How the Brain Determines Its Thinking

When I was a college sophomore at the University of Tennessee, I decided to spend the summer with my fraternity buddy, Sam Harris, whose family had moved to Hollywood. I met the girl friend, Irene, of his girlfriend, and the four of us spent many date nights that quickly spawned love among us. Sam married his girl, but being a college student living in another state 2200 miles away made it too difficult to nurture my love relationship. On one date night, Irene said to me with some consternation, "You are always thinking. Why is that?" Well, I don't know why that is, but it is true. Surely, I am in the habit about thinking of all sorts of thinking.

One of the things I have been thinking about lately is how the human brain decides what it thinks about. Not all thoughts are chosen. Some are imposed from the outside, as for example, with thoughts being triggered by sensory input, spurious surfacing of memories, or thoughts triggered by something we read or heard from somebody else. There is also the fact that many, perhaps most, of our "thoughts" are unconscious.

Converting Unconscious Thought to Conscious Awareness

Unconscious thought is basically the consequence of neural processing of which we are unaware. The brain processes a great deal of information unconsciously, such as control over our viscera, our habits, our prejudices, our feelings, and so on. These processes surely influence our conscious thought and behavior in ways we do not consciously realize.

Conscious realization and thought involve at least two basic steps: 1) some kind of neural tagging to select which unconscious sensory or cognitive processes to make available for conscious processing, and 2) the process of conscious realization itself. Electrophysiological research reveals that these two processes are separated in time, and thus they may reflect two different processes. For my purposes here, I wish to focus on the tagging process that the brain might use to identify the various local circuit neural activity to make available for conscious awareness.

The brain is a global workspace of interacting modules. Processing is often parceled out to certain circuits. For example, bodily sensations are routed to the sensory cortex. Precise movements are handled by the motor cortex. Sound and vision have separate processing circuitry. There is a face-recognition area in the parietal cortex. There are executive controls handled by specific areas of neocortex. Religious thoughts are handled in different cortical areas depending on the nature of religious thought. And so on.

Brains are wired to constantly surveil sensations in need of conscious detection and interpretation, ideas to be understood, feelings to be accommodated, memories to be retrieved, problems to solve, and plans for future actions. The point is that the brain not only has some sort of mechanism for routing processing needs to specific cortical modules but also must have some way to scan its workspace to tag those modules that would benefit from conscious access. Of course, tagging is not necessary for situations where a stimulus so pronounced that it demands attention. For example, a sudden unexpected thunder clap is so pronounced that it triggers conscious attending by its own characteristics. But for routine thinking, whether mind wandering or intentional control over a sequence of thoughts, the brain must have some way to tag which modules need conscious access and in which sequence.

The basic idea is that the brain has a default mechanism for scanning its unconscious operations for momentarily novel or relevant information in widely distributed local networks that are specialized for certain kinds of thought. Such scanning could enable attentional focus, leading in turn to linking of diverse local networks through temporal coherence within and among local circuits, especially in high-frequency bands, that improves signal-to-noise ratio and sharing of information by those local networks.

Scanning via non-living systems. as in radar, commonly involves detecting reflection from targets that have been scanned by beams of light or sound. Cognitive scanning obviously cannot work that way, but an analogous mechanism would involve recursively re-entrant feedback between neural signals that are scanning the moment-to-moment neural activity in the local circuits of the global workspace. Re-entrant interactions can alter the timing and phase relationships within and among the various local circuits, which effectively tag those circuits that have sufficiently novel or relevant information that warrants conscious access.

If we knew how the brain achieves such scanning and tagging, it might help us develop training methods to make our conscious analysis more rigorous and effective. I am developing a scholarly paper for publication that suggests some possible mechanisms and ways to test them. We will have to see how those ideas evolve.

 

 

 

Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence

It is hard to realize the existence of realities that that we cannot see or measure. This was impressed on me when I recently visited a planetarium in which the audience and I viewed a map of the universe created by the Hubble space camera. The camera had taken many successive snapshots of the sky as it moved along its orbit, saving each adjacent shot side by side. The overall result, projected on the curved ceiling of the presentation hall, looks like a bow tie. If we did not know any better, we would think that the universe actually has this structure, with nothing outside the three-dimensional bow tie. The confusion arises if we don’t realize that the camera is located in the center of its horizon view. The camera’s horizon is constrained by its orbit. To get a better mapping, it would have to create maps from all points in all theoretical orbits around the earth.

