Who You Are is an Interactive Process (Big Think)

For years, I have argued both here and elsewhere that our notions of self, identity, and consciousness are misguided. We typically think of them as nouns, as objects we can study and measure. I believe, however, based on my experience as a Buddhist and as a student of neuroscience, that who we are is not a noun, not an object.

From the Buddhist Abhidharma:

Here (in the the Dhammasangani), the human mind, so evanescent and elusive, has for the first time been subjected to a comprehensive, thorough and unprejudiced scrutiny, which definitely disposes of the notion that any kind of static unity or underlying substance can be traced in mind.

Here is more on the Abhidharma from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The mature Abhidharma thus assimilates the analysis of phenomena-in-time-as-constituted-by-consciousness with a highly complex description of the consciousness process, dissolving the causal relations between ordered successions of consciousness moments into the activity of perception.

We are verbs, we are process. It's slightly humorous that it has taken the West almost 2,500 years to catch up with these ancient ideas, but even now this is still a fringe perspective in the neuroscience community.

Last year Virginia Hughes' Only Human blog covered a couple of then-new research findings about consciousness, and concludes that "consciousness, too, is a process — a very slippery one."

Allan Combs has written about Consciousness as a Self-Organizing Process (An Ecological Perspective). In that paper, he offers this definition of consciousness, which is one of the best I have seen anywhere:

Consciousness is perhaps best understood from an ecological perspective in which the ongoing events that structure it are seen as a rich interacting complex of informing cognitive, perceptual, and emotional information subsystems analogous to the interactive energy driven metabolism of a living cell. The result is an organic, self-generating, or autopoietic, system constantly in the act of creating itself.

YES! Consciousness is constantly in the act of creating itself. But we are not aware of this process happening unless we have spent some considerable time in meditation watching the mind. So why is this? Again, Combs:

Informal introspection reveals the overall fabric of conscious experience at each moment to be constructed of a variety of undergirding psychological processes such as memory, perception, and emotion (e.g., James 1890/1981; Combs, 1993b; Combs, 1995b). This idea is consistent with Tart's (1975, 1985) view that states of consciousness, including dream and non-dream sleep, various drug-induced and ecstatic states, as well as ordinary waking consciousness, are formed of unique patterns of psychological functions, or processes, that fit comfortably together to make something like a gestalt. We may suspect that this comfortable gestalt represents an energy minimum from the brain's point of view.

Anyway, all of this is simply food for thought - as is the article below.

Perhaps if we did not see our self as fixed and unchanging, we might more easily change the dysfunctional patterns that disrupt our lives.

Who You Are is an Interactive Process

by David Shenk
December 23, 2013

We study savants - you know, Rainman and people like that - and we think there’s obviously evidence of innate gifts because these guys are obviously born with different sorts of brains. They’re born with these gifts that enable them to remember every calendar date going back to the year 1200 or whatever.

When you actually look at what is going on yes, these people are born with birth defects if that is what you want to call them. Their brains are certainly wired differently. There is no question about that, but it turns out that the actual skills that they acquire then come after that and that we can actually manipulate our own brains.

The word is plasticity. Everyone has heard the term plasticity. There is a difference in quantity between what these savants are born with and what we can do with our own brains. There isn’t really a qualitative difference. We can alter our own brains but we don’t actually develop the skills to do what the guy in Rainman did or these other amazing savants do. Those differences are already in place. It’s the process of developing these skills, not just being born with the skill or the gift.

I'm trying to help people understand that the old notion of innate, the old notion of giftedness, the notion that we are born with a certain quantity of intelligence or a quantity of talent really isn’t there. We’re all born with differences, no question about that. We have genetic differences, but how those genetic differences actually lead to differences in traits - that’s a dynamic process that we are all very much involved with on the family level, as parents, as kids ourselves, culturally, in terms of nutrition and the environment. Everything we do and everything we are is an ongoing interactive process, which affects how those genes are then subsequently going to be turned into the traits that work for us and against us.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock


by David Shenk

Virginia Hughes - Consciousness Is a Process

This cool article comes from the Only Human blog at National Geographic. Using the recent study that showed a mouse brain remains active for 30 seconds after death as a jumping off point, Virginia Hughes takes a look at the activity of consciousness, suggesting we should think of consciousness as a process, not a thing (in line with a lot of neuroscience research).

