Where is my mind?

trying to manipulate your experience a little bit. We'll see if we can get any traction or you game Robert It okay, So if you are able, if you're not operating a vehicle or juggling hatchets or something like that at the moment, please try this weird little meditation exercise with us. I want you to focus on an object in front of you. Can be any object. It should be something that stays in place that you can continually return your gaze. You. Yeah, so look at look at

a detail on the wall. Don't look at your own reflection. Maybe don't look outside the window and passing cars. Your own reflection is just too interesting, right, and it's gonna move and then you're gonna fall over it's just too beautiful. No, okay, so yeah, pick an object, focus on it, look at it and think for a little bit. Just contemplate the physical processes involved in sight. You don't have to know

all the science. Just think about the light passing from that object to your eyes, reflecting off that object coming into your eyes, being filtered through the lenses of your eyes, coming onto the retina, this layer of light sensitive cells being turned into information electrical impulses that are transported into

the brain via europtic nerve. And look at your object and think about the light passing through all the stages it goes through to get to your mind to form the image that you're seeing right now, not just the object itself, but your perception of it. Here's the question, where does it feel like this process ends physically? Where does it feel like this process ends scientifically? You might know something about the visual processing center of your brain,

but don't worry about that. Where does it just subjectively feel like the image is going or where does it feel like you are seeing it? Where's the part of your mind that recognizes what you're looking at, or even just the part of your your body To go beyond that, Sure, now, for me, i'd say default, if I'm not trying anything weird, I guess it feels sort of like it's located somewhere near the front of my skull, sort of hovering behind

my face. But I often wonder if it only feels that way because I've sort of been taught to think of my brain and specifically my prefrontal cortex as the seat of higher thought. And if you feel something similar or really no matter where you feel like this seeing is taking place, try a weird experiment see if you

can move it. I sometimes find that if I relax and focus my attention, I can, Though this sounds weird, subjectively move the center of seeing back in my head where I tricked my mind into feeling like I'm really seeing it somewhere further back in my skull, pushing that perceptive mind space further and further back, maybe just going outside the skull. Can you imagine feeling that like you are seeing in a place outside of your own head. Yeah,

but I've experienced this sort of thing before. Yeah, I mean you can. You can also in addition to moving this, uh, this sort of imagined spot of consciousness, besides moving it around in the skull, and outside of the skull, there's also the ability to move it down your spot mine, into your heart, into your belly, uh, and then again

moving it outside of the body. Yeah. And now, of course, seeing isn't the only mental activity that we have conscious awareness of, so you could try similar experiments with perceptive activities other than just the imagination of the mind's eye. You could try to move the part of you that perceives sounds, or you could try to move your internal monologue.

So we're talking about meditative states here, really, and it's important to note that there are multiple forms of meditation and tailing varying methods of closed eye, open eye, visually aided meditation, audibly aided meditation, walking meditation, yoga meditation, etcetera. And in terms of imagining, we're gonna get into some of the different views that have existed throughout time about

different places in the body that consciousness is centered. But also it's worth noting that out of body states factor into a number of different faiths and supernatural world views. There's actually an interesting version of this in scientology that's called the exteriorization. Oh boy, So the idea here is that uh, and this is This is right off of what is scientology dot org the state of the theting being outside of his body, with or without full perception,

but still able to control and handle the body. When a person goes exterior, he achieves a a certainty that he is himself and not in his body. And to explain that er scientology of theting is essentially the concept of a soul not to be confused with a body, theting, which is like a disembodied theting that's lodging in your body and it's causing physical and mental problems and you

have to exercise it via auditing. Yeah, this sort of interrogation process, right, Yeah, which we touched on in our episode on religious technology if you want to go back and listen to that. But that the idea here is like this is just one example of a of a a supernatural mode of viewing the world or or religious state of mind that in evolves a system of of

imagining the seat of consciousness exiting the body. Yeah. Now, even if you have some success with this experiment, if you can do it, if you can move the place where you're thinking outside your head, we are certainly not trying to suggest or at least I'm not. I think you'll be on the same page here, Robert. We're not trying to suggest that anything is actually moving, or the thought takes place outside the body, or the existence of

an immaterial soul or anything like that. I think it's pretty clear that information processing is performed by the nervous system, primarily the brain, and your brain isn't leaving your head. So whatever the organ is in the body that's generating the experience of consciousness does seem to be stuck in

your skull. But today we wanted to explore this odd feature of human consciousness that it sometimes feels like it has the subjective experience of a place of a sort of self and an identity, even though it's this immaterial concept. It's an experience we know created by a material brain. But but why is it that you might be able to feel like you can move your seat of thought

around two different locations. Um, And if you had, like if you were living in ancient times and all you had to go on was your own subjective reflection, where would you believe your mind was? Yeah, because I believe we we take it for granted with our with our modern scientific understanding of the human nervous system and then

the brain. Like most of the time, I don't even really think about where I'm thinking from, though I do find myself at times falling into the idea that I'm if I'm feeling like particular love or warmth, uh, that this is somehow emanating from my heart, not in a rational sense, but in kind of a literary romantic sense.

You know, this is a kind of crazy thing to suggest, but I've sometimes wondered if the idea of the heart as the seat of emotion and emotional warmthing connection is something that is derivative from the cultural institution of hugging, in that when you embrace someone, you bring them into your torso like your chest area, and you you close the distance between chests, essentially creating this sense that you're

bringing hearts together. I've I've wondered if it's actually backwards like that, that, like the hugging leads to the belief that the heart is the seat of emotional connection, and maybe, knowing what we know about the brain, that's where we get these scenes in movies where like two very manly individuals were like one will grab the other by the head and they'll kind of like do this slight head butt in all their foreheads to each other. You know,

they're like having this this manly bond of minds. Oh, it's not just it's not just men. Forehead hugging is like a kind of cool thing. I remember there's a scene in Mad Max Fury Road and there where like Furiosa and and Max sort of put their heads together for a minute. It's sweet. Okay, Well, what we'll think about that is we proceed here. So in terms of thinking about like how ancient people thought about the seat of consciousness, we we have to begin with the ancient Egyptians.

