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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | pp. 75-80
Hashim, H. T., Ramadhan, M. A., The Concept of Post-consciousness & Its Role in Human Behavior
Exploration
The Concept of Post-consciousness
& Its Role in Human Behavior
Hashim T. Hashim*, Mustafa A. Ramadhan
University of Baghdad, College of Medicine, Baghdad, Iraq
Abstract
Post-consciousness is a state of consciousness overlapping consciousness and unconsciousness.
This concept of consciousness is developed to explain what is not explained by the other
concepts of consciousness, the reaction of a person after committing a mistake. The Study
reported here is a cross sectional study involved 112 participants from 25 countries with higher
educational levels. We tested them for reliability (Two way mixed effect) and used Pearson
correlation coefficient which was significant at 0.01 (R = 0.00). The majority (67%) said that
when they committed a mistake or did something wrong, their behaviors changed and became
more careful. The majority (85.7%) said that their minds were responsible for these changes.
There were not significant differences between age or gender and other variables.
Keywords: Post-consciousness, human behavior, reaction, mistake.
Introduction
Consciousness as explained in psychology, is the fineness or the state of being aware of any
external object or something within the oneself, such as thoughts, feelings, memories, or
sensations. It has also been defined as: the awareness, the ability to experience or to feel,
wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive – control system of the mind (1).
Consciousness is something that cannot be touched or felt, it controls our feelings, ourselves and
our sensation in the way that it thinks it is suitable for each situation and the human cannot
control his consciousness by doing what he wants to do, he has to obey it (2).
When someone do something wrong, his consciousness informs him and he may blame himself,
but to avoid this conflicting, the brain will create an imaginary picture of needing to do the
wrong thing but it will never occur again to overcome the conflicts inside the brain (3,4). There
is a balance between consciousness and unconsciousness, but the stronger one is consciousness
which control our feelings and what we do. When one of them become stronger, the other
*
Correspondence: Hashim T. Hashim, University of Baghdad, College of Medicine, Baghdad, Iraq.
Email: hashim.h.t.h@gmail.com
ISSN: 2153-8212
Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | pp. 75-80
Hashim, H. T., Ramadhan, M. A., The Concept of Post-consciousness & Its Role in Human Behavior
become weaker and vice versa. When the unconsciousness controls the feelings and thoughts of
a person, he will be insensible and may be psychotic (5,6).
Post-consciousness is a state of consciousness that convince the person to do something that he
intend to and it overlap his/her consciousness and unconsciousness that can lead to a
psychological problem if not controlled (7). This state of consciousness is newly developed to
explain what is not explained by other concepts of consciousness.
Methodology
The study is a cross sectional study, conducted as an interview survey for a month during
October, 2019 as face to face or video call interviews. It involved 112 participants from 25
countries. I did not exclude anyone. They were students, employees or from higher educational
level because they have more awareness about the topic and can be helpful and to reduce the
biases resulted from misunderstanding by illiterate people. My sampling procedure was
convenient sampling. I tested them for reliability (Two way mixed effect) in a pilot study of 30
participants by asking them the questions and after one week, I asked them again, the answers
were exactly the same, we used Pearson correlation coefficient and it is significant at 0.01 (R =
0.00).
All the participants were well informed about the aim of the study and what we were testing for
before they gave their consent. Ethical approval was obtained too. The data was analyzed by
Statistical Package for Social Science Program (SPSS) version 25.0 and I used T – test in testing
the significant between variables.
Results
The ages ranged (18 – 65) years old, with mean of 36.4 and the standard deviation is 13.2. 57.1%
of them were male (64) and 42.9% were females (48). The countries of the participants were
distributed as classified in (Table 1).
Table1: Countries distribution for participants
Frequency
Percent
Valid Percent
Cumulative
Percent
Algeria
3
2.7
2.7
2.7
Brazil
3
2.7
2.7
5.4
Canada
3
2.7
2.7
8.0
Egypt
4
3.6
3.6
11.6
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | pp. 75-80
Hashim, H. T., Ramadhan, M. A., The Concept of Post-consciousness & Its Role in Human Behavior
France
2
1.8
1.8
13.4
Germany
1
.9
.9
14.3
Iran
6
5.4
5.4
19.6
Iraq
42
37.5
37.5
57.1
Italy
2
1.8
1.8
58.9
Jordan
4
3.6
3.6
62.5
Kenya
2
1.8
1.8
64.3
Lebanon
2
1.8
1.8
66.1
Morocco
1
.9
.9
67.0
Oman
3
2.7
2.7
69.6
Pakistan
1
.9
.9
70.5
Peru
2
1.8
1.8
72.3
Rwanda
3
2.7
2.7
75.0
Saudi Arabia
5
4.5
4.5
79.5
Sudan
2
1.8
1.8
81.3
Switzerland
6
5.4
5.4
86.6
Syria
2
1.8
1.8
88.4
Tunis
1
.9
.9
89.3
UK
5
4.5
4.5
93.8
USA
4
3.6
3.6
97.3
Yemen
3
2.7
2.7
100.0
Total
112
100.0
100.0
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | pp. 75-80
Hashim, H. T., Ramadhan, M. A., The Concept of Post-consciousness & Its Role in Human Behavior
Table 2 classifies the percentages of answers for the three questions that was conducted in the
questionnaire.
Table2: The percentages of answers.
Frequency
Percent
Valid Percent
Cumulative percent
Q1: When you fall in a conflict between doing a mistake or stop it, does your mind tell you to
do it in the that time because you need it, but you will not do it again?
Yes
No
101
11
90.2%
9.8%
90.2%
9.8%
90.2%
100%
Q2: When you do a mistake or something wrong (you think or believe it is a mistake), do
your behaviors, actions and disposals change or become more careful?
Yes
No
75
37
67%
33%
67%
33%
67%
100%
Q3: Why do your behaviors and actions change during or after doing a mistake?
* Because of
16
fears or worries
* Your Mind
96
tell you to do
that (even if
there is no
source of fear)
14.3%
14.3%
14.3%
85.7%
85.7%
100%
Q4: Does your mind warn you before and/or during doing the mistakes?
Yes
No
93
19
83.03%
16.97%
83.03%
16.97%
83.03%
100%
83.03%
10.7%
6.27%
83.03%
93.75%
100%
Q5: Do you follow these warnings?
Always
Often
Never
93
12
7
83.03%
10.7%
6.27%
Q6: Did these warnings save you or become real for at least once, previously?
Yes
No
Maybe
26
57
29
23.3%
50.8%
25.9%
23.3%
50.8%
25.9%
23.3%
74.1%
100%
Q7: Do you feel comfortable after following these warnings?
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | pp. 75-80
Hashim, H. T., Ramadhan, M. A., The Concept of Post-consciousness & Its Role in Human Behavior
Yes
No
58
54
48.2%
51.8%
48.2%
51.8%
48.2%
100%
The first three questions are strongly related to the topic of mistakes' commission and the other
questions are to make the idea clear to the respondents. There are not significant differences
between age or gender and other variables.
Discussion
When one tries to do something wrong, he will be in a conflict between his consciousness that
encourages him to go ahead and his unconsciousness that prevent him from doing it. This
conflict will be solved by the post-consciousness that gives the excuse to do the wrong things
because one needs it and it will be never done again. We as humans, have many situations and
behaviors that cannot be explained by other level of consciousness because all our actions and
reactions are controlled by the four levels of awareness in our consciousness. One of these
reactions are the changing of our behaviors and disposals when we intend to do a mistake or it
has just done.
The explanation of this changings in our reactions as a result for our actions which are the
mistakes are controlled as we tried to approve in this study by the fourth level of consciousness
which is the post-consciousness. For example, when you want to stole something, you will have
tachycardia, face's changes and you will be very careful and warned. These changes in
physiology and psychology are done by post-consciousness that tries to make the process as easy
as possible so you cannot feel sorry or worry about anything. The post-consciousness tell you to
do these reactions or (in an accurate description) tell your body to show these reactions to
overlap the worries and fears that can occur or to convince you that you cannot be discovered or
caught. So it tries to protect you, and in the same time, it tries to make you as comfortable as
could. The age and gender do not affect in this process, so it occurs to everyone at any age
regardless the gender.
Conclusion
The role of post-consciousness in controlling the reactions that accompany one’s mistakes is very
clear and important. In this study, We approved this role by asking three questions in a cross
sectional study to 112 participants from different age groups and genders. We as humans, have
many situations and behaviors that cannot be explained by other level of consciousness because
all our actions and reactions are controlled by the four levels of awareness in our consciousness.
One of these reactions are the changing of our behaviors and disposals when we intend to do a
mistake or it has just done. What is responsible for this reactions is the post-consciousness in
human mind.
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | pp. 75-80
Hashim, H. T., Ramadhan, M. A., The Concept of Post-consciousness & Its Role in Human Behavior
Acknowledgment: We thank Maryam A. Habib for editing the paper. We also would like to thank Waed
Yassir, Abdulla Reda, Sakib Chowdhary, Ali T. Hashim, Mustafa A. Muhson, Ahmed Dhiya, Yahya
Dhiya and Jack Monoro for helping with this research.
Received December 20, 2019; Accepted January 7, 2020
References
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Dietrich, Arne. Introduction to consciousness. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2007.
Armstrong, David M. "What is consciousness" The nature of mind (1981): 55-67.
Ornstein, Robert E. "The psychology of consciousness." (1972).
Fireman, Gary D., Ted E. McVay, and Owen J. Flanagan, eds. Narrative and consciousness:
Literature, psychology, and the brain. Oxford University Press on Demand, 2003.
Bouveresse, Jacques. Wittgenstein reads Freud: The myth of the unconscious. Princeton University
Press, 1995.
Schimek, Jean, G. "A critical re-examination of Freud's concept of unconscious mental
representation." International Review of Psycho-Analysis 2 (1975): 171-187.
Hashim, H. T., and M. A. Ramadhan. "The Need for Developing a Fourth Level of Awareness in
Human Consciousness: Unconsciousness." Pre consciousness, Consciousness and Post
consciousness 9.361 (2019): 2161-0487.
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| April 2021 | Volume 12 | Issue 1 | pp. 23-31
Camelo, L. G., Existential Conflicts of Neuroscience: A Brief Analysis of Consciousness
23
Exploration
Existential Conflicts of Neuroscience:
A Brief Analysis of Consciousness
Luiz G. Camelo *
Abstract
Consciousness is an intelligent entity of a higher order. It is creative, dynamic and transformative
that interacts with nature. It manifests itself through your “semi-material mind” which is the
“perennial model” of your biological brain. Throughout its existence, endlessly, it shaped its own
body to interact with matter. This interaction is done through your "psychic body", semimaterial, which we call Psychosoma. It is a fluidic body that reduces high frequency vibrations
that comes from Consciousness. This body at the moment of fertilization of the egg by the sperm
expands and takes the form of a Human Being, whose vibrational interaction takes place
molecule-by-molecule until the final modulation of your body. It is indeed a morphogenetic
field. It is feasible for science only to discover the intelligent effects of Consciousness through its
neuronal correlates, located not only in the brain, but also throughout the body. For example,
neurotransmitters are the first neuronal correlates categorized by science. In fact, they are not
found in images or in specific areas of the brain. Does anyone really believe that
neurotransmitters are produced only in the brain?
Keywords: consciousness; brain; dualism; neuroscience; neuronal correlates of consciousness;
mind; endogenous quantum field.
The human being is an electronic set governed by Consciousness. Albert Einstein
1. Introduction
Man is a multidimensional being 1-6. He is similar to all beings and all things and at the same
time completely different. It encompasses an animal nature and a higher order nature. Except for
Consciousness, man has the same origin in fundamental elementary matter. Undoubtedly, the
Consciousness that gives life to man, is a “entity” of a higher order with various levels of action
in the matter3,5-8. It is an intelligent principle. Its intimate nature is unknown. It is impossible to
describe it, but it is feasible for science to discover its action in matter, its neuronal correlates.
Consciousness is in fact the intelligent being of the universe2,3,5-8. Undoubtedly, it is generated by
the Supreme Intelligence of the universe 1-4,6-8, the primary cause of all things. Everything in the
universe is generated by the mind7,8. In fact, whatever the versatility of the human being,
however exceptional he may be, will always be the manifestation of Consciousness. The matter
*Correspondence: Luiz G. Camelo, Independent Researcher. Email: luizgcamelo@gmail.com
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Camelo, L. G., Existential Conflicts of Neuroscience: A Brief Analysis of Consciousness
24
ultimately is plastic to the intelligences evolving that make up the universe. In fact, there are no
insurmountable material barriers to these minds. Without a doubt, there are only vibratory
barriers. In fact, what differentiates everything in the universe is the vibratory pattern.
After all, what is man, if not Consciousness 2-4,9-11 imprisoned in a body? The Intelligent Being,
when covered with matter is Life at any planetary latitude or longitude. On the other hand, the
“inert being” has no relationship life because Consciousness is life itself. Everything is linked
and interconnected in nature. Evolution is not a confused, disordered, chaotic event, but an
intelligent, disciplined movement with no possibility of mistakes. It is necessary to exist, live,
experience and mature under the psycho-evolutionary impulse, of cause and effect, following a
pattern of uninterrupted continuity12. Whatever the instabilities, they are always transitory.
The subjective experience of Consciousness13 how to see, hear or perceive is actually a type of
neuronal correlate because the agent of experience is receiving a command from Consciousness,
that is, there is an interaction with your brain. However, brain activity does not generate this
experience. It is generated at a higher vibratory level and is accompanied by a conscious
experience13. Ever! Consciousness is never unconscious6,8,13. Here, Consciousness is the
observer agent of an omnipresent nature. On the other hand, “personality” is not always
conscious. However, individuality is always there! For example, preserved brain activity in an
unconscious patient, means that Consciousness is conscious6,8,10,13 or is present. Here, if
Consciousness drifts away, the patient will die. In fact, this is not the difficult problem of
Consciousness; in fact, it is one of the easiest.
The difficult thing is to describe it. In fact, it is impossible for science to discover its intimate
nature. For example, it is not possible to reduce Consciousness to its intentionality 9,10. Without a
doubt, this is one of her countless attributes. Therefore, "intention" and "being conscious" are
exclusive attributes of Consciousness. Thus, it cannot be approached from a reductionist
perspective9-11. It is possible for science to discover the mechanism by which the mind / matter
interaction occurs. Despite being different categories, they are essentially similar7,10. They are
able to engage in reciprocal action of active information7,10.
Strictly speaking, what really matters is the correlation between the two categories, since both
are made up of the same underlying matter. As the mind that acts on the biological brain and the
action of an “intelligence” on matter always leaves a causal relationship, there is no
incompatibility in these unusual events. In this context, science can explain the apparently
insoluble causal mechanism. It is necessary that there is a flow of active information from the
mind to the brain, from top to bottom and from the brain to the mind, from bottom to top for a
neuronal correlate printed in matter to occur. Therefore, information of a higher order6,7,10,11.
The aim of this study is to address the positive aspects of the mind / matter duality of
Consciousness, as well as to show a new view on the mind and the neuronal correlates of
consciousness. We will not waste time on other known aspects of literature, such as materialism,
physicalism, monism, reductionism, etc., as it is an unproductive, dogmatic and infinite
discussion.
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Camelo, L. G., Existential Conflicts of Neuroscience: A Brief Analysis of Consciousness
25
2. Underlying Mechanism and Theoretical Foundations towards a Higher
Order Theory of Consciousness
From a scientific point of view, Consciousness is inexplicable. Neuroscience can and must
explain its manifestation in matter, its intelligent effects. Does science know all the secrets of the
material world? The hidden world from the depths of the Earth and the darkness of the oceans?
Of course not! There are natural laws that govern matter, still unknown to science. On the other
hand, the “invisible world” is also governed by laws completely unknown to science.
Consciousness is a non-material entity1,10, without form. It is a focus of "intelligent light" that
acts on matter and vice versa. Undoubtedly, “intellectualizing matter” is one of the numerous
attributes of the Intelligent Being. However, to manifest itself in matter it needs to be covered by
an underlying body1-4, quasi-material8-10. For lack of a more appropriate term, by analogy, we
will call it Psychic Body. This, called Psychosoma, a self-replicating biological organizing
model3-5,11, has the same properties as matter, in addition to having an inseparable physical and
mental aspect7-10. It is an indivisible holistic unit. It is the plastic mediator through which subtle
matter flows, replacing cells and rebuilding the living organism incessantly, every day, through
DNA, a holographic information field1. It is, in fact, a copy / matrix of the entire human body3-5.
Therefore, Psychosoma is an electromagnetic agent1-5,8,9 that forms a non-local and non-temporal
field that, in turn, gives rise to the physical body, predisposing it to health1-5 or disease1-5 without
apparent cause. Here, the cause is almost always in the patient's energy field due to the
inappropriate use of his modulating energies. In this context, the energies that characterize
health2 or disease2 are added to the “psychic body” due to the vibratory affinity. For example, the
content of sublimated or degraded thought has a bidirectional flow, from top to bottom and from
bottom to top. Here we can also insert the chapter on “psychosomatic illnesses” like depression,
fibromyalgia, panic disorder and other phobias. In this way, disease 2,4,5 or health 2,4,5 is in
Consciousness 1-3 from where the electromagnetic vibrations are transferred to the "psychic
body" in the form of health or disease and finally to the physical body. Therefore, the
Psychosoma is an “electrodynamic field”2-4,9 complex, living, perennial matrix consisting of all
the quasi-material components that make up the human body, from the atom to the brain. It is
undoubtedly similar to Sheldrake's [1981] "morphogenetic Field".
It is important to highlight that it is a replicabl11 and immutable model that gives rise to human
beings only. Here, our main representative is the primordial DNA14. Originally, it is a quasimaterial molecule that comes from the perennial matrix, the Psychosoma, governed by the
intelligent impulse of Consciousness. In other words, DNA2,14 is a signaling molecule that
transmits specific information through electromagnetic resonance originated in the Intelligent
Principle. In this way, the DNA molecule could be seen as containing active information2,7,8,10
that guide self-replicating biological processes. Undoubtedly, the Psychosoma is the interface
between Consciousness 15-17 and the body. It is a resonant electromagnetic field 2. In fact, here
there is a transformation from quantum events to classic events 2,10, from a more fundamental
underlying dimension 17 under the command of Consciousness 1-3,7,9,14. Although there is a
transformation from quantum events 2 to classic events, there is in fact no loss in the speed of
active information7,10,13. The mind, the “brain of consciousness”, with quantum information
potential2,7,8,10 is coupled with the biological brain2 which is its correspondent in matter. In this
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| April 2021 | Volume 12 | Issue 1 | pp. 23-31
Camelo, L. G., Existential Conflicts of Neuroscience: A Brief Analysis of Consciousness
26
regard, information can be transported only by “quantum potential” or by the interaction of
different fields2,8,17,18.
Rudimentary mental states here refer to mental states in the evolutionary beginnings of the
Intelligent Principle, when it leaves the animal realm to enter the human realm, as soon as it
acquires its free will8,11,19. Here, Consciousness becomes aware of itself6,10,18. On the one hand, it
should be noted that there are no "primitive" mental states attributed to human beings, except for
the physiological functions common to lower animals, since man has a superior and animalized
nature. On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that the lower animals have rudimentary
“conscience” and “intelligence” 20. However, a "relatively primitive" state of mind is attributed
only to beings that are still on lower evolutionary scales. For example, the dog becomes aware of
itself only when it acquires its free will when entering the human realm. In this context,
Consciousness is still an Intelligent Principle in formation, on the way to individualization until
it evolves to the point of acquiring its free will18,20. Here, cause and effect are perennial, that is,
Consciousness has to account for everything it does or does not do.
3. The Mind
The Mind or non-local field is a quasi-material electromagnetic body 21. It is the brain 9,21 of
Consciousness that works through its manifestation. The mind is an inconceivable structure for
human beings. I presume that it is almost impossible for science to unravel the mysteries of the
mind in the present century. In that regard, it implies discovering the Intelligent Principle. The
mind, therefore, is at a vibratory level far beyond the biological brain18-24. It is important to note
that this is just a perfect copy of the mind. This is the seat of memory 18. Here, there is no short
or long term memory. It is just memory where omnipresent information is recorded. One day it
will be remembered and revealed in the form of a memory containing new information.
It is worth mentioning, however, that in memory an immeasurable intellect-affective collection
of the Intelligent Being is stored, which is ultimately man. In this context, the mind is the
interaction agent14,20-22,24 between Consciousness, the body and the environment25. Here, it has
two aspects of the same underlying reality9,15,18. The physical and mental aspects 7,10,11,18,20,21. In
fact, it is a singularity of the Intelligent Principle. Conscious memory is not in the brain, but in
Consciousness17. In this sense, the command occurs at a higher level21 of organization17,24 and in
this way the mind serves as a vehicle for the manifestation of thought. Thus, it is Consciousness
who thinks. Therefore, the intelligent Being. In this respect, thought is the transmission of nonlocal information and, certainly, faster than the speed of light. Undoubtedly, man is the only
Being that has continuous thinking, being conscious or unconscious.
The biological brain does not generate the mind24, much less Consciousness24. It's impossible.
On the contrary, it receives the flow of thoughts generated in Consciousness24. Undoubtedly, the
brain under the effect of the “mind” acts according to the conscious intention9,19 generated in
Consciousness18. Therefore, the biological brain is just a "brain" that reflects everything that
comes from Consciousness, from your omnipresent brain. In this context, there is an
electromagnetic coupling9,10 with interaction between the fluidic, electromagnetic brain and the
biological brain19,24. Therefore, this is the organ of the mind. In fact, on the mental and physical
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Camelo, L. G., Existential Conflicts of Neuroscience: A Brief Analysis of Consciousness
27
side there is a similarity of substance19. In fact, it is impossible to reduce Consciousness to the
material functions of the brain. However, neuroscience will never succeed in discovering the
intimate nature of Consciousness from the reality of the physical world.
4. Mind/matter duality
In fact, everything in our world is dual. However, concretely there is no duality7,10,19,24. Thus, it
is apparent, intuitive. In this sense, they are physical and mental aspects7 of the diversity that
constitutes the unit. Here, science clings to the letter. Duality is undoubtedly due to the lack of
understanding of materialistic and dogmatic science and the “myopic vision” of those who deal
with it. In this context, there is an Intelligent Principle in the universe that acts on matter, whose
laws of this action are still unknown to science. This Principle over the millennia of its existence,
without end, created an “electromagnetic body / matrix”2,4 containing the matrix of all cells and
organs in order to interact with matter.
Each living being, animal or plant has its perennial matrix. For example, the seed of the
"eucalyptus" tree contains in itself the majestic appearance of the future tree. After all, there is no
“banana” originating from the apple tree. Undoubtedly, interacting with matter is one of the
attributes of Consciousness9,10,24. Physical and mental aspects are inseparable17 from active
information7,10,25,26, that is, it has functional correspondences27,28. It is a fundamental law.
The Psychosoma, being governed by an Intelligent Being, reduces its vibrations and inserts itself
into a fertilized egg. Therefore, the Psychosoma vibratory interaction with the physical body
takes place molecule-by-molecule at the moment of fertilization of the egg by the sperm until the
generation of the future being. Here, the Intelligent Principle, in order to condense itself into a
biological structure, shapes its own physical body. It is in their energy intimacy that cells are
added to finally shape their future body. Ultimately, Consciousness25-28 permeates the entire
physical body, cell by cell giving life to the entire organic structure. Then, as the fetus grows, the
Psychosoma expands already in the form of a human being. It's a model! Undoubtedly, the body
cannot avoid experience. He's alive with her. In it the manifestations of life are expressed.
Therefore, there is a similarity in the “underlying fundamental matter”2,3,6,16 that makes up the
Psychosoma and mental matter24-28, as both have the same energetic constitution, that is, they
have the same origin in the primitive or fundamental elementary matter . It is a vibratory
correspondence. For example, the concept of receptor resembles the resonant correspondence
invoked to characterize receptor-mediated responses to hormones and drugs. In this context,
there is no mind / matter reductionism9-11,25,27. There is incomprehension! The human body,
therefore, is almost perfect. In fact, we still don't know everything about him. Ready! Here the
supposed mind / matter duality ends9,10,19,27-29.
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5. Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness
Neuronal correlation of consciousness is electromagnetic information7,10,11,24 containing the
guidelines of material life emitted by Consciousness, captured and decoded27 by neurons.
Meaning is always linked to the encoding and decoding processes. Without a doubt, it is a
vibrational correspondence. An electromagnetic resonance1,21. It is a conscious neuronal
phenomenon. In this sense, it is the exchange of communication between Consciousness and the
brain17,23,30.
For each human action, the brain reacts with a specific response to that action, that is, with a
neuronal correlate of consciousness11,17,21. Here, science can already detect “neuroimages”
suggestive of a neuronal correlate. But that is not all. It is the processing of information with an
instant response of that information15,23 to a peripheral action triggered in neural networks. On
the other hand, “dendritic networks” are primary structures for perceiving wave function that
initially resonate in specific receptive fields24. This implies much more capacity for storing and
processing information10,17,23 of the holographic type1, which would be impossible to be
generated in the brain. The latter, in its function as an instrument of action, reacts according to
the “imperatives of the mind” through which the correlates are expressed.
It is worth mentioning that the neural correlates of consciousness are infinitos16,27. In fact, during
just one hour of human life, the neuronal correlates of Consciousness that appear during this
period tend to the infinite. The “nuances” of this experience are incalculable. Ultimately, the
brain is just a receiving and sending agent of information10,23 for Consciousness to make its
decisions. In other words, the neuronal correlate is the "holographic signature", the "trademark"
that the brain has consciously received and responded to a certain message that comes from
Consciousness. Therefore, there is no way to identify a specific area of the brain or a certain
substance “circulating in the blood” that corresponds exactly to the presence of a certain
neuronal correlate.
At the present time, it is impossible for Neuroscience to explain the intimate nature of
Consciousness17,19,22,30,31, but it is possible to explain its neuronal correlates8,29 or the action of an
intelligence on matter22. Today, neuronal correlates are only electromagnetic information, but in
the future they will be revealed in the form of "molecules" that carry this information. It is
possible that informational fields of ultra-weak photons are somehow related to biochemical
processes, or perhaps related to all cellular physiology. These molecules are in the etheric state,
that is, a type of condensed energy that is still quite subtle for science. They are on the threshold
of the energetic world with the material world. It is very similar to what happened with
neurotransmitters before they were categorized and revealed by the Austrian Otto Loewi in 1921.
It is noteworthy that neurotransmitters were the first neuronal correlates systematized by science.
The secretion of a given hormone is a type of neuronal correlate, even if the patient is
unconscious. Who does the most efficient monitoring of a sleeping or unconscious patient? Of
course, it is Consciousness. Undoubtedly, Consciousness is never unconscious9,13. And there's
more. Now, everything is a matter of quantum chemistry and biology.
After all, where are the neuronal correlates of Consciousness located? They resonate throughout
the human body. In fact, to be more precise, using a metaphor, they are more present in the
“mind”, in the men of science and in the “heart”, in the good and benevolent men. In the end, are
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Camelo, L. G., Existential Conflicts of Neuroscience: A Brief Analysis of Consciousness
29
“neurotransmitters” located only in the brain? At first, it was thought so. The response in the
release of neurotransmitters anywhere in the body can be affected by the mental field 24. In fact,
they are not found exactly in images or in specific areas of the brain. Who is watching these
action potentials, if not Consciousness?
6. Conclusion
Neuroscience has difficulties in dealing with the only reality that is the “immaterial world” and
in this way, existential conflicts arise. In that sense, quantum mechanics leaves no doubt. In fact,
several structures of Consciousness have been proposed to reconcile mental and physical states
and have not been successful. An impasse is reached that has to extrapolate paradigms. It is
necessary to move forward. The difficult problem with science is breaking paradigms. It is
necessary to challenge, dare and confront. The human being is afraid of the unknown, of the
new, of replacing ancient habits in exchange for a new vision. You are afraid of losing
privileges, notoriety and dominance. The difficult problem is that science does not understand
how the immaterial interacts with the material. It is only to dive deep into the energetic world,
which is the destination, the reality of Being, in search of its essence, instead of seeking answers
in the world of condensed energy, as stated by Albert Einstein. Now, everything is a matter of
transcendental physics.
Consciousness is never unconscious, even when it is sleeping, in fact, precisely it never sleeps.
She has redo periods. In fact, who sleeps is the physical body for rest, organization of mental
files and redo. On the other hand, Consciousness is never absent. She is the throbbing life
without interruption ever since. During sleep, it emancipates itself, that is, it moves away from
the body and acquires maximum activity in its original world, interacting with the body through
a practically immortal "fluidic cord" that gives it organic life. On the other hand, the physical
body is only an instrument of work for Consciousness. It is through this cord that the nervous
fluid circulates. The vital energy. It is also where the pain flows. Pain is in Consciousness32 and
not in the brain. For example, it is anesthesia that drives Consciousness away from the body.
Here begins the "principle" of general anesthesia we know24. Consciousness also stores all the
information that occurred in the past, present and usually envisions the future.
Received March 2, 2021; Accepted April 11, 2021
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Article
Events to Dualism
Frank De Silva*
Abstract
Perception is a continuous experience that exists at every instant, across a set of simultaneous
events in the brain. Special relativity physics states that there can be nothing physical, that connect
simultaneous events. As such, perception cannot be physical but non-physical or dualistic. This
argument is analysed further, and a new concept called Concept A is introduced. With the aid of
Concept A, free will is explained.
Keywords: Continuous experience, special relativity, event, dualism, concept, free will.
Events to Dualism
1. Event
The definition of an event from physics is a point in space-time. If we were to consider one
dimension of space and one dimension of time, then an event will be a single point as shown in
Fig 1. A given point in space, will correspond to a series of points or a line when taken over a
period of time as shown in Fig 2. Thus in a given coordinate system an event will be defined
completely by its coordinates (x, y z, t) where x,y,z are the coordinates in space and t
corresponds to the instant of time.
*Correspondence: Frank De Silva, Independent Researcher, Australia. E-mail: franknimal1@outlook.com
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457
Space
Event
·
Time
Fig 1. Event
Space
A line of events
created by a single
point in space
Time
Fig 2.
A single point in space over time will create a line of events
1.1 Passage of time
Time passes from one instant to the next. This allows for a well-defined past, current and
future instant of time.
1.2 Perception
Consider the experience of watching an apple. If we close our eyes the apple cannot be
perceived. From this observation we can conclude that the light from the apple stimulates the
eyes which in turn stimulate the brain, which results in an apple appearing in the mind. From this
experience we get the following axioms.
Axiom A: Stimulating events in the eyes give rise to perception located within the brain
at the current instant.
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Axiom B: Perception consists of two components:
a. The observed or the object of perception (U), that is the apple.
b. The perceiver (I) or the thing looking at the apple.
1.3 Events of perception
Consider the distribution of events in the brain pertaining to perception. U, the apple or the first
component at any given instant will correspond to a set of simultaneous events in the brain as
given in Fig 3.
Red dots
represent
events
Fig 3. Simultaneous events of perception at the current instant
I, the second component by the act of perception will connect this set of simultaneous brain
events.
2. Special Relativity Physics and Simultaneous Events
Special Relativity groups all events into two distinct groups:
a. Time-like separated events
b. Space-like separated events.
2.1 Time-like separated events
These are events that are separated in space and time such that there is sufficient time for a beam
of light from one event to have reached the second event.
2.2 Space-like separated events
These are events that are separated in space and time such that light from any one event can
never reach any of the other events. Thus, simultaneous events are space-like separated. That is,
even two events occurring 0.0001 mm from each other in the same instant will be space-like
separated.
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3. Pivotal Argument
P1: Thus, the events of U at a given instant is space-like separated.
P2: Perception connects these events.
P3: Special relativity states that nothing physical (material) can connect space-like separated
events.
C1: Therefore, perception as it connects space-like separated events of U, cannot be physical.
That is, it is non-physical or dualistic.
The above conclusion can be false if one of the premises is false. P3 is accepted physics and as
such will be taken as true without argument (Einstein, 2015). In the case of P1 and P2, it can be
false if at any given instant U is not a set of events but instead is a single event or perception is
not a singular process but a set of parallel processors somehow appearing to be one etc. Any such
view is to deny the truth of the axioms, that is, the perception of the whole apple from instant to
instant is not true. In this paper, we will take the axioms to be true and events to be distributed as
stipulated by the axioms. Thus, taking the conclusion C1 as true, we will proceed to analyse
where it may lead us.
4. Hearing
Consider a note of music. A musical note is undefined in an instant of time. It exists over a
period of time. Sound in general exists across time and not in an instant. From this observation
we get the following axiom.
Axiom C
Hearing consist of two components.
a. Sound a set of events distributed across time (U).
b. The hearer or the thing hearing the sound (I).
C2. From axiom B and C we can conclude that U is 4-Dimensional set of events that is
perceived and heard (by I).
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5. The Geometrical Vantage Point of I
a. In order to observe a 1-Dimensional object fully, you need to be in a 2nd Dimension (see
Fig 4).
Vantage point
of observer in
2nd Dimension
2nd Dimension
1-Dimensional
object
Fig 4. 1-Dimensional object vantage point located in 2nd Dimension
b. In order to observe a 2-Dimensional object, you need to be in a 3rd Dimension (see Fig 5).
Observer in 3rd
Dimension
object
2-Dimensional surface
Fig 5. 2-Dimensional object vantage point located in 3rd Dimension
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c. In order to observe a 3-Dimensional object, you need to have access to the 4th Dimension
of time to travel around it and observe (see Fig 6).
Observer must travel
around in 4-Dimensional
of time to observe
Observer must use 4th
Dimension of time to
travel around the object to
observe it fully
Fig 6. 3-Dimensional object vantage point located in 4th Dimension
C3: In C2 above we concluded that the events of U are 4-Dimensionally distributed.
Thus, the geometric vantage points for I would be in the 5th Dimension.
C3 further straightens C1 where we noted perception is non-physical.
6. Introducing Concept A
Consider changing the shape of a 4-Dimensional object as show in the Fig 7 below.
Fig 7. Concept A – A change in shape
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As the change is across time and space, from within the 4-Dimensional object such changes will
not be observed. Further such changes as they act across space–time, will not violate
conservation of energy as it changes not just the present and future but also the past. This type of
change will be called Concept A.
6.1 Changing frequency of oscillations via Concept A
Fig 8 below shows a particle oscillating over time. Concept A can contract time leading to an
increase in the frequency of the oscillations.
Fig 8. Concept A changes the frequency and amplitude of an oscillating particle
6.2 Concept A acting on interacting particles
Consider a particle over time. It would be a 4-Dimensional string. Now consider the action of
Concept A at a point of interaction between two such strings as shown in Fig 9. It can be seen as
pulling on one string leading to changes in the path of both strings across past, present and
future.
Fig 9. Two particles over time will be like two strings entangled with each other. Concept A
acting at a given point will change the future but also the past
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7. Hypotheses A: the Mind-body Interaction and Concept A
Consider moving one’s finger or hand. This ability to move does not feel to be constrained in any
deterministic way by prior states of the mind. From this observation we get the following axiom.
Axiom D
Free will gives rise to movement and consist of two components:
a. The part of the body that is moved (U), e.g. Finger, Hand etc.
b. The thing (I) that initiates and controls movement.
It is hypothesised that free will comes about by I acting on the events of U (located in the
brain), via Concept A. Thus, acts of free will result in change not just in the present and
future but also in the past. This hypothesis is in agreement with C3 that the vantage point
of I is in the 5th Dimension, as such, it can change the observed 4 Dimensions of U. This
interaction is as shown in Fig 10.
Fig 10. The interaction between Mind and Brain via Concept A
The interaction can be shown via the following four states as given in Fig 11.
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Fig 11. Four states in the mind-brain-body-world interaction
Consider the events associated with asking a person to make a choice of clicking a button on the
occurrence of an external event such as a light flashing or not flashing. This is shown in Fig 12.
Fig 12. The corresponding change of states in the mind-brain-body-world interaction over three
instants of time
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The mind makes a choice at time T2 on observing events E1 or E2 (Flash of light or No flash of
light). The choice the mind makes at time T2 will be either M2 or M3. This will lead to the mind
going to state M4 or M5 respectively. In regards to the state of the mind prior to T2, that is at T1,
it is M1, nothing has changed.
The body has state B1 at T1 and at T2 the state B2. However, at T3 the body will have either
state B3 or B4 depending on the choice made by the mind. That is B3 might be the state in which
a button was pressed and B4 the button was not pressed.
Now the interesting aspect of the hypothesised interaction can be seen in the brain states. The
choice of the mind at T2 will not only alter the brain state to be A2 or P2 at T2 corresponding to
M3 and M2 respectively, but also change the past brain state to be A1 or P1. The brain state A1
and P1 are both compatible with the single mind state M1. The future brain state will change to
A3 or P3. It is this changes to the past that would be the hallmark of Concept A type changes.
The physical changes in the brain states is shown in Fig 13:
Fig 13. The brain state changes via Concept A as seen acting on two particles
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8. Hypotheses A to Theory A
We shall now explore potential evidence for Concept A to be the vehicle of interaction between
mind and brain. At the onset it must be noted that C1, that is the observation that simultaneous
events are connected by perception, by itself stands as strong evidence for I to be outside the 4
Dimensions U of space-time events. We shall explore two other sources of evidence.
a. Circumstantial evidence provided by Electrical Potential studies of the brain
b. The expanding universe or the Big Bang theory.
8.1 Libet's experiment on free will
In the famous experiment carried out by Benjamin Libet (Libet et al., 1983), a person makes a
choice to press a button or not to do so at a given time, that the person notes down. It was noted
in this experiment that when a choice is made at say T2 as stated by the person, nevertheless
prior to this time, proceeding by about 300ms, there can be detected an increase electrical
potential in the brain. It was interpreted at the time as showing that free will choices are not free
as prior to the person making the choice subconscious processes were already in operation, as
seen by the increased electrical potential 300ms before the time of making the choice. However,
this is exactly what would be expected if free will was brought about by Concept A type
changes. Brain states at T1 prior to the time of making the choice at T2 will change as a result of
the mind making a choice at T2 (see Fig 12).
8.2 Variation to Libet experiments
Now if the observation from Libet experiments is due to Concept A, a further confirmation can
be made by the following scenario. In Libet experiments the subject made a choice at a time of
their choosing if to press the button or not to press.
Consider the following variation. Suppose you tell a subject to decide to press or not press a
button when they see a red-light flash. The light is flashed randomly at a time unknown to the
subject. Now if the result shows that there is a change in electrical potential in the brain prior to
every time they choose to press the button, this will be circumstantial evidence for Concept A.
As the subject or the subjects brain could never have known when the light was going to flash.
Such an experiment has been carried out by Jo, Hinterberger, Wittmann, Borghardt and Schmidt
(2013). The results are as expected (Jo, Hinterberger, Wittmann, Borghardt, & Schmidt, 2013).
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8.3 Evidence from the Big Bang
The Big Bang theory says that all of space-time started as a single event or point. That is the
whole universe was the size of a single event and it is expanding. Thus, both space and time is
created in this expansion. As such this would mean there is a continues change in shape of the
universe. Expanding 4 Dimensionally means changing shape 4 Dimensionally. Thus, the
universe does allow for 4-Dimensional shape changes. This is what is needed for Concept A to
be possible ("Big Bang,").
9. Concluding Argument: Minds and Events
Following Rene Descartes meditation (Descartes, Tweyman, Haldane, & Ross, 1993), we shall
now summarise the above findings:
Category 1: Minds
I exist, and I am a mind. Therefore, Minds exist.
Category 2: Matter
I have feelings. These feelings originate from sensors in what I call my body. The sensors
are receptive to stimulation from events created from within my body and from events
created from outside my body. The stuff that bring about these events I shall categorise as
matter. Thus, my body is also made of matter. Therefore, Matter exists.
Category 3: Space
My body needs Space and Matter in general needs Space. Matter can exist only in Space.
Therefore, Space must exist.
Category 4: Time
My body needs Time to change and Matter in general needs Time for change. Matter can
change only in Time. Therefore, Time must exist.
From the above observation I conclude that these four categories permeate each other and
exist equally with none more abstract or less abstract than another.
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Now to the question of the origin of these categories
Could it be that any one or more of these categories can be made from any one or more of
the remaining categories? Could these categories transform from one to another?
Matter needs Space and Time for its existence, therefore without Space and Time, Matter
will not exist, as such Matter could not have been the origin of Space and Time.
From physics it has been observed that Space and Time can give rise to Matter
spontaneously. As such Matter maybe a result of a localized change to Space and Time.
So then, could Space and Time be the origin of everything else?
Again, from the theory of the Big Bang all Space, Time and Matter originated from this
singular event. Therefore, Space and Time could not alone have brought about the other
categories.
Since the Big Bang was an event, could it be that all things are made from events?
Where there is Space, Time and Matter there is always an event.
There can be no Space, Time or Matter without events.
In an instant all of Space and the Matter is nothing more or nothing less than a set of
events. So then Space, Time and Matter is one and the same as a set of simultaneous
events from one instant to the next.
From this observation the four categories can be reduced to two categories
Category 1: Minds
Category 2: Events
Now then, can Minds exist without events? We know that simultaneous events give rise
to feelings in Minds. We know from special relativity simultaneous events cannot give
rise to anything physical or material. Therefore, feelings cannot be physical or material.
Now as feelings are a part of Minds, we must conclude Minds are not physical.
Now can the Mind exist without feelings OR does feelings create the Mind, that is one
and the same as the Mind?
If feeling create the Mind then as feelings are created by events then Space, Time and
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Matter which we have concluded is the same as events, must also have feeling and thus
be one and the same as a Mind.
Thus, we would need to conclude a rock has a Mind or is part of a Mind to the same
extent that my brain is a Mind or is part of a Mind.
This conclusion is not palatable as such let’s consider the OTHER alternative.
Now if a Mind can exist without feeling then we also know that the Mind can create
events (e.g. throw a rock, move a finger).
So then given that the mind can create events then the Big Bang (The Event) could have
originated from The Mind in order to evoke feelings in other minds.
These other minds may have also been created by The Mind.
Received August 12, 2022; Accepted September 25,2022
References
Big Bang. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110906105327424
Descartes, R., Tweyman, S., Haldane, E. S., & Ross, G. R. T. (1993). Meditations on first philosophy in
focus. New York;London;: Routledge.
Einstein, A. (2015). Relativity: Princeton University Press.
Jo, H.-G., Hinterberger, T., Wittmann, M., Borghardt, T. L., & Schmidt, S. (2013). Spontaneous EEG
fluctuations determine the readiness potential: is preconscious brain activation a preparation process
to move? Experimental Brain Research, 231(4), pp. 495-500. doi:10.1007/s00221-013-3713-z
Libet, B., Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., Wright, E. W., . . . Pearl, D. K.
(1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential):
The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 106(3), pp. 623-642.
doi:10.1093/brain/106.3.623
Appendix A
The object of study in consciousness
Acquisition of knowledge by humanity is dependent on the consciousness of the individual. When a
person makes an observation, and comes to an understanding, this understanding is this person's
subjective knowledge.
If another person, on making a similar observation, arrives at a similar subjective understanding, this
knowledge they share can be taken to be part of humanity's objective knowledge.
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Thus, all of humanity's objective knowledge is a subset of all of humanity's subjective knowledge; that is,
there can be no objective knowledge that has not been some person's (dead or alive) subjective
knowledge.
Thus, an intrinsic assumption behind all of humanity's objective knowledge is the similarity of the axioms
of consciousness of the individuals.
With regard to the study of consciousness, the object of study must be once own consciousness. In the
study of consciousness, if a person gives a description of consciousness that does not correspond to
his/her subjective axioms of consciousness, then with it must also be given the transformation that
reconstructs these axioms. If not, this description is but only a fairy tale.
Seen in this light behaviourism is a mistake as it attempts to study consciousness via the behaviour of
another person. This is like hoping to study mathematics by getting somebody else to study it.
Appendix B
Pinocchio Syndrome, the Turing Test and the Axioms of Consciousness
From the very inception of one’s own consciousness, a human knows most perfectly well one’s own
consciousness and its associated experiences.
All its (humans) interactions with the universe is via its consciousness.
Now consider a child, it will initially think everything is conscious like itself. A baby will smile at a toy.
So the toy starts of having passed the Turing test.
With more learning the child will start to pass and fail different objects as to if they are conscious or not.
Thus, each person runs a Turing test on objects encountered all their life all the time.
Now in the past people ran Turing test on the sun, stars, the weather, volcanoes and most of the time these
things passed their Turing test. As such they were worshiped as gods.
So, the definition of the Pinocchio syndrome is this:
From childhood we have a tendency to assign consciousness to everything. Then we run a Turing test to
assert if its correct or not.
All of us suffer from this syndrome and we need to keep this syndrome in mind when it comes to Strong
AI. If the Turing test is weak then Strong AI would be a worship of gods.
Now, a better approach to this question would be:
a. Each human knows very well what it is to be conscious. What constitutes a conscious experience. As
such it would be possible to define a set of Axioms, the Axioms of consciousness.
b. In regards to computers again, a computer is not a black box. Humans know exactly how they work.
As such it would be possible to decide if the working of the computer can bring about the Axioms of
consciousness.
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Foundation of all Axioms the Axioms of Consciousness
Consider the experience of watching a live performance of music and dancing to the music. This
experience has the following axioms
Axiom 1
Consciousness consists of two components:
a. The Observed (U)
b. The Observer (I)
Axiom of U
a. The observed (U) is a 4-Dimensional (4D) object. (This is the totality of all sensations and
actions. Consider music, it must span time as such the whole experience is 4D.)
b. The 4D object observed has finite boundaries in Space and Time.
c. U being a 4D object can be broken down into component 4D objects.
a.
b.
c.
d.
Axioms of I
Ability to observe U
Feelings
Free will
Curiosity and playful behaviour
Axioms resulting from the interaction between U and I
Based on the type of interaction with I, U can be broken down into the following three
components.
a. Those which can evoke feelings in I (e.g. vision) referred to as Sensory objects.
b. Those whose motion can be controlled by the free will of I (e.g. hand) referred to as Motor
objects.
c. Those which are model of past Sensory objects and Motor objects (e.g. Memory) referred to as
Memory objects.
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Appendix C
Distribution of brain activity and perception
Fig 14. Distribution of brain activity and perception
It is commonly held belief that nerve impulses and activity at nerve synapses alone can explain
consciousness. However, it will now be demonstrated that the need for a connection between
simultaneous become even more evident when the actual distribution of these events (nerve impulses and
activity at nerve synapses) over space and time is considered. From a physics point of view a nerve
impulse or the activity at nerve synapses is more than a single event. However, for this analysis a nerve
impulse as well as a synaptic vesicle will be considered as single object (Objects of perception) that create
a single event by its location in space and time. One of the fundamental properties of nerve impulses is
that it must end before it can cause the next event. That is a nerve impulse dies by discharging at a
synaptic cleft, which will then release a synaptic vesicle. Essentially, these objects are transient with a
limited lifespan and distinct space between the object. Thus, if you were to consider all the nerve
impulses and activity at synapses at an instant in time. The following would always be true:
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1. These objects are physically separate from each other; and
2. None of the objects that are present at an instant in time have been caused by any of the other objects
that are present at that same instant. If you were to consider a set of balls on a pool table, when one
ball hits another after this event of hitting, both balls remain on the table, this contrasts with what
takes place in the brain as a nerve impulse must essentially end its life before its subsequent cause
will arise by way of a synaptic vesicles. Thus, at any given instant all the objects present do not also
contain the causative objects. All the causative objects must have essentially come to an end.
Given observation 1 and 2 let the objects of perception at any given time be enclosed in the smallest
possible virtual spherical globes. Then over any length of time these globes will never intersect. Thus,
they are separate in space and time. These globes will form an ever-changing pattern. With none of the
globes having been created by any of the other globes at any given instant (Fig 14). We know that the
activity within these globes together gives rise to a single phenomenon such as perception. However, we
know that distinct space and time cannot have any form of connections (special relativity). Yet
phenomenon such as perception makes exactly such a connection as it is a singular result of all these
transient objects.
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Oliver, A. J., A Philosophy of Consciousness
Exploration
A Philosophy of Consciousness
Alan J. Oliver*
Abstract
This essay completes my earlier essays on consciousness, and ranges from what I found in The
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali1 by Swami Veda Bharati, and The Sankhya Karika2 by G Srinivasan,
through to my conclusions. In the past I found modern philosophy requires any definition of
consciousness to provide an explanation of its subjective aspects, and the author of the Yoga
Sutras mentioned above provides a basis for my explanation which I believe can be understood
by a layperson in general terms of philosophy and neuroscience. Leaving aside convention and
limits I hope to present an understanding of consciousness, mind and memory based on practical
experience in the state of Samapatti. I am very aware that the knowledge within the two books I
cite originated at a time when people had a different way of understanding reality and verified
their knowledge through direct perception. My learning process will seem tedious but the fact is
that I find answers piece by piece and I write in much the same way. In citing these two authors I
do not claim or infer any agreement or support from either of them for the conclusions I reached
in this essay.
Keywords: Nonlocal, Yoga diagram, composite sentience, memory, retained information,
manifestation, manifestative cause, composite sentience, quantum potentials, entanglement, brain
plasticity, manifestation.
Introduction
This discussion began in 1986 during a conversation with the late Dr Bevan Reid 5, a cancer
researcher at the University of Sydney. Some years later I read Bohm and Hiley‟s Undivided
Universe6 and found in that book a clear relationship with Bevan Reid‟s concept of information
in space. I had been attending a class about The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and early in 1987 I
began my first experiences of Samapatti.
The first Samapatti experience came about when I was asked to see what I could do about Zac,
the anti-social cat. Inviting me to sit on a bean bag chair, his owner placed Zac on my lap saying
“He doesn‟t miaow, he snarls; he won‟t let anyone hold him for more than a couple of minutes,
we haven‟t seen him wash himself in a year or more and he smells awful, … can you do anything
for him?” I held my hand over the cat and focused on the top of his head intending him to go to
*
Correspondence: Alan J. Oliver, Normanville, South Australia. E-mail: thinkerman1@dodo.com.au
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sleep. I relaxed myself and Zac went to sleep immediately and I turned my focus on this smelly
cat.
Right away I had a cluster of simultaneous images in my mind; the chaotic lights and wavy lines
were a surprise for me because I have never had any mental images in my life. There were many
different pictures, and my first thought was they are like a few video games overlaid
simultaneously on the screen. I was unable to hold any one image long enough to recognise a
scene and focused on my own stillness; after about twenty minutes the chaos gave way to a
tranquil garden scene. Everything I noticed about this garden seemed to be wrong; all the colours
were autumn tones, no green and no blue. And there was something odd about the perspective
too; the plants were recognisable, but everything seemed much larger and out of proportion. I
realised I was seeing from Zac‟s eye level and colour spectrum. In fact I was seeing the garden
as if I was Zac.
I knew I had never seen this garden before and yet it felt both familiar and comfortable. I stayed
with the garden scene for a further fifteen minutes and then came back to being me. I felt he
would wake up and looked at his owner to tell her Zac would wake up now. Zac opened his eyes,
yawned and immediately began to wash himself. He had been asleep on my lap for almost an
hour. I knew this event was a significant landmark because I had not only seen what the subject
was dreaming, I had experienced his experience of his dream as he would have dreamt it, and I
had assumed that the flow of information between a healer and subject appeared to run in both
directions because I had been aware of two simultaneous viewpoints.
o0o
This next experience involved a woman with a fractured leg which had been broken a year
earlier. She told me a steel rod had been inserted into the bone to support the join as the bone
knitted together. Unfortunately, it hadn‟t knitted successfully, and the rod had been removed.
Her current option was to have a bone graft and an appointment to have an X-ray had been
arranged for a week‟s time. The X-ray would give the surgeon the information needed for any
further bone graft procedure.
I sat down in front of her and looked at where she said the fracture was in her leg and wondered
what I could do about it. I asked her to relax and close her eyes while I relaxed myself to focus
on her leg. I closed my eyes and immediately thought the bone marrow looked like a dark mass
in a distressed state. I thought I should remove the distress and fill the space with some bright
energy. I opened my eyes, intending to ask her to open her eyes and saw they were already open
and she was very excited.
She told me she had seen me remove some dark stuff from her leg and replace it with bright
golden light. She was obviously very excited, but not as much as I was; I recognised she had
„seen‟ what I had only thought; moreover that thought manifested what I would have liked to
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happen in her leg. In the following weeks she told me the subsequent X-ray showed some new
bone growth at the fracture site.
These are two examples of what I found in the Samapatti state, and I will interpret the Yoga
diagram in a manner which I believe allows me to relate Swami Veda Bharati‟s description of
consciousness and the Sankhya Karika to my experiences in terms of the quantum states present
across the whole diagram in any one moment of this fundamental process. By doing this I hope
to develop an explanation of what happens in that Samapatti state and how it can assist in
gaining an understanding of what is consciousness, mind, memory and the unconscious or
acognitive state.
Later, in an email exchange with Professor Basil Hiley I asked how physics might describe this
interaction between minds; he said the best explanation he could offer would be that of a
quantum entanglement of the minds. With the benefit of hindsight I can put Hiley‟s explanation
with what I know from my interpretation of the Sankhya Karika to build a coherent picture of the
Yoga diagram as a narrative of interactions between selectively interactive quantum potentials as
real information arising within a fundamental quantum process. I will do my best to develop that
narrative throughout this essay.
Hiley‟s email response, suggesting a quantum entanglement as an explanation of my experience
with the cat, seemed to clarify David Bohm‟s Wholeness and the Implicate Order 7 in which
Bohm talked about information infolding and unfolding in the nonlocal space. I had learned from
my conversations with Dr Bevan Reid about information retained in space that we were all
describing much the same sort of quantum event, and this kept me looking for a way to pull it all
together. The description I found in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, supported by Swami Veda
Bharati‟s Yoga diagram, provided that way as a concept but I needed to find how to translate that
spiritual concept into something based on my rudimentary physics. When I saw that my
Samapatti experiences could be described in terms of the Yoga Sutras and Sankhya Karika I
began writing.
This present discussion is a continuation of those earlier conversations about my experiences and
their explanation which I found in the Yoga Sutras. I will move between the descriptions given
in The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali1 and The Sankhya Karika2; the former being an explanation of
the Swami Veda Bharati‟s Yoga diagram from a spiritual perspective and the latter being
essentially the same explanation from a scientific perspective. I support both viewpoints from my
own experiences in the state of Samapatti because I can recognise each one is explaining the
same phenomenon.
Now we must take a look at the Yoga diagram itself.
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The Yoga Diagram
prakriti
1.
2.
mahat or buddhi, t he faculty of discrimination,
intelligence or intellection,
the first vehicle of purusha
ahamkara, ego, the principle of
self-identification
sattvic
tamasic
rajasic
ahamkara
impelling both
3-13. mind
5 cognitive senses
5 active senses
14-18. tan-matras
5 subtle elements
(tan-matras)
19-23. matter becoming atomic
5 gross elements
(bhutas or tattvas)
earth, water,
fire, air and space.
Fig.1.
Fig. 1. is taken from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and I will use it as an aid to describe the
concept of the descent of consciousness into matter as well as the creation of matter and will
refer to it throughout this essay. Unlike Swami Veda Bharati‟s description of that concept, what
follows will be an exploration of two of my experiences in the Samapatti state from the spiritual
and the Yoga science perspectives.
The Yoga Diagram
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My description of Figure 1 begins with Sattva, Rajas and Tamas, which are the three
gunas/aspects of the oscillation which results from the descent of Pure Consciousness (Purusha)
on prakriti, the undifferentiated potential in space. The final products are Mind as an aspect of
Sattva, and Matter as an aspect of Tamas, with Rajas impelling both, which I understood to mean
Mahat alternates between them. This „descent‟ of Pure Consciousness into matter is central to the
whole of the spiritual interpretation of Patanjali‟s Yoga Sutras, in which, prior to the descent of
Purusha, all three gunas are in a state of equilibrium. Patanjali tells us that when Purusha reflects
on prakriti, the reflection provides a degree of consciousness at Mahat and causes the
disequilibrium of the gunas. Mahat/buddhi is the first appearance of intelligence, discrimination
and intellection in this moment of the process of creation. At the lower end of the Sattvic arrow
we have the potential for the senses, both cognitive and active. At the lower end of the Tamasic
arrow we have five subtle elements and the five gross elements which become matter.
We should note here that in a spiritual context, this space has the title of Greatest Teacher, which
co-incidentally is also the title attributed to Mahat. My interpretation of this conundrum is that
the whole diagram represents information-in-potential in this nonlocal space (Akasha) at every
point on what I see as a diagram of quantum potentials simultaneously available in any given
quantum moment. My understanding of the word „space‟ as it is used in the Sankhya Karika is
best described as mini black holes within an unmanifested substrate which is both perpetual and
dynamic. Its dynamism relates to the unmanifested nature of this fundamental substrate, inferring
energy with the form of a spherical standing wave. Its unmanifested state infers a quantum state
which when considered as a hologram infers that the diagram represents every mini black hole
which would be part of every point in that hologram. The process of manifestation is what we
must consider in terms of the diagram as it relates to both of the two sources of my description.
The whole of Figure 1 can be considered in terms of the fundamental process of matter becoming
atomic, keeping in mind that I am also thinking about this diagram in terms of Srinivasan‟s
translation of Sankhya Karika, which gives a clearer understanding of the gunas when he says
that ‘all manifestation processes were defined by one type of event and that was an interaction in
three modes which are represented by the gunas. The first interaction can axiomatically be only
between the first two objects’. Please note that these two interacting objects are Mahat and any or
all of the quantum potentials which are considered in the moment of an interaction.
As a point which is „merely a point without mass‟, Srinivasan‟s description of space as
„coherent, perpetual, dynamic but unmanifest‟ describes the Yoga diagram perfectly; it is a point
which is a perpetually oscillating spherical standing wave in that unmanifested state. The same
points exist in all of the matter which manifest, as well as the charges, fields and particles
maintaining that matter. Srinivasan tells us that the gunas represent this oscillation, with Sattva
being the expansive phase of the spherical wave and Tamas being its compressive phase. Rajas
represents the tension between Sattva and Tamas, the stress within the wave itself.
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This oscillating standing wave is able to interfere with itself, producing every possible harmonic
of that fundamental frequency. Looking at the final evolutes which produce matter, Srinivasan
describes the harmonics of the fundamental waveform, one of which is a collapsing state as a
potential for gravity; another is radiative, inferring the potential for the fields and charges
required for the transformation of energy into matter. This is the fundamental process of creation,
and when considered as the process of creating consciousness it has application in the tissue,
momentary charge, and elements which perform specific functions within the neural network of
the brain; indeed it operates throughout the whole body in every one of Srinivasan‟s mini black
holes which drive the actual creation process according to the Sankhya version of the Yoga
diagram, but we will need to approach that realisation gradually in the discussion.
My interpretation of the Yoga Sutras in reference to the equilibrium between the gunas prior to
Purusha‟s reflection on prakriti is in the context of creation, and when I consider this moment of
equilibrium I believe it is the moment between the end of an oscillation of one spherical standing
wave and the beginning of the next; the moment between the end of an expansion of the point
and the beginning of its collapse. Considering Srinivasan‟s first interaction, I interpret his
statement to mean that the two objects interacting are Mahat, (which represents the moment of
equilibrium between Patanjali‟s gunas), and the existing potential information and context at
Sattva or Tamas observed by Mahat in an interaction.
The use of the term „observed‟ comes in part from the description of the process from a spiritual
context where each moment or interaction would be observed by Purusha. Here we find the
discrimination of the Buddhic component of Mahat, which Srinivasan has translated as a
scientific context, such as making a comparison between each informational outcome of the
interaction with the previous outcome. The second part of using the word observed relates to the
relative absence of time in one quantum moment within the process, which in nonlocal terms
provides for the retention of information in this space. I will get to the issue of the retention of
information in space a little later.
To explain these points which are an example of a quantum entity having the capacity to be in a
number of states „at the same time‟ or „simultaneously‟, I provide a simple summary of what I
have hypothesised about the process and the diagram at this point in real time and develop my
explanation of the process and how quantum entanglement fits into the whole concept. Because
Figure 1 is intended to illustrate the potential for matter present in a nonlocal state, and that
matter manifests through a fundamental process within the diagram itself, it follows that the
diagram represents the process by which Energy in potential becomes matter.
1. From Einstein‟s E = MC2 we can propose that M = E/C2
2. If we assume the unmanifested energy to be a quantum potential of energy in the context
of the diagram, then it is possible to view the diagram as a representation of an
interaction between these potentials, the assertion being that the only interactions will be
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an expression of the stress in a waveform or harmonic and the null point or equilibrium
between oscillations.
3. The narrative in the Yoga Sutras gives a description of those interactions in a context
written with the intention of understanding the different levels of Samadhi and validating
the spiritual model of creation as it was generally understood in the Vedic culture.
4. A narrative of the process from the Sankhya perspective leads to a quasi-modern
understanding of the same process in the context of a quantum entanglement as suggested
by Hiley in reference to my Samapatti experiences described earlier.
The question of how one of an entangled pair of particles can „know‟ the state of its entangled
partner has always intrigued me and I can only say how I think it fits within the Yoga diagram.
From my reading of the spiritual perspective of Yoga the question suggests some form of
selfhood at the level of a particle, most likely a common self, carried over from a moment before
a particle which had been a single entity decayed to become an entangled pair. An alternative
explanation could be that the prior state of the particle has retained information entangled with
individual identity, which is what happens in simple cell division.
To follow that thought we need to revisit the notion of self, or asmita as it is described in the
Yoga Sutras. Swami Veda Bharati tells us this notional „self‟, asmita, can be „coloured by‟
Ahamkara, the retained experiences in mind which constitute the five ignorances given in the
Yoga Sutras, namely:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Asmita
I Amness
Attraction
Repulsion
Fear of death of or what I believe myself to be.
Retained information can best be understood to be the information relating to the who, how,
what, when, where and why, arising from asmita and Ahamkara; a context in fact, and it is the
information relating an experience together with its related contexts. Asmita represents the whole
context of an interaction because it is the information which is entangled in any experience and I
have assumed it will remain entangled in the samskara arising from that experience. Essentially,
I believe every samskara of an individual is entangled with that individual‟s asmita, which means
that all of an individual‟s experience is available to be „kept in the individual‟s mind‟ and is
made available by the information retained from an interaction with Mahat; this is why one
thought leads to the next, and why decision making can be difficult, at times uncomfortable and
at other times revelatory.
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From Yoga we find that when Purusha (without distinguishing marks) reflects on the finest state
of prakriti, that reflection retains the characteristics of Purusha, which are called Mahat/Buddhi,
effectively a Samapatti in which Purusha is the seer and Mahat/buddhi is the subject because the
whole diagram is entangled. Moreover, that entanglement between Purusha and Mahat/Buddhi is
retained in this nonlocal state. These characteristics retained in Mahat/Buddhi are Satchitananda
(existence, knowing and bliss); the first two being the finest matter and consciousness while the
final attribute of Purusha to be realised is the universal Self. This Self, asmita, remains present
throughout the subsequent evolutes simultaneously and is an aspect of the agency of
consciousness inferred to be Purusha in the Yoga Sutras and is what gives Mahat its agency of
consciousness. I believe this entanglement can give us another way to explain Mahat‟s agency of
consciousness.
From my perspective of the Sankhya Karika, the question of agency must derive from the first
interaction (which can axiomatically be only between the first two objects) which is the moment
or null between successive waveforms and the potential related to that moment. Swami Veda
Bharati tells us that asmita (the reflection of Purusha on matter (prakriti) is described as a
„composite sentience‟ involving Mahat/buddhi, with the composite being the combination of
consciousness and the potential to exist (matter) and know (intelligence). Applying that notion of
composite sentience to the diagram in the context of the first creation of matter prior to any
living form, it becomes obvious there must be a deeper effect of Srinivasan‟s „first interaction
between the first two objects‟ within the fundamental process.
I believe this first interaction would relate to the beginning of a cycle of creation on the diagram,
which suggests to me that the two objects would be Mahat and the retained information related to
the last oscillation at the end of the previous cycle of creation. My reason for saying Mahat is the
principal one of the first two objects is that in the spiritual interpretation of the Yoga Sutras
Mahat represents the reflection of Purusha‟s consciousness, and in the Sankhya translation
Mahat is the reference object for every interaction. In giving Mahat the role of reference object
for every interaction I believe Srinivasan describes every cycle of the perpetual oscillation in
terms of the interaction between the quantum potentials and Mahat in every quantum moment.
From my point of view, this is the point at which we can begin to explain the diagram from a
practical perspective.
At this point in the discussion I recognised the need to include some of the process of
consciousness in my discussion of the creation of matter because it is essentially the same
process. My first thought about this point was to provide another diagram to illustrate the process
but on reflection I decided to use the concept of a computer program instead because we are
talking about retained memory and a process which has some similarity to a computer program.
From that perspective, I am suggesting that consciousness is the product of process which is
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analogous to the application software running on a computer while programmer is the
author/agency of the fundamental process.
I have been fortunate enough to have collaborated with Dr Syamala Hari in JCER essays on
consciousness, and in explaining the analogy I used in the previous paragraph, Dr Hari used the
example of a programmer writing software as a comparison for the need of a notional external
agency or creator to produce consciousness from chemical and electrical activity in the brain. In
my discussions with Dr Hari we realised that the consciousness we find in mind is the same
consciousness present at the time of creating a memory of that item or experience. The identity
of a specific memory item becomes part of the context related to the observation, the process and
instrument of apprehension, the object remembered, together with its manifestative cause, which
results in the simultaneous activation of every singularity/mini black hole in the observer‟s body
and therefore the related momentary neural map which Patanjali calls a samskara. My view is
that all of the quantum potential involving living forms is conscious information, not because
consciousness is a fundamental of reality but because every experience is the result of these
quantum interactions which produce its related samskara whose manifestative cause creates our
conscious awareness.
At this point we need to examine the process of memory, as given in YS 1.11., where we find
that:
A cognition is associated with and coloured by the object of an apprehension and resembles
and manifests the features of both the object apprehended and the process and instrument of
apprehension. Such cognition then produces an imprint (samskara) that is similar to them
both.
That samskara then manifests its identity with its own manifestative cause; it generates a
memory. This memory is identical in form to the same manifested identity and manifestative
cause. It consists of both the object apprehended and the process and instrument of
apprehension.
When the object of apprehension is primary, we call that memory. When the process and
instrument of apprehension are primary, we call that intelligence.
A „cognition‟ refers to something (the object) becoming known (in mind); the process and
instrument of apprehension and an intellectual copy of the object creates an imprint that is
similar to both, a samskara. We need to note here that the process and instrument of
apprehension and the intellectual copy of the object are simultaneously present in that samskara.
Initially, the instrument of apprehension is the senses while the process of apprehension is the
knowing of what has been apprehended by Buddhi, the agent of apprehension which exists also
as Mahat at evolute 1. It is presented to mind and thus „modifies‟ mind and is retained as a
samskara. The „modification of the mind‟ comes from the manifestative cause or samskara
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arising from that cognition and puts it into effect through the related functions within the neural
network; this modifiable nature of the neural map is known as brain plasticity, which is the
physical expression of a samskara.
The samskara combines the identity of the object together with the manifestative cause as a
memory; retained information. When the object of apprehension is primary we call that memory.
The „manifestative cause‟ is the retained composite information which can reactivate the process
and instrument of apprehension expressed as a whole of body memory through the neural
system.
The term „manifestative cause‟ is significant because here Patanjali is pointing out every detail of
the process we must consider if we are to understand how it really works. In my Samapatti
experiences I experienced the experience of the subject during that Siddhi state. I was able to
know and experience a cat‟s dream, while in another experience the subject saw the change I
thought I would like to have happen as it was happening. Given that I am unable to form any
mental imagery, I was relieved to find that the subject could mentally see my thought through
what must have been the same process when I watched the cat‟s dream.
When the process and instrument of apprehension are primary we call that intelligence.
This sentence explains the two different kinds of memory. The first kind is one in which we
remember the object and experience of the observation as it was presented to the mind at the
time and can relive the experience. All of this becomes the specific manifestative cause activated
in any subsequent recall of that specific object and/or its context, and by that Patanjali means the
object and the experience are what becomes present in our conscious awareness or mind, and we
call that a memory.
In the second kind of memory one only remembers the intelligence, which is „I saw this
happening in a specific context‟ (I am aware of the initial experience in the mind and body; there
is no manifestative cause, hence no re-manifestation of the experience). Swami Veda Bharati
calls this intelligence acognitive knowing, indicating it is not something one knows with the
mind. It is only a narrative because what was retained was the process and instrument of
apprehension which only involves what Mahat/buddhi appears to retain in the actual experience
and has no samskara/manifestative cause. This is the kind of memory I have; I do not re-manifest
an experience; I only have a narrative of the experience.
To add to this description I quote YS.1.41. which describes the coalescence of two minds which
we find in the state Samapatti state. Patanjali tells us that:
When one’s modifications have subsided, his (mind’s) stability on and coalescence with the
apprehender, the process and instrument of apprehension and the objects of apprehension,
like pure crystal (which takes on the reflection and colour of proximate objects), is called
Samapatti.
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In his commentary on this Sutra, Swami Veda Bharati explains that the seer‟s causal cognition
has set, which means her/his mind is empty because all samskaras have been brought under
control and are inactive, evidence that the seer is in Asamprajnata Samadhi a state in which the
self-identity (asmita) is minimised. What „the seer‟s causal cognition has set‟ really tells me that
rather that having no samskaras, I do have samskaras but they are inactive. This is why the seer‟s
mind is coloured by being in the presence of proximate objects, like the cat in my description of
the first experience and the lady with the leg fracture in the second experience.
This is where the notion of a common language emerged for me; the phrase, coalescence with
the apprehender, is where Patanjali brings home his point of two minds merging. What that
means is that both the seer and the subject have the two individual manifestative causes
simultaneously in their awareness, and the Buddhi of each can distinguish between these two; the
distinctions made by Buddhi is presented to Mahat; for the subject it will be only the information
apprehended by the subject which is actually the seer‟s stillness; for the seer it will be only the
information apprehended by the seer. However, the seer will know both sets of information are
present and he/she is able to know which is which. I think this word coalesce explains the phrase
„is coloured by‟ exactly, while the discrimination of Buddhi suggests that Buddhi knows both
observations simultaneously (an entanglement), supporting the view that the process is in the
quantum domain.
Considering this Sutra, we must take into account the many functions at play in the seer‟s and the
subject‟s body to manifest the experience simultaneously in each. This means that the same
quantum information and related process works to manifest the momentary brain plasticity of the
subject‟s neural network and to retain that experience of the seer‟s cognition as her/his
experience. For the seer though, all that is retained is the intelligence of Mahat‟s observation,
despite the fact that the seer has the experience of the subject‟s experience at the time, and
therefore the subject‟s manifestative cause.
Mahat‟s observation of the subject‟s experience does not contain the seer‟s asmita and therefore
the seer does not create a samskara, which makes his memory of that event a simple narrative or
statement.
In Sankhya Karika, Srinivasan tells us that when harmonics of the fundamental standing wave
synchronise, their properties such as radiation, charge and mass, combine to create specific
matter. This is not too far removed from Patanjali‟s statement, „when there is a conjunction of a
number of points without mass, a point with mass can appear‟. Such a conjunction at the
beginning of a cycle of creation could combine a number of neutrons to create light; if it
produced atoms of hydrogen it might have created a Big Bang. In the case of a seer and subject
in Samapatti, what is produced are the changes needed to the brain‟s neural structure to
implement the manifestative causes operating at the time. Here is another example of what I
called a common language through which I knew that the cat‟s dream of a garden felt familiar,
which I am inferring was how it felt for the cat. I make this inference supported by the fact that
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this smelly cat which had not washed itself for more than a year woke up when I felt it would
wake; it woke and began to wash itself as I knew it would.
My notional common language is the activation of a specific manifestative cause to produce the
brain changes which I infer gave the same subjective response in the cat and me in the first
Samapatti experience given earlier. In that Samapatti state I was able to know the cat‟s
experience and my own and was able to discriminate between each viewpoint. In the second
experience the situation was reversed; the subject experienced what I had thought, which is what
happens in Samapatti and is generally described as a coalescence of two minds, more of which
we will come to a little later.
At this point I need to explain the relationship of Mahat/Buddhi too, given that in the spiritual
interpretation, Patanjali tells us that Mahat is „merely a mark‟ with no distinguishing features; it
is simply a presence, the subtle energy which will produce objects. It is also the individual
buddhi, the faculty of discrimination, intelligence and intellection in a sentient entity.
Interpreting these attributes in terms of Sankhya Karika where Mahat is part of the fundamental
process, it is evident to me that the attributes belong to the process itself, producing the specific
manifestative cause of each attribute as it is known/presented by Mahat in both the seer and the
subject.
To explain this I turn to Bevan Reid‟s work as a cancer researcher 5 where he had found and
recorded that the survival rate of his cell cultures of mouse fibroblasts was consistent over a
number of years. In one of his experiments designed to reveal a structure for space he introduced
a 10kg of lead into the laboratory space to find whether it would have any effect on the survival
rate; he found the survival rate decreased markedly in the presence of the lead. Repeating the
experiment with fresh cells he found that the effect of the introduced lead on the new fresh cell
cultures resulted in the same decrease in survival rate. Then he removed the lead from the
laboratory space and the decreased survival rate was maintained for some weeks, confirming that
the effect of the lead remained in the space after its physical removal from the laboratory space.
His conclusion was that the laboratory space retained the effect of the lead, which was the mouse
fibroblasts‟ response to the presence of lead in that space and he said that what was retained was
the information relating to the mouse cells‟ response to the lead, the manifestative cause.
Now I will explain what I mean by retained information.
The whole Yoga diagram represents quantum states of information as potentials which become
flexibly entangled in a quantum moment within the fundamental process. I said earlier that the
diagram represents every singularity point or mini black hole throughout the body. This includes
the brain mass which is a flexible network of neural structures capable of reflecting that flexible
entanglement of quantum potentials in the nonlocal state. The body‟s sensory system
communicates with the neural network and vice versa to produce the effect we call conscious
awareness.
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In the Sankhya Karika Srinivasan tells us that “while laboratory instruments emulated all the
five senses, they could not imitate natures' own instrument the brain, which was the core that
maintained all forms of life. Sankhya proves that the two halves of the cerebral system were a
sensory signal multiplexing instrument, Buddhi and Siddhi, based on the same interactive Guna
qualities of space. It was indeed the most magnificent instrument to detect a null current or
equipotential state. The brain, detecting the Moolaprakriti (singularity point) stress currents as
an imbalance in the potential of the two cerebral lobes, transmitted its difference through the
(eye of wisdom) pineal gland to the lower spinal plexus that magnified it. It was an
experienceable signal, the much spoken about Kundalini current. On receiving a human query,
the two unbalanced cerebral lobes went on a furious search till they reached the balancing point
of a null Moolaprakriti current. On receiving that answer, the human gave a sigh of relief,
demonstrating his utter satisfaction. That process signified the symbolic 'OM' state”.
In the Yoga Sutras the needed external agency required for consciousness is Purusha which
reflects on prakriti. Patanjali tells us that this reflection is Mahat and is „coloured by‟ Purusha‟s
innate consciousness. My understanding of this external agency from the Sankhya perspective is
quite different. When we consider creation in the first instance such as might exist at the end of a
cycle of the universe, Patanjali tells us that Mahat/buddhi is „merely a mark‟, making the
retained information the equivalent of a zero for the information related to any created matter at
the end of a cycle of creation. Bearing in mind that we are discussing a fundamental process
which creates matter and consciousness, the term used in the Yoga Sutras which relates to the
potential to create is „manifestative cause‟. This retained information, as a potential to create, is
the „second object‟ in the first interaction and provides me with a rudimentary idea of how the
process operates in the quantum state prior to the manifestation of matter.
What we need to remember here is that this manifestative cause represents both the object being
remembered and the context of that moment, which will include the immediate space and
circumstance. In 2005 I read a report in New Scientist 4 of Madeleine Ennis‟s experiment
designed to debunk homeopathy. In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked
at the effect of the ultra-dilute solution of histamine on human white blood cells involved in
inflammation. These „basophils‟ release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once
released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different
labs, found that diluted homeopathic solutions „worked just like histamine‟. Ennis might not be
happy with the homeopaths‟ claims but admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal,
deadly nightshade or spider venom, in ethanol and then diluting this “mother tincture” in water
again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy
leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however the diluted solution
becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
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You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic
remedy has ever been shown to work in large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trials. But
the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something real is going
on. “We are”, Ennis says in her paper, “unable to explain our findings and are reporting them
to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon. If the results turn out to be real,” she
says, “the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.”
Reading this report again I can see in hindsight that space in this context, or specifically the
singularities within the space within the water molecules, contained information relating to the
„manifestative cause‟ or memory/samskara which resulted from the quantum interactions present
when histamine was added to what became the original tincture prior to its dilution. Any
subsequent examination of the diluted solution with the intention to assess any evidence of
histamine would activate that memory of histamine in the water molecules, demonstrating the
whole context of the original quantum interactions being retained within that context. It is the
same kind of quantum information present across the Yoga diagram which I have described in
relation to Srinivasan‟s interaction.
The difficulty for science and philosophy is that the quantum interactions exist as retained
evidence of the interaction when the original histamine was added to the original water. That
interaction involved the histamine, the water and the space, in which the water and histamine
interacted as a context, and any of that water plus the water added for dilution maintained the
original context regardless of the quantity of water added. This same difficulty exists for anyone
attempting to define how conscious and mind operate in the brain in terms of what is currently
measurable. One attempting to define the retained information from a spirituality or science
viewpoint would add that disciplinary asmita to the context, making any explanation invalid.
Considering the Yoga diagram as a set of quantum information interacting within itself to create
matter and taking the interaction to be the result of the perpetual oscillation, my view is that the
process is something similar to Wheeler‟s3 quantum foam in that quantum information shuttles
back and forth across the interface of the virtual and real states if that is what really happens.
Alternatively one could say the process is a switching between moments of memory as quantum
potential and at the end of the process we have a quantum manifestative cause of matter, living
or inorganic.
In his explanation of the Yoga diagram, Swami Veda Bharati makes it very clear that the phrase,
„in the presence of‟ is fundamental to understanding the Yoga diagram. Applying this importance
to every part of the diagram it becomes clear that every one of the singularities is in the presence
of its adjacent singularities and will be interacting with them, creating the equivalent of what is a
samskara, inferring that space itself creates its own memory.
I think we can take that point further and say that space itself is cognitive and this would be
another supportive element for the composite sentience of entangled particles before they have
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participated in an event which would obviously be an interaction. I think Bohm and Hiley had
already worked out this cognitive aspect of space before they talked about „hidden variables‟ in
their book, The Undivided Universe6.
Once again, we have reached a realisation which adds to our understanding of the fundamental
process which we can expand to include life as a form of chemistry which is dependent on
quantum interactions supported by retained information. I could take this point further but this is
an essay, not a book, and I will leave it there. Suffice to say that as life and its replication became
more complex, the information needed for sustainability of the form manifested possibly as RNA
and DNA or earlier precursors; that is a story for someone well versed in those subjects.
Using Srinivasan‟s brain model from Sankhya Karika I can attempt my explanation of the
quantum interactions. I believe that Buddhi and Siddhi are representative of Mahat interacting on
the Yoga diagram with the quantum states present during each step of the perpetual oscillation.
When Mahat is „in the presence of‟ (observes) information related to a momentary context (a
samskara) it knows all of the retained information related to that samskara. That information and
context may relate to many experiences of that particular self or just the present moment. In the
model above, it may arrive at a null point or not, depending on the outcome of the intelligence
arising from Buddhi‟s discrimination and intellection. A null would have Buddhi indicate the
information (samskara) regarding an outcome and manifest recognition of some relief to
associate that relief and the information as a new samskara. If there is no null detected the
process would continue to examine the samskaras related to the question, creating uncertainty,
fear, depression, fight or flight depending on the number of samskaras and the related responses
related to these samskaras.
Now I will try to illustrate the process itself with words rather than a diagram.
1. Given that Mahat is „merely a mark‟, then in terms of the Yoga diagram, Mahat is a
fundamental which I will call, i, an imaginary number.
2. I am assuming that any interaction will be made in terms of the relationship between i and
any of the quantum states on the Yoga diagram representative of the retained information
(memories) in a given moment.
At the end of the previous cycle of creation there would be no matter present, so the first
iteration of the next cycle will have i in the presence of no matter, which produces (i+0), the
samskara for the creation of matter. This relates to Patanjali‟s statement that Mahat has no
distinguishing mark, merely a mark, in this case a presence of nothing; I am sure a
mathematician would have a name for this state.
The next interaction is between i and (i+0), which produces the samskaras related to the
manifestative causes (the gross elements for the creation of matter). Looking at the Yoga
diagram in terms of Srinivasan‟s statement about the brain, I am inclined to relate this to Rajas
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which represents the tension between Sattva and Tamas. When considered in terms of creation,
(i+0) can be the manifestative cause for hydrogen or light depending on which creation story one
might be considering in that moment. The point being that (i+0) is the quantum potential for
manifesting an atom of hydrogen or photons of light. It would also produce the clumping
together of the atoms produced, creating gravity as a force which would be present in this new
context. Literally, we have a „manifestative cause‟ creating real matter from a quantum process
in which (i+0) is the memory or retained information of an earlier iteration of creation from the
earlier creation.
This same process produces consciousness but rather than (i+0) we have i + the samskaras
related to the electro-chemistry of life available to the senses, + the sensory experience which
manifests as consciousness, + asmita/Ahamkara, + everything with a relationship to a specific
living form (self or DNA or mind) as retained information in the quantum state which manifests
its material self. All of the „+ …‟ information are contextual entangled potentials related to that
moment and can include related and or all similar experiences which are relevant in that moment
and space.
And of course it is not quite that simple; to understand what is going on we must take into
account that Mahat represents composite sentience of the unmanifested state. I would say that
prior to the creation of the first matter, every singularity/Moolaprakriti in space is in the presence
of the same zero and can be considered to be i. This suggests a possibly novel thought of
relativity in which each singularity bears a relationship with every other singularity, a
relationship which has been called asmita. In the context of a human this relationship can be the
individual identity mentioned in YS. 1.11. and will be part of that individual‟s samskaras.
This takes our consideration of the Yoga diagram to another level of complexity; it also provides
some understanding of the paranormal event of bilocation. Two years ago I read an article in the
Weekend Australian by journalist Nicholas Rothwell who quoted reports by the early
anthropologists in outback Australia of such an event. In his article Rothwell described reports
by two of these scientists in which each had documented a conversation he had with an
indigenous elder. When they met up with each other weeks later and compared their notes they
found they had the described exactly the same conversation with the same elder at the same time
on the same day. Their records showed they was at least some hundred or miles apart at that
time. I am suggesting that particular elder was able to perform Samapatti as an action at-adistance simultaneously with two subjects.
The point I want to make here is that our individual identity as a context will always have a
relativity component within the composite sentience of Mahat, and that relativity component will
include a spatial configuration such as the one mentioned in Bevan Reid‟s experiment with the
mouse fibroblasts in the present of a 10kg lump of lead. That spatial component will be part of
the space in which Dr Ennis mixed her histamine solution prior to its dilution. Little wonder that
sensitive people can be uncomfortable in a space where a massacre had taken place, often a
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decade or century after the event; like Ennis, we all need to rethink about entangled information
being retained in space because that retained information already has its place in the definition of
quantum entanglement.
At times a person can have a subliminal recognition of a place without any knowledge of the
reason why that place feels like it had been known in the past; we call that feeling déjà vu. These
intrusions of quantum information have been recognised by physicists in terms of a particle
„choosing‟ a path in an experiment. John Wheeler 3 called the calculation of the choice which
Richard Feynman had assumed to have been made by the particle a „sum over histories‟. My
view is that it was the presence of the relativity of the information within the singularities of the
whole location and its participants and the experimenter‟s desire to know which path would be
taken and how it was chosen.
I do not feel the need to expand the diagram of the fundamental process; instead I need only to
relate that process to the same 5 subtle elements and 5 gross elements (bhutas or tattvas), earth,
water, fire, air and space which can be understood to be the quantum manifestation of the
charges, fields, particles present in manifesting an atom of matter or charge in the neuronal
system, and is why I used the term brain plasticity earlier in the essay. In terms of consciousness,
these quantum elements manifest as the network of connections in the neuronal structures of the
brain; there and how it is that quantum potential as the manifestative cause becomes matter. The
actual experience of our awareness of what is experienced as mind is the conscious content
related to that experience. In other words, we remember the conscious experience „consciously‟
as now, based on what was spatially relative in that moment.
We can use this model of consciousness to reconsider an experience in Samapatti; here the seer‟s
mind is still, meaning she/he has no active asmita to provide a sense of self. In that state the
seer‟s mind is „coloured by‟ whatever he/she is focused on to the extent is takes on the same
manifestative cause present in the subject‟s mind, hence the seer „knows‟ what the subject is
feeling in the same way that I knew the cat‟s dream. At the same time the subject „knows‟ the
seer‟s stillness, and in the case of the lady with the leg fracture, was able to experience my
thought from her own visual perspective (a samskara). This is why the Yoga student mentioned
earlier from Srinivasan will re-experience the lesson given by her/his teacher when the lesson is
recalled while the student is in the Siddhi state.
Putting this Sankhya model into a general perspective of the cognitive mind, I think that Swami
Veda Bharati‟s explanation of YS 1.11 can be interpreted as a description of the stream of
conscious which we all experience. The process remains the same and Mahat will still be
represented by i, what changes is the introduction of the term cognition. My view is that
cognition is the composite sentience which we know as our conscious awareness. The sentience
comes from Mahat, which we can regard as a seer in Samapatti with the body, or, as Swami
Veda Bharati said, Mahat is in the present of the body, which means Mahat is coloured by the
body‟s momentary experience.
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I know from my direct experience in Samapatti that the seer, Mahat, can have two simultaneous
viewpoints; that of the subject and that of her/himself, with the Buddhic intelligence from each
viewpoint known and the clear distinction of which is which. The subject in Samapatti will know
Mahat‟s viewpoint without Buddhi and believe that as his/her own experience and this is what
becomes the cognition, with a composite sentience based on the subject‟s asmita.
From that point the subject‟s samskara of that cognition will evoke her/his own related
experience or experiences and her/his Mahat will provide further cognitive moments which
become a stream of consciousness. Of course, this stream does not run as fast as the creative
process; its progress is limited to its own process of considering every related samskara and its
effect of the body through the brain manifesting each memory as a manifestative cause. I would
describe this process as samskara
cognition
samskara
cognition
samskara
cognition
samskara
cognition
….
I could have placed the words and arrows around a circle but that would be misleading; the fact
is that each thought is observed by Mahat and recognised by Buddhi, whose cognition elicits any
number of related samskaras, comparing each against the observation by Mahat. The most
relevant elicits any number of its own related samskaras, and the process continues. The process
described is what happens in the waking state. During sleep the samskaras presented to Mahat
and the discrimination of Buddhi become less related to the current moment because the
composite sentience is disrupted as each part of the body is responding to every local singularity.
Think of the cat before Samapatti, when there was evidence of multiple samskaras all activated
simultaneously to create the chaos I observed in Samapatti. When the cat finally responded to
that state it had suspended its entrenched sense of self and was able to experience my stillness. It
„slept‟ undisturbed in a physical sense for almost an hour; on waking it had reverted to a way of
being related to an earlier time in its life.
The last point to note in this discussion is about the unconscious state. In other discussions I had
said this is about Mahat and Buddhi, and that the unconscious state is what is mentioned in the
final statement in YS 1.11. The reason this state is regarded as being unconscious comes from
the fact that Mahat is „merely a mark‟ which means that it does not create any samskaras. In
practical terms, this leaves Mahat without any means of manifesting consciousness and may be a
possibly valid demonstration of why there is a time lag between a brain signal to respond and the
response itself.
In my effort to understand this aspect of me I had thought I have an almost non-existent working
memory, and obviously that is not the case. It is simply that since I do not create samskaras I do
not remember the whole moment, only the intelligence arising from that moment. I have no
stream of connected thoughts, which is why my answers to a question my seem lacking
coherence; the thoughts do connect eventually, but the time of that connection is quite variable.
The reason why we are not conscious of the acognitive aspect of Mahat is that this troubling
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aspect relates to Buddhi. We become conscious of Mahat‟s cognition of Buddhi‟s discrimination
used to extract the samskaras relevant to an interaction, question or observation, and this
discrimination takes a finite amount of real time to manifest each moment of a memory in the
body/brain while Buddhi discriminates to reach a final answer. Mahat‟s intelligence therefore
becomes apparent after Buddhi has provided an answer to Mahat and the selected samskara or
memory becomes known by Mahat as a conscious memory. This realisation about the
unconscious Mahat might provide food for thought about mental states in general and I will
leave that to the experts.
For me, the whole question of consciousness is not quite as simple because I have become
„established‟ in this Samapatti or Siddhi state or was simply „born that way‟. I certainly didn‟t
acquire this state through meditation and study with an accredited teacher. What I can say from
direct experience is that I don‟t have the first kind of memory; mine is of the second kind. This
leaves me with this relatively empty mind which does have the normal visceral experiences when
they are happening but lack any visceral component when I remember anything. Mostly I am in
the same acognitive state or unconscious state of Mahat and have managed to get by with limited
information at hand because there is no manifestative cause to inform me in the same way every
normal person can operate.
I am intrigued by the role of context as it plays through the common language. We all know what
we can rely on so far as other people are concerned in a general sense. In this essay I have drawn
from two different sources, one in a spiritual context and the other in a science context but each
are translations of the same word. For example, the Yoga interpretation of (Sattvic) the
expansive phase of the fundamental oscillation is one of illuminative, light and expansive; the
Sankhya interpretation relates to the stress present in that singularity/mini black hole during that
expansive phase. Both are descriptions of the information in the same quantum diagram. It
reminds me of the Inuit having over seventy words to describe snow, but I think that is only how
a western mind might understand it. More likely is the context of the snow being described; it
can be snow falling, wind-blown, wind-shaped after settling, fresh snow, old compacted snow.
The reason for many words for snow is really obvious if we realise each word represents a
context. The same goes for samskaras as the manifestative cause related to a specific memory
and its context.
I think composite sentience is present in schools of fish, flocks of birds and wild animals
collectively avoiding predators, but I think it goes further than that. A new-born infant has a
brain, relatively but not quite, a blank slate. Until its birth the infant‟s brain was part of the
mother‟s body and would have acquired samskaras and memories of the mother‟s experience
during gestation through the same entanglement mentioned earlier in relation of cell division.
After partition, the baby‟s brain would lack that built-in entanglement connection with its
mother‟s asmita, and its now empty „mind‟ would place it in the same state as a seer in
Samapatti. It now has a Samapatti connection to its mother‟s asmita because it „experiences‟
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mother as „me‟ and can be „coloured by‟ those minds around it in the same way its mother is
coloured by them until its own asmita or a sense of self develops during the first two to three
years.
As I consider Srinivasan‟s brain model I can agree that the null between the two brain
hemispheres would occur in the bliss state of Samadhi, but I believe things would be quite
different in an everyday sense. Most people can be aware of their momentary mind state and the
stream of consciousness which pours forth as each thought elicits the next thought. I can see how
depression as a dominant samskara would be present in that stream in the same way that love and
its associated thoughts can dominate our mind. But it is in the decision process where this model
can inform us of the way making a decision can be both time consuming and difficult. This is
because the issue at hand will have so many related memories, all aspects of asmita mentioned
earlier. Each related memory can be felt in the body along with its associated pain or pleasure as
we are drawn to a potentially negative or positive personal or collective outcome.
From my own experience in Samapatti, especially that experience with the cat, I have come to
the view that there is a common universal language manifesting as common manifestative
causes. These causes would have been learned by the first forms of life and shared in the
common memory before differentiation of the forms. We have seen how some mammals have
become domesticated by humans, and in the case of Elsa the lioness in the Born Free story and
movie even an animal as fierce as a lioness can express that same common language. What I do
know from experience is that commonality is present in the Siddhi state of Samadhi.
Received December 23, 2019; Accepted January 12, 2020
References
1. Samadhi Pada. Swami Veda Bharati, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Himalayan Institute Pennsylvania.
USA. 2015.
2. G. Srinivasan, Kapilavastu, The Sankhya Karika. Online.
3. John Archibald Wheeler & Kenneth Ford, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam.
4. New Scientist. March 19, 2005, p33.
5. B. L. Reid and K. J. Pryor., Medical Hypotheses. 1989. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
6. D. Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe. Routledge London UK. 1993.
7. D. Bohm. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge Keegan Paul. UK. 1984.
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Guertin, P. A., Conscious, Unconscious & Involuntary Control of Locomotion & Comparable Stereotyped Motor Behaviors
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Review Article
Conscious, Unconscious & Involuntary Control of
Locomotion & Comparable Stereotyped Motor Behaviors
Pierre A. Guertin*
Dept. of Psychiatry & Neurosciences, Laval University, Canada
ABSTRACT
It is generally believed that voluntary movements are controlled by brain structures. Signals from
cortical areas (e.g., primary motor cortex) are specifically considered to underlie the expression
of volitional motor behaviors such as pointing finger or hand reaching for a bottle. However,
there are also compelling evidence and breakthrough findings demonstrating that some motor
behaviors, especially rhythmic and/or stereotyped, can also be unconsciously and/or involuntary
controlled for the most part. For instance, the classical Ia reflex, a simple stereotyped,
monosynaptic, and involuntary mediated motor response can be consciously felt in some
circumstances whereas the Ib disynaptic reflex is always completely involuntary and
unconscious. The pioneering work of Graham Brown in the early 1900s provided evidence of
involuntary control mechanisms even for more complex stereotyped behaviors such as basic
walking or running that can be mediated in complete absence of supraspinal inputs. In the 70s,
Grillner and Zangger clearly showed that basic locomotor activities can indeed be induced
without brain structures and sensory inputs in completely decerebrate and rhizotomized animals.
Other findings showed subsequently comparable brainstem and/or spinal control mechanisms for
many other complex rhythmic stereotyped motor behaviors such as mastication, deglutition,
respiration, micturition, defecation, and ejaculation. The relevance of such findings for research
on the neural control of movements as well as on the role of neural correlates of mindful (e.g.,
DMN, DAN, etc.) movements is discussed.
Keywords: Consciousness, mindfulness, reflex, walking, motor cortex, brainstem, spinal cord.
Brain centers and voluntary motor control in mammals
It is a general belief that most movements are voluntarily and consciously initiated and, hence,
essentially controlled by the brain – mental processes would be at the origin of movements
purposefully executed (so-called volitional actions), as proposed by Descartes a few centuries
ago (1). A pivotal role for the primary motor cortex in volitional movements has also been
proposed by several neuroscientists more recently. Electrical stimulation of the primary motor
cortex (i.e., located in the frontal lobe, anterior to the central sulcus) was shown to have the
lowest threshold for inducing movements (2) – its activation was reported in cats and dogs to
*Correspondence: Professor Pierre A. Guertin, Dept. of Psychiatry & Neurosciences, Faculty of Medicine, Laval University,
Laval University Medical Center, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, G1V 4G2. Email: pierre.guertin@crchudequebec.ulaval.ca
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trigger per se the expression of specific movements. That led to the notion that the primary motor
cortex is the main control center of most movements (3).
In humans, Penfield and Jasper from McGill University were the firsts to report that stimulation
of discrete motor cortex areas with an electrode can trigger site-specific, coordinated muscle
responses (4) which led to a map of motor cortex functions better known as the motor
homunculus. For instance, stimulation of the most caudal area of the motor cortex elicited a
contraction of muscles controlling the fingers on the opposite side of the body (contralaterally).
That homunculus contributed to show also that motor cortex areas are organized somatotopically
in an orderly fashion so that adjacent muscles are controlled by adjacent regions of the primary
motor cortex (1). Subsequently, it was shown that other regions of the brain such as the
prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex, and supplementary motor cortex play also a significant role in
voluntary motor control by planning, controlling, and executing so-called volitional movements
(1). However, those breakthrough findings do not necessarily mean that simple or more complex
motor behaviors can’t, in turn, be elicited and controlled involuntarily or in a total absence of
consciousness.
Does a boundary between conscious and unconscious movements exist?
However, prior to further explore this question, another problem needs imperatively to be
addressed. Those two words – consciousness and unconsciousness – have long been a subject of
debate primarily for conceptual, metaphysical, philosophical, and semantic reasons. They have a
considerably different meaning depending on the situation or the person (5). For some people,
consciousness and specifically self-consciousness refer to being shy and worrying about what
others think of ourself. In contrast, the Collins English dictionary defines consciousness simply
as the state of being awake (3). Some researchers such as Dr Uriah Kriegel have proposed that
consciousness includes self-consciousness or ‘intransitive self-consciousness’ since the latter
can’t be expressed without the former (6).
Descartes had proposed a long time ago that the pineal gland was the center of consciousness and
consciously induced actions – i.e., volitional movements (7). Between the intention of moving
and its execution, the pineal gland was imagined by Descartes as the ‘central command center’
from where the final decisive signal is sent to each specific muscle for its contraction.
Nowadays, physicians use instead more clinically relevant definitions for practical and
professional reasons. In some medical areas, consciousness is considered as a level of
responsiveness either verbal, motor, or brain activity-related. It is thus perceived as a continuum
of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of
meaningful communication, and finally loss of reflexes (8).
For anesthesiologists, unconsciousness is defined by a loss of alertness or full anesthesia (9)
assessed with scales such as the Glasgow Coma Scale (10). All in all, one of the main problems
when trying to understand voluntary, conscious, unconscious, reflex, and/or involuntary motor
control mechanisms is not of scientific origin – it is instead essentially of conceptual and
semantic origin. The word consciousness is ambiguous because it is a word used by everyone but
with different meanings and for different purposes (11).
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The motor cortex can, in some circumstances, be accessory for the expression of relatively
simple motor response
An elegant study by Prof J. Martin in genetically engineered mice showed that corticospinal
neurons originating from the primary motor cortex can be ‘deleted’ without detectable changes
on locomotion (12). With the gene EphA4 removed unilaterally from the cerebral cortex, EphA4
KO mice remained capable of well-coordinated walking which, in turn, demonstrated that
circuits in other parts of the central nervous system (e.g, brainstem and spinal cord), not affected
by the gene manipulation, suffice to control conscious or at least volitional walking. In contrast,
it has been shown also that nerve impulses from the primary motor cortex can generate
movements even if someone is unaware of them.
Indeed, the Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is a rare neurological disorder that leads to spontaneous
hand movement expression when the person is not aware of them. A person with AHS may reach
for objects or even manipulate with precision those objects without intentionally wanting to. It
was shown using functional magnetic resonance imaging that their primary motor cortex was
nonetheless activated during those unconscious, unintentional, and involuntary movements (13).
The contrary is also possible. For instance, simple reflexes such as the stretch reflex (also known
as the Ia reflex, tendon tap reflex, and knee jerk response) are examples of involuntary, simple,
stereotyped responses and movements that don’t require the primary motor cortex for their
expression although they can be conscious or at least consciously felt in some circumstances.
That stretch reflex is elicited when a muscle and specifically its tendon is elongated suddenly. In
response, the muscle from which the stimulation arises will contract ispilaterally.
When performed by a medical doctor with a small hammer tapping the quadriceps tendon or
patellar tendon, its activation causes a fast contraction of the quadriceps, and hence, an extension
of the leg. Given the speed of the response (e.g., 20-50 ms), it has clearly been demonstrated that
the corresponding circuits, comprising only one synapse (monosynaptic), are located exclusively
in the spinal cord since brain structures can’t technically be involved (14). That is an example of
an involuntary induced, but yet consciously felt movement. Another type of stereotyped motor
behavior called the rapid eye movement (REM) may be expressed involuntary and unconsciously
during sleep. Random and quick rhythmic movements of the eyes particularly during dreaming
occur involuntarily (i.e., since sleeping) and thus unconsciously without a contribution of the
primary motor cortex (15) although this has been recently challenged by researchers (16).
Furthermore, REM can also be accompanied of violent movements of the limbs and other
complex behaviors (17).
Locomotion is a highly complex stereotyped and rhythmic motor behavior that does not
necessarily require cortices
Complex and very well-coordinated motor behaviors such as locomotion don’t necessarily
require supraspinal structures to be expressed. Convincing evidence arises from studies in
decebrate or spinal cord-transected animals as well as from in vitro isolated spinal cord
preparations. Pioneers such as Flourens (1824), Philippson (1905), and Graham Brown (1911,
1914) reported spontaneous hindlimb rhythmic stepping movements after a complete lowISSN: 2153-8212
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thoracic spinal cord transection (Tx) in cats and dogs with or without reduced afferent inputs
using ether or chloroform (18-21). Grillner and Zangger (1974, 1979) have provided even more
convincing evidence of a key role for spinal cord neurons in the control of locomotor rhythm and
pattern generation in mammals. They showed fictive locomotor activity in hindlimb motor
nerves induced by L-DOPA and nialamide i.v. in curarized Tx cats that had been completely
deafferented surgically (22,23).
Several years later, selective lesions, patch-clamp, KO models, and in vitro isolated preparations
enabled the identification of spinal locomotor neuron candidates (called locomotor CPG
neurons) in the lumbosacral areas with key rhythmogenic elements in L1 and L2 (24). In
humans, stimulation epidurally (ES) or intraspinally near L1-L2 segments was shown to
successfully trigger stepping-like movements in patients with complete spinal cord injuries (2528). More recently, buspirone/levodopa/carbidopa (SpinalonTM) administered to completely
paraplegic mice was reported to enable the expression of involuntary full weight-bearing
locomotor movements on a motorized treadmill (29).
Locomotor-like activities in the muscles of patients with complete or motor-complete spinal cord
injuries were also found after a single dose of SpinalonTM (30). Those results provide compelling
evidence that complex involuntary motor behaviors such as locomotion can, at least in some
circumstances, be controlled essentially by the spinal cord. Yet, those movements can remain
consciously felt by patients since vision or proprioception can provide the corresponding signals
(e.g, from upper body muscles in the case of paraplegic patients).
Other highly complex stereotyped and rhythmic motor behaviors that are essentially
unconscious and/or involuntary
More recently, additional complex stereotyped behaviors have also been shown to be controlled
essentially by non-cortical CPG networks (24). Several CPGs have indeed been identified in
brainstem and spinal cord areas. Their role in controlling the expression of complex behaviors
such as deglutition, mastication, respiration, defecation, micturition, and ejaculation is
increasingly being understood. For ejaculation, the pivotal role of a CPG called the spinal
generator for ejaculation (SGE) essentially composed of LSt cells was found when discovering
that the corresponding muscle contractions failed to be inducible in LSt cell-lesioned animals
(31, 32). LSt cells were identified nearby the central canal in the lamina X and medial portion of
lamina VII of L3 and L4 spinal cord segments.
The pivotal role of spinal SGE neurons in ejaculation was further supported by findings showing
that microstimulation of L3-L4 segments can automatically elicit a stereotyped and wellcoordinated ejaculatory motor response even in thoracic Tx animals (33). For micturition,
compelling evidence of a determinant role for another spinal CPG called the sacral micturition
center (SMC) was provided with experiments showing that automatic or reflex-like, wellcoordinated voiding in Tx cats could be induced by intraspinal stimulation at the upper sacral
level (34, 35). Specifically, using intraspinal electrodes, stimulation of the S2 segment produced
bladder contractions insufficient for full voiding behavior, whereas stimulation of the S1
segment generated powerful rhythmic, well-coordinated bladder contraction and external urethral
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sphincter relaxation, resulting in successful bladder voiding in thoracic spinal Tx animals (36).
Other CPGs involved specifically in the involuntary control of chewing, swallowing, breathing,
heart rate, and defecating were identified respectively in the medulla oblongata, nucleus tractus
solitaris, ventrolateral medulla, and sacral spinal cord (24).
The role of neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in voluntary and unvoluntary
movements
Although cortical structures and networks can, in some circumstances, initiate, modulate,
promote, or inhibit both rhythmic stereotyped movements and volitional movements, the role of
neural networks and nuclei, generally believed to underlie consciousness and awareness, remains
incompletely understood. As mentioned above, although the primary motor cortex is recognized
as the cornerstone of volitional movement induction, it is not necessarily activated or involved in
the control of several stereotyped motor responses and behaviors. Many other areas have been
postulated to play a role either direct or indirect in the expression of consciousness or
consciously controlled behaviors. The premotor cortex, if stimulated electrically, has recently
been shown to shut down awareness of voluntary actions (37) much like for patients with AHS
(13) or anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP).
Several other brain networks and nuclei such as the default mode network (DMN) comprising
the medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, precuneus, angular gyrus, and amygdala have been
associated with consciousness expression. Long-term meditation training was reported indeed to
specifically stimulate NCC element such as the DMN (Rochat, 2010; Ziegler et al., 2019; Polak
et al. 2018). Interestingly, increasing evidence suggest also that regular physical activity – e.g.,
walking and running – can stimulate those same regions (38). Another area called the dorsal
attention network or DAN (comprising the intraparietal sulcus and frontal eye fields) was
recently shown to have extensive functional interactions with the DMN (39) which may suggest
also a role in mindful movements.
All in all, it remains unclear the extent to which brain areas associated with conscious movement
induction and consciousness/awareness expression are involved in the control of movement in
everyday life. On one hand, several stereotyped behaviors (e.g, walking, chewing, defecating)
are known not to absolutely require cortical activity for their control. On the other hand, several
cognitive functions underlying consciousness expression such as memory, attention, focus,
concentration, and executive function abilities can be improved by meditation approaches (e.g.,
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy or MBCT and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or
MBSR) (40-42) as well as by regular exercise (e.g., walking, running) suggesting
neurofunctional links between movement and consciousness.
Concluding remarks
Obviously, further research is needed to reach consensual agreements about what conscious,
unconscious and involuntary movements truly mean. NCC and corresponding patterns of global
brain activity (e.g., perturbational complexity index or PCI, weighted symbolic mutual
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information or wSMI, integrated information or Φ, etc) have recently been proposed as
meaningful assessment values of consciousness levels. Other mechanisms such as the ‘holistic
brain soup theory’, gamma loop theory, and recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance have also been
proposed to contribute to consciousness expression (11, 43-45). Yet, their role in motor control
remains poorly understood.
Even if definitions are unclear and mechanisms are incompletely characterized, one thing is sure
– volitional movements do not necessarily involve primary motor cortex activity whereas CPGmediated complex motor behaviors such as locomotion can be expressed without inputs from the
brain. However, since elements and mechanisms associated with the NCC can be stimulated by
training (e.g., meditation, physical activity (38)), it is not unreasonable to believe that we can
over time voluntarily recruit them in order to bring increased awareness and consciousness to
what we do either during yoga and pilates classes or in everyday duties and behaviors such as
during breathing, walking, talking, eating, etc.
Received October 29, 2020; Accepted December 17, 2020
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Article
Why We Need a New Whole Approach Into the
Study of Consciousness
Javier García-Castro* & Siva Prasad Kodukula
Universidad Villanueva, Spain
Abstract
After almost four centuries of philosophical and scientific research concerning the study of
consciousness, it seems that it is time to step forward. We cannot have a formal definition of
consciousness mainly because we still do not have a complete theory of it. Theories about
consciousness abound, but we are still not sure about its ontological and epistemological ground.
Thus, a new hypothesis based on quantum mechanics is presented in this paper. This new
hypothesis states that consciousness does exist, that it is not a fundamental property of the entire
universe and that conscious experience emerges by transformation from mind (‘‘jeeton’’) to
matter (‘graviton’), just like many other physical phenomena such as light, heat, sound or, color.
Although this hypothesis is already based in empirical evidence, new experimental designs must
be addressed to further increase our knowledge about consciousness and its relation to reality and
subjective experience.
Keywords: Consciousness, qualia, quantum mechanics, observer, relativity, film theory of the
universe, jeeton, graviton, mind, matter.
What is consciousness? Does anybody know? In fact, yes. Any person may be able to feel what
it is like to be that person. Everybody has that private, subjective feeling of what is going on in
the environment and the self. Nevertheless, as is often in the history of science, the problem may
not be that simple. On the contrary, it seems to be far more complicated, including problems with
its scientific definition, its ontological status, objective measurement, epistemology, and many
others.
We reject to offer a formal definition of consciousness, following the advice provided by
Sommerhoff (1996). First, we need a comprehensive theory of consciousness, and then, we must
be able to provide an exhaustive and operative definition of this term. In fact, many types of
consciousness have been proposed, such as phenomenal/access consciousness (Block, 1995),
primary versus secondary consciousness (Edelman & Tononi, 2000), core/extended
consciousness (Berkovich-Ohana & Glicksohn, 2014), and so on, suggesting the provocative
idea of a non-unitary construct of consciousness (Zeki, 2003). This obscures what already is
extremely fuzzy.
The study of consciousness poses so many queries which neither physics, nor neuroscience or
philosophy have resolved satisfactorily yet. In principle, authors not only disagree in its
Correspondence: Javier García-Castro, Universidad Villanueva, Spain. E-mail: jagcastro@villanueva.edu
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García-Castro, J., & Kodukula, S. P., Why We Need a New Whole Approach Into the Study of Consciousness
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definition, but also in its ontological status (from its non-existence to being fundamental).
Furthermore, the extraordinary plethora of theories trying to explain consciousness allows us to
suspect that this object of study is currently in an immature stage of science development (Wiese,
2018). On the other hand, dualism has been pointed out as a “dead end” for many authors, given
that we cannot fill the explanatory gap (Levine, 1983) to connect subjective experience with
physical-deterministic entities.
Therefore, this article focuses on a brief history of the concept of consciousness. Then, main
problems of consciousness are discussed. Finally, a new hypothesis based on quantum mechanics
is provided to interpret consciousness in terms of physics, which hopefully will leads us to
develop a new whole approach to the unification of psychology and physics for experimental and
theoretical purposes.
1. The birth of consciousness: from Philosophy to Psychology
We can probably date the first attempts into the study of consciousness back to the earliest
mystical adventures, thousands of years ago, in the context of magical and religious practices
(Mithen, 1998). In fact, in terms of evolution, several authors propose that critical nervous
system structures for consciousness could have arisen around 500 million years ago (Feinberg &
Mallatt, 2013) or, more recently, during the emergence of the mammalian brain, around 200
million years ago (Baars, 2012). However, and according to psychologist Julian Jaynes (1976),
consciousness could be a more recent, learned cultural ability, since there are no words for
‘consciousness’ in the most remote and well preserved text of antiquity: the Iliad (~ 900-850
BC). In any case, the truth is that the concept of ‘consciousness’ has been documented in several
historical sources since ancient times, although the terms and expressions have changed during
that period (Monzavi et al., 2017).
Given that it is highly controversial to establish a concrete period of time concerning the
emergence of consciousness, we can date more accurately the interest in its philosophical and
scientific study. A frequently cited milestone on this topic is the ‘dualism’ proposed by the
French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) in the 17th century(1641), which tried to
articulate the relationship between the material part of human beings (res extensa) with its
correlative, the immaterial mind (res cogitans). Subsequently, after a period of several
philosophical speculations, the first laboratory of experimental psychology is founded in Leipzig
by the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). There, superior mental functions such
as perception, memory, attention and consciousness are studied following a mixed methodology
which combines introspection with mental chronometry. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the
20th century, pessimism surrounding the scientific study of cognitive processes replaces these
initial attempts in favor of behaviorism, and consciousness was relegated to ostracism for almost
a century (Searle, 1992).
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2. Considering the dubious ontological status of consciousness: Dennett
versus Chalmers
In 1995 Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1995a) stated that there are two main problems
when facing the study of consciousness: the easy and the hard problem. The easy problem of
consciousness refers to the flow of information along the neural pathways in the brain. This is a
tough task, but contemporary neuroscience is equipped with appropriate methodological and
epistemological tools to face it (Kandel, 2013). The hard problem, for its part, tries to explain
“how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience” (Chalmers, 1995b, p. 2).
If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. Given that
phenomenological experience could not be reducible to physical processes, and assuming that
consciousness exists, then, a fundamental theory of consciousness is a logical consequence of
this reasoning: consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, such as mass, space-time
or charge, and because of that, it does not require explanation: it is (Travis, 2021).
More recent versions of this ‘fundamental consciousness’ can be found elsewhere (Monzavi et
al., 2017; Prentner, 2018). Leaving aside their differences, all of them agree in that
consciousness is not explanandum, but explanans, the cornerstone of a real science of
consciousness. And this idea is compatible with a scientific approach. In fact, Integrated
Information Theory (Tononi & Koch, 2015) claims that consciousness is an intrinsic property of
any physical system, determined by its causal properties. Following that, consciousness is
everywhere in the universe, but distributed in different degrees depending on the complexity of
any given system.
Nevertheless, the ontological status of consciousness has been questioned by many authors. For
example, philosopher Daniel Dennett (1991) supports that consciousness is an illusion; therefore,
any attempt to explain consciousness as real falls into what he baptized the Cartesian theater, a
neodualism in which there is always some homunculus at the end. In the same vein, other
neuroscientists like Michael Graziano (2015) explain consciousness in terms of a brain trick, a
product of awareness attribution process in the context of social perception.
Once again, as we can see, consciousness swings from being fundamental to a residual
epiphenomenon or even an unreal illusion arising from a brain’s mirrors game. Can we dare to
provide a definition of something that we certainly still doubt is real?
3. The irruption of neuroscience: the signatures of consciousness
An astonishing hypothesis was proposed at the very end of the 20th century: “you’re nothing but
a pack of neurons” (Crick, 1994, p. 3). That claim was the trigger for a race towards the quest of
the neurobiological basis of consciousness (Koch, 2004). Since then, many attempts have been
made to explain the emergence of consciousness as a function of neuronal firing (Brogaard &
Gatzia, 2016; Miller, 2005). At present, the efforts are gathered around the signature of
consciousness, that is, what happens in the brain when a person, or animal, has a conscious
experience. Using different cognitive paradigms, electrophysiological recordings and
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neuroimaging techniques, some findings can be obtained. For example, there is strong evidence
that coordinated activity in the fronto-parietal areas is needed to achieve a conscious experience
of ‘something’, whether visual, auditory or haptic (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Lamme, 2003;
Laureys, 2005; Rohaut & Naccache, 2017). This cortical activation should be accompanied by an
intense and massive activation of lay-distance areas involving thalamo-cortical networks and
correlated with P300 wave recorded via evoked potentials (Bollini et al., 2017; Dehaene, 2014;
García-Castro, 2021). Also, the synchronization of information must rely on a sudden burst of
high frequency oscillations (~ 40 Hz) (Crick & Koch, 1990; Llinas & Ribary, 1993; Singer,
1995; Ward, 2011). For a deeper revision of the neurobiological correlates of consciousness, the
reader is invited to consult Sattin et al. (2021).
But it seems that neuroscience is trying to solve only one part of the problem, once again, the
‘easy’ problem of consciousness. Following Ned Block’s distinction between phenomenal
consciousness and consciousness-access(Block, 1995), the former keeps always out of the
picture, that is, the private and subjective experience, whereas all these neural correlates could be
nothing but neural activity related to cognitive contents available as ‘consciousness-access’ to
perform motor, language or perceptual actions. But the subjective experience (qualia) is not
necessary to perform any of these functions(Chalmers, 1995a). In fact, there are plenty of
cognitive activities, some of them as complex as mental arithmetic, decoding semantic meaning,
attention or error detection, that can be performed in absence of conscious processing of
information (Dehaene, 2014). Still, there is always something elusive to the realm of science.
Also, these studies are correlative, and because of that, we cannot be sure of the directionality of
causality, much less, conclude that brain activity is producing the phenomenal conscious
experience(Chalmers, 2000; Noë & Thompson, 2004).
In addition, consciousness is not a unitary phenomenon, but consists of different types of
processes that may be linked to different neural networks distributed along cortical and
subcortical regions within the brain (Sattin et al., 2021; Shanon, 2010; Zeki, 2003). For example,
there is evidence of a primitive, degraded and unconscious form of consciousness related to
N1/P2a evoked potential complex, in absence of its subsequent P300 wave (Bollini et al., 2017).
It is probably located in primary sensory areas, far from cortical long-distance networks. Also, it
might be very short and weak, and it may be responsible for some well-known psychological
effects such as ‘phi phenomenon’, the ‘cutaneous rabbit’ or the ‘flash-lag’ illusion (Geldard &
Sherrick, 1972; Herzog et al., 2016; Kolers & von Grünau, 1976). Conversely, the immediate
conscious experience which can be separated from another is delayed at least 300 milliseconds,
correlated with P300 potential (ERP) measured with different cognitive experimental paradigms,
and associated to strong activation of fronto-parietal networks (fMRI) (Dehaene & Changeux,
2011; Grill-Spector et al., 2000). Finally, the sense of subjective present, which can be extended
from past to future, rely on working memory, runs in periods of around 30-60 seconds and must
be linked to memory systems (Pöppel, 1997). Although this is highly speculative, it is an
example of the extraordinary complexity of the phenomenon we agree to call consciousness.
Be that as it may, ‘it is something like to be that ‘something’’ (Nagel, 1974), whether it is real or
an illusion, whether it is an epiphenomenon or a fundamental property of the universe, whether it
is a unitary, brain-based product or a dualistic, metaphysical and interactionist entity. And it
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should be explained by science, despite needing a new epistemological framework or scientific
paradigm, as has happened so often in science history (Khun, 1962).
4. Unsolvable problems of consciousness
The following is a detailed, although not exhaustive list of the main problems in the study of
consciousness that remain not only unsolvable, but still very far from a satisfactory solution.
Consciousness versus reality. As René Descartes might have said, the only thing we
‘have’ is our subjective experience. From that, everything begins, but: what certainty do
we have about that ‘experience’? There is a continuum from idealism to materialism that
covers all possible solutions to this question. Unfortunately, neither is satisfactory yet.
What we certainly know is that reality, taken as the ‘ultimate reality’ as in the concept of
noumenon (Kant, 1999), is not what we perceive. In fact, studies on perception have
shown that organisms have not been evolutionarily selected to perceive reality as it is, but
to optimally record those stimulus configurations that are most advantageous for their
adaptation to the environment and survival(Hoffman & Prakash, 2014). Also, lessons
taken from quantum mechanics reveal that microphysics’ reality is far more complicated
than we originally have thought (Bohm & Hiley, 1975; Heisenberg, 1963).
The conundrum of dualism. ‘Dualism’ versus ‘monism’ is a complete ‘dead end’: there is
no satisfactory proposal to disentangle the question; while dualism cannot satisfactorily
explain the interaction between two substances of different nature, monism has not been
able to complete successfully its reductionist project. How can we ever be able to
reconcile a space-time physical object as the body with some ethereal non-physical entity
such as ‘conscious experience’?
If we could formulate the problem as follows:
a) Ф = ψ
b) Фψ
c) Фψ
d) Фψ
beingФ = physical events; ψ = mental states, we have these four possibilities: a) identity
(monism), b) physicalism, c) panpsychism or d) dualism. Current neuroscience and other
disciplines are beginning to question the traditional directionality ‘brain-mind’ in favor of
other, more exotic approaches. Then, if brain states produce conscious experiences, we
must be able to explain a plausible mechanism of interaction within a causally closed
system such as the brain (Georgiev, 2013). It seems that, after at least four hundred years
of fruitless proposals to solve this antinomy, it is time to move on to some daring
approaches.
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Qualia or the scent of subjective experience. Finally, at the root of the problem of
consciousness we always find the inner, private, subjective and personal experience of
everyone, which independently of intersubjective judgment agreement, will always be
like fingerprints: inalienable and unique. Also, inaccessible to science. Beyond the axon
tracts, the exchange of neurotransmitters and the feedback/feedforward sweep
mechanisms, the mysterious sensation of what it is to feel like(Nagel, 1974) will always
remain in the air; it seems to escape, at least for the moment, the methods of modern
science. What kind of neuro-computational theory could ever account for such a
mysterious product, something which cannot be measured, extracted, put in a dish,
analyzed or dissected?
5. A new whole approach
In the following section we are going to provide some new insights into the study of
consciousness from a new hypothesis recently proposed by Kodukula (2017, 2019, 2021b).
5.1. Consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe like mass, charge or
space-time.
Consciousness cannot be a physical entity like mass, charge, space, time or space-time. It is an
emergent property (like smell, heat, etc.) while transforming the ‘information’ to ‘time’ to
‘space’ and to ‘space-time’ and ‘mass or charge’. The universe will not contain that property. It
only contains ‘quantum information’. ‘Living thing’ or ‘conscious observer' will contain that
property since it is the device that processes the information. By default it is inbuilt in this huge
quantum system with a loop in the direction of the process. But it is countable after a critical
limit which we have named consciousness. Below this limit it is a living thing with negligible
consciousness. The flow of information process through a device (in this case, a neuro-center
like the brain) goes in one direction and circulates within the body of living things and comes out
(Figure 1). As long as the flow continues, the living thing will contain life, and when a loop
disappears the living thing will become dead. And the process will be continued with other
loops.
Now the question is about qualia. Since there is no physical evidence of qualia involved in this
process, it is proposed that during this process of passage of information and observation,
consciousness in which qualia plays a role is an emergent property of this information process
and is a fundamental property of time which always flows. Previous theories emphasize the role
of information in the process of consciousness. While one of these theories says that information
runs the activities of the universe (Shannon, 1948), the other says that consciousness emerges
due to collective activities or information like a pattern (Tononi et al., 2016). This new theory of
consciousness presented here (Kodukula, 2019, 2021b) synchronizes all and provides new vision
to see further. It says that only processing of information runs this universe. Feelings or qualia –
the other emerging property – are not due to this information process. There exists some sort of
resistance to the process of information like ‘inertia’ to mass in physics. Inertia is an intrinsic
property of mass due to its movement. In the same way, cognition is a resistance to the process
of information passage to keep the object in a conscious state.
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García-Castro, J., & Kodukula, S. P., Why We Need a New Whole Approach Into the Study of Consciousness
Figure 1.Showing the relation between Universal Film and conscious observer. Adapted from:
Kodukula (2019).
This can be explained as: “A force ‘F’ is applied to mass ‘m’. The mass will get an acceleration
‘a’ if there is no rigid support attached to that mass in the opposite direction of force”. This is as
per Newton’s second law of classical mechanics. If support exists, there will be a reactive force
opposite to force applied. In this situation, mass will not move, but according to its structure, it
will contain resistance. Actually, as per Newton’s first law, mass itself will have an intrinsic
property called inertia. In general terms, it will have a tendency to resist its own movement. Now
let us suppose that an external energy (E) is applied to mass instead of force. So the energy has to
do some work (E=W) on that mass (W=FS) and pushes that mass with a force F to a distance S
and F=ma is applied. In this situation, if the mass has not moved, it will have a resistance which
is equally develops internal resistance equivalent to its acceleration ‘a’ as in the case of ‘F’
applied on ‘m’. If ‘E’ is more, more mass will be created and acceleration remains constant. It
means that all energy is converting into mass and at the same time its resistance is also
increasing. So resistance will be there and will not affect its acceleration (its movement will be
constant).
Applied to consciousness and cognition, a signal will be passed to a human brain, it encircles the
body like a loop and passes to another conscious brain (Figure 1). It is explained that the signal
contains information, but information is not energy. The information will be encoded to form
space-time and objects on it, and moves according to the instruction of information. This flow is
at a rate of 144 qubits1/sec (Kodukula, 2019, pp. 39–40) and one qubit contains a 1043 quantum
states of information. Superposition of these quantum states is called a film of the universe. Each
1
unit of quantum information
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such film contains information and converts into objects and instructions to move that objects as
the process continuous. Therefore, all the activities in this universe are simply instruction to
change films that are being considered as actions of living things. Actually, it is a mechanism
only. Thus, all living things will have a specific property distinguished from non-living things
called life. Its movement is dependent on other movement also. So it should be aware of its own
environment and, thus, it is called as consciousness. Thus a universal film contains conscious
observers only. All the non-living things or objects are manifestations of this process of
information. The importance of a conscious observer is emphasized in Kodukula (2021b, p.
1649).
For further clarity about the above description, let us consider the following example. Suppose
that we have two similar conscious brains. Due to the passage of information and film change,
same activities have to be done simultaneously by two conscious beings/living things. Now let us
suppose one activity is a dramatic action, say the word ‘cry’, and another is a real situation
(really cry). As per the above analysis, the first one is mechanical, that is, there will be no
emotion in it. The other one is an emotion out of friction/resistance between consciousness and
cognition. How can it be explained quantitatively?
As explained above, consciousness will not contain emotion, but mechanical action exists. So the
‘dramatic cry’ will contain a certain amount of information only to run the activities
mechanically. But for the presence of ‘emotion’, some more information has to be processed and
it should create or raise the cognitive energy so as to produce an emotional cry for the same
action associated to that concerned consciousness. It is just like the conversion of additional
energy or force to acceleration and to internal energy even though there is no acceleration to
mass as a whole (as explained above).
Thus the emotions or even thoughts are emergent from interaction of consciousness and its
resistance due to cognition. In a similar manner, qualia will contain additional ‘qubit’
information than the required to keep it alive. Different qualias, thoughts, emotions, etc., will
have different quantum bits of information for comparison. Cry will have different number of
qubits, smile will have different qubits, angry will have different and so on.
Thus we can say that the interaction between consciousness and cognition gives rise to qualia
and the interaction between ‘jeeton’ (proposed quantum particle of energy-mind from the
fundamental force of nature) and ‘graviton’ (mass-matter particle) would give rise to
consciousness. This is because ‘jeeton’, a quantum particle from the biological force present in
all living things, is associated with ‘graviton’, a quantum particle from the relativity system, to
form consciousness. So as explained in Figure 2, the ‘jeeton’ contains a point space-time in
relativity and superpositioned states of films in quantum coordinates. Thus ‘jeeton’ is a
superpositioned information which will be processed through the brain by entanglement with
‘graviton’, creating matter in 4-dimensional relativistic space-time. The continuous circulation of
this information between ‘jeeton’ and ‘graviton’ within this living thing gives rise to
consciousness, which in its interaction with cognition, results in qualia. If a ‘jeeton’ is cut from
the loop of this process of information, it loses entanglement with ‘graviton’ and the living thing
will be considered dead. The detached ‘jeeton’ contains the information and if it gets into any
situation to form into a loop and regenerate the material to entangle, it will start from the
beginning to feed its own living thing device (i.e., brain), which is connected to it. It is the life
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and death cycle of living things or conscious beings (Kodukula, 2019, p. 42).This leads us to
consider consciousness as a required ingredient for synchronizing quantum mechanics (discrete
property of space-time) and general relativity, (continuous4-dimensional space-time), where
objects are created.
5.2. Consciousness can be reduced to brain activity
Consciousness is the property that differentiates between living and non-living things. Following
our reasoning, as long as the flow continues, the living thing will contain life and when its loop
disappears, the living thing will become dead. Here we propose that all living things must
contain consciousness. In some cases conscious activity cannot be recognizable and will be
treated as unconscious; that would be the vegetative or coma states (Laureys, 2005), or even
being under anesthesia (Hameroff, 2018). But consciousness itself creates its own device by
universal instructions and creates a structure (brain with several neuro-centers) to support or to
keep information (memory) and integrate all these activities to sustain its state of consciousness.
Thus, consciousness is the fundamental property by which any other events or activities will be
perceived. Because of consciousness, information will become analog and will turn into
collective reactions to keep up with the environment; this is what we call ‘cognition’, a resistance
to the passing of information. This resistance or friction comes out as emotions, thoughts,
perceptions, etc., which are identified as qualia by philosophers. For cognition, neural centers are
to be formed and must be in a position to exchange the information collected by its environment.
But consciousness is a property that will start to emerge while in a coherent state of information
processing. Without consciousness, cognition cannot be sustained. But without cognition,
consciousness can remain. Finally, the brain is like a projector, and consciousness acts through it.
The information passage is from brain and forms the real objects on this 4-dimensional screen of
space-time after transformation from a quantum mechanics system to a relativity system; thus,
brain activity cannot produce consciousness. It is a process of transformation of quantum
information and it is continuous process with the passage of time.
5.3. Consciousness can be segregated into periods of time
After Einstein, the concept of time has been changed abruptly. His special theory of relativity
along with Lorenz transformations clearly explained the principle of simultaneity. It is nothing
but an explanation of time by making various reference frames with different time intervals into
one single picture of space time. Further, his equivalence principle lead the concept of time to a
much more profound understanding of time and concluded general relativity by the concept of
space-time continuum.
Then, time can be defined as quantum states of preserving information (Kodukula, 2019), where
the difference between information and energy is clearly explained. Superposition of two
universal films will originate time. This is explained on the basis of physics theories. The
duration of these two films is equal to Planck time. Quantum code of information will be
processed through the brain like an object. During this process of information, time will be
originated. The flow of information instructs all the parts of the body (taken as a biological
material) to move according to the information processed. This is called a living system and it
will be connected to the entire universe.
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When a universal film changes, the biological system will get the information to change
accordingly. Here the process is completely mechanical. Thus it will have a certain frequency.
For human beings it is proposed as millions and millions of films per second (1.85488837 x 1043
universal film changes in one second). Depending upon this duration of universal film change,
the loop within that system, which is a biological system, will process the information and reach
back to the universal film. Based on this, the brain’s processing speed has been calculated (144
qubits/sec). This duration of film change denotes its frequency. Thus this frequency is in
synchronization with biological systems frequency. This makes the difference between a living
thing and a non-living thing.
This is the only thing that can be called consciousness. Thus time is interpreted in two quantum
states (future and past) and the superposition of these two states explains the present (Kodukula,
2021a, p. 1341). This time converts into space and forms space-time, which is the basic entity to
form the physical or materialistic world. In this process, due to this change of quantum states
within threshold time (without decoherence), consciousness will emerge and after this coherence
process it will emerge as consciousness with qualia due to the interaction with cognition (physics
explains it as the observation part of this process). Then, the information will become analogous
on the surface of space-time. In this 4-dimensional world those impressions (information) are
objects made up of space-time.
5.4. Consciousness and the nature of reality
Observation by our senses is not real (Kodukula, 2021b). Reality is in the form of quantum
information and can be interpreted by quantum coordinates. While making an observation, the
same coordinate system will be transformed to relativistic or Minkowski coordinates and will be
observed. Consciousness is an emergent property in the transformation of a quantum coordinate
system to a relativistic coordinate system. So reality will be changed into observation. So
consciousness is necessary for observation. Thus consciousness will exist before observation
itself. But once it is observed, it will check its correctness. If there is any drawback with the
observing senses, the difference will create illusion. Thus, if all the senses fail to observe, it will
create illusion, but this won’t be an absence of consciousness. Consciousness still exists. And it
is reality.
In 4-dimensional space-time coordinates, space will be the X axis and time is the Y axis. So
every point in this coordinate system will be specified by a time and corresponding space for that
time. In a quantum coordinate system space will be in the X axis and information will be in the Y
axis. Separate information will be there for separate space points. But, while in transformation
from quantum to relativistic, different space points will have the same information. This is due to
superposition of all these information states into one mixed state. This is defined as film of the
universe; thus a film of the universe is a quantum state and contains all the points with same
information (Figure 2).
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García-Castro, J., & Kodukula, S. P., Why We Need a New Whole Approach Into the Study of Consciousness
Figure 2.Transformation of quantum coordinate system to relativistic coordinate system in the
process of observation. Adapted and modified from: Kodukula(2021b).
Change from one film to another will transform information analogous to events in the space
time continuum, transforming information into objects for observation. While in transformation,
‘double relativity’ will be applied. So the result in reality will be different in observation. Illusion
is a defect in the observation process.
5.5. Consciousness cannot be explained as a physical entity
As explained above, a physical body in the space-time continuum is analogous of quantum
information and quantum information is an interpretation of time. Part of it will convert into a
physical object which occupies space-time. But conscious experience will not be associated to it.
Conscious experience emerges by this transformation, just like other phenomena such as light,
heat, color or sound. So definitely, it can also be defined by some physical or chemical science
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408
basics. Thus, we can exactly reconcile a space-time physical object in to an ethereal non-physical
entity such as ‘conscious experience’.
Regarding qualia, contemporary science is not able to calculate subjective experiences exactly.
But this is due to lack of knowledge, awareness, supportive methodologies and technological
developments. In fact, there is no such experience for the brain as subjective and objective.
Reality is one for all and that is associated to consciousness. As explained above, it is not
complete without observation by its sensory organs, so the loop that observes reality will be
completed by observation. The phenomenal experience that arises in this process will vary from
person to person due to the structure of its observing center which is made up of interacting
frequencies, neurons and exchange of particles or chemicals.
Thus, reality is objective and is same for all in a film or in an inertial frame of reference (IFR).
For example, in quantum coordinates, a photon is a space zero super positioned quantum state.
But in relativistic transformation, it will have space, a space between two divided quantum
states. Thus a conscious observer observes it as super positioned quantum states, and this is the
final observation that we called reality. Therefore, reality is the consequence of both ‘double
relativity effect’ and ‘consciousness’ on the process of observation. Regarding this effect of
consciousness over observation, consider that signal velocity is √2, but observed velocity is
∴vr= voγr, where (Kodukula, 2021b, pp. 1646–1648)
γ=
1
√1 − (
√
)
It is not possible to observe these velocities without the involvement of consciousness. Thus, the
result is a proof for consciousness also.
6. Discussion and conclusions
“No problem can be solved from the level of consciousness that created it” (Gerbaulet & Henry,
2019, p. 114). It is arguable that philosophers studying consciousness have been dealing with
similar paradoxes that physics found when they first started to study subatomic particles (Capra,
1974). Because of that, it is probably not a question of dualism versus monism, physicalism
versus qualia or subjective versus objective, but to focus on a new whole perspective that allows
us to overcome all these unsolvable antinomies.
Here we have presented a non-exhaustive, though fundamental list of the main problems of
consciousness. Afterwards, we have proposed new insights to overcome these difficulties from a
new perspective, reconsidering the current starting points. This new proposal is more than a
hypothesis. It is an analysis of a few fundamental queries of philosophy of physics which could
help to answer many questions about consciousness and information processing.
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As we have previously stated, consciousness cannot be a fundamental property of the universe,
given that only living things can be conscious. All living things must contain consciousness.
Information flows by interconnecting all the living things forming a loop and with a device like a
brain (or an equivalent neural network). The brain will perceive and experience the things around
it. In this sense, consciousness is a property that will start to emerge while in a coherent state of
information processing. Thus, consciousness is fundamental and can remain without cognition.
This idea is also supported by other authors (Gerbaulet & Henry, 2019; Prentner, 2018; Travis,
2021).
Concerning the time-scale processes of consciousness, most of the studies in cognitive science
are from pre-Einstein’s time. Time is not a mental condition, but the same as space, where both
can be transformed into each other. Here it is proposed that all the points in space of the universe
are condensed into one event in terms of films. When we analyze the physical meaning of
quantum states at the most fundamental level, we can see that a quantum state is a universal film
in which time exists, but no flow of time will be present. Flow of time exists only when a film
changes into another film, arguably by a mechanism of consciousness.
Consciousness cannot be reducible to brain activity. Consciousness is prior to and can remain
without cognition. Thus reality exists in transformation through the additional coordinate system
called as “quantum coordinate system”, that is, the transformation from a quantum coordinate
system into a relativistic frame by ‘double relativity effect’. Thus consciousness is needed to
synchronize quantum mechanics (discrete property of space-time) and general relativity
(smoothed continuous space-time).
Regarding qualia, it is an emergent property of this information process and is a fundamental
property of time which always flows. Like many other physical phenomena (i.e., heat, sound,
color) qualia emerge as a result of resistance to information passage through a neurobiological
device like the brain. Qualia are nothing but a byproduct of a mechanical process of information
flow. Support for this statement can be found elsewhere (Jylkkä & Railo, 2019).
This view based on quantum mechanics is supported by many researchers. For example,
Hameroff and Penrose (2014) previously formulated the Orch-OR theory of consciousness,
which proposes that consciousness consists of a sequence of discrete events, each being a
moment of objective reduction (OR) of a quantum state, orchestrated in an appropriate way
(Orch-OR) inside neuronal microtubules. In fact, the time for decoherence processing for
quantum states could be compatible with conscious processes, given that they proceed in the
millisecond scale in the brain (Tegmark, 2000). However, other authors such as McFadden
(2007) criticizes the need to use quantum mechanics to explain consciousness, because the brain
is not an optimal place for quantum coherence, considering the infinite amount of information
that should be stored in a qubit. Also, many other authors have argued that the brain is not an
appropriate device to carry on quantum coherence processes given the temperature, humidity,
and other conditions that hinder quantum phenomena or that the strange phenomena involved in
quantum processes do not, of themselves, explain why there is experience rather than not (Koch
& Hepp, 2006; Prinz, 2003).
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410
Obviously, other problems remain elusive and must be addressed by future research. For
example, neurobiological basis of consciousness are still an important issue for the future.
However, in this article we claim that no models or experiments on consciousness can be
sustained without considering these basics at quantum level. That would be the same reasoning
as if social sciences would refuse to study the neurobiological basis of behavior. They are not
contraria, but complementa, and a comprehensive theory must go beyond any limits to be
complete.
Also, all these proposals have the following implications for the integration of physics and
psychology: the involvement of consciousness could play a vital role in the synchronization of
quantum mechanics with general relativity. Observer and observation have a deeper meaning
involving the concept of consciousness. Because of that, the mechanism of consciousness could
play a vital role in this synchronization.
Therefore, we can finally conclude that: consciousness does exist, given that observed velocity
(vr) needs consciousness, opposed to conventional signal velocity ‘c’. Two observers (or
conscious states) are needed to create reality. Consciousness cannot be a fundamental property of
the entire universe, but only in living things, and that will be the main constituent that shows the
difference between living and non-living things. Conscious experience emerges by
transformation from mind (‘jeeton’) to matter (‘graviton’), just like many other physical
phenomena such as light, heat, sound, color, etc. Information is not equal to energy; information
can be transferred without energy (in a system that prevents decoherence such as a brain with
series of neurons). Cognition is a resistance to the process of information passage to keep the
object in a conscious state. The brain is like a quantum processor’s projector, and we can
calculate the processing speed of the brain to be conscious as 144 qubits/sec. Thus,
consciousness is the hinge between quantum mechanics and relativity that allows having
experiences of reality, based on universal films, which are quantum states that contain all the
points with same information.
Because of that, new experimental paradigms inspired by these or other proposals must be
designed to prove or refute the main thesis presented here. Experimental results will increase our
knowledge concerning the roots of consciousness and will open new paths to go further in its
clarification. It seems that it is very important to synchronize the definitions of consciousness
and cognition aimed at the unification of psychology and physics for experimental purposes.
Humankind must give giants leaps into the exploration of the universe, but this should be
accompanied by little steps into the more radical and intimate realms of conscious experience,
the fountain where everything, including the observation of the smallest particle, abounds.
Received August 01, 2022; Accepted September 25,2022
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 1 | pp. 118-125
Kozlowski, M., Crop Circles & Schumann Consciousness Waves
Perspective
Crop Circles & Schumann Consciousness Waves
Miroslaw Kozlowski*
Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland
Abstract
In article, we discuss the plausibility that crop circles are the result of the interaction of
Schumann waves with crops. Previously, we defined the Schumann waves and brain waves as
the results of the interaction of Schumann waves with human drain which are parts of Schuman
Consciousness field (SCF). The full spacetime between planets and Sun in reality is the SCF.
Through spacetime, mathematical graph such as Julia Set is coded in SCF and transported to the
surface of the Earth, that is, mathematical graph modulates the SCT.
Keywords: Crop circle, Schumann Wave, consciousness, Julia set, Earth.
1. Historical overview
In 1952, Winfried Otto Schumann, a professor at the Technische Hochschule Mü nchen,
Germany, published several papers postulating the resonances of extremely low frequency
(ELF) waves in the Earth-air-ionosphere waveguide excited by lightning discharges. His
idea was composed of three topics: (1) the propagation of electromagnetic waves in a
spherical cavity; (2) the Earth-air-ionosphere system acting as a waveguide; and (3) excitation
by lightning discharges.
During the last four years, a rather extensive literature search had been undertaken to unveil
some historical facts related to the physics of the so-called ‗‗Schumann resonances.‘‘
Although the search led to a vast amount of literature on the topic starting in the middle of
the 1960s, references predating Schumann‘s publications were rather scarce. Nevertheless, an
even more profound search in wave propagation-related journals and books unearthed some
interesting pieces of real and pretended precursors to Winfried Schumann.
Although extensive, any literature search can never be entirely exhaustive, and in particular, the
one performed for this study was limited mainly with respect to the Russian literature, and
therefore, it cannot be ruled out that this synopsis misses some relevant pieces. If this is the case,
the author would be deeply grateful to get notice from the reader.
*
Correspondence: Miroslaw Kozlowski, Prof. Emeritus, Warsaw University, Poland. Email: m.kozlowski934@upcpoczta.pl
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The scope of this paper is limited to prime sources of the pre-Schumann era (before 1952) and to
the main developments in the field during roughly the first decade after Schumann predicted the
Earth-ionosphere cavity oscillations. Additionally, this report is not supposed to render earlier
reviews on this physical topic obsolete; it should rather complement them.
Any paper on ELF (or VLF) wave propagation, and certainly a historical review, should
mention the ‗‗monumental‘‘ work of James R. Wait who published in sum over 800 papers
and eight books on electromagnetics. He was an outstanding theoretician and contributed to all
the different aspects of very low frequency (VLF) and ELF wave propagation. A full
appreciation of Wait‘s work is outside the scope of this paper, and therefore the reader is
referred to some recollections of Wait‘s colleagues, e.g., the paper by Smith (2000, and
references therein).
Schumann published only in German, and up to now only scarce information about his life and
work has been available in the English scientific/technical literature. Therefore, a short
biographical summary will be given in section 2. In sections 3 and 4 the historical
development of the problem of propagation of electro- magnetic waves in a cavity between
conducting spherical shells and the waveguide concept of the Earth-ionosphere system with
examples from the scientific/technical literature will be outlined. A discussion about Schumann‘s
work regarding the long wavelength oscillations in the Earth- ionosphere cavity will be carried
out in section 5, followed by the final sections devoted to the reception of Schumann‘s work
by his contemporaries and the early observational evidence for the existence of ‗‗Schumann
resonances.‘‘
2. Overview of Crop Circles
Crop circles - strange patterns that appear mysteriously overnight in farmers' field - provoke
puzzlement, delight and intrigue among the press and public alike ( Fig.1 and Fig.2). The Crop
circles are mostly found in the United Kingdom, but have spread to dozens of countries around
the world in past decades. The mystery has inspired countless books, blogs, fan groups,
researchers (dubbed "cereologists") and even Hollywood films.
Despite having been studied for decades, the question remains: Who — or what — is making
them?
Many people believe that crop circles have been reported for centuries, a claim repeated in many
books and websites devoted to the mystery. Their primary piece of evidence is a woodcut from
1678 that appears to show a field of oat stalks laid out in a circle. Some take this to be a firsthand eyewitness account of a crop circle, but a little historical investigation shows otherwise.
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The woodcut actually illustrates what in folklore is called a "mowing devil" legend, in which an
English farmer told a worker with whom he was feuding that he "would rather pay the Devil
himself" to cut his oat field than pay the fee demanded. The source of the harvesting is not
unknown or mysterious; it is indeed Satan himself, who — complete with signature horns and a
tail — can be seen in the woodcut holding a scythe.
Fig.1. Crop Circle ―Julia set‖
Fig.2 The fractal model of crop circles (Fatou and Julia calculations)
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Some claim that the first crop circles (though they were not called that at the time) appeared near
the small town of Tully, Australia. In 1966, a farmer said he saw a flying saucer rise up from a
swampy area and fly away; when he went to investigate he saw a roughly circular area of debris
and apparently flattened reeds and grass, which he assumed had been made by the alien
spacecraft (but which police investigators said was likely caused by a natural phenomenon such
as a dust devil or waterspout). Referred in the press as "flying saucer nests," this story is more
a UFO report than a crop circle report.
As in the 1678 mowing devil legend, the case for it being linked to crop circles is especially
weak when we consider that the impression or formation was not made in a crop of any kind but
instead in ordinary grass. A round impression in a lawn or grassy area is not necessarily
mysterious (as anyone with a kiddie pool in the back yard knows). Indeed, mysterious circles
have appeared in grass throughout the world that are sometimes attributed to fairies but instead
caused by disease.
In fact, the first real crop circles didn't appear until the 1970s, when simple circles began
appearing in the English countryside. The number and complexity of the circles increased
dramatically, reaching a peak in the 1980s and 1990s when increasingly elaborate circles were
produced, including those illustrating complex mathematical equations.
In July 1996, one of the world's most complex and spectacular crop circles appeared in England,
across a highway from the mysterious and world-famous Stonehenge monument in the Wiltshire
countryside. It was astonishing fractal pattern called a Julia Set, and while some simple or rough
circles might be explained away as the result of a strange weather phenomenon, this one
unmistakably demonstrated intelligence. The only question was whether that intelligence was
terrestrial or extra-terrestrial.
Making the design all the more mysterious, it was claimed that the circle appeared in less than an
hour and during the daytime — which, if true, would be virtually impossible for hoaxers to
accomplish. The circle became one of the most famous and important crop circles in history.
It was later revealed that the circle had in fact been made in about three hours (by three hoaxers)
very early that morning. It simply hadn't been noticed until the following afternoon when spotted
from an airplane overhead.
Unlike other mysterious phenomenon such as psychic powers, ghosts, or Bigfoot, there is no
doubt that crop circles are "real." The evidence that they exist is clear and overwhelming. The
real question is instead what creates them — and there are ways to investigate that question.
We can look at both internal and external evidence to evaluate crop circles. Internal information
includes the content and meaning of the designs (is there anything that indicates that any
information contained in the "messages" is of extraterrestrial origin?), and external information,
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including the physical construction of the crop designs themselves (is there anything that
indicates that the designs were created by anything other than humans?)
Crop circle enthusiasts have come up with many theories about what create the patterns, ranging
from the plausible to the absurd. One explanation in vogue in the early 1980s was that the
mysterious circle patterns were accidentally produced by the especially vigorous sexual activity
of horny hedgehogs. Some people have suggested that the circles are somehow created by
localized and precise wind patterns, or by scientifically undetectable Earth energy fields and
meridians called ley lines.
Others, such as molecular biologist Horace Drew, suggest that the answer lies instead in time
travel or alien life. He theorizes that the patterns could be made by human time travelers from the
distant future to help them navigate our planet. Drew, working on the assumption that the
designs are intended as messages, believes he has decoded crop circle symbols and that they
contain messages such as "Believe," "There is good out there," "Beware the bearers of false gifts
and their broken promises," and "We oppose deception" (all, presumably, in English).
However, these odd, pseudo-biblical messages undermine the credibility of the crop circles, or at
least the meaning read into them. Of all the information that an extraterrestrial intelligence might
choose to convey to humanity — ranging from how to contact them to engineering secrets of
faster-than-light travel — these aliens chose to impart intentionally cryptic messages about false
gifts, broken promises
The crops circles or rather Field crops are in my opinion the result of Schumann field interaction
with crops. In this paper we search the equation which can describe that interaction
3. The model
In paper (Kozlowski, 2017), we showed that for particles with m<< M (Planck Mass)
equation
1 2
2
0
c t 2
2
(1)
describes the pilot wave equation. It is interesting to observe that the pilot wave equation is
independent of mass of the particles.
Let us look for the solution of the Eq. (1), , in the form (for 1D)
( x ct )
(2)
where is for example Julia set encoded in Schumann wave
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For For finite Planck mass we obtain (Kozlowski, 2017)
2ic
( x ct ) exp
( x ct )
(3)
where the reduced μ mass equals
mi M p
(4)
mMp
For m << Mp, i.e., for all elementary particles one obtains
μ = mi
(5)
and formula (2) describes the wave function for free Schrödinger particles
2mic
( x ct ) exp
( x ct )
(6)
2M p ic
( x ct ) exp
( x ct )
(7)
For m >> Mp, μ = Mp
From formula (6) we conclude that ( x ct ) is independent of m of particle, m.
In the case m < Mp from formulae (6) and (7) one obtains
m1
m
M p
(8)
m 2mc
2mc 2
2imc
( x ct ) exp
( x ct ) exp i
x
t
M
p
In formula (8) we put
2mi c
2 mi c 2
k
(9)
and obtain
( x ct ) e
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i ( kxt )
i
e
m
( kxt )
Mp
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As can concluded from formula (10) the second term depends on the gravity
m 2G 2
mi
exp i
(kx t ) exp i i (kx t )
c
M p
1
(11)
where G is the Newton gravity constant.
It is interesting to observe that the new constant, G ,
mi2 G
G
c
(12)
is the gravitational constant. For mi = mN nucleon mass
G 5.90421039
The equation ( 10) describes the the resutling ― picture ― of intial Schumann wave ( Julia set)
4. Conclusions
In this article, the solution of the QM equation with memory term ( gravity dependent) was
obtained. It is shown that for m < Mp , where Mp is the mass of Planck particle=neuron mass the
wave function Ψ contains the component dependent on the structure constant for gravity
G
mi2 G
.
c
We argue that the Field crops are the results of interactions of Schumann waves with crops.
Assuming the linearity of the wave equation formulated in our earlier papers we argue that the
Field crops are the formulae encoded in Schumann waves. Due to the weakness of Schumann
field the picture of formulae can be obtained only in crop (photographic plate) for Schumann
photons.
Received October 27, 2019; Accepted December 11, 2019
References
M. Kozlowski, J. Marciak – Kozlowska, Wave phenomena in nano-bio-technosciences
Lambert, 2017
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Appendix
Winfried Otto Schumann (1888–1974)
Winfried Otto Schumann was born on 20 May 1888 in Tübingen, Germany, the son of the physical
chemist Ernst Otto Schumann (1852 – 1898) [Poggendorff, 1904]. Because of his father‘s several jobrelated relocations, he grew up in different places in German-speaking countries, among them Berndorf,
southeast of Vienna (Austria), and Karolinental, near Prague (now Karlı́n, part of Praha, the capital of the
Czech Republic).
From 1905 to 1909, he studied electrical engineer- ing at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe (now
named Universität Karlsruhe, the first German polytechnic, nowadays equivalent to a technical
university) and worked subsequently as assistant to the founder of its Institute of Electrical
Engineering, Engelbert Arnold (1856 – 1911) [Poggendorff, 1956; Killy, 1995]. During this time,
Schumann prepared his doctoral thesis ‗‗On the torques of the damper winding of a multiphase synchronous machine at small pendulum oscillations in parallel operation‘‘ under Arnold‘s guidance (until his
death in November 1911) and earned his doctorate degree ‗‗Dr.-Ing.‘‘ after his viva voce in 1912.
After his final examination he started to work in industry as head of the High-Voltage Laboratory for
the company Brown, Boveri & Cie at Baden, Switzerland, until 1914. During the First World War he
served as a radio operator, and beginning in 1919 he worked as research assistant of the Robert-BoschStiftung (Robert Bosch Foundation) in the Institute of Electrical Engineering at the Technische
Hochschule Stuttgart (now Universität Stuttgart). There he also qualified for university teaching
(‗‗Habilitation‘‘) in 1920 with a thesis on ‗‗Electrical breakdown stress of gases.‘‘ In the same year he
was appointed Associate Professor (‗‗Außerordentlicher Universitätsprofessor‘‘) of Techni- cal Physics
at the University in Jena, Germany.
In 1924, he was appointed full professor (‗‗Ordent- licher Universitätsprofessor‘‘) for theoretical
electrical engineering at the newly founded Electro-Physical Laboratory at the Technische Hochschule
Mü nchen (since 1970 named Technische Universität München), Germany. This laboratory was later
upgraded and renamed Institute of Electrophysics. From September 1947 to October 1948 Schumann
was on leave and worked at Wright Airfield (later renamed Wright-Pat- terson Air Force Base),
Dayton, Ohio, for the United States Air Force (see Figure 1). In 1961 he was given the status of
professor emeritus, but he remained active in research until his death on 24 September 1974.
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Malik, S. S., Role of Consciousness in Creation
Article
Role of Consciousness in Creation
Satinder S. Malik*
Abstract
Science has made great breakthroughs in understanding of our universe. Science has some
limitations. It has done lots of research in material dimensions of matter and energy and a small
part in time. Science has not acknowledged the existence of the dimension of Consciousness.
There are a number of phenomena apparently without explanation on earth and in the universe.
Some of these can be explained incorporating this dimension. The limitation of modern day
science is it doesn‘t have any laboratory support for this dimension. This is the controlling
dimension for life and for universe and without knowing this aspect understanding of science is
bound to be limited.
Keywords: Consciousness, dimension, creation, science, matter, energy, universe, Aliens
Formation of Milky Way Galaxy
As the cognitive Black Hole pre Sagittarius A often termed as Golden Egg (Hiranyagarbha)
containing dense matter was burst to form Milky Way galaxy. One side was used form eco
system for Heavens and other side for Earth. The entire creation from the start of universe till
present day is based on three principles. These are the following:
(a) The principle of Mahat
(b) The principle of creation (Serg)
(c) The principle of evolution (Prati-Serg)
The Principle of Mahat. This is the integral characteristics of the wave. As the quality and type
of strand decide the further formation of rope, characteristic features of vibration decide types of
resultant waveforms, quarks, sub-atomic particles, elements, compounds, mixtures, large objects,
heavenly bodies and their interactions.
Neptune has 14 moons. Recently discovered phenomenon is motion of Naiad which help it keep
avoiding collision with Thalassa. It moves up and down, passing by Thalassa twice from above
then twice from below, a cycle that repeats. It is not the only noteworthy orbital resonance in the
solar system. The resonance between the Jovian moons of Io, Europa and Ganymede causes tides
inside Io, creating friction, heat and the solar system‘s most active volcanic system. Jupiter itself
is in resonance with the asteroid belt, with the gas giant‘s immense gravitational pull keeping
lanes within the belt conspicuously free of asteroids. Neptune and Pluto are also in a resonance,
with the dwarf planet completing two orbits of the sun for Neptune‘s three, a groove that keeps
both orbits stable.
*
Correspondence author: Dr. Satinder S. Malik, Independent Researcher, India. E-mail: adventuressmalik@gmail.com
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The existence of our Universe [2] is dependent upon interactions from the tiniest subatomic
particles to the largest clusters of galaxies. At galactic scales, interactions can take millions of
years to unfold, a process seen in this image of two galaxies released by the Gemini Observatory.
The new image captures the slow and intimate dance of a pair of galaxies some 160 million
light-years distant and reveals the sparkle of subsequent star formation fueled by the pair's
interactions. There are many such events which keep happening in our universe, all of these are
governed by the principle of Mahat.
The Principle of Creation. The cognitive part of the matter and dimension beyond it is known
as consciousness. The consciousness provided triggering action and controlling power for
creation, its management and further evolution. We would discuss further about this principle in
rest of the paper.
Principle of Evolution. The principles of acclimtisation, adaptation and evolution are the
short, medium and long term measures for life form to adjust to its surrounding ecosystem.
[3] A theory of biological evolution was developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin
(1809–1882). It stated that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural
selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive,
and reproduce. Darwin‘s theory was missing a mechanism for how beneficial traits could survive
over generations.
Darwin supposed that the life began [4] in the bubbling sea vents—but all this overlooks the fact
that to turn monomers into polymers (which is to say, to begin to create proteins) involves what
is known to biology as dehydration linkages. As one of the leading biology text puts it, with
perhaps just a tiny hint of discomfort, “Researchers agree that such reactions would not have
been energetically favorable in the primitive sea, or indeed in any aqueous medium, because of
the mass action law.” It is a little like putting sugar in a glass of water and having it become a
cube. It shouldn’t happen, but somehow in nature it does.
If you make monomers wet [4] they don’t turn into polymers—except when creating life on
Earth. How and why it happens then and not otherwise is one of biology’s great unanswered
questions. For two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life [4]. They lived,
they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn‘t show any particular inclination to move on to
another, more challenging level of existence. At some point in the first billion years of life,
cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, learned to tap into a freely available resource—the hydrogen
that exists in spectacular abundance in water. They absorbed water molecules, supped on the
hydrogen, and released the oxygen as waste, and in so doing invented photosynthesis. As
Margulis and Sagan note, photosynthesis is ―undoubtedly the most important single metabolic
innovation in the history of life on the planet‖—and it was invented not by plants but by
bacteria. As cyanobacteria proliferated the world began to fill with O 2to the consternation of
those organisms that found it poisonous—which in those days was all of them. In an anaerobic
(or a non-oxygen-using) world, oxygen is extremely poisonous. Our white cells actually use
oxygen to kill invading bacteria. That oxygen is fundamentally toxic often comes as a surprise to
those of us who find it so convivial to our well-being, but that is only because we have evolved
to exploit it.
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In the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin argued that [11] with the natural variations that occur in
populations, any trait that is beneficial would make that individual more likely to survive and
pass on the trait to the next generation. If enough of these selections occurred on different
beneficial traits you could end up with completely new species. He did not have a mechanism for
how the traits could be preserved over the succeeding generations. At the time it was thought that
the traits of the parents were blended in the offspring. Unfortunately, blending would dilute any
beneficial trait out of a population within a few generations. This is because most of the blending
over the next generations would be with individuals that did not have the trait.
This is where the intelligent interference through action of the spirits or comes in. The principle
of natural selection is indeed a bright observation by Darwin and his theory is mostly right
except that selection is not made by the organisms themselves or it is not autonomous but
interfered by the intelligent design. The evolution takes place naturally as an inbuilt principle or
property of living beings, as a part of their design. However, evolution can be accelerated or
decelerated or given desired direction from the dimension of consciousness. [11] The most
famous of the early defenses of Darwinism was not by Darwin himself but by the famous
biologist, Thomas Huxley and the social philosopher, Herbert Spencer. Darwin's ideas were
adopted by supporters of laissez-faire capitalism. "Survival of the fittest" gave an ethical
dimension to the no-holds barred capitalism of the late nineteenth century.
Theory of Creation
At the beginning of Big Bang about 216 billion Year ago (time is of a little relevance at this
moment) from the center of our galaxy where presently lies the super massive black
hole Sagittarius A. This black hole was even bigger and denser. Incidentally, all the energy and
matter in the universe is made of initial vibration (first product of Pradhána) and therefore all
energy and matter is sensible to Consciousness. This Big black hole containing the entire Milky
Way was controlled by Vishnu (creator & controller of the dimension of time). Combination of
matter and consciousness is necessary to renovate creation and time plays most important role in
it. He put a part of his consciousness (Brahma) in it and controlled its expansion as per the
principles of Mahat (cardinal principles for formation of energy, matter and their interaction). In
his book The Intelligent Universe, the great astrophysicist Fred Hoyle admits that an intelligent
principle has begotten the universe. Brahma has since then controlled the expansion of black
hole in to the present Milky Way and chosen planets for creation to begin. In one part he chose a
planet which we know as heaven and other ‗earth‘.
The entire scheme of things is with a purpose. The purpose will emerge out of the pattern if we
understand it carefully. Keeping the above example of creation, we also know that there are other
older galaxies present in our universe and hence there will also be life with same purpose.
Therefore, alien life is not only possible but it is also present in our universe.
Earth is a well-chosen planet for human evolution. Here on earth, one solar year is equivalent to
one day on Heaven- another planet in Milky Way. Apart from heaven there are other planets are
there where life is presently in evolution. Eventually human race would also contribute to
development of life on such planets. Though, it is pertinent to note that such contribution
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will not be physical. [4] A trip of 240,000 miles to the Moon still represents a very big
undertaking for us. A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a
moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost
$450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew (their DN Atom to tatters by highenergy solar particles from which they could not be shielded).
Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that
any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system—ever. It is just too far. As it
is, even with the Hubble telescope, we can‘t see even into the Oort cloud, so we don‘t actually
know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.
For a peak into modern scientific theories about solar system and life on Earth, I depend on [4]
Bill Bryson- A short History of Nearly Everything heavily and I have largely quoted from his
book. Martin Rees, Britain‘s astronomer royal [4], believes that there are many universes,
possibly an infinite number, each with different attributes, in different combinations, and that we
simply live in one that combines things in the way that allows us to exist. Rees maintains that six
numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even
very slightly things could not be as they are.
For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in
a precise but comparatively stately manner—specifically, in a way that converts seven onethousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly—from 0.007 percent to 0.006
percent, say—and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen
and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly—to 0.008 percent—and bonding would be so
wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the
slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here.
If gravity may turn out to be a little too strong, and one day it may halt the expansion of the
universe and bring it collapsing in upon itself, till it crushes itself down into another singularity,
possibly to start the whole process over again. On the other hand it may be too weak and the
universe will keep racing away forever until everything is so far apart that there is no chance of
material interactions, so that the universe becomes a place that is inert and dead, but very roomy.
The third option is that gravity is just right—―critical density‖ is the cosmologists‘ term for it—
and that it will hold the universe together at just the right dimensions to allow things to go on
indefinitely. Cosmologists in their lighter moments sometimes call this the Goldilocks
effect—that everything is just right [4].
Also, Bill Bryson brings out very precisely the apt location of earth in our solar system. [4] The
right distance away from the right sort of star, one that is big enough to radiate lots of energy, but
not too big as to burn itself out swiftly. Too much nearer and everything on Earth would have
boiled away. Much farther away and everything would have frozen. Earth would have been
uninhabitable had it been 5 percent nearer and 15 percent farther. Earth is the right kind of planet
with a molten lively interior that created the out gassing that helped to build an atmosphere and
provided us with the magnetic field that shields us from cosmic radiation. It also gave us plate
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tectonics, which continually renews and rumples the surface. We also have the right elements in
the correct proportions. There are ninety-two naturally occurring elements on Earth.
Therefore, in entire combination and permutation of probability for creating suitable material life
earth was a planet which was chosen and was allocated with the consciousness along with other
planets in our solar system and our central star. This is to make sure that time on effort spent in
creating life on earth is not wasted. All bodies in Milky way follow principles of Mahat for their
evolution, change, motion and interaction with other bodies and a handful of them are with
additional consciousness to be more responsible and integral in their act. All these heavenly
bodies are endowed with Mahatattva (dark matter) – a medium through which these can be
controlled.
Brahma himself experimented with creation of life. It is the natural way of the independent
consciousness that one it gets combined with various forms of matter it can start learning
interactions with environment. The learning could be Sattvic (purea), Rajsic (controlling others)
or tamsic (exploitative and indulgent). Brahma was not amused with the results of his creation,
maybe it was the quantitative or qualitative properties of the fragments of consciousness which
he used to create first beings. Therefore, after learning from his first experiment he created four
Kumaras Sanaka, Sanatana, Sanandana, and Sanatkumara from different parts of his body to aid
him. The Kumaras was the first such beings. They were created from his mind and appeared as
infants. They were high on consciousness and were not interested in procreation; they were
pursuing brahmacharya against the wishes of their father. They are said to wander throughout the
materialistic and spiritualistic universe without any desire but with purpose to teach.
Thereafter, Brahma created ten Manputras (his ideas in his own image) with the objective of
increasing the population and their names were these Rishis, or Sages were also known as
Prajapatis (creators of Milky Way population). According to the Bhagavata Purana, their names
are Angiras (sage), Atri, Pulastya, Marichi, Pulaha, Kratu, Bhrigu, Vashistha, Daksha and
Narada. We must understand that these were in form of consciousness (spirits).
Wikipedia mentions that [5] Earth formed around 4.54 billion years ago, by accretion from the
solar nebula. Volcanic out gassing probably created the primordial atmosphere and then the
ocean, but the early atmosphere contained almost no oxygen. Much of the Earth was molten
because of frequent collisions with other bodies which led to extreme volcanism.
Brahma sent all Prajapatis to create life on Earth, however when they appeared on earth the
found earth was beginning to have some form of life, however that was not as per their plan.
They found the waters were mixed with harmful chemicals. So Brahma requested Vishnu‘s help
and Vishnu created an ideal solution after assuming (Varaha Avtar). Their resulted in a planetsized body named Theia causing collision with Earth. This collision is thought to have formed
the Moon as well as tilt in the rotational axis of earth. Since the earth was mostly molten and
even after becoming in two parts such state acquires minimum surface area (spheroid), both
became round objects in accordance with principles of Mahat. The tilt is what gave rise to
seasons and created ideal conditions for life to start. Moon also helped to stabilize any
oscillations in motions of earth while it went around Sun. Over time, the Earth cooled, causing
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the formation of a solid crust, and allowing liquid water on the surface. This water was pure and
favorable to creation of life.
As far as the theory of creation goes it is based on intelligent principles, on intelligent
design and with objectives. Brahma also stared creation of other worlds DuLoka (heavens),
Bhuvar Loka and Suvar Loka. The development of life on earth was most important to all
because of one factor faster time on earth. It was used as laboratory to quickly determine the
results and learn lessons. Other options were much slower.
The development of life on earth started with creation of favorable atmosphere with oxygen. [4]
Atmosphere keeps the Earth warm. Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice with an average
temperature of minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit without it. In addition, the atmosphere absorbs or
deflects incoming swarms of cosmic rays, charged particles, ultraviolet rays etc. Altogether, the
gaseous padding of the atmosphere is equivalent to a fifteen-foot thickness of protective
concrete, and without it these invisible visitors from space would slice through us like tiny
daggers.
Wegener developed the theory that the world‘s continents had once come together in a single
landmass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before the
continents had split apart and floated off to their present positions. All this he put together in a
book called Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, or The Origin of Continents and
Oceans.
One reason life took so long [4] to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler
organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently. It took about two billion years, roughly
40 percent of Earth‘s history, for oxygen levels to reach more or less modern levels of
concentration in the atmosphere. But once the stage was set, and apparently quite suddenly, an
entirely new type of cell arose—one with a nucleus and other little bodies collectively called
organelles (from a Greek word meaning little tools). The process is thought to have started when
some blundering or adventuresome bacterium either invaded or was captured by some other
bacterium and it turned out that this suited them both. The captive bacterium became, it is
thought, a mitochondrion. This mitochondrial invasion (or end symbiotic event, as biologists like
to term it) made complex life possible. (In plants a similar invasion produced chloroplasts, which
enable plants to photosynthesize.) Single-celled eukaryotes were once called protists.
Compared with the bacteria that had gone before, these new protists were wonders of design and
sophistication. The simple amoeba, just one cell big and without any ambitions but to exist,
contains 400 million bits of genetic information in its DNA—enough, as Carl Sagan noted, to fill
eighty books of five hundred pages. Eventually the eukaryotes learned an even more singular
trick. It took a long time—a billion years or so. They learned to form together into complex
multi-cellular beings. This was the beginning of first root race of life on earth. I tend to accept
the theory of Helena P Blavatsky with some modifications. The reproduction was by budding.
Francis Crick [4], co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague Leslie Orgel have
suggested that Earth was ―deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens, ‖an idea that
Gribbin calls ―at the very fringe of scientific respectability‖—or, put another way, a notion that
would be considered wildly lunatic if not voiced by a Nobel laureate. Fred Hoyle and his
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colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe further eroded enthusiasm for panspermia by suggesting that
outer space brought us not only life but also many diseases such as flu and bubonic plague, ideas
that were easily disproved by biochemists. Hoyle—and it seems necessary to insert a reminder
here that he was one of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century—also once suggested,
as mentioned earlier, that our noses evolved with the nostrils underneath as a way of keeping
cosmic pathogens from falling into them as they drifted down from space.
The Hadean eon [5] represents the time before a reliable (fossil) record of life; it began with the
formation of the planet and ended 4.0 billion years ago. The following Archean and Proterozoic
eons produced the beginnings of life on Earth and its earliest evolution. The succeeding eon is
the Phanerozoic, divided into three eras: the Palaeozoic, an era of arthropods, fishes, and the first
life on land; the Mesozoic, which spanned the rise, reign, and climactic extinction of the nonavian dinosaurs; and the Cenozoic, which saw the rise of mammals.
Life emerged so swiftly [4], in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help—perhaps a
good deal of help. The idea that earthly life might have arrived from space has a surprisingly
long and even occasionally distinguished history. The great Lord Kelvin himself raised the
possibility as long ago as 1871 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science when he suggested that ―the germs of life might have been brought to the earth by some
meteorite.
