The world shows up for us as bits of information that we decipher, like linguistic relics of an ancient culture that we have to interpret. Like when Mr. Spock says, "What is this strange kissing custom?" The danger is alienation, plain and simple. We're strangers in a strange land.

I find this a very sad and ugly picture of our circumstance. Now contrast that view with a sense of ourselves as engaged in the flow, responsive to the things going on around us, part of the world. It's a very different picture.

The late David Brower, conservationist and founder of Friends of the Earth, said that a California condor is only 5 percent feathers and blood and 95 percent its environment.


There's a kind of temporal lobe epilepsy that causes people to experience deeply religious feelings. Couldn't the relevance of that association tell us something about, say, the roots or essence of religious experience?

I'm pessimistic. A lot is context; things always happen in a setting. Imagine how you feel after a run. Out of breath, rapid heartbeat, sweaty? Now imagine you just woke up feeling like that. It would be terrifying. But after a run it makes sense and it feels good. Meaning is not intrinsic, it's relational. It's only in context that an intense feeling means one thing or the other. Again, we need to look outside neuroscience to understand what that significance is.

If someone had a seizure that caused a sensation like they imagine they might have if they were meeting God, that would be very confusing. But it would be a mistake to conclude from that that religious experience is only a brain state.

I'm not a religious person. And putting aside the fact I don't believe in God, I don't think the impulse of religion can be thought of as a kind of biological feature of us, or that there's something about our brains that makes us apt for that. I think of religions as communal and as literary traditions, both things existing outside the brain. I don't think of religious belief as something we can understand individualistically. When someone says they believe in God, you've got to understand the practices, customs, backgrounds and social realities that are part of that. None of it is going to reduce to anything individual inside of that person's brain.


Why are so many smart people these days looking at the brain as the key to understanding consciousness? Is it just irrational exuberance about the new imaging techniques and other technological advances that give us peeks inside the functioning brain?

Yes, but there's something else, too. For a long time now, going back at least to Descartes and Galileo, we've liked to be told that things are not what they seem. When we go to a magic show, there's a feeling of delicious pleasure when the wool has been pulled over our eyes. Similarly, to be told that the love you feel is actually just a chemical reaction, or that your depression is just a malfunctioning of your brain, is surprising and in some paradoxical way satisfying. There's a modern pleasure in the unmasking of our everyday experience. We feel like we're seeing behind the curtain, seeing how the trick is done.

It validates our suspicion that the world is different than it looks?

Yes. Galileo said that the apple in your hand is colorless, odorless and flavorless. That color and so on are effects that the apple has on you, comparable to the sensation of the prick of a pin. The flavor of the apple, he said, is no more in the apple than the prickliness is in the pin. The taste and the prickliness are in you. Galileo thought we were radically deceived by the world around us. The contemporary neuroscientists simply extend this even further -- this idea that the world is a kind of grand illusion that the brain creates.

Sure, it's an important fact that the perception of colors depends on the physics of light and the nature of the nervous system. If our physiology were different, our ability to detect colors would be different. But none of that speaks to the unreality of color, any more than saying that I can't see anything in my room if I turn the lights off speaks to the unreality of my desk. We've almost made a fetish of this desire to be told that things are not what they seem. We get a thrill from the paradox.

OK, if our brains aren't going to explain thought and consciousness, then how should we study these things?


Suppose we ask ourselves: What makes certain patterns of neural activity visual? What I have proposed -- building on work with collaborators -- is that to answer that question, we need to look to the behavioral and environmental context. I think we can make progress toward explaining the character of experience, but only by looking at the way the neural activity arises in and indeed enables a certain kind of dynamic exchange with the world.

Seeing is a certain way of relating to the world around you; the brain plays a critical role in supporting that relation. It's not revealing something about the cells themselves -- or the way they are firing -- that does the explanatory work. Rather, it's understanding the way the cells participate in a larger interaction with the world that will shed light on what it is to see. This is a whole new way of approaching the problem. The "it's all in your brain" approach doesn't work. If we expand our idea of the machinery of mind to include the body and the world, whole new ways of thinking about and explaining consciousness come into view.

The study of consciousness should be a cross-disciplinary field: behavioral science, math, linguistics, robotics, artificial intelligence and philosophy -- these all make contributions. Brain studies, too. But you can't reduce the study of human life to the study of things happening inside a person's brain. You have to look at a person's active life in its context.

Evolutionary biology is one good example of the way to proceed. We don't look at an organism as a collection of cells or molecules or atoms. We look at it as a creature with interests and needs. We take an ecological approach that has the organism as an actor facing problems and struggling to survive and reproduce. We view all of that as the natural backdrop against which to carry on our investigations. I think it's that organism-centered approach, where you look at the animal in its environmental situation, that's the appropriate way to approach and study consciousness and the human mind.

Now, neuroscience can look for meaningful correlations between what's going on in the brain and experience, or the ways brain functions contribute to our ability to have the kinds of experience we have. It makes sense to use brain-imaging techniques like fMRI that way. Studying the brain is part of the picture, but only a limited part. The important point is not to think we're somehow catching the mind in action by stop-motion photography; that's not what we're doing with fMRI at all.

What role do you think the brain does play in consciousness?