And I just to clarify, we're not going to do an exhaustive study of of ancient cultures and how they thought about the mind. But but we're gonna go through a few just quick examples. Well, the ancient Egyptians are a good one to feature because they had lots of thoughts on the mind. Oh yes, and the and ultimately the soul. For for them, the human soul wasn't so

much a single entity but a composite. So you had you had to bob the human headed bird combined with cod a life force coup the spiritual intelligence, seek them the power cohibit to the shadow and Wren, which was your name. Uh and isn't many of you might know or remember from our episode on the Egyptian Mummy. While other organs were removed and placed in canopic jars for use in the afterlife, the brain was removed and discarded. Only the heart was left in the body, as this

was the seat of the mind. Uh. And in this they were cardiocentrics. The heart is the center that and and they also believe that the heart would be eventually be weighed on a scale against the head dress of mock the goddess of truth. Yeah. I love this, this story about the afterlife where you're a part of your soul, one of these aspects. Uh, this sort of like heart mind thing gets weighed on the scale against I think it's like an image of a feather usually or something.

And if you're you're too heavy, if you're too heavy with sin or with burdens whatever. The conception they had was that weighed down this part of your soul, you get eaten by this hybrid monster that's part hippopotamus and part crocodile. Isn't that great? I love it? Yeah? Yeah. Egyptian cosmology is just fabulous. Now let's turn to another ancient, UH civilization that that did a lot of thinking, not just about the state of the mind, but just in general.

And that would be, of course, the the ancient Greeks. The Greeks thought a great deal about the seat of consciousness between the sixth century BC and the second century CE. And we could essentially spend an entire hour discussing the

various models proposed by the great minds in those eight centuries. Uh. But just to boil it down, I'm gonna refer to a two thousand seven paper Soul, Mind, Brain, Greek Philosophy and the Birth of Neuroscience, by authors Crivolto and Rebody, and they boiled down Greek perceptions of the brain to the following. So under our Camion and the fifth century b C, there's this idea that that the brain is

the seat of sensation and understanding. And then under Hippocrates around four b C, the mind is the interpreter of things. The brain is the interpreter of things, the messenger of understanding um. And then under Plato three forty seven b C. The brain is the seat of the rational soul. Under Aristotle, three four through two B c E. The brain is the cooling agent of body heat. Okay, under Herophilus through two A d b c it commands the center of the body. And under Galen about nine to two uh

fifteen c E it's uh the seat of hegemonicon. And this is the this is the idea that that So the brain is the hedgemonicon, the ruling principle of the body, the regent or hedgemonica. I know it needs to That's that's the band name right there for sure. So we're talking Galen or Galen of Pergammon again sixteen his lifespan. Central to his interpretation of the human nervous system is

this idea of the hegemonicon. Now, the term itself was Stoic, but Galen firmly believed in the brain central role, which was in sharp contrast to the stoics largely cardiocentric views. So the Stoic philosophers would be more like the Egyptians that saw the heart has played some role in empowering the mind and thought, yeah, they believe that the heart that's where you found the human soul, the intellect, uh, and in the the numa around the heart, and in

this the micro world reflects the macro world. So they believe, you know, here's here's the heart as the sun of human life. And thus it was regarded as as the seat of the logos, the universal intelligence. And they offered various bits of rhetorical argument and support this, as well as the argument that the voice clearly rises from the heart via the throat. Oh that's kind of interesting. Yeah, so,

but Galen was not having it. You know, with lots of ideas like that, I'm always like they're funny in retrospect, but it must have seemed incre doubly clever at the time. So yeah, obviously you think with something down in your chest instead of in your brain. Otherwise, why would speech come from down there If it's coming from the part of you that's thinking, it has a It would be very circuitous for information to be going from the head

down there and then coming out of speech. Yeah, understanding what they knew and did not know at the time, it has a certain truthiness to it. Right. So again Galen was was not having any of this, and uh, and he may have engaged in the first experiment to to to produce evidence that the brain controls behavior and thought.

So he offered up a rigorous and objective anatomical demonstrations, such as such as noting the disappearance of voice in a pig after an incision of the inferior laryngeal nerves. And he also stressed that the heart produced neither sensation nor modification of consciousness when touched. So he was he was all about, let's get down though I would think

it would produce some kind of effect when touched. But but the take home here is that Galen will listen to these ideas, and he said, well, let's put them to the test. Let's actually conduct experiments and uh and and see if if there's any truth to this idea that the heart is uh is the seat of consciousness. And he concluded that it was not. Now one thing

that we could look at and separate. Here is is back to the classical hard problem of consciousness, the one you're going to encounter every time, which is that, like if you're doing experiments on animals or something like that, you can never get inside the animal and really know whether you're affecting its consciousness or not. You can just

look at its behavior. Um, you can even really say that ultimately you'd have the same problem with other human beings, except human beings can at least tell you they can claim to experience consciousness or not. Um But yeah, so we are dealing with these sort of related but different concepts. On one hand, there is activity of the nervous system, as in the central command of the body that produces behavior, and then the other thing is the subjective experience of being.

