ASMR Learn About Consciousness While You Sleep (Part 1)

[00:00:01]Hello.

[00:00:04]Welcome or welcome back.

[00:00:09]Today I'm going to be reading this to you.

[00:00:17]It's the New Scientist introduced by Christof Koch.

[00:00:27]How to think about consciousness.

[00:00:33]Just a quick note to those of you who were waiting for more reading.

[00:00:43]I apologize.

[00:00:45]It is not the Kafka I read last time.

[00:00:48]I have moved and I literally don't know where the book went.

[00:00:55]Um I'm probably going to move again soon.

[00:00:59]I'll probably find it.

[00:01:02]But if you really wanted to hear that story, I apologize. Maybe sometime I'll definitely read more fiction at some point.

[00:01:16]But whether you like non-fiction whether you find this material about consciousness interesting or how I definitely do, sometimes you just want to intentionally get bored and fall asleep.

[00:01:45]That is my goal for this video. So I found this maybe a year ago um in a Barnes & Noble.

[00:02:01]Just looked interesting.

[00:02:03]I'm a bit of a nerd.

[00:02:07]Um I'm not promising any of it that going to make sense.

[00:02:13]I'm not promising I understand everything.

[00:02:18]I just like reading about it and usually forgetting all of it.

[00:02:23]And I didn't even get like I think I maybe got halfway through this when I bought it, but we're going to start with a chapter one.

[00:02:50]Let me know if you enjoy this and I'll definitely try to finish this whole thing.

[00:02:58]But for part one, here we go.

[00:03:02]Chapter one.

[00:03:05]Theories of consciousness.

[00:03:11]The nature of consciousness is truly one of great mysteries of the universe.

[00:03:22]Consciousness is, after all, all we know.

[00:03:28]Without it, there is no self, no others, no universe.

[00:03:37]And yet, we still don't know what consciousness is.

[00:03:45]How does the brain, a decidedly physical object, generate our subjective experience of the world.

[00:03:58]That decidedly non-physical feeling of being.

[00:04:05]There is no shortage of ideas and no easy answers.

[00:04:23]Why is consciousness so mysterious?

[00:04:29]How does the lump of tofu-like tissue inside your skull give rise to that ineffable thing we call consciousness?

[00:04:41]The question has occupied scientists and philosophers for centuries.

[00:04:47]And there is little agreement about how or even if we can answer it.

[00:04:57]Consciousness is a slippery concept, difficult to even define.

[00:05:03]The closest we have to a consensus is that there is something it is like to be conscious.

[00:05:11]There is something it is like to be you.

[00:05:15]And probably something is like to be a dolphin or a mouse.

[00:05:23]But there is presumably nothing it is like to be a bacterium or a toy robot.

[00:05:33]The challenge is to understand how and why this can be true.

[00:05:39]How does conscious experiences How do conscious experiences relate to the cells and molecules and atoms inside brains and bodies.

[00:05:52]Why should physical matter give rise to an inner life at all?

[00:05:59]Humans have pondered the relationship between physical matter and conscious experience for a long time.

[00:06:07]In the 1600s, René Descartes divided the universe into mind stuff and matter stuff, raising the conundrum of how the two might ever interact.

[00:06:24]Today, most, although not all, scientists reject this strict dualist perspective.

[00:06:33]Instead, they prefer physicalism, which says that consciousness is the which says that consciousness is related to or emerges from physical matter.

[00:06:47]In particular, the firing of neurons in our brain.

[00:06:52]The question is how.

[00:06:56]In 1994, philosopher David Chalmers at New York University made an influential distinction between the easy and hard problems of consciousness.

[00:07:11]The easy problem is really a series of problems.

[00:07:16]These involve understanding how the brain, in concert with the rest of the body, gives rise to functions like perception, cognition, learning, and behavior.

[00:07:35]These problems aren't easy.

[00:07:38]The point is that there is no conceptual mystery.

[00:07:45]That they can be solved in terms of physical mechanisms, however complex and hard to discern these mechanisms may be.

[00:07:58]Chalmers hard problem, on the other hand, is the enigma of why and how any of this should be accompanied by conscious experience at all.

[00:08:10]It is a uniquely difficult conundrum owing to the inherently subjective nature of felt experience, which, whatever it is, isn't something you can prod and measure.

[00:08:26]Not that scientists have shirked the challenge.

[00:08:30]In the early days of modern consciousness science, back in the 1990s, the focus was identifying empirical correlation empirical correlations between aspects of conscious experience and properties of brain activity.