 

In this case, the evidence for a relatively homogeneous three-dimensional universe caused a central black hole explosion is missing. We might erroneously conclude that the “big bang” theory is wrong. But absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. This principle emerges in another context when we say that certain phenomena are “immaterial.” Material things have a chemistry and physics, and things that do not seem explainable in those terms are often called “immaterial.”

 

What about things we call “abstract,” such as probability? Probability is not defined as a reality but rather the likelihood that a certain reality may emerge. In Shannon’s Information Theory, for example, “information” would not be regarded as a material reality as such but rather as the probability that a certain material event may occur. Indeed, information’s lack of material reality was probably why Shannon chose to define it the way he did. Probability ideas apply to much of the “spooky” aspect of quantum mechanics.

 

In the field of neuroscience, many scholars use the words “immaterial force” to explain consciousness. Yet, how can a force have the force of mediating our thoughts and willed action if it is immaterial? In the field of religion, many theologians use the word immaterial to explain the soul as some kind of immaterial form of being. How can something “be” and yet not be?

 

Neither case explains anything. In both cases, “immaterial” is intended to have the circular definition of not being material. What can this word possibly mean? To claim that something is immaterial is to imply that it does not exist. We know from personal experience that consciousness surely exists, and there are many good reasons to believe that souls exist too.

 

A fundamental premise of science is that all things are material, including those things that we cannot explain in material terms. Here is a list of material phenomena that were originally thought by many to be immaterial, because at the time there was no evidence for a material explanation:

 

·       The germ theory of disease

·       Immunity to infection

·       X-rays and other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum

·       Heat and cold

·       Gravity

·       Curved space-time

·       Quantum mechanics

·       Unconscious Mind

 

Quantum mechanics is of particular interest and relevance to this issue. Numerous experiments have demonstrated that observing something, even if just by a laboratory instrument, can make apparent physical realities we did not know existed. Matter can go from one spot to another without moving through the intervening space (called quantum tunneling). Information moves instantly (faster than the speed of light) across vast distances. Clearly, this does not reflect the kind of reality we ordinarily experience. Yet it exists.

 

Two explanations are possible. One is that the act of observation actually creates the manifest physical phenomena. Another is that the physical properties were pre-existent in inapparent form. Neither possibility makes sense in terms of our present knowledge. While many physicists can describe quantum phenomena, no one can explain them. Nonetheless, the facts are demonstrable.

 

What then is meant by material reality? Real things can seem unreal (immaterial?) under certain circumstances. This  perspective suggests that everything could be material, though sometimes that material reality may not always be apparent. Most likely, things we think of today as immaterial, such as consciousness and soul, are real material phenomena that we think must be immaterial because we have not yet discovered their material nature.

 

Science, by definition, MUST deal exclusively with material things. It is not possible for things to exist and yet not exist because they are immaterial. Thus, those who cling to immateriality are obliged to defend their position with compelling logic and evidence, if there were any. The rest of us are left with the conclusion that everything is material, though sometimes that material reality may not always be apparent. This surely can apply to consciousness and the soul. Considering consciousness or the soul as immaterial precludes any possibility that science is relevant to these phenomena. On the other hand, if consciousness and the soul have a material reality that is not yet apparent, then science might find evidence to help document and explain those realities.

 

The Electrical Nature of Conscious Memory Formation and Retrieval

When you memorize something, the brain creates a nerve-impulse code to create a representation of the information represented in brain, and this code can get stored in memory. Upon retrieval, the code is replayed, and thus what the code represents becomes consciously available again as a simulation. At least that’s the theory. Until now, the evidence for this explanation has been derived mostly from rodents. But now rather direct evidence is available from humans.

In one new study, human subjects created memory associations between word pairs, while experimenters simultaneously recorded single-neuron impulses and their associated field potentials from an implanted microelectrode array in the medial temporal cortex, which is known to participate in memory formation. The EEG was also recorded from subdural electrodes implanted over the temporal cortex immediately above the microelectrode array. This allowed simultaneous observation of the local nerve impulse discharges, their associated local field potentials, and the EEG during memory formation and retrieval after a brief distraction period.

Recordings revealed the well-known relationship that EEG signals often have superimposed low-voltage high-frequency waves, which are called ripples. As expected, the ripples appeared at the same time of the impulse discharges from the microelectrodes, indicating that the impulses actually cause the small field potential changes of ripples.

In the top signal, we have the sum of a fast and slow oscillations, where the power of fast oscillation's envelope changes with the phase of the slower oscillation. The bottom signal shows only the filtered fast oscillation and the variation in its power. As it is obvious from comparison of two signals, the fast rhythm's power is always maximum at a certain coupled phase of slower oscillation (From Samiee et al.).

