The home of the late Nobel Laureate, Gerald Edelman, is the setting for an elevated discussion on human consciousness among three neuroscientists and a professional magician.
Bernie Baars opens the discussion by asking what is on top of everyone’s consciousness. Gerald’s son David Edelman asks: What level of biology is relevant to the study of conscious processing? Is it a matter of molecules? Or cells? Or networks?
The Biological Level of the Conscious Brain. David points out that some would say that consciousness is somehow quantum-based, while others would claim that it comes down to subjective human experience. Bernie points out that all observable conscious animals live in the very confined biosphere of Planet Earth. This narrows the field considerably.
Like Evolution, Consciousness is Highly Adaptive. Mark describes how magicians interact with their audiences, and this process of feedback and feedforward allows them to draw attention to some things, and hide other things. Mark talks about his conversations with Gerald Edelman, where similarities between the conscious brain and a magician working an audience became apparent.
Like Magic, Inductive Science is Highly Adaptive and Full of Surprises. Intrigued by this shifting of perspectives, Bernie asks Mark if it is possible to know what drives someone without being familiar with the content of their conscious thoughts. Referring to the story of the Greek legend of Procrustes, Mark notes that a magician needs a repertoire of options in order to adapt to the audience. A magician wants to find the right size of the “Procrustean” bed to draw in and deceive the audience. Bernie makes a link to this process of science, where we constantly misunderstand things and then work to minimize our mistakes – like running into a brick wall and learning from all the bumps and scrapes.
How Magic Exploits The Limited Capacity of the Conscious Brain. Do magicians create magic tricks based on their knowledge of the brain? We are all constrained by the invisible boxes inside our minds. Mark enjoys probing scientists to figure out where their blind spots are. He demonstrates his point by having Jay visualize a playing card and then this very card stunningly appears inside Bernie’s shirt pocket. Everyone seems to agree that science is about the ability to be surprised.
“From the antigens perspective, he’s just an organism trying to be alive as well. So, once you take the full account of that offensive-defensive — you know, who’s the aggressor and who’s the protector — that’s one thing that’s useful about magic, to be able to do those flips instantly when you hear someone talking from one perspective.”
– Mark Mitton
The Hippocampus and Amygdala are Two Evolved Structures of the Brain. Mark states that when he creates magic tricks, he is not necessarily thinking about firing people’s amygdalas (one of the centers of the emotions in the brain). The amygdala is not only associated with fear, Mark explains, but also with the Five Fs – fight, flight, feed, freeze, and fornicate – as neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has stated. All these factors go into our decision making in real life. Jay says that magic tricks create powerful experiences because they defy our expectations of reality, and it puts us on high alert. Each magic surprise cascades on top of previous ones to make us feel astonished and entertained, slightly fearful, duped and pleasurably relieved.
Deception and Self Deception Create Mismatches Between Reality and Expectations. The discussion then moves on to the various types of deception. Bernie says that deception and self deception are sources of mismatch with reality during waking consciousness. He speculates that our brains evolved to be as large as they are to cope with the overwhelming complexities of the human world. Jay emphasizes the flexibility of the cortex, which has not changed very much in the last 10,000 years, although our world is profoundly different from the world of 10,000 years ago.
The Immune System and the Brain Are Both Highly Adaptable. In the final moments of the conversation, David points out his father’s idea of the conscious brain in terms of Neural Darwinism, beginning with the repertoire of cells and neural activities in the brain that are selected so that some set of neural activities survives by improving its predictions of the world. But none of the adaptations the conscious brain makes is perfect. There is always some mismatch between expectation and reality, and that keeps us alert, conscious, and trying to understand more.
Bernie concludes that Neural Darwinism suggests that moment to moment consciousness is a kind of evolutionary process.
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Talking Points
0:00 – The Biological Level of the Conscious Brain
6:28 – Like Evolution, Consciousness is Highly Adaptive
12:27 – Like Magic, Inductive Science is Highly Adaptive and Full of Surprises
18:05 – How Magic Plays With The Limited Capacity of the Conscious Brain
23:18 – The Hippocampus and Amygdala are Two Evolved Structures of the Brain
28:39 – Deception and Self Deception Create Mismatches Between Reality and Expectations
36:25 – The Immune System and the Brain Are Both Highly Adaptable
Bios
David Edelman, PhD: A neuroscientist and currently Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, David has taught neuroscience at the University of San Diego and UCSD. He was Professor of Neuroscience at Bennington College until 2014 and visiting professor in the Dept of Psychology, CUNY Brooklyn College from 2015-2017. He has conducted research in a wide range of areas, including mechanisms of gene regulation, the relationship between mitochondrial transport and brain activity, and visual perception in the octopus. A longstanding interest in the neural basis of consciousness led him to consider the importance—and challenge—of disseminating a more global view of brain function to a broad audience. linkedin
Mark Mitton is a professional magician who is fascinated by using magic to better understand how we see the world. In addition to performing at private and corporate events all over the world, and creating magic for film, television, the Broadway stage, and Cirque du Soleil, Mark tieressly explores the theme of ‘Misdirection’ from an interdsciplinary standpoint. He regularly presents on ‘Perception’ at unviersities and conferences in North America and Europe, including the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and has lectured with the late Nobel Laureate Dr. Gerald Edelman on The Neurosciences Institute. http://markmitton.com
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.
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.