We assume those things are linked because when you know, we can think about our behavior and that experience is subjective. But but yeah, you could imagine that maybe animals are behaving as automata. They have behavior and even apparently some kind of information processing thought, but it doesn't feel like anything to be them. So I guess those are concepts to to sort of keep separate in the mind. But throughout the history of investigating the seat of consciousness, we're

always going back into blurring them, aren't we. You sort of can't help but do it. Yeah, And now I like that you mentioned the objective and the subjective here, because to get back to this idea that most of us don't have any problem thinking about, the brain is the seat of the mind. In this the subjective and the objective tend to line up for most people, Like I haven't seen a cardiocentric argument made by even the most like the the most out there fundamentalist adherent to

a faith. You know, I can't think of an example off hand where someone's saying, look, dinosaurs are fake. The world is three years old, and you think with your heart. Man, Like, nobody's making that argument. So we're kind of lucky too, if you will to to to largely live in a world where the subjective and the objective line up. Yeah, And I mean, to another extent, I kind of wonder, um, how to put this, Like I sort of wonder how

you could think your mind was powered by your heart. Now, I know that's just my chauvinism as a as a you know, brain centric thinker, knowing what I know and having the cultural beliefs that I do. But I also have thoughts like, um, a strong blow to the head does seem to temporarily impair your consciousness to some extent, Like you lose lucidity, you're sort of harshly removed from the world and you're thinking. Even your subjective experience of thinking seems to kind of slow down and grind its

gears a little bit. This doesn't really seem to happen when somebody hits you in the body, or at least not to the same extent. Or I don't know, maybe you wouldn't agree, but just that kind of thing alone would seem to suggest that people should get the idea the thinking and the subjective experience of being has something to do with what's in the skull. Well, certainly a sort of a heart. Well, we'll stop you. Well, that's

certainly true. Yeah, And and in pro wrestling you have the heart punch, which for a while and many territories was banned because you would you would you'd like you take the individual's arm and like folded behind them, thus exposing that the ribbed area, and then there would be like a very calculated punch to the heart and you

would just go out like a light. So maybe, uh, you know, I wouldn't put cardiocyentracism, uh you know, you know, out of the framework of professional wrestle, and in case if it seems like it could work in the context, Well, but I mean, do you do you generally agree or not that, like the something does feel very natural about thinking about thinking being in the head. Yeah, I largely

agree because I can. It's it's hard to imagine a situation where you have have you know, not only intellectuals, but like working people and soldiers engaging in activities that would result in a in in cranial injuries that they wouldn't you know, be privy to this connection, right, But then again, I guess maybe in defense of the idea, maybe you could think about it more like it's just an injury to things like the eyes and stuff like that.

You know, if we were primarily visually oriented in the world, if you if you hit the part of my body that has the eyes on it, maybe you could explain a loss of lucidity through that somehow. Now, this this leads to our next example. We're gonna We're gonna roll through here, uh, a spiritual supernatural idea, and that is of the seven chakras. Now, this is something I feel a little embarrassed that I think I should know about. I've always heard of chakras, but I really know almost

nothing about them. So give me the the beginner's crash course, Robert. What what's the deal with the chakras? I know there are multiple chakras in the body, Yeah. Then this is another one of those topics that if we wanted to, we could explore just had nauseam. Uh. It shows up in Hinduism, Johnism, Buddhism, and of course your your local neighborhood yoga studio and uh or your local neighborhood tool

album cover. Yeah. Yeah, the work of Alex Great It features into a lot of New Age belief systems as well. And uh. And this is something I've always I've always been fascinated by the metaphysics of chakras. They're various artistic representations and uh. And when I adjust to the my own perceptive lenses to the worldview and of these these models, I can certainly say that I believe in them and find the model useful for meditation in yoga, like when

you put on the spiritual glasses. This makes good sense to Yeah, when I check and do a yoga class, I can engage in this this model of thinking. So chakras or wheels in Sanskrit, are concepts of the subtle spiritual body. The idea that you have energy points position down the body, from the top of your skull to the base of your spine roots roots chakra to crown chakra, so it would go root, sacred naval heart, your third eye,

and then the crown. Whoa, Now, so these all go up sort of the center of your body, right, Like there's a line going up your spine from in the middle, from sort of from your butt to your forehead. Yes, and and I've seen it argue that that animals with tails would have more chakras, but maybe that's one of their more you know, their chill. That's when we turn to our pets for a little slices in My pet

is not chill. Oh yeah, well not always okay, but sometimes at least he lives in the moment, right, that's true. That's the great thing about pets is they are very much in the moment. They don't care about past or future. That they don't have too much trouble with losing the self. Well, uh, with each chakra, each one is tied to different organs, different aspects of personality and human behavior. There's a whole system built up around this. Uh. The numbers vary, but

but seven is pretty much the norm. And it's a reverent, rather different take than the two previous views. The idea that it's been that consciousness and everything that we are is based on neither the heart of the mind, because the energy of being flows through these points, and it can be focused in certain chakras. So, for instance, there's an exercise for opening a particular chakra, concentrating it, even

breathing into or through one's third eye. And this is an interesting experience because in which I've I've engaged in because naturally you know that you're not actually breathing through a non existent aperture in your skull. But if you close your eyes and you focus on the concept, you can you can kind of feel it. You can imagine yourself as this ball of energy moving up and down your body. You can imagine and even feel your center

of being pooled into different parts of your anatomy. I mean, part of me wants to ask, like, why is it that we can do that? But that sort of goes back to the question we started with at the beginning, to the extent that some people can move the location of their consciousness around and in this at least subjective sense, they can make it feel like they're thinking from outside their body. Why can they do that? But why why

is that a feature of the human mind? Well, I think a lot of it comes back to this whole the whole mind body connection there and this this tendency especially you know, you could say we have a definite advantage in modern civilizations of of knowing intrinsically that we think with our mind, but we also fall into that you mean think with the brain. Yes, yes, that we think with a we think with the mind, it's positioned in the brain within and ultimately that we think with

the brain. But uh, in doing this we often fall into this model of the right are on a horse, where the rider is the brain and the horses the rest of the body, when really there we're connected. Really were a centaur. So the you know, study after study continues to you know, to to point out, oh, your your your digestion has a has a role to play in, uh, in what you're thinking and how you think and how your mind works. This is something I wanted to get

into later in the episode. Maybe I'll save part of it, but yeah, there is this idea of embodied cognition, which is one subset of the discipline of extended cognition. And this is just sort of ways of thinking about all the different ways that the human mind is really based

in more than just the brain. Not not to say that the brain is not the primary organ doing the information processing, but that parts of information processing and body processes that inform information processing are offloaded to other things. For example, counting on your fingers, you are literally using your hand for part of the information processing right there. And is no matter how much we think of ourselves as a brain, we are not just a brain. We are a body. Like like who are you? You are

your body. So I think that's one reason that the chakra model is is interesting and and why we can pour ourselves into it so easily. But I also like how this model lines up with the experience of of multiple cells and the ebb and flow of identity and emotion. The idea that you know the person you are first thing in the morning is not necessarily the exact same version of you right before you go to bed, the person that there's the person yesterday that you are yesterday

versus the person you are today. And I'm not I'm not using this as like a real hippie dippy model of of your multiple people. Man, and you've been multiple people throughout your lives. No, it's just the exact manifestation of who you are is gonna vary. Sometimes you're gonna be angry, Sometimes you're gonna be sad. Sometimes you're gonna be a more Um, you're gonna more me be more mentally engaged. Other times you're gonna be more heartfelt. Yeah,

