CogSci Humor: Consciousness

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Magic Research

Yesterday's Science Times described research published recently in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in which "a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality."

See performances of one the magicians, Apollo Robbins:
(you can also check out his web site, IStealStuff.com)

The Times article talks about the relationship between magic and perception, suggesting that the work of magicians can help neuroscientists understand the limits of perception. My non-scientific take on this is that magicians are exploiting known phenomena like the blind spot we have in our vision. The Times article highlights several magic tricks that rely on these "biological limitations" to trick humans into thinking that magic is being performed, while it comments on how the brain is misled:

The brain focuses conscious attention on one thing at a time, at the expense of others, regardless of where the eyes are pointing. In imaging studies, neuroscientists have found evidence that the brain suppresses activity in surrounding visual areas when concentrating on a specific task. Thus preoccupied, the brain may not consciously register actions witnessed by the eyes.

There are interviews with a few magicians, as well as a description of Apollo Robbins' performance at last summer's Magic of Consciousness Symposium.

For More Information

• Carey, Benedict. While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks. New York Times, August 12, 2008.
• Doctorow, Cory. Magic teaches us about human cognition. Boing Boing. August 5, 2008. There are some interesting comments about the Boston Globe coverage of the same Nature Neuroscience article.
• Stephen L. Macknik, Mac King, James Randi, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson and Susana Martinez-Conde. Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, advance online publication, 30 July 2008.
• Magic of Consciousness Symposium. June 24, 2007. See some video clips, including a video of Teller speaking, Apollo Robbins picking the pocket of a New York Times reporter, and Dan Dennett being fooled by the Amazing Randi.)

Fun with Brains & Consciousness

I've seen a couple of fun cogsci / brain / consciousness items lately & thought I'd share them:

From Sunday's New York Times article about comedian Steven Wright comes this new joke:

“I need one of those baby monitors from my subconscious to my consciousness so I can know what the hell I’m really thinking about.”

And the LooseCannonLibrarian points me to neuroscience stamps featured on BoingBoing today:

For More Information

• Keepnews, Peter. A Strange Career Takes an Odd Turn New York Times, February 10, 2008.
  

Signs of Consciousness

Jerome Groopman has an article in the Oct. 15 issue of the New Yorker. Medical Dispatch: Silent Minds: Reporting & Essays is about consciousness, particularly among those in various degrees of coma. Groopman reports on some fascinating work by the British neuroscientist Adrian Owen, who's used fMRI to demonstrate that some vegetative patients respond to language, some of whom show the "the same response to the sentences as scans of healthy volunteers." Once he and and his colleagues determined that one patient could distinguish language from noise sounds, they conducted tests to see if she would respond to mental imagery: when asked to imagine herself playing tennis, again her fMRI " 'activation [was] indistinguishable from those in the group of normal volunteers' "who had also been asked to imagine themselves playing tennis.

Groopman goes on to report on work that Lionel Naccache, a neurologist at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, is doing to develop a medical definition of consciousness, which includes these three elements:

1. Ability to report the content of a representation ("I see my cat")
2. Ability to sustain this representation over time ("I still see my cat")
3. The ability to "broadcast" this information to other areas of the brain. (I think this would mean things like ... "I pet my cat" or "I must feed my cat"). Groopman describes some interesting work Naccache has done to show the importance of broadcasting.

Groopman also talks about work that Joseph Giacino, a neuropsychologist at New Jersey's J.F.K. Johnson Rehabilitation Institute is doing with "deep-pressure stimulation": Giacino would squeeze "patient's muscles with force and precision," after which a patient seemingly in a vegetative state began to talk and answer simple questions. Further work at the Institute uses brain-scan technology to help with diagnosis of patients who might respond to such therapy.

The article is packed with interesting case studies and some fascinating scientific, ethical, and philosophical questions. A related article in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American by Steven Laureys is interesting because Laureys has done similar work himself. The Sci Am article also points to an interesting book about the medical, ethical, and legal dilemmas raised by these breakthroughs.

For More Information

• Davis Matthew, Coleman Martin, Absalom Anthony, et al. Dissociating Speech Perception and Comprehension at Reduced Levels of Awareness. PNAS (the journal of the National Academy of Sciences) October 9, 2007, Vol. 104 no. 41, p. 16032-16037. (abstract only; full-text may be available @ your library)
  
• Groopman, Jerome. Medical Dispatch: Silent Minds: Reporting & Essays. New Yorker, October 15, 2007 (free online).
  
