Dean Buonomano: Okay but let me, I’ll try to add a bit more on consciousness.
So consciousness is one of the deepest mysteries that we have never attempted to resolve.
And part of the problem with studying consciousness if that it’s very difficult to measure.
But we do have some insights and for one in the context of how the brain tells time there’s
evidence that consciousness is not really what it seems to be.
So what I mean by that is we feel our subjective experiences unfolding in the world around
us in sort of this linear narrative in which A follows B follows C and follows D in which
we experience the world.
I should say that again.
In which B follows A and in which C follows B and D follows C in which things are happening
in a linear progression.
But in reality it seems that our subjective experiences, our conscious narrative might
not be that linear.
So there’s a number of experiences or experiments that suggest that the brain processes information
in sort of a discontinuous and discrete manner.
So it’s not that I’m conscious of everything happening in a nice linear progression.
It seems to be in some cases that what happens after interferes or modulates what our conscious
experience of those things that came before.
So it seems that in some cases that things that happen after an event can alter our conscious
of what happened before.
So there’s something called the cutaneous rabbit illusion in which if you feel a couple
of taps on your arm maybe one, two, three, four people will feel that as sort of a continuous
progression.
But in reality that can’t be a continuous progression because it’s the taps that came
later that determined where you felt that the previous taps were occurring.
And if you think of something like speech you’re probably not aware of my speech in
a syllable by syllable, word by word manner.
It seems to be that we become conscious of events around us sort of in chunks in which
you’re unconscious mind reaches a point of analysis by taking and sampling everything
that’s happening around it before a subjective experience is delivered into your conscious
mind.
So I think there’s some suggestions that the unconscious brain is continuously taking
in, sampling events through its sensory organs waiting to appropriate points in the narrative
to deliver something, a nice narrative of the world around us into our conscious mind.
So in the case of speech, for example, we don’t have an experience of every syllable
by syllable, every word by word.
But sometimes we have this chunking that happens.
So, for example, if I say the mouse pad was beside the computer in that case the mouse
could have another meaning.
The mouse could mean a rodent or it could be the mouse pad of a computer.
But you only knew the meaning of the word mouse with the word in this case that came
after the word mouse.
So the mouse pad.
I could have said the mouse was hungry.
So the meaning of the word mouse can only be understood based on what comes after that.
So it seems that when people understand that they might have to wait until the appropriate
time to create a conscious perception or a conscious interpretation of what we’re listening
to.
So I think there’s mounting evidence that consciousness is not a linear flow of what’s
happening around us but sort of a creation, a narrative, a convenient narrative of what’s
happening around us created for our viewing pleasure by the unconscious brain.