[00:08:49]This search for the neural correlates of consciousness was motivated in part as a response to concerns that consciousness might lay beyond the remit of science altogether.

[00:09:04]In recent years, however, there's been a blossoming of neurobiological theories of consciousness.

[00:09:12]This is a sign of the field's growing maturity because it is only when couched in terms of a theory that experimental findings can deliver a satisfactory understanding of consciousness.

[00:09:26]Despite this, some maintain the hard problem can never be solved.

[00:09:32]That it is beyond the capabilities of human cognition.

[00:09:36]Others consider it a red herring.

[00:09:39]Arguing that consciousness is just a useful illusion and therefore that the hard problem creates an issue where there is none.

[00:09:50]But there are plenty of researchers who believe that consciousness is both real and solvable.

[00:09:57]That by tackling the easier stuff to get a better understanding of the brain we can address the hard problem indirectly and ultimately solve the great mystery of being.

[00:10:16]The section on the left here models of experience.

[00:10:21]There are many theories for how consciousness arises.

[00:10:25]Here are the four leading approaches.

[00:10:30]Global workspace.

[00:10:32]This idea states that consciousness happens when one part of the brain broadcasts to the others.

[00:10:40]If the prefrontal cortex deems incoming information sufficiently important it sends the message out to a wider network known as the global workspace, the stage on which experience occurs.

[00:10:56]The second one integrated information.

[00:11:00]Consciousness arises from the way information moves between different areas of the brain or parts of any system, says this theory.

[00:11:09]It purports to let you measure consciousness by quantifying how well this the system integrates information.

[00:11:20]The third attention schema.

[00:11:24]This rejects the assumption that consciousness is a ghost in the machine and instead suggests a mechanistic explanation.

[00:11:35]That it is a product of how the brain models itself, paying attention whether to the outside world or its own internal states.

[00:11:47]>> [snorts] >> And the fourth, predictive processing.

[00:11:54]The brain is viewed as a prediction machine here, anticipating sensory inputs so that it can work as efficiently as possible.

[00:12:04]The idea holds that what we consciously experience, including our sense of self, is often based on what we expect, not what is there.

[00:12:24]Next page.

[00:12:26]The search for a seat of consciousness in the brain thrown up some tantalizing clues, but precious little in the way of definitive answers.

[00:12:38]Where does consciousness arise in the brain?

[00:12:43]When neuroscientists started looking at the activity of the 86 billion neurons inside the human brain, one of the first questions they asked was which regions are associated with consciousness.

[00:12:58]You might think a good place to look would be the cerebellum, a sort of mini brain hanging off the back of your cortex that contains about three quarters of the neurons in your brain.

[00:13:11]But the cerebellum seems to have almost nothing to do with consciousness.

[00:13:16]And while they experience some problems, Oop.

[00:13:20]One reason we know this is because some people are born without a functioning the And while they experience some problems, a lack of consciousness is not one of them.

[00:13:34]Some bundles of neurons do appear to be vital for consciousness.

[00:13:39]If damage occurs to specific parts of the thalamus or to a particular region of the brain stem, the result can be permanent unconsciousness.

[00:13:50]Some research Some researchers also ascribe a vital role to the prefrontal cortex, PFC, which is responsible for sophisticated cognitive processes, including attention, decision-making, and planning.

[00:14:09]They argue that for sensory information to become a conscious perception, for you to actually see a red apple, say, it has to be processed not just by the sensory cortex, but also here, the prefrontal cortex.

[00:14:27]Neuroimaging studies of people support this idea.

[00:14:35]But skeptics say that the PFC activity they show could relate to thinking about a stimulus and planning a response rather than being conscious of it.

[00:14:48]Kristof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, also points to patients who have had large regions of their prefrontal cortex surgically removed due to term tumors or epileptic seizures.

[00:15:07]They go on living, by and large, a normal life, never complaining that they have been turned into zombies, he says.

[00:15:15]In 2021, Omri Raccah, then [clears throat] at New at New York University, and his colleagues conducted a review of evidence from studies that involved inserting electrodes into various parts of human brains and asking volunteers about the effects.

[00:15:33]They concluded that stimulation of only two regions of the prefrontal cortex the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex sometimes alters reports of conscious experience.

[00:15:54]It seems likely that these subregions support the emotional aspects of conscious experience as well as self-consciousness and meta-consciousness the awareness of being aware.

[00:16:07]But they may not be involved in more fundamental sensory perceptual awareness.

[00:16:14]It appears that an area towards the rear of the brain's cortex the posterior hot zone as Koch calls it is crucial for this.

