Act 1

LN: Welcome to The Really Big Questions. I'm Lynn Neary. Let's begin with a quick experiment What are you doing right now as you listen to this? Are you preparing dinner or driving a car? What would happen if something on the stove started to burn or the driver in front of you slammed on the brakes? My voice would still be there, coming out of the speaker, traveling through your ears and into your brain, but you wouldn't really hear what I was saying until you felt those other more urgent matters were under control. In other words, for a few minutes at least, you would no longer be conscious of my presence.

But is consciousness simply a matter of awareness or is it something more profound? And is there a connection between the brain and consciousness? Or is it all a matter of the mind?

    CK: Hello, Lynn.

    LN: Let's start with that question, one of that questions that I just raised, because in your book, The Quest for Consciousness, you use awareness and consciousness as synonyms, and I was surprised by that a little, because I guess I always thought of it as something more complex than that. Is that really what it means to be conscious, to be aware?

00:02:01.00    CK: Yeah, it's one aspect of consciousness. Right now, it's different experimentally to distinguish awareness from consciousness, but it's one aspect. In general, it's any form of feeling, any time you're feeling pain or pleasure of being mean [?], of being angry, of seeing the sunrise. These are all different conscious states. The mystery is: How do these conscious states arise from brain? What's the connection between the mind, the conscious mind, and the physical brain? That's the ancient mind/body problem.

    LN: Yeah, and of course, you are studying this connection. How are you going about that? How are you studying the connection between the brain and consciousness?

00:02:35.10    CK: Well, you can study it in patients. You can see what happens if you have a particular patient if the patient has lost the ability to recognize a face, a patient who doesn't see color any more, a patient who doesn't have a feeling of familiarity any more. He's lost the feeling, the conscious feeling of familiarity. Then you can put the patient in the brain scanner, and you can see what's wrong with his brain. Is there a particular hole in a particular part of the brain? The location of the hole will tell you something. This part of the brain always seems to be involved in generating the feeling of consciousness, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing red, of seeing a face. That's one way to study it.

00:03:09.24    You can take normal, you know, paid undergraduate volunteers, and you put them in a [inaudible], and again, you can see which part of the brain lights up when they have particular conscious feelings. You can do animal experiments. Animals, of course, are also conscious, just as we are, and you can study their brain while they're going through different conscious experiences.

00:03:40.12    CK: Well, we think they're intimately linked, but they're very different. So the mind is this ineffable stuff. You can't really locate the mind, right? The mind is me. Christof is part of my mind, and my memories are part of my mind, and what I talk and what I say and what I think and what I feel is all part of my mind. But we know some of them intimately relate to this physical thing, to this chunk of three pound thing inside my skull, to the brain. We know this for thousand of years experience. If there's a hole in my brain or if I have an infection or if I have a wound or an injury to my brain, my mind will be—there will be holes, as it were, in my mind. There will be disturbances. There will be pathologies of my mind. So we know the two are related.

    But what exactly is the nature of the relationship? We don't know. It used to be thought of as like software and hardware, but I don't think that's a particularly useful analogy, but that's how some people used to think about it. The brain is the hardware, is the computer, and sort of the operating system, the software, that's really your mind. That's sort of a metaphor. It's a model. I don't think it's a particularly useful one, but it is one way to think about it.

00:04:43.28    LN: Something that you point out in your book also that I want to ask you about is that human beings are capable of making a lot of decisions, some of them pretty complex, without conscious thought. In other words, they can be trained to do things without thinking consciously about that. Can you give us an example of that?

00:05:00.03    CK: I mean, both at the highs and at the lowest end. So at the lowest end, when you play tennis, when you weave through traffic at high speeds on a motorcycle, when you dance, when you climb a mountain, when you do any other fast activity, when you really train to do that, like if you drive in L.A. on a freeway, you do it fast unconsciously without really thinking about it. If you think about it consciously, it may actually interfere somewhat with your performance in soccer, in golf, or in tennis, or in all of these other sports.

    At the highest level, a lot of our creativity really takes place unconsciously. We think about a program. We incubate it over days or weeks and then suddenly one morning, I wake up and the solution pops into my mind. Well, what happens? It's not magic. It's my unconscious mind was at work while the conscious me was sleeping, and was sort of generating solutions and going through them and then suddenly, what looks like a positive solution, the conscious mind decides, well, maybe this is something useful, and then it enters into my consciousness.

00:05:55.23    We know that since Sigmund Freud that most of what happens in our brain, particularly all the emotional stuff, why we love and why we hate, all that stuff is outside the pale of consciousness. What you're aware of consciously is only a very small part of all of the stuff that goes on in your mind..

    CK: Do it consciously.

    LN: Consciously.

00:06:24.19    CK: That's correct. There's a transition. So early on when you learn something, you need to be exquisitely conscious. Like your parents tell you, your teacher tells you to hold the racquet in this way and that way to do things, to pay attention to that, but once you do it, once you're in the zone—this was [inaudible] called "the zone"—you do it effortless, the smooth merging of mind and muscle and nerve. It all comes together, and at that point, all the performance takes place—most of the performance takes place unconsciously, but you're right. To come to that point, you have to be very conscious.

00:06:52.24    So there are probably different parts of the brain that are involved early on when you're exquisitely conscious, when you do things slow and deliberate, and then after a while, those parts of the brain probably lessen while other parts of the brain, probably evolutionary older parts of the brain, like the basal ganglia, are involved and do this unconscious, very effortless, graceful performance.

