Unconscious secrets

I am sometimes asked where I find the material that goes into these columns and whether it is difficult to write something new every month. When I started it was easy because I had a large stock of material accumulated over many years during which I did not write columns. And, yes it is becoming increasingly difficult as the stock has dwindled with the passage of time. I am always on the lookout for anything ludicrous and bizarre in science but there isn’t much more that I can add to the absurdities of scientific publication, grant-giving bodies and the human genome project. Evolution remains a good topic and I am coming to believe that consciousness is another. I am told that consciousness is the most significant problem we can tackle in biology and solving it will be the landmark of the 21st century, as DNA was in the last century and natural selection in the one before. If these are any precedent, we shall have to wait fifty years for a solution, although this will be too late for most readers. You may recall that I have written on this subject before, but it seems that nobody took much notice of what I had to say as I have never seen it quoted, except in jest. I shall therefore have to start at the beginning and, for starters, let me point out that consciousness is a field in which philosophers are very active and not in full retreat as they are in other areas of biology. Since consciousness is connected with the soul, many other people are actively involved, most of whom will not be found in any department of neurobiology. Also these people write a lot and apparently don’t have to do any experiments or satisfy referees — much like me, in fact. The first thing for a novice entering the field to beware of is that consciouness has quite a lot to do with language, and especially with the use of language by the practitioners themselves. Thus you will find that awareness of the self easily becomes self-awareness, that awareness is about attention and that attention is a brain activity that can be measured and studied. Notice also that consciousness of the self is different from being self-conscious, which has connotations of awkwardness and embarrassment. You will find that there are those who think that consciousness is simply going to be more of the same thing. That is, it will be explained in terms of the same machinery of brain function by which we explain other functions, such as visual perception, in terms of neurons, synapses and circuits. Other people think this will be insufficient and that we will need to involve new scientific principles and perhaps even new physics. However, before everybody rushes off to learn quantum mechanics or to read Gödel, just think about the following. I know quite a lot about my conscious self, as you do about yours. I do this with something called thinking. Thought is central to my consciousness, so we want to know how we think. Thought is generated from within our brains, so generation of neuronal activity from within the head seems important. Of course, we might be able to think about thought and think new things at that. All of this is important not only to myself as a human being but especially to myself as scientist, because what I find absolutely remarkable is how much we can find out about brain activities that we cannot contact directly. Science has revealed for us what goes on during every picosecond in the molecules in our photoreceptor cells, every microsecond in the subsequent molecular events in those cells, and every millisecond in the neural circuits that connect these cells to others. Science has told us about unconsciousness, about phenomena outside the scales of space and time that govern the formation of our own selves. If we were conscious of these molecular fluxes within out brains, the tops of our heads would be blown off, so it is a good thing that the unconscious activity of the brain needs science to tell us about it. It is still the most important function we should be studying, because everything we learn about neurons and their circuits will find its place in our understanding of the brain. When we discover the neuronal basis for generating activity within the brain, and how this may ‘playback’ experience, we will have started to learn about thought. And at that stage I suspect that consciousness as a problem will simply disappear and won’t require a solution in the form that is being posed today. Years ago, students frequently used to ask me what will be the big breakthrough in neurobiology. I could tell them that it had already happened and that they were more than a half a century late. It was called the neuron hypothesis. Today it is more than a hypothesis, it is a fact. It did for the brain what the earlier cell theory did for the body: it told us that the organs of the body were collections of cells that, by division of labour, performed the physiological function ascribed to them. Perhaps that is the best way to look at the brain — as an organ, a hybrid of an endocrine gland and a kidney, with the dual function of secreting thoughts and excreting words. R505