Since we are exploring formation of life on Earth we need to limit ourselves to the bigger picture
and less on details. It is indeed a vast subject. We can explore it here only in principles. A
biological species is a group of organisms that can reproduce with one another in nature and
produce fertile offspring. Species are characterized by the fact that they are reproductively
isolated from other groups. We will take species group as our subjects with their common
methods of reproduction. The main methods of reproduction identified are through asexual,
sexual with different methods of fertilization. Asexual reproduction [6] produces offspring that
are genetically identical to the parent because the offspring are all clones of the original parent.
Asexual reproduction in animals occurs through fission, budding, fragmentation, and
parthenogenesis. There is an advantage that large numbers of offspring can be produced quickly
and it is ideally suited to a stable or predictable environment. This was a design decision of the
Prajapatis within the limitation imposed by the environment.
Parthenogenesis [6] is a form of asexual reproduction in which an egg develops into an
individual without being fertilized. The resulting offspring can be either haploid or diploid,
depending on the process in the species. Parthenogenesis occurs in invertebrates such as water
fleas, rotifers, aphids, stick insects, and ants, wasps, and bees. Ants, bees, and wasps use
parthenogenesis to produce haploid males (drones). The diploid females (workers and queens)
are the result of a fertilized egg. Some vertebrate animals such as certain reptiles, amphibians,
and fish also reproduce through parthenogenesis.
Incidentally, Parthenogenesis has been observed in species in which the sexes were separated in
terrestrial or marine zoos. Two female Komodo dragons, a hammerhead shark, and a blacktop
shark have produced parthenogenic young when the females have been isolated from males. It is
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possible that the asexual reproduction observed occurred in response to unusual circumstances
and would normally not occur. The species was at the borderline where a distinct change in
separation of sexes occurred. These were the species what Helena P Blavatsky mentioned as
sweat borne. This method offered fastest method of reproduction of complex organisms.
In Sexual reproduction [6] the genetic material of two individuals is combined to produce
genetically diverse offspring that differ from their parents. The genetic diversity of sexually
produced offspring is thought to give sexually reproducing individuals greater fitness because
more of their offspring may survive and reproduce in an unpredictable or changing environment.
This was an important step to ensure diversification of species and to evolve them further.
Hermaphroditism occurs in animals in which one individual has both male and female
reproductive systems such as earthworms, slugs, tapeworms, and snails are often hermaphroditic.
Hermaphrodites may self-fertilize, but typically they will mate with another of their species,
fertilizing each other and both producing offspring.
External fertilization usually occurs in aquatic environments where both eggs and sperm are
released into the water. After the sperm reaches the egg, fertilization takes place. Most external
fertilization happens during the process of spawning where one or several females release their
eggs and the male(s) release sperm in the same area, at the same time. The spawning may be
triggered by environmental signals, such as water temperature or the length of daylight. Nearly
all fish spawn, as do crustaceans (such as crabs and shrimp), mollusks (such as oysters), squid,
and echinoderms (such as sea urchins and sea cucumbers). Frogs, corals, mayflies, and
mosquitoes also spawn. These species are known as egg born.
Internal fertilization occurs most often in terrestrial animals, although some aquatic animals also
use this method. Internal fertilization may occur by the male directly depositing sperm in the
female during mating. It may also occur by the male depositing sperm in the environment,
usually in a protective structure, which a female picks up to deposit the sperm in her
reproductive tract. There are three ways that offspring are produced following internal
fertilization. In oviparity, fertilized eggs are laid outside the female‘s body and develop there,
receiving nourishment from the yolk that is a part of the egg. This occurs in some bony fish,
some reptiles, a few cartilaginous fish, some amphibians, a few mammals, and all birds. Most
non-avian reptiles and insects produce leathery eggs, while birds and some turtles produce eggs
with high concentrations of calcium carbonate in the shell, making them hard. The eggs of the
egg-laying mammals such as the platypus and echidna are leathery.
In ovoviparity, fertilized eggs are retained in the female, and the embryo obtains its nourishment
from the egg‘s yolk. The eggs are retained in the female‘s body until they hatch inside of her, or
she lays the eggs right before they hatch. This process helps protect the eggs until hatching. This
occurs in some bony fish (like the platyfish Xiphophorus maculatus, some sharks, lizards, some
snakes (garter snake Thamnophis sirtalis), some vipers, and some invertebrate animals
(Madagascar hissing cockroach Gromphadorhina portentosa). In viviparity the young are born
alive. They obtain their nourishment from the female and are born in varying states of maturity.
This occurs in most mammals some cartilaginous fish, and a few reptiles.
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There is a gradual development in method of reproduction depending on the factors such as rate
of reproduction required, stability of external environment, complexity of organism being
reproduced etc. Hermaphroditism was initially considered by Brahma as the top form for
reproduction, however it was not found interesting enough by the subjects.
Simultaneously with evolution of life on earth designs were being prepared in heavens. Having
created Mansputras, Brahma designed Tanmatras as essence of sensors so that they can sense.
These progenies of Brahma were Hermaphrodites. They were supposed to be reproducing from
themselves. Sanat Kumars were devotes and didn‘t have any motivation to reproduce. Brahma
found that all of them were free from worldly desires and extremely virtuous. Narad even told
his father that he is not interested in procreating and will spend his life in universe being a
devotee of Vishnu. Seeing dismal outcome of his efforts, Brahma had to think of alternative, as a
result of which he manifested Rudra. Half of Rudra's body resembled like a male while the
remaining half appeared like a female. He used one of the tanmatra as a motivation for
procreation. Lord Brahma instructed Rudra to detach the female form from his body and
commence copulative creation. Following his advice, Rudra detached the male part of his body
and created eleven male entities. Similarly he created various female entities from the female
part of his body. So the creator also learns and having done so similar design was also used for
humans. This led to further part of creation in heavens. Daksha Prajapati begot sixty daughters
from his wife Virini. In course of time ten of them were married to Dharma whose names were
Arundhati, Vasu, Jami, Lamba, Bhanu, Marutvati, Sankalpa, Muhurta, Saadhya and Vishwa.
Vishwa gave birth to Vishwadeva, while Saadhyaa was the mother of Saddhya. Marutvati gave
birth to Marutvan. Vasu had eight sons who became famous as the Vasus. Bhanu Arundhati
became the designer of all the creatures of this world.
Prajapati Kashyap had thirteen wives Aditi, Diti, Danu, Arishta, Sursa, Surabhi, Vinta, Tamra,
Krodhvasha, Ira, Kadru, Khasa and Muni. Kashyap had two sons from Diti. Kashyap had
begotten one hundred sons from Danu, among whom Viprachitti was the most powerful.
Kashyap had also begotten forty nine Marudganas from Diti. Those who were born of Diti were
known as Daitya and born of Danu were known as Danavs and from born of Aditi were known
as Adityas. These were the two main groups in heaven of Adityas on one side and Daityas and
Danavs on the other who were competing against each other. Consciousness of Aditya makes the
Grahas (planets) sentient.
There have been set objectives for the reproduction of so many species. The objectives were the
following.
(a)
Integration of plants and animals in to environmental cycles. Our earth is a
living being with a soul which has been granted by Brahma and so are the Grahas
(surrounding planets). Environment on Earth has various cycles such as water cycle,
nitrogen cycle, oxygen cycle, carbon cycle etc. Whatever parameter in these cycles
varies, it is able to maintain their designed value with sufficient margin. This is a
comprehensive and intricate design.
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(b)
Development of tissues and biological building material required for human body.
Earlier organisms have been developed to prove individual system concepts of
pneumatics system (lungs), Hydraulic system (blood), actuators (skeletal & muscle
system) etc. For example tissues of tongue in mammal and tissues of octopus are similar.
This could be true that one of the prime reason for existence of octopus is tissue culture
for reptilian and mammalian tongue.
(c)
The Prajapatis needed genetic codes to design human life and they also needed
genetic codes for themselves to start life in heavens (Alien life on another planet). The
reason was development on earth was happening at fast pace due to lower gravity and
faster time lapse.
(d)
Development of software (souls) from initial root program which goes in to
unicellular cell, to multi-cellular and the up the species ladder for learning the
environment and survival, procreation, team spirit etc. Software soul is essential
requirement of living beings as it is the guiding factor for various functions which are
executed consciously and subconsciously by the organism.
Since creation is a process in which one has to design carefully and
wait for the results patiently. Results needs to be evaluated and
several such iterations may be required to perfect a design. During
the entire process of creation, one important event took place in the
oceans when entire heavenly creation descended on earth to collect
genetic codes. Collection of genes was done around Mt Meru in
erstwhile Pangea or Gondwana. Mt Meru was the first mountain that
arose and may be now under the sea again. This event was called
‗Sagar Manthan‘ or churning of the oceans for the famed nectar.
The nectar was essentially required for having a physical form. The gene pool and samples are
collected and for further processing and design. Which tissue is required to be used where and
how these will evolve in sequential fashion is highly complex task of highly intelligent cosmic
civilization. They populated heaven as ideal planet with best of species of plants, animals and
environment. They also designed species of plants and animals on earth as stated above.
Having found the initial genetic code work began at fast pace. Prajapati Rishi Kashyap also had
six daughters from Tamra. These were Shuki, Shyeni, Bhasi, Gridhi, Sugridhi and Shuchi. All
six of them designed various species of birds. Shuki was the designer of Parrots and Owls.
Shyeni designed hawks while Bhasi was the designer of ospreys (a large fish eating birds.)
Gridhi gave birth to Vultures and Sugridhi was the mother of pigeons. Shuchi was the designer
of cranes, Swans and other similar aquatic birds. Vinita was the designer of Garuda and Arun
Supreme among birds. Arun was the designer of Sampati and Jatayu. Sursa was the designer of
the serpents and had designed a thousand snakes. Surabhi, one of the thirteen wives of Kashyap
had desgined cows, buffaloes as well as beautiful women. Muni was the mother of the celestial
damsels Apsaras. Arishta designed Kinnars and Gandharvas. Ira was the designer of various
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vegetations like grass, trees, creepers and bushes. Khasa gave birth to ten million Rakshashas
and Yakshas.
This period relates directly to Cambrian period. The seemingly rapid appearance of fossils in the
Primordial Strata and it was noted by William Buckland in the 1840s. The Cambrian explosion
occured approximately 541 million years ago when most major animal phyla appeared in the
fossil record.[It lasted for about 13– 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most
modern metazoan phyla. The event was accompanied by major diversification of other
organisms
The early reptiles of various types such as Hylonomus lyelli (the first one). It is also the first
animal known to have fully adapted to life on land. Hylonomus lived about 315 million years
ago, during the time we call the Late Carboniferous Period. Most creatures were developing from
the boneless to with bones. The reptiles were required to be controlled for further biological and
higher souls couldn‘t incarnate in them. Brahma created special souls for these reptiles including
huge dinosaurs and dragons, these were called Nagas. After their role finished they later got
upgraded to incarnate in human forms and still they were known as Nagas. Nagas represent an
important phase of biological development on earth.
It is a matter of great curiosity in wondering about how many different types of species are there
on earth. The most accurate census [20], conducted by the Hawaii's University, estimates that a
total of 8.7 million species live on the planet. This is closest to the estimate of 8.4 million (84
Lakh) species mentioned in Vedic scriptures.
The design of human body was made by seven different Prajapatis who collaborated and
designed seven similar types of first humans put them slightly far apart on seven different islands
of Pangea. Every prototype human was designed to be androgynous i.e having property of both
male and the female, with activation of one gene prototype became a male and further activation
of hormones other differences emerged. This concept was simple to execute because of similarity
of everything except one function. Also one point which is of great importance here is that this
method is principally the same as in majority of other mammals. Even the organs of procreation
have same sub-parts and work on the same design. These organs are also special and develop
most before the birth and are more prominent on a new born. The idea of progenration is for the
survival of species. In the design for male mammals one would find some parts such as nipples
which are dormant or not active. This is because initially all mammals start their growth as
females and at appropriate time males genes get active and embryo develops as male. This also
highlights the equality of both the sexes and their importance being in complimentary to each
other.
The word root of Man is derived from Sanskrit word Man- to think and hence the man is thinker.
In Sanskrit, it is also called as Manav or manushya. This is true because man is an intelligent
animal species. Also, the word Adam, Adami have root in Ad (first), meaning the ones who are
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born from the first prototype, initial (man). The lead progenitor for every race is therefore called
Manu.
Prajapatis watched the growth and development of this species and even now all monitoring is
done. In the initial part they used souls of higher beings (heavens) to incarnate in them. Even
Prajapatis incarnated in them to check out these earliest humans for the design parameters,
deficiencies etc. The first humans were the humans of third root race. According to Puranic
cosmography [14], the world was initially divided into seven islands (sapta-dvipa vasumati)
separated by the seven seas. The seven continents of the Puranas are stated as Jambudvipa,
Plaksadvipa, Salmalidvipa, Kusadvipa, Krouncadvipa, Sakadvipa, and Pushkaradvipa. All seven
islands are now major continents of the world. This is interesting because whatever has been
mentioned in olden texts confirms to the modern findings. Many a times the meanings may have
been lost due to lack of vocabulary or perspective in translation.
In 1912, Alfred Wegener [11] proposed a theory that the continents had once been joined, and
over time had drifted apart. Alfred Wegener proposed two different mechanisms for continental
drift. One was based on the centrifugal force caused by the rotation of the earth and another a
'tidal argument' based on the tidal attraction of the sun and the moon. Apart from this one of the
reason could be the movement of magnetic poles of earth leading to changes in magnetism and
asymmetric pull of gravitations forces between sun, moon and earth. These forces become
particularly asymmetric during the eclipses.
(Image credit [10] & Google earth – current showing submerged lands that were once above water)
Although Wegener's ‗continental drift‘ theory [12] was discarded, it did introduce the idea of
moving continents to geosciences. And decades later, scientists confirmed some of Wegener's
ideas, such as the past existence of a supercontinent joining all the world's landmasses as one.
Pangaea was a supercontinent that formed roughly 200 to 250 million years ago, according to the
U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and was responsible for the fossil and rock clues that led
Wegener to his theory. Plate tectonics is now the widely accepted theory that Earth's crust is
fractured into rigid, moving plates. In the 1960s, scientists discovered the plate edges through
magnetic surveys of the ocean floor and through the seismic listening networks built to monitor
nuclear testing, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Alternating patterns of magnetic
anomalies on the ocean floor indicated seafloor spreading, where new plate material is born.
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Magnetic minerals aligned in ancient rocks on continents also showed that the continents have
shifted relative to one another.
(Image credits [12] various tectonic plates and their movement over the millions of years)
The Himalayan mountain range and Tibetan plateau
have formed as a result of the collision between the
Indian Plate [13] and Eurasian Plate which began 50
million years ago. As seen in the animation above not
all of the Tethys Ocean floor was completely sub
ducted; most of the thick sediments on the Indian
margin of the ocean were scraped off and accreted onto
the Eurasian continent in what is known as an
accretionary wedge (link to glossary). These scrapedoff sediments are what now form the Himalayan
mountain range.
(Image Credits [13] movement of Jambu Dwipa)
Prajapati Daksha typifies the early Third Race [9], holy
and pure, still devoid of an individual Ego, and having
merely the passive capacities. Brahmâ, therefore,
commands him to create inferior and superior (avara
and vara) bipeds and quadrupeds ; and by his will, gave
birth to females . . . . to the gods, the Daityas, the
snake-gods, animals, cattle and the Danavas and other
beings.
These early humans of third root race were the earliest ancestors of us humans. One more
significant discovery about beginning of life on earth [15] is found from a 550 million-year-old
fossilized digestive tract found in the Nevada desert one of the oldest known examples of
fossilized internal anatomical structures. One must note that this period coincides with the
Cambrian period indicating that human are as old as other species and not evolved from them
whereas the Archaeologists previously thought Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 200,000
years ago, but the story has become more complicated. Fossils discovered in Morocco have
pushed that date back to 300,000 years ago, consistent with ancient DNA evidence. This raises
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doubts that our species emerged in any single place. Anthropologists are realizing that our Homo
sapiens ancestors had much more contact with other human species than previously thought.
Although discovered in the 1990s, publication [8] of the 4.4 million year old skeleton nicknamed
‗Ardi‘ in 2009 changed scientists‘ views on how hominins began walking. Perspectives on our
own species have also changed. Today, human evolution looks less like Darwin‘s tree and more
like a muddy, braided stream. Our lineages split up to 800,000 years ago, modern humans and
Neanderthals mated a number of times during the last Ice Age. This is why many people today
possess some Neanderthal DNA. Ancient DNA is how researchers first identified the mysterious
Denisovans, who interbred with us and Neanderthals.
The early humans were of huge size nearly 30-50 feet and large variation in samples. Iguanodon
of the Mesozoic ages was 100 feet long and now it is transformed into the small Iguana lizard of
South America. The evolutionary series of the animal world is a warrant that the same thing took
place within the human races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same
in the flora going pari passu with the fauna in respect of size. The pretty ferns we collect and dry
among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew
during the carboniferous period. Popular traditions about giants in days of old, and their mention
in every mythology, including the Bible are for people who really existed. These were named as
Cyclops, Medusa, Orphic Titan, the anguipedal monster known as Ephialtes. There were good
giants in days of old jand the Rakshasas and Yakshas of Lanka. The Râkshasas are simply the
primitive and ferocious giants, the Atlanteans, who were scattered on the face of the globe.
The Giants of old are all buried under the Oceans[9], and hundreds of thousands of years of
constant friction by water would reduce to dust and pulverize a brazen, far more a human
skeleton. Most of the huge size mammals were the vehicles of cosmic spirits and they roamed
around the earth without much effort. The survival was probably easy for the giants keeping in
mind their physical strength and their high intelligence consciousness being belonging to races of
Daityas, Danvas etc directly from the heavens. In secret doctrine one mythological text from puts
it as the third and fourth races became tall with pride thinking they are the kings and they are
the gods. They built big cities, cities laden with precious metals. They took wives fair to look at,
Wives from the mindless, the narrow-headed. They bred monsters, wicked demons, male and
female, also, Khado (Dakini) with little minds. They built temples for human body. Male and
Female they worshipped. Then the third eye acted no longer.
All such big cities of Asuras were in Mu, Lemuria and Atlantis. Science had reached its peak of
development even at that time. Most of the souls or Monads of these people belonged to
heavenly spirits and they were actively guided and aided in their building of huge cities and
technological developments such as flying machines. Following images show the probable lands
where the cultures evolved. Asuramâya, created astronomical works to have determined the
duration of all the past geological and cosmical periods, and the length of the all the cycles to
come, till the end of this life-cycle, or the end of the seventh Race.
Having witnessed from heavens that creation is not moving in the desired direction Brahma must
have asked for all such giant creatures be replaced with smaller ones because then they will come
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under the force of nature and may evolve as thinkers in order to survive. This was major design
decision by the creator.
The Second Flood affected the Fourth Root Race (now conveniently regarded by theology as ‗the
accursed race of giants, the Cainites, and the sons of Ham) is that flood which was first perceived
by geology. If one carefully compares the accounts in the various legends of the Chaldees and
other exoteric works of the nations, it will be found that all of them agree with the orthodox
narratives given in the Brahmanical books. In the Satapatha Brâhmana, Manu finds that ―the
Flood had swept away all living creatures, and he alone was left‖ — i.e., the seed of life alone
remained from the previous Mahapralaya, and the Mahabhârata refers simply to the geological
cataclysm which swept away nearly all the Fourth Race to make room for the Fifth.
The sinking of continents and emergence of new lands was major event on earth. The current sea
level is about 130 meters higher than the historical minimum. Historically [17] low levels were
reached during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 20,000 years ago. The last time the sea
level was higher than today was during the Eemian, about 130,000 years ago. The time before
which is known as antediluvian (before the he great flood) which is mentioned in books of many
religions and cultures. As a result of rise of the oceans and pale movements many flourishing
cities became the ocean beds and these people either perished or migrated to new lands. Many
clans of Danavs and Daityas migrated to Patal Loka (Americas) where they again started their
civilizations Such as Maya, Inca, Aztecs etc.
Language plays a vital role in development of society. There are many different type of
languages spoken in the world. Most of them have common roots. During the development of AI
bots of Facebook were shut down after developers discovered that the AI had created its own
unique language that humans can‘t understand. It is a natural capability of intelligence to make a
language more convenient for its own usage. This is why we have diverse languages and accents
in difference social groups. Oldest spoken language was Tamil in the lands connecting India to
Australia. While Tamil was the language of masses and usual conversations Sanskrit was the
language of literature. Sanskrit is the language of heavenly spirits, perfectly crafted and epitome
of linguistic development. Sanskrit posed has two major advantages, one it is lyrical and
secondly it can compress huge amount of information in small couplets. These qualities make it
is easier to be remembered. The text is written in Devnagari script which literally mean the one
used in city of Devas (Gods).
Post antediluvian period saw the advent of fift root race of human beings. HP Blavatsky in
‗Secre Doctrine‘ describes about fifth root race Aryan race (Arya – means Shresta or Superior).
They have emerged after the fourth root race) beginning about 100,000 years ago. Aryan root
race was physically progenerated by the Vaivasvatu Manu. Manu is also known by different
names such as Nuh, Nu, Noah etc. The subraces of the Aryan Fifth Root Race include the first
subrace, the Vedic people which populated India in 60,000 BC; the second subrace, the Arabian,
which migrated to Arabia in 40,000 BC; the third subrace, the Persian, which migrated to Persia
in 30,000 BC; the fourth subrace, the Celts, which migrated to Western Europe beginning in
20,000 BC (the Mycenaean Greeks are regarded as an offshoot of the Celtic subrace that
colonized Southeast Europe); and the fifth subrace, the Teutonic, which also migrated to what is
now Germany beginning in 20,000 BC (the Slavs are regarded as an offshoot of the Teutonic
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Malik, S. S., Role of Consciousness in Creation
subrace that colonized Russia and surrounding areas. All these subraces migrated from a central
location known as city of bridges – a place where lies Gobi desert. The location could even be
the land of Mansrovar lake near Kailash Mountain in Tibbat.
Sanskrit and Vedas were prevalent even before the arrival of Aryans in India. Vedas being the
knowledge which is given by Brhama to Rishis. The culture of new comers was different. The
Vedic Aryans were meditating, Yagya performing, eco-friendly people. The cities (Purs) built by
these people were of material wood and mud. Beautiful cities, bustling with people who were
rich on Dharma, lived happily in the pursuit of intellectual interests. ―आ नो भद्रा: क्रतवो यन्तु
ववश्वत: Let noble thoughts come to us from every side. (Rigveda 1-89-1) A L Basham wrote his
book ‗A wonder that was India‘ about ancient India. During these periods, the major
development of Ayurveda, Siddha medicines, Vastu-shastra, Astronomy, Philosophy etc took
place. The timings of Ramayana and Mahabharta have been carefully calculated by Nilesh Oak
[19]. Period of Ramayana is from 12,240 BCE – 12,196 BCE and Mahabharata War happened in
5,561 BCE. Rest is history. The entire aim here is to present the larger scheme of things and
build up our perspective.
All humans have interbred earlier and also now. All beneficial genes have spread across the
different human races. The human races are just like different models and types of biological
machines with minor variations. The main driving software in all human biological hardware is
the soul. This scheme goes to show that it wouldn‘t help to differentiate the humans just by their
biological machines but they need to be graded with quality or version of the software (Soul).
This signified by the variance of human behavior all across the races. There are criminals, people
with animalistic tendencies, good people, erudite scholars, craftsmen, leaders all across the
human races. No race is best, all are mixture.
Purpose of Creation. One begins to wonder as to what is the purpose of creation. After all,
science and philosophy give credence to logic and reason and nothing else. The purpose would
be discussed in detail in next paper where we would talk about the nature of human body and its
integration with consciousness. However at present, we will contend with the fact that purpose of
creation is to create a mechanism for learning. The mechanism of learning is for software soul or
monad which evolves from a binary spark, keeps on learning by integrating in various types of
organism body vehicles or biological machines.
Alien Interference. The life on earth has been designed by beings from another dimension. This
dimension is dimension of consciousness. The various level of software souls which have been
influencing us are 33 different types of heavenly beings with appropriate organisation in various
planets. The same beings have born on earth as prototype humans and started human race with
purpose given above. The same beings experimented with small insects like ants, white ants
species like how the governance should take place and the society was divided into four social
groups— Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras. In the world today also these
boundaries exist, one who are part of Government and military, the businessmen and associated
workers, craftsmen and farmers and service industry. The heavenly beings have taken different
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roles and incarnations in this world to lead people to knowledge. The human society is also
monitored from the other dimension and some special ones of us humans may have souls that
belong to different heavenly class. You would not be surprised to identify such humans of great
intellect, leadership and ideal human values.
Conclusion
Creation follows three principles, the principle of Mahat, the principle of creation, the principle
of evolution. The principles of acclimtisation, adaptation and evolution are the short, medium
and long term measures for life form to adjust to its surrounding ecosystem.
In the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin postulated principle of natural selection. The principle
of natural selection is indeed a bright observation by Darwin and his theory is mostly right
except that selection is not made by the organisms themselves or it is not autonomous but
interfered by the intelligent design. The word natural itself signifies nature- an unseen force or
entity. This entity can be called nature or divine or Prajapati, by whatever name. The evolution
takes place naturally as an inbuilt principle or property of living beings, as a part of their design.
Therefore, the scheme of world is not creation alone or not evolution alone but both can be seen
as triggering and supplementing processes. This is the major role played by consciousness in
creation.
In the scheme of progressive complexity of life evolved on earth, it is the software soul or monad
which is benefiting from the lives with organism bodies as its vehicles and keeps evolving (by
learning). Human evolution started as different designs, correction, and improvements and
remains a complex and intermingled species. The entire scheme highlights the equality of sexes
and futility of comparisons across the human races.
Received January 14, 2020; Accepted January 25, 2020
References
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/science/neptune-moons-orbit.html
[2] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/aouf-agd121219.php
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism
[4] Bill Bryson- A short History of Nearly Everything
[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth
[6] https://opentextbc.ca/biology/chapter/13-1-how-animals-reproduce/
[7] https://tinyurl.com/sxx7vgs
[8] https://theprint.in/science/teeth-to-dirt-archaeological-discoveries-are-happening-faster-than-everbefore/344248/
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[9] The Secret Doctrine Vol II - H P Blavatsky
[10] http://www.crystalwind.ca/mystical-magical/earth-enigmas/lemuria/the-lost-lands-of-mu-andlemuria
[11] http://www.scientus.org/Wegener-Continental-Drift.html
[12] https://www.livescience.com/37529-continental-drift.html
[13] https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-Tectonics/Chap3-Plate-Margins/Convergent/Continental-Collision
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jambudv%C4%ABpa
[15] https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-find-550-million-year-old-fossilized-digestive-tract-solving-amystery-of-primordial-evolution/
[16] http://ajitvadakayil.blogspot.com/2012/07/maya-inca-aztec-civilizations-decoded.html?m=1
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level
[18] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-artificial-intelligence-aichatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html
[19] https://nileshoak.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/ancient-indian-history-chronology/
[20] https://allyouneedisbiology.wordpress.com/2018/05/20/biodiversity-species/
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207
Article
Revisiting Stock Returns and the Mind:
Digging Deeper into the Data
Ulf Holmberg*+
Abstract
I revisit the findings in Holmberg (2020) and address some of the concerns raised regarding the
results. In particular, I analyze the distributional properties of the daily aggregate out of the
Global Consciousness Projects data (Max[Z]), remove “bad data” due to malfunctioning random
number generators and let global stock market returns interact with Max[Z] in a more tractable
and transparent way. In practice, the "bad data" is removed by the means of truncation and a
comparison between the truncated Max[Z] variable and computer simulated data reveals that
Max[Z] deviates from the computer simulations in ways that seem consistent with the global
consciousness projects hypothesis. It is also found that Max[Z] significantly correlates linearly
with global stock market returns and that Max[Z]:s stochastic process itself is affected by market
volatility. Since meaningful variations in Max[Z] suggest that the mind can stretch out of beyond
the boundaries of our head, the results put doubt on the prevailing paradigm with regards to
consciousness and highlights the need for much more research.
Keywords: Mind, random number generator, Global Consciousness Project, stock market return.
1. Introduction
In Holmberg (2020) it was found that stock market returns covary with variations in the random
numbers produced by the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). The covariation was found by
correlating the novel Max[Z] variable with several well-known stock market index return series
and even though the results where strong and robust, concerns were raised with regards to the
validity of the results. In this paper, I address these concerns.
The hypothesis underlying the GCP is that events which elicit widespread emotion or draw the
simultaneous attention of large numbers of people, may affect the output of the hardware
generated random numbers in a statistically significant way. As such, the GCP data hypothesis
suggests that the mind can affect matter at a distance. This is a not entirely uncontroversial
hypothesis as the possibility that the mind can do so could challenge our current understanding
of physics. Most scientists thus demand a very high standard of evidence and to date, published
results that seem to validate the GCP data hypothesis are in general regarded as invalid and put
to question (see, e.g., Scargle, 2002). 1 The results presented in Holmberg (2020) however
appears to validate some of the claims made by the GCP and since the prevailing working
hypothesis, in most sciences, is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain and a result
*Correspondence: Ulf Holmberg, Independent Researcher, Sweden. Email: ulf.e.holmberg@me.com
+ The author thanks for the comments received by Dean Radin and Roger D. Nelson.
1
See, e.g., Radin (2002) and Nelson and Bancel (2011) for research supporting the GCP data hypotheses.
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of physical arrangements and information processing patters alone, the results suggested that the
current paradigm with regards to consciousness needed to be discussed.2
After its publication however, the author received several comments and concerns pointing out
the fact that the study had included observations affected by malfunctioning random number
generators (RNG). Since such malfunctions may result in unreasonably large values on the daily
GCP data aggregate studied, concerns were raised with regards to the validity of its results.
Furthermore, since an unspecified data driven polynomial was used to link the GCP data
aggregate to global stock market returns, criticism was put forward with regards to the
complexity of the statistical models used as it made the results unnecessarily opaque.
In this paper I seek to address these concerns as I redo part of the analysis after taking the
comments received into consideration. To this end, I begin with analyzing the distributional
characteristics of computer simulated data from a data generating process that mimics the
process underlying the Max[Z] variable. The simulations, together with sound statistical
reasoning, are used to find a reasonable truncation point such that the variable is cleansed from
“bad data”. This truncated Max[Z] variable is then linked to global returns linearly such that the
results are kept more tractable.
The revised analysis using the truncated variable again shows that global stock market returns
significantly correlates with Max[Z] (the daily aggregate out of the GCP data). As such, it is
concluded that the qualitative implications of the findings in Holmberg (2020) are likely to hold
true and in this paper, I also explore the nature of the found correlation. Here it is found that
seems to be related to market volatility, a result that could be attributed the finding that the
stochastic Max[Z] process itself is affected by market volatility.
The paper is organized as follows. The next section discusses consciousness, the GCP data and
how and why it should be related to global stock market returns. This is followed by a section
discussing the Max[Z] variable in Holmberg (2020) in more detail which is followed by a section
linking the truncated Max[Z] to global stock market returns. The paper ends with a discussion on
the results.
2. Consciousness, the GCP and Stock Market Returns
Consciousness is perhaps one of our greatest mysteries as no one knows what it is, what it does
or even how it has emerged. The prevailing working hypothesis, in most sciences, is however
that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain and a result of physical arrangements and
information processing patters (see, e.g., Güzeldere, 1997). This viewpoint rests on the existence
of neural correlates (see, e.g., Cotterill, 2001; Llinás, 2002 and Koch, 2004 among others) but
how the brain alone can produce our subjective experiences (such as the feeling of warmth, cold
or pain) is not yet understood. It is even a philosophical mystery how unconsciousness matter
can give rise to sentient beings and this unsolved philosophical conundrum is often referred to as
the “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers, 1995; 2003).
2
This especially if its results are seen together with the many results produced by the GCP.
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From the above it can be read that our understandings of consciousness are incomplete and that
much more research is needed. It could also be understood that most studies on consciousness
focus on explaining an individual’s consciousness experience and not the will of the many,
which arguably is what determines the market price of a good or service (to be studied herein)
even though one notable exemption exists namely, the collective consciousness concept within
the field of sociology (Durkheim,1893).3
There does however exist several alternative theories on consciousness, theories that opens for
the possibility of the mind stretching out beyond our heads. It could also be noted that physics
allows for this possibility as the so called “observer effect” in quantum mechanics (a wellestablished physical property of matter) describes that the observation of a quantum phenomenon
changes the phenomenon observed and studied. Even though this does not necessarily require a
conscious observer, the observer effect seems to suggest that only the measurement of an object
(or event) onsets the transition from the "possible" to the "actual" as the famous “wave function”
collapses. A parsimonious interpretation of these results thus suggests that human measurement
at a distance affects quantum systems at a distance and the question thus becomes if
consciousness itself could be said to be an apparatus of measurement.4
That consciousness could have the ability to extend outside a human head and interact with
matter has been studied within the research field of parapsychology (see, e.g., Nelson, Jahn and
Dunne; 1986; Radin et. al., 2006 and Dunne and Jahn, 2007) and the results from these studies
suggests that consciousness indeed has the ability to interact with matter as it was found to affect
physical random number generators at a distance. Resting on such findings, Roger D. Nelson
developed the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) to investigate if this human machine
interaction could pick up the emotional response of a large number of human’s coherent
attention. Up to date the GCP has produced remarkable results as the projects hardware
generated random numbers indeed seem to be influenced by large global emotional events
(Nelson and Bancel, 2011).
The GCP is an international and multidisciplinary collaboration project that generates and
collects random number data continuously from a network of physical random number
generators at up to 70 locations around the world.5 The random numbers are generated using a
quantum tunneling technique and the hypothesis underlying the GCP is that events which elicit
widespread emotion or draw the simultaneous attention of large numbers of people, may affect
the output of the hardware generated random numbers in a statistically significant way.6 The idea
is thus that if the mind can stretch out beyond our heads and affect random number generators at
a distance, it could be true that the mind could do so unconsciously and unintentionally such that
large emotional events could affect hardware generated random numbers in a way that gets
“picked up” and made visible in the numbers generated from it.
3
Perhaps the problem with explaining what consciousness originate from the problems faced in the definition of the concept. It
could for instance be defined as the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings but since such a definition
(or similar versions of it) are imprecise, the term has also been defined in terms of sentience alone e.g. awareness, qualia and
subjectivity.
4
It is noted that this interpretation of the observer effect is controversial within the field of physics.
5
The exact number of active physical random number generators tend to vary over time.
6
Please visit https://nooshere.princton.edu/reg for details on the physical RNGs.
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Even though the GCP, and the data generated from the project, are subject to much debate one
thing is clear: the events that are claimed to be picked up by the GCPs data should also affect
daily stock market returns. This since market sentiment affects market prices (Shiller, 2017) and
since sentiment is likely to be affected by strong collective emotion and intent. Thus, the global
events that are claimed to affect the GCPs data should also, in principal, to some degree covary
with changes to global stock market valuations. This was studied for in Holmberg (2020) in
which the daily returns from several global stock market indexes where correlated with an
aggregate daily GCP data variable labeled Max[Z]. In the study, it was indeed found that they
did covary.
3. The Max[Z] Variable: What It Is and What It Measures
Max[Z] is derived out of the huge bulk of second-by-second data provided for and made publicly
available by the GCP.7 The GCP is an international and multidisciplinary collaboration project
that generates and collects random number data continuously from a network of physical random
number generators (RNG:s). The random numbers are generated using quantum tunneling
techniques and the hypothesis underlying the GCP is that events which elicit widespread emotion
or draw the simultaneous attention of large numbers of people may affect the output of the
hardware generated random numbers in a statistically significant way. As discussed above and as
argued for in Holmberg (2020), such events should also affect investor and market sentiment and
thus also daily stock market returns. Resting on this insight, the daily Max[Z] variable was
constructed which made it possible to correlate unexpected GCP data changes with daily stock
market returns.
The Max[Z] variable is an aggregate measure of daily large and unexpected random values
obtained from several RNGs spread out all over the world. In order to get a more precises
understanding of it, denote a single random number from an individual RNG at time as
,
for = 1,2, … where is the total number of operating RNGs at that time. Also acknowledge
that each individual RNG produces a random number between 0 and 200 every second and that
the random numbers have an expected value of = 100 and a variance of
= 50. From this,
a standardized value can be calculated by simply subtracting the mean and dividing it with the
square root of its variance (i.e., its standard deviation). 8 As such, the GCP produces
standardized random numbers ( , ) every second ( ). Thus, a method is needed to aggregate the
values over time and to this end, I do as the GCP and bundle the data into 15-minute data chunks
and derive a 15-minute (900 seconds) non-negative aggregate using Stouffer's Z-score method
(Stouffer, 1949):
=
7
8
∑ #$%% ∑"
,
∗ !!
.
The data can be downloaded from http://noosphere.princeton.edu/.
&'( )*
More formally, the standardized random numbers are defined as , = + , .
,
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Since each individual standardized value ( , ) should be considered as a random draw from the
standard normal distribution and since the aggregation of individual numbers is done using the
square root of summed squared standardized values;
can be viewed upon as the absolute value
of a random draw from a standard normal distribution. 9 Measuring
at the end of each 15minute interval, 96 intraday measurements are made daily such that the Max[Z] is the 24-hour
maximum from 96 absolute valued random draws from a standard normal distribution.10
Understanding how Max[Z] is constructed is useful since knowledge on the data generating
process can be used to computer simulate Max[Z]:s theoretical distributional properties. Such a
distribution can then be used for both identifying unreasonably large observations (bad data) as
well as for understanding in which ways, if any, Max[Z] deviates from computer simulated data.
To this end, I use Excel to produce daily simulated values by simulating 96 random numbers
from a standard normal distribution, on which I take the maximum value out of their absolute
values.
Table 1 presents descriptive data on 10 000 000 computer simulated such random draws (each
draw being the maximum out of 96 individual draws) i.e. a random process constructed to mimic
the data generating process underlying Max[Z] would be created solely due to chance. As can be
seen, the computer simulations indeed suggest that the original Max[Z] variable includes very
large values and since malfunctioning physical RNGs will produce unreasonably large numbers,
such large values should probably be excluded. Why they should be excluded can also be
understood from the fact that if the RNGs that produces the numbers malfunctions, they could
produce “corner values” and deliver values close to 0 or 200. In such cases, the absolute value
out of each standardized random value would be unreasonably large which in turn would
influence the aggregate
variable from which Max[Z] is derived. It is thus reasonable to
truncate Max[Z] in order to cleanse the series from such “bad data”.
Table 1. Descriptive data on the computer simulations and Max[Z]
Average
Median
Std. Dev.
Minimum
Maximum
Skewness
Kurtosis
Computer simulated
data
2.73
2.68
0.40
1.00
6.06
0.70
0.90
Max[Z]
Truncated Max[Z]
3.04
2.71
3.99
1.13
94.48
16.39
294.17
2.75
2.70
0.41
1.13
5.69
0.85
1.95
Note: The simulated data results rests on 10 000 000 computer simulated random draws from a process that mimics Max[Z]:s construction The
Max[Z] data is derived out of 7936 daily observations and the truncated Max[Z] out of 7849 daily observations between 1999-01-04 and 202012-31.
.
Noting that a value of 6 is a six-sigma event for , , it is also acknowledged that obtaining
values larger than so is unlikely unless they are the result of malfunctioning RNGs. Thus,
9
The statistically bewandered could recognise this as a chi distribution.
In practice, the Z-scores are obtained from the column “All Egg Composite” from the Daily Tables section on the GCP
webpage.
10
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Holmberg, U., Revisiting Stock Returns and the Mind: Digging Deeper into the Data
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Max[Z] is truncated at this value and as can be seen in Table 1, the truncated Max[Z] variable
has distributional properties that closely resembles its computer simulated counterpart even
though its average and median values are slightly larger. As it is claimed that the random
numbers produced by the GCP will be affected by events “outside” the data generating process
discussed above and since such events most likely will result in larger Max[Z] values; these
distributional characteristics can be said to be consistent with the GCP hypothesis. Note also that
truncated Max[Z] is both more positively skewed and has a larger kurtosis than the computer
simulated data which implies that values larger than the median materialize more often, also this
in accordance with the GCP data hypothesis.
Figure 1 depicts the truncated Max[Z] variable over time and from the figure it can be seen that
the time series is stationary. 11 It is however also found that occasional large values remain but a
more detailed analysis of data on the dates on which these observations are retrieved reveals that
the RNG:s indeed did function properly during those dates. As such, the observations are
regarded as valid and kept for the analysis below.
Figure 1. The truncated Max[Z] process
Note: The truncated Max[Z] represents 7849 daily values smaller than six between 1999-01-04 and 2020-12-31.
In Figure 2 the truncated Max[Z] variables distribution is depicted and compared with the
simulated data’s distribution. Here it can be seen that they are mostly distributed similarly. But,
if the area around the distribution’s mode is more closely analyzed, a tendency towards larger
values can be seen as distributional mass is “pushed” over from the left side over to the
distributions right side. 12 Furthermore, anomalies can also be seen at the “edge” of the
distribution and it seems like the truncated Max[Z] variable has a tendency to materialize larger
11
This is confirmed through the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test as the null hypothesis that Max[Z] has a unit root is strongly
rejected (P-value<0.000).
12
The mode of a continuous probability distribution is the distributions local maximum value i.e. its peak.
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Holmberg, U., Revisiting Stock Returns and the Mind: Digging Deeper into the Data
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values more often than supported by the underlying data generating process; also this consistent
with the GCP hypothesis.
Figure 2. Distribution of the truncated Max[Z] and its simulated counterpart
(a)
Full distribution
(b)
Around the mode
(c)
At the edge
Note: The distributions are approximated from histograms using bins between 1 and 6 in increments of 0.1. The
simulated data results rests on 11 20 000 computer simulated random draws from a process that mimics Max[Z]:s
construction. The truncated Max[Z] variables descriptive data is calculated out of the 7849 daily values between
1999-01-04 and 2020-12-31.
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Thus, some small differences between the truncated Max[Z] variable and its computer simulated
counterpart is found, differences that correspond well with what one would expect if the
hypothesis underlying the GCP data would be true. The question thus becomes if these
differences are the result of coherent attention of a large number of people or if they are simply
due to chance. As argued for in Holmberg (2020), market sentiment may also be affected by such
events and thus also stock prices. 13 As such, stock market returns can be used for validating the
GCP data hypothesis and I thus revisit this topic by analyzing the truncated daily Max[Z]
variable and its covariation with two well-known global stock market indexes and their daily
returns.
4. The Truncated Max[Z] and Global Stock Market Returns
It is first acknowledged that no theoretical functional form that links Max[Z] with stock market
returns yet exists. This can however be bypassed by simply acknowledging that any unknown
functional form can be approximated using a polynomial function (Taylor, 1715).14 In Holmberg
(2020), the data was allowed to determine the polynomial but as this resulted in somewhat
opaque linkages, I in here keep the results tractable and use the following linear equation:
-. = / + γ-.#2 + 3456[ . ] + 9(456[ . ] × - ,.#2 ) + ; ,. ,
(1)
where -. is an indexes simple return, γ the autocorrelation coefficient, 3 returns dependence with
the present dates truncated Max[Z], 9 the potential interaction effect and where ; ,. is a random
error term subject to the usual assumptions. 15 Note that I in Equation (1) allow for autocorrelated
returns, a likely outcome since market wide information tends to get incorporated gradually
causing serial correlation in the short term (see, e.g., Chordia and Swaminathan, 2000, Sias and
Starks; 1997; and Lo and MacKinlay, 1990 for a more detailed discussion). Note also that I study
also a version in which the potential interaction effect ( 9) is ignored making the linkage
completely linear.
I study two global stock market indexes namely the S&P Global 1200 index and the Dow Jones
Global index. Even though both these indexes capture the performance of stock markets
globally, they are constructed differently and will display slightly different daily return values.
The S&P Global 1200 index for instance seeks to capture about 70% of global market
capitalization while the Dow Jones Global index focuses on stocks traded globally and targets a
95% coverage of markets open to foreign investment. Table 2 displays descriptive data on the
daily returns from both these indexes and as can be seen, they exhibit the usual distributional
properties as they both have positive daily averages, are slightly negatively skewed and exhibit
large excess kurtosis. The small, yet positive daily average indicates that global equity prices
have been subject to trend growth, the negative skewness that returns have been subject to
13
Shiller (2017) argued for the importance of sentiment as investors’ optimistic or pessimistic beliefs about the stock markets
may directly influence prices
14
A Taylor series is a series expansion of a function about a point that allows for an approximation of functional dependence.
15
I let -. = (<. ⁄<.#2 ) − 1 where < is the stock market index value at time t i.e. I use simple returns. As such, the results are
comparable with the findings in Holmberg (2020).
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215
frequent small gains and a few extreme losses while the excess kurtosis suggests that returns are
leptokurtic with some extreme values.
Table 2. Descriptive data on the global stock market indexes returns
Mean
Median
Std. Dev.
Minimum
Maximum
Skewness
Kurtosis
S&P Global 1200
0.02%
0.06%
1.04%
-9.49%
9.76%
-0.37
10.40
Dow Jones Global
0.02%
0.04%
1.02%
-9.49%
9.07%
-0.47
10.20
Note: The number of observations for S&P Global is 5599 and 5539 for Dow jones Global
Equation (1) is estimated using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and due to possibly of
heteroskedastic and/or autocorrelated residuals, the HAC-Newey-West estimator (Newey and
West; 1987) for standard errors is used. 16 Table 3 presents the results and as can be read from the
table the results confirm the qualitative findings in Holmberg (2020) since also the truncated
Max[Z] variable correlates significantly with global stock market returns. In fact, both the S&P
Global 1200 and the Dow Jones Global index returns are positively and significantly affected by
the present dates (truncated) Max[Z] value and by focusing on the “No interaction” model it can
be read that a one-units increase in Max[Z] tends to increase global returns with between 0.05
and 0.06 percent. Note also that the autocorrelation coefficient is positive and significant and that
if the interaction term (9 ) is included (“With interaction”), the size of the autocorrelation
coefficient increases significantly. The increase is however severely dampened by large Max[Z]
values since the interaction terms are negative and significant. That Max[Z] interacts with past
stock markets returns makes the interpretation of the results less obvious and I thus proceed with
deriving the marginal effects of the interacting variables.
The marginal effects can be found by taking the partial derivative of Equation (1). By doing so it
is found that the marginal effect on daily returns due to changes in past returns is C-. ⁄C-.#2 =
γ + 9456[ . ] and that the marginal effect due to a change in Max[Z] is C-. ⁄C456[ . ] = 3 +
9-.#2 . Figure 3 illustrates these marginal effects and here it can be seen that past returns adds
positively to today’s returns only if Max[Z] is lower than 3.5 (Figure 3a). As most anomalies
found with regards to Max[Z] occurred for lesser values then so (Figure 2) it can be said that
most events that elevate Max[Z] interacts with past returns in a way that results in a positive
marginal effect in past yesterday’s returns. But if Max[Z] is larger than 3.5, a rarity as only about
6.2% of the observations has such large values, yesterday’s returns contribute negatively to
today’s returns. Turning to the “With interaction” models’ marginal effect of Max[Z] (Figure
3b), it is noted that Max[Z] contributes positively to today’s returns only if yesterday’s returns
16
The Breush-Pagan Heteroskedasticity Test (Breush and Pagan 1979) strongly rejects that the returns series are
homoscedastic.
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are negative. It thus seems like Max[Z] acts a bit as a “shock absorber” that stabilizes returns
within a certain interval. 17
Table 3. Global stock market index returns and Max[Z]
P-values in parenthesis
D
E
F
G
HI
S&P Global 1200
No interaction
With interaction
-0.0015
-0.0016
(0.0906)
(0.0831)
0.0739
0.3655
(0.0141)
(0.0057)
0.0006
0.0006
(0.0493)
(0.0454)
-0.1075
(0.0367)
0.61%
0.81%
Dow Jones Global
No interaction
With interaction
-0.0012
-0.0013
(0.1652)
(0.1471)
0.0948
0.4299
(0.0008)
(0.0009)
0.0005
0.0005
(0.1008)
(0.0890)
-0.1235
(0.0147)
0.95%
1.20%
Note: P-values calculated from the t-distribution using HAC standard errors. Estimates based on 5599 (S&P Global) or 5539
(Dow Jones Global) covering the period 1999-01-04 to 2020-12-31
Furthermore, it is noted that the research hypothesis that Max[Z] has no effect on global stock
returns (i.e. that 3 =0) is rejected on the ten percent significance level for the Dow Jones Global
index (with interaction) and on the five percent level for the S&P Global 1200 (both models).18
Even though they clearly are significant, between one in ten or one in twenty hypothesis tests
using the “No interaction” models can be expected to show a false positive and signal
significance even though no true dependence exists. Thus, the results are not strong enough to
rule out the possibility that the dependence found is due to chance alone. The practical and
philosophical implications of these results thus call for a further investigation on the origins of
the found significance.
Keeping the results tractable, the nature of 3: s significance in Table 3 is investigated by
focusing on the “No interaction” model and by redoing the analyses on chunks of one year
data.19 Thus, the model in Equation (1) is re-estimated without the interaction term on the two
global stock market indexes 24 times such that 48 annual estimates on 3 are retrieved. Figure 4
depicts the 3:s P-values together with the return’s annual standard deviations and by simply “eye
bowling” the figure it can be understood that more estimates are significant than what is
expected due to chance. In fact, almost 16 percent of the obtained estimates are significant at the
17
One way of thinking about it is that events that elevate Max[Z] also affects investor sentiment such that emotion driven daily
valuations becomes less pronounced.
18
Note that the interaction effect (9) in general has a lower P-value than 3. Since lagged daily returns values already are
included in both interaction models, also these P-value can be used for testing for the validity of the GCP data hypothesis. As
such, the probability that the GCP data hypothesis is due to chance alone is found to be between 1.5 (Dow Jones Global) and
3.7 (S&P Global 1200) percent.
19
The annual sample periods always begin on the 1st of January and end on the 31st of December each year.
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ten percent level while 9 percent are significant at the five prevent level; results that adds weight
to the finding that 3 L 0.20
Figure 3. Marginal effects on the model with interaction
a) GMN ⁄GMN#O
b) GMN ⁄GPQR[S]N
Since the P-values seem to decrease when standard deviations increase, the results also suggest
that Max[Z] interacts with global stock market returns only during turbulent times when daily
stock market returns are volatile. A cluster analysis on the data in Figure 4 confirms this
observation as such an analysis suggests that the estimates can be divide into two distinct
clusters. Furthermore, it is found that none of the 3 estimates in the low standard deviation
cluster (Cluster 1) have a low enough P-value for significance while 64 percent of the estimates
in the cluster for volatile years (Cluster 2) are significant. It also looks like the year 2008 is an
“odd fellow” and that this year possibly should be viewed upon as an outlier. This is thus
investigated by redoing the regression analysis in Table 3 with the inclusion of an indicator
variable on all 2008 observations and from the redone analysis it is found that the indicator
variable is significant at the five percent and that all P-values decrease. This in turn results in that
3 becomes significant at the ten percent level for also the Dow Jones Global index for “No
interaction” model. The results also seem to point towards that the year 2008 should be viewed
as special and if it is excluded from the cluster comparison done above it is found that 78 percent
of the estimates in Cluster 2 are significant.
20
A P-value of (say) 10 percent suggests that 10 percent of the hypothesis tests are significant only due to chance. The results in Table 3
are thus considered valid if more than 10 percent of the annual estimates in Figure 3 are significant at the 10 percent level.
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Figure 4. P-values are dependent on market volatility
Note: Estimates are classified into clusters using the k-means cluster method (MacQueen; 1967) and the P-values are
calculated from the t-distribution using HAC standard errors.
The results suggest that volatility is an almost a necessary condition for significance and that the
year 2008 should be treated as a special year.21 This opens up to questions with regards to the
behavior of the Max[Z] process itself and I thus proceed with analyzing the stochastic Max[Z]
process in more detail. 22 In the analysis of Max[Z]:s stochastic process, I acknowledge the need
for a daily measure of market volatility if volatility is to be correlated with the Max[Z] process.
To this end, I use the results in Pagan and Schwert (1990), Rogers et al. (1994) and Ghysels et al.
(2006) and proxy daily volatility using squared daily returns. Furthermore, I note that Max[Z] is
stationary and that its stochastic process can be described using one polynomial for the processes
autoregression (AR) part and one for its moving average (MA) part (Shumway and Stroffer;
2010). Thus, the Max[Z] process is parsimoniously written as:
456[ . ] = T + ;. + ∑ U 456[ .# ] + ∑ V W.# + X
.# ,
(2)
where ; are white noise error terms, U parameters for the autoregressive component, V the
moving average parameters and where X is a parameter linking Max[Z] to daily stock market
volatility ( .# ).
Table 4 presents Maximum Likelihood estimates on the parameters in Equation (2) and as can be
seen, the Max[Z] variable can be described using its own values as a ARMA(1,1) process. The
results in the table also confirm the findings in Figure 3 as it is found that market volatility plays
a significant role in explaining Max[Z]:s stochastic process. In particular, it is found that Max[Z]
is influenced by yesterday’s and tomorrow’s volatility but that it is unaffected by todays
volatility. That the Max[Z] process is influenced by volatility can possibly be explained by
acknowledging that financial markets tend to “pick up” the publics general mood (market
sentiment) and adjust prices accordingly. Thus, what should affect Max[Z] should also affect
market prices (the results in Table 3) which in turn also should affect daily market volatility.
The result that the past and future but not the presents volatility affects the Max[Z] process does
however require some additional explanation. To this end, assume that an event that results in
21
22
In September 2008 the bank Lehman Brothers unexpectedly collapsed which forced the onset of the global financial crisis.
The analysis is done on the truncated Max[Z] variable.
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changes to coherent attention of a large number of people occurs at time t. Assume further that
the event gets picked up by the GCP:s RNG:s which in turn results in a slight increase in
Max[Z]. Recalling that a change in Max[Z] will affect global returns in time t (Table 3) the event
will also affect squared returns which is what is used as a proxy for the present date’s volatility.
But, as no significant correlation is found with regards to today’s volatility on the Max[Z]
process (Table 4) these results point towards the direction of causality; Max[Z] affects market
prices while the Max[Z] process is unaffected by changes in (squared) returns.
Table 4. The Max[Z] process and its dependence with market volatility
P values in parenthesis
Y
Z
[
HI
Y
Z
[
_`
HI
AR(1)
2.7471
(<0.01)
0.0273
(0.0163)
-
MA(1)
2.7471
(<0.01)
0.0264
(0.0206)
-
ARMA(1,1)
2.7471
(<0.01)
0.8761
(<0.01)
-0.8514
(<0.01)
0.07%
0.07%
0.26%
S&P Global 1200
Dow Jones Global
] IN
] IN
] IN^O
\
] IN#O
] IN^O
\
] IN#O
\
\
\
\
2.7501
2.7484
2.7498
2.7505
2.7490
2.7498
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
0.8709
0.8740
0.8809
0.8802
0.8724
0.8787
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
-0.8466
-0.8496
-0.8481
-0.8552
-0.8574
-0.8567
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
(<0.01)
-28.327
-11.853
-23.537
-32.304
-16.837
-23.662
(0.0283)
(0.5136)
(0.0945)
(0.0195)
(0.3742)
(0.1090)
0.33%
0.27%
0.31%
0.34%
0.28%
0.30%
Note: ARMA Maximum Likelihood using the OPG – BHHH optimization method. Estimates based on 5599 (S&P
Global) or 5539 (Dow Jones Global) covering the period 1999-01-04 to 2020-12-31
Since market price affecting information will be incorporated into the price gradually, the events
impact on returns is also likely to be carried over to the next day, affecting tomorrow’s volatility
through the autocorrelation coefficient (γ) in Equation (1). Thus, it is probable that the Max[Z]
processes dependence on tomorrows volatility originate from the events impact on tomorrows
returns. If so, the relative size of returns daily autocorrelation in Table 3 could be used to
determine the relative size of the parameter determining the size of the impact of tomorrows
volatility in Table 4. This is exactly what is found since a is 17 percent larger while X.^2 is 14
percent larger for Dow Jones Global compared with for S&P Global 1200. This found
dependence could also be why yesterday’s returns correlate with today’s Max[Z] (9 in Table 3),
a claim supported by the finding that the index with the lowest P-value on 9 in Table 3 (Dow
Jones Global) also is the index on which tomorrow’s volatility interacts the strongest with the
Max[Z] process
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Taken together, the results suggest that it is reasonable to include measures of market volatility
in models that seek to disentangle the Max[Z] variables effect on global stock market returns. I
thus use the findings above and estimate a model that includes lagged squared returns as a proxy
for volatility while also acknowledging that the year 2008 can be regarded as a special:
- ,. = / + a- ,.#2 + 3 456[ . ]+ 9(456[ . ] × - ,.#2 ) + V-.#2 + bc %%d + ; ,. .
(3)
Table 5 presents estimates on Equation (3) using OLS with HAC standard errors and a
comparison with Table 3 reveals that the P-values again decrease as the model’s coefficients of
determination ( ) increases. The findings thus suggest that global stock market returns are
affected by the present days Max[Z] and that this dependence is strengthened when Max[Z]:s
dependence with market volatility is accounted for.
Table 5. Global stock market index estimates with volatility measures
P values in parenthesis
D
a
3
9
V
b
HI
S&P, Global 1200
No interaction
-0.0017
(0.0624)
0.0770
(0.0036)
0.0007
(0.0358)
1.5982
(0.0032)
-0.0026
(0.0232)
1.11%
Interaction
-0.0017
(0.0606)
0.3330
(0.0093)
0.0007
(0.0341)
-0.0946
(0.0499)
1.4587
(0.0041)
-0.0026
(0.0230)
1.26%
Dow Jones, Global
No interaction
Interaction
-0.0014
-0.0014
(0.1107)
(0.1041)
0.1005
0.3936
(0.0000)
(0.0016)
0.0005
0.0006
(0.0750)
(0.0683)
-0.1083
(0.0210)
1.9469
1.7899
(0.0003)
(0.0005)
-0.0028
-0.0028
(0.0184)
(0.0183)
1.58%
1.78%
Note: P-values calculated from the t-distribution using HAC standard errors. Estimates based on 5599 (S&P Global) or 5539 (Dow Jones
Global) covering the period 1999-01-04 to 2020-12-31
5. Concluding remarks
This paper addresses some of the concerns made with regards to the results in Holmberg (2020).
The results presented herein confirm its finding that global stock market returns correlate with
Max[Z] and since the Max[Z] variable is derived out of hardware generated random numbers
produced by the GCP, the results suggest that consciousness has the ability to stretch out beyond
our heads and affect hardware generated random numbers at a distance.
I begin with analyzing the distributional properties of computer simulated data derived from a
data generating process that mimics the process underlying the Max[Z] variable. From the
computer simulated data, a level at which Max[Z] should be truncated in order to remove
potential “bad data” influenced by malfunctioning RNG:s is found. By comparing the truncated
Max[Z] variable with its computer simulated counterpart it is found that the truncated Max[Z]
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has both a slightly larger average and median value than it simulated counterpart, is more
positively skewed an exhibits larger kurtosis. As the GCP hypothesis suggests that events of
coherent attention of a large number of people at times will result in slightly larger Max[Z]
values, these are statistical properties that resonate well with what could be expected if the
hypothesis underlying the GCP would hold true.
Given these results, I redo parts of the analysis in Holmberg (2020) and find that also the
truncated Max[Z] variable correlates significantly with global stock market returns. Furthermore,
the Max[Z]:s stochastic process is itself found to be affected by daily market volatility and by
including a proxy measure of daily market volatility it is found that the models fit can be
improved. This suggest that statistical models can be further developed by simply
acknowledging that volatility interacts with Max[Z] while Max[Z] affects returns. Perhaps
Max[Z]:s interaction with volatility can be more precisely accounted for using versions of
autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) models; an interesting avenue for future
research to explore.
The findings in this paper thus confirms the qualitative results in Holmberg (2020) and adds
evidence to the hypothesis underlying the GCP. As the GCP hypothesis suggests that the mind
can affect matter at a distance, the results are not supported by our current understandings of
consciousness. I am thus left with two unanswered fundamental questions: why and how? What
is the mechanism underlying the mind-matter interaction and why does the mind have the ability
to do so?
The prevailing working hypothesis with regards to consciousness states that it is an
epiphenomenon of the brain and a result of physical arrangements and information processing
patters. This explanation does thus not allow for the possibility of mind-matter interaction of the
sort suggested by the results in this paper. It is also unlikely that the results can be explained
using electromagnetic theories of consciousness (see, e.g., Pocket, 2012 and McFadden, 2002)
since the electromagnetic field produced by the brain is not strong enough to affect matter a
distance. Thus, one needs to look elsewhere and begin exploring alternative ideas on the nature
of consciousness.
Perhaps coherent attention of a large number of people impacts some unexplored consciousness
field of sorts and that ripples in this field has the ability to affect matter at a distance; or perhaps
the mind projects a field of its own with the ability to affect matter at a distance. Whatever its
cause, the results suggest that the prevailing paradigm with regards to consciousness needs to be
discussed as the results cannot be understood using our current understanding of consciousness
alone.
Received June 15, 2021; Accepted June 26, 2021
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Intelligent Minds
Article
Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with
Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
Intelligent Minds
Tariq Khan*
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE
Abstract
A constructor algorithm is presented that, after an initial bootstrap instantiation, may describe
many aspects of our Universe. Memory is a foundational aspect of this short algorithm and is
considered as a bridge between the physical Universe and intelligent minds. Nature is speculated
to have copied the constructor algorithm for the benefit of intelligence in complex minds. The
reoccurring presence of the Fibonacci Sequence and π are shown as derivative of the constructor
algorithm. Human intelligence is described as arising from changes in working memory in the
mind via cyclical serotonin levels in the brain.
Keywords: Mind, Universe, Memory, constructor algorithm, bridge, intelligence.
All that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
Time is but memory in the making
-- Vladimir Nabokov
The concept of the computing universe is still just a hypothesis; nothing has been proved.
However, I am confident that this idea can help unveil the secrets of nature.
-- Konrad Zuse, Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space)
So how can a brain perform difficult tasks in one hundred steps that the largest parallel computer
imaginable can’t solve in a million or a billion steps? The answer is that the brain doesn’t
“compute” the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory. …The entire cortex is
a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all.
-- Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence
Other, less abstract approaches to improving creativity center around the importance of
serotonin. According to research... serotonin levels are tied to creativity... a gene pertaining to
serotonin, known as TPH1, is associated with “figural” creativity — or creativity regarding
shapes, diagrams, and drawings.
-- Jandy Le and Michael Xiong, The Scientific Origin of Creativity
*Correspondence: Tariq Khan, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA.
E-mail: tariqkhanomaha@gmail.com
ISSN: 2153-8212
Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
Intelligent Minds
It is a great ball resting on the flat back of the world turtle.” “Ah yes, but what does the world
turtle stand on?” “On the back of a still larger turtle.” “Yes, but what does he stand on?” “A
very perceptive question. But it’s no use, mister; it’s turtles all the way down.
-- Carl Sagan, Gott and the Turtles
On the shoulders of giants, many a great mind has sought a Grand Unified Theory to explain our
reality. Similar minds have also suspected that our Universe or reality had origins from a simple
start e.g., a Big Bang or cellular automata rule set (Figure 1 and Figure 2).
Figure 1. An initial dream of an origin to reality via binary mathematics: “2, 3, 4, 5, etc.
0. Omnibus ex nihilo ducendis sufficit unum.” (To make all things from nothing, unity
suffices) from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s imago creationis [12 ]. Source: Mutalik, P.
(November 24, 2021). Why e, the Transcendental Math Constant, Is Just the Best. Quanta
Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-eulers-number-is-justthe-best-20211124 December 20, 2021.
So perhaps there is a simple equation or algorithm that can explain features that we find in our
reality. This work presents a model using very simple pseudo-code, and an initial intelligence
(required to bootstrap initiate the repeating code), as another template in this same theoretical
direction.
Academic and scientific culture derides any mention of a primordial consciousness, mind, or
God-like intelligence but, although tremendous progress has been made in terms of unifying
forces in our Universe, the goal of a simple and primordial equation or theory has remained
elusive, as has an explanation for human consciousness.
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
Intelligent Minds
Figure 2. Cellular automata examples start with simple “a priori rules” (cuts or decisions)
and then grow into complex patterns and structures; primordial rules determine the future
evolution of structure. Source: Rule 30 Cellular Automata image retrieved from Wolfram
Mathworld. Retrieved from: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/CellularAutomaton.html on
December 20, 2021.
This model imagines an initial intelligence that may inherently exist “a priori” or before the very
creation of our Universe - akin to a mind in a Platonic dualist world. This intelligence could be
ever-present but is required, at the very least, to bootstrap our algorithm “out of nothing” to
begin the creation of our Universe, akin to the starting point of Set Theory. Echoing writings of
Descartes, we can imagine a primordial awareness or intelligence that can identify and
distinguish itself (SELF) from that-which-is-not-itself (NOT-SELF). This “primordial cut” is
considered an instantiation act and would minimally require - simultaneously or beforehand - at
least two “units of memory” - that may or may not be internal to our physical Universe. From
this starting point, our simple algorithm can be used to explain a vast set of features present in
our reality after this origin act.
Consider a simple constructor algorithm. The term constructor borrowed from the JAVA “object
oriented” programming language subroutine and from the name of theoretical work by Oxford
quantum physicist David Deutsch. In the Biblical book of Genesis 1:3 we have the famous
existential line of “Let there be light.” But note that various elements are involved in this
statement. There is the mind of a God, which is aware and makes a decision to “cut” reality into
two segments, one with light and one without light (darkness) in a workspace (mind or
otherwise).
We face an obvious challenge to attempt to describe origins from a realm that might be timeless
or without any entities or consciousness or perhaps filled with both. But, if we assume that logic
holds, even during our bootstrap start, then perhaps, following the beliefs of so many cultures in
history and around the world, we must start with an initial awareness or intelligence. Consider
the existence of a primordial mind with memory, awareness of a self, and a primordial “cut”
decision, or segmenting of self from non-self, with these two concepts inherently stored in a
ISSN: 2153-8212
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
Intelligent Minds
primordial memory of two units. These memory units may be all that is needed as a primordial
workspace. Perhaps these are the very first units of a fundamental “unit” of spacetime in our
Universe. One can imagine this since, as our algorithm continues to repeat, it basically resembles
a Fibonacci Sequence and, thus, increases at a rate that approaches an exponential growth rate
(Figure 3).
Figure 3. After the bootstrap instantiation, repeating the constructor algorithm shows
how the count of required memory units matches the ever-present Fibonacci Sequence we
see in our reality.
But as our reality becomes vast, we can see the growth rate of memory units increasing even
more. This is of interest as it mirrors observations in our Universe that show our Universe
growing at similar incredible expansion rates attributed to Dark Energy.
To summarize, our proposed algorithm starts with a primordial awareness, cuts into self and nonself (vis a vis binary 0 and 1 or “something and nothing”) with the change in these relationships
being equivalent to time i.e., progressing via each cut, and then the algorithm repeats - with our
entire Universe of spacetime being inclusive to this primordial realm of non-self. Two units of
memory are added (pseudo-code is used ease of discussion) and a one-dimensional point in the
“non-self” portion of reality is “cut” creating point 1 and point 2, point 1 and 2 define Line1, and
then Line 1 is cut to create Line 1 and Line 2. Line 1 and Line 2 are used to define a twodimensional circle and non-circle entities. This “add memory, cut, and repeat” process continues
ad infinitum.
Here we need to clarify the use of the word cut. The term perhaps is closer to the idea of a
schism. The cut can be a mental or logical identification or segmentation e.g., one line into two
lines or even the breakdown of molecule into its component elements then protons, neutrons, and
quarks, electrons, photons etc. But the algorithm remains the same, even in a much later complex
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
Intelligent Minds
Universe, as every simple decision (go left or go right?), click of clock, or even as entropy itself
where particles decay into foundational particles and quarks as if attempting to return to the
foundational origins of structure versus randomness. The primordial cut being synonymous with
“something from nothing” or structure versus randomness akin to the Chinese origin philosophy
of Yin and Yang.
After our two-dimensional reality is instantiated, the cut function thus leads to an aggregation
function i.e., not-cut or “combine.” This is the basis for memory and an ideation hierarchy e.g.,
lines become letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, books, and libraries. All
subsequent opposing “strategies,” thus, mirror CUT vs NOT-CUT including hatred vs desire,
attachment vs aversion, decay vs survive. A reality, after the primordial instantiating “cut,” now
exists where, even if only in two physical dimensions along with time, we can repeat the same
algorithm to produce a third dimension (if even needed) and a reality of immense complexity.
University of California Irvine cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues that the third
dimension does not exist and is used only as informational redundancy to improve fidelity of
two-dimensional data: This is exactly what Bekenstein and Hawking discovered about
spacetime. It is redundant. Two dimensions contain all the information in any 3D space [1].
Hoffman’s theory is also possible in the framework of this model. This model does not
necessarily require a third dimension to achieve its success in creating so much of what we
observe in our reality.
Note the appeal of an origin constructor algorithm is that it may be able to eliminate vastly
dualist cosmological models that involve Laws of Physics that exist “a priori” or before the
creation of our reality in a Platonic Universe of perfect circles, infinity, and ideas. Consider
comments from philosopher Angus Menuge:
If I am going to have an account that fully explains what’s going on when a scientist
measures a system in quantum physics and deals with entanglement and all these other
things, what if it turns out that that account must appeal to consciousness? Does
consciousness then become part of physics? If it does, then — in a way — the debate
between physicalists and dualists dissipates because the physical has just absorbed
consciousness. But the dualists would have won in the sense that consciousness doesn’t
reduce to any of these other things. That is what they’ve been claiming for a few
centuries…[2].
Perhaps the ongoing challenges with unifying Gravity with the other fundamental forces or the
Standard Model are because Gravity is a result of foundational cut events (minimization of
surface areas) versus the existence of graviton force-carrying particles like those of the other
fundamental forces in Nature.
Note too how Quantum Mechanics, at a fundamental level, shows that our Universe is “cut” into
identical minimal entities (photons, electrons, quarks, etc.…) and that when one attempts to
determine an attribute of one of these entities with an increasing level of detail, the detail of the
corresponding attribute is decreased (position vs momentum as the classic example of the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). This behavior echoes a reality that “prefers” cuts and
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
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segments i.e., one or the other, but not both! Note, too, the lack of an observed decay of a proton
or quark or electron. Our simple constructor algorithm: 1) bootstrap initial intelligence, 2) add
two units of memory, 3) cut, and 4) repeat (Figure 4), produces results that we see in our reality
and becomes almost synonymous to entropy i.e., driving (cutting) entities toward disorder.
Figure 4. Visual representation of the constructor algorithm. Where, or in what “mind,”
lies the primordial memory units is the dualist assumption required in this proposal to
bootstrap instantiate reality.
The Principle of Least Action, so fundamental to our reality, becomes a logical outcome of this
constructor algorithm. The appearance of π, present in so many aspects of our Universe, becomes
a necessary result of our model as does the existence of so many shapes that resemble
fundamental circles or spheres (Figure 5).
With the assumption of an initial or foundational intelligence, perhaps Nature, which attempts to
use all tools at her disposal to survive, has simply appropriated the boot code of the Universe
and, with the complexity of evolved biological brains, is then able to reuse that code in minds,
thus leading to consciousness? Nature wants fecundity and variety, and it wants these ultimately
to ensure survival. Nature, thus, uses all tools at its disposal; consider how plant life uses aspects
of Quantum Mechanics to optimize photosynthesis i.e., Quantum Biology. Thus, it is not a
stretch to consider Nature appropriating boot code from an underlying reality. This could explain
the existence of consciousness in human minds as Nature using the “bootstrap code” of the
Universe for its own benefits to help ensure survival.
Note how in this model numbers exist or originate as “labels of minimum memory size.” So now
let us consider the origin of π. Upon the creation of a circle, following the cut of Line 1 into
“Line 1 and Line 2,” we have an actual boundary between Circle and Non-Circle; the
circumference of the circle (Figure 6).
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
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Figure 5. Is the “reality” outside of our window – that is full of demonstrations of
gravity, of the principle of least action, of Fibonacci Sequences, and of minds – just a
vast repetition of “memory adds” and concept “cuts” or combines (“not-cuts”) scaling to
the entire Universe? Source: https://www.indiewire.com/2017/10/the-matrix-code-digital-rainmeaning-1201891684/ and NASA\ESA\IPAC\Caltech\STScI\Arizona State University
Figure 6. The minimal area of a two-dimensional “reality” encompassed using
previously “cut” entities line 1 and line 2, is a circle; they remain independent and not
crossing. The boundary of randomness vs structure (e.g., maximum randomness =
minimal structure) is the circumference of the circle. The length of the circumference is,
thus, measured as diameter (line 1) x π. The circumference, thus, defines the length
required of line 2 in order to create a boundary between our new concepts of circle
(yellow region) and non-circle (blue region). Π, thus, is a simultaneous minimum and
maximum “cut” border and, thus, is ever-present in our reality.
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
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If we attempt to measure or calculate the length of the circumference of this unit circle (diameter
of length 1) we begin to require a vast amount of memory units. Here, many assumptions are
made but they lead to some interesting conclusions. In our model the length or digits of π do not
exist “a priori” or in a Platonic realm of infinity but, rather, must be calculated using memory.
But π is a very special number, and a special irrational number, indeed. As defined in Wikipedia:
Being an irrational number, π cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction (equivalently, its
decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern).
Still, fractions such as 22/7 and other rational numbers are commonly used to
approximate π. The digits appear to be randomly distributed; however, to date, no proof
of this has been discovered [3].
Since π lies on the border between circle and non-circle it, literally, is the maximum amount of
randomness and the minimum amount of structure possible, thus its presence in so many areas of
reality. But in our model, to ensure a string has non-repeating and perfectly random digit
placements, implies a need to not only have a memory unit for a given digit (a la an instantiation
cut) but also a memory unit(s) for all of the possible permutations of every digit and digit string
up to and then including the digit in question as well as the implied memory to compare them to
ensure no pattern or eternal repetition exists. This idea is speculative, and resides in the field of
metaphysics, but it still is simpler than a required Platonic Universe with “a priori” infinitely
long numbers. In this model, the memory is added as digits in π are measured. Does this mean
that measuring the digits in pi could be increasing the size of the Universe a la Dark Energy
expansion - perhaps?
With the above model in mind, let us now compose an updated “short history” of man's attempts
to understand reality:
Plato - reality must be dualist - a world of ideas and a physical world of material (cave
shadows).
Democritus – reductionist approach; Universe built from identical fundamental tiny
atoms.
Rene’ Descartes - I and NOT-I is the starting point of understanding reality.
Isaac Newton - mathematical rules underly reality; predictive time functions (calculus)
and "law" of gravitation pattern; spacetime as Absolute.
Gottfried Leibniz - reality from 0 and 1 - starts at two dimensions with the rest functions
of relations (distances) between objects including time as the change of these. Calculus
and spacetime as Relational.
Charles Darwin - Nature appears formulaic, evolution via fitness = optimization
algorithm.
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
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Albert Einstein - reality is a function, with space and time as a single operation! Gravity
is derivative of this. Speed of light has max velocity but zero memory. No relative
velocity = max memory = slowest clock time. General Relativity directly implies
expanding universe and origin from single start Big Bang vs Cosmology.
Kurt Gödel – there can never exist a finite complete system without a higher order
awareness!
John Von Neumann - set theory is only way to create math - requires a bootstrap into null
set. Designs computer architecture based on memory!
Alan Turing - code for an operating system and for program or data are both able to be
encoded into the same string of code! All we need is a single "Universal Turing
Machine" to "read" (cut into memory) infinite tape of binary symbols.
Richard Feynman and John Wheeler – pursued the “why of quanta” (identical, long
lasting, fundamental particles). IT from BIT. Reality is derivative and consistent with
rules fundamental - delayed choice quantum eraser. "Sum of all histories" implies
memory (if not awareness) with fundamental "which path" choices. Quantum mechanics
is younger sister of computation
Jacob Bekenstein - Holographic paradigm from black hole thermodynamics - all info of
reality coded into 2 dimensions!
Stephen Wolfram and Konrad Zuse - reality is a "cellular automata" at foundation starting
with a simple rule deeper than physics Grand Unification theories.
Donald Hoffman - there is no 3rd dimension at all! Our reality is all two-dimensional. All
of reality is a fitness algorithm.
David Deutsch - computation is THE foundation of reality. A "constructor" must exist
like in Java code. Multiverse advocate. Multiverse = “dual” reality (mind or "realm of
infinite" is separate from brain).
Lee Smolin - all realities (Universes) evolve from prior ones in eternal evolution toward
complexity and fecundity (via more Black Holes after every big bang).
Various cosmologists – Inflationary (nested) multiverse and Black Hole event horizon as
equivalent to cosmic horizon.
Various biologists - Nature appears to be algorithmic and a "distributed intelligence"
using any tool it can (over billions of years) to ensure survival via variety, fecundity,
complexity e.g., photosynthesis using path optimization aspects of Quantum Mechanics
and slime model problem-solving.
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
Intelligent Minds
Thus, in attempt to tie together all of these concepts, perhaps all of reality is an algorithm that
requires at least an initial bootstrap of intelligence (a la a "toe dip" into a dual world). Reality is
two- dimensional with time and THE simple function of "add at least two units of memory, cut
or not-cut (combine), and repeat." In a manner, man might therefore actually be "created in the
image of God" as Nature appropriates reality's bootstrap code that, used with a complex enough
brain becomes what we call and experience as consciousness. The above model is obviously
speculative so, perhaps, we can find additional supporting evidence in our world. The following
observations attempt to bridge the gap between the self, in our minds, and the physical world, in
our Universe, using memory.
In terms of our human brains, serotonin becomes a key mechanism. We can envision a model of
human behavior driven by changes in serotonin (from medicine, environmental histamine, or
bodily bipolar cycles) that result in changes in the mind’s amount of working memory. These
changes lead to variations in mental cut and combine (not-cut) operations that are the precursors
to creativity and, thus, intelligence. When serotonin is low, there is reduced working memory. In
this phase we see OCD, anxiety, and depression behaviors. When serotonin is high, there is
hyperactivity and even mania. But, in the up and down slopes in between the peak and nadir, we
have changes in the size of working memory (Figure 7).
Figure 7. The human brain’s bipolar wavelength and intelligence (creativity) from
changes in working memory via serotonin cycles.
Humans will repeat a song over and over again when working memory is small and they will
work to map out entire systems and find “associations across boundaries” when working
memory in the mind is large. During the ebb and flow of working memory, we can envision the
human mind making associations, pattern matches, or analogies i.e., intelligent behaviors.
“Norepinephrine and serotonin have been consistently linked to psychiatric mood disorders such
as depression and bipolar disorder” as noted on WebMD [4]. Thus, imagine a patient with a
bipolar diagnosis whom, in a low serotonin phase, has a small window of working memory and
thus ruminates over and over again on a negative outlook that leads to a suicide. In this phase,
the patient is unable to conceive of longer term turns for the positive or of big picture outlooks or
perspectives.
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
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Serotonin is also linked to consciousness via anesthesia. Tiger et al. in their 2020 research
Ketamine Acts by Boosting Serotonin 1B Receptors state that “researchers found that the
therapeutic effects of ketamine were due to inhibition of serotonin action [5].” Wikipedia notes
the “biochemical mechanism of action of general anesthetics is not well understood… Potential
pharmacologic targets of general anesthetics are GABA, glutamate receptors, voltage-gated ion
channels, and glycine and serotonin receptors [6].” Additional observations of anesthesia being
linked to serotonin lead to a grand claim that consciousness is just (or is the experience of)
changes in working memory size. This model may even lead to a different approach toward
Artificial Intelligence noting that the discussed sizes of working memory, stored long term
memory, and sensory inputs are large.
Numerous studies have reinforced the role of serotonin in memory, anesthesia (consciousness),
creativity, and bipolar disorders. PsychGuides.com states that obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD):
…is triggered by communication problems between the brain's deeper structures and the
front part of the brain. These parts of the brain primarily use serotonin to communicate.
This is why increasing the levels of serotonin in the brain can help to alleviate OCD
symptoms [7].
Sadasivan Chinniah et al. in their 2008 research note:
Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) is a monoamine neurotransmitter… 5-HT is
involved in a number of physiological systems of relevance to the anesthetist… [t]he
exact sites and modes of action of 5-HT remain ill-defined and elusive. A CNS
deficiency of serotonin is thought to be key to the etiology of depression, and selective
5-HT reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the first-line pharmacological treatment. SSRIs
augment 5-HT concentrations at the synaptic cleft [8].
Gwen Smith et al. note in their 2017 research note:
Lower serotonin transporter binding was associated with worse performance in verbal
and visual-spatial memory in mild cognitive impairment. … “Now that we have more
evidence that serotonin is a chemical that appears affected early in cognitive decline, we
suspect that increasing serotonin function in the brain could prevent memory loss from
getting worse and slow disease progression.” … [R]esearchers found that people with
mild cognitive impairment had up to 38 percent less SERT detected in their brains
compared to each of their age-matched healthy controls. And not a single person with
mild cognitive impairment had higher levels of SERT compared to their healthy control.
… The researchers then compared the results from the brain imaging tests for the
serotonin transporter to those two memory tests, and found that the lower serotonin
transporters correlated with lower scores. For example, those people with mild
cognitive impairment had 37 percent lower verbal memory scores and 18 percent lower
levels of SERT in the brain’s hippocampus compared to healthy controls [9].
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Khan, T., Memory as a Bridge between Mind & Universe with Nature Copying a Constructor Algorithm of the Universe for
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Svob et al. note in their 2016 paper that:
The current evidence implies that reduced 5-HT neurotransmission negatively
influences cognitive functions and that normalization of 5-HT activity may have
beneficial effects, suggesting that 5-HT and 5-HTR represent important
pharmacological targets for cognition enhancement and restoration of impaired
cognitive performance in neuropsychiatric disorders [10].
Sasaki-Adams et al. note serotonin as having greater significance in brain functions than, and
even controlling, dopamine:
There is ample evidence for serotonergic influences on dopamine function. …For
example, a number of in vivo microdialysis studies have clearly shown that exposure of
the striatum or nucleus accumbens to serotonin results in increased release of dopamine
(Benloucif and Galloway 1991; De Deurwaerdere et al. 1996; Hallbus et al. 1997;
Parsons and Justice 1993; Yadid et al. 1994; Yoshimoto et al. 1996)… 5-HT1B and 5HT3 agonists tend to facilitate dopaminergic effects (De Deurwaerdere et al. 1998;
Parsons et al. 1996) [11].
In summary, this model proposes that Nature copied the boot code constructor algorithm of the
Universe to make intelligent minds. Human minds are, thus, by all measures, each essentially a
unique universe. Recently cosmologists discovered the equivalence between Black Hole event
horizons and the cosmic information horizon. Thus, perhaps, one day human minds will be found
to be equivalent to a primordial “cosmic mind,” i.e., a dream within a dream indeed.
Received July 09, 2022; Accepted August 03,2022
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Article
Anatomical Correlates of the Main Levels of Consciousness
Tina Lindhard*
International University of Professional Studies (IUPS), Hawaii, USA
ABSTRACT
Consciousness has scientists baffled, and the search to understand it has been described as the
Holy Grail of science. However, the hypothesis that different levels of Consciousness, which can
be encountered through phenomenological introspection, might be correlated with different
layers of our anatomical development, which unfolds in gradational degrees, offers a new way of
looking at our body, our mind, our nature, and Consciousness. Here Pure Consciousness is
considered a non-physical intelligence that gives rise to life, expresses itself through all forms,
prompts our anatomical development, and in humans, manifests itself through a by-product
called ‗mind‘ comprising of several levels. As we are part of this intelligence, we can explore the
deeper levels of our consciousness using the cursor of our mind. The search for the deeper Self is
consistent with the phenomenological perspective used by somatic heart-based meditation
methods, as opposed to the modern Western phenomenological standpoint, which is the study of
‗phenomena‘. As our body unfolds in gradational degrees linked to layers, we suggest there
might be a relationship between these layers and the levels of consciousness we can encounter in
our search to know our deeper Self. These different aspects are addressed in this paper.
Keywords: Consciousness, anatomy, correlate, levels, layers, mind, intelligence, self.
1. Introduction
One of the enigmatic frontiers of science is understanding consciousness. Disciplines that study
consciousness, especially those disciplines which are still based "on the Newtonian-Cartesian
paradigm of mechanistic science" (Grof, 1985, p. 65), are inclined to support a materialistic point
of view. Western science has stripped the original view of Newton and Darwin of their belief in
divine intelligence underpinning all of creation and replaced it with one of radical philosophical
materialism. This has given rise to the belief that consciousness is a product of the brain, which
is understandable, as clinical and experimental neurology demonstrate there are close
connections between various aspects of consciousness and physiological or pathological
processes in the brain, such as traumas, tumors, and infections. "However, they do not
necessarily prove that consciousness is produced by the brain" (Grof, 1985, pp. 21–22).
*
Correspondence: Tina Lindhard, Ph.D., International University of Professional Studies (IUPS), Hawaii, USA
Email: t.lindhard@iups.edu
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This model of reality is now being supplemented:
By quantum-relativistic physics [which] has transcended the concept of solid,
indestructible matter and separate objects and shows the universe as a complex web of
events and relations . . . However, the physicist has very little to say about the variety of
the different forms the cosmic dance takes on various other levels of reality. The
experimental insights from unusual states of consciousness suggest the existence of
intangible and unfathomable creative intelligence aware of itself that permeates all
realms of reality. This approach indicates that it is pure consciousness without any
specific content the represents the supreme principle of existence and the ultimate
reality. From it, everything in the cosmos is derived. (Grof, 1985, p. 72)
In this paper, I look in more detail at the ‗cosmic dance‘ this creative intelligence takes in
humans by suggesting there is a relationship between different levels of consciousness which we
can encounter through phenomenological introspection and our anatomical development which
unfolds in degrees.
Whether we like it or not, and whether we acknowledge it or not, in Psychology whatever
statement we make rests on our metaphysical perspective. Materialistic science has influenced
our thinking, and the philosophy of Descartes still affects us by creating a mind-body split. In
Transpersonal Psychology, the influence of Buddhism has always been strong (Berkhin, 2014)
and some authors are investigating the transplantation of Buddhism in the West (Clasquin,
1999). However, we must remember that Buddhism and more particularly Theravada Buddhism,
does not recognize the existence of the Self (Buddha, n.d.; Ruparell & Markham, 2001). The
position I adopt here is that Pure Consciousness1 is a non-physical intelligence giving rise to life
that is expressing itself through all forms. As such we are a fragment of that entity, and we
participate in its nature, a position known as qualified monism. This intelligence also prompts
our anatomical development, and in humans, it manifests itself through a by-product we call
‗mind‘ comprising of several levels (Arka, 2013). Here I look at how these levels might be
correlated with the unfolding of our anatomical development which develops in layers in
gradational degrees.
Like material scientists, many biologists consider individual organisms as consisting of "separate
systems‖ (Grof, 1985, p.22) where the whole is the sum of the parts. Here we take the view that
the body of a living organism is an interconnected whole that develops in gradational degrees. It
can be considered as a special type of container (Arka, 2003) with which we and the
environment can interact, but it is also under creative cosmic influences. In Biology, we talk of
anabolism, metabolism, and catabolism. It is these forces that are behind the development,
maintenance and destruction of the material body of a living organism including cells (Bhakti
Niskama Shanta, 2015), all of which are unfolding individually and collectively as a single unit
in time. As this is a process, it makes the analysis of the body difficult as any investigation
involving measurement collapses the wave of unfolding time and transforms the body into a
1
Consciousness, Self, Soul, and the Self of Nature, all similar concepts, are used here interchangeably and are
written with capitals to distinguish them from soul and self which is a fragment of Consciousness. Pure
Consciousness is also known as Spirit Consciousness.
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static entity. I do not negate the importance of genes but suggest that as identical genes are
present in every cell, they cannot be the intelligence behind deciding how, when and where to
activate what needs to be done in each moment in the organism. In this, I concur with
Blechschmidt (2004), who also suggests the ―form of the organism differentiates under
biodynamic forces, not chemical-genetic information‖ (p. 18).
As background material, I also briefly outline some fundamental differences in approach to
consciousness between the modern-day Western phenomenological perspective and the
phenomenological perspective used by people in the search for the deeper Self or Pure
Consciousness using somatic heart-based meditation methods. I then outline the Theory of the
Six Main levels of Consciousness which is coherent with this latter approach. It was developed
by Srinivas Arka (2009; 2013) and is based on explorations into the nature of his consciousness
and the experiences of his pupils using a somatic heart-based method of meditation known at
Intuitive Meditation. Although the inner experiences of each person are unique, according to this
theory each level has an inherent characteristic, quality or commonality which can be accessed
and experienced by the practitioner when investigating the nature of his or her deeper self. It is
this commonality that I hypothesize is correlated with certain phases in our anatomical
development.
As the hypothesis regarding levels of consciousness and different layers of our anatomical
development is linked to Arka‘s theory, it is important to also establish the validity of this theory.
It is testable, at least in principle, by making his statement regarding consciousness as an entity
that takes different forms and activates several levels in humans into various hypotheses where
each level consists of a separate hypothesis. Among other corroborating evidence, I present
scientific findings in support of the third level of this theory, insights from other approaches
including analytic psychology, and information based on another heart-based meditation method
known as Prayer of the Heart. Support for the anatomical correlates with the different levels
comes from Arka‘s (2013) descriptions of the levels, and the reverse order of the distinct
anatomical phases our body undergoes during our embryonic development. I therefore also
describe this development and how our body unfolds in gradational degrees linked to layers; a
process referred to as gastrulation, so we can better understand the suggested correlates between
our anatomical development and different levels of Consciousness I am suggesting here.
These different aspects are addressed in more detail in this paper, as are the many implications of
this approach, theory, and hypothesis.
2. Background
The nature of consciousness can be looked at from various lenses. India has a long history of
investigating consciousness and its nature using the ―inside out approach‖ (Lindhard, 2019). This
involves meditating on the Self and contemplating its nature. The people who were successful in
their search became known as philosophers, rishis, seers, and yogis and to help others undertake
this inner inquiry, they developed methods, known as meditation. However today most methods
of meditation have little to do with this original intention (Arka, 2013; Lindhard, 2016).
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One thing that these early methods have in common, is the withdrawal of the senses from their
objects in the outside world. This is one of the fundamental differences between the modern-day
Western phenomenological approach and that of India. In the Indian tradition, the aim is to know
one‘s deeper nature or Self and the object of ones‘ inquiry is ―the origin of consciousness
expressing itself through the human body‖ (Arka in Lindhard, 2016, p. 147).
This approach was not only undertaken in India but was also used by other people in the ancient
world such as Egyptians, Persians, Jews, people in the Mediterranean area, the Desert Fathers in
the Christian tradition and later by the Sufis (Louchakova 2004). As many of these people
practiced a somatic heart-based method known as Prayer of the Heart to discover through
"experimental phenomenological introspection, the living topological construct of the Self "
(Louchakova, 2007, p. 82), I prefer to use the term ‘Yogic tradition’ rather than Eastern to
collectively refer to all the traditions which meditate on the Self. Yogic traditions stem from the
root of the Sanskrit word yoga, meaning to Yoke by ―uniting the individual spirit with the
Universal Spirit‖ (Ayush, n.d.para. 1).
The experiences that arise as one progresses with one‘s investigation into one‘s inner nature, are
unique to each individual. However, Arka (2009; 2013) maintains that certain levels are common
when a person goes below his or her (thinking) mind using a heart-based method. He identifies
the part of the individual that undertakes this inner journey, as the "I awareness," "I ego
conscious awareness," or "I ego awareness". This part of us is the pivot of our memories which
make up our personality (Arka, 2009). Human awareness is a fragment of Consciousness, and it
is the part of us that, like a cursor, we can direct at any activity or object we want, including
exploring the deeper nature of our own consciousness or Self. In the journey to Self-realization,
Arka (2013) talks about the need of the person to reverse all that has happened to him or her
whereas other heart-based meditation approaches that meditate on the Self, talk of ego
transcendence (Louchakova, 2006; 2007; Louchakova & Warner, 2003; Louchakova-Schwarz,
2014).
In the West, modern-day phenomenology is considered the study of structures of
consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure
of an experience is its intentionality, it‘s being directed toward something, as it is an
experience of or about some object …. literally, phenomenology is the study of
‗phenomena‘: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the
ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience ….
phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from
perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily
awareness, embodied
action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The
structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called
―intentionality‖, that is, the directedness of experience towards — represents or
―intends‖— things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc.
(Smith, 2018)
Philosophers refer to phenomenal introspectively accessible raw, direct subjective aspects of our
mental lives as qualia (singular quale) (Tye, 2017).
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In comparing the modern-day Western and Yogic phenomenological approaches to
consciousness, we can see they are essentially two different undertakings both involving inner
inquiry but where each has a different intention. The Western phenomenological approach
involves the study of the appearances of things or things as they appear in our awareness,
whereas in the yogic approach, one has to withdraw one‘s senses from objects in the outside
world to go below or above one‘s surface (thinking) mind consciousness to discover one‘s true
nature or Self through experience. This is achieved by rewinding our surface consciousness.
Figure 1. Outline of the Principle differences between the Western and the Yogic approach to
Phenomenology
3. The Theory the Six Main Levels of Consciousness, Definition of
Consciousness, our Anatomical Development and Possible Anatomical
Correlates of the Main Levels
The following sections involve different facets of the Self and Self-inquiry using Arka‘s theory
of the Main levels of Consciousness as a starting point.
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3.1.
134
The Theory the Six Main Levels of Consciousness
This first section deals with the main levels the practitioner will discover when going below the
mind using a heart-based method such as the Intuitive Meditation method. It is consistent with
the Yogic approach which involves the search for the Self. The main levels Arka outlines in his
theory are:
M (Mind) – Consciousness: Mind is the first layer, which manifests on the surface
of the cerebral region. As it becomes sharpened by the cultivation of learning, it
evolves into a faculty called intellect.
SM (Subliminal-Mind) – Consciousness: The second level, which is below the
surface mind, is the subliminal or subconscious mind. We are unaware of its
potential and capabilities, which may seem incredible to the surface mind. Many
daily activities are governed by the subconscious mind.
F (Feeling-Mind) – Consciousness: The third level is the feeling mind. This
feeling-consciousness generally prevails in the heart area and can thus be called the
Heart of Heart-Consciousness. It includes an emotional faculty called intuition.
Almost all mothers have this faculty naturally available and readily accessible to help
them understand the intense needs of their children and the people they care about.
H (Emotional-Heart) – Consciousness: The fourth layer is the deeper heart where
you feel emotions with even greater intensity. This can be called the spiritual heart,
or your inner consciousness. The presence of the surface mind is reduced and the
presence of subliminal or subconscious mind is enhanced. It is formed by
impressions gathered through what you have learned and experienced along with the
memory of your personality.
HS (Heart-Soul) – Consciousness: The fifth level is between the deeper heart and
the ultimate essential being (Soul). Here you experience inner-space and the Mystical
Universe, where the laws of physics start reversing and lead you to experience many
alternative realities and possibilities that give access to your soul. Here you become
more connected with Nature and the forces of the Universe.
PS (Pure-Self) – Consciousness: The sixth layer is Core-Consciousness. This is the
very essence of your whole presence and of everything that you feel, think and do. It
is addressed as Soul or Self. (Arka, 2013, pp. 37–38)
3.2.
Arka’s Definition of Consciousness
Fundamental to Arka‘s theory is his definition of Consciousness.
Consciousness manifests itself through physical matter. Similar to bacteria that are
able to survive with a complete lack of oxygen and in high temperatures,
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consciousness lacks boundaries, can take any form or shape and can emerge under
challenging life conditions. In spirituality, consciousness is mainly a non-physical
yet powerful entity that is the pivotal point of all life and activates the senses in every
living being. It is highly responsive and expressive and activates many levels,
especially in humans. (Arka, 2013, p. 37)
This definition is consistent with those based on the Vedic tradition of India but Arka amplifies it
by adding the notion of levels. In the Vedantic tradition, life and Consciousness are interrelated.
―Life is essentially cognitive and conscious. And consciousness, which is fundamental, manifests
itself in the gradational forms of all sentient and insentient nature‖ (Bhakti Niskama Shanta,
2015, abstract).
Clarifying it further, Arka says ―Consciousness is a highly resourceful non-matter-based
intelligence with the capacity to create and dissolve any form and body according to certain laws
and principles. To reduce itself to material existence Consciousness creates a by-product of itself
which we call mind. The extension of consciousness from the heart center is mainly brain-based‖
(private correspondence 10.9.2019).
3.3.
Our Anatomical Development
To follow the suggestion that levels of consciousness might be related to different layers of our
anatomical unfolding, we first have to have a clear idea of the phases we undergo during our
embryonic development and how our body develops in gradational degrees linked to layers; a
process referred to as gastrulation.
3.3.1. The Anatomical Phases
In this section, we look at the development of the heart system and the CNS. However, we must
remember the body is a single growing unit and it is only our analysis that separates the various
systems when we collapse the wave of time at specific moments to study the different aspects in
more detail.
3.3.1.1. Development of the Heart System
The outer body: After fertilization, the developing zygote goes through various phases where
the outer body, also known as the ectocyst (outer egg), or placenta, develops first. This lays the
ground for the development of the endocyst, inner egg or inner body which gives rise to our
physical body, including the brain. The development of the inner body is linked to blood and the
formation of blood islands and blood vessels (capillaries) that originate within extra-embryonic
meso-(derm) in the outer body. Van der Wal (2003/2014) reminds us that meso-(derm) is not a
derm, but an inner layer which "creates space and connects at the same time" (p. 42) and for this
reason, he prefers to write ―meso-(derm)” (p. 42); a convention I follow here.
Blood: Blood is the first functional differentiation of the meso-(derm) in the ectocyst and can be
considered as a form of ―liquid connective tissue‖ (Hill, 2019a, Introduction) which links the
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meso–(derm) of the ectocyst with the meso–(derm) of the endocyst during embryonic
development. Even though the embryo‘s blood and the blood of the mother do not directly touch,
blood can be seen as our direct link with our mother via the placenta, and also with our mother,
father, and ancestors via genes. Although in the adult, red blood cells have no nucleus, fetal
blood does (Hill, 2019a). In the embryo, red blood cells can be seen as transporters of our lineal
history and also carries of life in the form of oxygen and nutrients. As such, in the embryo blood
forms a bridge between the outer and inner environment and the development of the new being
with their ancestral past.
Blood flow: In the developing embryo, blood flows from the metabolic periphery of the
trophoblast, or extra-embryonic meso-(derm) to the body stalk, which is at the caudal end of the
germinal disc. It then proceeds toward the cranial end of the embryo, running alongside the
―flanks‖ of the bi-laminar germinal disk, then dorsally along the amniotic cavity (only very little)
and ventrally along the yolk sac (some more). At the central point, which van der Wal calls the
"centripetal junction of blood vessels," it comes to a halt and then flows back to the periphery
through other capillaries. "This point of reversal, where the flow comes to a standstill, turns
about, and takes on a rhythmical character, is the first indication of the origin of the heart" (van
der Wal, 2003/2014, p. 44). It must also be noted that "the movement of blood flow is primary;
the emergence of the heart is secondary. First, there is flow, and where this comes to a standstill,
the form arises" (van der Wal, 2003/2014, p. 44).
Pulsation, a new phase: When the heart begins to pulsate on about day 17, it heralds a new
phase, as through the pulsating heart the wave of life becomes tangible. Pulsation is ―the
underlying core principle and property of universal existence, cosmic existence, and local
existence‖ (Arka in Lindhard, 2016, p. 87). This is in accordance with the quantum physicist de
Broglie who held ―a particle at rest not only possessed a localized heartbeat but was also
accompanied by a widespread pulsation forever in step with it and extending all over the
universe‖ (Hoffman,1959, p. 75). Pulsation seems to be the commonality between the material
world consisting of particles and the human world including animals for ―at the core‖ all pulsate
(Arka in Lindhard, 2016, p. 87).
This is in keeping with some spiritual traditions which recognize ―the essential nature of the
Lord (non-physical intelligence) is perpetual spanda (creative pulsation). He is never without
spanda. Some hold that the Highest Reality is without any activity whatsoever. But in such a
case the Highest Reality being devoid of activity, all this (i.e. the universe) will be without a lord
or Creative Power (Singh, 1992, p. 10).
Planck too assumed that there was "a conscious and intelligent mind" behind the force that
brings "an atom to vibration (pulsation) and holds this most minute solar system of the atom
together" (Planck, 1944, p. 47).
Looked at from this perspective, the heart takes on new relevance, for, through pulsation, it is the
representation of the highest creative force behind the Universe. ―God‖ made manifest. As G-OD is also an acronym standing for Generation, Organization and Destruction, we get back to the
biological forces of anabolism, metabolism, and catabolism.
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Descent of the heart: During the next phase, the heart begins its descent to its final position in
humans at the center-left in the upper chest. This phase takes many days where the morphology
of the human embryo undergoes numerous changes. During this descent, cardiac morphology
repeats a pattern of development that "occurred in millions of years from worms to mammals"
(Corno, Kocica, & Torrent-Guasp, 2006, p. 562). At the same time, the initial tube-like nature of
the heart at the cranial end of the germinal disc begins to form itself into a double helix. That the
mature heart consists of a band known as the helical ventricular myocardial band which folds
itself into a helix, was established by Torrent-Guasp (1973) after spending many years of
literally unraveling the heart through blunt dissection (2011)
Gastrulation: A helix means a curve in space and to fully grasp the importance of descent of the
heart from its position at the top of the bilaminar germinal disc, requires comprehending a
process known as gastrulation, which involves the development of different layers. Although the
body is a single unit or interrelated whole, understanding the layers may help us unravel some of
its mystery and how the development of our body is prompted or propelled by Consciousness
through biodynamic forces to develop in a certain way. In the human embryo and most animals,
gastrulation follows the blastula phase and corresponds with the ―formation of the three primary
germ layers – ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm‖ (Lim & Thiery, 2012, p. 3472). Gastrulation
is followed by organogenesis, which is when individual organs develop within the newly formed
germ layers. Each layer comprises certain elements, for example, the outer germ layer or
ectoderm includes skin, hair, nails and the nervous system. The interior endoderm includes all of
the cell systems which line our organs and vessels. The layer in between, known as the
mesoderm, includes ―the great muscle masses, both the voluntary muscles which underlie all of
our work, actions and behavior, and the involuntary muscles which make up the walls of all of
our organs such as heart and blood vessels, respiratory and gastrointestinal systems, and our
bones‖ (Course Hero, n.d., Early Brain Development). As stated earlier, meso-(derm) is not a
derm but ―creates space and connects at the same time" (van der Wal, 2003/2014, p.42).
Essentially during gastrulation, the rudimentary body of the bilaminar two-dimensional germinal
disc transforms into a three-dimensional body with an inner space where the first organ is the
pulsating heart. The heart system can also be considered as extending throughout the body for
the ―heart‖ is not only the organ but consists of the whole circulatory system, the involuntary
muscles that make up the walls of the heart and blood vessels and blood. Where the heart as
organ stops and starts is a decision; does the artery when it leaves the heart as organ no longer
form part of the heart? Although the heart as ‗organ‘ can be considered the center of the heart
system, the formation of blood in the extra-embryonic meso-(derm), is the precursor of this
system.
3.3.1.2. Development of the CNS
The midline of the organism which forms into the backbone unfolds in parallel with the looping
of the heart. The notochord starts to form on the same day the heart primordium starts pulsating
(Moscoso, 2009). ―One of the first tasks of the primitive meso-(derm) is coming together to form
a long cylindrical structure. In doing this, they are recapitulating the earliest event in the
transition from invertebrates to vertebrate forms, a transition which occurred at least six hundred
million years ago‖ (Braintour, n.d., Early Brain Development).
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Delamination: Delamination or folding takes place over several days starting day 18/19
(Moscoso, 2009) and consists of two main stages: longitudinal folding and transverse folding
during which the flat tri-laminar disk is slowly changed into a three-dimensional cylinder.
CNS: In the trilaminar embryo, the notochord consisting of meso-(derm) tissue, initially lies
ventral to the ectoderm, out of which the neural plate and finally the neural tube form. The
notochord is ―a transient embryonic anatomy structure, not existing in the adult, required for
patterning the surrounding tissues‖ (Hill, 2019b, Introduction)
The neural tube is a visible dorsal line that curves inwards giving rise to the neural fold, the sides
of which finally meet to form the neural tube that lies beneath the ectoderm layer. The anterior
end of the neural tube will develop into the brain, starting on about day 25, and the posterior
portion will become the spinal cord (Rice University, n.d.) This basic arrangement of tissue
structure will eventually develop into the CNS and the brain comprising of neural ectoderm.
Electrical Potential: These midline structures are probably related to the inherent electrical
potential discovered by Burr discovered in unfertilized eggs or ovules of various species. In
chicks, his studies seemed ―to indicate that the potential gradients also are associated with the
development and differentiation of the nervous system" (Burr & Hovland, 1937, p. 255).
Main Division of the Brain: The three main divisions of the brain at the anterior end of the
neural tube can be distinguished while the neural groove is still completely open (The Virtual
Human Embryo, 2011) These are primarily just bulges but by day 29 ―three brain vesicles or
neuromeres can be clearly identified on close examination: the prosencephalon (forebrain), the
mesencephalon (midbrain) and the rhombencephalon (hindbrain)" (Moscoso, 2009, p. 15),
although strictly speaking the word rhombencephalon translates as four-sided-figure-brain. At
this stage, the head has become larger than the cardiac loop and these structures continue to
develop throughout the rest of embryonic development and into adolescence. The brain vesicles
are the basis of the structure of the fully developed adult brain. The primary vesicles differentiate
into five secondary vesicles with the prosencephalon (forebrain) differentiating into the
telencephalon and the diencephalon; the mesencephalon (midbrain) stays the same, and the
rhombencephalon
develops
into
the metencephalon and myelencephalon.
The
telencephalon becomes the cerebrum and the diencephalon gives rise to further structures such as
the into the thalamus and hypothalamus. The metencephalon gives rise to the pons and
cerebellum and the myelencephalon corresponds to the adult structure known as the medulla
oblongata. Except for the cerebellum, these latter structures make up the brain stem.
Human Neuroaxis. As the human being is two-legged, the neuroaxis has a bend between the
brain stem and the diencephalon, along with a bend in the neck, so that the eyes and the face are
oriented forward.
The Cranial Nerves: The cranial nerves are paired and can be mixed (motor/sensory), The
trigeminal nerve (CNV) develops first and is connected with touch, and as such, is the ‗mother
sense‘. Whether sensor or motor, most of the cranial nerves are related to our sense system
through which we receive information about objects in the exterior world or orientates us to act
or react to these objects. The cranial nerves are the brain equivalent of the spinal cord spinal
nerves. (Hill, 2019c),
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While the brain is developing from the anterior neural tube, the spinal cord is developing from
the posterior neural tube. The basic structure of the neural tube remains long and straight. In
addition to being defined as anterior and posterior, ―it also has a dorsal-ventral dimension‖ with
dorsal being the side closest to the surface and ventral being the deeper side (Rice University,
n.d.). The former is to do with sensory functions, and the latter with motor functions. The spinal
cord retains its tube-like structure which has a hollow center becoming a very small central canal
through the cord which connects with the rest of the hollow open neural tube spaces within the
brain called the ventricles, where cerebrospinal fluid is found.
Bioenergetic and environmental forces: Neural development is a ―protracted development that
begins in the third gestational week‖ (Stiles & Jernigan, 2010) and the last system to be
completed after birth. Because of the long-time period, in-utero insult during pregnancy such as
adverse environmental factors can later give rise to later anomalies in the fetus. But beyond
environmental factors, the synchronicity in development between the morphology of the heart,
which repeats a pattern of development that "occurred in millions of years from worms to
mammals‖ (Corno, Kocica, & Torrent-Guasp, 2006, p. 562) and midline development, which
―recapitulate the transition from invertebrates to vertebrate forms‖ (Course Hero, n.d. ) suggests
an intelligence which manifests itself through bioenergetic forces where the pulsating heart plays
a role in changing a static system into a dynamic system occurring in waves which unfold in
time.
3.3.2. Our ontological development
Ontologically, the heart is primary with the CNS including the brain developing later. The heart
system is also the deeper system that exists below the surface neural ectoderm system of the
brain and is separated from this deeper layer by the blood-brain barrier. From this perspective,
the ‗brain‘ is another division, for below the neurons of the brain (neuroectoderm), lie the whole
of the heart system which extends throughout the body as well as other components which make
up the meso-(derm) layer. Although it is not directly relevant to the topic presented here, some
parts of the brain do not have a blood-brain barrier: the area postrema, the median eminence, the
pineal gland, the neurohypophysis of the posterior pituitary gland, and the choroid plexus.
3.4. Relationship between the Anatomical Layers and the Main levels of Consciousness
Arka‘s theory and comments lend themselves to speculation about possible anatomical correlates
with the main levels of consciousness he mentions in his theory. When we start to explore the
nature of our consciousness to discover our true Self, we start from where we are at the moment,
and this is the reverse order of that of our anatomic development which develops over time and
involves different layers. The suggestion that there might be a relationship between levels and
layers is in keeping with Arka (2013) statement that discovering our true Self requires rewinding
our surface consciousness.
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3.4.1. The First Two Levels
The first two levels he mentions can be seen as being associated with the reverse order of the
development of the neural system which as we have seen, began its development from the neural
tube with the anterior neural tube developing into the brain and the posterior neural tube into the
spinal column.
Mind – Consciousness: Arka links the first level with the surface of the cerebral region. The
cerebral region consists of the frontal lobes, parietal lobes, occipital lobes, and temporal lobes.
The frontal lobes are the last to develop in young adulthood and the most recently evolved part
of the brain. The cerebral region is associated with higher brain functions such as thought,
speech, and action. Mind – Consciousness is most important as it enables us to communicate
with the world and with others. Thinking with training as we grow up, develops into intellect, a
topic which is of great interest to neuroscientists. Although no single region in the brain has a
dominant effect on intelligence, the parietal frontal interaction theory offers a solution that has
been supported by various neuroimaging studies. Recent studies suggest ―each core region for
intelligence works in concert with other regions‖ (Yoon, Shin, Lee, et al. 2017). Through the
senses, the cranial nerves enable us to obtain information about the world outside of us.
Characteristic: awareness of the thinking mind
Subliminal-Mind – Consciousness: If we descend from this outer cerebral layer related to
thinking, we get to more primal layers of the CNS which make up the cerebellum and the
brainstem. The functions of the cerebellum are to coordinate muscle movements, maintain
posture, and balance. The brain stem ―acts as a relay center connecting the cerebrum and
cerebellum to the spinal cord. It performs many automatic functions such as breathing, heart rate,
body temperature, wake, and sleep cycles, digestion, sneezing, coughing, vomiting, and
swallowing‖ (Mayfield Brain and Spine, 2018, Brain).
Both these areas can be associated with the subliminal mind which performs many actions that
are normally beyond or beneath our conscious awareness. Some meditation methods direct
attention to the breath, bringing this activity into conscious awareness.
Characteristic: awareness of automatic functions not normally under our control
3.4.2. Levels Connected with the Heart
To access the next levels which are related to the mind of the heart, we have to withdraw our
senses from the outer world and go below the neural layer to contact with the heart. This requires
entering into the inner or meso-(derm) layer, which joins and creates space (van der Wal,
2003/2014). We can divide the phase involving the formation of the heart system into three
phases or waves, pre tangible pulsation, tangible pulsation and the development of the whole
heart system which is linked to the formation of the body. The order of these phases is reversed
as we descend from our thinking mind in our phenomenological quest to discover our true Self.
Feeling-Mind – Consciousness: This level can be associated with the whole of the heart system
including the heart as an organ and the circulatory system made up of the involuntary muscles
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which make up the walls of the heart and blood vessels and the oscillating heart. The level of
consciousness is to do with feeling, hence its name. The feeling-consciousness that generally
prevails in the heart area can be ―called the Heart of Heart-Consciousness‖ and includes ―an
emotional faculty called intuition‖ (Arka, 2013, p. 37).To tune into this level, we need to go
below our thinking minds which enables us to open to intuition. The pulsating heart is an
oscillatory or vibratory system intrinsic to the mesoderm layer and it seems that through the
heart, we may become sensitive to other vibrating fields. The heart‘s electromagnetic field is the
biggest in the body, changes under different circumstances. This system can be considered a
sensory guiding system that we can access by tuning into these fine changes through feeling and
intuition. Mothers understand the need of their children and loved ones using this faculty (Arka,
2013). Armour (1991; 2007; 2008) has shown that the heart has an intrinsic nervous system of its
own and McCraty (2009) found that the heart sends more signals to the brain than vice versa.
Characteristic: awareness of feelings giving rise to intuition
Emotional-Heart – Consciousness: This level is somewhat similar to the previous level but
more intense. It can be seen as being made up of the pulsating heart. Pulsation, we will recall, is
the underlying core principle and property of universal existence, cosmic existence, and local
existence. Arka (2013) refers to this level as ―the spiritual heart‖, or one‘s ―inner consciousness‖.
One is more aware of inner space and one feels emotions which are like ―waves in the sea of
consciousness‖, with even greater intensity. According to Arka (2003) "feeling is like water,
emotion is like waves in the lake of consciousness" (p. 18). At this level, ―the presence of the
surface mind is reduced and the presence of subliminal or subconscious mind is enhanced and
that ―this level is ―formed by impressions gathered through what you have learned and
experienced along with the memory of your personality‖(Arka, 2013, pp. 37–38), which suggests
that this system is to do with memory. The fact that between 5 and 10 percent of the people who
receive a transplanted heart report changes in their tastes, personalities, and most extraordinary,
in their memories (Skofield, 2012) may support this assertion. During this fourth level, the
practitioner also starts to become aware of the connection of their heart with the highest creative
force behind the Universe. By tapping into this source, one receives guidance through intuition
(Arka, 2013)
Characteristic: awareness of inner space, intensity of emotions, memory of one‘s personality
and impressions of what one has learned as well as the ability to receive guidance.
Heart-Soul – Consciousness: I connect the next level ―between the deeper heart and the
ultimate essential being (Soul)‖ (Arka, 2013, p.38), with blood. Blood, as we have seen, first
developed in the ectocyst and can be considered as a form of ―liquid connective tissue‖ (Hill,
2019a, Introduction) which links the meso–(derm) of the ectocyst with the meso–(derm) of the
endocyst during embryonic development. Blood can be seen as our direct link with our mother
via the placenta, and also with our mother, father, and ancestors via genes. Blood also forms a
bridge between the outer and inner environment and the development of the new being with their
ancestral past.
We can say through blood we are connected with our parents, the environment, life, nature, our
ancestors, and the Universe. When accessing this level ―you experience inner-space and the
Mystical Universe, where the laws of physics start reversing and lead you to experience many
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Lindhard, T., Anatomical Correlates of the Main Levels of Consciousness
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alternative realities and possibilities that give access to your soul. Here you become more
connected with Nature and the forces of the Universe‖ (Arka, 2013, p. 38).
Characteristic: awareness of one‘s connection with Life, Nature and the Universe and its
various dimensions.
3.4.3. Pure-Self – Consciousness
Consciousness is present throughout the body and beyond. Here you first realize your ‗self‘– as a
unique being living in a time-bound body which is part of Consciousness. The soul/self is the ―is
the very essence of your whole presence and of everything that you feel, think and do‖ (Arka,
2013, p. 38). When this level is reached many different possibilities and choices open up such as
the mystical union of awareness with Consciousness or the Self of Nature permanently or
temporarily by choosing to return to inspire others on their path to self-realization. During this
experience, the practitioner goes beyond his or her ego identity and mystically merges with the
consciousness of the Universe. This has some parallels with near-death experiences (Moody,
1975; van Lommel, 2010; Sleutjes, Moreira-Almeida, Greyson, 2014). Another option is to
choose to explore different dimensions of reality. It seems ―Nature is infinitely compassionate in
giving us freedom of choice in our unfolding and destiny‖ (Arka, personal correspondence,
2.9.2019).
Characteristic: awareness of oneself as a soul, a unique being which at the same time is a
fragment of Consciousness expressing Itself as Life which is manifesting itself through the body.
This can lead to the mystical union between the individual self and the Self of Nature or Pure
Consciousness which pervades everything.
Figure 2. Outline of the Main Levels of Consciousness and Possible Anatomical Correlates
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4. Discussion
The discussion is divided into two sections: support for the theory and the implications of the
possible anatomical correlates of the main levels of Consciousness.
4.1 Support for the Theory, Conundrums, and Suggestions
4.1.1 Support based on Research: Using a repeated measures design to test the third level of
Arka‘s theory, Lindhard (2016; 2017; 2018) found a significant difference in scores of
participants as measured on the Feeling Consciousness Scale (FCS) after receiving five Intuitive
Meditation training sessions spread over six weeks (a total of 13.5 hours). The scale items were
based on Arka‘s theory, the literature, and descriptions by people who had practiced the Intuitive
Meditation for about 2 years. Qualitative comments of the participants supported the test results.
Although this study needs to be repeated using a bigger sample size, it does indicate it is possible
to explore the different levels through quantitative and qualitative means. In her study Lindhard
(2016) suggests that Feeling-Mind Consciousness might be related to the consciousness of the
very young and the very old when they return to a more heart level of functioning.
It would also be interesting to establish if there is any connection between the levels and the
brain waves like alpha, beta, theta, and even delta. Adding technologies like the MCG, ECG,
EMG, EEG, MRI or the SQUID to investigations into the different levels using a qualitative and
quantitative approach, might give us interesting insights into the levels. Like with dream research,
instruments do not tell us about what the person is experiencing or the characteristic of their
experiencing consciousness, but they can tell us more about corresponding brain waves or heart
rates. Combining an ‗outside-in‘ and ‗inside-out‘ approach can give us a bigger and more
complete picture.
4.1.2 HeartMath: HeartMath‘s scientific investigations into the heart have done much to
dispel the notion that the heart is just a pump. Largely what goes on in the area of our Feeling
Heart is below our awareness. Nevertheless, the heart has been found to send more signals to the
brain than vice versa (McCraty, 2009). Research investigating the role of physiological
coherence and intuition has shown the heart is involved in the processing and decoding of
intuitive information (McCraty, Atkinson, & Bradley, 1998). Although the HeartMath technique
does not involve the contemplation of the Self but ―self-induced positive emotions‖ (McCraty &
Zayas, 2014, Abstract), positive thinking and creative positive scenes, they have done extensive
research into the different ways the heart communicates with the brain. According to them, there
are four communication pathways: neurological, chemical, biophysical, and energetic
(HeartMath Institute, 2016, Heart Brain Communication section, para. 1).
4.1.3 Heart Sounds: The hearts ubiquitous sound provides a continuum of sound and
vibrational energy for the whole body throughout the entire lifespan‖ (Burleson & Swartz, 2004,
p. 1112). The rhythm the heart emits can also be changed through changing our respiratory rate
as in meditation and this can affect cognitive states and abilities (Peng, Mietus, Khalsa, et al.,
1999). Vibrational heart sounds also seem to have a role in maintaining bodily function in the
adult (Burleson & Swartz 2004). The Intuitive Meditation method rests on three pillars: touch,
one‘s own vibratory sound, and breath but how these collectively affect heart rhythms still needs
to be researched.
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4.1.4 Prayer of the Heart: The oldest well-known heart-based method of meditation is known
as Prayer of the Heart. It was practiced by many ancient traditions (Louchakova, 2004, p. 35).
Prayer of the Heart is said to uncover ―the inner structure of consciousness within this 'mind of
the Heart' as opposed to 'mind of the head'" (Louchakova, 2005, p. 295). Based on data from
focus groups, Louchakova (2005) distinguished between intentional consciousness associated
with the head which usually consists of self-reflective, analytic/synthetic, logic-based constructs
as opposed to the lived experience of 'mind of the Heart' in the chest which is gnostic or knowing
(p. 295). This distinction is similar to the differences between the first and third levels of Arka‘s
theory. Prayer of the Heart also increases intuition and is said to open practitioners to their
emotional layer and feeling level of experience where silence leading to insights starts prevailing
(Louchakova, 2005; 2007). However as little scientific research has been done on Prayer of the
Heart, one does not know if this method opens the practitioner to all the levels outlined in Arka‘s
theory.
4.1.5 Hydranencephaly
Although some of these children might have a more enlarged head at birth, many are of normal
appearance and exhibit typical spontaneous reflexes such as sucking, crying, and movement of
the arms and legs. But after a few weeks, symptoms like seizures, impaired vision and/or
hearing, lack of growth, spastic quadriparesis (paralysis), and intellectual deficits appear. It is a
developmental malady where the cerebral hemispheres in the cortex region of the brain, are
completely or partially filled with a membranous sac filled with cerebrospinal fluid (Global
Hydranencephaly Foundation, 2019). Considered as a cephalic disorder either of genetic or
environmental origin, it occurs early in pregnancy. Neuroscientists describe the behaviors of
these children as ‗vegetative‘, but 69% indicate that, like normal children, they are interested in
their mother‘s voice, music, bells, and stories, 81% show awareness of their surroundings, and
96% were observed to feel pain (Rays of Sunshine survey, n.d.). Although these children do not
develop their cognitive abilities, they are conscious and aware, which raises questions regarding
the theory that consciousness is a product of the brain. Pereira (2016) suggests that
consciousness is beyond the brain and applies a quantum model where ―alternative or capability
transfers through quantum computation of consciousness as a means of survival‖ (p.614). For
him, consciousness needs to reside in ―every inch and cell of the body‖ (p. 616) for these
individuals to survive. Although we agree that consciousness is present throughout the body,
Pereira‘s model does not help understand or explain the experiencing consciousness of these
children. On the other hand, the model we present suggests children with hydranencephaly
possess an emotional-heart and feeling-based consciousness as well as subliminal-mind
consciousness, but the extent of the latter depends on the severity of their handicap. For a variety
of reasons which still need to be clarified, they do not develop thinking-mind consciousness
linked with the cortex. This model is also able to throw light on the type of experiencing a
consciousness of individuals not only with hydranencephaly but who have other types of
cephalic disorders.
4.1.6 Heart-Transplant Patients: Between 5 to 10 percent of heart transplant patients can tap
into memories of their donors and even adopt some of their habits (Pearsall, Schwartz, & Russek,
2005; Skofield, 2012). This seems to lend some support for the fourth level, which is said to be
also related to memories of our personality. Observations concerning patients with other organ
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transplants such as kidney and liver, also manifest changes in sense of smell, food preference,
and emotional factors, but these seem to be transitory and could be associated with medications
and other factors of transplantation (Pearsall, 1998). These observations need to be verified as
they imply the heart has a special role regarding memory (Pearsall, Schwartz, & Russek, 2005).
Reports from some heart transplant patients lead to many questions concerning memory and its
storage. Is it stored in the heart circulatory system below the neural ectoderm layer of the brain,
the whole of the mesoderm layer, the heart as an organ, or even outside of the system where the
heart plays a role in its recovery? It is also possible that there are different places for long and
short-term memory.
For Oschman (2000) the heart plays a modulating, perhaps even coordinating, role in the body's
electromagnetic, potential and quantum fields acting through the living matrix. For Maret (n.d.)
biological systems, including the heart, exhibit non-local, global properties, which are consistent
with their ability to function at the quantum level (Maret, n.d., para. 3). Living systems are
dynamic organizations of intelligent information expressed in energy and matter (Swartz &
Russek, 1997; 1998). When modern systems theory is applied to biophysical energy, known as
the ‗dynamical energy systems approach‘, the biophysical consequences of organized energy
have far-reaching implications for the role of the heart. Whereas living systems theory posits that
all living cells possess "memory" and "decide" functional subsystems within them (Miller,
1978), the dynamical energy systems approach posits that all dynamic systems store information
and energy to various degrees (Swartz & Russek, 1997; 1998).
It seems that many aspects might be involved in the storage of memory and I am not going to
venture an answer to this conundrum in this article except to say Arka‘s theory and its possible
anatomic correlates provides a new way of looking at our bodies which are comprised of various
systems and where the heart as organ and as a sensory vibratory or oscillating system probably
plays a much bigger and more important role than is realized by science at present. Although
these theories talk about how memory might be stored, they do not tell us how the heart recipient
retrieves the information, although the sensitivity of the person seems to be a needed quality.
Another mystery that needs to be addressed.
4.1.7 The Unconscious Mind of Freud and the Collective Unconscious of Jung: Although the
term ‗unconscious‘ was first coined in 1896 by the German philosopher Schelling, Freud
popularized it in his psychoanalytic theory. It seems that it might have a relation to the above
topic about heart transplants as the unconscious (mind) is said to consist of processes that are not
normally available to our surface consciousness and include thought processes, forgotten
memories, interests, motivations and repressed desires (Western, 1999). For Freud (1963) these
past experiences direct our feelings and are the primary source of human behavior. As such, the
heart as a sensory vibratory system that lies below the neural system might be related to Freud‘s
unconscious with memories being held in the mesoderm layer which includes all major muscles,
both those under our control and those that are not. These muscles especially those of the heart,
could form into fixed patterns depending on our habitual way of doing and reacting to the world.
Nummenaa, Glerean and Hietman‘s (2013) investigation into emotions could be related to this,
as are the effects of our emotional thoughts on our bodies (Lindhard, 2015). Indirectly these
investigations give support for the third and fourth level of Arka‘s theory, as well as suggesting
they might provide a possible location for the unconscious of Freud.
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Jung recognized the personal unconscious of Freud but claimed there is another level which he
referred to as the Collective Unconsciousness where a person could tap into archetypes and
memories of a collective nature (Jung, 1969). This could be related to the fifth level of
consciousness where blood as a carrier of our past via genes, plays a major role in forming the
body and is the early connection between the outer and inner world.
Unraveling all the implications of these suggestions is a challenge that is beyond the objective of
this article.
4.2 Implications of the possible anatomical correlates of the main levels of Consciousness
Although many of the implications of Arka‘s theory and the possible anatomical correlates of the
main levels of Consciousness have already been touched on indirectly in this paper, below we
consider several of them from a biological, neuroscientific, cognitive, socio-cultural, scientific,
and philosophical perspective.
4.2.1 Biological perspective: Correlating levels of Consciousness with anatomical layers
invites one to contemplate the creation and maintenance of the body and how it functions.
During our embryological development, the descent of the heart possibly plays a role in creating
the inner space or dimension between the ectoderm and endoderm layers and the oscillating heart
probably has a dynamic function in creating the wave of time (Lindhard 2016). Through the
pulsating heart, it seems Pure intelligent Consciousness plays a major role in creating and
maintaining the body. This does not exclude the role of DNA and RNA, and the environment in
this undertaking; instead it invites exploration into how these different factors interact to form
and maintain a body that is unique to each individual. Looking at the possible relation of
different levels of Consciousness to different layers of our anatomical development opens
science to a new way of looking at the human being. This relationship also permits speculation
about the levels of the experiencing consciousness of animals and other living beings.
4.2.2 Neuroscientific perspective: The approach presented here does not distract from the
research already done on the brain and the correlates between structure and function. However, it
indicates that below the neural layer is another layer and network which is predominately made
up of the heart system that extends throughout the body. This division opens new avenues of
exploration regarding how the various parts of the brain are influenced and possibly coordinated
by this underlying layer.
4.2.3 Cognitive perspective: It seems as though we have two main epistemological ways of
knowing, one to do with the thinking mind and one to do with deeper feeling-heart mind which
gives rise to intuition. This suggested separation brings clarity to an area that has long fascinated
philosophers and psychologists alike. The next step is researching how one can access and
develop intuition consciously and the possible role of heart-based methods like Intuitive
Meditation in this ability.
The role of bringing our unconscious memories and suppressed emotions to the light as a
possible necessary prerequisite in not only fine-tuning our intuitive abilities but also accessing
even deeper levels of consciousness also needs to be clarified and investigated.
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4.2.4 Sociocultural perspective: The Intuitive Meditation method is said to be a natural way
of investigating one‘s inner world and undertaking the search for one‘s deeper Essence, Self or
Soul. This has wide implications. One does not have to be religious to undertake this inner
journey, however one needs to want to know the truth and experience it. It is not an easy journey
as one has to re-wind one‘s history however for those who want to do this, there is a theory that
gives clear guidelines about some of the levels one will experience that can be tested by the
person undertaking the journey.
Many modern-day meditation methods claim to be secular and are often directed at transforming
the practitioner but are not focused on knowing one‘s true self or soul. When comparing
meditation methods, these differences need to be taken into account and also investigated.
4.2.5 Scientific perspective: Although it is not possible to scientifically prove that
Consciousness is primary and is an entity taking different forms, Arka‘s suggestion that it
activates different levels in humans, enables the levels to be researched through quantitative and
qualitative investigations of people undertaking the inner journey and by using technology from
the outside-in position. This theory, and the possible anatomical correlates, is also open to
investigation by various disciplines through which we might be able to obtain a more complete
understanding of the human being as a self or soul living in a time-bound body, how the body is
formed, the role of memory and how and where it is stored, and also how to retrieve our past.
4.2.6 Philosophical perspective: In Eastern philosophy, Buddha removed the soul as an entity
experiencing life by claiming all states are impermanent and the idea of a self or soul is an
illusion (Buddha, n.d.; Ruparell & Markham, 2001). In the West, Descartes‘s cogito ergo sum, ‗I
think therefore I am‘, created a mind-body duality which associated the soul only with thinking.
As such, for him, animals have no souls. Descartes‘s thoughts still influence us today and the
neurological search to find consciousness in the brain seems to be a reflection of this.
Arka‘s theory admits to a personal self or soul, which is seen as a part of Consciousness, also
known as Self, Soul, or the Self of Nature. Here consciousness is considered as being
omnipresent throughout the body, as well as promoting its development in gradational degrees
linked to layers. As suggested, these layers might be related to the different levels of
Consciousness outlined in Arka‘s theory and where each level shares a certain commonality. We
cannot be sure if the experiences of practitioners who undertake the inner quest are the same as
when they were embryos. However, experiences during Holotropic Breathwork, indicate that
there might be a relationship between experiences in therapy and what occurred to the person
during his or her embryonic past (Grof & Grof, 2010).
After discovering our personal self as a fragment of Consciousness manifesting through our body
and beyond, this approach admits to the possibility of the mystical union of our individual self
with Consciousness or the Self of Nature, either permanently or temporarily. Arka‘s
philosophical stance is suggestive of a position known as qualified monism. He also seems to
hold a soul-body duality where the incarnated soul interacts with the body but is not the body
which is seen as a special kind of container (Arka, 2003).
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5. Conclusions
Arka‘s (2013) theory brings back the concept of Self and soul to a secular world where these
concepts are often ignored. The idea that Consciousness is a nonphysical intelligent entity
manifesting through all forms which actives different levels of consciousness in humans, makes
Consciousness primary, rather than just a product of the brain. Being a fragment of
consciousness, we can discover our true Self by using our surface awareness or cursor of the
mind, to explore our inner world. We can undertake this investigation as a personal inner quest,
but, as suggested here, it can also be investigated through the scientific study of others engaged
in the search for the topographical nature of their inner Self.
The hypothesis that the main levels of Consciousness mentioned by Arka might be correlated
with our anatomical development opens science to a new perspective, which may lead to novel
insights about the interconnection between consciousness and the development of the body. It
also might clarify the origin of some of our abilities, such as intuition, and point to a location
related to the unconscious of Freud.
The approach highlights the relationship between the heart and feeling and, therefore, presents
the possibility that embryos, babies, young children, infants with hydranencephaly, and even
other species, have different levels of experiencing consciousness to people who have developed
their intellectual abilities linked to their thinking mind.
There is much to explore, and this article is only an introduction to this new way of looking at
our body, our mind, our nature, and Consciousness.
Conflict of Interest Statement: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of
any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments: I am very grateful to the many people who have helped me understand this topic,
especially the philosopher and yogi Srinivas Arka who inspired and encouraged me to think, feel, and see
things in their true perspective, through science, logic, and intuitive experience. I also thank him for
sharing his insights about the nature of Consciousness and mind. In addition, I thank Dr. van der Wal for
helping me see our embryonic past through various lenses.
Received January 11, 2020; Accepted January 29, 2020
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Hu, H., The American Dream of the 21st Century: A Call for Transformation of America
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Statement
The American Dream of the 21st Century:
A Call for Transformation of America
Huping Hu*
ABSTRACT
In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., we call all
Americans to rise up in the pursuit of the American Dream of the 21st Century under the Laws of
GOD – equality, liberty, justice and civic duty in all aspects of American life, guaranty of basic
necessities of food, medicine and shelter, and the pursuit of happiness and World Peace. It is
noted that these sacred pursuits are hindered by excessive capitalism and individualism and the
state of our own consciousness. Thus, the transformation of the consciousness of all Americans
from the rich to the poor is the key to accomplish these sacred pursuits and transform America.
By transforming our consciousness and transcending ourselves, we shall transform greed to
compassion, hate to love, wealth possession to wealth sharing and war to peace. GOD Bless
America!
Key Words: American Dream, 21st Century, transformation, declaration.
[Post-election America in 2020 is at
A critical and historical moment,
So let the healing begin and let the
"American Dream of the 21st Century"
Begin!]
Preamble
Over 230 years ago, our founding fathers brought forth on America, a new nation conceived in
liberty, civic duty and the pursuit of happiness and dedicated to the ideal of equality under the
Laws of GOD.
Today we hold these rights, duties and their extensions to be applicable to all Americans in all
aspects of our lives - spiritually, physically, financially, environmentally, scientifically and
politically - that to secure, advance and perform these rights and duties and thus perfect our
Union, our Constitution may be amended time to time, if necessary, and successive
governmental, social and corporate structures and institutions shall be established, deriving their
just political, social and economical powers and duties from the consent of the people - that
whenever any structure or institution becomes inadequate of these ends, it is our duties to
modernized it or to abolish it, and to establish new ones, laying the foundation on such principles
and organizing the structures in such forms, as to us shall seem most likely to reflect our
understanding and knowledge of the evolving Nature and Life under the Laws of GOD.
*
Correspondence: Huping Hu, PhD, JD, Scientific GOD, Inc., P.O. Box 267, Stony Brook, NY 11790, USA E-mail: editor@scigod.com
Note: This Statement as a Proposed Declaration of American Dream was first published in Scientific God Journal 2(7): 638-645 (2011).
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The Critical Moment in American History
As a country, we are now facing the greatest challenge both domestically and internationally,
testing whether our public and private institutions can be transformed and work in harmony for
the benefit of all Americans and whether we can still be a Great Nation on Earth and lead the
World.
As a people, we are now engaged in a great struggle, testing whether our rights and duties so
conceived and dedicated at the birth of our Nation, so implemented, protected and extended
through out our history as a Nation can be sustained and be further advanced. Some of us are also
engaged in a silent struggle in our hearts testing whether our yearning for love and compassions
for fellow Americans and mankind at large can conquer our own shortcomings – selfishness,
arrogance, hypocrisy, intolerance, or excessive capitalism, individualism, rivalry and
commercialism.
Reflection on American History
So, at this critical moment, it is appropriate that we Americans from all walks of life – the rich
and the poor, the executives and the workers, the professionals and the laymen, the religious and
the non-religious, Americans by birth and new immigrants– and indeed all who loves America
and Her people - reflect on the status of our Nation and our own moralities and conducts as
individuals with the great hope of achieving the American Dream of the 21st Century and usher
Americans and the mankind at large into a new era of unprecedented progress, prosperity and
enlightenment.
Before the advent of our Nation, our people were under the colonial rule and tyranny of a
European monarch. Oppressed and exploited by a tyrant, early Americans rebelled. The
Declaration of Independent drafted by Thomas Jefferson became the great beacon of light to
early Americans, who under the leaderships of George Washington and his generals, bravely
fought the Revolutionary War and gave birth to our Republic.
However, a great injustice, slavery, remained and divided our people almost a century later as
South and North. Again, as a people we fought and overcame slavery through Civil War and
saved our Union under the leaderships of Abraham Lincoln and his generals.
Our people then ushered in the great Industrial, Scientific and Economical Revolutions of the 19th
and 20th centuries together with the remaining World which brought us and rest of the World
unprecedented materials wealth, scientific knowledge and technologies and thrust our Nation to
the World Stage as a Great Power and Leader.
As a Nation and a People, we have fought in World Wars and defeated evil powers, endured and
overcome the Great Depression, endured and overcome racial segregation and injustice under the
leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Cold War and oversaw the collapse of Godless
Communism around the World.
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Hu, H., The American Dream of the 21st Century: A Call for Transformation of America
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Since September 11, 2001 terrorists attack on our Nation, we are again at a critical moment in our
history.
The Aftermath of Excessive Capitalism and Individualism
No doubt that it has been the creativity, productivity and entrepreneurship of our people and the
advances of sciences and technologies fueled by capitalism and individualism that brought our
Nation unprecedented material wealth, prosperity and a world-influencing pop culture.
But, the very wealth is now concentrated in the hands of so a few wealthy individuals and big
banks and corporations and has displaced many among us into poverty and despair. The very
wealth has created a deep gulf between the rich and the poor and among the political parties as
reflected by increased hostilities and seemingly irreconcilable differences among Americans and
in our Congress. The very wealth and prosperity have not stopped hunger and disease in the
World and might have produced our arrogance and intolerance in the eyes of the rest of the
World along with our Nation’s positive image. The very pop culture might have both positively
and negatively influenced the young generations worldwide. On the other hand, many Americans
are unable to cope with or adapt to the new environments.
Thus, after all the recent revolutions, many of today’s Americans are not better of than the
Americans of yesterday.
After all these revolutions, young generations of Americans are at peril of not being able to
realizing their American Dream as their parents did.
After all these revolutions, the spiritual lives of many among us are sadly crippled by the
manacles of mechanical view and the prisons of random chance and chaos.
After all these revolutions, some among us including some children still go hungry daily and
without shelters at night in the midst of mountains of food and vacant homes.
After all these revolutions, many among us cannot afford medical cares in the midst of a vast
ocean of medical advances and modern medicine.
After all these revolutions, many of our educated people cannot find a decent job and is
suffocating under the piles of educational debts.
Indeed, after all these revolutions, the moralities of many among us are degenerating, many
among us become selfish, mean-spirited, non-collaborative and too commercial, and some among
us even become hypocritical, untruthful and are solely driven by money, power and fame.
As a People, many among us are unemployed, our homes and investments have drastically
decreased in values, our bank accounts have dried up, our individual and family debts are
overburdening us.
As a Nation, our financial system almost collapsed, we are still at war abroad and facing
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Hu, H., The American Dream of the 21st Century: A Call for Transformation of America
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unprecedented economical crisis, national debts and economical inequality at home in the
backdrop of a World foreshadowed by the turbulence in the Middle East and the rise of China,
India and other countries.
So, at this critical moment, we dramatize these depressing and shameful conditions.
Sacred Pledges
In a sense, it is high time that each American makes a pledge to our fellow Americans – A pledge
that each of us shall rise above ourselves and shall work and struggle together with fellow
Americans for equality in all aspects of our lives, guaranties of food, medicine and shelter to all
Americans and opportunities of cost-effective education and employment afterword through our
Constitution, legislations or other meanings.
Each American shall further promises to do his/her best to contribute to American Society. The
rich may pay more taxes, if necessary, and shall pledge more of their wealth to help and assist the
less fortunate. The less fortunate shall work hard to realize their American Dream.
Each American corporation shall promise to be a moral corporation to American Society. The
executives shall strive for common good instead of excessive profit at the costs of the workers
and the society and the workers shall strive to contribute their best productivity to the
corporation.
Each American educational institution shall promise to be the best American Dream making
institution. The administrators and teachers shall strive for producing the best students instead of
collecting excessive tuitions and endowments and the students shall strive be the best students
and future American Dream makers.
The three respective branches of our Federal and State Government shall promises to all
Americans and their respective State Citizens that they will work in harmony for the prosperity
and common good of all Americans and the advancement of this cherished Nation and Republic
under GOD, not the interests of a few or self-interests. The executives, representatives and judges
shall strive to carry out the businesses of our Nation and the respective States in their best
abilities and the supporting staff shall strive to provide the supporting services to their best
abilities. Let us remember that our Government is of the people, by the people and for the people
as Lincoln declared.
It may be said that today some among us in America would have defaulted on these Sacred
Pledges if made earlier. Instead of honoring these obligations, some among us would have given
Americans bad checks, checks which would have come back marked "insufficient funds." But we
refuse to believe that the banks of this Great Nation would be bankrupt. We refuse to believe that
there would be insufficient funds in the great vaults of America. So all American Citizens,
corporations, institutions and Governmental units should make good on these Sacred Pledges —
Pledges that will in the long run give our people the security of basic necessities of food,
medicine and shelter, riches of the economy and the fulfillment of happiness under GOD.
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Finally, as a Nation and a People, we pledge to the World that we shall always work for World
Peace, eliminations of hunger and diseases, economical stability and prosperity and mutual
benefits of all nations on Earth.
Fierce Urgency, Warning & Precaution
As Martin Luther King, Jr. once did, let us remind ourselves the fierce urgency of now. This is no
time to keep our silence or hope others to take action. Now is the time to make transformational
changes in America. Now is the time to rise from the darkness and despair of an excessively
capitalistic and individualistic society to a compassionate and morally just society. Now is the
time to lift America from the quick sands of corporate greed and personal financial gains at all
costs to the solid rock of glorious path under GOD to prosperity and happiness for all Americans.
Now is the time to make equality in all aspects of American life a reality for all our people.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. would warn, it would be fatal for American corporations, the financial
and educational systems, other social and economic establishments and the wealthy individuals to
overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering heat of many Americans’ discontents will
not pass until there is an invigorating atmosphere of transformational changes, economical
equalities and job opportunities in America. This is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope
that we needed to release our angers and will soon be content will have a rude awakening if the
establishments of America return to their businesses as usual. There will be neither silence nor
rest in America until all Americans have regained their hopes of American Dream. The
whirlwinds of protests and non-violent struggles will come to shake the establishments and
current status quo of America until the bright day of transformational changes, economical
equalities and job opportunities emerges.
There is something else that we must say to all Americans who stand on the warm threshold
which leads into the glorious path to American Dream of the 21st Century. In the process of
gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our
thirst for transformational changes, economical equalities and job opportunities by drinking from
the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must forever conduct our protest and struggle on the high ground of dignity and discipline as
Martin Luther King, Jr. did. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical
violence or worse. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting economical
inequality and other injustice of excessive capitalism and individualism with positive forces. The
marvelous new struggle which may engulf the establishments of America and the World must not
lead us to a distrust of all the wealthy individuals, corporate executives and representatives in the
establishments, for many of them, as evidenced by their sympathy or silence, have come to
realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their yearning
for love and compassion to fellow Americans is inextricably bound to our struggles. We cannot
walk alone.
At this critical moment, we must also ask ourselves the soul searching question: Are we really
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fighting the benefit of all Americans or our own self-interests? And do we want to go down in
history as hypocrites or equality-seeking men and women? And so, as John F. Kennedy would
urge: My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you but what can you do for
your country.
Marching Ahead
As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead as King would do. We
cannot turn back. There are those who ask, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be
satisfied as long as the majority of Americans are short-changed by the minority and
disadvantaged by the establishments of America. We can never be satisfied, as long as our hard
work cannot feed our families nor provide them with medicine or shelter. We can never be
satisfied as long as young generations of Americans, loaded with heavy burden of educational
debts, cannot find decent jobs and robbed of their American Dream by signs stating "for the rich
only." We cannot be satisfied as long as an American wanting to work cannot find a job and
another American who has a job feels insecure and is in despair. No, no, we are not satisfied, and
we will not be satisfied until economical equalities roll down like waters and job opportunities
rain like a mighty stream.
We are not unmindful that some among us have suffered great trials of unemployment and
financial difficulties. Some among us are still in the suffocating environment of hopelessness and
despair. Some among us have been battered by the storms of corporate greed and staggered by
the winds of layoffs. Some of us have been the veterans of unearned suffering. Continue to hope
with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to your work, go back to your study, go back to your business, go back to your place of
worship, go back to the backwaters of undesirable jobs, go back to the forgotten paths of
entrepreneurship knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not
wallow in the valley of despair but turn to our family to help each other and pray to GOD for
comfort, inner strength and salvation.
We Have a Dream
We say to you today, fellow Americans, so even though we face the difficulties of today and
tomorrow, we still have a dream in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a dream deeply
rooted in the American Dream of the 21st Century and the struggle for the advancement of our
Republic and the mankind at large under the Laws of GOD.
We have a dream that one day all Americans will be better off than today, secure in basic
necessities of food, medicine and shelter, prosperous in all aspects and happy in our lives.
We have a dream that one day all wealthy Americans will be compassionate and giving, sharing
their wealth with the less fortunate and the Nation.
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We have a dream that one day all American corporations will rise up and live out the true
meaning of an ideal corporation: morality before profit, employment before dividend,
collaboration before monopoly and cooperation before competition.
We have a dream that one day Wall Street will not be a “greed” street but a “moral” street:
orderly market, honest investment banking, transparency in financial reporting and no
manipulation of market and no insider trading.
We have a dream that one day all educational institutions will provide educations to their
students at reasonable costs, use their endowment generously and ensure their students
employment opportunities after graduation.
We have a dream that one day even a bigot, sweltering with the heat of anti-immigrants,
sweltering with the heat of racism, will be transformed into an oasis pursuing equality for all.
We have a dream that one day, the three respective branches of our Federal and State
Government will always work in harmony for the prosperity, common good and advancement of
all Americans and this Great Nation under GOD.
We have a dream today. We have a dream as that of Martin Luther King, Jr. “that one day every
valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made
plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of [GOD] shall be revealed, and
all flesh shall see it together.”
So, we have a dream today. We have a dream that one day we will be live in a Paradise on Earth
and a peaceful World under GOD for a thousand years to come.
This is our hope. This is the faith that we go on in the pursuit of the American Dream of 21st
Century. With this faith as that of Martin Luther King, Jr. “we will be able to hew out of the
mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling
discords of [American economy and finance] into a beautiful symphony of [harmony and
prosperity].” With this faith we will be able to work together, to struggle together, to pray
together, to stand up for America’s future together, knowing that we will be truly happy one day.
This will be the day when everyone will be able to sing as Rumi “I am so tipsy here in this world,
I have no tale to tell but tipsiness and rapture."
Let Transformation of Consciousness Begin
No doubt that our pursuit of American Dream of the 21st Century is hindered by the state of our
own consciousness from the rich to the poor. Thus, the transformation of our consciousness under
GOD is the key to accomplish this sacred pursuit and transform America. By transforming our
consciousness and transcending ourselves from the rich to the poor, we shall transform greed into
compassion, hate to love, wealth possession to wealth sharing and war to peace.
So, let transformation of consciousness begin in each of us from the rich to the poor! Let
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transformation of consciousness begin in corporate America! Let transformation of consciousness
begin on Wall Street! Let transformation of consciousness begin in all places of business,
schools, churches and all institutions!
But not only that, let transformation of consciousness begin in the respective three branches of
our Federal and State Government! Let transformation of consciousness begin in the
corporations, businesses and government of every nation! From every corner of Earth, let
transformation of consciousness begin!
When this happens, when we allow transformation of consciousness to begin, when we let it to
ring from every individual, every corporation, every business and every governmental unit, we
will be able to speed up that day when American Dream of the 21st Century shall be realized
under the Laws of GOD.
Tribute and Resolve
Let us now pay tribute to those who have greatly contributed towards the birth, endurance and
advancement of our cherished Nation and Republic. But, as Abraham Lincoln would declare, in a
larger sense we cannot compose anything proper to honor those heroes. The brave men and
women of America, living and dead, who struggled, have already done so, far above one’s poor
power to add or detract. The World may be little notice what we say here, but it can never forget
what they have done. It is for rest of us, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which
they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
great task remaining before us, that from these honored we take increased devotion to the cause
for which they have given their full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these
dedicated shall not have fought in vain, that our Nation shall have a new birth, and that American
Dream shall endure and advance and shall not vanish in the 21st Century.
GOD Bless America from Sea to Shining Sea!
Acknowledgements: The layout of this Essay “The American Dream of the 21st Century: A Call for
Transformation of America” is based on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “I have a Dream.” The Essay is
also fused with languages from the Declaration of Independence the chief drafter of which was Thomas
Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It also contains a quote from John F. Kennedy and
a verse from “GOD Bless America.”
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Article
From Quantum Universe to Holographic Brain:
The Spiritual Nature of Mankind
Francisco Di Biase*
Dept. of Neurosurgery-Neurology, Clínica Di Biase & Santa Casa Hospital, Rio, Brazil
Abstract
We are living a special moment in the scientific evolution of our civilization, with the emergence
of a fantastic integral holoinformational quantum-holographic cosmovision [3]. The foundation
of this new paradigmatic transformation connecting all levels of the universe is the phenomenon
of non-local information [1] interconnecting all self-organizing universal systems in this cosmos.
This holoinformational intelligent self-organizing field is continuously emerging from a plenum
(not a vacuum) that permeates all the cosmos, full of quantum information and energy popping
out of nothing every billion of trillionth of a second. This quantum field plenum is a kind of
cosmic DNA scattering “in-formation” (active information with meaning that forms the reality)
through all the universe, creating galaxies and supernovas with thermonuclear furnaces
generating atoms of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen the basis of all life forms. The fine-tuned
biosignature of this non-local informational field is so fundamental for the cosmic evolution and
the emergence of life that it must be seen as a cosmic organizational principle with a “status”
equal to matter, energy and space-time, and as we shall see, also consciousness.
Keywords: Unified field, consciousness, universe, quantum field, holoinformation, cosmovision,
non-local, quantum information, DNA.
1. Introduction
We are living a special moment in human history of emergence of a fantastic integral quantumholographic cosmovision [3], developing a “magic” world, as Arthur Clark said, where we will
not differentiate technology from magic. Our civilization is discovering and making reverse
engineering from everything that evolved in this Cosmos. We will be creators not only of stemcells and nanobots but also of stars and galaxies.
This new integral cosmovision is more wide than the quantum-relativistic paradigm that
emerged in the beginning of the XX century. The foundation of this new paradigmatic
transformation connecting all levels of the universe is the phenomenon of non-local
information [1] interconnecting all self-organizing universal systems in this cosmos. The
Quantum Field Theory developed by Umesawa [1] with its concept of non-local information
connecting everything in the universe from quantum physics-chemistry, quantum biology and
*
Correspondence: Francisco Di Biase, Professor, Post-Graduation Dept., UGB Universidade Geraldo Di Biase - Volta Redonda,
Rio, Brazil; Department of Neurosurgery-Neurology, Clínica Di Biase and Santa Casa Hospital, Rio, Brazil; Full Professor, Grand
PhD, World Information Distributed University, Belgium; & Honorary Professor, Albert Schweitzer International University,
Switzerland. E-mail: dibiase@terra.com.br
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quantum mind, through quantum consciousness and quantum cosmology fine-tuned [2] for the
emergence of life show us that human evolution and the emergence of mind and consciousness
are the inevitable consequence of a intelligent informational universe. This holoinformational
intelligent self-organizing field is continuously emerging from a plenum (not a vacuum) that
permeates all the cosmos, full of quantum information and energy popping out of nothing every
billion of trillionth of a second.
This quantum field plenum is a kind of cosmic DNA scattering “in-formation” (active
information with meaning that forms the reality)) through all the universe, creating galaxies and
supernovas with thermonuclear furnaces generating atoms of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen the
basis of all life forms. The fine-tuned biosignature of this non-local informational field is so
fundamental for the cosmic evolution and the emergence of life that it must be seen as a cosmic
organizational principle with a “status” equal to matter, energy and space-time, and as we shall see,
also consciousness.
2. Information Self-Organization and Negentropy
Chalmers [4] states that information is an essential property of reality, as matter and energy, and that
“conscious experience must be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic”.
He argues that each informational state has two different aspects, one as conscious experience, and the
other as a physical process in the brain, that is, one internal/intentional and the other external/physical.
This view finds support in the present developments of the so-called “Information Physics”, developed
by the physicist Wojciech Zurek [5] and others. This Information Physics developed in the first
years of the 90’s have demonstrated that beyond the Law of Conservation of Energy there is a
more fundamental Law of Conservation of Information.
In the process of developing a new Quantum Information Theory, Zureck propose that the
physical entropy would be a combination of two magnitudes that compensate each other: the
observer’s ignorance, measured by Shannon’s statistical entropy, and the disorder degree of the
observed system, measured by the algorithmic entropy which is the smallest number of bits needed to
register it in the memory. During the measurement, the observer’s ignorance is reduced, as a result of
the increase in bit numbers in its memory, remaining, however, constant the sum of these two
magnitudes, that is, the physical entropy.
In this context the equivalence/identity between order, negentropy and information, is the way that
allows us to build upon and understand the whole irreducible and natural flow of order transmission in
the universe, organized in a meaningful and intelligent informational mode. In the classical
thermodynamic theory, the definition of order is probabilistic and dependent on the entropy concept,
which measures the degree of disorder of a system, reducing to uncertainty the immense dimension of
natural meanings. For Atlan [6,7], and for us, Di Biase [8,9,10,11,12], “entropy shouldn’t be
understood as a disorder measure, but much more as a measure of complexity”. To make this, it is
necessary to consider that information implies a certain ambiguity, meaning the bit capacity of a
physical system as Shannon [13 ] put it, or the semantic content (meaning) conducted by the bits
during a communication. In the information theory, the organization, the order expressed by the
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amount of information in the system (Shannon’s H function) is the information measure that is missing
to us, the uncertainty about the system.
Relating this uncertainty, this ambiguity to the variety and the non-homogeneity of the system, Atlan
[7] could solve certain logical paradoxes of self-organization and complexity, widening Shannon’s
theory and defining organization in a quantitatively formal mode. Atlan showed that the system’s order
corresponds to a commitment between the maximum informational content (i.e. the maximum variety)
and the maximum redundancy, and showed also that the ambiguity can be described as a noise
function, or even a time one, if we consider the time effects as related to the random factors
accumulated by the environment’s action. Such ambiguity, peculiar to biological self-organizing
systems, can be manifested in a negative way (“destructive ambiguity”) with the classical meaning of
disorganizing effect, or in a positive way (“autonomy producer ambiguity”) that acts by increasing the
relative autonomy of a part of the system in relation to the others, reducing the system’s natural
redundancy and increasing its informational content.
Atlan developed this self-organizing theory of complexity for biological systems. Jantsch [14] has
show that cosmological evolution is also a self-organizing process, with the microevolution of the
individual systems (holons) co-evolving towards macrosystemic collective structures better organized,
with a big reduction in the amount of these collective systems. This whole self-organizing process
represents, actually, a universal expression of a bigger acquisition of variety or informational content
that is a consequence of a reduction of redundancy in the totality of the system.
Seager [15] states that consciousness, self-organization and information are connected at the level of
semantic significance, not at the level of bit capacity, and that “as the classical theory of information is
situated at the level of “bit capacity” it would seen unable to provide the proper connection to
consciousness”...and “we can begin to move towards a more radical view of the fundamental nature of
consciousness with a move towards a more radical view of information”. Seager still reminds us that in
the famous two-slit experiment, and in the quantum eraser experiment, what is at stake is not the bit
capacity, but the semantically significant correlation of information laden distinct physical systems, in
a non-causal mode.
3. Linking quantum information to consciousness and physics
Wheeler [16] realized how important information is in such context. With his genius, Wheeler
describes an elegant information-participatory universe that is the most brilliant and fundamental
model of interaction brain-mind and Cosmos ever described in the science of consciousness. With his
famous “the it from bit” concept he unite quantum information theory to consciousness and physics:
...every it - every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself - derives
its function, its very existence, entirely - even if in some contexts, indirectly - from the
apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits”. “It from bit
symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom – at a very deep
bottom, in most instances – an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality
arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no question and the registering of
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equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in
origin and this is a participatory universe.
In the same paper Wheeler [16] gives the example of a photon being detected by a photodetector under
watch, when we ask the yes-or-no question:
Did the counter register a click during the specified second?”. If yes, we often say “a photon
did it”. We know perfectly well that the photon existed neither before the emission nor after
the detection. However, we also have to recognize that any talk of the photon “existing”
during the intermediate period is only a blown-up version of the raw fact, a count. The yes or
no that is recorded constitutes an unsplitable bit of information.
There is a cosmological version of Wheeler’s experiment with photons emitted by a distant
double quasar that shows that photons interfere with each other not only when observed in the
laboratory but also when emitted in the cosmos at huge intervals of time. A double quasar with
its light-image deflected due to a gravitational lens made by a galaxy situated about one fourth of
the distance from Earth was observed. The additional distance travelled by the photons deflected
by this intervening galaxy was fifty thousand light years longer than those that came by the direct
way. Although originating billions of years ago and arriving with an interval of fifty thousand
years, the photons interfere with each other just as if they had been emitted seconds apart in the
lab.
Wheeler developed this it from bit perspective studying the unification of quantum gravity theories in
black holes and telling that we must understand quantum information as being more fundamental than
energy, matter and space-time. This has relevance for consciousness studies as we see consciousness
primarily as an informational system. As Doug Matzke [17] states:
[I]t requires the adoption of an energy/information duality for anything within
accessible states, such as quantum states and consciousness. The seemingly paradoxical
aspects of consciousness will become more understandable adopting this
energy/information duality just as early in this century the particle/wave duality was
insightful in understanding physics” … “By understanding quantum states as an
information system, the energy/information duality is exposed.
The corresponding nature of quantum spacetime supports non-local behaviors.
Quantum information laws form a consistency network that creates all fields, particles
and even spacetime itself. Even Einstein was wrong about the thinking of quantum
mechanics as mere energy mechanics. Correctly labeling phenomena as information vs.
energy will lead to clarity about paradoxical aspects of consciousness.
4. The Cosmic Informational Code
What self-organizes significantly the cosmic evolution is the relationship between the physical entropy
and the universe’s non-local quantum-holographic informational content, through a process in which
the complexity using the pre-existing informational content reaches each time higher organizational
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levels and variety. The concept of quantum information as being more fundamental than energy,
matter and space-time, is the foundation of a transdisciplinary holoinformational unified field
theory of consciousness that connects “all that is above to all that is below”.
Complexity in the universe grows gradually, from gravity and nuclear powers in the cosmosphere,
with information stored in atomic-nuclear structures. Intensifies with the emergence of the selforganizing macromolecular systems of the biosphere, with information stored in the DNA
molecules code. And reaches an almost infinite antientropic state of complexity, variety and
informational content with the emergence of the noosphere and the mind code with information
stored in neural networks, and the consciousphere the consciousness-universe interconnection
code with information stored in quantum-holographic networks. This universal distributed nonlocal quantum holographic information network connects our consciousness to the quantumholographic cosmos. It is a non-local quantum informational unfolding, that self-organizes matter, life
mind and consciousness in a meaningful way as we can see in the conceptual framework of the
quantum holographic theory of the universe of David Bohm.
Such informational codes, this order that is transmitted in a meaningful and intelligent way through all
levels of complexity of the universe, is the negentropic self-organization nature of the informationconsciousness, an irreducible physical dimension of the cosmos as energy and matter.
5. Consciousness and Non-Locality
Adding to its equations a Quantum Potential that satisfies Schrödinger’s equation, that depends on the
form but not on the amplitude of the wave function, David Bohm [18,19,20] developed a model in
which the quantum potential, carries “active information” that “guides” the particle along its way. The
quantum potential has inedited characteristics unknown up to then, because differently from the other
nature’s forces, it is subtle in its form, and does not decay with the distance. Such interpretation allows
communication between this “pilot wave” and the particle, to be processed in a higher speed than the
light, unveiling the quantum paradox of non-locality [20], i.e., of the instantaneous causality,
fundamental in our holoinformational view of consciousness.
For Bohm, differently from Bohr, the elementary particles do not have dual nature wave/particle but
are particles all the time, and not only when observed. Actually, the particle originates from a global
quantum field fluctuation, being its behavior determined by the quantum potential “that carries
information about the environment of the quantum particle and thus informs and affects its motion.
Since the information in the potential is very detailed, the resulting trajectory is so extremely complex
that it appears chaotic or indeterminist” [21]. Any attempt of measuring particles properties, changes
the quantum potential, destroing its information. As John Bell [22] observed, “ the De Broglie-Bohm’s
idea seems... so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle, dilemma in such a clear and ordinary
way, that it is a great mystery... that it was so generally ignored”.
In the quantum-holographic theory, as Bohm [23] put it:
[T]he implicate order is a wave function, and the superimplicate order or superior
informational field, is a function of the wave function, i.e. a superwave function that makes
the implicate order non-linear organizing it in complex and relatively stable structures.
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Besides that, the holographic model as a way of organization of the implicate order was
dependent upon the quantum informational potential field, that did not have capacity for selforganization and transmission of the information, essential for the understanding of the
genesis and development of matter, life and consciousness. The superimplicate order fills this
need, allowing the understanding of consciousness, energy and matter as expression varieties
of a same informational order. As a result consciousness would already have been present
since the beginning of creation in the various levels of nature’s unfolding and enfolding.
6. Organisms and Brains are Macroscopic Quantum Systems
In the living world non-local coherence is just present as in the quantum and in the cosmos scale.
In living organisms the coordination of functions inside the organisms is ensured by quantum
coherence as we can see in the instantaneous correlation between parts and molecules and also
between the organism and the external milieu. This instantaneous quantum information transfer
are observed in organic molecules in entangled quantum states, in quantum tunneling , in BoseEinstein condensates, and in superradiance states occurring in brain structures as microtubules,
synapses and the cerebrospinal fluid. According to Erwin Schrödinger in his seminal book What
is Life? [24] , in living organisms we must replace the concept of mechanical order that make
order from disorder, by the notion of dynamic order, that produces order from order, from
complex organization and information.
This difference between mechanical and dynamical order, according to Schrödinger was first
proposed by Max Planck that already made this distinction in a little paper named The
Dynamical and Statistical type of Law, as I show in Di Biase, Auto-Organização em Sistemas
Biológicos [8]. That type of non-local informational order explains the living matter and is not
based on mechanical molecular chance collisions and interactions, but in a system-wide
correlations involving even distant parts that could not have time for mix in a mechanical
process. This organic coherence is only possible through the mobilization of non-local
information and energy far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Mae-Wan Ho[25] suggests the
organism maintain itself in a negentropic state through the superposition of a non-dissipative
cyclic process with entropy balance out of zero, and a dissipative irreversible process with
entropy production greater than zero.
The cyclic non-dissipative loop coupling with the irreversible energy loop frees the living
organism from immediate thermodynamic constraints. But how a self-organizing quantum mind
can overlap quantum decoherence and maintain a persistent coherent state for a long time, at room
temperature. Ho [25] has been demonstrating that:
Highly polarized multiple layers of liquid crystalline water molecules form dynamically
coherent units with the macromolecules, enabling them to function as quantum molecular
energy machines that transform and transfer energy with close to 100 percent efficiency. This
liquid crystalline continuum of intimately associated polarized water and macromolecules
extends throughout the extracellular matrix into the interior of every single cell, enabling
each cell, ultimately each molecule, to intercommunicate with every other.
Dejan Rakovic [26], points out that:
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Quantum-Holographic and Classically-Reduced Neural Networks can model
psychosomatic functions: “The prevailing scientific paradigm considers information
processing within the central nervous system as occurring through hierarchically organized
and interconnected neural networks. However, it seems that this hierarchy of biological
neural networks is going down sub-cellular cytoskeleton level, being according to some
scientists a kind of interface between neural and quantum levels. At the same time it
appeared, within the Feynman propagator version of the Schrödinger equation, that the
quantum level is described by analogous mathematical formalism as Hopfield-like quantumholographic associative neural network. The mentioned analogy opens additional
fundamental question as to how the quantum parallel processing level gives rise to classical
parallel processing level, which is a general problem of the relationship between quantum
and classical levels within the quantum decoherence theory as well. The same question is
closely related to the fundamental nature of consciousness, whose in-deterministic
manifestations of free will and other holistic manifestations of consciousness like transitional
states of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, and consciousness pervading body –
necessarily imply that some manifestations of consciousness must have deeper quantum
origin, with significant psychosomatic implications.
7. Quantum-holographic neuronal dynamics and classical neuronal computer
network interconnection
It is very well stablished experimentally today that the molecules of chlorophyll responsables for the
photosynthesis process that transforms light photons in chemical energy in plants, can do this with
extraordinary efficiency, for about 750 femtoseconds, compared with 1 to 1.5 femtoseconds frequency
of chemical-bond vibrations. This is due to the action of a protein called antenna protein that holds the
chlorophyll molecule sustaining the quantum coherence state and suppressing decoherence, by
reinducing coherence in decohering parts of the chlorophyll molecule [27]. This show us that the
capability to suppress decoherence at environment temperature is a common process in nature. So the
capability to suppress quantum decoherence must be seen as a natural process in the wet brain, and we
must work with the possibility that neurons and glia can sustain a quantum coherent state for
milliseconds in the organized cellular complex molecular system full of proteins macromolecules,
small molecules, ions and water.
It is well known that in the vicinity of these macromolecules there is ordered water, and that proteins
with a cavity in its 3 D structure can hold one or a few water molecules by means of hydrogen bonds.
Quantum chemical computation shows that these ordered water molecules within and between two
proteins separated by 12 to 16 ångstrons permits the occurrence of quantum coherent electron transfer
[28]. This quantum coherence can propagate through non-local information transfer in the nervous
system and in the body by quantum entanglement and superradiance. As biological self-organized
systems these molecular systems have a huge structural and functional redundance that facilitates the
non-local interconnection of all parts.
8. In-formation in Self-Organizing Dissipative Structures
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Ilya Prigogine [29,30] Nobel Prize winner, developed an extension of thermodynamics that shows how
the second law can also allow the emergence of novel structures, and indicates the ways in which order
can emerge from chaos. This type of self-organization generates dissipative structures that are created
and maintained through the energy’s exchanges with the environment in non-equilibrium conditions.
These dissipative structures are dependent upon a new order, called by Prigogine “order from
fluctuations”, which corresponds to a “giant fluctuation” stabilized by the exchanges with the
environment. In these self-organizing processes the structure is maintained through an energyinformation dissipation that displaces itself, simultaneously generating (in-formating) the structure
through a continuous process. The more complex the dissipative structure, the more information is
needed to keep its interconnections, making it consequently more vulnerable to the internal
fluctuations, which means a higher instability potential and higher reorganization possibilities. If
fluctuations are small, the system accommodate them and does not change its organizational structure.
If the fluctuations reach a critical size, however, they cause disequilibrium in the system, generating
new intra-systemic interactions and reorganization. “The old patterns interact between themselves in
new ways, and establish new connections. The parts reorganize themselves in a new whole. The system
reaches a higher order” [29]. The brain is a dissipative self-organizing conscious quantum computer.
9. Consciousness Self-Organization and In-formation
Pribram [31,39-42] has demonstrated an analogy between the fields of distributed neural activity
in the brain and the wave patterns in holograms. His neural network equation is similar to
Schrödinger’s wave equation of quantum physics with the adition of Bohm’s quantum potential
that guides by means of active information the particle alongside its course. As any elementary particle
is united to the whole cosmos by means of a quantum active non-local information potential, capable of
change the structure of the universe, information then can be understood as nature’s fundamental
process, as Stonier [32,33] put it. This “active” (Bohm) non-local in-formation that organizes the
particle’s world reveal that the whole nature is informational, organized in a meaningful way. In the
brain, this informational process is non-local quantum holistic based in quantum-holographic neural
network fields, and at the same time local classical Newtonian and mechanistic, based in classical
neural networks. So, as Di Biase [11] has been demonstrating in the last years it is a holoinformational
field (nonlocal and local).
This view is crucial to understand the holoinformational nature of consciousness and intelligence in the
universe [12]. Matter, life and consciousness are meaningful activities, intelligent quantuminformational processes, order transmitted through the cosmic evolution, originated from a generating
non-local informational field beyond our perception limits.