In the experiment, impulse burst clusters occurred throughout the presentation of word pairs while subjects were encoding the pairs. Trial-specific spike sequences observed during encoding were replayed during correct recall. As expected, ripples during recall appeared at the same time as the impulse sequences.

Not mentioned by the authors is that their findings have implications for neural correlates of consciousness. After all, forming the word-pair associations was a conscious operation. In the field of consciousness research, neural correlates are clearly evident in the EEG in that the frequency of voltage shifts predictably as the brain progresses from large slow waves during anesthesia or sleep to increasingly faster and smaller waves during alert arousal.  Relatively high frequencies (40-200 waves per second) appear more prominently when the brain is working on difficult tasks. Moreover, hard tasks are associated with more phase-locking of the EEG oscillations at different locations of the cortex.

Conscious perceptions seem to involve short- and long-range oscillations in the vertically oriented network columns in the cortex. Each column contains a local network that processes input locally in oscillatory activity that is gated at certain frequencies by inhibitory neurons in the circuit.  

At the same time, local oscillations from large pyramidal cell firings spread to distant columns both within and between the cortical hemispheres. The frequencies of this long-range activity may be slower because of the longer impulse conduction and synaptic delays. Collectively, local and distant networks interact and may likely be the basis for consciousness. The electrographic correlate is that of fast frequencies from local processing being nested within more globally generated slow frequencies. The timing phase relationships would clearly influence how much integration of local and distant processing occurs and the likelihood that the processing could be consciously perceived.

Many experiments have shown that selective attention is needed for conscious perception. Such attention activates local processing (and ripples in the local field potential). Bear in mind, however, that the ripples are not the source of processing but rather an associated manifestation of the processing that is actually occurring via the impulse timing in the local circuitry.

Two basic kinds of coupling can be seen in brainwave activity: 1) the phase of the slower frequency modulates the faster frequency, and (2) the phase coupling between two overlapping frequencies occurs when one frequency is a harmonic multiple of the other.

Conscious processing seems to be crucially dependent on the cross-frequency coherence of neural activity that can be seen at the local circuit level in multiple local sites of neocortex, hippocampus, and basal ganglia. There are different varieties of cross-frequency coupling (phase-phase, amplitude-amplitude, and phase-amplitude coupling), each of which may reflect distinctive processing. Such coherence differs across brain areas in a task-relevant manner, and changes quickly in response to sensory, motor, and cognitive events, and correlates with performance in learning tasks. Moreover, cross-frequency coherence increases with level of task demand. For example, continuous EEG recordings obtained during an arithmetic task, rest and breath focus revealed that cross-frequency alpha and theta peak-frequency coherence significantly higher when cognitive demands increased (Rodriguez-Larios and Alaerts, (2019). What is likely to remain enigmatic is how such cross-frequency coupling yields a conscious perception.

The most significant neural correlation of consciousness may prove to be time locking of nested oscillation of different frequencies whose underlying impulse patterns carry different aspects of information. The time locking of nested high- and low-frequency activity likely increases information throughput in the local circuits participating in selective attention, occludes noisy disruption from other inputs, and improves the signal-to-noise ratio of neural activity that is processing the target of attention. Parsimonious as this view might be, it still does not fully explain how a conscious percept emerges.

Sources:

Rodriguez_Larios, Julio and Alaerts, Kaat (2019). Tracking transient changes in the neural frequency architecture: harmonic relations between theta and alpha peaks facilitate cognitive performance. J. Neurosci. 7 August, 39 (32) 6291-6298; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2919-18.2019

Samiee, Sohelila et al. (2019) Phase-amplitude coupling. Nov. https://neuroimage.usc.edu/brainstorm/Tutorials/TutPac

Vaz, Alex P. et al. (2020). Replay of cortical spiking sequences during human memory retrieval. Science. 367,1131-1134.

Is Consciousness Unique to Humans?

Despite their elegant descriptions of animal behavior, I am not sanguine about the effort of some scholars to extend consciousness to lower animals like insects. One example of such efforts is found in the Nov./Dec. 2019  issue of American Scientist, by professors Chittka and Wilson. They rightfully, I think, reject the possibility of consciousness in plants and inanimate objects, because these have no agency; that is, they can’t move around and do things. But the possession of agency is no assurance of consciousness. Almost all animals exhibit agency, but how can we know that any non-human species is conscious? In fact, many scholars are still debating the definition of consciousness and nobody I know presumes to explain how the brain generates consciousness.

