The Sleeping Brain

What differentiates conscious and non-conscious states? Depending on the context of the conversation and various definitions, when talking about sleep, consciousness can be described as the ability to integrate information in a unitary and cohesive way. Ilian and Alea talk about how limitations in our vocabulary may restrict our understanding of consciousness. Their dialogue evolves into the topic of sleep. Alea shares a personal lucid dreaming experience, where different levels of conscious awareness made her realize that she was actually in a dream state.

When we talk about conscious and non-conscious states, I feel like for simplicity sake, what we're talking about when we say that one is conscious that basically means being able to integrate and process the information that's coming from the outside world. Is that correct? So, sort of like when you say, we're sleeping, ergo we're unconscious, that means even though we still sense information from the outside world such as, you know the temperature of the room or how dark it is in the room, we are not necessarily able to integrate the information as well, so therefore we're unconscious. Is that how our viewers and I should look at things when we talk about conscious and unconscious states?

I think that's a really good question and there's like debate about what conscious consciousness is and what qualifies as a conscious state. But in 'Global Workspace Theory', this idea of conscious awareness, that all of these different pieces of information that your brain is processing do get integrated into this experiential state that we subjectively experience as consciousness or awareness. So if you remember some of the studies we talked about during waking states, there is information or studies of conscious awareness or awareness of information versus unconscious information process. So even when you're awake, you know you can do an experiment where you flash something in front of someone's eyes so quickly that they don't consciously register it, in that they could not report on it, they're not aware of it but that information could actually still impact their processing and influence how they answer the next question or how they behave. So the definition of, 'What is consciousness?', kind of depends on what level we're talking about here. But I think when we're talking about dreaming, sleeping, shifting between waking and dream states, what we what we mean is this integration of this information into a unitary cohesive conscious experience. You know, I think it's really interesting that Bernie Baars mentioned dreaming is actually a conscious state and I would like to talk with him more about his understanding of that. Because in a dream state, you're actually kind of in this internal awareness, but it's somewhat separate or devoid from the external stimuli. You're in a dark room, you're not getting a ton of sensory stimuli, but you're having this rich internal potentially conscious experience that is disconnected from the external sensory information you're getting.

Do you think we're limited by our vocabulary when we talk about consciousness at all?

That's a good question. What makes you ask that?

Well, I feel like with any new scientific field that emerges, we just don't have good enough definitions for some of things or we don't have any definitions at all. Such as you know, there's many examples of words that exist in certain languages for certain types of feelings. Such as the German word 'Schadenfreude'. There are such words that just exist in some languages and don't in others and I feel like with the study of consciousness being relatively young in terms of the modern science, way of looking at things. I feel like we are limited because, for example, what is the difference between subconscious and unconscious levels of processing. I feel like there's just more vocabulary gaps out there. 

The study of consciousness as a brain phenomena, with the tools of neuroscience, is relatively new. But the philosophy of consciousness is like, as old as philosophy is. You know, it's been a while since I've taken a class on this, but people have been thinking about philosophy of mind and what it is to have this conscious experience for a long time. So in some ways you know for like a long hunk of human history and you know what is it to experience something in your mind versus the world. Even thinking back to 'Platonism' and all of these ideas of the subjective conscious experience. I wish that I had brushed up on some of my early theory of mind philosophy before we jumped into this. But, so in some ways it's very new and in some ways it's very old. This conversation is going on for a long time and I think one of the the challenging things around it is that it is necessarily subjective. Because your conscious experience is your conscious experience and so in some ways it's like maybe we're trapped inside of the thing, because we're trying to use the thing to discuss the thing. I have to be conscious of my experience to discuss consciousness and I'm trying to look at it from inside of it. So, I wonder if certain vocabulary, in terms of the the scientific piece, is lacking but I think also it's challenging in that we're in this almost process circular processing loop when trying to use our conscious awareness to observe and define our conscious awareness.

Sort of like a catch-22.

I know Bernie Baars is interested in, this is beyond the scope of this episode, but you know meditation and different techniques are kind of states of conscious awareness that offer different views into what it is or means to be conscious or the ways that things that we might experience as being fundamental to our conscious experience. Like a thought, are actually features in the space of consciousness rather than consciousness itself. And I think that's part of why sleeping and dreaming are are so interesting as well where you're still having this subjective experience of of being alive and yet it's very altered from the daily quotient experience. Especially with dreaming, it's highly interesting, because let's say a phenomenon such as Lucid dreaming. You know it involves turning on certain areas of the brain, turning off other areas of the brain and you're aware that you're dreaming but you can control your dreams but you're not necessarily aware of the outside world. So it's a it's a mind-boggling and fascinating way that the mind works. Especially switching from those conscious and unconscious state that you referred to earlier. 

I'm a sometimes Lucid dreamer and for me I think also as a brain scientist. Some of the most interesting moments are where those collide. So, I remember one of the the first times I became aware of a Lucid dream in the middle of a Lucid dream. I was building a boat in the dream and building this big ship from this wood. And suddenly in the middle of building this ship, I became aware that I was in a bedroom. And I was like, "How am I fitting this ship into the bedroom?" and "Where did I get the wood?" So the dream and the external state started to collide a little bit and I was like confused in my own dream. And then it was like, "Well the dream is happening in your mind." And I was like okay, "How did I fit the ship in my mind?", because the ship was still this physical thing. So my brain was first, "Well how did you fit it in the room?", like oh no, "It's okay, it's just happening in your mind." It's like my head isn't that big. "How did I fit this huge ark in my brain?" These kind of levels of awareness of space and then oh it's happening in my mind. But then this idea of in my mind is over concretized into this physical space. Yet I'm still aware that I'm building this ship and I'm kind of aware it's a dream, but I'm kind of not. It's kind of these levels of conscious awareness intersecting and colliding with each other. And I don't have a good answer for that of like beyond you know consciousness somehow being aware of itself

Listening to you now talk, I'm really curious to find out. Because when we wake up, you know especially if it's a force wild bang wake up and those first few seconds you're so disoriented you don't know what day it is, what time it is, how long have you been asleep for, what's reality, what isn't. That particular time between being unconsciously asleep and consciously awake those few seconds being like in that transition stage. I think it would be very fascinating to see what exactly happens in the brain. The way, for example, the first study you described, if we could measure what exactly happens in the brain. I think that will give us some good answers into what consciousness is or what parts are involved and so on.

Alea Skwara, PhD, UC Davis, and Ilian Daskalov, a cognitive neuroscience upper division student from UC Irvine.

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