A universe plenum of non-local quantum potential in-formation with meaning (active information) is
an intelligent universe functioning like a mind, as Sir James Jeans already had observed. So, as
consciousness has always been present in all nature’s levels of organization, matter, life and
consciousness cannot be considered as separated entities, capable of being analyzed under a
fragmentary Cartesian-Newtonian framework. Actually, consciousness must be considered a
fundamental property of the universe [12] like information, energy, matter, and space-time and must
be seen as an irreducible quantum non-local information distributed in a holistic cosmic way, and
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Biase, F. D., From Quantum Universe to Holographic Brain: The Spiritual Nature of Mankind
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simultaneously by local Newtonian mechanistic relationships, generating self-organization, complexity,
intelligence and evolution.
Such view of a holoinformational intelligent “continuum”, a fundamental generating order with a
quantum-holographic informational creative flow permeating the whole cosmos, permits to understand
the basic nature of the universe as an intelligent self-organizing unbroken wholeness. A kind of cosmic
consciousness unfolding in an infinite holoarchy. As a quantum-holographic system this universal
consciousness is distributed in every part of the cosmosphere, and our quantum-holographic mind as
part of this holographically distributed system contains the active in-formation of the whole indivisible
cosmos [Di Biase, 9,10].
10. Eccles Interactive Dualism and Pribram’s Monism
Sir John Eccles [35-38] described in the brain fine fibers structures he called dendrons composed of
pre-synaptic teledendrons, synapses and post-synaptic dendrites connections, that he postulated could
interact with the mind side of the interaction by way of units he called psychons. He proposed that
these psychons could operate on synapses through quantum processes, and with Beck [34] developed a
beautiful and logical quantum interpretation of the synaptic function. Pribram [31,39,40] demonstrated
that Eccles' dendrons make up receptive fields in cortical sensory units, that:
[A]s sensory receptive fields they can be mapped in terms of wavelets, or wavelet-like
patterns such as Gabor Elementary Functions. Dennis Gabor (1946) called these units
Quanta of Information. The reason for this name is that Gabor used the same mathematics to
describe his units as had Heisenberg in describing the units of quantum microphysics. Here
they define the unity structure of processes occurring in the material brain. However, Gabor
invented his function, not to describe brain processes, but to find the maximum
compressibility of a telephone message that could be sent over the Atlantic Cable without
destroying its intelligibility. The Gabor function thus describes both a unit of brain processing
and a unit of communication. Brain is material, communication is mental. The same
mathematical formulation describes both. The elementary structure of processing in Eccles'
material dendron is identical to the elementary structure of processing of a mental
(communication) psychon. There is a structural identity to the dual interactive process.
Pribram [43,44,45] proposes a monistic basis for Eccles dualism, showing that “there is a interactive
mind/matter duality that is a “ground” from which both matter and mind are “formed“ and the
“dual” emerges. That ground functions as a potential reality similar to Heisenberg potential world.
“This flux provides the ontological roots from which our experience regarding matter as well as mind
(psychological processing) itself become actualized in spacetime”. To illuminate this claim, Pribram
relates the following story:
Once, Eugene Wigner remarked that in quantum physics we no longer have observables
(invariants) but only observations. Tongue in cheek I asked whether that meant that quantum
physics is really psychology, expecting a gruff reply to my sassiness. Instead, Wigner beamed
a happy smile of understanding and replied, “yes, yes, that's exactly correct”. If indeed one
wants to take the reductive path, one ends up with psychology, not particles. In fact, it is a
psychological process, mathematics, that describes the relationships that organize matter. In
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Biase, F. D., From Quantum Universe to Holographic Brain: The Spiritual Nature of Mankind
165
a non-trivial sense current physics is rooted in both matter and mind. Communication
depends on being embodied, instantiated in some sort of material medium. This convergence
of matter on mind, and of mind on matter, gives credence to their common ontological root.
My claim is that this root, though constrained by measures in spacetime, needs a more
fundamental order, a potential order that underlies and transcends spacetime. The spectral
basis of both matter and communication portrayed by the Fourier relationship delineate this
claim.
As the brain has the capacity of function in the holographic non-local mode as in the space-temporal
local mode, we think that we are dealing here with Bohr’s concept of complementarity in the quantum
functioning of the central nervous system.
The holonomic brain theory of Pribram [31] and the holographic quantum theory of Bohm, added with
Laszlo’s akashic field [2], shows that we are part of something much more wider than our individual
mind. Our mind is a subsystem of a universal hologram, accessing and interpreting this holographic
universe. We are fractal-like holographic harmonic systems interacting continuously with this
unbroken self-organizing wholeness. We are this holoinformational field of consciousness, and not
observers external to it. The external observer’s perspective made us lose the sense and the feeling of
unity or supreme identity, generating the immense difficulties we have in understanding that we are
one with the whole and not part of it.
In this holoinformational model of consciousness the non-local quantum-informational flow in a
continuous holomovement of expansion and enfoldment between the brain and the implicate order, is
the universal consciousness self-organizing itself as human mind. This non-local quantum-holographic
Cosmic Consciousness manifest itself through our mind, seeing itself through our eyes and our
consciousness, interconnecting in a participatory holistic and indivisible way the human brain to all
levels of the self-organizing multiverse[45].
11. Quantum Brain Dynamics
Experimental research developed by Pribram [31] and other consciousness researchers like Hameroff
[46] and Penrose [47] , Jibu and Yassue [48,49], and Ho [25] confirm the existence of a Quantum
Brain Dynamics in neural microtubules, in synapses and in the molecular organization of the
cerebrospinal fluid, and in the intracellular medium matrix. This Quantum Brain Dynamics can
generate Bose-Einstein condensates and the Fröhlich effect. Bose-Einstein condensates consist of
atomic particles, or in the case of the Fröhlich effect of biological molecules, that can assume a high
level of coherent alignment, functioning as a highly ordered and unified informational state, as seen in
lasers and superconductivity. Also Sir John Eccles’s psychons [38] operate on synapses by way of
quantum coherence processes. These quantum dynamics show us that the interaction process between
what Eccles calls dendrons ( the brain side) and psychons ( the mind side) are not limited to the
synaptic cleft, as stated by him, but have a much wider embodiment throughout the whole brain.
Pribram [31,44] demonstrates good evidence that Eccle’s dendrons make up receptive fields in cortical
sensory units. Dendrons are composed of pre-synaptic teledendrons, synapses and post-synaptic
dendrites, and they compose the fine fiber structure wherein brain processing occurs. As Pribram states
[44]:
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166
[A]s sensory generated receptive fields they can be mapped in terms of wavelets, or waveletlike patterns such as Gabor Elementary Functions. Dennis Gabor (1946) called these units
Quanta of Information. The reason for this name is that Gabor used the same mathematics to
describe his units as had Heisenberg in describing the units of quantum microphysics. Here
they define the unit structure of processes occurring in the material brain”.
I see the quantum holographic interactions between brain and cosmos as a natural extension [10,11,12]
of Eccles ideas of an interactionism between dendrons and psychons.
Jibu and Yasue [49] studies on quantum brain dynamics with Umesawa also shows that:
[B]rain dynamics consists of quantum brain dynamics (i.e. quantum mode) and classical
brain dynamics (i.e. classical mode), and that “quantum brain dynamics is the fundamental
process of the brain given by quantum field dynamics of the molecular vibrational fields of
water molecules and biomolecules.
According to Jibu and Yasue [49], Umesawa introduced in quantum brain dynamics the notion that
“the quanta of the molecular vibrational field of biomolecules are corticons, and the quanta of the
molecular vibrational field of water molecules are exchange bosons.”
Quantum coherence can propagate through these vibrational fields of biomolecules and water
molecules by non-local information transfer, quantum entanglement and superradiance.
The dissipative quantum model in the brain is the extension to the dissipative dynamics of the
many-body model proposed in 1967 by Ricciardi and Umezawa[50,51]. The extended patterns of
neuronal excitations may be described by the spontaneous breakdown of symmetry formalism of
Quantum Field Theory.
Umezawa states that “In any material in condensed matter physics any particular information is
carried by certain ordered pattern maintained by certain long range correlation mediated by
massless quanta. It looked to me that this is the only way to memorize some information;
memory is a printed pattern of order supported by long range correlations..."
As these biomolecular systems are self-organized systems, they have a huge structural and functional
redundance, and this creates a quasi-cristaline medium that facilitates the interconnection of the
molecular quantum computer networks dynamics with the neuronal classical computer network, i.e. a
holoinformational field.
12. The Quantization of Mind
Amoroso [52,53,54] in his Noetic Field Theory, an extension of the De Broglie-Bohm
interpretation of quantum theory, has managed to solve the mind-body problem in a
comprehensive and empirically testable manner. While ‘qualia’ has remained a philosophical
construct in cognitive theory, Amoroso’s Noetic Field Theory: The Quantization of Mind (NFT)
has actually physicalized the basis of qualia breaking down the 1st person-3rd person barrier.
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167
Being able to physically quantify qualia led him to develop a formal model of Eccles’ psychon,
in a similar fashion of the creation of the unit of measure called ‘the Einstein’ signifying a mole
or Avogadro’s number of photons used in photosynthesis. Amoroso has created a unit of
measure called ‘the Psychon’ in honor of Nobelist Sir John C. Eccles that quantifies the energy
of qualia or measures the energy of awareness .
In this NFT a unified field theory of mind-body interaction, Amoroso says that:
[L]ife is based on the unified field of physics and is a physical real aspect of the unified
field. This removes the main stigma of Cartesian dualism that res cogitans violates the
laws of thermodynamics and the conservation of energy. In NFT the ordering principle
of the Unified Field is not a 5th fundamental force of physics; rather it is a ‘force of
coherence’ applied ontologically (rather than phenomenologically which requires the
exchange of energy by quanta transfer) by what is called topological switching.
Amoroso proposes the existence of three regimes to reality: Classical, Quantum and Unified, and
states that:
[I]t is in this new 3rd regime that access to the principles of the mind resides. Just as
Quantum Mechanics was invisible to the tools of Newtonian Mechanics, so until now
has the regime of the unified field been invisible to the tools of quantum mechanics [53].
For him in this 3rd physical regime exists a ‘life principle’ that interacts with the brain/body
forming a self-organized living system. The developing of of the Noetic Field Theory required a
whole new Holographic Anthropic Multiverse Cosmology, title of a Amoroso book coauthored with Elizabeth Rauscher [52] to introduce this essential component absent from Big
Bang cosmology:
Essentially NFT’s description of the ‘mind gate’ requires violation of the quantum
uncertainty principle [54]. Uncertainty is saw as being the shield ‘hiding’ the 3rd
regime. Related to the uncertainty principle is the zero-point field (ZPF) where virtual
quantum particles wink in and out of existence momentarily for a duration of the Planck
time (as governed by the uncertainty principle). The 1st component of the gate he
developed is called an ‘exciplex’, short for excited complex - meaning it stays excited
and never returns to zero as the ZPF does in terms of the exclusion principle of the
Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory. Operation of the exciplex gate requires
Large-Scale Extra Dimensions that includes an oscillating form of Planck’s constant,
fluctuating from the continuous-state asymptotic virtual Planck scale (never reached) of
the usual theory to the Larmor radius of the hydrogen atom. This is part of the process
in which the exciplex gating mechanism violates the quantum uncertainty principle [54]
utilizing Large-Scale Extra Dimensions in a continuous-state process such that the gate
is only periodically open - cycling like a holophote or lighthouse beacon into each point
and atom in spacetime.
For Amoroso, the Unified Field, UF is not a 5th force per se, and is also not phenomenological
as:
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Biase, F. D., From Quantum Universe to Holographic Brain: The Spiritual Nature of Mankind
168
[F]orces are mediated by the exchange of energy transferred by quanta, i.e. the EM
field is mediated by the photon[;] [t]he UF does imply force, however it is an
ontological or energyless ‘force of coherence.
I see Amoroso’s Unified Field as in-formation with a status like energy, matter and spacetime, I described elsewhere in this paper. Amoroso says that this in-formation “is transferred by
a process called ‘topological switching’, and that “this is what occurs when staring at a Necker
cube and the vertices change position”.
In Amoroso’s theory, There is a super quantum potential’ of the unified field, that arises from
NFT use of Large-Scale Extra Dimensions extension of the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of
quantum theory. Recall that in their theory quantum evolution is continuous and guided. Thus in
terms of NFT one would say that the quantum potential/pilot wave are a subset of the action of
the unified field
Observed (virtual) 3D reality arises from the infinite potentia of 12D space, as a ‘standingwave-like’ (advanced-retarded future-past) mirror symmetric model. Realize that the standingwave of reality is hyperdimensional. NFT is related to a unique M-Theoretic model of
‘Continuous-State' UF dynamics, and its putative exchange quanta of the UF is called the
noeon”.
Amoroso proposes as an essential part of this “continuous-state anthropic multiverse
cosmology” that “our observed reality is closed and finite in time as a ‘Poincare-Dodecahedral
Space’ at the cosmological scale and as a ‘virtual Euclidean cube’ at the microscopic”.
13. Nature, Information and Consciousness
In my conjecture the interconnectedness between brain and cosmos is an instantaneous holistic
nonlocal quantum connection and I proposed the concept of a holoinformational flux, from which both
mind and matter are in-formed, that resembles Bohm’s holomovement. But in this new concept, the
quantum holographic brain dynamic patterns are conceived as an active part of the universal quantumholographic informational field, and capable of generating an informational interconnection that is
simultaneously nonlocal quantum-holistic (mind-cosmos holographic connection), and local
Newtonian-mechanistic (brain-mind neural networks connections), i.e., holoinformational.
Taking in consideration the basic mathematical property of holographic systems in which the
information of the whole system is distributed in each part of the system, plus Bohm’s holographic
quantum physics data, and the experimental data of the holonomic theory of Pribram, we propose that
this universal interconnectedness could permit us to access all the information coded in the wave
interference patterns existing in all the universe since its origin.
Each part of the universe, each brain-mind-consciousness, interconnects with all the quantum
information stored in the holographic patterns distributed in the whole cosmos, in an indivisible
irreducible informational cosmic unity.
The beautiful buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net of the Avatamsaka Sutra, reflects in its poetry this
holoinformational nature of the universe:
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Biase, F. D., From Quantum Universe to Holographic Brain: The Spiritual Nature of Mankind
169
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has
been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all
directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificier has hung a
single glittering jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension,
the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first
magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for
inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are
reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the
jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewel, so that the process of
reflection is infinite.
According to Francis Cook [55] this metaphor “show a Cosmos with an infinite interrelation between
all parts, every one defining and maintaining all others. The Cosmos is a self-referent self-maintaining
and self-creator organism. It’s also non-teleological, because don’t exist a beginning of time, nor a
concept of creator, nor a questioning about the purpose of all. The universe is conceived as a gift,
without hierarchy: It has not a center, or maybe if exists one, it is in every place.”
Received January 17, 2023; Accepted April 02, 2023
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| February 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 2 | pp. 198-200
Cocchi, M., Gabrielli, F., & Gulino, G., Depression between Biology & Mathematics: Does the Word Play a Role?
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Essay
Depression between Biology & Mathematics:
Does the Word Play a Role?
Massimo Cocchi*, Fabio Gabrielli & Grazia Gulino
Research Institute for Quantitative & Quantum Dynamics of Living Organisms,
Center for Medicine, Mathematics & Philosophy Studies, Italy
Abstract
This essay is intended to be a reflection on the meaning and intervention of the “right word” in
the adjuvant treatment of psychopathology. The authors identify a logic which, starting from the
etymological meaning and phenomenology of the "word", enters into the possibility of using the
"word" as a modulator of the mental state of the person.
Keywords: Depression, word, biology, mathematics, psychopathology, phenomenology.
Many millions of people suffer from "depression" and misdiagnosis of this devastating disease.
This allows the drug to invade the brains of these people, violating their balance and, not least,
creating dangerous drifts that aggravate the pathological state. The incorrect diagnosis ranges
between 40% (Bowden, 2001) and 70% (Tenth World Day for the Prevention of Suicide, Rome, 2012) and
favors a consequently inaccurate therapy, often a harbinger of suicidal thought.
In this dramatic scenario that day by day recruits subjects who take drugs, based on rigorous
scientific evidence, the conviction is emerging that a possible effective and widespread use of the
"right word" can be combined with the "right drug".
In this regard, one cannot but refer to the etymology of the term “word”: from the Latin
"parabola", which in the church's language indicates the allegorical narrative, and more
specifically it refers to the parables of the Gospel, becoming the "word" for excellence, and again
in Greek "parabolè" from "paraballo" that is comparison, it manifests the intent to illustrate a
moral truth. Same goes for the term "drug", from the Greek "pharmacon" with its ambivalence of
meaning: "remedy" and "poison".
Strong biochemical evidence, together with the use of a higher mathematical function, have
allowed the creation of an effective and precise diagnostic system that allows to frame the
psychopathology from the onset, where the psychopathological aspects of "major depression"
and "bipolar disorder" fade into each other (Cocchi et al. 2008; Cocchi and Tonello, 2010;
Benedetti et al. 2014; Cocchi et al. 2017).
Correspondence: Prof. Massimo Cocchi, Research Institute for Quantitative & Quantum Dynamics of Living Organisms, Center
for Medicine, Mathematics & Philosophy Studies. Department of Veterinary Medical Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy.
E-mail: massimo.cocchi@unibo.it
*
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Cocchi, M., Gabrielli, F., & Gulino, G., Depression between Biology & Mathematics: Does the Word Play a Role?
199
Although this solution, surprisingly, can allow to better target the therapy, the belief remains that
the word intervenes with a mechanism still unknown from the biological aspect, however,
probably attributable to mechanisms, even if difficult to measure, which could influence the
temperature centrally.
And how can we not think in this regard of the anthropological value of the Sicilian dialectal
expression "na parola conza e na parola sconza" (a word corrects and a word destroys). Is it not a
"misplaced word" that in the course of a diatribe makes you lose your emotional control,
sometimes leading the individual to make unconscionable gesture for a temporary, sudden,
clouding of the psyche?
This is what happens in the tragedy of Medea, for example. In the same way, a "just word" can
be a harbinger of peace, and in this sense the use of the word is interpreted as a gift from God.
A reflection is required on the theme that sees word and drug in concert for the best success of
the treatment and the relationship between doctor and patient.
In this sense, the word must have above all a tactile and discrete nature:
-
Tactile, to the extent that touching, experiencing skin on skin, surface on surface, refers to
that original self, expressive of the first moments of life, which is, in fact, linked to the
skin (skin and brain are formed both in the ectoderm). Here, feeling welcomed thanks to
a touch that is deeply, entirely bodily, suggests how feeling is at the origin of the
relationship (between mother and baby, and then in future intersubjective dynamics).
-
Discreet, since the word, especially in human practices of extreme fragility, as in the case
of major depression, must never be invasive, overflowing, hegemonic, under penalty of
its unproductivity, its absolute non-listening, even more so in depressive manifestations.
If anything, it must be a welcoming verb, a womb imbued with body tenderness and
gestures, a fruitful practice of pauses and caresses. The caress, in fact, by its nature:
“[…]. It consists in not seizing anything […]. It ‹search›, rummages. It is not an
intentionality of disclosure, but of research: a path in the invisible. In a certain sense
‹expresses› love but suffers from an inability to say it. He is hungry for this expression
itself, in a continuous increase of hunger (Levinas, 2006).
Received January 19, 2020; Accepted January 29, 2020
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Cocchi, M., Gabrielli, F., & Gulino, G., Depression between Biology & Mathematics: Does the Word Play a Role?
200
References
Benedetti, S., Bucciarelli, S., Canestrari, F., Catalani, S., Mandolini, S., Marconi, V., Mastrogiacomo, A.,
Silvestri, R., Tagliamonte, M., Venanzini, R., Caramia, G., Gabrielli, F., Tonello, L., and Cocchi, M.
(2014). Platelet‟s Fatty Acids and Differential Diagnosis of Major Depression and Bipolar Disorder
through the Use of an Unsupervised Competitive-Learning Network Algorithm (SOM). Open Journal
of Depression, 3, 52-73.
Bowden, C.L. (2001). Strategies to reduce misdiagnosis of bipolar depression. Psychiatr. Ser., , 52, 5155.
Cocchi, M., Minuto, C., Tonello, L., Gabrielli, F., Bernroider, G., Tuszynski, J. A., Cappello, F. and
Rasenick, M. (2017). Linoleic acid: Is this the key that unlocks the quantum brain? Insights linking
broken symmetries in molecular biology, mood disorders and personalistic emergentism. BMC
Neurosci 18:38.
Cocchi, M., Tonello, L. (2010). “Bio molecular considerations in Major Depression and Ischemic
Cardiovascular Disease”. Central Nervous System Agents in Medicinal Chemistry. 9: 2-11.
Cocchi, M., Tonello, L., Tsaluchidu, S., Puri, B. K. (2008). “The use of artificial neural networks to study
fatty acids in neuropsychiatric disorders”, BMC Psychiatry, 8(Suppl 1): S3.
Lévinas, E. (2006). Totalità e infinito. Saggio sull‟esteriorità, introduzione di Silvano Petrosino, trad. di
Adriano Dell‟Asta, Sezione quarta „Al di là del volto‟, B. „Fenomenologia dell‟eros‟, Jaca Book,
Milano.
Tenth World Day for the Prevention of Suicide, Rome, (2012).
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Sharma, S., Entropic Integrated Information Theory: Theory of Consciousness due to Entropy
Exploration
Entropic Integrated Information Theory:
Theory of Consciousness due to Entropy
Siddharth Sharma*
Abstract
In this paper, I present a mathematical theory of Integrated Information Theory, using entropy as
measure of information and hence, as the information distance function. Also, we will consider a
set, whose open subsets are mechanisms and topology is the system, we use these two modification in the structure of Integrated Information Theory and Quantum Integrated Information theory, to define Entropic Integrated Information Theory, we will also justify our claims to use why
entropy should be use as a measure of cause/effect information and as information distance function using [1]. We will also see the relationship of entanglement with concept and conceptual
information. This paper is an attempt to binds consciousness, quantum information, entanglement and quantum mechanics together.
Keywords: Information theory, entropy, consciousness, integration, quantum information.
1. Introduction
In this paper we will use the structure of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) [2], Quantum
Integrated Information theory (QIIT) [3], and taking the cause/effect information distance
function as relative entropy to redefine the structure of IIT and QIIT, like cause/effect integrated
information, core causes/effects, integrated information of Mechanism,, we a set whose topology
would be the system and elements of topology would be mechanisms, this will help use to
redefine, concept, conceptual structure, conceptual space, conceptual information and integrated
information of system or conceptual integrated information, the degree of consciousness.
Following is the methology. Also will will observe the relationship between entaglement and
consioness.
2. Structures of Entropic Integrated Information Theory
The basic structure of Entropic IIT are as follows:
*
Structure I: Let Λ be a set with cardinality |Λ| < ∞ and topology . Here elements of
the topology is mechenisms and topology itself is the system For each ∈ Λ there is an
Correspondence author: Siddharth Sharma, Independent Researcher, India. E-mail: wise.plant.sid@gmail.com
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−dimensional quantum system with Hilbert space ℍ ≅ ℂ . Given any
associated
Ω∈
⊂
we define ℍΩ ≔
∈Ω
ℍ , with dimension
ℍ .
Structure III: One has that ℍ ≔ ℍΩ ⨂ℍΩ , where Ω denotes the complement of
Ω∈ ⊂ .
Structure IV: Let the dynamics be described by a unitary completely positive-map
:
ℍ
→
! " #≔ ! "+%
ℍ , such that
Structure V: Given Ω ∈
() :
.
Structure II: The state-space is the associated operator algebra denoted by
identity of operator ℍ .
|Ω|
ℍ
→
⊂
& = & , where &
with
is
we define the noising completely positive-map () by
&
,
ℍ , such that () ! ≔ tr) ! ⨂ |Ω|
Structure VI: let -, / be density matrices, then 01-, /2 is the information distance
function and defined as 01-, /2 ≔ |3 -||/ | the modulus of relative entropy (e.g.
relative von neumann entropy, renyi entropy), which is obvious as entropy is measure of
information.[5]
We know that the relative entropy is not symmetric function but Johannes Kleiner and
Sean Tull , clearly mention in the paper 112 that
“.. the distance function does not necessarily have to satisfy the axioms of a metric. While
……natural axioms…..might hold, they are not necessary for the IIT algorithm.”
Further structures require a detained information and hence are explained in their own sections
below.
3. Cause/Effect Repertoires
Definition: Given the unitary , the state Ψ ∈ ℍ , Ψ ≥ 0, tr Ψ = 1 and the
mechanisms 8, 9 ∈ ⊂ we define the effect (ℯ) and cause ;) repertoire of 8 over the
purview 9, by:
-<
Where C ∈ Dℯ, ;E. Let
ISSN: 2153-8212
ℯ
=
<
9|8 ∶= tr> ?
then
;
=
⋇
∘ (A Ψ B
, the dual of
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Sharma, S., Entropic Integrated Information Theory: Theory of Consciousness due to Entropy
The set of density matrices - ℯ 9|8
- ; 9|8 # encode how the dynamics constrain
the future (past) of 9, given that the system is initialized in ΨG and noised over 8′ .
Note, - ℯ
∅|8 = & = - ;
∅|8 , ∀8 by trace normalization
4. Cause/Effect Information
Definition: The cause/effect information, ℐ< 9|8 of 8 over 9 is given by
ℐ< 9|8 ≔ 0L- < 9|8 , - <
where it is easy to evaluate - < 9 |∅ ≔
9|∅ M
&N
|O|
distance monotonicity under partial traces and unitary invariance follows P ∈
ℐ< P|8 ≤ ℐ< 9|8 , where C ∈ Dℯ, ;E.
> ⇒
5. Cause/Effect Integrated Information
Given the mechanism 8 and the purview 9 we consider all possible bi-partitions of them
D8 , 8 E and D9 , 9 E, where ! ⋂ ! = ∅, ! ⋃! = ! and ! , ! ∈ U . Where U is sub
topology of ! and ! ∈ D8, 9E.
Definition: cause/effect integrated information of 8 over 9 by
V < 9|8 ≔ min 0L- <
9|8 , - < 9 |8 ⨂- < 9 |8 M
where C ∈ Dℯ, ;E. In this definition the minimum is taken over all the 2 |> |_|A|`a − 1
possible pairings 9 , 8 different from the trivial one ∅, ∅ , 9, 8 , which would make
any repertoire factorizable.
<
The e relative entropy of entanglement, bcd 9|8 which is the measure of entanglement
in the density matrix - < 9|8 is the lower bound of the cause/effect integrated
information and it’s upper bound is cause/effect information.
<
bcd 9|8 ≤ V < 9|8 ≤ ℐ< 9|8
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where
<
bcd 9|8 ≔ mine3 - < 9|8 ||/#: / ≔ / ⊗ / ′ g
Also, / ∈ ℍ , / ′ ∈ ℍ ′ and ℍ ⨂ℍ = ℍ>
6. Core Causes/Effects
Definition: The purview
<
9hi<
≔ e9 | max>∈ V < 9|8 g,
is defined a core effect/cause of 8, where C ∈ Dℯ, ;E.
The corresponding value of V < is denoted by
<
V < 8 ≔ max>∈ V < 9|8 = V < ?9hi< l8B
where C ∈ Dℯ, ;E.
The associated repertoires are called global given by
<
-m
<
<
l8B ⊗
8 ≔ - < ?9hi<
<
<
&n q
opq
q
|nopq |
<
Where rhi< complement 9hi< , i.e. rhi< ≔ Λ\9hi< , where C ∈ Dℯ, ;E
<
The corresponding value of bcd is denoted by
<
<
<
<
l8B
bcd 8 ≔ max>∈ bcd 9|8 = bcd ?9hi<
where C ∈ Dℯ, ;E
7. Integrated Information of Mechanism
The integrated information of 8 is defined as
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Sharma, S., Entropic Integrated Information Theory: Theory of Consciousness due to Entropy
V 8 ≔ mineV ℯ 8 , V ; 8 g
If V 8 = 0 then either V ℯ 9|8 = 0, ∀9 or V ; 9|8 = 0, ∀9. If, V 8 > 0 then it
creates a concept.
We will define integrated entanglement information as
ℯ
;
bcd 8 ≔ minubcd 8 , bcd 8 v
It is interesting to note that since, entanglement entropy is the lower bound, hence if there
is entanglement in quantum system then that would lead to a concept
8. Conceptual Structure
For any mechanism 8 ∈
ℯ
;
the triple ?V 8 ; -m 8 , -m 8 B with V 8 > 0 is
called a concept associated with V 8 , denoted by x 8 . The conceptual structure, y
is defined as follows i.e.
y ≔ x 8 | V 8 z "ℎ| }"|~•€"|
Where
⊂
is the subset of topology,
}•‚•ƒ€" ‚} ‚• 8 A∈
of set Λ.
9. Integrated Information of System
Conceptual space is metric space of conceptual structure. metric Δ defined as, given two
conceptual structures y and yℛ , where , ℛ ⊂
Δ y† , yℛ ≔ |‖y ‖ − ‖yℛ ‖|
where
‖y ‖ ≔ ˆ V 8 l3 ?-m< 8 Bl
<∈Dℯ,;E
A∈
<
is the conceptual information and 3 ?-m
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<
8 B is entropy of density matrix -m
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Sharma, S., Entropic Integrated Information Theory: Theory of Consciousness due to Entropy
It is again interesting two see that if we replace bcd 8 in place of V it serves as a lower
bound to conceptual information, hence we define conceptual entanglement information
as,
‖y ‖d‰Š ≔ ˆ bcd 8 l3 ?-m< 8 Bl
<∈Dℯ,;E
A∈
Which serves as the lower bound to conceptual information
Giulio Tononi defines Integrated conceptual information Φ in his final paper on IIT
as “Conceptual information that is generated by a system above and beyond the
conceptual information generated by its (minimal) parts…...”
Considering system as topology
we define
Φ ≔ min ⊂ Δ y , y
Œ
The measure of consciousness due to entropoy. We can’t certainly about the relation of
Φ and etegalment but to certain extent entegelment can cause consciousness.
10. Disscusion and Conslusion
This theory helps to understand the relationship between entropy and consciousness, it also suggests that entanglement can cause cansioness. This explains the breakdown of wave function due
to entanglement. This theory can help us to understand how quantum phenomena leads to classical reality at large scale and why quantum phenomena are not generally observed at large scale
thereby generating a relationship between classical and quantum physics.
Received December 14, 2020; Accepted February 7, 2021
References
1. Johannes Kleiner, Sean Tull (2202), The Mathematical Structure of Integrated Information Theory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.07655
2. Oizumi, M., Albantakis, L., & Tononi, G. (2014), From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of
Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0. PLoS Computational Biology, 10(5).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588
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Sharma, S., Entropic Integrated Information Theory: Theory of Consciousness due to Entropy
3. Zanardi, Paolo & Tomka, Michael & Campos Venuti, Lorenzo. (2018). Quantum Integrated
Information Theory. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01421
4. Petz D. (2008), Prerequisites from Quantum Mechanics. In: Quantum Information Theory and
Quantum Statistics. Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74636-2_2
5. Petz D. (2008), Information and its Measures. In: Quantum Information Theory and Quantum
Statistics. Theoretical and Mathematical Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74636-2_3
6. Petz D. (2008), Entanglement. In: Quantum Information Theory and Quantum Statistics. Theoretical
and Mathematical Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74636-2_4
7. Sharma, S. (2020). Quantum Information, Entanglement and Entropy.
https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/a3whf
8. Kleiner, J. (2020), Mathematical Models of Consciousness. Entropy 2020, 22, 609.
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| November 2022 | Volume 13 | Issue 4 | pp. 505-515
Malik, S. S., The Misnomers of Universe, Gravity and Black Holes
Research Essay
The Misnomers of Universe, Gravity and Black Holes
Satinder S. Malik*
Abstract
Knowledge rides on words. If the names do not correctly represent the knowledge then it is
bound to create hurdles in conceptualization, intuition and further enhancement of knowledge.
The languages evolved through deep meditations and intelligent thought processes. The words
need to be correct to the context and should not be used as if they are part of a trend or fashion.
Keywords: Universe, gravity, mass, Rig Veda, dark matter, dark energy, Big Bang, Galaxy,
intergalactic space.
1. Introduction
The language is considered as old as the cosmos. Language is connected to the origin of the
cosmos. It is known as Nadbrahma (expansive vibrations of musical notes). If you follow
#nasahubble page on Instagram then you can hear the music of the universe. The Hubble
telescope can pick up the radio, optical and other frequencies from distant stars and galaxies, and
these are given equivalent sound notes and the music is assembled. The frequencies are also like
mathematical infinite series and they can be compared to the sound spectrum to make it
compatible with human reception. Some of the basic laws of waves whether machinal or
electromagnetic or cosmic rays are the same for all. This indicates that the basic intelligent
structure of the Cosmos is simple, repetitive and layered.
Speech emanates from Para. Developing in Pashyanti, its two branches grow. In Madhyama it is
laden with flowers and in Vaikhari it bears fruit. The order in which it develops is reversed to
that rhythm as well. The vowels and consonants have their origin in primordial cosmic sounds.
As per Sankhya Philosophy, the ego and the mind originate from nature. When the galaxies
form, the communication between conscient beings (higher intelligence) takes place at the
highest level ‘Para’. Depending on the medium of communication of the Jeeva in various bodies,
Prajapati creates the speech from his mind. He gives it to Devas and then to the mortals.
बृह ते थमं वाचो अ ं य ैरत नामधे यं दधानाः ।
यदे षां े ं यद र मासी ेणा तदे षां िनिहतं गुहािवः ॥(ऋ. 10.71.12)
O lord of Infinite Speech, Brihaspati, the first and original form of eternal speech, which is the
integration of name, word, and factual reality, which the sages receive and bear in mind and
articulate at the dawn of human creation, lies immanent in the universal mind. It is borne in the
best and immaculate minds of the sages who make it manifest from there by divine inspiration in
a state of grace.
*
Correspondence author: Dr. Satinder S. Malik, Independent Researcher, India. E-mail: adventuressmalik@gmail.com
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506
2. The Universe and its Origin
The word universe (uni-verse or one verse or a stanza) etymologically refers to one galaxy but
today it is being used s a substitute for the word cosmos. The verse may contain many words and
words are made of consonants and vowels which may point to different wave strings and
fundamental particles of existence. The one verse may, therefore, point to a galaxy and many
different verses mean different galaxies. The theory of the Big Bang is the theory of the creation
of our galaxy and similar is the process for other galaxies and the cycle of collapse and creation
for individual galaxies. The theory of the creation of the cosmos is different, it will entail the
history of the formation of five basic dimensions of the universe viz consciousness, time, space,
energy, and matter.
The Big Bang Theory is about the evolution of the universe. The idea of Hirayangarbha (Golden
Womb) has been referred to in Puranas in many places. The description is also the same. The
word universe (uni-verse or one verse or a stanza) etymologically refers to one galaxy but today
it is being used s a substitute for the word cosmos. The theory of the Big Bang is the theory of
the creation of our galaxy and similar is the process for other galaxies and the cycle of collapse
and creation for individual galaxies. The theory of the creation of the cosmos is different, it will
entail the history of the formation of five basic dimensions of the universe viz consciousness,
time, space, energy, and matter.
The timelines for the Big Bangi are 10-43 seconds in which the Universe took shape in 10-6
seconds, the formation of basic elements happened in 3 seconds, the radiation Era that lasted
10,000 years, and so on.
The interpretation of these timelines by the scientists lacks a perspective when they decide the
age of the universe. The primaeval atom from where the big bang happened was containing all
the compressed matter in whichever form and therefore had a tremendous amount of gravity.
This aspect has not been catered to by scientists. These timelines when applied to such a time
system (of a Black Hole) will give nonlinear timelines.
Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole (400 million times the mass of the Sun) at the centre
of our galaxy. It is 26,000 light-years from the Solar System. Emma Osborne, an astrophysicist
at the University of Southampton told an audience at New Scientist Live, “Anything mass will
stretch space-time. And the heavier something is, or the more mass it has, the more it will stretch
space-time. “If you were to stand just outside the event horizon of Sagittarius A*, and you stood
there for one minute, 700 years would pass because time passes so much slower in the
gravitational field there than it does on Earth.”
The phenomenon of different speeds of time has also been described in Puranas. The book,
‘Beyond Common Sense’ narrates the story of King Kakudumi and his daughter Revathi visiting
the galactic centre. If we apply this kind of nonlinear timeline to the age of the Milky Way, the
preset timeline of the universe being 14-18 billion years old would stretch to great lengths. It
may come close to 432 billion yearsii.
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3. Gravity
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was an English mathematician and physicist. In 1687, he
presented the inverse square law of gravitation in "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
The legend goes that Newton discovered Gravity when he saw a falling apple while thinking
about the forces of nature. He termed it as spooky action at a distance.
The words, sometimes, act as authentications seals and point to the source of knowledge. The
word ‘gravity’ has a similar case. Our word gravity and its more precise derivative gravitation
come from the Latin word gravitas, from ‘gravis’ (heavy), which in turn comes from a still more
ancient root word thought to have existed because of numerous cognates in related languages.
From ‘gwerh’ and ‘gwrhu’ comes the Latin ‘gravis’ and ‘gravitas’ meaning ‘heavy’ ‘weighty’
‘important’ and the Latin ‘gravity’iii. The Sanskrit cognate is Gurutva (weighty, venerable),
These words have common meanings of heaviness, importance, seriousness, dignity, grimness,
etc.
It is believed that the modern, physical sense of a field of attraction did not appear until Newton's
time. Indeed, for Galileo, Newton, and scientists up to the beginning of the twentieth century,
gravity was no more than an empty name for the phenomenon, a fact that they were well aware
of. Newton's law of universal gravitation states the following. F=G m1 m2 / r2. Whereas
F is proportional to M1M2 / r2, (directly proportional to both masses and inversely proportional to
the square of the distance between them). The proportionality becomes equal by inserting a
value, a constant G. Value of G balances the equation with unknown factors which seem to
affect the equation. It would not be wise to discard G despite all its theoretical limitations
because it’s a practical constant. It represents the forces that balance out at a distance. The
equation for Gravitational force was a theoretical deduction and Newton only solved the
proportionality aspect by inserting G, he did not assign any numerical value to G. The universal
constant G was calculated by observation (practical empirical experiments) and not theoretically.
The practical values of G vary slightly during different measurements.
5. Ancient References to Gravity
Rishi Kanad (pre-Mahabharta, 4000-6000 BC) propounded Visheshika Sutras (special
knowledge or science) about the throwing of an object. He mentions gravity (Gurutva) and its
effects in Visheshika Sutras about throwing an object….
गु
य संयोगानामु
ेपणम् ॥ १ ॥ १ ॥ २६ ॥
The motion of throwing upwards is due to the conjunction (resultant) of force and gravity.
Falling of that object
संयोगाभावे गु
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ात् पतनम् ॥ ५ ॥ १ ॥ ७॥
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In the absence of conjunction, falling is due to gravity. In the section where he describes forces
acting on the launch of an arrow, he explains how the arrow falls.
सं
ाराभावे गु
ात् पतनम् ॥ ५। १ । १८ ॥
In the absence of the efficacy of previous resultant actions, the arrow falls due to the effect of
gravity.
In the section where he describes forces acting on the flow of water, he explains how water falls.
अपां संयोगाभावे गु
ात् पतनम् ॥५॥२॥३॥
In the absence of conjunction, the water falls due to gravity.
5th-century scholar Aryabhata also mentioned gravitational force. He referred to spherical earth
drawing things to it on all sides. He did it poetically by likening the earth to the florets of the
spherical Kadamba flower. Brahmagupta, a 7th-century astronomer, was another mathematician
who knew about the effects of Gurutva. Brahmagupta postulated correctly that there is an
attraction towards the centre of Earth. Brahmagupta did not say anything about the inverse
square law. He had not used gravity to predict the orbits of planets.
“[Indian astronomers] used this argument to justify the concept of a self-sustaining spherical
earth which did not need to be supported from the 'bottom' by Sesha or elephants or any other
cosmological underpinnings, and which also would not be subject to beings falling off the
‘bottom’ of it,” said Kim Plofkeriv, assistant professor of mathematics at Union College in New
York, in an email to Scrollv. Plofker has researched Sanskrit texts, including Aryabhata’s work,
for the origins of mathematics in India.
The equivalence principle states that two fundamentally different quantities, inertia, and
passive gravitational mass, always be exactly proportional to one another.
Inertia comes from the Latin word ‘iners’ meaning idle, sluggishvi Inertia is one of the primary
manifestations of mass, which is a quantitative property of physical systems. Vis Insita- The
innate force of matter; another name for vis inertiæ. It is that by which a vessel "keeps her way.
The word ‘vis insita’ means an innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which
everybody, as much as in it lies, endeavours to persevere in its present state, whether it be of rest
or of moving uniformly forward in a right line.
The word gravity reflected common meanings of heaviness, importance, seriousness, dignity,
and grimness whereas mass comes directly from Latin massa meaning "kneaded dough, lump,
that which adheres together like dough, "probably from Greek maza "barley cake, lump, mass,
ball," which is related to masse in "to knead," from PIE root *mag- "to knead, fashion, fit”. vii The
modern sense of the word mass in English was extended in the 1580s to "a large quantity,
amount, or number". Meaning "bulk" in general is from c. 1600. As "the bulk or greater part of
anything" from the 1620s. The strict sense in physics, "quantity of a portion of matter expressed
in pounds or grams" is from 1704.
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The important fact is that both Gurutva (gravity) and Mahatva (mass) have been described quite
well in Vedas and ancient works. The word Mahatva is used most commonly today in a sense of
importance. The root word for Mahatva is Mahat. The Cosmos has been created in the principle
of Mahat. The order of evolution of the universe according to Sānkhya and the evolution of
Prakṛti (Nature) in its Vikaras (special attributes). Mahat contains all individual buddhis and all
potential matter of the gross universe in its cosmic extent as the first manifest principle (tattva).
Mahat in turn produces ahaṃkāra, the ego principle. That is how it comes to meaning as
importance and ego of matter as to stay where it wants.
The Anutva is subtle and subtler and Mahatava is gross and grosser. The entire creation is
manifested in smaller existence (Bhuta) combined with different permutations and combinations
under influence of different forces and making it bigger, stage by stage. At every stage, so
combined smaller existence forms bigger existence and so on.
The Gurutva is considered the opposite of the Mahtva. In the traditional sense, it is a quality that
makes the mass behave with certain intelligent attributes. Jupiter is known as endowed with high
Gurutva and has been granted as Guru of all Devas.
Gurutva may reflect the intelligence (Buddhi) of a heavenly body. Earth is also conscious and
follows astronomical laws and maintains balance. The movement of magma, plate tectonics,
magnetic field, winds, ocean currents, and cyclic activities of various elements and occurrences
indicate that Earth is conscious in a unique way. Recently papers were published showing water
has memory, the dunes communicate with Earth other so do the star systems, but we may not
know it yet. The interaction of a satellite to a planet system, their effects, and mutual dependence
could be some of the intelligent features. The ability of the Moon to affect life on Earth and the
stabilization it provides to the Earth’s orbit are well known. Io (a satellite of Jupiter) and Jupiter
constitute a moon-planet system. Io influences Jupiter by supplying heavy ions to its
magnetosphere, which dominates its energy and dynamics. Jupiter influences Io by tidally
heating its interior, which in turn drives the volcanic activity on Io. The role of Io and Jupiter in
their mutual interaction and the nature of their coupling have been studied by scientists.
Savita- a Controlling Force of the Milky Way. The flow of spacetime has been described as
Savita (with special attributes). Savita is the force of universal firmament that has been described
in Rig Veda. The difference is spacetime as proposed by Einstien is without any intelligent
attributes whereas Savita is with intelligent attributes. This is merely a change of perspective on
whether we can call matter having unique intelligence as it can follow Padarth Dharma
(properties of matter). This intelligence is not interpretative as in the case of humans but more
like passive intelligence as a property of their design as reflected in mathematics and science in
their creation and behaviour. Rig Veda 1.35.9
िहर%पािणः सिवता िवचष)िण भे *ावापृिथवी अंतरीयते ।
अपामीवां बाधते वेित सूय)मिभ कृ2ेन रजसा *ामृ णोित ॥
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The gold-handed, all-beholding, Savitā is spread between the two regions of heaven and earth,
dispels pain brings the sun, and overspreads the sky with control and radiance destroying
darkness.
Rig Veda 10.149.1
सिवता य4ैः पृिथवीमर6णाद
8ने सिवता *ाम9ंहत् ।
अ:िमवाधु ;द् धु िनम<=र;मतूत> ब?ं सिवता समु @म् ॥
Savitā has fixed the earth with fetters; Savitā has made the heaven firm in a plural place where
there was no support; Savitā has milked the cloud of the firmament bound to the indestructible
(ether) like a trembling horse.
It is now evident that it may not be gravity alone that is responsible for making the earth go
around the Sun. The ancient scriptures such as the Veda and Vaishesika Sutra of Kanad give an
insight into a continuously controlled Cosmos based on Nature’s laws and also by intelligent
interference of universal force.
In many places, the translation of the word ‘Savitur’ is referred to Sun but that may not be
proper. Savitur and Savita are found in many places in Veda (Knowledge). Savitur also cognates
with Sagitur which could be a root word for Sagittarius. The same is also related to sagacious,
sage, and also Sagitaviii. Sagita means arrow in Latin.
Sagittariusix is usually depicted as a centaur holding a bow and arrow. The constellation’s
symbol is ♐. It represents the archer. It is also associated with Crotus, the satyr who kept the
company of the Muses on Mount Helicon. Sagittarius is one of the largest southern
constellations. Sagittarius is the 15th largest constellation in the sky. It is easy to find because it
lies in the centre of the Milky Way and its brightest stars form an asterism known as the Teapot.
Sagittarius is known as Dhanu (in the Indian zodiac) and that also represents a bow.
Karl Jansky, considered a father of radio astronomy, discovered in August 1931 that a radio
signal was coming from a location in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius, towards the
centre of the Milky Way. The radio source later became known as Sagittarius Ax.
Sagittarius or Savitur is considered the seat of Brahma. This is also the origin point which is
described as Hiranyagarbha (golden womb) or golden egg as is in the theory of the Big bang. All
radio signals, gravitational waves, and time-base signals (spacetime fabric) are controlled by
Sagittarius. Sagittarius is the provider of intelligence as indicated by the most important and
powerful hymn of Rigveda known as ‘Gayatri Mantra’.
Ushas- a Controlling Force of the Sun. Usha is considered the daughter of the Sun
representative of the Dawn, Usha is said to travel in a shining chariot drawn by ruddy horses or
cows. Like a beautiful maiden dressed by her mother and covered with jewels. She is young,
being born every day; and yet she is old, being immortal, wearing out the lives of successive
generations, which disappear one after another, whilst she continues undying. She is young,
being born every day; and yet she is old, being immortal, wearing out the lives of successive
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generations, which disappear one after another, whilst she continues undying. The souls of the
departed are said to go to her and to the sun. Rigveda 6.64.1
उदु श=रय उषसो रोचमाना अCथु रपां नोम) यो श<ः |
कणEित िव:ा सुपथा सुगाFभू दु वGी दि;णामघोनी ||
The radiant Dawns have risen up for glory, in their white splendour like the waves of waters. She
makes paths all easy, fair to travel, and, rich, hath shown herself benign and friendly.
It is no wonder that the Sun’s rays fly to interact with the Heliosphere- the region surrounding
the Sun and the solar system that is filled with the solar magnetic field and the protons and
electrons of the solar wind. The heliosphere acts as a shield that protects the planets from
interstellar radiation. This is not just a random protection shield that enables life in the
solar system.
Bhaga- a Controlling Force of the Cosmos. In Hindu philosophy, it is Bhagwan who is the
preserver of the cosmos. He runs a show in which he influences his mechanism through other
divine beings. The word ‘Bhaga’ means movement of light. Therefore the Bhagawan is who
controls the movement of light and in that essence the one who controls time. In the
cosmological sequence of evolution, the unseen energy reaches a state where it becomes forever
(in both ways space and time). Control of this energy essentially enables control in the cosmos.
The force in between the intergalactic space is Bhaga, in the galaxies, it is Savita, in the solar
system it is Usha and on a planet it is Gurutva. Therefore, any being on any planet or anywhere
in the cosmos is affected by the result of these forces. The interplay of these forces is the root
cause of vacuum energy which is underlying background energy that exists in space throughout
the cosmos. Vacuum energy is a special case of zero-point energy that relates to the quantum
vacuum.
Though it may appear that the force of ‘Bhaga’ moving the galaxies would be stronger its
otherwise, ‘Savita’ is stronger than ‘Bhaga’ and ‘Ushas’ is stronger than ‘Savita’, only then they
can make the difference within the galaxy and the Solar system respectively.
4. Black Hole or Dark Star
The first real evidence for dark matter came in 1933 when Caltech’s Fritz Zwickyxi used the
Mount Wilson Observatory to measure the visible mass of a cluster of galaxies and found that it
was much too small to prevent the galaxies from escaping the gravitational pull of the cluster.
Something else, concluded Zwicky, was acting like glue to hold clusters of galaxies together. He
named the substance Dunkle Materie in German, or dark matter.
Matter can be invisible only if it does not interact with light in terms of emission, reflection,
refraction etc. The photons hold zero mass and anything that holds mass less than zero would not
qualify as matter in a classical sense. Dark matter is a substance that is pre-matter.
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512
Only 4.6% of the universe's energy comprises the visible baryonic matter that constitutes stars,
planets, and living beings. The rest is thought to be made up of dark energy (68%) and dark
matter (27%).
Hydrogen is the most abundant element (73-74%) in the cosmos followed by Helium (23-25%),
Oxygen, Carbon, Neon, Iron and Nitrogen. It is the first stable element and acts as fuel for the
stars. The stars convert the lighter matter into heavier matter and the remaining matter of the
fused nuclei may be responsible for the emission of energy. In 1895, Rowland, studied the
intensities of 39 elemental signatures in the solar spectrum. Leaving hydrogen and helium, the
rest of the seen matter comprises less than 0.5% of the total cosmos.
The Standard Model of Physics talks about fundamental particles The nucleus (protons and
neutrons) contains almost all the mass of the atom, while the electrons are responsible for the
chemical properties of the atom. These are further made up of 6 types of quarks, 6 types of
leptons and 5 categories of many different types of Bosons (force interaction particles).
Neutrinos are likely the most abundant particles in the universe and may be more common than
photons, the basic unit of light. Neutrinos are a type of leptons, which are also fermions, and
together with quarks make up matter. The difference between leptons and quarks is that leptons
exist on their own, whereas quarks combine to form baryons. A neutrino is an exponentially
small particle with no electrical charge. As other particles traverse galactic and extra-galactic
distances, they can become deflected, scattered, or even stopped altogether by matter,
gravitational and magnetic fields. Neutrinos can pass through all of these uninhibited, which
makes them excellent sources of information from the far reaches of the galaxy.
These subatomic particles are not stable and particles such as leptons and baryons decay by
either the strong force or weak force (except for the proton). Neutrons have a mean life of approx
881 seconds. The life of Proton is {16.7 billion yottayears (1034 yr)}. The μ and τ muons, as well
as their antiparticles, decay by the weak force. Neutrinos (and antineutrinos) do not decay, but a
related phenomenon of neutrino oscillations is thought to exist even in vacuums. The electron
{66,000 yottayears (6.6 × 1028 yr)} and its antiparticle, the positron, are theoretically stable due
to charge conservation. These particles are made up of energy and they come to life depending
on wave interaction. These are caused essentially by a collapsed wave function or a quantum
excitation of a field or just an entangled vibrating string. Vyasa Muni in his teachings to Rama
tells about many types of wave structures as ‘Pata’ (2D fabric-like cloth) made up of threads
(energy channels), ‘Ghata’ (3 D spherical Structures), and ‘Kunda’ (hollow wells).
The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with
electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Black holes are considered objects whose
gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape. This understanding is bound to change with
the correct understanding of the force of gravity. Every formation of the cosmos has a definite
objective.
The nucleus of an atom is about 10-15 m in size, this means it is about 10-5 (or 1/100,000) of the
size of the whole atom. A good comparison of the nucleus to the atom is like an apple where the
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Malik, S. S., The Misnomers of Universe, Gravity and Black Holes
513
nearest electron will be approx. 3 km away. This is what explains the density of the Black holes,
that they cannot be made up of normal matter with electrons orbiting around but are made up of
solid nuclear particles and their pre-matter forms kept together by the stronger nuclear force.
The pre-matter is a product of the Black Holes as the matter is produced by Stars. The force
which may attract and attach photons may be a different kind of fundamental force other than
gravity. The Black holes are not holes but essentially Dark stars or black stars.
The Black holes may churn out the fundamental particles such as protons and neutrinos, which
after interaction with other particles or wave functions may lead to the creation of the basic
element hydrogen. The external accretion disk forming quasars may be the input-output
mechanism. The galaxies have originated from their central Black Holes which may act in cycles
of expansion and contraction over huge time scales. These black holes also exert forces which
are natural but which may also contain intelligent control mechanisms. More about the central
black holes of the milky way is discussed in the last section.
5. Dark Energy
The cosmological constant is a homogeneous energy density that causes the expansion of the
universe to accelerate. The cosmological constant is the simplest realization of dark energy,
which is the more generic name given to the unknown cause of the acceleration of the universexii.
There was a difference in the observed and predicted value. If the value of the constant is
different then the cause is referred to as ‘Dark Energy’. We know how much dark energy there is
because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. It turns out that roughly 68% of the
universe is dark energy. xiii Intergalactic spacetime and spacetime inside a galaxy may have
different formatting leading to the difference in values. This would come into perspective if
we consider different space-time fabrics for every galaxy which arises out of the central black
hole.
Incidentally, in Hindu philosophy, this energy is depicted as Kali Shakti, the principal goddess,
another form of Shiva, and (dark) energy of the Cosmos. For matter to appear, there is a state
which is pre-matter and in a similar way for energy to appear there is a state called pre-energy.
This state is of energy which is unseen or not capable of being attributed to and therefore known
as Dark Energy.
The forces in the Cosmos are resultant of the interplay of energy. These are referred to as
‘Bhava’ (affinity) and are the result of wave characteristics like coherence, spin or polarity of the
wave function which continuously forms and decays and may become a stable structure spanning
across the cosmos forever. These Bhava (forces) may have a disposition from the strongest to the
weakest. That is integral to the structure of the universe and these forces are applied to similar
types of interactive participants. For example, there is a strong nuclear force inside an atom but it
doesn’t affect other things.
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6. Conclusion
Philosophy paves the way for theories and theories combined with mathematics and/or
experimental proof pave the way for science. The human mind carries out interactions with
nature to understand and evolve. These interactions take place not only through the human sense
organs or scientifically extended sensors but also through human perception. Human perception
contains higher algorithms for receiving knowledge through the higher languages of Para and
Pashyanti. The human mind needs to have correct conceptualisation with correct words for it to
have better abstract imaging (pictographic processing by the brain, Pashyanti) of concepts and
hence the concepts may be represented by the appropriate and correct words.
Received August 02, 2022; Accepted November 6, 2022
References
i
http://patrickgrant.com/BBTL.htm
The Big Bang - 10-43 seconds: The universe begins with a cataclysm that generates space and time, as well as all
the matter and energy the universe will ever hold. For an incomprehensibly small fraction of a second, the universe
is an infinitely dense, hot fireball. The prevailing theory describes a particular form of energy that can suddenly
push out the fabric of space. At 10-35 to 10-33 seconds a runaway process called "Inflation" causes a vast
expansion of space filled with this energy. The inflationary period is stopped only when this energy is transformed
into matter and energy as we know it.
The Universe Takes Shape - 10-6 seconds, after inflation, one-millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe
continues to expand but not nearly so quickly. As it expands, it becomes less dense and cools. The most basic
forces in nature become distinct. The particles smash together to form protons and neutrons.
Formation of Basic Elements- 3 seconds: Protons and neutrons come together to form the nuclei of simple
elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. It will take another 300,000 years for electrons to be captured into orbits
around these nuclei to form stable atoms.
The Radiation Era- 10,000 years: The first major era in the history of the universe is one in which most of the
energy is in the form of radiation -- different wavelengths of light, X rays, radio waves, and ultraviolet rays. This
energy is the remnant of the primordial fireball, and as the universe expands, the waves of radiation are stretched
and diluted until today, they make up the faint glow of microwaves which bathe the entire universe.
ii
Beyond Common sense- dr Satinder Singh Malik (Author) Kindle
Present Kalpa 5.784 Million Years represents restart of life on the Earth, Elapsed time in Present Manvantara 0.3
Million Years or 3,36,000 Years (Modern human origins). These timelines may vary due to faulty interpretation of
ancient texts.
iii
https://stanford.io/3KvmumH
iv iv
v
https://iks.iitgn.ac.in/kim-plofker-2020/
https://scroll.in/article/709070/newton-discovered-gravity-even-if-he-stood
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vi
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=mass
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=mass
viii
Southern constellation; ninth sign of the zodiac, late Old English, from Latin, literally "archer," properly
"pertaining to arrows," from sagitta "arrow," which probably is from a pre-Latin Mediterranean language.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Sagittarius#etymonline_v_22603
sage (adj.) "wise, judicious, prudent," c. 1300 (late 12c. as a surname), from Old French sage "wise, knowledgeable,
learned; shrewd, skillful" (11c.), from Gallo-Roman *sabius, from Vulgar Latin *sapius (also in Hindi- Sadhu)
with -ous + stem of Latin sagax "of quick perception" (see sagacity). The sense of "skilled at discovering truths,"
especially as regards human natures,
vii
ix
https://www.constellation-guide.com/constellation-list/sagittarius-constellation/
x
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*
xi
https://bit.ly/3vQnnRK
xii
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Cosmological_constant
https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy
xiii
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Kozlowski, M., On Empty Space
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Opinion
On Empty Space
Miroslaw Kozlowski*
Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland
Abstract
In this essay, we present fact well known to scientists that matter is empty with very small
percentage of elementary particles and nuclei. We argue that one cannot develop special
relativity, the notion of the spacetime and localization of consciousness in empty space.
Keywords: Void, spacetime, atom, elementary particle, consciousness.
In some sense man is a microcosmos of the Universe therefore what man is, is a
clue to the Universe. We are enfolded in the Universe. David Bohm
Electrical phenomena have been known for thousands of years, but the mysteries of the magnetic
compass needle, the sparks of lightning, and the nature of electricity remained well into the
nineteenth century. The situation towards the end of that century was summarized in a book that
I bought as a child in a jumble sale for one penny. Entitled Questions and Answers in Science it
had been published in 1898 and in answer to the question ‘What is electricity?’ it opined with
Victorian melodrama that ‘Electricity is an imponderable fluid whose like is a mystery to man.’
What a difference a hundred years makes. Modern electronic Communications and whole
industries are the result of Thomson’s discovery of the electron in 1897, answering the above
question a full year before that book was published; news travels faster these days.
Electrons flow through wires as current and power industrial society; they travel through the
labyrinths of our central nervous system and maintain our consciousness; they are fundamental
constituents of the atoms of matter and their motions from one atom to another underpin
chemistry, biology, and life.
The electron is a basic particle of all matter. It is the lightest particle with electric charge, stable
and ubiquitous. The shapes of all solid structures are dictated by the electrons gyrating at the
periphery of atoms. Electrons are in everything, so it is ironic that the discovery of this basic
constituent of matter was a result of the ability developed in the nineteenth century to get rid of
matter, to make a void.
*
Correspondence: Miroslaw Kozlowski, Prof. Emeritus, Warsaw University, Poland. Email: m.kozlowski934@upcpoczta.pl
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For a long time, there had been a growing awareness that matter has mysterious properties,
although initially it did not directly touch on the question of the void. The ancient Greeks had
already been aware of some of these, such as the unusual ability of amber (electron is the Greek
for amber) to attract and pick up pieces of paper when rubbed with fur. In more modern imagery,
brush your hair rapidly with a comb and on a dry day you might even cause sparks to fly. Glass
and gems also have this magical ability to cling to things after rubbing. By the Middle Ages the
courts of Europe knew that this weird attraction is shared by many substances but only after
rubbing. This led William Gilbert, court physician to Elizabeth I, to propose that matter
contained an ‘electric virtue’ and that electricity is some ‘imponderable fluid’ (as in my 1898
book) that can be transferred from one substance to another by rubbing. Gaining or losing this
electric virtue was akin to the body being positively or negatively ‘charged’.
Benjamin Franklin in America, taking time off from flaming the constitution of what would
become the USA, was fascinated by electrical phenomena, notably lightning. A thunder cloud is
a natural electrostatic generator, capable of creating millions of volts and sparks that can kill.
Franklin’s insight was that bodies contain latent electrical power, which can be transferred from
one body to another. But what this imponderable fluid was, no one knew.
Today, we know that it is due to electrons, which contribute less than 1 part in 2,000 of the mass
of a typical atom, and as only a small percentage of them are involved in electric current anyway,
the change in mass of a body when electrically charged is so trifling as to be undetectable. How
then was this imponderable fluid to be isolated, catalogued, and studied?
Electricity normally flows through things, such as wires, and as it was impossible to look inside
wires, the idea developed of getting rid of the wires and looking at the sparks. Lightning showed
that electric current can pass through the air and from this grew the idea that the flow of electric
current might be revealed ‘out away from the metal wires that more usually conduct it and hide
it.
So scientists set about making sparks in gases contained in glass tubes. Air at atmospheric
pressure transmitted current but obscured the flow of electrons. By gradually removing more and
more of the gas, it was hoped that eventually only the electric current would remain. It was
following the industrial revolution and the development of better vacuum pumps that bizarre
apparitions appeared as scientists electrified the thin gas in vacuum tubes. As a result of this,
electricity gradually revealed its secrets. At one fiftieth of atmospheric pressure, the current
produced luminous clouds floating in the air, which convinced the English physicist William
Crookes that he was producing ectoplasm, much beloved of Victorian seances, and he turned to
spiritualism.
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The colours of the light in these wispy apparitions depended on the gas, such as the yellow light
of sodium and green of mercury familiar in modern illuminations. They are caused by the current
of electrons bumping into the atoms of the gas and liberating energy from them as light. As the
gas pressure dropped further the lights eventually disappeared but a subtle shimmering green
colour developed on the glass surface near to the source of the current. In 1869, came the critical
discovery that objects inside the tube cast shadows in the green glow, proving that there were
rays in motion coming from the source of electric current and hitting the glass except when
things were in the way.
Crookes discovered that magnets would deflect the rays, showing that they were electrically
charged, and in 1897 J. J. Thomson using both magnets and electric forces (by connecting the
terminals of a battery to two metal plates inside the tube) was able to move the beam around (in
effect a prototype of a television set). By adjusting the magnetic and electric forces he was able
to work out the properties of the constituents of the electric current. Thus did he discover the
electron, whose mass is trifling even compared to that of an atom of the lightest element,
hydrogen. From ’the generality of his results, which cared naught for the nature of any gas left in
the tube or the metal wires that brought the electric current into the vacuum tube, he inferred that
electrons are electrically charged constituents of all atoms.
Once it was realized that electrons are at least 2,000 times lighter than the smallest atom,
scientists understood the enigma of how electricity would flow so easily through copper wires.
The existence of the electron overthrew forever the age-old picture of atoms as the ultimate
particles and revealed that atoms have a complex inner structure, electrons encircling a compact
central nucleus.
Phillipe Lenard bombarded atoms with beams of electrons and found that the electrons passed
through as if nothing was in their way. This almost paradoxical situation—matter that feels solid
is nonetheless transparent on the atomic scale—was encapsulated by Lenard with the remark,
‘the space occupied by a cubic meter of solid platinum is as empty as the space of stars beyond
the Earth’.
Look at the dot at the end of this sentence. Its ink contains some 100 billion atoms of carbon. To
see one of these with the naked eye, you would need to magnify the dot to be 100 metres across.
While huge, this is still imaginable. But to see the atomic nucleus you would need that dot to be
enlarged to 10,000 kilometres: as big as the earth from pole to pole.
The simplest atom of hydrogen can give an idea of the scales and emptiness involved. The
central nucleus is a single positively charged particle known as a proton. It is the path of the
electron, remote from the central proton, that defines the outer limit of the atom. Journeying out
from the centre of the atom, by the time we reach the edge of the proton we have only completed
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Kozlowski, M., On Empty Space
239
one ten thousandth of the journey. Eventually we reach the remote electron, whose size also is
trifling, being less than one thousandth the size of the proton, or a ten millionth that of the atom.
So having made a near perfect vacuum, which led to the discovery that atomic matter contains
electrons, we appear to have come full circle in finding that an atom is apparently a perfect void:
99.9999999999999 per cent empty space. Lenard’s comparison hardly does the atoms emptiness
justice: the density of hydrogen atoms in outer space is huge compared to the density of
particulate matter within each of those atoms!
The atomic nucleus also is an ephemeral, wispy thing. Magnify a neutron or proton a thousand
times and you would find that they too have a rich internal structure. Like a swarm of bees,
which seen from afar appears as a dark spot whereas a close up view shows the cloud buzzing
with energy, so it is with the neutron or proton. To a low-powered image they appear like simple
spots, but when viewed at high resolution they are found to be clusters of smaller particles called
quarks. To reveal the quarks we would need to expand the dot out to the Moon, and then keep on
going another twenty times more distance.
A quark is as small compared to a proton or neutron as either of those is relative to an atom.
Between the compact central nucleus and the remote whirling electrons, atoms in practice terms
are mostly empty space, and the same can be said of the innards of the atomic nucleus. In
summary, the fundamental structure of the atom is beyond real imagination, and its emptiness is
profound.
Now, let us formulate the SR postulates: 1. There exists inertial reference frames; and 2. In each
inertial reference frames the Law of Nature are the same. Now how the inertial reference frame
are defined, for example, in 3D?
The axes of inertial reference frames are defined by the motion of solid body with constant
velocity. But in void there are no solid body, so inertial reference frame does not exist. So one
cannot develop special relativity, the notion of the spacetime and localization of consciousness in
empty space.
Received December 30, 2019; Accepted January 29, 2020
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Gullapalli, S. N., Consciousness, Quantum Mechanics, Duality, Monism and Vedanta: Speculations and Facts
Perspective
Consciousness, Quantum Mechanics, Duality, Monism and Vedanta:
Speculations and Facts
Sarma N. Gullapalli*
Abstract
Wave-particle duality, inseparability of the observed from the observer, and the role of
observation in Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle, have been central to most discussions in
the quantum mechanical context of consciousness and monistic Advaita Vedanta philosophy.
With regard to wave-particle duality and complementarity, recently it has been shown that the
physical particle always remains particle and the mathematical wave function associated with it
always remains a wave defining probabilities. This impacts viewpoints not only of wave-particle
duality, but also of wave function collapse, entanglement, action-at-a-distance and others, often
cited in context of consciousness. We discuss these new developments, improve objective clarity
and reduce subjective vagueness regarding quantum mechanical phenomena. Additionally, we
show that when probability is quantified, claims made about consciousness influencing physical
outcomes through observation have such low probability (< 10-10) that for all practical purposes
they can be regarded as speculations.
Keywords: Consciousness, quantum mechanics, duality, monism, observer, observed, Vedanta.
Introduction
We first elaborate and discuss some important terms. Wherever possible the source is indicated,
such as (oxford) for Oxford Languages.
Consciousness (oxford) “The awareness or perception of something by a person. The fact of
awareness by the mind of itself and the world”. Swami Chinmayananda (1969 Kindle Life, p58)
“The core of the human personality is the Consciousness, which is the ‘Life Center’ around
which all the activities of the body, mind and intellect revolve”. Niels Bohr (1961 Atomic
Physics and Human Knowledge, 92-93) “In the account of psychical experiences, we meet
conditions of observation and corresponding means of expression still further removed from the
terminology of physics. Quite apart from the extent to which the use of words like instinct and
reason in the description of animal behavior is necessary and justifiable, the word consciousness,
applied to oneself as well as to others, is indispensable when describing human situation … In
deeds the use of words like thought and feeling does not refer to a firmly connected causal chain,
but to experiences which exclude each other because of different distinctions between the
conscious content and the background which we loosely term ourselves”.
*Correspondence: Sarma N. Gullapalli, Independent Researcher. Email: sngullapalli@hotmail.com
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Von Neumann (1955 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Chapter IV) proves that
the quantum mechanical measurement (when an observer is involved in the measurement) must
include the observer’s eyes, optic nerves ending in an area of brain - which we may call
consciousness. Extensions of this by Stapp (1993) include ‘feeling’, and by Wigner (1967)
include the reverse process, the impact of consciousness on the physical state of the measured
system.
Consciousness, regarded as associated with brain which is fundamentally made up of particles of
matter and energy which is the domain of quantum mechanics, can therefore be investigated in
terms of quantum mechanics, a field of active research by neuroscientists, biologists and others.
Early on, Niels Bohr (1934, cited by Bohm 1951 p170) “had suggested that thought involves
such small amounts of energy that quantum theoretical limitations play an essential role in
determining its character” in the functioning of the brain”. But did not mention consciousness.
A comprehensive review of research on quantum physical functioning of the brain can be found
in Betony Adams and Francesco Petuccione (2020) which briefly touches upon consciousness
also. A detailed review of quantum approaches to consciousness can be found in H.
Atmanspacher (2020) which discusses three main approaches: “(1) consciousness is a
manifestation of quantum processes in the brain (2) quantum concepts are used to understand
consciousness without referring to brain activity, and (3) matter and consciousness are regarded
as dual aspects of one underlying reality”. The first approach is closest to quantum physical
reality with its wave functions defining probabilities in the physical brain, the second one is a
model fashioned on the lines of quantum physics but is not quantum physics, and the third can be
entertained without any reference to quantum physics, as a general philosophy that has been
around for centuries long before quantum physics. We are primarily concerned with approach (1)
which is based physical quantum mechanics, while commenting on meta-physical (2) and (3)
also.
In contrast to these efforts to explain consciousness in terms of quantum mechanics, there have
also been efforts to explain quantum mechanics in terms of consciousness. For example
Manousakis (2006 ‘Founding quantum theory on the basis of consciousness’), Goswami (1993
‘The Self-Aware Universe, how consciousness creates the material world’) along the lines of
Vedantic spiritual philosophy.
From the above, we can regard consciousness, which is essentially subjective, in two
fundamentally different perspectives: (a) physical consciousness as pertaining to a zone of
physical brain along with its electromagnetic signals that may extend into space outside the
brain, and (b) meta-physical consciousness as pertaining to strictly non-physical meta-physical
projections of the brain that may extend into the realm of spirituality.
Objective (oxford) “Not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and
representing facts”.
Subjective (oxford) “Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions”.
Heisenberg (1958 Physics and Philosophy pp 44 - 58) regards subjectivity as pertaining to the
statistical variation from person to person in the matter of how the experiment is set up and how
the results are observed, similar to the statistical errors inherent in the measuring equipment, all
of which can be made practically small, limited only by the uncertainty principle, which limit in
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most cases is exceedingly small : “The probability function combines objective and subjective
elements … In the ideal case the subjective element may be practically zero”. He does not
mention consciousness.
Observer (oxford) “A person who watches or notices something”.
Observation (oxford) “The action or process of observing something or someone carefully or in
order to gain information”.
Epistemology (oxford) “The theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and
scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion”. Scientists justify
their belief in quantum mechanics based on evidence of experiments which can be verified by others within the
margins of (sufficiently small) instrument errors and (sufficiently small) errors in observation of instrument
readings by persons conducting the experiments, and so such evidence-based belief is essentially objective. In
contrast, opinions are weak in evidence and are mostly subjective. Niels Bohr (1984) ‘Discussion with
Einstein on epistemological problem in atomic physics’ is informative about his views which are
essentially objective and not subjective, observation essentially meaning measurement using instruments.
Quantum Mechanics: Oxford: “The branch of mechanics that deals with the mathematical
description of the motion and interaction of subatomic particles, incorporating the concepts of
quantization of energy, wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and the correspondence
principle”. We emphasize the basis on physical particles of matter and energy, not merely a
mathematical edifice.
For example, in Schrodinger’s wave equation (i∙ℏ)(∂/∂t) = H defining the wave function ,
Hamiltonian function H is physical energy, involving physical parameters of the particle such as
mass and momentum. Physical parameters result in finite velocity of propagation of wave
function, less than speed of light for mass particles such as electron, and equal to speed of light
for energy particles such as photon. Schrodinger’s wave equation is grounded in physical reality,
is not merely a mathematical construct.
Probability is not unique to quantum mechanics, was extensively used in classical physics long
before quantum mechanics (Goodman 2000 Statistical Optics; Statistical Mechanics;
Boltzmann’s statistical formulation of effects of temperature foundational to thermodynamics).
But what is unique in quantum mechanics is that probability, a non-negative quantity, is
expressed as magnitude squared of probability amplitude function (the wave function) which is
sinusoidal with both positive and negative excursions that is characteristic of wave propagation
(non-negative classical probability does not result in wave propagation – herein lies the genius of
Schrodinger).
The occurrence of “imaginary” number i (= √(-1)) in Schrodinger’s wave equation (and also
elsewhere in quantum mechanics) has evoked the view of unreality in quantum mechanics. But
there is nothing “imaginary” (an unfortunate misleading terminology used in mathematics) about
√(-1). The algebra of complex numbers (x + iy) where x and y are real numbers, can be just as
rigorously developed without i, by using pair of real numbers (x, y), defined as follows:
addition: (x1, y1) + (x2, y2) = (x1 + x2, y1 + y2); multiplication: (x1, y1)∙(x2, y2) = (x1∙x2 –
y1∙y2, x1∙y1 + x2∙y2). It is readily verified that (0, 1)∙(0, 1) = (-1, 0), that is, (0, 1) = √(-1, 0),
which is i. In this formulation, both x and y axes are real, y is not “imaginary”. But this algebra is
messy to keep track of, while (x + iy) permits the use of ordinary algebra which is very
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convenient. Complex algebra is widely used in classical physics also, for convenience, especially
in the analyses of wave propagation, and classical physics is all about real physical quantities.
There is nothing unreal about quantum mechanics.
A fundamental postulate of quantum mechanics is Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle (which can
be derived from the Fourier transform relationship between conjugate pair of variables such as
position p and momentum q, see Papoulis 1962, p 62-63) says that for a complementary pair of
physical quantities, such as position p and momentum q of a particle, if p is uncertainty in p and
q is uncertainty in q, then p∙q ≥ h/4 where h is Planck’s constant (6.63∙10-34 kg∙m2/s). That
is, both cannot be simultaneously defined to arbitrarily high accuracy. In classical mechanics
there is no such limit. Some scholars cite this to claim that everything in the world is uncertain,
“Maya”, illusory. Note that h is an extremely small quantity, and so in the macro world, like a
stone, pot or our body, p and q can be practically extremely small and still satisfy the
uncertainty constraint. Errors in our yard sticks, speedometers and even laser gages are orders of
magnitude higher. World is not illusory.
Application of the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics to meta-physics can lead to
unnecessary difficulties due to the finite velocity of propagation of wave function as defined by
Schrodinger’s wave equation, whereas meta-physical thought processes and meta-physical
consciousness can instantly reach the far corners of the universe.
Telepathy (oxford) “The supposed communication of thoughts or ideas by means other than the
known senses”.
Fact (oxford) “A thing that is known or proved to be true”.
Speculation (oxford) “The forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence”.
In the context of quantum mechanics which is fundamentally probabilistic, wherein, to quote a
leading physicist in a TV documentary (NOVA, Einstein’s Quantum Riddle), “everything is
possible”, how does one separate fact from speculation? The answer lies in “with what
probability?” In the range of all possible potentialities with total probability of 1, an event with
probability of 10-10 may be regarded as lacking evidence and hence speculative as compared to
an event with probability of 0.99 which may be regarded as fact. Brian Greene (2020, p 297-299)
estimates that long after our world, solar system and all galaxies have dissipated into swarms of
wandering particles, there is a non-zero probability that a subset of them would coalesce into
what constitutes a human brain (called Boltzmann brain, named after the scientist who first
studied molecular random motions in the context of thermodynamics), if we wait for
1000000000068 (that is 1 followed by 680000000000 zeros) years! Without doubt, we can call
occurrence of such an event speculation. Moreover, such a Boltzmann brain will exist only for a
fleeting moment before dispersing, a dead brain without blood circulation even for a fleeting
moment. This goes to show to what unrealistic lengths probability theory can be stretched.
Quantum mechanical “everything is possible” is highly misleading if the associated probability is
not quantified.
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Part 1. Quantum Mechanics
We begin with a summary of a recent key new development (--- 2018, 2019) that is foundational
to what follows, which explains wave-particle duality, which Richard Feynman (1965 Lectures
on Physics volume 3 p 1-1) had called “the only mystery of quantum mechanics”, without Bohr’s
complementarity principle that has been like a doorway through which have passed many a claim
that consciousness influences the duality experiments.
1.1 Wave-particle duality: Particle always remains particle, wave always remains wave.
Particle such as an electron or a photon occupies non-zero volume in space, both due to inherent
physical nature, and also due to (Heisenberg’s) uncertainty principle. Wave function (r, t)
associated with the particle is a mathematical probability amplitude complex number that defines
the probability |(r, t)|2 of the particle being at spatial point r, at time t, symbol |∙| denoting the
magnitude of complex number. Thus we need to represent the physical particle by a
mathematical point. Without loss of generality we can choose the centroid (similar to center of
gravity) of the blob that is the physical particle including (Heisenberg’s) uncertainty spread, as
shown in Figure 1 (a). In general, |(r, t)|2 can be non-zero over a region of space larger than the
particle, because the particle can possibly be at any one of the many points over the larger
region. When the particle is in motion, and there are multiple possible paths, such as a photon
hitting a beam splitter with two possible paths: reflected and transmitted, or a photon reaching
the two slits in Young’s double slit experiment (discussed later) with two possible paths, one
through each slit, then its wave function necessarily explores all paths and define corresponding
probabilities, total probability always being equal to 1, as the particle is there somewhere in
space.
(a) Mathematical wave function spans
larger volume than physical particle
(b) Divisible wave function explores multiple paths
while indivisible particle follows only one path
Figure 1. Particle always remains particle and its wave function always remains wave
This means that, as shown in Figure 1 (b), the mathematical wave function is divisible among the
multiple paths, while the physical particle (quantum – electron or photon) is indivisible by
definition of “quantum” in quantum mechanics. Thus, based on the very fundamental precepts of
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quantum mechanics, namely that (a) the particle’s divisible wave function defines the
mathematical probability of its position (it also defines other physical aspects of the particle, but
that is beyond the scope of our discussion) along multiple paths and (b) the physical particle is
indivisible, we see that (a) the indivisible particle always remains particle, and (b) its divisible
wave function always remains wave. As we shall see, this dispels most misconceptions about
quantum mechanics and replaces subjective vagueness with objective clarity. The prevailing
view of wave-particle duality, namely that the particle somehow changes to wave, or wave
somehow changes to particle, has a history, a short review of which helps dispel this
misconception.
Early on, pondering about the wave function of a photon, Albert Einstein had suggested
interpreting the electromagnetic wave (which in classical physics is a physical entity) as the
probability amplitude (wave function) for the photon. Max Born then generalized this to apply to
any particle such as an electron (Max Born, Nobel Lecture 1954 “The statistical interpretation of
quantum mechanics”); the wave nature of electron was also experimentally confirmed. Classical
electromagnetic wave being a physical wave, and electron being a physical particle, it was
initially (wrongly) thought that the associated wave function is also a physical wave. Because
wave function spatially covers a much larger space than the particle at any given time, it was
initially (wrongly) thought that a particle could be at more than one place at the same time.
The fallacy here is that the wave function is not a physical entity. Probability amplitude is purely
a mathematical construct, nothing physical. When we draw a graph of a probability density
function (a bar graph or bell shaped graph) there is no physical entity with that shape. This fact is
now recognized by most quantum physicists, but the old notion of wave function as a physical
aspect of the particle still persists among some scientists. According to quantum mechanics, the
physical particle can be observed to be at only one place at any given time. As an analogy,
consider a fugitive escaped from prison, and is expected to be in one of ten neighboring towns
T1 to T10, for which we assign probabilities P1 to P10, total being 1. This does not mean that the
fugitive is in all ten towns at the same time. At any given time, there is probability that he is in
respective towns.
1.2 Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle, and consciousness
dark screen
with slits
white screen with
interference pattern
Source
of light
dark room
Figure 2. Young’s double slit experiment
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In 1803 Thomas Young demonstrated the wave nature of light by performing an elegant simple
experiment shown in Figure 2.
In a dark room, on one side of a dark screen is a point source of light, and on the other side is a
white screen. In the dark screen there are two narrow parallel slits close together. On the white
screen, instead of just two adjacent bright patches of light with darkness between the two on the
center line as would be expected if light rays were made up of particles, one sees several
alternating bright and dark bands of light with the main bright band peaking on the center line
where it should have been dark. The only way this can happen is if light behaves like a wave.
The two wavelets, one from each slit, reinforce each other (in phase) on the center line, and
cancel each other (out of phase) at the dark bands, forming an interference pattern, like waves on
water passing through two narrow nearby gaps.
In 1864, based on equations developed by himself, James Clerk Maxwell predicted
electromagnetic wave propagation exactly at the speed of light, suggesting that light is an
electromagnetic wave. During 1880s Heinrich Hertz experimentally generated electromagnetic
radio waves, confirming Maxwell’s predictions. Thus, by the end of 19th century the wave nature
of light was firmly established. Then, when particle nature of light was required by quantum
mechanics, Young’s double slit experiment took center stage for re-examination. A particle of
light (photon) can go through one or the other slit, not both. But observed interference pattern
requires that the photon go through both slits like a wave!
Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr discussed this at great length (J.A. Wheeler and W.H. Zurek,
1984, pp 9-31; Niels Bohr, 1984 ‘Discussion with Einstein on epistemological problem in atomic
physics’), with Young’s experimental set up visualized with hypothetical modifications to detect
particle nature of light at the slits by cooking up elaborate schemes, and came to the conclusion
that if particle nature is detected, then the interference pattern must disappear (decades later,
experiments with single photon detectors at the slits confirmed this). Whether light behaves like
a particle or wave depends on experimental setup! How is this possible?
To answer this, Bohr postulated Complementarity Principle that almost begs the question: If
experimental set up is to observe particle nature of light, then light will behave like a particle; if
experimental set up is to observe wave nature of light, then light will behave like a wave. It
appears that Bohr got his idea of complementarity during discussions with psychologist Edgar
Rubin about bi-stable human perception of an object, such as the shape in Figure 3 which is seen
either as a vase or human face but not both at the same time. This has induced some scholars to
include the experimenter’s subjective perception, consciousness, in Bohr’s complementarity
principle.
But in all his papers on complementarity Bohr makes it clear that by observation he means the
experimental setup, and makes no reference to consciousness (Bohr 1949 ‘Discussions with
Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics’; Holton, 1970. The Roots of
Complementarity; Pauli 1948 Dialectica special issue).
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Figure 3. Edgar Rubin’s bi-stable perception: vase or human face, not both at same time (source:
https://qbism.art)
Albert Einstein vehemently disagreed, in effect saying how can an inanimate particle know what
the experimental set up is about? Decades later, when fast single photon detectors became
available, highly sophisticated experiments were conducted, which confirmed Bohr’s
complementarity principle (Kim et al, 2000; Jaques et al, 2006). The implications of Bohr’s
complementarity principle are huge for most technologies that rely on quantum mechanical
behavior of single photons, such as quantum communications and quantum computers, where
beam splitters and beam combiners are used in various interferometric configurations (the basic
principle is same as Young’s double slit experiment), wherein any knowledge of “which way”
the particle went, in effect detecting particle nature, would destroy the crucial interference
phenomenon! This “which way” criterion has been widely applied in designing and analyzing
quantum systems, with rapidly increasing difficulty as the complexity of systems increases. Here
again, experimental knowledge of which way has been extended by some scholars to include the
consciousness of the experimenter.
Recently it has been shown (Sarma 2018, 2019) that the results of the highly sophisticated
experiments that confirmed Bohr’s complementarity principle can all be explained on the basis
of coherence and alignment considerations of the (mathematical) wave functions which depend
only on the experimental setup, without using Bohr’s Complementary Principle, which, though
true, is thus redundant. That is, the role of observation in particle or wave behavior of photon
can be entirely dispensed with, and consequently, the inclusion of consciousness in Bohr’s
complementarity (he did not mention it) is not justified. This redeems Albert Einstein’s view that
the inanimate photon does not know that it is being observed.
1.3 Joint wave function of measurement and consciousness:
As proved by von Neumann, in quantum measurement all components (the measured object, the
measuring instrument, eyes of the observer reading the instrument, his or her brain, and a
terminating area of brain called consciousness) must be included in a joint wave function, and not
independently. The state of a component is a projection of the joint state for that component.
This is illustrated in Figure 4 for the case of Young’s double slit experiment discussed earlier,
with detectors at the slits to detect (observe) particle nature, extending observation to
consciousness.
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Figure 4. Joint wave function of measurement system from light source to consciousness
Scholars who claim that consciousness influences the experiment point to the joint wave function
as the link through which this effect takes place. What they omit is the crucial with what
probability, especially as probability is fundamental to quantum mechanics. We shall show that
the probability of consciousness influencing the experiment is practically zero, and so the claim
is not true for all practical purposes.
For clarity of discussion, let us simplify by first considering the joint wave function of orbital
electron in the atom of light source and orbital electron of the atom in detector, say 0.3 meter
from the light source, as shown in Figure 5. The amplitude of wave function of source orbital
electron decreases exponentially with distance r as e-r/(n∙a0) (see Zweibach MIT Open
Courseware) where n is the orbital number (less than 6 for most atoms) and a0 is first Bohr
radius which is 0.053 nanometer (1 nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). At a distance of just 6
nanometers the amplitude is 2∙10-9 and probability is 4∙10-18, an extremely small number,
practically zero. At t = 0 the source orbital electron drops to a lower energy level and emits a
photon, whose wave function, traveling at speed of light, reaches the detector atom in 1
nanosecond (not instantaneously), where it interacts with the detector orbital electron, imparting
to it energy which releases it to be amplified by the detector’s amplifier circuitry.
The amplitude of the wave function (wave packet) of a photon of wavelength say 800
nanometers (visible light) is localized to within about 600 femtosecond duration (Brian J. Smith
Figure 1) which at the speed of light is 180 microns, less than two tenths of a millimeter
Experimentally, single photon detectors time stamp detection to this level of resolution, which
shows the highly localized nature of photon. The small size of photon’s wave packet should not
be confused with its coherence length, which is the space-time distance over which phase of the
wave packet remains stable with respect to another (earlier) space-time point, and it depends on
the source, and can be very large for lasers due to the nature of laser source.
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Figure 5. Joint wave function of source orbital electron, photon and detector orbital electron
Thus, until the photon is in the atomic neighborhood of the detector orbital electron, the
projection of its state on the state of orbital electron via the joint wave function is practically
zero, though theoretically non-zero. The point of this discussion is that until the time of detection
there is practically no influence of detector orbital electron on the photon, which in turn has
practically no influence on the source orbital electron after the photon leaves the atomic
neighborhood of source orbital electron. Thus, the theoretical influence of detector atom on the
source atom via photon in joint wave function has practically zero probability. Extending this
reasoning to LED, eyes, retina, brain and the consciousness point in the brain, we conclude that
effect of brain’s consciousness on the source or detector in the experiment by observation route
via joint wave function has practically zero probability. In contrast, an action by the observer
through his or her limbs such as hand controlling the experiment will have a significant
probability.
In the above scenario, the involvement of the observer’s consciousness is through photons
reaching the retina of the eye. If, however, we consider a scenario involving not light photons
(whose wavelength and hence wave packet is extremely small), but microwave and radio wave
photons which have much longer wavelength and wave packets (microwave ~ a few centimeters;
radio waves ~ tens of meters, longer all the way down to electrostatics) in which case there can
be non-trivial interaction between the source and detector, and, if the observer’s brain has the
ability to interact directly with such longer wavelength electromagnetic waves or electrostatics
(not through the eyes), then one can make the case for brain / consciousness interacting with the
experiment. This falls under telepathy and telekinesis, a nebulous subject that has been around
for a long time. If confirmed through repeatable predictable experiments, it will be a major
advancement for neuroscience. Some scholars (Goswami) have tried to explain some reported
telepathy experimental results on the basis of quantum mechanical non-local-action-at-adistance. We shall show later (in the section on non-local-action-at-a-distance) that this is not
quite true.
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1.4 Wave function collapse:
At the instant a particle is detected (observed in a detector), its wave function instantly vanishes
everywhere else, localizing it (collapsing it) to just the detector. For example, when a photon
interacts with an electron in the detector, the electron gains energy and (its wave packet) moves
to the amplifier, while the photon (and its wave packet) disappears. This is called wave function
collapse. This apparent violation of physical laws (instantly vanishing everywhere, faster than
relativistic limit of speed of light) has been cited by some scholars to regard wave function as
supernatural. But the wave function is non-physical mathematical probability amplitude, and so
it can vanish instantly everywhere without violating any physical laws. In the earlier analogy of a
fugitive on the run, when he is captured in a particular town, probabilities for all other towns
instantly drop to zero. There is nothing supernatural in this. Sometimes particle is not absorbed,
and continues on with modified energy or momentum. Then a correspondingly modified wave
function defines its probabilities from that point on. In the analogy of fugitive on the run, if he is
spotted in a town but not captured, the probabilities for the other towns get redefined, and some
new towns may enter the picture with their own probabilities.
1.5 Observation in quantum mechanics:
Given a cause – effect relationship of an event, wherein the cause can have one of several values,
in an ensemble of random probabilistic cause (at time t1) – effect (at time t2 > t1) events, in
classical physics the randomness is resolved (which is the actual event out of the many probable
events) at time t1, the effect of which is observed at time t2. In sharp contrast, in quantum
mechanics the randomness is resolved only at the time of observation, till which time it all
remains probabilistic. To the question “What is the actual event before the time of observation?”
the quantum mechanical answer is “The question is ill-posed, we can talk only about
probabilities till the time of observation”.
One can argue that it makes no difference because for each observed effect there is a
corresponding value of cause, in a one-to-one cause-effect relationship. But it makes a huge
difference when two or more entangled particles are involved, which we shall discuss shortly in
the context of non-local action at a distance, for which there is no parallel in classical physics.
Thus, in quantum mechanics observation plays a fundamental role, and opens the door to
involving consciousness. An example is Schrodinger’s cat.
1.6 Superposition of states and Schrodinger’s cat:
Depending on the system, Schrodinger’s wave equation can have multiple solutions (like the
many modes of acoustic vibration of a string), each defining a distinct probability profile in
space-time, the sum total of all probabilities must always equal 1 because the particle exists
somewhere there in space-time. Each such probabilistic profile is called a quantum mechanical
“state” of the system, and as each is a valid solution to Schrodinger’s wave equation (which is a
mathematically linear partial differential equation), a linear combination (a weighted sum) of
these states is also a solution to Schrodinger’s equation, and so is a valid (generalized) state. This
is called superposition of states. All are still only probabilities. Clearly, this does not mean that
the particle exists in all the states at the same time. While all states remain probabilistic until
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observation, the observed particle is only in one state. For someone rooted in classical mechanics
this answer may not be convincing, and so the incorrect notion evolved that “the particle is in all
states at the same time until the time of observation” which should actually read “the particle is
probabilistically in all states at any given time until the time of observation”.
To explain the fundamental role of observation in quantum mechanics, Schrodinger visualized
the following hypothetical experiment: A cat is placed in a box, along with a mechanism that can
release poisonous gas at some random instant of time in future, and the lid is closed. The
question at some time in future is: Is the cat dead or alive? We will not know the answer to this
question until we open the box and observe the cat, till which time the state of the cat is a
superposition of two probabilistic states (dead, alive). Note that it is not actually being alive and
dead at the same time. Some scholars include the consciousness of the observer in the
observation, claiming to influence whether the cat is dead or alive. A test to verify this claim is to
have the observer consciously decide whether the cat is dead or alive before opening the box and
record the decision, and then open the box. Repeating this experiment many times, one would
find that there is no correlation between conscious decision and the outcome. Furthermore, if no
observation is ever made, after a long time, say a century, the cat would be definitely dead, no
question of still being both alive and dead.
Note that observation defines a particular state of the object out of many potential states, but
does not create the object. The object is in existence throughout, only its state is unknown till
observation. It is wrong to say that observation creates the object.
Material universe functions even if no intellect ever observes it, as it has done for more than 14
billion years, even if no human beings ever existed to formulate the Big Bang theory. In nature,
“observation” = inter-particle interaction.
1.7 Entanglement, non-local action at a distance and the EPR Paradox:
“Action at a distance” means cause and effect are separated by empty space. Examples are
gravitational, electric and magnetic fields which act on a body at a distance across empty space,
well known in classical physics. These fields propagate in free space at the speed of light which
is about 3∙108 meters per second. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, nothing can
travel faster than speed of light. That is, effect at time t1 of a cause at time t0 cannot happen at a
place farther than c∙(t1 – t0) where c is speed of light in free space. If the effect happens at a
distance greater than this, it is called non-local action at a distance, “locality” being c∙(t1 – t0).
Photons have the property of polarization, with two components: horizontal and vertical (familiar
example is Polaroid eye glass which cuts off glare which is horizontal polarization component in
scattered light). Sometimes when two photons are created together at the same space-time point,
their polarizations can become correlated (for electron pair it is spin, plus or minus). That is, the
state of one has a fixed relationship to the state of the other, the two states are not independent.
Then the two particles are said to be entangled. The state can be random, but with a given fixed
relationship between the two. In the classical picture, the actual value of random state is defined
at the time of creation of the pair. In quantum mechanics where probability is fundamental, only
the joint probability of the pair is defined at the time of creation, and (as Schrodinger pointed out
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in his cat experiment) the actual state is known only at the time of observation (measurement).
This makes a huge difference.
Albert Einstein, who was uncomfortable with the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum
mechanics (famously saying “God does not play dice”, but, nevertheless, as a true objective
scientist accepted all objective evidence that led to quantum mechanics, he himself being one of
its founding fathers) set out to cook up a thought experiment that he hoped would show the
inadequacy of quantum mechanics, described in a paper with co-authors Podolsky and Rosen
titled “Is quantum mechanics complete?” (1935 Physics Review 47) – The now famous “EPR
Paradox”. In this thought experiment, a pair of entangled particles are created and sent along in
opposite directions in space. When the spatial separation of the two is significant, the state of one
particle is measured, at which time the state of the other particle, which until that instant
remained probabilistic according to quantum mechanics, must be fixed instantly, thus acting at a
distance instantly, violating the relativistic speed limit of velocity of light! Therefore, quantum
mechanics must be missing something! Schrodinger immediately responded (1935 Mathematical
Proceedings of Cambridge Philosophical Society 31-4) saying that this prediction of quantum
mechanics is correct, and coined the term entanglement for this incredible classically
unbelievable phenomenon.
t0
S
AY
tA
AX
B1
A
axis a
tA
ALICE
tB
B
axis b
by
BY
BX
Figure 6. Experiment with polarization-entangled photons proving non-local-action-at-a-distance
Decades later, when technology was available for sending single photons uncorrupted over
sufficiently long distances (fiber optics) and fast single photon detectors became available to
detect/timestamp for determining correlation between the entangled photons with sufficient
resolution and accuracy, non-local action at a distance has been confirmed, through numerous
ingenious experiments, pioneering proposal by Aspect (1976) followed by many, including a
notable one by Zeilinger (2015) over distance of kilometers. A typical setup is shown in Figure
6. Source S at time t0 emits a pair of polarization entangled photons, to station Alice where its
polarization state is measured at time tA and to station Bob where its polarization is measured
at time tB = tA + t (distance between Alice and Bob being greater than c∙ t, and so non-local)
and found to be correlated to that of .
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Does this mean there is something supernatural going on? No. Because what we are measuring
for the entangled pair is the correlation of their states and not individual states, the measurement
(observation) is not complete until both are measured. It is a question of correlation of the two,
not a question of one being the cause and the other being the effect. In fact, if Bob’s
measurement at tB is taken to be the cause (until which time we would not know there is
correlation), the effect at tA happens earlier than the cause, “retro-causality”! But the divisible
joint wave function of the two travels from S along respective paths at a speed less than or equal
to speed of light in free space. It can be argued that if the act of entanglement at S is taken to be
the cause, as it should be, there is truly no non-local action at a distance, correlation requiring
both measurements, not one cause and the other effect. This does not, however, diminish the
astonishing nature of this phenomenon, so accurately predicted by Schrodinger and verified
decades later – objectively, no subjective mysticism.
It may be noted that it is a challenge to measure the correlation, because (a) not all particles
created are entangled, and not all particles received are entangled, constituting a noise
background and (b) a particle must be correlated to its companion particle, not to a particle of
another pair, which requires extremely high temporal resolution of the detections, requiring
single photon (one photon at a time) regime of operation. It is a testament to the experimental
genius and perseverance of the researchers.
In quantum physical reality (fact, not fiction or speculation), cause-effect relationships are thus
far more complicated, fundamentally probabilistic even in plurality of particles through joint
probabilities, than the simple minded one cause - one effect relationships lined up neatly along
the arrow of time from past to future, foundational in classical mechanics, and also in religious
concepts tracing back to God as the unique original cause without a cause.
1.8 Quantum jump:
In the quantum mechanical model of the atom, orbital electrons surrounding the nucleus are in
different discrete levels of energy. When the energy of a photon is absorbed by an orbital
electron, the electron “jumps” to a state of correspondingly higher energy. Likewise, when an
orbital electron drops from a higher energy level to a lower energy level, a photon is emitted with
the difference energy. These jumps are called quantum jumps. Believing the jump to be
instantaneous, some scholars say that at the instant of the jump the electron exists in both orbits
at the same time, being at two places at the same time, discussed and dismissed earlier in the
context of wave function of the particle. It is worth noting that the jump is not instantaneous, and
has been measured recently, Max Planck Institute (2016), to be about a hundred attoseconds (1
attosecond = 10-18 second). Even for an instant the orbital electron is not at two different energy
levels. Nothing supernatural.
1.9 Uncertainty principle:
Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle says that for a complementary pair of physical quantities,
such as position p and momentum q of a particle, if p is uncertainty in p and q is uncertainty
in q, then p∙q ≥ h/4 where h is Planck’s constant (6.63∙10-34 kg∙m2/s). That is, both cannot be
defined to arbitrarily high accuracy. In classical mechanics there is no such limit. Some scholars
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cite this to claim that everything in the world is uncertain, an illusory perception by one’s
consciousness. Note that h is an extremely small quantity, and so in the macro world, for a stone,
pot or our body, p and q can be practically extremely small and still satisfy the uncertainty
constraint. Errors in our yard sticks, speedometers and even laser gages are orders of magnitude
higher. World is not illusory, not a figment of imagination by one’s consciousness.
1.10 Telepathy:
Reported experiments involving telepathy (assuming that they have been conducted scientifically
and repeatability verified by others) involve a person communicating with another person across
space, with no electromagnetic neuro signals detected. Scholars who suggest explaining such a
phenomenon of telepathy as quantum mechanical non-local action at a distance (Goswamy 1993
p 130-133) overlook a key fact: In the time interval between cause (sending person initiating
signal transmission) and effect (receiving person receiving the transmission) the distance covered
at speed of light far exceeds the distance between sender and receiver, so it cannot be non-local.
If neuro electromagnetic signals are not involved, as claimed, this would open up a new fertile
ground for further research in physical sciences, to send and receive non-neural telepathic
signals.
Part 2. Vedantic Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics, in which wave function defines all probable (not yet realized) outcomes for
physical event, out of which one is observed (realized) at the time of measurement, has naturally
invited philosophical comparisons of quantum mechanics with Vedanta which says that the
physical universe is unreal and that the only Reality is Paramatma the omnipresent highest level
of consciousness (Parama: highest, Atma: consciousness) that also resides in all living beings at
a lower level as Jivatma (Jiva: living being, Atma: consciousness) through which instantiations
of physical objects are observed (as if real). Such philosophical discussions are indeed very
enlightening in the search for some underlying common truth. There are strong arguments both
for and against similarities between quantum mechanics and Vedanta. To cite a few, review
paper by Jonathan Duquette (2011) ‘Quantum Physics and Vedanta: A perspective from Bernard
d’Espagnat’s Scientific Realism’; Goswami (1995) ‘The Self-Aware Universe, how
consciousness creates the material world’. Krishnamoorthy (2017) ‘Quantum Physics came from
Vedas: Schrodinger and Einstein read Vedas’; ISKCON (2009) ‘Vedic Knowledge and Quantum
Mechanics’.
But, certain important fundamental aspects must be considered, for completeness in such
comparisons: (1) Quantum mechanics quantizes energy, which is also conserved. In Vedanta, the
energy behind physical universe is Paramatma, any attempt at quantization of which is not only
meaningless, it would degrade the very concept of Paramatma. Moreover, energy of Paramatma
is limitless, so conservation of energy is meaningless. (2) Quantum mechanics deals entirely with
physical reality, nothing unreal. All objects exist in physical reality at all times, only their state
(out of all possible states) is undefined till measurement (observation). In Vedanta, physical
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existence itself is regarded as unreal, the only Reality is meta-physical Paramatma. (3) Applying
physical quantum mechanics to meta-physical Vedanta invites the problem of finiteness of
velocity of propagation of wave function as defined by Schrodinger’s wave equation which
includes physical parameters such as mass and momentum, whereas meta-physical
consciousness can span the entire universe in an instant.
Until now, all scholarly discussions of quantum mechanics and Vedanta have been based on the
prevailing view of wave-particle duality, namely that depending on observation the particle
somehow mysteriously changes to wave or from wave to particle. New development discussed in
Part 1 resolves this mystery and adds much desired clarity: Physical particle always remains
particle and mathematical wave always remains wave, there is no role of consciousness. Other
aspects of wave function such as wave function collapse, superposition of states, non-local action
at a distance and quantum jump have also been shown not to involve consciousness or metaphysical mysticism. For example, with reference to Goswamy (1995), the following statements,
which may be valid per prevailing view, are not true per the new development: p45 “in order to
understand the behavior of quantum mechanics, however, we seem to need to inject
consciousness – our ability to choose – according to the complementarity principle and subject –
object mixing”; p48 “The antithesis of material realism is monistic idealism. In this philosophy,
consciousness, not matter, is fundamental”; p85 “As soon as a conscious being observes, the
material reality becomes manifest in a unique state”; p107 “The idealist resolution of the
Schrodinger’s cat demands that the consciousness of observing subject choose one facet from the
multifaceted dead-and-alive coherent superposition of the cat and thus seal its fate. The subject is
the chooser”.
The claim that the material world is created by one’s conscious observation, is not justified either
by quantum mechanics (as shown in part 1), or by Vedanta:
Jivatma is same as Paramatma (Self), but diluted by ignorance. (Swami Chinmayananda SelfUnfoldment p 41 “An individual is the Self as though degraded by ignorance, which finds
expression in the world as thoughts and actions”). Paramatma does not directly interact with
one’s senses (Radhakrishnan p 581-4 Kena Upanishad verses 1.2 to 1.9). That interaction occurs
through Jivatma. Thus, Jivatma does not create the physical objects in the world through
observation.
Furthermore, Vedanta talks about cyclical nature of creation, without a beginning or an end, not
a particular time in the distant past when the universe was “created”. In the Creation Hymn (Rg
Veda hymn 10-129), Vedic sages pose to themselves difficult questions about how the universe
came to be, followed by suggestive answers, followed finally by honest “who knows?”, kindling
further inquiry, guiding one towards the truth. This hymn hints at nothingness, neither existence
nor non-existence, neither air nor space, neither death nor immortality, neither darkness nor light,
then the ONE enclosed in nothing breathed, the calmness of nothingness perturbed by ripples
leading to the universe we see. Nothingness without beginning or end, cyclical creation is but
like ripples disturbing the eternal nothingness. Such deeply inquiring knowledge was transmitted
from teacher (guru) to student (sishya) in a strictly oral tradition over thousands of years, to this
very day, long after writing, books and notebooks became available.
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The import of this is that Vedanta is all in the mind, the field of thoughts, requiring mental
discipline and memory power, the central role of consciousness. This remarkable oral tradition
that has survived to this day has been studied and documented by Professor David M. Knipe
(2015 Vedic Voices – Intimate Narratives of a Living Andhra Tradition) who spent thirty years
with Vedic families in the Godavari river delta region of Andhra Pradesh, India.
To summarize, the essence of Vedanta is illustrated in Figure 7, which for completeness includes
also the Hindu concept of cycle of rebirths before (by doing good and not evil) Jivatma merges
with Paramatma which is salvation terminating the cycle of rebirths.
Figure 7. Vedanta Consciousness: Higher Paramatma and Lower Jivatma
Also shown is the distinction between monist (Advaita) and dualist (Dvaita) interpretations of
Vedanta. Note that in Vedanta, consciousness is entirely meta-physical, as compared with
physical treatments of consciousness as a zone in the brain.
Scholars who claim that the concepts of quantum mechanics came from Vedanta
(Krishnamurthy, ISKCON) base their claims in part on the high praise for Vedanta by some
founding fathers of quantum mechanics like Erwin Schrodinger (wave equation), Werner
Heisenberg (uncertainty principle), Niels Bohr (quantized atomic structure) and Von Neumann
(mathematical frame work), and also Robert Oppenheimer (atomic bomb). This, naturally
demands clarification.
None of the scientists Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Von Neumann and
Robert Oppenheimer based their scientific work on Vedanta. Their high praise for Vedanta was
strictly their subjective philosophical opinions. Their objective scientific work was entirely based
on hard experimental evidence verifiable by any scientist, nothing subjective. Rooted in classical
physics which had explained by late nineteenth century most of what physicists had thought was
to be known, by the dawn of twentieth century they were confronted with formidable
fundamental discrepancies (anomalies) which classical physics just could not explain. It is a
testament to their collective genius that they, along with other eminent scientists like Max
Planck, Albert Einstein, Max Born and Paul Dirac, painstakingly came up with quantum physics
which resolved the anomalies. But, unlike classical mechanics which made intuitive sense,
quantum mechanics is totally counter-intuitive and weird, which puzzled them and troubled
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them. It was in this context, namely that what is true at atomic level (quantum mechanics) was
not what seemed to be true at macro level (classical mechanics) - for example a particle can also
behave like a wave – that Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Von Neumann
and Robert Oppenheimer found comfort in Vedanta which teaches that the world we observe is
not what it seems to be, the truth that drives the world is far more subtle.
Erwin Schrodinger (1944 ‘What is Life?’): “From the early great Upanishads the recognition
Atman = Brahman (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self)
was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of
deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was,
after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest
of all thoughts.” This shows his high regard for Vedantic philosophy. His remark “The unity and
continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is
entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One” shows how he felt comfort in the
unifying wisdom of Vedanta in the context of his wave equation that unified the particle and
wave nature of light. But his development of quantum mechanical wave equation in 1925 was
entirely and strictly based on objective facts of physical experimental evidence and related
theories, not Vedanta. The fact that Schrodinger read Vedas does not mean he based his wave
equation on Vedas, to which he makes no reference in postulating his wave equation.
When Robert Oppenheimer saw the explosion of his prototype atomic bomb at White Sands test
range in 1945, he was reminded of Lord Krishna’s revelation of Vishwarupam described in
Bhagavat Gita verse 9-12: If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky,
that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. It is said that he later recounted that another
Bhagavat Gita verse 11-32 had also entered his mind at that time: "kālo'smi
lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho lokānsamāhartumiha pravṛttaḥ" ("I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds”). Because of this we cannot claim that Oppenheimer based his design of atom bomb on
Bhagavat Gita. He based it entirely on objective experimental facts and theories of atomic
physics.
Note that the other founding fathers of quantum mechanics like Max Planck, Albert Einstein,
Max Born and Paul Dirac had not sought Vedanta for comfort. In fact, Paul Dirac was atheist.
Scientists are also human beings, and they are entitled to their own subjective personal opinions
about religions and spirituality. But their scientific work was never based on religion or
spirituality. To say so would be unfair to them. Isaac Newton believed in the Biblical notion of
the Last Day when the world would end, and he even predicted the date of the Last Day (that
date passed without the world ending) but he never based his scientific work on his religious
beliefs. In fact, Newton’s laws of motion and his law of gravitation explained and supported
Kepler’s heliocentric model of planetary motions which was at that time vehemently opposed by
the Church which believed in geocentric model (a short time before Newton, natural philosopher
Bruno Giordano was brutally burnt alive at the stake by the Church for his belief in Kepler’s
heliocentric model, and seventy year old Galileo had barely escaped death by recanting his belief
in heliocentric model on his knees before the Church). When science and religion are mixed,
terrible things can happen: religion can lose its spirituality, and science can lose its objectivity.
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Discussion
We have presented the implications of a new development in quantum mechanics that clears the
century old mystery of wave-particle duality and other aspects of wave function, with particular
reference to consciousness. We have shown that consciousness plays no statistically significant
role in influencing the objective world through observation; it influences only through one’s
limbs or robot hooked up to one’s brain. The notion that the essentially objective physical
quantum mechanics implies a subjective role of physical (brain) or meta-physical (non-brain)
consciousness in physicality has led to speculations that belie the facts.
Properly understood, there is nothing vague, mysterious or mystic about quantum mechanics, the
most accurate physical science to date whose predictions have all been verified to be true. The
fact that its predictions have been revolutionary compared to prior views of physical universe is
no different from the fact that Newton’s laws and his law of gravitation were revolutionary
compared to prior views in explaining the “mystery” of motions of heavenly bodies. Both are
accepted only because their predictions are found to be true, Newton’s in the macroscopic
world, and quantum mechanics in the atomic world. Once we accept the (more general than
deterministic) fundamental probability amplitude wave function concept of quantum mechanics,
everything, including the non-local action at a distance correlations of entangled particles, all
make perfect sense. No ambiguity, mystery or mysticism whatsoever. It is really a case of
mindset.
The magnificent edifice of Vedanta, rationally and logically inquiring into the nature of the
universe, both physical and meta-physical, the genius of Vedic sages who were so humbled by
the knowledge they uncovered that they did not claim authorship, saying it must be of divine
origin, the knowledge that has survived intact for thousands of years entirely through oral
tradition passed from generation to generation of gurus and students to this day, stands to lose its
greatness through infusing of quantum mechanical concepts of today that will certainly be
replaced in future by other scientific theories. Vedanta should not be diluted by quantum
mechanics or any other physical science, all of which are transients compared to the permanence
of Vedic knowledge.
Received February 22, 2021; Accepted April 11, 2021
References
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Karl, S., How Brain Makes Mind: The Principles of Operation (Part I)
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Article
How Brain Makes Mind:
The Principles of Operation (Part I)
Karl Sipfle*
Abstract
We present the principles of operation by which a brain makes a mind, at all scales necessary to
cover the whole problem. We inventory the necessary capabilities for a mind. We divide
conscious mind into four layers of increasing elaboration. For the principles of operations of the
lower two layers, we provide the STFC theory. For the upper two, we provide the STHC theory.
We survey the evolutionary progression from first twinge of experience to human capacities. We
explain the types of memory and problem-solving we carry and by what structures they are made
to happen. We compare to prior works and review the philosophical implications and stance. All
of this is done with minimal incoming assumptions, and those made are declared.
Part I of this four-part article includes: 1. Introduction; 2. All the Elements of Mind; 3. A
Multiscale Problem; 4. Definitions; 5. Important Assumptions; 6. Levels of Consciousness; 7.
The Four-Layer Architecture: The Gross Architecture of Consciousness; 8. Consciousness
Architecture Layer 1: Fundamental Consciousness; 9. Sites of Fundamental Consciousness in the
Brain; 10. The Nature of Sentience; and 11. Consciousness Architecture Layer 2: Sentience.
Keywords: Consciousness, physics, evolution, feeling, qualia, mind, cognitive, affective,
sensation, memory, learning, attention, perception, recognition, decision-making, problemsolving, coordination, self, symbol manipulation, language.
1. Introduction
This paper comprises a Concept of Operations and Architecture Description Document for a
mindful brain, plus rationale and process notes on their derivations.
The term “consciousness” has been used to address everything from the smallest fundamental
capacities enabling sentience to the internal world of a human mind. In this paper, we address all
of it.
We refer to an Architecture with which a mind is built. It is a layered architecture, cognizant of
the building process of evolution.
The architecture we populate with theory. The theories are expected to see more revision over
time than the architecture.
*
Correspondence author: Karl Sipfle, Independent Researcher (also working independently at NASA GSFC).
E-mail: ksipfle@umich.edu
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By the time we get up to vertebrate brains (appearing in Layer 3) we start to have a great deal of
extant data on how lower mechanisms are exploited and can use it here.
The paper’s scope is of natural brains rather than artificial ones, though it is relevant to the latter.
The most elementary facts of brain anatomy and operations we don’t belabor and are widely
available (Kandel, 2021).
2. All the Elements of Mind
This is the complete list of ingredients for mind:
Reflex (underpinning mind)
Regulation
Sensation
Memory, of half a dozen different types, enabling Learning
Feeling
Prioritization
Attention, bottom-up and top-down
Perception, Recognition
Prediction
Action Planning
Imagination
Decision-Making
Problem-Solving
Coordination
Unity
Making sense
Differentiating the real from the recalled or the imagined
Self
Symbol manipulation
Language
A theory that describes how all of these things work is a complete theory of mind.
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3. A Multiscale Problem
The biggest issue of the consciousness mystery is not self-reference and certainly not cognition,
but the existence of feeling. This topic has been rightly called the Hard Problem (Chalmers,
Facing up to the problem of consciousness, 1995).
There is the matter of why and how we can feel at all, what is “subjective experience.” And there
is why given the useful valuation that the feeling phenomenon provides, we should also actually
feel.
The answer to the Whys appears to be that any value mechanism would do, and real pain and
pleasure are usable natural phenomena that are here in this universe for evolution to employ.
There is also the What and the How. What is feeling, scientifically? We address that.
The next puzzle is as to how minds are woven from basic mechanisms. While our knowledge is
not complete, much of this puzzle is easier.
Multiscale models (what Rolls (Rolls, 2016) calls “levels of explanation”) of less complicated
systems have been employed for decades. To understand the whole of consciousness (or even
just some important parts) it is necessary to examine it at multiple scales.
4. Definitions
Feeling: Experience. That which makes the Hard Problem (Chalmers, Facing up to the problem
of consciousness, 1995).
Raw feeling: The concept of basal, indivisible feeling.
Qualia: The allegedly rawest feelings discernible to a mind, discovered through introspection.
Consciousness: Feeling and, typically, information processing affecting each other in organized
fashion to make action decisions in the interests of a species.
Levels of Consciousness: A progression of Fundamental Consciousness, Sentience, Animal
Consciousness, Human Consciousness (Sipfle K. , 2018), see below.
Fundamental Consciousness (FC): The smallest element of what distinguishes consciousness;
the actual smallest bit of feeling. Pure pain or pure pleasure. Somewhat similar concepts have
been called pre-consciousness, protoconsciousness (Penrose & Hameroff, Consciousness in the
Universe, 2017), microfeels (Poznanski & Brandas, Panexperiential materialism: A physical
exploration of qualitativeness in the brain, 2020), and fundamental feelings.
Mind: An island of Animal or Human Consciousness. On Earth, each requires and belongs to at
most one brain.
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Cognitive: Related to thought and/or information processing and not to feeling (though in
practice feelings typically accompany the cognitive).
Cognition: Thought, as opposed to feelings.
Perception: Informational understanding (not emotional).
Affective: Related to feeling, not cognitive.
Valence: Goodness/positivity or badness/negativity.
Emergence: A consequent complex whole arising from the interactions within a system, that
takes on its own characteristics not describable/expected in terms of just the individual elements
of the system.
5. Important Assumptions
This paper makes a few assumptions, which are out of its scope to justify (instead see (Sipfle K. ,
The Nature of Fundamental Consciousness (preprint), 2018)).
Postulate 1: Physicalism is necessary and information- and computation-based theories cannot
provide for the source of conscious experience.
Postulate 2: Consciousness functions within the same basic rules (including mathematics) as all
other phenomena that also exist in Nature.
6. Levels of Consciousness
We start by conceptually sectioning the vast scope of what is called “consciousness” into a few
large categories of increasing capability (adapted from (Sipfle K. , 2018)).
Level 1 Consciousness a.k.a. Fundamental Consciousness a.k.a. Base Consciousness
This consists of the smallest elements that represent experience. (This is where freestanding experience occurs, without an observer.)
Level 2 Consciousness a.k.a. Sentience
Consists of everything that must be added to level 1 to make the sentience of the simplest
sentient organism. (This is where “subjective experience” occurs- it introduces the concept
of an observer.)
Level 3 Consciousness a.k.a. Mind
Contains everything above level 2 that enables the behaviors and experiences up to the
most complex of nonverbal organisms (by adding cognitive componentry).
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Level 4 Consciousness a.k.a. Human Consciousness
That which has been attained by humans (by adding the symbolic manipulation that is
used for language) (Edelman, 1993) (Rolls, 2016).
Level 1 Consciousness plus Level 2 Consciousness are the foundation beneath the entirety of
“consciousness” defined as “a bubble of experience” if that bubble “consists of colours, sounds,
smells, tastes, etc.” (Gamez, 2018). Level 1 Consciousness has its own elemental bubbles of
experience, which we may call “psybits (as Eccles did),” but the experience is more primitive
and not in all occurrences integrated into any kind of mind or substantial piece thereof.
We will see that Level 1 is the root of actual experience, rather like Layer 1 of a computer
network, the Physical Layer, moving around real individual electrons. In both cases, all the rest
sits on top and is connected assemblies and software built on Level 1. If we simulate
Consciousness Level 1 and Level 2 and then put all the same algorithms atop them as we find in
natural brains, we can get all the same behaviors, but that “mind” will not actually feel.
Level 1 Consciousness is the fundamental consciousness that is the physics manifestation of
what is needed to build, from it, consciousness as we know it. The nature of this low level and
the connection from it upward answers Chalmers’s Hard Problem: feeling is a phenomenon of
our universe that preceded minds and was discovered and exploited by evolution to build minds.
Once we put the horse before the cart, the Hard Problem evaporates.
IV
Verbal Mind. Abstracting
More wiring and “Algorithms” Cognitive
III
Mind.
Wiring and “Algorithms”
Cognitive
II
Sentience. Qualia
STFC
Affective + Cog
I
Fundamental Consciousness.
STFC: Particles, Fields
Affective
Figure 1: Levels of Consciousness
7. The Four-Layer Architecture: The Gross Architecture of Consciousness
Next, we move from conceptual and abstract observations to the question of how brains and
minds are actually built. We construct as Nature did, in layers whereby each earlier layer
provides a platform for the next and new things become possible. Our identification and
classification of Levels of consciousness corresponds well, it turns out, with layers of
architecture of real minds. These are shown in Figure 2: The Four Architectural Layers of
Consciousness.
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Figure 2: The Four Architectural Layers of Consciousness
These architectural layers of mind include, from the top down:
Language, integrated into thought.
Cognition, integrated with feeling.
Higher manipulations
Manipulation of base objects
Qualia, simple and complex.
Fundamental physics, whence come base feeling and objects that can be used to record
information.
This we call the Four-Layer Architecture or FLA (colloquially the “Florida Architecture”).
Now that we have specified the architectural concept of this evolved layering of consciousness,
we shall discuss each of Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3, and Layer 4 Consciousness. In the process we
also present our full-sweep ToC (Theory of Consciousness), comprising two sub-theories. The
compliant and motivating theory described for Layer 1 and Layer 2 is the Sentonic Theory of
Fundamental Consciousness, STFC. Strictly speaking, STFC is a metatheory, as it is agnostic on
some specific aspects for which there are multiple candidates. The compliant theory described
for Layer 3 and Layer 4 is the Systems Theory of Higher Consciousness, STHC. STHC is a
synthesis drawing on the latest and best insights from neuroscience and theoretical and
experimental psychology.
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8. Consciousness Architecture Layer 1: Fundamental Consciousness
All phenomena we humans have identified have been seen to emerge from things that appear at
the fundamental particle level through, maximally, the molecular scale.
Though we are not yet certain of the exact mechanism in Layer 1, we can characterize necessary
key properties of it (and thus also speculate on actual mechanisms). This allows us to describe,
without impediment because it is supposed to be more abstract, the nature of Layer 2.
Problems that will be faced in getting up to qualia (Layer 2) include
1. Qualia are not all of the same character.
2. Qualia are multitudinous.
3. A feeling is fused into a whole, and more intense feeling is a stronger whole. This is the
“combination problem” first identified by William James, with many prior attempts to
answer it (Harris, 2020) (Chalmers, The Combination Problem for Panpsychism, 2016).
4. At the bottom there are no Observers (in the mind sense), only observers (in the physics
interactions sense) (Sipfle K. , The Nature of Fundamental Consciousness (preprint),
2018).
5. There must be a way- a path- for our minds to have evolved
We now discuss Layer 1 from the standpoint of what it must be like in order to support an
explainable Layer 2.
Layer 1’s province is the true indivisible, smallest feeling that can occur in the universe.
Pursuing that leads us to some important (and non-traditional) conclusions.
First of all is the problem: for a feeling, who is feeling it? The process of drilling down to
physics reveals that the question itself is essentially a meaningless assumption when we get to
physical fundamentals rather than psychological concepts. When two electrons collide, which
one is the observer?
Feeling in its simplest form does not happen to an observer, it simply happens, as a
freestanding event. The whole notion of a subject to experience something is a much higher
development (and a true emergent phenomenon).
The Observer as we know it comes late in the upward progression. The Observer amounts to one
clot of feeling and computation taking as input another clot of computation (and often, feeling).
The Observer is a swelling in the unified corpus of mind and is not even 100% separated from
the (internally) observed or 100% the same thing from one moment to the next.
At the bottom there is no observer, at least not one that is somehow fundamentally separate from
the observed. Electrostatic interactions are not Observations, in a mental sense, they just happen.
Fundamental feeling is the same way.
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Secondly, our physics describes very well nearly everything in the so-called “physical” world,
from the tiny to the immense and everything in between, while not at all describing such things
as pain or pleasure. This tells us that
Postulate 3: Something basic is missing from, and must be added to, our physics, which is our
description of reality.
Our feelings are real. Any Theory of Everything that really is that must include feeling or a way
to make it. That the problem may be hard to solve does not make it invalid or meaningless as a
problem. (Ironically, the only reason people study and develop physics in the first place is that
they want to.)
The missing simplest physical feeling event we call Fundamental Consciousness. These are
“psybits”; each functions as a “microquale” ( (Poznanski, Theorising How the Brain Encodes
Consciousness Based on Negentropic Entanglement, 2019) refers to somewhat similar
“preconscious microfeels”).
Notice that there is not necessarily anything especially quantum about this. But because the
fundamental level of Nature, which is the quantum level, extends up to the molecular scale, the
exact process of feeling may conceivably occur up at this scale (at the maximum) rather than the
particle scale. The Architecture, which is a framework or meta-solution, makes no demand that
precludes that.
8.1. The Quale Garden
The first thing we should note as to the emergence of qualia from physical fundamental
consciousness is whether there is any difference between the two. The answer is Yes, and this is
terribly important to understanding of mind. In fact, there is also a large difference in nature
between the different qualia.
If a quale for Red really were fundamental in the universe, then there would have to be hundreds
or more of qualia for all the other cited experiences- the taste of wine, the sound from a musical
instrument and so on. Quite obviously this is literally unnatural. The grand “plan” in every case
to date has been found to be a few simple fundamental elements, then placed in combination.
This means the typical quale is actually a composite structure, that is, the “atoms” of feelings of
the mind are not the “atoms” of feeling of the universe. So, we do need something smaller than a
quale, or alternatively, some of the qualia are more elementary than others. At bottom will be the
smallest experiences in the universe (the psybits).
The usually cited qualia include a cast that are deeply dissimilar, not peers.
Of special note are the differences between, for example, Red and Pain. First of all, there are a
great many qualia (especially in principle) just as “elementary” as Red, which immediately
suggests it is not a truly elementary feel. Second, there is nothing special about Red from the
standpoint of the universe; again, it is just one arbitrary spot in a large field of characteristics
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(even though as it happens our nervous systems are specifically sensitive to red light). Third and
most saliently, Red has no intrinsic valence; Red is not intrinsically a painful thing or a bad thing
or a good thing, it is just a factual condition.
Pain is entirely different in all three of these ways. There is pain and there is pleasure and there is
nothing else in that family. Pain (or pleasure) is a very special occurrence in the universe,
different from others. It has valence, and furthermore no factual content, only valence. The view
that pain and Red are atomic siblings is false. Red and Blue and Shrill and Motivated are all of
them more complicated than Pain and have internal structure. To a mind, or particular minds,
they may be the simplest and most individual things detectable at the bottom, but that does not
mean they are not made from simpler things (and they are).
In fact, the only clearly elemental qualia are pain and pleasure, the “emotional” ones (Sipfle K. ,
The Nature of Fundamental Consciousness (preprint), 2018). It turns out this is a profound
observation and an important clue. Pain and pleasure are must-haves in the base feeling
repertoire; no others are, they are constructed. The key categories of qualia, then, are Valent or
Not, and Level of Complexity.
If a quale is a feel, then the simplest quale is the simplest feel. The simplest feel contains nothing
other than feeling. This means a simplest quale cannot be about something, for then you have the
feeling plus the thing about, and so here we encounter a difference in structural levels (levels of
complexity).
To a mind, Red may seem as elemental as pain, because inside a mind you are sitting on top of
everything needed to begin making one. This does not mean Red is as simple as pain inside the
fabric of that platform. Indeed, this has been one of the primary confusions historically in
understanding consciousness.
Even at the lowest level, one can’t get from an ”Is” (information) to any kind of “Ought” (which
regards value and therefore feeling); the two different elements must become associated. The
connection of feeling to information flows is ultimately what makes ideas “register.” The idea is
cognitive, the registration is feeling.
8.2. Necessary Qualities of Fundamental Consciousness
Qualia are the molecules of the mind, but not its quarks. And since qualia must be constructed of
something similar (for workable emergence (Sipfle K. , The Primary Pitfalls on the Road to
Understanding Consciousness, 2021)), this constructability becomes an essential feature of a
successful architecture.
The answer is provided by the physical field, the mechanism that addresses another key problem,
the fusion of feeling. This may be either an actual physical field (the “sentonic” field), which we
presume is the simplest explanation, or in principle another mechanism that is different but very
similar in character.
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We address first the build-up from fundamental pain to quale-level (mind-level) pain.
Note that by pain we mean “the painfulness of pain.” Pure pain is the dysphoric (“emotional”)
aspect, the negative experience that is the end result of everything that causes pain.
If you are in slight pain and it gets much worse, we know that you will be experiencing the effect
of more neurons activating, not just one or two becoming tremendously more active. At a
physics level, the effect is many more psybits (fundamental feeling events) occurring, generally
in close quarters. But what you feel at the mind level is not 1,000 individual small dots of pain.
Your mind experiences the same, unified thing, greatly amplified. This means there must be a
mechanism adding and joining these psybits into the whole pain. Note that simply
interconnecting these feeling spots with neural information signals is not enough- that would still
be separate little feelings, possibly now synchronized in time but still isolated as feelings and
linked only by informational bridges. An additional mechanism is needed.
Physical interactions are all the behavior of forces. In a force field, every spot is subjected to the
influence of every other spot in the same field. What results is a three-dimensional (four,
including time) intensity cloud of a specific compositional shape. With this fusion, the otherwise
freestanding feels join into a larger cloud of feeling. This is why you feel one big pain instead of
a thousand little ones.
Pain is special as a feel/quale because pain is pain, on a small scale or a larger scale. Pain flows
up from Layer 1 to Layer 2 in a rather direct and simple fashion.
8.3. Hypotheses Contained in STFC
STFC Hypothesis 1: Fundamental feeling is freestanding and requires no separate feeler. At
most there is a physical interaction between fundamental elements.
STFC Hypothesis 2: There is a physical process that is fundamental feeling.
STFC Hypothesis 3: The fundamental feelings are pain and pleasure.
STCF Hypothesis 4: There exist pain and pleasure in minimal discrete bits independent of any
brain, at the particle scale.
These are discussed in (Sipfle K. , The Nature of Fundamental Consciousness (preprint), 2018).
Re layer 2 we will discuss the informational qualia, which are very different. For example our
Pain that is distinctly located also activates primary and secondary somatosensory cortex. But the
same mechanism we have been discussing still underlies these pains. A field mechanism is
needed in the consciousness architecture.
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9. Sites of Fundamental Consciousness in the Brain
Let us now drill down on the matter of the most likely sites of action for consciousness in the
brain.
This question is actually three: which neurons hold the sites of action, which regions of the brain
contain these neurons, and where in the neurons is the site of action. For the first two questionsthe macroscopic world of the cortical region and the cell- the evidence is stronger. For the thirdthe sub-neural, molecular scale (where physics lives), we are further away from knowing.
Macroscopically and microscopically, some areas of the brain show no signs of consciousness.
This suggests that certain neurons and not others have evolved conscious (feeling) capability,
directly causing pain or pleasure. This means the former have evolved nontrivial, nonchaotic
access to the sentonic field.
9.1. Macroscopic Scale
It is medically known that human consciousness requires only
1. Cerebral cortex (“for awareness”)
2. The Reticular Activating System of the brainstem (“for arousal”)
The RAS projects to all cortex but mainly to prefrontal cortex.
If we look at limbic brain tissue as pain/pleasure-related, we find that it omits the stellate cells of
cognitive tissue. This suggests that the feeling neurons ae pyramidal. Throughout the cortex
pyramidal cells are the “workhorse” cells, the primary (and evolutionarily long-standing) units of
the cortex, while the others provide regulation, lateral inhibition, relay, and pattern preprocessing
to the deciding and publishing cells, the pyramidals. Closely associated with pyramidal cells,
however, are chandelier neurons, whose axons always synapse exclusively on the axon initial
segment of pyramidal cells. Therefore, chandelier cells may play a role in consciousness.
Pyramidals appear especially in cortical layers III and V so one (or both) of these is probably the
most conscious layer(s). The III pyramidals and V pyramidals differ, with the latter being larger,
and as we shall see, are used for different processing.
Layers II and IV of neocortex contain many stellate interneurons which are evolutionary newer,
added once consciousness was in place.
Pain (dysphoria) centers can be found in the anterior insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex
(discussed later). The ACC is unique in its abundance of spindle cell neurons, which are
connected to the anterior insular cortex and which are only found in very intelligent mammals.
The spindle cells may not be themselves a site of consciousness, and do exist in other places, but
their high density here may highlight the special importance of this area for very smart, very
aware animals and the importance of pain to successful mentation.
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In pleasure (euphoria), the insular cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are probably involved.
9.2. Molecular Scale
Anesthetic experiments and pathology and injury studies (e.g., (Hemmings, 2019)) indicate that
it is not receptors directly and it is firing sequences that cause consciousness (and also that some
neurons make consciousness and others do not). Most likely, spike generation or transmission is
related to consciousness by a very short causal path.
Consciousness appears to occur in axons. The charge travel pattern of a neural spike is complex,
unusual, and dimensionally precise. Here we have a toroid of deluges of ions across the axonal
membrane, itself traveling along the considerable length of the fixed-diameter axon.
This means the ion rush through these channels (Fain, 2014) may be the site of consciousness.
While dendrites often taper, axons maintain a constant radius. The exact diameter varies by
neuron type. It is typically about one micron. No neuron ever has more than one axon (though it
may branch extensively). The axon initial segment consists of a specialized complex of protein
molecules.
Note that the physics of axonal spikes might be replicated by a constructible apparatus for
experimental purposes. This would allow for more intense examination than is readily possible in
a brain or even brain slice. (Effects discovered could then be sought in real brain tissue.)
Microtubules have been suspected in consciousness theories (Penrose, The Emperor's New
Mind, 1989). Much like axons but at a smaller scale, they are of even more constant and small
radius and run the length of the axon and whole neuron. They experience the toroidal voltage
pulse running down the axon that possibly induces something in or on the microtubule. These
precisely dimensioned microtubules might function as resonators of some kind. In our model
they would produce resonances in the sentonic field, or of a causative agent. Subsequent spikes
would regenerate a decaying resonance. Also worth noting is that many differing molecules bind
to microtubules.
It is not clear yet what the exact mechanism is, but it is clear that there are several possible
pathways for what is needed, which is ion control of sentonic events and vice versa. At a slightly
higher level knowing that is all we need, and we can await the elucidation of the details.
The sentonic field provides another means, requiring no direct cabling, for points in the brain to
communicate with each other (“ephaptically”) (Sipfle K. , Support for the Sentonic Theory of
Fundamental Consciousness (STFC), 2019).
While cycling (and resonance) of signaling in the recurrent connections in neural networks may
provide a regenerative effect that fortifies consciousness (and provide computation and
correlation), it is not the base mechanism (cycling is a base mechanism of short-term memory,
however).
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10. The Nature of Sentience
Layer 2 takes us from individual glints of minimum feeling to our first unitary body of larger
feeling. It provides the combining and fusing. It is the weaving of the elementary and separate
into whole cloth.
This layer provides fusion, minimum awareness, and discernability between individual fused
configurations.
This layer exists in physics, possibly chemistry, and brain biology to provide the needed
surrounding conditions and location in the real world.
In keeping with Layer 1, there are two conceivable mechanisms providing this.
The first is the field. The nature of fields is such that each point is influenced by all neighbor
points. Electrons for example form a summary, mutually owned electric charge profile owing to
their relative locations. Sentonic charge and its local interactions would presumably have similar
field effects.
The second possible contributor at this scale is quantum entanglement at maximum scales up to
perhaps a millimeter. A problem with this mechanism, though, is that it is unlikely to serve at
brain-size scales, as the brain is a messy, hot environment that would not support any large-scale
entanglement. It could be speculated that while large scale, stable entanglements are infeasible,
brief chains might repeatedly appear. The earliest actualizations of this layer could conceivably
rely on entanglement across macroscopic scales, for example on the order of a neuron.
This layer is the first in which we now have a feeling object larger than elementary ones, that can
then be impinged upon by external elementary ones or others like itself. Now we have something
we can call sentient- a unitary blob responding to impingement with macroscale feeling.
In other words, at this level something resembling a Feeler occurs, a Subject, whereas before
there were only equal minimal partners in mutual physics interactions.
Feeling is fundamental to the large-scale operation of vertebrates and not necessary to the
behavior of other life forms, so this layer probably organized a bit before vertebrates but not
greatly before. So far, we have no evidence that a single-celled organism or an ant has any
reason to feel.
In addition to fusion this layer likely contributes or sets up for persistence.
Important and subtle things happen in this layer. A composite feeling and sub pieces thereof
must be not only fused but individually distinguishable (Sipfle K. , The Solvability of The Hard
Problem of Consciousness and its Relation to Fundamental Consciousness and Human
Consciousness, 2019).
This layer provides “molecules” of feeling from which real qualia can be built.
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Note also here that you can have an awareness of something without it capturing attention. As
humans we would call such things “at the periphery” (because our actual or minds’ foveas have
not been fixed on them).
10.1.
Hypotheses Contained in STFC
STFC Hypothesis 5: Some biological brains have evolved to organize and exploit pain and
pleasure.
STFC Hypothesis 6: The fusion of feeling across the brain occurs in a force field.
11. Consciousness Architecture Layer 2: Sentience
Unification of information can occur in one way by the interconnected firing of informational
components, but that does not explain a feeling of Red that is both unitary and different from a
feeling of Blue.
One will come to know a feeling of Red through very long experience with it, but as has been
oft-cited, exactly what red is like to me may not be identical to what it is like for you. What is
important in the fabric of mind is that it feels like something, and it feels different from Blue, and
from early on we then take these things (feelings) for granted as our minds continue to build.
Separate occurrences are not enough. Both for feeling and for informational meaning (which
suggests the same mechanism is at play), we must have both the individual sub-aspects and
unification of those into a whole. Assuming that there is only one level- qualia- is one of the
fundamental errors in traditional thought on the topic, even before we get to the assumption that
these individual qualia are the same thing as physics acts rather than compositions of physics
acts.
We are provided an excellent clue toward the solution of the problem with pain (and pleasure).
Pain is all the same, at all scales. It contains no information; it is purely valent.
Once we understand the necessary nature of fundamental consciousness, and that this is not the
same as qualia, the next question presenting itself is how do we get from the former to the latter?
11.1. Meta-Symbols
To make thinking requires unique “symbols,” things we can manipulate that represent other
things. Even a symbol is divisible, and that is even before we deal with a symbol having both a
name and an appearance. What is needed to start are unique identifiers- tags (meta-symbols)- to
associate with large clouds of meaning. The tags, which are themselves each feeling clouds,
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become associated with yet more clouds, for its name, for its written visual representation if any,
plus possible explicit association with net feelings of goodness or badness.
This assemblage provides two things: feeling and unique pattern of real things in space. One
such blob “feels different” from another, both in the sense of the blob doing its own feeling and
of interacting blobs “experiencing” it (which is the underpinnings of mind, and which is two
peers- being feeling- affected by each other).
The little clouds feel different. This, ultimately, is why Red is different from Blue and a hundred
other “raw” feels. Red and blue must feel different, and we must have a means by which this can
be so. This issue is right at the nexus between the cognitive and the emotional mental realms. It
is not enough to be different informationally.
Different patterns of feeling in the clouds allow for the existence, recognizability, and reference
of tags that are different. By themselves, they (the tags) have no meaning or clear symbolic
identity, the purpose is simply to be different and distinguishable- unique identifiers. Precise
visual or aural symbols can then exist- which themselves have some complexity- and then be
attached to these tags, just as the many specific experiences that make up the meaning are
attached to them.
What does “attached” mean? The attachment to both the symbolic detail and the meaning detail
can be just cognitive- neural links that don’t, themselves, have to feel. This is the connection
between the what-it-is-like for the remembered meaning (and similarly for the visualization of
the symbol) to the what-it-is-like of the tag.
These three identifiable clouds of experience (generic tag as a handle, symbolic
name/description, and situational experience) will bump up against each other in the overall
continuous train of feeling being created in the lower brain, while the higher has the parallel
cognitive conversations, to whatever relative degrees the content has high cognitive content vs.
high impact.
Each part of each cloud is being stimulated by a cognitive circuit (possibly by way of an
additional connected neuron whose only function is to tweak the field), and then unified by the
natural field(s).
Cognition evolves to where the differentiated and distinguishable tags become persistently
associated with much larger “clouds” of cognitive activity. With these handles, entire ideas can
be effectively referenced and manipulated.
This is what “meaning” is to us. “Meaning” as a term in common use means: 1) a collection of
informational associations and 2) subjective experience of it. This is the blossoming of “what it
is like.”
Information is patterns of things, as with an abacus, and in full reduction the only things needed
are the feelings. Anything else is intermediary, inert in the sense of importance to the abstract
theory and architecture, other than to help arrange the patterns (which is where the wiring of the
brain and physical shapes of neurons themselves come into play).
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Random variability in the structure of neural nets and neurons yields unique, distinguishable
signatures of the clouds of psybits mutually influencing across space where these activations are
happening in the brain. Red feels like something and Blue feels like something and they are
different.
The full picture of this is feeling stimulated in the field by informational circuits and a return
path (otherwise feelings would have no effect), and this occurs both very far down and at
multiple levels, ascending with the size and sophistication of thoughts (bigger concepts will
literally be larger than tiny concepts). There is a very intimate and deep back and forth of feeling
what is known and happening and knowing what is being felt that forms the stuff of our minds
(so much so that it has been difficult for us to tease these two strands apart).
It is necessary to have physics at work up to the point of constructing qualia. Qualia are the link
from the actual to the abstract. Qualia are a conceptualization of the reality of feelings. With the
“hardware” realization in place, we can manipulate and trade in the constructs conceptually, and
the rest of the stack becomes “software” (and connective wiring). An important transition is
made at this point: feeling is absolutely critical to how our minds work and this must be
understood. Once it is, though, feeling can be considered a known aspect and discussed and used
in an abstract way in recognizing a working architecture that relies upon it.
We note that feeling provides “information” of a sort, but with important difference from
ordinary information. Feeling enables a key portion of the control section that guides the
operation of the data paths and computation, and this is going on at all levels of the mind (though
not in all portions).
The difference can be understood in terms of implications. Knowing of either kind can be
encoded in information, which is then read so as to know what is in the message. The knowing
elicited may be of a fact or of a direct pain/pleasure experience. The two are different, even
though both may be represented and, in that way transported, by information (and even if
information is the patterning of feelings).
Another way to see the distinction is: Given enough book knowledge to read and enough mental
ability and time you might understand any fact presented. However, to know what an experience
was actually like can only be successfully transmitted to someone who has had the same
experience or similar experiences. Otherwise, one must resort to knowing factual features about
the experience and cogitating about a described experience instead of being able to emulate
personally the experience of the sender, to sympathize.
The top two layers of the architecture presented do not discuss physics, they discuss the structure
of our minds. The bottom two layers explain what the fundamentals are for the top two layers to
work with, and make the connection up to the bottom of what we can introspect to, and call for
specific explanation to ultimately prove those things at that bottom are the atoms of mind,
validating the assumptions made by the higher two layers.
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Note that stratification into layers correlates nicely with the different disciplines;
neuroanatomists’ findings, for example, are especially useful throughout Layer 3, and harder to
use in explanation beneath or above.
We have seen that cognition manipulates information and so is not of necessity related to the
stuff that encodes it. Feeling is not about information and has everything to do with actual
physical process. This means in its simplest form, mind needs nothing more for the stuff than the
feeling, and the wiring that helps pattern the occurrences of the feeling; no other stuff is strictly
required other than to maintain life and the mechanics and housekeeping of biological
functioning.
While we are here in the discussion, we can point out that this leads (distantly) to a subbranch of
the present thinking that is (much) more speculative but not devoid of merit, involving the belief
by some that life itself involves the fundamental consciousness force. The primary rational
support for this notion, which probably originates from a “transcendent” suspicion (as did also
that we are related to animals and stars), derives from the realization that feeling had to be
discoverable by evolution. One possibility, then, is that the feeling necessary for our world was
discovered quite early by evolution and has been used to enable life processes that speak little (at
least, obviously) to its experiential nature, just as electromagnetism and gravity have been used
early and often. Note that base consciousness is expected by this paper to be variations in a field
present everywhere. From the other direction, it is also possible that our particular region of
space was particularly seeded not only with proto-life elements but with proto-consciousness
elements.
11.2. Primitive Self
There is a self- the one- before awareness of self. When do things enter one’s consciousness?
When the chief, large, dominating (though shifting) cloud of feeling with embedded cognition
that we call Me is affected by other clouds- when they come into effective contact because of out
of a background of feeling noise there is a local strengthening that bridges into the primary Me.
The Me is already a large cloud of assembled feelings, that has a (fuzzy) perimeter- a cloud that
hangs together with only thin “mist” of disorganized consciousness between it and other little
clouds.
To enter your conscious mind, you must feel what is entering. Not to feel is not to be conscious
of.
To be conscious of is not the same as the core mechanism of attention, which is a cognitive (that
is, unfeeling) mechanism. What you feel will in large part (the other part being cognitive things
like difference) determine what the attention circuits bring into focus, and the cognitive things
(and feelings, too, as objects of attention) then amplified rather than suppressed will in turn result
in feelings, which will then affect attention, but the attention proper is a cognitive device. Feeling
occurs in its usual independent and passive way yet determines and thus drives the direction of
thought.
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Split-brain studies show one self in each hemisphere of the brain (even when still connected, the
informationally linked but separated hemispheres may have distinct emotional lives). This
suggests a prediction about the field strength formula of the consciousness (sentonic) force: it
should feature high influence in the micron-millimeter scale and poor influence at the
centimeter-meter scale. That would also make sense from an operational utility standpoint:
Goodness v. badness values are most useful when they summarize each of subsets of everything
that is going on.
11.3. Qualia
Qualia are the essence of the Hard Problem. Qualia are at the bottom edge of human mind
(which is a whole represented by intense interconnections both mentally and physically). The
bottom of the mind is well above the physical level making it possible, that is, fundamental
consciousness.
In analyzing this layer, pain and pleasure are interesting as subjective experiences that are
included as basic experiences to every human mind, but that do not demand a substantial range
of possibles, as qualia (such as colors), in general, do. Suffering and pleasure are distillable in
pure form from the human mind, and there is only one essential member of each of those two
experience classes (or just two of one class if you prefer), not a spectrum or family.
In contrast, Red is not a single raw feel. Red, and anything else we calmly notice, has impact, a
feel shared by many other “raw” feels. Furthermore, it is a visual (possibly envisioned)
experience, and additionally to those two facts, it is also red.
Impact is like pain and pleasure without the sign. Impact is neutral oomph. (Impact may simply
be a composite of negative and positive.) Minimum awareness is naked impact.
While this quale- red- may be among the least at once that the mind can do, and in that way this
supposedly elemental thing may be atomic to the mind, it is already clearly made of multiple
things. Commonly mentioned qualia are not the rawest of raw feels; they are more complex.
Such a minimal, actual experience for us is likely to be an assemblage of some kind of that
which applies at the elementary physical level.
How do we feel red and blue? A little piece of your brain will light, consciously, when blue light
comes in. However, this piece in isolation would not influence the connected whole of
consciousness that we call the mind; it would be an outlier. This piece of brain is connected
closely with a piece of brain that activates for any such visual color input (these connections are
either direct or effectively so). Now we have a mob operating in concert, the experiencer of blue,
and the experiencer of visual color upon which other color experiencers converge. This explains
both the specific and the more general experience which are happening together. Yet higher
convergence is to vision as a whole (fusion). These elements of experience are integrated into a
whole, yet with introspection we can detect that both a common visual awareness and a specific
blueness are occurring.
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What then makes the activity of the red brain patch different from the activity of the blue brain
patch? One can say they are separate and so can hold separate information but that is only half
the answer. Furthermore, there is nothing at bottom to us that feels special about red or blue, yet
they feel different.
The two patches of brain tissue will have different microdetails physically, which could cause
differing blobs of fundamental consciousness actions (psybits) in space (with these psybits in
contact with one another by virtue of their field). It is not important on this point what the exact
arrangement within these blobs is, just that they differ. The degree of difference is yet more
pronounced with fundamental consciousness coming in positive and negative flavors, because
there is not only an amplitude shape in space but also a pattern of +/- psybits within the blob.
What is happening is that the detailed tapestry of individual spots (psybits) has different detailed
composition, so the feeling of the little mob is different. This effectively gives differentiating
identities to each particular feeling; the experience of each is a little different (these then become
associated in groups at higher levels of the mind, into richer experiences).
In a signed theory, a typical glob will have impact but not pain or pleasure because the plus and
minus psybits cancel each other out overall, but each pattern made of the individual psybits
exists and is different.
(Continued on Part II)
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Pitkänen, M., The Emergence of Brain-Like Functions in Neuromorphic Metallic Nanowire Network
Exploration
The Emergence of Brain-Like Functions in Neuromorphic Metallic
Nanowire Network
Matti Pitkänen 1
Abstract
The article by Diaz-Alvarez et al published in Nature reports rather interesting findings suggesting
that human brain-like functions emerge in neuromorphic metallic nanowire networks. There are also
other findings suggesting that simple systems such as plastic balls can exhibit life-like properties. In
this article the TGD inspired model for the latter findings is applied to neuromorphic networks.
1
Introduction
The popular article ”Human Brain-Like Functions Emerge in Neuromorphic Metallic Nanowire Network”
published in Scitechdaily ( http://tinyurl.com/v8a2pqg) represents findings, which are very interesting
from TGD point of view. The original article ”Emergent dynamics of neuromorphic networks” by DiazAlvarez et al is published in Nature [1] (http://tinyurl.com/v44rc62). There are also other findings
suggesting that simple systems such as plastic balls can exhibit life-like properties. In this article the
TGD inspired model [4, 8] for these findings is applied to neuromorphic networks.
Consider first the findings.
1. One can say that the self-organization process corresponds to the system ”struggling” to find optimal
current pathways. This process involves fluctuations akin to those found in memorization, learning
and forgetting processes of brain. The temporal flutuations also resemble the processes by which
brain becomes alert or returns to calm.
2. The metallic Ag nanowires become coated with a polymer (PVP)( http://tinyurl.com/tnmu4y9)
insulating layer with about 1 nm thickness. Also metallic junctions between two nanowires acting as
a resistive elements analogous to synapse are formed. The average diameter and length of nanowires
was measured to be 360 ± 110 nm and 14 ± 5 µm, respectively.
Remark: These scales correspond to biological length scales (p-adic length scales L(161) and
L(172)).
3. There are suggestive connections with biology. PVP polymer is an organic compound with repetive
active part which consist of two parts: CH2 and aromatic Carbon 5-cycle with one C replaced
with N and one CH2 replaced with C=O. In TGD framework this could be relevant for the selforganization - maybe the magnetic bodies of PVP polymers are in an essential role. I have proposed
that valence bonds correspond to flux tubes with effetive Planck constant he f f = n × h0 > h = 6h0
[3] (http://tinyurl.com/ycg94xpl).
4. The formation of low resistance pathways between probes contacting the networks induces a transition from low conductance state to high-conductance state at given voltage threshold usually below
10 V. This occurs even for millimeter distance between probes. The weak independence on voltage
suggests that the current flow is almost dissipation free - could dark supra currents at magnetic flux
tubes be involved?
1 Correspondence: Matti Pitkänen http://tgdtheory.com/. Address: Rinnekatu 2-4 A8, 03620, Karkkila, Finland. Email:
matpitka6@gmail.com.
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2
TGD based model
TGD predicts several a lot of new physics possibly relevant to the findings [10, 9] (http://tinyurl.com/
wd7sszo) and http://tinyurl.com/y3xbkokb).
1. Magnetic flux tubes (magnetic body, MB) carrying dark matter as phases with effective Planck
constant hef f = n × h0 .
2. Zero energy ontology (ZEO) allows to formulate quantum measurement theory without paradoxes.
The possibility of time reversal is one dramatic prediction. Basic mental functions like memory
would be completely universal phenomena and possessed in principle even by elementary particles.
Both memory recall and motor action would involve ”big” (ordinary) state function reduction
(BSFR) changing the arrow of time. Biological death would correspond to BSFR.
Sensory perception assignable to ”small” state function reductions (SSFRs) identifable as correlates
of ”weak” measurements would not involve change of the arrow of time: the increase of distance
between tips of causal diamon (CD) in each SSFR following unitary evolution would give rise to the
experienced flow of time and correspondence between subjective time as sequences of SSFRs and
geometric time as temporal distance between the tips of CD.
3. Universality of cognition described in terms of p-adic (adelic physics) is predicted [5, 6, 7] (http:
//tinyurl.com/ycbhse5c and (http://tinyurl.com/yyyk6fu8)). Number theoretic vision realized as adelic physics predicts evolution as increase of the dimension of extension of rationals
characterizing basic building bricks of space-time as surface.
Self-organization involves generation of coherence and requires energy feed [9] (http://tinyurl.
com/y3xbkokb). Same applies to life. Self-organization would be also universal: the self-assembly
aspect of self organization would be simply due dissipation at reverse time direction at the level of
dark matter at magnetic body controlling the dynamics at the level of ordinary matter as master.
4. Quantum criticality is essential element of self-organization and the observed 1/f fuctuations could
be interpreted as their signature. Note that 1/f fluctuations are observed also in the ordinary
electric circuits and since also these involve self-organization aspects, dark matter in TGD sense
might be involved.
At quantum criticality long range fluctuations take place and correspond to the creation of phases
with large hef f and having therefore long quantum coherence length. Energy feed is however
required and serves as analog of metabolic energy. Freezing of water could a good example about
quantum criticality at the level of MB inducing ordinary criticality and leading to generation of
complex structures at the level of ordinary matter. Snowflakes (http://tinyurl.com/wg8fyth)
and the patterns observed by Emoto [12] (http://tinyurl.com/ycdywctw) as a response to stimuli
like emotional voices provide examples of this.
The TGD based interpretation relies on the same ideas as the model for other findings about simple
systems possessing lifelike properties [4].
1. The voltage feeds metabolic energy to the system by making current flow possible. The transition
to high conductance state above critical voltage could correspond to minimal metablic energy feed
needed to induce a phase transition generating Cooper pairs of electrons or even dark Ag ions with
hef f > h at magnetic flux tubes so that current would become partially dark and conductance would
increase. The preservation of dark phase requires energy feed but the reduction of dissipation for
supracurrents makes this possible.
2. Ag+ have cyclotron frequency of 2.8 Hz in ”endogenous” magnetic field Bend = .2 Gauss assigned
with living systems tentatively identified as the dark monopole flux carrying part of the Earth’s
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magnetic field with nominal value BE = .5 Gauss. Are the Cooper pairs of these ions involved?
What about electronic Cooper pairs with cyclotron frequency about .6 MHz? Could the Coulomb
energy Ec = ZeV for Cooper pair in critical voltage correspond to the cyclotron energy of the dark
Ag+ Cooper pair or of electronic Cooper pairs? Nottale hypothesis hef f = hgr = GM m/v0 [2] is an
essential part of the TGD based model of quantum biology [11] (http://tinyurl.com/rw58zaz)
and would predict that cyclotron energies would not depend on the mass of the charged particle.
3. EEG is basic aspect of brain function of vertebrates. Could it be that Ag+ ions and also the possible
ionization of the aromatic cycles make possible analog of EEG around 2.8 Hz?
In this framework the findings discussed in the article could be assigned with system which are very
simple life forms. To gain improved understanding a model for the magnetic body of the system would
be needed.
Received February 21, 2020; Accepted February 29, 2020
References
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reports. Available at:http://tinyurl.com/v44rc62, 9(14920), 2019.
[2] Nottale L Da Rocha D. Gravitational Structure Formation in Scale Relativity. Available at: http:
//arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310036, 2003.
[3] Pitkänen M. Does valence bond theory relate to the hierarchy of Planck constants? Available at:
http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/valenceheff.pdf, 2017.
[4] Pitkänen M. Life-like properties observed in a very simple system. Available at: http://tgdtheory.
fi/public_html/articles/plasticballs.pdf, 2017.
[5] Pitkänen M. Philosophy of Adelic Physics. Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/
articles/adelephysics.pdf, 2017.
[6] Pitkänen M. Philosophy of Adelic Physics. In Trends and Mathematical Methods in Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences, pages 241–319. Springer.Available at: https://link.springer.
com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-55612-3_11, 2017.
[7] Pitkänen M. Getting philosophical: some comments about the problems of physics, neuroscience, and
biology. Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/philosophic.pdf, 2018.
[8] Pitkänen M. Do hydrogels learn in presence of irradiation and heating?
//tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/gellearns.pdf, 2019.
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[9] Pitkänen M. Quantum self-organization by hef f changing phase transitions. Available at: http:
//tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/heffselforg.pdf, 2019.
[10] Pitkänen M. Some comments related to Zero Energy Ontology (ZEO). Available at: http://
tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/zeoquestions.pdf, 2019.
[11] Pitkänen M. TGD inspired model for magneto-reception and circadian rhythm. Available at: http:
//tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/RPMshort.pdf, 2019.
[12] M. Pitkänen. On Masaru Emoto’s Experiments with Emotional Imprinting of Water. Journal of
Consciousness Exploration and Research, 9(6), 2018.
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240
Article
A Scientific Study of Spirituality as the Foundation of
Consciousness & the Core Component of Mental Health & a
Meaningful Life
Spencer M. Robinson*
Center for Applied Social Neuroscience (CASN), Fukui, Japan
ABSTRACT
Using Judaism as an explanatory model, this study demonstrates how consciousness is a
construction of spirituality, spirituality forming the very foundation of our evolutionarily defined
core behavior. This core behavior is integral to mental health while simultaneously susceptible to
suppression and even distortion by socioenvironmental pressure. In this study, a
neuropsychologist introduces the neuroscience-informed modality of Cognitive Neuroeducation
(CNE) for the prevention of and recovery from mental disorder through the renewal of core
human behavior, exploring the spiritual qualities embodied within mental health and well-being,
tightly coupling spirituality and science toward understanding how we define and achieve a
whole, self-actualized, meaningful life.
Keywords: Cognitive neuroeducation, neuroplasticity, synaptic strength modulation, long-term
potentiation, long-tern depression, enriched environment, core behavior, self-renewal, wellbeing, Judaism.
Core human behavior as defined in Judaism and science
In his 2018 lecture entitled, Can we ask about the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ of Torah (the Five
Books of Moses – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and mitzvos (the sacred duties of
righteousness), or do we have to accept it all without questions? Rabbi Simon Jacobson states:
“Questioning is a part of faith. It goes hand-in-hand – faith and reason – reason as a complement
of faith.” The balance between the Jewish tradition of faith and the natural human inclination to
question and to strive for knowledge and enlightenment has long been, and continues to be, a
topic of discussion among Jewish thinkers (e.g., Bronfman, 2013; Horowitz, 2005; Sacks, n.d.;
Leener, 2017).
Putting this into a scientific, evolutionary perspective, both faith and reason are inherent
components of the uniquely human social brain that directs our interpretive process in interacting
with our environment (for studies on the uniquely human social brain, see, for example: Adolphs,
2009; Bhanji & Delgado, 2014; Blakemore, 2008 and 2010; Brüne, Ribbert, & Schiefenhövel,
*
Correspondence: Spencer M. Robinson, PhD, Executive Director and Chief of Research and Development, Center for Applied
Social Neuroscience (CASN), Fukui, Japan. Email: casn@brain-mind-behavior.org
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Mental Health & a Meaningful Life
241
2003; Cozolino, 2006; U. Frith & Frith, 2010; Grossman & Johnson, 2007; Insel & Fernald,
2004; Kennedy & Adolphs, 2012; Lieberman, 2013; Saxe, 2006).
Insufficiently equipped to compete with other animal taxa (kinds) for survival on an individual
basis, humans evolved to rely on the competitive edge of cooperative behavior in groups. This
cooperative behavior is the driving force constituting the Jewish principle of b’tzelem Elohim,
literally meaning „in the image of HaShem‟ (HaShem, literally, „The Name,‟ a traditional Jewish
convention honoring the ineffable name of the Unimaginable Majesty) – the expression b’tzelem
Elohim referring to the commitment to the conception that humankind was created in the image
of HaShem [as proclaimed in Bere’shit (Genesis) 1:27], and that every human being should be
treated with the reverence and dignity honoring the sacredness of that image.
B’tzelem Elohim further dictates that, as we are all created from a sacred image of humankind,
we were all created to live and work together in harmony and cooperation to perpetuate
humankind, and in this regard, a number of basic Jewish values and principles of life emerged:
chesed – generally translated as „mercy,‟ referring to compassion and caring for others; g’milut
chasadim – acts of kindness, assistance and charity to others; sh’lemut – literally, „wholeness‟ or
„completeness,‟ referring to the pursuit of wholeness through honorable actions; amcha –
literally, „your people,‟ referring to our sense of Jewishness that, though we are scattered across
the globe, connects us together as one people from one generation to the next; derech eretz –
literally, „the way of the land,‟ referring to the inheritance of our shared Jewish tradition in the
honoring of mutual respect of our fellow humankind and acceptance of responsibility in our daily
actions in dealing honestly and with forbearance with others and following the secular laws and
rules of the greater society in which we live; tzedakah – literally, „righteousness,‟ referring to the
obligation of the Jewish community to set an example of justice in the world; and tikun olam –
literally, „repair of the world,‟ referring to our obligation, collectively as a Jewish people and
individually as Jews, to engage in activities directed toward righting the wrongs of the world (i.e.,
to take action against injustices and corruption, including the moral duty of engaging in
conscientious and responsible social activism). These maxims are universal throughout the
various denominations of Judaism. From an evolutionary perspective all of these Jewish values
are in fact inherent qualities that define us as human; i.e., behavioral dispositions of group unity
and solidarity that evolved to give competitive advantages that enabled our taxon (Homo sapiens
sapiens) to survive (b’tzelem Elohim – in the image of HaShem for the sake of humankind).
These core behavioral dispositions evolved as pseudo-fixed action patterns defined as engrained
behavioral tendencies, that, rather than fixed action patterns of nonhuman animals – i.e.,
hardwired, preprogrammed automatic responses (as first described by Lorenz, 1970, pp. 316350) – are, in humans, more prone to mediation by genotype (genetic composition) and
phenotype (the interaction between genetic composition and environmental and experiential
factors), and may even be entirely overridden by experience (as learning outcomes), stressing the
flexibility of human behavioral response, with its dependency on learning [the cognitive
imprinting in the codifying of all experience from sense-given impressions of external stimuli
and the interpretation thereof in ideational constructions of meaning through internally
configured associations (see Wood, 1942)] and, consequently, the susceptibility of human
behavior to molding by environmental influence.
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As an evolutionary biological determinant of survival, the uniquely human social brain evolved
highly flexible behavior through pseudo-fixed action patterns – including the acute stress
response (fight-or-flight response), attachment/bonding response, mating (procreative) response,
tend-and-befriend response, etc. – to adjust to changing environmental conditions and to allow
adaptation to the widest variety of habitats, overcoming the limitations of the fixed action
patterns that regulate behavior in nonhuman animal taxa. Fixed action patterns regulating
behavior in nonhuman animals, while eliciting behavior finely tuned to adaptation to a very
specific habitat, are unresponsive to environmental changes, whereby the preset behavioral
patterns may become ineffective or maladaptive in the changed environment such that even
small environmental changes may lead to taxon extinction. Rather than a fixed preadaptation to a
specific habitat, humans evolved to learn to adapt to the widest variety of habitats by the creative
use and manipulation of the resources available within and in the vicinity of their habitat through
curiosity, inquisitiveness, imagination, creativity and reasoning. With a critical dependence on 1)
learning as the mechanism for adaptation to the widest variety of habitats, and 2) cooperation as
the key to human survival, the neurophysiological system of the uniquely human social brain
became organized for the optimization of the facility and flexibility of learning and the
orientation towards social behavior and structures of community.
By cooperative behavior facilitated by language, which led to both higher-order reasoning and
tool-making flexibility to manipulate their environment, humans were able to out-strategize, outplan, out-maneuver, and simply out-think their taxonomic rivals for survival. Humans organized
in groups such as bands or tribes also competed against each other – group against group – in a
particular habitat or region, so that social cohesiveness as well as role and skill diversification
and skill expertise within a group leading to more specialized supportive social structures
became the keys to group survival that pushed evolutionary determinants toward the human
tendency for more sophisticated, intricate and complex social organization.
So-called „morality‟ evolved as a condition of group survivability. Such so-called human „virtues‟
as courage, love, compassion, forgiveness, charity, mercy, consideration, honesty, honor,
selflessness, steadfastness, loyalty, self-sacrifice, etc., that though became instituted in codes of
behavior in the formulation of social order and sacred ideals of religious conviction, stem from
natural tendencies embedded within the pseudo-fixed action patterns and cognitive constructions
of the uniquely human social brain that are designed to solidify group cohesiveness and
effectiveness in maximization of the competitiveness of a group. The greater these qualities
among its members the stronger the group; conversely, the degree to which they are lacking
among the members of a group (be it a mating pair, a family, a band, etc.), the less a group is
able to work together effectively and benefit from the interrelationships of its members.
For basic human survival:
1) learning became the central operating principle of the uniquely human social brain;
2) curiosity or inquisitiveness in response to novelty became the driving force of learning;
3) logic and reason became the principal method of understanding;
4) and affective state (emotive response) became the mechanism mediating the balance
between understanding and action.
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Affective (emotive) qualities constitute essential components of pseudo-fixed action patterns,
such as fear, anger, rage, hate, aggression and violence in the acute stress response and love,
compassion, empathy, concern, and selfless, protective loyalty in the attachment/bonding
response and the tend-and-befriend response, etc. While the predisposition of affect is an innate
biological determinant of human behavior, the individual capacity for and/or particular nature of
affective reaction is mediated by genotype and phenotype to the extent that each individual
possesses a unique basic affective profile. Individual affective reaction is highly malleable, and
is learned or modified through experience such that highly indoctrinated societies can skew mass
behavioral tendencies.
Cognitive and behavioral disorder
In human pseudo-fixed action patterns behavioral flexibility and inventiveness can respond as
group action while maintaining basic individual core principles of social cohesiveness and
harmony in meeting changing environmental demands, but, on the other hand, such behavioral
flexibility is equally responsive to pressures of conformity and pervasive social indoctrination
that can mold individual characteristics to such extent that basic natural or core dispositions are
altered, subverted or completely overridden, skewing the very nature of individuals, of groups,
and even of entire societies, toward mindsets and behavior antithetical to core values, leading to
cognitive and behavioral disorder (i.e., so-called „mental disorder‟) in individuals and/or „sick‟
(i.e., dystopic, dysfunctional or nonsustainable) societies.
The brain of the anatomically modern human is a biologically evolved social brain, whereby all
voluntary (consciously directed) human behavior, including social interaction, is learned. In the
human social brain all learning is grounded in and constructed from a social context (the very
basis of self-identity) and all positive learning – i.e., learning consistent with core values and
cognitive growth – occurs in a normative positively stimulating environment or, in negative
learning – i.e., learning inconsistent with core values and/or cognitive growth – in an
impoverished environment („impoverished environment‟ referring to a dearth of positive stimuli
as experienced in a corrosive, threatening, confined, isolating or otherwise psychosocially
inhospitable or deprived, barren environment). Impoverished environments as well as different
forms of diseases or organic disorders resulting in cognitive neurophysiological disturbance can
lead to cognitive and behavioral disorder; i.e., so-called “mental disorder.”
Since our behavior is defined by our learning experiences, in addition to effective treatment for
any organic pathology, recovery from cognitive and behavioral disorder requires relearning and
more intensive positive stimulation than in normative learning in order to trigger a stronger
neurophysiological response to rebuild stagnant cognitive neurocircuitry and/or rewire cognitive
connections from negative (i.e., maladaptive or distorted) cognitive constructs to positive
cognitive constructs (cognitive constructs = conceptual orientations) and override and transform
negative behavioral patterns set through the previous negative experience. The design, content
and application of such a more intensive positive stimulation or positive learning environment, is
referred to as the „enriched environment‟ (for studies on the enriched environment and its
efficacy in recovery from cognitive and behavioral disorder, see, for example: Alwis & Rajan,
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2014; Hannan, 2014; Kleim & Jones, 2008; Kleim, 2011; Sampedro-Piquero & Begega, 2017;
Nithianantharajah & Hannan, 2006 and 2009; van Praag, Kempermann, & Gage, 2000; Hebb,
1947; Taubert, Villringer, & Ragert, 2012; Draganski & May, 2008; May, 2011; Pascual-Leone,
Amedi, Fregni, & Merabet, 2005; Woo, Donnelly, Steinberg-Epstein, & Leon, 2015; Sweatt,
2016).
An enriched environment is the primary foundation of Cognitive Neuroeducation (CNE), a
rigorously researched cutting-edge, neuroscience-informed modality for the prevention of and
recovery from cognitive and behavioral disorder. The CNE enriched environment is one that has
constancy, creates a bonding group dynamic, provides fun, engaging and challenging eclectic
learning experiences and is positive, reinforcing, stimulating, rewarding, encouraging, supportive,
and full of possibilities. In the CNE program we explore together conceptualizations, beliefs,
modes of social interaction and interpersonal relationships, reactions to situations, emotive
contours, flights of imagination, aesthetic visions, creative artistry and nuance, duty, purpose,
loyalty, love, spirituality, sense of destiny and myriad other products of the mind that define the
true essence of being human in understanding others and discovering or rediscovering ourselves
through games, stories, group outings, music, skits and drama, motion picture films and dance,
study sessions and discussion, debates, etc.
We are normally born with a pseudo-fixed action pattern of curiosity about our environment and
the world we live in. This curiosity or inquisitiveness, this fascination for the answers to the
mysterious and the unknown, this striving to know and understand, this questioning and great
wonder and delight of discovery is an inherent part of being human manifest from infancy,
becoming the dominant preoccupation of early childhood. This innate curiosity was the spark
that ignited exploration, discovery and creative manipulation of natural resources that enabled
humankind to adapt to diverse habitats, an essential feature of our evolutionary survival. In the
modern formula-driven, staid curriculum of education reinforcing the artificiality of the modal
socialization of mass consumerism, our innate curiosity is suppressed and largely overridden by
force-fed narrow concepts, empty sound bites, dissociated „facts‟ and rote stereotyped surface
role-playing by the time we reach adulthood in the impersonal, hype-infused, small-minded,
electronic-media-inundated anonymity of modern urbanized daily life. If, however, our natural
curiosity and questioning is nurtured it may be maintained throughout life, and through CNE can
be regenerated in adulthood, fostering creativity; an open, receptive mind; critical thinking; and
an ongoing love of learning.