[00:16:27]Another posterior region apparently important for consciousness is the parietal cortex which processes sensory information from the body.

[00:16:37]In 2021 Mohsen Afraz and Bobby and Michelle Redenbaugh at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and others reported research on bodies that were sleeping anesthetized or awake.

[00:16:59]They concluded that connectivity between the parietal cortex and two other brain regions the striatum and the thalamus is a hallmark of conscious states.

[00:17:15]This here says brain scanning reveals that certain areas of the brain have a pivotal role in generating conscious experience, lateral prefrontal cortex, thalamus internal, and posterior parietal cortex.

[00:17:40]Studies of people who have regained wakeful consciousness after being in a vegetative state also support the idea that integration of activity in different regions is key for various aspects of consciousness.

[00:17:56]This notion is central to the global workspace model of consciousness, too.

[00:18:01]See page eight.

[00:18:03]While there is much disagreement about which brain areas are most crucial for subjective experience, most theories do agree that consciousness is dependent on communication within and between different brain areas, says Ridenbaugh.

[00:18:27]Next section.

[00:18:31]Can maths explain consciousness?

[00:18:37]Rather than searching for specific brain regions associated with consciousness, some argue that the phenomenon is the result of information being shared across different parts of the brain, and that it can be measured.

[00:18:55]When you contemplate a bunch of flowers, it is not possible to be conscious of their color independently of their fragrance, because the brain has integrated the sensory data.

[00:19:10]This simple observation, that each and every moment of our conscious awareness is unified lies behind one of the most intriguing ideas about where consciousness comes from and one of the most controversial, too.

[00:19:28]Integrated information theory, or IIT, was conceived in the early 2000s by Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[00:19:45]His basic idea was that consciousness arises from the way information moves between different parts of a system such that something has a higher level of consciousness if the interactions between its components yield more information than when reduced to just its components.

[00:20:05]In other words, when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

[00:20:13]One way to think of these subsystems is as islands, each with their own population of neurons.

[00:20:22]The islands are connected by traffic flows of information.

[00:20:27]For consciousness to appear, Tononi argued, this information flow must be complex enough to make the islands interdependent.

[00:20:38]Changing the flow of information from one island should affect the state and output of another.

[00:20:48]In principle, this lets you put a number on the degree of consciousness.

[00:20:54]You could quantify it by measuring how much an island's output relies on information flowing from other islands.

[00:21:01]This gives a sense of how well a system integrates information.

[00:21:06]A mathical and mathematical value called phi.

[00:21:12]"Theoretically, it's quite appealing."

[00:21:15]says Daniel Bor at the University of Cambridge.

[00:21:18]"We have this association between consciousness and intelligence.

[00:21:23]Creatures able to recognize themselves in the mirror also seem to be the most intelligent.

[00:21:29]So, some connection between consciousness and intelligence seems reasonable.

[00:21:37]It also seems to make sense given some of what we know about consciousness in the human brain.

[00:21:44]It is compromised, for example, if there is damage to the cerebral cortex.

[00:21:52]>> [snorts] >> This region has a small number of highly interconnected neurons and would have a large phi in IIT, integrated information theory.

[00:22:04]The cerebellum, on the other hand, has a much higher number of neurons, but they are relatively unconnected.

[00:22:14]IIT, integrated information theory, would predict that damage to the cerebellum might have little effect on conscious experience, which is exactly what studies show.

[00:22:33]The theory is quite controversial, not least because it posits that something inanimate like a grid of certain logic gates may have an extremely high degree of consciousness.

[00:22:46]But, it has attracted its fair share of supporters.

[00:22:50]One of the other problems is that calculating phi seems to be as good as impossible for something as complex as the human brain.

[00:23:01]In 2023, Andrea Sodu at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and his team used brain scanning data to calculate phi for simplified models of specific neural networks within the human brain that have known functions, such as the visual cortex.

[00:23:26]Instead of regarding each neuron as a node, they treated small anatomically defined brain areas as nodes, selecting five nodes for each network, and doing this for 11 11 networks in total.

[00:23:43]To get the data, the team asked 17 people to lie in a brain scanner as they experienced four states of consciousness.

[00:23:52]Awake, mildly sedated, unconscious, and in a recovery stage brought about by using an anesthetic.

[00:24:03]The scans were made using functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI.

[00:24:10]This allowed the team to assign assign a value of one, relatively high activity, or zero, low activity, to each small brain area over successive time points.

[00:24:26]To calculate phi for each network, a huge data set made from the scans was fed into a software package written by Tononi and his team.