    LN: Let's go back that question that you started, not the question but the issue you raised before about scientists using animals, research animals, to give us clues into the human consciousness How so? How does that work?

00:07:27.13    CK: Well, I mean, if we look at our animal friends, like if we look at monkeys or we look at dogs or cats, there's very little question to my mind or to the mind of most biologists that they are also conscious. It's not to say that the conscious states of a dog is the same as your consciousness. So the dog doesn't have nearly as much self-consciousness as you have. So we all know we're going to die one day. We all can contemplate what happens after a death. We can contemplate what happened before we were born. A dog doesn't do that. But a dog sits there and gets excited and is happy and a dog can be sad. So a dog can tell us something. We know a dog is in pain. He doesn't tell me directly. He can't say, "I'm in pain," but he can gnaw [?]. He can limp. He can vocalize. He can tell me indirectly he's in pain. Just like a baby. A baby can't tell me directly, "I'm in pain," but he can scream. He can do other things to let me know that it has consciously experienced pain.  

00:08:15.03    So then we can take it one further and we can do with proper controls and with care and with anesthesia, etc., we can try to do experiments on animals to see which part of the brain is involved, if they have [inaudible] pain, if they have chronic pain, because we want to understand chronic pain in humans. So we can study chronic pain, the condition of chronic pain, and what are the causes in the brain of an animal before we do experiments on humans.

00:08:42.14    So the animal brain can tell us a lot about the human brain, because we are very closely related. Only very few experts on the planet can tell the difference between a little chunk—if I give you a little grain-sized volume of human brain, of monkey brain, of dog brain, of mice brain, nobody but a few experts can tell the difference, because at that level, it's very similar. Our brain is a little bit bigger than a dog brain, but our brain isn't the biggest. I mean, the dolphin brain, a whale brain is much bigger than our brain. So we're very similar. We're all related. We're all nature's children.

00:09:12.09    LN: Professor Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology whose research focuses on what the consciousness is and how it's linked to the brain. We'll come back to you later in the program, Professor Koch. Thanks so much.

    Right now, I want to turn to Professor Colin Allen of Indiana University. He is an expert in something called cognitive ethology, which is the study of animal cognition and evolution. Thanks so much for being with us.

    CA: Thank you, Lynn.

00:09:36.20    LN: Professor Allen, do we even know yet whether animals have consciousness?

    CA: Well, I listened to Christof Koch speak. I think there's lots of people who would say, "Yes, we do know." There are always some skeptics out there, and I think it's an interesting part of the scientific process that the skeptics are pushing a certain kind of argument that has to be responded to. So the give and take of science, yes, there are people who doubt it, but the majority of scientists these days accept some form of consciousness in animals.

    LN: And that is by scientists observing behavior that we would associate with consciousness, presumably.

    CA: Yeah, there's a range of things. So we heard a little bit about the neural similarity in the earlier segment of the show, but also behavioral similarities as you point out and even physiology. So we know that animals respond, for instance, to similar drugs when it comes to painful stimuli, give opiates that will help relieve the pain behavior. So there's a similarity at many different levels here.

00:10:37.13    LN: It's interesting, because I think that people have always been sort of fascinated by the way animals seem to exhibit human characteristics. They look at their pet, and they think they're very human, but as you both have alluded to, there are skeptics among scientists. But when did scientists begin sort of catching up with the rest of us and saying, "Hmm, maybe we should be looking at these animals" and see what they know about consciousness.

00:11:01.28    CA: I think these things have gone in cycles, but you're right that there's a real boom at the moment in scientists taking questions of animal consciousness and cognition more generally seriously. There was a long period in the early twentieth century where psychology really had to reinvent itself from a kind of introspective discipline that it was at the end of the nineteenth century, it was thought that the best way to study the mind was to sit and reflect upon how one managed to carry out certain kinds of tasks.

00:11:32.04    But as Christof Koch was saying, we only have awareness of a very limited part of what's actually going on inside our own brains. And so that turns out to be a very limiting and a very misleading way of going about doing the science of psychology. The early part of the twentieth century, much more emphasis on experimentation, on what could be objectively observed and reported, and in what became known as behaviorist psychology, very much a distaste for questions about things like consciousness that could not be settled so easily on direct grounds of experiment and observation.

    LN: Does that distaste in the scientific community go back to some degree to a sense that if you begin to talk about consciousness, then you're going to get to questions of the soul perhaps? You're going to get to questions that are outside science completely.

00:12:24.23    CA: Well, I think there was some of that, and certainly one sees people who still have—scientists, that is, who have some reservations about talking about things like animal consciousness, accusing the scientists who are happy to talk in those terms of being dualists, of bringing up the old Cartesian idea that mind and body are completely distinct things.

00:12:45.29    In fact, even in Professor Koch's statements earlier in the show, there was a little bit of hedging on that. The mind is something completely different from the brain. And yes, we want to recognize that the brain alone sitting there as a lump of meat doesn't do very much, but the brain with all of its activities is producing the mind. I think the modern view is that there's really no separation between those two, but we still have a long way to go to understand exactly how they're related.

    LN: Colin Allen, stay with us. We're going to continue this discussion. Colin Allen is a professor at Indiana University who studies cognitive ethology. That's the study of animal cognition and evolution. And coming up, we'll—coming up, we'll look at a fascinating study into scrub jays that give new meaning to the phrase "birdbrain." More really big questions after a short break.