I don't think that's hippie dippy. I mean I think we've got two things in conflict, which is that, Um, On one hand, we feel a strong sense of the unity of our experience. We feel like I am the same person I was yesterday. Like, um, here's one example. If I told you, like, okay, uh, tonight, when you go to bed, your conscious experience will forever cease. Essentially you will die and your experience, but tomorrow morning your body will wake up and continue doing that thing, and somebody,

some other consciousness will inhabit your brain. That maybe the that consciousness is identical to yours except yours just ends. Well, people don't like that idea. I mean, that would not be very enticing to most people. But then again, how can you prove that's not already what happens? Yeah, we have this like there there is no way in which you could know that you don't in fact die every night when you go to sleep and wake up with a new consciousness full of the old consciousness is memories.

And that's sort of the the bizarre fleeting nature of consciousness. It's experienced as an endless succession of moments, and yet we have this strong sense that it's unified throughout our lives. Yeah. I mean, that's the kind of the trap of belief in a soul, or or even even outside of thinking like specifically of a soul, just the thinking of a mind state that it's this thing that could be taken off, put on a shelf, restored, saved, backed up, put in

a new body, etcetera. Uh, and instead it's this. Uh, it's the string. It's this, it's the it's a timeline. Yeah. Uh. Just as a weird little side note, I also think that thinking like that, though it sounds kind of weird to people, this idea that you know, every every moment, your consciousness sort of dies and becomes something new, constantly rising from the ashes every time it goes down a

new train of thought. That could sound kind of weird and depressing, but I think you could also think about it the other way. That can be a kind of exciting liberal rating thought that I think maybe could even help people, you know, people who have fear of death and stuff like that. Just try try try getting around that by thinking about your whole experience is a series of moments that perish every second. Yeah, that's not something you're gonna have to do. It's some future schmuck version

of you that's gonna have to do that. So you know, chill out right. Likewise, quit quit worrying about you know, some transgression you made, uh, you know, several years ago, because that that version of us gone. This is a different to you, moment to moment. It's all open for interpretation, That's what I'm saying. It was the heat of the moment.

All right, We should probably take a break at this point, and then when we come back, we will we will, we will leave the realm of ancient Egyptians and chakras and uh and cardiocentric stoics, and we'll get into some neuroscience. Okay, alright, So note that there are two different things you could really be talking about when you talk about the location of consciousness. Right. One is what we were doing in that experiment at the beginning, the subjective sensation of the

location of consciousness. Some people might be able to do uh, some kind of meditative exercise. They could be very skilled meditator and place their subjective experience of consciousness in somebody else's head. I could think that I'm thinking from Robert's brain.

That would not mean that Robert's brain is what's generating that sensation, obviously, So the location that really and objectively physically generates consciousness is a different question that where than where it feels like you're thinking from um And as as always with our discussions of human consciousness, we've gotta stress again there's no final answer regarding what's true. We you know, we don't know that. There's no final insight as to the objective nature of it, certainly not yet,

and there there may never be. We don't really know. But humans have have been banging on this nutshell for a long time trying to crack it, and there have been some interesting discoveries. Right. Oh, yeah, So the human brain contains about a hundred billion neurons, and neuroscientists have a general understanding of how that network of neurons computes information. But how and where does this computation computation transform into awareness into sentience, into the human condition. Uh, and this

is the so called hard problem of consciousness. Right. One way of putting this might be you could easily explain how organisms with our behaviors would you know, would evolve, But why does it feel like something to be one of those organisms? Why aren't they just automata with with unfeeling intelligence, performing these behaviors in the universe where there's

nothing like to be anything. So for starters, let's take a moment and refer back to to Galen and we'll go ahead and raise his hand in victory over the cardiocentric stoics. Yes, yes, yes, the brain is the seat of cognition, or rather, it's certainly the seating section for the concert. Right. We've already discussed a couple of the interesting qualifiers on that, but I think we can say without blushing too much, that the brain is where information

processing primarily happens. Right, But if this is the seating section in the stadium, what are the exact seats? What does what does consciousness look like? From? Where does it arise? Neurologically speaking? Well, obviously something that we haven't dealt with much in this episode except to sort of ignore it.

Maybe we will just continue this tradition is that for a lot of human history people have had some version of what's known as dual is um Cartesian dualism, the idea that the mind is the thing separate from the body, maybe a thing that controls the body, that it is in some sense immaterial, as it has no physical embodiment whatsoever, or or sometimes I think in the ancient world it was thought of not necessarily as immat he real, but it's certainly not as a solid object you could you know,

extract with a scalpel or something. It was maybe more like a numa or a breath, some kind of gaseous thing. So this concept that we we talked about earlier, the scientology concept of a thetan, like that would be a duelist concept, right, because it is a thing outside of yourself. Yeah, I guess so. Though I wonder in that case is it is the theting considered material or immaterial. I don't

actually know the answer there. I think, based on what I was looking at earlier, I think it would be considered immaterial because I think there's a I think el Ron Hubbard had some some writings where he's talking about it about it, you know, not having mass etcetera. But I am no expert on scientology on the details the

theology of scientology. Now, obviously a lot of people are still very committed to dual is um today for various you know, faith reasons and things like that, and and that's cool, but I'm not aware of any good scientific evidence that has been produced in favor of dual is um. It seems like pretty much everything goes the opposite way.

