The quest to understand consciousness - Antonio Damasio

[Music] [Applause] here to talk about the Wonder and the Mystery of conscious Minds The Wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind uh we recovered Minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence and we hardly ever pause to consider this Wonder we should in fact because without having this possibility of conscious Minds we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our Humanity we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world we would have no

pains but also no Joys we would have no access to love or to the ability to create uh and of course Scott Fitzgerald said famously that uh he who invented Consciousness uh would have a lot to be blamed for but he also forgot that uh without Consciousness he would have no access to true happiness and even to the possibility of transcendence so much for the Wonder now for the mystery this is a mystery that has really been extremely hard to elucidate uh all the way back into early philos phos ophy and certainly throughout the history

of Neuroscience uh this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation has caused major controversies and there are actually many people that think that we should not even touch it we should just leave it alone it's not to be solved I don't believe that and I think the situation is changing it would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make Consciousness uh in our in our brains but we certainly can begin to approach the the the question and we can begin to see the shape um of a solution and one more Wonder

to celebrate uh is the fact that we have Imaging Technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do for example what you're seeing right now these are images that come from hanasu lab and which show you in a living brain the Reconstruction of that brain and this is a person who alive this is not a person that uh is being studied at autopsy and even more and this is something that one can be really amazed about is what I'm going to show you next which is going underneath the

surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections real Pathways so all of those colored lines correspond to Bunches of axons the fibers that join cell bodies to uh synapses and I'm sorry to disappoint you they don't come in color but at any rate uh they are there the colors are codes for the direction for whether it is back to front or vice versa um at any rate what is consciousness uh what is a conscious mind uh and we could take a very simple view and say well it is that

which we lose when we fall into uh deep uh sleep without dreams uh or when we go under anesthesia and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia um but what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia or when we are in deep dreamless Sleep well first of all uh it is a mind which is a flow of mental images and of course consider images that can be sensory patterns visual such as you're having right now in relation to the stage in me or auditory images as you're having

now in relation to my to my words that flow of mental images is mind but there is something else that we all experiencing in this room we are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images we have selves we have a me that is automatically present in our minds right now we own our minds and we have a sense that it's every one of us that is experiencing in this not the person who is sitting uh next to you so in order to have a conscious mind you have a self within the conscious

mind so a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it the self introduces a subjective perspective in the mind and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind so what we need to know to even address this mystery is number one how minds are put together in the brain and number two how selves are con constructed now the first part the first problem is relatively easy it's not easy at all but it it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience and uh it's quite clear that in order to make

Minds we need to construct neural Maps so imagine a grid like the one I'm showing you right now and now imagine within that grid that two-dimensional sheath imagine neurons and picture if you will a billboard a digital billboard where you have elements that can be either lit or not and depending on how you create the pattern of lighting or not lighting the digital elements or for that matter the neurons in the sheet you're going to be able to construct a map this is of course a visual map that I'm showing you but this applies to

any kind of map auditory for example in relation to sound frequencies or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate now to bring home the point of how close it is the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the the activity of the neurons and our mental experience I'm going to tell you a personal story so if I cover my left eye I'm talking about me personally not all of you if I cover my left eye I look at the grid pretty much

like the one I'm showing you everything is nice and fine and perpendicular but some time ago I discovered that if I cover my left eye instead what I get is this I look at the grid and I see a warping at the edge of my central left field very odd I've analyzed this for a while but some time ago uh through the help of an opthalmologist colleague of mine Carmen Pito who developed a laser scanner of the retina I found out the following if I scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there

in the little corner what I get is the following on the right side my retina is perfectly symmetrical you see the going down towards the fobia uh where the optic nerve begins but on my left retina there is a bump which is marked there by the red arrow and it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below and that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image so just think of this you have a grid of neurons and now you have a plain mechanical uh change in the position of the grid and

you get a warping of your mental experience so this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball or for that matter a sheath of visual cortex so from the retina you go on to visual cortex and the of course the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina and in that image there you see a variety of islands of what I call imag making regions in the

brain you have the green for example that corresponds to tactile information or the blue that corresponds to auditory information and something else that happens is that those image making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural Maps can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around which is Association cortex where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image making and the great beauty is that you can then go from memory out of those Association cortices and produce back images in the very same regions that