The Jewish tradition of learning as mirrored in CNE
In the Jewish tradition, learning and education, questioning, the continual seeking of more
definitive answers, and the honing of the intellect, are revered and assimilated into the religious
practice itself as exemplified in consideration of the Talmud (the collection of the commentaries
of the noted rabbis of the ages in the interpretation of the Scriptures) as a process, not a product,
as summed up in the phrase „turn and turn the Torah.‟ In the study of the Talmud, when an
answer to a question is developed, it is not the end, but only the beginning of a new question
using the principles and techniques of hermeneutics and the hermeneutic circle in the deep
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Mental Health & a Meaningful Life
245
analysis of the Talmudic text in the questioning and revisiting of the meaning underlying
grammatical construction and every term, expression, generalization or exception and all the
interrelationships thereof. The Talmudic way of thinking is the seeking of ever-new ways to see.
This thinking is paralleled in the CNE curriculum based on learning as the mechanism for the
remediation of and recovery from cognitive and behavioral disorder and sees the accumulation of
learning, that is, knowledge itself, as composed of relative truths, as all things may be understood
from many different starting points, frames of reference and personal perspectives. Being relative
does not make these „truths‟ any less real to the frames of reference in which they reside. The
full recognition of this relativity leads to the undeniable, stirring realization that there are so
many more, endless things to discover, so many more, endless ways by which to view all
phenomena, so many more, endless ways to think about life and all its mysteries and so many
more, endless contributions to knowledge waiting for eager, imaginative, curious, probing,
questioning minds to reveal.
The CNE activities, related materials and group dialog explore the different realms of
understanding and knowledge from the widest possible perspectives, stimulating each of the
group members with the awe of the vast potentials of discovery, of endless paths on the journey
through life, and the eager anticipation of the possibilities waiting beyond the bend in the road on
the great adventure of being. While invisible to the CNE participants, this exploration seamlessly
blends hermeneutic techniques and exegetic principles in the group dialogs and interchanges
between the CNE participants in questioning, probing and debating in the quest for
understanding the various scenarios, situations and responses encountered in the CNE activities,
thus realizing the many considerations, nuances and different sides that may reside in any
question. We live within our mind and the journey of life continues on in elderhood and even in
infirmity of body through a healthy, active mind and an environment arousing our innate
curiosity and deep human need to communicate, share experiences, exchange ideas, work
through challenges and involve ourselves with others.
Faith and the scientific method
Faith is the very cornerstone of this journey through life. Quite contrary to the common myth
that faith is antithetical to reason and the anathema of science, faith is the very foundation of
science and the thread of life that ties together the binary constructs of reason (rationality) and
spirituality, intellect and emotion, practicality and idealism, common sense and imagination – the
paradoxes that form the very essence of being human. Let us consider science then in
understanding this critical role of faith.
According to a rigorous interpretation of the scientific method, science is defined as possessing
the following qualities:
1) it is empirical: based on actual experience
2) it is rational: following the rules of logic and consistent with known facts, subject to
change as new evidence dictates
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3) it is testable: verifiable by experimentation – it is possible to imagine ways that scientific
theories and hypotheses prove invalid
4) it is parsimonious: the explanations must be simple in that they involve few assumptions;
i.e., solutions must be tightly constructed in which all facts are accounted for in a
seamless logical progression of cause and effect, and considered invalid if any elemental
facts do not fit in and/or fundamental questions remain unanswered
5) it is general: theories work for a relatively wide range of phenomena
6) it is tentative: theories are readily abandoned when confronted by new, refuting evidence
7) it is rigorously evaluated: hypotheses are continuously subject to testing, retesting and
modification
The rigorously logico-deductive scientific model of hypothesis testing is constructed as follows:
Figure 1. The Scientific Method: The Steps of Hypothesis Testing
As the diagram above shows, hypotheses testing, and therefore, scientific results, are never
finalized or proven, they are simply approximations of the rules governing observed phenomena
that represent our current understanding of the mechanisms of physical properties. Testing,
probing and questioning are ongoing processes of experimentation in 1) either the revision of
hypotheses in the event of unexpected results, or 2) in new predictions in the event of expected
results, digging deeper into ever more detailed understanding of a phenomenon and its
relationship with other phenomena. There is no end to the accumulation of knowledge or
learning, and within scientific study, no absolutes, only different ways of understanding and new
relationships and new concepts to be discovered. This comports with the tentative nature of
science that, in point 6 above, maintains that theories are readily abandoned when confronted by
new, refuting evidence, and in point 2 maintains that scientific understanding is subject to change
as new evidence dictates. This never-ending cycle of testing also follows the tenets of science in
points 1, 3, and 7, that all scientific statements are testable, based on actual experience (i.e.,
experimentation) and are continuously subject to testing, retesting and modification in a restless
dialectic.
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However, in science, as well as in all efforts of understanding, every problem, idea or
observation is seen in light of some intrinsic basic assumptions stemming from an adopted
worldview. Every scientific endeavor, every experimental design, must start with some basic
assumptions. Basic assumptions include underlying tenets concerning questions of primary
concepts. In science, for example, we must make some assumptions regarding such questions as:
1) is there an outside intelligence operating, or is the system closed, depending only on internal
known laws? 2) are the laws of nature constant everywhere? 3) were the laws of nature in the
past the same as they are now? 4) what initial conditions are assumed as base phenomena?
Science does not, and cannot, take place in a vacuum – an underlying worldview, i.e., belief
system, a faith in some view of the basic agent or agencies which regulate the world, is
presupposed.
The belief system upon which modern logico-deductive science rests is known as naturalism and
is based on the faith that 1) the entire universe can be explained entirely on the basis of physical
realities plus time plus chance and 2) that the laws of physics have never changed since the
beginning, so that the evidence revealed by experimentation in the modern natural world can be
applied to explain past conditions as reliably as today‟s conditions. This faith, however, is being
challenged by new evidence that suggests that perhaps the laws of physics have indeed changed
over time and that some so-called mathematical constants are actually fluctuating values
(Moscovitch, 2013). While this new evidence challenges some basic scientific concepts and
implies how we might need to rethink some of the tenets of science and some of the processes of
the scientific method, scientific thinking and the fundamental philosophy of the scientific method,
when rigorously applied, offer the most systematic, credible, rational and precise way to explore
and unravel the mysteries of the physical world, as science demands, first and foremost, that all
results must be able to be repeated without fail and therefore, be fully verifiable to others, and
that a problem and its experimental design be constructed around a phenomenon in which large
amounts of data are available, as the results from small amounts of data are inconclusive since
small sampling populations are statistically meaningless.
Science, then, by its own rigorous mandates, is, by definition, limited. Although qualitative
research as a model of enquiry is gaining traction among the social sciences, it is still largely
dismissed by the more quantitatively oriented scientific disciplines due to the lack of rigor in
theoretical grounding, analysis, replicability and intersubjective verification in much of the
corpus of qualitative research studies. However, qualitative research rigorously following the
hermeneutic triad of claims, evidence and warrants and the hermeneutic circle (see Robinson,
2012, pp. 1-2 and pp. 9-10) not only incorporates many of the principles of the scientific method,
but can even exceed its rigor, and, freeing research results from dependence on statistical
evaluation, opens up a much wider field for scientific investigation. Such a wider field of
exploration may embrace such areas as 1) deeper and more experiential explorations of the mind,
behavior, and theology; 2) cognitive interpretation of history, art, music, dance and literature; 3)
mysticism, metaphysics and the essence of being, and spirituality (as inclusive of but a broader
phenomenon than religion per se); and 3) semantics and the meaning of meaning and other areas
of fundamental critical and compelling concern and interest beyond the material arena of the
physical world (see Robinson, 2012 and 2008/2010, respectively, for 1) a description of an
exclusively hermeneutic, scientifically rigorous qualitative research model; and 2) a
comprehensive study rigorously employing that exegetic model).
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From the above, we see how faith anchors science – the most rational, evidence-based process of
thinking and understanding. Without faith, there can be no science, as reason itself is the
principal method of the uniquely human social brain in understanding the world in which we live,
and faith is an intricate component of reason as faith establishes a world-view, the essential
platform upon which rational explanation may begin – the fundamental concept of order: the
starting point of speculation, questioning and exploration – the belief and trust in some order and
agency by which phenomena may be explained and understood. This vital aspect of faith molds
our cognitive constructions such that understanding is founded on the unquestioned (faith-based)
acceptance that there is some order or plan, that is, governing principles, that constitute the
arrangement of our world – not only the order that we find in nature, but equally the order that
we inherently generate from the constructs of our socially oriented brain in molding our social
structures.
The agency by which this order is established becomes the central question of faith. Is this order
1) the result of the laws of nature as discovered and explained by science, though many things
remain unexplained and perhaps unexplainable by science? 2) the result of the laws of nature that
can be explained by science, but also extend beyond the reaches of science, with the laws
themselves originating from and governed by a Being – a Deity, unfathomable, omniscient,
omnipotent, eternal, the Creator of all? 3) the sole result of the will of the Creator? 4) the result
of some essence that surrounds us and resides within us all and which we are an integral part of –
an ethereal or incorporeal thread connecting all things and from which life and all matter
emerges – an agency that we might simply refer to as Nature, constituting the interconnection of
all things?; 5) or is it some combination of the above or something else entirely, or perhaps all
the same seen from different viewpoints?
The phenomenon of faith and its relation to intellect and understanding is put into a Jewish
perspective by the former Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks, as follows:
The historian Paul Johnson once wrote that rabbinic Judaism was “an ancient and
highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals.” Much of that had,
and still has, to do with the absolute priority Jews have always placed on education,
[secular] schools and the bet midrash [a bet midrash is a Jewish study hall located in a
synagogue or specialized school of Jewish religious study] – religious study seen as an
act even higher than prayer, learning as a lifelong engagement, and teaching as the
highest vocation of the religious life. (Sacks, n.d. – insertions in brackets mine)
“But much too has to do with how one studies and how we teach our children. The Torah [refers
to] the most powerful and poignant juncture in Jewish history – just as the Israelites are about to
leave Egypt and begin their life as a free people under the sovereignty of God;” Moses entreats
the Israelites to “Hand on the memory of this moment to your children,” – but not in an
authoritarian way – rather in the encouragement of our children “to ask, question, probe,
investigate, analyze [and] explore. Liberty means freedom of the mind, not just of the body.
Those who are confident of their faith need fear no question. It is only those who lack
confidence [i.e., real faith], who have secret and suppressed doubts, who are afraid [to question]”
(Sacks, n.d. – insertions in brackets mine).
Note: I have inserted explanations for clarification in certain quotations, and, because
of the difference of expression used in liturgy and Scripture as opposed to theology,
and the common conflation of liturgy and Scripture with theology in religious writings,
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to maintain consistency with the language of the central theological theme presented
herein, that of the nameless indefinability of the Great Absolute, I have substituted or
added words in certain quotations, preserving the meaning, and hopefully balancing
the „flavor‟ of the original text, with that of the prevailing theological theme in each
instance.
As Rabbi Sacks (n.d.) states, it is important to recognize, and to teach our children, “that not
every question has an answer we can immediately understand. There are ideas that we will only
fully comprehend through age and experience, others that take great intellectual preparation, yet
others that may be beyond our collective comprehension at this stage of the human quest. . . In
teaching its children to ask and keep asking, Judaism honored what Maimonides [Rabbi Moses
ben Maimon] called the „active intellect‟ and saw it as the gift of God [the „active intellect‟ is
discussed by Maimonides in Part 2, Chapters 36-37 of his circa 1190 tome The Guide for the
Perplexed – a very accessible English translation of which may be found in Friedländer, 1904,
pp. 225-229 – in Scripture, the gift of the intellect is included in the „seven gifts of the spirit of
HaShem‟ in Nevi’im (Isaiah) 11:2-3, in which four of the seven, i.e.; wisdom, insight, counsel
and sense of truth (the latter two consisting of prudence and the perspicacity of inference and
penetrating judgement), are all manifestations of the intellect (see Jewish Publication Society
(JPS), 1999/2000, p. 870)]. No faith has honored human intelligence more” (insertions in
brackets mine).
Judaism itself then is a religion based on intelligence, reason and faith, equally valued. In
honoring the „active intellect‟ as the gift of HaShem, understanding becomes the avenue by
which we exercise our faith – coming closer to HaShem and embracing existence itself by
striving to ever more deeply discern the mysteries of HaShem, the meanings and appropriateness
of the Tanakh (the complete 24 books of the Hebrew Bible), the Halacha (the collective body of
Jewish religious laws), the Musar literature (the didactic Jewish ethical literature which
describes virtues and vices and the path towards perfection) and our duties and responsibilities,
not only as Jews but as citizens of a society and as members of the human race.
Our faith is based on our belief that, as Rabbi Sacks (n.d.) states, “. . . intelligence is [HaShem‟s]
greatest gift to humanity” and “Judaism a faith that is centered on asking questions, sometimes
deep and difficult ones that seem to shake the very foundations of faith itself. . . Rashi [Rabbi
Shlomo Itzhaki] understands the phrase that [HaShem] made man „in His image, after His
likeness,‟ to mean that [HaShem] gave us the ability „to understand and discern.‟ The very first
of our requests in the weekday Amidah [Tefilat HaAmidah, „The Standing Prayer,‟ the central
prayer of the Jewish liturgy] is for „knowledge, understanding and discernment. . .‟” There is no
word in Biblical Hebrew that means „to obey‟ [that is, in the sensu stricto of a forced act of
absolute, unquestioning compliance]. “When Hebrew was revived as a living language in the
nineteenth century and there was need for a word meaning „to obey,‟ it had to be borrowed from
the Aramaic le-tsayet. Instead of a word meaning „to obey,‟ the Torah uses the verb shema,
untranslatable into English because it means 1) to listen, 2) to hear, 3) to understand, 4) to
internalize, and 5) to respond. Written into the very structure of Hebraic consciousness is the
idea that our highest duty is to seek to understand the will of [HaShem] [i.e., to delve into the
mysteries of the principles, construction and metaphysics of the order of The Great Design], not
just to obey blindly” (insertions and substitutions in brackets mine). Note that Maimonides
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discusses more nuanced meanings of „obey‟ and the Hebrew word „shema‟ in The Guide for the
Perplexed, Part 1, Chapter 45 (see Friedländer, 1904, pp. 58-59).
Simply because we use the masculine personal pronoun to refer to HaShem does not mean that
HaShem is male or can be identified with any attributes that we can define within the limitations
of language constructed by mortal man, it only means that we have no non-gendered pronouns
that we can use to refer to HaShem, as the neuter pronoun „it,‟ redolent of the insentient, would
be disrespectful, even blasphemous, so, traditionally, from the ancient patricentric Near Eastern
culture of the Biblical Lands, the male personal pronoun was adopted in early Judaism to refer to
HaShem. But though HaShem may be defined as a mysterious absolute beyond human
contemplation, we certainly must try to understand HaShem up to the very boundaries of human
limitation, as understanding is a form of connecting, adoration and respect; the striving for
understanding then the path to internalize as much of the absolute of HaShem as our human
intellect allows. The more we know about that Absolute and understand it, the more we can
engage the essence of all things, of which we ourselves are a part, and merge its connection with
us into our perspectives of life.
The ‘absolute’ in Jewish mysticism and in science
The question of what constitutes an „absolute‟ is highly contentious and lies outside the purview
of the quantitative scientific method and outside of the capacity of comprehension of mortal man,
like „infinity‟ or „nothingness‟ – though such words themselves are understood as superficial
concepts, their reality is beyond human contemplation (to illustrate, try to visualize what the
concrete reality of nothingness or infinity would be like; a condition without time? without cause
and effect relationships? without beginning or end? without boundaries or development or
growth? a condition without conditions?). While HaShem is an example of an absolute beyond
human contemplation, we may still gleam important, vital concepts by carefully probing aspects
of The Elemental Vitality such as defined by Maimonides in Part 1, Chapter 50 of The Guide for
the Perplexed (as translated in Friedländer, 1904, p. 67), where Maimonides states: “Those who
believe that [HaShem] is One [and has] many attributes, declare the unity with their lips, and
assume plurality in their thoughts” (substitutions in brackets mine). Since HaShem is thus
described in contradictory terms, Maimonides concludes that one cannot describe or define
HaShem in terms of positive (that is, definitive) attributes, but can only consider HaShem in
terms of negative attributes, that is, what HaShem is not, such as not corporeal but an
Absoluteness of One, a Singularity, having no parts, no arms, no legs, no back, no front, no end
or beginning – an Essential Impetus that does not occupy space, has neither generation nor
corruption (i.e., is everlasting – never born, never aging, fading, or deteriorating – an
Eternalness). The nature of HaShem is so far beyond the realm of human existence that it is
unimaginable, unfathomable, incomprehensible to human conception, and therefore utterly
beyond description, as HaShem is revealed to Moses as Nameless, related in Shemot (Exodus)
3:13-14, as follows: 13“Moses said to [HaShem], when I come to the Israelites and say to them,
„The [Guiding Light] of your fathers has sent me to you,‟ and they ask me, „What is His name?
what shall I say to them?‟” 14“And [HaShem] said to Moses, „Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.‟ He
continued, “This you will say to the Israelites: „Ehyeh sent me to you‟” (Jewish Publication
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Society [JPS], 1999/2000, p. 117; – substitutions in brackets mine – JPS notes that the meaning
of Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh in Hebrew is uncertain, but is conventionally translated variously as “I
Am That I Am,” “I Am Who I Am,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be,” with Ehyeh variously
translated as “I Am” or “I Will Be”). Furthermore, in regard to the indescribable nature of
HaShem, HaShem‟s very attributes are proclaimed in Kethuvim (Psalms) 145:3 and 147:5 as
unthinkable, as follows: 145:3, “Great is [HaShem] and much acclaimed; His greatness cannot be
fathomed” (JPS, 1999/2000, p. 1592 – substitution in brackets mine); 147:5, “Great is our
[HaShem] and full of power; His wisdom is beyond reckoning” (JPS, 1999/2000., p. 1594 –
substitution in brackets mine).
As regards „faith‟ in the Jewish tradition, Maimonides writes, “All we understand is the fact that
[HaShem] exists, that [HaShem] is a Being to Whom none of [HaShem’s] creatures is similar,
Who has nothing in common with them, Who does not include plurality, Who is never too feeble
to produce other beings, and Whose relation to the universe is that of a steersman to a boat: and
even this is not a real relation, a real simile, but serves only to convey to us the idea that
[HaShem] rules the universe: that is, that [HaShem] gives it duration, and preserves its necessary
arrangement” (The Guide for the Perplexed, Part 1, Chapter 58, as translated in Friedländer,
1904, p. 83 – substitutions in brackets mine).
Faith is an essential component of spirituality and an inherent component of emotion, intellect
and reason. This may be understood from an evolutionary perspective in the recognition that
spirituality evolved as the vehicle driving the uniquely human social brain‟s orientation towards
cooperative behavior through the dual impulse of 1) commonality, community, connectedness –
the basic urge of transcendence, to go beyond the confines of self to connect with others, to bond,
identify with and feel part of a group and of a larger wholeness, to connect with all that there is;
and 2) curiosity and reason – the striving to know and to understand, to delve into the deeper
mysteries of life, to get closer to the truth of existence and the origin of all things. These dual
impulses of transcendence, that combine connectedness and inquisitiveness working together in
the yearning of belonging, of sharing, of purpose, of meaning – propel the quest of the intellect
and reason to understand what it means to be alive, to be human. Spirituality and its essential
component of faith constitute that core of being that defines us as both human and each of us as a
distinct, individual psyche that belongs to and is part of the very fabric of the world in which all
life and all manifestations of nature are interwoven while simultaneously constituting our
individual uniqueness and the need to define our individual, unique, special place within the
universality of existence.
Jewish mysticism delves deeper into the very fabric of existence through the Kabbalah and other
metaphysical texts, opening the door to a process of discovery in learning and knowing the
revelations of HaShem and the mysteries of the universe in deep, intense study through the
channels of inner contemplation and intellectual abstraction. This journey of discovery begins
with the concept of the Nothingness of the Prime Force (Ayin) and its emanation into levels of
knowing as revealed through the Sefirot (the finite receptors of the emanations of Ayin).
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Figure 2. The Sefirot of the Kabbalah
Source: Dubov, Nissan Dovid. (n.d.). The Sefirot.
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/361885/jewish/The-Sefirot.htm
Because the Great Absolute is so distant in reality from everything else, all else being only finite
emanations of the Great Absolute, the Great Absolute, far beyond the frame of reference of
human knowing, has been referred to in Hebrew by the Jewish mystics as Ayin (nothingness),
meaning the Great Absolute is so far beyond anything that one could imagine, that the Great
Absolute is like no thing, no other – nothing can compare with this absoluteness. Ayin has also
been conceived as a nonbeing, and even a nonentity; i.e., an existent nonexistence, the Great
Paradox of Paradoxes [as Plotinus states, The One surpasses our most basic and cherished
categories such that “even being cannot be there” (as cited in Matt, 1988, p. 43) – a concept
echoed by the Byzantine theologian Gregory Palamas, who wrote that “the One is not being if
that which is not the One is being” (as translated in Sinkewicz, 1988, Chapter 78)] – a closed,
sealed, unknowable Absolute, closely associated with the Ein Sof (without an end – infinity), a
single infinite unity beyond any description or limitation. The Keter (crown) bridges the process
of the unfolding of the Ayin with the Sefirot (the repository in the finite world of the emanations
from the unfolding). The process of the unfolding is referred to as Yesh me-Ayin [something from
nothing – beginning with a contraction (tzimtzum) providing an empty space for the unfolding
leading to the Creation (creatio ex nihilo), the Big Bang)]. The Keter is intermediary between the
Ein Sof and Chochma (wisdom), the first of the Sefirot. As a supreme revelation of the Ohr Ein
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Sof (Infinite Light – the infinite “dispersion” of the emanations of Ayin), the Keter is deemed to
transcend the manifest Sefirot (the finite receptors of the emanations of Ayin) and is therefore
considered distinct from the Sefirot in some interpretations and interchangeable with Daat
(knowledge) in others. Though each of the Sefirot is identified by a specific number and position
on the Kabbalah Tree of Life and by specific names that constitute particular literal meanings,
they assume different nuances of meaning in multiple planes of manifestation both individually
and in different interconnections between them.
The Jewish mystical modal of the creation of the universe accepts, from both a spiritual and
intellectual epiphany through a transcendental connection, that both the pre-creation condition
representing the Singularity of an unknowable Nothingness, and the unfolding of the emanations
of Ayin out of nothing (i.e., the creation of the universe) are mysteries and processes beyond
human knowing. While the scientific concept of the Big Bang seeks to unravel the mystery of the
creation of the universe, it nevertheless postulates the creation of the universe from an unknown
state followed by a hot and dense condition preceding the Big Bang (see Lincoln & Wasser,
2013). Like the Jewish mystical model, the initial condition in the scientific model of the
creation, then, is an undefinable state in the Big Bang theory or, in the case of the CEN theory, a
condition of nonexistence (CEN referring to Creatio Ex Nihilo – creation out of nothing).
Figure 3. A schematic route map of the Big-Bang theory
and the CEN theory in Lincoln & Wasser, 2013
“The Big Bang theory has been extremely successful in correlating the observable properties of
the universe with the known underlying physical laws. Yet, this theory cannot describe what
came before the Big Bang event and also what happened during the first miniscule time fraction
after the initial Big Bang (Planck time)” [Lincoln & Wasser, 2013]. The Big Bang event itself is
comparable to the series of transitions comprising tzimtzum/Yesh me-Ayin/Ohr Ein
Sof/Keter/Chochma. Both the Big Bang and Creatio Ex Nihilo (CEN) scientific theories of the
creation of the universe hinge on the assumptions of “a preliminary state prior to creation.
Nevertheless, theories that require initial conditions are not considered complete since they lack
an explanation of what created such conditions” (Lincoln & Wasser, 2013).
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Both the CEN and Big Bang theories assume a nebulous precondition (an Unknown in the case
of the Big Bang theory and a Nothingness in the CEN theory) and provide no explanation or
cause for the transition from a preexisting state to the state providing the conditions leading to
the state of creation, suggesting a correspondence with the Jewish mystical model in the
proposition of the creation of something out of Nothing – the Creation emanating out of some
undefinable, transcendental Great Void. While there are no definitive intersubjective criteria for
equating metaphysical phenomena with purely physical events, especially in the consideration of
a pre-physical void wherein neither time itself nor cause and effect exists under the same laws as
the physical world, there are however plausible parallels that can be rationally conceived in
correlating the Kabbalistic conception of the creation of the universe with that of the two
prevailing scientific theories.
Referring to Figure 3 above of the parallels and divergences of the streams of the two scientific
theories of the creation of the universe, „SSB‟ on the CEN line refers to Spontaneous Symmetry
Break – cosmological phase transitions in the early universe produced by the spontaneous
breaking of a fundamental symmetry. It is plausible to consider that the point of SSB on this line
corresponds to the tzimtzum, whereas the „Big Crunch‟ on the Big Bang line would correspond to
the combination of tzimtzum, Yesh me-Ayin, and Ohr Ein Sof, with the „Creation of Information‟
on the CEN line corresponding to the combination of Yesh me-Ayin and Ohr Ein Sof, and the
„Creation of Forces & Dynamicity‟ on the CEN line and the „Burst of Energy‟ („Big Bang‟) on
the Big Bang line corresponding to the Keter, with point A representing the second or final phase
of unfolding leading to the Big Bang or moment of creation, and point B representing the
manifestation of the Sefirot, the transference of the emanations of Ayin thereto, and the
coalescing of the finite world – critical points of the Kabbalistic model of the creation of the
universe paralleling that of both the Big Bang and the Creatio Ex Nihilo scientific theories.
In the Ayin, the Ein Sof, the Ohr Ein Sof, and the Keter, the Kabbalah explores the Infinite. From
out of the infinite the Sefirot and the world of humankind arises. Referring to Figure 2 of the
chart of the Sefirot of the Kabbalah, the Kabbalah represents the ethical properties in the
different aspects that comprise righteousness. Loving kindness in Chesed, and justice in Gevurah
(strength) are both mediated by compassion and mercy (rachamim). These nurturing affective
(emotive) states are embedded within the attachment/bonding response and the tend-and-befriend
response, pseudo-fixed action patterns that evolved in the anatomically modern human to foster
social connection and cooperative behavior in the construction of well-knit social groups – the
key to the survival of the human taxon. These pseudo-fixed action patterns form an integral part
of an individual‟s natural or core disposition developed through nurturing and multifaceted
experience (learning) and maturation in the context of positive social interaction.
The Sefirot and the CNE enriched environment
When cognitive growth is forestalled or one‟s core disposition is threatened and compromised
past a cognitive/neurophysiological threshold by a negative environment, or distorted by organic
pathology, cognitive and behavioral disorder emerges. To restart stagnant cognitive processes or
reconfigure deleterious cognitive constructs in rewiring cognitive connections from negative (i.e.,
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deficient or distorted) to positive cognitive constructs in cognitive and behavioral disorder
requires a more intensive stimulation than the normal incidental experiences of pure chance and
life choices. This dedicated, more stimulating learning environment is referred to as the enriched
environment. In recovery from cognitive and behavioral disorder, the modality of Cognitive
Neuroeducation (CNE) restores the individual‟s core disposition through an enriched
environment of learning framed within an engaged group dynamic revolving around a central
theme of perspective taking.
Humankind has been evolutionarily directed to live in a social environment, with a principal
tendency toward complex social structures consisting of societies composed of a hierarchy of
overlapping nested groups, each containing specific cultural and social norms under the umbrella
of the general cultural and social norms of the encapsulating society. Not only pure survival, but
basic psychological needs and the well-being and quality of life of the individual depend on the
cognitive skills to effectively negotiate social interaction in meeting the demands of the
individual‟s social environments.
The regulation of affect is pivotal to the formation and maintenance of social relationships.
Affect not only informs and directs reasoning, but may also block it. This is reflected in the
Kabbalah, which warns that even the pillars of morality embodied within the Sefirot become
immoral and destructive once they become extremes, such that, loving kindness taken to
mindless obsession can lead to both sexual depravity and lack of justice in failing to properly
punish wrongdoing and thereby insufficiently protecting the innocent, and, when justice itself
becomes overzealous, it can lead to unfair punishment and even to torture and the murder of
innocents. With this understanding, „emotional intelligence‟ – the maintenance of balance
between emotion, rationality and morality – has now been recognized as an integral component
of social integration in the fields of psychology and psychiatry (see, for example: Mayer,
Salovey, & Caruso, 2004; Mayer, Roberts, & Barsade, 2008; Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Izard,
Fine, Schultz, Mostow, Ackerman, & Youngstrom, 2001; Lopes, Brackett, Nezlek, Schütz, Sellin,
& Salovey, 2004; Keefer, Parker, & Saklofske, 2009; Lopes, Grewal, Kadis, Gall, & Salovey,
2006; Lam & Kirby, 2002; Kiecolt-Glaser, McGuire, Robles, & Glaser, 2002; Emmerling,
Shanwal, & Mandal, 2008; Di Fabio, 2015; Payne, 1986; Zeidner & Matthews, 2016; Schutte,
Malouff, Bobik, Coston, Greeson, Jedlicka, Rhodes, & Wendorf, 2001; Sánchez-Álvarez,
Extremera, & Fernández-Berrocal, 2015).
Although normatively conforming to the general rules and behavioral expectations of the larger
umbrellas of civilization, culture, society, nation, state, city and community, social relations are
actually experienced more directly, intensely, consistently and personally in small group settings,
as outside of small groups person-to-person encounters are more random, fleeting and superficial,
hence social rules and regulations are more directly defined and reinforced in interpersonal
interactions within the group dynamic in small group settings. Since social relations are defined
by groups, social integration is developed through the individual‟s interaction within each
distinct group to which the individual belongs, particularly through the formulation of a shared
understanding regarding common themes. It is the group dynamic in the participation of
social/learning activities in small groups that forms the vehicle by which both social integration
and learning is enhanced in CNE with its emphasis on perspective taking.
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Perspective taking is an essential component of bonding and genuine, meaningful connection
with another, consisting of the ability and custom to go beyond spontaneous, initial surface
impressions and apply a thoughtful appraisal and a honed proficiency in recognizing and
interpreting social cues that explain another person‟s thinking, feeling and behavior from that
person‟s perception of her or his own situation in a particular social encounter.
Perspective taking involves the development of respect for, understanding of, and empathy with,
other individuals by putting oneself in the other person‟s place and reflecting how one would feel
and act in that place (b’tzelem Elohim applied on an individual basis). An important process of
perspective taking is social context appraisal – the balanced assessment of social contexts and
circumstances which account for an individual‟s behavior in a particular social encounter (the
application of an aspect of both derech eretz that guides behavior in accordance with a particular
society‟s rules and expectations and that of chesed in selfless concern for, and true empathy with
another).
While the context of the individual is always essential for understanding individual behavior, in
the CNE group dynamic social context appraisal transcends individual behavior, extending to the
culturally transmitted „norms‟ of the group (an application of an aspect of amcha in conjunction
with derech eretz in one‟s identification with the group and its shared values, concerns and rules
of conduct). In the CNE group dynamic, perspective taking integrates both the personal context
and the social context defined by the group „norms.‟
An essential element of perspective taking is affective engagement. It is precisely one‟s own
emotional state that influences one‟s perception of another‟s emotional state and determines the
selection and processing of individually relevant social information that determines the degree to
which one effectively picks out the essentials of a situation relevant to the individual or
individuals concerned and the implications thereof within the particular social encounter.
However, it is impossible to understand the affective state of another unless one‟s own affective
response is appropriately well harmonized with one‟s own personal situation relative to the
context of any particular experience. In order to correctly understand another‟s feelings, one has
to consistently experience one‟s own appropriate emotional reactions. A major part of
perspective taking then, is the realization of one‟s own emotional capacity by learning to engage
experiences deeply through commitment and the full giving of oneself to the experience with
introspection, reflection, sharing and attachment. By putting oneself totally into the experience as
an integral part of the experience, the individual learns involvement and concern; and learns to
fully relate to the experience and to others – to feel, to empathize, and to bond.
Though functioning as a powerful modality for the prevention of and recovery from cognitive
and behavioral disorder, effective in even profound cognitive dysfunction, CNE is presented as a
fun, engaging program of activities conducted through a group dynamic emphasizing shared
engagement through teamwork, problem solving challenges, discussion, dialog, debate, critical
thinking, and personal reflection. CNE participants experience the program as a recreational,
social and educational curriculum promoting health and well-being for mind and body through
exercise, social relations, and learning activities. There are no references of any kind to the
stigma and negative connotations of therapy, pathology, disability, mental abnormality or
diagnostic labels.
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As new thought patterns and cognitive constructs emerge from engaged, affirmative, selffulfilling learning experiences within the enriched environment, both the depth and breadth of
the individual‟s cognitive core is exercised, strengthened and continually expanded through the
introduction of new ideas, ways of thinking, frameworks of knowledge and understanding that
open up ever-multiplying doors of possibilities. The richness of experience of bonding with and
developing respect for and appreciation of others, the joy of belonging and acceptance in group
identity, and sharing of discoveries and feelings opens up the individual‟s self-conceptualization
and the possibilities of being.
Through the CNE program the participants internalize chesed and assimilate the harmony of the
Sefirot in righteous actions (achieving emotional and behavioral balance and well-being in
involving themselves with, and caring about, others). As the Kabbalah states, if there were no
righteous humans, the blessings (emanations of Ayin) would become completely hidden, and
creation would cease to exist [as only humans evolved pseudo-fixed action patterns embedded
with emotions and morality, all other organisms driven by fixed action patterns of behavior – i.e.,
automated responses neither moral nor otherwise – therefore, without humans, especially those
that act in righteous ways, there can be no morality, and consequently no Sefirot and no finite
world (creation); as, without receptacles (Sefirot), the emanations of Ayin, though radiating in the
nebulous Infinite (the Ohr Ein Sof), would be hidden, unrealized through finite righteous actions,
and without realization – the ultimate purpose of the emanations – and, thereby, without purpose,
there would be no impulsion or transcendent impetus for the unfolding of Ayin, and hence, no
creation].
Human actions are the „Foundation‟ (Yesod) of the finite world of the earth [Malchut (kingship)]
– referring to the dominion (responsibility of stewardship) of humankind over the earth, as the
Torah [Bere’shit (Genesis) 1:26-28] relates: 26“And [HaShem] said, ‟Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the
whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.‟ 27And [Hashem] created man in His
image, in the image of [HaShem] He created him; male and female He created them. 28[HaShem]
blessed them and [HaShem] said to them, „Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and
rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth‟” (Jewish
Publication Society, 1999/2000, p. 2 – substitutions in brackets and emphases mine). But this
so-called „dominion‟ of humankind is not meant to be a domination or ascendancy over the earth,
but that of a loving caretaker, which, through HaShem’s gift of the „active intellect‟ [Binah
(understanding), Daat (knowledge) and Chochmah (wisdom)] endows humankind with the
capability and the responsibility to oversee and maintain the balance and harmony within the
ecosytems of the habitats in which humankind resides. Such action must accompany the
conscious intention of compassion, not only for all humankind but equally extending to all
lifeforms and all HaShem’s creations. Compassionate actions are often impossible without faith
(emunah), meaning to trust that The Ultimate and Undefinable always supports compassionate
actions even when the evidence for such seems hidden in the mundane and vacuous priorities of
unenlightened society. Ultimately, it is necessary to show compassion toward oneself too in
order to extend compassion toward others. This „selfish‟ enjoyment of the blessings (the
appreciation of the majesty, beauty, bounty and awe of nature, and the pleasures in camaraderie
and in satisfying the appetites of one‟s own senses, good health and vigor) – but only in order to
empower oneself to assist others [the Sefirah of Netzach (victory)] – is an important aspect of
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Robinson, S. M., A Scientific Study of Spirituality as the Foundation of Consciousness & the Core Component of
Mental Health & a Meaningful Life
258
„Restriction‟ (avoidance of excess), and is considered a kind of golden mean (a perfection of
balance or homeostasis) in Kabbalah, corresponding to the Sefirah of Tiferet (beauty or
adornment).
The CNE enriched environment in a scientific context
Putting this into a scientific context, we define the neurophysiological correlates of the processes
at work in the CNE curriculum through the agency of neuroplasticity, fundamentally understood
as constantly changing patterns of neuronal interconnectivity („neuronal‟ referring to neurons,
herein defined as nerve cells of the brain) through 1] the modulation of channels of neuronal
connectivity by a) synaptogenesis (the generation of new synapses; a synapse = the connective
medium between one neuron and another) and b) pruning (the elimination of superfluous or
ineffective synapses); and through 2] synaptic strength modulation involving the mechanisms of
long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). LTP is defined as the
development of a long-lasting synaptic strength between a presynaptic-postsynaptic neuron pair
as a product of the interactivity (reverberatory interaction) of the pair and LTD is defined as the
long-term persistence of the depression of synaptic action (i.e., inhibition of connection) between
a presynaptic-postsynaptic neuron pair.
The CNE enriched environment contains strong, affirmative, stimulating, deep, constantly
expanding learning experiences that trigger persistent reverberatory interaction in neuronal
connections, and through such continual associative action effecting a change of thought patterns,
weakens – in the lack of excitatory (connective) synaptic action – both the reverberatory
interaction of neuronal interconnections representing previous faulty learning from negative
experiences and the attendant ineffectual or detrimental cognitive constructs, as excitatory action
is dominated by the new, affirmative learning and newly configured thought patterns constantly
deepened and broadened by the positive-directed learning.
The cognitive constructs formed from the new learning within the CNE enriched environment
are continually strengthened by LTP and become dominant cognitive constructs undermining the
relevance of the previously formed detrimental or negative cognitive constructs, whereby the
presynaptic-postsynaptic connection between neuron pairs comprising the pattern of neuronal
interconnections representing a negative cognitive construct are less activated as the negative
cognitive construct more and more fades from ongoing thought patterns, the related less active
synaptic connections continually weakening to a threshold point triggering LTD that, in turn,
triggers the elimination of the synaptic connection between the neuron pairs comprising the
pattern of neuronal interconnections representing the negative cognitive construct, purging it
from the behavioral repertoire of the individual‟s cognitive schema („cognitive schema‟ refers to
the continuously interacting „combinations‟ and „permutations‟ of the individual components of
the full complement of one‟s cognitive constructs and the behavior induced therefrom).
These neurophysiological processes stimulated through CNE promote growth of mind and spirit,
casting off negative traits in the revamping of deficient, dysfunctional or dormant cognitive
constructs whereby the individual reaches higher planes of cognitive proficiency (animating the
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Robinson, S. M., A Scientific Study of Spirituality as the Foundation of Consciousness & the Core Component of
Mental Health & a Meaningful Life
259
„active intellect‟) and absorbs the harmony and ethical qualities of the Sefirot in communion with
the emanations of Ayin on the road of righteousness (tzedakah), becoming whole (sh’lemut),
reengaging with oneself, with others and with life itself in awakening to a new and meaningful
life [Hod (splendor)].
While using Judaism as an example of the deep connection between spirituality, evolutionarily
determined human values, mental health, religious quest and the enterprise of science, it should
be borne in mind that spirituality is a universal condition of humankind, and most religions share
basic principles of spirituality. Despite the surface differences in custom, ritual, liturgical texts,
and forms of observance, in digging beneath the surface one can find that the fundamental
spiritual quest is markedly consistent across a wide span of religious traditions, sharing the same
basic affinities between faith, human values and science as demonstrated in this study.
Received February 27, 2020; Revised March 9, 2020; Accepted March 28, 2020
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| July 2021 | Volume 12 | Issue 2 | pp. 102-121
Lee, P. F., Karthiyeyan, S. A. P. N., Cheng, K. S., Cheung, W, M. Y., & Kok, B., Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic
Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
102
Article
Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic Cell Metabolism Rate
Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
Poh Foong Lee*, Sharannaya, A. P. N. Karthiyeyan,
Kok Suen Cheng, William M. Y. Cheung & Bryan Kok
ABSTRACT
Can a single cell response to auditory stimuli and contribute to the cell decision? Here, we aimed
to investigate the response of prokaryotic cell to single tone frequency and Pali chant in a time
series. Cell metabolism rate was measured to determine the response of the cells after sound
treatment. Two groups of specimens in which one batch was fresh for each sound treatment time,
whereas another group was a continuous batch of specimens in which the sound treatment was
performed to the same cells for the whole series of time duration. We found that the continuous
batch specimen responded significantly to Pali chant through the increased in metabolism rate
(10 min to 30 min) which indicates the potential of studying cell cognition and memory with
prokaryotic cell as a model to gain behavioral information without stereotype feedback. The
outcome from this investigation suggests that the unicellular cell consciousness might potentially
be used for preliminary study of signaling pathway in consciousness and cognition before study
with multi-cell organisms.
Keywords: Prokaryotic cell, cell cognition, single tone frequency, Pali chant. metabolism rate.
Introduction
Consciousness is elucidated as the dualism concept involving the body and mind in material and
immaterial objects that is nonphysical in nature (Schweizer 2013). Consciousness is expanded to
the awareness of one’s existence, sensations, and thoughts, surrounding with an awake and aware
mind which spring into the exuberant neural correlate and empirical analysis of cognition and
affection on human decision making. This give rises to meta-cognition studies on one’s
awareness and the capability to regulate their own thinking (Wokke et al. 2020). Consciousness
is a polymorphic feature involving different levels of biological organisms that stem from a
complex nervous system (Lau and Lau 2020).
However, the complex study seems to derive from a reaction evaluation stemming from
consciousness responding to a stimulus by a human being consisting of multi trillion cells.
Therefore, a human decision making on an event or a response to stimuli is unidentifiable to
*Correspondence: Poh Foong Lee, Lee Kong Chien Faculty Engineering & Science, University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malasia.
Email: pfleej@gmail.com, leepf@utar.edu.my
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Lee, P. F., Karthiyeyan, S. A. P. N., Cheng, K. S., Cheung, W, M. Y., & Kok, B., Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic
Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
103
which cells have involved in the action or decision. Furthermore, the duration to response to the
stimuli is definite an important parameter on consciousness. Florian Klapproth (Klapproth 2008)
had reviewed on the relationship between time and decision making in humans with respect to
the evaluation process, which the delay were owing to realizing the options and time available
for making that decision.
Besides, prediction ability in decision making is also part of the fundamental for all living system.
The decision-making system even extended into animal collection observation(Arganda et al.
2012). Moreover, living microorganism on making decision has been reported which the growth
speed of microbiology in different chemicals conditions(Ashino et al. 2019). In addition, surface
charge changes with electrophoretic mobility measurement of living and dead microorganism on
different chemical conditions and temperatures were also observed its changes which indicated
the unicellular decision making experiment(Poh Foong 2009). Microbial behavior has linked to
cell cognition where the understanding of the cognitive evolution either unicellular or
multicellular organisms is yet to reach a conclusive outcome(Lyon 2015).
The effect of sound on consciousness in neural observation suggested the neural correlates
consciousness was dependent on stimulus features, higher cortical levels and different aspects of
a single perceptual scene might not be processed simultaneously(Brancucci et al. 2011). Sounds
is an essential stimulus for living organism to survive and detect the surrounding necessitates.
However, sounds form multiple perceptual bias which dominates the majority studies in
psychoacoustic(Moore 2007),(Li et al. 2010). Neural with auditory paradigm studies is growing
rapidly in these recent years(Smith et al. 2013; Hettich et al. 2016; Norman-Haignere and
McDermott 2018; Wöstmann et al. 2019). Conscious processing with auditory paradigm
response was inferred from neurophysiological measurement suggested that the presence of the
global effect might be a signature for conscious processing(Bekinschtein et al. 2009). However,
different perception, attention and many minds interpretation(Zeh 1970) to conclude the
particular sound effect on multicellular system is remained challenging.
On the other hand, animal consciousness study was reported to be more challenging than human
studies although animal are speculated to have a simpler mindset in responding towards stimuli.
This is due to the animal has lacking human language to explain their thinking but only can
inferred from their reaction to the experimental manipulation(Hoy 2005). A report even
highlighted that the animal hearing evaluation depends on few aspects, including anatomical,
physiological, economic, spatial and psychosocial factors and evaluation objective(Reis et al.
2017). Therefore, consciousness of multicellular organism in responding to a stimulus required
multiple conditions of investigation and measurement but have yet to identify the fundamental
study of the exact signaling pathway of a cell on an auditory stimuli response.
A novel method to brim the curiosity in studying a simple cell response to sound stimuli within
the human hearing range is inviting. Prokaryotic cell is a classic model for this approach as it
recaptures precedent of the pre-Cambrian explosion where the Earth begun with simple cells
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Lee, P. F., Karthiyeyan, S. A. P. N., Cheng, K. S., Cheung, W, M. Y., & Kok, B., Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic
Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
104
organism and latter evolved to vertebrate organism which was estimated to begin 551 million
years ago(Condon et al. 2005). Mechanical response to single-tone and two-tone stimuli was
inspected on Chinchilla cochlea with Mossbauer spectroscopy measurement(Robles et al. 1986).
However, applying the human sound range stimulus on prokaryotic cell has yet to be reported.
In this work, single tone harmonic sound at frequency of 500 Hz and 1000 Hz, added a natural
Buddhist Pali from monks hymning sound without music instruments background were
employed in this experiment as auditory stimuli onto Escherichia coli (E.coli). The response
from the cells was measured with UV spectroscopy on instantaneous metabolism rate. For sing
tone frequency auditory stimuli, both 500 Hz and 1000 Hz were clustered as single tone
harmonic sound(Persinger 2014). Meanwhile, the single tone frequency at 1000 Hz was
proclaimed as high frequency sound or loud(Smyth 2019). A research shows that the auditory
frequency range from 500 to 2000 Hz were able to stimulate a profound immediate effects on the
lower limb motor function of the healthy people(Yu et al. 2016), this indicated the exist impact
of auditory effect on the brain connection with motor muscle. Another interesting work shows
that the auditory stimuli within the range of 200 Hz to 1000 Hz on deaf participants reported
experienced dizziness, pain and vibration, suggested the sound experiences can occur without
functional hearing(Persinger 2014). These are among reports which encourages the work on how
the auditory give impacts on the body and mind, in term of cognition and consciousness.
On the other hand, Pali chant from the monk’s natural human hymning voice was adopted in the
experiment. A review shows that the prayer related to spirituality and religion has increased in
healthcare area and being suggested as a non-pharmacological intervention on resources to be
included in the nursing holistic care(Simão et al. 2016). A report shows that the
neurophysiological correlates of religious chanting are likely different from those of meditation
and prayer, suggested that the chanting would possibly induce distinctive psychotherapeutic
effects(Gao et al. 2019). Consciousness study on religious chanting or repetitive mantra
commonly elicits unequivocal multiple interpretations and perceptions on human response(Zeh
1970), therefore E.coli k-12 was expected to provide stereotypic feedback to religious chant.
Consequently, this study has incorporated the Buddhist Pali chant to measure the response of the
unicellular cell together with single tone harmonic frequency sounds in this experiment. For
resolving the ambivalent effective durations of the sound stimulus, a series of time was tested for
the range of 5 to 30 min. The cells were groups into two different categories for their metabolism
rate measurement - continuous batch of specimen (CS) for the whole series of sounds treatment
and a new batch of specimen (NS) for each different duration. Both batches of specimen would
indicate the accumulation effect for the same bacteria for progressive treatment.
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Lee, P. F., Karthiyeyan, S. A. P. N., Cheng, K. S., Cheung, W, M. Y., & Kok, B., Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic
Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
105
Materials and Methods
Specimen preparation
Lysogeny media (LB media) is a nutritionally rich medium primarily used for the growth of
bacteria. First, 100 ml of LB media and 2g of the LB media powder was measured and diluted
with 100 ml of distilled water. Once it had been thoroughly mixed without any visible powder
clumps, the media solution was then transferred to a conical flask and covered with an
aluminium foil and cotton pad. The prepared LB media in the conical flask was autoclaved at
120℃ for 15 minutes. Once the autoclave had been completed the LB media solution was left to
completely cool down for the inoculation of bacteria. When the LB media culture medium was
fully cooled down, the sterile inoculation loop was used to transfer the E.coli k-12 into the
culture medium. The inoculation loop is a small and lengthy metal instrument made up of a
looped wire at one end that is attached to a handle at the other end. The looped wire end is
usually used in capturing bacterial samples from a liquid type of reagent as the loop wired end is
designed to hold a drop of liquid. The inoculation loop was sterilized on a Bunsen burner before
further used in cell culture. After sterilization, the inoculation loop with the wired end was
slowly and gently dipped into the bacterial source plate and then dipped back into the conical
flask containing LB media. It was followed by a gently mixing of the sample with the prepared
LB media culture medium. The next step was to immerse the conical flask containing the
bacteria in the culture medium and incubating at 37°C for 12-18 hr in a shaking incubator. After
incubation, the growth of the bacteria was characterized by a cloudy haze in the media.
The preparation of the new batch of specimen (NS) was started by taking out the inoculated
bacterial culture medium from the shaking incubator and placed the medium in the fume hood.
The specimen was taken out from the culture medium by using a sterile pipette tip. 0.4 ml of the
bacteria was pipetted out and added into one well on the 96 Greiner well plate. This step was
then repeated for another 10 times under the same condition. After the treatment had been
performed, the well plate was removed from the Styrofoam box and placed into the microplate
reader to measure the absorbance rate.
For the continuous batch of specimen (CS), once the absorbance rate was measured, the well
plate was removed from the microplate reader and again being placed back to the Styrofoam box
for the next time duration of sound treatment and so forth. The steps were repeated for 10 min,
15 min, 20 min, 25 min and 30 min and also subsequently the same experimental steps for 1000
Hz single tone frequency and Pali chanting. For new batch of specimen on sound treatment, the
new fresh group of specimens exposed to the same type of sound stimuli but was discarded after
every single time duration metabolism rate measurement.
Microplate reader OD600 assay
Quantification on bacterial growth by measuring the optical density at 600 nm (OD600) (Infinite
M200 series, Tecan) is a well-established method in giving the value on the turbidity outcome
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
106
that results from light scattering by the bacteria in the well plate. It is a fast and cost-effective
method in monitoring the instantaneous metabolism rate of the bacteria in LB media(Stevenson
et al. 2016).
Auditory stimuli
The sound treatment was performed at six different time durations which included 5 min, 10 min,
15 min, 20 min, 25 min and 30 min using three different types of sounds. Two of them were
single frequency sounds at 500 Hz and 1000 Hz, as well as a Pali chanting natural sounds by
monks without instrumental music (https://www.peacebeyondsuffering.org/audio-chanting04.html). The frequency ranges between 200 Hz to 900 Hz for the Pali chanting. (See appendix)
Experiment setup protocol
The complete experimental setup is shown in Fig. 1. These three music frequencies were played
through a Bluetooth speaker that was placed directly on the Greinier 96 well plate placed within
a Styrofoam box. A Styrofoam box was used because it provided good insulation for the sound
without taking up much noise and avoiding the sound escaping out to the surrounding. An
empirical study was done on using recycle Styrofoam as porous sound absorption(Rey et al.
2012). The Bluetooth speaker was controlled by a handphone where the sounds were selected
and played using a repeat player. Furthermore, the audio length for the 500 Hz and 1000 Hz were
only 30 seconds long in a file, hence these two tracks were set to play on loop continuously to fit
the time frames set at 5 min, 10 min, 15 min, 20 min, 25 min and 30 min. The length of the Pali
chanting is 18 min 11 seconds which was also controlled using the repeat player to the expected
prepared time frames of sounds treatment to the bacteria.
Fig. 1. The experiment setup for the sound treatment on new and continuous batch of specimen
in the Styroform box where the speaker with Bluetooth was allocated on top of the 96 well plate
which the time series of sound treatment was controlled with smartphone.
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
107
Data analysis
For the new batch of specimen, we used 4 x 7 ANOVA with 4 being the between subject
Frequency (Control, 500 Hz, 1000 Hz and Pali Chanting) and 7 being the within subject variable
Time (0 until 30 min). For the continuous batch of specimen (CS), we used 4 x 6 ANCOVA with
the same explanation as above except for the absorbance rate at 0 min being the covariate. For
the comparison between the new batch (NS) and continuous batch of specimen (CS), we used 4 x
2 two-way ANOVA with 4 being the Frequency and 2 being the Group (New Specimen and
Continuous).
Results
Comparison of the metabolism rate on new batch of specimen (NS) for the sound treatment
There was a significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 266) = 57.652, p < 0.001,
significant Time main effect (F(6, 266) = 15.633, p < 0.001,
= 0.394), a
= 0.261) and a significant
Frequency × Time interaction (F(18, 266) = 10.888, p < 0.001,
= 0.424). Post-hoc analysis
with Bonferroni correction stratifying for the Frequency (Table 1) revealed that for the 500 Hz
frequency, the absorbance rate at 0 min was significantly smaller than both 10 min and 25 min (p
< 0.001 and p = 0.006, respectively).
Table 1: Post-hoc analysis for the new specimen group showing the p values of the different
times for different frequencies (Control, 500 Hz, 1000 Hz and Pali chanting). Significant p
values are bolded.
Control
0 min
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
500 Hz
0 min
5 min
10 min
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0 min
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
-
0 min
1.000
< 0.001
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
0.024
-
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
1000 Hz
0 min
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
Pali chanting
0 min
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
1.000
1.000
0.006
0.231
1.000
0.095
1.000
1.000
0.002
< 0.001
1.000
0.208
0.702
0.256
1.000
< 0.001
0.010
1.000
-
0 min
1.000
0.060
0.043
1.000
0.337
1.000
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
0.087
0.063
1.000
0.245
1.000
1.000
0.004
< 0.001
1.000
0.003
< 0.001
1.000
1.000
1.000
0.914
-
0 min
1.000
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
0.126
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
0.001
0.069
1.000
1.000
0.056
1.000
0.634
< 0.001
1.000
< 0.001
< 0.001
-
108
The absorbance rate at 5 min was significantly smaller than 10 min (p = 0.024) whereas the
result at 10 min was significantly larger than 15 min and 20 min (p = 0.002 and p < 0.001,
respectively). For the result at 20 min, it was significantly larger than that of at 25 min and 30
min with p values of 0.001 and 0.010, respectively. For the 1000 Hz frequency, the absorbance
rate at baseline was significantly smaller than 15 min (p = 0.043), however, results at 10 and 15
min was both significantly larger than 20 min and 25 min (p = 0.004, p < 0.001, p = 0.003 and p
< 0.001, respectively). Similarly, the result at 30 min was significantly larger than that of 25 min
with p = 0.006. Meanwhile, the absorbance rate at 0 and 5 min for the Pali chant was all
significantly smaller than 10 to 30 min (all p < 0.001) whereas the results at 15 to 25 min was all
significantly larger than 30 min (p < 0.001, p < 0.001 and p = 0.004, respectively).
The post-hoc comparisons for each Time are shown in Fig.2A. At baseline, the absorbance rate
for the 500 Hz frequency was significantly smaller than Control and 1000 Hz frequency (p <
0.001 and p = 0.005, respectively). At 5 min, the Control frequency result was significantly
larger than both 500 Hz and Pali chanting (p = 0.048 and p = 0.004, respectively). For 15 to 30
min, the same trend of Pali chant resulting in significantly larger absorbance rate as compared to
all other 3 frequencies was observed (all p < 0.001), with the exception of 30 min being only
significantly larger than 500 Hz (p = 0.034).
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
109
Fig. 2. Comparisons of the absorbance rate when the bacteria E. Coli was subjected to
different frequency vibrations at different times for the (A) new specimen group and (B)
continuous group. * - p < 0.050; ** - p < 0.010; *** - p < 0.001.
Comparison of the metabolism rate on continuous batch of specimen (CS) for the sound
treatment
There was a significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 37) = 309.452, p < 0.001, = 0.962), a
significant Time main effect (F(3.558, 37) = 130.876, p < 0.001, = 0.775) and a significant
Frequency × Time interaction (F(10.659, 37) = 49.515, p < 0.001, = 0.801). In terms of the
Time difference (Table 2), post-hoc analysis revealed that the absorbance rate at 10 min for the
500 Hz frequency was significantly larger than all other 5 times (all p < 0.001). For the 1000 Hz
frequency, the result at 10 min was significantly larger than that of 25 min (p = 0.009) whereas at
15 min the absorbance rate was also significantly larger than both 20 min and 25 min (p = 0.007
and p = 0.003, respectively). Besides that, both 20 min and 25 min had an absorbance rate that is
significantly smaller than that of 30 min, respectively, with p = 0.002 and p = 0.001. As for the
Pali chant frequency, the result for 5 min was significantly smaller than all other 5 times (all p <
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
110
0.001). Further, the absorbance rate at 25 min was also significantly larger than that of 20 min (p
= 0.049).
Table 2: Post-hoc analysis for the continuous group showing the p values of the different times
for different frequencies (Control, 500 Hz, 1000 Hz and Pali chanting). Significant p values are
bolded.
Control
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
500 Hz
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
1000 Hz
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
5 min
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
-
5 min
< 0.001
0.743
1.000
0.270
1.000
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
0.484
-
5 min
1.000
1.000
1.000
0.246
1.000
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
1.000
0.119
0.009
1.000
0.007
0.003
1.000
0.449
0.002
0.001
-
5 min
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
0.568
0.106
1.000
0.966
1.000
0.348
1.000
0.049
1.000
0.381
-
Pali chanting
5 min
10 min
15 min
20 min
25 min
30 min
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
111
Fig. 2B shows the post-hoc analysis for each Time for the continuous treatment (CS) and
generally two trends can be observed. For 10, 20 and 25 min time, the absorbance rate for the
500 Hz frequency was significantly larger than 1000 Hz (p < 0.001, p = 0.019 and p = 0.005,
respectively). The second trend involved all time series from 5 min to 30 min such that the result
for Pali chant was significantly larger than all other 3 groups (all p < 0.001). The only exception
is at 10 min with the absorbance rate of Pali chant being only significantly larger than Control
and 1000 Hz (both p < 0.001).
The impact of different time duration on the new and continuous batch of specimen
To compare the difference between the new specimen (NS) and continuous specimen (CS), the
measurements for each Time were analyzed separately for the Group and Frequency factors (Fig.
3 and Table 3).
Fig. 3 Comparison between the new specimen and continuous group at different times at (A) 0
min, (B) 5 min, (C) 10 min, (D) 15 min, (E) 20 min, (F) 25 min and (G) 30 min. *** - p < 0.001.
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
112
Table 3: Post-hoc comparisons of the frequencies at different times for the new specimen and
continuous group. The values are the p values and significant p values are bolded.
New Specimen
5 min
Control
500 Hz
1000 Hz
Pali
10 min
Control
500 Hz
1000 Hz
Pali
15 min
Control
500 Hz
1000 Hz
Pali
20 min
Control
500 Hz
1000 Hz
Pali
25 min
Control
500 Hz
1000 Hz
Pali
Continuous
5 min
Control
0.017
1.000
< 0.001
500 Hz
1000
Hz
0.374
1.000
0.044
-
Control
1.000
1.000
0.016
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
1.000
0.044
0.566
-
Control
0.006
0.296
< 0.001
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
-
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
Control
< 0.001
0.074
< 0.001
Control
1.000
0.008
0.011
Pali
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
-
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
0.251
< 0.001
< 0.001
500 Hz
1000
Hz
-
30 min
Control
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Control
-
Pali
Control
0.075
1.000
< 0.001
10 min
Control
< 0.001
1.000
< 0.001
15 min
Control
1.000
1.000
< 0.001
20 min
Control
0.682
0.032
< 0.001
25 min
Control
1.000
0.010
< 0.001
30 min
Control
-
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500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
0.374
< 0.001
< 0.001
-
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
< 0.001
1.000
< 0.001
-
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
1.000
< 0.001
< 0.001
-
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
1.000
< 0.001
< 0.001
-
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
0.016
< 0.001
< 0.001
-
500 Hz
1000
Hz
Pali
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
500 Hz
1000 Hz
Pali
0.047
1.000
1.000
0.317
0.062
1.000
-
0.257
1.000
< 0.001
0.847
< 0.001
< 0.001
113
-
0 min
There was a significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 76) = 43.242, p < 0.001, = 0.631). Posthoc analysis revealed that the absorbance rate of the Control was significantly larger than all
other 3 frequencies (p < 0.001, p = 0.002 and p < 0.001, respectively). Besides that, the result for
the 500 Hz frequency was found to be significantly smaller than 1000 Hz and Pali chant as well
(both p < 0.001) (Table 3).
5 min
There was a significant Group main effect (F(1, 76) = 17.509, p < 0.001,
= 0.187), a
significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 76) = 9.036, p < 0.001, = 0.263) and a significant
Group × Frequency interaction (F(3, 76) = 20.107, p < 0.001, = 0.442). In terms of the
frequencies, the results showed that the New Specimen’s (NS) absorbance rate when no
frequency was applied, i.e. Control, was significantly larger than both 500 Hz and Pali chanting
(p = 0.017 and p = 0.001, respectively). Further, the absorbance rate for the 1000 Hz frequency
was also significantly larger than that of Pali chant with p = 0.044. For the Continuous group
(CS), it was found that the result for Pali chanting was significantly larger than all other 3
frequencies (all p < 0.001). In terms of the groups, the continuous treatment (CS) produced an
absorbance rate significantly larger than that of the new specimen (NS) (p < 0.001; Fig. 3B).
10 min
There was a significant Group main effect (F(1, 76) = 235.119, p < 0.001, = 0.756), a
significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 76) = 129.616, p < 0.001, = 0.837) and a significant
Group × Frequency interaction (F(3, 76) = 104.281, p < 0.001, = 0.805). As shown in Table 3,
the Pali chanting produced an absorbance rate significantly larger than both Control and 500 Hz
(p = 0.016 and p = 0.044, respectively) for the New Specimen group (NS) . As for the
Continuous group CS), the result for the Control was significantly smaller than 500 Hz and Pali
(both p < 0.001). Other than that, the result for the 1000 Hz frequency was significantly larger
and smaller, respectively, than 500 Hz and Pali chanting (both p < 0.001). In terms of the group
difference at fixed frequencies, at both 500 Hz and Pali frequencies, the continuous treatment
produced an absorbance rate that was significantly larger (both p < 0.001) (Fig. 3C).
15 min
There was a significant Group main effect (F(1, 76) = 42.907, p < 0.001,
significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 76) = 171.067, p < 0.001,
Group × Frequency interaction (F(3, 76) = 39.883, p < 0.001,
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= 0.361), a
= 0.871) and a significant
= 0.612). The New Specimen
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
114
group (NS) , the absorbance rate of the 500 Hz was significantly smaller than all other 3 auditory
stimuli (p = 0.006, p < 0.001 and p < 0.001, respectively) whereas the Pali chant produced an
absorbance rate that was significantly larger than others (all p < 0.001) (Table 3). As for the
Continuous specimen group (CS), the result for the Pali chant was also significantly larger than
all stimuli (all p < 0.001). Like the results at 10 min, the absorbance rate for the continuous
treatment group (CS) was significantly larger than the New specimen group (NS) for both 500
Hz and Pali frequency (both p < 0.001). However, the new specimen (NS) result was
significantly larger than the continuous treatment (CS) instead at 1000 Hz frequency (p = 0.027)
as shown in Fig. 3D.
20 min
There was a significant Group main effect (F(1, 76) = 117.765, p < 0.001,
significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 76) = 262.233, p < 0.001,
= 0.608), a
= 0.912) and a significant
Group × Frequency interaction (F(3, 76) = 56.011, p < 0.001, = 0.689). Similar to 15 min, the
new specimen group at 500 Hz frequency was observed to have a significantly smaller
absorbance rate than the other 3 frequencies (all p < 0.001) and the result for Pali chanting being
significantly larger than all other 3 frequencies (all p < 0.001) (Table 3). On the other hand, for
the continuous group (CS), the Pali chanting resulted in a significantly larger absorbance rate
than all other frequencies (all p < 0.001) with the addition of the Control group also being
significantly larger that of 1000 Hz as well (p = 0.032). As shown in Fig.3E, at 500 Hz and Pali
frequencies, the Continuous group (CS) had a significantly larger absorbance rate than the New
Specimen group (NS) (both p < 0.001).
25 min
There was a significant Group main effect (F(1, 76) = 44.669, p < 0.001,
significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 76) = 124.428, p < 0.001,
= 0.370), a
= 0.831) and a significant
Group × Frequency interaction (F(3, 76) = 40.202, p < 0.001, = 0.613). Post-hoc analysis
comparing the frequencies revealed that for the new specimen group, the Pali chanting resulted
in an absorbance rate significantly larger than all other 3 frequencies (p = 0.011, p < 0.001 and p
< 0.001, respectively). Further, it was also observed that the result for the Control was
significantly larger than that of the 1000 Hz frequency (p = 0.008). As for the Continuous group
(CS), the absorbance rate for the 1000 Hz was significantly smaller than all other 3 frequencies
(p = 0.010, p = 0.016 and p < 0.001, respectively) whereas the result for the Pali chant was
significantly larger than all other 3 frequencies (all p < 0.001) (Table 3). In terms of post-hoc
comparisons across the groups, the Pali frequency was the only frequency that produced a
significantly larger absorbance rate (p < 0.001) when comparing the continuous group (CS) to
the new specimen group (NS) (Fig.3F).
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Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
115
30 min
There was a significant Group main effect (F(1, 76) = 80.423, p < 0.001,
significant Frequency main effect (F(3, 76) = 97.902, p < 0.001,
= 0.514), a
= 0.794) and a significant
Group × Frequency interaction (F(3, 76) = 74.815, p < 0.001, = 0.747). Post-hoc analysis
stratifying according to Group revealed that for the New Specimen group (NS), the Control
frequency had a significantly larger absorbance rate than 500 Hz (p = 0.047). For the continuous
group, the result for the Pali chant was significantly larger than all 3 other frequencies (all p <
0.001) (Table 3). Similar to 10 - 25 min, post-hoc analysis stratified for Frequency revealed that
the Continuous treatment (CS) produced an absorbance rate that was significantly larger than the
New Specimen group (NS) (p < 0.001) as shown in Fig.3G.
Discussion
The study was aimed to provide a quantitative study on cell consciousness investigation by
providing a new insight into the effect of sound using single tone frequencies at 500 Hz, 1000 Hz
and Pali chant on the cell metabolism rate for different treatment time durations ranging from 5
min to 30 min (5 min interval). Further, the effect of the same settings on the new batch of
specimen (NS) and continuous batch of specimen (CS) were observed as well. The profound
finding shows that the absorbance rate which indicated the metabolism rate for continuous batch
of specimen was significantly increased as compared to the new batch of specimen (NS) for Pali
chant for all the time durations for sound treatment. Besides that, 10 min of sound treatment at
500 Hz displayed an equally significant modulation on the metabolism rate of the specimen for
the continuous batch (CS).
It is worth to take a tour on the speculation for a deeper study on the mechanism of the cell to
propagate in a profound manner when stimuli are given. Of note, prior study suggested that the
cell membranes on cytoskeletal models with G-protein dynamics is a promising starting point to
link psychiatry to quantum models of mind, brain and consciousness (Tonello and Cocchi 2010).
A review has reported that lipid rafts, a type of G proteins, exist in the nervous system and these
proteins were mostly studied for the regulatory and trafficking of signal transduction(Brady et al.
2012),(Chini and Parenti 2004) and membrane interactions between G proteins and other related
proteins was reported(Vögler et al. 2008). The fundamental study on this cytoskeletal element in
animals are believed to function in orchestrating the neurotransmitter signalling and the
characterization of the element is associated to the area of neurological or psychiatric diseases in
human being(Allen et al. 2007). For instance, to clarify neural factors that contribute to
depression and to allow a deeper understanding of the neural trafficking causality which leads to
depression at the molecular level is highly demanded as this can increase the efficacy of
antidepressants(Senese et al. 2018).
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Lee, P. F., Karthiyeyan, S. A. P. N., Cheng, K. S., Cheung, W, M. Y., & Kok, B., Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic
Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
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Furthermore, the biomolecular pathway related to cell membrane viscosity through Gsα protein
and tubulin was hypothesized to enable the measurement of conscious state using
electroencephalography on the brain's γ wave synchrony(Cocchi et al. 2010). When sample
subject on lipid raft is down-sized to microorganism, eukaryotic cells were studied as a
fundamental step to understand the evolution of cellular complexity(Bramkamp and Lopez 2015).
In contrast, membrane of single cell without nucleus, i.e. prokaryotic cells have been used to
elucidate the effect of FtsZ in regulating cell division(Margolin 2000). The close approach of
prior study in association with this is found from a study investigating the lipid raft-mediated
transcytotic pathways of E.coli k-12 to cross the intestinal epithelium indicated that the poor
invasive enteric of bacteria to gut epithelial cell during inflammatory stress(Clark et al. 2005).
Lipid rafts enriches in cholesterol and sphingolipids that are involved in the lateral
compartmentalization of molecules at the cell surface is getting great interest as part of a cellular
element that enable cell signalling study. However, association between the metabolism rate of
prokaryotic cell relating to lipid raft has yet to be found. In this study, E.coli k-12 in the
prokaryotic cell group has been studied for its response based on the metabolism rate affected by
different sound stimuli.
Prior study showed the glucose effect on catabolite repression to induce a positive control of
transcription whereby glucose repressed the inducible enzymes(Clark et al. 2005) as well as
temperature effect on the metabolism rate of bacteria with optical density measurement
(OD)(Membré et al. 2005). Another report was found to obtain an increase in linear vibrational
effect on the metabolism rate of bacteria included E.coli k-12 whom had employed the optical
density measurement as metabolism rate monitoring system(College et al. 2001). On the other
hand, vibration through ultrasound was adopted to monitor the metabolism rate of the bacterial
cells that were adhered to polymer rods revealed that the bacteria growth increased after 30 min
of low frequency, low acoustical intensity ultrasound treatment as compared to without
ultrasound and this lead to the hypothesis of ultrasound elevating the rate of oxygen and nutrients
to and out from the cells which propagated the metabolism rate(Pitt and Ross 2003). E.coli k-12
was selected as the specimen for this study as a similar strain of specimen was used on different
acoustical treatments. These studies had reported an agreeable result of increased E.coli k-12
metabolism rate with audible sound stimuli compared to control group and this indicated that
E.coli k-12 responded rapidly to sound stress through promoting the synthesis of intracellular
RNA(Gu et al. 2016).
One of the prior study which possess a similar aim with our work here had reported that the
significant effect on growth promotion at 100 dB and 5000 Hz at multiple variation of the
audible sound frequencies for E.coli k-12 indicated that their activity of antioxidant enzymes
increased in which they speculated the audible sound may trigger a secondary oxidative
stress(Gu et al. 2013). Similarly, another research had experimented on mono frequency at 300
Hz with different loudness and had found the most significant effect on Chromobacterium
violaceum was at the sound level of 13 dB(Kothari et al.). Most of the studies had aimed on
understand better the environment audible effect on the growth of the E.coli k-12 and other
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Lee, P. F., Karthiyeyan, S. A. P. N., Cheng, K. S., Cheung, W, M. Y., & Kok, B., Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic
Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
117
prokaryotic bacteria where variable range of frequencies had been set as parameter. Nevertheless,
the use of single tone frequency at 500 Hz and 1000 Hz including different time duration
treatments has limited reporting in literature. In our study, the metabolism rate of E.coli k-12
decreased profoundly at 500 Hz for 15 min and 20 min of sound treatment as compared to the
single tone of 1000 Hz whereas after 15 min the result showed a decrease in growth for specimen
for the new batch of specimen group. At 25 min, the sound treatment at 1000 Hz showed a
decrease in the growth as compared to the control group.
Besides single frequency sound to stimulate the growth of bacteria, Indian classical music
consists a range of frequencies from 41 – 645 Hz had been reported bacteria exhibiting antibiotic
susceptibility under the influence of music suggesting that the production of cell was linked with
the quorum sensing(Sarvaiya and Kothari 2017). There is no similar research studying bacteria
response in human hymning sound and moreover for a series of treatment time. In this study, the
E.coli k-12 obtained profound metabolism rate from 5 min to 30 min under the stimulation of
Buddhist Pali chant as the natural human hymning sound for both new and continuous batch of
specimen in the whole range of treatment time series. For new batch of specimen on each time
treatment, the metabolism rate shows significant results at 15 min, 20 min and 25 min in Pali
chant sound treatment. However, the appalling finding from this research is the metabolism rate
of the continuous batch specimen experienced a great increased surpassing other sound treatment
and this trend was the same from 5 min to 30 min. The dominant finding from the Pali chant
effects on the metabolism rate in the continuous batch of specimen lead to a new insight on cell
memory.
Does cell or bacteria have memory? Chih et at published a very recent work reporting on the
memory encoding for bacteria which mimics the neurons whereby the stimuli were based on
light and measured on the response of potassium channels in a biofilm and the modelling results
predicted from Hodgkin-Huxley model explained that the memory is athletic to ionic
perturbations(Yang et al. 2020). Another robust finding on cell memory was studied with single
bacterial cells through repeated exposure to salt stress and had discovered that the resiliency of
the past exposure cells displayed a memory-like behaviour at the population level(Mathis and
Ackermann 2016).
Repetitive religious chanting has been reported to be able to pacify the negative mind of first
timer involved in Buddhist chanting and this chanting was able to modulate the brain responses
during the late-stage cognitive processing as revealed by event related potential study (Gao et al.
2017), consistent to another report that highlighted the benefit of the repetitive “OM” sound
which worked as a brain stabilizer through frequency spectrum analysis(Gurjar et al.). On the
other hand, repetitive chant brought significant effect to hypothermia induced stress on cognitive
abilities(Pereira 2016). The decision making of human being or animal is defined as the process
of selecting an action in which the action stems from memory which is defined as the physical
change that carries information about the historical past happening between neurons and wrap
into cognition(Del Missier et al. 2013).
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| July 2021 | Volume 12 | Issue 2 | pp. 102-121
Lee, P. F., Karthiyeyan, S. A. P. N., Cheng, K. S., Cheung, W, M. Y., & Kok, B., Cell Consciousness Study with Prokaryotic
Cell Metabolism Rate Measurement in Response to Acoustical Vibration
118
The accumulation effect is speculated in this study given that Pali chanting cause the metabolism
rate of both the new batch and continuous batch of specimen to have a profound increase in the
metabolism rate from 5 min till 30 min with the most significant results happening at 5 min. The
metabolism rate has surpassed the duplication rate of the normal metabolism rate of E.coli k-12
which is about ~20 min. This has enabled the analogy of the cognition of a human participating
in this experiment who has received three different stimuli and one’s physical response is
measured. Similarly, the E.coli k-12 in this experiment had decided to grow more under Pali
chant sound treatment from 5 min till 25 min of treatment durations as compared to single tone
frequency.
The limitation of this work is the variety of measurement tools to further observe the changes on
the cells. Further investigation is great to include compartments of the unicellular cells, for
example, lipid rafts on the cell membranes, RNA, quorum sensing, ion channels and more
protein composition changes measurement. These measurements can provide a more in-depth
information on the cell propagation mechanism in responding to the auditory stimuli. More
religion or healing music can be used as stimuli to measure the metabolism rate of similar
specimens. Thus far, the clue on why Pali chant has triggered a great response from this strain of
bacteria has gone unknown but enigmatical.
In this study, both new batch specimen and continuous batch specimen of the prokaryotic E.coli
k-12 cells responded with significant metabolism rate in Pali chant as compared to single tone
frequency sounds in a short durations of sound treatment, moreover the profound increased in
metabolism rate in the continuous batch of specimen. The outcome has indicated its potential in
using prokaryotic cells as a simple complex unicellular model on behavioural study which lessen
the bias in interpreting the stimuli can contribute to the area of mind and body studies,
neuropsychiatry area, experimental quantum mind and neuropharmacology.
Received April 1, 2021; Accepted May 22, 2021
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Baer, W. NMN, Conscious Life Beyond Death (Part I)
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Article
Conscious Life Beyond Death (Part I)
Wolfgang NMN Baer*
Nascent Systems Inc. & Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA
Abstract
In this five-part article, known scientific principles are used to prove that conscious systems
maintain a permanent physical soul beyond the existence of a material body. We will
demonstrate that the fundamental material form which conscious physical structures are built
occupy their own space and change in their own time according to their own laws of behavior.
These changes are controlled by forces within each soul but also are a result of interaction forces
connected with external events. It has become customary to treat the behavior of our bodies as
the sum of behavior attributed to dead material and the sum attributed to the desires of our soul
as evidence of living material.[1] Because we assume the soul occupies its own space and time,
the property of life as exhibited by a body lasts as long as the communications channels
supplying the interactions between body and soul are maintained. Temporary interruptions of
communication are associated with a loss of consciousness. A permanent break is recognized as
death.
Mainstream science has failed to identify the material basis of consciousness in living organisms
let alone dead matter[2] while most religious traditions assume consciousness as a fundamental
postulate that relies upon faith without the need for scientific evidence. Both approaches are
incomplete. Recent developments in physics addressing the necessity of including the conscious
observer in any complete theory of our own existence have emerged. Progress has been
achieved, not by advancing ontological interpretations or refinements of quantum theory, but by
eliminating the assumption that we live in an objective world independent of our own existence.
In Conscious Action Theory[3] (CAT), we recognize that our objective world is a phase of a selfmeasurement, explanatory activity that includes both our conscious experience and the physical
material producing the experience. We adopt the assumption that elementary events, not
elementary particles, are the building blocks of both ourselves and the universe we believe that
we live in.
Such a change to the foundations of physics allows us to conceive of ourselves as interacting
lifetimes instead of the cosmologies found in classic or quantum physics. Life and death are then
conceived as the difference between interacting and isolated events. Living bodies are evidence
of interaction while non-interacting lifetimes, like non-interacting atoms, cannot be seen. You
and I are events containing each other’s bodies as memories of our interactions. Consciousness
has always been part of existence, both before our bodies are grown and after they are
abandoned. This article will show that CAT is a viable theory of physics that contains
consciousness in cyclic events. These events grow, maintain, and abandon material bodies along
*
Correspondence: c/o Steven Mitchell. Email: smitc1@brockport.edu Note: This article was written by Prof. Wolfgang NMN
Baer and is published posthumously. Wolfgang NMN Baer, Ph.D. (in Physics) was an Associate Professor of Information
Sciences (Ret), Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA, & Research Director, Nascent Systems Inc., Carmel Valley,
CA, USA.
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Baer, W. NMN, Conscious Life Beyond Death (Part I)
531
their own evolutionary trajectories. Evidence of human consciousness beyond an individual
body’s life is generally available when a belief system such as CAT is adopted that includes the
subjective element and gives us a logical explanation for the available evidence.
Keywords: Conscious life, beyond death, material body, physical soul, consciousness, quantum
physics, existence, conscious action.
Part I of this Article contains the following Sections:
Prolog
1. Introduction to the Multiverse of Conscious Beings
1.1. Development of Event-Oriented Physics
1.2. The Action-Flow Diagram of a Conscious Being
1.3. The Multiverse Cosmology of Conscious Systems
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Baer, W. NMN, Conscious Life Beyond Death (Part I)
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Prolog
Lying on a balmy beach in Mexico last winter, I looked up to see the moon and stars glittering in
the dark sky above. As my head rested on the warm sand, I wondered, as I often did as a kid,
how far away are the stars? I remembered hitchhiking a ride from the University of Michigan to
Detroit, listening to an old man in a pickup truck who assured me that stars were many miles up
in the sky. “They are as big as houses,” I recall him saying. “They only look small because they
are so far away.” I remember chuckling at this sweet old man’s colossal ignorance and did not
want to embarrass him with a correction.
I studied physics at University of Michigan to learn what the world and my life in it was all
about. In my youth, the moon and stars were clearly out there. Way out there. Alpha Centauri is
four light years away, the other stars and galaxies thousands of light years beyond that. In my
youth, the night sky stretched out before me whenever I looked up. It was obvious. The vastness
of outer space was where we all lived and where I wanted to go. Exploring this world was my
dream, and eventually I got a job as mission analyst, planning and flying satellites at Goddard
Space Flight Center. It was obvious. Up there is space, in it are stars; some of them have planets
that could sustain life, and all we needed to do was to develop the technology to get there.
Today things look different. I’m no longer so sure of my world. The old man’s colossal
ignorance may have more truth than my own arrogant calculations. I recognize the difference
between the mental sensations I experience and the ‘reality’, which I believed caused those
sensations to happen. Certainly the mental sensations of Alpha Centauri are not four light years
away. But where are they? If I shut my eyes the sensations disappear altogether. So, what is it
that is four light years away? Where do my momentary experiences of the raw sensations, termed
‘qualia’ by some psychologists, happen? Are those qualia inside or outside of me? Where do the
‘qualia’ of my raw sensations, as some psychologists call the spots and streaks of brightness in
front of my nose that balmy night, happen? How far away are they? And what is it that I believed
I lived in when I pursued my studies and career to explore and eventually colonize this universe?
Still resting on the beach, I closed my eyes and imagined myself lying on the ball of the earth
with my back pressed against its surface. In a split second the images of the moon, sun and
planets flashed upward. The long distance beyond the solar system passed in my mind’s eye as I
imagined a ‘star’ of burning gasses in front of me. It was a familiar image; one I had often
imagined in my youth. When I opened my eyes, this ‘star’ vision immediately registered with a
point of light in the Centauries constellation. But where was reality amongst all my feelings?
While repeating this exercise, of concentrating on the ‘qualia’ and imagining their causes,
something new became obvious. I could feel the processing from qualia-sensations to their
explanatory cause. It is something I do every day, all day long. I live work and play in the
registered and fused experience of a world I create. Both the raw sensations and the explanations
of their cause are processed so quickly that they appear to represent reality. Neither of these
sensations is the real star we call Alpha Centauri, and today as I look around at the palm trees
and listen to the guests eating dinner behind me, I realize that everything I experience in front of
my nose, including that nose, is created inside a larger mechanism I now call my real ‘Self’.
If someone had told me when I was younger that I live in a world of my own creation, I would
have classified them as a lost nut case. Now I understand that someone espousing that
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Baer, W. NMN, Conscious Life Beyond Death (Part I)
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perspective believed their mental experiences to be foundational, while I believed the properties
of the material that I see in front of my nose is the ultimate explanation for everything, and
neither of us had the complete story. I cannot deny the feeling of creating the operational reality I
use to guide my life, neither can I deny the reality of the rock in the sand I can kick, because it
kicks back.[4] Both idealists and materialists are right and wrong. We create the operational world
we live in, and once we have found a world that works, we run our lives with it until that world
fails us. Secular science is the most successful theory we have, and the objective world it allows
us to build dominates our culture. However, it cannot account for the conscious living
experience, even in principle, and fails completely at the point of death.[2] Science vigorously
defends its failure by insisting that nothing can be experienced beyond the life of the body. It has
developed both a vocabulary in colloquial and mathematical languages that makes the expression
of any alternative to this nihilistic conclusion difficult if not impossible to communicate.
The topic we are about to embark on involves the construction of a scientifically verifiable
system that includes the subjective and objective aspect of our existence within a physically real
framework. The framework will be used to identify the location of subjective conscious
experiences at places beyond the living material body. To efficiently discuss this topic, we must
describe its ideas and concepts in the English language, with some notation adoption. As shown
in the previous seaside anecdote, the word ‘star’ when used in conventional conversation
collapses several meanings of nouns. This collapse hides the critical changes that implement the
conscious experience and the life in which it resides. We will not be able to clearly describe the
processes involved in our conscious existence unless we use terminology that separates the
functions that we use to build the reality in which we live.
To expand our terminology, I have defined a noun code (CAT-code in Appendix A1), which I
will use to identify the phases in the process that create the objects we see and feel in front of our
noses. In my experience on a balmy beach, I used the word ‘star’ to refer to the unidentified
external sensation display and the word ‘star’ to refer to our internally explanatory observable,
which are registered with each other to produce the explained observable objects we see every
day.
Examples
Description
You, I, Star, U
– First letter capitalized: references an event-in-itself, replaces Kant’s
thing itself, the name of action structures, the entity that exists. Such
words are operational symbols defined by their use not their referential
meaning.
you, i, star, u
– First letter lowercase: references a directly observable experience, the
entities that are experienced–sensations, thoughts, pains, etc. directly felt,
a qualia.
You, I, Star, U
– First letter capitalized and boldface: references the causes of directly
observable experiences. These are the working symbols that make up our
Model of Reality (MoR), i.e., the physical memory that explains one’s
observable experience.
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534
– First letter lowercase and boldface: references a vector of observable
experiences that visualize the semantic meaning of the physical memory
defined by You, I, Apple; names explanatory experiences projected onto
sensations.
.
In the main text we will use standard English interpretation, unless we place coded nouns in
singe quotations only when referring to Conscious Action Theory symbols. For example,
applying this CAT-code to pronouns separates ‘You’ – the real reader of this essay – from ‘you’
the 1st-person sensations of yourself, from ‘you’ the explanatory 3rd-person visualization of what
you believe you really are, from ‘You’ the physical model of yourself built into ‘You’ from
infancy. Thus, the three terms ‘you, you, and You’ refer to internal physical components in the
larger system that ‘You’ really are. You are a Kantian-unknowable to yourself because any
physical mechanism is what it is, and nothing can get outside itself to experience a god’s eye
view of itself.
The main hindrance to adopting an integrated self-regenerating subject-objective view of our
existence is the absence of a viable and practical scientific theory that includes both. What you
are about to read eliminates this difficulty and gives us the scientific basis for answering the
conscious life-after-bodily- death question.
1. Introduction to the Multiverse of Conscious Beings
Whether looking through one’s biological eye, a large optical telescope, or something as
sophisticated as a tunneling electron microscope, the first time we look, we see pure sensations:
colors, sounds, dots and streaks without any understanding of what they are. Whether we are a
baby or a Nobel Laureate, a learning process ensues that produces a theory involving a
continuous feed-forward loop that in turn produces predictions that when compared with pure
sensations generate an error signal. The number of iterations required to reduce the error to
“small enough” can be very large, but once established, the feed-forward process executes
automatically, and the meaning of the symbols is registered with the (now equivalent) pure and
predicted sensations to produce the actionable reality we see in front of our noses every day.
The model of reality we are introducing is somewhat analogous to a little man or woman in the
control room of a large machine that neither he nor she can get outside of. The reader must take
this “cannot get out” very seriously. It is of no use for you – the reader – to imagine seeing,
touching, or smelling the machine from the outside because you, dear reader, are one of the little
men or women who cannot get out of your own machine. What you can do, however, is build a
model of what you believe is outside based upon the information presented on your control-room
display screen. What you build might look something like a dynamic multi-team chess game that
executes automatically unless you intervene by modifying a move one of your colored pieces
makes. The difference between this version and the standard game is that capturing an
opponent’s piece does not eliminate the piece but absorbs it into one’s own team. The game
board is registered like a touch screen over the pure sensation layer to provide both an
explanation but also a control layer for you to direct your team.
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The applicability of this analogy to the life of a human being can be made clearer by referring to
the night sky experience of a primitive man without any instruments. As he looks up, he sees
light and streaks. He might first imagine gods and goddesses and project their images into the
firmament. His belief might be so strong that he pays for his funeral fire, which he believes will
carry his soul in the smoke to become a permanent star. The bigger the fire, the higher and
brighter the star. It makes perfect sense to take a few loved ones along. The “good enough” feedforward loop explanation began to crumple with the invention of the telescope. But the
processing architecture has not changed. Only the beliefs being processed have been modernized.
The pure sensations are still processed into an internal mental display, and their explanation is
still the registered meaning overlay of the symbols implemented in the remainder of your
machine.
With the continued invention of sensing equipment, the size and age of the universe we believe
we see has grown. But the experience is still physically presented on the display screen that still
happens inside our machine, and both what is really outside the machine and what the machine
really is are still as unknowable as they were millennia ago. Our belief is that raw sensations
simply happen, and our theoretical explanations are constantly being updated. The machine that
you and I are is more like an activity being executed than an object being seen from the outside.
An activity by this machine can be described as a physical flow action behaving like an
incompressible fluid that makes its own space and proceeds at its own rate. An isolated actionflow cycle in the ‘Nothing’ surrounding our machine is a self-regeneration activity that can only
be experienced by our machine if an interaction occurs. We are not simply objective bodies that
live between birth and death but rather we are these larger event cycles that execute an endless
existence activity within its own material and in its own space and time. The structure of this
event is governed by the dual desires to:
1) maximize material growth in forms; and
2) minimize internal stress and strain of unbalanced forces.
The cosmology of this theory is that of a multiverse of beings in the ‘Nothingness’ of beings that
may or may not be interacting with each other. Some of these beings are so convinced that their
reality belief is reality itself; they are living in a universe that we know now is of their own
making, but they do not know it. Therefore, they falsely believe that their own and other people’s
bodies must live and die. The remainder of this essay will produce evidence that the multiverse
of ‘Conscious Beings’ forms the next revolutionary improvement in our knowledge of ‘Reality’.
It is the only scientifically testable theory that addresses the consciousness question with
something other than denial.
1.1 Development of Event-Oriented Physics
Whether conscious life after death is scientifically provable depends upon what science we
believe most closely describes the reality in which our bodies live and die. The foundations of
our mainstream Natural Science and in particular the Laws of Physics effectively limit
acceptable evidence for the survival of human consciousness to signals emanating from one’s
body. This version of science teaches that the world of objects we see in front of our noses is the
one and only true reality, and it will exist as a world of objects whether we are alive or not. If
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true, then this version of science rightly claims conscious life after death is impossible. One can
hardly expect to receive signals from a mechanism whose signal-production capacity has, by
definition, been irreversibly destroyed.
However, our mainstream science is only a partial and incomplete description of what is actually
happening. How the undeniable existence of the conscious experience can emerge from material
that is subject to the current physical laws of science has never been explained and is logically
impossible[1]. Thus, developing a more complete science that includes the subjective experience
and accurately describes the bigger life-and-death picture is a prerequisite before we can answer
the consciousness-after-death question. In search of such completeness, the foundations of
Natural Science have been examined to determine where the Laws of Physics are deficient and
thereby impose limits on human knowledge that prevent us from understanding the larger reality
in which we are embedded. Such investigations have led to the development of a line of
theoretical physics starting with Schrödinger, Madelung, DeBroglie, Bohm, Everett, Penrose,
Stapp, Vitiello, Rovelli, Tegmark, and most recently, the works called Conscious Action Theory
(CAT) by the author of this essay.[2]
Classic Reality is
an objective space
with objects
Quantum Reality
is a probability of
seeing objects
Measure
Explain
ψ
ψ
Event Reality is a selfcontained process that
experiences
objects
Measuring
tion
R
Explaining
time
space
Fig. 1.1 Paradigm shift from objective, quantum, and cyclic event
reality (Ref. CAT Fig-1.1-3).
Figure 1 summarizes this development by depicting a series of icons that are cartoon versions of
more detailed visualizations of the meaning the symbols that model ‘Reality’ in each of the
scientific theories considered in this essay. The objective world view on the left treats ‘Reality’
as an a priori empty space and time containing objects that move each other by forces. By
including the man holding an apple on the Earth we include an icon of one’s own material body,
which according to the classic version of science, eats material from the rest of the universe and
grows, lives, and dies, thereby returning its material back to the rest of the universe.
That this dust-to-dust scenario is either wrong or at best incomplete has been proven by the
success of quantum theory. This theory introduces the important distinction between what one
believes ‘Reality’ to be and what one perceives it to be. In the quantum version of science, what
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we perceive is the directly seen in measurement reports, and what is believed is a probability
amplitude of getting a specific result from a measurement operation on what quantum physicists
believe is a sort of wave-based ‘Reality’. If the human sensory apparatus is treated as the
measurement instrument, then any report is displayed as the multimedia display we experience
every day. The logical conclusion that the quantum wave, identified as “pilot waves” by De
Broglie and Bohm, represents an individual’s thoughts was unfortunately rejected by the
mainstream science community because it is holding onto the wrong assumptions. As
D’Espagnat wrote in Scientific America[3]:
The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of
human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts
established by experiment.
Eliminating this doctrine and accepting the probabilistic wave picture of quantum theory leads to
the explanatory-measurement event of Conscious Action Theory (CAT). This theory represented
by the right panel in the figure above does the following:
1) It expands the quantum concept of reality with an icon representing a snapshot of our
material body and the Universe as it might exist in a Now instant in the lower phase
of a self-regenerating activity and,
2) It replaces what was objective reality with an icon that represents what it consciously
feels like to be that material in its symmetric mental upper phase.
The small upper icon, which we have identified as the 1st-person perspective, shows an apple, an
arm holding it, and the nose of the observer in his/her optical field of view superimposed over
the phenomenological dark space surrounding us when we close our eyes[4]. Event reality is not
represented by any particular icon shown in Figure 1. Rather, reality is the entire content in each
panel. For our purposes, what we really are is an action flow through our own time that closes on
itself and thereby exists forever. A fusion of the measured result shown in the upper icon and its
explanation in the lower icon, which we have identified as the 3rd-person perspective, provides a
permanent self-updating conscious experience. These icons are cross sections of the action flow.
The drawings of the man holding an apple are first, his phenomenological view of himself and
second, his explanation of what he actually is. Views and explanations of reality are realities in
themselves but not equal to the realities they are portraying. In other words, nothing shown in the
action cycle depicting the event reality shown in Figure 1.1 has the properties of what the secular
population would identify as our material body.
In order to show what our material body actually is and how it relates to the cyclic action flow
shown here as the core activity of a conscious being, we will first present a more detailed
description of a conscious being.
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1.2. The Action-Flow Diagram of a Conscious Being
The diagram of a simple action network from a Reader’s perspective, looking down on the
Model of an interacting Conscious Being[1], is shown in Figure 1.1 as a simple action-flow cycle.
Here the 1st- and 3rd-person perspectives, representing what a human might experience in its here
and now, are connected by action flows labeled ‘Measuring’ and ‘eXplaining’. Important
features of a system that grows living beings have been deliberately hidden. Under the 3rd-person
perspective lies the ‘Model of Reality’ (MoR) this being has built to explain and control the raw
sensations that are experienced.
The 1st-person perspective shows a merging of external and internal sensations whose
independent production must be explained in detail. Lastly, the entire model is held together in a
black background signifying nothing. An artist’s drawing of such an expanded model of a
conscious being is shown in Figure 1.2. This division exposes the Model of Reality and three
overlaid spatial cross sections of sensations observable in the 1st-person’s here and now.
The action types flowing through these spaces – labeled ‘ax ’, ‘a’ or ‘ai’, and ‘a’ throughout this
essay – are graphically placed top to bottom in the action flows implementing a conscious
observer in Figure 1.2a. The internal ‘ai’ and external ‘ax’ flows interact with each other to
generate their difference. This encodes the model-of-reality updates signal back into the Model
or Reality update branch as well as adds commands as desired into the external actuator branch.
When these two perspectives differ by small enough amounts of energy flowing through every
space point in the ‘ax’ and ‘ai’ observable cross sections, the conscious being feels the comfort of
feeling its MoR is accurate enough to be trusted. Above Figure 1.2b on the top bar, the merging
of interaction between the two action flows produces a merged experience of an everyday
human,.
We now recognize this icon as a merging of qualia color blobs and the outline of objects
imposed by the pattern recognition of our objective theory of reality. In other words, the
explanatory 3rd-person perspective of the man standing on the earth holding an apple is an
accurate enough representation of reality to act as the conscious being’s actionable reality, a kind
of generalized keyboard.
Also shown in Figure 1.2a are classic physics symbols that operate in the conscious system’s
Model of Reality. The mathematical physics of a conscious system is presented in Appendix A1.
Here we only show the top level parameters. The momentum (P) and quantity vectors (Q) of
classic physics are transformed into the next Time (T’) and quantity (Q’) values by the time
function (Z). The action flow can also be experienced by the 1st-person perspective parameters
Energy (E) and Time (T) shown on the output side of the MoR. The energy field at a time point
‘T’, location ‘Q’, are the correlates of consciousness in that they determine what an individual
thinks he sees. NOTE: dQ/dT =Vc the velocity of consciousness. Figure 1.2a correctly
summarizes the actual activity executed by a living conscious being who is aware of his reality
projection and understands that his MoR is an evolutionary work in progress that in its current
objective formulation seems to function quite well. The parameters introduced in this paragraph
are fundamental and pertain to all scales.
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=
ax
ai
ai + ax = 2 • a
Sensor
Processing__
_
a
Mental
Action
Physical
Action
E
MoR
P
P’
Q' = Z Q
T
Fig. 1.2 Symbolic god’s eye view of the basic model of an interacting and an isolated
Conscious Being. Note, the display ‘a-type’ meaning symbols are a trusted actionable
display. This allows a self-stimulating action loop that never ends.
In the body of the text, we are examining the situation centered on the human scale. The entire
color medium rotates through the cross sections or function boxes. Action is the material of
change, and in the text, we will use incompressible fluids as an analogy for visualizing action
flows. Consider the circular water rides in parks that carry one around a circuit of the park. You
float along with the current, laughing with your friends. Pretty soon you float into a tunnel. A
single light accompanies your group as you move along. You lose reference, and your group,
possibly others nearby, and including the water itself, form our stationary here and now. The
tunnel opens up. You realize the channel curves back on itself, closing a flow cycle of change.
You float through the tunnel, around in your here-and-now bubble, and pass the open section in
which you are reminded of the bigger world, before you pass through the tunnel again.
Being curious, you leave your friends behind and decide to find the control room where a bored
park operations monitor happily answers your questions about the design of the park. He even
gives you a diagram of the water-flow mechanism. Not surprisingly, it looks a lot like Figure
1.2a. Like a clock pointer stationary against a rotating clock face, the here and now in which
your friends are enjoying themselves remains stationary at 12 o’clock in the park’s version of
Figure 1.2a. You remember thinking what it felt like to forget about the bigger world outside
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while you were riding along. Looking ahead at 9 o’clock from the unknowable input ‘
’ body
sensors, action flows in. You remember the warmth of new water coming in. Like action is
absorbed into the permanent momentum of the circulating water. If the water were action, it
would be processed to appear as blobs of meaningless warmth ‘ax’ type sensation in the
conscious being’s here and now. At this juncture the action flow is mixed with the internally
generated expected sensations and our friends quickly feel comfortable that the warm blobs of
sensations are actually warm water.
Stepping outside the metaphor, observables are implemented by action flowing in the mental
phase of the processing cycles. The inner red dotted line is the mental side of the charge whose
cross section is primarily responsible for displaying predictions. This, along with the external
sensor processing path, is now brought inside the periwinkle action volume. The chance of ‘You’
being the man with the red apple is minuscule. To be pertinent, you need to find and register a
pair of 3rd-and 1st-person sensations of the type encountered in your own everyday experience.
Once this has been accomplished, the interactions with objects of interest can be verified in
Reader’s here and now. When measurement and prediction coincide, there is a very good chance
that the theory behind the prediction is correct. As we become more complex we grow a more
comprehensive network, more proficient in its use, and the dependence of well-established truths
becomes obvious and expedient. In the extreme case, the conscious being is in such a deep
conviction of the truth expressed by its ‘a’-type sensations that it is no longer connected to the
outside world. Figure 1.2b represents a flow diagram of a conscious action model of a selfcontained action flow in nothing.
1.3 The Multiverse Cosmology of Conscious Systems
Figures 1.2a and 1.2b properly use the objective world view as a mechanism for understanding
and running a trusted MoR but leaves the question of ‘Reality’ unanswered. The unknowable
blackness is again unknowable and thereby freed from a priori objective reality assumptions.
This allows us to ask anew, “What could this Unknowable be?” To answer this question, we
must first recognize that our working MoR based upon classic terminology has been upgraded to
quantum theory during the last 100 years and therefore our objective world view no longer
correctly reflects what well proven quantum models would suggest.
Unfortunately, the ontological interpretation of quantum terminology is far from settled and no
clear picture of what Reality we are now dealing with has emerged.[1] That an action model of
conscious beings can provide a context for the quantum model, suggests that an explanatorymeasurement activity into which alternative Models of Reality can be inserted and operated is
more fundamental than any MoR it may contain. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suggest that
whatever is out there beyond our external sensors is not represented by any MoR we can come
up with, but rather is an interacting action structure that exists for the same reasons and is guided
by the same principles as ours.
The simplest example of what the Unknowable could be is a duplicate of what we think we are.
Figure1.3 shows two symmetric copies of two conscious systems imbedded in the Unknowable
nothing. They have been given the reality names ‘I’ for the conscious being modeled by this
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action flow and ‘U’ for the rest of Reality. Together ‘U’ and ‘I’ then make up the whole of
‘Reality’. Of course, it is ludicrous to think that both ‘I’ and ‘U’ would come to model reality
with the same 1st-person image, especially one that shows an exaggeratedly large man holding an
apple. But a man holding an apple is just a pedagogical example to show how interacting
conscious systems function. What is important to remember is that the MoR is designed to model
reality as a ‘Whole’ but built with material belonging to each part.
eXplain
I
Measure
tion
AII
AIU
AII
AUI
AUU
AUU
Measure
U
eXplain
Fig. 1.3 Action flow of Reality with
two parts explicitly shown
In the past, theories of physics modeled a single objective universe. Since there was only one real
reality, all legitimate physical theories should describe one and the same thing. The requirement
that all theories should have the same form when formulated by two observers is called the
principle of covariance. It is much like asking two people to draw a picture of an object as it is,
not as it is seen. Then also asking both parties to draw what one of them perceives from their
point of view. We would end up with two separate drawings on two separate pieces of paper
filled with two separate patterns of ink. If both parties have an accurate concept of the object in
question and the person looking at it, then they should get the same drawing on two pieces of
paper.
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This is what we have drawn in Figure 1.3.[2] The object in question is reality as a ‘Whole’, which
includes ‘U’ and ‘I’. If their theory of the ‘Whole’ is correct, they will have the same model
mechanisms in both their MoRs, and the same 1st-person experience will be calculated for ‘I’ by
both parties. The difference between Conscious Action Theory and our old classic objective
concept is that here we are looking at a reality whose independent parts are events not objects.
Objects are created within each part as interpretations of sensory stimulation.
The action sent out by ‘U’ is labeled ‘AUI’ and if ‘I’s’ model is accurate, it will generate an exact
prediction of the 1st-person observable so ‘ax’ equals ‘ai’ and ‘I’s’ output signal will be equal to
the action flow ‘AIU’ from ‘U’ to ‘I’. If ‘U’s’ model is also accurate, it will predict its 1st-person
observable, and both systems will conclude they know what the Unknowable is and act on that
knowledge. By first defining ‘I’ and then ‘U’ as whatever is not ‘I’, we have logically defined
the ‘Whole’ of ‘Reality’ as ‘U’ plus ‘I’. This means that Figure 1.3 depicts the ‘Whole’. We
simply drew a more detailed breakout of the action flow in the ‘Whole’ in order to apply CAT to
the problem at hand.
U
AYU
AUI
AYI
AIU
AUY
Y
Fig. 1.4 Three part ‘Whole’ of our observable
Universe, here separated by Nothing. Most
contemporary physicists assume that if they
cannot interact with events they do not exist.
However, if we expand definition of ‘U’ as
the context-dependent ‘Rest of Reality’ or the
‘Rest of the Universe’, whichever fits one’s
world view, then it is the failure to
acknowledge the inner subjective aspect of
the material from which we are built that has
limited our current science
AIY
The problem at hand is the question of conscious life beyond death. An action labeled ‘AIU’ in
the form of this essay is sending a message to ‘You’. The message claims that ‘You’ and ‘I’ are
self-contained cycles of change that can be modeled by an action stream that flows through our
individual here and now. Your personal experience right now is explained in the objective model
by the fact that your body is on the Earth reading this essay. In the CAT-model, ‘You’ along with
all your interactions have been identified within the rest of the Unknowable to show a three-part
reality in Figure 1.4.
This means ‘We’ are connected by a half-duplex communication channel. For some time now I
have been building a model of ‘You’ in my memories, and it makes sense that ‘You’ have built
one of me, so on your end as well, but only in this instance, do the two become aware of each
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other and, at least in principle, could connect. For however long it lasts, the each of our
memories are being updated for the purpose of exchanging actions between our own structures in
forms that minimize our own stress and strain.
Describing what is happening this instant from physical first principles starts with Figure 1.4
interactions: AIU) ‘I’ sends essay to ‘U’, AUY) essay sent to ‘You’, AYU) evaluation returned to
‘U’, AUI) result of contest returned to ‘I’. We are now in a state of updated memories with no
direct interaction but a rather large infusion of inferred information that is stored in each of our
internal action rings.
Can those action rings interact with each other? What if you found them truthful and more
practical than what you now believe? Then would You adopt this cosmology? For me there are
limits. I cannot believe that when You read these words in your here and now, and I read these
words in my here and now, a transfer of meaning by some direct book-to-book communication
ray of knowledge is happening. No, the direct communication between some book in my world
and a similar one in yours is not possible. There are more ways to communicate – perhaps more
like a lens transforms a signal. or like a resonant antenna pulls in ideas from noise.
Fig. 1.5 Three-part interacting I, Y, and
the rest of the Universe as a cluster of
observable interacting systems placed in a
multiverse of unobservable events
It is because we have an innate desire to grow in comfortable forms that we bother to maintain
our interaction links in the first place. However, a three-part ‘Whole’ is too simplistic for all but
the most intimate interactions between individuals. For further practical applications, the
interaction diagrams or, alternatively, the details of the interaction matrix must be expanded.
Without showing interaction details among ourselves and all the relationships that might have
grown and faded in our lifetimes, Figure 1.5 shows a background of action cycles. All of these
action forms can be separated from the ‘U’ thus distributing the interactions in a network of
interconnections. These permeate through the Nothing like a spidery tapestry of fibers that flow
themselves through invisible channels. The instant snapshot shown here begins to move as the
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‘We’ turn around on our individual axes. The connecting interactions, like drive belts on a
cosmic engine, keep the entire configuration of parts in synchronization so that each of souls
continue to experience their lifetimes. We are not objects with a single material body but selfregenerating activities that evolve models of themselves and their environment. The internal
activity that maintains each part, may or may not find any one interacting appendage too costly
to hold. The interaction stops, and a part will disappear in isolation.
That concludes our introduction to the Multiverse of Conscious Beings. By now you should
understand that flow diagrams can formulate detailed physical models in which human conscious
experiences are produced. Further details of the machinery of a conscious being is provided in
the Appendices. Appendix A1 provides a detailed map of functions that are carried out by a
typical conscious being in order to be conscious. The further appendices provide connections
between action-diagram features and standard quantum and classic physics. Returning to the
problem at hand, we focus on the basic two states in which such systems can exist. They are
either interacting or they are isolated.
(Continued in Part II)
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Research Essay
Why AI Will Never Surpass Human Intelligence
Bradley Y. Bartholomew*
Abstract
A paper entitled ―The unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning in artificial intelligence‖
argues that the way forward towards achieving general AI, that is to say a human level
intelligence, is to copy how an organic brain does if for humans. The paper argues that AI has to
move from a very limited 2D-space which is referred to as Flatland to a tera-dimensional space
that represents the million billion synapses between the neurons in the cortex of the human brain.
It is pointed out that the move from 2-D AI to tera-dimensional AI is actually a move in the
wrong direction if they ever hope to achieve general AI. The fact is that although there are a
million billion synapses between the neurons in the cortex, human consciousness is one
dimensional or holistic. In order to achieve general AI the machine will have to do everything a
human can do where there are no gaps or seams in the output. A model of the human brain is
offered where different sections of the cortex are specialized for different functions and these
disparate regions communicate with each other electronically at the speed of light via brainwaves
and this is how the brain generates a global holistic 1-dimensional consciousness in us. Also as
numbers don‘t exist in Nature an organic brain, unlike deep learning, generates intelligent output
without the aid of numerical programs or statistics.
Keywords: Deep learning, AI, statistics, neural networks, mathematics, Singularity,
transhumanism.
This paper is a reply to a recent paper entitled ―The unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning
in artificial intelligence‖ which recalls the celebrated paper by Eugene Wigner ―The
unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences‖. 1,2 The author says:
In his essay ―The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the
Natural Sciences,‖ Eugene Wigner marveled that the mathematical
structure of a physical theory often reveals deep insights into that theory
that lead to empirical predictions. Also remarkable is that there are so few
parameters in the equations, called physical constants. The title of this
article mirrors Wigner‘s. However, unlike the laws of physics, there is an
abundance of parameters in deep learning networks and they are variable.
We are just beginning to explore representation and optimization in veryhigh-dimensional spaces
*
Correspondence: Bradley Y. Bartholomew, Independent Researcher, France. Email: brad.bartholomew2@gmail.com
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The remarkable thing is that although the title to the paper under reply mirrors Eugene Wigner‘s
paper, the theme or tone of the two papers are strikingly different. Whereas Wigner was
marveling at how effective mathematics has been to describe physical processes and predict
physical outcomes, in this paper the author seems to be arguing that deep learning in artificial
intelligence systems has hit some sort of ceiling in the pursuit of making a machine that can
match human intelligence. His argument is that further advancement towards general artificial
intelligence can only be achieved by studying and mimicking actual brain processes. If AI is ever
to become truly conscious and have a general intelligence to equal or surpass humans then it will
have to mimic the way the brain generates consciousness and intelligence in us.
On its face this of course is an eminently reasonable and valid argument, but it has a hidden
irony much like the ‗hidden‘ layers in the deep learning networks themselves, that deep learning
and AI in general relies heavily, one might say almost exclusively, on statistical mathematics in
order to generate output, whether this be recognizing a physical object in an image, or a word or
a sound, or answering any question that may be put to it. Essentially it makes five guesses and
gives you an answer that is ‗probably‘ the best answer. If that output happens to be wrong then
the ‗hidden layers‘ in the system will update the statistical analysis accordingly, and the next
time around it will be less likely to make that mistake. This is where the ‗deep learning‘ comes
in. The statistical analysis of the data is gradually improving with every iteration of the system.
This has proved to be remarkably effective in certain limited areas that involve human
intelligence, which gets us back to this word ‗unreasonable‘ in the title of Eugene Wigner‘s
article. Essentially we have to consider the true relationship between human mathematics and
natural processes.
AI and the Age of Spiritual Machines
The ideas that led to the first programmable computers came out of mathematicians‘ attempts to
understand human thought—particularly logic—as a mechanical process of ―symbol
manipulation.‖ Digital computers are essentially symbol manipulators, pushing around
combinations of the symbols 0 and 1. To pioneers of computing like Alan Turing and John von
Neumann, there were strong analogies between computers and the human brain, and it seemed
obvious to them that human intelligence could be replicated in computer programs. 3
This notion that computers and human intelligence are in some way related or involve the same
operations has permeated the information technology community ever since its inception and has
led to the wildest and most extravagant, dare one say absurd, claims by leading lights in the tech
industry as to what computers will ultimately be capable of. Notwithstanding that computer
output is to a 2D screen it has been seriously predicted that eventually computers will be
simulating whole universes, will be bringing cryonically suspended cadavers (and severed heads)
back to life whereupon they will live forever as cyborgs, terminally sick and aged people will
have eternal life by having their brain uploaded with their personal consciousness of self
remaining intact, machines will not only surpass human intelligence in specific domains and
generally, but will have humanlike consciousness, aspirations and emotions. Picture if you will
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an evil paperclip machine that ‗decides‘ to turn the whole universe into paperclips, or a pious
machine who stops into a church to pray.
The hype for AI has become a religion known as transhumanism. Notwithstanding the fact that
these machines have no mental life apart from crunching numbers, they will look upon us as
lesser beings. They will be ‗conscious‘ of being superior to us, just as we are conscious of being
superior to an intelligent animal such as a dog. God is not dead; in the religion of
Transhumanism, god is a Machine.
What is mathematics
All this hype that has turned AI into a religion is largely due to the fact that the speed of
computers for many years now has been increasing exponentially, as has memory storage
capacity. For the AI community the fact that computers can process exponentially growing data
at exponentially increasing speeds means that computers are becoming exponentially more
intelligent. Surely this is consistent with the initial inspiration of Turing and other
mathematicians that because computational ‗symbol manipulation‘ is exponentially improving
then the computer‘s ability to ‗replicate‘ human thought is exponentially increasing as well.
The sticking point is this word ‗replicate‘. Can machines crunching numbers replicate or
simulate living conscious human beings in such a way that they will actually surpass the human
beings intellectually, creatively and spiritually. Can enhanced number crunching create beings
with a ‗higher‘ consciousness? This certainly resonates with the enigmatic assertion of
Pythagoras that ―all things are number‖ which surely embraces our soul, our intellect, our
psyche, our mind and our consciousness. A subtitle to this paper could be: Solving the ‗hard
problem‘: Consciousness is a numerical phenomenon.
The only problem with all this euphoria surrounding numbers which has evidently been going on
for two and half millennia is that numbers don‘t actually exist in Nature. In earlier papers I
quoted the philosopher Oswald Spengler who to my mind stated this fact most emphatically. 4 He
also points out that the crown jewel of mathematics in the physical sciences, differential calculus
introduced independently by Leibniz and Newton, is mere statistics. As Spengler points out even
the fundamental premise in Physics that space consists of three dimensions, the xyz axes in
Cartesian coordinates, is a mathematical fiction.
We feel — and the feeling is what constitutes the state of all-round awareness in
us — that we are in an extension that encircles us; and it is only necessary to
follow out this original impression that we have of the worldly to see that in
reality there is only one true "dimension " of space, which is direction from one's
self outwards into the distance, the "there" and the future, and that the abstract
system of three dimensions is a mechanical representation and not a fact of life. 4
It is not necessary to name any particular mathematical functions as an example of something
that cannot exist in Nature. The fact is mathematics is about the properties of idealized concepts
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such as numbers, right angle triangles and circles that don‘t actually exist in Nature. If you take
all these idealized concepts out of mathematics then there is nothing left. All of the mathematics
in the physical sciences is a fiction invented by humans which enables them to observe, explain
and predict natural processes on a statistical basis. Take the march of time for example.
Mathematicians count the passage of time in seconds, minutes etc and put a t for time into their
equations but obviously that is not what is actually occurring in Nature. The much touted Laws
of Physics are merely descriptive; not dynamic. So deep learning in AI is not being intelligent in
its own right, it is not even artificial intelligence, it is merely statistical manipulation of symbols
that simulates processes in a human brain.
The unreasonable effectiveness of AI
The paper under reply presents a very reasonable and balanced argument as to what AI has to do
to move to the next level. The author is essentially saying that AI has already achieved
astounding successes but the way forward is to go back and study how the brain actually does it.
In fact the astounding successes the author is referring to are still examples of what is called
―narrow‖ or ―weak‖ AI. The terms narrow and weak are used to contrast with strong, humanlevel, general, or full-blown AI (sometimes called AGI, or artificial general intelligence)—that
is, the AI that we see in movies, that can do most everything we humans can do, and possibly
much more. General AI might have been the original goal of the field, but achieving it has turned
out to be much harder than expected. 3
Ever since its inception the development of AI has seen several seen several cycles where further
advancement seemed bleak. These are the AI winters. And then a new idea pops up, or in the
case of deep learning an old idea that was dead and buried comes to life again, and there is an AI
spring. Like every AI spring before it, our current one features experts predicting that ―general
AI‖—AI that equals or surpasses humans in most ways—will be here soon. ―Human level AI
will be passed in the mid-2020s,‖ predicted Shane Legg, cofounder of Google DeepMind, in
2016. A year earlier, Facebook‘s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, declared, ―One of our goals for the
next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human
senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.‖ The AI philosophers Vincent Müller and
Nick Bostrom published a 2013 poll of AI researchers in which many assigned a 50 percent
chance of human-level AI by the year 2040. Much of this optimism is based on the recent
successes of deep learning programs.3
Interestingly the high priest of the Transhumanism religion, Ray Kurzweil, who wrote the
Transhumanism bible ―The Age of Spiritual Machines‖ made the following prediction in 2002:
―A careful analysis of the requisite trends shows that we will understand the principles of
operation of the human brain and be in a position to recreate its powers in synthetic substances
well within thirty years.‖ Kurzweil is vague on how all this will happen but assures us that to
achieve human-level AI, ―we will not program human intelligence link by link as in some
massive expert system. Rather, we will set up an intricate hierarchy of self-organizing systems,
based largely on the reverse engineering of the human brain, and then provide for its
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education … hundreds if not thousands of times faster than the comparable process for humans.‖
Reverse engineering the brain means understanding enough about its workings in order to
duplicate it, or at least to use the brain‘s underlying principles to replicate its intelligence in a
computer.3
The paper under reply commences with the following statement:
In 1884, Edwin Abbott wrote Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. This
book was written as a satire on Victorian society, but it has endured because of its
exploration of how dimensionality can change our intuitions about space. Flatland
was a 2-dimensional (2D) world inhabited by geometrical creatures. The
mathematics of 2 dimensions was fully understood by these creatures, with circles
being more perfect than triangles. In it a gentleman square has a dream about a
sphere and wakes up to the possibility that his universe might be much larger than
he or anyone in Flatland could imagine. He was not able to convince anyone that
this was possible and in the end he was imprisoned. We can easily imagine adding
another spatial dimension when going from a 1-dimensional to a 2D world and
from a 2D to a 3-dimensional (3D) world. Lines can intersect themselves in 2
dimensions and sheets can fold back onto themselves in 3 dimensions, but
imagining how a 3D object can fold back on itself in a 4-dimensional space is a
stretch that was achieved by Charles Howard Hinton in the 19th century. What are
the properties of spaces having even higher dimensions? What is it like to live in a
space with 100 dimensions, or a million dimensions, or a space like our brain that
has a million billion dimensions (the number of synapses between neurons)?
The author doesn‘t enlighten us as to why he thinks the solution for the advancement of AI is to
increase the number of dimensions that AI is capable of processing. It is an interesting analogy
between AI and Flatland because the output of AI is in fact 2-dimensional. The output invariably
appears on a 2-D computer screen. So AI literally does exist in a 2-D space that could be aptly
named Flatland. The author then suggests that in order to upgrade from narrow AI to general AI
it will have to ‗learn‘ to do processing in a space that has a million billion dimensions (the
number of synapses between neurons). The author makes this suggestion in the form of a
question where he doesn‘t actually know the answer which can be found by simply ‗reverse
engineering‘ his question. Instead of increasing the number of dimensions in the AI space, the
secret is to decrease the number of dimensions to a 1-D space. The output of a human brain is not
2-dimensional or 3-dimensional or tera-dimensional. As Oswald Spengler observes above, our
consciousness is one dimensional, that is to say it is holistic. The issue is how does a million
billion neurons combine to generate in us a perfectly unified and seamless consciousness.
This question has been around for a long time. Erwin Schrödinger alluded to ―The Arithmetical
Paradox: The Oneness of Mind‖ in a series of lectures on Mind and Matter at Cambridge
University in 1956. Schrödinger ponders the question why every living cell in an organism (say a
human being) contains a complete copy of the DNA for that organism. He quotes Sir Charles
Sherrington:
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The cell as a component of the body is not only a visibly demarcated unit but a
unit-life centered on itself. It leads its own life … The cell is a unit-life, and our
life which in its turn is a unitary life consists utterly of the cell-lives.
This paradox is particularly striking in relation to the brain, where the cortex is made up of a
sheet of trillions of individual cells, each containing a complete copy of the human DNA in the
nucleus, so each cell appears to be an autonomous unit; yet somehow this ―commonwealth of
cells‖ produces in us the impression of having a unified mind. ―Matter and energy seem granular
in structure, and so does ‗life‘, but not so mind.‖ Here we have one mind based ostensibly on
many cell-lives; the only explanation Schrödinger could offer is that there must be a ―sub-mind‖
associated with the individual cells that enables them to act perfectly in concert to produce a
unified effect. He immediately dismisses this notion of a sub-mind in every living cell as an
―absurd monstrosity.‖ However, it is for every living cell, not just those of the brain, that this
paradox arises. All living creatures consist of individual autonomous cells, whether one or
millions or trillions, which act in concert to produce a unified effect. 5
This is the essential problem for the AI community if they ever want to ‗supersize‘ from narrow
to general AI. The intelligence or consciousness that they generate has to be 1-dimensional. The
irony of course being in order to ‗supersize‘ they will have to decrease the number of dimensions
of the AI generated space, not increase them. The author seems to suggest that with the
‗unreasonable effectiveness‘ of mathematics they should be able to increase the number of
dimensions of the AI space to an infinitely large number, and that is probably the case. 3-D
printing is an example of moving from 2-D Flatland to 3-D at least. The problem is the more
dimensions they introduce mathematically into the AI space the further away they are actually
becoming to achieve general AI.
It‘s probably bad form to introduce anything so frivolous into an academic discussion about
consciousness, but I would like to refer you to a video on YouTube that has the world champion
Boogie-Woogie dancers for the years 1991-2011.6 Consider, if you will, what the brain is
actually doing to generate a 1-dimensional and seamless consciousness in these dancers of
dancing the boogie-woogie. In addition to heightened general input-output for their autonomic
nervous system, their brain is simultaneously merging streaming input from all five of their
senses, and merging that with the parts of their brain responsible for proprioception, balance,
body schema, intelligence, emotion, language, memory and musical appreciation and producing
a unified consciousness on the cortex of their brain as well as simultaneously sending
instructions via motor regions to literally every muscle in their body. Their 1-dimensional
consciousness of dancing the boogie-woogie is simultaneously infinitely dimensional. And it is
for this reason I contend that AI will never achieve general AI, let alone actually surpass human
intelligence. There will be those who might deny that a champion boogie-woogie dancer is
displaying intelligence. To them I say that the essential talent of a good dancer is their ability to
‗interpret‘ the music.
These are world champion boogie-woogie dancers which of course AI will never ever come
close to matching let alone surpass, for if it were to do so, deep learning would display
‗unreasonable effectiveness‘ indeed. The examples of ‗unreasonable effectiveness‘ of deep
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learning that the author speaks of are considerably more modest although they do indeed involve
beating human champions at their particular game of expertise. AI has beaten a world champion
chess player at the game of chess, a world champion Go player at the game of Go, and there are
several other specific games that AI can play at somewhere near human levels of skill. These are
all classic examples of narrow AI. There is an AI that can play a specific game, and none other.
The other area where narrow AI has been ‗unreasonably effective‘ is in the area of language
recognition. The author says:
Natural language applications often start not with symbols but with word
embeddings in deep learning networks trained to predict the next word in a
sentence, which are semantically deep and represent relationships between words
as well as associations. Once regarded as ―just statistics,‖ deep recurrent networks
are high-dimensional dynamical systems through which information flows much
as electrical activity flows through brains.
One might question whether statistically predicting what word is most likely to follow a
particular word in a sentence actually represents a flow of ‗information‘ where any
‗intelligence‘ is involved, but it is true that narrow AI has achieved somewhere near 90%
effectiveness in transcribing spoken language into text. If the spoken language is a question
where a human is seeking ‗information‘ then this request is submitted to a massive database that
virtually encompasses the ‗information highway‘ – the internet. In this way AI has managed to
achieve a summit in narrow AI – it was able to beat a champion at the popular television game
of Jeopardy. Here I must take issue with the author. The effectiveness of AI at playing the game
of Jeopardy is not ‗unreasonable‘ considering that the AI had in its database all the questions
that have ever been asked in the game, and in fact the text of the question was submitted to the
AI although it was made to appear as if the AI was recognizing the spoken question. Also the
fact that the AI was simply quicker than the human at pressing the buzzer would have given the
AI a ‗superhuman‘ ability but I doubt if that really counts as ‗intelligence‘. Having said that,
any output of an AI or an organic brain may be called ‗intelligence‘ in the widest sense of the
word.
Deep learning vs neural networks
The paper under reply sets out what AI needs to learn from the neural networks in the brain in
order to achieve general AI. You will see that he is stating the problem correctly if AI is ever to
match the brain, however he doesn‘t seem to realize the enormity of the problem. Imagine if they
were to develop narrow AI for every single human skill, talent, emotion, creative activity, area of
knowledge and expertise and then have that network of narrow AI modules simultaneously
communicate with each other to create in the machine a holistic intellectual consciousness.
(Bearing in mind that for each of those broad categories of human endeavor there will be
hundreds of specific processes that the narrow AI would have to individually master; for instance
a human can learn to play hundreds of different games within the ‗skills‘ category). In order to
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have general AI they would first have to have narrow AI at advanced level for everything that a
human can do, and then have those thousands of modules of narrow AI instantaneously
communicate with each other to produce a seamless holistic output. This is what our brain does
and the author clearly recognizes this, but what he doesn‘t seem to recognize is that such a deep
learning neural network would be so ‗unreasonably effective‘ as to be impossible. He writes:
Features of neurons are likely to be important for their computational function,
some of which have not yet been exploited in model networks. These features
include a diversity of cell types, optimized for specific functions; short-term
synaptic plasticity, which can be either facilitating or depressing on a time scales
of seconds; a cascade of biochemical reactions underlying plasticity inside
synapses controlled by the history of inputs that extends from seconds to hours;
sleep states during which a brain goes offline to restructure itself; and
communication networks that control traffic between brain areas. Synergies
between brains and AI may now be possible that could benefit both biology and
engineering. The neocortex appeared in mammals 200 million years ago. It is a
folded sheet of neurons on the outer surface of the brain, called the gray matter,
which in humans is about 30 cm in diameter and 5 mm thick when flattened.
There are about 30 billion cortical neurons forming 6 layers that are highly
interconnected with each other in a local stereotyped pattern. The cortex greatly
expanded in size relative the central core of the brain during evolution, especially
in humans, where it constitutes 80% of the brain volume. This expansion suggests
that the cortical architecture is scalable— more is better—unlike most brain areas,
which have not expanded relative to body size. Interestingly, there are many
fewer long-range connections than local connections, which form the white matter
of the cortex, but its volume scales as the 5/4power of the gray matter volume and
becomes larger than the volume of the gray matter in large brains. Scaling laws
for brain structures can provide insights into important computational principles.
Cortical architecture including cell types and their connectivity is similar
throughout the cortex, with specialized regions for different cognitive systems.
For example, the visual cortex has evolved specialized circuits for vision, which
have been exploited in convolutional neural networks, the most successful deep
learning architecture. Having evolved a general purpose learning architecture, the
neocortex greatly enhances the performance of many special-purpose subcortical
structures. Brains have 11 orders of magnitude of spatially structured computing
components. At the level of synapses, each cubic millimeter of the cerebral
cortex, about the size of a rice grain, contains a billion synapses. The largest deep
learning networks today are reaching a billion weights. The cortex has the
equivalent power of hundreds of thousands of deep learning networks, each
specialized for solving specific problems. How are all these expert networks
organized? The levels of investigation above the network level organize the flow
of information between different cortical areas, a system-level communications
problem. There is much to be learned about how to organize thousands of
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specialized networks by studying how the global flow of information in the cortex
is managed. Long-range connections within the cortex are sparse because they are
expensive, both because of the energy demand needed to send information over a
long distance and also because they occupy a large volume of space. A switching
network routes information between sensory and motor areas that can be rapidly
reconfigured to meet on going cognitive demands.
As it happens there is a model of the brain that does indeed purport to supply all the information
the author is seeking which will enable him to build his general AI. It is the model of the brain as
an electronic device.7,8 According to this model consciousness is generated by electronics, and
the brains of all living creatures are connected electronic devices. It has now been found that the
action potentials of the neurons specifically in the cortex of the brain are not an ‗all-or-nothing‘
event as was previously thought, but in fact they generate a waveform that is capable of
communicating information to other neurons in the cortex via brainwaves (ELF radio waves).
That is to say that neurons in disparate parts of the cortex that are ‗hard wired‘ to perform
specific functions are able to communicate with each other at the speed of light. This means that
input from an infinite number of terminals in the brain and body (including the senses) are able
to merge into a single holistic experience of consciousness at the level of the cortex at the speed
of light. In neuroscience this is referred to as the ‗binding problem‘ and this is exactly what the
author refers to in the passage above. ―The cortex has the equivalent power of hundreds of
thousands of deep learning networks, each specialized for solving specific problems. How are all
these expert networks organized?‖
Conclusion
The author has written a paper arguing that if AI is to ever achieve general AI they must pay
more attention to the way the brain does it. While his argument is perfectly sound, unfortunately
it demonstrates at the same time the impossibility of this goal of general AI that the AI
community has set itself. Essentially they will have to develop hundreds of thousands of narrow
AI modules and have them all communicate with each other at the speed of light in order to
simulate a global or holistic consciousness; no perceptible gaps or seams anywhere. But although
it has demonstrated the impossibility of ever achieving general AI, his article has at least given
the AI community a roadmap for the next five millennia at least. It‘s conceivable in the very
distant future that conventional computing will take place at the speed of light, and so it‘s
conceivable in the very far distant future that there will be something very closely approximating
human intelligence. The only thing that will remain impossible is for general AI to surpass
human intelligence. That would involve a programming that did not involve numbers, and an AI
where ‗intelligent‘ decisions are made that didn‘t involve mathematics and statistics. That will
only occur when and if humans can actually create living human beings by means other than
natural procreation. But the intelligence of these creatures would no longer be ‗artificial‘. Behold
the ‗singularity‘.
Received March 12, 2020; Accepted March 28, 2020
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References
1
Sejnowski, T.J. ―The unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning in artificial intelligence‖. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, (2020) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907373117
2
Wigner, E., ―The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences‖. Communications
in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13.1 (1960) New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
3
Mitchell, Melanie. ―Artificial Intelligence‖. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
4
Spengler, Oswald. ―The decline of the West.‖ London Allen & Unwin. Kindle Edition.
5
Schrodinger, E., ―What Is Life?‖ (1945) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6
World Champion Boogie-Woogie 1991-2011 https://youtu.be/Svcs5jTsTaA
7
Bartholomew, B.Y. ―Solving the ‗Hard Problem‘: Consciousness is an Electronic Phenomenon.‘ Journal
of Consciousness Exploration and Research. (2020) 11:46-60
https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/862
8
Bartholomew, B.Y. ―The Electronic Waveform of Action Potentials in the Brain.‖ Journal of
Consciousness Exploration and Research. (2020) 11:185-197
https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/871
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Valverde, R., & Swanson, C., Development of a Quantum-based Ontology for Describing NDE by Using Computerized
Natural Language Processing
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Research Essay
Development of a Quantum-based Ontology for Describing NDE
by Using Computerized Natural Language Processing
Raul Valverde*1 & Chet Swanson2
1
Concordia University, Canada
Independent Researcher, United States
2
Abstract
The Survival Hypothesis states that a person’s personality and consciousness survive the physical
death of the body. Ontology is a well-established theoretical domain within philosophy dealing
with models of reality. This report proporses the use of computer natural language processing
and classification of perceived objects in Near Death Experience (NDE) stories for the validation
of a Quantum Ontology based on the Quantum Hologram Theory of Physics and Consciousness.
This proposes Quantum Ontology to represent the unintelligible aspects of near-death
experiences. The research proposes a validation of ontology constructs within a Quantum
Ontology to show the potential of this methodology in NDE research.
Keywords: Near death experience, quantum ontology, data mining, natural language processing.
1. Introduction
The near-death experiences (NDEs) are very short stories of people who have been clinically
dead and then are resurrected or revived spontaneously after a brief interval with the memory of
what they experienced during that period. According to Greyson (2010), many people with near
death experiences reported vivid mental clarity exceptional sensory imagery and a clear memory
of the experience and an experience that is more real, then in their daily lives. Many people
experience NDEs and there seems to be a consistency across NDE experiences for their main
characteristics, this presents an opportunity to develop an ontology that can help NDE
researchers to map the different experiences into an ontology that can help researchers with the
establishment of the representation of the reality that is perceived in NDE experiences.
*
Correspondence: Raul Valverde, Concordia University, Canada. E-mail: raul.valverde@concordia.ca
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2. Ontology
In philosophy, ontology is the branch of metaphysics which studies what is existing, including
the relations that may exist between objects, their categorization, their structure, their properties,
their similarities, their states or their changes.
Ontology is a well-established theoretical domain within philosophy dealing with models of
reality. Over the years, many different ontologies have emerged. Mylopoulos (1998) suggests
that ontologism can be classified into four categories: static, dynamic, intentional, and social.
Each of these categories focuses on different concepts in the real world. Ontologies that fall into
the static category focus on things and their properties. Dynamic ontologies extend static
ontologies to focus on such concepts as events and processes, that is, how concepts in the
realworld change over time. Intentional ontologies attempt to explain abstract concepts such as
goals and objectives while social ontologies emphasize the concepts of values and beliefs.
An example of an ontology used to describe a reality is the ADL ontology (Min et al., 2017). The
ADL ontology for example can predict performance of Activities of Daily Living of cancer
patients by applying the ontology-guided machine learning method.
Today however, interest in, and applicability of ontologies, extends to areas far beyond
metaphysics. In the case NDEs, there has been different efforts to establish an ontology that can
serve as a reference to describe the reality experienced by NDE people. Rominger (2010), made
an effort to use art to describe an ontology for NDE experiences, he suggested the use of art as a
methodology for NDE ontology research.
3. Unintelligibility Approach and Quantum Ontology
Philosophers accurately identified the central, essential barriers to legitimate rational
examination of life after death. This section discusses a unique new rational method proposed by
Moody (2020) and Valverde & Swanson (2020) that builds on the arguments of both David
Hume and more recent analytic philosophers. Moody (2020) introduces the concept of
unintelligibility. He proposes the possibility that the universe is unintelligible. If we imagine
the universe as going on and on and on in space infinitely, that does not make sense either.
Either way, it ends up in unintelligibility. According to Moody (2020), the main obstacle to the
rational study of life after death can be removed through a logic of unintelligibility. Linguists
describe language on a continuum of intelligibility. The continuum ranges from highly literal
language through less intelligible figurative language to the meaningless and unintelligible.
Unintelligible language can also induce profound alternate states of consciousness, including
seemingly transcendent ecstasies
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Physicists complain that a third value of logic—neither true nor false—is needed to describe the
bizarre results of quantum theory. Quantum theory is unintelligible and has been used to attempt
to explain life reviews in NDEs. Near-death life reviews pose a challenge to current memory
research in terms of the sheer amount of instantaneous and empathetic information recall.
Advances in quantum physics and consciousness studies support for the first time a fully
realizable quantum biomechanical basis for near-death life reviews (Beck & Colli, 2003). The
quantum consciousness paradigm can be used to represent the unintelligible nature of NDE
experiences, in particular the timeless and spaceless nature of these experiences and the sense of
oneness with the universe. NDE experiences express the realization of the interconnectedness of
everything, with the quantum principle of ‘entanglement’ suggesting that differentiation between
‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ is an artificial one. Instead, there is a meaningful relationship
between experiences of consciousness in inner and outer worlds, with neither existing
independently of the other (Walton 2017). Tyler (2015) for example proposes a set of constructs
that could be used to describe NDE stories by using a Quantum ontology that includes constructs
for unity, complex interconnectivity and Extinguishability. Quantum consciousness paradigms
can be used to explain consciousness (Valverde 2018) and can provide the unintelligible aspect
required to describe NDE experiences and map them into a unified model of quantum
consciousness.
4. Quantum Matrix Type Reality Ontology
Hernandez et. al. (2018) proposed an ontology for a Matrix-type reality that is similar to an NDE,
they argue that one of the keys to understanding “Consciousness” is the understanding of contact
with Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) using what they call the “Contact Modalities”. They define
the different contact modalities of Non-Human Intelligence as:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
NDE contact
Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) contact
Out of Body Experience (OBE) contact
Shamanic Hallucinogenic contact
Channeling of Non-Human Intelligence
Spirit/Ghost communications
Remote Viewing contact
Hernandez et. al. (2018) hypothesize that all of these Contact Modalities are interconnected
through what is commonly called Consciousness and that advanced physics, in particular, the
Quantum Hologram Theory of Physics and Consciousness (QHTC) can begin to provide a
rudimentary understanding of the relationships between diverse paranormal “Contact
Modalities."(Mitchell 1999). Certain features of these contact modalities appear to have
quantum-like holographic properties that correspond with some of the basic principles from
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quantum theory. This includes: 1) Non-locality, coherence, and instantaneous information
exchange in a timeless and placeless dimension; and 2) Experiments which demonstrate that
“telepathy” is not affected by distance (outside space), and “precognition” which provides
information of future events (outside time).
Many authors have proposed using Quantum ontology to represent consciousness. Quantum
ontology has been proposed to represent not only objective but subjective worlds (Ruyant 2010).
According to Ruyant (2010), quantum ontology can be used to represent consciousness, and
accounts for the existence of a continuum between conscious and unconscious states. Quantum
ontology has been used in the study of consciousness in the field of psychology. Valadas Ponte &
Schäfer (2013), describe similarities in the ontology of quantum physics and of Carl Gustav
Jung’s psychology. They argue that the empirical world is an emanation of a cosmic realm of
potentiality whose forms can appear as physical structures in the external world and as
archetypal concepts in our mind.
Quantum ontology already has been used in near death studies research. Tyler (2015), for
example, describes NDE stories using a Quantum ontology that includes constructs for unity,
complex interconnectivity, and extinguishability. In regard to cases of life review in near death
experiences, reviews pose a challenge to current memory research in terms of the sheer amount
of instantaneous and empathetic information recall.
5. Research Methodology
An NDE database was generated based on the research of Dr. Jeffrey Long’s Near Death
Experience Research Foundation (https://www.nderf.org/). This database contains a collection of
4267 records of NDE experiences collected for research purposes. Dr. Jeffrey Long is an American
author and researcher into the phenomenon of near-death experiences (NDEs). A physician by
training, Long practices radiation oncology at a hospital in Louisiana. Long is the author of
Evidence of the Afterlife (Long & Perry 2010). He founded the Near Death Experience Research
Foundation, which is concerned with documenting and researching NDEs.
The research uses a multi-step methodology as indicated in Figure 1 based on the Culmone et al.
(2014) framework, which uses a MySQL DB to collect data that is then mapped to potential
ontology constructs of the Quantum Ontology. The Quantum Matrix-type reality of Hernandez et.
al (2018) would be used as a starting point for this research. The mapping will be done with the
help of SQL statements that retrieve data that is meant to match the meaning of the ontological
construct that is being tested. Human recognition is required to validate that the data retrieved
indeed represents the ontological construct being tested.
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Figure 1. Taken from Culmone et al.,2004
In order to analyze the large number of records, natural language processing (NLP) approach
guided by the work of Siddiqi and Sharan (2015). NLP is applicable in various problems such as
language translation, and text analysis (Navlani, 2019). The objective of this analysis is to use
N-gram word frequency analysis to link words with ontology constructs. For example, the
construct sense of unity can be linked with emotions captured in words such as connected, one,
calm, wholeness, etc. By connecting words to constructs, we can measure the level of connection
by calculating metrics such as F-measure (Kasteren et al., 2011) that can identify the level of
precision that an ontological construct can represent. A set of constructs would be then identified
and validated with the data collected and presented as an ontological grammar that can be used to
map any NDE experience. The main objective would be to have a better understanding of the
reality of the afterlife.
5. Conclusions
The approach discussed in this article opens new avenues for serious rational inquiry into
mysteries of consciousness and the after life. This method effectively reformats the mind to
reason logically about some previously intractable questions of science and religion, including
questions of life after death. Additionally, learning this approach gives people useful new means
of describing profound transcendent states of Consciousness. For instance, learning this method
can influence how people recount Near-death experiences they have subsequently. Specifically,
the method overcomes the main problem of ineffability. That is, people who report such
experiences invariability tell us that there are no words to give an adequate description.
The quantum consciousness paradigm is proposed as the main ontology to describe the
unintelligible aspects of NDE. Eventually, describing near-death experiences and other
transcendent states of consciousness can be standardized, using this unitelligable method.
Received June 28, 2021; Accepted September 19, 2021
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References
Beck, T. E., & Colli, J. E. (2003). A quantum biomechanical basis for near-death life reviews. Journal of
Near-Death Studies, 21(3), 169-189.
Culmone, R., Falcioni, M., Giuliodori, P., Merelli, E., Orru, A., Quadrini, M., ... & Matrella, G. (2014,
September). AAL domain ontology for event-based human activity recognition. In 2014 IEEE/ASME
10th International Conference on Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Applications (MESA) (pp.
1-6). IEEE.
Greyson, B. (2010) Implications of near-death experiences for a postmaterialist psychology. Psychology of
Religion and Spirituality, 2(1), 37.
Hernandez, R., Davis, R., & Schild, R. (2018). A Study on Reported Contact with Non-Human Intelligence
Associated with Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 32(2).
Kasteren, T., Alemdar, H. Ö., & Ersoy, C. (2011, February). Effective Performance Metrics for Evaluating
Activity Recognition Methods. In ARCS Workshops.
Long, M. D., & Perry, P. (2010). Evidence of the Afterlife. Harper Collins Publishers.
Moody, R. 2020. Making Sense of Nonsense: The Logical Bridge Between Science & Spirituality.
Llewellyn Publications
Min, H., Mobahi, H., Irvin, K., Avramovic, S., & Wojtusiak, J. (2017). Predicting activities of daily living
for cancer patients using an ontology-guided machine learning methodology. Journal of biomedical
semantics, 8(1), 39.
Mylopoulos, J. (1998). Information Modeling in the Time of the Revolution. Information systems, 23(3-4),
127-155.
Mitchell, E. (1999). Nature’s mind: The quantum hologram. National Institute for Discovery Science, Las
Vegas, NV, http://www. nidsci. org/articles/naturesmind-qh. html.
Navlani, A. (2019). Text Analytics for Beginners using NLTK. [WWW Document]. URL
https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/text-analytics-beginners-nltk (accessed 14.06.2020).
Rominger R. (2010). Postcards From Heaven and Hell:Understanding the Near-Death Experience Through
Art, Art Therapy, 27:1
Ruyant, Q. 2010. 'Quantum Physics and the Ontology of Mind'. Journal of Consciousness Exploration &
Research, 1(8), pp. 1027-1047.
Siddiqi, S., & Sharan, A. (2015). Keyword and keyphrase extraction techniques: a literature review.
International Journal of Computer Applications, 109(2).
Valverde, R. (2018). Quantum Theory, Consciousness, God & the Theology of the Urantia Book. Scientific
GOD Journal, 9(6).
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Valverde, R., & Swanson, C. (2020). The Unintelligibility Approach to Near Death Research. Journal of
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Watson, D. E., & Williams, B. O. (2007). Eccles' Model of the Self Controlling Its Brain: The Irrelevance of
Dualist Interactionism. NeuroQuantology, 1(1).
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Article
Conscious Life Beyond Death (Part III)
Wolfgang NMN Baer*
Nascent Systems Inc. & Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA
Abstract
Part III of this Article contains the following Section:
3. Action Theory Proofs
3.1. Philosophical Evidence
3.2. Physical Evidence
3.3. Psychological Evidence
*
Correspondence: c/o Steven Mitchell. Email: smitc1@brockport.edu Note: This article was written by Prof. Wolfgang NMN
Baer and is published posthumously. Wolfgang NMN Baer, Ph.D. (in Physics) was an Associate Professor of Information
Sciences (Ret), Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA, & Research Director, Nascent Systems Inc., Carmel Valley,
CA, USA.
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3. Action Theory Proofs
3.1. Philosophical Evidence
Is what we see in front of our eyes the external real thing out there or are these things our own
processed projections of signals from whatever is out there? The differing opinions regarding the
answer to this question goes back at least 2000 years. Aristotle thought we are looking directly at
reality through the windows of our senses and is credited for initiating Natural Philosophy, the
precursor of science.[1] Plato on the other hand offered his cave analogy to explain that we were
actually seeing the shadows made by external reality, and we ourselves were prisoners chained to
look only at the reflections on the wall that appear as signals from the cave entrance projector in
the opposite wall. What Aristotle thinks is reality itself, Plato assumes is a process flowing
through the cave that shows us one snapshot at a time.
Conscious Action Theory assumes Plato is right and has built a physically based model that
processes the signals required to implement Plato’s analogy. Proof that Plato’s answer to the
“What is my here and now?” question is correct, and its adoption allows for the integration mind
and body offered in this section.
3.1.1. Philosophical Explanations for Eyewitness Here and Now?
The central undeniable observation of a typical conscious human being is represented by the 1stperson eyewitness experience depicted in Figure 3.1 below. The meaning of this Figure is the
eyewitness stage in which evidence of any claim must be presented. This eyewitness report of
what was experienced is legal evidence that may contribute to proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is also the entry point to understanding the operation of Conscious Action Theory and the
physical framework in which the existence and properties of consciousness can be addressed.
Figure 3-1 shows an individual sitting in an armchair looking out through his left eye into the
living room of an apartment. He sees his nose on the right side, and his left hand is holding a
book. The sketch was inspired by a drawing by Ernest Mach (1867)[2] and updated by J. Gibson
(1950)[3] for the purpose of investigating human perception. The notepad in the 1st-person’s hand
was added to include an externalization of the 1st-person’s memory (Baer 1972)[4]. This was
necessary because the meanings held in these memories can only be seen symbolically within the
eyewitness stage. Without resorting to symbols, we can look directly at the brain inside our skull
from the outside 3rd-person vantage point and get a fairly detailed map of physical activity
happening in there. We can also just look around and get a 1st-person sensory experience of our
here and now. What we have not been able to do is find any direct correlations between any
physical activity and the sensory world we experience around us using 3rd-person reductionist
techniques.[5]
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Fig. 3.1 Prisoners in Plato’s Cave looking at a projection from the external world
3-2
The central question of this section is, “What is this thing, this body, and objects a conscious
being sees in front of its nose?” The two main answers to this question in Western thought
traditions can be designated as Platonic or Aristotelian. My intent is not to endorse all the
philosophical beliefs of these greats, but only to label the answers to our central question as
Aristotelian when we believe that we are looking through the windows of our senses at ‘Reality’
itself, and Platonic when we believe we are like prisoners in a cave and are bound to see only the
shadows in the signals emanating through from the reality outside and displayed on the cave
walls.
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The Aristotelian natural science is still the most practical interpretation of the eyewitness
experience. Most of us never question the actionable reality of the scene portrayed in front of our
eyes. Nor is such questioning necessary to successfully run our lives. We trust that what we see
is real, and we run downstairs or drive our cars accordingly. The first hint that we are not seeing
the real world directly comes from the many examples of optical illusions such as shown in
Figure 3.3. Our mental processing system attempts to present a simple flat scene drawn on a
piece of paper as a three-dimensional object but is frustrated by the conflicting hints. Depending
upon where we look, different corners come to the foreground, and staring at the picture will
produce a changing sequence of alternative three-dimensional renderings. One can literally feel
the behind-the- scenes processing take place, and neither the picture on the page or the light
transporting its information to the eyes has changed. Whether the scene keeps jumping or settles
down to a stable 3D object, it is clear that what we experience is a processed interpretation of our
external sensor stimulation.
3.1.2. Signal Interference Experiment
The central assumption of natural science is that we see objects because an objective reality
exists out there, in front of our noses, whether we are looking at them or not. Eliminating this
assumption is the first step toward expanding the scientific method to include the 1st-person
experiences of a standard observer. We can demonstrate the error in natural science’s central
assumption with the apparatus most any reader is endowed with. Consider the experiment
described in Figure 3.4.
Here the 1st-person has closed his right eye and with his left is looking at the cat under the lamp
in Figure 3.4. The cat appears to be a real object. The reader can substitute any object in his
environment and convince him or herself that the thing out there is as real as anything he sees in
his daily life. Next take a finger and gently push on the open eye. Do it gently. Just touch your
eyelid where you can feel your bone socket. It may take a little practice but soon you will notice
the cat move slightly with your push. That real thing out there, which you convinced yourself
was the real thing a moment ago, moves without you touching it. This proves that you are not
seeing the real thing itself but rather the down- stream, processing, mental display shown above.
Many people and respected philosophers[6], will insist that our mental image is proof that a real
objective cat is actually out there. The point, however, is that what you experience and normally
live in is a mental display you create to explain sensory stimulation. It is not objective reality
itself. Whether our mental display is a true description of reality is a legitimate scientific
question. Quantum theorists for example believe that reality is a probability disturbance, and the
object is created through the measurement process in your retina and brain. Whatever
explanations one’s belief system tells one to project into the sensations one experiences, the truth
is that the central assumption of Natural Science, originally attributed to Aristotle, is
demonstrably incorrect. Plato’s assumption that what we see in our here and now is a phase in a
process is correct, and the action-flow physics introduced in Section 1 more correctly describes
what we do to see what we see than classic or quantum formulations.
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Fig 3.4. Experiment that proves we experience our own mental display not a real-object world
3.1.3. Experiments in Alternative Action-Flow Processing
A dramatic and potentially useful demonstration of our internal processing capability is
observable in a phenomenon called “binocular rivalry”. The brain is stimulated with different
images in each eye. The brain selects one of the eye’s input as the source of the 3D-world
visualization while suppressing the opposite eye stimulation. It then flips back and forth between
image sources and alternatively selects one and then the other image as the source for
visualization. As in the visual illusion case, the mental process cannot decide which reality of the
two possible interpretations of its visual stimulation is correct, but rather than a small Figure 3.3
flipping back and forth, the entire visual field is here involved. After once experiencing the entire
world, like the one I use to drive my car, change dramatically because of sensory processing that
may be going on inside my head, there is no question that Plato was right in this matter.
As a practical application for binocular rivalry consider the use of a surveillance mission pilot’s
need for detailed narrow focus and wide-angle context image to be looked at simultaneously.
Rather than use two monitors, Figure 3.5 shows the setup to stimulate the pilot with two separate
fields of view and allow his brain processing to select which view to work with.[7]
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Fig. 3.5. Dual-eye UAV image exploitation system setup
The evidence presented in this section:
– illusions
– processing path interference
– demonstration in real-world application
proves that the “world” we experience around us is physically an internally generated
phenomenon. It is happening is implemented in material we, or in this experiment, the pilot,
inhabits.
That Plato’s Cave analogy correctly describes our situation makes it much more likely that
Conscious Action Theory provides a better answer to the life-after-death question than theories
built on Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy.
3.2. Physical Evidence
Proof that the outline of CAT physics summarized in Section 1 is correct enough to build models
that can scientifically answer the consciousness-beyond- body-death question will be given in
this section. A sufficient proof that CAT physics provides accurate predictions when physics is
expanded to include living material will first rest on its ability to predict experimental results
when the conscious human is involved in experiments. This category of proofs will be presented
in Section 3.3. In this section, we first prove that the event-oriented world view and the
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Conscious Action Theory’s physical formulation duplicate what has already been proven for
dead material. This grounds CAT in the physical sciences and the many practical predictions
produced by available theories. Compatibility with existing physical sciences is a necessary
condition for trusting CAT physics. We will then show how a logical expansion of known
formulas and equations can incorporate the subjective phase.
Compatibility Proof
Conscious Action Theory is compatible with both standard quantum and classical physics
because we can reduce its formulation to quantum theory by limiting the amplitude of masscharge displacements utilized in CAT to small amplitudes, where linear restoring forces allow
wave forms of action to be used as descriptors of what is happening. Once compatibility with
quantum theory is established, the classic physics approximation is evoked by reducing Plank’s
action constant to zero ‘h => 0’ in quantum formulas. The byproduct of this reduction eliminates
any mental activity in the conscious system, which is then described by the classic physics of a
robot.
The basic CAT existence event (Figure 1.1 consists of a cycle of activity divided into objective
and subjective phases. The gravito-electric forces in the objective phase involve the standard
charge and mass properties of material.[1] Classic physics utilizes particles as the units of
material aggregation. Elementary particles such as electrons or protons have their charge and
mass values concentrated at a single particle center. CAT duplicates this situation by increasing
the forces between charge and mass, which decreases any displacement amplitude and increases
the speed with which signals are transmitted. In this limit, the separate charge and mass
properties act like classic particles. Compatibility is achieved when eliminating the subjective
phase from CAT.
Compatibility with Quantum Theory
Here we make the claim that the action-flow model of Conscious Action Theory is identical to
quantum-wave description of Reality, in the limit that the amplitude of ‘ψ’ oscillation is small
enough to avoid breaching the containment of the flow. Much like a spring bouncing back
unchanged to its original condition, any system will oscillate around its undisturbed state
trajectory so that a wave description of Reality is appropriate. This means the CAT model
working symbolic operator for the total action in Reality ‘AR’ can be replaced with quantum
equivalent expressions of action. This means all of quantum theory is the small amplitude
approximation to the CAT formulation. Further detailed derivations are provided in Appendix
A4 and Chapter 6 of the CAT book.[2]
A second category of proof involves showing that the expansion of physics to include the
subjective domain is based on logical consistency and inferences that minimize and even reduce
the number of ad hoc assumptions or singularities, called miracles in non-scientific belief
systems. To follow this strategy, we will list a series of facts that can be demonstrably proven to
happen but have no explanation in current science. If such phenomena can be explained by a
logical expansion of standard physics, it greatly adds to their plausibility.
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The observer’s here-and-now experience happens internally to the observer
That the actionable reality of our daily here and now can be physically associated with
phenomena happening inside the observer’s material was proven in Section 3 above. In the
vision channels we showed that the explanatory action path from the ‘apple’ to the ‘retina’
represents what we believe happens outside, but the physical implementation of such
representations happens in the observer’s material. The process of absorbing action within the
‘retina’ transforms the action from an electromagnetically hosted activity that moves charges to
one that also moves the masses in the ‘retina’. The action is now hosted inside the retinal
material involving interactions between charges and masses. It is the action pattern between
charge and mass inside the observer’s material that produces an observable ‘apple’. This action
is not necessarily observed in the detector cell of the ‘retina’ because the action flow can be
processed and merged to other parts of the brain. But it is critical to understand that whatever
material supports the here-and-now experience, it is its internal mass-charge configuration that
physically produces the conscious experience.
The illusions, signal distortion and evidence presented in Section 3 proves. that the world of
color and light we see in front of our faces, as well as the explanatory sensations that interpret
such colors as the world of trees, sky and stars we believe to live in, is physically happening
inside our own material. This means we look out, in any direction, and logically know, feel, or
otherwise impute that there is something beyond the firmament, beyond the big Bang, beyond
whatever we can imagine somewhere out there … out there where we will eventually find our
own real Skull,[3] and that everything we treated as reality out there a few moments ago is
actually our phenomenal world, now understood to be contained within our larger Brain inside
our larger unknowable Skull.
There we have it, an entire universe, suddenly becomes an operating component of our MoR It is
worth commenting that the retina passes or transforms an amount of action. Here our mental
framework changes. The objective model of reality is removed, and a CAT action-flow model is
inserted. These models are shown in many figures in his essay.
An isolated conscious being exists in its own time and space
Proof of this claim is provided in Appendix A3 “Physics of an isolated System”. The argument
rests on the assumption that action seeks to exist in its most comfortable form. It identifies
comfort in the subjective with the balance of forces in the objective phase. It seeks to increase
comfort by reducing any imbalance in the forces encountered throughout its existence. If left to
its own, it will transform itself to a more and more comfortable lifetimes.
In such isolated states the material only interacts with itself and transforms itself through its
lifetime more or less deterministically. The trajectory is determined by all material. There is no
external Newtonian clock dictating progress or for that matter an external meter stick dividing up
volumes and shapes. Things happen in their own space and time.
Proof that action flow really happens
The equivalence of Newtonian physics and the action-flow formulation in solving physical
problems is derived in Appendix A2. To summarize the argument, we note that Newton’s 3rd
Law – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – actually refers to forces not
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action. Appendix A2 shows that when action flows between one degree of freedom to another,
the flow is accompanied by two equal and opposite forces. For example, when action is sent
from one atom to another, the sending atom experiences a reaction force while the receiving
atom experiences a direct force. The wave packet moving between the two atoms executes an
activity in which the electric field produces a magnetic field that produces an electric field. This
activity takes one Planks constant (h= 6.6x10-34 Joul seconds) of action, happens in a wavelength
‘λ= ΔQ’, and a period ‘τ=ΔT’. The action in the space-time square is ‘h’, and this action moves
along at the speed of light ‘c= λ/τ = ΔQ/ΔT’
We conclude this section by listing the claims and summarizing the connection to known anchor
points from which derivations and proofs start:
The physical proof that the observer’s here-and-now experience happens internally
to the observer is by direct demonstration.
The physical proof that 1st- and 3rd- person observables actually happen is that we
can interpret classic physics as two ways of looking at things.
The physical proof that an isolated conscious being exists in its own time and space
is the availability of stable minimum or zero entropy states of perfect equilibrium.
The physical proof that action flow actually happens is that it can be tied directly to
the energy momentum picture of classic physics.
3.3. Psychological Evidence
CAT implements a conscious system as a physically self-contained action core that has grown
interaction capabilities in the form of a ‘body’ built in the rest of the material in ‘U’. It is the
‘body’ in ‘U’ as shown in Figure 2.3 that I wake up inside of every morning. It is this piece of
‘U’s’ material that ‘I’ have evolved, grown, lived and let die that provides the reports of what it
feels like to experience the life-and-death cycle. That a large number of reported psychic
phenomena can be properly identified with the phases of an action model is submitted as further
evidence that the action-model approach is correct. How different categories of psychic
phenomena are explained in CAT will be described in the following paragraphs.
Anecdotal reports
When we listen to reports of people’s 1st-person experiences we encounter strange tales that do
not fit into the objective world model. We find their explanation in mental processing states that
produce content, utilizing the same here-and-now mental display hardware in which actionable
information is normally presented, but which is not classified as accurate representations of what
is really happening. Hallucinations usually happen in the context of trusted reality displays that
show up as individual people or sounds. These can be identified as hallucinations because one
can ask whether people whom we trust to be real – meaning people who are also connected to
external sensor disturbances – also see them.
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In lucid dreams, trances, or deep meditation, the entire here and now displays a fantasy that is
disconnected from external reality. In this case the fantasy can become the reality because there
is nothing more real to compare it with. The danger lurking in this disconnect is that body
commands may be sent that can damage the body, and for this reason the sensor/effecter
processing path is usually disconnected during such states.
We have already demonstrated in Section 3 that one’s here-and-now experience of the world in
front of one’s nose is an internal phenomenon happening inside the observer’s material. Our
CAT model also claims that under normal operation the conscious system also generates
expected sensations that are registered with the external sensor display content in a feed-forward
correction loop that updates our model and the expectation it generates. This correction happens
so quickly that all we experience is the comfort of knowing that our sensations are understood,
our expectations are accurately calculated and that our model and the theories it is built upon can
be trusted. That such data processing actually happens would require observable evidence that
will be presented below.
Conscious beings generate expected sensor measurement displays
When traveling on a highway at high speed for a long period of time one gets used to seeing the
road features such as trees, signs, and overpasses passing by. The physical location of a feature is
systematically displaced each moment as the car speeds on and one becomes comfortable with
the constant change. Next one pulls off the highway reducing one’s speed and coming to a stop
sign at the end of the ramp, noticing that it feels like one is going slower or even going
backwards. The trees should be a little closer than where one’s optical sensors put them. The
adjustment of the expected location of the trees, signs, etc., is a processing change. To some it
may feel like a flow of time. Whatever metaphor is used to describe what is happening, the
conscious being described by an action flow is predicted to experience an expected optic scene.
That expectation can be observed when one closes one’s eyes and experiences one’s perceptive
space.
Do such experiments verify that the CAT-predicted observation actually happens? Not by itself.
We can add the observable reality to the list of evidence that proves CAT describes what a
conscious system does. The additional evidence we could extract from this experiment is that
indeed behind the 1st-person display is some mechanism that does the predicting in the feedforward loop. We have called this function the Model of Reality, and its existence is an indirect
inference. To get further insight let’s consider the stability mechanism behind the perceptive
space.
We strap a conscious being into a swivel chair and spin it around until the being is good and
dizzy. Most of us have experienced the observable effect. The room and the walls feel like they
are spinning, and one puts out a foot to brace against the rotation. But one’s open eyes show the
room has not moved. Quickly the expectation is updated. The corrective foot maneuver was
wrong in the reality of a stationary room, and the being takes an awkward step regain his footing.
By that time the walls have moved some more, and the action repeats itself leaving the being
staggering until the dizziness settles down.
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The semicircular canals in the middle ear are built as gravito-inertial field detectors with the
movement of crystals against hair-like cilia protruding from the walls. The turn of the head can
be calculated from the crystal movement coded into the orientation parameters of the perceptive
space. From this data, the expected location of all the objects is calculated and compared with the
optic eye- open field of view. If the two agree, we have the comfortable feeling of everyday life.
We move our head, and the world remains stationary because we calculate it to be so. If the two
disagree by a small amount, we may stagger from a light case of dizziness but will be able to
recover quickly. The motions encountered have oscillating wave forms and are amenable to
linear algebra encountered in quantum theory. When inertial expectations and optical reality do
not match at higher amplitudes, the linear corrections provided by quantum theory maybe
insufficient, and we may see the body of the being slammed to the ground or experience
dangerous collisions. We are now describing phenomena that require CAT to explain.
Memory call-back sensations
Demonstration proof the that the time cross section of the action flow labeled with ‘a’ or ‘ai’
type in our CAT model are, in fact, internal memory recall phenomena is easily demonstrated
when the Conscious Being closes its eyes. When conducting this experiment, it is important to
choose a quiet room because it is difficult to close one’s ears without adding external apparatus
and the presence of external-sensory interpretations labeled ‘ax’-type action flow will
automatically update the Being’s model of reality. Several species of animals, such as bats,
navigate by sound input. By closing one’s eyes in a quiet room one eliminates external updates.
The close-eye signal has already updated the Being’s model, which now expects to receive an
empty space ‘ai’ pattern, which is what is receives, and therefore no MoR update is needed, and
the location-expected objects can only be calculated from data available in the MoR that is stored
in the ‘A’ or ‘Ai’ action patterns executing in the material from which the Being’s memory is
built.
At this point the Being, with eyes still closed, is asked to navigate to retrieve an object across
some distance across the black environment. To do so, the being can no longer rely on the
information contained in the ‘ax’ and ‘ai’ display since their equivalent ‘Null’ only indicates the
MOR can be trusted to be in the best state as dictated by empirical available input. If a command
output action is ‘ao’ to be inserted, the best option to do it in the vocabulary of objects identified
as the 3rd-person ‘a’ type display. When looking carefully, a normal awake individual with eyes
closed will notice a pattern in the black space. It is usually described as a ghostly white effect
that tells the individual where the tables, chairs, walls and even where other people would be
seen in the here and now if the Being’s eyes were suddenly open. If they stay closed, the Being
will be forced to navigate by memory-recall information stored in its MoR and interpreted as the
content of its 3rd-person imagination.
Many versions of this experiment can be performed. For example, one can frustrate the memory
accuracy by having a participant move objects very quietly, or perhaps asking a Being, who is
born blind, to establish the room’s geographic environment by feel and touch modality, storing
the information in its memory and then retrieving the information as a 3rd-person view map. In
all cases we will conclude that the signals are internal memory recall implemented within the
material owned by the Being.
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The strength of internal memory recall signals is not always small or subtle. If the mixing of
internal ‘ai’ and external ‘ax’ action flow, which CAT assigns to the tri-partite synapses that
implement the interface between the neuronal and gial network, is out of balance, mental
disorders such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, and epilepsy can ensue.[1]
Out-of-body experience
The out-of-body experience (OBE) is a well reported phenomenon that involves moving one’s
1st-person perspective from its behind-the-eye position to some other position in the actionable
reality space that the 1st-person currently uses. The current objective belief assumes that objects
and the empty black space between them are independently real. Such visualizations are
internally generated phenomena that are derived from paying attention to some aspect of one’s
MoR. Under normal everyday operations, supporting activities, such as driving a car, playing an
athletic game or fixing a dripping faucet, requires us to pay attention to where one’s model hereand-now interactions take place. This requirement is mentioned in Plato’s Cave analogy as the
chained beings who view only the immediate projections from the external world as reflected on
the cave wall.
The CAT proposition is to eliminate the chains shackling Plato’s prisoners and prove that a
Being has the capacity to view one’s MoR from many different directions and at many time
instances. In normal eye-open operation, one remains in one’s standard behind-the-eyes position
and only experiences such 3rd-person views as fleeting thoughts or daydreams but remains firmly
grounded in one’s standard reality belief. However, extreme stress or pain can force a being into
a position of looking down on one’s body from the corner of the room one is in or another
disembodied location. One thereby avoids the pain but also loses control.
At this point we must remind the reader that CAT makes a distinction between the physical
‘Entities’ that exist in themselves and their modeled ‘Entities’. Due to the tremendous practical
control function provided by the standard 3rd-person viewpoint, it is easy to understand why this
view seen from an OBE perspective is taken for ‘Reality’ itself, especially when the mental
display system has impressive 3D capabilities unmatched by the best computer graphics we have
been able to build to date. In this OBE state of mind, one’s personal ‘Body’ is taken to be one’s
real ‘Body’ in one’s real ‘Space’.
Unfortunately, the training required to execute and instrument reliable and repeatable
experiments is not easy. It takes effort away from our standard achieving objective goals. Most
people have enough to do in driving their bodies on the road of life rather than to have to stop to
figure out how the body works. Experiments that involve the level of pain and danger that
evokes OBEs are illegal. The only legal situation I found that induces the stress levels of OBEs is
fighter pilot training.[2] This means unlike the memory recall, we can only expect random results
from OBE experiments. This adds to the likelihood that our model inferences using CAT is more
inclusive than the standard scientific model and therefore more likely to give accurate answers to
the consciousness-beyond- life problems.
A second phenomena that involves an OBE experience comes to us from early childhood
experiences studied by Mahler.[3] It is as though the proper development of the human psyche
requires a separation of one’s body from the rest of the environment. This separation takes place
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in the first years of infancy and is described by Mahler as a kind of inverse OBE experience. I
can personally testify that in 1946 when I was about 15 months old, and heat was scarce in
Germany, whatever the world was felt extremely cold. That’s all, just cold. There was no ‘I’, just
cold. Suddenly ‘I’ found myself on the ceiling of my grandfather’s living room and saw below
me a baby getting a bath in cold water. As soon as ‘I’ realized that that baby was me, ‘I’ was in
that baby and found myself able to shiver, which caused my aunt and mother to come running
with a blanket. I’ve been in that body ever since, and every once in a while, I think about the
meaning of this memory. Was this proof that OBEs happen, and my internal MoR had evolved to
separate ‘I’ from the rest of the Universe?
What we have proven with OBE demonstrations is that CAT has a physically based explanation
for them while current science eliminates any existence of consciousness outside of an
operational body, and therefore when that body dies so does its capability to generate conscious
thoughts. CAT claims that the body other people see as well as the hands and arms of one’s own
body seen from the outside have been captured by one’s own Soul. That Soul is in
communication with the captured material, and when the communicated signals ‘ax’ become too
painful, or even when the expected ‘ai’ predicts pain, the Soul abandons its control position, and
we appear unconscious or dead to the rest of us.
Near-death experience
The near-death experience (NDE) differs from the OBE because the situation no longer safe. No
longer can the conscious Being happily wander through its ‘Reality’ with the knowledge in its
back pocket that its real ‘Body’ is lying comfortably in bed in some realer ‘Reality’, which one
can always wake up in from the current one. In the NDE experience, the threat of discomfort is
real in itself. The ladder slips, the car skids, the cardiovascular surgeon’s knife cuts, and
suddenly the normal stream of 1st-person experience, through which memory updates, stops and
only the 3rd-person map becomes available. The best reference on this topic is Van Lommel’s
analysis of NDEs. As head of the Cardiovascular Department at the Rijnstate Hospital, Arnhem,
the Netherlands, he has a particularly strategic observation point on NDE phenomena.[4,5]
His findings reveal that a small number of clinically dead patients who are revived report
phenomenal experiences from a dramatically different reality model than the objective world
they left behind and which they are given a choice to return to. The only information available to
make such a decision is the 3rd-person map that continues to predict the current state of ‘Reality’
from its last update. The last freeze-frame in front of the Being in the car-accident case was now
predicted to show the left headlight of a large semi-truck headed straight toward the driver’s left
side a few feet away. What would you the Reader do in this situation? The next re-entry into the
body would very likely show an astronomically excruciating array of pains as every smashed,
muscle, bone, and organ attempts report its extreme material distortions from its pre-crash near
equilibrium state.