So I don't think we should really consider that their scientific grounding for the idea that thinking happens outside the brain in some other place and we're forced to try and figure out the connection the differences between how brain activity seems to work and how we actually experience consciousness. Right now, for my own part, I i've I've tended to favor the the epi phemonologist viewpoint of Thomas Huxley.

So he was a duelist and believing in that the mind and the brain are not identical, but he also believed that the mind was an unnecessary byproduct of the of the brain, a sort of cognitive shadow, and I tend to like that that view of it. Now, some people react to epiphenomenalism with real rank or Some people are deeply offended by the idea that the mind doesn't actually do anything, that it's just an unnecessary byproduct of

the brain. Yeah, or an accident, a happy accident, or a sad accident, depending on what your mood happens to be. I think you could also look at that is a very beautiful thing to believe. That's the kind I mean, that's the way I tend to interpret, Like wow, Like this shadow puppet on the wall is amazing. It's not that, you know the fact that it's it's accidental, it's it's caused by this just machinery moving to to make this,

uh this ape body do its thing. Uh. You know, I don't think that that takes away from the miracle of it all at all. Of course, the opposite of that view would be the idea that in some sense it would be hard to understand exactly what this is. But that doesn't mean it's wrong that in some sense consciousness is adaptive, that that consciousness plays some kind of role in the survival of the organism. It happens for

a reason. But in general, we we struggle to comprehend this the psycho physical nexus between our immaterial consciousness or mind and the physical lump of brain in our head. And to be clear, consciousness does not make its nest in any one portion of the brain. Well some people might argue with that, but I think you're right. Okay, Well more on that argument in just a set can. But okay, this idea that there's no center of the brain,

no brain of the brain where everything is aggregated. Uh, this mirrors what we know about memory, right, we have we we don't just have memory like this this one little uh you know, zip drive in our head. We have multiple systems, multiple regions of the brain. Uh. The brain can suffer damage in one area, in an entire system of memory can go offline. But the brain lives on by by the You live on by virtue of

other routes of memory. I kind of like the way I think one episode in the past, I can't remember which one it was, we talked about the metaphor of the brain as almost like an office full of workers, where there are some people who maybe stopped showing up to work, and other office workers may be able to fill in for them, sort of pitch in and cover the bases. Now, some people may be more crucial than others.

Like if your operations manager who keeps the power on doesn't show up, Uh, then you might be in real trouble. Other people might not show up and you can you can find ways to get around it. Yeah, Jim's not here, who's gonna make the coffee? Well, maybe Jane can do it. The coffee might not be as good, but there will still be a caffeinated beverage. Now, a lot of what we understand is as consciousness seems to boil down to awareness and integration of information. Yeah, this is often a

model that's put forward. It's it's this idea of um. Yeah, I'm trying to define awareness. But that's a really hard to do, isn't it. Yeah, Because again we're getting to this this situation where we're trying to explain away the magic of the of the human experience and uh and take it apart into functional um aspects of itself. So, for instance, research into the effects of anesthesia and the brain suggests that integration of information across the brain this

might be our best gauge of consciousness. And some argue that this might be consciousness that what we experience again the shadow cast by this integration. So in other words, that if this is happening, consciousness wouldn't necessarily be rooted in one particular place in the brain. If we're still talking about the location of consciousness, but it's more like a phenomenon arising when the brain is talking to itself

across many different regions. Yes, yeah, well that does sort of tie into something I do want to get to in a second about a proposed localization. Now, one one interpretation of this that I really like this comes down to a book by a neuroscientist Michael Graziano title Consciousness in the Social Brain, and he breaks it down more or less to this. This is a This is the the elevator version of this. This is the crash course version. You take me up to the thirteenth floor. All right,

up here we go. Animal nervous systems evolved to process incoming data more efficients efficiently, but a lot of data streams in so the brain has to sort it all out and apply deeper processing to what really matters. So this is, yeah, we all know this experience because there's a ton of stuff in your field of vision right now that you absolutely are not noticing you see way

more than you really see. Yeah. For another great example, as of your are at a party and you can focus in on either the conversation you're having, or you can sort of loose depart from the conversation you're locked into and and fully engage and listen to another conversation that's more interesting. Yeah, you can keep going like yeah, uh huh, Well, really, what you're doing is evesdropping exactly so.

But we see some more things in insects. We see it in our ability again to see yet not see, to hear yet not here, the less important bits of sense data in our surrounding. And so this focus, the attention, or the control of attention, Graziana argues, is key to our experience of consciousness. Our brains process all of this sense data, as well as our knowledge of self in the world. The self we're aware of is like a game piece on a table. Consciousness then it's just information.

That's his argument anyway. I mean, that's a really interesting way to put it. But as with a lot of these explanations of consciousness, it's hard to feel it. I'm not suggesting that's an argument against it. I don't think it is but a lot of times when people try to say, here's how you explain how consciousness is generated by the brain, however coherent the explanation might be, it's hard to make it feel like, oh, yeah, that feels right, that's what my consciousness is. Um um, I mean, how

does it happen? Like? Where does it come from? You might be able to explain it as attention, But yet again, why is this not some kind of automated, non subjective experience. Yeah, anytime we actually try to see ourselves in these uh, these explanations of consciousness, that they almost always fall flat. Yeah.

So I mentioned a minute ago that there actually have been multiple attempts to locate the seat of consciousness in in one brain subsystem or brain region, uh you know, the place where you'd see the certain brain activity light

up on the f M R I or whatever. And one example is that, I don't know if you remember this, there was a lot of hubbub back in about a brain region known as the clostrum I guess the clos drow because there are two of them, and how research, which was new at the time, might implicate it as the single region responsible for generating the experience of consciousness.