had perception so think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the the brain is so it provides certain areas for perception and image making and those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image making when we recall information so so far the The Mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images but what about the self the self is really the elusive problem and um for a long time people did not even want to touch it and because they say

how can you have this sort of reference point this stability that is required to maintain the continuity of cells day after day um and I thought about a solution to this problem is the following we generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other Maps so let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this I came to this because if you're going to have a reference that we know as self the me the I in in our own uh processing we need to have

something that is stable something that does not deviate much from day to day well it so happens that we have a singular body we have one body not two not three and so that is a beginning there is just one reference point which is the body but then of course the body has many parts and things grow at different rates and they have different sizes in different people however not so with the interior the things that have to do with what is known as our internal milar for example the whole management of the chemistries within

our body are in fact extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason if you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life permitting survival range you go into disease or death so we have an inbuilt system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity I I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day because if you don't have that sameness physiologically you're going to be sick or you're going to die so that's one more element for this continuity and the final

thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself unlike any other coupling so for example I'm making images of you but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain however there is a close permanently permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body so here's how it looks look at the region there there is the brain stem in between the cereal cortex and the spinal cord and it is

within that region that I'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life regulation devices of a body this is so specific that for example if you look at the part that is colored in red in the upper part of the brain stem if you damage that as a result of a stroke for example what you get is coma or vegetative state which is a state of course in which your mind disappears your Consciousness disappears H what what happens then actually is that you lose the surrounding of the self you have

no longer access to any feeling of your own existence and in fact there can be images going on being formed in the cereal cortex except you don't know they're there you have you have in effect lost Consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem but if you consider the green part of the brain stem nothing like that happens it is that specific so in that green component of the brain stem if you damage it and often it happens what you get is complete paralysis but your conscious mind is maintained you

feel you know you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly this is a horrific condition you don't want to see it uh and people are in fact imprisoned within their own bodies but they do have a mind there was a very interesting film one of the rare good films done about a situation like this by Julian Schnabel some some years ago about a patient that was in that condition so now I'm going to show you a picture I promise not to say anything about this except this is to frighten you is

just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem there are to make it simple all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior different aspects of our body they are exquisitely topographic and are exquisitly interconnected in a recursive pattern and it is out of this and out of this tight coupling between the brain stem and the body that I believe and I could be wrong but I don't think I am uh that you generate this mapping of the body that provides the

grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings primordial Feelings by the way so what is the picture that we get here look at cerebal cortex look at brain stem look at body and you get a picture the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body and you have the cereal cortex providing the great spectacle of our minds with the profusion of images that are in fact the contents of our minds and that we normally pay most attention to

as we should because that's really the film that is rolling in our minds but look at the the the arrows that're not there for looks that there because there's this very close interaction you cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between cereal cortex and brain stem you cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between the brain stem and the body another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species so throughout vertebrates the design of the brain

stem is very similar to ours which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious Minds like we do except that they're not as rich as ours because they don't have a cereal cortex like we do that's where the difference is and I strongly disagree with the idea that Consciousness should be cons considered as the great product of the cereal cortex only the wealth of our minds is not the very fact that we have a self that we can refer to our own existence and that we have any sense of um

person now there are three levels of self to consider the Proto the core and the autobiographical the first two are shared with many many other species and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of Cortex in those species it's the autobiographical self which some species have I think satans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree and everybody's dogs at home have an autobiographical self to a certain degree but the novelty is here the autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories

of the plans that we have made it's the lived past and the anticipated future and the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory reasoning imagination creativity and language and out of that came the instruments of culture religions Justice trade the Arts science technology and it is within that culture that we really can get and this is the novelty something that is not entirely set by our biology it is developed in the cultures it developed in collectives of uh human beings and this is of course the culture where we have developed something that I like to call

sociocultural regulation and finally you could rightly ask why care about this why care if it is the brain stem or the Cal cortex and how this is made three reasons first curiosity primates are extremely curious and humans most of all and if we are interested for example in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the earth why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings second understanding society and culture we should look at how society and culture uh in this sociocultural regulation are a work in progress and

finally medicine let's not forget that some of the worst dis diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression Alzheimer's disease drug addiction think of Strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious you have no prayer of understanding how the of of treating those diseases effectively and in a non- serendipitous way if you do not know how this works so that's a very good reason Beyond curiosity to justify what we're doing and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains thank you for your attention