The authors seem to confuse being awake with being conscious. We humans are only conscious of those things to which our brain attends, a well-documented phenomenon captured by the phrase “inattentional blindness.” If you need convincing, see the classic video on U tube where a gorilla walks through a basketball game and about 1/3 of the viewers fail to see it.

Every consciousness theorist has the problem of finding a good definition for consciousness. There is a solipsistic view that consciousness is the only reality, that what we think we experience of the world is an illusion created by consciousness. Few scientists take this view seriously, because there is no evidence for this view.

Chittka and Wilson define consciousness as a kind of thinking that allows avoidance of trial and error. That is not a sufficient definition. A chain of stimuli can drive a chain of stereotyped behavioral elements that produces adaptive behavior without the need for trial and error. I have even published research on such behavior, the “flehmen” sexual behavior of bulls, stallions, and males of certain other species. Chittka and Wilson use the loaded term, “evaluate,” to say that is how bees plan the construction of a hive and communicate to each other what to do. The claim is that they must be conscious because hive building is not hardwired but has to be learned. However, learning is also not an adequate criterion for consciousness: computerized neural networks can learn, and few people would say that computers are conscious beings.

Then, the authors argue that "self-recognition" is a signature of consciousness. But "recognition" is not the same as self-awareness. We humans have our body mapped in the sensory and motor cortices, and the location of our body in space is mapped in the hippocampus-entorhinal cortex. But these mappings can operate unconsciously. All of the behaviors of bees, flies, and lower animals to which the authors ascribe consciousness can be performed unconsciously as the nervous system reflexively responds to environmental stimuli and feedback cues. Their use of descriptive words such as "foresight, anticipation, communication, optimism/pessimism, appreciation, picture (in the mind's eye)" are loaded anthropomorphic words used to assume consciousness. Proof is lacking.

Finally, the authors say that neural correlates of consciousness have not been identified in humans, but when they are, then finding those correlates in lower animals would confirm that those species are conscious. No, sorry, correlation is not the same as causation. Moreover, some correlates of consciousness have been identified, as I describe in my book, Mental Biology.

Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for showing that lower animals (including bees) can perform highly complex behaviors in an automated way, without need for conscious "evaluation, foresight, anticipation,” and so on. These founders of modern animal behavior should not be dismissed by assigning consciousness to other species until we discover more about the neural mechanisms of consciousness and whether a given species has the neural resources to generate those mechanisms.

Nerve Impulses: the Key to Understanding the Brain

One of the greatest, relatively underappreciated, discoveries in all of science was the discovery of the nerve impulse in the 1930s by the British Lord Adrian. Adrian did win a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1932, but scholars underestimated its implications, which go beyond the fact that four later Nobel Prizes were awarded for work based on Adrian’s discovery. This included discovery of sodium and potassium ionic flux during impulses, the role of impulses in releasing neurotransmitters, and the role of membrane ion channels in impulse generation and second messenger cascades.

Like many discoveries in science, this one could not have been made without technological advance. In this case, the essential advance was the development of the capillary electrometer, which enabled detection of very small electrical pulses on the order of one millisecond duration. This instrumentation was crude and far inferior to later advances such as the oscilloscope and computer screens. Before Adrian’s use of the electrometer, scientists generally knew that peripheral nerves generated some kind of electrical signal, but nothing was known about the nature of the signal in individual neurons.

Nerves contain fibers from hundreds of neurons that produce a summed, relatively long duration and large wave that spreads down the nerve. No one knew how the individual nerve fibers contributed to this compound signal. Adrian answered this question by tedious microdissection of nerves into their individual fibers and recording stimulus-evoked responses in a single fiber. What Adrian saw was that the response was a series of voltage pulses, each about one millisecond long, all of the same amplitude in a given fiber.  Decades later, development of microelectrodes enabled confirmation of Adrian’s discovery in neurons in the brain.

Fig. 1. Train of nerve impulses from a single neuron over 2.5 seconds, as recorded with extracellular electrodes. Amplitude calibration = 0.5 millivolts. The thick baseline is electronic noise, in which the spikes are embedded. The signal-to-noise ratio is vastly improved with modern electronics and intracellular recording. From Fromm and Bond, 1967, Electroenceph. clin. Neuro. 22, 159.

This provided the evidence of the basic similarity and difference between brains and the later development of computers. Both computers and brains convert the real world into representations. In computers, information is coded, in the form of 1s and 0s, and as nerve impulses in brains. Both computers and brains distribute and process this represented information, and can store it as memories. However, because brains are biological and use impulses to represent information, they can change their circuitry and can self-program. Unlike computers, brains also have will, including a likely degree of free will.