I believe Francis Crick, who worked on you know, the d n A it was involved in investigating the idea that the clostrum played a major role or was the seat of consciousness. So the clostroom is a small little sheet of neurons underneath the neo cortex, the all important neo cortex, and it's very thin. It's completely surrounded by what's known as white matter, this connective tissue that's said to sort of wire different brain regions together. And there

are two of them in your brain. As I said, these closter their their positions sort of anterior center location around around where the temples are on your head. And the classroom has been referred to as this quote neuronal super hub as a sort of central exchange where information from all other all over the brain travels to and from. So it's got information coming in and out from all over the place, and that makes it kind of interesting.

If we're going with the hypothesis you talked about earlier, that uh that the experience of consciousness is the integration of the activity of multiple brain regions, right, that's putting all this information together. Then there have been some really interesting case studies certainly not definitive, but things that make

people in consciousness studies prick up their ears. One of them, for example, is this case of a woman who repeatedly lost conscious experience or reported doing so, when this region

of her brain was electrically stimulated. But it was not the same kind of losing consciousness where usually when we say lose consciousness, it means like go to sleep, you know, or something like that, you sort of close your eyes and you lose all you stop acting, you just kind of fall over, and all that really continues is like breathing and heartbeat and digestion and stuff. This lady was

not like that. She could, according to UH to the reports about this, she could continue very basic behaviors for a few seconds after the point where she claimed her conscious experience stopped. So if she was like doing simple movements or repeating a word, just very simple things like that, they could do this stimulation. Her memory of being conscious goes away, and yet her body continues doing the thing

for a brief period of time. Wow, And so I'm assuming they're doing this with electromagnetic stimulation or some other similar I think it was. I think it was electrode stimulation. Um, this is this is scary if you start thinking about the possible implications of this in the same way that they're you know, the the the alleged god helmet. What if you had the zombie helmet where you just do you put it on and then your consciousness is out and you're just just go about about like, you know,

cleaning an apartment, right, you act without awareness? Of course, would you really mind that? You might mind? You might mind missing that time later? Um? Yeah, So I don't know what to make about that. I I'm a little skeptical about the idea that you'd ever be able to pin consciousness on one particular part of the brain. But then again, I'm I'm not a neuroscientist. I mean, there

might be something to that. I'm also sympathetic to the ideas that that consciousness is not one unitary thing, but is in fact as symboled out of different experiential components. This is also a controversial idea. It's but by no means, you know, widely accepted a lot of people don't like that idea at all. But I think this might be a good place to to come back to. This idea of extended cognition. You know that we mentioned earlier with

the idea of of embodied cognition. So if you do something extremely simple like write down a note on a piece of paper to help you remember something, say you write down, you know, uh need need to buy five golf balls at target. Yeah, in what sense is that piece of paper and pencil not a part of your cognition, not a part of your information processing. It's only in the sense that you would make a perhaps arbitrary rule that says only stuff that happens inside the brain counts

as cognition. But there are tons of external tools and phenomena that aid in our cognition, from calculators to hand gestures and even other people. You can use other people's cognition to supplement your own, and that would be sort of like computer adding on an extra processing core. In what sense is that not part of the information processing? And that's happening. And this is the main idea behind

the concept of extended cognition. The brain is obviously the primary organ used in thinking, but thinking includes the activity if tons of external things hands, pen and paper, computers, other people. And with that in mind, I don't want to take a take this in a spooky direction. But could we not begin to see how extended cognition could imply a sort of willingness for the brain to engage

in extended consciousness. If the subjective experience of the world is generated by information processing, and information processing involves external activity hands, pen and paper, other people, could part of the experience of consciousness be thought of as generated by something external to the brain. I do want to be clear here again, not not proposing anything supernatural or ghostly about that, just trying to introduce some more weirdness into

this idea about where the mind resides. Yeah, because if you're doing a math on your fingers, then is there is there is their mind all over your fingers. It's got cognition over your your hands. I don't know that that might be a nonsensical idea, but I do think it's at least worth contemplating, at least maybe long enough

to dismiss I'm not sure. All Right, we should probably take one more break at this point, but when we come back, we'll discuss this topic a little bit more, and we'll even get into a little bit of Daniel Dinnett. All right, we're back. Okay, one last thing I wanted to talk about in this episode, Uh, about asking the question where is my mind? And it's a short story by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett's philosopher we've talked about on the show before. I always think he's a

really interesting dude. Uh. He's written a lot about philosophy of mind. He's trying to He wrote a book in the nineties called Consciousness Explained, where he tried to outline a theory about how consciousness was generated from the ground up by these different cognitive processes sort of having additive properties adding up to consciousness, and how things could He had the idea that consciousness is not either just an

either or like it's there it's not. He has this idea that things can be sort of conscious, there can be varying degrees of consciousness and uh, and that we

represent some level of consciousness that is common to human animals. Yeah, because certainly when you start looking at at other animal specimens, you look at say dolphins, um various primates, or another example is is octopi, you start you have to ask yourself, well, to what extent do we dare take the human model of cognition and say, all right, octopus, do this make this shape with your with with your brain. Uh, that's

that's that's the ridiculous. But then even if we get the octopus to do it, it's it's still hard to know what's going on inside the octopus's experience. I mean, I probably assumed that other animals are having some sort of experience. You can never really know for sure. It would just seem by analogy that they are to some extent, probably, but yeah, it's hard to know. But anyway, I want

to get into this. So Daniel denn it's this philosopher, but years ago he wrote a sci fi short story and this was to get into some of his weird ideas about the mind. So Dennett's main character in this story is a fictionalized version of himself who is delivering a lecture to an auditorium full of students and colleagues. Here's the setup. He says, several years ago he was

recruited by the government to undergo a dangerous mission. And what it was was that the Department of Defense had developed a new type of weapon, which was an underground tunneling nuclear warhead. It sounds like a great centerpiece for a nineties movie, right, like the has Nicolas Cage in it. Maybe, yeah, Nicolas Cage, I think. I think it's it's like the sequel to con Air. They get him to come in there an con drill um and it's known as the