Do you want experience all that? You run the 3rd-person isolated prognosis forward only to
realize experiencing a mess of rotting meat through the signal interpretation function your body
executes had better remain un-experienced. This is the logical end point of the near-death
scenario using the objective model of reality. When the body is smashed at the moment of
impact, any conscious activity happening inside that body is smashed as well. Whether or not
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anything I’ve described in this paragraph actually happens is unprovable in the objective model
because, by definition, destruction of the human body is also destruction of any physical
correlates of consciousness that the body may have developed. We have never experienced a
physical message from a smashed human corpse and by definition never will.
What we have experienced are reports from clinically dead patients who have been rescued by
outside intervention or internal change-of-mind state and reconnected to their bodies with the
memories to tell about their impressions leading to waking up. The reports are quite consistent.
They range from ho hum to mind changing. One of the most interesting phenomena reported is
the ability to see objectively real information that is physically beyond the patient’s sensor range.
This would imply that the patient’s consciousness has the ability to change its viewpoint not only
to observe its own MoR but the real reality in which the doctor inadvertently left his street
glasses in the wrong drawer in the scrub room. After the surgery the doctor had forgotten where
the glasses were, but the patient knew the room number and drawer location in which the glasses
were actually found.
Such and similar experiences have been reported often enough to justify its inclusion in the
growing unexplained facts piling up around the question of life and death. The logical
explanation that addresses the issue centers upon the fact that in CAT the decision was based
upon the predictions produced by the patient’s MoR. Unfortunately, it involves non-linear and
usually non-repairable destruction of often valuable memories, but it is in fact only a part of the
real ‘Patient’s’ existence cycle, a part that continues to operate and may have already opened up
new connections to a living state.
I submit the demonstrably observable by reliable witnesses of NDE phenomena as proof that the
CAT formulation of action physics provides a more accurate answer to what actually happens
outside the boundaries of a physical bodies’ growth, maturation, and decline.
(Continued in Part IV)
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Essay
Man, Virus, & Bacteria: Conscious or Unconscious Invasion?
Massimo Cocchi*, Fabio Gabrielli & Grazia Gulino
Research Institute for Quantitative & Quantum Dynamics of Living Organisms,
Center for Medicine, Mathematics & Philosophy Studies, Italy
Abstract
In this essay, we discuss a comparison between humans and microorganisms in the similarities
that unite them as a result of a conscious and proto conscious condition. A reflection on the
essential rules of nature in the survival of the species and in the eternal conflict of good and evil,
of the desire for supremacy or in the fate of succumbing.
Keywords: Man, virus, bacteria, invasion, unconscious, conscious.
About three to four billion years ago, individual cells begin to organize themselves to form a real
community: they grow, multiply, cooperate with each other. The modern man who was born
about 200,000 years ago will do the same thing by organizing, building tools and moving all over
the earth: an impressive similarity. We all understand human organization, less we understand
bacterial and viral organization.
The human population consists of some billion people who commit their intelligence by
directing it towards good or evil, in the multitude the individuals who exercise evil seem
numerically inferior, as well as among the microorganisms, which are many billion more than
the representatives of the human species, those who exercise "evil" are inferior. A parallel story
that leads us to make some reflections.
Also from the socio-economic point of view, men and bacteria are similar. In danger, they both
start aggregations and develop strategies for a dominant target, that of defending themselves. It is
precisely in relation to this purpose that the concept of consciousness emerges, at least of proto
consciousness.
Bacteria and Viruses - different in their vital attitude, the former, in fact, multiply on their own,
the latter, however, live feeding on the material inside the cells - are constantly on alert, ready to
"disembark" or attack ", just as sadly happens in situations of war among humans. Here both
good and evil, both in the microscopic world and in the human world, exchange, contaminate
each other, spread themselves according to articulated defensive strategies. Also in this case
consciousness comes into play, oriented, in fact, to good or evil.
Correspondence: Prof. Massimo Cocchi, Research Institute for Quantitative & Quantum Dynamics of Living Organisms, Center
for Medicine, Mathematics & Philosophy Studies. Department of Veterinary Medical Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy.
E-mail: massimo.cocchi@unibo.it
*
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In other words, to the legitimate conservation or usurpation of the conservation principle of
others. Let's not forget that a few centuries ago, Spinoza affirmed that "existing" is equivalent to
"power to exist", that is, living beings are pushed to exist by a conatus, a tension/effort, a vital
energy, a power that increases itself, but as finite power, energy limited by other similar forms.
These brief considerations, however, do not want to enter into the rhetoric of good feelings, even
less in a debate of a purely ethical nature, but aim to address the concept of the relationship
between man and that bacterial multitude that inhabits our intestine, at least in its essential lines.
Billions of years will pass before man is fully aware that other organisms exist besides him - it
was Van Leeuwenhoek who, in 1676, had the first perception of the existence of bacteria.
From that moment, the scientific history of bacteria and viruses begins, on which much has been
debated and written.
A story, however, that begins with man's lack of awareness of their existence, directing his
rudimentary knowledge towards a perception of "individuals" who can harm and cause disgust,
precisely because they live in the animal organ considered the container of the most execrable
material, where waste is produced.
It will still take many years, in practice until very recently, a microscopic time compared to the
billions of years in which bacteria and viruses have organized themselves, to hypothesize and
demonstrate that bacteria, even in that space, are well organized, are divided into "good" and
"bad" and regulate functions essential to life, such as immunity and others, such as brain
function, just the brain with which they, constantly, communicate.
It will also be understood how it is largely dependent on the human being that the army that lives
in the intestine can attack us or not: for example, stress and anxiety can create alterations in the
microbial organization of the intestine itself. Just like wars: they depend on us! Here, therefore,
changes the perception that humans have of bacteria and viruses.
The problem that arises is anthropological: Are we sure we have well understood the function of
microorganisms in humans? Can we venture that bacteria and viruses are provided with forms of
proto consciousness?
Reddy & Pereira (Reddy & Pereira, 2017) write on microbial consciousness:
...Consciousness as proto-consciousness or sentience computed via primitive
cytoskeletal structures substantiates as a driver for the intelligence observed in the
microbial world during this period ranging from single-cellular to collective intelligence
as a means to adapt and survive. The growth in complexity of intelligence, cytoskeletal
system and adaptive behaviours are key to evolution, and thus supports the progression
of the Lamarckian theory of evolution driven by quantum mediated proto-consciousness
to consciousness…
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The Cambridge Declaration on Conscience states:
…The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from
experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that nonhuman animals
have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of
conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours.
Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in
possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals,
including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also
possess these neurological substrates…
Reiterates the Trapani document on animal consciousness and the quantum function of the brain
(Cocchi et al. 2017):
A potential for generating consciousness can be expressed by any cell containing a
cytoskeletal network, in any animal species, and this could represent the biological
interface between physical and mental phenomena. A hidden animal consciousness
probably uses tubulin and microtubules as substrates for the cognitive processes in order
to self-determine a state of consciousness, limited to what is required to exist, without
emotional expressions and with the development of a critical mass relationship between
tubulin, synapses, cortex, and serotonin. Thus, we start leaning towards a growing
neuro-correlated consciousness event (classic information) with expressions of a more
complex and differentiated emotional consciousness. It is assumed that consciousness
survives even with basic conditions and this assumption is proven, at the bio-molecular
level, by the hypothesis according to which a Schrodinger protein (e.g. tubulin but
possibly other proteins as well, especially ion channels) is the biological interface from
quantum physics to classic computation, the basis of quantum/classic consciousness
processes. It can also position itself at the crossroad of memory and learning skills.
Now, the problem that arises is that of understanding well the human-bacteria relationship in the
completeness of their biochemical-physiological functions. To understand, whether the principle
of essentiality, as well as for human life, depends on certain fatty acids and certain amino acids,
depends also by bacteria.
Would it be possible for man to live in the absence of that bacterial patrimony with which he is
endowed? Many studies show that it is not possible, because the completeness of the immune
process would be lost and the cognitive process could not fully express the state of
consciousness, each for its own species.
Let us read these lucid statements (Margulis &. Sagan, 1989):
From the first current bacteria, myriads of organisms formed by symbiosis have lived
and died. But the common microbial denominator remains essentially unchanged. Our
DNA derives, along an uninterrupted sequence, from the same molecules that were
present in the primordial cells, formed at the edges of the first warm and shallow
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oceans. Our bodies, like those of all living beings, retain within themselves the
environment of a past Earth. We coexist with today's bacteria and host in us vestiges of
other bacteria, symbiotically included in our cells. In this way, the microcosm lives in
us and we in it.
In short, our wonderful epic, the anthropological elegance that connotes us, the majestic bulk of
our frontal lobes, everything is of bacterial nature. We are children of proto ancestors of about
three and a half billion years ago!
The most radical question then arises (Margulis, L, Sagan):
Why humans must be considered more singular than elephants, penguins, beavers,
camels, rattlesnakes, talking birds, moray eels that give the electric shock, insects that
camouflage themselves on the leaves of giant sequoias, religious mantises, bats or deep
fish that have a fluorescent lantern on their heads?
The answer: for its symbolic ability, causal reasoning, cooperation/relationship with other human
beings: in a word, language.
But bacteria and viruses also organize themselves, organize themselves into groups, cooperate
with each other. And all this, isn't it cooperation, communication, language? A bacterial and viral
language that speaks within us, outside us, with us, with our organs, with the blood, tissues,
muscles, flesh of which we are made. In fact, the microcosm lives in us and we live in it.
Received March 19, 2020; Accepted April 7, 2020
References
Cocchi, M., Bernroider, G., Rasenick M., Tonello, L., Gabrielli F., and. Tuszynski, J. A. (2017):
Document of Trapani on animal consciousness and quantum brain function: A hypothesis. Journal of
Integrative Neuroscience 16 S99–S103.
Margulis, L, Sagan, D. (1989): Microcosmo. Dagli organismi primordiali all’uomo, un’evoluzione di
quattro miliardi di anni, tr. it. Mondadori, Milano.
Pinker S. (1998) L’istinto del linguaggio. Come la mente crea il linguaggio, tr. it. Mondadori, Milano.
Reddy, J. S. K., & Pereira C. (2017): Understanding the emergence of microbial consciousness: From a
perspective of the Subject–Object Model (SOM). Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 16 S27–S36.
The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, (2012) (The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was
written by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip
Low and Christof Koch. The Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 7, 2012, at the
Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals, at Churchill College,
University of Cambridge, by Low, Edelman and Koch. The Declaration was signed by the conference
participants that very evening, in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfour Room at the Hotel du Vin in
Cambridge, UK. The signing ceremony was memorialized by CBS 60 Minutes).
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Research Essay
EEG and the Structure of Magnetosphere
Matti Pitkänen 1
Abstract
Roughly 15 years ago I proposed the idea that Earth’s magnetosphere (MS) could serve as a sensory
canvas in the sense that biological systems, in particular the vertebrate brain, could have sensory
representations realized at the ”personal” magnetic body (MB) closely associated with the MS of the
Earth. EEG would make communications to and control by MB possible. At that time I did not yet
have the idea about number theoretical realization of the hierarchy of Planck constants hef f = nh0
in the framework of adelic physics fusing the physics of sensory experience and cognition. This
hierarchy is crucial for understanding the basic aspects of living matter such as metabolism, coherence
in long scales, correlates of cognition, and even evolution. Also the concept of zero energy ontology
(ZEO) forming now the basis of the quantum TGD was missing although there was already the about
communication to past using negative energy signals. ZEO is now in a central role in the understanding
of self-organization - not only the biological one. The new view about time predicting that time
reversal occurs in ordinary state function reductions (SFRs) allows to understand homeostasis as
self-organized quantum criticality. For these reasons it is interesting to consider the notion of sensory
canvas from the new perspective. This article discusses besides the earlier ideas about the MS also
the proposal that it is possible to associate EEG bands to the regions of MS via the correspondence
between EEG frequency with the distance of the region from Earth. Also the idea that the structure
of MS could be a fractal analog of the vertebrate body is tested quantitatively by comparing various
scales involved.
1
Introduction
Roughly 15 years ago I proposed the idea that Earth’s magnetosphere could serve as a sensory canvas in
the sense that biological systems, in particular the vertebrate brain, could have sensory representations
realized at the ”personal” magnetic body (MB) closely associated with the magnetosphere of the Earth
[17, 16]. EEG would make communications to and control by MB possible [15, 19].
During fifteen years a considerable progress has occurred. At that time I did not have yet the idea
about the number theoretical realization of hierarchy of Planck constants hef f = nh0 in the framework of
adelic physics fusing the physics of sensory experience and cognition [28, 29]. This hierarchy is crucial for
understanding the basic aspects of living matter such as metabolism, coherence in long scales, correlates
of cognition, and even evolution.
Also the concept of zero energy ontology (ZEO) [32] forming now the basis of the quantum TGD was
missing although there was already the about communication to past using negative energy signals. ZEO
is now central role in the understanding of self-organization [31] - not only the biological one. The new
view about time predicting that time reversal occurs in ordinary state function reductions (SFRs) allows
to understand homeostasis as self-organized quantum criticality [36].
For these reasons it is interesting to consider the notion of sensory canvas from the new perspective.
1.1
Some basic ideas of TGD inspired quantum biology
The following list gives the basic elements of TGD inspired quantum biology.
1 Correspondence:
Matti Pitkänen http://tgdtheory.fi/. Address: Rinnekatu 2-4 8A, 03620, Karkkila, Finland. Email:
matpitka6@gmail.com.
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1. Many-sheeted space-time allows the interpretation of the structures of macroscopic world around
us in terms of space-time topology. Magnetic-/field body (MB) acts as intentional agent using
biological body (BB) as a sensory receptor and motor instrument and controlling the BB and
inheriting its hierarchical fractal structure. The quantum coherence of MB in turn induces the
coherence of biomatter.
That MB receives sensory input motivates the idea that MB serves as a kind of sensory canvas
[17, 16]. This idea generalizes: the information received can be also more abstract information and
the layers of the MB could define a hierarchy of increasingly abstract representations of the sensory
data [33, 37].
Fractal hierarchy of EEGs and its variants can be seen as communication and control tools of MB.
Also collective levels of consciousness have a natural interpretation in terms of MB.
MB makes also possible entanglement in macroscopic length scales. The braiding of magnetic flux
tubes makes possible topological quantum computations and provides a universal mechanism of
memory. One can also undersand the real function of various information molecules and corresponding receptors by interpreting the receptors as addresses in quantum computer memory and
information molecules as ends of flux tubes which attach to these receptors to form a connection in
quantum web.
2. MB carrying dark matter as hef f = nh0 > h phases of the ordinary matter and forming an onionlike structure with layers characterized by large values of Planck constant is the key concept of TGD
inspired view about Quantum Mind to biology.
MB is identified as intentional agent using biological body as sensory receptor and motor instrument
[22, 21]. EEG and its fractal variants are identified as a communication and control tool of the MB
and a fractal hierarchy of analogs of EEG is predicted. Living system is identified as a kind of Indra’s
net with biomolecules representing the nodes of the net and magnetic flux tubes connections between
then.
The reconnection of magnetic flux tubes and phase transitions changing Planck constant and therefore the lengths of the magnetic flux tubes are identified as basic mechanisms behind DNA replication
and analogous processes and also behind the phase transitions associated with the gel phase in cell
interior. The braiding of magnetic flux makes possible universal memory representation recording
the motions of the basic units connected by flux tubes. Braiding also defines topological quantum
computer programs updated continually by the flows of the basic units [23, 24, 25]. The model of
DNA as topological quantum computer is one application. In ZEO the braiding actually generalize
to 2-braiding for string world sheets in 4-D space-time and brings in new elements.
3. ZEO makes possible a p-adic description of intentions and cognitions and their transformations to
action. Time mirror mechanism (see Fig. https://cutt.ly/DcDKyTj) based on sending of negative
energy signal to geometric past would apply to both long term memory recall, remote metabolism,
and realization of intentional acting as an activity beginning in the geometric past in accordance
with the findings of Libet. ZEO gives a precise content to the notion of negative energy signal in
terms of zero energy state for which the arrow of geometric time is opposite to the standard one.
The associated notion of causal diamond (CD) is essential element and assigns to elementary particles new fundamental time scales which are macroscopic: for electron the time scale is.1 seconds,
the fundamental biorhythm. An essentially new element is time-like entanglement which allows to
understand among other things the quantum counterparts of Boolean functions in terms of time-like
entanglement in fermionic degrees of freedom.
4. The assignment of dark matter with a hierarchy of Planck constants gives rise to a hierarchy of
macroscopic quantum phases making possible macroscopic and macrotemporal quantum coherence
and allowing to understand evolution as a gradual increase of Planck constant.
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5. One can also understand genetic code. The model for dark nucleons leads to a surprising conclusion:
the states of nucleons correspond to DNA, RNA, tRNA, and amino-acids in a natural manner
and vertebrate genetic code as correspondence between DNA and amino-acids emerges naturally
[27, 30]. This suggests that genetic code is realized at the level of dark nuclear physics. The chemical
realization would provide only a secondary representation of the code.
The recent findings support the view that the genetic code is actually universal and realized at the
fundamental level in quantum TGD. Hitherto unknown realizations in living matterare suggestive
[35]. Second realization of the genetic code would be associated with communications using dark
photons. It would be in terms of dark photon triplets defining 3-chords of light and realized in
terms of icosahedral and tetrahedral Hamiltomnian cycles giving rise to a set of bio-harmonies
having interpretation as correlates of emotions at the molecular level [26, 34, 35]
1.2
Some questions
MB has roles as both sensory canvas and controller of the ordinary matter with standard value hef f 0nh0 =
h using EEG and its fractally scaled variants for these purposes. This raises some questions.
1.2.1
Could magnetosphere be a living and metabolizing organism?
hef f is a measure for algebraic complexity and analogous to IQ. hef f tends to be reduced spontaneously.
Metabolic energy is needed to preserve the distribution of hef f and also to drive self-organization.
Could one think that MB is a higher level organism utilizing energy arriving from the Sun. Could
solar radiation and solar wind provide metabolic energy to the Earth’s magnetosphere (MS) accompanied
by ”personal” MBs. Could MB also receive metabolic energy produced by photosynthesis at the surface
of the Earth?
Could the rotating inner MS transfer energy from solar radiation and transfer it to the night-side
of the Earth. Could also solar wind provide energy to magnetopause, plasma pause, plasma sheet and
neural sheet which are self-organizing highly dynamical structures? Could these regions of the MS serve
as a sensory canvas?
1.2.2
Could the anatomy of the magnetosphere be regarded as a scaled variant of the
anatomy of a vertebrate?
The anatomy of the MS (see the illustrations of https://cutt.ly/kcDKzqL) resembles that of a vertebrate. The TGD Universe is fractal and this inspires the question whether there is something deeper
behind this resemblance: could the anatomy of the MS be scaled up anatomy of the organism? This
would be natural if the ”big” part of the personal MB assignable to the MS serves as a sensory canvas.
The correspondence need not be a strict scaling. Conformal transformations define a more general
correspondence and the correspondence respecting only topology is even more general correspondence.
Could one gain useful insights by formulating this idea quantitatively? Could the scales of the body
parts of the vertebrate(say human)body and MS correspond to each other at the order of magnitude
level? Could the ratios of scales for the corresponding parts of the MS and human body be nearly the
same?
The sensory canvas idea is discussed earlier at the level of the brain in [17, 16] but restricting the
consideration to the cyclotron frequencies for magnetic fields involved with various parts of the MS. The
distance of the part of the MS gives an upper bound for the frequencies involved with the communications
between it and the biological body. Could one associate EEG bands with the parts of the MS? The
frequency scale correspondence indeed predicts frequencies in EEG range and it is possible to assign EEG
bands to the parts of the MS.
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2
The structure of the magnetosphere of Earth
It is interesting to try to relate the model for sensory representations to the structure of Earth’s MS. To
achieve this, I will provide a brief novice’s overview about the structure of MS. I will use partially TGD
based language in which magnetic field lines are replaced by magnetic flux tubes and the formation of
the plasma corresponds to the leakage of the supra currents from the magnetic flux tubes.
I will also briefly consider TGD based qualitative models for the phenomena, many of which are not
well understood in Maxwellian theory. Examples of such phenomena are Alfven waves which are not
proven to result from Maxwellian theory, and magnetic dynamo of Earth whose working mechanism is
not really understood. Also the mechanism of auroras becomes very concrete when field lines are replaced
with flux tubes [14].
2.1
Magnetosphere
Solar wind [4, 8, 7] determines the large scale structure of the magnetic field of Earth to a high extent.
The basic structural components are transition regions and regions between them.
1. At the bow shock the solar wind arriving at a supersonic velocity of 500 km/s encounters Earth’s
magnetic field and is transformed to a subsonic flow and dissipates energy inside magnetosheath
where the plasma is denser and hotter than in the solar wind. The distance of the bow shock is
roughly 12-14 R (R denotes Earth’s radius).
2. The shocked solar wind cannot penetrate Earth’s magnetic field and a cavity called MS is formed.
Interplanetary magnetic field and MS is separated by a transition region called magneto-pause,
which is accompanied by a plasma mantle. At the day-side magneto-pause is at a distance of about
10 R but when the solar wind is particularly strong, it can move down to 6-7 R. At the night side
MS is stretched into long cylindrical magneto-tail of length about 1000 R and radius about 20 R.
MS consists of clearly separated regions with widely different densities and temperatures. The main
division is into the inner and outer MSs. In the inner MS (also known as plasma sphere) magnetic field
lines are co-rotating with the Earth: in the outer MS they are stationary.
Boundaries are the regions at which self-organization typically occurs.
1. Magneto-pause contains an ionic current determined by the discontinuity of the magnetic field and
orthogonal to it. This region is highly dynamic.
2. The boundary between inner and outer MSs is known as plasmapause. Also this region is dynamical
and its shape and size varies as response to solar wind. The analog is liquid is the boundary between
two compressible liquid flows: other flow is rotating and other flow stationary.
3. Outer MS consists of a plasma sheet, which is between magnetic lobes carrying magnetic fluxes,
which have opposite directions and are bounded by the magnetopause. In the plasma sheet the
magnetic flux flows between the northern and southern lobes to give rise to closed field lines.
Neutral sheet is in the equatorial region and starts at 10 ± 3RE . Also this region is dynamic.
Both magnetopause, plasma pause and neutral sheet are expected to be highly dynamical selforganizing regions and are especially interesting from the point of view of magnetospheric consciousness.
2.2
Outer magnetosphere
2.2.1
Magnetic lobes
The outer MS at the night side, magneto-tail, consist of northern and southern magnetic lobes which are
cavities having very low ionic density of about.01 ions per cubic cm. The low density can be understood
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as resulting from the absence of the solar wind in this region. By Maxwell’s equations the magnetic field
is approximately constant in the region where the flow lines are parallel (if sources can be neglected).
According to [3] the value of the magnetic field is about 30 nT in the interior of the lobes. The relatively
strong magnetic field inside lobes serves as a magnetic energy battery feeding energy to the plasma sheet.
Magneto-tail is a cylindrical structure with radius of order Rm = 20R. Magnetic lobes extend up
to r ∼ 1000R. The magnetic field lines remain actually closed. In the TGD framework this means the
existence of a closed supra-current circuitry formed by the magnetic flux tubes.
2.2.2
Plasma sheet and magneto-pause
Magnetic lobes are separated by a plasma sheet in the equitorial plane consisting of hot (5 × 106 K),
low density plasma (.3-.5 ions/cm3 as opposed to.01 ions/cm3 inside lobes) with magnetic field ∼ 10 nT.
Plasma sheet extends from 8R to about 60R and has thickness of order few R, and gets thinner with
increasing distance. Plasma sheet disappears at the so called neutral point, where the magnetic field
vanishes. In the plasma sheet the magnetic flux from the southern lobe flows to the northern lobe. Near
the Earth plasma sheet reaches the high latitude auroral ionosphere. The value of the magnetic field
immediately above the magnetic sheet is 20 nT.
In the TGD framework the plasma sheet can be seen as resulting from the leakage of the supra currents
from the magnetic flux tubes of Earth’s magnetic field to a larger space-time sheet. This supra-current
leakage would be caused by the inertia of the ions and electrons in the region where the magnetic flux
tubes are highly curved. The leakage occurs also in the magneto-pause, where the tangential component
of the magnetic field is discontinuous and a surface current orthogonal to B generating the discontinuity
flows.
In the magneto-pause the magnetic flux tubes of the inner and outer region are parallel. The reconnection of the parallel flux tubes of the magnetic fields of Earth and Sun allows the transfer of the ions of
the solar wind to the MS. Magneto-pause is accompanied by a plasma mantle, which could be partially
due to the leakage of ions to a larger space-time sheet accompanying the reconnection process.
There is a convective flow of ions towards the plasma sphere along the plasma sheet. In the TGD
framework this motion must take place at a larger space-time sheet or involves a hopping between magnetic
flux tubes: in both cases a breaking of the propposed super-conductivity is implied.
Plasma sheet also has a boundary layer in which the tangential component of the magnetic field is
discontinuous. This requires a surface current orthogonal to the axis of the sheet. This current would
result as the ions from the magnetic flux tubes leak out from flux tubes to a larger space-time sheet by
their inertia in the highly curved portion of the flux tube caused by the tangential discontinuity.
2.2.3
Cusps
Southern and northern cusps are funnel-shaped regions which on the day side consist of closed highly
compressed flux tubes of dipole field and on the night side of almost open flux tubes stretched deep
into the magnetospheric tail. In this funnel magnetic field is orthogonal to the magneto-pause and the
magnetic flux tubes of the solar magnetic field can penetrate the MS. This implies that solar plasma
contained in the solar magnetic field lines penetrates deeply into the magneto-tail by reconnecting with
the field lines of Earth’s magnetic field near poles. This gives rise to auroras [9].
Reconnection can be seen as resulting from the penetration of the solar magnetic flux tubes at the
upper boundary of the magneto-pause along the plasma sheet to highly stretched flux tubes along the
boundary of the plasma sheet. The transformation to open flux tubes can happen only if the solar flux
tubes reconnect with the flux tubes of the solar magnetic field penetrated into the plasma sphere. Thus
auroras can be seen as a phenomenon involved with the boundary between plasma sheet and lobes.
Cusps, and to some extent also plasma mantle, serve as a channel along which the solar wind feeds
”magnetometabolic” energy to the MS needed to run the geodynamo system [1] (the notion of superconducting geodynamo will be introduced later). The dipole field generated solely by the convective
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currents in Earth interior would die out in a few thousands of years. The field inside lobes serves as a
storage of magnetic energy and is recharged by the energy of the solar ions leaking into the magnetic tail
in the reconnection process. One could see the cusps also as a communication channel between solar and
Earth’s magnetic structures, kind of magnetic ”ears” of magnetic Mother Gaia.
2.3
Basic structure of the inner magnetosphere
Inner MS is a toruslike structure whose extension varies between 4R (day side) and 8R (night side). In
the inner MS the typical density is about 1 ion per cubic centimeter.
Inner MS is bounded by a transition layer of thickness of ∼ R (magneto-pause). In this region the
density of the ions drops rapidly.
Inner MS contains plasma sphere whose radius varies in the range 2R-4R at day side and 2R-6R at
night side. Plasma has an ionospheric origin. The density of the cold plasma consisting mainly of protons
( T ∼ 1 eV) sphere varies in the range 10 − 103 ions/cm3 , whereas the temperature is ∼ 5 × 103 K. The
cold, dense plasma of the plasma sphere is frozen around magnetic flux lines which co-rotate with Earth.
In the TGD framework this means that flux tubes co-rotate and thus change shape. In the equatorial
plane the density of the plasma sphere drops sharply down to ∼ 1 ions/cm3 at r = 4R. This transition
region is known as a plasma pause. During magnetic storms the outer radius decreases since the pressure
of the solar wind compresses the plasma sphere. The day-night variation of the shape of the plasma
sphere is rather small. Within this region the magnetic field in a reasonable approximation has dipole
shape with radiation belts forming an exception.
2.4
Radiation belts and ring currents
Plasma sphere (i.e. inner magnetosphere) contains the inner and outer van Allen radiation belts [2]
(extending from 2R to 4R at the day side and from 2R to 9R at the night side).Inner radiation belt
extends from distance .2RE to 2RE . Outer radiation belt extends from distance 3RE to 10RE and is
regarded as part of non-rotating outer MS. Both the inner and outer belts extend up to latitude of 60
degrees. The boundaries of the belts follow magnetic field lines except at the Northern and Southern tips.
This region contains ring currents.
One of the functions of the radiation belts is to prevent the penetration of the biologically harmful
high energy cosmic rays to the ionosphere. In fact, the inner protonic belt results from the decay of the
cosmic ray neutrons to protons. Second function (in TGD universe!) is to act as a part of a controlled
dynamo system giving rise to the MS of Earth (for the standard theory of geodynamo see [1] ).
It has been found that the energies of the ions in the radiation belts are much higher than one might
expect [5]. This might be understood if part of the ions runs as supra currents along the magnetic flux
tubes. Super-conductivity is broken only by the leakage of the supra currents from the magnetic flux
tubes. This could explain the success of magnetohydrodynamics based on the assumption of effective
super conductivity.
2.4.1
Inner radiation belts
There are actually two separate inner radiation belts: the one containing protons and the one containing
electrons. Protons in the inner belt have energies at 10-100 MeV range and readily penetrate space crafts.
The inner radiation belts are concentrated around the equator in the range (1.1 − −3.3)R (these numbers
depend on the conventions used and should not be taken too literally). In the protonic belt the maximum
of the flux density is at 2R: in the electronic belt the maximum flux density is at about 1.4R. The inner
belts are relatively stable and there is no night-day difference. The inner belts feel magnetic storms and
vary with the 11 year period of solar activity.
What is interesting is that the inner belts are also sensitive to human technology. The inner belt has
lowered above the East Coast of US from 300 km to 10 km [13]: this process is associated with power
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transmission along magnetic field line and the usage of the ionosphere-resonance frequency 60 Hz as the
frequency of household current.
During the last decade two new belts have formed inside inner belts [4], [13]. The new electronic belt
has maximum electron flux at r ∼ 2R (earlier flux maximum was at r ∼ 1.4R). The second newcomer
consists mostly of O+ ions but contains also He+ . This process has been seen as a part of magnetic reself-organization process occurring in the scale of the entire helio-magnetosphere implying rapid changes
of planetary MSs [13].
2.4.2
Outer radiation belt
Outer belt contains mainly electrons with energies up to 10 MeV and is produced by the injection of
charged particles during geomagnetic storms. This makes the outer belt much more dynamical than the
inner one. The cross section of the outer radiation belt is banana shaped. The outer belt ranges from 3R
to 6R (at night side). The maximum for the density of electrons above MeV energy occurs at 4R.
2.4.3
Ring currents
Radiation belts contain ring currents. Electronic ring current rotates in the same direction as Earth
whereas protonic current runs to the opposite direction. In the outer belt only electronic current is
present. Quiet time ring current in the inner electronic resp. protonic belts consist mainly of hydrogen
ions resp. electrons but during magnetic storms also O+ ions are present (note however the presence of
the new O+ belt). Ring current has the effect that the magnetic field gets stronger at the outer side of a
given belt and weaker at the inner side.
3
Frequency scales associated with the magnetosphere
3.1
Cyclotron frequencies in magnetic lobes and plasma sheet
The values of important magnetic transitions frequencies in various regions of the MS are crucial if one
wants to construct a general vision about sensory and motor representations at the magnetic sensory canvas. In the inner MS dipole approximation allows to estimate the spatial dependence magnetic transition
frequencies.
In magnetosheath and magnetolobes the average values of the magnetic field are 10 nT and 30 nT
respectively. Immediately above the magnetosheath the value of the magnetic field is 20 nT. Magnetosheath could thus allow place coding by the magnetic transition frequency scale whereas magnetolobes
are not taylor made for this purpose. Note that the thickness of the magnetic flux tubes in the field of
10 nT = 2−9 BE , BE = 5 × 104 nT is from the quantization of magnetic flux equal to about 55 µm and
thus corresponds to a biological length scale. This length scale corresponds to the p-adic length scale
L(11, 16) (Lp (n) = p(n−1)/2 Lp ). Already this encourages to think that plasma sheet might be involved
with bio-control.
The strength of the interplanetary magnetic field depends on the intensity of solar wind and varies
between .2 − 80 nT and has average of 6 nT. Interestingly, the maximum value 80 nT corresponds to the
p-adic length scale L(173) = 20 µm.
1. Proton
In the case of proton there are three especially interesting frequencies to be considered: cyclotron
frequency fc = eB/2πmp , spin flip frequency and the frequency of combined spin flip and ∆n = 1
transitions. The frequencies of these transitions in magnetic field of .5 × 10−4 T are fc = 300 Hz,
ff lip = 838 Hz, f1 = 532 Hz and f2 = 1138 Hz. In a field of 10 nT the values of the transition periods
T = 1/f are Tc = 16.7 sec, Tf lip = 6 sec, τ1 = 9.3 sec, and τ2 = 4.4 sec. For a field of 30 nT the values are
obtained by dividing by three. Plasma sheet contains also He++ and He+ ions and for these the cyclotron
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times are 2τ and 4τ . For O+ ion which is also present cyclotron time varies between 1 min 20 s and
4 minutes. All these time scales are typical time scales of human consciousness. For the interplanetary
magnetic field protonic cyclotron times are 13.9 min, 27.8 sec, and 2.1 sec for the minimum, average, and
maximum respectively.
2. Electron
For electrons the cyclotron frequency is 282 Hz for 10 nT so that electronic cyclotron transitions
cannot represent ionic cyclotron transitions in brain (if they occur at the flux tubes of Earth’s magnetic
field!). Spin flip combined with cyclotron transition represents however an important exception. In this
case the non-vanishing transition frequency is due to the anomalous magnetic moment of electron and
the frequency in the reference field of .5 × 10−4 T is 2255 Hz. This gives T (e) = 2.24 sec. Note that also
n = 3 protonic cyclotron transition gives rise to nearly the same period.
It is interesting to notice that these time scales are important time scales of human consciousness and
that both protonic spin flip time scale and T (e) nearly half of the 5 second time scale associated with the
Comorosan effect [10, 11] discussed in [20]. If Earth’s magnetic field is accompanied by dark flux sheets
in entire MS carrying field Bend = 2BE /5, then the value of T (e) would become T (e) = 5 seconds for
BE = 11.2 nT.
To sum up:
1. The average magnetic field in plasma sheet corresponds to a definite p-adic length scale.
2. The mysterious time scale of the Comorosan effect pops up as a basic magnetic transition time in
magnetic lobes and plasma sheet and is related to bio-control by enhancing catalytic rates: it is
however essential that the ”dark” counterpart Bend = 2BE /5 of BE associated with living matter
is in question.
3. Plasma sheet is found to be a complex self-organizing system with the velocity distribution of ions
representing complex features (such as ”eyes” and ”wings”!) [6].
These findings force to seriously consider the possibility that plasma sheet and magneto-pause and
perhaps even magnetic lobes might perform high level bio-control utilizing MEs and supra-currents along
magnetic flux tubes forming the extension of the endogenous magnetic circulation to the entire MS.
3.2
Estimates for the natural frequency scales assignable to various parts of
the magnetosphere
The part of MS having distance R from the center of Earth corresponds naturally to frequency scale
f = 1/R. This allows a rough estimate for the frequencies needed for the communications between
various parts of MS. What is highly non-trivial is that these scales are in EEG range and that one can
even assign EEG bands to the regions of MS.
The basic correspondence is given by the formula f = 1/R: favored frequencies are harmonics of this
fundamental frequency. Takin the Schuman resonance frequency 7.8 Hz as reference and Earth radius as
length unit, one has
RE
RE
f
= 2π × 7.8 ×
= 49.0 ×
Hz
R
R
(3.1)
Table 1 summarizes the frequency scales assignable to the size scales of various regions of the MS.
Some remarks are in order.
1. Plasmapause corresponds to frequency range 10-12.5 Hz containing alpha band and also frequencies
often included in theta band.
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Region
plasma sheath
inner MS
plasmapause
inner van Allen belt
outer van Allen belt
day-side magnetopause
night-side magnetopause
plasma sheet
neutral sheet
R/RE range
...-1000
1-10
4.0-5.0
.2-2.0
3.0-10.0
8.0-10.0
10.0-200.0
10.0-60.0
7.0-13.0
f /Hz range
...-0.049 (20 s)
49.0-4.9
12.5-10.0
75.0-7.5
5.1-1.5
6.25-4.9
4.9-.2 (5 s)
4.9-.82
7.0-3.8
EEG bands
θ, α, β, γ
θ, α
θ, β, γ
δ
θ
δ
δ
δ
Table 1: The frequency scales f assignable to the size scales R of various regions of the MS (MS)
2. Neutral sheet corresponds to the range 3.8-7.0 Hz above delta band.
3. The outer van Allen belt corresponds to delta band in EEG. Therefore also the delta band of EEG
dominating during deep sleep appears naturally also at the day-side. Note that outer van Allen belt
belongs to the non-rotating outer magnetosphere.
4. Night-side magnetopause and plasma sheet contain frequencies in delta band which dominates
during deep sleep.
5. The lower bound for frequencies from the size of magnetopause at night-side corresponds to the
period 5 s assignable to the Comorosan effect [10, 11] [20].
6. Day-side regions of the MS correspond to θ, α, β and γ bands.
These findings encourage to ask whether the communications between the brain (and possibly also
other parts of body, at least central nervous system) and MS could be in terms of EEG.
3.3
Could one regard magnetosphere as a scaled variant of biological body?
Sensory canvas hypothesis allows two options. MS could be the sensory canvas for the brain or for the
entire nervous system and body. The structure of the MS suggests that it could correspond to a sensory
map of the entire body.
1. Inner MS could be the sensory canvas for the brain or part of it and Earth perhaps to some nucleus,
say pineal gland.
2. Magnetopause would correspond to skin and magnetic lobes would correspond to to the interior of
the body. Plasma sheet would correspond to the interior of the body and the neutral sheet at which
the direction of magnetic field changes to the spine.
3. Left and right body parts would correspond to northern and southern magnetic lobes.
4. The inner MS could correspond to the part of the nervous system assignable to the head and neck
and involve cranial nerves associated with vision, hearing, and smell. Outer MS could correspond
to tactile senses.
5. The neutral sheet at the night side of the outer MS could correspond to the spinal cord, which has
dorsal and ventral parts which could correspond to flux tubes with opposite fluxes.
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Region
Earth
plasmapause
inner van Allen belt
outer van Allen belt
day-side magnetopause
night-side magnetopause
plasma sheet length
plasma sheet thickness
neutral sheet
y = R/RE r
1.0
4.0-5.0
0.2-2.0
3.0-10.0
8.0-10.0
10.0-200.0
10.0-60.0
5.0-10.0
7.0-13.0
r
3.5 mm
1.4-1.7 cm
.84-7.4 mm
1.3-4.2 cm
2.8-3.6 cm
3.6-80.0 cm
3.6 cm-21.5 cm
1.8 cm-3.6 cm
2.4-4.6 cm
Table 2: The scaled down radii r = .5 × 10−9 R = y × 3.5 mm for various regions of the MS (MS) with
radius R = yRE
6. Plasma sheet would contain the spinal nerves leading to the magnetopause as the counterpart of
the skin.
The frequency-distance correspondence suggests a rather detailed correspondence between EEG bands
and magnetospheric regions. Delta band dominating during deep sleep should correspond to the magnetopause, plasma sheet, and neutral sheet.
A quantitative formulation for this hypothesis is in terms of fractality. The scales of the body and
corresponding parts of the MS should be in constant proportion and the ratios of the corresponding scales
should be the same for body and MS.
Magnetopause has thickness D ' 1000 km. Magnetopause corresponds to skin and the first guess is
that the ratio of smallest and largest length L = 200RE associated with the MS has same value as the
corresponding ratio for human body. One has D/L = 1340. The ratio the human body length l ∼ 1 m of
the human skin thickness d ' .5 mm is l/d = 2 × 103 . The order of magnitude is same. D/L = 2 × 103
would give a perfect fit.
RE = 6.37D and the ratio x = d/D = .5×10−9 allows to scale down various scales L = yRE = 6.37yD
of MS to xL = y × 3.5 mm to see whether they are consistent with the corresponding scales of body
suggested by the above intuitive considerations.
Table 2 summarizes the scaled down length scales for various regions of the MS.
Using these scaled down estimates one can try to identify the correspondence between body parts of
human body and parts of MS.
1. Pineal gland has radius 3.7 mm which is not far from the size scales 3.5 cm assigned to Earth.
2. Most scales correspond to the scales of brain nuclei which have diameter of 5 cm. Apart from pineal
gland these structures of MS are expected to appear as pairs associated with Northern and Souther
magnetic lobes.
3. Night-time magnetopause would correspond to a structure with radius .76 m and could correspond
to the entire body. Plasma sheet corresponds to size scales in the range 3.6 − 21.5 cm, perhaps the
upper limit corresponds to brain size scale.
One can also ask whether the length scales of DNA and proteins, cell membrane thickness, size scale
of cell nucleus, and the range of size scales for cells and neurons could have counterparts at the level of
MS and whether one might identify possible candidates for the counterparts for these structures.
Given the size scale d of the molecular or cellular structure the scaled up system should have size scale
R = .29 × 109 d. System with size 1 nm - roughly the size scale of the DNA codon - corresponds to a
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Region
DNA codon
lipid layer cell membrane
tubulin
cell nucleus
cell
neuron
d
1.0 nm
2.5-5.0 nm
10.0 nm
1.0 µm
2.5-25.0 µm
2.5-100.0 µm
R
29 cm
.73-1.45 m
2.9 m
290 m
.73-7.3 km
.73-29.2 km
Table 3: The scaled up size scales R = .29 × 109 d = y × 29 cm for basic biomolecules, cells, and neurons
with size scale d = y nm
system with a size scale 29 cm not far from the size of the brain hemisphere. DNA letter with size scale
.33 nm corresponds to scale 9-7 cm. Could the interpretation of the counterpart of the DNA codon as
brain hemisphere make sense? Could the brain consisting of three parts be seen as a counterpart of the
genetic codon with 3 letters?
The assignment of genetic codon with the brain does not seem to make sense but here an old idea
about a hierarchy of codes is suggestive. Ordinary genetic code would correspond to Mersenne prime
M7 = 27 − 1 and have 26 codons. Memetic code assignable to Mersenne prime MM7 = M127 = 2127 − 1
would have 2126 codons representable also as sequences of 21 ordinary genetic codons. One could say
that one has an abstraction hierarchy in which genetic code corresponds to 64 statements and memetic
codons to statements about these statements.
Individual brains do not certainly give rise to analogs of DNA sequences. Here however the notion
of magnetic body (MB) providing an abstracted representation of the brain and the biological body is
suggestive. The images of neurons at MB near to each other at MB need not be near to each other at
the brain level: it is enough that they are functionally similar. This would realize the analog of RAM.
Pietch [12] found that the shuffling of the neurons of the salamander brain does not lead to the loss
of its functionality. This supports the view about the brain as an analog ofRAM. In an analogous way
human and perhaps also other than human brains could serve as analogs for the codons of memetic code
mapped to the MB to form linear or even higher-dimensional analogs of the genome. Cultural evolution
could mean the emergence of the memetic code.
One can also consider other size scales. Table 3 summarizes the scaled up size scales for basic
biomolecules, cells, and neurons.
From the table one finds that the lipids of the lipid layers of cell membrane still correspond to human size
scales. This inspires the crazy idea that perhaps humans and possibly other higher animals correspond
at the level of MB to analogs of lipids for cell membrane like structures. Larger structures - such as cell
and neuron - could correspond to social structures reponsible for collective consciousness generated in the
cultural evolution.
4
The model for hef f preserving communications based on variable value of β0
Nottale’s gravitational Planck constant ~gr = GM m/v0 contains the velocity parameter v0 as the only
parameter. In the perturbative expansion of the scattering amplitudes β0 = v0 /c appears in the role of
fine structure constant.
There is however a problem.
1. The model for the effects of ELF radiation on vertebrate brain inspired by a generalization of
Nottale’s hypothesis by replacing the total mass M in the case of Earth by MD ∼ 10−4 ME suggests
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that in this case the dark particles involved couple only to a part of mass identifiable as dark mass
MD .
2. Since only GM appears in the basic formulas, the alternative option is that the value of G is reduced
to GD . This conforms with the fact that in the TGD framework CP2 length is the fundamental
parameter G is a prediction of the theory and therefore can vary.
3. A further option is that the parameter β0 = v0 /c ≤ 1 is variable and equals to β0 = 1 or to a value
not much smaller than 1, say β0 = 1/2.
These three options are discussed in [38]. The cautious conclusion is that the the third option is the
most plausible one. In the sequel I will develop a model for the communications between dark matter
phases with hef f = nh0 satisfying hef f = hgr based on the third option.
One can consider two options for the communications depending on whether the value of hef f changes
as (for instance) in the communications between dark and ordinary matter or whether it is preserved.
1. If the value of hef f can change, energy conservation for E = hef f f allows energy resonance whereas
the frequency changes. The simplest option is that the dark photon transforms to say ordinary
photon with the same amplitude
2. If the value hef f is preserved, one has both energy and frequency resonance. In the case of cyclotron
radiation, the simultaneous occurrence of energy and frequency resonances poses strong conditions
on the values of the magnetic fields, the values of charged particle masses, and the parameter β0 at
the ends of the communication line.
4.1
Conditions for frequency - and energy resonance
The condition that the frequency is the same at both ends implies for cyclotron frequencies fc = ZeB/2πm
the condition
Z 2 B2
Z1 B1
=
.
m1
m2
(4.1)
For hef f = hgr the condition that the cyclotron energy Ec = GM ZeB/v0 at both ends is same implies
Z1 B1
Z 2 B2
=
.
v0,1
v0,2
(4.2)
Z 1 B1
β0,1
m1
=
=
.
m2
Z 2 B2
β0,2
(4.3)
Together these conditions give
For instance, if the two particles are proton and electron, one obtains
me
β0,1
'
.
β0,2
mp
This ratio is is consistent with the values β0,2 = 1 and β0,1 = 2−11 in the accuracy considered. Is this a
mere accident?
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4.2
Resonance conditions for communications from the Earth’s surface to the
magnetosphere?
The simplest option is that the interacting particles have the same values of mass and β0 and magnetic
fields are identical. This is achieved if the flux tubes have constant thickness. Whether this is the case is
not clear.
However, the idea that the flux tube picture about magnetic fields is locally consistent with the
Maxwellian view inspires the question whether also the magnetic field strength at the flux tubes of Bend
behaves like Bend ∝ 1/r3 as BE in dipole approximation behaves.
Bend is by flux conservation proportional to 1/S, where S is the area of the flux tube. sOne would
have S ∝ r3 . The constancy of Bend /m would suggest m ∝ 1/r3 . If the charged particles are ions
characterized by the A/Z ratio.
This would suggest that the regions of tubes/sheets in frequency resonance are at distances
Z
A0
r
= ( )−1/3 ( )−1/3
r0
Z0
A
for ions Z0 , A0 at the surface of the Earth. The heaviest ions would be nearest to the surface of Earth.
Energy resonance condition
Bend (r)/β0,2 = Bend (RE )/v0,1
would give the additional condition
Z
RE 3
A0
β0,2
) =
.
=(
×
β0,1
r
Z0
A
β0 would be quantized and would decrease with the distance.
4.3
Magnetosphere as sensory canvas
TGD leads to a model of the ”personal” magnetic body (MB) as being associated with the Earth’s MS.
Different regions of the body and brain would be mapped to regions of the MS, which would give rise to
sensory representations at the personal MB [17, 16]. Personal MB, which would have size scale of at least
of the Earth’s MS, would also control biological body.
1. An interesting finding relates to the values of the magnetic field Bend ' 2BE /5 (perhaps identifiable
as the monopole flux part of BE ) and the value of B ∼ 10 nT in the magnetotail at the night-side
of the Earth.
One has B/Bend ∼ 2−11 so that for dark proton-dark electron communications between the Earth’s
surface and this region of outer MS the resonance conditions would be satisfied for β0 = x and
β0 = 2−11 x, where x < 1 not far from unity.
2. Could the parameter β0 characterize particles and act as a tunable control parameter allowing to
achieve energy resonance? Also the values of B are tunable by changing the thickness of the flux
tubes as a kind of motor action of MB.
This idea can be applied to the hef f preserving communications between biological body and the MS
of the Earth.
1. The quantum coherence condition suggests that the communications are optimal when the wavelength of dark photon is larger than the distance considered: λ > r or equivalently the frequency
satisfies f ≤ c/r (one has c = 1 in the units used). If the structure of the MS has distances from
the Earth’s surface below rmax then the frequencies f ≤ 1/rmax are optimal.
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Pitkänen, M., EEG and the Structure of Magnetosphere
2. Given the distance rmax and assuming B = Bend at the surface of Earth, one obtains for the
cyclotron frequencies the condition
fc =
ZeBend
1
≤
.
2πm
rmax
For instance, EEG frequency 10 Hz corresponds to 3 × 107 m. The cyclotron frequency of DNA
sequence does not depend on its length and composition since DNA has constant charge per unit
length. One has fc ' 1 Hz so that the corresponding distance is r = 3 × 108 m, that is r = 46.9RE .
Remark: Bend probably has a spectrum. Music experiences relies on frequency scale and if the
audible frequencies correspond to cyclotron frequencies then eBend /m is variable. This suggests
that the spectrum of Bend covers at least the range of the audible frequencies spanning roughly 10
octaves [18].
5
Further observations making bells ringing
5.1
Magnetosphere as self-organizing system
The view that MS is a self-organizing system is supported by the observations accumulated about the
magnetic self-organization of the solar system during the last decades reviewed in [13]. According to
this report we are living a period of transition basically due to a penetration of highly charged material
from the interstellar space into the interplanetary space from an interstellar plasma structure containing
various kinds of magnetic structures.
This energy feed is inducing various kinds of processes affecting not only the atmo-, iono-, and MSs of
Earth but also solar and other planetary MSs. Also interplanetary transmitting properties are affected.
The Schumacher-Levy comet, which for few years ago collided with Jupiter and among other things a
induced plasmoid train and had dramatic effects on Jupiter’s MS, is referred to as a Comet SL-9 in [13]. I
am not sure whether ”Comet” was meant to suggest that SL-9 was actually a plasma magnetic structure
from the interstellar space. There is also evidence that we are moving to a similar temperature instability
that occurred about 10.000 years ago and which might have initiated the development of the bicameral
society in turn leading to the modern society much later.
This process could be also seen as a re-self-organization and evolution of consciousness in solar length
scale as a reaction to the encounter of heliospheric and interstellar magnetic intelligences. The penetration
of interstellar plasmoid like structures to the interplanetary space through the solar magneto-pause could
be interpreted as a failure of the magneto-immune system of the helio- MS. The interaction of the
planetary MSs with these intelligent (benevolent?) plasmoid like structures would in turn induce the
re-self-organization. Needless to say, the interaction of the two intelligences might have far-reaching
consequences for the evolution of ordinary life.
5.2
Connection with the Comorosan effect
Comorosan effect means that the irradiation of living manner by visible light over a period which is a
multiple of τC = 5 seconds implies enhanced catalytic activity [10, 11]. According to private communication, this effect is not restricted to living or even organic matter. TGD explains the effect [20] but the
deeper explanation of the time scale of τC = 5 seconds has remained a longstanding challenge.
The 5 second time scale associated with Comorosan effect is the spin flip time scale associated with
proton’s ∆n = 1 cyclotron transition in the field of Bend = 13.32 nT (which could correspond to the value
of BE = 5Bend /2 = 33.3 nT in magnetic lobes). τC is also associated with proton’s ∆n = 3 cyclotron
transition and the electronic cyclotron spin flip in the field of Bend = 2/5BE = 11.2 nT (plasma sheet).
Lungs contain magnetic particles giving rise to ∼ 10 nT magnetic field and thus for Bend = 2BE /5 to
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n = 3 protonic cyclotron transitions and electronic cyclotron spin flips in 5.5 second scale, which is very
near to τC . Perhaps the Comorosan effect is used by the outer MS to affect the behavior of living matter
and lungs are involved with this process.
5.3
Plasma sheet as a ”microchip”
Plasma sheet should be a seat for magnetospheric sensory representations in theta and delta bands and
among other things provide a model of magnetospheric self. If the plasma sheet has this kind of role, it
should manifest itself in its properties. The plasma sheet should be self-organizing, complex structure
rather than a system near thermal equilibrium. In the TGD framework, the plasma sheet could also
perform bio-control.
There is a fascinating finding about the ”memory chip” character of the organization of the ionic
velocity distribution in the plasma sheet [6]. The belief was that the distribution is a Maxwellian thermal
distribution but a complex organization of the number of ions as a function of speed and direction relative
to the direction of the local magnetic field has been detected [6]. By coloring the bins representing small
volumes of the velocity space, one finds that 3-dimensional features like ”eyes” and ”wings” appear! The
proposed interpretation is that these features code for the history of ionic currents.
One cannot exclude the possibility that these ionic currents could reflect even our sensory experiences.
The prediction is that also other transition regions (in particular magneto-pause) should exhibit similar
complex self-organization patterns. The simplest possibility is that the velocity patterns of ordinary
electrons reflect the underlying pattern of dark matter at the dark magnetic flux tubes forming perhaps
some kind of sensory representations.
Received April 16, 2021; Accepted July 15, 2021
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2023 | Volume 14 | Issue 2 | pp. 127-130
Roy, A., Space time, Consciousness & Creation of Universe
127
Essay
Space time, Consciousness & Creation of Universe
Arup Roy*
Scottish Church College, Kolkata, India
Abstract
Careful consideration of the modern cosmological studies in connection with the origin of the
universe reveals some open questions. Answers to some of those are sought in this article in
terms of the ‘consciousness field’ which, in some recent publications, has been elaborated upon.
Keywords: Spacetime, black holes, wormholes, consciousness, entanglement.
1. Introduction
There is a hypothesis which states that the world basically consists of space-time, matter and
consciousness, with their own degrees of freedom (Smythies, 2003). For further investigation
along this line, with regard to the creation of the universe, information about developments in
cosmological investigations are collated here. Correlation and analyses of theoretical predictions
and experimental observations, however, indicate certain gaps in understanding the cosmological
model(s) of the universe. To address these an idea of a conscious universe is suggested in this
article.
2. Existing theories and experimental results
Space and Time: Einstein's general theory of relativity (Tillman et al, 2022) holds that space and
time are soft, malleable entities; but space is expanding or contracting over time. The important
postulate of this theory is that gravity is a feature of spacetime itself. According to John Wheeler
(Taylor & Wheeler, 1992) ‘Spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move... Mass grips spacetime,
telling it how to curve ‘. On the basis of a great deal of compelling evidences, astronomers have
confirmed that our universe starting from a point is currently expanding. So, if one could set the
cosmic history run backwards in time then all the galaxies or their forebears would have come
together into a single point called a singularity (breakdown in spacetime) beyond which cosmic
ancestry cannot extend. The situation would be analogous to matter descending into a black hole
(Curiel, 2021); time line would end at that singularity and spacetime would cease to exist
(Penrose, 1965; Schoen and Yau, 1983; Wald, 1984). This singularity becomes obviously a point
of infinite density and temperature and of infinite spacetime curvature.
The Big Bang and expanding universe: Modern cosmology delves in understanding the genesis
of the universe. In the last seventy to eighty years, there has been enormous progress in
*
Correspondence author: Arup Roy, Retired Associate Professor, Scottish Church College, Kolkata, India. E-mail:
aryscottish@gmail.com
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technology and mathematical theory in this connection. Light emitted from galaxies billions of
light-years away are detected and analysed by modern telescopes; using Hubble telescope and
techniques like ‘gravitational lensing’ photographic images of quasars are taken. There are clear
evidences that galaxies are actually moving apart. Hubble (1929), using a pool of experimental
data, showed that the rate at which a galaxy is moving away from us is roughly proportional to
its distance from us. However, the theory that survived all tests to date is the Big Bang
cosmology according to which at a particular instant, roughly 13.7 billion years ago, all the
matter and energy, concentrated in a point-like region, began to cool at an incredibly rapid rate
following huge explosion and expansion. The major claim of the theory is that the universe
starting from an extremely dense early state is expanding at accelerating rate (Wall, 2022). The
idea of inflationary universe was put forward by Guth (1984) who suggested that ‘inflaton’ field
was responsible for a hyper-accelerated expansion in the first instant after Big Bang and only
after that very brief period of acceleration the universe flattened out. Numerous experimental
observations support Guth’s theory that strengthened the idea that the early universe contained
fields that drive inflation.
Although scientists are unclear about its source, the ‘dark energy’ is claimed to be the prime
driver of the accelerating universe; the quantum fluctuations in the ‘vacuum’ of space have been
speculated as the source of the dark energy. Again, the enigmatic ‘dark matter’ (Blumental et al.,
1984; Bertone and Hooper, 2018) that governs the formation of galaxies is accepted as an
essential element of the standard cosmological model. In spite of being about six times the total
mass of the ‘normal matter’ of the universe, there is no clue to how it came into existence and
why it is only gravity and nothing else that interacts with them.
Black holes & wormholes: Black holes are regions of curved spacetime; in its exterior, spacetime
is curved but objects and messages can escape while the interior lies beyond the point of no
return. The interior and exterior of a black hole are separated by a surface known as ‘event
horizon’. Two black hole horizons separate rapidly in case they are extremely close. It was
Hawking (1974) who showed that quantum effects would cause black holes to emit radiation,
which goes to imply that they have temperature. Therefore, looking at a black hole from the
exterior, one should find a quantum system with many microstates. Wormholes are the outcome
of the general theory of relativity, which according to Maldecena (2016), is understood to
connect two distant regions of spacetime and hence can serve as a link between two black holes;
these are curved spacetime only, containing no matter. A wormhole elongates and become
thinner as time progresses.
Quantum Entanglement: As in the case of two entangled particles one can conceive of an
entangled pair of two microstates. According to ‘string theory’ (Maldecena, 2016), a pair of
black holes with their microstates entangled would result in a wormhole, linking the interior of
both the black holes. This would suggest that spacetime itself could have emerged from the
entanglement of many microscopic constituents of the universe. In this sense wormholes and
quantum entanglements are equivalent.
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3. Analysis and the role of consciousness field
The Big Bang did not expand through anything because there was no space to expand through at
the beginning of time. It is believed that the Big Bang created and stretched space itself,
expanding the universe (Origin, CERN, IDEAS). Space needs to be created even for the ‘dark
energy’ in order to facilitate quantum fluctuations.
If one goes back in cosmological history of time that is, in other words, if one thinks of
contraction of the universe, then spacetime will allow entangled black holes to come closer
before their horizons touch each other. In the process the wormholes connecting them will
become thicker and condition will be created for the black holes to move away from each other.
For this to happen spacetime should exist or should be created in the exterior of the so-called
singularity. At this juncture the cause for creation of spacetime in the exterior and interior of the
black holes can be postulated to be due to the existence of the hypothetical consciousness field
[(Roy and Roy (2015, 2019)]. As time progresses the entangled black holes would move away
from each other and the wormholes connecting them would elongate. The consciousness field,
being always associated with spacetime, would use wormholes as conduits to send information
from one point of spacetime to the other. Since this field is devoid of any matter, the wormholes
associated intimately with the field, would convey the information. It is to be noted that Roy and
Roy (2021) discussed about the consciousness field as the possible source of communication
between entangled pairs and proposed ‘bit’ as one parameter defining consciousness.
Since space was needed to be created for expansion at Big Bang, the omnipresent consciousness
field can possibly serve as its source. Similarly, for the ‘dark energy’ to drive the accelerating
expansion of the universe, space bereft of real matter should owe its existence to the
consciousness field.
According to Musser (2018), not all phenomena neatly fit within spacetime and some new
foundational structure might be needed to complete the revolution that began with Einstein.
Therefore, if following the hypothesis by Roy and Roy (2015, 2019), consciousness is accepted
as the result of interactions with the consciousness field, then one can interpret dark matter as
being differently conscious due to interaction with this hypothetical field.
As an alternative to Guth’s idea of inflationary cosmology, Steinhardt and his colleagues (2011)
proposed the ‘cyclic’ theory; they suggest that the Big Bang is not the beginning of space and
time. According to them, expansion followed contraction and smoothing of universe took place
before the bang. If this be the case, then one does not need to go back in time to speculate the
origin of the universe; the contraction would take care of the creation of spacetime with the help
of the consciousness field for the universe to expand. It therefore follows that, irrespective of the
speculated origin, at every stage of evolution of the universe the ubiquitous consciousness field
ensures that the journey is basically a conscious one.
Received November 19, 2022; Accepted December 26, 2022
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130
References
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Bertone G, Hooper D, History of dark matter, Rev. Mod. Phys., 90 (2018) 045002 1-32
2.
Blumenthal G R, Faber S M, Primack J R, Rees M J, Formation of galaxies and large-scale structure
with cold dark matter, Nature, 311 (1984) 517-525
3.
Curiel Erik, "Singularities and Black Holes", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/spacetimesingularities
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Guth A H, Steinhardt P J, The Inflationary Universe, Scientific American, (May 1984) – JSTOR
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Hawking S W, Black hole explosions?, Nature, 248 (1974) 30–31
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Hubble E. "A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic
nebulae". PNAS. 15 (3) (1929) 168–173.
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Maldecena J, Black holes, Wormholes and the Secrets of Quantum Spacetime, Scientific American,
315 (5) (2016) 26-31
8.
Musser G, Nature, 557, (2018) S3-S6. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05095-z
9. Origins: CERN: Ideas: The Big Bang, https://bit.ly/3WrmMkA
10. Penrose R, Gravitational Collapse and Space - Time Singularities, Physical Review Letters, 14 (3)
(1965) 57-59
11. Roy A, Roy A, Evolution is a conscious process – a perspective in metaphysics, IJTP, 63 (2015) 5366. http://www.citphy.org/volume-63-nos-12-2015/; https://bit.ly/3DbpuUq
12. Roy A, Roy A, Properties and State of Consciousness, International Journal of Science and
Consciousness, 5(4) (2019) 32-40. http://ijsc.net/docs/issue17/properties-and-state-ofconsciousness;
https://bit.ly/3WxRkBj
13. Roy A, Roy A, Reality Resides in The Realm of Consciousness, International Journal of Science and
Consciousness, 7 (2) (2021) 34-39, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354687009
14. Schoen R and Yau S T, The Existence of a Black Hole Due to Condensation of Matter, Commun.
Math. Phys, 90 (1983) 575-579
15. Smythies J, Space, Time and Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies,10 (3) (2003) 47-56
16. Steinhardt P J, The Inflation Debate, Scientific American, April (2011), 38-43
17. Taylor E F, Wheeler J A, Spacetime Physics, (W. H. Freeman and Company, New York), (1992) pp
275
18. Tillman N T , Bartels M, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Space.com, published January 05,
(2022), https://www.space.com/17661-theory-general-relativity.html
19. Wald R M, Black holes, singularities and predictability in Astrophysics, Cosmology and Astronomy
(Adam Hilger Limited; Bristol, UK), (1984) pp.160-168
20. Wall M, (2022), https://www.space.com/13347-big-bang-origins-universe-birth.html
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| April 2020 | Volume 11 | Issue 3 | pp. 318-320
Hu, H., & Wu, M., Fight against the 2020 Pandemic & the Rise of a New World under God (新世界歌)
318
Poem
Fight against the 2020 Pandemic
& the Rise of a New World under God
(新世界歌)
Huping Hu* & Maoxin Wu
ABSTRACT
This poem/lyrics1 in both English and Chinese calls for united efforts against the 2020 pandemic
and promotes the transformation of the Present World to a peaceful, sustainable & prospering
New World under GOD post 2020.
Keywords: Fight, 2020, pandemic, God, Present World, New World, Earth, transformation,
sustainable, green, peace, post 2020.
Rise, people all over the world,
(起来，全世界所有人們,)
Rise, all governments of all nations,
(起来，全世界所有政府,)
An invisible enemy is attacking the mankind,
(一個看不見的敵人正在攻擊人類,)
A New World will be born,
(一個新的世界正在誕生,)
The Present World will be transformed,
(當今時代将会更新換面,)
Rise, Rise people all over the world.
(全世界所有人們起來, 起來.)
Mankind’s survival requires efforts from all,
(人類生存需要所有人來努力,)
Be the heroes to save the sick & vulnerable.
(讓我們拯救病者弱者.)
This is a critical time (for mankind),
(這是人類關鍵的時刻,)
Let’s unite and struggle together,
(讓我們團結一起奮鬥,)
The New World under GOD,
(神引導的新世界,)
Shall be realized.
*
Correspondence: Huping Hu, PhD, JD, Scientific GOD, Inc., P.O. Box 267, Stony Brook, NY 11790, USA E-mail: editor@scigod.com
1
It is adapted from Eugène E. Pottier’s L'Internationale written in 1871. Please don’t use in countries where its use is prohi bited due to
copyright restrictions and/or other regulation(s).
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319
(就一定能實現.)
This is a critical time (for mankind),
(這是人類關鍵的時刻,)
Let’s unite and struggle together,
(讓我們團結一起奮鬥,)
The New World under GOD,
(神引導的新世界,)
Shall be realized.
(就一定能實現.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mother Earth has been ravaged for too long,
(地球母親已被踐踏太久,)
Please wake up from the material pursuit,
(請从物質追求中醒來,)
Mankind’s survival depends on a healthy Earth,
(人類生存依賴健康的地球,)
Courageous actions are called for,
(勇敢的行動是必要的,)
Protect Mother Earth & other lives on Her,
(保護地球母親和別的生命.)
Together let’s conquer the adversity.
(讓我們共同克服逆境.)
Be the forces of change in the Present World,
(做改變當今時代的動力,)
March on the path to the New World.
(前進在去新世界路上.)
This is a critical time (for mankind),
(這是人類關鍵的時刻,)
Let’s unite and struggle together,
(讓我們團結一起奮鬥,)
The New World under GOD,
(神引導的新世界,)
Shall be realized.
(就一定能實現.)
This is a critical time (for mankind),
(這是人類關鍵的時刻,)
Let’s unite and struggle together,
(讓我們團結一起奮鬥,)
The New World under GOD,
(神引導的新世界,)
Shall be realized.
(就一定能實現.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Hu, H., & Wu, M., Fight against the 2020 Pandemic & the Rise of a New World under God (新世界歌)
320
Who set the foundation of the world?
(是誰為世界奠定了基礎,)
It is no other than Scientific GOD,
(是科学的造世主,)
Our Souls need new nourishment,
(我們的精神世界需新營養,)
GOD’s Scientific Truth is the new nutrient,
(主的科學真理就是新食物,)
Everything in the World belongs to GOD,
(所有一切歸造世主所有,)
We shall use each justly and equitably.
(我們要正確合理使用.)
The New World under GOD is approaching,
(一個大同世界已接近,)
Let’s take a quantum leap from the Present World.
(讓我們飛躍地跳出當今時代.)
This is a critical time (for mankind),
(這是人類關鍵的時刻,)
Let’s unite and struggle together,
(讓我們團結一起奮鬥,)
The New World under GOD,
(神引導的新世界,)
Shall be realized.
(就一定能實現.)
This is a critical time (for mankind),
(這是人類關鍵的時刻,)
Let’s unite and struggle together,
(讓我們團結一起奮鬥,)
The New World under GOD,
(神引導的新世界,)
Shall be realized.
(就一定能實現.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Released March 31, 2020)
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139
Hardy, C. H., The Solution to a Deadlocked Conflict Is a Leap to a More Global Level – Logical Fields and the Dynamics of Change
Research Essay
The Solution to a Deadlocked Conflict Is a Leap to a More Global
Level – Logical Fields and the Dynamics of Change
Chris H. Hardy*
Abstract
The point of this paper is to explore the dynamics of the thinking process, especially the
nonrational, analogical, and systemic aspects of natural thinking that create an interdependence
between our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. There is an extreme diversity in the way humans
think, despite the existence of patterns of thought or Logical Fields, that feed individual and
collective mental models. The Logical Fields Model based on systems theory, provides an
evolutionary and dynamical formalization that accounts for both the patterns of thought and their
exquisite diversity. It is applied here to the understanding and strategic resolution of the spiral of
Hate-Violence in ethno-political conflicts. The model proposes that a deadlocked conflict can
only be broken by creating a conceptual model and organization at a higher, more encompassing
level: in brief, by creating a meta-logfield. Then the democratic vision, as a shared planetary
cooperation for the well-being of the variegated peoples of Earth and the planet (as opposed to
special interests groups and lobbies) and the problem of accountability will be discussed.
Keywords: Systems theory, logical field, thought-process, group-thinking, ethno-political
conflict, conflict resolution, semantic fields theory, democracy and accountability, governance.
1. A Plurality of Logics: Logical Fields
From the Greek philosophers onward, logic has been traditionally defined as the strict
application of rules of inference and deduction. It has been equated with pure reason (Aristotle,
Kant, Descartes, etc.), while the principle of reason was itself equated with the principle of
causality (Leibniz, Heidegger). Both Leibniz in his Monadology and Heidegger (1992) have
clearly stated that causality is only one type of link between concepts or events – among many
other types of links (Hardy, 2001). Thus, if I use the basic rule: If A = B and B = C, then A = C,
to explore the problem at hand, I get: If logic = reason, If reason = causality, If causality IS
only one type of link, then logic IS only one type of link.
In brief, the logic (that is defined as reason and causality) is only one type of link between
concepts/events, among many other possible linkages. Logic can now be redefined thus:
[A]
Logic is a qualitative connection between semantic elements
where „semantic elements‟ refer to any concepts, events and processes happening in a mind or
cognitive system and concurring to the generation of meaning. Logic, in other words, is how our
*
Chris Hardy, Ph.D., Eco-Mind Systems Science, Seguret, France. Email: chris.saya@gmail.com
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mind connects cognitive events or concepts and makes sense of the world. Therefore:
[B]
Logic is the process of connecting semantic elements, in its qualitative
singularity
Thus, while logic in a classical sense is a fixated formalization (or matrix) used to structure
thought, it is, in a wider sense, a connective dynamic making use of a variety of specified (or
qualitative) links. Inference is only one of these specified links, other ones being the very
diversified semantic linkages found in connective logic – such as analogy, metaphor, symbolism,
and the like (Bertalanffy, 1967; Beer, 1966; Hardy, 1998) – which are spontaneous and
nonrational processes of natural thinking (Reber, 1995). Hence the need for a concept describing
a pattern of logical links, which I call Logical Field.
In this sense, Quantum Mechanics (QM) is a specific logical field (as is any sub-domain of
science) in which the organization of links and concepts (e.g. in equations) is quite different
from, say, relativity theory. Similarly, systems sciences show an interesting logfield shift from
Beer‟s cybernetic model to Checkland‟s Soft Systems methodology. Logical fields describe the
particular organization of concepts and the thought-process not only in scientific subdomains,
but also in natural thinking. If we remain in the domain of abstraction and mathematics, the term
logical field becomes redundant with „formalism‟ or „framework‟. Now, if we use the Semantic
Fields Theory, which poses that the basic and underlying thought-process is a spontaneous
connective dynamic, then we are looking for different types of (natural) logics participating in
the personal and collective creation of meaning and concepts. Let me define the concept of
logical field:
[C]
A Logical Field is a natural self-organizing system of the thought-process
that instantiates a specific, more or less flexible, organization of links
between concepts, events, and objects, and thus triggers a particular
patterning of thought, hence of feeling and behavior.
Logical fields (or logfields) are thus akin to Piaget‟s schemata, Beer‟s thought-blocks, and
generally to the concept of mental models (Senge, 1990; Argyris, 1991); however, whereas
mental models are viewed as fixated, logfields are continuously being created, reinforced, or else
modified. They are nearer to Checkland‟s concept of Weltanschauung (W) or worldview, in Soft
Systems Methodology (SSM), about which he says (1999, p.219) “The methodology emerges as
a learning system in which underlying Ws are exposed and debated alongside alternatives.”
The flexible versus fixated ratio in logical fields
Since they are the natural ways our minds operate, logfields tend to show flexibility and
enormous adaptability, so that they may be used in many different situations. They reflect how
the mind conjointly extracts patterns from the environment and creates its own thought-patterns
to make sense of itself and the world. Confronted with a new situation, already existing logfields
in the mind will be matched against the patterns emerging (or extracted) in the ongoing creative
cognitive process, and will be made to adjust to them, thus enabling recognition and the
generation of meaning. In the process, logfields may undergo subtle or drastic changes – such as
adaptation, merging, recombining, or even the creation of a new logfield. The flexible vs. fixated
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ratio will be a way to assess both creativity/health and fixation/pathology in a given mind or
group-mind. Too extreme a flexibility, insofar as it precludes the healthy creation of patterns,
will not allow for a meaningful world. On the other end of the scale, extreme fixation is a sign of
a traumatic, pathological, despotic, or fanatic thought-process. This is reminiscent of the concept
of requisite variety in Viable Systems Model – which state that organizations must develop
sufficient internal variety to be able to understand, adjust to and cope with a complex changing
sociocultural environment that itself exhibits high variety (Beer, 1979).
Organizational variables
Sorting out the organizational variables of logfields means finding what, in a mind, is able to
steer (or modulate, or modify) the natural connective dynamic. The four main variables informing logfields (and thus the thought-process itself), are Value-Purpose (mind), FeelingRelational style (psyche), Behavior-Action (body), and Interaction with the (social and natural)
environment. Any of these variables can be given predominance, however they keep interacting
and co-creating the logfield in a systemic way.
Thus, in order to describe, and eventually predict, the thought-process of individuals or
groups, parameters quite foreign to rational thinking and goals must be taken into account.
Natural thinking is not a chess game and the priorities are not always “one‟s own best interest”
as game theory would have it. On the contrary, the global development of thought, as well as
congruent decisions and behaviors, will have everything to do with deeper moteurs of semantic
processes – meaning, feeling, community (Husemoen and Zhang, 1999) – those very forces
through which we create meaning for ourselves, our community, our sociopolitical and
philosophical networks, and the world.
2. Group-mind and Collective Logfields
A group (or network), when constituted around some core concepts and/or socio-political
actions, creates a collective logfield. The gathering of people around shared values form the
basic system-organization of most scientific, humanitarian, green, socio-political, and religious,
associations. To values are attached connective-logic propositions (expressing procedures and
know-how) and an underlying paradigm. Three other variables interact in a logfield: behavior,
affect, and the environment.
Values and connective-logic propositions
The values shared by a group are generally spelled out clearly (as for example a political agenda,
religious beliefs, or basic concepts in a theory). However, these values show an underlying
coherency grounded in a paradigm (a scientific, sociopolitical worldview; Kuhn, 1970) that often
is not recognized consciously because its blind assumptions are not even disentangled from what
constitutes “reality” or “truth”. Additionally, the logfield contains basic connective-logic
propositions (Hardy, 1998) used regularly by members that reflect the heuristic knowledge
accumulated by the group-mind. They may for example be judgments such as “It‟s better to do X
than Y”, “A often means B in this context”, and the like. They are for the most part rules-ofthumb about meaning and procedures, about the topological organization of patterns,
transformative processes, contiguity, and the internal (albeit not causal) evolution of patterns.
While such loose propositions may sometimes resemble rules of formal logic, they remain
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fundamentally different from them. First, they are not strictly causal or deterministic (Hardy,
2001); second, they convey a global (as opposed to detailed) understanding of patterns; and
three, far from being invariant and two-dimensional (either true or false), they allow for selforganization and adaptation to changing contexts. The extreme usefulness of connective-logic
propositions in real-life situations is precisely stemming from their enormous flexibility, which
keeps them widely open to possible partial misfits with real patterns-in-context – what
constitutes the feedback from the environment. In case of a partial misfit, these propositions
allow for on-the-spot tinkering, divergent or plural interpretation (“It could be this or that”),
adaptation, modification or even total restructuring of the connective proposition.
Behavioral codes
A group may endorse very stringent behavioral rules, such as in the military, a specific sport, or
else in extremist groups. Strict behavioral codes generally go hand-to-hand with fixated values
being enforced on members, since they will be derived from these values. An example is
religious fundamentalism, in which a set of broad “truths” and concepts constituting a religion is,
as Stengers (1987) explains it concerning science, stolen from a context carrying high credibility
and used to give more weight to a less credible context – here a fundamentalist credo and
extreme behavioral codes. The resulting particular enacted-dogma will then be imposed on
individuals, while sold to them as the „pure‟ form of the religion.
Of specific interest is the fact that people may be attracted by any single part of the dogmasystem – that is, antique truths and root-philosophy (thus confusing conservative minds), the
fundamentalist credo itself (with its clear racist and despotic connotation), or worse, the very
extremist behaviors themselves. Only in some cases will strict behavioral codes exist while no
immutable values are set forth, such as in sport. Most social groups show loose behavioral codes,
coherent with the group values (e.g. a member of a green association will tend to respect nature).
Members of a group will tend to be more and more influenced in their behavior by the values
they have adopted. And vice versa, a member attracted by a specific activity (e.g. watching
dolphins at sea) will progressively tend to adopt the values inherent to the group he has joined.
Shared feelings
In any given set of values, there is a range of feelings deeply intertwined with it. For example,
the way an ecologist understands the deep interconnection of natural systems will lead her to
have a keen grasp of human relationships and subtle inter-influences, and to develop a sense of
dialogue and negotiation (in contrast to an authoritarian style). Feelings are also closely
interconnected with behaviors, the one feeding into the other. Thus, a profound respect for
natural systems will generate protective behaviors and lead to developing respectful interactions
with fellow humans.
The complex organization of logfields in society
If all professions, sciences, and constituted groups can be represented as logfields – expressing a
particular way to think and interpret events – then how does this large variety of logfields coexist
in a given society, or in our mind for that matter, since we get to use more than one logfield? We
may view the various logfields‟ organization as similar to that of networks of neurons in our
brain. On its boundary, each logfield interfaces with logfields specifically related to it, more or
less deeply, and it also interfaces with basic social logfields (such as the political system, the
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law, etc.). There exists in a society a consensual worldview at any given time (the Zeitgeist) that
includes values and behaviors. However, and fortunately so, there are a number of competing
worldviews stemming from diverse philosophical, scientific, and religious, perspectives –
especially in periods of great social change, as is the case now. The logfield of the business
world, for example, is undergoing a deep transformation from a focus on profits toward valuing
collaborative networks of responsible individuals and a “shared vision” as in Senge‟s (1990)
“learning organization‟. This business-logfield will undergo an even greater transformation when
shifting its short-sighted profits-based logfield to one addressing the climate crisis and adjusting
to the necessary strategies to reduce green house gases emissions – one we could call a greenprofit logfield.
Summary
Logfields expressing various knowledge-systems influence the thought-process of individuals
and groups (their natural connective logic), as well as their values, behaviors, and feelings. The
complexity of the Logical Fields Model (weaving several levels of a cognitive system) allows for
interesting insights. First, reason is neither controlling thinking, nor the main factor in behavior.
Second, each variable is in deep interaction with other variables at other levels, that is, all mental
and psychological forces are deeply intertwined in a Mind-Body-Psyche system (individual or
collective). Finally, any theory, dogma, or knowledge-system, while appearing to have a mentalonly reality, in fact implies specific values (the underlying paradigm), as well as specific
behaviors, feelings, and relational styles. This is how, for example, adhering to a seemingly
„reasonable‟ discourse may lead to unknowingly adhere to, and perform or act out behaviors one
would never have endorsed consciously.
3. Hate-Violence Logfield
Let us now see how the Logical Fields Model may shed some light on ethno-political
interactions, namely the spiral of hate-violence. Any political analyst knows that using
aggression and violence in a conflict can only bring more hate and violence in return, ad
infinitum, in a mounting spiral of aggression. What is surprising, then, is the total blindness of
both fighting sides to this simple fact, and how each insists on being the sole victim of
aggression, while it memorizes only its own losses and damages. After doing so, it feels
obligated, and „rightly so’, to „retaliate‟. The Hate-Violence Logfield, being quasi similar in the
two opponents, creates the sadly well-known „deadlock‟ of ethnic hate.
ENNEMY X: Values: Ethnic identity, religious identity, land ownership
(usual healthy values for a country); however, here, these values are thought
in opposition to the „enemy‟.
Affect: Feeling threatened and being on the defensive engenders fear
leads to imagine worse-case scenarios of enemy‟s actions.
Pressure leads to believing these worse-case scenarios.
Actions/behaviors: Believing worse-case scenarios leads to „defensive
measures‟ (as if responding to, or averting the scenarios) and imposing
losses and damages to the enemy.
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FACTS: many wounded and dead.
ENNEMY Y: In the enemy camp (after the felt „aggression‟):
Affect: horror, shock, and grief. Amplification of grief through the medias.
Grief triggers anger triggers rage leads to wishing and projecting
retaliation.
Actions/behaviors: Planning retaliation retaliation.
FACTS: many wounded and dead.
ENNEMY X: In the enemy camp (after the felt „aggression‟):
Affect: horror, shock, grief …
The population on each side is fed information nearly exclusively at the „affect‟ level (and
using the worst possible images) – so as to impact with enormous force on the psyche of
people, thus fueling more hate and building up support toward the „necessary retaliation‟.
The level of affect turmoil in everybody (including army, police, militants) is such that all
thinking and discussions are mostly restricted to this level and to angry-desperate or else
angry-punitive forms of „retaliation‟.
At the thinking level, any event is processed through the logfield, i.e. through basic axioms (The
enemy IS the aggressor, cruel, projecting our end as a people, etc.). As we have said, the
logfields of both opponents are nearly similar (even if the means of „retaliation‟ and aggression
differ): there is only one Hate-Violence Logfield, mirrored in the two sides. The basic
constitutive values of a people (or a sub-culture), the fundamental rights of a country (such as
ethnic and religious identity, and land ownership) are progressively denied to the „enemy‟
deemed less than human. Soon, only the negative Affect-Violence cluster remains. In a grassroot, spontaneous uprising of a people striving to be granted basic human rights, the purpose will
never be lost, rendering high-level political manipulation useless; only finding a long-term
settlement – that grants them these basic human rights and social justice – will do.
Events’ interpretation within a logfield
A useful feature of the Logical Fields Model is the way it may highlight the interpretation of
events within a given logfield. The logfield of each side is a self-contained, encysted,
interpretation-engine, in which the enemy‟s acts and all events touching on the issue – whatever
they are – are not only systematically understood through the biases of the logfield, but more to
the point, are all forecasted and pre-interpreted. EX predicts EY will do action N for such and
such reason, thus when event N do occur, the interpretation is already at hand, even if the said
event needed, for its occurring, a specific prior action M enacted by EX (who made the
prediction). This seminal action M precipitating the event will be totally blacked out from EX‟s
reports on the current events, while in contrast, EY will report having „retaliated‟ to the enemy‟s
horrendous act M. This is reminiscent of the „self-fulfilling prophecy‟ phenomenon; however the
present framework may help us analyze it in more depth.
Semantic Fields Theory poses that events are brought about by a slow-building semantic
constellation of forces consisting not only of the usual hard constraints (physical, economical,
biological, etc.) but of semantic and psychic forces as well – whether collective or personal
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(Hardy, 1998, 2003). In such a perspective, the attribution of worse intentions to the other side is
in itself a semantic force contributing in reality to the in-forming of more dire events. As the two
sides engage in a similar attribution of worse intentions, it raises the sheer intensity of the
mistrust between them, consequently empowering their radical wings and further cementing the
deadlock.
Deadlock situation
A deadlock conflict between two countries (or ethnies) has devastating consequences on both of
their populations, such as: highly negative affects (exacerbated hate, anger, fears, anguish) and
losing sight of positively balanced values (such as human rights for all, or any country‟s or
ethnie‟s rights). Its effect on the civil population, especially the youth, is devastating: the loss of
humanistic values together with negative affects plus a growing sense of helplessness, all this
creates a feeling of desperation, of meaninglessness, of being robbed of one‟s own future, of
being expendable, one‟s life being useless, etc.). It creates a mix of vengefulness and acute
helplessness, a condition psychologically extremely dangerous and bordering on the
pathological. One of its most appalling consequences is the seeding of hate-violence in a new
generation, rendering the possibility of normalization and the befriending between the two
people even more remote in time.
4. How to Disentangle a Deadlock Situation
Concerning the logfield‟s organization, given that Affect is both the fuel of violence and the
main target of manipulation, the soundest way to de-escalation, détente, and normalization is to
shift the weight out of Affect and back into Values. Purpose-driven rebellious or terrorist acts, if
it is what they are, must definitely get to a stop when the core goal (in Value) is achieved. (Of
course, in practice, it has to be clearly expected and accepted, that the heat of hatred will keep
producing dramatic acts of violence for some time afterwards, but they should nevertheless show
a clear decline.) The overall purpose (or goal) is in the mind dimension, something that can be
discussed, bargained for, trade off; something lending itself to rational talks, collective
discussion, and brainstorming toward a bipartisan solution.
The African art of palabre teaches us that a small group of wise, authoritative and above-theconflict coordinators – in our ethnic conflict case, at the regional and international level – has the
ability and the power to command a reasonable settlement and to make it happen. It will then be
the task of responsible governments in the two countries/ethnies to reinstall a value-oriented
focus in all political and public debates, which would then be naturally reflected in the media
„coverage‟. Political manipulation, if pursued, will then stick out of the background by its
attempts at wrecking the normalization by lingering on Affect and opponent‟s demonization.
This is why peace-talks at the political level have to be pursued at all costs whatever the situation
on the terrain, and if dodged by one or both sides, a settlement reached within the UN, or
backed-up by the UN, has to be imposed, because achieving a political settlement is the only
means of ending the conflict. It seems obvious then that the only way out of the spiraling
violence is to install a neutral, UN-type, peacekeeping force that will single out the perpetrators
of violence and confront them with the new law and worldview (the new logfield of peaceful
cohabitation and cooperation).
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The quickest solution to a deadlocked conflict is a leap to a more global level, to a metalogfield
How can a deadlock situation be disentangled, whatever the kind of logfield implied? One would
be wise to say that a thorough systemic reorganization has to occur... but how? Given the
encysted interlocked logfields (which can only lead to more tension and more hate-violence), it
appears the deadlock can only be broken by creating a conceptual model and organization at a
higher, more encompassing level: in brief, by creating a meta-logfield. As Peter Checkland
advises: “Lift the thinking [out of] models which map existing structures,” (1999, p.A22). In
other words, this meta-logfield should stand above, and circumvent, the paradigmatic
assumptions of the two contending logfields.
This meta-logic was absolutely necessary in science, and provided for example a royal exit out of
the gridlock of the light-as-particles versus light-as-waves schools of thought; Louis de Broglie
leapt to a higher logic: Not only photons, but all particles, were both waves and particles; the
meta-logfield was that all particles had associated waves. Furthermore, the higher-level logic
proved the two schools to be correct (something their equally successful yet competing
experiments over the decades of the conflict had already shown).
Similarly, a conflict at the state level can be resolved by organizations at the federal level, and
conflicts that are ethno-religious or between countries should be resolved at the Global Earth,
systemic, level, by international organizations representing the will of all nations in a kind of
meta-level cooperative and conversational network, based on exchanges and the democratic
participation of all members. Yet, let me also point that to deny to a weak-end of a conflict the
participation as a full member to these global organizations – thus denying them the right to be
uplifted out of the conflict in a just, supportive, and comprehensive way – displays an appalling
cruelty toward this community, and it reveals only a grave lack of insight and sense of justice
from the part of the superpowers.
Let‟s now take the perspective of our actual zeitgeist, which has been uplifted by the Black Lives
Matter movement in 2020 in the US and the world (Hardy, 2020). Our collective intelligence has
suddenly made a leap and developed an acute awareness of, and empathy vis-à-vis, any social
injustice – especially racist, gender-based, ethnic and community-based – and it steered us to
nurture a focused and shared goal of atoning for, and redressing these injustices, right now, as we
become intensely aware of them.
We are now a different people, citizens of Earth, experiencing a shared consciousness of how our
governance systems (at all levels) impact on the people, communities, and the planet itself; and
there is no going back to accepting any tone-deaf and self-interested plutocracy or autocracy.
And with this new zeitgeist, we shall assume that ethno-religious conflicts, generally triggered
and intentionally sustained by autocrats, are not only severely outdated and obsolete, but
exceedingly counter-productive, since they do not respect human rights and cultural differences
and are contrary to achieving a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, mosaic in the world, respectful of the
planet and of our shared life-sustaining resources.
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5. Democracy & Accountability
Democracy, says Linda Dennard (1997) is a process still in evolution that “exists in the dynamics
of society itself as it adjusts to accommodate difference”. Thus the essence of democracy does
not lie in the voting procedure per se, nor in the representative system – all too often flawed
themselves. Rather it lies in the dialogue about governance and in the political options allowed
by a multiparty organization. It points to the possibility of achieving a constructive debate and
multi-partisan governance, that is, a cooperative network striving to represent the will of all the
people (in the way Holland allocates TV time to all political parties, as a direct percentage of
their number of adherents).
In this respect, democracy is about accountability, and breaking a linear, quasi-dictatorial, chain
of command. It is about an administration being accountable vis-à-vis not only its own laws and
Constitution, but also international law and human rights – the latter standing above any
government, even an elected one.
Classical Military Logfield
Let us analyze in this light the outmoded Classical Military Logfield. Its values are a strict
hierarchical chain of command, unquestioned, and harshly imposed. Behaviors: the top brass
issues orders to which lower-rank officers can only obey. Actions: unaccountable violence and
inflicting inefficient, heavy, casualties, without so much as sparing the civilian population.
Affect: loyalty to one‟s own country, fear of disobeying. The Vietnam War has shown the
horrendous perverse effects of this logfield. Officers are now considered accountable for their
actions in regard to international law and human rights violations. This accountability notion
runs contrary to both the blunt use of power by the top brass, and the blind following of orders
by lower rank soldiers. The result of this value shift is exemplified by the creation of the
International Criminal Court (ICC), standing above governments and leaders too much inclined
to seize dictatorial power, even in democracies.
Emerging Military Logfield
Let us now analyze the Emerging Military Logfield. Its values, in a true democratic vision, are:
accountability at all levels, respect of international law and human rights, protection of all
civilian populations, minimum casualties. Affect: humanitarian vision, cooperation, and
responsibility. Behaviors: peace-serving behaviors, respectful of environment; use of force
strictly limited to law-enforcement.
Let‟s keep in mind that, just as democracy, this Emerging Military Logfield is an ongoing
evolutionary process as well. Thinking within this logfield leads to interesting new insights:
First, our current preeminent and guiding worldview is now to attribute to (1) being human, and
(2) on planet Earth, a higher value than one‟s own sense of belonging, or appartenance, to a
country, race, religion, party or clan. That means putting the respect of human life and the
viability of natural systems above particular interests – whether the latter are those of an interest
group or a superpower. The congruent value is to give priority to international law and human
rights, and solving the climate emergency, over any sub-system laws.
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A second insight (and it is quite sad that it needs advocating) is to give added value to the
coming generations, especially in terms of avoiding war-inflicted traumas, whether in the
aggressor or the victim role – both roles being damaging to the psyche – and that calls for waractions to become peace-keeping actions and to be solely a profession and not a patriotic duty.
(This becomes self-evident when the military endorses a peace-keeping, and planet-saving,
cooperative mission.).
6. Conclusion
Clearly, it is essential for all nations to give proper decisive power and responsibility to
international organizations representing the will of all nations in a kind of meta-level democracy.
The unavoidability of globalization (as planetary systems become more and more intertwined)
should not lead us to assume that it is bound to be a homogenous order enforced by some
superpowers, and the playground of special interests groups and lobbies. We should instead
strive for envisioning and in-forming several multinational organizations endowed with specific
tasks. And lastly, the decisive paradigm shift is to be able to raise our concern about a viable
future toward creating a humanistic and multi-cultural world-society, welcoming difference,
divergence, and sub-cultures‟ richness.
The democratic vision takes us more and more to creating a shared consciousness that becomes
an active and generative collective intelligence, and to the launching of a planetary cooperation
for the well-being of the variegated peoples of Earth and the planet. Let us soar with it.
Received May 22, 2021; Accepted June 26, 2021
References
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Beer, S. (1966). Decision and control. NY: Wiley.
Checkland, P. (1999). Systems thinking, systems practice. NY: Wiley.
Hardy, C. (1998). Networks of meaning: A bridge between mind and matter. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Hardy, C. (2001). Self-organization, self-reference and inter-influences in multilevel webs: Beyond
causality and determinism. Journal of Cybernetics and Human Knowing. UK: Imprint Academic. 8(3):
35-59.
Hardy, C. 2003. Multilevel Webs Stretched across Time: Retroactive and Proactive Inter-Influences.
Systems Research And Behavioral Science, vol 20, N° 2 (pp 201-215). (Special Issue on: Systems
Thinking for Social Responsibility.)
Hardy, C.H. 2020. Black Lives Matter: Why This Tidal Protest Movement will Prod Us to Save the
Planet. The Edge Magazine (Oct.1). https://independent.academia.edu/ChrisHHardy/Papers
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Dennard, L. (1997). “The democratic potential in the transition of postmodernism,” American Behavioral
Scientist, 41(1): 148-162.
Heidegger, M. (1992). The principle of reason. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Husemoen, M. and Will Zhang, C. (1999). “The nature of living knowledge,” Trondheim, Norway:
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Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago press.
Reber, A.S. (1993). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.
Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline. New York: DoubleDay.
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Von Bertalanffy, L. (1967). Robots, men and mind. New York: George Braziller.
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2023 | Volume 14 | Issue 1 | pp. 39-49
Karl, S., How Brain Makes Mind: The Principles of Operation (Part III)
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Article
How Brain Makes Mind:
The Principles of Operation (Part III)
Karl Sipfle*
Abstract
We present the principles of operation by which a brain makes a mind, at all scales necessary to
cover the whole problem. We inventory the necessary capabilities for a mind. We divide
conscious mind into four layers of increasing elaboration. For the principles of operations of the
lower two layers, we provide the STFC theory. For the upper two, we provide the STHC theory.
We survey the evolutionary progression from first twinge of experience to human capacities. We
explain the types of memory and problem-solving we carry and by what structures they are made
to happen. We compare to prior works and review the philosophical implications and stance. All
of this is done with minimal incoming assumptions, and those made are declared.
Part III of this four-part article includes: 15. What It is Like to Be a Human; 16. Consciousness
Architecture Layer 4: Language-Enabled Mind; 17. Evolution; and 18. Conclusions.
Keywords: Consciousness, physics, evolution, feeling, qualia, mind, cognitive, affective,
sensation, memory, learning, attention, perception, recognition, decision-making, problemsolving, coordination, self, symbol manipulation, language.
15. What It is Like to Be a Human
As higher consciousness emerged there came the experience and recognition of time, as a
consequence of the differences it sees between its world at times t and t0 (where t and t0 keep
increasing). Effectively, consciousness moves along time. At a low level there are linked
stimulations of conscious events, and the propagation times and stimulus persistence of the brain.
These cause the continuous flow of high consciousness time, enabling our “now.”
Some opine that consciousness causes time (Deutsch, 1998), in the sense of the experience of a
physical dimension that would otherwise just be another physical dimension. One might say that
time is the progression toward increased entropy, or one might say that time is the experience of
progression toward increased entropy; this contrast is just a matter of definition. The idea that the
consciousness of beings such as ourselves specifically and literally causes physical time,
however, we reject. There is insufficient evidence and plausibility to accept that possibility. It
remains possible that the sentonic field and time have a very close relationship.
*
Correspondence author: Karl Sipfle, Independent Researcher (also working independently at NASA GSFC).
E-mail: ksipfle@umich.edu
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Time might be a sequence of quantum collapse events, but space might, also.
Humans are action-oriented. The brain exists to decide what to do. The frontal lobe is the motor
lobe. Impulses for action are suppressed and analyzed and selected and organized for submission
to execution areas. Unlike other animals that go to sleep whenever they can, humans are curious
and exploratory and chatty and get bored, stir-crazy, and lonesome. This keeps us active and
learning.
The human brain features high-level, complex connections: understanding is pleasurable, novelty
is pleasurable. These make curiosity and enhance creativity, itself a mix of compliance and
variance.
Things bubble up into human consciousness from “subconscious” areas. Only some parts of the
brain are organized to be part of the human-conscious. It is the unity of feeling and the unity of
the cognitive and the fusion into a greater unity of these two (plus language) that form the
experience of what we call our minds. For the base feeling this fusion is done in and by the
sentonic field. For the cognitive, this is done by networking of neurons. The final fusion is done
by the connection of cognitive (information-processing) neurons with feeling neurons, which
connects cognition to feeling. This creates both complex deep emotions with a cognitive
component, and rich thought embroidered with, encouraged by, discouraged by, and steered by
emotion. The two things that make all this possible are the information processing and
communication ability of all neurons, and the (strong) connection to the sentonic field of some
neurons.
To “make sense” is a pleasurable condition related to high discovered recognition and
correlation, and low ambiguity, as seen in strong standing signals against a relatively quiet
background of alternatives. It brings comfort and is sought. Confusion and unsureness are
negative, and we seek to eliminate or avoid these. The neural circuits for this are imaginable.
The human mind loves order in all things. It has grown through evolution to where it is possible
for it to see a whole big picture (and even to describe that to another), wherefrom flows its great
power.
Organized mind appears when awake, as opposed to when dreaming. One possibility is that the
mind would be organized when we sleep were it not for interference caused by signals that are
generated (or removed) during sleep (Sipfle K. , A Neurobiological Theory to Explain the Lack
of Rationality in Dreams, 2021). Another possibility is that the operation of perceptual regions
close to the senses, which are inoperative during sleep, ordinarily organize the flow through the
rest of the brain, to restrict what is thought to what “makes sense.” Both factors could well be
significantly contributing. A third possibility is that prefrontal centers that impose a critical
evaluation upon earlier cortex are disconnected during sleep; this is supported by EEG studies
(Sipfle K. , A Neurobiological Theory to Explain the Lack of Rationality in Dreams, 2021).
We note also that emotions are quite in their normal form and understandable even during sleep;
it is the cognitive, which is intrinsically of structured nature and of high continuous relatedness
to many patterns we know, that loses good form and becomes disjointed.
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A related possibility is that our simulation centers- our imaginations- are only constructed to run
coherently for seconds at a time, because that’s what is needed. In sleep we also don’t playback
our memories verbatim in long sequences; memory centers are executing a consolidation process
and bubbling and burping as a result when they are active at all. Thus, disconnected splotches of
memories start up short sequences of reconstructions and predictive simulations with no sensory
perception or memory circuits activation to police for order.
Human-level consciousness occurs from adding to lower animals
a) Full language, with its ability to precisely manipulate symbols and abstract objects
b) A strong sense of what “makes sense”
c) Much increased short-term working memory and richer interconnections
(b) is what is not acting as much when we are dreaming. We may say that a scene or utterance is
“incomprehensible,” which means it does not comprehensively hang together (make
connections) that result mostly in recognitions of things and relationships deeply honed over the
years, rather than confusion resulting from a lack of this. Things make sense when there is high
recognition and sharp inhibition, connected to feeling. In sleep the contrast is lost, and things
bleed over into each other.
Humans are so advanced that they are aware of concepts as high as feeling confused and feeling
sure they have “got it” (which are indeed feelings and may even be misplaced ones). Knowledge
is not feeling. But feeling convinced of knowing something is a feeling (and generally a positive
one). “I feel that X” means that X is coupled with a feeling of some certainty.
The mechanics of a working mind run on Recognition and Value. Direct pain and pleasure
served as the first source of Value, allowing bootstrapping. Now, many local inter-neuronal
circuits have likely generalized Value informationally, and no longer feel pain and pleasure,
there being no evolutionary need to maintain them. At the micro level of large networks, the
original pain and pleasure are too crude to serve- at least, globalized pain and pleasure are too
crude.
Mouse consciousness is surely emotional and very action-oriented. It lives in a world of smells
and touch and motor movement. In contrast, a grown chimpanzee has the intelligence of a 2.5year-old human, and probably his emotional life as well. Such a human is no longer an infant but
a toddler, with rudimentary language ability. Human consciousness is visual and analytic.
Humans inhibit action until selected and initiated after analysis of the world.
Returning to time, consciousness has duration, necessarily. The actual “remembered present,” as
Edelman called it (Edelman, 1993), gives a more global (across space) and constant (across
time) existence to an object than the millisecond/millimeter world of neural-neighborhood-scale
operations.
This very short-term memory is very useful to sophisticated cognition, a sort of object cohesion
and permanence enabler. Coupled with the connections that compare between different parts of
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this time snippet and those that react to it and supply it with emotion, to a first approximation
this is low-level, higher-animal consciousness. It is the now in which all thought and feeling
occurs, about three seconds long.
Consciousness has a smidgeon of usefulness even without net emotional affect. Change and
novelty and distinct form cause this impact (which on repetition fades, both as it happens and
from (nonmotor) memory). But consciousness without net emotional affect, which supplies
positive and negative values, is very limited in what it can do.
The emotions we feel affix value to things, including objects to study and courses of action to
choose. In principle in another universe another mechanism could have been used to supply
value but feeling is what evolution discovered in our universe that could be used.
And why did evolution use this means? What is helpful about feeling, is that it has its own
intrinsic value- positive or negative. That means evolution did not have to manage to use
valueless connections in a consistent way to emulate the same thing, or invent centers as
assigned positive and negative places that must be connected to. Consistently labeled positive
and negative things were available in nature to happen upon, and then use again and again. This
made it easier, and thus more likely, and thus the way, that summary value is implemented in the
brain.
We don’t call it thinking unless we can feel it happening. There are also underlying processes to
our thinking which we can’t see (e.g., associating). Crossing the boundary is what happens when
things “pop into my mind.” We are able to deliberately reflect to encourage these unconscious
processes to happen, and to deliberately turn down our attention and fixations to allow broader
and freer flow of proto-thoughts and metathoughts.
We can feel the thinking process partly because cogitating kicks feeling parts (rather like feeling
limb motion), and probably because of the changes in blood vessels (which we can see in
imaging).
It is probably even important to our thought processes that we can feel our thoughts and where
we are paying attention, and probably there is specific sensation of that because the sense-ability
has utility.
General “awareness” may include arousal (which increases intensity of attention behavior) more
than emotional response, which gives value to things. A high level of arousal can be pleasurable
or stressful; it is an intensifier.
Our emotions are different from an awareness of things. We can just feel sad or fearful, then start
thinking or noticing or inventing supposedly why. Sad can be purely dysphoric, without knowing
“why,” which is cognitive (in contrast, the more complex dread is also dysphoric, but refers to
something).
People use the word “feeling” to refer both to emotions and to intuitional judgements. This is
natural, because our processing circuitry includes a bed of elaborate, general recognition circuits
effectively much-interwoven with feeling circuits so as to develop finely detailed value
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processing of things under consideration, resulting in a net high-level score, and the distinction
between emotion and cool judgement can be difficult for us to tease apart.
It is possible both to have a “feeling” (observationally) of a large object in front of your face
without net caring, and also possible to feel positive or negative for no apparent reason. As to the
former- impact- it is the shapeless glob of feeling that is doing the reacting to factual stimuli.
You still hear emotional white noise even though it doesn’t settle on organized tones. The white
noise activity is impact. Everything noticed makes "you" feel something- even if only a unified
agitation.
Concentrating of pain or pleasure is relatively unusual in the universe (rather like the very big
molecular machinery of life being unusual). Thus, it is a specific achievement of evolution that is
useful. Pain and pleasure allow advanced minds. By the Anthropic Principle, that is why it’s
here.
Physical consciousness was exploited in vertebrates just as the laws of mechanics and chemistry
were. It serves the functions of learning and assigning general goodness and badness to large and
complicated and long-lasting experiences and plans, and in bonding social groups.
Higher consciousness is like multicellularity, something that emerged as a complex system
incorporating many points of occurrence of base consciousness, allowing novel survival niches
by supporting highly elaborate, flexible, and effective structures.
While our consciousness is observable and organized, this does not mean that simple
consciousness does not happen all around us. The organization of fundamental consciousness
into high-level consciousness was done with our brains by evolution (or preceding mind to
whom we are the artificial intelligence). As one of the available forces, fundamental
consciousness probably has been exploited elsewhere, and elsewhere there will be pain and
pleasure (and therefore perhaps good and evil).
Is consciousness “just” an epiphenomenon? Yes, in the sense that it was not necessary that we
actually feel, only that the same values be attached to things as feelings allow. No, in that the
values consciousness provides form a key part of what our minds are and how they work.
Value is needed for how we think. It is what steers the cognitive centers to make decisions. The
cognitive centers can recognize things and recall candidate action sequences, but it is the
emotional input that determines the selections- the “voluntary” behavior. Volition equals
emotion.
The nature of our human-level consciousness is that we react emotionally to (and perceive) our
thinking, and we cognitively notice our feeling, and we talk to ourselves about all of this in a
chorus of stream of consciousness (James, 1890). Our words then evoke feelings and more
thoughts and around it goes. We talk to ourselves like a friend (or enemy), and our real friends’
words are in there, incorporated.
I feel. What is I? An assemblage of interlinked cognitive and feeling events. I am intellectually
aware that I am feeling, and I can feel and have feelings about my thinking. The human mind is
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everything it is because it contains not only thought and feeling but can think about feeling and
feel about thinking, and do so under the organizing and evocative presence of language. Higher
consciousness is the interaction of knowing and feeling, and each of each other. The deep mutual
interplay of feeling and thought, and of these with language, comprise the mind.
16. Consciousness Architecture Layer 4: Language-Enabled Mind
There are two major elements added to make a human level mind beyond just scale. These
require new brain tissue. One is a refined sense of what “makes sense” (that which is lost when
dreaming). One might call this our reality detector. The other is language.
Language organizes all the little fits of proto thought, and one's own assembled phrases stimulate
those same fitful centers to recognize and remember and churn out new proto thoughts.
Language crisply organizes associations and spatial, motor, and intuitive thought. This is done
using the new language centers of our brain (notably Brodmann 22, 44, and 45). The appearance
(“hearing”) of the sentences to our non-language-centric brain centers evokes in them the
unstructured thought that is then organized into language again. This cycle, along with emotion,
is the fundamental stuff of our highest-level consciousness (mind), as we talk to ourselves about
our thoughts and feelings and react to what we have heard from ourselves.
We have coined many words for various kinds of feeling (and thinking), which attest to the
richness and complexity of human-level minds.
16.1.
Human Evolution of the Prefrontal Cortex
While 99% of human DNA is the same as a chimpanzee’s, 80% of the proteins differ between
the two species (Passingham R. , 2021), which diverged 7 Mya. By about 2 Mya humans (Homo
Erectus) had evolved, left Africa, and made it to China. In another wave, by about 0.6 Mya
archaic Homo Sapiens appeared and made it to Germany. Modern Homo Sapiens appeared by
0.3 Mya in Africa, 0.2 Mya in Greece.
The frontal cortex- particularly the granular prefrontal cortex- and medial parietal cortex, was
expanded in Homo Sapiens.
During the evolution of the anthropoids (monkeys through humans), there was an expansion of
association cortex within each lobe, and not just within the frontal lobe. The human prefrontal
cortex, though, expanded more than the middle and inferior temporal cortex, the premotor, and
the motor cortex. This means there is more human prefrontal cortex for re-representing visual
information from the ventral visual stream and for generating goals as opposed to just directing
the actions that achieve them (Passingham R. , 2021).
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16.2. Goal and Feature Memory of Humans via Parietal-Prefrontal Network,
Temporal Area, and Prefrontal Adaptations
Parietal-Prefrontal capability advanced from representing relational metrics to supporting
generalized relational reasoning. Temporal areas advanced from representing the signs of
resources to supporting semantic generalizations. Prefrontal cortex adapted its top-down biasing
function to memory retrieval. (Murray, 2017).
16.3.
Social-Subjective Memory of Humans via New Granular Prefrontal Cortex
New and higher levels of hierarchy emerged courtesy additional prefrontal areas.
Representations of self and others developed in these areas. These came to influence existing
medial and lateral networks (Murray, 2017).
The medial network came to support perspective-taking, recognition of situational contexts,
mental simulation of past and future events, and knowledge of self and others from participatory
experience.
The lateral network came to represent social goals, norms, and concepts, categories, groups and
roles of individuals, and generalizations about self and others.
16.4.
Explicit Memory of Humans
Explicit memory emerges from interactions between the forms of memory, each having evolved
at different times. The hippocampal memory system learns about what happened at a particular
time and place while granular prefrontal areas learn about what happens in relation to behavioral
goals. With the appearance of humans, these came to work together (Murray, 2017).
High order, human-specific representations of self-contribute to both the perception of
participating in attended events, and the perception of knowing attended facts. These selfrepresentations become a part of conjunctive representations that are explicit memories. When
individuals retrieve memories containing this part they re-experience the participating in events
and knowing of facts (Murray, 2017).
16.5.
Language-Enabled Mind
On Earth, only humans operate at this level. Other species have not achieved true grammatical
language. Universal capacity for grammar is literally wired into humans (Pinker, 2009).
As we have noted, observation of the experiential parts of the mind by the verbal parts results in
the spontaneous forming of sentences that crystallize precise statements of observation. This
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evokes responses of meaning in the experiential parts of the mind, forming our loop of realizeand-comment that operates continuously in our waking hours.
These mental abilities enable long-chain serial thought and precision and abstract languages such
as mathematical notation.
(None of this capability has anything to do with Goedel. Recognizing mathematical truths is a
combination of learned discernment skill and natural machinations of our evolved brains that live
in a naturally patterned world. Also, many people cannot make these recognitions so it cannot be
fundamental to the human mind.)
Language is long, sequential chains of symbols, especially with the advent of writing, which
provides external memory much as the real world of objects is itself persistent.
16.6. Hypothesis Contained in STHC
Hypothesis STHC-2: Cyclically, language organizes thought and stimulates new thought to
organize as language centers interact with earlier non-language centers (Sipfle K. , 2018).
16.7. Problem Solving 6: Reasoning, Imagination, and Planning and Generating
Goals from Instructions and Imagination via Enlarged Polar Prefrontal Cortex
of Humans
Polar prefrontal cortex is Brodmann area 10, located right behind the forehead. Brodmann 10 is
now the largest Brodmann area.
Through human-level general intelligence exploiting human capacity for instruction, imitation,
and mental trial and error in internal re-representations of the world, humans are able to reduce
errors in action choices- which are dangerous in the wild- to nearly zero. The imaginative
abilities, even of actions planned but not executed, that emerged to reduce errors in specialized
situations, created the internal world that provides modern insight (Passingham R. E., 2012).
16.8. Problem Solving 7: Language via Areas 44 and 45 and Culture and Social
Rules via Medial and Orbital Prefrontal Cortex and Amygdala
Functional brain imaging studies and meta-analyses thereof have revealed the following
knowledge (Passingham R. , 2021).
There is cerebral dominance in the left for speech, but also for performing skilled actions other
than speech, regardless of hand used. The same precision manipulation mechanisms are used.
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The prefrontal area Brodmann 44 is active when words and sentences are being assembled (but
not when speaking them). Left areas 44 and 45B support generating verbs appropriate for nouns
(that is, verbs that make sense for nouns) , with 44 generating sentences by hierarchical rules.
45A supports learning association pairs and names associated with things (tagging with words).
Names can evoke visual imagery (elsewhere in the cortex) of the named objects.
Left 44, 45B, and 45A plus the middle frontal gyrus are critical for the semantic system.
Observing demonstrations activate 44 and 45B. Verbal instructions can be acted on immediately
without first learning. Instruction activates prefrontal cortex linked to cortical areas specific to
the requested tasks.
The interconnected medial and orbital prefrontal cortex and amygdala are activated in
anticipating punishment, feeling empathy, and feeling guilt.
17. Evolution
We have presented an architecture, which itself stands for study irrespective of the specific
explanation as to how it is “implemented” by Nature. But as evidence of its truth, it must be a
plausible destination of evolution. Here we summarize that journey. We can recapitulate the
evolutionary development sequence because the needs and difficulties are obvious, and because
we have the animals around us as evidence.
First needed would be basic stimulus/response. This could be viewed as the degenerate case of
the cognitive. Then would come totally dispassionate ability for slightly complicated perception
and actions. In other words, calculating ability- pure, passive cognitive- would appear first, and
still exists in primitive animals.
Feeling provides for the first operant (reinforcement) learning opportunity, and certainly for
more complicated organisms. It offers a broad whatever-you’re-doing-is-bad (or good) signal for
learning, and it provides the second needed, broadly distributed system- Value- which
determines what action impulses are let through, the first system being Activation. Third is
Attention, targeting and focusing the cognitive portions. Even before well-developed learning
appears, feeling allows for generalized real-time changes in decisions in creatures with some
neural complexity, and serves Attention.
The wholesale march into feeling began with the evolutionary outgrowth of the allocortex- the
olfactory system and the hippocampus. The paleocortical piriform cortex, a.k.a. posterior
orbitofrontal cortex (posterior OFC), is heavily correlated with the cingulate gyrus and the septal
area, which is part of the basal forebrain. The OFC mediates the expectation of
reward/punishment in response to stimuli. The paleocortical olfactory tubercle plays a role in
transmitting positive signals to reward sensors.
Once all of these lower mechanisms were in place, the neocortex burst forth into high growth.
Warmer/colder is a powerful concept (complementing recognition and association).
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The older and deeper parts of mammalian cortex form the connections to pain and pleasure that
guide the cognitive circuits (literally) above. With this basic plan in place, the stage was set to
scale up- with the same basic brain architecture- to more and more, and more refined, cognitive
mass. Summary good/bad/pain/pleasure/warmer/colder is key to advanced brains and simplifies
genetics in that action selection circuits can be built to pursue summary “good” and avoid “bad,”
while other independent ones connect perceptions and relationships to those values, rather than
trying to wire together myriad situational aspects to individual acts of plans.
As the ability to manipulate objects became more abstract, true language first emerged and then
became not just a communication feature but integral to human thought; communication itself
became internalized and reflective. Metalanguage (grammar, new notations, compound
constructed words, and descriptive theories) emerged and itself became introspectively
manipulable.
Pain and pleasure have been discovered and harvested by evolution. (There are likely other
worlds in which pain and pleasure don’t exist to organisms, even complicated ones.) Pain and
pleasure might not actually be the same force. And there might be animals that feel pain but no
pleasure. Use of one may have come first in bio-evolution.
Intensity of experience increases by way of more spots in the field, and so indirectly, by more
related brain interconnections. Harvesting fundamental consciousness by evolution would mean
“crafting” the shapes and/or construction and constituents of neurons, and possibly sets of
neurons.
Feeling continues to guide cognition at all levels. This allows three-pound brains to handle
situations usually well enough that would be impossible to handle with combinatoric perfection,
and provides an edge to conquer, in evolution, competitors and challenging niches. With bacteria
and others optimized for the easier (in terms of complexity) niches, we populate the harder ones,
requiring large-scale sophistication.
If not already on Earth, comets or asteroids could have provided batches of particles rich in
sentonic charge. They could have come from anywhere or anyone. They are the seeds of
advanced minds.
18. Conclusions
We have presented an Architecture (FLA) and compliant theory for every major constituent of
mind from nothing but the existence of this universe up through human minds.
The STFC metatheory does not presume that human-level consciousness is everywhere. It does
assert that primitive fundamental consciousness is distributed throughout the universe and the
field carrying it is everywhere. The universe does not understand things or feel as a whole in a
unitary fashion. It does contain such “flecks.”
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The STHC theory of animal-level consciousness assumes that it is probably the result of activity
of networks of physical neurons that calculate and harness feeling.
The nature of our human-level consciousness is that we react emotionally to (and perceive) our
thinking, and we cognitively notice our feeling, and we talk to ourselves about all of this in a
chorus of stream of consciousness. Our words then evoke feelings and more thoughts.
On the way to our solution, we have laid down some postulates and presented hypotheses, to wit:
Postulate 1: Physicalism is necessary and information - and computation-based theories cannot
provide for the source of conscious experience.
Postulate 2: Consciousness functions within the same basic rules (including mathematics) as all
other phenomena that also exist in Nature.
Postulate 3: Something basic is missing from, and must be added to, our physics.
STFC Hypothesis 1: Fundamental feeling is freestanding and requires no separate feeler. At
most there is a physical interaction between two fundamental elements.
STFC Hypothesis 2: There is a physical process that is fundamental feeling.
STFC Hypothesis 3: The fundamental feelings are pain and pleasure.
STCF Hypothesis 4: There exist pain and pleasure in minimal discrete bits independent of any
brain, at the sub-molecular scale.
STFC Hypothesis 5: Some biological brains have evolved to organize and exploit pain and
pleasure.
STFC Hypothesis 6: The fusion of feeling across the brain occurs in a force field.
STHC Hypothesis 1: It is by way of feeling and information processing that aware and
intelligent minds have developed that can solve problems and set goals.
STHC Hypothesis 2: Cyclically, language organizes thought and stimulates new thought to
organize as language centers interact with earlier non-language centers.
(Continued on Part IV)
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Merlin, S., Beyond Survival Debates: Addressing the Source-of-Psi Problem with the Multiple Sources of Psi Hypothesis (Part I)
Article
Beyond Survival Debates: Addressing the Source-of-Psi Problem
with the Multiple Sources of Psi Hypothesis (Part I)
Serge Merlin*
California Institute of Integral Studies, CA
Abstract
Evidence from survival research has been supported by verified report data from reincarnation
studies. Based on this collected evidence, supporters claim the survival hypothesis provides a
better explanation for apparent post-mortem survival than the rival living agent psi hypothesis.
There is no consensus on this issue, and many believe that efforts to bring empirical evidence to
bear on survival debates have reached an impasse. An alternative psychic reservoir hypothesis
proposes that information about the sentient experiences of intelligent organisms may be
available to living and discarnate individuals with a certain level of psychic functioning. Studies
analyzing mediumistic communications and psychic readings suggest that the source of psi
cannot be unequivocally identified. A novel multiple sources of psi (MSoP) hypothesis is
advanced, suggesting that aggregating diverse explanatory hypotheses with differing advantages
may point the way toward some future solution in which current shortcomings may be overcome.
This approach resolves the impasse between survival and living agent psi hypotheses, and has
the advantage of compatibility with both reincarnation and psychic reservoir hypotheses.
Part I of this two-part article includes: Introduction, The Survival Hypothesis, Survival and
Reincarnation, Survival and Mediumship, Survival and NDEs, Survival and Apparitions of the
Dead, The LAP Hypothesis, and The Psychic Reservoir Hypothesis.
Keywords: Survival hypothesis, reincarnation hypothesis, living agent, psychic reservoir
hypothesis, multiple sources, psi hypothesis.
Introduction
For over a century research has produced significant volume of intriguing empirical data
supporting the survival hypothesis, which posits the unceasing post-mortem existence of a
person‟s ante-mortem nonphysical essence in alleged disembodied form (Sudduth, 2016).
According to the reincarnation hypothesis, a particular version of the survival hypothesis, some
personality properties not only survive the death of a person but may join another physical body
(Irwin & Watt, 2007; Matlock, 1990, 2019; cf. Stevenson, 1960a, 1960b; Shweder, 1986). Fifty
years‟ systematic studies have produced compelling evidence for the reincarnation hypothesis, a
parsimonious and relatively exhaustive theory accounting for reincarnation phenomena (e.g.,
Almeder, 1992; Beloff, 1993; Slavoutski [Merlin], 2012).
Correspondence: Serge Merlin, California Institute of Integral Studies, CA. E-mail: smerlin@mymail.ciis.edu
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Since these hypotheses share conceptual ground, the reincarnation hypothesis has reinforced the
survival hypothesis (e.g., Braude, 2003; Stevenson, 1982a; Sudduth, 2016). Both have been used
to address controversy surrounding survival evidence from parapsychological research, including
mediumship (paranormal communication between a living agent and some discarnate entity),
reincarnation, apparitions of the dead (visual, auditory, or tactile manifestations or perceptions
that defy conventional objective explanation; e.g., Irwin & Watt, 2007; MacKenzie, 1982;
Melton, 2001b), poltergeists (recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis; movement of objects, noise,
fires, water inundations, and other physical effects of unknown causal agency; e.g., Gauld &
Cornell, 1979; Maher, 2015; Roll, 1977, 2003, 2014), and psychokinesis or PK (the mind‟s
ability to affect physical systems without intervention from any recognized physical or energetic
forces; Braude, 2002a; 2015; May & Marwaha, 2014, 2015b; Varvoglis & Bancel, 2015). The
main evidence for survival, however, comes from mediumship and cases of the reincarnation
type (CORTs). Mental mediumship refers to communication by a deceased‟s discarnate spirit
(called a discarnate or communicator) through the agency of the mind and/or body of a living
person (called a medium or living agent) and may involve dramatic impersonations of the
deceased (e.g., Braude, 2003; Gauld, 1983, 2005; Sudduth, 2016).
Physical mediumship involves communications from the deceased, manifesting in apparently
paranormally facilitated actions, such as raps, table tilting, object movements, and
“materializations” with the direct involvement of the medium (e.g., Beischel & Zingrone, 2015;
Gauld, 1977; Kelly & Arcangel, 2011). Survivalists (e.g. Becker, 1993, 1995; Habermas &
Moreland, 1992, 2004; Rivas, 2003) regard evidence from certain near-death experiences
(NDEs), incidents reported by people who have demonstrated characteristics of death yet regain
consciousness afterwards (e.g., Greyson, 2014; Ring, 2006; Van Lommel, 2010; Holden, 2009),
especially those featuring veridical out-of-body experiences (OBEs), as supporting survival.
OBE refers to a mental state in which consciousness and perception seem to come from an
extrasomatic location (e.g., Braude, 2001; Griffin, 1997; Sudduth, 2016), and while OBEs occur
under numerous conditions, they are frequent in NDEs.
The most significant rival of the survival hypothesis has been the living agent psi (LAP)
hypothesis (Braude, 2003, 2009a, 2014; Griffin, 1997; Sudduth, 2009, 2014; 2016), formerly
called the super-psi or super-ESP hypothesis, referring to an arguably unlimited “acquisition of
information about, or response to, an external event, object, or influence (mental or physical; past,
present, or future) in a way other than through any of the known sensory channels” (May &
Marwaha, 2015a, p. 8; the term LAP will be used throughout this paper). According to the LAP
hypothesis survival evidence can be explained exclusively “in terms of psychological and
paranormal resources of living agents” (Sudduth, 2009, p. 167), psychic functioning involving
the information exchange with discarnate and/or living persons (e.g., mental mediumship,
psychic readings) and mentally facilitated physical influencing of objects (e.g., physical
mediumship, poltergeists, PK). If a dying person‟s brain in NDEs with an OBE-component
(NDEs/OBE) can sustain conscious experience, the anomalous acquisition of information in
these instances may involve LAP.
Survivalists (e.g., Almeder, 1992, 1997; Lund, 2009, 2012; Fontana, 2006, 2010) oppose the
LAP hypothesis, arguing that satisfactory explanations of mediumship, reincarnation, and
NDEs/OBE would require psi of limitless power, or at least more potent than that demonstrated
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in spontaneous cases or controlled conditions. However, real-life psychic functioning could be
significantly more wide-ranging and manageable than experimental demonstrations indicate (e.g.,
Braude, 2009a, 2014, 2016; Sudduth, 2013, 2014, 2016). Since the nature and the limits of psi
are unknown, it is unwarranted to impose confines on psi in survival cases. It has been
established that LAP cannot be refuted on theoretical grounds (Braude, 2002b, 2003; Gauld,
1983; Sudduth, 2014, 2016). Moreover, LAP is grounded in paranormal phenomena, such as
ESP and PK, backed by substantial empirical research. Neither hypothesis, however, has
ascendency in explaining post-mortem survival for different but compelling reasons (e.g., Braude,
2014; Sudduth, 2009, 2014). A third hypothesis, the psychic or cosmic reservoir hypothesis
postulates an implicit source of anomalous information used by the living or discarnates in
mediumship, CORTs, ESP studies, and psychic readings. At its root, is the conjecture that all
sentient experiences of intelligent organisms are in some way accessible by an appropriate level
of psychic functioning (e.g., Berger & Berger, 1991b; Fontana, 2010; Melton, 2001c).
Recent mediumship research has presented a quintessential source-of-psi (SoP) problem. Both
quantitative (e.g., Beischel, et al., 2017; Rock & Beischel, 2008) and qualitative (e.g. Beischel et
al., 2017; Rock, et al., 2009) findings indicate that mediums‟ experiences during mediumistic
communications and telepathic psychic readings with the living have qualitative differences (cf.
Beischel & Rock, 2009; Jamieson & Rock, 2014; Rock & Storm, 2015). Some mediums claim
they can distinguish between a) communicating with discarnates and living persons, and b)
obtaining information from discarnates and a psychic reservoir, which may involve different
sources of psi. The presence in mediumistic communications of discarnate psi, a psychic
functioning attributed to discarnates involving ESP and/or PK, is commonly acknowledged
(Sudduth, 2009, 2016). Studies also revealed that during psychic readings mediums contact what
they described as “friendly” ethereal entities such as angelic beings, familiar communicators, and
spirit guides.
However, along with differences, the studies also found similarities in medium‟s experiences
during discarnate communications and psychic readings. While these mixed results indicate that
the source of psi cannot be definitively identified, they suggest a multiple sources of psi (MSoP)
hypothesis, which would involve the co-functioning of LAP and psi-based processes that
mediate different cognitive and/or physical manifestations of discarnates. Essentially, the MSoP
hypothesis postulates the coexistence of multiple sources of psi: discarnates, living persons, and
a psychic reservoir. By including the explanatory virtues, such as “simplicity, consilience,
conservatism, and coherence” (Sudduth, 2014, p. 42) and compensating for the deficiencies of
other hypotheses, a novel MSoP hypothesis demonstrates the potential for enhanced explanatory
power and the promise of providing the most comprehensive explanation for mediumship data,
anomalous processes behind psychic readings, transfer of personality aspects from a deceased to
a newly born person in CORTs, psi functioning in NDEs/OBE, acquisition of anomalous
information in remote viewing, and paranormal activity in poltergeists. Moreover, the MSoP
hypothesis resolves the theoretical impasse between the survival and LAP hypotheses, is
compatible with both reincarnation and psychic reservoir hypotheses, and enhances the prospects
for future research of a broad variety of paranormal phenomena.
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The Survival Hypothesis
In Western and Eastern spiritual traditions, beliefs in an afterlife, reincarnation, and eternal
existence have been grounded in sacred teachings and practices, whereas Western philosophies
support or oppose the idea of personal survival on theoretical and empirical grounds. Survivalists
claim their hypothesis is superlative to rivals in explaining evidential data (Sudduth, 2014).
Some critics (e.g., Geach, 1987; Flew 1996, 1997; Edwards, 1997a, 1997b; Rosenberg, 1998)
question the validity of the evidence, maintaining that the empirical world rejects the idea or, at
the very least, the plausibility of survival. Others (e.g., Braude, 2009a, 2014; Sudduth, 2014,
2016), while not denying survival, contend that the interpretation of data does not render the
survival hypothesis the best explanation.
Since the end of the 19th century a number of authors (e.g., Ducasse, 1961; Murphy, 1945a,
1945b; Myers, 1903; Price 1953) systematically examined survival evidence. Empirical data
supporting the survival hypothesis primarily come from mediumship, CORTs, and possibly
NDEs/OBE and post-mortem apparitions (Sudduth, 2009). Common explanations for survival
phenomena fall into three general categories. The first includes ordinary causes, in which
information is obtained by natural means, such as cryptomnesia (unconscious recall of covertly
existing forgotten memories); intentional or unintentional fraud; and human errors (e.g., faulty
documenting, misperception, misinterpretation of facts, and illusions, delusions, or conscious
fantasies). Although the history of paranormal research is not short of such incidents, such
explanations cannot account for all thoroughly investigated cases (Gauld, 2005, 2007). Another
naturalistic interpretation implies manifestations of multiple personalities caused by the
dissociative functioning typical for trance-like states (e.g., Braude, 1995, 2009b; Krippner, 1997a,
1997b, 1999; Roxburgh & Roe, 2011).
The second category includes explanations grounded in the belief that some significant memories
and/or aspects of personality survive death. Strong evidence comes from mental mediumship,
such as mediums‟ displaying the alleged authentic behaviors of a discarnate personality
(Almeder, 1992, 1996; Ducasse, 1961; Gauld, 2007; Lund, 2009), or from children in CORTs
(e.g., Pasricha, 2019; Stevenson, 1990, 2000a, 2000b; Tucker, 2005, 2007, 2013). Survivalists
(e.g., Almeder, 1996, 1997; Kelly, 2007b; Lund, 2009) have argued that such factually verifiable
information cannot be obtained by normal or psi-based means. The explanations in the third
category suggest that information in mediumship and CORTs is communicated on a psi basis,
involving the living and the deceased. Since the limits of psi are unknown and some of its forms,
such as ESP and PK have been validated experimentally, survivalist opponents (e.g., Braude,
2003, 2014; Sudduth, 2014, 2016) have argued that a psi-based interpretation is equally plausible,
namely that information can be communicated by a discarnate to the medium (discarnate psi) or
acquired from and conveyed by living agents (LAP), including children in CORTs using ESP or
PK (Gauld, 2005; cf. Irwin & Watt, 2007). According to Gauld, all paranormal explanations
involve persistent philosophical, empirical, and scientific problems, discussed below.
Some (e.g., Fontana, 2006, 2010) find survival evidence convincing and believe that its
abundance renders post-mortem survival empirically feasible; it is resisted on biological and
philosophical grounds (Murphy, 1961; cf. Braude, 2014). The main difficulty, though, is lack of
clarity or consensus about what constitutes acceptable evidence for survival (Gauld, 2005). Lund
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(2009) claimed that different areas of survival research provide “a cumulative evidential weight
sufficient to conclude that the survival hypothesis is probably true” (p. 217), and further, that its
explanatory advantages combined with the shortcomings of the LAP hypothesis, render the
survival hypothesis superior. Sudduth (2013) challenged this claim on two counts: 1) the data the
survival hypothesis explains are no less implausible than those the LAP hypothesis expounds,
rendering criticisms of LAP “significantly defective” (p. 283); and 2) the survival hypothesis is
not “an antecedently credible hypothesis that leads us to expect observational data that are
otherwise improbable” (Sudduth, 2014, p. 42). Having examined the arguments for survival
based on known properties of the empirical world, Sudduth (2016; cf. Hart, 1959; Tyrrell, 1961)
determined they lacked good evidence for survival.
The survival hypothesis aims to explain data for a discarnate‟s continuing purpose-driven, goaloriented, and memory-based mental processes responsive to the demand conditions in a manner
characteristic of the ante-mortem personality. It presumes discarnate interactionism, a causal
interface between discarnates and the physical world involving discarnates‟ acquisition and
communication of empirical knowledge about events in the material world, as well as creating
physical effects (Sudduth, 2009). Even if discarnates inhabit a reality consistent with their needs,
wants, and recollections of prior life, discarnate interactionism may not happen: discarnates may
remain unaware of conventional physical reality and have no interaction with the living or other
discarnates. Data for the survival hypothesis, however, relies fully on discarnate interactionism.
A scientific hypothesis is only as good as its predictive power, required for testability, and the
survival hypothesis faces an essential problem: discarnate survival does not inherently lead to a
rational conclusion that discarnates have effectual mental capacity to purposefully produce
evidence of survival, such that any of the following may be true: 1) discarnates survive death but
lack the mental abilities to causally affect material reality; 2) they retain consciousness and
willing to communicate, but lack the power to do so; 3) they posses sufficient power, but do not
wish to do so; or 4) they lack the power, will, and interest to communicate (Sudduth, 2014).
Simply put, the mere survival of consciousness does not provide grounds for manifestation of
post-mortem survival. Although a simple survival hypothesis postulating continuity of the self
after bodily death does not have predictive significance, if supplemented by adequate auxiliary
hypotheses, it can potentially gain predictive power (Sudduth, 2014).
According to discarnate interactionism, discarnates are intelligent beings possessing
psychological properties, such as beliefs, needs, and intentions, and capable of manifesting
phenomena suggestive of survival, leading Sudduth to propose the first auxiliary hypothesis that
“at least some discarnate persons possess the power, desire, and intention to communicate with
the living” (p. 47). Veracious data suggests that they have knowledge about the minds of living
and other deceased beings, as well as of events in the physical world, Sudduth‟s second auxiliary
hypothesis. The paranormal nature of discarnate interactionism necessitates the discarnate psi
hypothesis (Sudduth, 2009), the third auxiliary hypothesis that some discarnates demonstrate
potent psi functioning allowing them to communicate with the living (cf. Braude, 2003, 2014;
Broad, 1962; Gauld, 1983). All four combined represent a more robust survival hypothesis that
satisfies the requirements for expecting manifestations of survival phenomena as a result of
discarnate interactionism and suggests the existence of evidence for post-mortem survival in the
physical world. Nevertheless, even this strengthened survival hypothesis lacks predictability
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(Sudduth, 2014). Even in the best mediumship cases, it is impossible to predict whether any
discarnate will interact with the living agent, who that discarnate will be, and any particulars of
discarnate communication, such as its time, form, or context. The same applies to the
reincarnation hypothesis; evidential data in CORTs does not allow predictions.
Strong theoretical differences exist in the interpretation and assessment of survival evidence, as
well as the analysis of essential properties of the survival hypothesis. This remains the focus of
controversy. While even strengthened survival hypothesis is not sufficiently robust, it is
supported by experimental studies of various paranormal phenomena.
Survival and Reincarnation
Reincarnation, “the notion that a nonphysical element of human existence not only survives but
subsequently is reborn in another body” (Irwin & Watt, 2007, p. 208), has ancient and deep roots,
but not until the second half of the 20th century did empirical evidence for reincarnation began to
attract serious researchers (Carter, 2012; Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf, 2008; Mills, 2008). Accidental
investigation of spontaneous reincarnation experiences occurred in India in the 1920s (Pasricha
& Stevenson, 1987; Sahay, 1927; Sunderlal, 1924), but systematic study of CORTs only began
in the early 1960s with Stevenson‟s (1960a, 1960b) examining the accounts of young children
who reported ostensible memories of previous lives. Stevenson introduced the reincarnation
hypothesis, “not a matter of belief, but an empirical issue, based on very specific experiences and
observations” (Grof, 2000, p. 235), aiming to explain them, irrespective of cultural or social
background, or belief in reincarnation.
Reincarnation phenomena are usually associated with past-life memories or experiences,
“impressions that individuals report in which they have experienced themselves as a particular
person with an identity (other than their current life identity) in a previous time or life span”
(Mills & Tucker, 2014, p. 305). Objective verification of past-life experiences has become the
focus of CORT research (e.g., Irwin & Watt, 2007; Kelly, 2013; Mills & Tucker, 2014, 2015). In
strong cases, children revealed specific, intimate details about the environment and life events of
their previous personality, including the circumstances of their death (e.g., Stevenson, 1974,
1977c; 1987, 1997b, 2000a; Haraldsson, 2003; Tucker, 2007) and past relationships with their
current or a totally different family (Tucker, 2008). The child did not simply exhibit knowledge,
but claimed “to remember having lived a past life as some particular formerly living person”
(Sudduth, 2016, p. 107, italics in original). Such memories appeared to be integral part of the
child‟s current personality, revealed as autobiographical narrative. In most CORTs (e.g.,
Haraldsson, 2000a, 2000b, 2003; Pasricha, 2008a, 2008b, 2019; Stevenson, 1974, 1977c, 1983,
1987, 2000a, 2003; Tucker, 2007, 2013), the previous personality continuously manifested for a
prolonged period, to the point that the current identity was overtaken by the previous personality,
rather like a long-term possession (e.g., Almeder, 1992; Stevenson 1974; Stevenson, Pasricha, &
McLean-Rice, 1989) in contrast to the transient possession of mediumship (Gauld, 2005).
Ex hypothesi, reincarnation represents an ostensible embodied survival, circumventing some
personal identity issues raised by disembodied survival (e.g., Helm, 1978; Penelhum, 1971;
Purtill, 1973; cf. Broad, 1976; Braude, 2005). At the same time, the reincarnation hypothesis
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does not address the physical permanence of previous personality (Beloff, 1977; Braude, 1992a),
but only psychological continuity, although in some cases, discrete physical elements, such as
bodily marks or birth defects, persist (e.g., Pasricha, 1998; Pasricha et al., 2005; Stevenson,
1997a). Whereas “none of this compels us to postulate a numerical identity” (Beloff, 1977, p.
764), subjectively, the link to one‟s past self is memory. Thus, when in reincarnation the same
mind might enliven different bodies, continuity is not an issue, and memory should be a decisive
factor (Beloff, 1993).
Despite an enormous body of empirical evidence, Gardner Murphy (1973) argued that children
more likely possessed implicit psychic powers sufficient to utilize any form of ESP to obtain
knowledge of their previous personalities. Stevenson (1977a, 1987, 1997b, 2000a, 2003) also
considered the plausibility of other interpretations. Some CORTs could involve LAP rather than
explanations based on the survival hypothesis (1977b), though LAP does not provide a
comprehensive explanation for such cases (Rivas, 1993). Furthermore, CORTs and mediumship
cases with a drop-in communicator share some strong and weak explanatory elements, as both
can be interpreted on the basis of the LAP hypothesis. However, both raise a legitimate question
why the medium or child using exceptional psychic abilities to paranormally acquire information
chooses (consciously or unconsciously) to imitate the cognitive patterns of one specific
individual. The LAP hypothesis does not offer simple and direct answer. Moreover, whereas
mediums were known on numerous occasions outside sittings to demonstrate extraordinary
psychic powers (Barrington, Stevenson, & Weaver, 2005; Crabtree, 2007; Gauld, 1983;
Stevenson, 1977b), children in CORTs (with few exceptions) did not do so in their daily lives (cf.
Lund, 2009). Besides the cognitive aspects, many CORTs provided evidence for post-mortem
survival involving manifestations of specific behavioral patterns and emotional longings (e.g.,
Haraldsson, 1997, 2003; Pasricha, 1996, 2019; Stevenson, 1990, 2000b; Tucker, 2005, 2007), not
easily explained by LAP (Stevenson, 1977b; Matlock, 2019). Analysis suggests that the
reincarnation explanation for CORTs‟ data is logical and consistent (Matlock, 1990, 2019) and
that the reincarnation hypothesis provides the most parsimonious interpretation of the evidence
(e.g., Almeder, 1992; Beloff, 1993; Rivas, 1993; Slavoutski [Merlin], 2012).
Survival and Mediumship
At the end of the 19th century, mediumship produced a large volume of high quality data, a
“historically important component of survival research” (Irwin & Watt, 2007, p. 139), but by the
mid-20th century, interest declined, probably attributable to the deadlock between the survival
and LAP hypotheses (Kelly, 2010). Neither mental nor physical mediumship provides direct
support for the survival hypothesis. “Evidence of survival (if any) comes from the content of the
communications – the memories, personal characteristics, intellectual skills, etc., apparently
displayed” (Gauld, 2005, p. 216). The medium‟s involvement can range from a fully waking
state, to light trance, to a deep dissociative state (trance mediumship), in which their usual
personalities are seemingly replaced by that of the discarnate spirit. Along with demonstrating
behaviors recognized as typical of the deceased (e.g., mannerisms, wording, articulation, humor,
etc.), some forms of mediumship, such as proxy sittings, drop-in communicator, and crosscorrespondences are considered strong evidence for the survival hypothesis by some (e.g.,
Almeder, 1992, 1996, 1997; Kelly, 2007b; Lund, 2009) but not others (e.g., Braude, 1996, 1997,
2003, 2014; Griffin, 1997; Sudduth, 2014, 2016). In proxy sitting, the sitter or séance participant
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and the medium intend to receive messages for a non-present, living third party whose personal
circumstances, concerns, or wishes are unknown. In drop-in communicator cases, no one among
the sitters, including the medium, expects or requests the presence of a particular discarnate
whose previous life identity may or may not be recognized. Cross-correspondences were
reported in a few cases, in which the identity of the communicator was verified, and goals and
intentions were apparent but did not coincide with any of the sitters or medium (Richmond,
1938).
After analyzing all three types, Kelly (2010) recommended that survival investigations focus on
proxy sittings to overcome the rival hypotheses impasse. Some (e.g., Braude 2003; Gauld 1983;
Stevenson 1970) held that drop-in communicator cases provide the most plausible interpretation
of data since sitters and medium do not expect the communicator, know nothing about their
identity, and thus cannot willingly or involuntarily engage an ostensible discarnate, such that a
more probable reason for contact might be a presumed need of the communicator rather than of
the living (Sudduth, 2016). On the other hand, cross-correspondences may demonstrate the
superiority of the survival hypothesis owing to two factors. First, the communications are
intentionally structured based on intelligent design with a consistent, goal-driven source of
information (Gauld 1983; Griffin 1997).
Since multiple mediums, unknown to each other, receive separate messages, their meaning
becomes clear only when individual messages are analyzed together. Second, this type of
communication is allegedly initiated and maintained based on motivation of a deceased
individual and not of living agents, individually or collectively (Kelly, 2010). Sudduth (2016),
however, questioned the latter, noting that the most famous cross-correspondence
communications involved three deceased members of the Society for Psychical Research, whose
survivalist bias during life “arguably would have had an overriding interest in producing
evidence that would be better explained by survival than by the alternatives” (p. 91). Since the
content of cross-correspondence messages is extremely complex, rendering analysis difficult,
their value as evidence for the survival hypothesis cannot be easily appraised (Irwin & Watt,
2007).
Survival evidence from mediums in part comes from discarnates‟ veridical reports of real-world
facts, including their experiences related to such data. Since discarnates lack bodies, survivalists
must explain how such information is obtained without normal sensory apparatus. Disembodied
persons lack the corporeal perceptual capacity allowing for the localization or spatial orientation
of sensory experience, i.e., “perspectival awareness” of “things that normally can only be
observed or experienced from certain points of view in space” (Braude, 2009a, p. 197). In
Braude‟s view, the only way survivalists can meet the challenge of discarnate interactionism in
the absence of perspectival awareness is via routine clairvoyance. Studies on clairvoyance and
remote viewing have demonstrated that a concrete observational locale during normal sensory
processing is not necessary for an authentic awareness of material-world events. Such “nonperspectival awareness” (p. 202) is possible logically as well as empirically. A discarnate‟s
“awareness of physical states unmediated by the physical and sensory mechanisms” is “a
paradigm instance” (p. 208) of clairvoyance that allows for either perspectival or nonperspectival awareness. So, it is reasonable that post-mortem awareness as well as discarnate psi
would also be an instance of ESP. Braude proposed that “the survival hypothesis presupposes the
operation of refined or frequent clairvoyance and telepathy between the deceased and the
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physical world” (p. 208), thus providing explanatory merits for the survival hypothesis. Besides,
including ESP in discarnate psi grounds the survival hypothesis in a sizable body of experimental
and case ESP evidence – “empirical footing” (p. 206), however limited and contentious.
To qualify as acceptable evidence, mediumistic information must be specific and veridical – that
is, sufficiently abundant, intimate, and exclusive, as well as independently verifiable that it has
not been obtained through chance or interpreted on the basis of open-source data (Braude, 2003,
2014; Sudduth, 2016). However, even after meeting these criteria, clear-cut interpretation of
survival evidence is paradoxically challenging. Uniformly, the best cases contain a vexing blend
of data suggestive of survival, LAP, and evident gobbledygook (Braude, 2003, Broad, 1962),
complicating accurate analysis (Kelly, 2017). Descriptions of events and activities of the living,
as well as their thoughts and feelings, suggest LAP and/or discarnate psi (cf. Sudduth, 2009). In
LAP, the sourcing of information may not even be conscious and can involve an involuntary
extrasensory contact with a living source (Anonymous, 1923; Dallas, 1924). Not surprisingly
after over a century of meticulous investigations, scholars have not agreed on the superiority of
any paranormal explanation for mediumistic communications.
Survival and NDEs
Especially since Moody‟s (1975) publication of Life After Life, NDEs became the subject of
intense debates (Agrillo, 2011). In a large number of clinical death cases, individuals reported
realistic experiences of “leaving their body, entering other realms of existence, meeting deceased
relatives, and having a review of their life” (Sudduth, 2016, p. 58; cf. Fenwick, 2012; Greyson,
2014; Parnia, 2013; Van Lommel, 2011b; Zingrone & Alvarado, 2009). Encounters with
deceased individuals during an NDE are common (e.g., Fenwick & Fenwick, 2008, 2012;
Greyson, 2010a; Kelly et al., 2007). Often the identity of the deceased or fact of their death
unknown to the NDEr was later verified (Greyson, 2010a; cf. Hasker & Taliaferro, 2019; Kelly,
2001; Rousseau, 2012), refuting the “expectation hypothesis” (that the visions are hallucinations
triggered by the NDErs‟ expectation).
Many eminent scholars (e.g., Alexander, 2012; Beauregard, 2012; Greyson et.al, 2009; Holden,
2009; Parnia, 2013; Van Lommel, 2010, 2011a) claimed that NDEs provide strong evidence of
survival. Critics (e.g., Blackmore, 1993, 2007; Braithwaite, 2008; Craffert, 2015a; Mobbs &
Watt, 2011; Nelson, 2017; Woerlee, 2005) have argued on a physicalist basis that death-state
neurophysiology can account for these subjective experiences, lending no support for the
survival hypothesis, though notably none of their arguments can account for all of the data. A
number of studies analyzed NDEs to support the survival hypothesis (Cook [Kelly] et al., 1998;
Kelly et al., 1999-2000; Kelly, 2001), specifically that three commonly reported characteristics
present in the same experience would be necessary and sufficient to provide evidence for
survival: 1) enhanced mentation, such as clarity and lucidity of cognition and heightened
perceptual vividness when mental and physiological functioning are significantly compromised;
2) OBEs; and 3) paranormal perceptions allowing access to phenomena beyond the reach of
normal senses, typically inaccessible in normal consciousness.
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Brain functioning during an NDE might vary from considerably reduced cognition to no
measurable activity (Sudduth, 2016). Nevertheless, many NDErs have reported full and even
enhanced cognitive operations while clinically dead (Kelly et al., 2007; Van Lommel, 2010).
Clinical death is characterized by body-wide circulatory insufficiency, respiratory failure, and
lack of electrical brain activity and brainstem reflexes, caused by cessation of effective heart
function (e.g., Greyson 2010b; Quigley, 2011). While people experiencing clinical death may
still be reanimated (e.g., Engmann, 2014), unsuccessful resuscitation results in brain or
biological (irreversible) death (Craffert, 2015a; Engmann, 2014). Even flat EEG readings during
NDEs do not necessarily indicate total cessation of brain functioning (Braithwaite, 2008);
consequently, it is impossible to affirm that during NDE “there is no residual activity going on in
the brain that could be the locus for the experiences” (Hasker & Taliaferro, 2019, para 4; cf.
Borjigin et al., 2013; Chawla et al., 2009). The brain showing no measurable neurophysiological
activity can still acquire and retain meaningful information, indicating that consciousness may
continue during clinical death. Based on that, critics question whether “temporary” death is
relevant to the survival hypothesis.
Considering the experient‟s moribund physical condition, NDEs/OBE are deemed essential as
they often involve unexpected and unusual psycho-emotional experiences, during which some
people demonstrated veridical knowledge about distant places and events unattainable through
normal senses (e.g., Braude, 2001; Hasker & Taliaferro, 2019; Kelly et al., 2007). Verified
reports of incidents happening to or around the clinically dead NDEr are frequent (e.g., Bellg,
2015; Greyson, 2007a, 2009, 2010b; Holden, 2009, 2017; Rivas et al., 2016) and defy
conventional explanation (e.g., Hasker & Taliaferro, 2019; Sartori et al., 2006; Sharp, 1995).
“Apparently non-physical veridical perception” (Holden, 2017, p. 79, italics in original) while
the brain is incapacitated challenge physicalist NDE hypotheses.
An OBEr‟s impression that their consciousness has separated from their body can be so
convincing, they may truly believe that it can survive death (Gauld, 2005). However, even in
conjunction with NDEs, OBEs are not direct evidence for survival (Griffin, 1997), and no
consensus exists (e.g., Almeder, 1992; Alvarado, 2001; Paterson, 1995; Woodhouse, 1994). Thus,
Braude (2001) asserted that the survival argument in “its most careful and plausible form” (p. 87)
still renders the connection between OBE and survival questionable. From the neuroscientific
perspective, OBEs are seen as brain phenomena possibly “caused by a functional disintegration
in lower-level multisensory processing (vestibular, proprioceptive, tactile, and visual
information)” (Bünning & Blanke, 2005, p. 346; Blanke & Arzy, 2005). The neurophysiological
mechanisms in some altered states of consciousness may produce the “undercontrol of the usual
sensory and perceptual processes” (Gabbard & Twemlow, 1984, p. 238; cf. Saavedra-Aguilar &
Gómez-Jeria, 1989), resulting in unexpected OBE imagery.
Some (e.g., Gauld, 2005; Braude, 2003; cf. Cheyne & Girard, 2009; De Ridder et al., 2007;
Mobbs & Watt, 2011) considered OBEs merely extensive hallucinations, imaginative
productions of creative mind, suggesting that expanded paranormal awareness during OBEs may
not be a result of consciousness separating from the body, but rather hallucinatory experience for
acquiring information by ESP (cf. Krishnan, 1985). Hasker and Taliaferro (2019) concurred.
Hallucinations mediating psi-based information acquisition may manifest similar to dreams,
visions, spontaneous imagery, and altered states of consciousness. Anecdotal and experimental
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evidence indicates that some non-ordinary states are psi-conducive (e.g., Braud, 1975, 1978,
2002b; Carpenter, 2015; Rock et al., 2013; Tressoldi et al., 2010). OBEs are also believed to
provide evidence of psychic functioning, such as clairvoyance and remote viewing. The
assessment of veridical perception in NDEs/OBE has been complicated by reliance on
retrospective studies without appropriate control procedures, and a few prospective studies with
visual targets hidden in projected locations failed to produce any evidence (Greyson, 2014; cf.
Craffert, 2015a; Parnia et al. 2014; Trent-von Haesler & Beauregard, 2013), perhaps attributable
to the dying person‟s lack of incentive to examine and remember targets designed by researchers.
Proponents of non-local consciousness (e.g., Kelly, 2007a, 2015; Kelly, 2007; Weiss, 2015)
believe that the mind, personality, or self may not be dependent on the body‟s limitations in any
case, an argument too complex for treatment here. Suffice to say, substantial theoretical and
empirical data (e.g., Beauregard, 2012; Fenwick, 2012; Greyson, 2010b; Holden 2009, 2017;
Parnia, 2014; Trent-von Haesler & Beauregard, 2013; Van Lommel, 2006, 2011a, 2013)
suggests “ontological autonomy of consciousness” (Sudduth, 2016, p. 47). Since there are
sufficient grounds to suppose that NDEs/OBE are genuine and veridical, it is rational to assume
that they represent post-mortem continuity of consciousness (Dell‟Olio, 2010). Current
methodologies do not confirm neurophysiological hypotheses accounting for NDEs (Greyson,
2014), certainly not that NDEs are dependent on such mechanisms (Greyson, 2013; Kelly et al.,
2007). Moreover, important data incongruent with the mainstream physicalist paradigm have
been frequently ignored, and brain-related psychopathology is qualitatively different from NDE
phenomenology (Greyson, 2007b), rendering neurobiological explanations of NDEs speculative
at best (Facco & Agrillo, 2012; Fracasso & Friedman, 2011).
At the same time, evidence for mind-body separateness essentially is nonexistent or at the very
least inconclusive (e.g., Braithwait, 2008; Long & Perry, 2010; Laws & Perry, 2010). Due to the
extremely short time during which NDEs are believed to occur, hypothetically the mind could
become dissociated from the brain, “but cannot survive for long in the absence of
neuroanatomical structures” (Agrillo, 2011, p. 8). No matter how compelling the claim of nonlocality of consciousness, it does not lead to or warrant the assumption that the mind can survive
biological death (e.g., Engmann, 2014; Greyson, 2014; Potts, 2002; Craffert, 2015a, 2019). An
argument that NDEs/OBE at most can identify only unconventional or paranormal methods of
information access and retrieval is concurrent with the supposition that consciousness relies on
the functioning of active brain (Ducasse, 1961; cf. Borjigin et al., 2013; Craffert, 2015a; Irwin,
2014). It is still not improbable that veridical NDEs/OBE could indirectly support the survival
hypothesis (Braude, 2003; Sudduth, 2016) or offer supplemental support in conjunction with
evidence from mediumship and CORTs (Braude, 2003; Kelly et al., 1999-2000).
Survival and Apparitions of the Dead
Apparitions of the dead, a focus of early survival research, have been considered “second in
importance only to the best medium-produced material as proof of survival” (Moore, 1981, p.
127; cf. Fontana, 2010). Traditionally, the so-called spirit hypothesis suggested that apparitions
represent an essential aspect of post-mortem existence, involving principles (e.g. Hart, 1956,
1959, 1967; Crookall, 1970) similar to those behind the NDEs/OBE, further inferring unceasing
post-mortem existence of the ecsomatic (out-of-body) aspect (Irwin & Watt, 2007). However,
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commonly reported descriptions of fully clothed apparitional figures have challenged the spirit
hypothesis (e.g., Ducasse, 1961, 1969; Griffin, 1997; Moore, 1981), as have the unconvincing
results of experimental studies employing apparition-detecting equipment (e.g., Maher & Hansen,
1992, 1995). Today most parapsychologists have rejected the spirit hypothesis (Irwin & Watt,
2007; Maher, 2015).
According to Paterson (1995), post-mortem apparitions represent transitory manifesting figures
that strongly resemble the ante-mortem deceased, demonstrating their survived minds‟ continuity.
Some scholars (e.g., Gauld, 2005; Paterson, 1995; Stokes, 2007; cf. Lester, 2005) believed that
the image of the deceased, as well as the conveyed information, and intent behind such
communications to be the conscious or unconscious mental productions of the observer. Even
when multiple observers share the same experience, the possibility of “collective” hallucination
cannot be ruled out (West, 1948; cf. Moore, 1981): an acceptable account of collective cases has
not yet been established (Irwin & Watt, 2007).
Providing accurate information initially unknown to the witness points to involvement of some
form of paranormal process (Griffin, 1997, Lund, 2012), suggesting two probable explanations:
1) apparitions show evidence for post-mortem manifestations of the deceased, and 2) they denote
LAP functioning, involving some form of ESP (Fontana, 2010). Stevenson (1982b) concluded
that collective cases (more than one person concurrently witnessing the same apparition at the
same place) and reciprocal cases (when a living person is perceived as an apparition and the
latter confirms afterwards that it saw the observer at the same place; Lester, 2005) along with
apparitional characteristics, such as reflections in mirrors and gesticulation, are less likely to be
explained by ESP. He also argued that ESP is not probable in manifestations showing “the
purposiveness of the deceased” (Lester, 2005, p. 172) because when such purpose is
representative of the apparent person rather than of the observer or other living individuals, it
suggests the survival hypothesis, not the overcomplicated and perplexing explanations offered by
LAP (Lund, 2009).
Both the survival and LAP hypotheses would involve a high level of psychic functioning,
namely, discarnate psi (Lund, 2009; Sudduth, 2016). If veridical cases can be explained by
discarnate psi, then the sufficiently credible apparitional theory must include the interactive
performance of the deceased (Griffin, 1997) that may entail some form of ESP-based input from
them (e.g., Becker, 1993; Griffin, 1997; Paterson, 1995), a proposal that can neither be
empirically corroborated nor refuted (Lester, 2005). If on the other hand, some aspect of the
apparition happens to have such input, “the stream of consciousness of the deceased person
persists after death” (p. 168). Some survivalists (e.g., Lund, 2009; Myers, 1892) claimed that
apparitional phenomena involve post-mortem psychological continuity of an ante-mortem mind,
implying discarnate consciousness (Irwin & Watt, 2007).
Paterson (1995) proposed a mechanism behind the discarnate psi functioning in apparitional
cases: an imaginary construct or hallucinatory representation of an apparitional figure is sourced
from the deceased‟s mind and telepathically transmitted to the observer‟s mind. This could
account for explicitly or implicitly passing on factual information to the living, as well as for the
manifestation of identifiable figure of the deceased, the essential feature of the experience. It is
not unreasonable to expect that a psychologically healthy individual‟s mind would construct and
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retain, not necessarily consciously, their ante-mortem body image. If, based on the survival
hypothesis, a significant aspect of deceased‟s consciousness containing just basic psychological
structures survives, then their body image also survives, although in some discarnate form.
Similar to that of the living, this body image would comprise mentally reconstructed memory of
physical, psychological, and behavioral characteristics. Since in the post-mortem state “its
ontological status, as in life, would be mental” (p. 48), it can be projected telepathically to the
minds of the living, with the same effort as any other essential aspects of the deceased‟s mind.
Historically, some apparition theories were congruent with the survival hypothesis (e.g.,
Crookall, 1970; Gurney et al., 1918/1962; Hart, 1956, 1959; Myers, 1889-1890, 1892). Recently,
opinions have been more cautious or even strongly critical. Survivalists (e.g., Carter, 2012;
Laszlo, 2014; Paterson, 1995) have argued that evidence suggests the reality of post-mortem
apparitional functioning and presents “obvious proof of an apparition of a dead person being
„real‟” (Lester, 2005, p. 170, author‟s emphasis). Paterson (1995) considered apparitional
experiences of the dead authentic, and from the survival hypothesis perspective, veridical,
proposing their significance for post-mortem survival based on: 1) number of sightings; 2)
dependability and overdetermination of witness statements; 3) environmental awareness
exhibited by apparitions; 4) demonstrated purposeful behavior; and 5) the truth of communicated
information unknown to the observer at sighting but later verified. Since reciprocal
apparitions have much in common with apparitions of the dead, they may also provide a
reasonable support for survival (Lund, 2009). Stevenson (1982b) suggested that collective cases,
post-mortem apparitions with evidence of purpose, and reciprocal cases provide stronger support
for the survival hypothesis, though relatively scarce. According to Paterson (1995), the evidence
from apparitions is definitely stronger than mediumship evidence of discarnates.
On the other hand, apparition reports as evidence of survival are problematic: the majority are
outdated; many are based on earlier memories, which could be inaccurate and distorted; and the
vast majority come from ordinary people, lacking skills and experience in experimental research
(Lester, 2005). Besides inadequate specificity and veracity, the investigations based on these
reports are statistically insignificant due to their small sample. The hypothesis of post-mortem
mind continuity, allegedly demonstrated by apparitional phenomena, lacks robust empirical
evidence and, compared to other sources, apparitions offer the weakest evidence for survival.
The LAP Hypothesis
Early psychical researchers were aware of the problems with evidence for survival (e.g., Crabtree,
2007; Braude, 2003, 2014; Krippner et al., 2013; Sudduth, 2009, 2014, 2016). For example,
Flournoy (1900, 1911/2007) deemed mediums capable of creating imaginative personalities and
dramatizing their narratives via automatisms. Later he believed telepathy was significantly
involved in mediumistic communications and ultimately introduced the LAP hypothesis
(Crabtree, 2007; cf. Braude, 2003, 2014; Sudduth, 2009; 2014, 2016). Mediums‟ exceptional
psychic abilities, including telepathy and clairvoyance, beyond séance settings, contributed to its
advancement (Crabtree, 2007; cf. Barrington et al., 2005; Gauld, 1983; Stevenson, 1977b).
According to the LAP hypothesis, mediumistic communications include a “Super-ESP
Component,” mediums‟ sufficient ESP powers to access and retrieve any information related to
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the deceased, and a “Superplasticity Component,” their unconscious ability to embody and
dramatize this paranormal information to realistically portray the deceased (Crabtree, 2007, p.
360, italics in original). Braude (1989, 1992b, 2003) made “the most empirically informed and
philosophically sophisticated” effort to advance a robust LAP hypothesis (Sudduth, 2016, p. 271)
whose explanatory power is enhanced by some psychological expounding component (cf.
Ducasse 1961; Hart 1959; Lund 2009; Stevenson 1974), which can account for a broader scope
of evidence, including impersonations.
Survivalists nevertheless argue that LAP has little or no explanatory power concerning the
variety of abilities demonstrated by mediums and some children in CORTS: First, LAP is limited
to propositional knowledge, “the articulation of facts or items of information (often called
„knowledge-that‟)” and unable to account for applied knowledge, “the manifestation of abilities
and skills (usually considered a type of „knowledge-how‟)” (Braude, 2003, p. 9, italics in
original); Second, the development of skills that mediums or children do not originally possess
would normally require extensive learning and practicing (Sudduth, 2014; cf. Braude, 1992a,
1992b, 2003; Stevenson, 1977c, 1987, 1992, 2000a). However outside survival, dissociative
experiences, such as dissociative identity disorder, commonly involve the spontaneous exhibition
of previously unknown cognitive patterns and behaviors, such as extraordinary language skills,
artistic abilities, and musical talents (e.g., Moline, 2013; Putnam, 1989; Ross, 1997). This does
not imply that mediums or children in CORTs attained those abilities through LAP. There is no
indication that those skills “have been transferred or acquired, only that novel skills are
suddenly manifested without any obvious antecedents,” which studies in abnormal psychology
confirm (Sudduth, 2014, p. 55, italics in original).
According to Braude (2003, 2014) and Sudduth (2014), the robust LAP hypothesis involves the
“motivated-psi” hypothesis, “the operation of psychic abilities in the services of some agent's
genuine or perceived needs and interests” (Braude, 2003, p. 13, italics in original). In this
enhanced hypothesis, psi offers an alternative source of autobiographical information about the
deceased. Motivation or psychodynamic function of psi can explain both why living agents seek
such information and the impression that the deceased is the source of this information. The
robust LAP hypothesis endorses the semblance of survival, allowing this function of psi to
stimulate conscious or unconscious dominant drives within living individuals. When the
motivated-psi hypothesis includes “motivational and dissociative psychodynamics” (Sudduth,
2014, p. 56), it becomes a robust LAP hypothesis.
In the best cases, mediums possess factual, exhaustive, and personal knowledge about the anteand post-mortem existence of the deceased, “a composite of information the individual elements
of which are located in independent sources (persons or documents)” (Sudduth, 2014, p. 58).
Survivalists argue that, if LAP accounts for the medium‟s knowledge from multiple sources, it
must be of super-psi magnitude. Though nothing is known about the actual ability of psi to
handle multiple sources of information, experimental studies (Kennedy, 1980; Schmidt, 1987; cf.
Schmidt, 1975, 1984) have shown that psi appears to be immune to task complexity. Thus,
“psychically accessing multiple sources . . . [is] no more imposing than accessing one” (Braude,
2014, p. 29). Besides, the assumption that LAP functioning is similar to conventional sequential
information processing is entirely speculative (Sudduth, 2014).
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Assuming psi overcomes task complexity and its functioning based exclusively on effective wish
fulfillment, the streamlined agent‟s psychic activity Braude (2003) called the “magic wand
hypothesis” (p. 11), it still would not escape an “argument from crippling complexity” (p. 86,
italics in original; cf. Sudduth, 2014). Because psi is presumed to function in an environment of
interconnected wide-ranging psi and non-psi activities, its operations are believed to be affected
by a variety of explicit, implicit, local, and global interferences. To surpass these hindrances, psi
must continuously demonstrate exceptional strength. Effectively functioning psi, regardless of its
power is involved in multiple activities, which may cause its operations occurring elsewhere to
be compromised. Therefore, besides needing to be isolated from external non-psi noise, psi
requires sufficient power to overcome its own diminishing psychic effects. The excessive power,
however, can obstruct its various manifestations, and thus, the overly powerful psi could become
self-sabotaging. The argument of crippling complexity implies that ultimately, LAP “may not be
unlimited and indeed may not even have the required degree of potency and refinement”
(Sudduth, 2014, p. 60, italics in original; cf. Braude 2003) to acquire detailed, veridical
information about the ante- and post-mortem existence of the deceased.
Although crippling complexity challenges the explanatory power of the LAP hypothesis, it does
not indicate the superiority of the survival hypothesis. The scope and sophistication of psi
functioning involved in discarnate psi, which the survival hypothesis requires, is no different
from what LAP needs to account for the same data (Braude, 2003, 2009a; Sudduth, 2009, 2014,
2016). If the argument of crippling complexity imposes confines on psi in an attempt to eliminate
its self-sabotaging behavior, then it would also limit discarnate psi, which would reduce the
explanatory power of the survival hypothesis for mediumship evidence. While maintaining that
certain data might better support the survival hypothesis, Braude (2003) believed that the robust
LAP hypothesis retains considerable merit.
The Psychic Reservoir Hypothesis
The plausibility of the LAP hypothesis suggests that psi may be involved in psychic functioning
posited by both the survival and psychic reservoir hypotheses (Rock, 2014). The latter is based
on the premise that information about all sentient experiences of intelligent organisms is retained
in some putative implicit depository of unknown nature and location. When applied to sourcing
paranormal information (e.g., in mediumship, CORTs, ESP studies, or psychic readings), this
hypothesis considered an alternative to the survival and LAP hypotheses (e.g., Beischel, 2014;
Fontana, 2010; Rock & Storm, 2015). Since it cannot be tested, it cannot be falsified; and having
no supporting empirical evidence, it has less explanatory power than other two hypotheses.
The first reference to a cosmic data repository in the context of mediumship is attributed to
William James who, among other possibilities, considered “access to some cosmic reservoir,
where the memory of all mundane facts is stored and grouped around personal centers of
association” (1909, as cited in Leuba, 1915, p. 412; cf. Tymn, 2011). However, a concept of a
collective memory store known as the Akashic Record has existed for millennia (Chaney, 1996;
Krippner, 2006). Akasha is often translated as space or ether and in Hindu philosophy represents
one of the two fundamental entities of the universe, the subtle substance from which all creation
emerged (Vivekananda, 1996; cf. Krippner, 2006; Laszlo, 2014). In Indian tradition, the Akashic
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Record is also called Mahat, or cosmic mind and is said to contain records of all events, thoughts,
and actions happening everywhere in the universe through all time. It may be accessed by yogis
in an advanced meditative state, by rishis or Vedic seers, and descriptively similar experiences
have been reported by psychics in altered states of consciousness (e.g., Laszlo, 2014; Melton,
2001a; Panda, 2013; Rao, 2011).
Although it is believed that recordkeeping is effected by the permanent impression of
information upon akasha, the actual mechanisms are unknown. No theory claiming to offer
scientific basis for such a construct was known until the late 20th century when Laszlo (2007,
2008, 2012, 2016; cf. Chaney, 1996; Grof, 2006) expanded it into “an interconnecting,
information-conveying, and conserving cosmic field” (Szabo, 2017, p. 95), “augmented
continuously by quantum holographic information” (Mitchell, 2009, p. 229); however, such
theories remain speculative. The Akashic field is believed by some to possess indelible memory
of the universe with unlimited capacity (Szabo, 2017). Information obtained by various forms of
ESP have been theorized to be an integral part of this cosmic data field (Berger & Berger, 1991a,
1991b; Krippner, 2006).
The psychic reservoir hypothesis, however, lacks two important explanatory virtues,
conservatism and consilience (Sudduth, 2014). It arguably is based on the incomprehensible – at
least from the Western scientific perspective – idea that essential data are “stored in a structure,
independent of any context” (Rock & Storm, 2015, p. 571). At the same time, compared to the
survival and LAP hypotheses, it offers a single, direct, and universal source of information; does
not require the existence of an afterlife; does not necessitate explaining what exactly survives
bodily death, including survival and reincarnation mechanisms; avoids LAP‟s needing super-psi
quality; and circumvents the issue of crippling complexity in LAP functioning. Jamieson and
Rock (2014) found this hypothesis helpful in demonstrating the qualitative difference between
agentive and non-agentive sources of psi.
(Continued on Part II)
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Article
Pitch Inverted Songs as Affirmation of Panpsychism
Based on a Theoretical Mirror Universe
Stephen P. Smith*
Abstract
Every song that carries a melody can be pitch inverted to uncover a dual song that is different to
the original song and where the pitch-inverted melody also relates to our emotions. This is
creating music for the minor cost of pitch inversion, and without a lot of creativity beyond
technical skills. The principle is demonstrated on 50 songs, with 100% success. As a general
principle this implicates a reflective property that is necessarily part of human psychology.