Brains have conspicuous functional states, ranging from intense conscious concentration to drowsiness, to sleep, to coma, to death. Neuronal electrical activity correlates in a systematic way with these state changes. The most conspicuous of these activity measures exist in terms of nerve impulse firing and the extracellular ionic currents they create at synapses, known as field potentials. As these field potentials reach the scalp, they produce the signal we call an electroencephalogram. Field potentials are technologically easier to record than individual nerve impulses, but more ambiguous to interpret because of the spatial summation of voltages from hundreds of heterogeneous neurons.

The original nerve impulse findings were that the rate of impulse firing governed the impact on neuronal targets, whether they be muscle or other neurons. Various labs, including my own, in the 1980s discovered that the intervals between impulses also contained their own kind of information. For example, my lab reported that some neurons contained statistically significant serial ordering of impulse intervals in a neuron’s impulse stream. The intervals, at least in higher-level brain areas, are not random. They are serially dependent, as if they contained a message. If you are familiar with Markov transition probability, you can understand our finding that serial dependences exist in as many as five successive intervals (Sherry et al. 1982). This led us to suggest “byte processing” as a basic feature of neuronal information processing. This view has not caught on, and most people still seem to think that firing rate is the basic information code, despite the well-established temporal summation that occurs as impulses arrive at synapses. Bernard Katz demonstrated temporal summation of impulse effects in neuromuscular junctions in 1951 and later J.P. Segundo and colleagues confirmed it in neuronal synapses (Segundo et al., 1963).

 It should not be surprising that there are serial dependencies in impulse intervals. For example, intracellular recording of postsynaptic potentials revealed that the polarization change caused by a single impulse input decays in a few millisecond. However, a succession of closely spaced impulse inputs allows the polarization changes to summate.

These days, the emphasis needs to be put on impulse activity in defined circuitry. All neurons are linked in one or more circuits, and the impulse train in any one neuron is only a small part of the over-all circuit activity. The function of any given circuit depends on the circuit impulse pattern (CIP) of the whole circuit. Researchers have developed microelectrodes that allow recording of impulse trains from single neurons, but the problem is in implanting a series of electrodes so that each one monitors the activity of a selected neuron in a defined.

I think that research should focus on CIPs and the phase relationships of electrical activity among cortical circuits, both within and among cortical columns (Klemm, 2011). Nerve impulses have to be at the heart of consciousness, inasmuch as impulses contain the brain’s representation of information and create the synaptic field potentials.

We know from monitoring known anatomical pathways for specific sensations that the brain creates a CIP representation of the stimuli. As long as the CIPs remain active, the representation of sensation or neural processing is intact and may even be accessible to consciousness. However, if something disrupts ongoing CIPs to create a different set of CIPs, as for example would happen with a different stimulus, then the original representation disappears. If the original CIPs persist long enough, a memory could form, but otherwise the information would be lost. The implication for memory formation is that the immediate period after learning must be protected from new inputs to keep the CIP representation of the learning intact long enough to form a more lasting memory.

Much current research shows that conscious awareness correlates with the degree of synchrony and time-locking of CIPs in various regions and within regions of cortex. The evidence comes from electroencephalographic monitoring of the oscillating field potentials in a given area. These are voltage waves that occur in multiple frequency bands. Phase relationships of voltage waves from different circuits surely reflect the timing of the impulse discharges that create those fields. I summarized the animal research evidence for this view in my first book, some 50 years ago (Klemm, 1969). Depending on the nature of stimulus and mental state, these oscillations of various circuits may jitter with respect to each other or become time locked. The functional consequence of synchrony has to be substantial, and many others and I suggest that this is a fundamental aspect of consciousness. The correlation between frequency coherences and states of consciousness is clear. Frequency coherence reflects a “binding” of neurons into linked and shared electrochemical activity, but how this relates to conscious awareness will require a next great discovery in science.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (1969). Animal Electroencephalography. New York: Academic Press.

Klemm, W. R. (2011). Atoms of Mind. The “Ghost in the Machine” Materializes. New York: Springer.

Segundo, J. P., et al. (1963). Sensitivity of neurons in Aplysia to temporal pattern of arriving impulses. J. Exp. Biol. 40: 643-667.

Sherry, C. J., Barrow, D. L., and Klemm, W. R. 1982. Serial dependen­cies and Markov processes of neuronal interspike intervals from rat cerebellum. Brain Res. Bull. 8: 163‑169.

