“The brain seeks meaning and patterns. It would be very adaptive to do so in nature, because you need to know how to predict danger and to develop social ties. So our brains are very good at recognizing patterns, but also at creating them, even when they’re not there.“
–Dr. Jay Giedd, Chair of Child Psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital, San Diego and Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Professor of Psychiatry at UCSD School of Medicine
In this lighthearted conversation, developmental neuropsychiatrist Dr. Jay Giedd, Professor of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine returns to the podcast to engage in a discussion that touches on the nuances of unconscious and conscious states, the relationship between dreams and waking moments, and what the recent science tells us about different brain specializations.
How does consciousness emerge?
Jay Giedd shares one of the utmost questions on his mind as of late, namely, at what point do we cross the threshold from being unconscious to being conscious?
The discussion touches on how sleep studies and improving brain imaging technology can help us understand the nature of consciousness, and Jay considers the notion that emergence of awareness is caused not only by the quantity of brain neurons, but also by the types of connections.
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
The duo discuss dream content, and Jay reflects on his initial training as a Freudian psychoanalyst, part of which included keeping a dream journal. He makes the observation that although the dreaming mind can create a narrative where the laws of physics and biology are defied, our dreams are nonetheless connected to our day-to-day activities. Bernie suggests that one possible hypothesis for this phenomenon is the cortex trying to find meaning, even with random input.
Sensory Perception and Conscious Beliefs: True or False?
Jay highlights the fact that perception and cognition do not always accurately represent reality. In terms of increasing our chances of survival, it may be more important that our perception and pattern recognition skills actually work, rather than how accurate they are. Jay also emphasizes that over time, the physiology underlying conscious signals might have been strengthened by providing humans the ability to cooperate and better understand one another, thus further increasing our odds of survival.
How neural traffic flow is measured and the limitations of our scientific tools.
Bernie makes a distinction between the functional and the anatomical connectivity of the brain. Jay reinforces this by explaining how neural traffic flow can be measured. Scientific tools have greatly improved, but there are still many puzzles that are unsolved.
In the final moments of their conversation, Jay shares his belief that one day, consciousness will not seem incomprehensible, although he acknowledges that we still have a long way to go. He emphasizes the immense complexity of the developing brain and the emergence of consciousness.
“Good science always raises more questions than answers and consciousness is a great example of that.”
– Dr. Jay Giedd
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Talking Points:
- 0:00 – How does consciousness emerge?
- 8:46 – Ways to study dreams
- 17:05 – Conscious truth and fantasy
- 22:57 – Brain connectivity: The street map and the traffic flow
- 29:19 – Clarifying the concepts
Bios
Bernard J. Baars: a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA, Bernie is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory and global workspace dynamics, a theory of human cognitive architecture, the cortex and consciousness. Bernie’s many acclaimed books include A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness; The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology; In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind; Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience. Winner of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by the International Neural Network Society, which recognizes work in perception proven to be paradigm changing and long-lasting.
Dr. Jay Giedd is the Chair of Child Psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital — San Diego and Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dr. Giedd is also a Professor of Psychiatry at UCSD School of Medicine, and Professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Giedd was chief of the Section on Brain Imaging, Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). His widely published research and expertise evaluates how the child’s brain develops in health and illness, the factors that influence development and how to optimize treatments to take advantage of the child’s changing brain. Jay and his award winning work were featured in the PBS 2 part series “Brains on Trial” hosted by Alan Alda.
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) began with this question: “How does a serial, integrated and very limited stream of consciousness emerge from a nervous system that is mostly unconscious, distributed, parallel and of enormous capacity?”
GWT is a widely used framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the functioning of the brain, as Baars first suggested in 1983.
A set of explicit assumptions that can be tested, as many of them have been. These updated works by Bernie Baars, the recipient of the 2019 Hermann von Helmholtz Life Contribution Award by International Neural Network Society form a coherent effort to organize a large and growing body of scientific evidence about conscious brains.