Moreover, this discovery affirms the belief in panpsychism where the reflexive property is active
as part of a broader mirror universe.
Keywords: Song, pitch inversion, panpsychism, mirror universe, reflective property.
1. Introduction
Panpsychism is a philosophical theory of consciousness that is gaining acceptance today
(Skrbina 2017). This theory stipulates that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter.
Because matter cannot be disconnected from the entire universe, panpsychism also asserts that
consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe.
Smith (2018, 2019) described a panpsychism that relates to a fundamental symmetry described
by physics, the charge-parity-time symmetry (or CPT symmetry), and also connects it to a mirror
universe theory described as a two-sided CPT inversion. As a logical necessity for a
comprehensible universe, it must be that the universe holds a reflective properly that permits
comprehension, otherwise the world would not be comprehendible (Langan 2017). This logical
necessity resembles photographic prints that are made from negative film, where the negative
film equates to the reflective property in the universe as an analogy. Moreover, while the
negative film is found necessary, there remains an undeclared middle-term that takes the
negatives and does the work of making the prints, agreeing with Trinitarian philosophy (Smith
2008). Therefore, evidence that supports the belief in such a mirror universe comes in the form
of discovering the negative film, or reflections, that are found after looking for them.
This paper entertains the theoretical possibility that songs also carry a negative, or dual song, and
these songs are represented by pitch-inversion. To the extent that every song that has ever been
composed comes with such a dual song, that is also recognized to carry a distinct melody that
evokes an emotional response to some degree, then this would constitute evidence of a mirror
universe that encapsulates the emotive source. The theory predicts a 100% success rate in finding
a dual song that carries a melody, not that all such melodies will be found pleasing. This is a
Correspondence: Stephen P. Smith, Ph.D., Independent Researcher. E-mail: hucklebird@aol.com
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testable prediction that is reported in this paper on 50 different attempts to create dual songs.
Section 2 describes pitch inversion in music, and how to pitch-invert songs. Appendix A provides
more details on how to pitch-invert sheet music by hand. These instructions were used to pitch
invert 50 popular songs, using a music note editor (Cresceno, made by NCH Software). Section 3
describes the information content in songs, and how songs carry a relativity that makes them
invariant to transposition. Section 4 explains how the relative information contained in a song
pertains to panpsychism and the mirror universe. Section 5 summarizes the results for 50 songs,
including links to YouTube videos where the songs can be heard. All 50 attempts were found
successful in generating a distinct melody, most being very different from the initial song, and
these findings support the belief in the mirror universe. Concluding remarks are presented in
Section 6.
2. Pitch Inversion
The pitch inversion of musical notes have been studied in musical set theory (Forte 1977). Pitch
inversion is defined as the flipping, or reflecting, of a note around a second note that represents
the center note. The center note is selected once 1 but can be selected anywhere, but various keys
have natural center notes that do not complicate the notation. For example, using the note D as
the center note returns notation in C major given that the original song is in C major, where the
pitch-inverted notes will have accidentals only when the original notes have accidentals.
Like the transposition of notes, pitch inversion maps a song into a class without changing the
tempo while making a second song. In the case of transposition, which is the raising or lowering
of notes a specified number of chromatic steps, the same melody is returned. That is, melody is
found invariant to transposition, even as the tone changes. Pitch inversion changes the melody,
but not necessarily to an extreme extent even as extreme changes are found in particular
examples. Therefore, the pitch-inverted song represents a dual song that shadows the original
melody, and only when the melody and its dual are defined equivalent is a broader equivalence
or invariance (representing a class) meaningful.
When working with an audio file, it is possible to use software (e.g., Patrick Feaster‟s software
described on griffonagedotcom.wordpress.com) to pitch-invert a song around a selected pitch (if
not a note). The evolution of sound from notes played by a musical instrument are impacted by
time creating a waveform signature that‟s asymmetrical in its presentation (changes in
amplitude), and in any regard, pitch-inverting sound is not as pristine as pitch-inverting notes
before they are played. The bigger challenge is that the chromatic scale is exponentially spaced,
where frequency must be log transformed to make a linear scale for direct pitch inversion of
sound. Its more straightforward to invert notes before they are turned into sound, using the
natural exponential chromatic spacing. C++ Software (Craig Stuart‟s MIDI file parsing library,
part of GitHub) is available for pitch-inverting a midi file around a center note. If not careful,
however, reflecting midi files can lock the process into making all notes on the bass clef high
notes and while making all notes on the treble clef low notes, and this creates an inflexible
1. When inverting notes in one staff.
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method that is not desirable. It is preferable to break a song into multiple staffs (which is
tantamount to making multiple midi files), pitch-invert each staff individually using a center note
that‟s natural for the key but in the middle of the staff (more or less), then transpose each staff up
or down one octave to present the most desired arrangement for all the staffs together. Therefore,
pitch-inversion of a song does not necessarily lock the process into a single center note. The
added flexibility is actually preferred with a process that is otherwise highly automatic, and the
process can now be done by hand using a good music note editor (See Appendix A). The
disadvantage of doing the inversion by hand with a note editor is that the operation can introduce
errors.
3. Information Contained in a Song and Relativity
The exponential spacing (given by the factor 12√2) that typifies the chromatic scale is
remarkable. The implication is that the human ear not only can distinguish among these notes,
but actually prefers this arrangement when notes are set to music. Because the normal scale with
seven notes represent a subsequence of the 12 chromatic notes, the same preference given to
exponentially spaced notes is again realized. Its unclear how this preference can be explained in
mathematical terms, but there is a vague hint that this preference connects to the probabilistic
concept of entropy, or to the scale invariant prior and utility function of Bayesian statistics, all of
which incriminate multiplicative transitions. The fact that this preference connects to
consciousness makes the spacing very mysterious. Nevertheless, pitch inversion will be taken to
pertain to this unusual spacing, which is not linear in pitch, it is multiplicative.
The fact that a transposition of notes in a song leaves the melody intact while changing the tone,
implies that the information that is recognized as a melody is contained in the relative changes of
notes as time unfolds according to the tempo. Only the tempo and transitions between notes
define the melody, not the absolute frequency that defines any particular note. This represents a
type of relativity given by the representation of melody as the transitions given in the exponential
scale. This is not saying that the melody is relative, only the representation of melody is relative.
The representation does not stand in isolation to its reception in mind, i.e., something must
receive the representation, and something must hold the representation to its reception. The strict
application of relativity only applies to the song‟s representation, and perhaps the song‟s
reception, but not to the undeclared middle-term that holds the representation to its reception.
Imposing relativity on the middle-term is to imply that everything is relative, which is to confuse
the thing-in-itself with appearance and is a mistake that Kant recognized in the Critique of Pure
Reason.
The observation that representation is relative, as is the representation‟s reception, is presumably
a condition of consciousness. Information showing the middle-term gets left out of appearance
by necessity, and must be apprehended by something other than simple appearance. We cannot
see the middle-term for the same reason that our eyes cannot see the back of our head without the
aid of a mirror; i.e., the blind spot is caused by self-referral. A mirror, or frame of reference, must
always be provided in order to detect something closer to the middle-term. Likewise, a popular
science turned folk philosophy might leap to the false conclusion that everything is relative
(radical relativism) based on the findings of special and general relativity (if not postmodernism),
but clear thinking shows that something fundamental and non-relative may go unnoticed in the
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possible eather that never finds experimental detection. It is not accidental that Einstein‟s
theories postulated a frame of reference as a first step in his thought experiments. However, a
frame of reference (even those described in physics) implies a self-referral that carries its own
blind spots.
4. Panpsychism and the Mirror Universe
Information of any kind presupposes the existence of consciousness. Or if consciousness is to be
taken for granted, attempts to turn information into a one-sided measure (such as Shannon‟s
information given the thermodynamic quantity called entropy) pushes consciousness out of the
window of appearance and into a metaphysics that may get completely ignored. In the worst case
this is to confuse appearance with the thing-in-itself again, as Kant warned. Nevertheless, the
push of consciousness out of the one-sided appearance leaves it fully in reality as the other side
of appearance, consciousness carries the appearance that is reflected off the other side, and
carries an undeclared middle-term again. Consciousness becomes a fundamental substance in
reality, something that is not a derivative of one-sided causation, and even if it is not admitted by
those confused by appearances. This view of consciousness that connects to a fundamental is the
definition of panpsychism, and because this view also carries a realty that is two-sided with an
undeclared middle-term this view indicates a rediscovery of the Logos that makes a particular
type of panpsychism and implies a mirror universe.
The Logos that represents the absolute mover 2 of the universe acts now as a strange attactor, and
forms a fractal pattern in evolution by leaving behind a reflection of itself on all levels. The
mirror universe leaves behind lesser mirrors that may serve as evidence for the theory of the
mirror universe.
Information that represents a melody, given as tempo and the relative spacing of notes, must
somehow meet the representation‟s reception (the reflection). The hypothesis of this paper is that
the organic reception, or the song‟s reflection, is none other than the pitch inversion of the
melody. This is not to say that there are not deeper reflections, perhaps going all the way to CPTinversion that‟s described in physics. However, its very ambitious to dig this deep, and a deeper
reflection may be unintelligible to the human mind. The deeper search is unnecessary, however,
as the proof in the mirror universe is the finding of lesser mirrors that are all necessary; we are
permitted to make incremental discoveries.
So finding ourselves sitting at a piano we may also find our self-looking into a near-by mirror.
Playing the piano while looking into the mirror we discover that the right hand is playing on the
low-pitched keys while the left hand is playing on the high-pitched keys, the complete reverse of
what normally happens, but matching perfectly the operation of pitch-inversion using the
chromatic scale with its exponential spacing. The pitch-inverted song matches perfectly the
mirror reflection of ourselves playing the piano that‟s unified through the unspecified middleterm. Could this be the organic mirror we are looking for, a lesser mirror that‟s found necessary?
Songs carry a remarkable connection to emotion, and less so to intellect. A possible panpsychism
2. As in motivation and the source of all that is emotive.
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is better described as a vitalism because its emotion that we look for, not so much consciousness.
To seek is to be motivated, and that‟s an emotional requirement. To seek is futile if there was no
awareness of fulfilment, and so consciousness in some degree is also required and therefore goes
hand in hand with emotion. A song is like a language that connects with emotion and takes us
somewhere with a motivated direction. The mirror image of the song should also take us
somewhere as it necessarily does if the original song is faithful to a direction representing the
melody. Therefore, all pitch-inverted songs should carry a hidden melody, the dual song,
provided pitch-inversion is the actual organic mirror, a lesser mirror, that is necessary for the
mirror universe where the middle-term represents the source of all that is emotive. This is a
testable prediction, 100% of the inverted songs should carry a melody if the hypothesis is true.
Finding one song that is little more than random noise would indicated that the organic mirror is
not yet discovered.
5. Fifty Pitch-Inverted Songs
All the songs were pitch-inverted following the method in Appendix A, for the present
investigation, and are identified in Table 1. The 50 remade songs are presented in a YouTube
play-list and are found with this internet link:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdHv1duZhJ8-NhMv2wxEVVUHPi-56Bp5q
Simply match the video named in Table 1 to the video in the play-list.
Table 1. List of pitch-inverted songs.
Video
Original Song
Composers
1. Beautiful Dreamer
Beautiful Dreamer
Stephen Foster
2. Southern Swamps
Bonnie Blue Flag
Harry McCarthy
3. Swan Lake and its Echo
Swan Lake
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
4. Abducted by the Mirror
Man in the Mirror
Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett
5. Wanderlust
America
Paul Simon
6. Broken Ties
Castles in the Air
Don McLean
7. Once Upon a Time in the
Mirror
Once Upon a Time in the West
Ennio Morricone
8.Brothers in Repose
Brothers in Arms
Mark Knopfler
9. The Big Mirror
The Big Country
Jerome Moross
10. Polished Corn
Popcorn
Gershon Kingsley
11. The Magnificent Mimic
The Magnificent Seven
Elmer Bernstein
12. Do You Know the Way?
Do You Know the Way to San
Jose
Burt Bacharach
13. The Reflection of Love
The Look of Love
Burt Bacharach
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14. Don‟t Wake in a Dream
Don‟t Sleep in the Subway
Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent
15. Burning Daylight
The Hustle
Van McCoy
16. Hot Death Valley
Hot Hot Hot
Alphonsus Cassell
17. Ride the Train
Locomotive Breath
Ian Anderson
18. Ode to Joy and its Echo
Ode to Joy
Ludwig Van Beethoven
19. Ipanema
The Girl from Ipanema
Antonio Garlos Jobim
20. Gun Fighters
The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance
Burt Bacharach
21. Sailor‟s Dream
Daydream Believer
John Stewart
22. Painted Desert
This Guy‟s in Love with You
Burt Bacharach
23. Internet Killed the Shopping
Mall
Video Killed the Radio Star
Bruce Woolley, Trevor Horn and
Geoff Downes
24. Cover of Darkness
The Sun Ain‟t Gonna Shine
Anymore
Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio
25. Saturday‟s Travel
Come Saturday Morning
Fred Karlin
26. Everybody‟s Leavin‟ Town
Good Time Charlie‟s Got the
Blues
Danny O‟Keefe
27. New Beginnings
Goodbye
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
28. Empty Places
Brandy
Elliot Lurie
29. Dancing in the Garden
Dancin‟ in the Moonlight
Sherman Kelly
30. Baja California
Come Monday
Jimmy Buffett
31. God‟s Will be Done
God Only Knows
Brian Wilson and Tony Asher
32. Empty Streets
Downtown
Tony Hatch
33. Sweeter Song than the Birds
My Girl
William “Smokey” Robinson and
Ronald White
34. Wabash Cannonball and its
Echo
Wabash Cannonball
A.P. Carter
35. Armidale by Afternoon
Amarillo by Morning
Terry Stafford and Paul Frasier
36. The Master‟s Tapestry
Coat of Many Colors
Dolly Parton
37. God‟s Sanctuary
Amazing Grace
John Newton
38. Where Have They Gone
Abraham, Martin and John
Richard Holler
39. On Straight and Narrow
The Only Daddy that Will Walk
the Line
Ivy J. Bryant
40. The Fast Track
Lost Highway
Leon Payne
41. Is Anybody Goin‟ to
Shangrila
Is Anybody Goin‟ to San Antone
Dave Kirby and Glenn Martin
42. How „Bout them Memories
How „Bout them Cowgirls
Casey Beathard and Ed Hill
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43. Time Reversal
Time Passages
Al Stewart and Peter White
44. Waiting for a Sign
Waiting on a Friend
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
45. My Front Pages
My Back Pages
Bob Dylan
46. Ghost Returning from other
Side
Wuthering Heights
Kate Bush
47. Megaliths and Geoglyphs
No One to Depend On
Gregg Rolie, Michael Carabello
and Thomas Escovedo
48. Music from the Other Side
Both Sides Now
Joni Mitchell
40. Pyroclastic Flow
Landslide
Stevie Nicks
50. From Flower to Seed
From Hank to Hendrix
Neil Young
All 50 remakes produced melodies, supporting the belief that pitch-inversion is more than just an
interesting generation of musical notes. By comparison, playing notes backward can create
interesting sounds sometimes, but these are unlikely to generate interesting melodies; playing
notes backward may only generate uninteresting sounds. What has been demonstrated here is
more of a general principle, a demonstration that all songs that have a defined melody also carry
a hidden song by necessity, a dual song that can be recovered by pitch-inversion. This is not to
say that the pitch-inverted songs are necessarily beautiful, or as beautiful as the originating song.
Its only that an emotion connecting melody is guaranteed by the principle that‟s now found
validating the hypothesis of a mirror universe, as described.
Some of the pitch-inverted songs are quite beautiful, however. The author finds the songs (5, 21,
25, 27, 30, 41, 42, 48 and 50) very beautiful, and quite striking. Other songs (4, 5, 8, 10, 15, 16,
20, 38, 39 and 46) are very interesting, and beautiful in an unconventional way. Most of the
pitch-inverted melodies bear little resemblance to the originals, but there are dual songs (9, 10,
12, 15, 19, 28, 30, 34, 46 and 47) that hold some minor similarities with the original song. These
appraisals are likely to show subjective variation.
When first investigating pitch-inversion, very simple songs were considered, limited to one staff
showing mostly single notes, with few or no chords. But to avoid the selection bias of only
showing interesting examples, these few simple songs (Videos 1 and 2) have a listing in Table 1.
Video 1 plays the original song followed by the pitch inversion, followed again by an
improvisation that has little to do with pitch-inversion. Video 2 also plays the original melody
followed by the pitch inversion, but it also experiments with overlaying a two melodies which
actually worked for that particular song. Overlaying the song with its pitch-inversion, however,
was in general found to generate dissonant sounding notes and was abandoned in the later
productions. Videos 3 and 34 also plays the original song and its pitch inversion. The remaining
videos only play the pitch-inverted songs, but versions of the original melodies can easily be
found on YouTube if a comparison is needed.
It was found that the method of Appendix A was very robust, and worked best for more
complicated songs that had several staffs. The staffs for a more complicated song can all be
inverted independently, then transposed up or down to make a harmonious synthesis of all the
inverted staffs. Most of the 50 songs listed in Table 1 came with four staffs: for a guitar; the
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chords, and the piano‟s bass and treble clef. These staffs were then borrowed by different musical
instruments (by the computer synthesizer) to create more interesting productions.
Something must be strangely said about the very unusual experience of hearing a pitch-inverted
song for the very first time. In some cases the music comes out as not sounding right, confusing,
and more like a failure showing less than the expected 100% success rate now reported. Some of
this is due to small errors that end up getting corrected, and doing the inversion by hand can
introduce errors. However, this can‟t be the only reason for the initial confusion. Its like looking
at the Figure 1 below, and getting confused about seeing a vase or two opposing faces.
Figure 1. Optical Illusion.
Having recognized the melody for the very first time, then the confusion goes away like magic!
The melody becomes a rote that‟s first learned, but this is where the experience becomes
inexplicable because I doubt that any of my YouTube viewers find an initial confusion while
listening to these 50 songs! The implication is that the learned rote becomes part of the collective
memory, a sort of Mandela effect that rewrites history, or a type of morphic resonance that
becomes available to the collective. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and no
one should adopt this speculation as certain. Something unusual happened when listening to
some (not all, but including 8, 13, 31, 40, 43, 45 and 46) of the pitch-inverted songs for the first
time, that‟s all that is being claimed. Fortunately, the experience can be repeated if its real. If any
investigator wants to pitch invert different songs in the future, be looking for this experience.
There is no shortage of songs that can be inverted, and so its possible to bring clarity to this
issue.
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6. Conclusion
The attempts to make melodies by pitch inverting 50 songs was 100% successful. Interesting
songs of all types were generated using the robust method presented in Appendix A, and most of
the remade songs showed little resemblance to the originating song even when the tempo was
maintained. This strongly implies the validity of a general principle, that all songs that carry an
identifiable melody can be pitch inverted to make new melodies with 100% success. This
conclusion is firm because the results are highly reproducible. Doubters will find the identical
melodies reported here following independent attempts at pitch inversion with any of the same
50 songs. Moreover, new songs can be inverted to further test the general principle, but it is now
doubtful that the conclusion will change.
The only possible controversy is with what these findings mean, including the general principle
that‟s now uncovered. As argued in this paper, these results affirm the belief that we live in a
mirror universe that is a necessary adjunct of panpsychism of a sort that endorses Trinitarian
philosophy. The proof of the mirror universe is in the lesser mirrors that are discovered, and one
such lesser mirror is the pitch-inverted song that equally brings the listener on an emotion laden
journey like all songs. Moreover, the middle-term that holds the song to its reflection is the
emotive source that connects to the absolute mover or motivator for the entire universe. Such a
system act as a strange attractor that generates the lesser mirrors out of necessity and on all levels
of a fractal pattern, and so finding these mirrors constitutes evidence that affirms this
speculation. Yes, this last paragraph is speculation, but it now falls into testable science because
there are many kinds of mirrors beyond music that can be gathered as evidence.
Appendix: Robust Method to Pitch Invert Songs with Multiple Staffs
A.1 General Protocol
1. Rewrite the sheet music using C major notation.
An attempt might be made to pitch invert a song directly in the key its written in (sheet music notation)
by following the instructions given under Section A.3. But this will lead to unwanted complexity for those
notes that come with accidentals. Therefore, its better to rewrite the sheet music into the key of C major
(or A minor). Music note editors may provide this operation as part of software, and a transposition of
notes is also needed to minimize the creation of accidentals when going into C major. Those required
transpositions are presented in Section A.2.
2. Identify and separate out all the staffs, and transpose all the notes down making bass clefs.
Songs come with multiple staffs, and these will all have to be treated separately. In addition to the staffs
that are explicitly represented with the sheet music, it is sometimes recommended to break a staff into
sub-staffs when notes are found running over a few octave levels. These sub-staffs can all be inverted
separately (jumping ahead to Step 3), and brought back together after inversion by resetting them on
preferred octave levels (jumping ahead to Step 4) and this need not mimic pitch inversion of the
originating staff and had the staff not been broken up. This lets the composer stir the process better based
on preference rather than being locked into an automatic protocol.
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More generally, all the notes and staffs (and possible sub-staffs) will be in the key C major, where the note
D is the reflective center as found in Section A.3. The note D is right in the center of the bass clef,
running longitudinally down the middle, making an ideal platform to pitch invert by hand. Therefore, its
preferable to transpose all staffs down by octave steps and express them as bass clefs.
3. Pitch invert all the staffs around the note D that‟s in the middle of each bass clef.
The precise instructions for pitch inversion are given in Section A.3, with reference to music in the key of
C major notation. However, it is now very easy to see pitch inversion in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Showing two staffs in C major notation, where the top staff is the pitch inversion of
the bottom staff, and visa versa. The note D that serves as the center note, is indicated by the red
line that runs through the middle of each staff. The notes are flipped around the red line making
the pitch inversion. Sharps are turned into flats, and flats into sharps, and the natural accidental
is carried without adjustment.
4. Transpose up and re-express the preferred key.
Transpose all the pitch-inverted staffs up by octave steps to reestablish treble clefs, perhaps leaving only
one bass clef for the piano. By following Section A.2, its also possible to change the music key (for all the
staffs) into something other than C major, noting the further transpositions in Table 2 that may be
preferred.
One uses preference to determine the octave levels for each staff, and the overall key for all staffs, and
this is different than using a single center note across all staffs where a literal pitch inversion is found
unnecessarily restricted. The recommended inversion described here provides for multiple center notes 3
that permit a harmonious union over all the staffs.
A.2 Instructions for Changing Sheet Music Notation
Rewrite the notation into the new notation; either C Major or one of the other keys if starting from C
Major. This may introduce many accidentals. Then transpose the notes up or down the prescribed steps as
given by Table 2. The transposition will remove all of the newly introduced accidentals.
Table 2. Transposition steps needed to change sheet music notation from a given key into C Major (or A
3. That‟s suitable for the key. As an example, the note D can be found in several places and is suitable for the key of
C major.
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Minor), or from C Major into the key.
Transposition Steps
#‟s → C Major
♭‟s → C Major
Key in Sharps
C Major → ♭‟s
C Major → #‟s
Key in Flats
#
-7 or +5
+7 or -5
♭
##
-2 or +10
+2 or -10
♭♭
###
-9 or +3
+9 or -3
♭♭♭
####
-4 or +8
+4 or -8
♭♭♭♭
#####
-11 or +1
+11 or -1
♭♭♭♭♭
######
-6 or +6
+6 or -6
♭♭♭♭♭♭
#######
-1 or +11
+1 or -11
♭♭♭♭♭♭♭
A.3 Instructions for Manual Pitch Reflection of Musical Notes
Identify the key that the music is written in, thus finding the note representing the reflective center in
Table 3. Locate one note position on the staff corresponding to the reflective center, selecting from
suitable choices merely by preference. Reflect all the notes in a measure around the reflective center, as if
this center note represents a mirror going down the length of the measure. Notes that happen to equal the
reflective center are left unreflected.
Special treatment is given to notes that may rarely come with accidentals. First observe that if sharps (#)
always increased the impacted note by one semitone, and if flats (♭) always decreased the impacted note
by one semitone, and if the natural accidental (♮) always reset the impacted note to the default for the
selected key, then pitch reflection would be an easy extension. However, these conditions are only
satisfied for C major (or A minor) notation. These conditions are not stickily enforced for the other keys, a
fact that is sometimes missing off introductory accounts of sheet music notation pertaining to accidentals.
Fortunately, Table 2 permits a transformation of music into C major that‟s followed by the specified
transposition to minimize accidentals, and this transformation can be made for music written in any of the
keys. Its in C major that pitch inversion is made following these straightforward instructions: first, it is
recommended simplifying the notation by removing multiple expressions of enharmonic equivalence, so
that each note inside one measure is represented only by one of the variants that come as the natural
accidental (♮), sharp (#), flat (♭), or an adjacent scale note, making sure any ties are correctly indicated;
accidentals are reflected like regular notes, but in the reflection show a flat if starting from a sharp, or
show a sharp if starting from a flat, or show a natural accidental if starting from a natural accidental; ties
are transferred automatically. This pitch reflection is made around a central note D that is well positioned
in the staff. Once this is completed for all the measures, the entire staff can be transposed up or down one
octave to improve appearance. Table 2 is also used to return the reflected notes back into the originating
notation or key.
Table 3. Center note that permits pitch reflection while maintaining the notation (without the need of accidentals)
within a key.
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Key
Sheet Music Notation
Reflective Center
C Major or A Minor
Default
D
G Major or E Minor
#
A
D Major or B Minor
2 #‟s
E
A Major or F# Minor
3 #‟s
B
E Major or C# Minor
4 #‟s
F
B Major of G# Minor
5 #‟s
C
F# Major or D# Minor
6 #‟s
G
C# Major or A# Minor
7 #‟s
C
F Major or D Minor
b
G
Bb Major or G Minor
2 b‟s
C
Eb Major or C Minor
3 b‟s
F
Ab Major or F Minor
4 b‟s
B
Db Major or Bb Minor
5 b‟s
E
Gb Major or Eb Minor
6 b‟s
A
Cb Major or Ab Minor
7 b‟s
E
Received April 7, 2020; Accepted April 26, 2020
References
Forte, A., 1977, The Structure of Atonal Music, Yale University Press.
Langan, C., 2017, An Introduction to Mathematical Metaphysics, Cosmos and History: The Journal of
Natural and Social Philosophy, 13 (2), 313-330.
Skrbina, D., 2017, Panpsychism in the West, 2nd Edition, The MIT Press.
Smith, S.P., 2008, Trinity: The Scientific Basis of Vitalism and Transcendentalism, i-Universe, Inc.
Smith, S.P., 2018, Time, Life & the Emotive Source, Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, 9
(8), 707-721.
Smith, S.P., 2019, A Possible Holarchy Representing Morphic Resonance as One Side of the Poised
Realm, Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, 10 (5), 371-379.
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287
Pitkänen, M., Some Questions Concerning Zero Energy Ontology
Exploration
Some Questions Concerning Zero Energy Ontology
M. Pitkänen1
1
Independent researcher. 1
Abstract
Zero energy ontology (ZEO) gives rise to quantum measurement theory and theory of consciousness. There are several questions without a ”final” answer related to ZEO. At least the following
questions are still waiting for a precise answer.
1. How uniquely does the preferred extremal property of the space-time surface fix the space-time
surface inside a given CD? The simplest situation is that the data at the intersection of the
space-time surface at either boundary of CD fix it completely. Space-time surface would be an
analog of Bohr orbit. However, both the dynamics of soap films and M 8 − H duality suggest
that it need not be quite so.
2. How unique is the interpretation of zero energy ontology (ZEO)? Here actually 3 options suggest
themselves corresponding to western, eastern interpretation and their hybrid.
3. Sub-CDs of CD are correlates of subselves mental images. What is the precise definition of
sub-CD and of subself? How subselves, that is sub-CDs, are created?
1
Introduction
Zero energy ontology (ZEO) [26] gives rise to quantum measurement theory, which naturally extends to
a theory of consciousness. There are several open questions related to ZEO and TGD inspired theory
of consciousness and the existing view involves several working hypothesis which should be reduced to
deeper principles or shown to be wrong.
At least the following questions about ZEO are still waiting fora detailed answer.
1. Preferred extremal property of space-time surfaces is central for quantum TGD [29]. It follows
from holography forced by general coordinate invariance (GCI). How uniquely does the preferred
extremal (PE) property of the space-time surface fix the space-time surface inside a given CD? The
simplest situation is that the data at the end of the space-time surface at either boundary of the
CD,fixes it completely. Space-time surface would be an analog of Bohr orbit.
Full determinism would imply that WCW for CD effectively reduces to the space of 3-surfaces
assignable to either end of CD. The dynamics of SSFRs would reduces to that in fermionic degrees
of freedom assignable to Boolean cognition since WCW degrees of freedom assignable to sensory
percetion would be fixed.
However, the dynamics of soap films spanned by frames suggests that this is not the case. The 3-D
ends of the space-time surface define a frame and also dynamically generated portions of frame are
allowed by the variational principle defined by the sum of a volume term and Kähler action as an
analog of Maxwell action. The coefficient of the volume term has an interpretation in terms of a
length scale dependent cosmological constant Λ.
Outside the frame space-time surface would be an analog of complex surface and therefore minimal
surface [24]and also extremal of Kähler action. At the frames only the equations for the entire
1 Correspondence: Matti Pitkänen http://tgdtheory.com/. Address: Rinnekatu 2-4 A8, 03620, Karkkila, Finland. Email:
matpitka6@gmail.com. Email: matpitka6@gmail.com.
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Pitkänen, M., Some Questions Concerning Zero Energy Ontology
action (sum of volume term and Kähler action) would be satisfied. The divergences of the conserved
isometry currents for the volume term and Kähler action would have delta function type singularities
but they would cancel each other. The portions of the frame could be analogous to singularities of
analytic functions such as cuts and poles.
2. How unique is the definition of zero energy ontology (ZEO) [26]? Here 3 options suggest themselves
corresponding to western and eastern world views and their hybrid. For the western option the
space-time surface continues outside any CD as external world, in particular sub-CD and sub-CD is
a correlate for the perceptive field of self. For the eastern option, space-time ends at the boundary
of any CD and sub-CD is not a correlate for the perceptive field of self and there is no constraint
from the external world at boundaries of CD. For the hybrid of these two options, conscious entity
corresponds to a hierarchy of CD for which the highest level corresponds to CD for which space-time
does not continue outside the CD. The highest level represents a God-like entity.
3. One can also challenge the definition of CD as an intersection of future and past directed light-cones.
The study of a simplest cosmological minimal surfaces (see Appendix) leads to ask whether CD could
be replaced with a piece of light-cone bounded by light-cone boundary and proper light-cone time=
constant hyperboloid.
The new picture about sub-CDs at WCW level raises questions related to the TGD inspired theory
of consciousness. This view involves several ad hoc assumptions related to the notions such as attention, mental image, memory, volition and intentions. Do these assumptions follow from more general
assumptions or can some of them be simply wrong.
1. Sub-CDs of CD are correlates of subselves mental images. What is the precise definition of sub-CD?
How subselves, that is sub-CDs, are created? The sub-CD as a correlate of sub-self is defined by
the restriction of zero energy state associated with sub-CDs so that they are induced by CD.
This freezes WCW degrees of freedom of sub-CD at the passive boundary (PB) but the failure of
determinism leaves discrete degrees of freedom at the active boundary (AB) so that the dynamics
of SSFRs is restricted to these sub-WCW degrees of freedom and fermionic degrees of freedom.
2. Where sub-CDs and subselves are located? The natural location for a minimal sub-CD and mental
images is around 3-surface at which the classical non-determinism fails.
3. How sub-selves (sub-CDs) are created? Can they disappear? The notion of attention as generation
of sub-CD achieved by a location of WCW spinor field at spacetime surfaces having their intersection
with the PB of CD in a fixed set of 3-surfaces defining sub-WCW is highly suggestive. This also
affects the WCW spinor field of CD.
The attention can be directed in several manners. Redirection of attention means a movementof
the region defining the content of mental images, in the interior of CD. Entanglement and classical
communications would be naturally associated with attention defined in this manner. If minimal
subselves are associated with the loci of classical non-determinism, the set of targets of attention is
discrete and finite.
This view about attention makes it possible to see also memory, anticipation, and intentions as
special cases of attention.
4. The time evolution of CD itself would correspond to a scaling of CD (rather than translation),
which by the failure of strict determinism brings new discrete degrees of freedom at the AB . In the
new picture sub-WCW property does not allow the earlier picture about the development of CD.
The idea about silent wisdom as mental images preserved from the previous life after BSFR is not
lost but is considerably modified.
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Pitkänen, M., Some Questions Concerning Zero Energy Ontology
Clearly, classical non-determinism would be an absolutely essential element in that it makes possible
a non-trivial theory of consciousness at the level of CD and at space-time level. Otherwise would
have only fermionic degrees of freedom forgiven sub-CD.
2
Some background
In the sequel, some understanding of the basic ideas and notions of TGD proper [29] is needed. Also ZEO
as the target of critical discussion is briefly summarized.
2.1
TGD view briefly
Very concisely, TGD emerges as fusion of special and general relativities and has Poincare invariance
of special relativity and General Coordinate Invariance (GCI) and Equivalence Principle (EP) as basic
principles. Also the interpretation as a generalization of string models is possible: point-like particles are
replaced by 3-surfaces instead of strings and world lines become space-time surfaces.
The notion of induction makesit possible to eliminate classical boson fields as primary dynamical
variables and reduce them to the sub-manifold geometry of the space-time surface. Free second quantized
quark fields of the imbedding space H = M 4 × CP2 induced to the space-time surface remain as fundamental fermion fields and quarks serve as basic building bricks of both bosons and fermions as elementary
particles.
Some understanding of notions such as the ”world of classical worlds” (WCW) [5], preferred extremal
[6], and various variants of holography [27, 28] implied by general coordinate invariance (GCI) in TGD
framework is assumed. Inclusions of hyperfinite factors of type II1 (HFFs) [17, 16] are central elements
of quantum TGD proper.
Adelic physics [20, 21] replacing real number based with number theoretical universal physics based
on the hierarchy of adeles defined by extensions of rationals (EQs) and M 8 − H duality allowing number
theoretic and geometric views about physics dual to each other is also assumed as the background.
Hierarchy of Planck constants hef f = n × h0 , with n identified as dimension of EQ, is the basic
implication of adelic physics and central for quantum TGD. The phases labelled by hef f behave like dark
matter [7, 8, 9, 10]. This hierarchy serves as a correlate for quantum criticality in arbitrarily long length
scales.
Cognitive representations identified as points of space-time surface for which preferred coordinates of
imbedding space are in an extension of rationals are also central for the construction of the theory using
M 8 − H duality [27, 28].Galois group of EQ becomes number theoretical symmetry and is central in the
description of quantum variants of cognitive representations [18, 30].
Zero energy ontology (ZEO) [26] is a key notion of quantum measurement theory. The basic prediction
is that time reversal occurs in the ordinary state function reduction (SFR). This has profound implications
for the interpretation of the quantum measurement theory [22].
TGD inspired theory of consciousness can be seen as an extension of quantum measurement theory
and relies on Negentropy Maximization Principle (NMP) as a basic dynamical principle [4] [32] implying
second law for ordinary entanglement entropy.
2.2
ZEO
The TGD based view of consciousness relies on ZEO solving the basic paradox of quantum measurement
theory. First, a brief summary of the recent view of ZEO [26] is required. Some aspects of this view will
be challenged in the sequel for sub-CDs.
1. The notion of a causal diamond (CD) is a central concept. Its little cousin ”cd” can be identified as
a union of two half-cones of M 4 glued together along their bottoms (3-D balls). The half-cones are
mirror images of each other. CD=cd×CP2 is the Cartesian product of cd with CP2 and obtained by
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replacing the points of cd with CP2 . The notion of CD emerges naturally in the number theoretic
vision of TGD (adelic physics [21])via the M 8 − H duality [25, 27, 28].
2. In the ZEO, quantum states are not 3-dimensional, but superpositions of 4-dimensional deterministic time evolutions connecting ordinary 3-dimensional states. By holography time evolutions are
equivalent to pairs of ordinary 3-D states identified as initial and final states of time evolution.
Quantum jumps replace this state with a new one: a superposition of deterministic time evolutions
is replaced by a new superposition. The classical determinism of individual time evolution is not
violated. This solves the basic paradox of quantum measurement theory. There are two kinds of
SFRs: BSFRs (counterparts of ordinary SFRs) changing the arrow of time (AT) and SSFRs (analogs
of ”weak” measurements) preserving arrow of time that give rise to an analog of the Zeno effect
(https://cutt.ly/yl7oIUy) [26]. The findings of Minev et al [3] provide strong support for ZEO
[22].
To avoid confusion, one may emphasize some aspects of ZEO.
1. ZEO does not mean that the physical states identified in standard quantum theory as 3-D time=
constant snapshots - and assigned in ZEO to the opposite boundaries of a causal diamond (CD)
- would have zero energy. Rather, these 3-D states have the same conserved quantities, such as
energy. Conservation laws allow us to adopt the convention that the values of conserved quantities
are opposite for these states so that their sum vanishes.
This is not new: in quantum field theories (QFTs), one speaks, instead of incoming and outgoing
particles, external particles arriving from the geometric past and future and having opposite signs of
energy. That conserved quantities vanish in the 4-D sense, expresses only the content of conservation
laws. A weaker form of this condition [31] states that the total conserved Poincare charges are
opposite only at the limit of infinitely large CD. CD would be an analog of quantization volume in
QFTs, whose finiteness implies a small conservation of momentum.
2. ZEO implies two times: subjective time as a sequence of quantum jumps and geometric time as a
space-time coordinate: for instance, the proper time of the observer. Since subjective time does not
correspond to a real continuum, these times are not identifiable but are strongly correlated. This
correlation has led to their identification although they are different.
3
How uniquely PE property fixes the space-time surface?
How uniquely the PE property fixes the space-time surface if its 3-D intersections with the boundaries of
CD are given? This is the key question in this section.
3.1
Various variants of holography
General coordinate invariance (GCI) forces holography in the TGD framework. One can however consider
several variants of holography [27, 28, 32].
1. Holography in the standard sense would fix the space-time surface from the data of its intersection
with either boundary of CD or the data associated with the light-like 3-surfaces at which the
signature of the induced metric changes.
2. Strong form of holography (SH) states that 2-D data at the intersections of the light-like 3-surfaces
and boundary of CD are enough to determine the space-time surface.
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3. The strongest form of holography inspired by M 8 − H duality states that space-time region is determined by a rational value coefficients of a real polynomial extended to an octonionic polynomials,
whose ”root” is the space-time surface in M 8 . The n real roots of a real polynomial would determine
the space-time region and its image in H = M 4 × CP2 .
4. There is a variant of holography, which gives up the full determinism of classical field equations and
gives rise to what look like classical topological analogs of Feynman diagrams.
(a) Consider first the particle level. Particle lines generalized to 4-D orbits of 3-D surfaces representing particles. Particles as 4-D orbits of 3-surfaces contain light-line 3- D orbits of partonic
2-surfaces.
(b) Partons as building bricks of particles in the information theoretic sense, and correspon to
partonic 2-surfaces at which the orbits of partonic 2-surfaces meet. Their orbits are 3-D lightlike surfaces at which the signature of the induced metric of the space-time surface changes.
The partonic 2-D surfaces defining topological vertices belong to the 3-D sections of spacetime surface with a constant value of M 4 time coordinate t to which one can assign 6-D branes
predicted by M 8 − H duality [27, 28].
In M 8 -picture, tn correspond to the roots of a real polynomial and can be complex since M 8
is complexified to Mc8 . The real space-time surface is defined as a real projection of complex
8-D space-time surfaces in Mc8 .
In TGD inspired theory of consciousness, these time values tn correspond to ”very special
moments in the life of self” [23].
This picture suggests that, besides the data at the boundaries of CD, also the data at the partonic
2-surfaces in the interior of CD are needed. This failure of clasical determinism brings in the failure
of the strongest form of holography. There would be a large number of PEs connecting the 3-surfaces
at the ends of CD and they would correspond to the analogs of Feynman diagrams.
Zero energy state as a scattering amplitude would be a superposition over these diagrams. This
superposition would not be however pre-determined as in the path integral but the zero energy state
would define the superposition of paths in question.
3.2
Is the failure of classical determinism possible?
The possibility of classical non-determinism is suggested by the interpretation of space-time surfaces as
generalized Feynman diagrams. These Feynman diagram entities would not however define an analog
of path integral in TGD framework. Classical non-determinis would be a space-time correlate for the
non-nondetermism at quantum level.
In this framework partonic 2-surfaces or equivalently the 3-D sections of the space-time surfaces with
constant value of M 4 time would act as 3-surfaces at which the deterministic time evolution as a minimal
surface would fail.
Another option is that light-like 3-surfaces containing the partonic 2-surfaces at very special moments
of M 4 time define frames. These special values t = tn of M 4 time would be associated with 6-D branes
predicted by M 8 picture as universal special solutions and would define ”very special moments in the life
of self” defined by the sequences of SSFRs defining the self.
1. The first hint comes from the dynamics of soap films. Soap films are minimal surfaces. The soap
films spanned by 1-D frames consist of minimal surfaces glued together at the frames and this
dynamics is non-deterministic in the sense that it allows several soap film configurations due to the
different branchings at frames. At frames the minimal surface equations fail.
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2. In TGD framework space-time surfaces as PEs are both minimal surfaces and extremals of Kähler
action. In this case the 3-surfaces associated with ”very special moments of time” t = tn could
define an analog of a dynamically generated frame defining a 4-D soap film. The 3-surfaces at the
ends of the CD would be fixed frames like those for soap films.
This realizes quantum criticality in the sense that the field equations outside frame do not involve
the parameters of the action which sum of volume term and Kähler action. The interpretation as
a non-linear analog of massless free field theory outside the frame conforms with the basic spirit of
quantum field theory. These solutions of field equations rely on a a generalization of holomorphy to
4-D situation so that field equations reduce to purely algebraic conditions involving only the first
derivatives of imbedding space coordinates. The analogy is defined by the solution of 2-D Laplacian
equation in terms of real or imaginary part of an analytic function.
Field equations consist of two terms, which are divergences for the conserved currents (4-momentum
currents plus color currents) defined by the induced metric in the case of volume term. In the interior
of the space-time surface these divergences vanish separately for the volume term and Kähler action
but not at the frame.
3. The field equations must hold true also at the 3-D frame but this need not be true for both volume
term and Kähler action separately. The coupling parameters of the theory make themselves visible
only via the frame. For the volume action the divergences of the conserved currents are orthogonal
to the space-time surface. For K ”ahler action, the divergences of the conserved currents contain
to terms. The first term is proportional to the energy momentum tensor of Kähler action and
orthogonal to the space-time surface.
Second term is not orthogonal to the space-time surface. For twistor lift the Kähler also has an M 4
part with a similar decomposition.
The sums of the parts of divergences orthogonal to the space-time surface and parallel to it must
sum up to zero separately. This gives 8 conditions altogether so that the number of field equations
is doubled at the frame.
4. Could it happen that the divergences of these two isometry currents are singular and proportional
to 3-D delta function but that their sum vanishes and conservation laws are respected? The part of
the frame in the space-time interior would be dynamically generated whereas the part of the frame
at the ends of CD would be fixed.
5. The restriction to 3-D frames is not the most general option. The delta function singularities could
be located also at 2-D partonic 2-surfaces, at light-like 3-surfaces at which the induced metric
changes its signature, and at string world sheets which connect these light-like 3-surfaces and have
1-D light-like boundaries at them. The light-like 3-D surfaces would be analogs of the cuts for
analytic functions. Partonic 2-surfaces at the ends of light-like 3-surfaces could be analogs for the
ends of the cuts. String world sheets could serve as analogs of poles.
6. The non-determinism associated with the soap films and with frames suggests that there is a large
number of 4-D ”soap films with a given frame”, which is fixed at the boundaries of CD but not in
the interior of CD.
4
Questions related to the theory of consciousness
At the level of TGD inspired theory of consciousness theory, causal diamond (CD) defines a correlate
of self or of its perceptive field. CD has sub-CDs which correspond to subselves experienced by self as
mental images [26].
Concerning the evolution of self, the basic notions of ”small” state function reduction (SSFR) as an
analog of ”weak measurement” and ”big” SFR (BSFR) as an analog of ordinary SFR.
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1. The first deviation from the standard ontology is that BSFR changes the arrow of time defined by
the selection of PB of CD at which 3-D part of zero energy states remains unchaged during SSFRs.
2. The second deviation is that either boundary of CD and states at it remain unaffected in SSFRs
whose sequence defines self as a conscious entity. This is the TGD counterpart for the Zeno effect
of ordinary quantum theory in which repeated measurements of the same observable leave the state
unaffected.
The details of the evolution of self are not fully understood and the proposed general view can be
criticized.
1. How the constraint that sub-CD serves as a correlate for a classical perceptive field can be taken
into account?
2. What is the precise definition of mental images as subselves? Are they at some special positions
inside space-time surface?
3. What are the precise definitions of memories and conscious memory recall? The same question
applies to the notions of intention, anticipation and attention.
4. Can the mental images be destroyed or do they only experience BSFR and continue to live with an
opposite arrow of time and become unconscious to self? If a mental image can completely disappear,
what could be the physical mechanism leading to its disappearance?
5. One can challenge the detailed picture of the notion of time evolution by SSFRs. The assumption
about the drift of mental images towards future in the second half-cone of CD is ad hoc and should
be replaced with a deeper assumption.
4.1
Three ontological options
The basic problem of ZEO is whether the causal diamond (CD) represents a perceptive field in the sense
that the space-time surface continues outside the CD or whether CD is an independent entity in the sense
that space-time surfaces do not continue outside CD. Conservation laws do not exclude either option.
ZEO allows 3 ontological options which might be called easter, western, and intermediate views.
Option I: Space-time surfaces are restricted inside CDs. Quantum universe is a collection of CDs
containing space-time surfaces, which have ends at the boundaries of CD.
In this framework, space-time in cosmological scales is an idealization and could be perhaps explained
in terms of the correlations between CDs. CDs do not form a fractal atlas of something unless one says
that the atlas is the territory. CD is an independent entity rather than a perceptive field of sub-self.
One can argue that for sub-CDs this picture is problematic since it seems that one loses totally the
notion of objective reality as something existing outside CD. There are no sensory perceptions. Could
the overlaps with other CDs create the experience about the existence of the external world?
Cosmology would be a mental construct and correspond to a very large CD. One would have a
multiverse but only at the level of conscious experience. Option I is consistent with the eastern view that
only subjective experience exists but not with the western view.
Option II: Space-time surface continues always outside all CDs and CDs can be interpreted always
as perceptive fields. Option II conforms with the westerm option and implies that cosmology is something
real.
Option III: Self is a hierarchy of CDs such that for sub-CDs the space-time surfaces continue outside
the CD but for the largest CD this would not be the case. Sub-CDs would represent perceptive fields but
the largest CD would be a God-like entity experiencing itself as the entire cosmos.
Meditators report altered states of consciousness in which the separation to self and external world
ceases and the mind is empty. Also the experience of timelessness is mentioned. Could these states
correspond to experiences without mental images (sub-CDs) created by SFRs at this highest level?
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Option III is roughly consistent with both western and eastern views about consciousness. If one
requires the notion of the external world as objective reality and accepts the proposed explanation of
altered states of consciousness, option III remains the only possible option.
4.2
A general picture about the dynamics of sub-CDs
The ZEO based view of quantum measurement theory and the theory of consciousness inspired by it have
not been precisely formulated for sub-CDs. In particular, the question of how sub-CDs as mental images
are created, has remained unanswered.
The following proposal provides such a formulation and is consistent with Options I and III.
1. CDs form a fractal atlas of conscious maps but the map would be the territory since in general the
space-time surfaces need not continue outside the CD. There would be no external particles as 4-D
lines for generalized Feynman diagrams outside CD.
2. Sub-CDs correspond to mental images of CD as a conscious entity. From the point of view of
consciousness theory, there are only experiencers (CDs) which can have experiences as mental
images (have sub-CDs), be mental images of experiencers (be sub-CDs) and share mental images
(intersecting CDs with common sub-CDs).
3. Consistency conditions for the quantum dynamics of CDs and sub-CDs and for the overlapping
CDs give rise to correlations between the regions of the map. The shared regions are geometrically
analogs for the intersections of the intersections of a covering of a manifold by open sets.
4. For sub-CD the interpretation of sub-CD as a perceptive field would be natural.
The first question is what does one really mean with sub-CD at the level of space-time surfaces.
1. Do the space-time surfaces of sub-CD continue outside sub-CD as space-time surfaces of CD? Does
this imply that the quantum dynamics of sub-CDs in ZEO is completely dictated by that of CD? This
is certainly not the case. Fermionic zero energy states associated with the sub-CD are possible and
are analogous to quantum fluctuations. Note that in the TGD framework all elementary particles
can be constructed from fundamental fermions (quarks).
2. If the PE (PE) property fixes completely the space-time surface, its intersections with the boundary
of CD, this seems to be the case. If the classical dynamics is not completely deterministic, as
suggested by the analogy with minimal surfaces spanned by frames, the situation changes.
Sub-CD defines a subsystem of CD with boundary conditions at the boundary of CD which do
not completely fix the quantum dynamics of sub-CD. Quantum states as WCW spinor fields inside
sub-CD could change in SFRs of sub-CD.
The tensor product of sub-CD with CD would not be ordinary tensor product but much more
restricted one and Connes tensor product, related to inclusions of HFFs, would be a possible identification. A sub-system would be like an included hyper-finite factor of type II1 (HFF).
Suppose that the classical dynamics is indeed non-deterministic and sub-CDs are defined in the proposed manner. How the view about WCW spinor fields changes as one restricts the consideration to
sub-WCW.
1. The failure of the classical determinism forces to replace each 3-surface at PB with a discrete treelike structure consisting of all PEs connecting it to AB. Sub-WCW as the space of PEs is larger
than the space of 3-surfaces X 3 at PB. Zero energy states are defined in this sub-WCW and assign
to a given X 3 a wave function in this discrete set allowing interpretation as wave function in a set
of paths of the tree.
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One cannot avoid the association with cognitive representations of adelic physics involving the
number theoretic degrees of freedom characterized by Galois group of the extension of rationals
associated with the polynomial defining the space-time region [19, 30].
2. The activation of sub-WCW would mean an SFR selecting in WCW of CD such sub-WCW for
which the space-time surfaces are such that their ends at sub-CD are fixed. This would correspond
to SFR creating a sub-CD and corresponding mental image. This would answer the long standing
question whether and how mental images can appear as if from scratch. This SFR would also
represent a third kind of SFR having interpretation as a partial localization in WCW associated
with CD. This also suggest that mental images could disappear suddenly. This ”activation” could
be seen as a directed attention.
3. WCW degrees of freedom at the boundaries of sub-CD are fixed. Also sub-WCW spinor fields make
sense. One can allow the tensor product of Fock spaces of many-fermion states associated with the
boundaries of CD. One would have a QFT like picture with sub-WCW degrees of freedom fixed at
boundaries of sub-CD.
4. The tensor product of fermionic state spaces at the boundaries of sub-WCW makes sense and one
can define zero energy states in the same manner as proposed hitherto. The only difference is
that WCW degrees of freedom are frozen at the boundaries of sub-CD. At the level of conscious
experience this means that the subself experiences the external world as fixed. This would be by
definition the meaning of being subself.
The fermionic Fock state basis has an interpretation as a Boolean algebra so that fermionic zero
energy states have an interpretation as Boolean statements of form A → B. This would mean
that consciousness of the subself would be Boolean, cognitive consciousness, thinking. This conforms with the Eastern view that ordinary consciousness is essentially thinking and that the higher
level of consciousness as that associated with the highest level of the CD hierarchy of self is pure
consciousness. Thinking assignable to the fermionic degrees of freedom would be seen as an endless generation of illusions. ”Reality” in this interpretation would correspond to WCW degrees of
freedom.
What restrictions must one pose on the quantum dynamics of CDs in the case of sub-CDs? Does the
subjective evolution of sub-CD states by SSFRs and BSFRs make sense for sub-CDs?
1. The increase of the size of sub-CD makes sense and the proposed subjective evolution by scalings
and SSFRs makes sense. The time evolution is also now induced by the increase of the perceptive
field of a subself defined by the WCW associated with increasing sub-CD bringing in new 4-surfaces
due to the classical non-determinism.
2. What about the interaction between CD and sub-CDs. Does this time evolution respect the condition that the space-time surfaces meet the fixed 3-surfaces at boundaries of sub-CD or is it possible
that the SSFRs of CD destroy the subself by delocalization so that sub-CD as a mental images must
be regenerated by localization in WCW.
3. Also the interaction between overlapping CDs and the sharing of mental images can be understood
in this framework.
5
Comparison of the revised view of self with the earlier one
The revised view about TGD inspired theory of consciousness relies on the definition of subself at the
level of WCW unlike the older view. In the following the new view is compared with the old view.
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5.1
The view about SSFRs
5.1.1
Earlier picture
The earlier view about SSFRs was inspired by the M 8 picture.
1. The surfaces inside CD (or sub-CD) were assumed to be mirror symmetric with respect to the
middle plane of CD. This assumption does not conform with the assumption that these surfaces
define a perceptive field in the sense that they are parts of large space-times and continue outside
CD.
2. The dynamics was assumed to involve both scaling of CD with respect to either tip of CD. The lower
half-cone was only scaled whereas the upper half-cone was also shifted as required by the reflection
symmetry. Dynamics was passive in the sense that only a portion of the space-time surface became
visible in the sequence of SSFRs. The idea about scaling leads to a rather concrete proposal for the
S-matrix characterizing the scalings of CD.
3. The old view had several ad hoc features.
(a) The creation of mental images was implicitly assumed without specifying what this could mean
mathematically. These mental images were assumed to be created in the upper half-cone just
above the t = T mid-plane of CD and shift to the geometric future with the upper half-cone
of CD. The asymmetry between upper and half-cone could be seen as reflecting geometrically
the future-past asymmetry but was ad hoc.
(b) One can criticize the assumption that the memories about the events of the subjective past
are located in the geometric future with respect to the mid-plane of CD.
(c) Whether mental images can disappear or only die and reincarnate by BSFR, was not specified.
5.1.2
New picture
In the new picture the situation is the following.
1. Also in the new picture, the time evolution by SSFRs would be a sequence of scalings of CD. The
assumption about reflection symmetry of space-time surfaces is given up since it is inconsistent with
the identification of sub-CD as a perceptive field. There would be no shifting for the upper halfcone. Also now the time evolution is passive in the sense that only a new portion of the space-time
surface extending outside sub-CD is revealed at each step.
2. As in the previous picture, new discrete WCW degrees of freedom appear during the sequence of
SSFRs and complexity increases. For both options only fermionic degrees of freedom remain if full
determinism is assumed.
3. In the new view both directed attention, memory, and intention correspond to a generation of subCD by a localization in WCW fixing a subset of 3-surfaces at the PB of CD. Redirecting of attention
would allow apparent movement of the sub-CD in the interior of CD and as a special case shifting
the mental images in the time direction assumed in the earlier picture.
4. In the new view the loci of mental images are naturally associated with the loci of classical nondeterminism that is 3-surfaces at the 4-D minimal surface branches. M 8 − H duality suggests that
the branchings occur at t = tn planes identified as ”very special moments in the life of self” emerging
naturally in M 8 picture.
The targets of attention would therefore form a discrete set. Note however that each 3-surface X 3
in the superposition defining the WCW spinor field at the PB of CD has its own discrete set loci of
non-determinism. BSFRs can change the superposition of these 3-surfaces. The selection between
branches is possible in BSFR but not in SSFRs.
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5. An attractive idea is that volitional action could be interpreted in the new view as an SFR selecting
one path at the node of a tree. Inthe M 8 picture, the very special moments t = rn in the life of self
correspond to the roots of a real polynomial. What happens when all roots have been experienced?
Does NMP force BSFR occur since nothing new can be learned?
5.2
Comparison of the views about BSFR
Those aspects of BSFR in which old and new views differ are of special interest.
5.2.1
Earlier view
The fact that the notion of sub-CD and mental image were not properly formulated led to several ad hoc
assumptions.
1. The possible failure of complete determinism was realized. The failure of strict determinism was
assigned to ”very special moments in the life of self” associated with M 4 time t = constant planes
at which the partonic vertices as loci of non-determinism were assigned.
2. The mental images of previous life near the AB of CD were assumed to be inherited as ”silent
wisdom”. Their contents was from the early period of life and one can of course ask whether they
were really ”wisdom”.
3. There were also assumptions about the change of the size scale of CD in BSFR. The idea that
the reduction of the size scale guarantees that re-incarnate has childhood was considered. This
assumption also prevents unlimited increase of the size scale of sub-CD.
5.2.2
New view
The new view makesit possible to develop a more detailed picture of what happens in BSFR.
1. The WCW localization at the AB of CD selects one of the branches of the space-time surface
beginning at the PB . This selection of the branch happens to each 3-surface in the superposition
of 3-surfaces at the PB defined by the WCW spinor field before BSFR.
2. The future directed tree becomes a past directed tree beginning from one particular branch at the
AB . The initial and final space-time surface share a common space-time surface connecting the
roots of the old and new trees. This is essential for having a non-trivial transition amplitude for
BSFR at WCW level.
In the earlier view, the mental images interpreted as memory mental images and located near the
boundary of CD were assumed to be inherited as ”silent wisdom” by the time-reversed reincarnate.
What happens now?
The notion of ”silent wisdom” as inherited information makes sense.
1. The new space-time surfaces originate from 3-surface which was selected by WCW localization in
BSFR. Therefore the new space-time surfaces carry classical information about previous life.
2. The space-time surfaces originating from the new root are near to the space-time surface connecting
the old and new roots. The WCW spinor field before and after BSFR musthave a strong overlap in
order to make the transition amplitude large. This implies that information about previous life is
transferred to the new life.
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3. The nearness property could imply that they are easily re-created as perceptions by directed attention so that they would indeed be ”silent” wisdom. These mental images are from the later part of
the life cycle rather than from the early life as in the earlier picture. If aging means getting wisdom,
then silent wisdom would be in question.
Does the notion of ”silent wisdom” as mental images make sense?
1. Mental images - this includes both sensory and memory mental images and intentions) are naturally
assignable to the loci of classical non-determinism at the planes t = tn of the branched space-time
surfaces associated with the new root (”very special moments in the life of self”).
For the special space-time surface connecting the roots of old and new space-time surface, the
preferred moments of timet = tn would not change and the mental images would carry information
about previous life. Could one talk about potentially conscious ”silent wisdom”.
2. What happens to the mental images of self in BSFR? Can they be preserved or do they disappear
or do they reincarmate by BSFR? The idea about preservation makes sense only for space-time
surfaces connecting the roots.
3. What can happen to the size scale of CD in BSFR? The extreme option that CD decreases in size by
shift of the formerly PB such that the time evolutions are fully determinimistic in the superposition
of 3-surfaces. There would be no inherited silent wisdom and the self would start from scratch, live
a chilhood. Otherwise these loci would define candidate for inherited silent wistom.
In the earlier picture the mental images corresponding to sub-CD could not disappear although it
could die by BSFR and reincarnate with a reversed arrow of time. Can the mental image disappear
now? Creation of mental image require metabolic energy feed: this explains 7 ± 2rule for the number of
simultaneous mental images. Could this happen when attention is redirected? Therefore one could argue
that mental image must totally disappear when the attention is redirected.
On the other hand, time reversed mental image apparently feeds energy to the environment in the
original arrow of time, i.e. apparently dissipates. Could this dissipation be interpreted as an energy feed
for its time reversal.
Note that the total disappearance of the mental image means delocalization at the level of WCW and
seems possible. The new view clearly challenges the idea about the Karma’s cycle of self. This cycle
appears in many applications of BSFR.
6
Conclusions
Also the article Some comments related to Zero Energy Ontology (ZEO)” [26] written for few years ago
challenged the basic assumptions of ZEO. One tends to forget the unpleasant questions but now it was
clear that it is better to face the fear that there might be something badly wrong. ZEO however survived
and several ad hoc assumptions were eliminated.
6.1
Progress at the level of basic TGD
The basic goal is to improve the understanding about quantum-classical correspondence. The dynamics
of soap films serves as an intuitive starting point.
1. In TGD frame 3-surfaces at the boundaries of CD define the analog of frame for a 4-D soap film
as a minimal surface outside frame. This minimal surface would be an analog of a holomorphic
minimal surface and simultaneous exremal of Kähler action except at the frame where one would
have delta function singularities analogous to sources for massless d’Alembert equation.
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2. There is also a dynamically generated part of the frame since the action contains also Kähler action.
The dynamically generated parts of the frame would mean a failure of mimimal surface property at
frame and also the failure of complete determinism localized at these frames.
3. At frame only the equations for the entire action containing both volume term and Kähler term
would be satisfied. This guarantees conservation laws and gives very strong constraints to what can
happen at frames.
The frame portions with various dimensions are analogous to the singularities of analytic functions
at which the analyticity fails: cuts and poles are replaced with 3-, 2-, and 1-D singularities acting
effectively as sources for volume term or equvavelently Kähler term. The sum of volume and Kähler
singularities vanish by field equations. This gives rise to the interaction between volume and Kähler
term at the loci of non-determinism.
4. H-picture suggests that the frames as singularities correspond to 1-D core for the deformations of
CP2 type extremals with light-like geodesic as M 4 projection, at partonic 2-surfaces and string
world sheets, and at 3-D t = tn balls of CD as ”very special moments in the life of self” which
integrate to an analog of catastrophe.
Deformations of Euclidian CP2 type extremals, the light-like 3-surfaces as partonic orbits at which
the signature of the induced metric changes, string world sheets, and partonic 2-surfaces at r = tn
balls taking the role of vertices give rise to an analog of Feynman (or twistor -) diagram. The
external particles arriving the vertex correspond to different roots of the polynomial in M 8 picture
co-inciding at the vertex.
The proposed picture at the level of H = M 4 × CP2 has dual at the level of (complexified) M 8
identifiable as complexified octonions. The parts of frame correspond to loci at which the space-time as a
covering space with sheet defined by the roots of a polynomial becomes degenerate, i.e. touch each other.
There is a nice analogy with the catastrophe theory of Thom [2, 1]. The catastrophe graph for cusp
catastrophe serves as an intuitive guide line. Imbedding space coordinates serve as behaviour variables
and space-time coordinates as control variables. One obtains a decomposition of space-time surface to
regions of various dimension characterized by the degeneracy of the root.
6.2
Progress in the understanding of TGD inspired theory of consciousness
The improved view about ZEO makes it possible to define the basic notions like self, sub-self, BSFR and
SSFR at the level of WCW. Also the WCW correlates for various aspects of consciousness like attention,
volition, memory, memory recall, anticipation are proposed. Attention is the basic process: attention
creates sub-CD and subself by a localization in WCW and projects WCW spinor field to a subset of
WCW. This process is completely analogous to position measurement at the level of H. At the level of
M 8 it is analogous to momentum measurement.
One can distinguish between the Boolean aspects of cognition assignable to WCW spinors as fermionic
Fock states (WCW spinor field restricted to given 3-surface). Fermionic consciousness is present even
in absence of non-determinism. The non-determinism makes possible sensory perceptions and spatial
consciousness.
A precise definition of sub-CD as a correlate of perceptive field at WCW level implies that the spacetime surfaces associated with sub-CDs continue outside it. This gives powerful boundary conditions on
the dynamics. For the largest CD in the hierarchy of CDs of a given self, this constraint is absent, and
it is a God-like entity in ZEO. This leads to a connection between the western and eastern views about
consciousness.
A connection with the minimal surface dynamics emerges. The sub-CDs to which mental image as
subselves are assigned would be naturally associated with portions of dynamically generated frames as
loci of non-determinism. If one identifies partonic 2-surfaces as vertices, one can interpret the collection
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of possible space-time surfaces for a fixed 3-surface at PB as a tree. All paths along the tree are possible
time-evolutions of subself. The dynamics of consciousness for fixed 3-surface at PB becomes discrete and
provides discrete correlate for a volitional action as selection of a path or a subset of paths in the tree.
The reduction of dynamics of mental imagines to discrete dynamics would mean a huge simplification
and conforms with the discreteness of cognitive representations.
6.3
Challenges
There are many challenges to be faced. The discreteness dynamics of sub-self consciousness certainly
correlates with the notion of cognitive representation based on adelic physics [20, 21] and implying a
discretization at both space-time level and WCW level. The Galois group for the extension of rationals
acting on the roots of the polynomial plays a key role in this dynamics [30]. One teaser question remains.
Localization requires energy quite generally and this conforms with the fact that mental images demand
metabolic energy feed. It is possible to redirect attention and remain unclear whether the mental image
disappears totally or suffers BSFR.
7
Appendix: M 8 - and H views about classical non-determinism
and particle reactions
7.1
M 8 picture and M 8 − H duality
In M 8 picture, space-time surfaces correspond to real projections of 4-D complex ”roots” of octonionic
polynomials obtained from real polynomials with rational coefficients by algebraic continuation, i.e. by
replacing real coordinate by complexified octonion coordinate [11, 12, 13] [27, 28].
M 8 −H duality maps the point of M 4 ×E 4 to a point of M 4 ×CP2 such that the point of M 4 ⊂ M 4 ×E 4
is mapped to some point of M 4 ⊂ M 4 × CP2 . M 8 − H duality is not a local map. Rather, the normal
space of a x ∈ X 4 ⊂ M 8 goes to a point of CP2 characterizing its quaternionic normal space.
1. To be a 4-D ”root” in the complex sense means that the real part of a complexified octonionic
polynomial determining the space-time surfaces vanishes. The number theoretic content of this
condition is that the normal space of the space-time surface is quaternionic and therefore associative.
The second option would be that the tangent space is associative but this gives only M 4 as a solution.
2. At a given point there are n roots and some of them can coincide in some regions of the space-time
surface. These regions correspond to the branchings of the space-time surface at which particle-like
entities identified as space-time surfaces meet and interact.
The quaternionic normal plane at this intersection is not unique so that several CP2 points of
X 4 ⊂ H correspond to a single point of X 4 ⊂ M 8 . The extreme situation is encountered in a
point-like singularity when the normal plane at a given point of M 4 is a sub-manifold of CP2 .
The interpretation is as particle vertices. The intuitive expectation is that they correspond to
partonic 2-surfaces and perhaps also string world sheets. These surfaces are mapped to those in
M 4 × CP2 by M 8 − H correspondence.
3. Also 6-D brane like entities are predicted as universal ”roots” they correspond to 6-spheres in M 8
with M 4 projection which is a 3-ball with constant value t = tn of the Minkowski time coordinate
such that tn is the roots of the real polynomial defining the octonionic polynomial. These time
values are interpreted as ”very special moments of time in the life of self”. To these moments the
failure of classical determinism giving rise to one particular kind of quantum non-determinism is
concentrated.
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4. The intersections of 4-D ”roots” with 6-D brane-like entities are 2-D and itis natural to interpret
them as either partonic 2-surfaces or string world sheets at which several roots become degenerate
of octonionic polynomial co-incide. Outside the singularity, the roots do not coincide and define
separate space-time sheets and it is natural to interpret them as external particles of a particle
reaction.
5. At the light-like orbits of partonic 2-surfaces the induced metric for the H-image of the space-time
surface becomes degenerate since its signature changes. Could one say that the Minkowskian and
Euclidian roots coincide at the partonic orbits?
One can also wonder what the M 8 interpretation of wormhole contacts having two throats could
be. Do the two throats correspond to two coincing roots at the level of M 8 having different normal
spaces and mapped to separate 2-surfaces in H?
7.2
Catastrophe theoretic analogy
Consider the analogy with the catastrophe theory of Thom [2] in more detail.
1. Catastrophe map is the graph of solutions for the vanishing of the gradient of a potential function
as a function of control parameters. One considers only real roots as function of variable control
parameters and the number of real roots varies as a function of parameters and one obtains lowerdimensional regions at which the number of roots to catastrophe polynomial changes as roots become
degenerate. Cusp catastrophe serves as the school example.
2. In the recent case, space-time surfaces correspond to roots of complexified octonionic polynomials
and the coefficients of the polynomial appear as control parameters. Also complex roots are allowed
and real 4-D space-time surface is obtained as a real projection and mapped to H by M 8 −H duality
and conjectured to correspond to a preferred extremal of an action determined by the twistor lift
of TGD.
3. The basic motivations for this assumption are quantum criticality requiring preferred extremal
property, which requires at the level of H the independence of the dynamics on coupling parameters
of the twistor lift of Kähler action outside the loci of non-determinism demanded by M 8 level.
7.3
Connection between singularities and preferred extremals of various types
The above picture suggests the characterization of the space-time surfaces in terms of their singularities
as surfaces of M 8 .
At the level of H one can consider 4 kinds of very simple preferred extremals, which give rise to
prototype singularities.
1. Einsteinian spacetime X 4 ⊂ M 8 with a 4-D M 4 projection and a unique normal space as a point
of CP2 . X 4 = M 4 defines a prototype.
2. Cosmic string extremal X 2 × Y 2 with Y 2 a complex surface in CP2 and defining a set of normal
spaces assignable to a point of X 2 . M 2 × S 2 , S 2 a geodesic sphere defines a proto type. S 2 can be
either homological trivial or non-trivial.
3. X 3 × S 1 ⊂ M 4 × CP2 , where S 1 is a geodesic circle of CP2 , is a candidate for a preferred extremal
and singular surface. Both M 3 × S 1 and E 3 × S 1 are minimal surfaces and vacuum extremals of
Kähler action.
For the Euclidian signature, X 3 could be space-like and define a 3-ball compactifying to S 3 as a
sub-manifold of the S 6 brane. The very special moments tn would be singular in the sense that
the normal space at a given point of X 3 ⊂ M 4 ⊂ M 8 would not be unique and would give rise S 1
singularity.
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4. CP2 type extremal with light-like geodesic as M 4 ⊂ H projection and corresponding to a light-like
geodesic in M 8 with normal spaces forming a 3-D surface in CP2 . Also M 1 × Y 3 ⊂ M 4 × CP2 can
be considered but is probably not a preferred extremal.
The intuitive picture is that these 4 types of preferred extremals correspond to singularities of the
normal space of X 4 ⊂ M 8 of dimension d = 0, 1, 2, 4 and codimension dc = 4 − d.
7.4
Analogy with knot theory
In knot theory a knot in 3-D space is projected to 2-plane where one obtains a diagram containing
crossings. Knot invariants can be constructed in terms of this diagram. A knot theory inspired intuition
is that space-time surfaces near to these special cases are projected to these special surfaces to get the
toy model.
1. Canonically imbedded M 4 ⊂ M 8 (or M 4 ⊂ M 4 × CP2 ) is an analog of the plane to which the knot
is projected. One can project the space-time regions with 4-D M 4 projection to M 4 . In particular,
those with a Minkowskian signature of the induced metric.
2. The M 4 projection of CP2 type extremal is 1-D light-like geodesic. One must project the deformations of CP2 type extermals to CP2 type extremal at the level of H. At the level of H, CP2 type
extremal could correspond to a light-like geodesic of M 8 such that each point of the geodesic is
singular point such that the union of quaternionic normal spaces defines a 3-D quaternionic surface
in CP2 .
A puncture in E 3 as an infinitesimal hole serves as an analogy. At the puncture, one can say that
all normal spaces labelled by points of S 2 are realized.
At the given point of the light-like geodesic, the quaternionic normal space of point is not unique
but a 3-D union of normal spaces and defines a 3-D subset CP2 .
3. For the X 2 × Y 2 ⊂ M 4 × CP2 type cosmic string extremals and their small deformations, one must
project to M 2 × S 2 ⊂ CP2 . For a point of X 2 the normal spaces define Y 2 ⊂ CP2 so that the
singularity is milder.
For X 3 × S 1 ⊂ M 4 × CP2 the normal spaces at a point of X 3 would define S 1 ⊂ CP2 . If X 3 is
Euclidian, these 3-D singularities could correspond to the t = tn planes associated with the branes.
The small deformations of these surfaces would project to M 3 × S 1 . This picture would integrate
all 3 kinds of singularities and various types of preferred extremals to a single unified picture.
7.5
A toy model for the singularities
The following toy model for the singularities in the case of CP2 type extremals generalizes also to other
singularities.
1. A rather general class of CP2 type extremals can be represented as a map M 4 → CP2 given by
mk = pk f (r) ,
where pk is light-like momentum and r is radial U (2) invariant CP2 coordinate labelling 3-spheres
of CP2 such that r = ∞ gives homologically non-trivial geodesic 2-sphere instead of 3-sphere.
If f (r) approaches constant value for r → ∞, one can say that M 4 time stops at this limit, and
one obtains a homologically non-trivial geodesic sphere instead of 3-D surface identifiable as an
intersection with 6-D brane. Various external particles of the vertex would correspondto mk =
pk fi (r) such that their values at r = ∞ co-incide.
It is not possible to obtain homologically trivial 2-sphere in this manner.
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2. Outside the vertex, the CP2 type space-time sheets have distinct light-like geodesics as M 4 projections and they can be continued to distinct regions of M 4 in the toy model.
The analog of the knot diagram would be a set of M 4 :s with different constant values of CP2
coordinates. The CP2 type extremals would be glued along light-like geodesics to various M 4 s.
The CP2 points of M 4 :s meeting at the same geodesic sphere must belong to the same geodesic
sphere S 2 . The S 2 :s associated with different vertices are different. Note that any two geodesic
spheres must have common points.
3. In the toy model for the string world sheets X 2 × Y 2 would be projected to a piece of M 2 × S 2
connecting two partonic vertices with the same S 2 . S 2 :s would be at the ends of the string, whose
orbit is a piece of M 2 .
B 3 × S 1 could be interpreted as a subset of 6-D brane with B 3 identified as the t = tn cross section
of M 4 light-cone.
This picture would suggest that the singularities could be indeed located to t = tn planes and integrated together to form a rough analog of catastrophe map.
7.6
Some examples of minimal surfaces with 1-D CP2 projection
This subsection is not directly relevant to the basic topic and is added to give idea about the possible
role of volume term. The original proposal was that preferred extremals are extremals of Kähler action
but the twistor lift introduced the volume term as an additional term. This removed the huge vacuum
degeneracy of Kähler action meaning that any 4-surface for which CP2 projection was so called Lagrange
manifold with the property that induced Kähler form vanishes, was a solution of field equations. For
these surface induced Kähler potential is pure gauge.
The addition of the volume term removes this degeneracy and only minimal surfaces of this kind are
possible as extremals. It is however not clear whether they are preferred extremals (are they analogs of
complex surfaces?). These solutions have not been studied previously [6]. Space-time surfaces representing
a warped imbedding of M 4 with a flat metric represent the simplest example.
1. Denoting the angle coordinate of the geodesic sphere S 1 byΦ and the metric of S 1 by ds2 = −R2 dΦ2
the ansatz reads in linear Minkowski coordinates as Φ = k · m, where k is analog of four-momentum.
The induced metric is flat and the second fundamental form vanishes by the linearity of Φ in m so
that the field equations are satisfied.
Boundary conditions require the vanishing of the normal components of momentum currents and
give (η αβ − R2 pα pβ )nβ = 0 .This condition cannot be satisfied so that these solutions should have
infinite size, which looks unphysical.
The presence of the volume term in the action implies that the induced metric appears in the
boundary conditions and this represents a problem quite generally. The only way to overcome the
problem is that there are no boundaries. The many-sheetedness indeed makes this possible.
The warped extremals could represent a reasonable approximation of the space-time surface in the
regions which are almost empty.
4
2. The light
p velocity defined in terms of time taken to get from the M position A to B, is reduced to
c1 = 1 − |k · k|. If k is light-like this does not happen.
Although the analog of gravitational force is vanishing in warped metric, the deviation the flat
metric from M 4 metric given by |k · k| in flat case could it be interpreted as gravitational potential
and the gravitational potential energy of test mass would be given by by Egr = −m|k · k|.
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Could Nature provide a kind of cognitive representation or toy model of a gravitational field as a
piecewise constant function in terms of CDs with which warped vacuum extremals would be associated? The representation would contain length scale dependent Λ as second parameter assigning
momentum 4-momentum proportional to Λpk to the CD. The volume energy would include its
gravitational potential energy represented in terms of warping?
For warped solutions the space-time light cone - to be distinguished from its imbedding space
counterpart - would defined by c21 t2 − r2 = 0 and space-time CD would be modified accordingly.
Only single extremal - canonically imbedded M 4 - remains from the spectrum of cosmological vacuum
extremals for Kählerp
action defined by Φ = f (a), where f is an arbitrary function of light-cone proper
2 .
time coordinate a = t2 − rM
At QFT-GRT limit, the many-sheeted space-time is approximated with Einsteinian cosmology with
the deviation of the induced metric from M 4 metric defined by the sum of the corresponding deviations
for the sheets. Since the value of Λ becomes large in short p-adic length scales, a cosmology resembling
GRT type cosmology could emerge and Einstein’s equations would be a remnant of Poincare symmetry.
The induced metric for the solutions has very little to do with the metric appearing at the Einsteininian
limit. The models of cosmology as space-time surfaces based on Kähler action with vanishing Λ could
however make sense in very long scales for which Λ approaches zero.
For string dominated cosmology, the comoving mass is proportional to a [15, 6, 14]. One has a silent
whisper amplified to a Big bang in GRT sense. Also critical cosmology[6] as an analog of inflationary
cosmology for which curvature scalar as dimensional quantity vanishes can be regarded as a silent whisper
amplified to a Big Bang and also it becomes Euclidian for a critical value a = a0 of cosmic time.
Received June 28, 2021; Accepted October 16, 2021
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Available at: https://
www.JCER.com |
83
Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| January 2023 | Volume 14 | Issue 2 | pp. 83-89
Malik, S. S., Source of Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations
Article
Source of Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations
Satinder S. Malik*
Abstract
The standard model in physics, explains reality only to a certain level. Even after all the subatomic particles and waves are catered for, space has quantum wave fluctuation. The paper
attempts to describe the source and structure of these wave fluctuations It seems that the Cosmos
may have evolved from one cascading principle of mass. This gradual process is called the
principle of Mahat (Mass). The Cosmos is built to perfection without wastage in which all
system act in harmony. Time consciousness helped by energy directs the motion in this cosmos
from smaller to bigger formations. The Vaidik view of time and space, cosmic intent and
intelligence, as an observer in quantum uncertainty and a source of quantum vacuum
fluctuations.
Keywords: Big Bang, galaxy, age of universe, philosophy, ancient wisdom, Vedas, Rig Veda,
gravity, dark matter, dark energy, cosmology, quantum physics.
1. Introduction
Is space completely empty? or does it contain something? The space was known to be containing
ether by the ancients. Ether was an element of the Greeks, as Aksha was of Vaidik philosophers.
It was believed to be existent by Descartes, Newton, and nearly everyone. Ether held a position
of absolute centrality in nineteenth-century physics as a way of explaining how light travelled
across the emptiness of space.
In 1909, J. J. Thomson1 said, “The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher;
it is as essential to us as the air we breathe”. Michelson and Morley attempted to determine ether,
a stable, invisible, weightless, frictionless medium that was thought to permeate the universe.
They aimed to measure the ether drift - a kind of headwind thought to be encountered by moving
objects as they ploughed through space. The speed of light could vary as it pushed through the
ether with respect to an observer depending on whether the observer was moving toward the
source of light or away from it, but no one had figured out a way to measure this. It occurred to
Michelson that for half the year the Earth is travelling toward the Sun and for half the year it is
moving away from it, and he reasoned that if you took careful enough measurements at opposite
seasons and compared light’s travel time between the two, will provide an answer.
Michelson’s interferometer could measure the difference in the velocity of light with great
precision. In 1887 they had negative results. Caltech astrophysicist Kip S. Thorne said, “The
*
Correspondence author: Dr. Satinder S. Malik, Independent Researcher, India. E-mail: adventuressmalik@gmail.com
1
A short History of Nearly Everything- Bill Bryson
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speed of light turned out to be the same in all directions and at all seasons.” 20 years later,
Michelson became the first American to be awarded a Nobel Prize in physics.
The experiment failed to detect ether and ether is now non-existent but it is known by another
name now, the fabric of space-time. The ether drift was probably an incorrect conception as it
may be a disturbance caused in space-time by the massivity (gravity for the non-familiar) of an
object. Following is the high-precision test of general relativity by the Cassini space probe, radio
signals sent between the Earth and the probe (green wave) are delayed by the warping of
spacetime (blue lines) due to the Sun's mass2.
Experiments show that Einstein's description of gravitation accounts for several effects such as
minute anomalies in the orbits of Mercury and other planets. General relativity also predicts
novel effects of mass (or gravity), such as gravitational waves, gravitational lensing and an effect
of gravity on time known as gravitational time dilation. Many of these predictions have been
confirmed by experiment or observation, most recently gravitational waves.
What MM experiment couldn’t detect the effect of either at small distances and within the
Earth’s space-time disturbance, this could be detected by the Cassini space probe, in form of
gravitational time dilation (disturbance of space-time affecting the speed of radio waves).
2. Quantum Vacuum Fluctuations
Empty space not only contains the fabric of space (as format) and time (the flow of energy) but
also some other energy fluctuations. This so-called empty space is still not empty enough, we
have just reached the deepest level of detection of such energy by any experimental methods and
inference. Even if everything, every known particle or wave is catered for in space which is zero
point space there is still some energy that can be attributed to space itself. This energy form may
be termed quantum vacuum fluctuations3 and they represent the temporary random change in the
amount of energy at a point in space, as prescribed by Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
These fluctuations are minute random fluctuations in the values of the fields which represent
elementary particles, such as electric and magnetic fields which represent the electromagnetic
force carried by photons, W and Z fields which carry the weak force, and gluon fields which
carry the strong force. Quantum Vacuum fluctuations appear as virtual particles, which are
always created in particle-antiparticle pairs. Since they are created spontaneously without a
source of energy, vacuum fluctuations and virtual particles are said to violate the conservation of
energy. This is theoretically allowable because the particles annihilate each other within a time
limit determined by the uncertainty principle and therefore, they are not directly observable.
Wave mechanics uses mathematics to describe various characteristics of the complex wave
patterns and probabilities of wave function collapse, having a background perspective that these
waves are random natural phenomena and by deciphering their source and characteristics we
may arrive at ‘A Theory of Everything’. This kind of perspective is leading us in direction of
2
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_general_relativity#Cosmology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation
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ideological hallucination as we have employed mathematical tools for something that may have
been interfered with or modulated by intelligence or '‘will’. It may be easier to describe and
predict a simple geometrical pattern on a screen mathematically but not a live show simply
because that latter has intelligence interference.
3. The Construct of Energy-Time-Space
Quantum mechanics implies inherent randomness to nature. This randomness caters to the
construct to accommodate the free will of the atomists. It has moved a level deeper since science
has progressed deeper into energy fields going deeper through the atoms. Einstein addressed this
in a letter to Max Born, one of the fathers of Quantum Mechanics. The full phrase is, “Quantum
theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am
convinced He does not play dice with the universe4.”
This doesn’t mean Einstein was deterministic or he rejected the idea of free will, but he simply
rejected the wither this way or that way uncertainty of quantum mechanics. For example, even if
we are watching or not, a top quark becomes a top quark not by one of the choices but maybe
there is some unknown factor that helps it (and also many others) to make that choice.
As Albert Einstein quotes about imagination, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my
imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination
encircles the world.” Treating this issue like a mathematics problem, we may use a supposition
or assumption Method a Math problem-solving technique where we assume an extreme situation
to solve a question. This method is often seen as a faster alternative as compared to the Guess
and Check method. Almost all scientists would concur with the fact that there is a perfect brain
behind the Cosmos and this thought is reflected in their statements. Let them be not sure about
god but the laws of nature, what governs the sciences, laws of mathematics and logic, there is
some superintelligent source for them. So let's assume that such a source exists and it doesn’t
need any manifest mechanism of energy or matter, it could be some different dimension or realm
that we are not privy to, or aware of but we are certain.
Such a perfect source of superintelligence beyond the known dimensions is conscious and has its
issues, so much of superintelligence and nothing to do except run into ideological hallucinations.
Such ideological hallucinations are described as Asat. To create Sat – intelligence, truth, reality,
and feasibility of those ideas there is a need for action to exercise the will of the
superintelligence.
ॐ अस
व
ु सतोऽनु पप ेः ॐ ॥ २.३.९॥
The Sat does not originate from the impossible.
This superintelligent power creates a plan, earmarks the resources (its processing power) and
creates a thought force of will that is instantaneous. Let us assume time and space as absolutes
without any measurement that we know of. Time is a manner of sequencing causality in the
4
https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/einstein-christian-15102017/
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thinking process as to what leads to what. Space may be thought of as the extant of land
available to a single farmer on the earth and he making use of the arable cultivable patch of land
as per his capacity.
The superintelligent being (Prime Consciousness) dedicates the parts of his capacity to creating
the thought force of will (software to subtle hardware transition) and uses another part of his
processing capability to sequence and regulate the spread. All action is achieved by the thought
force and all controlling is regulated by processing power. The Venn diagram below will show
this better.
There is a reason why the above assumption is made in this particular way. It is because is also
described in Upanishads in this particular way. So instead of re-inventing the wheel, we can
examine a pre-existing concept.
The willpower is called Moolaprakriti or root nature. This is primal vibration, substratum or
hardware of the cosmos. It is also known to be having three attributes of Sat (intelligence), Rajas
(control, action) and Tamas (energy). This energy which is the base mortar is controlled and
directed by its own energy sub-streams which are embedded by other conscious subparts which
act as the controlling software.
The Sat is responsible for the universal mind and it rides on the digital (measured) energy
streams and resided in the complete universe, formatting it the way a field is prepared. The
action energy is responsible for movement and directing the root energy streams in the formation
of further higher-density streams. these vibrations in such a way produce harmonic interference
patterns leading to attributes like frequency, wavelength, polarisation etc. The process of
formation of dense energy layers and matter etc is from the same cascading pattern of one root
nature substratum and it is named Mahat.
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4. Cosmic Intelligence as part of QVF
The formatted space has a particular way the energy flow takes, and it is further grouped as
Akshar (unchanging) and Kshar (changeable). Akshar is the root of intelligence, mind, and self
and it helps passively in shaping the Mahat. The form, sound and colour (Varna) and its
alphabet are not only the Akshar (letters) but also contain the numbers. The space is one
manifestation of Kshar Shabda (word) and the other is of Akshar Shabda as the universal mind.
Moolaprakriti thought force is associated with numbers. The integers denote various forms and
combinations of Moolaprakriti. An infinite series of repetitive patterns in nature exists (presently
incorrectly known as the Fibonacci Sequence) of the addition of the previous two forming the
next number. The alphabets represent modifications of the primal energy (Moolaprakriti) with
consciousness and their resultant words and language. This force translates into the vibrations of
a certain frequency and carries that significance in shaping the root sub-atomic particles which
are the building blocks of matter. The influence of thought vibrations can be illustrated.
Such cosmic language is known as Para. Para means remote or beyond and this belongs to
Paramesvara. It contains Ashar and Kshar (non-continuous, discreet, measures, consonants and
Kshar, Svar, changeable, vowels). Like that in language, these vowels bind the consonants in a
word.
This language ridden with intelligence may represent the coding of Quantum Vacuum
Fluctuations. The frequency and complexity of quantum vacuum fluctuations display how much
processing of such energy has taken place before it reached this subtle level. As the waveform
becomes laden with attributes of frequency, beats, amplitude, phase etc the speed may get
reduced.
ॐ अ रम रा धृ तेः ॥ १.३.१०॥ The akshara (consonants) are basis of space.
ॐ सा च शासनात् ॥ १.३.११॥ And that from the command (of Akshar).
ॐ अ"भाव$ावृ े% ॥ १.३.१२॥ Other forces make up vrittis (wave spirals)
The idea of creation from nothingness to expanding spheroid (Brahman) starts from the
integration of initial vibration Aum (Pranav Shabda) with time, forming space and nonmanifesting wavelet strings. These wavelet strings further integrate into time and space using
many combinations and permutations of conjunctions and disjunctions creating forces and the
wavelets, strings, waves, rays, unstable elementary particles, quarks and so on.
आकाशात् तु िवकुवा)णात् सव) ग,वहः शुिचः ।
बलवाञ् जायते वायुः स वै 5श)-गुणो मतः ॥ १-७६
But from the ether (space), changing itself, springs the pure, powerful wavelets, the vehicle of all
perfumes; that is held to possess the quality of touch (exertion of force, a cause).
वायोर् अिप िवकुवा)णाद् िवरोिच9ु तमोनु दम्।
:ोितर् उ<=ते भा>त् तद् ?प-गुणम् उ@ते ॥ १-७७
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88
Next from wavelets modifying (by combining in various permutations and combinations),
proceeds the brilliant light, which illuminates and dispels darkness; is declared to possess the
quality of colour (visibility).
ॐ :ोितिष भावाB ॥ १.३.३२॥ and the light has a force.
ॐ कCनात् ॥ १.३.३९॥ Vibrations
ॐ :ोितद) श)नात् ॥ १.३.४०॥ It is seen by light.
ॐ आकाशोऽथा) रFािद$पदे शात् ॥ १.३.४१॥ The space is described different by the way of
manifestation.
The formation of matter (heavier from lighter) is according to that one cascading principle of
Mahat. Brahman becomes the playground of both intelligent and intelligence-driven energies.
Mathematics is a play of energy, numeral 0 indicates the root i.e. consciousness and 1-9 are
Shaktis with each digit representing a different potential or amplitude.
5. Time Consciousness (Theos) affecting the Quantum Uncertainty
Tie consciousness is often compared to or referred to as a person for ease of understanding by
the philosophers as a cosmic person, Theos or Vaishwanar.
ॐ वै Gानरः साधारणशHिवशेषात् ॥ १.२.२४॥
Vaisvanara (the Cosmic Person) is also manifested by the same words arranged in a special way.
ॐ शHादे व िमतः ॐ ॥ १.३.२४॥
These words are measured (digital).
ॐ दे वािदवदिप लोके ॐ ॥ २।१।२५॥ The world too is like the Deva (Vishavanara).
Quantum mechanics states that energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other quantities of a
bound system are restricted to discrete values (quantization), and objects have characteristics of
both particles and waves (wave-particle duality). Space channel and their shapes may be the
reason for the quantisation.
The electron acting as a wave or particle or a quark becoming a top quark, down quark or a
charm quark etc, has an uncertainty which can be affected by an observer. But how the observer
affects that and which way the event will turn up is uncertain. The Copenhagen interpretation
consisting of views of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and other physicists states the
probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is not a temporary feature but is instead a final
renunciation of the classical idea of "causality". The logic of causality is perennial and
axiomatic. The permanent observer of the event here is intelligence contained in space and time
energy shaping up the motion. Braham Sutras state the following.
ॐ अ रा िवJानमनसी Lमेण तMNOािदित चेPािवशेषात् ॐ ॥ २.३.१५॥
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Iintervening mind and science (knowing in special way) in particular order that is mark of
general consciousness.
ॐ चराचर$पाQय
ु Rात् तSपदे शो भाTः तUावभािवFात् ॐ ॥ २.३.१६॥
It is spread in conscious and non-conscious, depending on the forces, the expression of light
transforms. The aphorism talks about the intelligence spread in space which may be part of the
quantum vacuum fluctuations and the unified field. Therefore, in the famous cat experiment by
Schrodinger, the cat will live or die as per the action of the cosmic observer.
6. Conclusion
Philosophy paves the way for theories and theories combined with mathematics and/or
experimental proof pave the way for science. The human mind carries out interactions with
nature to understand and evolve. These interactions take place not only through the human sense
organs or scientifically extended sensors but also through direct and indirect human perception.
Human perception contains higher algorithms for receiving knowledge through the higher
language of Para. If the assumption can explain the riddle of life in the cosmos then the
hypothesis is proved. Quantum uncertainty can be solved and the mathematical solution to
quantum wave fluctuation can be understood as to why it may not exist. In the quest to know
humanity moved a step closer and evolves. Science helps us evolve in a much more organised
way.
Received December 20, 2022; Accepted December 30, 2022
References
Brahm Sutra- By Rishi Vyasa/ Badrayna and translated by Shankaracharya.
A Short History of Nearly Every Thing- by Bill Bryson
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Kozlowski, M., Images, Mathematics & Consciousness
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Essay
Images, Mathematics & Consciousness
Miroslaw Kozlowski*
Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland
Abstract
In this essay, I discuss structural relation among concepts (images) that creates the sense of
physical reality we experience in everyday life. As an example, I describe the connection
between the image of cardioids on the mosaic in Isfahan Mosque, Iran, and the formula for
cardioids discovered by Europeans much later.
Keywords: Art, image, science, mathematics, concept, consciousness.
Science may not give us a complete picture of life because it does not deal with experience
beyond its own realm of study. Many scientists admit that there is no way to understand
subjective phenomena in any scientific manner. What we actually experience within our own
consciousness will never be experienced by others in any objective manner, remaining
permanently beyond the bounds of science. Scientists try very hard, in fact, to keep the scope of
their inquiry clear of subjective phenomena in order to avoid the taint of opinion or prejudice.
What do we do, then, with the very real yet untestable part of reality to which we cannot point?
Must we admit that there is one reality for what “we” see, and another for what “I” see? Are we
forced to conclude that there are separate and distinct realities that meet only at the surface
between brain and mind? From a philosophical, theological, or psychological standpoint, this is
entirely unsatisfactory. But it is just what we have been doing for the last three and a half
centuries.
Within the last century it has become unsatisfactory from the scientific point of view as well. In
physics, there is no longer a strict separation between subjective and objective. In each of the
enigmas mentioned in the introduction and discussed later in this book, the “role of the observer”
must be taken into account in order to understand the physics involved. In relativity theory for
instance, an observer sees a rapidly moving object become shorter, gain in mass, and move
through time more slowly only because his “frame of reference” is moving relative to the object.
An observer moving with the object (in the same frame of reference) does not experience these
dilations in space, time, and mass. In quantum mechanics, it is the act of observation itself that
determines the outcome of an experiment. Extremely small particles pop into existence at
indeterminate locations in space and time only when they are observed; where they are (or if they
are) in between observations cannot be determined. In modem physics things do not just happen
in an empty, dead universe—there has to be somebody, or something, observing an event for it to
*
Correspondence: Miroslaw Kozlowski, Prof. Emeritus, Warsaw University, Poland. Email: m.kozlowski934@upcpoczta.pl
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have physical meaning. This comes as a big surprise to physicists, who, until these effects were
discovered, assumed that consciousness was an unnecessary appendage to the material world.
A clue to the relationship between consciousness and physics is that the enigmas mentioned
above are not noticed in everyday life. They occur only at dimensional extremes: at extreme
velocities, with extremely small particles, or in extremely strong gravitational fields. They
happen where a space dimension is extremely large in relation to time (near light velocity),
where space and time are extremely small (quantum mechanics), or, interestingly, where mass is
extremely large (general relativity) or extremely small (quantum mechanics). Also, each of these
effects involves distortions, discontinuities, or interconnections of space, time, or mass. (It is
impossible, for instance, to know at the same time a subatomic particle’s location in space and its
momentum, or mass x space / time.) There is something fundamental, therefore, about the
relationship between consciousness and the dimensions, something that we miss in the middle
latitudes of space and time.
We will make a suggestion now as to what it is that we have missed. We assume that
consciousness is inside of space and time. We think of it as a complexity of neural processes
somewhere in our heads. If we turn this around and think instead of dimensions within
consciousness, a continuity develops between what we call subjective and objective phenomena.
Dimensions of space and time contain what we call “objective” phenomena: objective experience
is dimensional, subjective experience is not.
There are problems with this, of course, not the least of which is that it does not make sense after
a lifetime of assuming its opposite. But I will try to prove in this essay that this is a better and
simpler way to understand what we experience in modern physics, and in everyday life.
But what is experience, and what are dimensions? In this essay I will try to show that experience
consists entirely of what I call “images,” and that dimensions are “potentials” corresponding to
“realms” of consciousness.
An image is a thought, a thing, a concept, a feeling, or an object; in fact, it is things, physical and
non-physical. It is the sound of a raindrop falling on the roof, or of an airplane in the distance. It
is the picture of a place never seen, the memory of a taste experienced long ago, the touch of
warm fur, and the pain of standing too long in one position. It is anger and Inst. It is the
Andromeda Galaxy, a moon of Jupiter, or a photon. It is a ball rolling down a hill. It is a cloud
moving slowly across the sky that puffs up into large white billows, until raked by the wind, and
combed smooth into thin wispy strands of smoke. It is an idea that ripples the mind.
Images are slippery and hard to catch. They are like fish in a river: if you reach down and catch
one, it squirms and wiggles while you hold it, and slips back into the water.
Everything is an image, and some things that are not things are images. Images are the sole
content of consciousness, and constitute, for our purposes, ultimate reality. Reality consists
entirely of images in their various forms.
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Most scientists feel that images, while real in some sense, are no more than unreliable
approximations of the physical world. For them our definition of image may be difficult to
accept. We defend it only by saying that what they call the physical world consists of dimensionally-structured images. Some philosophers, on the other hand, particularly those of eastern
religious traditions, may feel that ultimate reality lies beyond what we call images. They are right
in a sense that we not dealing with here. While we believe that the further progress of science
depends upon a transcendence of the material world, we do not, in this presentation, attempt a
transcendence of the normal consciousness through which we experience the material world.
Eastern thought and practice present a fresh approach to the inner workings of thought, sensory
information, and imagination, and an entirely new look at the western scientific tradition. I have
found it extremely useful in understanding modem physics. The use of this approach is all we
attempt here.
We should admit at this point that defining “image” as ultimate reality does away with the
problem of saying what it really is. If it is ultimately real, and there is nothing else, what more
can be said? This is exactly my purpose I do not want to know what an image really is, nor how
ultimate it may be, at least right now. What I am interested in here is the structural relation
among images that creates the sense of physical reality we experience in everyday life. I want to
know why, when I experience a visual image and a tactile image at the same time and in the
same place, I think of something “out there,” and why this sense of reality is distorted at dimensional extremes.
This theory, then, is an attempt to explain everything in terms of images without saying what an
image is. The word itself is one we have had to select and weigh down with meanings, only some
of which it can carry on its own. For rhetorical purposes, I have had to stretch and shape it,
hopefully not too far beyond recognition. Also, as words are themselves images, none, including
“image,” is other than that which I wish to describe. My definition, therefore, is a tautology: We
must use an image to impart an image of what 1 mean by “image.” In any case, the word is the
best available for my purposes in that it implies that all things, physical and mental, are
essentially fleeting and ephemeral, and that imagination, while fundamentally identical with
material substance, is in some sense more fundamental.
Objects are composed of images. You can touch an object because you experience a tactile
image where and when you experience a visual image. The “object” is an intersection of images
in space and time. It is this particular structure of consciousness, then, that creates the apparent
existence of matter within objects.
There are images that are “real” and those that are purely “imaginary.” The difference is that
those we call “real” are experienced within a dimensional structure. Their dimensional context
means that they are potentially experienced through any of the senses and also by any other
observer. Images experienced subjectively are non-dimensional. The difference between “real”
and “imaginary” is, We will try to show, the structure of the universe. Mental concepts differ
from physical objects only by the context in which they are experienced, a context that we know
as space, time, and mass. That they are both images, and therefore composed of the same
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primordial substance, I shall have to show. Or, we should say, we shall suggest that modern
science has already shown.
But why has it been left to modern physics to discover a fundamental structure of consciousness
when physics is not even interested in the structure of consciousness? Like Columbus on his way
to India for gold and spices, physics has tripped over something it was not looking for in its
search for grand unified theories and ultimate “building blocks” of matter. It has expanded the
scope of human experience beyond its own conception of what is real. Before it began its
voyages into relativity theory and quantum mechanics in the present century, the human mind
was confined entirely to macroscopic dimensions. It is only with explorations inside the atom
and beyond the galaxy that we have begun to peer around the edges of the dimensional world.
An image is never complete unto itself, but always relates to other images in some way. A
particular image is similar to another in that there is a greater image that contains them both. A
red house, for instance, bears some similarity to a green one in that there is such a thing as
“house” that contains them both. The larger image serves as a means to locate and identify
smaller ones within it. A pain in the jaw can be identified as a "toothache” because it is similar to
other such experiences. The United States is a “nation” in that there are other nations like it. We
know what an "automobile” is when we see one because we have seen so many others Wore.
Conversely, every image consists of smaller, more fundamental images. A toothache is a
combination of many separate “painful sensations,” the United States is fifty “states,” and an
automobile is a particular arrangement of “bolts,” “carburetors,” and “seat covers.” Conscious
activity is a constant arrangement and rearrangement of images into other images, hopefully
better, simpler, or more efficient ones. It is always a mind process, and there is no perfect image
or system of images containing all the experience. What I offer here, for instance, can be no
more than a less imperfect arrangement than that I wish to replace.
One image that contains many others is what I call a “realm.” A realm is a structured part of
consciousness, containing a specific form of information. The “perceptual” realms are taste,
touch, smell, hearing, and vision. There is also an “observational” realm of consciousness, or of
chromosomes in the cells of a particular species. The number of realms is, however, related to
our experience as humans (as opposed to plants or animals) at a particular stage of evolution.
Plants experience two realms and animals anywhere from two to six. This has to do with the
development of specialized sensory organs among higher animals, and of symbolic language
among humans and some animals.
Realms are interrelated on the macroscopic level by coordinated dimensions. Three of these
dimensions are spatial, and a fourth temporal (as demonstrated by Einstein in special relativity).
We will make a case for mass, removed from the concept of matter, as an additional dimension.
These first five dimensions are macroscopically distinct and measurable. The sixth dimension,
that indicated by non-uniform acceleration, is less easily defined, but experienced in everyday
life nonetheless.
The perceptual realms are also interrelated on the quantum level. The visual and auditory realms,
for instance, consist of information that is reducible to tactile sensation, and thus to the tactile
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realm. Light is visual consciousness on the macroscopic level but at the same time tactile
consciousness on the quantum level: each photon “touches” the retina as it becomes part of
visual consciousness. The visual realm is, therefore, an outgrowth of the tactile realm. Extremely
small images (objects approaching the energy of photons) are not exclusively visual or tactile
(wave or particle) because the dimensional context within which they are experienced begins to
disintegrate at this level. This is why we experience enigmas at dimensional extremes.
It is interesting that we notice the dimensional structure of consciousness only where it begins to
unravel. We do not notice it in everyday life because it is everywhere.
Fig. 1. Mosaic of Shiite Mosque , Isfahan, Iran [1]
In Fig.1, we present the photo of Mosaic from Mosque in Isfahan, Iran. First of all it is beautiful
image which consist a lot of geometric form, cardioids. The name cardioid was first used by de
Castillon in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1741. Its arc length was found by
La Hire in 1708. There are exactly three parallel tangents to the cardioid with any given gradient.
Also, the tangents at the ends of any chord through the cusp point are at right angles.
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The curve given by the polar equation
(1)
sometimes also written
(2)
where
.
The cardioid has Cartesian equation
(3)
and the parametric equations
(4)
(5)
It is quite astonishing that artists perform the mosaics full of cardioids without the knowledge of
its formula.
In this essay, I discussed the structural relation among concepts (images) that creates the sense of
physical reality we experience in everyday life. As an example, I describe the connection
between the image of cardioids on the mosaic in Isfahan Mosque, Iran, and the formula for
cardioids discovered by Europeans much later.
Received May 29, 2020; Accepted June 13, 2020
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References
Yates, R. C. (1952). "Cardioid". A Handbook on Curves and Their Properties. Ann Arbor, MI: J. W.
Edwards. pp. 4 ff.
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Levi, K., The Realization of Self in Everyday Life
Research Essay
The Realization of Self in Everyday Life
Ken Levi*
Abstract
This article is about the role of “self” in understanding consciousness. From a symbolic
interactionist perspective, we can see how qualia emerge from “frames” of experience. These
frames progress from the natural frame to the social frame to the focus frame to the holographic
frame. In the natural frame stimuli from external sources are reflected on the surface of our body.
These stimuli are parsed and consolidated, and ultimately projected onto a holographic frame. At
that point not only do we reflect the outside world, but we know we are doing so. Such
knowledge comes from what philosopher Henri Bergson calls the “principle of actionrelatability.” That principle relates the raw stimuli to how we might respond to them, which, in
turn, tells us who we are. Consciousness is about self, and the process of self-definition underlies
how we become aware.
Keywords: Consciousness, self-concept, symbolic interaction, frame analysis, holograms,
holographic principle, sentient self, holographic mind.
1. Introduction
Most studies of consciousness focus on the “image” of the object of our attention.
Representationalists argue that such an image occurs inside our heads (Pribram, 1971; Dretske;
1995; Block, 1996; Tye, 2000; Coates & Coleman, 2015). Supposedly, we experience our world
through a filter of intentionality, or “aboutness.” We view items of interest as intentional objects.
The image of intentional objects that forms inside our heads represents what our perception is
about. That image is projected onto a kind of internal movie screen (Bailey, 2006).
The problem for Representationalists, however, is two-fold: where exactly is this image, and
what is it made of? Neuroscience, so far, has not detected any such image inside our heads. As
Bergson (1896) notes, “No photograph of the external world is found in the brain.” Moreover,
electrical impulses, jumping from neuron to neuron, form the equivalent of digital 0’s and 1’s.
How do these digital impulses result in images and sensations?
Even more problematic is the question of the viewer. If there really is an image projected inside
our heads, then who views it? Is there, as Robbins (2016b) jokingly proposes, a “homunculus”
inside of us? Is there a tiny person inside our heads watching the movie screen of the image?
*
Correspondence: Ken Levi, Independent Researcher. Email: levik2016@yahoo.com
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But if so, how does the homunculus see the screen? Does he have a homunculus inside of him?
And then, does the homunculus’s homunculus have a homunculus inside of him? Et cetera. It
leads to an infinite regress, and therefore doesn’t solve the problem.
This article presents an answer to both enigmas. The answer is based not on neuroscience, not on
quantum mechanics, not on spiritualism, and not on panpsychism. It’s based largely on a
combination of symbolic interactionism and physics. It’s based on frame analysis, the
Holographic Principle, and, ultimately the concept of the self.
2. What Is Consciousness?
The dictionary defines consciousness as awareness, and awareness as consciousness. Other
definitions include wakefulness, sentience, alertness, realization.
Philosophers define consciousness as “qualia” (Tye, 2021). This is the intangible quality of an
experience. It is a subjective quality, because only the person who has it can attest to it. For
example, if you say, “I am running,” other people can observe you doing it. But if you say, “I am
hearing,” only you can know that as a fact.
In Knowing (Levi, 2019), I define consciousness as the five senses: seeing, hearing, tasting,
smelling, and feeling. These are the ways - the only ways - we have of knowing what’s going on.
Absent any one of these senses, the others compensate. But absent all, we are either dead or in a
coma. We are “unconscious.”
The five senses have particular properties. For one thing, they aren’t actually activities. They are
states of being. The activities are what we do to achieve those states. The activities include:
looking, listening, eating, inhaling, and touching. Looking results in seeing; listening results in
hearing; touching results in feeling; eating results in tasting; inhaling results in smelling.
As already noted, the five senses are intangible and unobservable to outsiders. They are also
holistic, in the sense that they form a singular impact on us - a smell, a sound, a touch - and
cannot be broken down into component parts. For that reason, they are analog, rather than
digital.
But the main feature is one that’s often overlooked. All of the senses require a “self.” We don’t
say, “smelling the roses,” or “feeling the heat.” We say “I” am smelling, “I” am feeling, “I” am
hearing, and so on. The “I” designation is integral to the aforementioned properties of
subjectivity, states of being, and knowing. All of these properties require a self, as the central and
essential ingredient for consciousness to exist.
Consciousness, then, is an intangible and subjective state of being for a “self.” It involves not
only the reflection of information from the environment, but knowing that reflection has
occurred. This, for example, is what distinguishes minds from mirrors. The mirror can reflect
images. But it cannot know that it has done so. A tape recorder can reflect sounds. But it cannot
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know it. Neither mirrors nor tape recorders have - or ever can have - a self. In sum,
consciousness is a knowing reflection. It is a knowing reflection had by a self.
3. Frame Analysis
Now, let’s take a look at what we mean by “knowing reflection.” In his brilliant and
pathbreaking volume Frame Analysis (1974), sociologist Erving Goffman defines a frame as
how we perceive particular events. He distinguishes between two classes of “primary
frameworks.” These include the “natural frame” and the “social frame” (22). Natural frames are
“purely physical,” and require no interpretation. For example, a photograph of a table, a chair,
and a person sitting on the chair would be a natural frame.
Social frames, however, “provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will,
aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence” (22).
How that understanding occurs depends on how the events are “framed.” Goffman distinguishes
several “tracks” of information that inform that framing. These include the main track, the
directional track, the overlay track, the concealment track, and the disattend track (247-300).
For example, suppose you are attending a play. The main track would be the plot unfolding on
the stage. The directional track might include scary music intended to shape how you feel about
the plot. The overlay track might be other audience members coughing. The concealment track
might include what the actors are doing behind the scenes. And the disattend track could be the
ushers cleaning up the aisles.
The point here is we rarely, if ever, encounter a situation raw. We selectively interpret those
situations. For example, while for you, the theater-goer, the main track is the play. For the usher,
at that same performance, the main track is the audience.
So, as Goffman instructs us, the “knowing reflection” in any given situation is usually not the
raw event, but rather our particular take on that event. Indeed, the subtitle of Goffman’s great
work is An Essay on the Organization of Experience.
Of course, he’s not just talking about any old experience. He’s talking about your experience.
And this is made explicit in one of Goffman’s earlier works, The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (1959). The interpretation of any frame you enter into tells you what kind of self
you need to be, and what kind of self you are.
4. The Natural Frame, the Social Frame, and the Focus Frame
For any given event, the natural frame is our starting point. It’s equivalent to what the mirror
captures. By the same token, it’s what our eyes capture on our retinas. The social frame then
includes how the brain pairs that natural frame with associations and memories, fears and
desires.
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The focus frame refers to cerebral “binding”. Every 1/40th of a second, a high-frequency gamma
wave passes through our brains and consolidates all of the sensory inputs - all the sights, smells,
sounds, etc. - and all of the associations that our brains have captured during a moment in time
(Pinker, 1997; Blakeslee, 1998).
Electroencephalography studies tell us, “When many neurons interact in this way at the same
time, this activity is strong enough to be detected even outside the brain” (Muse, 2018).
Moreover, investigators have also confirmed that these brainwaves convey information.
Researchers have demonstrated, “. . . the ability to nonintrusively record neural signals outside
the skull and decode them into information that can be used to move a prosthetic” (Moisse,
2010).
This information in our focus frame is encoded, because our brains operate digitally, like
computers. In effect, the on-off switches activated by electronic and chemical signals passing
from neuron to neuron in our brains produce something like a set of “0’s” and “1’s.”
5. The Dream Frame
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Shakespeare mused (1611). Indeed, much of what
occurs in dreaming can give us perspective on what happens when we’re awake.
In both cases - awake and asleep - we are the central characters in our narrative. But, we don’t
see ourselves. We don’t picture ourselves in our dreams, as if we were a third person. Instead, we
see the world through our eyes, just like we do in “real” life. And that world is a contrivance.
That is, we aren’t seeing the “natural frame.” In the case of dreams, there is no natural frame
before us. Instead, we are framing a composite of events, reflecting our fears and desires.
If we are capable of making composites of the real world when we’re asleep, may we not be
doing something similar when we’re awake?
If we differentiate between the dreamer and the dream-self, what the dream-self sees, hears, and
feels, is like what the dreamer sees, hears and feels. For example, if my dream-self falls off a
cliff, I feel like I’m falling as well. In that regard, the dreamer and the dream-self are one in the
same.
Of course, in dreams there is no actual “seeing.” Our eyes are moving - especially during REM
sleep (Cherry, 2021). But there is no actual scene for them to take in.
The dream, then, is a made-up story about ourselves. And it is told through feelings - through
sights, sounds, and sensations. Rationally, these stories often don’t make sense. But emotionally,
the stories are clear.
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6. The Holographic Frame
The Holographic Principle
Physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft, winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in physics, conceived the theory of the
Holographic Principle. That theory states that for any given region of space, the three
dimensional (3D) information that exists within that region is encoded on its two-dimensional
(2D) surface (Robbins, 2019; PBS, 2019; Susskind, 2019). Experimental evidence for the
Holographic Principle has been reported in the literature (Chown, 2009; DeWet, 2012;
Skenderis, 2017). If the theory is true, what this means is that wherever we go, we are virtually
swimming in a sea of information.
‘t Hooft’s theory is based on discoveries by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking about Black
Holes (Smolin, 2001). They concluded that none of the information that falls behind a Black
Hole’s Event Horizon ever disappears. To do so would violate the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. Instead, all the information that passes through the Event Horizon is encoded
in 2D on the Event Horizon surface.
It was ‘t Hooft’s genius that led him to realize such a finding also applies to space in general.
The Holographic Mind
Almost a hundred years earlier, French Philosopher Henri Bergson (1896) proposed a strikingly
similar theory for human perception. Based on Bergson’s writings, contemporary cognitive
scientist Stephen Robbins has created a series of lectures entitled Bergson’s Holographic Theory
(2016a, 2016b, 2019).
Like ‘t Hooft, Bergson believed that all 3D information is encoded in a 2D format throughout the
Universe. The way this works is akin to how we create holograms. In ordinary holography, a set
of laser beams create light waves which overlap in something called an “interference pattern.”
That pattern is what converts the image of a 3D object into a 2D code (Robbins, 2019). Once that
2D code is created on a surface, later on another laser beam can aim a “reconstructive wave” at
the code. The ensuing laser wave decodes the information and renders a 3D image.
To Bergson, perception works in a similar way. The Universe is packed with interference
patterns, formed by electro-magnetic waves emitted by objects (Bergson, 1986; Matthews, et al,
2017; Verma, 2021). Citing Faraday’s “centers of force.” Bergson notes:
“The lines of force emitted in every direction from every center bring to bear upon each
the influence of the whole material world” (p. 31, cited in Robbins, 2016a).
Those interference patterns create 2D codes. Our brains, Bergson contends, supply the
reconstructive wave. That reconstructive brain wave is “modulated” according to the “principle
of action relatability.” What this means, in contemporary terms, is that the focus frame in our
brain sends out a wave. That wave reconstructs objects and events in terms of our particular
perspective.
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The resulting reconstructed image, according to Bergson and Robbins, includes all aspects of the
target objects, meaning their look, sound, smell, taste, and feel (Dyslexic Artist, 2017). The end
result, they claim, “IS” perception (Robbins, 2016a).
The Holographic Self
At it’s core the hologram is creating something much more than our image of the outside world.
It is creating a self. As I wrote in an earlier article (Levi, 2021),
“The resulting holo-frame includes not only the objects of our attention, but, significantly,
ourselves as the subjects of that attention. In that way we experience a self. We experience a self
referentially from our environment. We experience a self in terms of our action-relatability to
that environment. What the hologram does is connect us to that environment through the eyes of
a subject, and that subject happens to be us” (p. 249).
Consider the example of the hunter and the deer. His focus is hunting a prey. And for him the
reconstructed image of the deer isn’t “Bambi.” For him, the reconstructed image is “target.” And
the ultimate meaning of that image must be that he himself is a “targetter.”
Hence, the object speaks to the subject. And that’s how the hunter comes to know himself. In
general, how we relate to our environment tells us who we are. We might take Descartes’ famous
dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” to mean: my perceptions of the world tell me my place in it.
The Sentient Self
In a prior article (Levi, 2020a), I distinguished between two different kinds of experience:
thought and sensation. Evidence for their difference comes partly from the observation that the
more of one, the less of the other. The more thinking, the less feeling. The more feeling, the less
thinking.
Two different kinds of experience logically imply two different kinds of experiencer, even if
both kinds reside in the same person. I referred to these two kinds of experiencer as the
“thinking self” and the “sentient self.”
The holographic self is the sentient self. It consists entirely of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling,
and feeling in general. These are the sensations that underlie consciousness.
Some of the contrasts between the thinking self and the holographic self-include:
a. The holographic self is older and more primitive. Dogs, for example, have a fantastic
sense of smell, but probably none of them can do calculus. Frogs can reflect a large, dark,
moving figure, and immediately sense “enemy image.” And they have that image as a feeling,
rather than an articulation.
b. The holographic image is holistic, rather than composed of parts. In that sense, it is
analog versus digital. For example, you smell the perfume first, then you think about it
afterwards.
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c. The holographic experience is outward oriented. Thinking - cogitation - and logic seem
to occur entirely inside our heads. But, for the most part, sensations originate from outside of us.
The dog’s smell, the frog’s menace, the connoisseur’s taste all emanate from something outside
of them.
d. The more we put aside our thoughts, and concentrate just on the sensation, the more
we seem to be captivated by the external source.
e. In such cases of external captivation, we often say that we “lose a sense of self”
(Harding, 1986). But, as I noted above, the object tells us about the subject. So, what I think is
happening is that we are finding ourselves outside ourselves. The reason the hunter may be
captivated by the deer-as-target, or the racist may be captivated by his image of the “inferior”
outsider is because that image reflects back on themselves and who they think they are.
f. The connection, then, between object and subject is what gives the object meaning.
You don’t really know what something is, until you know how it relates to you. As Bergson
(1896) states, the principle of holographic modulation is “action relatability” to the subject.
g. Once the connection between the object and the subject occurs, the image becomes a
“knowing image.” That knowing image is a realization of self. That realization of self is
consciousness.
The Realization of Self
So far, we have described a progression from natural frame, to social frame, to focus frame, to
holographic frame. In this way our world comes into greater and greater focus.
The natural frame refers to raw impacts of external stimuli on the surfaces of our body. These
stimuli are captured on our retinas, eardrums, nasal passages, tongues, and skin. At this stage, we
are having sensations, but we don’t know it yet. For example, our tongues may be capturing
bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and savory, but consciousness of those tastes has yet to occur.
Next, stimuli from the natural frame are parsed in our brain and combined with associations and
memories, fears and desires (Lu, et al, 2016). Through these personal linkages, the natural frame
is converted into what Goffman calls a social frame. Supposedly, this process happens digitally,
like the way it works in computers.
Digitized data from all areas of our brain are consolidated into a focus frame. This happens every
1/40th of a second.
Electro-magnetic waves from the focus frame reconstruct the objects and events of our attention
into a holographic frame. According to the Holographic Principle, those objects are encoded in
space in a 2D format. Our focus frame converts 2D codes into 3D experiences.
In effect, the digitized information in the focus frame is converted into analog sensations.
Digitized images become real images. Digitized smells become real smells, and so forth.
The 2D codes are selectively reconstructed, as Bergson contends, according to the principle of
“action-relatability.”
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So, now we have a 3D holographic frame. It consists of the look, sound, smell, taste and feel of
objects and events in our immediate world (I, 2020b; Dyslexic Artist, 2017). But how do we
become “conscious” of all this? How is the holistic information received?
Remember the focus frame contains digitized instructions. The instructions are to reconstruct not
merely the scene before us, but, critically, ourselves experiencing that scene. What is depicted is
the self-having an experience in which the elements of the frame are presented in terms of their
action-relatability to the self.
So, unlike the raw, natural frame, the holographic frame engenders three kinds of knowing.
First, we are made aware that we are seeing, smelling, tasting, etc. The holographic frame
transforms the natural frame, reflected on the surfaces of our body. For example, in the natural
frame we may be smelling perfume, but we aren’t conscious of it yet. The holographic frame
makes us conscious of it by linking the raw smell to us having that smell.
Second, we know what it means. The hunter doesn’t just see a deer, he sees a target for him to
shoot at. The dog doesn’t just smell drug odor, he smells something that will get him a reward
once he uncovers it. So, objects and events become “known,” once the observer grasps how to
place them in his personal world of action.
This “knowing” need not be elaborate. For instance, when I enter a familiar room, what it tells
me is: it’s a place where I can do familiar things.
Third, the objects and events depicted in the holographic frame reflect back on the self and tell
him what kind of person (or dog) he is. The racist, for example, encounters an “inferior”
outsider, so he, by contrast, must be “superior.”
The big difference between the natural frame and the holographic frame is this: the image now
includes a self. Instead of a raw reflection of the scene before us, we now have a self-referential
collection of objects and events. That’s how we come to know them.
Ultimately, that’s what consciousness is all about. It’s about the realization of self. Our
awareness of the world is about who we are in that world. No encounter is ever simply “raw.”
Consciousness
In the end consciousness consists of three parts: the body, the holographic frame, and the self.
Our bodies are impacted by stimuli, and those impacts are analog, much like the grooves on a
vinyl record.
The holographic frame “interprets” those grooves. The look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of
objects and events in our frame make the impacts on our bodies meaningful. So, a reflection of
deer on our retinas becomes an apparition of deer as target. The resonance of sonic waves on our
eardrums becomes the sound of bells summoning us to morning prayer.
The objects and events in the holographic frame derive their meaning from their relation to a
self. The sight of the hunted evokes a hunter. The sound of the bells evokes one who is
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summoned. The knowledge of self, that the holographic frame provides, completes the circle of
awareness.
Once we relate objects and events to ourselves and our place in the world, we know them. And
that knowing satisfies Goffman’s essential question - “What’s going on here?”
7. Conclusion
The theory of the holographic mind presented above addresses the two knotty questions of the
image and the viewer, referenced in the introduction. The image is the holographic frame. The
viewer is the self. Unlike the notion of an inner “homunculus,” requiring an infinite regress of
homunculi, however, the self-depicted in the holographic frame is different. By experiencing the
world in terms of what it means to your self and your place in it, you achieve the state of
“knowing.” You have created a knowing reflection. In so doing, you have “completed the circle
of awareness.”
Consciousness is like a dream. Both states contain an unseen protagonist - ourselves. In both
states we view the world through our eyes, even though we don’t actually see ourselves. In both
states we are the subjects, not the objects, of the experience. The scene that unfolds before our
dreamer’s eyes is a compilation of bits and pieces of our waking life that come together to form a
story. That story is told primarily through sights and sounds that ultimately reflect the
associations and memories, the fears and desires of the central character - the protagonist - for
whom it’s all about.
If that is the experience we have when we dream, why should it be surprising that we have a
similar experience when we’re awake? The dream frame supports the concept of the holographic
frame.
Throughout the ages, people have distinguished between body and soul; matter and mind. It was
thought that while the one was tangible and solid, the other was invisible and ephemeral,
belonging to an entirely different class of reality.
This article, however, proposes that the elements of the conscious mind are very much part of the
material world. But their ephemeral nature comes ultimately from the magic of the Holographic
Principle. If that theory is correct, then we are surrounded by information. We are swimming in
it. It exists in the form of 2D codes, which we and other living creatures have the unique ability
to access by virtue of the focus frames formed within our brain.
Received November 8, 2021; Accepted November 30, 2021
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Essay
Is Negentropy Maximization Principle Needed as an Independent
Principle?
Matti Pitkänen 1
Abstract
I have proposed Negentropy Maximization Principle (NMP) as a variational principle for the
evolution of conscious experience. Mathematically, NMP is very similar to the second law although
it states something completely opposite. Second law follows from statistical physics and is not an
independent physical law. Is the situation the same with the NMP? Is NMP needed at all as a
fundamental principle or does it follow from number theoretic physics? Two additional aspects are
involved. Evolution can in adelic physics be seen as an unavoidable increase in the algebraic complexity
characterized by the dimension n = hef f /h0 of extension of rationals associated with the polynomial
defining the space-time region at the fundamental level by socalled M 8 − H duality. There is also the
possibility to identify a quantum correlate for ethics in terms of quantum coherence: the good deed
corresponds to a creation of quantum coherence and the evil deed to its destruction. How do these
two aspects relate to the NMP? Is NMP an independent dynamical principle or a consequence of
number theoretic (adelic) quantum physics? If the reduction of quantum coherence in state function
reduction serves as a correlate for evil deed, how does the conscious entity, self, know or learn this?
1
Introduction
Discussions in the Zoom group led once again me to worry about the Negentropy Maximization Principle
(NMP) [2, 14, 8], which I have proposed as a variational principle for the evolution of conscious experience.
Mathematically, NMP is very similar to the second law although it states something completely opposite.
Second law follows from statistical physics and is not an independent physical law. Is the situation the
same with the NMP? Is NMP needed at all as a fundamental principle or does it follow from number
theoretic physics?
Two additional aspects are involved. Evolution can in adelic physics [9] be seen as an unavoidable
increase in the algebraic complexity characterized by the dimension n = hef f /h0 of extension of rationals
associated with the polynomial defining the space-time surface at the fundamental level by socalled M 8 −H
duality [11, 12]. There is also the possibility of identifying a quantum correlate for ethics in terms of
quantum coherence: a good deed would correspond to a creation of quantum coherence and the evil deed
to its destruction.
How do these two aspects relate to the NMP? Is NMP an independent dynamical principle or a
consequence of number theoretic (adelic) quantum physics implied by the unavoidable increase of the
algebraic complexity? If the reduction of quantum coherence in state function reduction serves as a
correlate for evil, how does the conscious entity, self, know or learn this?
In the sequel, the notion of number theoretic evolution, the possible connection between quantum
coherence and ethics, and p-adic negentropy as a measure for the information content of conscious experience, allowing to resolve the apparent conflict of NMP with the second law, are discussed. Two options for
the NMP are discussed and the conclusion that, in analogy with the second law, NMP is a consequence of
number theoretic quantum physics. Also the question how zero energy ontology (ZEO) makes it possible
for a conscious entity, self, to learn the distinction between good and evil, is considered. In the case that
the deed affects the self, this means learning what deeds are threats for the existence of self.
1 Correspondence: Matti Pitkänen http://tgdtheory.com/. Address: Rinnekatu 2-4 A8, 03620, Karkkila, Finland. Email:
matpitka6@gamail.com.
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Pitkänen, M., Is Negentropy Maximization Principle Needed as an Independent Principle?
2
Background notions and ideas behind NMP
It is good to discuss first the basic concepts and ideas behind NMP [2, 14, 8] .
2.1
Number theoretic evolution
M 8 − H duality is the cornerstone of number theoretical (or adelic) physics [10, 9]. M 8 or rather its
complexification is interpreted as complexified octonions and one has H = M 4 × CP2 . M 8 is analogous
to momentum space and M 8 − H duality becomes the analog of momentum-position duality when a
point-like particle is replaced with 3-surface.
1. The roots of a polynomial P with rational coefficients (they can be chosen to be integers by a
suitable scaling) define a set of 3-D hyperbolic spaces H 3 having interpretation as mass shells in
M 4.
2. The 3-surfaces associated with these mass shells define 4-surfaces by the holography in H forced by
general coordinate invariance. In M 8 the holography is defined by the condition that the normal
space of the 4-surface is associative (quaternionic). Therefore associativity becomes the number
theoretic variational principle.
3. A stronger condition would be that the 3-surfaces correspond to unions of 3-D hyperbolic manifolds
as sub-manifolds of H 3 [17]. The 4-surface in M 8 defines by M 8 − H duality a space-time surface
in H.
Physical intuition suggests additional conditions on the integer coefficients of the polynomials P .
1. In [18] the possibility that the integer coefficients of the polynomial P are smaller than the degree
k(P ) of the polynomial, is discussed. The assumption that the integers are smaller than n has
strong intuitive physical motivations and has deep mathematical and physical implications.
The number of these kinds of polynomials of a given degree k is finite as is also the number of
corresponding space-time surfaces as points of the ”world of classical worlds” (WCW). Also the
number of the points of 4-surface is finite in the unique discretization of the 4-surface of M 4 by
points in the extension of rationals defined. As a consequence, quantum TGD becomes computable
in a rather strong sense. One can also say that the physical system itself defines its approximation.
The algebraic complexity of the space-time surface dictates the maximal information content of the
associated quantum states.
The second implication is that finite fields become a fundamental structures of the number theoretic
physics besides other number fields (classical number fields, rationals and their extensions, and padic number fields and their extensions). These number fields combine to adeles and also infinite
primes, integers and possibly also rationals are involved [5, 6, 4].
A given polynomial defines an algebraic extension of rationals, which makes its manifest in numbertheoretic physics via Galois confinement.
2. The higher the degree k of the polynomial, the higher the dimension n and complexity of the
extension can be. n = hef f /h0 serves as a measure for the complexity of the system, a kind of IQ,
and for the scale of quantum coherence.
3. Since there are many more polynomials of degree k higher than the given degree k0 than those of
lower degree, the degree of polynomial P defining the space-time surface and the dimension n of
corresponding extension of rationals n tend to grow in the series of quantum jumps. The world is
getting smarter, and this fact seems to follow only from basic number theory.
This motivates the question whether also NMP follows from number theory and quantum theory in
the same way as the Second Law follows from the nondeterminism of state function reduction.
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2.2
Quantum coherence and ethics
According to the TGD inspired theory of consciousness [3] any system can be conscious and the distinction
between electron and human is only due to the different degree of the complexity of the systems involved.
Quantum coherence means something positive intuitively. This suggests that the creation of quantum
coherence could be seen as a good deed at the fundamental fundamental level. The notions of good and
evil would be universal.
1. Free will makes it possible also the destruction of quantum coherence. This would be the physical
correlate of violence at the fundamental level. Good deeds create quantum coherence and evil deeds
destroy it. This formulation of quantum ethics does not seem to relate in any obvious way to NMP
or number-theoretic evolution.
2. The selection between good and evil is made in each BSFR as the partition of the system into a
subsystem and complement is selected. NMP tells if BSFR can happen for this particular partition
or not. If BSFR happens, a bad deed has been done, otherwise the deed is good since quantum
coherence does not decrease.
2.3
What does one mean with p-adic negentropy?
To define p-adic entropy and negentropy, one must define p-adic counterparts of probabilities. This
definition is possible if the probabilities are in an extension of rationals so that they make sense both as
p-adic and real numbers. This poses conditions on entanglement coefficients.
If the entanglement coefficients for the pair of systems defined by subsystem and its complement are
in the extension of rationals defined by the polynomial P , the probabilities are in an extension of this
extensions since they are eigenvalues of the density matrix and defined by a polynomial whose degree is
the dimension D of the state space defined by the entangled states. This suggests a criterion for whether
the SFR can take place.
1. The definition of p-adic entropy is given by the Shannon formula by replacing the logarithms of
probabilities with the logarithms of their p-adic norms: they are well-defined for any extension of
rationals. Note that the entropy is a real number so that ”p-adic” might be somewhat misleading.
The p-adic entropy satisfies the same additivity formula as the ordinary Shannon entropy. Unlike
the ordinary entropy, the p-adic entropy can be negative, and this motivates the identification of
p-adic negentropy as a measure of information. The total p-adic negentropy can be defined as a
sum over the p-adic negentropies for various primes p.
2. The interpretation of p-adic negentropy is as a measure of negentropy of quantum entanglement
associated with the partition of a system to a subsystem and complement. One could also consider
all possible partitions of the system to subsystem and complement and assign to them the sum of
p-adic entanglement negentropies identified as the total p-adic negentropy.
3. The total p-adic negentropy could be interpreted as a measure of the content of the system’s
conscious information. Ordinary entropy is in turn a measure of the external observer’s ignorance
of the state of the system (Schrödinger cat). Therefore the apparent conflict between NMP and the
second law disappears.
4. A large p-adic negentropy is accompanied with a large standard entropy, and this could perhaps be
interpreted so that the creation of conscious information produces entropy at the level of matter [14].
The difference of the p-adic negentropy and the ordinary entropy is non-negative and is guaranteed
by NMP and the basic properties of p-adic negentropy. The difference between negentropy and
entropy increases even though entropy is created at the level of matter. Number theoretic evolution
implies the increase of the total p-adic negentropy.
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Pitkänen, M., Is Negentropy Maximization Principle Needed as an Independent Principle?
5. A possible concrete biology inspired interpretation is that the system tries to extract as much
information as possible from the incoming organized energy (metabolic energy) and in an ideal
situation only completely unorganized thermal energy remains, what is produced by dissipation.
What we call energy saving is exactly this efficient extraction of information. Conscious informationproducing systems that use metabolic energy to increase hbar dissipate. This is what Jeremy
England discovered [1, 7].
2.4
Zero energy ontology very briefly
The key notions of zero energy ontology (ZEO) are zero energy states defined as pairs of quantum
states at the 3-D boundaries of the space-time surface at the opposite boundaries of a causal diamond
(CD= cd × CP2 , where c is causal diamond of M 4 ) having interpretation as a 4-D perceptive field. For
how the space of CDs forms the backbone of the ”world of classical worlds” (WCW) see [20].
Geometrically, the zero energy states are superpositions of space-time surfaces connecting the opposite
boundaries of CD. The space-time surfaces satisfy holography and are analogous to Bohr orbits. Twistor
lift leads to a proposal that they correspond as extremals of 6-D Kähler action to 4-D minimal surfaces
which are simultaneously extremals of 4-D Kähler action. An intriguing fact is however that since the
field equations reduce to a 4-D generalization of 2-D holomorphy, they are also extremals for a very large
class of actions. The possible implications of this are discussed in [20].
There are two kinds of state function reductions (SFRs).
1. One can assign to CD a passive boundary, which is only scaled during ”small” SFRs (SSFRs) and
the states at it are unaffected: this is the counterpart for Zeno effect. SSFRs correspond to repeated
measurement of the same observables at the passive boundary. The additional observables measured
at the active boundary of CD must commute with these observables.
The states at the active boundary are affected in SSFRs and the geometry of the future light-one
implies that the active boundary drifts farther away from the passive boundary in the statistical
sense at least. Therefore the temporal distance between the tips of the CD increases. This corresponds to the flow of geometric time correlating with the sequence of SSFRs defining subjective
time.
2. When the measured observables are changed to new ones, not commuting with the original ones,
the state at the passive boundary changes and BSFR takes place. Passive boundary of the CD
becomes active and vice versa and the arrow of time changes. CD begins to increase in the opposite
direction of geometric time. The implications are discussed from the point of view of consciousness
and quantum biology in [20].
It took a long time to become convinced that quantum jump can involve the creation of an entirely
new CD. Birth would be a universal quantum phenomenon. The minimal interpretation is that a new
perceptive field is created. ZEO also allows the ”Eastern view” in which a new Universe would be created.
3
Negentropy Maximization Principle revisited
NMP is mathematically analogous to the second law of thermodynamics and the proposal has been that
it serves as the basic variation principle of the dynamics of conscious experience. NMP says that the
information related to the contents of consciousness increases for the whole system even though it can
decrease for the subsystem. The number theoretic evolution is such a powerful principle that one must
ask whether NMP is needed as a separate principle or whether it is a consequence of number theoretical
quantum physics, just like the second law.
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Consider in the sequel BSFR as the counterpart of the ordinary state function reduction. I’m not
completely sure whether the following arguments can be also applied to SSFRs for which the arrow of
time does not change.
One can consider two alternative formulations for NMP.
3.1
Option I
Option I is the simpler and physically more plausible option.
1. BSFR divides the quantum entangled system at the active boundary of CD into two parts, which are
analogous to the measurement apparatus and the measured system. The selection of this partition is
completely free and decided by the system. This choice corresponds to an act of free will. Depending
on conditions to be discussed, the action of the measurement to this pair can be trivial in which
case the entanglement is not reduced. The measurement can also reduce the entanglement partially
or completely and the p-adic entanglement negentropy and entropy decreases or becomes zero.
2. If the partition into two parts is completely free and if the choice is such that NMP, or whatever
the principle in question is, allows BSFR, the quantum coherence decreases. Number theoretic
evolution suggests that the principle telling when BSFR can occur is number theoretic.
There is a cascade of BSFRs since BSFRs are also possible for the emerging untangled subsystem
and its complement. The cascade stops when the entanglement becomes stable.
3. What condition could determine whether the reduction of the entanglement takes place? What
could make the entanglement stable against BSFR?
Number theoretical vision suggests an answer. Physical intuition suggests that bound states represent a typical example of stable quantum entanglement. Bound states correspond to Galois confined
states [19, 13, 15, 16] for which the momenta of fermions are algebraic integers in an extension of
rationals but total momentum has integer valued components. This mechanism for the formation
of the bound states would be universal.
A natural number theoretical proposal is that the entanglement is stable if the entanglement probabilities obtained by diagonalizing the density matrix characterizing the entanglement belong to an
extension of rational, which is larger than the extension, call it E, defined by the polynomial P
defining the space-time surface. An even stronger condition, inspired by the fact that cognition is
based on rational numbers, is that BSFR can take place only if they are rational.
This kind of entanglement would be outside the number system used and one can argue that this
forces the stability of the entanglement. A weaker statement is that the reduction is possible to a
subspace of the state space for which the entanglement probabilities belong to E (or are rational).
4. This option could replace NMP as a criterion with a purely number theoretical principle. This does
not however mean that NMP would not be preserved as a principle analogous to the second law
and implied by the number theoretic evolution in turn implied by the hierarchy of extensions of
rationals.
Could free will as the ability to do evil or good deeds reduce to number theory that is to the choice
of a partition, which leads to either increase or decrease of entanglement negentropy and therefore of
quantum coherence?
The basic objection can be formulated as a question. How can the conscious entity know whether a
given choice of partition leads to BSFR or not? Memory must be involved. Only by making this kind
of choices, a system with a memory can learn the outcome of a given choice. How could the self learn,
which deeds are good and which are evil? The answer is suggested by the biologically motivated view of
survival instinct and origin of ego [21] based on SSFRs as a generalization of Zeno effect.
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1. Conscious entity has a self characterized by the set of observables measured in the sequence of
SSFRs. BSFR as a reduction of entanglement occurs when a new set of observables not commuting
with the original set are measured. In BSFR self ”dies” (loses consciousness). Second BSFR means
reincarnation with the original arrow of time.
2. The perturbations of the system at both boundaries of CD are expected to induce BSFRs and to
occur continually. Therefore the arrow of time is fixed only in the sense that it dominates over the
opposite arrow.
3. Self preserves its identity (in particular memories defining it) if the second BSFR leads to a set of
observables, which does not differ too much from the original one. The notions of survival instinct
and ego would reduce to an approximate Zeno effect.
4. This mechanism would allow the self to learn the distinction between good and evil and also what
is dangerous and what is not. A BSFR inducing only a brief period of life with a reversed arrow
of time could teach the system when the BSFR leads to a reduction of entanglement and loss of
coherence.
The harmless BSFRs could provide a mechanism of imagination making survival possible. Intelligent
systems could do this experimentation at the level of a self representation of a system rather than
in real life and the development of complex self representations would distinguish higher life forms
from those at a lower evolutionary level.
3.2
Option II
Option II is stronger than Option I but looks rather complex. I have considered it already before. NMP
would select a partition for which the negentropy gain is maximal in BSFR or at least, the decrease of
the negentropy is minimal. One must however define what one means with negentropy gain.
Before considering whether this condition can be precise, it is good to list some objections.
1. Is the selection of this kind of optimal partition possible? How can the system know which partition
is optimal without trying all alternatives? Doing this would reduce the situation to the first option.
2. Free will as ability do also evil deeds seems to be eliminated as a possibility to either increase or
decrease entanglement negentropy and therefore quantum coherence by choosing the partition of
the system so that it reduces negentropy.
3. If the BSFR cascade would lead to a total loss of quantum entanglement, the entanglement negentropy would always be zero and NMP would not say anything interesting. On the other hand, if
the selection of the partition is optimal and the number theoretic criterion for the occurrence of the
reduction holds true, it could imply that nothing happens for the entanglement. Again the NMP
would be trivial.
4. What does one mean with the maximal negentropy gain?
3.3
What does one mean with a maximal negentropy gain?
Option II for NMP says that for a given partition BSFR occurs if the entanglement negentropy increases
maximally. What does one mean with entanglement negentropy gain? This notion is also useful for
Option I although it is not involved with the criterion.
1. Entanglement negentropy refers to the negentropy related to the passive edge of the CD (Zeno
effect). Passive boundary involves negentropic entanglement because NMP does not allow a complete elimination of quantum entanglement (bound state entanglement is stable). The new passive
boundary of CD emerging in the BSFR corresponds to the previously active boundary of CD.
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2. For option I for which the concept of good/bad is meaningful, the number theoretical criterion
could prevent BSFR and stop the BSFR cascade. There is however no guarantee that the total
entanglement negentropy would increase in the entire BSFR cascade. This would make the term
”NMP” obsolete unless NMP follows in a statistical sense from number theoretic evolution: this
looks however plausible.
The unavoidable increase of the number theoretical complexity would force the increase of p-adic
entanglement negentropy and NMP as an analog of the second law would follow from the hierarchy
of extensions of rationals.
Received February 25, 2023; Accepted May 19, 2023
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[20] Pitkänen M. New result about causal diamonds from the TGD view point of view. https://
tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/CDconformal.pdf., 2023.
[21] Pitkänen M. TGD view of Michael Levins work. https://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/
Levin.pdf., 2023.
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Exploration
Evolution of Consciousness
Satinder S. Malik*
Abstract
In this article, I explore the evolution of consciousness and the state of Samadhi. When a Yogi
withdraws all senses, he doesn‟t smell, taste, see, hear or feel the touch and he knows nothing but
the self (Atma), then the yogi is Samadhi and he is a liberated one. Thus, the Yogi so settled in
Samadhi achieves a control over his sensors but also gains telepathy, wisdom of Sat and ability
to see past present and future, he truly goes beyond the bandwidth of normal human being‟s
senses and becomes an adept (Siddha). This is surest path for evolution of Consciousness.
Keywords: Evolution, consciousness, Samadhi, Yogi, Atman, Siddha.
There are approximately 7.8 billion people live on this earth in 2020 [11]. The population was
6.92 biilion in year 2010. Out of these people the religion wise distribution is given in following
table [13]. The religiously unaffiliated number 1.1 billion, accounting for about one-in-six (16%)
people worldwide [14]. The religiously unaffiliated include atheists, agnostics and people who
do not identify with any particular religion in surveys. However, many of the religiously
unaffiliated have some religious beliefs.
Religion
Christians
%age Population
31% 2,173,180,00
0
Muslims
23%
1,598,510,00
0
No Religion 16%
1,126,500,00
affiliation
0
Hindus
15%
Buddhists
Folk
Religionists
Other
Religions
7%
6%
1,033,080,00
0
487,540,000
405,120,000
1%):
58,110,000
Jews
0.2%
13,850,000
Remarks
50% are Catholic, 37% Protestant, 12%
Orthodox, and 1% other
87-90% are Sunnis, 10-13% Shia
Agnostics and people who do not identify
with any particular religion. One-in-five
people (20%) in the United States are
religiously unaffiliated.
94% of which live in India
50% live in China
Faiths that are closely associated with a
particular group of people, ethnicity or tribe
Baha‟i faith, Taoism, Jainism, Shintoism,
Sikhism, Tenrikyo, Wicca, Zoroastrianism
and many others.
Four-fifths of which live in two countries:
United States (41%) and Israel (41%)
*
Correspondence author: Dr. Satinder S. Malik, Independent Researcher, India. E-mail: adventuressmalik@gmail.com
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A total of approximately 84% population on planet earth believes in some form of supernatural
power or super consciousness. There are also local beliefs in paranormal activity, ghosts, magic,
sorcery etc some sort extra dimensional experiences which are unexplained by science and
rejected as imagination or some freak activity of mind due to mental stress.
While Hinduism is mentioned as a religion above, it is the name given to the people who live
beyond river Indus (Sindhu) and to the east of it. The accurate name of India is Bharat meaning
in pursuit of light. The most ancient name is JambuDwipa (Island with trees of Jambu) as
mentioned in scriptures. The supercontinent Pangea began to break up approximately around 200
Ma (million years ago) and India started a northward drift towards Asia. 80 Ma India was 6,400
km south of the Asian continent but moving towards it at a rate of between 9 and 16 cm per year
[12]. The Himalayan mountain range and Tibetan plateau have formed as a result of the collision
between the Indian Plate and Eurasian Plate which began 50 million years ago and continues
today.
It would be difficult to classify Hinduism as religion because it is a way of life or more
importantly a culture. The real name of what is inferred as Hinduism is „Sanatan Dharma‟.
Sanatan means „since the beginning‟. Therefore, there is no single propounder of the
SanatanDharma. Dharma is set of principles which are applied to thinking and action to cater to
environment & nature, animals, other humans, society and for evolution of consciousness. The
ancient wisdom flows from Brahma who is originator of Vedas (Vid is to know). These are the
manual for the humanity to live on theEarth. These were brought to earth by Rishis (higher
conscious forms) who were researchers doing research on how the designed human and animal
life is proceeding on earth and also experience of nature of human body and environment of
earth. More scripture about historical treatises (Purana), Upanishads, Vedanta, Brahmana,
Aranyakasetcdescribed various aspects and all were in verbal form. You could well imagine the
mental capacity of those people who could remember thousands of couplets in Sanskrit language.
Sanskrit is a language based on scientific principles and also rhythmic.It known as DevBhasha
(language of the Gods).
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The world is spending billions for search of life in the universe. This knowledge has been
available to world‟s most ancient civilization from the beginning of human life. There have been
frequent contacts with what we call as „Alienlife‟ today. People have visited other planets along
with Gods. The space races have also been identified and named. The planet has been a ground
for competition between various alien life-forms. The aliens have also lived on earth settled,
ruled and married human and also had children.Other than them higher consciousness beings
have taken birth in human body shells and guided humans by setting examples on how to life of
dharma.
Reality Versus Maya
Reality is the quality or state of being actual or true. We know that all animate and inanimate
beings are built of atoms and their various combinations. If you enlarge an atom so see its
nucleus of the size of tennis ball, the nearest electron would be nearly three kilometers away.
Therefore 99% of us are actually made up of what we call as space. It is difficult to perceive the
reality in this world which is under various layers of illusion or mystery.
The Sanskrit term for supreme consciousness is Prabrahamha (Beyond Universe). The same term
is used for Parameshvara (Ultimate God, Purush) who is Nirgun (Beyond the ambit of three
gunas of Sat, Rajas and Tamas), Nirakar (no shape) and ultimate truth. Universe is sprung out as
Sankalpa (resolution) of God. Ultimate God is represented in Sakar Brahma (Consciousness with
shape) as Trinity (Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma). The idea of creation from Nothingness to
expanding spheroid (Brahmand) starts from integration of initial vibration Om (Aum) with time,
forming space and non-manifesting wavelet strings. These wavelet strings further integrate in
time and space using many combinations and permutations of conjunctions and disjunction
creating forces and the waves, rays, unstable elementary particles and quarks. The entire process
is formation of universe is autonomous barring some intelligent interference and follows
principles of Mahat (great principle or a principle which leads from small, un-manifested things
to great things). Mahat is the mathematics behind the magic numbers and wave geometry for
formation of space, energy and matter forms. As the formation of universe progresses from step
zero to one and further, at each step whatever new forms up, appears completely different than
the original ingredients. This is known as Maya (illusion). For example, hydrogen is a flammable
gas and oxygen is a gas which aids combustion and their combination is water which helps douse
fire. At the next level from elements to compound, the nature of matter has changed to a
completely differ set of characteristics. Thechanged characteristics completely different than
original is an illusion which is described in Vedas asmaya.
Leading from small to big in various permutations and combinations can still be understood, how
something whatever small and un-manifested came out of nothingness is great mystery
(mahamaya). Creation of first vibration from Shunya is known as Mahamaya. No one has been
able to decipher as to what is Mahamaya. It is the source code of the first re-iterating equation.
The initial vibration was manifested with three gunas (Sat, Rajas and Tamas). At the moment Sat
can be understood as knowledge and purity, rajas as control and tamas as binding forces.
Therefore, Sat (also known as truth) is the intelligence riding in every corner of space, wavelets
and particles and their future heavier and larger outcomes.
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Let‟s consider this world at reality level one. The physical world is unreal because the truth of
body is atoms, truth of atoms is particles, truth of particles is quarks, truth of quarks is waves and
truth of waves and even if do not go any deeper in reality the entire thing can be explained very
well be mathematical equations which helps unravel the reality from the clutches of maya. The
mathematics is Sat (truth) and humans and to some extent animals can perceive it because of
inherent consciousness.
In the Lemurian and Atlantean periods,Asuras, Danavas and Daityas were experts in maya (they
themselves had origins in space) and had built exceeding great civilizations, palaces which were
full of gems and gold.Vimanaswere at their disposal. They were intoxicated with ego and
considered no one equal to them. Indus valley civilization is some of their doing when their
powers had decayed and still these were the best designed cities in the world.
Maya has the capability to deceive us away from reality. Technology also impacts reality and
fools our senses and the mind. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad reflects on theory of dreams,
positing that human beings see dreams entirely unto themselves because the mind draws in itself,
the powers of sensory organs, which it releases in the waking state. It then asserts that this
empirical fact about dreams suggests that human mind has the power to perceive the world as it
is, as well as fabricate the world as it wants to perceive it. Mind is a means, prone to flaws. The
struggle man faces, is in his attempt to realize the "true reality behind perceived reality". The
world at reality level one is also perceived differently by different humans. Therefore, as many
numbers of worlds exist as there are preceptors. Perception of the world by a scientist, a rich
man, a poor man, a person living in big city or small place would be different. Why maya is
dangerous in spite of giving humans beautiful, tasteful, musical, sensuous experiences and
dreams is an enquiry every educated person must seek.
Psychology as Nature of Subtle Body
Psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting
behaviour in a given context. In India, psychology was never a subject because nature of human
psyche was not only well known but also well controlled.
The human perception is generated by five senses and interpreted by mind. The subtle body in
man has the cognitive complex consisting of Chitta (Consciousness), Buddhi (intellect),
Ahankara (ego/ identity) and Man (mind). We are aware that there are chiefly five main senses in
the human body which help build perception; these are sight, sound, smell, touch and taste.
These five senses give their inputs to mind and mind stores this information in memory. Mind
acts like pre programmed or hard wired firmware responsible for management of the body.The
mind is connected to the senses through the information superhighways of naadis which are as
much as 300,000 but mainly considered 72000 as important and 10 of them are chief because
then connect mind with nine portals (openings) of human body. These are a pair each of eyes,
ears and nose, a mouth, a genital and an anus. Intellect accesses all the information from memory
simultaneously or later for drawing inferences and make decisions.Chitta is source code for
deploying software for generating intelligence (buddhi). It is like arithmetic & logic unit (ALU)
to the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer.
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इन्द्रियाणाम् , हि, चरताम् , यत् , मनः, अनु, हिधीयते , तत् , अस्य, िरहत, प्रज्ञाम् , िायु ः,
नािम् , इि, अम्भहि।।2.67।।
Geeta (Chapter 2 verse 67) mentions when the mind follows the senses experiencing their
interests, his understanding is taken over by them like an unanchored sailboat which gets drifted
due to the wind blowing from any side.Like the wind is a natural force, senses are also hardwired
to sense the inputs and send them to mind, mind is the interpreter and it can dwell longer in areas
which of more interest. Sensors also have local muscle memory but it is the mind needs to be
kept on leash by the intellect.
Priority of needs
As far as the priority of needs, wants and desires of human body are concerned, these can be
inferredlocation of the chakras. Strength and balancing of chakras is important for wellbeing and
health of mind and body. Meditation of chakras can ensure natural healing.
Fear (Immediate Survival). Survival is first priority of any organism. For the purpose of
survival of the organism, a protective sense of fear has been programmed. This is characterized
by Muladhar Chakra located on the base of perineum. If this Chakra is not balanced then a
person would be extremely security conscious. In extreme cases, due to exposure to a fearful
situation loss of bowl control is because of this reason. Fight or flight syndrome is also a
characteristic of this.
Procreation (Survival of the Species).
Below the navel, there is small congregation of
nerves known as Kanda, it controls procreation. The entire system is designed for ensuring
survival of the species. The pleasure in procreational activity is due to a large number of sensors
located on genital of both male and female. This is a clever mechanism and acts as incentive for
ensuring survival of the species. It also helps in selection of better genes.
The liking for particular partners is also driven by the genetics driven agenda. A woman would
like to select a partner who could give her most talented offspring. A man would like to select a
woman who could be most charming, lovable and could provide better nourishment to his future
offspring. Various other types of unions such LGBT are not for pro-creational cause and
therefore considered as vikaras (faults) due to unbalanced chakra.
Energy (Hunger, Survival). In the navel center is Manipur Chakra taking care of digestion and
ensuring calorific values from food for energy generation and body maintenance. From here,
most of the physical strength is generated. Hunger is an indication for requirement of food and
pleasure of taste is a motivation for eating food as well as mechanism for identifying suitable
food.
Love and Friendship.
Man is a social animal. The society would be incomplete without
sense of love and friendship; these are the necessary ingredients of loving and caring social units
such as family, clan and higher social systems. Man has advantage of power of expression
through speech and hence able to evolve language for communicating. These higher centers are
not so developed in Animals.
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Speech and Expression.
No other life form has such ability of speech as it is
endowed in humans. As humans decide to say something, air passes throughairway passage
following constrictions in throat and mouth, it is modulated by tongue and instantly a stream
sound energy starts flowing. Vishuddhi Chakra controlability of expression by speech and vocal
music.
Sahsrar
Intuition, Consciousness
Agya
Intellect, Perception
Vishudhi
Speech, Expression
Anahata
Love, Friendship, Emotional strength
Manipur
Physical Strength
Swadhistan
a
Mooladhara
Cognition.
Procreation, Survival of the Species
Fear, Survival, Anger
Agya chakra controls learning, intelligence, memory and intuition.
Consciousness. Sahsrara Chakra control union with universal consciousness. Higher Chakras
enable intelligence and intuition, connect with dimension of consciousness.
Causes of suffering
The universal experience of suffering compels an enquiry for its removal and ultimately leads to
realisation of the truth (about Soul). The suffering appears to be applicable to all rich and poor,
strong and weak, old and young irrespective of caste, creed, sex or race. The mind attaches to
what it considers as a comfort causing experience and tends to stay away from sorrow and
painful experiences. Maharishi Patanjali described working of mind in PatanjaliYogsutras. He
also describes the factors which cause inflictions on mind.
अहिद्यान्द्रितारागद्वे षाहिहनिे शाःक्ले शाः॥२.३॥
Avidya – ignorance, Asmita – egoism, Raga – attachment, Dvesha – aversion (Hatred, Jealousy),
Abhiniveshah - clinging to life, Kleshaah - causes of suffering.
A lack of insight (avidya) is the source of most obstacles and can be latent, incipient, full-fledged
or overwhelming [13]. Avidya (ignorance) is of two types „Sanskara‟ born and sense born.
Sanskara born is due to past life learnings& actions and sense borne is due to inputs of the
sensors in human body. Therefore, it is first and foremost duty of a human being to remove
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avidya by seeking knowledge and drawing inferences to gain vidya by reasoning and logical
thought process.
All human beingsexist based on same principles. Small differences may exist, however, these are
miniscule and can hardly be considered as ground for feeling different. It is thinking and action
what makes human superior or inferior. Ego is a process of identity and differentiation and it is
an important trait. If a person can stay grounded despite success, doesn‟t take credit of his
success and doesn‟t take oneself too seriously, he can keep his ego in check.Ego can inflate very
fast in gratifying conditions. False ego is generated when one starts associating himself with
body and environment which needs to be avoided.
Association with objects which are ephemeral, temporary and notunder one‟s control would
cause inflictions on mind during their separation. The presumption that happiness depends on
external circumstances is referred to as desire (raga). The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad states that
all love is for the sake of one's Self. A child loves his mother for his own sake and not for the
sake of mother.
The notion that pain and suffering are caused by external circumstances is referred to as aversion
(dvesha).
Abhinivesha can cause anxiety. Anxiety canarise spontaneously in particular conditions and can
even dominate individual existence. Suppose a cosmopolitan city dweller that is in thick of
action, office or work gossip, party animal and always looking for next excitement and addicted
to social media and Smartphone. If such a person is left in a remote village without phone or
electricity and no modern amenities, his favourite brands or entertainment around would become
unhappy. All the above causes of suffering need to be nipped in the bud.
There are some misconceptions that can arise due toVriitis. Vrittis are whirlpools of thoughts in
peaceful lake of human mind. Undisturbed mind is like a calm and peaceful lake. Inputs from
senses create waves of disturbance upon its surface. If the indulgence is repeated or prolonged
they develop in stronger waves also affecting the deep layers. When the strong waves persist
they become whirlpools or Vrittis affecting deeper intellect and also causing sanskara (long term
habit). Falling in love with an object or a person is a vritti. Similarly, depression is also a vritti.
Combined impact of Maya and Avidya due to incorrect application of modern scientific
knowledge in our Present Environment
Due to lack of understanding in causes of suffering and attachment to comforts, human beings
are pursuing accumulation of material resources to ensure lasting happiness which has largely
been elusive. World is busy consuming resources of the earth to in order to maximize the
physical comforts for the body. Some of the recent developments of science have lowered human
beings perception increase risks of degenerative vrittis on his mind. Some of these are due to
impact of current system of economics which is known as capitalism. It is a system which in fact
has become areligion as most people are unable to follow their religions.
Since many people in cities are busy working living away from families. Their identity becomes
what they project without being judged by the traditional value system. It is a kind of freedom
since they are not completely influenced by their old social system. The new system allows them
to take decisions which may not have been seen in good light by traditional system.
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Modern food habits are shaped by the extraordinary science of addictive junk food [15]. Even if
you avoid the junk food, you will end up buying from a departmental store. That food too is
packages with intention of a longer shelf life. Food is being produced in farms with lots of
chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Large corporations are deciding what you eat. This is mainly
because of rise of industrialization and near collapse of agrarian system. Governments find
themselves in weaker position to control this due to corrupt officials, ignorance of public and
profit hungry capitalistic system.
Due to advent of recording which permitted preservation of effort of the artist is basically,
entertainment is suddenly available to all. Entertainment which found in sports, wildlife, social
gatherings etc has been shifted to theaters, bars and also invaded the family and personal space.
Just imagine that human need air, water, food, clothing and dwelling in that order. Out of these
air may be polluted but free and water is starting to cost. The man who produces food is the least
priority and main who is an entertainer, who is not even figuring out in the chain above, has
become the highest grosser.
The purpose of procreation is for the survival of the species. It is a gift and absolutely not a sin. It
does not need be an education, however, wrong usage of this system can cause harmful results
and that needs to be educated. Look at the animals and see how their life is regulated. Human life
was also regulated in same manner in when there was requirement of long hours of physical
work, healthy pastimes and a joint family system. The act of procreation is deceivingly well
marketed through movies, TV series and portrayed as a new found freedom which is facilitated
by harmful world of contraceptives. Availability of porn magazines and audio visual media
engage attention of the mind and cause vrittis. Sexual tools are being sold to singles in the name
of sexual health. Mental vritti is like a love affair, a depression which clings human to the act.
This causes addiction limiting the free mental space time and hence the mental capacity to
launch one in various higher intellectual pursuits.
A perfectly well thought out and well design system of human procreation has become a red
herring for human race. The Book of Genesis records circumcision as part of the Abrahamic
covenant with Yahweh [16]. The angel of Moses and Mohammed was Gabriel who dictated this
practice as means to reduce sexual urge in humans. He was well aware about the potential
dangers of uncontrolled addiction to this urge. In some cultures, it is still practiced in males as
well as females. Genital mutilation is an external fix for controlling human urge for sex. This
method has not as proven successful. This is because of the fact that sensor is just a tool, mind is
the master. This wisdom was well received by people following natural Dharma. In ancient India
life was divided in four ashrams. These were Brahmcharya, Grahstha, Vanprastha and Sanyas.
Up to 25 years practice of Brahmacharya was encouraged which was mainly study, yoga, homa,
service of the teacher and a celibate life. Brahmcharis used the yogic kriya of holding the mind to
the bindu. Bindu is located beneath the cowlick that most people have at the back of their head.
Anatomically, it is located where the bones of the back and sides of the skull meet (the occiput
and the parietal). The direction of the stream of cosmic energy flowing into the Chakra can be
seen quite clearly at this point. Apart from danger of addiction caused by pornography, the main
danger is its ability to be passed as karma for the next birth also because vrittis dig deep in mind.
The thinking process affect individuals aura and that causes an effect similar to mutual induction
to other nearby human beings.
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Patanjali has also described a solution to overcome vrittis. ध्यानिे याःतद् िृ त्तयः॥११॥
Meditation on overcoming the vritti eliminates such misconceptions that arise from the vritti.
Objectives of Life
One has always wondered as to what are the objectives of human life. A term for this is known in
Sanskrit as Purusharth. Purushartha can be translated as the “purpose/ meaning of man (what
does he mean to do)” and also as "pursuit of Consciousness” becausePurushaalso means
"Consciousness," [6]. The objectives of human life are Dharma, Artha, Kam and Moksha.
Dharma is what one ought to think as a code of the conduct, a duty, set of morals& ethics by
which one should think and act to achieve the aim of Purushartha. Artha is accumulation of
required material resources to fulfill ones worldly obligations. Kama is satiation of one‟s desires
and Moksha is ultimate aim of spiritual liberation. The planning for life is by keeping the
objectives of the soul in mind and not the objective of the body. As we eat food to nourish our
body, exercise body to gain strength, study to build up mental faculties in the same manner we
need to contemplate on evolving consciousness which is the objective of the soul.
Nature of Soul
In Geeta (Chapter 15 Verse 16 above) it is also mentioned that Purush (Consciousness) is of two
types in universe, Kshar and Akhshar. Kshar (decay-able, changeable) is in every substance and
Akshar (Unchangeable, undecaying) is extremely well hidden (secret). The above fact is
indicative that everything in the universe is conscious. The Akshar is type of consciousness
which is pervading in living beings. It is everlasting continuous and continues to evolve.
Consciousness has three attributes of Sat, Rajas and Tamas. Higher manifested AksharPurusha
are Shiva (Progenitor of Initial vibration from Shivalinga), Vishnu (Time) and Brahma (Creator
of every local universe).
AksharPurush in man is known as Atma which is integrated in physical body using six stages
layering of subtle energies. It is coded in as akin to software. These layers are explained in
earlier paper with the title „Human body as Cradle of Consciousness‟.These layers are known as
Suksham, Karan, Mahakaran, Hansa (Ham Sa),Param-Hansa (Ham Sa), KaivalyaSharir (body).
It is also known as seat of the soul is pineal gland. Tibetan scriptures mentioned that in the day
time soul resides behind the eyes and in the night time in heart (or some also mention liver).
Maharishi Kanad reflects light on nature of soul in Visheshaka Sutra. He described the nature of
the Soul in the journey through time, the suffering Soul revolving on the wheel of births and
deaths and re-births under the Law of Karma.
Process of Evolution of Soul
Evolution of consciousness is by knowing self (soul) and then soul is able to interact with
dimension of consciousness which is sat. Thus by knowing Soul all is known. Sat (Knowledge)
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is already integrated in universe; a soul has to perceive it to receive it. By receiving the
knowledge, it is illuminated.
In AtmaUpanishadGargi says to Yagvalkya…that a man is sterile is he not able to does not
realise the Atma which is in his heart and the Atma is image of the Purusha (Ultimate God), self
illuminated, blissful and it is un-manifested. [8]
In the diagram above, two approaches to truth are shown. One approach is internal. In internal
approach, consciousness is evolved to seek the knowledge of the universe.Second approach is
external. External approach is by knowing the external matter using sense organs and scientific
apparatus which widens the spectrum of our sense inputs. For example, the scientists are looking
for a „God‟ particle using Large Hadron Collider. The enquiry into detailed nature of things is
also known as Sankhya. In Geeta, two ways have been described best to reach supreme
consciousness one is Yoga and other is Sankhya.Sankhya is also referred as Gyan yoga and is
followed via internal route. In my earlier papers titled „Nature of Dimensions‟ and „Role of
Consciousness in Origin of Universe‟sankhya is described and here in this paper Yoga is
described.
Yoga
Yoga means union, union of jeeva (soul) with purusha (dimension of consciousness). The yoga is
achieved by one simple step of ChittaVriitiNirodha (stopping of thought whirlpools). The state of
thoughtlessness can be achieved by a human being using various means. These include Samadhi,
Bhakti (devotion), Kirtan (Dance and Music), Mantra, temporarily due to certain hallucinogenic
drugs, certain medical condition, sleep withdreams and permanently at the time of the
death.Mantra Chanting of certain syllables is powerful enough to invoke vibrations in mind.
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Meditation leading to Samadhi is a confirmed path for yoga. This path has been in practice since
the Prajapatis and Manus and other higher beings descended on earth. Early humans Rishis,
Daitya and Asuras have also been using this sure shot path. Performance Yagya (offerings to
Devtas) and meditation was the mainstay of Vedic culture. This path, therefore,is a gift straight
from the higher beings and not invented or conjured up by any human being.
Maharishi Patajali lays down foundation of Yoga in is Yoga Sutras. The path to Samadhi is eight
fold. It includes Yam, Niyam, Asan, Paranayam, Pratyahar, Dharna, Dhyan and Samadhi. Hatha
Yoga Tradition lays down six fold path to yoga without the first two stages of Yam and Niyam.
However, they emphasize on body purification prior to commencement of Yoga. Also, they ask
to follow Raj Yoga after Agya Chakra is realized and Sahsrara Chakra is to be achieved. Raj
Yoga is a form of yoga which was given to line of kings so that their consciousness is developed
so high that they can rule as per Raj Dharma (duties of the King). Without such high level of
consciousness when human beings reach position of power, they become corrupt, arrogant, cling
to power and cause atrocities. Yoga builds up character of person who practices it. Practice of
Yoga is a complete lifestyle not one of the activities.
Yamas are codes of restraint, abstinences and self-regulations. These include Non-violence,
Truthfulness, No stealing, Brahmacharya (dwelling in universe and celibacy) and Nonpossessiveness.Niyamas are to do with self-discipline and spiritual observances that need to be
cultivated. These includePurity of body and mind, Feeling of contentment in all circumstances,
Self-discipline, Self study of the sacred scriptures and Isvarapranidhana(devotion to God).
Asanas arethe correct postures for exercises for the all parts of body, internal as well as external.
The Gorakṣa-shataka states that there are as many asanas as the species 8,400,000 and that 84 of
these are recommended. For meditation,siddhasana and padmasana are the best.
Pranayama is exercises of prana, the subtle energy in the body. It is often misunderstood as
exercise of the breath. Prana are considered as Vayu (air) by most practitioners. Prana is subtle
energy on which the information system of the body rides and information flow is maintained.
Prana is the science behind the concept of Kundalini Yoga, Hatha Yoga, Chakra meditation,
Kriya Yoga and Raj yoga.
Pratyahara is withdrawal of the senses from external objects. Dharana is focused concentration.
Dhyana is meditation (absorption in the vast perception of God). Samadhi is experience of union
of the individual‟s soul with dimension of consciousness. These are to be studied in detail by
Yogi.
GorakshShatakamlays downhundred sutras in easy language for yogis by nath Yogi
ShriGorakhNath who is considered a part of Shiva himself. These sutras describe the nature of
Prana, naadis, human physiology a yogi must know and process of Samadhi.
Prana (breathing system and heart), Apana (below the diaphragm), Samana (digestive, parallal),
Udana(throat), Vyana(through the body), Naga (eructation), karma (blinking), krkara (sneezing),
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devadatta (yawning) and dhananjaya (pervading the entire body that does not leave even the dead
body.
Naga etc are subtle energies which are discrete and Pranaetc are continuous and these are
pervading the thousands of channels in a person‟s body.
The prana is continuously flowing through Ida, Pingla and Sushumna, three channels of
information and energy flow. They are represented as Sun, Moon and Fire channels.Normally the
prana flows thru Ida and Pingla alternatively every 1.5 Muhurta (72 minutes), this helps regulate
the temperature of body as Ida is cold channel and pingla is hot channel. (30 Muhurta in a 24
Hrday, 1 Muhurta = 48 Minutes).
Sushumna is active only for short duration when both channels are equalized. How to equalize
both channels using the following Bandhas (stoppages). In yoga flow of air or its stoppage
controls Prana and Prana rises up the sushumna and energizes certain parts of the brain.
The yogi who knows the mudras (postures) such as Jalandhar Bandh (Throat lock),
UddiyanaBandh (Stomach pulled in), MoolaBandha (Rectum pulled up), Nabho Mudra
(Khechari Mudra) and Mahamudra, that one is authorized to proceed on path of liberation. The
Paran is energized and it flows upwards through sushumna from where it rises up to Pineal gland
which is also known as the third eye.