For more information, see my book, Mental Biology (Prometheus)

"I Observer"/"I Avatar"

As a young adult, I bought crime novelist Mickey Spillane’s premier 1947 novel, I, The Jury. Before it was made into two movies, the book had sold 3.5 million copies. In a flurry of action, Spillane wrote it in 19 days.

In ways generally unrecognized, the book captures the essence of the existential “I” that we all carry around in that three-and-a-half pound of mush inside our head. The protagonist of the book’s narrative, detective Mike Hammer, featured his “I, Observer,” who witnessed the deliberately intended painful murder of Jack Williams, a close friend who had saved Hammer’s life during a WWII combat incident. Hammer’s “I, Observer” felt the injustice, pain, and grief of the murder. Hammer’s “I, Avatar,” acted to achieve revenge on the killer.

All real live humans have these two “I’s.” Our “I, Observer” is a witness to the events of life. We experience life as if we were given a ticket to watch the game of life as it unfolds. Our “I, Avatar” responds to what it sees to act on our behalf. We take actions that we think are appropriate ways to respond. The difference is that the one I is “captain of its own ship,” while the other I is the sail of its own ship, unfurling as the wind blows.

One way to recognize one’s own dual I’s is in the dreams we have every night. Our “I, Observer” consciously witnesses a dream, whether we later remember it or not. In such dreams, we are aware of the story and maybe even of our role in it. Normally, however, we do not intervene to alter what happens in the dream. Even our own actions are just witnessed, not modified, as if we were watching ourselves in a movie.

Photo by Daniel Hohe on Unsplash

There are, however, other dream occasions, apparently relatively rare, in which “I, Avatar” takes over in a dream to steer its course in the real time of the dream. These so-called “lucid dreams” are apparently not the default mode of brain thinking in dreams. Maybe “I, Observer” is the default mode of operation in both dreams and in wakeful life.

It does seem clear that the mode sometimes switches to “I, Avatar.” Our I becomes an agent that intends to act in response to what happens to us. “I, Avatar” reasons on the issues, decides the most appropriate course of action, constructs an action plan, launches activity, and adjusts action in response to the emerging consequences.

Neuroscientists don’t know how the brain switches between observer and avatar. In fact, some neuroscientists believe that the brain has no avatar, only the observer. These scientists enlist this view to support their contention that humans lack free will. If your conscious mind has no capacity for agency, then it surely cannot exert free will. All willed action would have to be pre-determined or driven by uncontrolled forces, like the sails of a ship. Such a view precludes a captain who can adjust the sail positions.

Most neuroscientists likely agree that Observer and Avatar, if it exists, are creatures of the brain. The brain must construct those creatures the way that it constructs everything else—that is, in the form of nerve impulse representations. This basic fact was made most compellingly by the Nobel Prize studies of David Hubel and Torsten Weisel, who noticed something astonishing as they moved recording electrodes up and down in the visual cortex of awake cats who were watching scenes on a screen. A given neuron was inactive most of the time, but occasionally fired off a burst of voltage pulses. They later proved that a given neuron was sensitive to only a small feature of the image, such as a small line segment. Other visual cortex neurons were sensitive to other small segments, and they likewise selectively responded with impulse discharge. Together, all these neurons could reconstruct the image. A key point is that the image is not in the cortex. Its representation is there, in the form of nerve impulses.

The logical extension of such facts is that the brain experiences and acts in the world via its nerve impulse representations. Both the observer and the avatar must be likewise constructed of patterns of impulses, likely differing depending on whether the I is operating as observer or avatar.

This way of thinking about selfhood also resolves the mind/brain enigma. Mind is not some ghost floating around in brain. Mind is the material existence of nerve impulse representations of experience and thought. The concept of “mind over matter” is nonsense. Mind IS matter.

No one knows how the brain decides which mode of operation to use. The Observer mode seems preferable as a default, because it is the collector of information and experience that can inform the Avatar should action be beneficial to the brain and body in which it is embedded. Without the Avatar, however, our personhood is a victim of circumstance, compelled to act in predestined ways that may not be beneficial or wise. We can argue that the Avatar is the brain’s way of saving itself from its own foolishness, of counteracting adverse circumstance, and of advancing one’s agendas. The trick of successful living is the ability to switch into Avatar mode when it is needed. When we fail in life, we should ask I, Avatar, “Where were you when I needed you?

Source:

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate. New York: Prometheus.

What Am I? What Are You?