• Laureys, Steven. "Eyes Open, Brain Shut." Scientific American, May 2007, p. 86-89. (Full article at Academic Search Premier and other library databases)
• Jennett, Bryan. The Vegetative State: Medical Facts, Ethical and Legal Dilemmas. Cambridge University Press. 2002.
  
• Owen, Adrian, Coleman, Martin, Boly, Melanie et al. "Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State." Science. September 8, 2006, Vol. 313. no. 5792, p. 1402. See also the many related commentaries in that issue of Science. (abstract only; full-text may be available @ your library)

Christof Koch Now

["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news]

Ginger Campbell over at the Brain Science Podcast recently interviewed Christof Koch. It’s a fascinating discussion -- almost a lecture by Koch -- on the nature of consciousness. Koch kept things (relatively) simple and it was pretty easy to follow for the non-philosopher, non-neuroscientist, non-physicist. He was delightfully gracious, even as he knocked philosophers here & there.

Koch and Susan Greenfield had an interesting point/ counterpoint about where the neural correlates of consciousness are in the October 2007 Scientific American: very short version; full version your library. :-)

Another podcast ... (tho' I haven't listened to these yet)
* 'Consciousness, Free Will, and God': "The nature of consciousness in humans and animals and its effect on how we view religion, science and philosophy will be tackled during three lectures at Vanderbilt University by prominent researcher Christof Koch." This page offers links to the three lectures in mp3; you can also get them via iTunes.

the Magic of Consciousnes, or, Teller Speaks

Interesting article in last week's Times about a recent conference by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). George Johnson covered the event, and describes it: "After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller — magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention."

You can see some tricks from Teller, and some explanations about how his repetition and our assumptions aid the tricks at the video below (approx. 17 minutes).



Teller of "Penn and Teller" TALKS! ¦ about magic, consciousness and the art of visual illusion! from Dean McCall and Vimeo.

And on the ScienceTimes podcast, David Corcoran interviews Teller, who explains in more detail -- and less flourish -- about why his and other magic tricks work. He says that magicians exploit the way we see the world ... just for a minute ... just for fun.

For More Information
* Corcoran, David. ScienceTimes Podcast , August 21, 2007.
* Johnson, George. "Sleights of Mind", New York Times, August 21, 2007.
* Laureys, Steven. Eyes Open, Brain Shut. Scientific American, May2007, Vol. 296 Issue 5, p86-89. Teller refers to this article in which Laureys proves that when eyes don't move, they cease to see. [Full-text available in Academic Search Premier]
* Mind Science Foundation: Magic of Consciousness Symposium – Video Clips.

Blue Jay's Theory of Mind?

Fascinating article in the New Scientist about potential theory of mind in members of the crow family. Theory of mind (wikipedia), as you know, is the ability of one being to estimate what another being might be thinking or how he might respond to a given situation. For instance, I can imagine that my husband would want some strawberry shortcake if it were available, or that he would be excited if the Jets went to the Superbowl next year. Children as young as 3-4 years of age have some understanding that others have thoughts different from their own, but generally animals and birds are not thought to have this ability.

Research by Joanna Dally, associated with the Comparative Cognition Lab at Cambridge, writes about some interesting developments in crow and scrub-jay behavior that point to potential awareness of how other birds might respond to their actions. Nicky Clayton and Nathan Emery studied food-hiding and stealing habits of scrub-jays:

"The allowed jays to hide worms either while they were alone or when another bird was watching, and to recover the hidden items in private later that day. Worms are the 'Belgian truffles' of the jay's gastronomic world, so the researchers anticipated that birds would make every effort to protect their stores. They found that when jays were allowed to return to their stash, those that had hidden worms under the gaze of a would-be thief moved them to new sites. Birds did not move worms they had hidden in private, however."

Further research carried out by Dally and Clayton showed that this was not the only strategy jays use to protect their worms: "we found that when hiding worms with another bird around, jays prefer to cache their meal behind a barrier that blocks their rival's view. That might not sound very clever," Dally continues, "but it suggests they may be able to see things from the visual perspective of another individual. In other words, they might understand that another bird learns about the world through its sense of vision" (emphasis mine).

Further research includes suggestions that jays are aware of what other birds know and when they know it (jays are more likely to re-hide food when they know that someone watched them hide it in the first place). Also, jays who have never stolen worms themselves are less likely to re-hide worms.

Fascinating suggestions about the intelligence of scrub-jays, and by extension, the crow family. Bird brains are notoriously small, but these jays are pretty smart about what other birds know about their food.