Supersonic Tunneling Underground Device or STUD exactly. So. It was designed to tunnel through the core of the Earth and be capable of delivering a nuclear payload to weapons installations on the other side of the globe. But it became stuck about a mile beneath Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oh. So, the government wants dinn It to go disarm the device, and unfortunately, the device is known to emit, a type of radiation that is considered harmless to the body but fatal to

brain cells. But the government has a solution. They want to remove Dinnett's brain from his body and store it in a jar full of liquid in a lab in Houston, allowing it to control his body remotely via a radio link. This is great now, so you think, wait a minute, that's crazy. Not really, they explained, because the body is already connected to the brain through a series of nerves. For all practical purposes, you can think of these as

wires of varying lengths. So what if you just imagine making the wires a little bit longer, and a little bit longer, and a little bit longer still, and then eventually just skipping the wires altogether and substituting wireless radio waves that can do the same types of energy and information transmission that the nerves do, just like the communication

between your computer and your WiFi router. See this, This blows another hole in the RoboCop to scenario where you had Tom Noonan's brain put into this this robotic war machine, and then RoboCop is able to defeat RoboCop too by reaching and pulling his brain out of the machine and crashing it on the smashing it on the ground. Why did Why did it? Because his brain was just connected by via wires to the rest of the robot. It

could have been an a vault somewhere protected. Why So anyway, Dennett says, well, yes, I'm very curious about the mind and the brain, so I will undergo the procedure. So he wakes up from surgery and everything feels basically normal, as if nothing has changed, except he has some antenna's poking out of his head, but otherwise he feels like he is him. But then he goes to view his brain. There it is, He sees it sitting in a vat

full of He describes what looks like root beer. Um, and or wait does he say ginger ale or root beer? I can't remember. It's sitting in something that looks like a delicious sugar yeah, okay um, And it's attached to a bunch of electrodes in antenna's. But then he is struck with a really odd thought. Why does he think, here, I am looking at my own brain instead of there's my body looking at me. After all, the brain is the thing doing the thinking. He's looking at the thing

that is thinking right now. It's the organ responsible for generating the idea of the self, maintaining it through every environmental variation. And yet he cannot shake the idea that he is still, in some sense in his body. Uh. And in the sense he is because he's looking out through eyes that are attached to his body. But to answer the question where am I? He subjectively feels that he is in his head, but consciously knows that he is in the jar. Now for somebody who doesn't usually

write science fiction. I think this is a really good setup for a story. Yeah, I'm digging it. I can I can imaginate at least as an Outer Limits episode. Now, can you only imagine how it would end if it were a Twilight Zone episode? Okay, So he's trying to sort out his feelings, and Dinnett decides to rename the two objects. So he names his body Hamlet and he names his brain Yorick. Good choices. If Dinnett is not strictly in Hamlet Hamlet, and he's not strictly in Yorick,

where is he? Where? Where is the self that he's thinking from? Uh? And maybe maybe he's wherever his point of view is. He goes through a bunch of different options here, but then he also discovers there's a switch he can flip to turn off the antennas on his brain and sever the connection between his brain and body. Flipping the switch causes him to become groggy and collapse, and somebody else has got to flip it back on

for him. And now eventually he's got to go face down the underground nuke, so controlling his body via a radio link just like before, then it goes down into the tunnel to disarm the stud but unfortunately, while down there, one by one his radio links begin to fail, So first he loses his hearing, then he loses control of his speech, then of various motor functions, eventually goes blind and loses all connection to his body. At this moment,

he realizes something very weird has happened. Um his body has collapsed in the tunnel with nothing to control it, and he has become a disembodied mind nobody, only a brain. And the odd thing is that whereas before his intuition told them, he told him he was in his body, even though he knew otherwise, now he asked the question where am I, and his intuition tells him that he's in a jar in a lab in Houston. It's only by like subtraction of the rest of what's available that

he starts to put himself in the brain. Uh. And this makes me wonder just as a side we we would usually assume that some version of this is possible, but should we, like, could you really think at all if your mind was confined to a total void, and you had no input or output or any kind any kind of anything whatsoever between your brain and the outside world.

I wonder if that would actually preclude thinking somehow. Well, you know, Lovecraft actually got into this little bit and he hit a short story titled The Whisper and Darkness, and there's a plot concerning the ego. These alien fungal creatures from another world, and they have a habit of removing a human's brain, putting them into a mego brain canister so they can be uh, you know, stored away

or shipped elsewhere, and you just go mad inside the canister. Well, this is something I think that's legitimate to worry about. When people talk about this sci fi trans human kind of idea of downloading your brain into a computer, Uh, a lot of people think this is really gonna happen someday. I remain highly skeptical about it. Um, but okay, let's

say it is possible. I'm not sure that would be a good thing to do, because I mean, there you run the risk of putting your consciousness into a scenario where you would be uh possibly psychologically tortured by you know, lack of some kind of crucial input or output, and also at the same time unable to even kill yourself and escape it. Yeah, I mean you could have like

a virtual sense of your body. But eventually you're gonna have to hire mcjag or to kidnap the MeV o este as from the past so he can occupy his brain. Is this the plot of Free Jack? I have Anthony Hopkins in it. Yeah, he plays the brain in question. Okay, so back to the story. We're getting close to the end now. So he's been in this brain. Now he's just a brain, and he goes into a dreamless sleep.

He wakes up about a year later, and upon awaking in a hospital, he again finds himself having the sensation of being located in a physical body, but it's not his original one. He has the sense that his personality has been maintained. You know that he's the same person. This thing we're talking about earlier, the unity, the unity of conscious experience over time. But he's in this new body, supplied to him by the government from previous circumstances unknown. Uh,

of course. And yet, of course the organ doing the thinking is still in the jar in Houston, connected to his body via new radio links just like the old one. Uh. And in keeping with his Hamlet theme, he names his new body Forton bra all right, now refresh me. I certainly remember that, of course Hamlets, the main character Yorick is the skull that how does Forton brought factor in? Forton Bra is the character who comes in at the end of Hamlet, and uh and just sort of survey.