I am an agent, one who does things like think, feel, believe, choose, plan, and does things. But what is it about me that makes me an agent? Obviously, my agency arises from my brain, as does yours—but where and how?

The starting point for an answer has to be based on how the brain does everything else it does besides create my “I.” The principle is that the currency of brain function is the nerve impulse. More specifically, the brain models my inner and outer worlds by creating representations of sensation, memory, and thought in the form of patterns of nerve impulses flowing in specific neural networks. I call these Circuit Impulse Patterns (CIPs). For detection of a specific visual image, for example, the image is represented by one set of CIPS in the visual cortex. A different image will generate a different set of CIPS in the visual cortex to represent it. Documentary basis for this conclusion was provided in the Nobel Prize work of Hubel and Weisel. The same principle applies to all other mental forms of representation. That is, for example, one set of CIPS carries out the command of my “I” to type this sentence. Another set of CIPs carries out the command of my “I” to get up out of my chair and take a break. In short, everything my “I” chooses to think, feel, and do is implemented by a specific set of CIPs.

The circuit nature of the nervous system is fundamental. I have, for example, a circuit of neurons that begins in my foot, projects into a specific spinal cord segment of neurons, and these in turn project back to leg muscles that make me lift my leg if I step on a tack. Nerve impulses carry the sensory and motor information in this circuit. Additionally, this spinal circuit has reciprocal connections with various circuits in the brain that collectively inform me of pain and may also modulate my behavioral response to the pain. This information is likewise carried by nerve impulses.

So now we must examine my “I.” What is its nature? How does it get created? How is it that I know I have stepped on a tack, have generated a stream of cursing, and am aware of any other associated behaviors? Is it not likely that this “agent” of selfhood inside my brain is itself a set of CIPs? This set may operate unconsciously or consciously. I likely am not aware of what is happening in my spinal cord. I most certainly will be aware that my foot hurts and that “I” am responding to the pain. This “I” serves as an avatar that mediates my interaction with the world my brain is representing via CIPs.

Now, this brings us to the issue of conscious awareness. That too may be implemented as a set of CIPs. The CIPs of consciousness are equivalent to an avatar that the brain has instantiated to act consciously on behalf of its perceived interests. My avatar can reflect on the meaning of various sets of CIPs circulating within the global workspace of brain. The avatar can access and influence these various CIPs sets, because it too is a CIP set that connects physically to the other circuits and communicates in the shared language of nerve impulses.

This means that the conscious avatar can do things via its integral connections with other circuits. This capacity for agency refutes the contention of many scholars who have the unfounded belief that consciousness is just an “observer” that cannot do anything. Because the CIPS of my conscious avatar can do things, it means that it can implement choices and decisions that it makes.

This brings us to the issue of free will. The CIPs of my conscious avatar most certainly are affected in automatic ways by its connections to other CIPs. Thus, much of what my avatar does is not caused by free choice. Such actions result from inherent circuit connectivity and the programming of prior learning. On the other hand, because my avatar CIPs have their own existence, they can create representations for many alternative actions, including creative options that it had not been taught by prior experience. The avatar CIPs can reason about the pros and cons, and make a choice that is neither pre-determined nor inevitable. In short, my “I” avatar has the capacity for some free will.

The CIPs of my avatar allow me to be conscious, to think, feel, and choose with some degree of freedom. To reframe the dictum of Descartes:

I am, therefore I think.

References

1.       Klemm, W. R. 2016. Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will. New    

York: Elsevier.

2.       Klemm, W. R. 2014. Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate, New York: Prometheus/Random House.

3.       Klemm, W. R. 2011. Atoms of Mind. The “Ghost in the Machine” Materializes. New York: Springer.

4.       Klemm, W. R. (2015). Neurobiology Perspectives on Agency: 10 Axioms and 10 Proposition, Chapter 4. Constraints of Agency. Explorations of Theory in Everyday Life. edited  by Graig W. Gruber et al. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, Vol. 12, p.51-88.

5.     Klemm, W.  R. 2012. Sense of Self and Consciousness: Nature, Origins, Mechanisms, and Implications, p. 111-138, in Consciousness: States, Mechanisms and Disorders. Edited by A. E. Cavanna and A. Nani.  Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers. Open access available at https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=38801

6.        Klemm, W. R. 2011. Neural representations of the sense of self. Archives Cognitive Psychology. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 7: 16-30. DOI 10.2478/v10053-008-0084-2.

