My Consciousness Conundrums

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...

Welcome! This is my companion blog to the Neuroscience of Consciousness graduate seminar taught by Anne Harrington from Harvard’s History of Science department. Here, I grapple with the questions of consciousness presented in class and the survey of consciousness communicators, critics, researchers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers over the last century. I will strive to communicate my conundrums and the consciousness queries that arise in the flow of my day-to-day activity. What are the positions presented in the consciousness discourse, how do I make sense of them, and how are they reflected in life? As a mental health counselor and an MDiv student at Harvard seeking to incorporate spiritual care modalities into secular psychotherapy interventions, how might this material and companion blog facilitate the integration of consciousness concepts into practice? What can we draw from the intersection of Science, Spirituality, and Psychology? What will you, dear reader,...