He's the conquering invader who comes into the castle at the end and sees the devastation and a sort of comments on it all. Oh, yes, yes, gotcha. So if Dennett's original body, the first body he had Hamlet, is dead in the tunnel in under a huge grave marker reading stud why why does he still feel that he is alive but with a new body, rather than feeling that he died and now some other person is being

controlled by his brain? Uh? That that seems to root the idea of the location of the self in the brain. But then Dinnett, in his new body Forton bra goes to view his brain again. Once more, he tries to flip the switch to sever the connection between his brain and his body, and this time nothing happened. He doesn't become groggy and collapse. Here he discovers he has unwittingly been the subject of a secret side project scientists in the lab have made a computer copy of his brain

named Hubert. Now, who knows if such a thing as possible to do in reality, But let's go along with it for just a second. Running on a computer attached to radio transmitter, is a piece of software that is a perfect duplicate of his brain, exactly replicating all the function and retaining all the memories. And the scientists have been been experimenting with it to see how closely it mirrors the actions of his real brain, and so far

its behavior has been a d identical. Furthermore, he discovers that the reason he did not experience any problems upon severing the connection between Yorick and Forton Brough is that, in fact, Forton Braugh is not being controlled by Yorick the organic brain, but by Hubert, the computer copy. Both Yorick and Hubert are simultaneously fed the same input from the body, and they both react to it the same way, So it does not seem to matter which one of

them controls the body. Forton bra Now where is den it Um? And so there's some more wonderfully fun things that happened at the end of the story. I don't want to spoil the very ending of it for you. But that's sort of like the meat of of the philosophical questions posed. But as interesting as it is, it makes me wonder like, can you ever really learn anything about the nature of consciousness purely through these kinds of

thought experiments? You know, can can um can just coming up with scenarios and and sort of ratiocination in the chair get you to a place of understanding the nature of consciousness that say, you wouldn't have arrived at just

by having the experience of being conscious. Yeah, it's an interesting argument because on one hand, like looking at your own consciousness, like your own CONSCIOUSNSS kind of like this weird ledge we've built out over a canyon, and it makes sense that maybe to perceive it, we've kind of got to build a new, uh, a new artificial ledge over the edge of the canyon, so that we can actually have the perspective to look back on the previous perspective.

If that makes any sense. Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is if we kind of have a blinder up uh. In fact, our future guest are Scott Baker. I've talked a lot about this blind brain theory, about the brain not being able to perceive itself. It's just it has not evolved with the tools to study consciousness. That just is not relevant to survival. So we have to have a work around there. We have to sort of build new thought structures to try and perceive what

we are. Yeah, but I mean, who knows if these thought structures really provide any insights. I mean, I I find this story really interesting, and a lot of this is the kind of thing, A lot of this thought about consciousness. I mean, you know, a lot of times they're not doing scientific experience ements. Who knows of scientific experiments could give us any useful information about consciousness either,

or maybe even that doesn't work. Um. But yeah, it's this big, wonderful, juicy problem, and you're always tempted to come back to it and think you can have some new insight about it. But in the end, every time I have one of these conversations, I'm left wondering, like, was any new ground covered or we did we just kind of run in circles with this question that's so

enticing but maybe never solvable. I don't know. Well, one of the great things about this, this story, which is essentially a thought experiment is one of those thought experiments that the cause that that if if you if you pay close enough attention and you read it and you think about it, you may reach that point where something kind of clicks and you you're suddenly viewing your own reality in a way that either you haven't before, are certainly in a way that you do not view it

on a regular basis. It's not your default view of your subjective reality yea. And and that those movements can be magical where it takes you out. You're kind of taken out of the mud of who you are and you're able to to glimpse it almost like a imagine two dimensional being pulled out into a three dimensional world and and trying to just get a glimpse of everything before sinking back into place and to take it back to where we started at the beginning. This is what

a lot of meditative practicees. I mean, there are a lot of different ways to meditate, but one of the things people do when they meditate is to try to get out of themselves, to see themselves to and to to get out of you know, to shut down the default mode network too, to get out of this constant past versus present way of living and just be be present, to just set there and stare at an electrical outlet and and not even think about the electrical outlet, to

just be this moment of perception. And another thing that's interesting to think about the location of consciousness is the idea of losing consciousness while being conscious, if this makes any sense, not not like going under general anesthesia or something, but uh, one way of thinking about it is that we're constantly losing consciousness whenever we become absorbed in something.

You know, like when you're absorbed in watching a movie and you're you've you've hit that point where you stopped thinking about yourself, sitting there reflecting on things, and you're just in the story. You could look at that as a sort of loss of consciousness. You stop being, you stop being aware of the self, and you you're just experience, just pure experience. And the same thing happens in like some kind of creative projects, you know, you can be

like writing or or painting or something. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot of what the flow state often seems to be. Is it's like that physical location of consciousness disappears. You no longer have a sense that you're thinking is taking

place somewhere. You just are what you're thinking about. Yeah, And and there are different versions of it too, because like I'll experience this kind of flow state loss of consciousness, if you will, while maybe reading something really good or or hit or writing something and I'm really into the writing. But I'll also experience it when I'm painting a miniature sometimes. So it's so my consciouence has kind of becomes the tip of a paint brush, which which is is rather

different than it becoming this, uh, this fictional framework. Um. And then also in like say a yoga class or even outside of a ya like a purely um you know, a purely secular, purely physical activity of say running on a treadmill or what have you. Um, this too can be a situation where you just become the act. You just become the physical thing that you're doing, and everything else can, at least for a little bit, melt away. Well, folks, I don't think we had any answers for you about

the nature of consciousness. Somehow, that's always the case whenever we come back to the subject. But but I nevertheless I always feel called back to it anyway. That's it for this episode, but as always, you can head on over to our mothership, Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, blog posts, and links out to our various social media accounts such as Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, Facebook, and Hey on Facebook.

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