The Practical Meaning of Free Will

Philosophers and scientists have debated the issue of free will for centuries. In general, the consensus among seems to be that there is no such thing as free will. The problem is the premise of the debate. Those who have already decided against free will frame the issue so that no other conclusion can be drawn. Proper definition of terms is crucial to stay out of rhetorical weeds and traps.

For example, people will say that every action or event has a cause. Therefore, the event was determined and did not occur “freely.” To occur freely, an action or event would have to occur randomly. I have had professional statisticians tell me that in the real world almost nothing is truly random. Too many things are inter-dependent; that is, what happens to one thing creates a bias of action on something else.

Another argument is that every action or event has a certain probability of occurrence, ranging from zero to 100% chance that it will occur. Thus, the argument is that anything that can occur will occur, eventually. It if has a low probability, happening may just take a long time. It does not require being willed into existence.

Before we can go much further in this examination, we have to understand the word, “will.” This word implies an intent from an active, living agent that chooses to do a certain thing or avoid doing it. So, I suppose you could say that an ant has a will to go search for food, for example. But no one would suggest that an ant can freely do that. It is compelled by a biological need for food and sensory detection of odor cues that propel the ant to move in the direction of the food. This technicality aside, common use of the word “will” is that this is a goal or intent that higher animals have, and they may be constrained from complete freedom. In fact, a key part of the common definitions of will is that it requires consciousness. But free will opponents promote their foreordained conclusion that people can’t have free will by claiming that  consciousness itself has no agency. It is just an observer. Space prevents me for challenging this specious argument here, but I have defended conscious agency in other publications.

The most obvious constraint is lack of freedom of action. I cannot will to fly by flapping my arms, because that is not within my biological repertoire. I am not free to crack a safe, because I do not know how. So let us not confuse freedom of action with free will. Free will can only exercised if there is freedom of action for what one wills.

As for “free” will or “free” won’t, the premise is that one has two or more available choices and that nothing compels selection of one over the other. You may well have different probabilities for a given choice, each biased by certain contingencies associated with each choice. For example, the probability that I will have a breakfast tomorrow morning is highly likely, assuming I have the freedom of action by still being alive and that there are things in my kitchen to eat.  But, the probability is not 100%. I may get nauseous and not want to eat. I may have to fast because I am getting a medical blood test. But I can over-rule the forbidding factors. I can choose to eat, knowing that it may cause me to vomit (but maybe it won’t and in fact might settle my stomach if I pick something really digestible). I can choose to risk creating bad test numbers or skip the blood test to do it on another day that seems more convenient.

Here is how a free-will argument might proceed:

Determinist: “Whatever choice is made, it will be influenced by some factor that your reasoning develops. You used reasoning to change the probabilities and thus biased your choice. You simply redefine free will in a way that allows us to have it.”

Free-will Believer: “Well, you defined free will in a way that does not allow us to have it. It is specious logic to define things out of existence. The problem is that you have tried to foreordain your conclusion by saying that reason is not an acceptable basis for freely making a choice. This is a rhetorical trick. I am free to think this out, whatever way my knowledge and thinking skills allow. Remember, the reasoning only affects the probabilities. Reason does not compel a given choice. It merely alters the probabilities. People do make illogical or dumb choices from time to time.”

Determinist: “But you are constrained by the limits of your knowledge and brain. People make dumb choices when they are being dumb.”

Free-will Believer: “Yes, but within those limits, I have free choice. I may even make a choice that my reasoning concludes to be a bad choice, just for the hell of it—or just to counter your argument.”

Determinist: “Do you not see that just for the hell of it is an emotion that has biased your decision. Thus it is not free?”

Free-will Believer: “Note that I said may, not I will. I still reserve the possibility to choose. Do you not seen we have fallen into an infinite regress trap? Your line of argument cannot be pursued to a definitive conclusion.”

Thus, it seems to me that philosophical logic is not useful for this kind of debate. Here is a case where common sense makes more sense. In any choice that is not forced, we are free to change the probabilities or to confound them—for whatever reason or emotion.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. 2016. Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will. 

New York: Elsevier.

Klemm, W. R. (2018). Reason and Creativity May Require Free Will, Chapter 2, In  . Hauppauge, New York: Nova.

Klemm, W. R. (2015). Neurobiology Perspectives on Agency: 10 Axioms and 10 Proposition, Chapter 4. Constraints of Agency. Explorations of Theory in Everyday Life. edited  by Graig W. Gruber et al. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, Vol. 12, p.51-88.

Klemm, W. R. 2010. Free will debates: simple experiments are not so simple. Advances in Cognitive Psychology. 6: (6) 47-65.