Consciousness is a Process

by Virginia Hughes

Last week my fellow Phenom Ed Yong wrote a post about what happens to consciousness when animals die. According to the research Ed described, a rat’s brain shows signs of consciousness for at least 30 seconds after its heart stops.

That study got a lot of buzz, understandably, because of what it implies about near-death experiences: namely, that they’re more likely the product of a human mind than of some mystical power.

But Ed’s post also raised some more nuanced — and I think, more profound — questions about the work. For example, coma expert Steven Laureys of the University of Liège pointed out that nobody really knows yet how to determine whether an animal is conscious or unconscious by looking at its brain waves alone. “It’s terribly hard to make strong claims about what these rats actually perceived, or about possible conscious experiences,” Laureys told Ed.

But that line of research is advancing rapidly. Just two days after the rat study came out, researchers in Italy reported a new method for decoding neural signals of consciousness — in people. Marcello Massimini’s team from the University of Milan found that people in different states of consciousness will respond to a non-invasive electromagnetic pulse with distinctive patterns of brain waves.

If other groups confirm that these waves are reliable markers of consciousness, it would be a huge help to doctors who treat people with brain injuries. Many of these patients look the same from the outside — they don’t respond to doctors or loved ones with words, say, or eye blinks, or hand squeezes. But they are not the same. Some 68 percent will recover consciousness within a year, and 21 percent will lead independent lives, according to one study. What’s more, some people gain consciousness one, two or even five years after their injury.

With current technologies, however, it’s extremely difficult for doctors to predict which patients will have positive outcomes and which will never break through. In 2009, Laureys’s group estimated that 41 percent of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state (a murky state of biological arousal without any conscious awareness) were later found to have some level of consciousness.

Massimini’s solution relies on a technology called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, in which researchers place a wand on the person’s head. The wand contains a magnetic coil, which produces an electromagnetic pulse that passes through the person’s skull and tickles the neurons underneath. The neurons respond to that pulse, and the researchers then measure that neuronal response via EEG electrodes places all over the scalp.

The researchers created algorithms that analyze the patterns of EEG response and spit out a number — the “perturbational complexity index”, or PCI — between 0 and 1. PCI is based on the idea that consciousness arises when groups of neurons show responses that are both unique and coordinated. As Nicholas Schiff, a neuroscientist at Cornell University, explained it in a related commentary: “High PCI values are obtained only if the initial TMS perturbation alters activity in a large set of integrated brain regions that each then react differently over time.”

It’s complicated stuff. This video, created by the researchers, describes the technique visually, which helped me understand it:


 

Measuring Consciousness from Virginia Hughes on Vimeo.
Once they had refined their methods for calculating PCI, the researchers tested its validity on 32 healthy people while they were either: awake, in dreaming sleep, in deep (unconscious) sleep, or under various kinds of anesthesia. The lowest PCI recorded during a conscious state was .44, and the highest PCI recorded in an unconscious state was .31, suggesting that consciousness emerges somewhere, somehow, in between.

The team then showed that PCI could also accurately identify consciousness in 20 people with brain injuries. Six people in a vegetative state, for example, had PCI scores between .19 and .31 — in the same range as healthy people who were in deep sleep or drugged. In contrast, two patients with locked-in syndrome — a condition in which people are aware and have normal thinking abilities, but cannot communicate because of total body paralysis — had PCI scores ranging from .51 to .62, no different from awake healthy people.

There’s still much to be done before this new technology can be tested in the clinic. The sample size was pretty small. And it’s not clear yet whether PCI can reliable distinguish between patients who have a minimum level of consciousness and those who have none — the distinction that’s arguably the most difficult and important in a clinical setting.