For More Information
* Dally, Joanna. "Don't Call Me Birdbrained." The New Scientist, 194.2609, 23 (2007): 34-37. [will be available on InfoTrac in a few weeks; now available in LexisNexis]
* Dally, Joanna, Nathan Emery, and Nicola Clayton. "Cache Protection Strategies by Western Scrub-Jays, Aphelocoma Californica: Implications for Social Cognition." Animal Behaviour 70.6 (2005): 1251-63.
* Emery, Nathan and Nicola Clayton, "Effects of Experience and Social Context on Prospective Caching Strategies by Scrub Jays." Nature, 414.6862 (2001): 443-446.
* Animal Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006.

Why I Love CogSci

The Feb. 12 issue of the New Yorker had an extensive article in Pat and Paul Churchland, philosophers of mind at UCSD. So much cool stuff!

I'll quote snippets of the article, but if you like this kind of thing, it's worth tracking down the whole article.

About marriage: "Paul sometimes thinks of Pat and himself as two hemispheres of the same brain-differentiated in certain functions but bound together by tissue and neuronal pathways worn in unique directions by shared incidents and habit."

About "truth": Paul (again) "... always remembers that, however certain he may be about something, however airtight an argument appears or however fundamental an intuition, there is always a chance that both are completely wrong, and that reality lies in some other place that he hasn't looked because he doesn't know it's there." (emphasis added)

and on to philosophy, sort of, and neuroscience.

About the study of the brain a few decades ago, quoting Paul but (I think) based on Pat's experience: " 'There were cases when a split-brain patient would be reading a newspaper, and, since it's only the left brain that processes language, the right brain gets bored as hell, and since the right brain controls the left arm the person would find that his left hand would suddenly grab the newspaper and throw it to the ground!' Paul says." Bingo! My right brain almost threw this article down many times, but my left brain was very engaged. Question for self: how to keep the right brain busy when working hard with the the left brain?

About Pat & Paul's notion of philosophy as it relates to science: "Philosophy could still play a role in science: it could examine the concepts that scientists were working with, testing them for coherence, and it could serve as science's speculative branch, imagining hypotheses that were too outlandish or too provisional for a working scientist to bother with but which might, in the future, yield unexpected fruit."

Pat, Francis Crick, and consciousness: " 'He [Francis Crick] thought the strategy of looking for the neural correlates of consciousness was likely to be fruitful, but I became very skeptical of it. It seemed to me more likely that we were going to need to know about attention, about memory, about perception, about emotions - that we were going to have to solve many of the problems about the way the brain works before we were going to understand consciousness, and then it would sort of just fall out.' " (emphasis added)

On language, "... both [Paul] and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. ... The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile's complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine." Not sure how I feel about that, but it's interesting to contemplate, and the article gives examples of how it could be useful.

I'm skipping over the more substantive philosophy / neuroscience bits - largely because they are over my head! - and I also skipped the ethical issues they are addressing at UCSD with respect to legal aspects of neuroscience. Tell your right brain to shut up and read this article with your left brain fully engaged.

Larissa MacFarquhar, "TWO HEADS; A marriage devoted to the mind-body problem." the New Yorker, February 12, 2007, v 82 i 49, p58-69. The article isn't online for free, but you can read it in Academic Search Premier (AN 23916441) or LexisNexis.

Consciousness hits the big Time

A former Hampshire colleague points me to the Jan. 19, 2007 of Time magazine, whose big story is The Mystery of Consciousness. It includes the cover article by Steven Pinker, in which he defines (in layman's terms) the Easy Problem & the Hard Problem:

"The Easy Problem ... is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved." (which can likely be done with existing technology)

"The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. ...
"To appreciate the hardness of the hard problem, consider how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything."

- A Clever Robot, Dan Dennett's response to Pinker -- they disagree on whether the Hard Problem exists.
- How The Brain Rewires Itself, in which Sharon Begley explains neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone's experiments with real and imaginary piano players. Turns out that the brains of those subjects who actually practiced the piano for 2 hours at a time and those who simply thought about practicing were expanded in similar ways.
- a short history of Understanding The Brain via various aspects of brain science, including ancient beliefs, psychology, anatomy, and neuroscience.

Plus a short definition of various aspects of consciousness by scientists such as Michael Gazzaniga, Antonio Damasio, and Bernard Baars, as well as some additional graphics and videos. It's a good introduction to consciousness and some other aspects of cognitive science.