My Consciousness Conundrums

A bronze statue of the Hindu deity Siva stands before Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research located just outside Geneva. (see image below) How did Arya Siva and the Large Hadron Collider meet? Let us discover one possible narrative line between Siva, science, our collective culture, and the unfolding of consciousness studies. As with most explorations into consciousness and the studies that form them, our provisional answers or responses to its enigmas, queries, and quandaries will leave us with more questions. Consciousness discoveries at once expand and deepen the field of inquiry, while lurking beneath our postulations is the shadowy notion that our present insights are mere refoldings of previous ones. Standing just over two meters, Siva, the Hindu God of creation and destruction, is represented as Nataraja, the deity’s cosmic dance form. Siva is in mid-movement. One leg is raised, generating velocity, while the other is planted on its base. Four arms extend, tra...

How do our concepts regarding consciousness determine our understanding of consciousness? Do they fence us into the safe and “sane” demarcations of the known and socially accepted? Or do they provide jumping points toward broader, more profound, and even more granular understanding? Do our experiences align with our concepts, and do the contiguities of experiences and concepts intersect and give rise to insight regarding the befuddling nature and dimensionality of consciousness?  In correspondence with Aldous Huxley, Harry Osmond, in 1958, coined the term psychedelic—a single word composed of two Greek words, psyche for soul and delos for revealer. Psychedelics as a clinical modality has gained mainstream acknowledgment, institutional backing, and research funding and has become a capitalist venture port in the last two decades. In his 2018 New York Times article “My Adventures with the Trip Doctors,” Michael Pollan describes the complexities of such clinical trials and the commo...

As early as 1934, Wilder Penfield, a Montreal neurosurgeon, commenced brain-mapping surgery on epileptic patients. He aimed to locate the brain regions and mechanisms that produced "aura," the physiological, cognitive, and emotional warning signs of seizure. By administering a local anesthetic, Penfield removed a section of the skull to expose the cerebral cortex and probe the brain with electrodes. The patient, fully conscious and free from pain, would report experiences. As Winter describes in her book Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, a curious thing occurred in which electrocortical stimuli in regions and patterns of a patient's temporal lobe would activate a vivid life-like memory for patients - including memories that were long suppressed, forgotten, or seemingly insignificant. Patients reported fully experiencing those memories as if they were authentically occurring, perhaps akin to the dream simulations we nightly experience that convince us of their ultim...

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by the fine-art painter Julien Schnabel, portrays in impressionistic detail the life of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who awakes from a stroke and finds himself in the hospital. Except for vertical eye movements and blinking capacity, Bauby is completely paralyzed. From the first camera frames, Schnabel masterfully submerges the viewer in Bauby’s first-person perspective. We are locked-in Bauby's textured phenomenological viewpoint. Immersed within, we are made to feel the human distance between Bauby and his family and the attending medical staff. Connection to the outside world is tenuous. Locked-in syndrome, Bauby's neurological condition, is caused by damage to the brain stem, the brain's area responsible for movement and psychomotor activity. Bauby's condition presents a fascinating dimension in consciousness research and neuroethics. According to early consciousness voices, such as the physiologist T.H. Huxley from his 1875 add...

Who could have imagined Eugene Aserinsky's discovery in 1953? While the destitute University of Chicago graduate student observed his eight-year-old son's sleep pattern, he detected a remarkably "jerky," paradoxical-seeming movement of the eyes, later called rapid eye movement (REM). Like divining rods, Aserinsky utilized the electrooculogram (EOG) and then electroencephalograph (EEG) to decode REM's uniquely mysterious and hitherto night-shrouded processes. And who could dream up the stream of research on consciousness catalyzed by such a discovery?  In just 30 years, by the early 1980s, we cut to LaBerge, a Stanford scientist working from his sleep lab, making another discovery. From within the sleeping subject's lucid dream state, clearly encoded messages are conveyed to the researcher. Following a pre-determined protocol, the lucid dreamer demonstrates intentionality by making deliberate horizontal eye movements observable to the wakeful researcher. First,...

In their 1992 seminal paper, "The Problem of Consciousness" (image provided), Crick and Koch call upon the father of American psychology, Willam James: "Consciousness is not a thing but a process." In this manner, they herald the "new" field of consciousness studies and introduce the reader to their theory that consciousness results from an array of firing neurons. Neurons form networks, and the resultant "coalitions" across the brain produce consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent something. What is that something? Is it an epiphenomenon, or does it have a lasting substrate? Does it hold on to particular identity features and dispositional factors that then orient the individual? Does that emergent something appear and disappear? And when it reappears, is it the same or similar, perhaps only having made some adjustments?  During the 1990s, the neurocognitive philosopher David Chalmers famously described the consciousness mystery as having tw...