As the air moves in body, everything is active. As the breath stills everything stills. Therefore a
yogi must do pranayam to still the breath and hence mind. During the pranayam focusing is
different Chakras strengthens them and also gives different beneficial results.
Duration of Dharna is five naadis duration (one naadi is 24 minutes), and Dhayan (meditation) is
for 60 naadis(one day) and Samadi is for 12 days.
When the yogi withdraws all senses, he doesn‟t smell, taste, see, hear or feel the touch and he
knows nothing but the self (Atma), then the yogi is Samadhi and he is a liberated one.
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Types of Samadhi
Science of Samadhi is highly developed and Samadhi mainly described as of two kinds, with and
without support of an object of meditation. These are known as Sampragyat Samadhi and
Asampragyat Samadhi [14].
In Sampragyat Samadhi or Savikalpasamadhi or Sabija Samadhi, meditation is dome with
support of an object. Sampragyatsamadhi is associated with deliberation, reflection, bliss, and Iam-ness.Savitarka is deliberative and in this the intellect is concentrated upon a physical object
which is perceptible to our senses e.g. flame of a lamp, the tip of the nose or the image of a deity.
Awareness of word or object of meditation remains but disappears at certain stage, when the
deliberation ends, this changes to Nirvitarkasamadhi. Savichara is reflective and in this chitta is
concentrated upon a subtle object of meditation which is not perceptible to the senses, but arrived
at through an inference from the senses, mind, I-am-ness, chakras or prana flow. The stilling of
reflection is called nirvicharasamapatti. Sananda Samadhi, ananda, bliss: this state emphasizes
the still subtler state of bliss in meditation. In Sasmita, the intellect is concentrated upon the
sense or feeling of I-am-ness (asmita).
Asampragyat Samadhi, also called NirvikalpaSamadhiand or Nirbija Samadhi meditation
without an object, which leads to knowledge of purusha or super consciousness. Heinrich
Zimmer explains nirvikalpasamādhi as a merging of the mental activity (cittavṛtti) in the Self in
such a way that distinction of knower, knowing, and known is dissolved. As waves vanish in
water, and as foam vanishes into the sea same manner atma merges in Parma atma. Samadhi can
also give yogi various super powers. These super powers are the following eight classical siddhis
(Ashta Siddhi) [11]
(i) Aṇimā: reducing one's body to the size of an atom
(ii) Mahimā: expanding one's body to an infinitely large size
(iii) Laghimā: becoming almost weightless
(iv) Prāpti: ability to be anywhere at will
(v) Prākāmya: realizing whatever one desires
(vi) Īśiṭva: supremacy over nature
(vii) Vaśiṭva: control of natural forces
Thus a Yogi so settled in Samadhi achieves a control over his sensors but also gains telepathy,
wisdom of Sat and ability to see past present and future, he truly goes beyond the bandwidth of
normal human being‟s senses and becomes an adept (Siddha). This is surest path for evolution of
Consciousness.
Received April 23, 2020; Accepted April 27, 2020
References
[1]https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups
[3] https://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-unaffiliated/
[4]https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#religions
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[5]Geeta
[6]https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/5586/purushartha
[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puru%E1%B9%A3%C4%81rtha
[8]Geeta by Swami Argarnandreferrred
[9]https://patanjaliyogasutra.in/
[10]GorakshShatakam- Motilal Khaddar Shashtri (Master Ji)
[11]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhi
[12] https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-Tectonics/Chap3-Plate-Margins/Convergent/Continental-Collision
[13] https://www.ashtangayoga.info/philosophy/source-texts-and-mantra/yoga-sutra/chapter-2/
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali
[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_circumcision
[17] https://www.chakras.net/energy-centers/bindu
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Pitkänen, M., When Does ”Big” State Function Reduction & Reversed Arrow of Time Take Place?
Exploration
When Does ”Big” State Function Reduction & Reversed Arrow of
Time Take Place?
Matti Pitkänen 1
Abstract
In ZEO based view about quantum measurement theory as theory of consciousness one has two
kinds of state function reductions (SFRs). The ordinary ”Big” SFRs (BSFRs) and ”small” SFRs
(SSFRs) . BSFR changes the arrow of geometric time and is identified as death of self identified as a
sequence of SSFRs, which do not change arrow of time but increase the size of self by keeping passive
boundary in place and states at it unaffected but increasing the size of CD by shifting the upper
boundary towards future. Both boundaries increase in size. The 3-surfaces at the active boundary
form a kind of log file about events in the life of self and - contrary to expectations - the memories
are stored to geometric future. In this article the question under what conditions BSFR takes place
is considered using biological death as a starting point. It is found that metabolic conditions dictate
its occurrence. The condition that the decay of biomolecules and larger structures in biological death
corresponds to their generation for time-reversed re-incarnate gives testable predictions.
1
Introduction
In ZEO based view about quantum measurement theory as theory of consciousness one has two kinds of
state function reductions (SFRs) [2, 7]. The ordinary ”Big” SFRs (BSFRs) and ”small” SFRs (SSFRs)
[9]. BSFR changes the arrow of geometric time and is identified as death of self identified as a sequence
of SSFRs, which do not change arrow of time but increase the size of self by keeping passive boundary
in place and states at it unaffected but increasing the size of CD by shifting the upper boundary towards
future. Both boundaries increase in size. The 3-surfaces at the active boundary form a kind of log file
about events in the life of self and - contrary to expectations - the memories are stored to geometric
future.
Under what conditions does ”Big” state function reduction (BSFR) changing the arrow of time take
place? I have proposed several ad hoc guesses about this. One example is following. If the hef f = n × h0
assignable to the CD or its active boundary does not change in SSFRs, the entanglement can become such
that the diagonalized density matrices does not have eigenvalues in the extension of rationals considered
and one can argue that BSFR is forced to occur. The proposal for how the sequence of SSFR could in
special case correspond to a sequence of iterations for a polynomial of degree n [8] is however in conflict
with the constancy of n.
The hypothesis is that BSFR corresponds to the death of self followed by re-incarnation with opposite
arrow of geometric time in universal sense. This suggests that one should look what one can learn from
what happens in the death and birth of biological organism, which should now take in opposite arrow
of time. It is found that metabolic conditions dictate its occurrence. The condition that the decay of
biomolecules and larger structures in biological death corresponds to their generation for time-reversed
re-incarnate gives testable predictions.
In the following the question under what conditions ”Big” state function reduction (BSFR) takes place
and what happens in it.
1.1
Two kinds of state function reductions
The discussion however requires the basic ideas of ZEO as background.
1 Correspondence: Matti Pitkänen http://tgdtheory.com/. Address: Rinnekatu 2-4 A8, 03620, Karkkila, Finland. Email:
matpitka6@gmail.com.
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Pitkänen, M., When Does ”Big” State Function Reduction & Reversed Arrow of Time Take Place?
1.1.1
”Small” state function reductions (SSFRs)
”Small state function reductions” (SSFRs) are counterparts of so called ”weak measurements”, which are
rather near to classical measurements in the sense that nothing drastic happens.
1. The passive boundary of CD does not shift but changes in size because active boundary shifts and
this induces change of size. For state pairs defining zero energy states the members at passive
boundary do not change and the coefficients of possibly time-entangled state defined as their superposition do not change. The members of state pairs at active boundary change and this change is
induced by unitary time evolution between too SSFRs. This time evolution could be regarded as a
generalization of adiabatic time evolution.
2. In statistical sense the active boundary shifts towards future and the size of CD increases. The
temporal distance between the tips defines clock time in one-one correspondence with SSFRs. Note
that the unitary evolution forms a superposition of CDs with different sizes and SSFR means
localization to single CD size.
3. The moment ”Now” of self would naturally correspond to the M 4 hyper-plane dividing CD into
two pieces of identical size. The radius of this 3-ball would be r = T /2, where T is the temporal
distance between the tips of CD. At this hyperplane expansion of 3-ball with light-velocity would
transform to contraction.
4. The mental images of self would correspond sub-CDs and also they would shifts towards geometric
future in the sequence SSFRs. They would form a kind of log file about the life history of self such
that geometric time order would be opposite to subjective time order. Self could remember these
experiences by sending signals to geometric future reflecting back in time direction - seeing in time
direction would be in question.
What is in sharp conflict with natural expectation is that the memories would be stored in geometric future and part of them would become un-changing permanent part for the time reversed
re-incarnation of self- kind of Karma.
Note however that self might have also mental images represented as sub-CDs in geometric past.
M 8 − H-duality suggests space-time picture about the ”log files”.
1. 4-D space-time surfaces in complexified M 8 having interpretation as complexified octonions are 4-D
roots for octonion valued polynomial obtained as an algebraic continuation of a real polynomial
with rational or even algebraic coefficients. M 8 − H correspondence maps thee surfaces to minimal
surfaces with 2-D singularities in H [5, 4].
2. Besides this one obtains for any polynomial also special solutions as analogs of branes in M-theory.
They have topology of 6-D ball and their projection to M 4 is t = rn hyperplane intersecting CD and
with topology of 3-ball. rn is a root of P and thus an algebraic number. I have called t = rn ”very
special moments in the life of self”. Generalized vertices for particle reactions would correspond to
partonic 2-surfaces localized at these 6-surfaces. At these surfaces incoming and outgoing partonic
orbits would be glued together along their ends. The roots define positions of external particles at
the boundaries of CD.
3. In SSFRs these balls at the active half of CD would shift towards future and new roots would
emerge. These roots wold define a geometric representation of the memories of CD as ”log file”
increasing in size. If there are sub-CDs associate with them, one would have mental images shifting
towards future.
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1.1.2
”Big” state function reductions (BSFRs)
”Big” state function reductions (BSFRs) correspond to ordinary state function reductions (SFRs) in ZEO.
In BSFR the roles of active and passive boundaries of CD are changed and the arrow of geometric time
changes since the formerly passive boundary starts to shift to opposite time direction. State function
reduction not commuting with the observables defining states at passive boundary as their eigenstates
would takes place and the state at passive boundary would be changed. It would be however fixed by
quantum dynamics. The findings of Minev et al provide support for the change of the arrow of time in
ordinary SFR [3].
The passive boundary can be shifted towards future so that the size of CD would decrease. One can
say that the re-incarnate would be experience childhood. Note that also part of the ”log file” about
often personal experiences of self towards end of its life defining the permanent part of self-hood of the
re-incarnate would disappear. The interpretation in terms of Karma is suggestive.
Remark: During a discussion with Marko Manninen, Marko noticed that people who have had near
death experience often report that they experienced their entire life like a film during these moments.
Could the ”log file” representing stored mental images give rise to this experience at the moment of death?
1.2
What happens in biological death from TGD perspective?
What happens in biological death can be taken as a guideline in attempts to understand what happens
in BSFR.
1. Death certainly occurs if there is no metabolic energy feed to the system. Metabolic energy feed
is guaranteed by nutrition using basic molecules as metabolites. Since the increase of hef f quite
generally requires energy if other parameters are kept constant and since the reduction of hef f
can take spontaneously, the metabolic energy is needed to keep the distribution of values of hef f
stationary or even increase it - at least during the growth of organism and perhaps also during the
mature age when it would go to increase of hef f at MB.
If the size of CD for at least MB correlates with the maximum value of hef f or its average, the size
of CD cannot grow and can be even reduced if the metabolic energy feed is too low. The starving
organism withers and its mental abilities are reduced. This could correspond to the reduction of
maximum/average value of hef f and also size of CD.
One can argue that if the organism loses metabolic energy feed or is not able to utilize the metabolic
energy death and therefore also BSFR must take place.
2. In ZEO self-organization reduces to the second law in reversed direction of geometric time at the
level of MB inducing effective change of arrow of time at the level of biological body [6]. The
necessary energy feed correspond to dissipation of energy in opposite time direction. In biological
matter energy feed means its extraction from the metabolites fed to the system. One could say
that system sends negative energy to the systems able to receive it. A more precise statement is
that time reversed subs-system dissipates and metabolites receive the energy but in reversed time
direction.
In living matter sub-systems with non-standard arrow of time are necessary since their dissipation
is needed to extract metabolic energy. The highest level dissipates in standard time direction and
there must be a transfer of energy between different levels. This hierarchy of levels with opposite
arrows of geometric time would be realized at the level of MB.
1.3
Death as a re-incarnation with opposite arrow of time
These observations suggest that one should consider the reincarnation with opposite arrow of time with
wisdom coming from the death of biological systems.
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Pitkänen, M., When Does ”Big” State Function Reduction & Reversed Arrow of Time Take Place?
1. We know what happens in death and birth in biological systems. What happens in biological death
should have analogy at general level. In particular, in death the decay of the system to components
should occur. Also the opposite of this process with reversed arrow of time should take place and
lead at molecular level to the replication of DNA and RNA and build-up of basic biomolecules and at
the cell level to cell replications and development of organs. How these processes could correspond
to each other?
2. The perceived time corresponds to the hyperplane t = T /2 dividing CD to parts of same size. Here
T is the distance between the tips of CD and therefore to maximal diameter of temporal slice of
cd, which is 3-ball. The part of CD above it shifts towards future in SSFRs. In BSFR parts of the
boundary of space-time surfaces at the active boundary of CD become unchanging permanent parts
of the re-incarnate - kind of log file about the previous life. One can say that the law of Karma is
realized.
If CD decreases in size in BSFR the former active boundary keeps its position but its size as distance
between its tips is scaled down: T → T1 ≤ T . The re-incarnate would start from childhood at
T −T1 /2 and would get partially rid of the permanent part of unchanging self-hood corresponding to
interval [T −T1 /2, T /2] so that the permanent part of reincarnate would correspond to [T −T1 /2, T ].
Reincarnate would start almost from scratch, so to say. The part between T − T1 /2 and T would
be preserved as analog of what was called BIOS in personal computers.
3. At the moment of birth CD possibly would thus decrease in size and the former passive boundary
now in the range [T − T1 /2, T − T1 ] and lower tip of new CD at T − T1 would become active and the
seat of sensory experience. Arrow of time would change. Where the analog of biological decay is
located? The region of CD in the range [T /2, T − T1 /2] disappearing from ”log file” is the natural
candidate. This region is also the place, where the events related to birth in opposite time direction
should take place.
4. The decay of the organism should therefore correspond to the development and birth of re-incarnated
organism at the level of MB (it must be also remembered that genuine time reversal takes place at
the level of MB and induces only effective time reversal at the level of ordinary bio-matter). The
decay of organism dissipates energy in standard time direction: this energy could used by the reincarnate as metabolic energy. How long lasting biochemical processes have effective time reversals
depends on the quantum coherence scale determined by the size scale of corresponding CD.
1.4
Could the re-incarnations with opposite arrow of time be seen in biochemistry?
The possible occurrence of effective time reversals at the level of bio-chemistry could be perhaps tested
experimentally.
1. Could the replication of DNA and RNA and build-up of various bio-molecules be effective timereversals for their decays. Could the same apply to the replication of cells and generation of organs.
Replication of DNA is self-organization process in which second DNA strand serves as a template
for a new one. The decay of DNA should therefore involve two DNA strands such that the second
DNA strand serves as a template for the effectively time reversed replication. The double strand
structure indeed makes possible for the other strand to decay first. Cell replication should use
another cell as replicate and same would happen in the cell decay.
2. An interesting mental exercise is to imagine the time reversals of various basic processes like transcription and translation. In the time reversal of translation of mRNA to amino-acid sequence the
amino-acid sequence and mRNA would return to ribosome machinery, and amino-acid and tRNA
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Pitkänen, M., When Does ”Big” State Function Reduction & Reversed Arrow of Time Take Place?
codon associated with tRNA would return to form tRNA. mRNA strand would shift one step backwards and the process would repeat itself and finally mRNA strand would return to open DNA
strand. In the time reversal of transcription of DNA to mRNA, mRNA strand would return to open
part of DNA strand, decay to RNA codons and eventually DNA strand would close. It should be
easy to check whether these processes really occur in the decay process.
3. The formation of stem cells involves de-differentiation. Could it mean time reversal of the entire
process leading to a differentiated cell? Also this idea could be tested.
In biology pairs of various structures often occur. Could they correspond in some sense to effective
time reversals of each other whereas at the level of magnetic body one would have genuine time reversals
1. Could the opposite inherent chiralities of MBs of DNA strands correspond to opposite arrows of
time at the level of MB of DNA realizing dark genetic code [1]? Could this be seen as a kind
of explanation for the double strand structure of DNA. Could the passivity of DNA strand with
respect to transcription correspond to opposite arrow of time at the level of MB? Could the passive
strand become active in time reversal?
2. Even brain has this kind of pairing. Right brain hemisphere is passive in the sense that it does not
seem to contribute to wake-up intelligence (presumably identified as analytic intelligence). Could
either hemisphere serve as a template in the development of brain or could this happen only at the
level of MB of brain? Could different time arrows at the level of MB be used to understand the
strange passive character of right brain and could one one understand the holism of right brain viz.
analytic reductionism of left brain as reflection of the fact that dissipation as decay corresponds to
time reversal for self-organization generating structures at the level of MB.
1.5
What about ordinary re-incarnation?
A couple of comments relating to the notion of re-incarnation in standard sense are in order.
1. Eastern philosophies talk about the possibility of liberation from Karma’s cycle. Can one imagine
something like this? The above picture would suggest that in this kind of process the reduction of
the size of CD does not occur at all and therefore there would be no decay process equivalent to
the growth of time reversed organism. This would serve as an empirical signature for the liberation
- if possible at all. CD would continue to increase in size or perhaps keep its size. It would seem
that a new kind of non-biological source of metabolic energy would be needed.
2. Reincarnation is a basic notion in Eastern philosophies. In ordinary reincarnation person has
memories about life of a person, who lived earlier. There is evidence for this. This cannot be
understood in terms of time reversed re-incarnation.
Recall that there would be a hierarchy of selves and corresponding CDs within CDs. It has remained
an open question whether CDs could also overlap? Could re-incarnation in ordinary sense be
explained in terms of this kind of overlap?
Suppose that one has two overlapping CDs: CD1 and CD2 and that CD2 extends farther to the
future of CD1 . The sub-CDs of CD1 shift to future as the active part of CD1 shifts to future and
increases in size giving rise to a kind of log file defining the personal memories of CD1 . In this kind
of situation the mental images of CD1 can enter to CD2 and become mental images of CD2 . This
would be sharing of mental images but in different sense as compared to the fusion of mental images
by entanglement, which could also require intersection of sub-CDs of mental images.
Could one imagine that the cosmos is full of selves serving as counterparts of memes wandering
around and finding for selves hosting them by providing metabolic energy? Note that ZEO means
that CD center of mass degrees of freedom do not carry any conserved quantum numbers so that
the motion of these lonely CDs would not be restricted by conservation laws!
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Pitkänen, M., When Does ”Big” State Function Reduction & Reversed Arrow of Time Take Place?
3. This picture suggests that CD:s form a conscious fractal atlas consisting of charts with various
resolutions analogous to the atlas defining a covering of manifold by open sets. The earlier proposal
was that in biological death MB redirects its attention to a new system. This picture would be
modified: the MB of of CD1 would still attend the time-reversed system and experience timereversed life. Some sub-CDs of CD1 would however belong to a new CD in its geometric future CD2 . This conforms with the intuitive expectation that space-time surfaces continue outside CD
and only the perceptive field of conscious entity is restricted to CD.
4. Mental images should correspond to sub-selves and therefore sub-CDs of CD. Contrary to what I
have proposed earlier, it seems that after images cannot correspond to BSFR type re-incarnations
of mental images nor re-incarnations in standard sense.
Mental images would shift towards the future together with active part of CD and form a kind of
log file. Could after images be memories of previous mental images involving a signal time reflect
from the the mental image in log file and creating the after image as a sensory memory of the earlier
visual mental image? Or could one understand after images in terms of propagation of dark photon
signals along closed magnetic loops giving rise to periodically occurring mental images.
While writing this article I learned about a highly interesting claim (https://tinyurl.com/yap8ss4p)
made by the research group led by Harold Katcher. The claim is that the epigenetic age (there are several
measures for it such as methylation level of DNA) of rats has been reduced up to 50 percent. The theory
goes that epigenetic age of molecules would be controllable by hormonal signalling globally.
BSFR would mean death of conscious entity and its reincarnation with opposite arrow of time. The
system would rejuvenate in the transition starting a new life in opposite time direction from childhood
so to say - rejuvenation would be in question. Doing this twice would lead to life with original arrow of
time but starting in rejuvenated state. The claim of the group suggests that living matter could do this
systematically using hormonal control.
Received May 6, 2020; Revised May 13,2020; Accepted June 29, 2020
References
[1] Pitkänen M. About Physical Representations of Genetic Code in Terms of Dark Nuclear Strings.
Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/genecodemodels.pdf, 2016.
[2] Pitkänen M. Getting philosophical: some comments about the problems of physics, neuroscience, and
biology. Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/philosophic.pdf, 2018.
[3] Pitkänen M. Copenhagen interpretation dead: long live ZEO based quantum measurement theory!
Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/Bohrdead.pdf, 2019.
[4] Pitkänen M. M 8 − H duality and consciousness. Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_
html/articles/M8Hconsc.pdf, 2019.
[5] Pitkänen M. New results related to M 8 − H duality. Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_
html/articles/M8Hduality.pdf, 2019.
[6] Pitkänen M. Quantum self-organization by hef f changing phase transitions. Available at: http:
//tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/heffselforg.pdf, 2019.
[7] Pitkänen M. Some comments related to Zero Energy Ontology (ZEO). Available at: http://
tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/zeoquestions.pdf, 2019.
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437
Pitkänen, M., When Does ”Big” State Function Reduction & Reversed Arrow of Time Take Place?
[8] Pitkänen M. Could quantum randomness have something to do with classical chaos? Available at:
http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/chaostgd.pdf, 2020.
[9] Pitkänen M. The dynamics of SSFRs as quantum measurement cascades in the group algebra of
Galois group. Available at: http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/SSFRGalois.pdf, 2020.
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| October 2021 | Volume 12 | Issue 3 | pp 312-313
Hu, H. & Wu, M., Iona Miller (1949 - 2021): Multitalented Writer, Artist & Visionary
312
In Memoriam
Iona Miller (1949 - 2021): Multitalented Writer, Artist & Visionary
Huping Hu* & Maoxin Wu
ABSTRACT
Iona Miller (1949 - 2021) was a multitalented writer, artist and visionary. She was an
inspirational and compassionate human being and a member of the Advisory Board of this
journal. She also published twenty-nine (29) articles here. She will be missed by us, our
readers/patrons and many others who knew her – Good journey on the other side, Iona, and may
your legacy live on!
Keywords: Iona Miller, artist, writer, visionary, nonfiction, multimedia, legacy, compassionate,
inspirational.
Iona Miller journeyed to the other side quite unexpectedly on March 26, 2021 [1]. She last
communicated on March 4, 2021 with the first author on a scientific topic through Facebook
Messinger. She was “a nonfiction writer for the academic and popular press, clinical
hypnotherapist (ACHE) and multimedia artist[;] [h]er work is an omni-sensory fusion of
intelligence, science-art, new physics, symbolism, source mysticism, futuring, and emergent
paradigm shift, creating a unique viewpoint[;] [she was] interested in extraordinary human
potential and experience, and the EFFECTS of doctrines of religion, science, psychology, and
the arts[;] [she served] on the Advisory Boards of Journal of Consciousness Exploration &
Research, DNA Decipher Journal, and Scientific God Journal....” [2].
She was an inspirational and compassionate human being and a truth seeker. She pondered and
explored the meanings of life and death through numerous writings and artworks [2].
In an essay/statement entitled “The Mask of Eternity: The Quest for Immortality and the
Afterlife” and published in a Special Issue of JCER “Theories of Consciousness and Death”
edited by Gregory M. Nixon, Ph.D., she shared the following with the readers [3]:
Correspondence: Huping Hu, Ph.D., J.D., QuantumDream Inc., P. O. Box 267, Stony Brook,, NY 11790. E-mail: editor@jcer.com
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Hu, H. & Wu, M., Iona Miller (1949 - 2021): Multitalented Writer, Artist & Visionary
313
When we are gone, only the ultimate question remains. Evidence that consciousness
survives death remains elusive. With or without warm, welcoming smiles from relatives
we may have loathed in life, it remains our obsession to know what happens when our
screen-reality stops, and fades to black. Conscious immortality remains questionable.
This writer remains firmly agnostic but enjoys entertaining wishful thinking.
Death is the greatest mystery of life. Buddha rejected the question as useless, according
to Jung. Throughout history, it remains a source of wonder, fear, hopefulness, and
puzzlement. We seek compassionate ways of dealing with this uncertainty that no
discussion of entanglement or holographic memory can assuage.
There is little wonder we tend to fall back on traditional attitudes informed by
simplicity, meaningful ceremony, and acceptance. It is something we cannot grasp at
all, despite our conceptions of time and space and what might lie beyond them, even if
some of our psychic experience seems unbound by spacetime. There is NoWhere to go
and we are all going to get there.
We at JCER celebrate her life and thank her for her advisory services to the journal. She will be
missed by us, our readers/patrons and many others who knew her – Good journey on the other
side, Iona, and may your legacy live on!
References
1. https://www.facebook.com/iona.miller
2. https://ionamiller.weebly.com/
3. Miller, I. (2016), The Mask of Eternity: The Quest for Immortality and the Afterlife, Journal of
Consciousness Exploration & Research, 7(11): pp. 1218-1228.
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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| May 2023 | Volume 14 | Issue 3 | pp. 225-245
Pramod, D., Vedic Traditions & Scientific Applications
225
Perspective
Vedic Traditions & Scientific Applications
Domadala Pramod*
R&D, Malla Reddy University, Hyderabad, India
Abstract
India is a land of temples and pilgrimage centres. It is ruled by many kings of different people
and constructed by many religious places and temples and education centres for the betterment of
their life and to understand purpose of life so that they upgrade them self and to the higher levels
by following the Vedic scriptures and visiting the divine places. Thus, the Hindus have staunch
believers of spirituality. They follow traditions and customs, based on Santan Dharma, which are
derived from the Vedic scriptures and two great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. They are
meant for a prosperous, healthy, and spiritual environment in the society which would be free
from the infections and crimes. The individual or society who follows systematically experience
peace and harmony. In this materialistic world, people have either neglected or have forgotten to
adhere to traditions and cultural values, may be due to the lack of understanding of their
importance in everyday life. The sudden outbreak of pandemic COVID-19 has compelled them
to realize and understand their importance, how our forefathers and sages designed without any
flaws, and passed from one generation to another for the wellbeing of people and to protect from
unforeseen incidents and epidemic diseases. Modern studies show that there is a strong
relationship between spirituality and medicine. There are a large number of traditions and
customs in Hindu scriptures. Some of the prominent traditions (such as hygienic and satvik food,
eating habits, isolation, cleanliness, healing prayers, healthy children, yagnas, etc.) are
systematically analyzed and presented in this paper. All the Vedic traditions are scientifically
based and they need to be explored further for understanding the science behind them.
Keywords: COVID19, Hindu traditions, spirituality in medicine, lighting lamp, namaste, masks,
cleanliness, healing prayers, vegetarian diet, eating habits, yagnas, cremation.
1. Introduction
India is a resource centre of spirituality in the world. Indian Rishies or Sages received the
wisdom through “Divya Drishti or Farsight”. The Hindu way of life is based upon the teachings
of the Vedic scriptures. The two great epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and holy
scriptures the Bhagvad gita1 and the Srimad Bhagvatam2 are sources of inspiration and direction
to establish proper civilized society. They led to the formulation of proper rituals and traditions,
and cultural and moral values for human society. They are based on the concepts of Dharma,
Ahimsa, and Karma. The customs and rituals are eternal and their culture is very rich. They have
*Correspondence: Prof. D Pramod, Dean, R&D, Malla Reddy University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India.
E-mail:dpramod61@gmail.com
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Pramod, D., Vedic Traditions & Scientific Applications
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been framed by our great ancestors by considering all aspects of cosmic elements for the welfare
of all living entities on this earth planet. These are challenges and eye-openers for scientists to
explore Vedic science.
As per the scriptures, the birth and death cycle continue as per the law of Karma.3,4 The human
form is very rare to get it and that should be utilized for liberation from this materialistic world
and to go back to Godhead. These beliefs have made them follow and practice traditional and
cultural values, which together give a proper direction to act in a particular way to lead a happy
life in harmony with nature and other living entities. The studies have shown that the science of
spirituality has a psychological influence on the behaviour and self-confidence of patients and
the relation between spirituality and medicine cannot be ruled out. 5
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The natural calamities, droughts,
floods; and cyclones environment pollution, water crisis, and the regular epidemic diseases are
consequences of the ruthless activities of humans in the name of civilization and industrialization
of a country. The drunken people can enjoy themselves, but excessive drinking is harmful to self
and others. Because of one drunken driver may kill innocent passengers and outside standing
vehicles and other people and their properties. Professor Robin Room, Director, Centre for
Alcohol Policy Research, University of Melbourne writes in a given year 367 people Australians
die because of another’s drinking and 13,600 are hospitalized etc. 39
It is believed the regular epidemic diseases such as Ebola virus, Zika virus, Chikungunya,
Plague, H1N1, Swine flu, and the present Coronavirus were caused due to the merciless
activities killing of animals for consumption of unhealthy meat, beef, pork, and chicken, etc.
These diseases are mostly originated from slaughter centres and unhygienic places from different
parts of the world. The present dreadful Coronavirus which was originated from the Wet market,
Wuhan, China, spread globally and cause pandemic diseases and claimed millions of lives of
innocent people. 6,7
To save people from the deadly COVID1, the most of the world leaders-imposed lockdown in
their countries to avoid gathering of people and prevent the virus, it is suggested to maintain
social distance, cleaning hands regularly with sanitizer or soap water, and use a mask to cover
mouth and nose, whenever one goes outside and the infected people are put in quarantine
(Isolation) for 14 days. These types of precautionary measurements saved and cured a lot of
people from COVID positive patients.
The impact of lockdown is so powerful that it has touched the hearts of many people in the world
and cautioned them to follow ancient traditional values which were forgotten or neglected
intentionally or unintentionally in the name of human civilization and the development of
society. The basic concepts of moral and ethical values such as neatness and cleanliness; respect
all living and non-living bodies are taught to all children right from primary schools too, apart
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Pramod, D., Vedic Traditions & Scientific Applications
227
from the values they learn from their families. But people have either forgotten or not understood
the basic fundamental laws and concepts taught in our schools, colleges, or may be our education
system has failed to inculcate these values through texts and curriculum.
Some believe the Hindu cultural values are too complicated to perform and to understand its
procedures, and implications may not be scientifically proved. They are perfect and intact. No
one can find out any flaws and shortcomings. During ancient period people were following
Vedic culture and rituals relentlessly and passed from one generation to other, which yielded
peace and harmony in the Hindu families thus the Vedic culture was rich in the world. Western
people used to come to India to learn in Takahashila and Nalanda Universities.
But the present generation people are unable to understand or might not have reached that level
of consciousness to realize what is written in the literature. As a result, the people are
materialistically oriented and following unethical values for corrupt practices and lust for power
that is prevailing in the present society causing violence and unrest in the world.
Now we can see during this pandemic COVID19 the Government authorities of all countries are
educating people, the basic principles of cleanliness, washing hands and feet periodically, social
distances, stay at home and quarantine for COVID positive patients, etc, which are basics and
common practices in Hinduism. Some of the Hindu traditions and customs and practices in daily
life are studied and presented below.
2. Traditions & Customs
(a) Greetings - Namaste
Namaste or Namaskar is a special type gesture to greet each other when two
people meet each other. Every living entity has a soul and a super soul. It
implies "I bow to the Supreme Lord in you". It means “The Supreme Lord in
me recognizes the Supreme Lord in you”. In other words, two souls are
coming to unite for fruitful discussions. Namaste is usually spoken with a
pleasant voice by slightly bending and hands pressed together, palms
touching and fingers pointing upwards, thumbs close to the chest. This mode
of greetings avoids physical contact of persons and stop spreading
infections. It is being followed by most people in the world after the outbreak of Coronavirus.
(2) Hands & Feet
The well-known concept is
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness”.
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One needs to be pure internally and externally. Purity needs to be in the heart as well as on the
surface of the human body. The yoga and meditation yield internal purity whereas the cleaning
hands and feet regularly with soap water or sanitizer leads to external purity. One needs both
moral purity and personal hygiene. Cleaning your hands (Fig.2) and feet with regular soap and
with water is a highly effective way to stop the spread of germs and bacteria; and removes fungal
infections if any.
(3) Shoes & Socks
One must remove
shoes and socks before
entering the house and
temples. (Fig.3) One
must be pure of the
purest form to enter
into the sanctity place
at religious places. The
Supreme
Lord
in
Bhagavad-gita
says
one out of one million will reach Me. Thus one must be pure internally as well as extremally.
The basic thing bringing shoes and socks odor inside means allowing soiled things and bacteria
into the house or temples. It is a courteous way in respecting the house and temple to keep floor
free from fungus and harmful substances come along with shoes. It is a strict custom in Hindu
families to clean your hands and wash your feet and legs before entering in to the house (Fig.3)
and clean hands before taking food. One must wash hands and feet after coming from toilets.
Rest room shoes or slippers must be avoided to use in the houses. In some of the of the orthodox
families, outside cleaners and maid servants are also discouraged. One can see these customs in
some of traditional Brahmin houses that they clean their houses, utensils and wash their clothes
by themselves. The way one cleanses one’s own body, one can clean one’s own rest rooms. If the
anatomy of human body parts is not secret, humans could have appointed maid servants to clean
those parts also.
Visitors are not allowed into ICU of hospitals with their own shoes. As per the reports, the
during the Coronavirus period in Italy, most of the patients in the hospitals are infected by the
doctors, nurses and other medical staff, they were carrying the contagious Coronavirus through
shoes13. These small values could have saved people from death. Keeping your hands and feet
clean and dry is an effective way to prevent these health issues.
(3) Rangloi
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It is the general practice in Hindu families that everyday
morning, the front portion of the house, the open place is
swept and cleaned with water; and especially in rural areas,
they use even cow dung to wipe out dirt and insects. Before
performing morning and evening prayers, it is mandatory in
Hindu families to clean and mop the houses every day,
using detergents to remove dirt, dust, and insects for a
hygienic atmosphere in the house.
The way one cleanses one’s own body, one should clean
one’s restrooms. If the anatomy of human body segments is
not concealed, humans could have appointed maidservants to clean those parts also.
(4) Lighting Lamp
We are in a world of darkness. The light leads us from darkness to
enlightenment. It symbolizes the presence of goddess Laxmi and
goddess Sarswathi.8
a) Lighting lamp is a symbol of truth and wisdom and increases
the worship
b) Lighting lamp in the morning and evening before the deities in the
house gives peace,
happiness, and positiveness in the house.
c) In any organization, a program starts with lighting a lamp.
d) Diyas are lit in during dusk and place in front of the door to purify the house and air to
welcome goddess Laxmi in the evening and prevent insects and reptiles entering the house.
e) According to the Science of Spirituality lighting lamps with pure ghee is more satvic (mode of
goodness) when compared to oil. The pure ghee produces more satvic vibrations and it
spreads longer distance, the satvic effect is more predominant on the atmosphere when it
stops burning than the oil used lamps.9 When ghee comes in contact with fire, the atmosphere
becomes a more sacred and pleasant smell, and it removes diseases from the place. A house
without a lamp is considered to be a ghost place.
(5) Early to bed and early to rise
This is a well-renowned thought.10 Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy and
wealthy. One should sleep early and wake up early. The early morning period is considered to be
an auspicious time known as Braham Murtha nearly one and a half-hour time before the
Sunrise.11 During this time the environment is very clean and birds are cheerful for waiting to see
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the rising Sun. It will have a considerable effect on the body and mind when one practices
Meditation and Yoga. The early morning sun radiations will keep the body fit and healthy. These
are basic principles in Gurukuls and Vedic schools to learn scriptures and chanting Vedic hymns
during Braham Murtha time. The power of retentivity is very high; and students would be sharp
and bright if one utilizes this golden period for studies. Another advantage is, that one feels the
day is longer.
The human body requires at least four to five hours of sleep so that body is not overburdened
with conscious activities and concentrates on unconscious activities to rejuvenate for the next
day’s work. The regular night shift jobs in present MNCs may not be advisable for employees
in regards to health issues.
(6) Bath
The human body temperature varies from 36.10C to 38.30C (under extreme situation it may go
up to 400 C). Under these conditions dynamics of various parts of the body release sticky oil
through oil and sweat pores of the skin which accumulate bacteria and other microorganisms
with dirty smell. It gives irritation and suffocation to the self and unpleasant to others who are
standing nearby. To keep a healthy body and hygienic one must take bath with soap preferably
using hot water that removes the dust particles and bacteria. As per the scriptures: 2
a) One must take bath at least twice a day i.e. morning and evening. It is mandatory to take
bath before preparing the food and worshiping God.
b) Once taken bath you should not touch others who did not take bath.
c) After coming from a barbershop and funeral, one must take bath.
d) One should not touch anything or anybody in a home without taking bath
e) Once should touch others who are in isolation. These are further discussed in detail in
sections 13 and14.
(7) Clothes – Decency
Fresh or new clothes make you feel pure and happy. The used clothes generally will have dust
particles or dirty oil layer due to one’s sweating and bacteria from our own body, and from
outside. The body oil and sweat, other junk generated from glands reach out through the oil and
sweat pores of the skin. They cause skin infections and unpleasant smell to self as well as to
nearby people. Once the unwashed clothes and bed sheets especially pillow covers are used,
again and again, the sweat rubs off the bacteria and it gets multiplied which can cause a stinky
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smell and potentially skin irritations or cause fungal infections. Thus, it is suggested to have a
bath at least twice in a day i.e., morning and evening.
The conservative families avoid giving dirty clothes to washer men, thinking they mix and boil
with other’s infectious clothes. Either they were calling washer men to homes or washing clothes
by themselves only. Washing machines are better to avoid spreading outside infections. One
should generally avoid giving clothes to laundrymen or dry cleaners unless there is an emergency
of important dresses.12
The old clothes must be periodically disposed of to avoid the growth of germs. In the past,
people used to have a lot of manual work in the fields and outside, thus new clothes were
generally preferred to purchase during festivals and other occasions. The trend still is going on to
wear on important festivals. Turmeric powder is sprinkled or few dots are placed on new clothes
to kill bacteria. Special woollen or silk clothes kept separately are used for devotional activities.
The types of new clothes or dresses we wear affect our behaviour, attitude, personality, mood
and confidence, and even the way we interact with each other. In Hindu rituals, the dress code is
the most important attribute for both males and females. Specific dresses are meant to wear on
specific functions during rituals and marriages. To have proper decency, dress codes are also
observed in some of the educational institutions and organizations. The indecency or sexy
dresses will put her self-others in problems. Most of the crime rates are alarming problems in the
world because of dresses of women clothes. The difference between the human and animal is
that we wear clothes they do not wear, because we are intelligent. Those who do not wear clothes
they are worse than animals.
(9) Tilak
Tilak or Tika is a religious mark on the forehead that represents as
Hindus. The location on the forehead is of immense significance for
both males and females. Applying Tilak is mandatory for females
and especially for married people. Human bodies are energy
possessing bodies, where energy continuously flows within the
body; and between the body and surroundings and vice verse. This energy flows through Nadis
(Astral nerves)13 distributed through the body. All these Nadis will meet at a divine point on the
forehead between two eyebrows and above the nose or in other words the whole body is
controlled from this point. The point is also known as Ajna Chakra (it is one of the seven
chakras).14 This symbolic location is very sensitive and more powerful for two reasons - 1)
negative energy directed at this point, passes through the body and cause damage to the body and
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imbalance to take place within in the body, 2) positive energy flows out the body from this point
to protect as well as destroy harmful incidents.
It is believed that the Lord Shiva’s third eve or sixth sense is located at this point12. The
scriptures say when Lord Shiva opens the third eye; mahapralayam or disastrous events may
take place in the world.
The wrinkles on the forehead imply a person’s facial expressions. Applying a tilak, ensures
happiness, comfortable and peaceful, and gives self-confidence and appears to be a pure Hindu
devotee.
(10) Bangles
The bangles and earrings are God gifted
ornaments for ladies. The wrists are always
in regular movements. The bangles on the
wrists are in constant friction with each other
which increases the blood circulation in the
body. They control high blood pressure and
recharge the energy levels of the body. The
circular-shaped bangles revert the electricity
which is passing through them. 32
A function called “Seemantham” is arranged
during the 7th month of pregnancy. The mother is gifted with various types of Bangles and
Sarees. The tinkling sound of bangles of a mother, helps the child to develop the baby’s
audibility during the pregnancy period (more details in section18). The various types and colours
of bangles have different significances. Gold bangles yield fortune Red colour gives energy, etc.
The sound vibrations of bangles protect the ladies from negative energy sources. Thus, Hindu
girls are mandatory to wear bangles. The colourful of bangles and tilak on the forehead represent
they are married and respectable women and mothers in a society. Those representations reduce
the crime rate in society. The western culture of ladies which is more luring to opposite gender
causing more crime rates in the world.
(11) Healthy Children
Keeping in view of the healthy children and safety of pregnant ladies, the Indian government has
generously sanctioned six months of maternity leave for employees so that they get proper rest in
the home, and to be away from infections and virus-like COVID19 in offices and at other places
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and a risk factor for child and mother for daily commuting, thus country will be free from birth
defective or special needs children.33
Proper care and service to the pregnant lady and providing nutritious food daily, the happy joyful
environment in the house will have a great impact on the mother as well as the child in the
womb. Music is divine. In traditional families, classical music, divine slokas, and moral stories
are recited and audiotapes are played before pregnant ladies. The rhythmic sound vibrations
would give pleasure to the mother as well as pass on to the child which stimulates auditory
senses and improves the reflexes of the child. It is believed, the type of music she listens during
pregnancy would formulate the personality of the child when she or he grows up. The soft music
develops calm and quite whereas loud music leads to an aggressive child. The loudness of sound
also affects the sense organs, it is recommended to keep the volume around 50-60 decibels as
other sound vibrations such as heartbeats, the gurgling of the tummy.34 The alarming sound
vibration due to the regular movement of trains and excessive labour work or activities for
pregnant ladies may have adverse effects on the child and sometimes she may have a deformed
child.
(12) Pure Devotees
The scriptures reveal, the human form is very rare to get it and its purpose is for self-realization
and to go back to Godhead.1 To achieve this realization, one has to be a pure devotee. The
conditions for a pure devotee are: one should in the mode of goodness (Satvic) and should follow
four regulative principles1,2 -1) No eating meat, fish, or eggs. 2) No gambling, 3) No use of
intoxicants and 4) No illicit sex. They are said to be satvic pure devotees. (discussed in detail in
section 21)
If such saintly people are admitted to the hospital, they may be termed as Ideal Spiritual Patients
(ISP). It is believed that their health conditions are better than others as they are satvic people.
They are physically as well as mentally strong and always be in a transcendental state
irrespective of any happiness or sorrowfulness.5 They realize the physical pain is due to their law
of karma and they accept it as per the Lord’s wish.
3. Prayers - Healthy Environment
Prayers and deity worships are two divine activities of their daily schedule during the Sunrise
and the Sunset periods. Their payers are for the welfare of all living entities, for self as well as
for family members. They worship Trimurti, Four vedas, Five cosmic elements, Six seasons,
Seven rivers, Eight directions and Navagrahas and Dashvathaaras (Sanskruthi Song)15 for
providing optimum conditions for the liveable, healthy and prosperous environment on the Earth
for living entities and some other prayers for Lord Shiva to destroy evils and curb diseases and
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negative energy prevailing in the premises. The deities radiate positive energy and make free
from miscreants. A house without a God’s portrait, daily prayers, and lighting lamps are
considered to be non-inhabitant or ghost house. These prayers will bestow happiness and make
them psychologically strong.
(1) Healing Mantras - Spirituality and Medicine
As per Hindu traditions, when people are under a critical situation in fighting for health and
illness, or fear of threat and death or to protect from epidemic diseases or no hope on medicines,
the final remedy for them is to plead the God of medicine “Dhanwantari” and the God of
Destroyer “Lord Shiva” through a recitation of powerful mantras :16
Maha Mrityunjava, Mantra
Om tryambakam yajāmahe sugandhim puṣṭi vardhanam ;
urvā rukamiv bandhanān mṛtyor mukṣīya mā'mṛtāt .
Hare Krishna Mantra
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare .
Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare.
Vishnu Sahasranama Stohram.
They may get survived as per their Law of karma. In order to give the importance of Indian
medicines, the Indian Government has declared that Dhanwantari Trayodashi every year would
be celebrated as "National Ayurveda Day” 17
“Spirituality and medicine are closely associated and they are indelible; the quality of life of
spiritual patients is overall better than non-spiritual patients; the need for the medical community
to support the spiritual lives of patients. Do Spirituality and Medicine Go Together?” as reported
by Michel Balboni and Tracy Balboni in their article.5
(2) Navagrahas- Effects on Human health and Peace
Hindus firmly believe astrology, the study of nine planets (Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter,
Venus, Saturn, Rahu, and Ketu) forecast the effectiveness of planets on the earth atmosphere and
the lives of individual people.18 The interplanetary motion reflects some rays on the earth which
influences the lives of people. The body derives energy from the Sun, any small changes affect
the energy levels of the human body. It controls digestion and health, and healing process; Moon
controls the mind and emotions; Mars(Mangal) controls blood circulation and diseases;
Mercury(Budh) influences intelligence and grasping abilities; Jupiter (Brihaspathi, Guru) is a
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powerful symbol of spirituality, fortune and causes hurdles and diseases when it comes to
different positions; Venus (Shukra) is benevolent, brings wealth, honor and fame; Saturn (Shani,
son of Sun) creates most of the problems in life, fear, sorrow and diseases, sometimes he gives
happiness also; Rahu and Ketu are shadow planets, they are also like Shani cause problems. Thus
together all these planets control entire living bodies on the earth.
Shani Shingnapur is a famous place in Maharashtra , India, where no house has doors but only
door frames are found in the house. Still no theft takes place and no crime rate since centuries.
The Shnai temple known as Jagrut temple , meaning the Shani god resides alive and He punishes
anyone who attempts to theft from houses. The place is peace full and villagers are happy.
(3) Panchanga Shravanam
As per the tradition, kings in the ancient period and the present government authorities would
request astrologers to recite Panchanga Shravanam (recitation of the yearly calendar) on the day
of the new year festival, Ugadi (which occurs during the last week of March or the first week of
April every year), to know the predictions, the effects of planetary motion on the earth
particularly seasonal rains for agriculture, human health, diseases natural calamities, the safety of
the people and security of the country, etc. Based on those predictions they take precautionary
measures and allocate budget accordingly for the coming financial year.
The astrological effects are mainly due to the gravitational fields of various planets which are
moving around the sun in our solar system. The impacts are prominent when they approach and
deviate from the earth and when they lie on the same line. The Moon’s gravitational pull on the
earth is the main cause of the rise and fall of ocean tides. On no Moon day (Amavasya) is
considered to be as inauspicious19, causes negative effects whereas on full Moon day (Poornima)
is considered to be as auspicious, yield positive effects, these are visible human body and human
behaviour. The solar flares of sun, electric and magnetic field of planets have also critical
influences on the earth’s atmosphere, climatic and seasonal changes.20
People worship regularly, especially on every Saturday, would visit the temples and perform
prayers to minimize the effects of Planets (Nava Graha). Thus considering these effects on the
human body and mind, people give offerings to them before any auspicious or religious
ceremony.
(4) Yagnas
A Yagna is a powerful ancient method of ritual to satisfy Supreme
Lord Vishnu by reciting sacred Vedic verses through the fire of
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God (Agni) as a medium.21 It is a fire pit in which different materials like, pure ghee, cereals,
navratnas, camphor are added such that they all get merged with cosmic elements.
a) Yagnas yield bliss and benediction for the welfare of the members and remove bad karmas of
individuals and society.
b) Oaths are taken before the Fire God (Agni) are authentic and He stands as witness. Such
rituals are mandatory during marriage functions.
c) Maha yagam (large number of yagans together) are performed for the welfare people and to
minimize the effects caused by natural calamities such as drought, cyclones, and foods, etc.
d) The significance of yagans is studied by a team of research scientists under CPCB(Central
Pollution Control Board) conducted several experiments to observe the effect of yagnas.22 It
is noticed that Particulate Matters 2.5 and 10 in the environment are found to be reduced the
PM level after the yagna or hawan is performed. The results have shown that these yagnas
reduced indoor microbes, bacteria, fungi, and pathogens (viruses or microorganisms that
cause diseases). Thus Yagnas purify the environment of the place and drive away infections
and negative energy from that place.
4. Vegetarian Diet
Hindus perform several rituals that are based on the mode of goodness (satvic nature). To be in a
mode of goodness one has to follow vegetarian food (plant-based food includes dairy products
and honey). It is one of the basic conditions of four regulative principles of a pure devotee who
are eligible to perform rituals and go back to Godhead. They are termed as pure devote.
The Bhagvad Gita (BG17. 8-10)1 says, there are three types of foods based on three types of
modes of material nature (Gunas):
a) Foods prepared in the mode of goodness (Satvaguna) are pure and sweet and increases the
duration of life, increase strength, happiness, and satisfaction.
b) Foods that are bitter, too sour, salty, pungent, hot belong to the people of the mode of
Passion ( Rajoguna).
c) Foods cooked more than three hours before taking food is tasteless, decomposed and
unclean, such people are mode of ignorance(Tamoguna).
The three types of material nature determine the behaviour, nature, and health conditions of
people.
The scriptures say the soul carries good and bad deeds to the next birth. To progress in the next
birth, one should not do any misdeeds. As per the law of karma3, slaughtering and consuming
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animal meat are considered to be bad activities. Despite this, some people who are in the mode
of passion and mode of ignorance do take animal meat as a regular diet, however, they undergo
austerities as per their karma either in this birth or next birth.
The satvic vegetarian food has many merits than that of a non-vegetarian diet, in terms of human
behaviour, ethical and moral values, and health problems in everyday life. To maintain good
health, proper regular diet, and to have good health habits, and to be away from epidemic
diseases and infections and environmental effects people are shifting towards vegetarian diet.23-24
Sometimes medical doctors also advise patients to take a vegetarian diet to avoid complications.
Dr. N Gopal krishan (CSIR) scientist and Dr. T P Sethu Madhvan, Physician in an article in
Mathribhumi Daily (April 25, 1999) pointed out that the daily requirement of energy for a
normal human being is 2400 calories. The vegetarian food contains carbohydrates fats and
proteins and the variety of minerals such as calcium, phosphorus, iron, zinc, etc are plenty
available in grains, dal, vegetables, and fruits, which form healthier food. These are sufficient to
produce the required energy for humans. One may avoid animal food which causes contagious
diseases to human beings.25
Ayurveda recommends to respect eating habits, timings, avoid overeating, processed packaged
foods, and reduce fried items cold foods, and cold drinks, Thus traditional Vedic diets improve
the immunity and make them as satvic people. 26
(1) Eating Habits
a) Sitting on floor
Earlier days, people were comfortably taking food by sitting on the
floor. They were feeling healthy and maintaining a good physique.
There are many benefits such as digestion, blood circulation and
reduces muscle and joint pains. They sit on the floor with crossed legs
(Sukhasana) before the meal plate (Leaf plate) and move the body
front and back to take food. These repeated movements will activate
abdominal muscles, which increase the secretion of stomach acids and
allow food to digest faster. It is said that Sukhasan increases blood
circulation and evenly distributed in the body. This posture reduces the
muscle and joint pains in the legs and gives flexibility in the body and feel you feel comfortable.
27
This is still prevailing in traditional families.
It is not advisable to have meals always on the dining table. It may not add any benefit to the
body except giving comfortable and adding richness to your home.
b) Leaf Plates
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The general practice in India, people generally take food on leaf
plates such as on banana, dhaka, betel palm and teak plant leaves
by sitting on the floor. They are called “Pattal or Vistarlu”. They
are hygienic and biodegradable. In some rituals it is mandatory to
offer food on leaf plates for Brahmins. The conventional leaf
plates are superior to plastic plates.
WHO says plastic papers are made of chemical substances like
Melmine, Polypropylene, Bisphenol A(BPA), when hot food comes in contact with plastics,
chemicals are leached into the food. These chemicals are absorbed by human body and gradually
results in diseases, like breast cancer and heart diseases and others. 28
The most preferable plates are Gold, Silver or Copper. But they are unaffordable to middle class
people, one can choose stainless steel plates which are less expensive as well as less harmful.
However, the conventional leaf plates are superior to plastic plates.29 One can manufacture leaf
plates and leaf cups.
c) Chitrahuti
It is considered that whatever is getting to us because of God’s Grace and our Karma, be it food
or clothes or anything. In some regions especially Brahmins sprinkle water around the food
plates before taking the food by chanting Vedic mantras offering to the Supreme God, who is a
fire of digestion residing in living beings, requesting for proper digestion of food with upward
and downward of energy (BG 15.14)1. This process is known as Chitrahuti. Another reason is
that sprinkling of water around the plate does not allow insects or germs to enter and mix with
food that gets impure and infectious.
d) Buffet System
In the present days, we come across another type known as the Buffet system. The eating habits
are neither recommended nor preferred anywhere in Hindu scriptures. This western culture is
prevailing in the society for the past four to five decades.
It is not advisable for a health-conscious point of view, and in more philosophically the rich man
becomes a beggar with a bowl in front of a caterer.
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(2) Cremation
He who takes birth must take death also. In Hindu rituals, it is
customary to do the last rites by consigning the body to fire.
The human body is composed of five cosmic elements earth,
fire, water air, and sky. The Hindu cremations are directed
towards returning the body to these elements by burning it. It is
the method for the final disposition of a dead body through
fire.30 The dead body is kept on a pyre (wooden structure or
electric cremator) and then it is set on fire with rituals so that
all parts of the body get burnt and no pathogens survive at that
high temperature of the fire and ensure that all remnants are wiped out and preventing it from
being a source of spread of any infections and diseases. To offer the dead body to fire (Agni)
with earnest prayers signifies to purify and lead the individual soul for better and brighter life,
and release of spirit that gives a feeling of detachment from the loved ones.
In general, cremation is preferred over burial for space constraints, and the gradual
decomposition of the whole body is not seen clearly, and the possibility of infections and insects
around the place. The ancestors have meticulously planned, the cremation of one body takes
nearly one tree, it seems in the past one Hindu person used to plant at least three trees during
one’s whole life span on special occasions.
On the third day, the ashes and bones are collected and mixed any one of the Indian holy rivers,
preferably the Ganges river. The family members are allowed to enter the house after taking bath
to prevent in spreading of bacteria or viruses if any on their bodies or clothes. Even the sons of
the deceased will cut hairs and go for a bald head as per rituals. This cremation procedure is
being followed in foreign countries also, especially recently the USA government allowed the
cremation procedure for dead bodies of innocent people who lost their lives during the COVID
19 crisis due to the space constraints and spreading of infections.
(3) Isolation
Isolation means Sutak (Sutakam), in other words, it is a type of untouchability. In Hinduism,
sutak is aimed towards the purification of Atma (Soul). At heart, humans are uncleaned. One
must be pure both physically and spiritually. The family member must stay for 10 days in
isolation at the time of the birth of a child as well as at the death of a person in the house. If
parents are departed, the children stay in isolation for 12 days whereas wives are in isolation for
10 days. These details are well narrated in Sri Garudapuran31 which is generally recited during
the isolation period if a person is demised in the house. In orthodox families, four days of
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isolation is observed for ladies during the menstruation period. They come to normal and will be
allowed to interact with family members after taking a head bath.
Thus, the concept of isolation was introduced in Vedic literature. It is nothing but, what we are
calling now as the social distance to avoid shaking hands, staying, and sleeping together which
would prevent in spreading deadly Coronavirus.
(4) Masks
It is an etiquette to use masks or put a hand
before the nose and mouth while speaking
with someone so that droplets will not fall
and cause infections to others. The main
traditional reason is the concept of Ahimsa,
one should neither kill nor eat and inhale the
air which contains germs or insects. This is
still strictly followed in Jainism and orthodox
families. They wear masks, especially during the Sunset period.
(5) Neem Leaves
The Neem trees are abundantly seen in India. It is a medicinal plant,
known as the divine tree and Village Pharmacy tree. They increase
the fertility of the soil, the neem oil, or neem water is used as a
pesticide. The twigs are used for cleaning teeth, the leaves reduce
the boils, rashes, and wounds, they are placed near and under the
patient as insect repellent who is suffering from chickenpox. The
leaves are placed at the entrance of a door to protect harmful insects,
viruses, and bacteria.
(6) Killing of Animals
All living creatures are part and parcel of supreme Lord. Even they have equal rights to survive
on this earth. There is no theory, no law and no prayer to kill other living entities. Killing
animals and selling their meat products for consumption is one of the easiest and lucrative
businesses in the world. No proper scrutiny on their products
It is strong belief in Hinduism, killing animal is a misdeed activity and it is a curse which leads
to bad karma. As per the Newton’s 3rd law , one day there would be a revolt they chase humans
for retaliation; and as per the law of Karma he ( Killer) has to face the situation either in this
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present birth or next births. We find many examples in the literature how people are affected by
the curse
(7) Eating Meat
As per Hindu customs killing animals is a crime and eating meat is a double crime. The
designated place for dead bodies of humans and animals is
graveyard. But people are buying meat (pork , beef etc.) from
unhygienic slaughter centres, keeping in houses that too in
refrigerators , then frying them as mouth –watering dishes and
finally eating and storing in human body for digestion . In this
context lot of questions arise:
a) Is human body a graveyard?
b) Does the anatomy of human body adjust with foreign
material?
c) Does it not create risk to human health?
d) Why doctors do not recommend non vegetarian food to patients and old age people?
e) Why non vegetarian food is not served in the temples? .
f) Why don’t they eat agro products which also give same amount of energy?
“If you eat meat, that animal of that meat will eat you” 14. As per the law of karma eating animal
food is bad deed. To overcome this one has to do lot of positive deeds either in this birth or next
births.9, 14 The first basic condition in spirituality is violence (Himsa), is not allowed and the
meat eaters are not eligible to become pure devotees
(8) Carpets
Carpets beautify the houses and palaces that illustrate richness. Despite the glaring appearances,
the carpets are generally avoided in traditional houses for health hazards associated with allergic,
coughing, wheezing and skin infections due to i) accumulation of dirt, dust, mites, particle
pollutants ii) growth of bacteria due to the shoes, and pets paws iii) falling of eatable items when
taking food over the carpet. iv) infants and children get easily infected especially due to the
chemicals and adhesive used in color combinations are made with volatile organic compounds v)
these pollutants may become airborne while walking and cleaning, may cause allergic vi) they
are not easily washable. The houses and hotels appear to be multi-colored with carpets and
curtains but a lot of risk factors in terms of health.35,36
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(9) Bats
The bats are blood suckling or harmless wild creatures but they are
important to our ecosystem because they pollinate the crops
otherwise they get ruined. They eat mosquitoes. They generate a
deadly virus once if they are infected. There are a lot of myths about
bats, if a bat enters the house, it is considered to be an omen and
saddening news in a family and the house has to be vacated and one
can return after performing rituals.37 One can see the repercussions
and chaotic situations, spreading of Coronavirus for eating the meat
of bat at Wuhan, China.
(10) Alcohol
Taking alcohol is injurious to health is a well-known noble thought, but difficult to make alcohol
free country. Everyone knows regular drinking causes health problems. The consumption of
alcohol and non-vegetarian food does not give any environment in society. In spirituality, they
are called impure devotees. They neither go to temples nor attend religious functions, on the day
when they drink and eat meat.
In order to avoid the problems faced by the people during the lockdown period of Covid19, the
government authorities had relaxed some of the rules for the benefit of the business people and
daily labours so that they get employment. The permission to open the liquor shops had a
negative impact and the purpose of lockdown, social distance to curb the virus are futile, which
have been strictly monitored by the emergency service providers and security guards, that efforts
are null and void. There were a lot of questions in minds of people like it is not necessary that the
revenue would be generated only from wine shops. There are many other avenues also.
Do they not survive without liquor at least in the lockdown period? The long queues in front of
the wine shops led a bad impression as “Are they Starving or Feasting?” The excessive drinking
of alcohol adversely affects health conditions such as cancer of mouth throat, liver, heart failure,
and brain damage, etc. and affects the immune system.38 While some people may have multiple
visible effects like slurred speech, vision impairment lack of coordination, etc. Professor Robin
Room, Director, Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, University of Melbourne writes in his
article titled “ My drinking, your problem: alcohol hurts non-drinkers too.” It is not only harmful
self but it badly affects others such as family life, bad moments or may lead to diverse, financial
loses, violence in the family and friends in the society or offices, a risk factor for co-passengers
while driving and in some occasions, it causes a nuisance in the street.
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The article says in a given year 367 people Australians die because of another’s drinking and
13,600 are hospitalized etc. This report attracted internationally; the World Health organization
decided to measure alcohol’s harm to others as a major strand in its Global Strategy to reduce
harmful alcohol consumption. 39
5. Conclusion
Ancestors were methodically practicing the traditions and customs for a healthy environment for
the family and to the society. Unfortunately, those who do not understand their inherent
meanings insulted and laughed at the followers and used to make counter-arguments. As a result,
the rituals are being disrespected, decreasing, and discarding one by one for the fear of being
isolated and forced to sit blindly in one place for a few days. Some others are tending towards
simple rituals of the western culture.
The procedures of rituals laid down in Hinduism are appropriate and authentic to the society till
today. In the present scenario of Covid19, some of these traditions are being implemented and
educating people through social media as precautionary steps to wipe out the Coronavirus.
The industrialization and solid wastage, usage of plastic materials, global warming unhygienic
food items, clean water, slaughter centers, killing of animals and viral infections, terrorism,
nuclear as well as chemical weapons, and human values and healing of the earth, etc are some of
the global challenges in 21st century for all countries.
The Coronavirus has exposed the success of science and technology as no medicine or vaccine is
yet available to cure the patients, but it manifested the Indian traditional values social distances
(isolation), cleaning hands, and healing prayers saved a lot of people from death. Thus to
preserve harmony with nature, a healthy environment in society, adaptability to a vegetarian diet;
and to reduce infections, one should not abandon to practice Vedic traditions and customs which
are eternal in the nature and incorporation of spirituality in medicine improves the psychological
status of patients. Thus, there is a need for the scientific exploration for Vedic traditions.
Acknowledgement: This research work is carried out under the research project titled “Study of
metaphysical analysis of Bhagavad Gita and Srimadha Bhagavatam: Laws of Karma, Soul and Purpose of
life.” sanctioned by Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR) Ministry of Education, Government
of India vide letter No F.No.4-39/22-23/P&R/ICPR dated March 26,2023. I am thankful to ICPR for
sanctioning the research grant.
Received April 4, 2023; Revised April 6, 2023; Accepted May 18, 2023
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Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
The role of edge-based and surface-based information in natural
scene categorization: Evidence from behavior and event-related
potentials
Qiufang Fu a,⇑, Yong-Jin Liu b, Zoltan Dienes c, Jianhui Wu a, Wenfeng Chen a, Xiaolan Fu a
a
State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University,
Beijing 100084, China
c
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and School of Psychology, University of Sussex, BN1 9QH Brighton, United Kingdom
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 15 January 2016
Revised 6 June 2016
Accepted 7 June 2016
Keywords:
Natural scene categorization
Edge-based theory
Surface-based theory
SOA
ERPs
a b s t r a c t
A fundamental question in vision research is whether visual recognition is determined by
edge-based information (e.g., edge, line, and conjunction) or surface-based information
(e.g., color, brightness, and texture). To investigate this question, we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the scene and the mask in a backward masking task
of natural scene categorization. The behavioral results showed that correct classification
was higher for line-drawings than for color photographs when the SOA was 13 ms, but
lower when the SOA was longer. The ERP results revealed that most latencies of early
components were shorter for the line-drawings than for the color photographs, and
the latencies gradually increased with the SOA for the color photographs but not for the
line-drawings. The results provide new evidence that edge-based information is the
primary determinant of natural scene categorization, receiving priority processing; by
contrast, surface information takes longer to facilitate natural scene categorization.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Humans have a remarkable ability to categorize natural scenes quickly and accurately. The human brain needs only
approximately 150 ms to decide whether a color photograph, flashed for 20 ms, contains animals or vehicles (Rousselet,
Fabre-Thorpe, & Thorpe, 2002; Thorpe, Fize, & Marlot, 1996; VanRullen & Thorpe, 2001), even with little or no attention
applied to the task (Feifei, VanRullen, Koch, & Perona, 2005; Li, VanRullen, Koch, & Perona, 2002; Otsuka & Kawaguchi,
2007; Rousselet et al., 2002). The challenge is to explain how rapid natural scene categorization takes place in the human
brain.
A recent fMRI study found that line-drawings generated similar neural activation as color photographs in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), which suggests that the human visual system uses schematic
representations with content that is analogous to simple line-drawings, to encode and process statistical regularities in a
scene (Walther, Chai, Caddigan, Beck, & Fei-Fei, 2011). This finding has provided new evidence for an edge-based theory that
assumes that edge-based representations are sufficient for object recognition and that surface characteristics such as color,
⇑ Corresponding author at: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China.
E-mail address: fuqf@psych.ac.cn (Q. Fu).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.06.008
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Q. Fu et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
153
brightness, and texture are less efficient routes for accessing the memorial representation (Biederman, 1987; Biederman &
Ju, 1988). Indeed, some studies have found that surface gradients such as color changes had little influence on object classification and identification (e.g., Biederman & Ju, 1988; Cave, Bost, & Cobb, 1996; Joseph & Proffitt, 1996) or even impaired
object classification (e.g., Gagnier & Intraub, 2012). For example, Biederman and Ju (1988) demonstrated that the reaction
times and error rates were virtually identical for the common objects of color photographs and line-drawings when the
images were briefly (50–100 ms) presented. Thus, although scene recognition and object recognition are technically different, the same perceptual processes might be involved. However, due to poor temporal resolution, on the order of one to several seconds (Rossion, Kung, & Tarr, 2004), the above fMRI study cannot discriminate differences in the time course of
categorizing color photographs and line-drawings.
The role of surface properties in object or scene recognition remains controversial (e.g., Gagnier & Intraub, 2012; Parron &
Washburn, 2010; Wichmann, Sharpe, & Genenfurtner, 2002). In contrast with the edge-based theory, the alternative surfacebased theory assumes that surface gradients are central for object recognition and that both contour and surface information
provide simultaneous routes for basic-level categorization. This perspective has received support from other studies (e.g.,
Tanaka, Weiskopf, & Williams, 2001; Wichmann et al., 2002; Wurm, Legge, Isenberg, & Luebker, 1993). For example, color
improved object recognition of common food items when there was no time limit on the stimulus presentation (Wurm
et al., 1993).
Interestingly, Laws and Hunter (2006) did not find a significant difference in the accuracy between the objects in color
photographs and line-drawings with a 20-ms presentation of each image, which is consistent with the findings of
Biederman and Ju (1988), but a marginally significant advantage for color photographs over line-drawings was found
(p = 0.07) with a 1000-ms presentation of each image, which is principally consistent with the findings of Wurm et al.
(1993). A comparison of the above studies also reveals that most of the studies in support of the edge-based theory limited
the presentation times or processing duration to a very short time, while there was no time limit or a long processing time in
the study that supported the surface-based theory. Thus, we predict that the stimulus presentation or processing duration
could modulate the role of the surface information in scene perception. Specifically, if the processing duration is long enough,
then the surface information should facilitate the recognition; however, if the processing duration is extremely short, then
surface information could even impair recognition performance if edge-based information is thereby harder to extract. If the
latter occurs, then the result will provide new evidence for edge-based information receiving priority processing.
The purpose of the present study was to address this issue by adopting event-related potentials (ERPs) in a backward
masking task of categorizing natural scenes. To manipulate the processing duration, a backward masking paradigm was
adopted in the present ERP study, in which the stimulus duration was constant but the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)
between the image and mask was varied. Backward masking is useful in investigating the time course of information processing in the visual system in that it allows processing to be interrupted at different times (Bacon-Macé, Macé, FabreThorpe, & Thorpe, 2005; Hansen & Loschky, 2013; Holcomb & Grainger, 2006; Kovács, Vogels, & Orban, 1995; Loschky,
Hansen, Sethi, & Pydimarri, 2010; Loschky et al., 2007; Macknik & Livingstone, 1998; Rieger, Braun, Bülthoff, &
Gegenfurtner, 2005; Rolls, Tovée, & Panzeri, 1999; VanRullen & Koch, 2003). Usually, when the SOA becomes longer, the
behavioral performance and neural activation recorded by fMRI increase and so does the ERP differential activity, roughly
between 150 and 250 ms on the targets and distracters (Bacon-Macé et al., 2005; Holcomb & Grainger, 2006). Because accuracy increases significantly with SOAs below 44 ms (i.e., 6.25, 12.50, 18.75, 25, 31.25, 43.75 ms, see Bacon-Macé et al., 2005),
the SOA was set at 13, 27, 40 and 213 ms in the present study. Moreover, to explore the role of edge-based and surface-based
information in natural scene categorization, we adopted color photographs and line-drawings as stimuli because the color
photographs include both edge-based information (e.g., edge, line, and conjunction) and surface properties (e.g., color,
brightness, and texture), whereas line-drawings include only edge-based information, as established in a previous study
(Walther et al., 2011).
Previous ERP studies have shown that natural scene categorization involves two stages: a perception stage that extracts
information about different features of the visual input and a decision stage that evaluates the relevance of the information
in making a decision (Bacon-Macé et al., 2005; VanRullen & Thorpe, 2001). Early ERP components such as P1 and N1 are associated with feature detection or integration (Hillyard & Münte, 1984) and are sensitive to elemental features of stimuli (e.g.,
Holcomb & Grainger, 2006; Itier, Latinus, & Taylor, 2006). Given that color photographs involve both edge-based and surfacebased information while line-drawings include only edge-based information, differences in the components at the perceptual stage could be elicited by color photographs versus line-drawings. Specifically, if surface-based information is processed
simultaneously with edge-based information such that both facilitate categorization, then the latencies of the early components should be at least as fast for the color photographs as for the line-drawings. Conversely, if the latencies of early components are faster for the line-drawings than the color photographs, then it indicates the importance of edge-based
information, with surface information analyzed as a secondary route for visual cognition which does not facilitate early
on. Indeed, Walther et al. (2011) found that there was only a low correlation between the neural activity that was generated
by color photographs and the neural activity that was generated by line-drawings in early visual areas, which suggests that
the feature analysis in early visual processing differs between color photographs and line-drawings. The later ERP components, such as N2 and P3, are related to decision making (Folstein & Van Petten, 2008; Nieuwenhuis, Aston-Jones, &
Cohen, 2005). If only an edge-based representation is sufficient in the decision-making process, then there will be no difference in the pattern of later components of color photographs and line-drawings, as suggested by Walther et al. Conversely, if
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an edge-based representation is not sufficient in the decision-making process, then there will be differences in the pattern of
later components between color photographs and line-drawings.
To the best of our knowledge, although a considerable number of studies have investigated the role of surface information
in scene and object recognition (Biederman & Ju, 1988; Delorme, Richard, & Fabre-Thorpe, 2000; Gagnier & Intraub, 2012;
Walther et al., 2011), few studies have adopted ERP techniques to address this question. Goffaux et al. (2005), using a go/
no-go paradigm, measured ERPs when people categorized normally colored, grayscale and abnormally colored scenes with
a 100-ms presentation. They found that the reaction times and accuracy were optimal for the normal version, followed by
the grayscale and then the abnormal version; the onset of the early ERP component at the frontal sites mirrored these effects.
Thus, color contributes to rapid natural scene categorization, which is consistent with the surface-based account. However,
although the stimulus presentation in this study was 100 ms, they used a long variable SOA of 1500–1800 ms. Because no
masks were used to interrupt the processing, there was sufficient time to process the image fully. Moreover, their concern
was the role of color in natural scene categorization, and thus, they did not answer how edge-based and surface-based information contributes to natural scene categorization. The role of edge-based and surface-based information and its interaction
with the processing duration in scene recognition remains an open question.
In addition, all of the above ERP studies used a go/no-go paradigm, during which people first made a decision about
whether the image contained animals or vehicles and then performed the go or no-go reaction. Because the targets and distracters belonged to different categories, the differential activity between the targets and distracters might have reflected a
difference in either a high-level property such as the category or a low-level property such as the contrast (Rousselet &
Pernet, 2011). To avoid this ambiguity, we used a forced-choice rather than go/no-go task and compared the differential
activity between incorrect and correct trials. Because there were incorrect and correct trials for each category, the analysis
of the differential activity according to the correctness should reflect how people correctly categorize scenes. Second,
because the targets and distracters require different responses in the go/no-go task, the differential activity between the targets and distracters could result from either different decision-making processes or different preparations for reactions. To
dissociate the reaction preparations from the decision-making processes, the locations of six category names were randomly
assigned on each trial, and a blank was displayed for 500 ms before the presentation of the category names (see Fig. 1).
2. Methods
2.1. Participants
Twenty-two undergraduate and graduate students (11 male, 11 female), aged 19–29 years (M = 21.82, SD = 2.34), voluntarily took part in this experiment and were paid for their attendance. All of them had normal or corrected-to-normal vision
and gave the written informed consent. None of them had any history of neurological or psychiatric diseases. This experiment was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the committee for the protection
of subjects at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
2.2. Materials
Color photographs and line-drawings of six natural scene categories (beaches, city streets, forests, highways, mountains
and offices) were adopted as stimuli, which were first used by Walther et al. (2011).1 Each category had 76–80 different
images, for a total of 475. Each image had two versions: one was a color photograph, and the other was a line-drawing. The
line-drawings were produced by trained artists by tracing the contours in the color photographs (see Walther et al., 2011).
All of the images were resized to 320 ⁄ 240 pixels. Two white noise images at two different spatial scales were generated as
masks: one was generated at the resolutions of 320 ⁄ 240, and the other was generated at the resolutions of 20 ⁄ 15 and then
resized to 320 ⁄ 240 pixels. Each mask also had two versions: one in color, the other in grayscale. The experiment was carried
out on a CRT monitor with a resolution of 1280 ⁄ 768 pixels, a mean luminance of 50.6 cd/m2, and a refresh rate of 75 Hz. The
images of six natural scene categories were presented on a silver gray background with a mean luminance of 27.4 cd/m2.
2.3. Procedure
The participants were seated in an electrically shielded, dimly lit and sound-attenuated room. The distance from the participants’ eyes to the center of the screen was approximately 60 cm when they sat straight in the chair, and no chinrest was
used. Each image was approximately 8.70 deg wide and 8.19 deg high. The participants were tested for 10 blocks, for a total
of 950 trials. At the beginning of each trial, a black fixation cross was presented on a silver gray background in the center of
the screen for 500–950 ms at random (see Fig. 1). Then, an image was flashed for 13 ms, which was followed by two masks.2
Each mask was shown for 50 ms, for a total of 100 ms. The sequence of the two masks was randomly assigned on each trial.
1
We got all of the images from Dr. Walther.
In a preliminary experiment, we found that the mask with a high resolution masked color photographs (non-significantly) more than line-drawings, while a
mask with a low resolution masked line-drawings (non-significantly) more than color photographs. To balance possibly different masking effects on color
photographs and line-drawings, we used the two masks.
2
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155
Fig. 1. Materials and experimental procedure. (A) Examples of six categories of color photographs and line-drawings. (B) Experimental setup and design. (C)
Masks for color photographs. (D) Masks for line-drawings.
After the masks, there was a blank of 500 ms. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the image and the mask was 13, 27,
40 or 213 ms, at random. After the blank, six category names appeared on the screen from left to right, for which the locations
corresponded to the keys D, F, G, H, J, and K on the keyboard. On each trial, the locations of the six category names were randomly assigned, and thus, the participants would not prepare their response before its appearance and no response bias toward
a favored location would contaminate the results3 (Loschky, Ringer, Ellis, & Hansen, 2015). The participants were forced to make
a choice among the six categories by pressing the corresponding key, and there was no time limit for them to make the choice.
There was no feedback about the correctness of their response. After their response, they were further asked to report ‘‘how
clearly did you see the image” with four possible responses from left to right on a perceptual awareness scale (PAS), by pressing
the corresponding key. Then, the participants were asked to press the space key to begin the next trial when they were ready. In
each block, half of the images were color photographs, and half were line-drawings, with equal trials in each category and each
SOA. There was at least a 30-s rest between any two blocks.
2.4. EEG recording and analysis
The EEG was recorded from 64 scalp sites using Ag-AgCl electrodes in an elastic cap according to the International 10–20
system. The vertical and horizontal EOG were recorded with two pairs of electrodes placed 1 cm above and below one eye
and 1 cm lateral from the outer canthi of both eyes. The left mastoid was used as an on-line reference, and the algebraic average of the left and right mastoids was used as an off-line re-reference. The EEG and EOG signals were amplified by a NeuroScan Synamps amplifier with a band pass of 0.05–100 Hz and digitized at 500 Hz. The impedance of the electrodes was
maintained below 5 kX. EEG data were low-pass filtered with a cutoff frequency at 30 Hz and averaged offline for epochs
of 800 ms, starting 100 ms prior to the stimulus onset and ending 700 ms afterward. A baseline correction was performed
for each epoch using the 100 ms before the presentation of each image. Trials with artifacts that were determined by a criterion of 80 lV were rejected offline, which amounted to only 2.6% of the trials.
The ERPs were first averaged separately across correct and incorrect trials for each type of image and SOA for each subject.
The SOA of 213 ms was not included because of having an insufficient number of incorrect trials for the ERP average. In the
3
However, as participants need first search the target category name on each trial, thus the reaction time was inflated and the accuracy rather than RT was
used as a dependent variable.
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Q. Fu et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
statistical analysis of the ERP data, we focused on the peak latencies and amplitudes of the posterior P1 (80–160 ms) and N1
(130–210 ms) and anterior P2 (140–240 ms) and the mean amplitudes of the posterior P2 (210–260 ms) and anterior N2
(220–320 ms), P3 (370–420 ms), and N4 (420–520 ms). The time windows were chosen because they best captured the differences among the different conditions and were relatively free from overlap with adjacent ERPs. Based on previous studies
(e.g., Bacon-Macé et al., 2005; Melloni et al., 2011) and the topography of each component in the present study, a group of
occipital electrodes (CB1, O1, Oz, O2, and CB2) was selected for the posterior P1, N1, and P2 (see Fig. 3C and E); a group of
fronto-central electrodes (F3, Fz, F4, FC3, FCz, FC4, C3, Cz, and C4) was selected for the anterior P2, N2, P3, and N4 (see Fig. 5C
and E). The latencies and amplitudes were computed as the means over groups of electrodes that were representative of the
topography of each component for each subject. The mean and standard error for each component were computed across
subjects. Each was subjected to a repeated measures three-way ANOVA with the factors of type of image (color photographs
vs. line-drawings), SOA (13 ms vs. 27 ms vs. 40 ms), and correctness (correct vs. incorrect).
Key non-significant results were interpreted with Bayes factors. P-values by themselves cannot discriminate insensitive
data from support for the null hypothesis, whereas Bayes factors make that distinction. More specifically, when using the
Bayes factor, B, to compare an alternative hypothesis (H1) against the null hypothesis (H0), if B is greater than 3, then there
is substantial evidence for H1 over H0; if B is less than 1/3, then there is substantial evidence for H0 over H1; and if B is
between 3 and 1/3, then the data do not discriminate H0 from H1 (Dienes, 2011). Bayes factors were determined using
the free online software associated with Dienes (2014), which is located at http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Zoltan_
Dienes/inference/bayes_factor.swf, with the Matlab and R code provided at http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Zoltan_
Dienes/inference/Bayes.htm. Dienes (2014) provides a tutorial.
3. Results
3.1. Behavioral results
Fig. 2A shows the accuracy rate for color photographs and line-drawings for each SOA. Because the task was to make a
choice among the six categories, the chance probability is 0.17. The accuracy for the color photograph trials was significantly
better than chance for each SOA [SOA = 13 ms: t(21) = 11.08, p < 0.001, dz = 2.36; SOA = 27 ms: t(21) = 14.51, p < 0.001,
dz = 3.09; SOA = 40 ms: t(21) = 20.52, p < 0.001, dz = 4.38; SOA = 213 ms: t(21) = 75.99, p < 0.001, dz = 16.20], as was the
accuracy for the line-drawing trials for each SOA [SOA = 13 ms: t(21) = 10.66, p < 0.001, dz = 2.27; SOA = 27 ms: t(21)
= 12.96, p < 0.001, dz = 2.76; SOA = 40 ms: t(21) = 16.31, p < 0.001, dz = 3.47; SOA = 213 ms: t(21) = 51.09, p < 0.001,
dz = 10.89]. The results suggested that people could correctly classify natural scenes for each SOA. A repeated ANOVA with
the type of image and SOA as within-subject factors revealed that overall, the accuracy rate was higher for the color photograph trials than for the line-drawing trials [0.66 ± 0.02 vs. 0.62 ± 0.02, F(1, 21) = 18.87, p < 0.001, gp2 = 0.47], which
increased with SOA [F(1.95, 41.00) = 261.20, p < 0.001, gp2 = 0.93, using the Greenhouse-Geisser correction], and the increase
with the SOA was influenced by the type of image [F(3, 63) = 14.42, p < 0.001, gp2 = 0.41]. Further analysis revealed that the
accuracy rate was significantly higher for the color photograph trials than for the line-drawing trials when the SOAs were 27,
40 and 213 ms [SOA = 27 ms: 0.61 ± 0.03 vs. 0.55 ± 0.03, t(21) = 3.62, p < 0.01, dz = 0.77; SOA = 40 ms: 0.72 ± 0.03 vs.
0.64 ± 0.03, t(21) = 4.81, p < 0.001, dz = 0.96; SOA = 213 ms: 0.90 ± 0.01 vs. 0.84 ± 0.01, t(21) = 5.57, p < 0.001, dz = 1.19],
but was lower for the color photograph trials than for the line-drawing trials when the SOA was 13 ms [0.41 ± 0.02 vs.
0.44 ± 0.03, t(21) = 2.16, p < 0.05, dz = 0.46]. The results indicated that the facilitatory role of surface information in natural
scene categorization is modulated by the processing duration. A lower performance for the color photograph trials than for
the line-drawing trials when SOA was 13 ms revealed that surface-based information could impair recognition performance
Fig. 2. Accuracy rates. (A) Accuracy rates for color photograph trials and line-drawing trials in each SOA, in which the dotted line was the chance level; (B)
accuracy rates contributed by surface-based information, calculated by accuracy rate for color photographs minus accuracy rate for line-drawings in each
SOA, and accuracy rates contributed by edge-based information, calculated by accuracy rate for line-drawings minus the chance level in each SOA; (C)
awareness scores for color photograph trials and line-drawing trials in each SOA. The error bars depict standard errors.
Q. Fu et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
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when the processing time was extremely limited, providing evidence for edge-based information receiving priority
processing.
To further examine the contribution of surface-based and edge-based information to accuracy, we took the accuracy difference between the color photograph trials and the line-drawing trials as the accuracy contributed by surface properties
and took the accuracy difference between the line-drawing trials and chance level (i.e., 0.17) as the accuracy contributed
by edge-based features (see Fig. 2B). A repeated ANOVA with the contribution of different types of information and SOA
as within-subject factors revealed that overall the accuracy contributed by edge-based information was much larger than
that contributed by surface-based information [0.04 ± 0.01 vs. 0.45 ± 0.02, F(1, 21) = 191.36, p < 0.001, gp2 = 0.90], the accuracy contributed by edge-based and surface-based information increased with SOA [F(1, 21) = 212.77, p < 0.001, gp2 = 0.91],
and the increase with SOA was influenced by the contribution type [F(1, 21) = 34.93, p < 0.001, gp2 = 0.63]. Further analysis
revealed that the accuracy contributed by the edge-based information was much larger than that contributed by the surfacebased information for each SOA [SOA = 13 ms: 0.04 ± 0.02 vs. 0.27 ± 0.03, t(21) = 8.01, p < 0.001, dz = 1.71; SOA = 27 ms:
0.06 ± 0.02 vs. 0.38 ± 0.03, t(21) = 8.24, p < 0.001, dz = 1.76; SOA = 40 ms: 0.08 ± 0.02 vs. 0.47 ± 0.03, t(21) = 9.81, p < 0.001,
dz = 2.09; SOA = 213 ms: 0.07 ± 0.01 vs. 0.67 ± 0.01, t(21) = 25.39, p < 0.001, dz = 5.41]. Interestingly, the contribution of
edge-based information gradually and significantly increased with SOA (all ps < 0.001), whereas the contribution of
surface-based information increased from SOA of 13 ms to SOA of 27 ms [ 0.04 ± 0.02 vs. 0.06 ± 0.02, t(21) = 5.17,
p < 0.001, dz = 1.10], but there were no significant difference among SOAs of 27, 40, and 213 ms (all ps > 0.34). The results
indicated that the edge-based information plays a primary role and the surface-based information a secondary role in natural
scene categorization.
Finally, we calculated the average awareness score for each SOA of color photographs and line-drawings (see Fig. 2C).
When SOA was 13 ms, the awareness scores were significantly above 1 (no experience) for both types of images [color photographs: t(21) = 8.97, p < 0.001, dz = 1.91; line-drawings: t(21) = 9.14, p < 0.001, dz = 1.95], but were not significantly different from 2 (brief glimpse) [color photographs: t(21) = 0.61, p = 0.55; line-drawings: t(21) = 0.21, p = 0.83]. When SOA was
27 ms, the awareness score for color photographs was significantly above 2 (weak glimpse) [t(21) = 3.38, p < 0.01, dz = 0.72],
but significantly below 3 (almost clear experience) [t(21) = 5.45, p < 0.001, dz = 1.12]; the awareness score for linedrawings was not significantly above 2 (weak glimpse) [t(21) = 1.70, p = 0.10], and significantly below 3 (almost clear experience) [t(21) = 7.32, p < 0.001]. When the SOA was 40 ms, the awareness score for both types of images were significantly
above 2 (weak glimpse) [color photographs: t(21) = 5.68, p < 0.001, dz = 1.21; line-drawings: t(21) = 3.71, p = 0.001,
dz = 0.79], but significantly below 3 (almost clear experience) [color photographs: t(21) = 2.62, p < 0.05, dz = 0.56; linedrawings: t(21) = 4.88, p < 0.001, dz = 1.04]. When the SOA was 213 ms, the awareness score for color photographs was significantly above 3 (almost clear experience) [t(21) = 4.29, p < 0.001, dz = 0.91], but significantly below 4 (clear experience) [t
(21) = 6.48, p < 0.001, dz = 1.38]; the awareness score for line-drawings was not significantly above 3 (almost clear experience) [t(21) = 0.85, p = 0.40], and significantly below 4 (clear experience) [t(21) = 9.23, p < 0.001, dz = 1.97]. That is, participants reported having experience below ‘‘almost clear experience” for both types of images when SOA were 13, 27, and
40 ms, and having mainly ‘‘almost clear experience” only when SOA was 213 ms.
3.2. ERP results
The ERP data of the color photographs and line-drawings in both the correct and incorrect trials at the occipital sites (CB1,
O1, Oz, O2, and CB2) and fronto-central sites (F3, Fz, F4, FC3, FCz, FC4, C3, Cz, and C4) were analyzed when the SOA was 13,
27, and 40 ms. The SOA of 213 ms was not included because of having an insufficient number of incorrect trials for the ERP
average. We first consider how the type of image, SOA, and correctness influenced the posterior P1, N1, and P2 at the occipital sites. Then, we show how the factors modulated the anterior P2, N2, P3, and N4 at the fronto-central sites. Three-way
repeated ANOVAs with the type of image, SOA, and correctness as within-subject factors were performed over the latencies
or amplitudes of each component. To demonstrate the different time courses of the natural scene categorization of the color
photographs and line-drawings, we reported only two-way interactions between the type of image and the SOA and between
the type of image and the correctness. Finally, we will explore the relationship between the behavioral accuracy and ERP
effects by using regression analysis.
3.2.1. Posterior P1, N1, and P2 effects
Fig. 3 shows ERP data at the occipital electrode sites, in which the ERP waveforms were computed over the group of occipital electrodes (CB1, O1, Oz, O2, and CB2), which was representative of the topography of each component. Fig. 4 shows the
latencies or amplitudes of the posterior P1, N1, and P2 under each condition. Table 1 summarizes the significant results of
the three-way repeated ANOVAs that were performed over the latencies or amplitudes of the posterior P1, N1, and P2.
3.2.1.1. Peak latencies of the posterior P1 and N1. For the P1 peak latencies, there was only a significant SOA by the type of
image interaction. As shown in Fig. 4, consistent with the edge-based theory, the P1 peak latency was significantly shorter
for the line-drawing trials than for the color photograph trials when SOA was 40 ms [122.61 ± 3.43 ms vs. 115.19 ± 3.30 ms, t
(21) = 2.39, p < 0.05, dz = 0.51]; but inconsistent with the edge-based theory, the P1 peak latency was significantly shorter for
the color photograph trials than for the line-drawing trials when SOA was 13 ms [110.61 ± 2.19 ms vs. 116.29 ± 2.67 ms, t
(21) = 2.22, p < 0.05, dz = 0.47], and there were no significant differences between the color photograph trials and the
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Fig. 3. ERP data at the occipital electrodes. (A) Grand-average ERPs of correct and incorrect trials for color photographs and line-drawings in each SOA,
averaged across five occipital electrodes CB1, O1, Oz, O2, and CB2. (B) ERP differences of incorrect minus correct trials for color photographs and linedrawings in each SOA. (C) The scalp topography of the posterior P1, N1, and P2, incorrect minus correct trials separately for color photographs and linedrawings. (D) ERP differences of color photograph trials minus line-drawing trials for correct and incorrect ones in each SOA. (E) The scalp topography of the
posterior P1, N1, and P2, color photograph trials minus line-drawing trials separately for correct and incorrect ones.
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Fig. 4. Latencies or amplitudes of the posterior P1, N1, and P2. (A) Latencies or amplitudes of the posterior P1, N1, and P2 for the correct trials under each
condition. (B) Latencies or amplitudes of the posterior P1, N1, and P2 for the incorrect trials under each condition. The error bars depict the standard errors.
Table 1
Significant results of the three-way repeated ANOVAs performed over the latencies or amplitudes of the posterior P1, N1, and P2, considering the type of image,
SOA, and correctness.
Posterior P1 latency
Posterior P1
amplitude
Posterior N1
amplitude
Posterior P2
amplitude
gp 2
F
gp2
F
gp2
F
gp2
F
gp2
10.23⁄⁄
0.33
31.90⁄⁄⁄
6.42⁄⁄
0.60
0.23
0.67
0.17
0.41
0.35
7.34⁄⁄
15.42⁄⁄
4.77⁄
0.26
0.42
0.19
0.58
0.51
0.17
0.48
0.43
0.42
43.37⁄⁄⁄
4.38⁄
14.62⁄⁄
11.32⁄⁄⁄
28.39⁄⁄⁄
21.88⁄⁄⁄
4.43⁄
19.28⁄⁄⁄
15.99⁄⁄
15.31⁄⁄⁄
17.10⁄⁄⁄
11.67⁄⁄⁄
0.45
0.36
202.57⁄⁄⁄
105.74⁄⁄⁄
7.00⁄
16.31⁄⁄⁄
19.22⁄⁄⁄
0.91
0.83
0.25
0.44
0.48
F
Typ
SOA
Acc
Typ ⁄ SOA
Typ ⁄ Acc
Acc ⁄ SOA
Posterior N1
latency
Note: In each ANOVA, we report F (and df) values with significance. ⁄ p < .05; ⁄⁄ p < .01; ⁄⁄⁄ p < .001.
line-drawing trials when SOA was 27 ms [118.43 ± 2.57 ms vs. 118.45 ± 3.07 ms, t(21) = 0.01, p = 0.99]. However, more
importantly, the P1 peak latency significantly increased with the SOA only for the color photograph trials (ps < 0.05) but
not for the line-drawing trials (ps > 0.12). To interpret the latter non-significant results, Bayes factors were used (Dienes,
2011). Nothing at all follows from a non-significant result in itself, but a Bayes factor (B) can indicate substantial evidence
for the null hypothesis (B < 1/3), that the data are insensitive (1/3 < B < 3), or substantial evidence for the alternative (B > 3).
Because the linear trend was significantly greater for the color photograph trials than for the line-drawing trials, the alternative hypothesis for the line-drawing trials can be represented as being uniform between 0 and the maximum provided by
the linear trend estimated for the color photograph trials. For the P1 latencies, the linear trend for the line-drawing trials was
1 ms (SE = 2 ms); using the uniform range [0, 12] to represent the alternative (where 12 was the linear trend for color photographs) yields B = 0.15. In other words, there is substantial evidence for the null hypothesis of no linear trend in the P1
latencies for the line-drawing trials over the alternative. Thus, the results indicated that shorter SOA was sufficient for
extracting information from line-drawings rather than color photographs, which was principally consistent with the hypothesis of the edge-based theory.
For the N1 peak latencies, there was a significant type of image by SOA interaction. As shown in Fig. 4, consistent with the
edge-based theory, there was significantly shorter N1 peak latency for the line-drawing trials than for the color photograph
trials when SOA was 27 and 40 ms [SOA = 27 ms: 172.39 ± 1.87 ms vs. 162.20 ± 2.20 ms, t(21) = 5.37, p < 0.001, dz = 1.15;
SOA = 40 ms: 180.49 ± 1.85 ms vs. 161.21 ± 3.46 ms, t(21) = 5.70, p < 0.001, dz = 1.21], but there were no significant differences on the N1 peak latency between color photograph trials and line-drawing trials when SOA was 13 ms
[162.93 ± 1.78 ms vs. 159.74 ± 2.54 ms, t(21) = 1.55, p = 0.14]. However, more importantly, the N1 peak latency significantly
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increased with SOA for the color photograph trials (ps < 0.05) but not for the line-drawing trials (ps > 0.17). Similarly, the
linear trend was 1 ms (SE = 3.5 ms) for the line-drawing trials; using the uniform [0, 18] to represent the alternative (where
18 was the linear trend for the color photographs) yields B = 0.31, which is also substantial evidence for the null hypothesis.
The results confirmed that shorter SOA was sufficient for extracting information from line-drawings rather than color photographs, which was substantially consistent with the edge-based theory.
In addition, the type of image by correctness interaction was also significant. The N1 peak latency was significantly
shorter for the incorrect than correct trials for the color photograph trials [168.87 ± 1.64 ms vs. 175.01 ± 2.03 ms, t(21)
= 4.10, p = 0.001, dz = 0.87], but not for the line-drawing trials [162.19 ± 2.41 ms vs. 159.91 ± 2.59 ms, t(21) = 1.77,
p = 0.09]. That is, the N1 peak latency was related to correct classification for color photographs.
3.2.1.2. Amplitudes of the posterior P1, N1, and P2. For the posterior P1 peak amplitudes, there was a significant type of image
by SOA interaction. For both types of images, the P1 amplitude significantly increased from a SOA of 13 to a SOA of 27 [color
photographs: 2.77 ± 0.39 lV vs. 3.58 ± 0.45 lV, t(21) = 2.90, p < 0.01, dz = 0.62; line-drawings: 1.65 ± 0.40 lV vs.
2.28 ± 0.51 lV, t(21) = 2.56, p < 0.05, dz = 0.55], but not from a SOA of 27 to a SOA of 40 (ps > 0.29). The interaction of
the type of image by correctness also reached significance. For the color photographs, the P1 amplitude was significantly
larger for correct than incorrect trials for the color photographs [3.54 ± 0.41 lV vs. 3.22 ± 0.44 lV, t(21) = 3.51, p < 0.01,
dz = 0.75], but the P1 amplitude was marginally significantly smaller for the correct than the incorrect trials for the linedrawings [1.73 ± 0.49 lV vs. 2.08 ± 0.44 lV, t(21) = 2.04, p = 0.054, dz = 0.43]. That is, incorrect classification was related
to different P1 effects for color photographs and line-drawings.
For the posterior N1 peak amplitudes, there was a significant type of image by correctness interaction. The N1 effect was
significantly larger for the incorrect than correct trials for the color photographs [ 5.71 ± 0.48 lV vs. 4.64 ± 0.52 lV, t(21)
= 4.51, p < 0.001, dz = 0.96] but not for the line-drawings [ 3.03 ± 0.45 lV vs. 3.02 ± 0.46 lV, t(21) = 0.08, p = 0.94]. Furthermore, for color photographs, the comparison between incorrect and correct trials for each SOA revealed that the N1
effect was significantly larger for the incorrect than correct trials when the SOA was 27 and 40 ms [SOA = 27 ms:
5.86 ± 0.59 lV vs. 4.54 ± 0.53 lV, t(21) = 4.35, p < 0.001, dz = 0.93; SOA = 40 ms: 5.89 ± 0.57 lV vs. 4.03 ± 0.58 lV,
t(21) = 4.54, p < 0.001, dz = 0.97, respectively], but not when the SOA was 13 ms [ 5.37 ± 0.42 lV vs. 5.34 ± 0.53 lV,
t(21) = 0.08, p = 0.94]. The difference for SOA of 13 ms was 0.03 lV (SE = 0.37), using the uniform [ 1.86, 0] to represent
the alternative (where 1.86 was the difference for SOA of 40) yields B = 0.27, which is substantial evidence for the null
hypothesis. Thus, the results suggested that N1 was related to correct classification of color photographs when SOA was
longer than 13 ms.
For the posterior P2 amplitudes, there was a significant type of image by SOA interaction. The posterior P2 amplitude was
significantly larger for the line-drawing trials than for the color photograph trials for each SOA (ps < 0.001), while the P2
amplitude significantly decreased with the SOA for both types of images (ps < 0.001). The interaction of the type of image
and correctness was also significant. For color photographs, the P2 amplitude was significantly larger for incorrect than correct trials [2.68 ± 0.41 lV vs. 1.82 ± 0.36 lV, t(21) = 3.96, p = 0.001, dz = 0.84] but not for the line-drawings [4.15 ± 0.36 lV
vs. 4.33 ± 0.35 lV, t(21) = 1.55, p = 0.14]. That is, the posterior P2 amplitude was related to correct classification for color
photographs.
3.2.2. Anterior P2, N2, P3 and N4 effects
Fig. 5 shows the ERP data at the fronto-central electrode sites, at which the ERP waveforms were computed over the group
of fronto-central electrodes (F3, Fz, F4, FC3, FCz, FC4, C3, Cz, and C4), which were representative of the topography of each
component. Fig. 6 shows the latencies or amplitudes of the anterior P2, N2, P3 and N4 under each condition. Table 2 summarizes the significant results of the three-way repeated ANOVAs that were performed over the latencies or amplitudes of
the anterior P2, N2, P3 and N4.
3.2.2.1. Peak latencies of the anterior P2. For the anterior P2 peak latencies, there was a significant type of image by SOA interaction. As shown in Fig. 6, consistent with the edge-based theory, there was significantly shorter anterior P2 peak latency for
the line-drawing trials than for the color photograph trials for all SOAs [SOA = 13 ms: 176.39 ± 3.72 ms vs. 171.19 ± 4.44 ms, t
(21) = 2.13, p < 0.05, dz = 0.45; SOA = 27 ms: 181.97 ± 3.40 ms vs. 171.81 ± 4.45 ms, t(21) = 3.02, p < 0.01, dz = 0.64;
SOA = 40 ms: 193.01 ± 3.93 ms vs. 171.25 ± 4.46 ms, t(21) = 6.02, p < 0.001, dz = 1.28]. Importantly, the P2 peak latency significantly increased with the SOA for the color photograph trials (ps < 0.05) but not for the line-drawing trials (ps > 0.84).
Similarly, the linear trend was 0 ms (SE = 3.8 ms) for the line-drawings; using the uniform [0, 17] to represent the alternative
(where 17 was the linear trend for the color photographs) yields B = 0.28, which is also substantial evidence for the null
hypothesis. Thus, consistent with the results of posterior P1 and N1 latencies, the results of anterior P2 latencies provided
strong evidence for the edge-based theory.
In addition, the type of image by correctness interaction was significant. The P2 peak latency was significantly shorter in
incorrect than correct trials for the color photographs [176.62 ± 2.57 ms vs. 190.95 ± 4.85 ms, t(21) = 4.16, p < 0.001,
dz = 0.89], but not for the line-drawings [172.07 ± 3.93 ms vs. 170.76 ± 4.53 ms, t(21) = 0.51, p = 0.62]. The anterior P2
latency difference between the color photograph trials and line-drawing trials was similar to the posterior N1 peak
latency.
Q. Fu et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
161
Fig. 5. ERP data at the fronto-central electrodes. (A) Grand-average ERPs of correct and incorrect trials for color photographs and line-drawings in each SOA,
averaged across nine fronto-central electrodes F3, Fz, F4, FC3, FCz, FC4, C3, Cz, and C4. (B) ERP differences of incorrect minus correct trials for color
photographs and line-drawings in each SOA. (C) The scalp topography of the anterior P2, N2, P3 and N4, incorrect minus correct trials separately for color
photographs and line-drawings. (D) ERP differences of color photograph trials minus line-drawing trials for correct and incorrect ones in each SOA. (E) The
scalp topography of the anterior P2, N2, P3 and N4, color photograph trials minus line-drawing trials separately for correct and incorrect ones.
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Q. Fu et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
Fig. 6. Latencies or amplitudes of the anterior P2, N2, P3, and N4. (A) Latencies or amplitudes of the anterior P2, N2, P3, and N4 for the correct trials under
each condition. (B) Latencies or amplitudes of the fronto-central components for the incorrect trials under each condition. The error bars depict the standard
errors.
Table 2
Significant results of the three-way repeated ANOVAs performed over the latencies or amplitudes of the anterior P2, N2, P3, and N4, considering the type of
image, SOA, and correctness.
Anterior P2 latency
gp2
F
Typ
SOA
Acc
Typ ⁄ SOA
Typ ⁄ Acc
Acc ⁄ SOA
⁄⁄⁄
27.66
8.95⁄⁄
8.21⁄⁄
10.53⁄⁄⁄
15.00⁄⁄
3.35⁄
0.57
0.30
0.28
0.33
0.42
0.14
Anterior P2
amplitude
Anterior N2
amplitude
gp2
F
⁄⁄⁄
26.07
3.30⁄
5.80⁄
0.55
0.14
0.22
4.37⁄
0.17
Anterior P3
amplitude
gp2
F
⁄⁄
11.57
5.79⁄⁄
24.35⁄⁄⁄
0.36
0.22
0.54
Anterior N4
amplitude
gp2
F
⁄⁄⁄
40.35
6.39⁄⁄
0.66
0.23
gp2
F
⁄⁄
11.77
14.98⁄⁄⁄
7.26⁄
0.36
0.42
0.26
Note: In each ANOVA, we report F (and df) values with significance. ⁄ p < .05; ⁄⁄ p < .01; ⁄⁄⁄ p < .001.
3.2.2.2. Peak amplitudes of the anterior P2. For the anterior P2 peak amplitudes, there was a significant type of image by correctness interaction. The anterior P2 peak amplitude was significantly larger for incorrect than correct trials only for the color
photographs [6.53 ± 0.80 lV vs. 5.62 ± 0.68 lV, t(21) = 2.87, p < 0.01, dz = 0.61] but not for the line-drawings [4.45 ± 0.72 lV
vs. 4.29 ± 0.73 lV, t(21) = 0.65, p = 0.53]. Moreover, for both correct and incorrect trials, the anterior P2 amplitude was significantly larger for the color photograph trials than for the line-drawing trials (ps < 0.01). That is, the anterior P2 amplitude
difference between the incorrect and correct trials was similar to the posterior P2, while the anterior P2 amplitude difference
between the color photographs and line-drawings was opposite to the posterior P2.
3.2.2.3. Amplitudes of N2, P3, and N4. As shown in Fig. 6, consistent with our prediction, the three-way ANOVA on N2, P3, and
N4 revealed only significant main effects. The amplitudes of N2, P3, and N4 were all significantly larger for the color photograph trials than for the line-drawing trials (all ps < 0.001). However, for both types of images, a longer SOA led to significantly decreased effects of N2, P3, and N4 (all ps < 0.05), while incorrect trials of both types of images elicited significantly
greater N2 but smaller N4 effects (both ps < 0.05). The results indicated that the later components varied with the SOA and
correctness similarly for the two types of images.
3.2.3. The relationship between the behavioral accuracy and ERP effects
To further explore the relationship between the accuracy rates and latencies or the amplitudes of the ERP components,
the accuracy rates were stepwise regressed on the incorrect-correct difference for the latencies or amplitudes of all of the
components (i.e., incorrect minus correct latency or amplitude of each component averaged over the SOAs) separately for
Q. Fu et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
163
the color photographs and line-drawings. For the color photographs, this step revealed a relationship between the accuracy
rates and peak latencies of the anterior P2 which reached only marginal significance, F(1, 20) = 4.04, p = 0.058, R2 = 0.17. For
the line-drawings, this step revealed two significant models: (1) the amplitude differences of the anterior N2 significantly
predicted the accuracy rates, F(1, 20) = 5.78, p = 0.026, R2 = 0.22; (2) the amplitude differences of the anterior N2 and P2 significantly predicted the accuracy rates, F(2, 19) = 7.99, p = 0.003, R2 = 0.46. Thus, the anterior P2 latency appears to be an indicator of the accuracy for the color photographs, while the anterior N2 and P2 amplitudes appear to be indicators of the
accuracy for the line-drawings.
4. Discussion
Our behavioral results showed that the correct classification was higher for the color photograph trials than for the linedrawing trials when the SOA was longer than 13 ms, but crucially, it was lower when the SOA was 13 ms. These results reconcile the apparently contradictory empirical findings of Biederman and Ju (1988) with those of Wurm et al. (1993) and
Goffaux et al. (2005), and are consistent with our prediction that the role of surface information is modulated by the processing duration. Specifically, when the processing time was extremely limited, the color and other surface properties
impaired rather than improved the performance on the color photograph trials; even when the processing time was longer,
the contribution of the surface-based information to accuracy was very limited and much smaller than that of the edgebased information. The results provided new behavioral evidence for the edge-based theory which assumes that the
edge-based information determines primarily performance in visual recognition and gets priority processing.
Importantly, if edge-based information receives the first analysis and the surface-based information is analyzed as the
second route for recognition, then we predict that the latencies of early components that are sensitive to elemental features
of stimuli would be faster for the line-drawing trials than for the color photograph trials. Previous studies revealed that the
posterior P1 is the first component that indicates the spatial selective attention and the posterior N1 and the anterior P2 are
associated with feature detection or integration (Hillyard & Münte, 1984; Luck & Hillyard, 1994). Thus, we analyzed the peak
latencies of the posterior P1, N1, and the anterior P2 components. Consistent with the prediction, our ERP results revealed
that most latencies of the posterior P1, N1, and the anterior P2 were faster for the line-drawing trials than for the color photograph trials. Specifically, the results showed that the posterior P1 peak latency was faster for the line-drawing trials than
for the color photograph trials when SOA was 40 ms, the posterior N1 peak latency was faster for the line-drawing trials than
for the color photograph trials when SOA was 27 and 40 ms, and the anterior P2 peak latency was faster for the line-drawing
trials than for the color photograph trials when SOA was 13, 27, and 40 ms. Nonetheless, there was a slower P1 peak latency
and a similar N1 peak latency for the line-drawing trials compared to the color photograph trials when SOA was 13 ms, and a
similar P1 peak latency when SOA was 27 ms. Crucially, an increase in the SOA produced an linear increase in the latencies of
all the three components for the color photograph trials but not for the line-drawing trials. The absolute increase value of the
latency for the color photograph trials tended to rise up as one from the posterior P1 (12.00 ms) to N1 (17.56 ms) or the anterior P2 (16.62 ms). Thus, the results indicated that the shorter SOA was sufficient for extracting usable information from linedrawings, whereas more usable information continued to be extracted from color photographs as the SOA increased, which
was consistent with the edge-based theory.
Moreover, incorrect trials elicited shorter latencies of the posterior N1 and the anterior P2 compared to correct trials for
color photographs but not for line-drawings, indicating that incorrect categorization of color photographs may arise from
insufficient processing time of extracting relevant information from color photographs. Coincidently, the regression results
revealed that the accuracy rates for the color photograph trials instead of line-drawing trials could be predicted by the anterior P2 latency, suggesting that a longer anterior P2 latency is related to the higher accuracy rate for color photographs. That
is, the results confirmed that sufficient processing time was crucial for extracting useful information from color photographs.
This also explains why people performed worse on the color photograph trials than on the line-drawing trials when the processing time was extremely limited, i.e., when the SOA was 13 ms.
As there was such a short variable SOA (i.e., 13, 27, and 40 ms) and long-duration mask (100 ms), it is possible that the
latencies of the early components reflected the processing of the target plus the mask with different onset time. Nevertheless, previous neurophysiologic studies in monkeys, using line segments as stimuli, have demonstrated that backward masking typically does not have significant effect on the latencies of the early components in early visual areas (see Lamme,
Zipser, & Spekreijse, 2002). Consistently, our results revealed that the latencies of the early components did not change with
the SOA for the line-drawings. But we also found that the latencies of the early components gradually increasing with the
SOA for the color photographs. As the mask onset time is identical for line-drawings and color photographs, the different
latency patterns between the two conditions could not be due to the processing of the mask but the processing of the target
image. That is, surface-based information involved in color photographs is not processed simultaneously with edge-based
information, which is consistent with the edge-based theory.
Then, why would the edge-based information of the color photographs not be processed in the same way as that of the
line-drawings, especially when SOA was 13 ms? There are at least two possible explanations: either because the edge-based
information in the color photographs was not present to the same degree in the line-drawings (due to lower contrast for
example), or the presence of surface information influenced the processing of edge-based information. The former explanation is consistent with the edge-base theory, while the later one is in favor of an early mechanism for surface detection,
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which seems inconsistent with the edge-based theory. However, it should be noted that the lower performance for color
photographs than for line-drawings when SOA was 13 ms indicated that this possible early detection of surface properties
did not lead to early facilitation effects. That is, although there is possibly an early mechanism for surface detection, surface
properties are still less efficient routes for accessing the memorial representation in natural scene categorization, which is
consistent with the edge-base theory.
Previous studies have shown that the magnocellular (M) pathway (which is sensitive to the luminance contrast) is faster
than the parvocellular (P) pathway (which is sensitive to the chromatic contrast and generally less sensitive to the luminance
contrast) (Baseler & Sutter, 1997). The color photographs contained both luminance and chromatic information, while the
line-drawings contained only luminance information; thus, our findings are consistent with the previous findings. Moreover,
in Bar’s model, it is argued that low spatial frequencies (i.e., the global features of the image) conveyed by the M pathway are
perceived earlier than high spatial frequencies (i.e., the fine properties of the image) (Bar, 2003; Schyns & Oliva, 1994). This
relationship has been supported by a number of studies. For example, it is found that the inferior temporal cortex responded
to low spatial frequencies 51 ms earlier than when it received high spatial frequencies (Sugase, Yamane, Ueno, & Kawano,
1999). Low spatial frequency information represents global information about the shape (Bar, 2003) or reveals salient information about the global scene structure (Schyns & Oliva, 1994). Although line-drawings are famous for conveying high spatial frequency information while blurry blobs are known to convey lower spatial frequency information, the global structure
in the line-drawings produced by trained artists tracing the outlines was more salient than that in the color photographs.
Thus, our findings are also partially consistent with Bar’s model (Bar, 2003).
Nonetheless, our findings appear to be inconsistent with the finding that color can be perceived earlier than form
(Moutoussis & Zeki, 1997). In this previous study, colors were presented on the right half of the screen and oriented lines
on the left half of the screen. Both the colors and lines switched with a square-wave oscillation, and the participants were
asked to report what the color was when the bars tilted to the right or left. The perception in their study was conscious. In
our study, the stimulus was presented for 13 ms with a variable SOA of 13, 27, 40 ms between the image and the mask. Due
to the limited processing time, the perception in our study was mainly unconscious subjectively. It has been argued that
form or contour processing proceeds faster than surface processing at the unconscious level such as V1 and, by contrast, surface processing proceeds faster than form or contour processing at the conscious level (Breitmeyer & Tapia, 2011). Crucially,
the early peak latencies that are within 200 ms after the stimulus onset reflect unconscious processing as a precursor to conscious perception and not a separate pathway. In other words, although the contour usually receives priority processing in
early scene analysis, this circumstance need not imply that the reaction time is faster for the contours than for color in conscious perception.
Surprisingly, although the anterior P2 amplitude was greater for the color photographs than for the line-drawings, the
posterior P2 amplitude was larger for the line-drawings than for the color photographs. Enhanced anterior P2 has been found
when people attend to a specific color (Hillyard & Münte, 1984) or when only one of several simultaneously presented
objects contains the target feature (Luck & Hillyard, 1994), which indicates that the anterior P2 reflects the detection of a
specific feature with feature-based attention (Luck, 2012, pp. 331–332) or top-down matching processes (Evans &
Federmeier, 2007). Increased posterior P2 has been found when the targets are preceded by non-informative cues rather
than valid and invalid cues, which suggests that the posterior P2 reflects relatively late processing of the stimuli in the visual
areas (Talsma, Slagter, Nieuwenhuis, Hage, & Kok, 2005). Because the posterior P2 amplitude gradually decreased with the
SOA for both types of images and it was greater for incorrect than correct trials for the color photographs, the posterior P2
amplitude might reflect a top-down redetection or filling-in of features (Komatsu, 2006; Paradiso et al., 2006) in the early
visual areas.
Unlike the above components, for both types of images, the effects of N2, P3, and N4 at the frontocentral sites gradually
decreased with the SOA, despite the effects being larger for color photographs than for line-drawings. Because the N2 reflects
an actively attended mismatch between a stimulus and a mental template while the P3 appears to reflect top-down monitoring by frontal attention mechanisms that are engaged in evaluating incoming stimuli (see Folstein & Van Petten, 2008 for
review; Polich, 2007), the results were consistent with decision-making becoming easier with longer SOAs. Moreover, incorrect trials of both types of images elicited greater N2 and smaller N4 effects. The later components varied with SOA and correctness similarly for color photographs and line-drawings, which is in agreement with the prediction that edge-based
representation is sufficient for decision making.
Finally, we should note that there were some limitations in the present study. First, we did not include grayscale images
in the study, and thus, we could not differentiate the roles of color and other surface properties such as brightness and texture in rapid natural scene categorization. Future research should explore this arrangement by comparing the grayscales
with color photographs and line-drawings separately. Second, we did not manipulate the luminance contrasts and spatial
frequencies of the color photographs and line-drawings in the study. Further studies should investigate this type of scenario
by keeping the color photographs and line-drawings at similar luminance contrasts or spatial frequencies. Third, to compare
the ERPs elicited by edge-based information and surface-based information, we used color masks for color photographs and
gray masks for line-drawings. Further research should examine the role of different type of masks in ERPs for color photographs and line-drawings.
To summarize, our behavioral and ERP results provide converging evidence that edge-based information receives priority
processing and plays a crucial role in natural scene categorization, whereas surface information can help to improve judgment only when the processing duration is sufficient. These results reconcile the apparently contradictory empirical findings
Q. Fu et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 152–166
165
and theoretical predictions by the edge-based and surface-based theories and help us to understand the role of edge-based
and surface-based information in rapid scene categorization and how the human brain categorizes different visual stimuli in
natural scene categorization.
Author contributions
QF, YJL, WC, and XF designed the experiment, QF, YJL, and WC prepared materials and performed the experiment, QF, ZD,
and JW analyzed the data, and QF, ZD, JW, and XF wrote the paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Prof. Dirk B. Walther in the Department of Psychology, the Ohio State University, for providing us the
color photographs and line-drawings that were first used in Walther et al. (2011). The authors thank Kaiyun Li and Tinting Li
for running the experiment, and we thank Prof. Kan Zhang at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for
allowing us to use the NeuroScan equipment of his lab. This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China
(31270024, 61521002) and Royal Society-Newton Advanced Fellowship and the Natural Science Foundation of China
(61661130156).
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Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
More questions for mirror neurons
Emma Borg
Philosophy Department, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AA, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Mirror neurons
Mindreading
Intentions
Intentionality
a b s t r a c t
The mirror neuron system is widely held to provide direct access to the motor goals of others. This paper critically investigates this idea, focusing on the so-called ‘intentional worry’.
I explore two answers to the intentional worry: first that the worry is premised on too
limited an understanding of mirror neuron behaviour (Sections 2 and 3), second that the
appeal made to mirror neurons can be refined in such a way as to avoid the worry
(Section 4). I argue that the first response requires an account of the mechanism by which
small-scale gestures are supposedly mapped to larger chains of actions but that none of the
extant accounts of this mechanism are plausible. Section 4 then briefly examines refinements of the mirror neuron-mindreading hypothesis which avoid the intentional worry.
I conclude that these refinements may well be plausible but that they undermine many
of the claims standardly made for mirror neurons.
Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
As is by now very well-known, both the monkey brain and (apparently) the human brain contain a special category of
neurons which respond in two distinct conditions – neurons which fire both when a subject performs a given motor action
and when a subject witnesses the same motor act being performed by a target.1 So, for instance, one and the same pattern of
neuronal stimulation can be observed both when a subject undertakes a precision grip of a cup and when they merely see a
target performing that action. These dual-acting neurons – the so-called ‘mirror neurons’ (MNs) – have given rise to a great deal
of interest and a fair amount of speculation since being first reported by Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, and Rizzolatti (1996). Much of
this interest has stemmed from the idea that mirror neurons might play a fundamental role in social cognition, providing the
neurological basis for our understanding of the minds of others.2 The suggestion has been (e.g. see Gallese & Goldman, 1998)
that if self-generated MN activity (i.e. the firing of an agent’s MNs during the performance of an action by the agent) forms the
neurological basis of the subject’s plan to carry out that action, then externally-generated MN activity (i.e. the firing of an
agent’s MNs during observation of the same action performed by another) might still form the basis of plan formation, but
in the latter case the plan is in some way taken ‘off-line’, not resulting in motor-action by the agent but instead being somehow
‘tagged’ as belonging to the target. Such externally-generated MN activity would then provide direct access to the action plans
(or motor goals) of others, providing at least a first-step on the road to full social cognition. In what follows, I will term this idea
the ‘MN-mindreading hypothesis’.
As Hickok (2008) points out, one immediate worry for the MN-mindreading hypothesis is that terms like ‘goal’ and
‘action’ are ambiguous and can be read in either non-intentional or intentional ways (e.g. ‘the goal’ of an action might, on
the one hand, be simply the object to which it is directed or, on a more intentional reading, it might be what the action
E-mail address: e.g.n.borg@reading.ac.uk
See Chong, Cunnington, Williams, Kanwisher, and Mattingley (2008) and Dinstein (2008) for some questions about the evidence for the existence of mirror
neurons in humans (as opposed to monkeys). What is involved in ‘witnessing a target perform the same motor act’ will be explored below.
2
For instance, see the NY Times article on 10th January 2006 entitled ‘Cells that read minds’.
1
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
2
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
is designed to bring about).3 Clearly, if MN activity is to provide a route to an intentional explanation of the behaviour of others,
descriptions of MN activity must either deploy notions like ‘goal’ in non-intentional ways or proponents of the hypothesis must
explain how intentional readings are made possible. However MN enthusiasts are confident that such an explanation can be
given and that MNs can provide the bridge between physical actions and intentional attributions. So, for instance, we find
Ramachandran (2000) suggesting that MNs provided ‘‘the driving force behind the ‘great leap forward’ in human evolution’’
and that their discovery will ‘do for mindreading what the discovery of DNA did for biology’ (2006). Other authors have been
rather more circumspect, but still we find Iacoboni et al. (2005) arguing that MNs should be understood not merely as capturing
the what of an action but its why, i.e. the intention with which a given motor act was performed, and it now seems commonplace to hold (as, e.g., do Buccino et al., 2007: T119) that ‘‘the MNS [mirror neuron system] appears [also] to underlie the coding
of intentions behind the actions of others’’. Furthermore, the scope of issues to which MNs may contribute an answer is often
held to range widely, as for instance in Oberman et al. (2005): 190–1 ‘‘Mirror neurons are primarily thought to be involved in
perception and comprehension of motor actions, but they may also play a critical role in higher order cognitive processes such
as imitation, theory of mind, language, and empathy’’.4
In Borg (2007) I raised some questions for the MN-mindreading hypothesis and expressed some scepticism about the
claim that MNs can provide the key to intentional understanding (see also Csibra (2007) and Jacob (2008a, 2008b) for sceptical stances in this area). The aim of this paper is to revisit the argument against the MN-mindreading hypothesis given in
Borg, 2007, exploring further some of the possible solutions to it and assessing whether scepticism about the MN-mindreading hypothesis is still warranted. My conclusion will be that it is.
The structure of the paper is as follows: in Section 2 I will re-introduce the challenge I raised in Borg (2007) (here labelled
‘the intentional worry’) and explore the responses that can be made to it. As we will see, there are, I think, two main lines of
response to the initial worry: the first (introduced in Section 2 and explored in Section 3) is to claim that it rests on a misunderstanding of MNs (a route pursued, I take it, by Sinigaglia (2008)). The second, more concessive response, is to claim that
it rests on a misunderstanding of the MN-mindreading hypothesis. This kind of refinement of the MN-mindreading hypothesis can be found in recent work by both Gallese and Goldman and the move will be examined further in Section 4.5 The
conclusion of Section 3 will be that the problem does remain for strong accounts which take MNs as the key to at least some
attributions of intentional mental states. Furthermore, while the weaker reading of the role of MNs to be examined in Section 4
may yet be vindicated, I will argue that it does alter the MN-mindreading hypothesis in certain crucial ways. Thus, I will contend, at this stage of the debate, it remains completely unclear whether or not MNs do provide a critical first-step on the path to
social comprehension.
2. Mirror neurons and the intentional worry
The intentional worry for the claim that MNs provide the key to attributing (at least some) mental states to others is, at its
simplest, that MN activity is just too closely tied to behaviour to make it (at least unaided) a route to the attribution of intentional mental states. If MNs respond to gestures and simple motor acts (e.g. firing differentially in response to a precision grip
versus a whole-hand pick up) it would seem that they operate at the wrong level to underpin intentional attribution, since,
on the one hand, a single gesture can map to a multitude of intentions, while, on the other, multiple gestures can map to a
single intention. So, for instance, I can grasp a cup because I want to drink from it or because I want to examine it. Yet if MN
activity responds merely to the grasping act itself it will underdetermine the intention. Or again, a range of different specific
motor acts can all be realisations of a single intention (e.g. an intention to have a drink being realised through grasping a cup
with a precision grip or grasping a cup with the whole hand, etc.). So, again, if MNs are sensitive just to brute kinematics they
will underdetermine the intentions which accompany our gestures.
The most robust response to this worry (see, e.g., Sinigaglia’s thought-provoking 2008 paper) is to reject it entirely, arguing that it is premised on far too simplistic an understanding of MN activity – given a proper understanding of how MNs
behave and their sensitivity to the motor goals of the target, we will see that the intentional worry simply dissolves away.
To get a proper understanding of the behaviour of MNs we need to appreciate that, while some MNs do respond simply to
brute kinematics, others seem sensitive not to mere bodily movements but rather to the sequence of actions within which a
given motor act is embedded and thus to the goal which a sequence of actions is designed to realise. So, for instance, the MN
sequence for the grasp of an object can be triggered by seeing a conspecific reach behind a screen, so long as the observing
subject knows that there is a graspable object behind the screen (so grasping MNs fire even when the brute kinematics of the
grasp are unobserved). Furthermore, as Fogassi et al. (2005) demonstrated, one and the same precision grip of a piece of food
results in different patterns of MN stimulation in macaque monkeys depending on whether the movement is embedded in a
larger act of grasping food to eat or grasping food to place in a container (notably even if the container is located near the
monkey’s mouth, thus making the brute kinematics of the two action sequences extremely similar). On the other hand, very
3
See also Goldman (2009): 239: ‘‘The Parma team often stress that motor MNs code for the goals of observed actions. This may be uncontroversial if ‘goal’
means ‘goal object’, which might refer either to a physical object (e.g. a cup) or a physical event or outcome (e.g. a cup being moved to one’s mouth). But the
same term ‘goal’ can be used to refer to a mental state, a state of desire with a certain intentional object or relation of ‘aboutness’’’.
4
See also Arbib, Oztop, and Zuckow-Goldring (2005) and elsewhere for claims relating MNs and language understanding.
5
Though we should also note that in their original Gallese and Goldman (1998), the authors were careful (and perhaps more careful than some of those who
came after them) to stress both the modesty and the potentially tendentious nature of their claims about MNs.
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
3
different actions in terms of brute kinematics can result in identical patterns of MN stimulation if the actions are embedded
in the same overall goal-directed action. For instance, Umiltà et al. (2008) revealed a single pattern of MN activity when a
monkey cracked a nut using pliers and when it cracked a nut using reverse pliers (i.e. using a tool requiring exactly the opposite kinematic actions to standard pliers); see also Bonini et al. (2010). Finally, Rizzolatti and others report a single pattern of
MN firing for monkeys when cracking a nut or when merely hearing the noise of a nut being cracked. These findings – that,
on the one hand, single kinematically-described gestures can map to multiple MN patterns, while, on the other, multiple
kinematically-described gestures can map to a single MN pattern – are taken to show that (at least some) MNs are responsive not to the mere kinematics of an action (the what of the act) but rather to the overall goal of the act, thus that MN activity allows ‘‘an observer to distinguish between an agent’s ultimate intentions’’ (Ocampo & Kritikos, 2011: 262).6
The way in which MNs are supposed to embed this sensitivity to the larger goal to which a single kinematically described
motor act (e.g. a precision grip of a cup – what I will term below a ‘small-scale motor act’) is subservient is via the embedding
of the small-scale act within a larger hierarchy of motor-goals. As Fogassi et al. (2005): 665 suggest, single motor acts ‘‘are
not related one to another independently of the global aim of the action, but appear to form pre-wired intentional chains in
which each motor act is facilitated by the previously executed one’’. In a similar vein, Iacoboni et al. (2005) have stressed the
role of ‘functionally related mirror neurons’ which fire not in response to a witnessed small-scale motor act (e.g. precision
grip versus whole hand pick up of cup) but to the action most likely to follow the small-scale act given the particular context
in which it takes place. Thus, in an interesting set of experiments, Iacoboni et al. recorded different patterns of MN stimulation given one and the same small-scale kinematic act (e.g. the precision grip of the cup) but embedded in different background contexts, where one context was designed to suggest ‘before tea’ (promoting an assignment of the intention of graspto-drink to the target), while the other was designed to suggest ‘after tea’ (promoting an assignment of the intention to
grasp-to-tidy-away); see Borg (2007) for further discussion. On this model then, what underpins assignment of an intention
to another is not the witnessing of a single, small-scale action in isolation but rather a response across the whole MN system,
which involves logically related neurons and is modulated by contextual features. As Sinigaglia (2008): 84 stresses:
Whether [MN] activation reflects the goal-relatedness of an individual motor-act or is modulated by the overall goal that
identifies the action of which the individual motor act is a part, depends on [MNs] motor properties, more than on their
mirror properties, on whether they are organised in motor chains in which each single act is coded within a specific hierarchy of goals. In other words, it is due to this motor chain organisation that grasping is not just grasping for grasping’s
sake, but is grasping to carry food to the mouth and eat, or grasping-to-move X from A to B, etc.. . ..It is [rather] a question
of recognising the role of chains of motor goals, and the fact that they shape the motor expertise which is at the base both
of the agent’s capacity to act and to represent his/her actions and his/her ability to understand the immediate significance
of the actions and intentions of others.
Here then is the way in which the advocate of MNs seeks to avoid the simplest version of the intentional worry: MNs are
sensitive to small-scale kinematically-described gestures but these are themselves framed in terms of a hierarchy of motorgoals, and it is sensitivity to these chains of motor-goals, mirrored by differences in the patterns of MN activity, which underpins intentional attribution. There is a chain of motor-actions which carries out the intention to grasp-to-eat and a chain of
motor actions which carries out the intention to grasp-to-place and MNs help us to identify the motor goals of others by
responding to small-scale acts together with a sensitivity to the larger scale motor chains to which those small-scale acts
belong.7 As Fogassi et al. (2005): 666 note:
IPL mirror neurons, in addition to recognising the goal of the observed motor act, discriminate identical motor acts
according to the action in which these acts are embedded. Because the discriminated motor act is part of a chain leading
to the final goal of the action, this neuronal property allows the monkey to predict the goal of the observed action and,
thus, to ‘read’ the intention of the acting individual.8
Given this model of how the MN system works (akin to what I called ‘the revised MN hypothesis’ in Borg (2007)) I think
there are two questions that arise: first, does the appeal to motor chains really avoid the intentional worry? Second: if not, is
there a better move for the advocate of a MN-based form of mindreading to pursue? These questions respectively are pursued in the next two sections.
6
Sinigaglia (2008) also appeals in this respect to an experiment by Cattaneo et al. which showed (in normal subjects) an increase in the activity of the
mouth-opening mylohyoid muscle (MH) both when a subject instigated a grasp-to-eat of a piece of food and when observing a conspecific instigate a similar
action, whereas no MH increase was observed either when the subject instigated a grasp-to-place of a piece of paper nor when observing a conspecific instigate
a similar action. (Cattaneo et al. also found no increase in MH activity in ASD subjects in either condition.) However, for this experiment to bear weight here it
seems that the object-type would need to be held constant across the two conditions. As it stands, it seems the lack of MH activity in the second condition could
be attributed simply to the different affordances of the object involved (i.e. that it was not edible) rather than to any direct recognition of the target’s intention.
7
Note that these chains of motor actions must be operating at a sufficiently high-level to overarch a number of more specific chains of motor actions – the
motor chain which realises the intention to crack a nut must generalise over more fine-grained chains which include the movements of an agent cracking a nut
with paws, with fingers, with common tools and with novel tools (see below).
8
This passage may be thought to trade on the ambiguity in the term ‘goal’ noted at the start. As Goldman (2009): 239 writes ‘‘From the fact that a goal-event
– a non-mental event – is predicted it does not follow that a mental event such as an intention is predicted’’.
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
4
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
3. What is the mechanism behind motor chain embeddings?
An immediate and pressing question for someone who seeks to avoid the intentional worry via an appeal to motor chains
is ‘how does the MN system succeed in embedding an observed small-scale action within the right larger-scale motor chain
(i.e. the motor chain which does in fact realise the target’s motor intention)?’ I think there are four options to be found in the
current literature for answering this question. First, it might be claimed that two tokens of a small-scale motor action,
embedded in two different motor chains, while superficially highly similar, in fact differ in almost imperceptible ways
(depending on the hierarchy of motor goals within which the act is embedded). On this view, then, the MN system can
embed superficially identical kinematic acts in different motor chains because the system is sensitive to more covert kinematics (which reveal the acts as non-identical). Second, it may be held that the small-scale actions themselves are identical
from a kinematic point of view across different contexts but that the MN system is nonetheless able to embed them in different chains reflecting different intentions since contextual cues enable the triggering of one prewired motor chain
(amongst many such available ones). Third, it might be argued that MN activity is a learned response, so witnessing an action
which is sufficiently similar to an initial stimuli (which occurred in a learning phase) will be sufficient to trigger the conditioned response (perhaps given the presence of contextual cues). Finally, it might be suggested that the embedding process is
simply a fundamental neurophysiological fact.
Turning first to the idea that the kinematics of a small-scale act differ depending on why it is being undertaken: this position might be suggested by reflecting on research about the pre-contact phases of action, where it seems clear that the end
goal of an action can affect the way in which a small-scale action is itself performed. For instance, commenting on the work
of Armbruster and Spijkers (2006) and Ocampo and Kritikos (2011): 262 note (without necessarily endorsing the specific MN
proposal under consideration here) that ‘‘[t]he end goal of the action differentially modulated reach-to-grasp kinematics in
the pre-contact phase, suggesting that motor planning depends not only on the affordances that are visible on an object, but
more importantly, on what one intends to do with it’’. They conclude (2011: 263) ‘‘the motor control literature provides a
strong case for goal-specificity in action planning and execution. It seems that ‘post-grasp’ intentions can shape the way
in which particular movement parameters are programmed and carried out’’.9 So, while at a superficial or consciously accessible level, two movements might look kinematically identical, according to this proposal there will be subtle differences in
their execution which reveals them as manifestations of one intention or another: a grasp in one context (where it is, say, part
of a grasp-to-eat) might look at first glance just like a grasp in another context (where it is, say, part of a grasp-to-place), but in
reality, on this view, their kinematics will differ, each having been delicately shaped by the overall motor-plan to which it
belongs.
Clearly there are two empirical hypotheses in play here, both of which it should be possible to test experimentally: first,
there is the idea that there are very subtle kinematic changes in actions which are the result of the different motor intentions
with which those actions are performed. Second, there is the idea that the MN system of an observer is capable of registering
these differences and using them as the basis of an attribution of a motor intention. On the first point, there is evidence that
at least some motor intentions do result in genuine but subtle kinematic differences (e.g. see Naish et al., in press). However
there remains a significant question as to how extensive we can expect these kinematic differences to be. For, while (as far as
I know) it remains an open experimental question, it seems prima facie implausible to expect genuine kinematic differences
between actions intended to carry out a range of even quite basic motor intentions.10 For instance, we might wonder whether
there are really robust kinematic differences (which generalise across a population) to be found between moves to pick up food
and eat it versus moves to pick up food and merely taste it? 11 Or between picking up an object to feel its weight versus picking
it up to feel its texture versus picking it up to assess it as a weapon? Although it is a little hard to know what metric of ‘basicness’ we should deploy when talking of ‘the basic motor intentions which MNs recover for us’, all of these seem relatively
simple and evolutionarily ancient kinds of intention, and thus the kind of thing one might (at least initially) have thought a
MN account of motor intentions would yield. However it seems we would need much further evidence before accepting that
all such motor intentions genuinely do resolve into subtly different small-scale kinematic gestures and thus could be registered
by MNs which are genuinely sensitive only to kinematic properties. Yet if the MN system is limited just to differences like graspto-eat and grasp-to-place, with some other system needed to capture grasp-to-taste, grasp-to-give and grasp-to-examine, this
would seem significantly to undermine the explanatory value of the MN-mindreading hypothesis and might make us wonder
whether a single, unitary explanation, capable of capturing a wider range of motor intentions, might not be preferable.
9
It may be that this is also the view Sinigaglia has in mind when he talks in the quote above of chains of motor goals shaping a subject’s expertise, or again
‘‘As motor knowledge grows, the intentional chains that shape it become more articulate and the ability to discriminate the sensorial information received
becomes sharper, embedding the observed motor act in an increasingly rich intentional framework’’ (Sinigaglia, 2008: 86)
10
Of course, as a reviewer for this paper pointed out, one might query whether any of the intentions in play here should be counted as genuinely ‘motor’
intentions at all – one might think that the motor intentions here concern simply the grasp per se, with information about the reason for the grasp being some
kind of ‘prior intention’. I’m sympathetic to this point but note that it doesn’t seem to help the advocate of the MN-mindreading hypothesis, whose claim
precisely was that MNs are sensitive to the ‘why’ not merely the ‘what’ of an action and thus that the MN system is capable of holding apart intentions like the
intention to grasp-to-eat versus the intention to grasp-to-place or grasp-to-taste.
11
Furthermore, note that the supposed differences in play here must be differences in the small-scale acts themselves and not merely in the motor chain as a
whole – crudely, it can’t just be that one grasp ends up with food in the mouth and the other with food in the container – since MNs are supposed to underpin
prediction of action on the basis of attributed intentions, not merely retrodictive intentional explanation of action; one should be able to say, as the small-scale
act itself is underway ‘the target will put the food in her mouth because she intends to eat it’.
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
5
Turning to the second empirical point above – the idea that the brains’ of subjects are capable of registering and utilising
existing subtle kinematic cues – this also seems problematic. For even in cases where kinematic differences have in fact been
discovered, as in Naish et al’s work on reach-to-eat versus reach-to-place, it is far from clear that these differences are registered by observers. For instance, Naish et al. found that subjects exposed to isolated small-scale acts which contained subtle kinematic differences (e.g. witnessing just the grasp portion of a movement which was in fact either a grasp-to-eat or a
grasp-to-place) were in fact unable to predict correctly the motor-goal hierarchy to which the small-scale act belonged. So,
even though kinematic differences were found, it seems that subjects were unable to utilise these differences to assign the
small-scale act to the right overarching motor chain (i.e. either the MN system itself does not register the differences or they
are simply not available to be used in an attribution of intention).
Finally, we might note that this proposal raises again the Behaviourist-type worries which some opponents have levelled
at the MN-mindreading hypothesis before.12 For this approach embraces the standard Behaviourist idea that behaviour recognition is sufficient for intentional attribution. The only change is to the notion of behaviour in play, making it more fine-grained
than envisaged in standard Behaviourism. Thus to the extent that one does not like Behaviourism, one is likely not to like this
proposal.
So, on the first answer to the question of how a movement gets embedded in the correct overarching motor chain there is
a clear answer to the question of the mechanism by which such an attribution is made (namely, MNs are sensitive to very
subtle kinematic differences inherent in the small-scale acts and not available to first-person consciousness). However I
think much more evidence would be needed to show that such a claim can really do the work required. First, we would need
to know that the posited kinematic differences really do exist (i) for the range of motor goals we might expect the MN system
to capture, (ii) within the small-scale acts themselves and (iii) generalising across a population. Second, we would need to
show that subjects really are capable of utilising these differences to predict the motor chain to which the small-scale action
belongs. None of this has been shown.
Let us turn instead, then, to the second suggestion above, which avoids the straightforward identification of intentions
and kinematically-described behaviour involved in the first move. On this model, two small-scale grasping actions which
belong to different motor chains may be kinematically identical, yet still the MN system as a whole is capable of differentiating them. So, how does the MN system perform this feat? How does it assign kinematically identical acts to different
overarching motor chains – how does it know that in one context a precision grip of a cup is part of a grasp-to-drink while
in another it is part of a grasp-to-place?
One option (the focus of Borg (2007)) would be to appeal to prewired neuronal chains which are selected or impeded via
observation of the small-scale action in its contextual setting. In this way background conditions, together with the affordances of the object acted upon, would serve to allow the MN system to identify the intention with which the action was
performed by helping to trigger the appropriate prewired pattern of activity. This kind of appeal to prewired chains (and thus
presumably the view of the MN system as an evolutionary adaptation) can be found in Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998), Rizzolatti
and Craighero (2004) and Fogassi et al. (2005). Also, recall that in Iacoboni et al.’s (2005) study the difference in MN activity
apparently came entirely from the background condition against which the small-scale action was perceived (i.e. with a difference emerging from the same kinematic action set against different background contexts, when no difference occurred
when the backgrounds were perceived alone). Thus the suggestion would be that there are prewired motor chains embedded
in the MN system and the combination of witnessing a target perform a small-scale action together with the context in
which it occurs triggers the activation of one or other of these prewired chains. It is that activation which constitutes activation of (in the subject’s own case) or attribution of (in the observation of a target) a plan to grasp-to-drink, or a plan to
grasp-to-place, etc.
However I think there are questions to be asked of this kind of appeal to prewired, evolved motor chains working in
tandem with contextual cues. A first question (stressed in Borg (2007)) for the appeal to prewired chains is whether there
are any such chains which can be individuated without appeal to the intentional states of the target (i.e. whether or not
the account can be saved from circularity). Moving a cup to one’s lips might be the natural or typical next move in a ‘before tea’ context, but only if the context is one in which the target does not also believe that their tea has been poisoned,
etc. For prewired chains to provide the first step towards the attribution of mental states to others it would seem that they
cannot appeal to the mental states of the other in their construction, yet without such an appeal it is not clear that we can
isolate natural behaviour or functionally-related movements in the first place. In a related worry, we might also wonder
exactly how the MN system selects the right level of grain for the prewired chain into which an action is to be embedded.
For instance, thinking about the motor chain which realises the intention to crack a nut: this needs to operate at a higher
level than the brute kinematics of small-scale gestures, for it needs to overarch the smaller-scale acts of cracking a nut
using a precision grip with fingers, cracking a nut with pliers and cracking a nut with reverse pliers (and an indefinite
number of other small-scale acts). Clearly, on at least one level of description, the action following any one of these smaller-scale acts will be different (the kinematics of a small-scale movement following the grasp of a nut with fingers will
differ from the kinematics following the grasp of a nut with pliers, even though both may be instances of nut cracking),
12
See also Csibra (2007) for a discussion of the apparent tension between the idea that the MN system tracks subtle kinematic cues and the idea that it
attributes intentions.
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
6
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
thus the motor chain we are after for nut cracking must be at least one step away from brute kinematics. But how many
steps exactly?
Should the triggered motor chain overarch a group of more specific acts each of which would realise peanut cracking, or
peanut-or-brazil nut cracking, or nut-cracking in general, or the cracking of any external shell or container to reveal a foodstuff, or the undertaking of any action which reveals the prowess of the agent? Each of these would, it seems, constitute a
different motor intention and would include greater or fewer smaller-scale gestures within its scope, but which one of these
motor chains is triggered? On observing a small-scale gesture in a given context how does the MN system succeed in selecting a motor chain which lies at the right point between one which is so general as to be satisfied by any old action leading
to nut cracking (e.g. where nut cracking occurs simply as an accidental by-product of the intended action, as in a move to
strike a rival which accidentally leads to the striking of a nut) and one which is so particular as to be tied to the brute kinematics of just this particular instance of nut cracking? The concern here is that, if there is nothing intentional in our arsenal
to start with (i.e. if the MN system is our route to mental state attribution and therefore cannot itself appeal to the intentional states of the target) just how do we (or how do our MN systems) find a way of sifting through the deafening noise of
kinematic gestures in order to assign an observed small-scale gesture to a motor-chain which, say, groups together all and
only those actions which would suffice to satisfy the intention to crack a nut (as opposed to a chain which groups together
actions sufficient to crack a peanut or actions sufficient to crack any food container or actions sufficient to impress a mate,
etc.)?13
Finally, we need to ask whether the idea of prewired chains really fits with experimental evidence about the behaviour of
the MN system. For instance, work by Catmur, Walsh, and Heyes (2007) (amongst others) appears to show that MN activity is
malleable and can be induced via sensory-motor association. Yet if this is right it would seem to run counter to the idea of a
fixed, prewired neuronal structure.
As an alternative to the idea of prewired chains, then, we might instead turn to the view of patterns of MN firing as a
learned activity with a habituated outcome being triggered by contextual cues.14 For instance, the view of the MN system
as an associative one has been argued for at length by Heyes, who suggests (2010: 578) that MN effects occur due to ‘‘stimulus
generalisation – the tendency of conditioned responses (mirror neuron firing) to be proportional in magnitude to the physical
similarity between the current stimulus (the action sequence observed in [an] experiment) and the learning stimuli (the action
sequence observed before [an] experiment, while the neurons were acquiring their properties through associative learning)’’;
see also Heyes (2001, 2005) and Heyes and Ray (2000). In this way, we would not need a pre-programmed motor chain which
somehow embraces, say, all possible forms of nut cracking. Rather we would have specific actions which lead to nut cracking
during a learning phase and habituation to these actions (in context) would lead to anticipation of the habitual outcome when
later exposed to stimuli similar to that encountered in the learning phase, perhaps in the presence of conditioned cues (as Heyes
(2010): 578 notes, a container was always present in trials involving grasping-before-placing but never in trials involving grasping-before-eating, thus the presence or absence of a container could become a conditional cue for activating different MN
chains).
However if this is the right way to think about the MN system, then I would suggest it makes MN activity less like a
genuine form of intention–recognition and more like recognition of mere statistical regularity: in most contexts like the before-tea one (at least in the learning phase), when someone has picked up a cup they have gone on to drink from it, while in
most contexts like the after-tea one they have gone on to place the cup to one side.15 If this is what MNs are registering then it
seems they are registering nothing specifically to do with the mind of the agent carrying out the act but just what kind of things
people in the past have tended to do in these kinds of situations.16 On this understanding MN activity is entirely consistent with
what Hickok (2008): 1231 calls ‘the null hypothesis’: ‘‘namely that F5 is fundamentally a motor area that is capable of
supporting sensory-motor associations’’. If MN activity is understood as tracking some kind of sensory-motor regularity, this
is entirely consistent with thinking of MNs as specialised behaviour trackers instead of the much richer picture of MNs as
underpinning social cognition. We could explain the shared properties of MNs – the fact that they fire both when I exercise
a precision grip of a cup as part of a grasp-to-drink and when you do the same – simply in terms of the motor properties of
13
The objection here is, I think, an instance of more general rule-following considerations. The worry, as Kripke (1982) stressed, is that any account which
tries to extract rules from behaviour (or dispositions to behave) alone faces the problem that any given piece of behaviour can be made to accord with an
indefinite number of rules.
14
It might also be argued that these two views – the prewired, adaptive, evolutionary model of the MN system and the associative one – might be able to coexist, with selection of the right motor chain (i.e. the one which would realise the target’s intention) being fixed by contextual cues, but these cues then
selecting either prewired neuronal chains (which would encode what are, in some sense, the ‘natural’ actions for the target in a given situation) or associative
chains (chains of actions one has regularly instantiated or witnessed instantiated) as appropriate.
15
Note this objection does not hold for the pre-wired view: there could be an evolutionary advantage to embedding witnessed small-scale acts in motor chain
M1 even if the majority of small-scale acts witnessed had not in fact resulted in the chain of actions predicted by M1. So, for instance, watching someone
repeatedly move an object towards a shelf but then letting it drop just prior to reaching the shelf might nevertheless trigger a motor chain which would
eventuate in placing rather than dropping (see Meltzoff, 1995).
16
If this were right, perhaps what MNs should really be thought to do for us is underpin something like Hume’s natural grounding of induction – our brains
are so structured as to expect regularity, at least as far as the actions of others are concerned.
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
7
F5, e.g. that the region encodes the motor vocabulary ‘grasp’, together with a sensitivity to behavioural regularities involving
such grasping acts.17
So, if the MN system succeeds in embedding a small-scale motor act in a larger hierarchy of motor-acts (capable of realising an overarching motor intention – a grasp-to-eat versus a grasp-to-place) by relying on regularities, I think there are
serious questions to be asked about whether this should be understood as a variety of (motor-goal) mindreading at all since
tracking of regularities simply does not seem to be the same thing as genuine tracking of intentions. As Hurley (2006): 222–3
notes, any move in the opposite direction, where we treat intention recognition as very closely aligned to behaviour tracking,
threatens to obscure the genuine difference between the two abilities: ‘‘Psychologists ask: what is the functional difference
between genuine mind-reading and smart behaviour reading? Many of the social problems animals face can be solved
merely in terms of behaviour-circumstance correlations and corresponding behavioural predictions, without the need to
postulate mediating mental states. . .However, mind-readers do not merely keep track of the behaviour of other agents,
but also understand other agents in terms of their mental states. Mind-readers can attribute intentions to others even when
their actions do not carry out their intentions; they can attribute beliefs to others even when those beliefs are false’’. Given
this, it would seem question-begging to treat a system which merely registers behavioural regularities as the starting point
for genuine intentional attribution.
We have been in search of a mechanism by which the MN system assigns small-scale acts to larger motor chains and the
answers we have looked at have appealed first to subtle kinematic differences, second to prewired motor chains together
with contextual triggers, and third to associative mechanisms together with contextual cues. However I have argued that
none of these moves look particularly plausible (at least as current research stands). However, perhaps there is a fourth
and final option here: perhaps we should resist the idea that there is any further story to tell about how the MN system
comes to attribute a small-scale act to a specific motor-goal hierarchy. For instance, Sinigaglia (2008): 87 argues that the
regularity route is indeed the wrong way to understand these motor chains, writing that it is ‘‘a mistake to reduce motor
goal hierarchy [coded by the inferior parietal MNs] to a juxtaposition of single motor acts characterised by the fact that typically one follows another’’, and he points to the reverse pliers experiment of Umiltà et al. (2008) as evidence that mere statistical regularity cannot be what the MN system is tracking. So perhaps the right thing to say here is just that the MN system
simply does, somehow or other, succeed in mapping a single small-scale act to the overarching motor-goal hierarchy which
matches the one the target is in fact going to enact: a subject witnesses a precision grip of a piece of food by a target and
somehow the subject’s MN system just knows that this precision grip on this occasion is part of a grasp-to-eat and not part
of a grasp-to-place. But if this is the right thing to say, I would suggest that we do not have an explanation of the mechanisms
of mindreading here so much as a simple restatement of the mystery. We all know that somehow a subject manages to predict a target’s behaviour on the basis of an attribution of an intention to them and it is not clear that we have got any further
down the explanatory road by saying that, as it were, it is not the subject that does this (nothing inferential or higher-level in
the process) but their mirror neuron system that does it, though there is no story to tell about how the MNs manage the feat.
If this is what the MN-mindreading hypothesis amounts to, then it seems to me that the attempt to make a complex human
skill explicable has dissolved into an appeal to some kind of neurological magic.
It seems to me then that the intentional worry raised in Borg (2007) does still hold good against the MN-mindreading
hypothesis as stated above, for what is required for the MN account to work is not just an appeal to motor chains but some
story about how the MN system maps a single small-scale act (a precision grip of a cup, say) to the larger chain of motor acts
which could realise the target’s intention (an intention to grasp-to-eat, say, versus grasp-to-place or grasp-to-examine). Yet
none of the obvious candidates for this mechanism seem particularly plausible. First, it might be thought that different intentions or overarching motor-goals subtly shape the small-scale acts which realise them (so that a precision-grip of a piece of
food is subtly different if it is part of a grasp-to-eat rather than a grasp-to-place), yet much further experimental evidence
would be needed to show that (across a range of cases) this was really the case, i.e. that our gestures really do (at some very
fine-grained level of description) map one-to-one to our motor intentions. Furthermore, even if this were (somewhat
remarkably) to turn out to be the case, further evidence would be needed that subjects truly are able to make use of this
information in the way suggested. Alternatively, then, it might be thought that the MN system achieves the mapping of
small-scale acts via a system of prewired motor chains which can be triggered or inhibited via contextual cues. Yet, on
the one hand, it is not clear that such prewired chains exist (just what is the ‘natural’ series of actions for cracking a
nut?) nor that contextual cues could be sufficient for selecting the appropriate chain (could context serve to choose between
a motor chain appropriate for cracking a peanut, cracking a peanut or brazil nut, cracking any food container, etc.?). Furthermore, this approach does not seem to fit with evidence concerning the malleability of the MN system – the fact that patterns
17
If what we have with MN activity is some kind of regularity tracking and anticipation of a likely sequence of actions then the MN system could be taken to
be part of a more general predictive coding model of the mind. In this case the MN system itself need not be encoding the overarching goal of a motor act but
would instead be responding to the state anticipated for systems down-stream from the MN system. As Hickok (2008): 1233 again notes: ‘‘The predictive
coding in the motor system is now going to be different for the grasping-to-eat versus the grasping-to-place actions. For eating, there may be anticipatory
opening of the mouth, salivation, and perhaps anticipatory activity associated with the expected somatosensory consequences of the action. For placing there
will be no mouth-related coding, but there may be other kinds of coding such as expectations about the size, shape or feel of the container, or the sound that
will result if the object is placed in it. If cells in the IPL differ in their sensitivity to feedback from these different systems, then it may look like the cells are
coding different goals, when in fact they are just getting differential feedback input from the forward model’’. On this picture, systems outside the MN system
would be responsible for determining the anticipatory state of the MN system (i.e. what intention is taken to lie behind the witnessed action), with the MN
system itself just registering these anticipatory differences.
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
8
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
of MN activity can be learned rather than being innately given.18 As a third option, then, one might argue that the MN system
depends on associative learning and is thus a system for recognising statistical regularities. However, in this case, it is not clear
that the system need be taken to concern attribution of intentions at all, since sensory-motor associations are possible without
any attribution of mental states to agents. The fourth and final suggestion above is that there is no explanation needed for how
the MN system moves from the small-scale act to the larger motor-goal hierarchy within which it is to be embedded: although
there is no kinematic difference between a precision grip of a cup in two different contexts, and although the MN system is not
relying on prewired chains or statistically likely actions, still the MN system somehow manages to embed the small-scale act in
the right overarching motor chain, reading the action as a grasp-to-place in one context but a grasp-to-eat in the other. Yet in
this case it is not clear that we have a genuine explanation of mindreading so much as a neurological-level restatement of the
thing to be explained: we have replaced a person-level mystery with a brain-level one and this cannot, I think, constitute a genuine explanation. Thus, unless the advocate of the MN-mindreading hypothesis can provide an alternative mechanism for the
embedding process, I suggest that the intentional worry remains a challenge here.19 If the concerns raised in this section are on
the right lines, then, it seems an advocate of the MN-mindreading hypothesis might be well advised to explore a more concessive response, seeking to refine the claim made by the MN-mindreading hypothesis in such a way that it avoids the worry. It is
to this option that I turn now.
4. Refining the MN-mindreading hypothesis
One response to the intentional worry is to accept that it does hold against the construal of the relationship between MNs
and mindreading given at the start of this paper, but then to object that the construal given at the start of this paper is not in
fact the right way to model the relationship between MNs and mindreading. MNs do, on this revised approach, have a key
role to play in the recognition and attribution of mental states to others, but not because MN activity constitutes direct access to the motor-goals of others. On the one hand, it may be argued that MN activity does not constitute but merely causes or
otherwise makes possible instances of such mindreading. On the other, it may be thought that MN activity constitutes direct
access not to the intentional mental states of others but rather it underpins the sharing of phenomenal content, such as emotional or sensational content.
Both of these refinements of the MN-mindreading hypothesis can be found in recent work by Goldman (2009, 2010). For
instance, on the first refinement, Goldman suggests (2010: 314–5):
An act of mindreading consists of a belief or judgment about a mental state. So if a mirroring process in itself were to
constitute mindreading (as opposed to merely cause it) the ‘‘receiving’’ mirroring event would itself have to be or include
a judgement or attribution of a mental state. In particular, it would have to be an attribution to a third person, presumably
the originator of the mirroring process. . ..Now if the ‘‘receiving’’ mirror events are tokens of the same event types (i.e.
they co-instantiate the same event types) then they [too] will be units like ‘‘planning to grasp an object’’, ‘‘planning to
tear an object’’, ‘‘feeling touch in bodily area X’’ and so forth. They won’t also be beliefs, judgements, or attributions to
the effect that the observed agent is planning to grasp an object, planning to tear an object, feeling touch in bodily area
X, and so forth. If they were beliefs, judgements, or attributions of these sorts. . .then, since they are mirroring events, the
original endogenous occurrences would also have to be beliefs, judgements or attributions with the same contents. But
nobody has ever proposed that the sending mirror events are, or include, beliefs, judgements or attributions. These are
strong considerations in favour of [the thesis that MN activity causes but does not constitute acts of mindreading].
While on the second possible refinement, reflecting on lesion studies involving attribution of emotions like disgust, he
notes ‘‘It is a reasonable inference that when normal individuals recognise disgust when viewing the facial expression of disgust, this recognition is causally based on the production in the viewer of a (mirrored) experience of disgust’’ (2010: 318).
Goldman concludes ‘‘I would argue that the most important and extensive chunks of evidence for the [mirroring-mindreading thesis] are found I studies of non-motoric mirroring domains’’ (2009: 244).
It seems to me that these dual moves to refine the MN-mindreading hypothesis are indeed promising: if MN activity helps
cause but does not constitute the attribution of an intention to another, then there is much more space available for the
advocate of the MN-mindreading hypothesis to try and locate the elements needed to take us from sensitivity to behaviour
to sensitivity to intentions. For instance, it could be that MN activity provides a necessary input to the processes by which we
attribute intention, but that in the end such attribution still involves a (usually sub-personal) act of inference (on the basis of
perception of behaviour, contextual cues and background information) to the intentional state to be ascribed to the target.
However if the story is one of causation not constitution then it is no longer clear that MNs deserve quite the reputation they
have acquired in terms of providing a key to mindreading. After all lots of neural states might contribute to a complete causal
account of how mental state attribution comes about, and, again, this kind of explanation could be entirely consistent with
18
We might also wonder how the model of prewired chains fits with evidence that there is an F5 motor resonance for meaningless actions (Fadiga, Fogassi,
Pavesi, & Rizolatti, 1995; Maeda, Kleiner-Fisman, & Pascual-Leone, 2002), where presumably there should be no prewired circuit to call into operation.
19
We might also wonder how the MN-mindreading hypothesis fits with the findings from Buccino et al. (2007) that the MN system is activated both by
intentional actions and by unintentional, accidental actions. Although noted in a positive respect by Sinigaglia (2008), this finding looks prima facie problematic
for the idea that MN activity reveals the why not merely the what of an action, since in the accidental case there is no why to be discovered, thus one would
expect an MN system devoted to mindreading to remain silent in this case.
Please cite this article in press as: Borg, E. More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition (2012), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013
E. Borg / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
9
the idea that there are no special representational properties to be ascribed to the MN system. MNs could play the causal role
in question even if the correct way to understand MN activity was not in terms of the attribution of mental states to others,
but instead, say, as the neurological store for our motor vocabulary.
There is also a worry with redirecting attention away from the role of MNs in ascribing motor intentions and towards
something more like paradigm cases of empathy (the sharing of emotions and sensations). For although, as Goldman points
out, this kind of mindreading has been much less to the fore in discussions about mindreading (which have focused on paradigmatic belief/desire attribution) and while it is clearly right to say that the sharing of emotions and sensations stands in
need of explanation every bit as much as belief/desire attribution and the prediction and explanation of action, unless we
have a good reason to think there must or should be a unitary explanation of both abilities, showing that mirroring has a
key role to play in the former as yet tells us little or nothing about the appropriate explanation in the latter.20 Thus, again,
it seems to me that on this approach we might save the MN-mindreading hypothesis but at the risk of making it considerably
less relevant to core debates about cognitive architecture (e.g. between theory–theory and simulation theory accounts of intentional explanation) than was originally thought.
To conclude then: despite arguments to the contrary (e.g. Sinigaglia, 2008) it seems to me that the intentional worry
raised in Borg (2007) (and articulated in a similar form elsewhere, e.g. Csibra, 2007; Jacob, 2008b) remains a genuine challenge to standard versions of the MN-mindreading hypothesis. For even if we take into account the idea that MNs track
intentions via sensitivity not to brute kinematically described actions but to chains of motor actions which can be thought
to realise a target’s motor intentions (an intention to grasp-to-eat, say), we still stand in need of a story about how such
small-scale acts get to be embedded within larger ones. As noted at the close of Section 3, all of the obvious candidates
for this mechanism (subtle kinematic differences, an appeal to prewired chains selected via contextual cues, or an appeal
to associative learning and statistical regularities) seem to face significant problems. On the other hand, if the advocate of
the MN-mindreading hypothesis simply goes quiet at this point and suggests there is no further story to tell it is, I think,
quite unclear how much the appeal to MNs really furthers the explanatory endeavour. As suggested in this section, then,
it seems to me that a better move for the proponent of a role for MNs in mindreading to make would be to weaken the claims
made by the MN-mindreading hypothesis, allowing that MNs cause but do not constitute attribution of mental states to others and that the primary area of activity in which MNs facilitate a grip on another’s mind is in the realm of emotional resonance and the sharing of sensorial information. While no doubt the MN system and its role in this kind of sharing of
phenomenal states deserves much further exploration, still such a conclusion seems to undermine the dominant view of
MNs in the recent literature (as giving us the why not merely the what of motor-actions). If right, it reveals that establishing
the question to which MNs might be the answer is a task which still requires significant further work.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Katherine Naish and her co-authors for making their draft work available when writing this paper. Research leading to this work has been partially supported by the Spanish Government, research project FFI2011-30074-C0202.
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10.1016/j.concog.2012.11.013 |
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Article
Exploring Consciousness Perception within
Reference Frameworks
Ian Webb*
Abstract
Consciousness defines our awareness of the world. Many theories of consciousness exist, yet its
nature remains elusive. This article explores the assumption that only one type of conscious
awareness of experiencing reality exists. We discuss Einstein’s reference frameworks and
examine evidence from parapsychology. I put forward a framework to investigate whether there
are two potential types of awareness of reality; (1) everyday awareness and (2) cross-reference
experiences, such as Out of Body Experiences. In addition, we make a case for classical models
of the brain being incomplete using examples from general anaesthesia, mental health and
consciousness research. Furthermore, we make a case for quantum mechanics principles
influencing our conscious experiences. If cross-reference experiences can be proven, it supports
the scientific reductivism argument that the true nature of physical reality is quantum in nature.
Keyword: Consciousness, reference frameworks, quantum mechanics, paranormal.
1. Introduction
Philosophers have investigated consciousness for thousands of years, yet there remains a great
deal of mystery around the nature of consciousness. Currently, many consciousness theories
exist. Therefore, no accepted theory exists (Doerig et al., 2020). Nevertheless, many unknowns
remain about its nature, such as its relationship with the brain and whether the brain solely
generates consciousness or whether there is a degree separate from the brain (Searle, 1998). At
the heart of consciousness is how we experience the world.
It is common for many academic papers to describe consciousness without exploring the full
consciousness experience. For example, in the psychological literature, topics are often described
as alternative consciousness. There are five considered causes of alternative consciousness;
spontaneously, physically or physiologically induced, pharmacologically, psychologically
induced, and diseased (Vaiti et al., 2005). One fundamental assumption in the psychological and
scientific literature is that alternative consciousness has no basis in physical reality, i.e., a
product of the mind or a hallucination.
The assumption that alternative states of consciousness have no basis in reality, has been
questioned by people’s experiences close to death (Osis & Haraldsson, 1972; Moody, 1975).
Furthermore, Stevenson (1983) distinguished between hallucinations and idiophany (all unshared
*
Ian Webb, Independent Researcher, UK. Email: ianwebb_78734@hotmail.co.uk
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Webb, I., Exploring Consciousness Perception within Reference Frameworks
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experiences). Therefore, it is natural to ask whether these alternative states of consciousness are
accessing another mechanism of observing reality or just hallucinations generated by the brain.
This paper provides a theoretical and practical framework to explore whether more than one
perception of reality is open to humans.
Traditionally, there is a distinction between public and private consciousness. In public
awareness, there is often an agreement about whether two events occurred, i.e., two people can
agree if a table is in a room. In this article, we call these co-existence frameworks. In this case,
there is an agreement on the reality of a table. The other type is a private experience in that if a
person thinks about a table in a room, there is no way a second person can confirm that the table
exists. We can call these single reference frameworks. It is assumed that only public
consciousness is related to physical reality.
The theoretical basis of the argument lies in the famous debate between Bohr (1935) and
Einstein et al. (1935) on the nature of physical reality. Classical/Newton physics is observing the
behavior of objects in space-time and is often underpinned by how we perceive the world. These
often underpin empirical science but assume that human perception accurately reflects reality.
However, quantum mechanics experimental evidence that defies classical physics logic, such as
entanglement, quantum tunneling, and interference pattern (Hey & Walters, 2003; Horodecki et
al., 2009). Both classical and quantum mechanics physics are incredibly successful at predicting
experiments but have different theoretical principles.
How quantum mechanics and classical theories treat space-time are fundamentally different. For
example, classical physics treats space-time as fundamental, whilst quantum mechanics has the
concept of nonlocality (Fiscaletti & Sorli, 2008; Gallego et al., 2012; Hiley, 2001; Popescu,
2014). Therefore, we argue that if consciousness is fundamentally classical/biological driven,
there should not be any experiences outside the human body. However, if physical reality and
consciousness are fundamental quantum mechanics, there is the potential to experience another
type of reality. In this article, we explore our conscious awareness of space-time via Einstein’s
concept of reference framework.
We put forward a framework to explore whether private experiences, such as Out of Body
Experiences (OBEs), can validate the perception of another location to their physical body. If
these experiences can be validated, it suggests at least two types of conscious awareness of
reality rather than the assumption that what we perceive is the only reality. Therefore, suggesting
that the nature of physical reality and consciousness are quantum in nature.
2. Exploring consciousness perception of Space-time via reference frameworks
We start with Einstein’s (1916) thought experiment to explore our perception of space and
motion. Person A is on a train, and Person B is on a station platform. As the train passes through
the station, person A drops an item and asks to describe the object’s path to the floor. Person A
would say the object would fall straight to the ground. However, Person B would explain that the
item fell in a curve due to the train’s momentum. This thought experiment is that observing a
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Webb, I., Exploring Consciousness Perception within Reference Frameworks
282
point depends on the person’s reference framework, and there is no ‘true’ universal view of the
world.
By further expanding on the thought experiment, we can hypothesize that evolutionary principles
can explain discrepancies in the above thought experiment. The earth is moving through space
and spinning on its axis. Nevertheless, consciousness remains stable, and we cannot perceive the
earth’s motion directly. It appears the Sun and Stars are moving, but we remain stable.
Consciousness awareness has evolved to make life easier for functioning rather than a true
reflection of reality. There is only a minor discrepancy when motion is involved in conscious
perception. Only in recent human history can two observers perceive motion differently,
demonstrating the illusion of perceiving space.
Russell (1915) argued that two concepts of time are required to describe time: mental and
physical time. The distinction can be related to the feeling of now. Mental time is a shared
consciousness experience with two concepts of tensed (past, now, future) and tensless concepts
(earlier than, simultaneous, later than; see Primas, 2003). McTaggart (1908) suggested that no
complete, consistent account of time is possible, and our experience of time is unreal. However,
there is a consistent perception of time that appears to be an illusion, for example, time appears
quicker as we get older, but in reality, it is constant (James, 1886). Furthermore, the concept of
now is absent in classical and quantum mathematical formulations (Primas, 2003). We further
explore time in Einstein’s (1916) thought experiment about simultaneously.
A train travels through a station when both ends of the train are hit by lighting simultaneously.
Person A sits on the train while Person B is on the station platform. Both are asked which part of
the train was struck first. Person A said the front of the train, while Person B said both hits
simultaneously. Both are correct despite the different viewpoints. Einstein used this to
demonstrate general relativity principles that the world needs to be viewed as individual
reference frameworks rather than an absolute reality. Therefore, Einstein’s thought example
suggests that how we perceive time differs from the reality of time.
The principle of general relativity suggests that a mass of an object will influence time. This can
be demonstrated with atomic clocks at different heights from the earth’s surface (Chou et al.,
2010). The further away from the surface, the quicker the clock will run. This is not a faulty
clock but a demonstration of Einstein’s thought experiment that time measurement is based on
reference frameworks. Unfortunately, there is no universal definition of time across the three
different physics genres.
Here, Einstein sums up his thoughts on space-time towards the end of his life. “A human being is
a part of the whole, called by us’ Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences
himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our
personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving
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Webb, I., Exploring Consciousness Perception within Reference Frameworks
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for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security
(Einstein, 1950, cited by Schwartz, 2015, page 254).
A concept of how mammals observe space-time is called the specious present. The concept of
the specious present was developed by Clay and reported by William James (James, 1886). The
specious present is related to our experience of the present and can vary in length. Perhaps the
best example is a moving spot is moving in a circle. The eye will only notice the spot’s motion if
it goes around slowly enough. At a certain point, if the spot goes around faster enough, it will
appear as a circle. At the heart of the concept is that different species will have different concepts
of observing space and time. Therefore, Einstein’s thought experience suggests that the concept
of universal perception of space-time does not exist.
We can explore the concept from Einstein’s general relativity principles of a person’s reference
framework. Traditionally, consciousness is thought of as an awareness of the world (physical
world) and an inner world (thoughts of a person). We suggest three types of reference
frameworks to explore consciousness. These are (1) Co-existence Frameworks, (2) Single
Reference Frameworks, and (3) Cross Reference frameworks.
Co-existence frameworks describe our conscious awareness of the physical environment and
represent our everyday awareness experiences. In this state, consciousness represents the
physical environment, and a shared experience often corresponds to another person’s physical
reality. For example, if you physically throw water on a fire, it will affect the fire. This
materialistic reality is the basis for classical science, i.e., you can observe and validate theories
with the physical environment. However, we explore Einstein’s thought experiment of distance
and simultaneously that there are disagreements with observations in the physical environment,
which are generally irrelevant in the everyday experience. However, this explores the question of
perception of the world to the hypothetical true reality. This is related to the collective
consciousness.