[00:24:38]For two brain networks, the researchers found that phi was lower when people were in deep anesthesia than while awake, with an intermediate level for mild anesthesia.

[00:24:51]The networks, the frontoparietal and dorsal attention networks, were already thought to play key role in consciousness.

[00:25:01]The other networks did not show a clear decreasing trend in phi from an awake state through mild anesthesia to deep anesthesia, but showed small movements of phi either rising or falling.

[00:25:17]As these two networks were the only ones where the calculated value for phi behaved as expected, this lends further support to their role in consciousness, says Sodu.

[00:25:31]Not that the work did not Not that the work did much to convince critics of IIT, such as Scott Aaronson at the University of Texas at Austin.

[00:25:46]If you look at brains in fMRI while they're being sedated and woken up, it's clear and uncontroversial that you can see large changes in activity levels and patterns of information transfer between different regions, he says.

[00:26:01]You can surely learn many interesting things by examining those patterns with or without IIT.

[00:26:10]Interconnected information theory.

[00:26:14]In September 2023, dozens of neuroscientists, including some of the biggest names in the field, branded IIT as pseudoscience in an open letter.

[00:26:26]The letter, signed by 124 researchers and submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, said that the most recent experimental evidence claimed to support IIT did not, in fact, test the core ideas of the theory and that it is not even possible to do so.

[00:26:49]The latest salvo against IIT was triggered by a presentation at a meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in June of the same year.

[00:27:07]This work investigated if brain scans offered support for IIT, for instance, by looking at whether more densely connected brain regions at the back of the head, which should have a higher value of phi, had more activity when people carried out certain cognitive tasks.

[00:27:33]The study also considered a rival theory of consciousness, known as global workspace, which says that unconscious and locally processed signals reach consciousness when they are broadcast more widely through the brain.

[00:27:50]At the conference, the experiment experimenters said the new results offered partial support for both theories.

[00:27:57]However, regarding IIT, the open letter claims that the studies only tested some idiosyncratic predictions made by certain theorists, which are not really logically related to the core ideas of IIT.

[00:28:12]Findings, therefore, do not support the claims that the theory itself was actually meaningfully tested.

[00:28:19]Hakwan Lau at RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Wako, Japan, says some IIT supporters have overhyped findings, and so the public now believes IIT has more scientific support than it really has.

[00:28:33]This matters because some people interpret IIT to mean that fetuses and animals have some level of consciousness, which could affect policies on abortion and animal rights, he says.

[00:28:46]IIT supporters were quick to push back.

[00:28:50]Johannes Fehr and Fort at VU Amsterdam in the Netherlands, for example, said the letter went too far.

[00:28:57]There isn't a lot of empirical support for IIT, but that doesn't warrant calling it pseudoscience.

[00:29:05]Similarly, James Ladyman at the University of Bristol in the UK insisted that IIT is not in the same league as astrology or homeopathy.

[00:29:20]It looks like a serious attempt to understand consciousness.

[00:29:24]It doesn't make a theory pseudoscience just because some people are making exaggerated claims.

[00:29:34]Consciousness may arise from highly integrated neuronal activity.

[00:29:40]Some people interpret integrated information theory to mean that fetus and animals have consciousness.

[00:29:49]I'm going to stop there for today.

[00:29:52]That's a good stopping point.

[00:29:54]It was the end of the section.

[00:29:57]In my last reading video, even though the content was much different, I got a comment that I agreed with that I just need to slow down.

[00:30:08]So, I know I still stumbled over some words, but trying to slow down to read better, but also hopefully it's more relaxing and just makes more sense.

[00:30:24]These videos are kind of easier, and if I pick something I'm interested in, I don't have to think about it.

[00:30:32]It's easier to just hit record and start reading.

[00:30:36]So, sorry if you hate this book, but I'm going to post some more of these.

[00:30:45]And regardless, I hope you found it relaxing or fell asleep.

[00:30:57]I feel like there's something else about I was just going to say, I do think there are some more interesting sections. So, stay tuned.

[00:31:08]Um I personally like the more abstract ideas about consciousness. If you've never read anything like this, you'll see me chuckle sometimes because I find it funny when it's seemingly scientific and then like that section kind of ended and it's like, "Oh, but all also, by the way, the thing you just read for 30 minutes, there's a lot of people who disagree. Like, it could totally be wrong, but that's just how it goes and I it's just fun to think about for me."

[00:31:49]Anyways, I hope you enjoyed.

[00:31:53]I hope it was relaxing.

[00:31:57]I'll see you.