At the end of your book you say that we occupy "Home sweet home." What do you mean by that?


-- By Gordy Slack
Published 6-10-11 with permission


Dane Gerace com101 6002 said...

I also believe that your brain is a huge factor on your behavior. Everything you have experienced is up there making decisions based on those experiences. Your brain has physical reactions after youve been hit by a bat or something you will start to flinch if someone were to hold one up to you. Same as physical you have emotional reactions as well. If someone has really hurt you in the past you may not be as inviting to someone who resembles them in anyway, because of the memories you have.

Danielle Scarano 4041 said...

learned parts of the brain in psychology. very interesting.

Luisa Galdamez COm 101 Sec 4041 said...

i want to further develop my frontal lobe. :)

Anonymous said...

So if we are not our brains, then who are we? Our brains make up who we are. Those little nerve cells and molecules make up everything about us such as our sorrows, memories and ambitions... So how is that not us?

Danielle Davis

Anonymous said...

This is very interesting. The brain is very complex and fully understanding it will probably never happen. I find it very interesting when reading these new studies. This was one of my favorite parts when taking psychology was learning about the brain. I don’t know where I stand when it comes to this topic but it is still very interesting to consider both sides.

Chantel T.

Anonymous said...

I have to beleive that we are our brain. Our brain makes up alot of who we are. Without our brain, our body would just be a pile of mush sitting there. Our brains gets blast of information, sends it to different parts of the body and help us interpret what we are seeign, hearing etc. Without the brain we wouldnt be able to interpret anything. I think that our behaviors, what we know etc come from what information our brain has recieved but the brain is vital to every human.

Joseph Contreras HN 4049 COM 101

Anonymous said...

Do you not believe in the soul. The soul is not your is something unseen and far more.

Anonymous said...

All I know when you reach a certain age your brain isnt what it used to be. You forget everything :-)

Angela Mains
COmm 101 HN 4080

Anonymous said...

It's interesting to find out how many myths there are about the brain.. like the fact that we only use 10% of our brain, which isn't true. Our brain is so complex we really don't know everything about it and probably never will. I do however feel like we are our brains. Our brain just controls so much of what we do, and how we don't even realize we aren't doing things when we are just shows how littler control we really have.

Chelsee Henderson
Com 101 4049

Anonymous said...

I think we are our brains, but I don't think thats all we are. I think the brain does count for alot of us, but not everything. I think there's something more. Good post though. I enjoyed it.

Rebecca Johnson 4049

N186P said...

I think we are our brain. My brain remembers everything i need it to, and even information i dont need it to. It holds all my past memories and lets me retrieve them any time i want to.


Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

You are not your brain

Anonymous said...

Reminder: Our Memories Are Less Reliable Than We Think

On our earliest memories being out-of-body experiences
"[In my first memory] I'm on the floor of the living room in the house where I lived at the time. And I've got this toy forklift truck, and I'm pushing this thing across the carpet. There's something really strange about this memory — it's vivid, I can imagine the quality of the light, something of the atmosphere in the room. But I'm looking at myself in the third person. I'm not looking out at the room through my own eyes. I'm looking at myself as a kid in this memory. And that is one of the most puzzling things about particularly early memories. Sometimes we see ourselves in our memories as people in the third person — we don't look out through our own eyes. And this is one of the clues that psychologists get about how memory works as a reconstruction. If I was really recording, and reliving an experience that I kind of recorded in my mind, I should be looking out at that room through my own eyes — but I'm not. Something has flipped around. The perspective has changed."

On memories as altered reconstructions of the past
"There's something weird going on with memory. The scientists are telling us that memory is a reconstruction, and yet we, as people, tend to stick to our old-fashioned ideas that memory works like a video camera, for example, that it just records, and it files things away in mental DVDs that we can pull down and set playing. And in a way, that's not surprising, because we see memories as foundational for who we are. We commonly feel that we are our memories; our memories define us. So something needs to change. ... Accepting that memories are not literal representations of the past as it happened doesn't mean that we have to forget about them or start disbelieving them all. But they're shaped by who we are now. They're shaped by what we feel, what we believe, what our biases are."

Enlarge image
Charles Fernyhough is a nonfiction writer, novelist and psychologist. He conducts research into child development, hallucinations and memory at Durham University in the U.K.

On the faulty memories of couples
"I think one of the most interesting things about memory in relation to couples getting together is that there's this sense, this kind of pressure to agree on a shared representation of the past. You know, husbands and wives tend not to disagree about the past wholesale. They tend to come to a shared representation of what happened in the past. When people split up or couples get separated or divorced or whatever, those tensions about memory can come back to the surface, and you find out that people start to disagree and actually start to say, 'It never happened that way; it actually happened this way.' "

On quantity vs. quality
"Thinking about this book made me realize that remembering more stuff isn't necessarily better. Being able to recall every card in a pack of playing cards or recall pi to the thousandth decimal place — why? Why would you want to do that? It's no use to me. For some people it might be important, but it's no use at all for me. What I would like to do is remember the stuff that I remember better, in more detail, more vividly."

Read an excerpt of Pieces of Light

Anonymous said...

I think we are our brains without our brain we're nothing more than a vegatable waiting to wither and die. without my brain I wouldn't remember what I need to do next.