I like the study, though, because it emphasizes an essential point that also came out of the rat study.

“Doctors assume that after clinical death, the brain is dead and inactive,” the rat study’s lead investigator, Jimo Borjigin, told Ed. “They use the term ‘unconscious’ again and again. But death is a process. It’s not a black-or-white line.”

Right, death is a process. But consciousness, too, is a process — a very slippery one.

All Living Things Are Part of a System

This short excerpt is from an article by Louis W. Sander, a psychoanalyst, former Professor of Psychiatry (Boston University School of Medicine), and currently is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus (University of Colorado School of Medicine). The article is Thinking Differently: Principles of Process in Living Systems and the Specificity of Being Known [Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1):11–42, 2002].

His writings have been collected in Living Systems, Evolving Consciousness, and the Emerging Person: A Selection of Papers from the Life Work of Louis Sander (Psychoanalytic Inquiry Book Series).

I really like his perspective in this section - it has become increasingly impossible not to take a systems approach in understanding how individuals (from amoebas to human beings) interact and and participate in the "ever-ongoing exchange with its surround." He seems to be offering here another take on complex adaptive systems, from the perspective of psychoanalysis.

Life Process and Paradox

Immediately we begin to think about life and the mystery of life process, we begin to confront paradox, actually a list of paradoxes. For example, we cannot think of any organism, down to the smallest microbe, that lives without having to think of an environment within which it must be in an ever-ongoing interaction. Thus, if we begin with life, we begin not with the living organism itself, but with a “system”—the organism and its environment. But, if we begin with a system—the organism always within an ever-ongoing exchange with its surround—we are thinking of process, a continuing process with many levels of complexity occurring together. A process with many levels of complexity occurring together immediately becomes paradoxical since life process requires both ongoing continuity and ongoing change. What appears to have the stability of the material structure of the body is found to be, itself, within a flow of change. The molecules that make up the body today are not the same molecules that constructed it a month ago. This flow of change, paradoxically, must maintain the organized wholeness of the organism, while its components move through disorganization, removal, and replacement, all the while maintaining the vital coherence of the organism, essential for the continuity of its life. How can all this be done? How can continuity, discontinuity, and wholeness go on together? What we have been accustomed to thinking of as having the permanence of “structure” we now seek to understand as an ongoing process, a process “organizing complexity.” Later we will come to a way of thinking about this by taking a glimpse at chaos (or complexity) theory, but first let us return to paradox—that, by thinking of life as process, we must think of the organism actively and continuously engaged with its ecology at a complex hierarchy of levels—that is, we must think of the functioning of a system, not of life as the property of the organism alone.

Let us start with the meaning Webster gives to the word system: an assemblage of objects united by some form of regular interaction or interdependence or “a group of diverse units so combined as to form an integral whole.” For life to continue over time, the combining of diverse units to form an “integral whole” also must be continuous over time. If a coherently organized wholeness stops, life begins to fail; if process stops, life stops. We know that in living systems life does stop, but we know also that the new keeps appearing. Thus we must think of process as a flow of input and output in the system through an ever-moving, overarching, organizing process that, through ongoing interaction between organism and surround, is constantly achieving continuity in the face of discontinuity—rather than thinking of the continuity of life as having a kind of given permanence. It is process at all levels of complexity, from the molecular to our ecology within our solar system, that is required to keep the almost unimaginable diversity of parts combining to achieve the “integral whole” that the living system represents.[1]

NOTE:
1. Beebe and Lachmann (1996) have been on a similar search for principles of process in living systems at the human level, coming up with their “three principles of salience”: Regulation, Disruption and Repair, and Heightened Affective Moments. The experience of “heightened affective moments” provides the essential positive affects in our experiencing that accompany being “together-with” another. At the psychological level, then, events that generate the experiencing of positive affects become the source of the essential motivating impetus that pushes us to restore connection when it has become disrupted. Without something of this positive dimension as part of our framework of expectancy, we become vulnerable to a lapse into the dis-organization of depression or illness.