Ho!

 

It's been quite a while since I've written in thie forum...I am now currently living in Ediburgh pursuing my MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition among a great many Canadians and Americans (have only met five Scottish people at the University here so far, maximum).  Anyway, I have recently read an interesting article [Gazzaniga, M.S. (2000). Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication. Brain 123, 1293-1326.] which you can find here on-line: http://www.allgpsy.unizh.ch/People/Schwaninger/Download/Ac02/Gazzaniga_2000.pdf (not 100% sure that this will work outside the university, but considering the country the server is in, I'm betting you can)...  It is about split-brain research and conscious/subconscious processing of information (especially linguistic information).  The last section was quite interesting, and I thought I'd reproduce it here...hope somebody finds this useful/interesting.  -- Sasquatch

 

The interpreter's activities can be viewed on a larger canvas.  Most neuroscientists want an understanding of consciousness but also a neuroscience of human consciousness.  When considering the problem of consciousness, it is important to consider the possibility that consciousness is an instinct--a built-in property of brains.  Like all instincts, it is just there.  One does not learn to be conscious and one cannot unlearn the reality of conscious experience.  Some day a more mechanistic understanding of its operation will be to hand, but it will probably not be a personally fulfilling one.

 

We should abandon our expectations that a scientific understanding of consciousness will sweep away our sense of strangeness about its nature.  Consider our reproductive instinct.  Does it help our sense of desire to understand the role of testosterone when we see a shapely figure across the room?  Or take the human instinct for language.  Does it help us to enjoy language more when we understand that grammar is a universal built-in reflex but that our lexicon is learned?  It would seem that something wonderfully new and complex happens as the brain enlarges to its full human form.  Whatever happens, it triggers our capacity for self-reflection and all that goes with it.  How do we account for this?

 

When the foregoing research is taken together, rather simple suggestions are appropriate.  First, focus on what is meant by 'conscious experience'.  The concept refers to the awareness human beings have of their capacities as a species--awareness not of the capacities themselves but of our experience of exercising them and our feelings about them.  The brain is not a general-purpose computing device; it is a collection of circuits devoted to these capacities.  This is true for all brains, but what is amazing about the human brain is the sheer number of its capacities.  The human has more than the chimp, which has more than the monkey, which has more than the cat, which runs circles around the rat.  Step one is to recognize that the human mind is a collection of adaptive brain systems and, further, to recognize that each species' capacities affect its experience of the world.

 

Now consider step two.  Can there be any doubt that a rat at the moment of copulation is as sensorilly fulfilled as a human being?  A cat surely enjoys a good piece of cod.  And a monkey must enjoy a spectacular swing.  Each species is aware of its special capacities.  So what is human consciousness?  It is awareness of the very same kind, except that we humans are aware of so much more, so many wonderful things.

 

Think of the variations in capacity within our species; they are not unlike the vast differences between species.  Years of split-brain research have shown that the left hemisphere has mand more mental capacities than does the right.  The left is capable of logical feats that the right cannot manage.  Even with both our hemispheres, though, the limits of human capacity are everywhere in the population.  No one need be offended to realize that some people with normal intelligence can understand Ohm's law, while others, such as this author, are clueless about hundreds of mathematical concepts.

 

When we realize that specialized brain circuits arose through natural selection, it becomes evident that the brain is not a unified neural net that supports a problem-solving device.  If this view is accepted it becomes equally clear that smaller, more manageable circuits produce awareness of a species' capacities.  By contrast, holding fast to the notion of a unified neural net forces us to try to understand human consciousness by figuring out the interactions of billions of neurons.  That task is hopeless; this scheme is not.

 

Hence step three.  The same split-brain research that exposed startling differences between the two hemispheres revealed that the human left hemisphere harbours out interpreter.  Its job is to interpret our responses--cognitive or emotional--to what we encounter in our environment.  The interpreter sustains a running narrative of our actions, emotions, thoughts, and dreams.  The interpreter is the glue that keeps our story unified and creates our sense of being a coherent, rational agent.  To our bag of individual instincts it brings theories about our life.  These narratives of our past behaviour seep into our awareness and give us an autobiography.

 

Insertion of an interpreter into an otherwise functioning brain creates many by-products.  A device that begins by asking how one thing relates to another, a device that asks about an infinite number of things, in fact, and that can get productive answers to its questions, cannot help but give birth to the concept of self.  Surely one question the device would ask is, 'Who is solving all these problems?  Let's call it me'--and away it goes!  A device with rules for figuring out how one thing relates to another will quickly be reinforced for having that capacity, just as an ant's food-seeking devices.  Once mutational events in the history of our species brought the interpreter into existence, there was no getting rid of it.

 

Our brains our automatic because physical tissue carries out what we do.  How could it be otherwise?  Our brains are operating before our conceptual self knows it.  But the conceptual self emerges and grows until it can find interesting--but not disheartening---the biological fact that our brain does things before we are consciously aware of them.  The interpretation of things that we encounter has liberated us from a sense of being determined by our environment; it has created the wonderful sense that our self is in charge of our destiny.  All of our everyday success at reasoning through life's data convinces us of this.  And because of the interpreter within us, we can drive our automatic brains to greater accomplishment and enjoyment of life.