Single reference framework- These are consciousness awareness of real experiences to the
person but cannot be witnessed by another person or validated, i.e., thoughts, dreams, or
hallucinations. The moment they are observed, they are real consciousness experiences but have
no physical reality. For example, if you imagine throwing water on a fire, it will not affect the
physical environment, nor will anyone witness or validate the person’s experience.
In addition to everyday thoughts, a single reference framework can be considered alternative
states of consciousness (See Vaiti et al., 2005). All these experiences cannot be observed by
another person, which defines the single reference framework, i.e., a person cannot observe
another person’s dreams. There are two hypotheses for alternative states of consciousness
experience. The first is that the brain generates them and are not considered to have a basis in
reality, i.e., they are independently generated and, therefore, not linked to any physical reality.
The second hypothesis is that they can be verified experiences outside the experiencer’s physical
body location. These can be identified in the third type of reference framework.
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Cross-reference framework- These are single reference frameworks that evidence exists of a
reality different from the person’s physical location. It is best demonstrated in an example of a
Near-Death Experience.
Cook, et. al. (1998) gives an example of a cross-reference framework:
“I was standing there in the middle of the room and distinctly saw my dead body lying upon the
bed... I started to leave the room and met one of the physicians, and was surprised that he said
nothing to me, but since he made no effort to stop me, I walked out into the street where I met an
acquaintance of mine, Mr. Milton Blose. I tried to greet Mr. Blose by hitting him on the back,
but my arm went through him... It was impossible for me to attract his attention... I saw that he
went across the street and looked into a shop window where a miniature Ferris wheel was on
display”. Mr. Blose confirmed that he was looking at a Ferris wheel at the time. (Cook et al.,
1998, page 385).
Cross-reference frameworks are rare but are theoretically important in studying consciousness. It
challenges the assumption that co-existence awareness is the only access to the physical
environment. In the above example, it is difficult to explain this experience within a classical
model of the mind. However, applying general principles of quantum mechanics of nonlocality
and the principle of consciousness gives a framework to understand such concepts.
3. Exceptional Experiences
We explore parapsychology evidence for cross-reference framework experiences. Generally,
parapsychology is often considered controversial due to its nature. However, various scholars
have argued that there are similarities between quantum mechanics and parapsychology (Walach
et al., 2014; Walach et al., 2016). In this context, it gives a starting point in our framework for
exploring consciousness and the nature of physical reality.
Einstein famously quoted quantum mechanics as “spooky action.” Alan Turing (1950) described
extrasensory perception as the main difference between the mind and the machine. A group of
scientists and scholars set up paranormal societies in the 1880s to explore phenomena that did
not fit into the materialistic view of science at the time. For over 140 years, books have been
written documenting paranormal evidence, including; Phantasms of the Living (Gurney et al.,
1886), Human Personality and its Bodily Death (Myers, 1903). Noble prize winner Richet (1929)
published Thirty Years of Psychic Research. More recently, Real Magic by Dean Radin (2018).
However, the field has its critics (Alcock, 2003). We have divided this section into four sections;
(1) perception of space, (2) perception of time, (3) consciousness as a field, and (4)
communications.
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3.1 Perception of Space
An important consideration is the human experience of space and time. In human cognition, we
perceive them as two independent concepts. However, Einstein’s general relativity has linked
both space and time together. In theoretical physics, models exist for existing dimensions, such
as string theory (Gross et al., 1985; Witten, 1995) or nonlocality with quantum entanglement
(Brookes, 2017; Gauger et al., 2011). There are two hypotheses to explore in the consciousness
experience; (1) our cognitive perception is a true reflection of reality, and (2) our cognitive
illusion in which cross-references experiences can exist.
In this section, we explore three areas of parapsychology related to cross-reference frameworks.
First, we consider evidence from three topics of cross-reference frameworks, such as remote
viewing, Out of Body Experiences (OBE), and Near-Death Experiences (NDE), that can provide
evidence to discuss cross-reference frameworks. If these topics are to be proven, it will provide
evidence of an extension of human perception beyond the classical model and suggestive of the
nature of physical reality being quantum in nature.
3.1.1 Remote Viewing
Remote viewing is the alleged ability of an observer to perceive points of space and time
different from the physical body’s location. Therefore, giving an evidence base to the coexistence framework. The most extensive remote viewing research program came from a US
government research program. The Stargate program ran from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.
The first successful experiments were published in mainstream scientific journals (see Puthoff &
Targ, 1976; Targ & Puthoff, 1974). Both described statistically significant results. Although,
they have been criticized for methodological flaws in the early studies (Wiseman & Milton,
1998).
The Stargate remote viewing research program was evaluated by two research groups, Mumford
et al. (1995) and Utts (1996). Both came to different conclusions about remote viewing, but both
agreed on statistical evidence that cannot be accounted for by methodological flaws. Other
researchers associated with the review suggested that the program demonstrated success in
experimental and twenty years of field research (see May 1995; May 1996, May 2014). In
addition to the freedom of information act in the United States of America, thousands of
operational results of remote viewing of intelligent targets are known (see Marwaha, 2021).
Other remote viewing experiments have investigated remote viewing outside the government
environment, such as archaeology and financial markets. For example, Schwartz (1980)
examined the use of remote viewing against techniques used by archaeologists at the time.
Remote viewing provided more accurate information than archaeological techniques (Schwartz,
1980). Kolodziejzyk (2012) tested associated remote viewing in financial markets, found small
but significant effects, and the project made just under $150,000.
The estimated proportion of people who can successfully perform remote reviewing is 1.5%
(Lantz & May, 1988). Within the Stargate program, a training program developed potential
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remote viewers’ skills (see Hubbard & Langford, 1986). A central technique of good remote
viewing practice is reducing or managing conscious thoughts that could affect remote viewing
sessions (see Schwartz, 1980). The training of remote viewers is suggestive that the focus is to
reduce co-existence information and enter into another type of consciousness.
One of the leading remote viewers on the Stargate Project was subject to neurophysiological
monitoring during remote viewing sessions. As a result, Persinger et al. (2002) found an unusual
7hz spike and slow-wave activity over the occipital lobes. This research further evidences remote
viewing accuracy and neurological measures within the brain. Also, there is a potential to
enhance remote viewing with magnetic fields (Persinger et al., 2002).
Some evidence exists for remote viewing in intelligence services, archaeology, and financial
markets. However, remote viewing is not 100% accurate. The debate focuses on whether there is
enough evidence to suggest there is evidence for remote viewing (Mumford et al., 1995; Utts,
1996; Putoff, 1996). However, a widely cited piece of evidence comes from former President
Carter, who described an operation to recover a Soviet Union crashed plane via remote viewing
as the strangest thing he encountered as the President (see Targ, 2019). It is difficult to ignore if
operational results are successful. If remote viewing is accepted as a genuine phenomenon, it
strongly suggests a type of cross-references framework experience.
3.1.2 Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE)
An OBE is an experience in which a person perceives the world from a location outside of the
physical body (Alvarado, 1989). Unlike remote viewing, OBE generally occurs spontaneously
and not deliberately. The estimated prevalence rate for OBEs is around 12% of the population
(Blackmore, 1984). Below is an example of an OBE.
“The 59-year-old female respondent suffered a stroke three years previously and was left with
hemianopia. She reported once feeling very frustrated while watching television and then
suddenly seeming to be walking on the window ledge”. (Irwin, 1989, page 56).
A common theme of OBE is that it reports more vivid than a dream and is generally more likely
to occur when the person feels physically relaxed and mentally calm (Twemlow et al., 1982).
However, we have also seen in our example cases in stressful situations. Therefore, we cannot
conclude anything definitive based on a person’s state of mind. Nevertheless, most OBEs (70%)
have some visual content (Terhune, 2009).
There are strong neurological and psychological associations with OBEs, such as higher
somatoform dissociation, self-consciousness, lower confidence in the physical self, and temporal
lobe instability (Braithwaite, et al., 2010; Bünning & Blanke, 2005; Murray & Fox, 2005).
Therefore, the debate between biological and quantum states might be false. In that, both might
be part of the processes influencing one another. Furthermore, people who experience an OBE
observe the world from another perspective outside of the body, suggesting a cross-reference
framework experience.
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3.1.3 Near-Death Experiences (NDE)
An NDE is when a person survives a close-to-death experience, sometimes involving a cardiac
arrest. There are nine common experiences; (1) hearing the news of their death, (2) feeling of
peace and quiet, (3) a noise, (4) a dark tunnel, (5) being out of the body, (6) meeting others who
have passed away, (7) a bright light, (8) coming back and (9) telling others (see Moody, 1975;
Parnia et al., 2014; Schwaninger et al., 2002). Despite the common features, there are cultural
differences, and every person’s experience is unique (see Groth-Marnet, 1994). The prevalence
rate for NDE is between 4% of the general population and 33% of hospital samples (Greyson,
2003; Knoblauch et al., 2001; Parnia et al., 2014).
NDE does provide evidence for cross-reference frameworks. We provide two examples. The first
is described by Morris and Knafl (2003), demonstrating awareness of the physical environment
despite being in a comma.
“There was a penny on top of one of the cabinets, but you have to climb up to see it,” And
happened to mention to the other nurse who talks about things like I do. And she actually looked
up there and found it”. (Morris & Knafl, 2003, p 155)
Von Vommel (2004) gave another example of NDE where information was obtained supporting
co-existence reference frameworks. “During my cardiac arrest I had an extensive experience (...),
and later I saw, apart from my deceased grandmother, a man who had looked at me lovingly, but
whom I did not know. More than 10 years later, at my mother’s deathbed, she confessed to me
that I had been born out of an extramarital relationship, my father being a Jewish man who had
been reported and killed during the Second World War, and my mother showed me his picture.
The unknown man that I had seen more than ten years before during my NDE turned out to be
my biological father.” Von Vommel, 2004, p 120).
Two general theories explain NDE, spiritualism or hallucination (Seigel, 1980: Blackmore,
1996). However, a strong argument against the hallucination hypothesis is the existence of a coexistence reference. Besides, NDE is not affected by the type of medication intervention (van
Lommel et al., 2001). Therefore, by describing NDE within a co-existence framework, cannot be
explained by any biological/cognitive theories thus leaving us with a quantum mechanics
system.
NDE is not the only phenomenon related to death. These can include deathbed visions, where the
person close to death experiences seeing deceased loved ones just before they die (See Osis &
Haraldsson, 1972; Gibbs, 2010; Morita et al., 2016). In addition, terminal lucidity is when a
person with limited mental or language capacity becomes more articulate/ aware of their
surroundings before they die (see Nahm, 2009; Nahm et al., 2012). Finally, as a person becomes
closer to death, the rate of dreaming of deceased relatives increases, which provides comfort for
the experiencer (Fenwick et al., 2009; Kerr et al., 2014). All of the experiences described around
dying people suggest potential cross-dimensional communication and evidence to investigate
cross-reference framework experiences.
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The three types of research described in this section (remote viewing, OBE, and NDE) are
evidence of cross-reference framework experiences. We argue that studying these phenomena
from purely a cross-reference point of view can provide evidence of consciousness and physical
reality being quantum in nature. Speculating on the nature of these phenomena suggests that
reducing biological input into consciousness allows consciousness to operate at a purely quantum
level, such as biological death in NDEs, a meditative state in remote viewing, and feeling relaxed
in spontaneous OBEs.
3.2 Perception of time
First, dealing with mental time, we argue with reference frameworks that there is no universal
perception of time. Therefore, each individual will have their experience of “now”. These
thought experiments are suggestive that “now” is a cognitive illusion. The first experimental
research around the perception of time found a neurological signal a second before the person
reports the feeling of ‘now’ (Libet et al., 1983). There appears to be strong evidence to support
neurological response about 500ms before a conscious experience (Libet, 2002). So, the “now”
we experience is not a physiological event within the brain. No standard theories of present-day
physics explicitly reference the “Present” (Filk & von Muller, 2009).
Experimental tests have explored the concept of perception of time. Bem (2011) tested the
perception of time in four types of experiments; (1) precognition detection of erotic stimuli, (2)
participants avoiding negative stimuli, (3) retroactive priming, and (4) retroactive habituation.
Overall, only one of the nine experiments investigating precognition was not successful (Bem,
2011). A followed up meta-analysis of 90 experiments since the original study found a similar
effect size of .20 (Bem et al., 2016). This is aligned with our thoughts on mental time that there
is no universal time and differences between physiological and consciousness experience of
now.
There are some real-life examples of so-called precognition. Some famous examples include
people predicting the Titanic sinking (Stevenson, 1960) and identifying a body washed up on the
beach (Hasting, 1983). An estimated of the prevalence of precognitive dreams is 21.7% in the
general population (Para, 2013). Despite the famous cases, most precognitive dreams are about
trivial matters (Para, 2013). There are two interesting areas to explore with precognitive dreams.
Firstly, the person can distinguish between normal or precognitive dreams and the accuracy of
precognitive dreams.
The experience reports that precognitive experiences are different from ordinary dreams.
Describing precognitive experiences as usually clearer, more vivid and more emotionally intense
(Para, 2013). Perhaps the word ‘dream’ is misleading, considering the self-report measures
clearly distinguish experiences. Nevertheless, if people can distinguish between dreams and
precognitive dreams, it indicates a different type of consciousness awareness.
The second area worth exploring is the accuracy of the dreams. There are no studies that can
accurately assess self-report precognitive dreams. There are two main issues. One time frame we
expect the precognition to come true is not accurately defined. Secondly, it assumes that the
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future is fixed rather than probabilistic. However, this can only be confirmed if the accuracy of
the dreams can be accurately assessed. But, evidence from self-report accounts are that people
are also more likely to recall precognitive dreams that come true than those that do not, making
self-report measures problematic (Watt et al., 2014).
Despite the limitations of self-report measures of precognition, some experimental evidence for
precognition exists (see Rauscher & Targ, 2001). Theoretically, no accepted definition of space
and time combines classical and quantum physics. However, there is experimental evidence from
Bem (2011; 2016), and self-reported precognition suggests a cross-reference framework
experience. Furthermore, humans experience a general flow of time in one direction (see Stapp,
2004). Therefore, the argument is that the flow of time is a cognitive illusion, and the true nature
of time is how it is treated within quantum theory. For example, we perceive time to move faster
as we age (James, 1886).
3.3 Consciousness as a field
The two previous sections discussed cross-reference experiences. In this section, we discuss
evidence of consciousness as a field, as its relationship with quantum mechanics and
parapsychology. One of the foundations of quantum mechanics is interference experiment that is
suggestive of consciousness’s influence on photons. In the experiment, a single electron is fired
from a gun, it will go through one of the slits and form a pattern on a back screen. If the electron
is observed, the pattern forms as predicted by a solid object. However, if the electron is not
observed, it behaves like a wave pattern. The interference effect has been widely observed (see
Eichmann et al., 1993). Research into individual differences in performance in the interference
experiment has received mixed results (Radin et al., 2012; Wallezek & von Stillfried, 2019)
There have been other experimental studies in parapsychology that support the concept of
consciousness as a field. Therefore, suggestive of quantum mechanics as the foundation of
physical reality. Three areas have been tested within the paranormal literature to offer support to
consciousness being a field that can influence its environment, which includes; (1) staring
phenomena, i.e., you think someone is watching you, and then you turn around, and someone is
looking at you, (2) influencing a person’s attention and (3) poltergeist phenomena. All of these,
if confirmed, can demonstrate evidence of a conscious field, sometimes known as PSI.
An estimated 70-97% believe they had an experience of sensing someone watching them and,
when turning around, noticing someone looking at them (Sheldrake, 2001). A meta-analysis of
laboratory experiments into staring demonstrated a statistically significant effect but with a small
magnitude (Schmidt et al., 2004). Interestingly, whether the researchers were skeptics or
believers influenced the results despite having the same protocol (Schlitz et al., 2006).
Demonstrating statistical effects can rule out coincidences accounting for these experiences, but
others have questioned the methodology behind PSI experiments (Alcock, 1991; 2003).
Variation to the staring experiments is researched to investigate whether a nonlocal person
influences another person’s attention. In a typical experiment, a sitter would be asked to
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concentrate on a task while a helper in another location would try to support the sitter via
thoughts. Most research find a small but statistically significant effect (Braud et al.,1995). Most
experimental research on mental influence on the environment comes from Russia. An overview
of Russian research by May & Vilenskaya (1992) reported that people’s thoughts/fields could
affect both animals, self-report effects, and physiological measures in humans.
The third type of real-world case of a human field affecting the surrounding environment are
poltergeist cases. Traditional poltergeists can have many phenomena, including electromagnetic
interferences, moving objects, and unexplained sounds. Thousands of poltergeist cases have been
documented across time and cultures (Gauld & Cornell, 1979: Roll, 2004). There are two types
of poltergeist phenomena: haunting locations and person-centered poltergeist phenomena. Our
focus is on the person-centered poltergeist cases as it directly links a person’s neurological and
psychological profile and the phenomena.
In person-centered poltergeist activity cases, there are similarities in psychological and
neurological profiles (Roll, 2003). The person at the center of the poltergeist has neurological
abnormalities, including epilepsy (Persinger, 1985). Recent cases have strongly linked
psychological and neurological profiles to poltergeist behavior and the role of counseling in
reducing poltergeist activity (Kruth & Joines, 2016; Roll et al., 2012). Electromagnetic forces
appear to have a role in poltergeist activity, but its function remains unclear (Kruth & Joines,
2016; Kokubo et al., 2004; Roll, 2003).
Two personal-centered poltergeist case examples have demonstrated that they could be treated to
reduce the side effects of poltergeist activity (Kruth & Joines, 2016; Roll et al., 2012). In these
cases, the person at the center of the phenomena wanted to stop and had some neurological issue.
It is unknown why a particular profile causes poltergeist phenomena in one person but not
another. However, the interaction between electromagnetic fields and the prominent person’s
neurological and psychological profiles is central to these cases. Conceptually, it seems an
extension of the interference experiment.
These cases suggest that consciousness operates as a field outside the body. Evidence exists for
electromagnetic fields (ultraweak photon emission) emitted from the living systems (see Dotta &
Persinger, 2012; Schwabl & Klima, 2005). In addition, electromagnetic fields from a person can
influence cells and are related to photon emissions (Dotta & Persinger, 2011; Karbowski et al.,
2012; Persinger & Lavallee, 2010). Persinger et al. (2013) asked volunteers to imagine a white
light or not in a dark room. When the participants imagined the white light, the person emitted
photons and magnetic energy. This supported Hu and Wu’s (2006) hypotheses of quantum spin
consciousness theory (see Persinger et al., 2013).
Persinger et al. (2008) tested the role of magnetic fields and physiological response. Before the
experiments began, four pairs of strangers met and remained within one meter of each other for
one hour, twice per week, and for four weeks. After this period, participants were tested in a
closed chamber and were exposed to 6 (five minutes) different complex magnetic fields.
Participants were asked to imagine walking to and being near the other person. The researchers
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found that the person monitored sensed the person who also received changes in magnetic fields
and had significantly elevated scores for anger, sexual arousal, and emotional states.
Other follow-up research focused more on nonlocal communication in living cells. For example,
Dotta et al. (2011) conducted two experiments. The first experiment had one set of aggregate
cells occasionally receiving flashing lights while another group was placed in a dark room. The
aggregate cells receiving flashing lights evoked photon emissions in cells in the darkroom, but
only if both groups of cells shared the same magnetic field configuration.
Perhaps the most substantial research came from the former Soviet Union around mental
interactions with the environment (Karnbach, 2013; May & Vilenskaya, 1992). For example,
there are over 4,000 references on the biological effects of magnetic fields, with over 2000
around the nervous system (see Kernbach, 2013). In addition, in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, a
commission to investigate psychic phenomena found sufficient evidence to conclude that the
phenomenon existed (Kernbach, 2013).
There appears to be evidence supporting the consciousness field outside the human body. We
present evidence from the interference experiment, self-report of staring, meta-analysis of
laboratory experiments demonstrating small but significant effects, and person-centered
poltergeist cases with individuals with similar neurological and psychological profiles. A
speculative argument can be made that most individuals can influence photons, but as the objects
increase in size, only people with similar neurological and psychological profiles can influence
the objects.
3.4 Cross-reference framework communication
The final area of parapsychology we explore is nonlocal communication, particularly telepathy.
The first systematic evidence for telepathy occurred in the 1930s (Rhine, 1934). A typical
experiment would ask a sitter to guess what card will appear next. Out of 90,000 trials, they
found significant effects that could not be explained by chance. Further observations showed that
the longer the tests went on, performance declined in some people, fatigue, lack of sleep, and
illness all affected performance, and significant variations across people who could produce the
phenomenon consistently (Rhine, 1934).
The most extensive research program investigating telepathy was the Ganzfeld experiments, with
over a hundred experiments. The design protocol would involve the sitter being asked to go into
a mediative state and report what a sender was communicating in a different room. A metaanalysis by Bem and Honorton (1994) found a hit rate of 32% in forced-choice experiments
compared to a chance level of 25%. Follow-up meta-analyses have found statistically significant
results (Bem et al., 2001; Williams, 2011). However, telepathy is not without its critics (see
Milton and Wiseman, 1999).
There are individual differences in performance on telepathy tasks, such as psychological profile
or whether a person is known to the person (Goulding, et al., 2004; Watt, 2006). A meta-analysis
of Ganzfeld studies between 1992 and 2008 found that selecting participants performed better
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than non-selected participants (Storm et al., 2010). The individual differences reported suggest a
real phenomenon rather than an experimental artifact.
Further development of telepathy protocols is the measuring of brain activity during telepathy.
Some experiments have shown a physiological response in the receiver’s brain during telepathy
(see Kernbach, 2013; Standish, et al., 2003; Persinger, et al., 2003; Hinterberger, 2008).
Demonstrating the physiological, biological effect, and quantum principles suggest
consciousness operating across both systems.
There is some evidence for telepathy in everyday experiences, such as (1) predicting who calls
had positive results (Sheldrake & Smart, 2003), (2) twins can have a telepathic link (Brusewitz et
al., 2013), and (3) pets can read their owner's mind (Sheldrake & Smart; 1997). In addition, there
is experimental evidence for telepathy in everyday life (see Sheldrake & Smart, 2000; Sheldrake
& Smart, 2003; Sheldrake & Avraamides, 2009; Sheldrake et al., 2009). The research often
shows a small but significant effect, but other researchers have failed to replicate everyday
telepathy experiences (Schmidt et al., 2009).
There is a body of evidence to support the concept of telepathy. Research has demonstrated
significant effects and categorized personal differences on performance in telepathy experiments.
The impact of physiological measures and phenomena that biological/cognitive theories cannot
account is suggestive of consciousness in a biological/quantum model. In the paranormal
literature, numerous self-report and experimental procedures can only be explained if
consciousness has elements of quantum mechanics influencing its behavior. Therefore,
suggestive of further evidence of cross-reference framework experiences.
Alan Turing, in 1950 wrote, “These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific
ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately, the statistical evidence, at least for
telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas to fit these new facts in.
Once one has accepted them, it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies.
The idea that our bodies move simply according to physics’ known laws, together with some
others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. This argument is
to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain
workable in practice, in spite of clashing with ESP; that in fact, one can get along very nicely if
one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of
phenomenon where ESP may be especially relevant.” (Turing, 1950, p 450).
The question is, how should scientists and philosophers treat exceptional experiences? In this
section, we presented evidence of the existence of cross-reference experiences. Treating
evidence at face value supports cross reference framework and at least another type of perception
of reality. At worse, the evidence presented questions the assumption that only one perception of
reality should not be assumed.
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4. Are classical models complete?
In this section, we examine three topics whether classical/biological theories can explain the
brain. First, we can test whether classical physics models of the brain are adequate using proxy
measuring to explain general anesthesia and mental health. General Anaesthesia is the most
successful methodology for turning on and off consciousness awareness. Secondly, Mental
Health is predominately a conscious experience, with poor mental health significantly impacting
the person and with the extensive literature on treatments. Thirdly, is whether classical-based
theories can explain consciousness. If current biological/cognitive models are sufficient to
explain these three areas, it goes some way to suggest that the concept for biological/cognitive
models of consciousness is correct. On the other hand, if there are gaps in these indicators might
mean something is missing from the current approach to explaining the brain and mind.
4.1 The Mental Health Experience Problem
An underexplored area of consciousness theory is the role of mental states. Using the treatment
for depression as a proxy indicator for treatments in mental health, we can explore the
effectiveness of theories. A recent study researching the effectiveness of pharmacological and
non-pharmacological treatments for mental illness ranged from 42% to 55% (see Dunlop et al.,
2017). Also, treatments appear to be slightly more effective if combined rather than on their own
(Arnow & Constantino, 2003). The type of therapy seems less important than the person engaged
in an active therapeutic program (Khan et al., 2012). There is a lack of understanding of why
some work for some and not others (see Cohen & DeRubeis, 2018; Khan et al., 2012).
A criticism of the drug treatments for mental health disorders is the drug lag problem, i.e., the
abnormalities in chemicals in the brain are normal after a short period of time, but the user only
reports improvement 2-3 weeks later (see Machado-Vieira et al., 2010; Wickens, 2000).
Therefore, it is suggestive that drug treatments indirectly impact the mental state. Kirsch (2019)
has argued that drug treatments are less effective than psychotherapy and result in more relapses.
Many scholars have argued that a new theoretical approach to mental health is needed (see
Machado-Vieira et al., 2010; Malinauskas & Malinauskiene, 2019; Schaumberg et al., 2017;
Rocca et al., 2014; Tanner-Smith et al., 2013).
Perhaps one of the most interesting findings is that there is little difference between biological
and cognitive therapies in mental health treatment rates. An argument that has existed since
William James and was further developed by Sperry is that conscious thought can influence
neurobiology (See Sperry, 1969; 1987 & 1991). In addition, evidence supports biofeedback and
the placebo effect (Velmans, 2002). This can be seen in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which
has the same impact as pharmacological treatments. Therefore, the assumption that
consciousness is just a by-product of neurons does not fit with the evidence from mental health
treatments, parapsychology, and cross reference framework.
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4.2 General Anaesthesia
For over 150 years, general anesthesia has been at the center of the medical world, enabling lifeenhancement interventions. The process involves giving a person some drugs, which would
make the person unconscious, and then awakening a person by controlling chemicals induced
into the brain. This is suggestive that the drugs involved can control a person's consciousness
awareness.
It is estimated that 1-2 per 1,000 have awareness during general anesthesia, irrespective of the
general anesthesia techniques (Sebel et al., 2004). As expected, common reactions to these
experiences are a feeling of helplessness, terror, pain, and an inability to communicate, all of
which can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (Osterman et al., 2001). Unfortunately, no theory
can explain why some individuals will have conscious awareness during the procedure. This
small error rate raises two outcomes; (1) the approach is correct, but further work is needed for
general anesthesia to reduce error rates, or (2) conceptually, there is a missing piece of the jigsaw
regarding theories of consciousness.
At the start of the 20th Century, Meyer and Overton correlated the potency of general anesthesia
drugs with solubility in a non-polar hydrophobic medium similar to olive oil (see Craddock et
al., 2015: Franks & Leib, 1990). However, a problem existed for the lipid hypotheses that the
potency and lipid solubility is correct for specific compounds, but there are exceptions to the rule
(see Krasowski, 2003). Furthermore, other researchers found that proteins mapped onto
anesthetic target sites in animals better than Lipids (Franks & Leib, 1990).
Despite the effectiveness of general anesthesia in its application, it is unclear how different drugs
create the aesthetic state (See Craddock et al., 2015). Many chemicals are involved in many
different types, and there is no requirement for specific chemical groupings (Franks & Leib,
1990). Modern-day general anesthesia uses various drugs to create an aesthetic state (Brown et
al., 2018).
One of the latest theories of general anesthesia is the involvement of quantum mobility theory. It
suggests that consciousness is derived from quantum channels, which involve microtubules,
which we discuss more in quantum theory (see Craddock et al., 2015). In addition, Emerson et
al. (2013) research with tadpoles indicates the role of microtubules in general anesthetics. The
theory suggests that actions inhibit quantum dipoles, energy transfer, and electron mobility,
producing an aesthetic state.
In a study of Xenon, isotopes on consciousness awareness without nuclear spin are less potent
than those with nuclear spin (Li et al., 2018). The authors conclude that nuclear spins are a
quantum property, therefore, are consistent with theories that implicate quantum mechanics in
consciousness (Li et al., 2018). However, it is to be determined whether quantum mechanics will
provide a better theoretical understanding and better treatments in the future.
Anesthesia is an accepted medical intervention, but a complete theory is still allusive due to; (1)
theories of general anesthetic being driven by explaining how drugs work rather than being
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driven by an accepted theory, (2) many chemicals can produce the same loss of conscious
awareness, which is suggestive chemicals only indirectly affects consciousness, and (3) it is
estimated that 1-2 per 1,000 a person has conscious awareness during general anesthesia drugs,
but there is no theory to understand why these people become consciously aware. Nevertheless,
the research is suggestive of a gap in classical theories.
4.3 Biological/ Cognitive theories of consciousness
In this section, we explore biological and cognitive theories of consciousness. Perhaps one of the
most important questions is why humans evolved consciousness. The first theory we explore is
based on Darwin's theory of evolution (Darwin, 1871). The Neural Darwinism theory (NDT) is a
theoretical framework to connect biology and psychology within evolutionary mechanisms. NDT
implies that selection, reproduction, and mutation generate organisms' adaptive behavior
(McDowell, 2009). Central to NDT is the brain is an organism that can adapt to its environment.
It is often debated whether adapting to the environment is random or non-random (see Cairns &
Foster, 1991; Hall, 1990; McFadden & Al-Khalili, 1999). If non-random is suggestive of more a
field theory of the environment.
NDT suggests that the brain did not evolve as a set of instructions but from a selection process
upon variation. The world becomes labeled as two interactive variations (see Edelman, 1993).
The first is at the embryonic and postnatal stages of neural groups. Secondly, alternations in
synaptic strengths during animal activity yields adaptive behavior. According to some NDT
supporters, the variation within the brain structure would exceed a machine that could perform to
produce the same function (Edelman, 1993).
Seth and Barrs (2005) evaluated the NDT across 16 recognized findings of consciousness
research. The NDT could account for 6 out of 16, moderately for 6 out of 16, and needs
development in four areas (Seth & Barrs, 2005). Despite not being a complete model of
consciousness, it does provide helpful information that a complete theory needs to include; (1)
why the brain and consciousness evolved to produce what we have today and (2) the variation
within the brain structure may exceed machine performance, then the computer/ machine
analogy would be incorrect.
A successful approach to consciousness research is the neurological correlates of consciousness
(NCC). This framework has successfully established the relationship between neural activity,
brain zones, and consciousness (see Tsuchiya et al., 2015). One of the most consistent findings
with consciousness research is the accuracy of the relationship between the state of
consciousness and EEG recordings. During awake consciousness, it is a higher state.
Furthermore, the EEG patterns can distinguish between awake and non-awake consciousness
(see Niedermeyer, 1999). In addition, there is a slow wave high amplitude pattern in states such
as deep sleep and general anesthesia (Baars et al., 2003). Therefore, providing reliable evidence
of an interaction between the brain and consciousness.
The second consistent findings in NCC are the association between consciousness within the
brain structure. Baars (2005) suggests that the frontoparietal could have a relationship with
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consciousness based on three results; (1) in the awakened state, Conscious stimulation leads to
frontoparietal activation, but unconsciousness doesn't, (2) in an unconscious state, sensory
stimulation is associated in the sensory cortex, but not frontoparietal regions, and (3)
consciousness resting states show high frontoparietal metabolism. It is suggested that neural
correlates of consciousness are primarily localized to a posterior cortical hot zone (Koch et al.,
2016).
The underlying mechanics of EEG measurements do not rule out quantum mechanics. An
analysis of EEG signals using the Hilbert transforms provided evidence of intermittent spatial
patterns of amplitude and phase modulations of carrier waves that repeatedly resynchronize at
near-zero time lags over long distances (Freeman & Vitiello 2008). If neural interactions are by
axodendritic synaptic transmission should impose a distance-dependent delay on EEG
oscillations, but it does not (Freeman & Vitiello 2008).
The rise of the neurological correlates of consciousness approach leads to the development of the
thalamocortical system theory of consciousness (Baev et al., 2002; Ching et al., 2010; Llinä et
al., 1998; Ward, 2011). The theory suggests that the thalamus is the central hub in the cortex that
can communicate with one another (Llinä et al., 1998). It is also linked to alpha waves related to
the unconscious state (Ching et al., 2010). This brings together the observations about brain
wave patterns to the structures within the brain, which might be fundamental in a complete
model of consciousness.
Other theories, such as Global Workspace Theory (GWT), describe neurons' architecture and the
brain's structure in explaining consciousness (Baars, 2005). GWT predicts various mainstream
cognitive and neurological areas based on associations between consciousness and brain
functions. For example, Shanahan (2006) developed an architecture to control a simulated robot
based on information flow from GWT. At the heart of distinguishing between NDT and GWT is
that cognitive architecture can describe consciousness accurately.
Another theory of consciousness is the Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART). ART is a cognitive/
neural theoretical approach to describe how the brain categorizes, recognizes, and predicts
objects (Grossberg, 2013). ART has been developed over the last 20-30 years to predict human
and animal perception and cognition (Grossberg, 2013). It has similarities with NDT in that the
brain is adapting to the environment but built upon the NCC approach. However, at its
foundation is the assumption that biology and algorithms can explain conscious experiences.
The electromagnetic field theory proposes that conscious experiences are identical to specific
electromagnetic frequencies generated by neural activity in the brain without quantum mechanics
(Pockett, 2012). The correlation between consciousness experience and monitoring of brain
activity with EEGs supports it. In addition, there are often correlations between awareness and
magnetic fields generated by the brain (McFadden, 2002). This consciousness theory suggests
that certain fields can distinguish between conscious and non-conscious magnetic fields (Pockett,
2012).
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One of the problems for biological/cognitive theories of consciousness is explaining the
discrepancy between the quality of input from the environment and the richness of consciousness
experience (see O'Regan & Noe 2001). The sensorimotor adaptation theory suggests visual
filling-in occurs within the brain (see Degenaar & O'Regan, 2015; O'Regan & Noe, 2001). There
is strong evidence for this 'filling in' based on evidence of illusory visual contours (see Eysenck
& Keane, 2000). Therefore, implying that there is a discrepancy between perception and the
representation of the environment. Any theory needs to account for the quality and stability of
consciousness despite insufficient quality information and selective experiences, i.e., you do not
notice yourself blinking until someone points this out.
One of the difficulties generated is the problem of the poor environment input and a consistently
rich conscious experience. In order to address the problem. The Higher-Order Thought Theory
(HOT) suggests two levels of processes within the brain. The first-order states view
consciousness as determined by the environmental input. The HOT theory is suggestive that this
is not enough to produce conscious awareness, and a higher order of process is needed (Lau &
Rosenthal, 2011). LeDoux and Brown (2011) have argued that HOT can be applied to emotional
states. At the core of the hypotheses is that cognitive/biological associations with consciousness
can explain consciousness.
Another alternative suggesting extra processing within the brain to produce consciousness is the
recurrent processing theory (RPT). In RPT, the unconsciousness functions of feature extraction
and categorizations are mediated by feedforward sweep, while conscious processes related to
perceptual organizations are meditated by recurrent feedback (see Lamme, 2020).
Several experiments have tested the recurrent processing theory. For example, Auksztulewicz et
al. (2012) used somatosensory detection tasks that monitored the brain. In this section, we argued
that classical models of consciousnesses, mental health, and general anesthesia are incomplete.
In the next section, we explore whether quantum mechanics offers any solution.
5. The case for quantum mechanics within the brain
So far, we have made a case for classical models being incomplete and an evidence base for
cross-reference frameworks. In this section, we make a positive case for quantum mechanics
supporting the central thesis of quantum mechanics influencing the brain. We know that classical
mechanics fails at the atomic level and is superseded by quantum mechanics (see Stapp, 2004).
The argument is that thoughts, mental health, and consciousness cannot be perceived from a
materialistic perspective, so quantum mechanics should be explored (see Schwartz et al., 2005,
Stapp, 1999; Walker, 1970). This naturally leads to the logical argument that, if they exist, it
would be at the quantum level. At the simplest level, we know consciousness exists, and if it
operates below the atomic level, there is an argument that quantum mechanics should govern the
rules of its behavior (see Stapp, 1999, 2004).
Quantum mechanics fundamentally differs from our perceptions of the world and classical
theories. Thus, making quantum mechanics counterintuitive. One is the treatment of spacetime.
In quantum mechanics, there is the concept of nonlocality. This is demonstrated by
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298
entanglement, where one system can influence another but at a distance (Gühne & Tóth, 2009;
Horodecki et al., 2009). Classical theory assumes that spacetime is fundamental, but quantum
theory does not (Hiley, 2001). Therefore, we should not assume that our perception equals an
actual reality. It could equally be quantum mechanics as the true nature of reality, which is
supported by a cross-reference framework.
Due to the nature of quantum mechanics, not being intuitive has led to many interpretations. The
most accepted interpretation is Copenhagen, which Bohr and Heisenberg developed. Other
interpretations include the many worlds theory (Everett (1957), Bohm's Implicit Order (Bohm,
1990), and Transactional interpretations (see Crammer, 1986; 1988). This paper does not seek to
solve the debate but to make readers of non-quantum mechanics background that the nature of
quantum mechanics has different interpretations.
Therefore, it is unsurprising that quantum mechanics has been proposed as the most likely
scientific explanation to explain parapsychology. The Generalised Quantum Theory (GQT)
suggests relaxing some definitions and restrictions can keep core elements of quantum theory
while applying it to other systems (see Walach & Schmidt,2005; Walach et al., 2016; Walach et
al., 2014; Walach & von Stillfried, 2011). Its basis is that a Weak Quantum Theory could apply
quantum mechanics less restrictedly but with equal precision (see Atmanspacher et al., 2002).
Furthermore, the evidence of cross-reference framework experiences suggests that physical
nature is quantum in nature.
5.1 Evidence for quantum mechanics in biological systems
Despite the range of interpretations of quantum mechanics, there is emerging evidence of
quantum mechanics in biological systems. In the early 21st Century, a new division of research
around quantum biology emerged (see Al-Khalili & McFadden 2014). Evidence has been found
of quantum mechanics having a meaningful effect on photosynthesis (see Sarovar et al., 2010;
Scholak et al., 2011; Panitchayangkoon et al., 2011; Zhu et al., 2011). Also, quantum mechanics
have been demonstrated in migratory birds (see Hogben, et al., 2012, Hiscock et al., 2012;
Gauger et al., 2011). There is increasing evidence of quantum mechanics in animals and plants
(Craddock et al., 2014). A growing body of evidence suggests quantum states operate in the
biological temperature range (Mavromatos, et al., 2002; Sahu et al., 2013).
In a review, Brookes (2017) highlighted four living processes that might be considered quantum:
a reaction mechanism, a sensory signal, a transfer of energy, and an information encoding. The
review highlights the potential that a protein motion may support coherent oscillations (Brookes,
2017). In addition, the quantum mechanics effects observed range from tunneling, quantum
coherent superpositions, and entanglement (Brookes, 20017).
5.2 Theories of quantum mechanics within the brain
One of the great difficulties of classical models of the brain is a failure to match our experience
to the neurological functions (Cohen & Dennett, 2011; Noë & Thompson, 2004; Vitiello, 2015).
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Webb, I., Exploring Consciousness Perception within Reference Frameworks
299
Numerous arguments suggest that classical approaches to the brain/consciousness are incomplete
and quantum mechanics are needed (see Beck & Eccles, 1992; Penrose, 1995; Stapp, 1995).
One of the first proposed quantum coherence in biological systems was Fröhlich's (1968) and
(1970). The papers demonstrate that under appropriate conditions, a concept similar to BoseEinstein condensate involves communicating between cells at a distance. The role of quantum
coherence would involve bringing all neural activity so that the brain acts like one. The BoseEinstein condensate is the fifth state alongside solids, liquids, gasses, and plasma. However, in
the Bose-Einstein Condensate, particles will act like one close to absolute zero temperature.
Therefore, if these states exist in nature, they must demonstrate that they can operate in the
biological temperature range.
Arguments have been made that the Bose-Einstein condensate is involved in the learning and
memory process. Ricciardi & Umezawa (1967) suggest that information from outside is coded
within the brain, and since the requirement for memory stability, the code should be later
transferred to the group state of the system. The suggestion is that this is achieved via
condensation to the ground state (Ricciardi & Umezawa, 1967). The function of this state is to
regulate brain dynamics. (Ricciardi & Umezawa, 1967).
One of the proposed Quantum mechanics that influences brain functions is quantum tunneling. It
is argued that neither chemical, electric, nor magnetic fields are too weak to trigger collective
neuronal activity (Freeman & Vitiello, 2008). A theory of operation of synapses of the brain is
proposed that involves quantum mechanical tunneling at the synaptic cleft (Walker, 1970). An
argument put forward of quantum tunneling in the process of exocytosis (Beck and Eccles,
1992). The Quantum model of the brain can account for neuronal synchronized oscillations and
their rapid sequencing (Freeman & Vitiello, 2008).
Another theory that is attracting attention is the quantum spin theory of consciousness. The
model proposes quantum entanglement in which spin processes in non-spatial and non-temporal
pre-spacetime imply interconnectedness and play an important role in biology and consciousness
(Hu & Wu, 2006). Centered in the theory of quantum processes is phosphorus, which serves as a
qubit during quantum entanglement (Fisher, 2015). Perhaps the biggest debate of quantum
mechanics is whether entanglement can happen at higher temperatures (Hartmann, Dür, &
Briegel, 2006).
The question of mind/matter remains a fundamental question that remains unanswered.
However, if quantum mechanics is the underlying process, then neuroactivity could be the
outward material manifestation (Atmanspacher, 2012; Atmanspacher & Fach, 2013; Hiley,
2001). Alternatively, there is the dualism argument that the mind/matter are separate systems
interacting (Atmanspacher, 2012; Primas, 2003). There are many interpretations of dualism,
including neural monism, holistic dualism by Pauli & Jung, Russell's neutral monism, Bohm's
implicate order, and naturalistic dualism (see Atmaspacher, 2014).
One of the most debated theories of consciousness is The ORCH theory of consciousness
(Hameroff, 1994; Hameroff & Penrose, 2003; Hameroff & Penrose, 2014). ORCH theory that
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300
consciousness depends upon the biologically orchestrated coherent quantum process in
microtubules. Consciousness occurs in the objective reduction of the quantum state (Hameroff &
Penrose, 2014). Central to ORCH theory describes the physical nature of Einstein's general
theory of relativity and the fundamental theory of matter by quantum theory (Hameroff &
Penrose, 2003).
ORCH suggests conscious experience occurs due to the self-collapse of the wave function based
on quantum states having their own spacetime geometries (Hameroff & Penrose, 2003; Penrose,
1996). Hameroff (2014) describes ORCH theory as regulating neuronal membrane and synaptic
activity and connecting brain processes to fundamental spacetime geometry. In addition, there is
an element of microtubule decoherence interacting with neurophysiology (Hagan et al., 2002).
Central to brain function is the receiving information from the environment to form a plan of
action to respond to the environment (Schwartz et al., 2005). The basis of quantum theory is
information (Stapp, 1999). The integrated information theory starts with personal experience and
is central to the theory (Tononi & Koch 2015). It begins with essential priorities of an experience
from which it derives physical properties rather than the brain (Tononi et al., 2016). It starts from
the experience with five phenomenological axioms; (1) intrinsic existence, (2) composition, (3)
information, (4) integration, and (5) exclusion. However, like most theories, it does not explore
consciousness operating outside of the traditional view of science.
The newly emerging theory that consciousness is quantum in nature still has three major
technical problems (Stapp, 2004). The first quantum theory is primarily a theory of atomic
processes, whereas consciousness is connected with brain activity. The second problem is that
quantum mechanics is the study of atomic processes and is not designed to describe a biological
system. Finally, the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory for a set of rules for
calculating expectations and not a description or picture of reality (Stapp, 2004). The challenge
for dual aspects remains how consciousness, mind, and phenomenal experience are related to the
brain and physical world (see Atmaspacher, 2014). Perhaps the biggest challenge for quantum
theory is to provide evidence of how it arises or functions (Chalmers, 1995).
5.3 Quantum Mechanics in Human Cognition.
It is argued that quantum theories such as quantum probability, entanglement, and nonlocality
better describe human cognition than classical theories (Pylkkänen, 2015). These include
decision-making, ambiguous perception, probability judgments, order effects, and memory
(Pylkkänen, 2015). There are two distinct differences between classical and quantum mechanics
principles. Complementarity (some psychological measures are sequential and are influential by
order) and superposition (some psychological states cannot be measured with definitive values,
but all values have the potential to be expressed (Busemeyer et al., 2015).
One of the main differences between classic and quantum cognitions is in probability
judgments. In classical theories, a person is in a solid state and assigns a probability to a
particular judgment and cognition at that time. In contrast, the quantum account allows a person
to be in an indefinite state called a superposition state at each moment (Wang et al., 2013). As a
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Webb, I., Exploring Consciousness Perception within Reference Frameworks
301
result, human probability judgments often conflict with classical logical theory P (A&B) and
cannot exceed the probability of its constituents. Often in research, this is found in personality
judgment, medical prognosis, and political forecasting (see Tversky & Kahneman, 1983).
However, the quantum theory fits better with research into probability judgment (Pothos &
Busemeyer, 2013; Khrennikov, 2015, Tversky & Kahneman, 1983; Wang et al., 2013).
In addition to human probability judgment, quantum principles have been applied to explain
order effects (Atmanspacher & Römer, 2012). It is argued that how the information presented
affects the probability judgment is a type of interference experiment (see Busemeyer, et al.,
2009). Also, human perception and cognition of ambiguous figures follow quantum rather than
classical rules (see Conte et al. 2009). "The presence of quantum-like interference indicates that
quantum mechanics has a role in the dynamics of mental state" page 99 (Conte et al., 2009).
The two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's dilemma game demonstrated quantum
probability over classical theories and provided a better framework for modeling human
decision-making (Pothos & Busemeyer, 2009). In addition, bistable perception has been
suggested to be quantum in nature, producing the quantum Zeno effect (Atmanspacher et al.,
2008; Atmanspacher et al., 2004). Finally, there is evidence for quantum effects in human
cognition, such as contextuality, interference, entanglement, and emergence (see Aerts et al.,
2013).
The functioning of the whole brain appears not to be significantly affected by the functioning of
the single neuron (Vitiello, 1995). This further supports the Libet (1983) experiment that the
physiological and actual experience of "now" are separate. In addition, this can be applied to
general observations about the human experience. For example, when talking to older adults,
They often say that they feel like I am 21, but their body feels old. Therefore, we could speculate
that consciousness experience is timeliness that is often out of step with the body's condition.
Nevertheless, we are talking about the discrepancy between our experience and reality. Enough
evidence suggests that neuropsychological research into brain mechanics is incomplete (see
Schwartz, et al., 2005).
6. Conclusions
At the heart of this paper is the profound question of whether how we perceive the world is an
illusion or an actual reality of nature. We have argued that how we sense the world can be
viewed by our everyday experience, on which classical theories are based. In addition, we have
argued that cross-reference experiences provide an alternative awareness of physical reality
based on the quantum world. A key question for science is how to treat evidence from crossreference experiences. If we dismiss these experiences, there is a real risk of never understanding
the nature of reality or consciousness. Using a reference framework, allows scientists can explore
these questions by rejecting or accepting cross-reference experiences.
We have argued a positive case for quantum mechanics influencing the brain. In addition, we
created an opposing argument that materialism/classic physics cannot fully explain the brain with
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Webb, I., Exploring Consciousness Perception within Reference Frameworks
302
topics for general anesthesia and mental health. Therefore, we argue that parapsychology
experiences are a manifestation of physical reality and consciousness being quantum in nature.
Although, it should be stressed that it is a framework rather than having an exact theory of the
mechanics behind the phenomena. At its heart, cross reference framework experiences, if proven,
suggest the physical nature being quantum.
Speculating on the nature of cross-reference framework experiences such as remote viewing and
NDE, we can suggest that spacetime is also a field that is not fundamental. These experiences
should not be seen as sitting outside of science but can be used to understand the brain's nature
further. Cross-reference framework experiences suggest consciousness moving outside of the
perception of spacetime into another field in which quantum mechanics can be used as a
framework for understanding the experience. Therefore, suggesting the classical view of
spacetime is just a representation of consciousness experience and not an accurate fundamental
representation of reality, which is quantum in nature. It is not the first time this has been
proposed, such as quantum hologram (Michell. 1999). Naturally, consciousness fits into quantum
in nature because it does not fit into the traditional four states of matter, and there is evidence of
quantum mechanics influencing biological processes.
Implications for accepting Quantum Mechanics in Psychology
The acceptance of quantum mechanics within consciousness will have implications for models of
the mind and psychology. Despite a large body of evidence in psychology and neuroscience, how
the brain works remains primarily unresolved (Allefeld et al., 2009). McDowell (2009) has
argued, "Psychology, encouraged in modern times at least in part by the Kuhnian misprision of
revolution in science, has lurched from paradigm to paradigm in search of solid footing, but each
foothold has proved disappointingly precarious." (McDowell, 2009, p 365). Theories of both
biological/cognitive do not necessarily describe what is happening within the brain but only
build upon a description of the classical physics research paradigm.
A new theoretical psychology framework might be able to explain observations, such as the drug
lag problem, a complete theory of general anesthesia, a new perspective of interpreting the socalled paranormal phenomena, and a theory of why combined treatments for mental health work
better rather than a single framework. In addition, it will provide a theoretical basis for why some
spiritualist practice forms a basis for preventative mental health such as mediation and
mindfulness.
If proven correct of cross-reference framework experiences and quantum mechanics within the
brain, the principles outlined in this essay will create a new psychology paradigm. First, it would
suggest that no abstract concepts exist in psychology models, and everything would have a
classical or quantum physics explanation. Second, it would explain why cognitive experiences
are an illusion, a model to explain nearly all paranormal phenomena and explanations for mental
health treatments are similar despite being completely different, i.e., they all indirectly affect the
quantum mental state. Third, it would explain the observation that older adults feel the same as
they were 21, despite the biological aging process.
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Webb, I., Exploring Consciousness Perception within Reference Frameworks
303
The case is made that any theory of consciousness needs to include biological and quantum
levels. Cognitive and neuroscience have shaped most biological theories without exploring
potential evidence for quantum principles. If accepted, the consciousness experience may follow
quantum mechanics rather than classical logic. However, a range of research rarely cited in
cognitive/biological models supports the role of quantum mechanics principles in consciousness
research.
Received May 17, 2023; Accepted June 18, 2023
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 233–256
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
The imagination: Cognitive, pre-cognitive,
and meta-cognitive aspects
Kieron P. OÕConnor*, Frederick Aardema
Centre de recherche Fernand-Seguin, 7331 Hochelaga St., Montréal, Que., Canada H1N 3V2
Received 22 October 2003
Available online 2 November 2004
Abstract
This article is an attempt to situate imagination within consciousness complete with its own pre-cognitive, cognitive, and meta-cognitive domains. In the first sections we briefly review traditional philosophical
and psychological conceptions of the imagination. The majority have viewed perception and imagination as
separate faculties, performing distinct functions. A return to a phenomenological account of the imagination suggests that divisions between perception and imagination are transcended by precognitive factors of
sense of reality and non-reality where perception and imagination play an indivisible role. In fact, both
imagination and perception define sense of reality jointly according to what is possible and not possible.
Absorption in a possible world depends on the strengths of alternative possibilities, and the relationship
between core and marginal consciousness. The model may offer a parsimonious account of different states
and levels of imaginal consciousness, and of how ‘‘believed-in imaginings’’ develop and become under some
circumstances ‘‘lived-in experiences.’’
Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Consciousness; Cognition; Imagination; Possibility; Absorption; Meta-cognition
You canÕt depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus
Mark Twain
*
Corresponding author. Fax: +1 514 251 2617.
E-mail address: kieron.oconnor@crfs.umontreal.ca (K.P. OÕConnor).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.07.005
234
K.P. OÕConnor, F. Aardema / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 233–256
1. Theories of the imagination and imagery
1.1. Historical overview
Philosophers can generally be divided into those who have attributed imagination a subordinate role such as Sartre, Plato, or Hobbes and those for whom it took on a super-ordinate, almost
mystical role as with Kant, Coleridge, and Schelling (Brann, 1991). Aristotle can be placed in between these opposite positions as he primarily viewed imagination as a distinct faculty operating
in a wide variety of cognitive processes. In particular, for Aristotle imagination referred to the
process by which an image is presented to us, and may have been part of the same faculty associated with perception, the only difference being whether the image occurs in the presence or absence of sensory input. This link between sensory perception, imagery, and imagination has
persisted. Table 1 gives a summary of the history of ideas up to 1900 when imagination effectively
dropped off the philosophical map.
The current status of the philosophy of the imagination, or lack thereof, is traced back by Thomas (1997, 1999) to the linguistic turn in philosophy with its emphasis on the association between
thought and language. In psychological theorizing, the behaviorist turn in psychology, denied the
experience of mental images all together. Freud (1900) compounded the death of imagination by
relegating it as a surrogate satisfaction of basic instincts along with fantasizing and hallucinations.
Subsequently, in recent times, however, the phenomenological–existential tradition has addressed
imagination as a separate and parallel faculty to perception. In SartreÕs (1940) terms, imagination
concerns itself with Ôabsence,Õ perception with ‘‘presence.’’ Sartre and in particular Merleau-Ponty
Table 1
Conceptions of the imagination
Imagination as a faculty
Imagination as memory and
or a picture in the mind
Imagination as originality,
creativity, and transcendence
Imageless
imagination
Aristotle: The process by
which an image is
presented to us, and
present in all cognition
Hobbes: Imagination
as a decaying sense
Bacon: Imagination influenced
from above serving creativity,
religion, and poetry
Ryle: Imagination
as a form of
pretending
Sartre: Imagination situates Aquinas: Storehouse of forms
the unseen in time and
received through senses
place
Kant: Representation
of an object without
its presence
Furlong: Mental imagery is
quasi-perceptual experience
Descartes: Imagination
connects mind and body
Shelley: Seeing similarity
in difference
Gibson: Imagery as perceptual
anticipation
Hume: Imagination as the
lost vivacity of sense impressions
Kant: Imagination as the
White: Imagination
power to gain (transcendental) is to think of
knowledge
something as
possibly being so
Fichte: Imagination transcends Wittgenstein:
the ÔIÕ to produce non ÔIÕ
Imagination is in
the service of
intention and is an
echo of a thought
in sight
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(1945) seemed to assume that imagination would essentially take a visual form to enable the imagination to physically situate the ‘‘unseen’’ in both time and place.
1.2. Imagination as imagery
Image theories resurfaced in the wake of the cognitive revolution, but without any explicit link
between images and imagination. Current image theories generally do not claim to be theories of
the imagination (Thomas, 1999) although in practice confusion between imagery and imagination
still reigns (see Kosslyn, 1980). According to Thomas (1999), theories of mental imagery fail to
accommodate the much broader concept of the imagination, in particular the creative aspect of
the imagination. Picture theory for example, where visual imagery involves having inner pictures
composed of copies or remnants from earlier sense impressions, fails to account for the association between imagination and creativity, because imagination involves more than just recombining copies from former sense impressions. Whereas picture and descriptive theory, cannot
accommodate the association between imagination and creativity, active perception theory or seeing as could provide the missing link between imagination, imagery, and creative imagination in
the arts and sciences (Thomas, 1999). Gurswitch (1964) talks of imagination as a necessary extension of perception to give continuity to seeing as. This active perception theory holds that the perceptual processes involved in imagery are the same processes active in perception enabling us to
see things as they are or might be by discovering defining features. In this model there is no finished product, but an ongoing exploration of the environment. The notion of ‘‘seeing as’’ of
course implies that we know what ‘‘seeing’’ is.
One legacy of the equation of imagination with imagery is the assumption that imagery and
perception use the same psychological and physiological apparatus. Visual images and imagined
imagery are hence mutually exclusive to the extent that conscious construction of visual imagery
interferes with visual thinking or ‘‘imageless thought’’ (Kunzendorf, Young, Beecy, & Beals,
2000). Thus, the leading cognitive model of visual mental imagery holds that visual perception
and visual imagery share a number of mental operations, and rely upon common neural structures. Recent reports of patients showing double dissociations between perception and imagery
abilities have however challenged the perception-imagery equivalence hypothesis from the functional point of view (Kaski, 2002). But, the notion that imagination must take a visual form
has persisted even if it is recognized that smell, taste, sound, and words may elicit the imagery
(Baars, 1993). In the clinical literature also there is increasing recognition that imagined fears
can be script or verbally driven rather than take a visual form (Borkovec, 1985).
1.3. Seeing and ‘‘seeing as’’
The processes supposed to produce imagination have reflected the quasi-perceptual nature of its
content. Since the early days of perceptual theory, there was a tendency to consider that imagination was accounted for by perceptual theories. Sensory realist theories of perception do not need
imagination, since perception is entirely accounted for by sensory input. As the mind was an epiphenomenon to behaviorism, so to sensory realism, imagination is an epiphenomenon to sensation. The imagination is not a faculty or a stored image even, it is, like perception, a response
to the circumstances of external events. The person does the same in imagining as in seeing, except
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in the former the stimulus is absent and so the reception of the stimulus is less clear (Rachlin,
1980). The image like a neural trace will slowly decay without further stimulus input.
Sensory realism implies by default the tacit acceptance that perception deals with reality, but
imagination with the unreal, or what does not exist. Since our five senses can account for all
thatÕs there, any other functions are superfluous and are not dealing directly with reality. Likewise, historically, there has been a tendency to apply a sensory model to oneÕs sense of thought,
feeling, and imagination, which seemingly can only be understood in reference to images or quasi-perceptual experience. Such an inner sense model, however, does not give an adequate
account of the other meanings of the imagination that do not involve images. Rather, a coherent theory of the imagination needs to go beyond image and perceptual theories of the imagination and offer an account for imagination that does not rely on sensory models alone. Early
cognitive information processing theories built on the sensory realist model but interposed a
cognitive ‘‘black box’’ mediation of events. In this model of perception the role of the imagination was unproblematically grouped with pictorial and other cognitive representations. However, in newer models of active perception, the world is viewed as constructed actively by the
person.
The Gibsonian approach, for example, does away with cognitive representation, and sees perception ‘‘afforded’’ directly by the parameters in the environment, so that in an existential sense,
seeing (and being) become doing. Imagery in ecological psychology is tied to action. It is anticipation of action. Images are not pictures in the head but plans for obtaining information from
potential environments (Neisser, 1976). In motor theories of mind (Weimer, 1977), action, specifically muscle action, gates and determines sensory conduction tying image to action, harking back
to earlier ideomotor notions of thought control (Festinger, Burnham, Ono, & Bamber, 1967;
Munsterberg, 1899). This close connection between reality, intention, action, and meaning leaves
even less space for an independent role of imagination than with the pictoral theories of the cognitive representation models. In an extreme direct perceptual view, there is no function which is
not tied directly to relating and adapting to the environment. Imagination then either becomes an
extension of the perception-action cycle, its precursor or its by-product.
In more post-modern ecology and social constructionism, any reference to an internal world is
suspect, or is a language game (Wittgenstein, 1953). In such post-modern accounts, although the
imaginary may have a status, imagination does not. The imaginary is anyway a rhetorical, perhaps machiavellian, device to create illusions, as figures of speech. What is not real becomes
simply a shadow cast by what is real, and is always in the service of reality and real goals. In
post-modernism then conceptions of the imagination flip inside out and complete an historic shift
in location from an inaccessible place inside the person to the public domain outside. At the other
end of the spectrum, many literary writers would still consider imagination the epitomy of an inaccessible subjective process (Kearney, 1993).
The mechanism producing perceptual construction may be cognitive, ecological or motor as in
the motor theory of mind. In all cases however, imagination is not well addressed in itself. In cognitive constructivist terms, if reality is what I impose and interpret, then non-reality must equally
be my construction. It must serve a real purpose or it would make nonsense to construct it. But, of
course, the idea that imagination fulfills a role other than imaginal representation or preparation
for action, raises questions as to its adaptive utility. In particular, the creative role of imagination.
Conjuring up representations of reality might be useful in order to address them at a distance or to
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anticipate them. But what could be the use of a process devoted to creating and thinking about
things we know do not and perhaps can never exist!
In any case the neat distinction between perception and imagination or reality and non-reality
implied in both sensory, perceptual, and social constructionist theories does not conform with
everyday experience where such realms are continually blurred and overlapping in a non-pathological way. The relationship between imagination and reality is far too ambivalent for either a
realist or constructionist account. We can have a felt inarticulate sense of the real in the absence
of perceptual input. We can experience inexplicable shifts in reality under normal perceptual circumstances. The imagined can appear very real and elicit real reactions even when intellectually
we know we are imagining (e.g., mime illusion).
In the following sections we will outline a phenomenological account of the imagination which
suggests divisions between perception and imagination are transcended by pre-cognitive factors of
‘‘sense of reality’’ and ‘‘sense of non-reality’’ where perception and imagination play an indivisible
role. It is proposed that sense of reality and unreality informs both perception and imagination, so
imagination and perception always operate in conjunction, and predominance of one over the
other is a function of intention and level of absorption in reality. Finally, we argue that this synergy between imagination and perception supports a possibilistic model of consciousness. In the
possibilistic model, consciousness only ever presents the world in different degrees of possibility
never as certainty, consequently, perception and imagination must at all times work together to
form any kind of awareness.
2. Perception, imagination, and sense of reality
2.1. Reality and non-reality
Reality as we know it, is essentially defined by a consensus (Rorty, 1979) although physicality
and ÔtherenessÕ are part of the implicit criteria for recognizing reality, the feeling of ÔrealnessÕ is
built up by rhetoric and persuasion rather than through appeal to objective criteria (Edwards,
Ashmore, & Potter, 1995). As Havel (1997) points out clear indications between real and conceivable worlds are not self-evident. We know reality through the attitude we adopt to it, and by a
convincing discourse which builds up the real through use of culture bound signs not just through
phenomenal experience. All cultures make reference to unseen forces which have a reality value or
what de Rivera and Sarbin (1998) term Ôbelieved in imaginings,Õ whether these be X-rays or demons, and the cultural consensus on visible or undetectable reality can change over time (Feyerabend, 1988).
One approach to understanding how sense of reality is constituted is to see what happens when
it is not present. If we look at people who experience the loss of sense of reality, a condition also
known as derealization or depersonalization (Fewtrell & OÕConnor, 1995), we see that sense of
reality is intricately wound up with sense of identity. Losing one puts the other in question. In
a recent study looking at appraisals of those suffering from derealization, key worries were: fear
of not regaining sense of reality, and fear of losing self (Charbonneau & OÕConnor, 1999). Triggers for derealization tend to be discontinuities in normal experience, a trauma, an accident or a
sudden change in arousal or even perceptual incoherencies in the world (seeing something out of
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place) or dysfunctional self-awareness. Sometimes disruptions of the normal balance orientation
system linked to dizziness can lead to derealization experiences (Fewtrell & OÕConnor, 1988). People most likely to suffer distress from disorientation are those with a rigid and inflexible mode of
perception, about what should or not constitute reality or normality (OÕConnor, Chambers, &
Hinchcliffe, 1989). Obviously, as in other psychological disturbance, secondary appraisals of
the experience (IÕm going crazy) can exacerbate distress, but the lack of ability to tolerate shifts
to alternative forms of reality organization could make the person react Ôas ifÕ reality has disappeared (perhaps forever). In fact, one way to overcome derealization is to engage in whatever reality arises. In other words, drop the attitude of dysfunctional self-focus and focus awareness on
external detail. In this way, acting ‘‘as if’’ the self is distanced from reality is counteracted by acting ‘‘as if’’ immersed in reality. Both ‘‘as if’’s are meta-cognitive exercises which may draw on the
imagination, so paradoxically, imagining specific interactions with reality can help the person engage in perceived reality and lose the abnormal sense of self-awareness.
A shift into derealization always represents a defensive option and indicates a positioning of self
regarding engagement in reality. In some sense, removing the self from reality can be used to secure the self-world relation and safeguard sense of self over sense of reality. For example, a client
begins to experience derealization after a period of intense self-questioning. She asks: ‘‘Do I appear strange?’’ ‘‘Are people looking at me?’’ ‘‘Am I talking properly?’’ She feels the intense need to
continuously observe and monitor herself. Ironically, it is this hyperfocus on reality which is
inducing derealization. She begins to see herself as acting strangely and oddly and acts ‘‘as if’’
she is divorced from her body. Conversely imagining that she is in reality and acting normally
with her friends reduces the derealizing experience. So imagination can help reduce a sense of
unreality by bringing the experience within the bounds of the conceivable. It does so either because the real is not perceptually available, or needs elaborating on, or the inconceivable needs
to be established as a counterpoint to reality. However, this implies that a sense of reality and
unreality informs both perception and imagination in self-world relations. Whether imagination
or perception predominates may be a function of degree of sense of reality rather than a result
of a cognitive choice made on the basis, for example, of content of material to be processed
(e.g., visible versus invisible). We pursue this point in the next section.
2.2. Co-existence of imagination and perception
The common distinction between imagination and perception with the former signifying something that is not there and the latter signifying what is there is, by itself, not especially helpful in
determining the ‘‘realness’’ or ‘‘thereness’’ of a mental experience. In waking life, images rarely
occur in the total absence of stimulus input from outside reality and in situations where this is
the case, for example dreaming, the difficulty distinguishing between what is real and not real
is evident in sleep disordered states of parasomnia or dissociation. Perhaps even more salient is
the fact that perception does not always have ‘‘thereness’’ or ‘‘vivacity’’ either, especially during
times when we ‘‘imagine.’’ Yet, this is often considered less significant than any lack of vividness
during imaging, because the reappearance of physical reality when we stop imagining is never
doubted. Imaginal disturbance often accompanies perceptual disturbance, and as noted earlier,
in derealization, imagination can help in re-establishing sense of reality. In anxiety disorders,
imagined fears can lead directly to perceptual difficulties. Anticipation of threat can cloud vision
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and impair attention. Conversely, a perceptual shock can be followed by subsequent haunting
imaginary fears, as in post-traumatic stress disorder.
An important aspect about the boundary dispute between perception and the imagination, is
that both can exist simultaneously, and this rather upsets the notion that one concerns non-reality
and the other external reality. The ‘‘perky effect’’ originally showed the equivalent effect of perception and imagination on behavior, and that one cannot imagine and perceive the same object
at the same time (Perky, 1910). But people can easily slide off into dream like states without losing
contact with reality, occupying both imaginary and real space at the same time. A lady imagines
clearly her fatherÕs face in the window, whilst aware she is physically grounded in a therapistÕs
office. I imagine myself on a beach in Florida, whilst driving to work in Montreal in the here
and now. The person can function whilst not completely in reality nor in the imagination but
somewhere in between. The degree of this ‘‘in-betweenness’’ can clearly be modified by context.
Deprived of clear evidence of reality, imagination comes to the rescue and there is an ability to
shift between imagination and perception in the same stimulus context, without losing sense of
reality in order to function. In case of ambiguity, the potential symbiotic relation between perception and imagination is evident, since imagination enables me to draw on experiences from different times and places to try to ‘‘fit’’ with present reality. Seeing a half formed image in the dark, I
consciously generate different shapes from my memory (Casey, 1970, 1976), going back and forth
between perception and imagination to both imagine and see how they fit. On the other hand,
when current reality is not in question, the imagination can be evoked to conjure up experiences
or objects which have never existed. As Casey (1976) points out, imagination can serve to enrich
perception and when we return to perception it is enhanced. ItÕs use here is precisely that it is able
to elicit powerful reactions to enhance the effect of a real physical context.
2.3. Imagination and intentional context
However, one fundamental difference between imagination and perception is that perception
apparently responds less well to intent, manipulation, and expectations than the imagination. This
rather self-evident observation is given its rightful importance in dream research as a difference
between the perceptual dream environment and the conative aspects of the dreamer (DeGracia,
1999). This may tie in directly with sense of realness in that the consequence of the ability to direct
our mental content, although providing us with a sense of control, gives mental experience the
quality of impermanence as opposed to perception. When we open our eyes a perceptual environment will spontaneously appear while when we close our eyes our mental content follows our intent, volition, and expectations. However, much can be said for the idea that imagination would
take on qualities normally ascribed to the perception of objects in the outside world if we
would not use our volition so continuously, and if images and thoughts would not be so quickly
replaced by another. Exercising oneÕs intent and volition may tie in directly with our sense of identity and the boundary between perception and imagination, with the latter signifying something
we have and the former signifying something that happens to us. If we would imagine a tree without exercising any type of volition and thus not distract ourselves from the image of the tree, the
tree would appear to happen before our eyes, or in other words, not be experientially distinct from
seeing a tree in physical reality. In other words, interacting with the imagination can be identical
to interacting with the environment. I can adopt different intentional stances. Either I can be the
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spectator of an imagined scene and remain distant from it, or I can be absorbed and engaged in
the scene actively and be manipulating the imaginary environment around me. As in real interaction when I have skilled involvement in the imagination, I may lose sense of ego in the flow of the
engaging activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Novelists report how imaginary characters and plots
take on a life of their own. In anxious patients, imagined scenarios take off seemingly out of control and exert a pull stronger than the person.
A crucial determinant of my intent towards either an imaginary or a perceived object is its context. The imagination, like perception, always occurs in a context. It is not possible, in the imagination as in reality, to imagine people, events or even have meaningful thought unsurrounded by
an implicit context (Ahsen, 1984; OÕConnor & Gareau, 1991). In other words, in the same way
that when I see a tree, it is seen in the context of, say, a field and from an observer position,
so when I conjure up a person or a scenario in my imagination, there is a surrounding context
and I am positioned in respect to the person or scene. For example, I imagine my friend Geoffrey,
in Hong Kong, but the image is a Geoffrey dressed according to a specific past context or perhaps
a composite of contexts, but nonetheless linkable to specific past times and places. This context
and positioning embodies my way of seeing or imagining and hence guides my intent towards
the image. Changing implicit context may change intentional options. For example, I see a familiar face at a party and I struggle to place it in a context, finally settling on a person working in the
local library. I am not in the library now, but this implicit context directs my immediate intentional interaction with the person. On approaching more closely, I may realize that I was wrong
and that the face fits better within the context of the local hairdresser. Again my intended interaction and perhaps entire project towards and way of approaching the person could change. Neither the person nor the explicit context (the party) has changed, rather a series of implicit contexts
have redirected my intentional focus.
The existence of an accompanying background ‘‘wordly’’ context to any image or percept of
course confirms that all consciousness is relational. I am always in the world and, in some
way, relating to the world when I see or do anything. IÕm never in a vacuum. But this context
has, at the same time, a geographical and a dialectical aspect. Geographically, the context takes
the form of a distribution peaking at the immediate focus and tapering off into the margins of
consciousness (see Figs. 1A and B). The gradient is defined by diminishing clarity and accessibility
and necessarily so, since as Stephen Brown (2000) notes, the lack of clarity at the margins is essential to contrast with the vividness of the figure, and this contrast completes the sense of being
‘‘here’’ rather than ‘‘there.’’ What is unclear and out of view is an essential ground to give the figure clarity. Bruce Mangan (1993) has spoken eloquently of the margins of consciousness, and how
inattentiveness and inarticulateness does not diminish the phenomenological intensity and importance of vague feelings arising from the margins, such as ‘‘tip of the tongue’’ phenomena. In the
same way that I may just vaguely detect features of an object on the periphery of vision, so I may
have a vague sense of knowing a fact on the margins of my thinking focus.
The last point leads up to the inevitable dialectical logic of consciousness; what is clear is qualified by what is unclear, what is seen by what is not seen (Fig. 1C). This basic dialectical limitation of consciousness is simply a pre-cognitive fact of human existence, it does not need a
psychological or other explanation. However, the dialectical opposition between what is there
and not there creates a space between the two, in which we as human beings psychologically position ourselves. In psychological terms, what is unseen or unclear or vaguely on the horizon ‘‘out
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Fig. 1. (A) Vertical view of cognitive focus situated against an unseen background. Dotted circles represent competing
cognitive domains within the field of consciousness and the metacognitive ability to consider several competing
possibilities at the same time. (B) Horizontal view of cognitive focus sharing competing possibility distributions which
determine the geographical dimensions of the core and margins of consciousness. (C) Lateral view illustrating the
dialectical relationship between reality and non-reality as a separate but supporting dimension to the geographical
dimension (B). Intentionality determines the exact form and nature of the tension between what is there and what could
be there, thereby creating a concrete and identifiable possibility space for any one project.
of view’’ is never merely ‘‘not there,’’ it has a relationship to me and my projects, since the underlying dialectic of consciousness dictates it as essential to define the vivid real spot-lit workspace
(Baars, 1988) where my conscious projects are focussed. For example, if I am writing a letter, I
am not just not doing another activity. I am specifically and perhaps consciously not writing a
cheque or a report, and this comparative knowledge guides how I write the letter. In addition,
future possibilities are continually opening up as I carry out a task. A possibility is perhaps temporally or permanently ‘‘out of sight’’ or seeable later conditional on evolution of my project.
The most coherent way in which such a dialectical space can be ‘‘inhabited’’ by a relational consciousness and its future directed projects, is by itself becoming a possibility space affording me
and my projects, future possibilities.
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3. The possibilistic model of consciousness
3.1. Possibility and perception
Possibility as an epistemological category is hardly new to philosophy. Leibnitz (1682) was one
of the earliest thinkers to introduce the importance of considering ‘‘things that are possible but yet
not necessary and which do not really exist’’ in defining reality. More recently, artificial intelligence has also employed mathematical models of possible worlds as a way of reasoning about
changes in expected actions (e.g., Ginsberg & Smith, 1988). But the richness of possibility as a
psychological counterpart to the dialectical nature of consciousness merits further exploration.
It is argued here that possibility is a key defining psychological characteristic of consciousness
and that to be aware is be aware of possibility. Possibility covers very well the relationship of
all aspects of a ground ‘‘not yet in view’’ to my projects. It covers what might be, what might come
later, what might constitute a tolerable variation of what already exists, how my changing position might modify my perception. However, the notion of possibility does not just apply to what
might be, it applies also to what is here now.
In the same way that what is not yet seen has a meaning as a possibility, so what is ‘‘seen’’ is still
equally a possibility. The nature of my projects in the world is that they are directed into the future, ahead of themselves, in other words their possibility defines them. Since everything I see, I
see inside a project, so the ‘‘seen’’ too is defined by its possibility for my project. What I see about
a telephone or a lamp or a door depends very much on what I intend to do. We can always detect
new physical attributes in familiar objects which we never noticed before, but notice now because
our project dictates a possible relevance. Equally, potential physical attributes of a visible object
are never exhausted, and objects are frequently seen as complete objects despite the absence of
their complete physicalness (e.g., the corner of the chair 1 cannot see but whose absence from view
does not deter my belief in the chairÕs solidity). Clearly, however, the leg of a chair 1 cannot see
momentarily due to the perspectival limitations of my position has a different ontological and possibilistic status to the object not yet at all in view, or the scene around the next corner I have not
yet turned, or the future possible use for an object not yet conceived. Although there are many
qualitatively distinct types of possibility, and probably as many possible uses for an object as there
are projects, it seems nonetheless feasible to construct a distribution of possibility with a maximum and a minimum for any one project. Such a maximum likelihood distribution conforms with
the proposed distribution of consciousness with a figure ground gradient descending from core to
margins (Mangan, 1993). The knowledge that possibility is a key defining psychological dimension of consciousness, makes the co-existence of imagination and perception not only understandable but mandatory for an adaptive functioning.
If the seen is partially defined by the surrounding unseen then the act of perception itself is defined by the background context of the imagination and, as such, imagination helps form the perceived event and is part of it. Continuing the figure-ground analogy, perception then explores the
figure whereas the surrounding not-seen is a latent, if defining, characteristic of what is there.
Imagination is the active exploration of this latent possible space in the same way that perception
is the active exploration of the visible space.
We are now in a position to try to resolve previous incoherences in the cognitive distinctions
between perception and imagination through appealing to a possibilistic model. Classically, per-
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ception is outward, and concerned with what is there, whilst imagination is inward looking and
concerned with what is not there. But we can consciously switch from one to the other world,
and we can substitute one for the other. Also we can at the same time, sometimes within the same
stimulus context be seeing some aspects and imagining others. It is clear that within the structure
of consciousness itself, there must always be aspects of the real which we assume are there, but
which present themselves by their absence (the back of a chair I cannot see) and the object of perception is always embedded in the larger context of a world beyond it, of which I have only marginal awareness. The same appears to apply to mental experience not directly related to physical
reality such as thoughts, ideas, concepts or images, themselves being defined by the context surrounding it, which not only leads to the self-evident conclusion that we cannot imagine without
imagination but may also indicate that we cannot have meaningful thought without it. Thus imagination can operate both inward and outward, but is ever present within all mental experience,
regardless whether its causal history lies in the outside world or the one within. It then seems difficult to consider anything as entirely ‘‘definitely all there,’’ rather both perception and imagination are in different ways part of the same dialectical context. In both imagination and perception,
the common structure of consciousness dictates that to be aware is always to be aware that I am
aware of some things but not others. In other words, at the margins of consciousness are always
possibilities (e.g., future possible outcomes). An integral part of perception is inferring what is not
there, hence both, reality and possibility are part of perception. It may seem then more reasonable
to see imagination and perception not as distinct cognitive functions but rather to as dual modes
of consciousness operating together. In the following section, we expand on the role of imagination within a possibilistic model of consciousness.
3.2. The possibilistic model and imagination
The possibilistic model of the imagination grows naturally out of the foregoing observations on
the structure of consciousness and the perspective limitation of consciousness—what is seen is
necessarily defined by what is not seen but in particular it is defined by what could be. Possibility
as a defining dimension of consciousness brings forth the important role of conceiving the possible
through the imagination. Three separate claims of the model implicate the role of the imagination
in sensing reality: (a) What I am doing exists alongside what I am intending to do—my projects in
the world have a future, (b) Imagination creates the future and this creative aspect of seeing, fills
up the space between what is and what is not, and (c) Living in reality is a matter of degree, and I
exist in a gradient of awareness where different possibilities are associated with distinct senses of
reality.
3.2.1. Imagining and doing
Heidegger (1962) emphasized the primordial importance of time in defining human existence
and consciousness. I am always ahead of myself since I am constantly in a state of becoming.
An object, a scene or a person is defined by what they promise to become. In HeideggerÕs opinion,
the past comes towards the present from the future. As Heidegger (1988) also pointed out, key
emotions spring from the potential unfulfillment of the ‘‘about to be’’ (e.g., disappointment, grief,
and anguish). On the one hand, everything which is real in the here and now must, in order to be
so real, be independent from me with its history before and beyond me. But it only has this real
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property independent of me in the first instance because it has a future, and this future primarily
determines its existence for me as real. This future for the object always ties in closely with my
projects for my future. So, for example, if my intention is to make a cup of coffee, everything I
see fits into my coffee making enterprise, and is ordered in the center or on the margins of consciousness on the basis of relevance to my coffee making. Of course, I want to make my coffee
in a ‘‘real’’ mug, not one IÔm just imagining. A real mug is one that stands before me, beyond
me, with its own ‘‘factual history’’ as a mug capable of holding scalding hot water and brewing
a good coffee. If my project changes to clearing out old mugs, a whole new structure of past
and future possibilities of the same mugs comes into being. The real mug now becomes an
‘‘old-out-of-data-stained-to-be-thrown-out-mug’’, whereas previously it was a ‘‘solid-capable-ofholding-hot-coffee-mug’’. The realist argument might be that even though I may not notice all
attributes of an object at one time, they nonetheless exist independent of my project. But if I
go back to view attributes of objects I had not previously noticed, my seeing is still intricately tied
up with my being and projects (in this case a ‘‘going-back-to-see-missed-attributes’’-project).
What I see depends on what I do. I can of course vividly recall an activity at a different place
and time. But memory access depends nonetheless on my current project. Elements of the past
become important if they relate to future projects.
3.2.2. Imagination as the art of the possible
Some objects and events always exist on the margins of consciousness—as potential events, or
objects that cannot yet be seen. They emerge into full consciousness as I switch my head to a different position or my intention to a different project. Gibson (1979), in his direct realist approach,
locates these emergent properties invariantly within the objects themselves. So the use of an object
is reflected in its about-to-be used attributes. My intented use affords its existence to me for my
project. But the Gibsonian account cannot apply to all possible uses of an object. Many possibilities do not concern, not physical attributes but can be triggered by meta-suggestion. There is a
creative aspect to seeing, which is embodied in imaginal possibility. I may use a shoe as a wedge
or a hammer or for other uses not dictated by its singular attributes. In other words, imagination
can be concerned with possibilities which are not uniquely physically afforded by an object.
At the same time that I can be creative with worldly attributes, I am also living in a world beyond me that I can only partially predict and control. Such a condition is an existential given, and
trying to separate me from an ‘‘external’’ world is to destroy the essential pre-cognitive self-world
functional unit, where my sense of me and of reality is always partly defined by what is beyond
me. As the relational self is located in the space created by me and the world, so possibility is always situated between the person and the object in an intentional space filling the dialectical gap
in-between the two. It is not located discretely in either one. So intentional space between me and
the world needs always to be filled up creatively, it is never just there.
3.2.3. Absorption in degrees of reality
According to the possibilistic model, what defines our sense of reality is not an ‘‘out there’’ capturing our senses but our level of relative absorption in what is most possible. Such a degree of
absorption implies a comparable lack of absorption in a range of alternative possibilities. What
is seen arises against a background of what is not seen, what was there, or what can never be there,
or what might be there, or what is yet to come into view, all on the margins of consciousness.
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Psychologically, there is a clear distinction between ÔsupposingÕ and ÔimaginingÕ. Imagining always
takes place in a lived-in context, just as perception, otherwise we are supposing and not imagining.
So although I may suppose a possibility as an abstract idea, it is absorption in this possibility
which gives me the sense of reality in which I live, and so conditions what I know is there and
what I know is not there.
Conceiving possible worlds then in no way compromises my absorption in a real world. Indeed,
cognitive focus is predicated on a pre-cognitive world always there. But a gradient of absorption
covarying with degrees of possibility accommodates smoothly our sporadic changes in consciousness whilst maintaining our sense of reality. In other words, our focus of consciousness changes
seemlessly only because such focus takes the form of a possibility distribution where the next focus
is already imminent on the margins and appears or disappears from view according to its likelihood value in the possibility distribution rather like successive ripples on a water surface. So, in
fact, conceiving possibilities actually sharpens degree of absorption in reality.
The possibilistic model would be in broad agreement with the cognitive model of perception,
concerning the immediate perception of empirical detail under a normal sense of reality. So the
validity of the model is best explored though how it accounts for the role of absorption in setting
up a sense of reality in altered states of consciousness, including dreaming, where the person becomes absorbed and reacts realistically to an unreal world.
3.3. Dreaming and altered states of consciousness
Sense of reality does not suddenly collapse in the absence of sense information. One of the differences noted earlier between perception based on sensory information and imagery occurring
inside of us is that the former is often regarded as something that happens to us, while the latter
is wound up with our sense of identity and hence are qualified as experiences that we have. It appears the degree of absorption is directly related to these qualifiers, which in turn may be the result
of exercising our volition in the case of inner imagery, while perception with its causal history in
physical reality does not respond very well to any mental manipulation. Controlling the imagery
and exercising volition implies a meta-cognitive stance towards such imagery, which leads to holding a particular image or sequence of images static instead of letting the imagery present itself on
its own terms without any conscious intervention of the observer.
Let us say a person would be asked to close the eyes and imagine a pile of foods on a dish. At
several points during such an imaginary exercise the person will exercise his/her volition either by
deciding he/she wants to see a particular type of food displayed on the dish and retrieving the
proper information from memory. During that time, the focal point of awareness is not the imagined dish. Instead, the person has removed attention away from the image with the intent to return later once the proper information has been retrieved and decided upon. In such
circumstances, the image remains static, because the person beforehand decides what will be seen,
and will remain largely in a context generated by him/herself instead of the context surrounding
the dish.
However, if less volition is exercised, but attentional focus remains on the dish then with no
other thoughts to divert the persons attention, the focus of awareness continues to be the particular type of dish. The personÕs focus may however drift to the vegetables on the side. The person
did not intend to pay any particular attention to the vegetables on the side, and their colors, but
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was drawn to them automatically. The colors may stand out far more than before, and the whole
perception of the dish increases in vivacity. Then suddenly, again without conscious volition, the
person may suddenly become aware of something in the periphery of the dish and see a white table
cloth on which the dish is placed, all the while however no conscious decision has been made to
widen the imagined scenario. At this point, the image can hardly be distinguished from seeing a
dish on a table cloth in reality. The dish is vivid, very much ‘‘there’’ and appears to happen instead
of being something he/she has. The person is immersed in an imaginary scenario, which led to
actively participating in an imaginary world. Here we see the importance of intentional context
which may bring about a complete shift in object-subject where what was previously subject becomes object.
As hard as the above thought experiment may be to perform on demand, it occurs every night
as we go to sleep and become absorbed in hypnagogic imagery that appear to form the nucleus
around which a dream scenario appears. Regrettably, as the context which frames our waking
experience retreats to the background it often leaves our waking self in its wake with little memory
to report on such incidents. According to DeGracia (1999) such perceptual environments are the
result of a disengagement of the sensory ‘‘gear’’ leaving the perceptual and cognitive ‘‘gear’’ in
operation, which continue to produce a world that one is immersed in. When perception based
on sense information retreats to the background it leaves a vacuum. This vacuum is poised with
ambiguity on the verge of what could or might be there, which by degree of immersion will be perceived as really there.
LaBerge and DeGracia (2000) propose that global transient contexts and the cooperation and
the competition among them frame the dreaming experience, and this idea is not so conceptually
far from the possibilistic notion of competing possibilities of what could be there operating at the
background of any perceptual environment, poised ready to become part of the scenery as
‘‘about-to-be-seen.’’ For instance, the dreamer watches a dark doorway looking to see if something is there, and not surprisingly, a figure appears not much later, or, the dreamer imagines flying up from the ground and soon after finds her/himself shooting up in the sky. It then appears
that the unfolding story of the dream is the result of continuous shifts in possibilities of what
could be there and which by virtue of degree of absorption introduce themselves and fade out
of the perceptual environment. Lack of involvement and absorption in the dream would most
likely result in a sudden collapse of the possibility distribution resulting in the disappearance of
the perceptual environment with alternate possibility distributions coming to the rescue to fill
up the vacuum. Or alternatively, a lack of competing possibilities may result in the perceptual
environment becoming static and fading away, because the dream is unable to shift into alternate
events to continue the storyline. Both experiences are reported by lucid dreamers as a ‘‘blinking on
and off’’ of the visual field. This is more likely to occur with novice lucid dreamers perhaps because the possibilities operating on the margins of the events in the lucid dream are less well developed, and this may emphasize again the importance of possibilistic context.
Rightfully, LaBerge and DeGracia (2000) emphasize the importance of dream context in the
ongoing flow of the dream story and such a conceptualization enables a better understanding
of that special variety of dreams (lucid dreams) where one is aware that one is dreaming. The
importance of context for explaining this phenomenon is that the particular context affords a continuity with accessible memory so that the person while still dreaming is able to retrieve memories
from the waking self unrelated to the activities being performed in the dream. Such a Ôlucid dream-
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ing contextÕ consists of (LaBerge & DeGracia, 2000): (1) a reference to state (a meta-cognitive
awareness that one is dreaming) (2); a semantic framework (a framework of knowledge to
conceptualize and give meaning to the experiences); and (3) a goal-options context (a range of
behaviors expressed in the dream). In phenomenological terms, this context allows the waking self
to position itself in relation to events in the dream resulting in the formation of a functional
waking self-dream world unit that would otherwise not be feasible. Of course, such a context is
a delicate one creating a competing possibilistic context that normally operates while awake
(for instance, the realization that one is actually lying in bed). If the latter was fully activated it
would lead the person to wake up, or conversely, lead the dreamer to become absorbed with
events in the dream not part of the lucid dream context, and so revert back to a non-lucid
dreaming.
Experienced lucid dreamers are often quite aware of the waking self-dream world unit where
thoughts and expectations manifest themselves in their corresponding dream environment. Lucid
dreamers regulate their thoughts and expectations accordingly, since a free floating stance towards
the dream world may quickly result in an undesired and likely non-lucid story line.
Another aspect of lucid dreaming is the reliance on ambiguity to develop a dream scenario,
whereby that which is as yet unseen can often provide an excellent doorway to develop a dream
in the desired direction. For instance: Around that corner of the building there will be a magic
door transporting me to X, or in a few moments, a figure will appear from that dark spot in
the room. Failure or success in moving the dream environment in the desired direction often depends on a persuasive plot line, and the availability of alternative possibilities to emerge in the
story line. A persuasive narrative does not necessarily need to borrow upon elements in the dream
environment, but can be completely bypassed by a reliance on well-functioning waking self-dream
world unit. It seems then perceptually normal in lucid dreaming to be in a both real and possible
world at the same time. Whenever I see an object, I see its possibilities, and reality itself is established by my absorption in a most likely world rather than a certain one. Hence, I must necessarily
maintain some flexibility about the maximum possibility to permit for future developments and
future adaptation to projects. This meta-cognitive aspect of the imagination, entertaining competing maximal possibilities, also plays a crucial role in both normal and pathological absorption in
waking reality.
3.4. The possibility distribution
The idea of a personalized possibility distribution may be heuristically compared to a likelihood
distribution where the maximum possibility is a maximum likelihood (Edwards, 1972) (see Fig. 2).
In its simplest form the possibilistic model proposes that what we take as our reality is arrived at
as the most possible world in the context of other possible worlds. So this world is never a stand
alone reality, rather it is only ever constructed as maximum possibility relative to other possibilities. Hence, it forms the maximum of a special distribution of alternative possibilities, some
likely, some remote, given the maximum. The possibility distribution may be skewed, it may be
irregular, it may be sharp or flat. If flat, this would mean that in the face of certain alternatives,
the person would be more vulnerable to transition from one reality to another. The person might
tolerate more deviation in one direction or another. The maximum possibility may then easily
shift amongst closely competing possibilities and may be constantly modified or updated in con-
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Fig. 2. (A) Possibility distributon with high absorption. (B) Possibility distribution with low absorption.
tinuity with minor adaptation on the basis of interactive experience with the world. Choosing between the possibility that a roaring noise outside my apartment door represents a pack of wild
wolves, or the caretaker hoovering the hall floor, may not be difficult; everything about my current horizons, history, and projects support the caretaker as maximum possibility. There are other
likely possibilities, it may not be the caretaker who is hoovering, but his assistant, or someone else.
These possibilities are likewise well tolerated by my distribution and do not require re-orienting
my projects to which both the noise and the caretaker were in any case on the margins.
Of course if my current project involved the caretaker and hoovering, the possibility distribution would be more focused on the nuances of hoovering and could be sharpened by resolving
these possibilities, through opening the door, updating experience, and gaining perceptual fit. This
is the normal way for pursing perceptual fit and refining a possibility distribution by testing the
extent to which possibilities thrown up by my project in the world coincide with the figure ground
relationships of preexisting self-world horizons; my pre-cognitive sense of reality. The more remote the possibilities from my current intended project, the more they form the tail end of the
possibility distribution and the flatness of the tail end of the possibility distribution means I have
more tolerance for a variety of possible outcomes. But the maximum can also be modified by
changing the personal context of comparable alternative possibilities, forming around the margins
of the distribution. In other words, a change in the conception of what could be there (but is not)
could change perception of what is there. A good example, here, is waking up the first night in a
strange hotel room, forgetting you are not in your own bedroom at home, and being disoriented
by your perception of objects in apparently strange places; a perception rapidly normalized by
contextualizing the space as a hotel room.
The margins and the peak of the distribution are inter-dependent. Obviously change in one will
affect the form of the other. A bad perceptual fit will shift the peak possibility of the distribution
as may a change in the alternatives on the margins. However, the point is that according to the
model, both are at the mercy of the possibilistic distribution. We see an object and a possibility
distribution immediately forms around it, which defines my perceptual field, but imagining other
forms of possibility can easily change the perceptual field. Suppose, for example, I am looking at a
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photograph of a man standing on a bridge. I know nothing of the context of the photo. But in my
imagination I conjure up different contexts. If I imagine that he is about to be shot and the photograph is taken by one of his executioners, the way I ÔseeÕ him will be distinct from if I imagine he
is a tourist ambling by a historic bridge. Of course perception could be influenced by information
about say, age of the man or his achievements which might guide also my attentional focus. But
the point here is that even without such cognitive information, the imaginal context can also
change perceptual focus.
Technically, to be absorbed in possibility X implies not being absorbed in possibility Y yet the
level of absorption in Y may affect the level of absorption in X. Thus, absorption always exists in
relation to other possibilities where the degree of absorption in a particular scenario would be
viewed as the result of the relative degree of absorption in possibility X given the degree of absorption into competing possibilities Y1, Y2, Y3, etc. If there is a displacement from what is possible
to what is not possible, then this could likely be due to perceptual error, but also due to shifts in
the imagined context. So the reality value of possibility X is defined by the reality value of alternative possibilities. Such a conception of absorption allows level of absorption to be schematically
represented in Fig. 2.
Notice, in Fig. 2, that while the specific value of possibility X (shaded bar) can be similar in
both conditions (A and B) yet the level of absorption may differ from situation to situation.
The shape of the possibility distribution differs, with a high absorption scenario the distribution
being far sharper than in a low absorption scenario. Thus, the particular shape of a specific possibility distribution corresponds directly to the degree of absorption. Assuming that the comparison of alternative possibilities can be represented as a likelihood ratio, degree of absorption could
be defined mathematically as degree of support for one possibility against the others. Support
then could range from zero to an indefinitely large amount; greater values denoting greater degree
of support/absorption. The scale is arbitrary but subjectively meaningful.
support/absorption
PThe
s
function for a multinomial distribution would take the form: SðqÞ ¼ i¼1 ai ln pi ðqÞ where S is
support function, a the number of possibilities, p(q) the probability value for the ith of s classes
(Edwards, 1972).
3.5. Meta-cognitive absorption in different realities
Sense of reality at any moment for any project then is defined by the maximum possibility distribution. It follows that one could be absorbed in two maximum possibilities while still perceiving
only one reality, since an absorption in a maximum possibility is a combination of available alternative possibilities and my current project in the world. My project is always in the process of
becoming and so the object(s) or event(s) toward which it is directed are also in the process of
becoming. Since, at any one time an object may have two or more alternative equally likely possibilities, so I could be equally absorbed in the possibilities. Also, a maximum possibility distribution, and a sense of reality can exist for something totally unrelated to information coming
through the senses, because an imminent attribute could have a possibility value even though it
is not real. A possibility distribution could for instance involve a sense of reality towards the idea
of invisible contaminants on a hand, which might be unrelated to actual perception.
A visibly clean object could become dirty if touched or knocked over in the dust, but these possibilities can also relate to the past. It could also have been dirty, or dirty and not washed properly
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even whilst not appearing so. The fact that I do not see any dirt does not invalidate the sense of
reality that it could be dirty. As we noted physical ‘‘thereness’’ is not a criteria for sense of reality
and anyway our complete physical scene is always partly inferred. So it would be feasible for me
to, at the same time, know that a door is locked but at the same time entertain the possibility that
it might not be and accord both a ‘‘sense of reality.’’ Or to feel on the one hand I have my hat and
gloves in my hand, but to feel a strong sense on the other hand that they could not be there but left
behind in a café. Entertaining competing possible worlds at the same time is entirely possible and
even in some situations desirable. The problem is the degree of absorption in possible worlds.
Although there are several possible worlds, there is only one pre-cognitive reality for any given
project. But the same reality can spawn distinct and contrasting possibility distributions. Absorption in this case is not a question of perceptual fit, but of how my project, by my self-world relation, maintains a remotely possible world in preference to a more possible world with better
perceptual fit. Although we can be conscious of the imaginary part of a possibility and consciously
know that we are living Ôas ifÕ or seeing Ôas ifÕ something is there, in a more absorbed state, the
metaphorical stance may be forgotten and we become confused as to the reality value of the imaginal possibilities. We can consider three distinct degrees of absorption: (1) detachment—an
attitude of intellectual curiosity; (2) a metaphorical stance—acting ‘‘as if’’; (3) living ‘‘as if’’—complete absorption.
In my current writing project, I may consider the lamp in front of me has several possibilities. It
could change angle, go off, flutter, perhaps change colour slightly, it could even perhaps explode,
in all of which it would maintain its perceptual fit as a lamp. However, if it started flying around
the room, my perception ofÔ it, as a lamp, would be very disrupted. As a consequence, I would
likely in the process revise my projects towards it and my other self-world horizons would change
dramatically. Supposing, however, I felt that the lamp which performed all the normal functions
of a lamp, could at the same time also be a latent bird. So that the light bulb was its eye, the stem
its neck, the position its perch. In this circumstance, all the normal features of the lamp would stay
intact but with the additional possibility that they might develop into bird features. Now in some
sense my attitude towards the lamp and its operation would retain the possibilities and perceptual
fit of the lamp and I would treat the lamp as a lamp. If its bulb fails, I replace it, I change its height
or position for better light, but at the same time I would act towards it as a bird, occasionally
stroking it, talking to it, making it more comfortable. I am not at all surprised if the lamp squawks
or flies around the room, as well as shining light on the table. Am I treating a lamp ‘‘as if’’ it were
a bird, or am I treating a bird ‘‘as if’’ it were a lamp? Both positions could be supported by appeal
to the same real features. I could point to the switch or the metal cover of the lamp and without
denying anything about their perceived properties, I could consider them bird-like. Saying in the
cognitive sense that I have attributed bird features to what is really a lamp, is to add in an unhelpful layer of cognitive process which does not reflect the seemless way in which I alternate and integrate the two possible forms of the lamp (one near, the other remote) within the same reality. In
fact, ‘‘seeing’’ the same physical reality is at the root of the two distinct (bird/lamp) possibilities,
and only because they both ‘‘fit’’ real ‘‘seen’’ features could they be held simultaneously to both be
possibilities. Producing facts for example about birds is more likely to fuel my lamp-as-bird possibilities since the reality of birds or lamps is not in question and perceived reality, as noted, is the
starting point for both competing distributions. If the lamp were to physically mutate into a chair,
the chair would no longer be seen either as a lamp or a bird. It is only, in this instance, by chang-
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ing my degree of absorption in imagined possibilities that I am likely to change my lamp-as-bird
possibility.
3.6. Pre-cognitive, cognitive, and meta-cognitive domains and the imagination
There is then a pre-cognitive, meta-cognitive, and a cognitive aspect to consciousness. At a precognitive level I need a taken for granted sense of background possibility and reality in order to
even think further. But in a cognitive sense the work is never finished. In my further inspection
and seeing of real objects I am always consciously jostling local possibilities. Is it this form, is
it that form? The pre-cognitive aspects of consciousness are the givens by which I know I am conscious and through which I consciously realize my projects. The world is always there, in front of
me, and beyond me. There is space and time, distance, and other than me which in turn defines me
and my relational unit with the world. Senses obviously function as senses, once sense of reality is
established. Details are seen empirically and reported on, and clearly may reflect back to cognitive
decision making. At a meta-cognitive level, I may be able to consciously detach myself from one
sense of reality by creating imaginary possibilities and meta-cognitively jostling these possibilities
to create several senses of reality at the same time. Hence a person could legitimately be absorbed
in two possible worlds at the same time, as for example, in states of dissociation, or flip alternately
from one to the other, with a very small perceived change in context. However, if there is a pathological dissociation from reality, it may not be a problem of perception but of absorption.
So why would people construct and absorb themselves in different competing possibility distributions? It seems compelling, personal and cultural narratives may fuel the necessity to find alternatives, and fill up a self-created possibility space.
3.7. How ‘‘believed-in’’ imaginings become ‘‘lived-in’’
A good case illustration of the process of lived-in imagination is hypnosis. In hypnotic suggestion, the person is led up to believe in a story line and to respond and feel appropriately. The
induction techniques restrict the senses, and direct attentional and sensory focus to internal experience, and then guide exploration of this internal experience from beyond the personÕs experience,
so positioning the person as a passive recipient of possible experience.
Several authors have reported that a hypnotically induced image can be as vivid as a real one
(e.g., Bryant & Mallard, 2003) and invoke similar physiological reactions (e.g., Kosslyn, Thompson, Costantini-Ferrando, Alpert, & Spiegel, 2000). In hypnosis, sense of reality is enhanced by
the participantÕs ability to impose familiar and personally meaningful attributes on suggestions.
Elevated hypnotizability is associated with increased levels of absorption, and other traits and
cognitive styles (Bryant & Mallard, 2003). Heaps and Nash (1999) found a close association between imagination inflation and hypnotic suggestibility and dissociativity. Lynn, Kirsch, and
Rhue (1996) note that hypnosis depends more on clientsÕ ability to absorb themselves in suggestions and personalize suggestions through imaginative and dissociative abilities than on induction
technique or trance-like states. The inductive narrative and procedure works best however if it is
familiar and culturally credible in order to be trusted and believed-in. McGuire, Adams, Junginger, Burright, and Donovick (2001), for example, reported that in a sample of people with delusional beliefs, cultural familiarity with the context of delusional narratives mediated estimates of
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their probability. Green and Brock (2000) highlight the importance of the transportation quality
of a narrative to influence belief. Transportation requires imagery, affect and attention, and is
unaffected by whether a story is labeled as fact or fiction. As several authors have pointed out,
the absorption in hypnosis loses its metaphorical Ôas ifÕ qualities and becomes a lived-in
experience.
But people under hypnosis often report a metacognitive aspect as part of the experience. They
may be able to observe and report on their sensory state (e.g., hidden observer technique). There
can also be an awareness of the environment and of the hypnotic illusion/delusion. The experience
of hypnosis then does not change perception and can be most parsimoniously explained as a way
of modifying degrees of absorption in imagined possibilities. This experience is not far removed
from mime or magical illusion where a magicianÕs patter and mis-direction or a mimeÕs actions
lead us to believe that what is not there is real, since the actions or patter leave us no alternative
but to believe so, even in the absence of proof. In the words of Kay (2001), the expert magician
seeks to deceive the mind rather than the eye. In both mime and magic, however, the spectator can
be aware of the environment and of the illusion and may be aware that they are aware of an illusion but content to be absorbed in it since the metaphorical Ôas ifÕ is maintained.
Imaginary beliefs in order to be lived-in as well as believed in must somehow be convincingly
placed in the world. de Rivera and Sarbin (1998) have suggested that the background for such
beliefs must be a cultural framework. The lived-in world must have a familiar past and a future,
and an ecologically coherent history which creates a current environment and a future horizon.
If we go back to self-perception itself, part of knowing I am in the here and now in my current
environment is a knowledge of how I got here, what is beyond here, what is inside, outside, what is
me/not me. Without all these bearings, I would not feel comfortably here. By and large I can give
a credible account of myself and my surroundings, how I arrived, my intentions, how I intend to
carry out my projects and what at least some of the consequences of my acting in the current environment would be. It is when this narrative about our immediate environment is temporarily supplemented with a more remote but convincing one that we ÔknowinglyÕ see illusions. We act ‘‘as if’’
they were real, even though we may know differently because to question the reality of an illusion
puts in question our normal way of arriving at the real, and so it becomes normal to accept two
competing narratives with a meta-cognitive over-rider that our sense of reality has been tricked.
Sense of reality can change then not only due to problems of perceptual ‘‘fit’’ in either stimuli or
consequences but also to absorption in a possible world through transportation by an imaginary
narrative. Furthermore, such absorption is a logical consequence of being led up to see competing
alternatives as less likely either by experience or narrative. It follows then, in the evaluation and
understanding, of altered states of consciousness that the background distribution of other possible states should also be explored. The cognitive tendency has been to assume that in states
of delusion or hallucination, data gathering or perceptual processing is biased (e.g., Garety &
Freeman, 1999), whereas, as we have seen, it may be an imaginary possibility not perception
which maintains a distorted sense of reality. In this case what might be required is a therapy to
change parameters of the imagination. This would include operationalizing a possibility distribution, and manipulating alternatives on the margins of consciousness in order to shift absorption
through proposing a narrative context to introduce new credible alternatives. Meta-cognitively
the imagination can challenge sense of reality providing it can give a coherent and detailed story
of the historical, spatial, biographic, material context necessary for an alternative possibility to
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generate a sense of reality. For example, if I just stated that the pen IÕm holding is really a microphone, there would probably be little shift in the distribution centered around the maximum possibility that the pen is simply an instrument for writing. If, however, I embellished the story with
details of its past, present and future life as a microphone accompanied by my acting towards it as
a microphone, the possibility shift might be more marked. The story would require spatial and
temporal depth plus a repositioning of my project towards the pen in order to for me to be better
absorbed in the pen-as-microphone sense of reality.
The clinical message here is simply that when people enter states of dissociation and appear absorbed in unreality, they may not be suffering from distortions of reality but from a meta-cognitive
absorption in imagined possibilities. In this case, attempting perceptual ‘‘fit’’ through encouraging
reality testing or information seeking is inappropriate. As an example, people with obsessional
contamination fears can be convinced of the existence of ‘‘unseen’’ dirt, despite the presence of
an intact and accurate perceptual system which ‘‘sees’’ no dirt. Further exploration reveals absorption on the basis of a personally convincing narrative in the possibility of what might be there despite proof to the contrary. The therapeutic approach proposed here is to work with the client
constructing alternative imaginary scenarios in an attempt to dislodge the maximum possibility
from the bottom (i.e., margins) upwards (OÕConnor & Robillard, 1999). A cognitive focus on
improving perception of reality testing will not be helpful if reality is not the problem.
4. Conclusion
The current article has drawn on previous philosophical and psychological accounts of the
structure of consciousness, plus clinical observation to construct a possibilistic model of the imagination. In this model, the defining characteristic of perception is possibility, possible use, possible
form, and possible events. Sense of reality results from absorption in a maximum possibility above
other alternative possibilities. The shape of the possibilistic distribution depends on intentional
context and projects towards the world. But the possibilistic space is always creatively constructed
in between what is and what could be. The maximum focus requires the margins of consciousness
to give it focus. The dynamic between core and margins is not dissimilar to Baars (1997) notion of
the tension between conscious and unconscious cognitive processes, with both forming a ‘‘contrastive’’ context with the same content. Baars (1997) notes how discrepancies between conscious
and unconscious can lead the unconscious to become the focus of the global theatre workspace
(GWS). The margins can change the focus, but the notion of a possibility distribution makes such
dynamic change a key property of the workspace not just a product of a discontinuity. Indeed the
possibility distribution ensures by its nature a fluid uneventful transition of conscious focus, which
is so not apparent in Baars conception of the GWS.
The perceptual ‘‘fit’’ of the maximum possibility with sense information is the normal way that
maximum possibility is confirmed and follows the hierarchical cognitive processes present in the
GWS. However, in order to function, cognitive explanations require the pre-cognitive architecture
of a world-as-given. One where there are ‘‘real’’ objects, distances, things, and events beyond me
and around me, and which afford me a real self-world relation. The pre-cognitive architecture is a
relational consciousness which always takes the form of a gradient from conscious core to unconscious margins. This context has a geographical and dialectical dimension. Geographically, every
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sharp focus is surrounded by a field of consciousness and this focus becomes less and less acute
towards the margins (see Figs. 1A and B). But dialectically, what is seen is seen in a context of
what is not there. More specifically, the space between the seen and unseen becomes a possibility
space of what is about to be (Fig. 1C). Hence the need for imagination as a creative faculty which
fills up the possibility space by ‘‘imagining’’ what is not there. Perception has no such creativity. It
is this meta-cognitive possibility gap which provides the leeway for detachment and absorption in
reality. Although there is only one world or ‘‘reality structure,’’ our meta-cognitive ability permits
us to be absorbed in several possible worlds at the same time, and experience a sense of reality in
relation to worlds which do not (and which we sometimes know) do not exist but which nonetheless by their non-existence inform perception. The same perceived attributes may be seen inside
distinct and possibly opposing intentional contexts and projects so feeding distinct senses of
reality.
Intricately wound up with absorption is the intent of the person as personified by projects, positioning and doings in the world. This link is inescapable and nothing can be seen or imagined unless the person acts towards it to bring out its promise and possibility. Hence change in intentional
context can change possibilistic context and vice versa.
The possibilistic model then proposes that sense of reality can be changed from the margins
upwards, as well as by perceptual ‘‘fit’’ downwards, and that this explains the easy co-existence
of perception and imagination, and indeed the very ability to shift continuously over discontinuous environmental structures. Perceptual and imaginal illusions can lead us to see conflicting or
paradoxical information because narrative cues create a compelling competing context to perception. It is normal on such occasions to ÔseeÕ imaginary events and hence meta-cognitively experience conflicting senses of reality, whilst however ‘‘knowing’’ there is only one pre-cognitive reality.
It may even be desirable on occasion to be metaphorically absorbed in two senses of reality, for
example as a spectator of a magicianÕs or a mimeÕs illusion. We ‘‘suspend our disbelief’’ in reality
on such occasions. But, we may be transported by a convincing visual or verbal narrative to construct a maximum possibility distribution and believe in it accordingly, without in any way compromising our wider perceptual sense of what is ‘‘really’’ there.
Meta-cognitively the person can adopt one of three degrees of absorption with respect to possibility: detached; metaphorical; or living-as. The problem, clinically speaking, occurs when the
metaphorical stance is dropped and the temporarily ‘‘believed-in’’ becomes permanently ‘‘livedin.’’ Psychopathological distortions of reality where the person experiences a state of dissociation,
and appears absorbed in unreality, may not signal cognitive distortions, but rather a meta-cognitive shift of the imagination. Absorption occurs on the basis of a credible story line which
promotes remote possibilities not as alternatives to, but as extensions of factual reality. Facts
are unlikely to influence absorption. So this sense of unreality may be alleviated more by changing
the imagination than attempting to correct faulty perceptions.
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Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 167–176
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Examining the role of emotional valence of mind wandering: All
mind wandering is not equal
Jonathan B. Banks a,⇑, Matthew S. Welhaf a, Audrey V.B. Hood a, Adriel Boals b, Jaime L. Tartar a
a
b
Nova Southeastern University, United States
University of North Texas, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 1 September 2015
Revised 20 May 2016
Accepted 3 June 2016
Keywords:
Mind wandering
Emotional valence
Working memory
Sustained attention
a b s t r a c t
To evaluate the role of emotional valence on the impact of mind wandering on working
memory (WM) and sustained attention, we reanalyzed data from three independently conducted studies that examined the impact of stress on WM (Banks & Boals, 2016; Banks,
Welhaf, & Srour, 2015) and sustained attention (Banks, Tartar, & Welhaf, 2014). Across
all studies, participants reported the content of their thoughts at random intervals during
the WM or sustained attention task. Thought probes in all studies included a core set of
response options for task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) that were negatively, positively, or
neutrally emotionally valenced. In line with theories of emotional valenced stimuli on capture of attention, results suggest negatively valenced TUTs, but not positively valenced
TUTs, were related to poorer WM and sustained attention in two studies. Neutral TUTs
were related to poorer WM but not sustained attention performance. Implications for models of mind wandering are discussed.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Despite the growing body of research on mind wandering and the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon in everyday life,
our understanding on the phenomenon remains unclear. Mind wandering can be conceptualized as any thought related to
personal concerns or goals but unrelated to the current task (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs)
consume as much as 50% of our waking hours and occur during almost every type of behavior (Killingsworth & Gilbert,
2010). Two dominant accounts of mind wandering differ in their view of the role of working memory in explaining mind
wandering, but these models explain different components to mind wandering. The Executive Control Failures Personal Concerns model (McVay & Kane, 2010) suggests mind wandering occurs due to a failure of working memory to control mind
wandering and a priming of personal concerns. As such, this model can be used to explain why mind wandering occurs.
The Decoupling model (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006) suggests instances of mind wandering reflect a decoupling of attention
from an ongoing task toward an internal train of thought. Attentional resources then support this internal train of thought so
the internal thought can be continued (Smallwood, Brown, Baird, & Schooler, 2012). As such, the decoupling model suggests
that working memory resources are required to support mind wandering. Given the critical differences between these models in terms of the role of working memory in mind wandering, an alternative view has suggested that the two models are
not mutually exclusive but rather explain differing aspects of mind wandering. The Process-Occurrence framework suggests
⇑ Corresponding author at: College of Psychology, Nova Southeastern University, 3301 College Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33314, United States.
E-mail address: jonathan.banks@nova.edu (J.B. Banks).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.06.003
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
168
J.B. Banks et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 167–176
that the role of working memory may be two-fold, first to prevent mind wandering on tasks demanding external focus of
attention and second to support mind wandering once it occurs (Smallwood, 2013).
Impairment in primary task performance is often observed during mind wandering (McVay & Kane, 2010; Smallwood &
Schooler, 2006), possibly due to mind wandering competing for working memory resources that would otherwise be directed toward the ongoing task (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). A recent meta-analysis examining the causes and consequences
of mind wandering supported the view that mind wandering results in impairments in ongoing task performance (Randall,
Oswald, & Beier, 2014). However, task performance impairments do not always occur as a result of mind wandering
(Smallwood, Obonsawin, & Heim, 2003). One explanation for the discrepancy between studies investigating the impact of
mind wandering on task performance has to do with the attentional demands of the primary task (Thomson, Besner, &
Smilek, 2015). Tasks that require less attentional resources may be less likely to be impaired by mind wandering than tasks
that require greater attentional resources.
Thomson et al. (2015) recently proposed a resource control account of sustained attention that blends the decoupling and
executive control failure models of mind wandering. The resource control model suggests that the resources devoted to a
primary task may be less than the resources available to the individual and as such, additional resources (above and beyond
those required by the task) may be directed toward mind wandering. By this account, then, mind wandering may occur
simultaneously with the primary task, without impairment in the primary task. However, when the resources devoted to
the task are less than the resources required to complete the task, performance on the primary task will be impaired, as could
be the case when mind wandering occurs (Seli et al., 2014). This model helps to explain prior findings that individuals with
higher working memory capacity mind wander more when engaged in a task with few attentional demands but mind wander less on tasks with greater attentional demands (Levinson, Smallwood, & Davidson, 2012) and when individuals report
lower levels of concentration (Kane et al., 2007). The impact of mind wandering on primary task performance should differ
based on the amount of available resources to complete the primary task. The availability of resources may be altered by the
demands of the primary task, individual differences in working memory, and resources directed toward continuing mind
wandering. The degree to which attentional resources are directed toward mind wandering alters the impact on primary task
performance, such that greater disengagement from the primary task toward mind wandering results in the greatest performance deficits (Seli et al., 2014).
1.1. Examining the content of mind wandering
Examining the content of mind wandering may be critical for understanding the impact of mind wandering on primary
task performance, as not all content is likely to consume similar amounts of attentional resources. A few recent studies have
attempted to examine different dimensions of mind wandering, including temporal orientation. Temporal orientation of
mind wandering refers to the focus of the subjects’ thoughts in time (e.g. thinking about the past, present, or future). The
temporal orientation of mind wandering may alter the demands placed on attentional resources, with future oriented
thoughts consuming more resources than present or past thoughts (Smallwood, Nind, & O’Connor, 2009). The nature of
the prime used to increase mind wandering may impact the temporal orientation of mind wandering that is induced. Specifically, when participants are primed with personal priorities, increases in future-oriented mind wandering have been
demonstrated (Stawarczyk, Majerus, Maj, Van der Linden, & D’Argembeau, 2011). Future-oriented mind wandering is related
to increases in negative affect for individuals anticipating a stressful speech task (Stawarczyk, Majerus, & D’Argembeau,
2013). However, individuals primed with negative moods demonstrate a shift to a more retrospective orientation of mind
wandering (Smallwood & O’Connor, 2011). Although a prime to increase negative mood resulted in increases in mind wandering about the distant past, increasing positive mood did not result in increases in mind wandering about the past or
future (Smallwood & O’Connor, 2011). The differences in temporal orientation of mind wandering may be moderated by
individual differences in working memory, such that higher working memory individuals experience more future oriented
mind wandering (Baird, Smallwood, & Schooler, 2011), reflecting an increase in focus on individuals’ ongoing concerns, problems, or goals (Smallwood et al., 2009). However, other work has demonstrated that not only do higher working memory
individuals experience less mind wandering but also less future oriented mind wandering than lower working memory individuals (McVay, Unsworth, McMillan, & Kane, 2013).
1.2. Emotional valence
The emotional valence of the content of mind wandering may be a critical moderator for the impact of mind wandering
on primary task performance. Recent work has demonstrated a congruence between mood and the content of the mind wandering, such that sadness prior to mind wandering predicted mind wandering with sad content, and anxiety prior to the
mind wandering measurement predicted mind wandering with anxious but not sad content (Poerio, Totterdell, & Miles,
2013). Likewise, mind wandering with positively valenced content predicts subsequent positive mood (Ruby, Smallwood,
Engen, & Singer, 2013). However, the impact of emotional valence of mind wandering on future mood may be altered by
the temporal orientation of the thought, such that past and ‘‘other-related” thoughts are predictive of decreases in mood,
even when the emotional valence of the thought is positive. Mind wandering focused on the future or self is related to
increases in positive affect, even when the emotional valence of the thought is negative (Ruby et al., 2013). Response patterns in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) to affective stimuli can be used to successfully predict affective valence
J.B. Banks et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 167–176
169
of mind wandering during a later task-free period (Tusche, Smallwood, Bernhardt, & Singer, 2014). This suggests that the
mOFC plays an important role in determining the affective valence of mind wandering. Based on the role of mind wandering
in determining future affect (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Poerio et al., 2013; Ruby et al., 2013), understanding the sources
of affective valence of mind wandering may be important. The affective valence of mind wandering content is not always
related to current mood or altered by stress manipulations (Vinski & Watter, 2013). Vinski and Watter (2013) found that
overall rates of mind wandering appear to be greatest following stress manipulations for individuals reporting high levels
of negative affect prior to the stressor. Interestingly, negatively valenced mind wandering did not occur more often than neutral valenced mind wandering. Vinski and Watter (2013) did not examine possible differences in the impact of negative and
neutral mind wandering on task performance.
The primary concern for the current study is to understand the impact of mind wandering on current cognitive task performance. Although several prior studies have examined the emotional valence of mind wandering as it relates to mood, the
authors are unaware of any work that has examined emotional valence of mind wandering as a moderator for the impact of
mind wandering on primary task performance. As mentioned previously, mind wandering is presumed to lead to deficits in
primary task performance (McVay & Kane, 2010; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006), especially when the sufficient resources are
not available to support mind wandering and primary task performance (Thomson et al., 2015). Impaired task performance
may occur either from TUTs consuming executive attentional resources (Seli et al., 2014; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006;
Thomson et al., 2015) or due to resources being used to redirect attention and suppress off task thoughts (Wegner, 1994;
see Hertel & Hayes, 2015; Klein & Bratton, 2007).
Although the role of emotional valence of TUTs in determining the impact on primary task performance has not been
explored in the mind wandering literature, it is possible to draw inferences from related literature. Klein and Boals
(2001) argued that stress related TUTs require effortful suppression and that stress related TUTs are not likely to dissipate
as ongoing task demands increase, as may occur for neutral TUTs (Teasdale et al., 1995). In support of this view, the number
of negative life events is related to poorer working memory performance but the number of positive life events is unrelated
to working memory performance (Klein & Boals, 2001, Study 2). Klein and Boals (2001) demonstrated that negative and positive events did not differ in terms of rates of TUTs, specifically intrusive thoughts as measured by the Impact of Events Scale.
However, negative and positive events differed in terms of participants attempts to avoid event related TUTs. These findings
suggest that a critical difference between positively and negatively valenced TUTs has to do with the attempt to inhibit them.
The process of inhibition may result in impaired task performance because of the resources required to suppress the thought
(Wegner, 1994).
Emotional stimuli capture attentional resources due to their intrinsic evolutionary or motivational relevance. The perspective of natural selective attention emphasizes that emotional stimuli, particularly emotionally negative stimuli, innately
capture attentional resources and command priority processing due to their high motivational relevance (Desimone &
Duncan, 1995; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997; Olofsson, Nordin, Sequeira, & Polich, 2008; Schupp, Flaisch, Stockburger,
& Junghöfer, 2006; Yiend, 2010). This view supports the idea that emotionally-valenced TUTs would be more likely to consume attentional resources than neutral TUTs. Negatively valenced emotional stimuli, such as angry faces, capture attention
faster than neutral or positive stimuli (Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2001). Negative words in an emotional Stroop task produce longer response times than positive words (Pratto & John, 1991), suggesting a greater redirection of attention to negatively valenced stimuli relative to positively valenced stimuli. The degree of redirection of attention to emotional stimuli
may be altered by level of arousal (Pratto, 1994). However, negative stimuli typically generate greater levels of arousal than
other stimuli (Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993). Thus, negatively valenced TUTs may capture attention at a greater
intensity or at greater frequency. Further, attempts to suppress negatively valenced TUTs will consume additional attentional resources, reducing the availability of resources for primary task performance. Following the resource-control model
(Thomson et al., 2015), when mind wandering consumes more resources than are left available by the primary task, decrements in the primary task should occur. If negatively valenced TUTs capture attention at higher rates, thus consuming more
resources than positive TUTs, negative TUTs should be more likely to result in performance decrements than positive or neutral TUTs.
The current study examined the role of the emotional valence of the TUT to determine the impact on current task performance. Specifically, we analyzed here, for the first time, the content of the mind wandering based on the emotional
valence, in three previously published studies (Banks & Boals, 2016; Banks, Tartar, & Welhaf, 2014; Banks, Welhaf, &
Srour, 2015), that examined the relationship between working memory, sustained attention, mind wandering, and stress.
In all prior analyses, reports of any instance of mind wandering had been collapsed into a percentage of total off task
thoughts. The current analyses examined the impact of negative, neutral, and positive TUTs on working memory (Banks &
Boals, 2016; Banks et al., 2015) and sustained attention (Banks et al., 2014). Participants in all studies were asked to categorize the emotional valence of the off-task thought, thus one strength of the current study is that it does not rely on external
raters to code the emotional valence of the thought report. Additionally, together these studies examined the impact of the
emotionally valenced TUTs on multiple measures of working memory and a sustained attention measure to demonstrate
that any relationships observed are not limited to a single task or even a single attentional control function.
We hypothesized that the three categories of TUTs would not all serve as predictors of performance on either working
memory or sustained attention task performance. Specifically, we suggest that negatively valenced TUTs would be the strongest predictors of poorer task performance, due to their increased likelihood to capture attention (Eastwood et al., 2001; Lang
et al., 1997; Olofsson et al., 2008; Schupp et al., 2006; Yiend, 2010) and the increased likelihood to suppress negative
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thoughts (Klein & Boals, 2001). We hypothesized that positively valenced TUTs would not predict poorer task performance,
consistent with prior findings that although positive events result in similar levels of intrusive thoughts as negative events,
they result in lower levels of suppression attempts than negative events (Klein & Boals, 2001). Additionally, prior findings
suggest that rates of positive events were not associated with impaired WM task performance (Klein & Boals, 2001). As neutral TUTs represent a middle point between the positively and negatively valenced TUTs, we hypothesized that neutral TUTs
would be less likely to impact task performance than negative TUTs. Finally, we were also interested in examining the frequency of positive, negative, or neutral TUTs to determine if the relationship between impaired task performance and TUT
category was due to the frequency of that category of TUT. No specific hypothesis was made concerning the frequency of
each type of TUT.
2. Method
Below, we present the methodological details from Banks and Boals (2016) and Banks et al. (2014, 2015) that are necessary to evaluative the current reanalysis. For further information, particularly regarding additional measures subjects completed, the reader may consult the original publications.
Two of the three studies examined the impact of stress on cognitive performance (Banks & Boals, 2016; Banks et al.,
2014). Banks and Boals (2016) examined a psychological stress manipulation on mind wandering and working memory. Participants in the Banks and Boals (2016) study were assigned to write about either a future negative, positive, or neutral event.
All measures reported in the current manuscript occurred as part of an initial session prior to a stress manipulation. The
Banks et al. (2014) study examined the impact of a physical stress manipulation on mind wandering and sustained attention.
Participants were assigned to complete either the cold pressor task (CPT) or a control version of the task involving warm
water. All measures reported in the current study were completed immediately following the CPT or control CPT. As reported
in Banks et al. (2014), no differences were observed on any measure immediately following the stress manipulation. The
third study examined the impact of a mindfulness meditation on working memory (Banks et al., 2015). Participants were
assigned to either a mindfulness or relaxation condition. All measures reported in the current study were collected as baseline measures prior to delivery of either intervention.
2.1. Participants
Banks et al. (2015) tested 80 undergraduates from Nova Southeastern University (48 Females; Mage = 20.97 years,
SD = 6.53). Banks and Boals (2016) tested 150 undergraduates (84 Females; Mage = 21.28 years, SD = 4.93) from the University of North Texas. Banks et al. (2014) tested 53 undergraduates (38 Females, Mage = 22.19 years, SD = 6.28) from Nova
Southeastern University. Sample sizes for each study were determined by conducting a power analyses to provide sufficient
power for the desired effects in each study.
2.2. Measures
2.2.1. Tasks including thought probes
2.2.1.1. Working memory tasks. Banks et al. (2015) assessed working memory with the Automated Operation Span Task
(AOSPAN, Unsworth, Heitz, Schrock, & Engle, 2005). Banks and Boals (2016) assessed working memory with the AOSPAN,
and the Automated Reading Span Task (RSPAN, Unsworth et al., 2005; see Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). During both the
AOSPAN and the RSPAN, participants engage in a processing task followed by the presentation of to be remembered letters.
During the RSPAN, participants verify the meaningfulness of sentences (‘‘The ship sailed across the dishwasher”). During the
AOSPAN, participants verify the accuracy of a solution to a math problem (e.g. (2 ⁄ 5) + 3 = ?; 7). Following the verification of
either sentence or math operation a capital letter (out of a list of 12 possible letters) appears for 250 ms. Following a set of
between three and seven verification-letter pairs a grid containing all 12 possible letters appears on the screen. The participant is instructed to indicate all of the letters from that set in the order presented by entering the number corresponding to
the order in which the letter was presented. Participants are presented with each set length (three to seven times) three
times for a total of 15 sets per task.
The AOSPAN and RSPAN are scored by summing the total number of items recalled in the correct serial position, as recommended by Conway and colleagues (Conway et al., 2005). For the Banks and Boals (2016) study, the AOSPAN and RSPAN
scores were converted to z-scores and the z-scores were averaged to create a composite WM score.
2.2.1.2. Sustained attention task. Banks et al. (2014) measured sustained attention with the SART. The SART is a go/no-go task
in which participants must respond quickly to all frequent GO stimuli and withhold a response to the infrequent NOGO stimuli (Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997). In this version of the SART, the frequently GO stimuli was any
number from 1 through 9, except for the number 3, which served as the infrequent NOGO stimuli. Consistent with
Robertson et al. (1997), GO and NOGO stimuli were presented for 250 ms, followed by a mask presented for 900 ms. The
SART consisted of a total of 225 trials, made of 200 GO trials and 25 NOGO trials. The NOGO trials were inserted into the
task at random. Accuracy on the task was measured as the percentage of correct responses to the GO stimuli or GO accuracy.
J.B. Banks et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 167–176
171
The percentage of trials in which the participants correctly withheld a response to the NOGO stimuli was defined as NOGO
accuracy. Participants were instructed to complete the task as accurately and quickly as possible. The SART took approximately 5 min to complete. Response times (RT) for the GO trials were also collected. One participant (male) failed to complete the SART as instructed (responding on NOGO trials and not GO trials) and their data were removed from all SART
analyses.
2.2.2. Thought probes
For the Banks et al. (2015) and the Banks and Boals (2016) studies, 15 thought probes were inserted into the working
memory tasks following letter recall grids to measure task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). For Banks et al. (2014), 12 thought
probes were inserted at random intervals during the SART task. The thought probes of interest to the current study were
consistent across all studies. Additional probes varied in the studies to include task evaluative thoughts either as one probe
(Banks & Boals, 2016) or evaluative thoughts by emotional valence (Banks et al., 2015). Additionally, Banks et al. (2014, 2015)
include a probe specific to the stress manipulation used in the study.
For all studies participants responded to the prompt, ‘‘What were you just thinking about?” Response options for all studies can be found in Table 1. In all prior analyses TUTs were calculated by summing all off task response options selected, then
dividing by the number of probes presented, and multiplying by 100 to calculate a percentage of off task thoughts (Banks
et al., 2015: Options: D-G; Banks & Boals, 2016: Options: C-E; and Banks et al., 2014: Options: C-F). For all current analyses
we will examine the percentage of TUTs by probe for Negative, Positive, or Neutral valence. The percentage of each TUT category was calculated by summing all responses for the category, dividing by the number of probes presented in the task, and
multiplying by 100. Calculating a percentage of TUTs in each category is optimal as the number of probes presented in each
study varied.
2.3. Procedures
For the Banks and Boals (2016) study, participants completed the AOSPAN and RSPAN in a counterbalanced order prior to
completing additional measures in a larger study, including several measures of life stress, the Daily Inventory of Stressful
Events (Almeida, Wethington, & Kessler, 2002), the Life Experiences Survey (Sarason, Johnson, & Siegel, 1978), the Impact of
Events Scale (Horowitz, Wilner, & Alvarez, 1979) and a measure of thought control, the White Bear Suppression Inventory
(Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). In the Banks et al. (2015) study, participants completed the AOSPAN as part of a baseline measurement following several questionnaires on mindfulness and affect, including the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire
(Bond et al., 2011), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), and the Five Facet Mindfulness
Questionnaire (Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer, & Toney, 2006). Participants in the Banks et al. (2014) study completed
the SART following either a socially evaluative cold-pressor stress manipulation (Schwabe, Haddad, & Schachinger, 2008)
or a control water task. No differences were found between the two conditions on SART performance or overall TUTs in
the prior analyses. To ensure the conditions did not differ on items for the current study, t-tests were conducted. No significant differences were found, p > 0.05.
3. Results
3.1. Impact of TUT valence on WM performance
To test the primary hypothesis that negative emotional TUTs will have a stronger impact on ongoing task performance
than neutral or positive emotional TUTs, we conducted a series of multiple regression analyses. As seen in Table 2, a
significant regression model was found when predicting AOSPAN performance in the Banks et al. (2015) data set, with only
Table 1
Thought probes presented in each study.
Probe category
Banks and Boals (2016)
Banks et al. (2015)
Banks et al. (2014)
On-task
Task evaluative
Task-related thoughts
Task-related evaluative
thoughts – positive
Task-related evaluative
thoughts – negative
Task-unrelated thoughts,
negative content
Task-unrelated thoughts,
positive content
Task-unrelated thoughts,
neutral content
–
Task-related thoughts
Task-related evaluative
thoughts – positive
Task-related evaluative
thoughts – negative
Task-unrelated thoughts,
negative content
Task-unrelated thoughts,
positive content
Task-unrelated thoughts,
neutral content
Task-unrelated thoughts,
about the writing task
Task-related thought, that is, thinking about the task
Task performance, that is, thoughts about your performance on
the task
Negative TUT
Positive TUT
Neutral TUT
Other
Note: Bold text indicates the thought probes used in the current study.
Negative thoughts, that is, thoughts that are unrelated to the
task but are negative in nature
Positive thoughts, that is, thoughts that are unrelated to the
task but are positive in nature
Other TUTs, that is, any other TUTs
The water task, that is, thinking about the immersion of your
hand in water
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J.B. Banks et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 167–176
Table 2
Regression analyses predicting working memory task performance.
B
b
SE
t
p
F
df
p
Adjusted R2
Banks et al. (2015)
Predicting AOSPAN performance
Neutral TUTs %
0.26
Negative TUTs %
0.22
Positive TUTs %
0.06
0.13
0.16
0.14
0.24
0.16
0.04
2.05
1.36
0.39
0.044
0.177
0.697
3.06
3, 75
0.033
0.07
Banks and Boals (2016)
Predicting WM composite
Neutral TUTs %
0.02
Negative TUTs %
0.03
Positive TUTs %
0.00
0.01
0.01
0.01
0.34
0.46
0.01
4.94
6.82
0.21
<0.0001
<0.0001
0.836
24.74
3, 143
<0.0001
0.33
Predicting AOSPAN performance
Neutral TUTs %
0.23
Negative TUTs %
0.27
Positive TUTs %
0.08
0.05
0.06
0.07
0.32
0.33
0.07
4.40
4.54
0.99
<0.0001
<0.0001
0.326
15.34
3, 144
<0.0001
0.23
Predicting RSPAN performance
Neutral TUTs %
0.22
Negative TUTs %
0.36
Positive TUTs %
0.01
0.05
0.05
0.07
0.29
0.53
0.01
4.33
7.79
0.11
<0.0001
<0.0001
0.910
25.33
3, 145
<0.0001
0.33
Note: Neutral TUTs % = percentage of neutral task-unrelated thoughts, Negative TUTs % = percentage of negative task-unrelated thoughts, Positive TUTs %
= percentage of positive task-unrelated thoughts.
the percentage of Neutral TUTs serving as a significant predictor. Although the percentage of Negative TUTs was correlated
with AOSPAN task performance, r(78) = 0.24, p = 0.032, the percentage of Negative TUTs was also correlated with the percentage of neutral TUTs, r(78) = 0.36, p = 0.001. The regression analyses suggests that when controlling for shared variance,
only Neutral TUTs predict poorer AOSPAN performance.
We next examined the impact of TUTs on WM performance in the Banks and Boals (2016) data set. As seen in Table 2, a
significant regression model was found predicting the WM composite, with both the percentage of Neutral TUTs and the percentage of Negative TUTs serving as significant predictors. When we examined both the RSPAN and AOSPAN independently,
the same pattern of results was observed. A significant model was observed for the AOSPAN task, with both the percentage of
Neutral TUTs and the percentage of Negative TUTs serving as significant predictors. A significant model was observed for the
RSPAN task, with both the percentage of Neutral TUTs and the percentage of Negative TUTs serving as significant predictors.
We next examined the impact of TUTs on SART performance in the Banks et al. (2014) data set. To control for possible
speed-accuracy trade-offs that could occur during the SART (Seli, Cheyne, & Smilek, 2012; Seli, Jonker, Cheyne, & Smilek,
2013) we conducted a series of regression analyses examining the impact of TUTs on NOGO and GO accuracy, controlling
for GO trial response time. As seen in Table 3, a significant model was found predicting NOGO trial accuracy, with both
the percentage of Negative TUTs and GO trial response time serving as significant predictors. No significant model was found
for predicting GO trial accuracy. Finally, we conducted a regression analysis predicting GO response time from the three TUT
categories, but no significant overall model was found, R2 = 0.10, Adjusted R2 = 0.04, F(3, 45) = 1.67, p = 0.188.
3.2. TUT valence frequency
To examine the frequency of negative, neutral, or positive TUTs we conducted a series of repeated measures ANOVAs for
each of the studies. As shown in Table 4, neutral TUTs were more frequent in Banks and Boals (2016) and Banks et al. (2014).
Table 3
Regression analyses predicting SART performance (data from Banks et al., 2014).
B
SE
b
p
F
df
p
Adjusted R2
4.32
0.52
2.10
0.30
<0.0001
0.607
0.041
0.766
8.47
4, 44
<0.0001
0.38
1.21
0.93
0.04
0.34
0.231
0.355
0.967
0.734
0.72
4, 44
0.581
0.02
t
Predicting SART NOGO accuracy
GO RT
0.03
Neutral TUTs %
1.87
Negative TUTs %
13.84
Positive TUTs %
2.12
0.01
3.60
6.58
7.08
0.52
0.06
0.27
0.04
Predicting SART GO accuracy
GO RT
0.02
Neutral TUTs %
7.29
Negative TUTs %
0.59
Positive TUTs %
5.25
0.02
7.80
14.25
15.34
0.19
0.14
0.01
0.05
Note: Neutral TUTs % = percentage of neutral task-unrelated thoughts, Negative TUTs % = percentage of negative task-unrelated thoughts, Positive TUTs %
= percentage of positive task-unrelated thoughts, SART NOGO = percentage of NOGO trial accuracy, SART GO = percentage of GO trial accuracy, GO
RT = response time for SART GO trials in ms.
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J.B. Banks et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 167–176
Table 4
Descriptive statistics for cognitive tasks and mean percentage of negative, neutral, and positive TUTs from Banks and Boals (2016), Banks et al. (2014, 2015)
Study
Task
Cognitive task
Mean (SD)
Negative TUTs
Mean (SD)
Neutral TUTs
Mean (SD)
Positive TUTs
Mean (SD)
F
df
p
g2
Banks and Boals
WM composite
AOSPAN
RSPAN
0.00 (0.92)
62.57 (12.52)
58.87 (13.48)
8.62 (15.33)A
7.79 (15.09)A
9.40 (19.79)A
15.46 (15.29)B
15.00 (17.66) B
16.06 (17.93) B
6.73 (11.18)A
6.58 (11.89)A
6.94 (13.29)A
16.77
14.37
11.30
2, 292
2, 294
2, 296
<0.0001
<0.0001
<0.0001
0.11
0.10
0.08
Banks, Welhaf, and Srour
AOSPAN
56.58 (11.03)
2.87 (7.89)A
3.97 (10.10)A
1.77 (8.45)A
1.44
2, 156
0.241
0.02
4.01 (8.81)C
7.00
2, 102
0.001
0.14
Banks, Tartar, and Welhaf
SART NOGO
SART GO
SART NOGO RT
44.00 (20.78)
76.15 (4.37)
176.83 (84.88)
7.21 (9.90)
A
13.98 (16.45)
B
Note: Standard deviations appear in parentheses, superscripts that differ indicate significant differences between TUT categories, p’s < 0.05. SART
NOGO = percentage of NOGO trial accuracy, SART GO = percentage of GO trial accuracy, SART NOGO RT = response time for NOGO trials in ms.
When examining TUTs collapsed across both WM tasks, a significant difference between rates of negative, neutral, and positive TUTs was found in the Banks and Boals (2016) data. Neutral TUTs were more frequent than either negative, t(146)
= 3.89, p = 0.0002, d = 0.45, or positive TUTs, t(146) = 6.16, p < 0.0001, d = 0.65, but no difference between negative and positive TUTs were observed, p = 0.230. Similar results were observed when examining TUTs during the AOSPAN and RSPAN task
separately. A significant difference between rates of negative, neutral, and positive TUTs was observed during the AOSPAN
task and during the RSPAN task. Consistent with the overall findings, neutral TUTs were more frequent than negative TUTs in
the AOSPAN, t(147) = 3.97, p < 0.0001, d = 0.44, and in the RSPAN, t(148) = 2.96, p = 0.004, d = 0.35. Neutral TUTs were more
frequent than positive TUTs in the AOSPAN, t(147) = 5.04, p < 0.0001, d = 0.56, and the RSPAN, t(148) = 5.29, p < 0.0001,
d = 0.58. No differences were observed between negative and positive TUTs in either the AOSPAN or RSPAN.
A significant difference in the percentage of negative, neutral, and positive TUTs was found in the Banks et al. (2014) data.
Consistent with the findings in the Banks and Boals (2016) data, neutral TUTs were more frequent than either negative, t(51)
= 2.07, p = 0.044, d = 0.42, or positive TUTs, t(51) = 3.23, p = 0.002, d = 0.68. However, difference between negative and positive TUTs were also observed such that negative TUTs were more frequent than positive TUTs, t(51) = 2.16, p = 0.036,
d = 0.34. No significant differences in the percentage of negative, neutral, or positive TUTs was observed in the Banks
et al. (2015) data.
4. Discussion
The current study examined the role of emotional valence of mind wandering on working memory and sustained attention. We reanalyzed data from three independent studies that examined the relationship between mind wandering and
working memory. We hypothesized that negatively valenced TUTs would be more likely to predict poorer task performance
than positively valenced TUTS. This hypothesis was partially supported in both sustained attention and WM tasks, such that
negative TUTs, but not positive TUTs, predicted poorer performance in the ongoing tasks, in two data sets (Banks & Boals,
2016; Banks et al., 2014). Against our initial prediction that neutral TUTs would be less likely to predict task impairments,
neutral TUTs predicted poorer performance on WM tasks in the Banks and Boals (2016) and the Banks et al. (2015) data, but
not to performance on the SART task in the Banks et al. (2014) data. Although negative TUTs did not serve as unique predictors of AOSPAN performance in the Banks et al. (2015) data, the direction of the impact on AOSPAN task performance was in
the same (negative) direction as observed in the other data sets.
The differences between negative and positive TUTs, as predictors of current task performance, are not likely due to differences in frequencies of their occurrence. Differences between frequencies of negative and positive TUTs were only
observed in the Banks et al. (2014) data. No differences between negative and positive TUTs were observed in the other
two studies. Although neutral TUTs were reported at a significantly higher frequency than either negative or positive TUTs
in two studies (Banks & Boals, 2016; Banks et al., 2014), negative TUTs predicted poorer performance, on WM tasks and SART
NOGO trials, in both of these studies and neutral TUTs was only a significant predictor in one of those studies (Banks & Boals,
2016). Finally, no differences in frequency were observed between positive, negative, and neutral TUTs in the Banks et al.
(2015) data but only neutral TUTs were significant predictors of AOSPAN performance. Counter to our initial hypothesis, negative TUTs did not predict AOSPAN performance in the Banks et al. (2015) data. One possible reason has to do with the low
rate of TUTs overall (9%) in this data set. Given the low rate of TUTs it is possible that there were not enough negative TUTs
overall to impact AOSPAN performance.
The lack of a consistent relationship between neutrally valenced TUTs and task performance is of importance to understanding the impact of mind wandering. These findings may help to explain prior work that has demonstrated variability in
the impact of mind wandering on ongoing task performance (McVay & Kane, 2013). The differences we observed may be due
to differing levels of primary task demand. Specifically, neutral TUTs were related to performance on the higher demand
tasks, WM task performance, but not on a task with lower levels of demand, SART performance. This finding is inline with
the resource control account (Thomson et al., 2015), such that at lower levels of task demand, sufficient executive resources
are available to support mind wandering and task performance. Specifically, mind wandering about a neutral topic may not
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J.B. Banks et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 167–176
draw sufficient resources away from the primary task to result in impairments in performance on tasks requiring lower
amounts of attentional resources. Further examination of the SART provides additional support for this argument. Performance on the least demanding of the SART components, the GO trials, was not impaired by rates of neutral, negative, or positively valenced TUTs. However, performance on the NOGO trials, which are more demanding than the GO trials, was
impaired by negative TUTs. Negative TUTs should be more likely to impair performance on higher than lower demand tasks,
as they are likely to draw greater attentional resources from the primary task (Eastwood et al., 2001; Lang et al., 1997;
Olofsson et al., 2008; Schupp et al., 2006; Yiend, 2010). According to the resource control account (Thomson et al., 2015),
the likelihood of impairment as a result of mind wandering should vary as a function of resources required by the task,
resources consumed by mind wandering, and any individual differences in available resources. As such, when the task
required few resources, such as GO trials, mind wandering should be unlikely to impair performance. However, on moderately demanding tasks, such as on NOGO trials, when mind wandering consumes more resources, as would be the case with
negatively valenced but not neutrally valenced mind wandering, performance impairments should be expected. When task
demands are greater, such as on a working memory task, neutrally valenced mind wandering, consumes sufficient attentional resources as to result in impaired task performance as has been suggested previously (Baddeley, 1993).
Our findings are consistent with more recent models of mind wandering (Smallwood, 2013; Thomson et al., 2015) and
with a large body of work demonstrating the privileged nature of emotional stimuli in capturing attention (Bargh,
Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Pratto, 1994; Pratto & John, 1991). Indeed, the increased ability for emotionally negative
stimuli to capture attention has been demonstrated at the behavioral level (Eastwood et al., 2001; Pratto & John, 1991) and at
the neurophysiological level (Smith, Cacioppo, Larsen, & Chartrand, 2003). An alternative explanation is that the negative
TUTs resulted in greater levels of arousal in the participants. Relative to emotionally positive stimuli, emotionally negative
stimuli are typically associated with higher arousal levels (Lang et al., 1993). Since increased physiological arousal creates
widespread activation across emotional memory networks (Adolphs, Russell, & Tranel, 1999; Cahill, Gorski, & Le, 2003), it
is possible that the negative TUTs resulted in greater network activation relative to emotionally positive TUTs or neutral
TUTs (Mickley Steinmetz, Addis, & Kensinger, 2010). Greater activation of the emotional memory network would then have
increased the load on attentional resources, potentially increasing the cognitive resources required to suppress the negative
TUTs, thus resulting in greater ongoing task impairment. As negative TUTs, but not positive TUTs, served as predictors of task
performance in two of the data sets (Banks & Boals, 2016; Banks et al., 2015), this appears to suggest that negative thoughts
results in greater activation of the emotional networks (Mickley Steinmetz et al., 2010) resulting in greater impairment in
ongoing task performance.
Although the current analyses do appear to provide a demonstration of the importance of the emotional valence of the
TUT in determining the impact of mind wandering on task performance, several important limitations exists in the current
set of analyses. In order to provide sufficient evidence that positive and negative affect differ in their impact on ongoing task
performance, it would be critical to be able to manipulate levels of positive and negative TUTs and examine the subsequent
changes in task performance. Despite this limitation, the results are consistent with findings of manipulations designed to
alter working memory by increasing negative affect (Curci, Lanciano, Soleti, & Rime, 2013) or positive affect (Yang, Yang, &
Isen, 2013). A second limitation in the current set of studies has to do with the nature of the tasks used to assess the impact
of TUTs on task performance. Given the artificial nature of the laboratory tasks, it is possible, albeit unlikely, that participants
across all studies were not sufficiently motivated to achieve their best performance. On real world tasks requiring higher
levels of attentional resources, such as writing a manuscript or delivering an important speech, it is possible that all TUTs
would result in impaired performance either due to the TUT consuming attentional resources (Baddeley, 1993) or due to
attempts to suppress the TUT (Wegner, 1994). Finally, the current set of studies differs in several important domains, including the cognitive task examined and initial purpose of the study. However, despite any methodological differences between
the studies, the findings are relatively consistent. The consistencies across the studies suggest that combining the data from
these studies is a strength rather than limitation, as the findings are robust enough to be found on different cognitive tasks.
In summary, the current study is the first to reveal differences in the impact of TUTs on task performance based on emotional valence of the TUT. These findings are consistent with the most recent models of mind wandering (Thomson et al.,
2015) and are in contrast to recent work examining consequences of mind wandering (Randall et al., 2014), as they demonstrate that all types of mind wandering are not harmful to performance. We suggest that findings are in line with a large
body of work demonstrating the impact of emotional stimuli on the capture of attention (Bargh et al., 1992; Eastwood
et al., 2001; Mickley Steinmetz et al., 2010; Pratto, 1994; Pratto & John, 1991). The lack of an impact of some instances of
mind wandering are consistent with recent work demonstrating interventions that can reduce the impact of mind wandering on working memory (Banks et al., 2015). These findings highlight the importance of considering the emotional valence of
mind wandering when examining the impact on current task performance, and suggest that current models of mind wandering must consider the content of the mind wandering when determining the consequence on task performance.
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Automatic and controlled semantic processing:
A masked prime-task effect
B. Valdésa,*, A. Catenab, P. Marı́-Beffaa
a
University of Wales, Bangor, Adeilad Brigantia, Penrallt Road, Gwynedd LL57 2AS, UK
b
University of Granada, Spain
Received 5 February 2004
Available online 26 October 2004
Abstract
A classical definition of automaticity establishes that automatic processing occurs without attention or
consciousness, and cannot be controlled. Previous studies have demonstrated that semantic priming can be
reduced if attention is directed to a low-level of analysis. This finding suggests that semantic processing is
not automatic since it can be controlled. In this paper, we present two experiments that demonstrate that
semantic processing may occur in the absence of attention and consciousness. A negative semantic priming
effect was found when a low-level prime-task was required and when a masked lexical decision prime-task
was performed (Experiment 1). This paper also discusses the limitations of the inhibitory mechanism
involved in negative semantic priming effect.
2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Automaticity; Consciousness; Attention; Semantic priming; Negative Priming; Word processing
1. Introduction
When confronted with printed words, skilled readers have the subjective impression that reading is an automatic process that does not requires attentional control or effort. For decades this
*
Corresponding author. Fax: +44 1248 38 2599.
E-mail address: b.valdes@bangor.ac.uk (B. Valdés).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.08.001
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
279
idea has guided the research on word recognition (see Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, &
Seidenberg, 2001, for a recent review) and has served to explain some experimental phenomena
such as Stroop interference (Stroop, 1935; see also MacLeod, 1991, for a review) and semantic
priming (Neely, 1991). There is evidence that words are processed up to semantic levels even
though participants are not instructed to attend to them (Fuentes, Carmona, Agis, & Catena,
1994), or after attending to a non-semantic, physical dimension of the word (i.e., the ink colour)
instead of the meaning (MacLeod, 1991, 1992). Processing of words is assumed to proceed without explicit intention but also without consciousness. Merely presenting words either under a subjective conscious threshold (Marcel, 1983) or under an objective one (Dehaene et al., 1998;
Naccache & Dehaene, 2001) triggers a processing stream that cannot be prevented.
The complete processing of words involves the processing of multiple dimensions or levels
(McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989): a letter level, at which features
are integrated to form the letters that compose a particular word; an orthographic level, at which
letters are integrated to form orthographic patterns; a lexical level, at which the orthography of
the word is activated; and a semantic level, at which the meaning of the word is accessed (Bentin,
Mouchetant-Rostaing, Giard, Echallier, & Pernier, 1999). Event-related potentials and cerebral
blood flow studies (Posner, Abdullaev, McCandliss, & Sereno, 1999; Posner & Petersen, 1990)
have suggested that these levels are reached following a clear sequence. These stages of processing
are commonly believed to occur in a bottom-up manner that proceeds automatically (Neely,
1991). Despite such automaticity, recent studies have suggested that both unattended and unconscious information can be controlled (Carr & Dagenbach, 1990; Dagenbach, Carr, & Wilhelmsen,
1989; Tzelgov, Henik, & Berger, 1992).
To test the automaticity of word processing, several researchers have modified the traditional
procedure of semantic priming by manipulating the level of representation at which attention is
directed to during the prime display. The effect obtained with this procedure is known as
Prime-Task Effect (Marı́-Beffa, Fuentes, Catena, & Houghton, 2000). In traditional semantic
priming experiments, pairs of semantically related and unrelated words are presented in a sequential manner. Participants are instructed to perform a task that demands explicit awareness of the
meaning of the word (i.e., lexical decision, categorization, naming; see Neely, 1991 for a review).
This task can be performed, or not, in the first word (prime) and the effect is measured in the reaction time to the second word (probe) task. It is assumed that the presentation of the first word
produces the activation of its internal representation in memory, sending also activation to the
representations of those words that are more closely associated with it. Thus, when an associated
word appears as a probe stimulus, the previous activation of its representation due to the presence
of the prime related word facilitates any response to it.
In Prime-Task effect experiments the most common procedure is to compare the semantic priming effect, when participants are instructed to perform a lower level task on prime display (i.e. letter search), with another condition in which a higher or deeper level task is required (e.g. naming,
lexical decision, categorisation, etc.). In both cases, participants generally perform a lexical decision task on the probe word. It has been shown that if the prime-task requires attention to be allocated to a lower level of analysis, like in a letter search task, then the semantic priming effect is
reduced (Chiappe, Smith, & Besner, 1996; Henik, Friedrich, & Kellogg, 1983; Henik, Friedrich,
Tzelgov, & Tramer, 1994; Kaye & Brown, 1985; Parkin, 1979; Smith, 1979; Smith, Theodor, &
Franklin, 1983; Stolz & Besner, 1996). These results seem to challenge the idea of automaticity
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of word processing since they may suggest that the orientation of attention to a deep level of representation is necessary for the processing of meaning. Although there are some disagreements in
the theoretical explanation of this effect, most authors assume that the allocation of attention to a
low level feature impairs or interrupts the flow of processing to further stages. For example, Henik
et al. (1994) suggested that dedicating all the processing resources to the low level features could
exert this kind of attentional control. As a result, there are not enough resources left to activate
semantic properties, and semantic priming is reduced or eliminated. Alternatively, the lack of
semantic processing could also be modelled by blocking the feedback loops between lexical and
semantic levels in a neural network, as attention is oriented to lower levels (Stolz & Besner,
1996). In addition, Duscherer and Holender (2002) claim that semantic processing requires the
awareness of the meaning of the prime word. Thus, the reduction of semantic priming when attention is oriented to low level features would be the logical consequence of deploying awareness
away from the semantic level. In any case, all these theoretical accounts assume that semantic processing can be interrupted before it is completed if attention is not directed to a semantic level.
However, using this basic paradigm, the results are not always consistent. One of the patterns
of results most problematic, for the ‘‘lack of semantic processing’’ accounts, is that some studies
have shown a negative semantic priming effect when a letter search task is performed on the prime
display. If semantic processing was never completed, then no semantic effect at all, positive or negative, would be expected. The presence of a negative semantic priming effect suggests that the control mechanism responsible for the reduction of positive semantic priming may act once the
semantic representations have been already processed, bringing down their level of activation,
even below resting levels, in order to better control the goal of the task (Catena, Fuentes, & Tudela, 2002; Hoffman & MacMillan, 1985; Marı́-Beffa et al., 2000; Tipper, Weaver, & Houghton,
1994). Orienting attention to a low level of processing probably does not block the further processing of the semantic attributes of the prime. Rather, the prime word is automatically fully processed, but those dimensions that are not relevant for the task have to be inhibited to prevent them
from reaching the control of the response (Marı́-Beffa et al., 2000).
Interestingly, most models incorporating an inhibitory mechanism (see Tipper, 2001 for a review) assume that the development of inhibition requires certain time to be effective. Supporting
this idea, Yee (1991) has found positive priming when prime-probe onset asynchrony (SOA) was
500 ms, but negative semantic priming when the SOA was increased to 600 ms. Indeed, some
models (Houghton & Tipper, 1994; Houghton, Tipper, Weaver, & Shore, 1996) assume that inhibition cannot develop until the offset of the stimuli. Here, we addressed this issue in two experiments displaying words for a very short time (25 ms), and increasing the prime-response to probe
interval in order to allow the development of inhibition of the prime words.
A second line of evidence favouring the automaticity of semantic processing from words comes
from masking experiments where the prime display is presented under the conscious threshold. In
these experiments the prime stimuli were presented during a brief period of time. To avoid participants becoming aware of them, prime stimuli were followed and/or preceded by a pattern
mask. The probe was presented after a blank interval. Typically, the response to a word that is
preceded by another semantically related word is facilitated in comparison to an unrelated word
condition (Marcel, 1983).
There is now abundant evidence supporting the idea that the prime word does not need to be
consciously processed to obtain semantic priming effects (Abrams, Klinger, & Greenwald, 2002;
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
281
Brown & Hagoort, 1993; Dehaene et al., 1998; DellÕAcqua & Grainger, 1999; Draine & Greenwald, 1998; Greenwald, Klinger, & Liu, 1989; Kemp-Wheeler & Hill, 1992; Klinger, Burton, &
Pitts, 2000; Naccache & Dehaene, 2001).
It seems, at this point in our review of the literature, that neither attention nor consciousness is
necessary for the complete processing of words. But can this unconscious or unattended information be controlled? Previous studies investigating this question suggest that unconscious and unattended information are affected by the same underlying mechanisms (Merikle & Joordens, 1997).
Furthermore, Dagenbach et al. (1989) have demonstrated that the effect of an unconsciously processed word on a subsequent related target is affected also by the goals of the task. Then, if a word
is presented under a conscious threshold and performance demands a superficial analysis of its
characteristics, a reduced or absent semantic priming effect is observed on a related target. Nevertheless, if a high level of analysis is required negative semantic priming can be observed. Contrary to those effects occurring with consciously processed words, Dagenbach et al. (1989)
obtained the opposite pattern of results. The authors explained this effect as evidence of a ‘‘centre-surround’’ attentional mechanism that needs to suppress those active representations that may
compete for the response in order to highlight the properties of the stimulus that are relevant for
the task. In this case, due to the automatic spreading of activation, active and competing related
words have to be inhibited. As a result, negative semantic priming is observed on a subsequent
task on those words. The existence of unconscious negative semantic priming may suggest that,
similarly to what happens with unattended information, unconscious information can also be controlled. Nevertheless, the question remains, is it the same control mechanism underlying all of
these effects?
Our rationale for the current study is that a stronger test of non-automaticity of word processing can be obtained in conditions where neither attention nor consciousness are expected to be
devoted to word meaning. Thus, stronger evidence favouring the automaticity principle will be
obtained if non-attended and non-conscious words are found to prime the processing of related
probes. In this paper, we compare semantic priming effects produced by attended conscious information, unattended conscious information, attended unconscious information, and unattended
unconscious information. We assume that even when the prime words are masked, attention
can be directed to them because we warned participants that a word should be displayed before
the mask. Our prediction is that, if attention and consciousness have a common underlying mechanism, then unconscious and unattended information will be controlled in the same way depending on the goal of the task.
2. Experiment 1
In this experiment, we manipulated the nature of the prime task and the awareness of the prime
stimuli. Participants were presented with a prime display composed of a single stimulus followed
by a probe display containing a single stimulus. In one block of trials participants had to indicate
whether a pre-designated target letter was a component of the prime word or not (Letter search
task). As in previous prime-task studies we assume that the completion of this task requires attention to be allocated to a low level of analysis (letter level). In another block of trials participants
had to indicate if the prime stimulus was a word or not (a lexical decision task). We assumed that
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the lexical decision demanded a deep (lexical-semantic) level of processing. Any effects on the processing of related probes in the letter search block would support the idea of automaticity of
semantic processing. Furthermore, the direction of this effect may indicate the action of a control
mechanism upon it. To facilitate the action of a possible mechanism of control we simply allowed
some preparation for the prime-task by presenting the target letter in advance. If this control
mechanism blocks the higher processing of words, a reduction of positive priming will be observed. But, if meaning has been fully processed and causes any interference with the task, we expect to find evidence of its inhibition in the related probes task. When primes are displayed below
the conscious threshold, the predicted pattern of priming is rather imprecise, as no references were
found in the literature regarding the effect of allocating attention to a low-level of processing with
masked presentations. In any case, any inhibitory action would depend on the level of interference
of semantic properties with the task. On the other hand, it could be predicted that the level of
activation reached by masked words might not be strong enough to interfere with the task,
and therefore neither negative nor positive priming would be observed.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participants
Twenty-two students of the University of Granada, aged between 18 and 45-years-old, participated in the experiment and received course credit for their participation. All of them were native
Spanish speakers with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
2.1.2. Stimuli and materials
Stimuli consisted of 180 (4–8 letter, 1–3 syllabi) Spanish word-pairs (Mean Associative
Strength: 28.28), extracted from the Spanish word database of Soto, Sebastian, Garcı́a, and
Del Amo (1982). The 180 pairs of related words were divided in to three different lists (A–C)
of 60 related pairs of words in each. The word-pairs of each list were then mixed to construct three
different sets of stimuli with three conditions in each one: related (60 trials), unrelated (60 trials),
and non-word (60 trials). The resulting sets were counterbalanced across subjects. In this way, all
the word-pairs were presented in all conditions across subjects. For example, if BOCA (mouth)
and LENGUA (tongue) appeared related in one set, they were separated to appear as unrelated
in another set (MESA-LENGUA, table-tongue). The non-word condition was created by changing one letter in order to make it orthographically correct, but with no meaning in Spanish, for
example, MESA (table) was changed to MEPA (tatle). For masked conditions, the mask consisted
of an array of capital letters of the same length as its respective prime word (i.e., GTRD). Stimuli
were displayed in white on a black background. For the visual search task, the target letter was
presented at the centre of the display at fixation. In half of trials the letter was present in the prime
array (for positive visual search), and the other half absent (for negative visual search). In masked
trials, the letter was contained in the mask in the same position as in the masked prime-word. For
probe displays a ‘‘+’’ was used as a fixation point and a lexical decision was required. Thus, in
visual search trials, participants had to switch between a letter search task (to the prime) and a
lexical decision task (to the probe).
An IBM compatible personal computer was used to display the stimuli (via a S-VGA monitor
800 · 600), and to record responses using a custom written program. The monitor was located
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
283
60 cm in front of the participant. All participants were required to use one hand to respond to the
prime task and the other hand for the probe task. Hand responses were counterbalanced across
subjects. The ‘‘C’’ and ‘‘V’’ keys from the keyboard were assigned to the left hand and the ‘‘N’’
and ‘‘M’’ keys were assigned to the right hand. The ‘‘YES’’ or ‘‘NO’’ mapping of the response
keys were counterbalanced across subjects.
2.1.3. Design and procedure
A 2 (Task: letter search, lexical decision) · 2 (Masking: masked, unmasked) · 2 (Relatedness:
related, unrelated) within subjects factorial design was used. The factor Task was manipulated between blocks while the other two factors were manipulated within blocks. Within the visual search
block, half of the trials contained a positive search and the other half a negative search. In the
Visual Search literature it has being proposed that negative and positive trials could be completed
using different strategies (Chun & Wolfe, 1996). Therefore, for the analysis of results, Positive and
Negative trials were treated as separate levels of the Task factor. It is important to indicate that
the non-word condition was used only to induce the lexical decision task and was not included in
the analysis. The prime task was counterbalanced across subjects: half of the subjects performed
first the Visual Search task and then the Lexical decision, and the other half, the reverse order.
Each pair of words was presented masked and unmasked in a random order making a total of
360 trials per block, (180 masked and 180 unmasked: 60 related, 60 unrelated, and 60 non-words
for each mask condition). Each block was preceded by a practice block of 48 trials.
To obtain masked presentations with an objective threshold criterion, the parameters employed
were based on a previous pilot experiment with a different group of participants from those who
participated in the current study (Catena, Valdes, & Fuentes, submitted). In this experiment, each
trial started with a fixation point presented at the centre of the visual display for 500 ms. This was
followed by a sequence of two stimuli presented at the centre of the display: a word (BARBA,
beard) or a non-word (BARTA, beald) was followed by a 70 ms pattern mask. The interval between stimuli and mask onsets (SOA) was randomly selected in each trial from one of the following pool: 13.39, 26.78, 40.17, 53.56, 107.12, and 187.6 ms. Each stimulus (words and pseudowords) was presented once in each SOA condition. Participants were asked to press a key if
the stimulus was a word and another key if was a non-word (lexical decision task). Analysis of
discrimination signal detection theory index (d 0 ) showed that under a 40.17 ms SOA d 0 was not
different from zero (see Table 1), indicating that subjects were unable to discriminate between
words and non-words when the two shortest SOAs were used. Therefore, for all the masking conditions of Experiments 1 and 2 a SOA of 25ms was employed.
In Experiment 1, each trial started with a letter presented in the centre of the visual display, and
displayed for 250 ms, that served as fixation (lexical decision block) or indicated the target to
Table 1
Experimental measure of word awareness
Prime duration (ms)
0
d
SD
13.36
26.78
40.17
53.56
66.95
107.12
0.042
0.293
0.317
0.574
1.033*
0.699
1.692*
0.698
2.605*
0.766
2.769*
0.808
Asterisks indicate that discrimination performance began to deviate significantly from zero (p < 0.025).
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B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
search for in the prime display (visual search block). After a blank interval of 10 ms the prime
display was presented for 25 ms. In masked trials (M), immediately after the prime word, a pattern mask was presented for 70 ms. The same interval was blank in unmasked trials (UM). The
first response (prime task) was required within 1500 ms. Participants had to indicate whether
the target letter was in the prime display (letter search) or whether a word was presented in the
prime display (lexical decision), depending on the block of trials. An inter response-stimuli interval was fixed on 250 ms. After this period, a ‘‘+’’ sign was presented, in the centre of the display
for 250 ms, which acted as a fixation point for the probe stimuli. After a further 10 ms, the probe
display appeared for 25 ms. Participants were required to respond within 1500 ms of the presentation of the probe by indicating whether the probe was a word or not (see Fig. 1).
There were separate sets of written instructions for each block (visual search and lexical decision). Participants sat in front of the computer monitor and the experimenter provided further
explanations after the participants fully read the instructions. Participants were told that a mask
could follow some words, though the response should be based on the conscious stimulus. This
meant that in masked conditions the response should be based on the mask. With this procedure
it is guarantied that accuracy would be similar in both masked and unmasked conditions. In both
blocks a lexical decision was required for probe displays. In the continuous presentation of trials,
participants could distinguish between prime and probe displays because of the different cues presented at fixation. In the case of prime displays, the letter appearing at fixation served both as a
fixation point and as a cue indicating the letter to search for next. For probe displays the cross
‘‘+’’ was used for all the trials and served both as a fixation point and as a reminder for the lexical
decision task happening next. This arrangement was especially informative for the Visual Search
block because in the Lexical Decision block only lexical decisions were required for both prime
Fig. 1. Stimuli sequence in masked and unmasked conditions of Experiment 1.
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
285
and probe displays. At the beginning of each block the participants performed 48 practice trials
under the supervision of the researcher. At the end of the first block, the researcher explained the
instructions for the second block, highlighting the new task to perform with the prime. The response keys were identical for both blocks. After every 120 trials there was a short rest period
in each block
2.2. Results
Separate analyses were performed for the RT and errors data for prime and probe tasks responses. Two subjects were discarded due to the corruption of their data files.
2.2.1. Prime task
Mean reaction times of correct responses were submitted to a two way 3 · 2 repeated measures
analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the factors Task (PVS, NVS, and LD) and Masking (M and
UM). The analysis showed a significant effect for the Task · Masking interaction,
F (2, 38) = 27.78, MSE = 958.55, p < .01, and also a main effect of Task F (2, 38) = 23.84,
MSE = 5382.93, p < .01 (See Table 2). The simple effects analysis of the two-way interaction
showed significant effects of Task in both masked, F (2, 38) = 36.98, MSE = 3535.34, p < .01,
and unmasked trials, F (2, 38) = 8.62, MSE = 2806.13, p < .01, but no effect of Masking factor
on any task. Post-hoc LSD analysis indicated that in unmasked conditions Negative Visual
Table 2
Mean reaction time (in milliseconds) and error rates (%) for prime responses at masked and unmasked trials of
Experiments 1 and 2
Task
Experiment 1
PVS
RT
% Error
NVS
RT
% Error
LD
RT
% Error
Experiment 2
PVS
RT
% Error
NVS
RT
% Error
LD
RT
% Error
Unmasked
Masked
821
14.4
844
14.7
862
15.7
857
14.2
789
19.0
761
19
939
28.5
969
29.3
1029
28.8
1012
26.7
895
19.3
730
19.2
Note. PVS, Positive Visual Search; NVS, Negative Visual Search; LD, Lexical Decision.
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Search responses were significantly slower that in the other two tasks, and that Lexical Decision
responses were faster than Positive Visual Search responses. On the other hand, in masked trials,
Lexical Decision responses were significantly faster than in the other two tasks (See Table 2).
The same 3 · 2 (Task · Masking) repeated measures analysis of variance on percentage of errors showed only a significant main effect of Task F (2, 38) = 14.36, MSE = 17.00, p < .01. Post
hoc LSD test showed that there were more errors in Lexical Decision than in Positive and Negative Visual Search.
2.2.2. Probe task: Prime-task effect
Mean correct probe reaction times greater than 200 ms and less than 1500 ms were computed
for each participant and condition. Less than a 1% of trials were removed using this cut-off. Trials
with a wrong response to the prime were excluded from analysis. Table 3 shows the mean reaction
times and percentage of errors for lexical decisions at 18 target conditions. Data were submitted to
a 3 · 2 · 2 within subjects ANOVA, for the factors Task (Positive Search, Negative Search, and
Lexical Decision), Masking (Masked and Unmasked) and Relatedness (Related and Unrelated).
The analysis showed a reliable Task by Masking interaction, F (2, 38) = 5.09, MSE = 1232.25,
p < .01, and Task by Masking by Relatedness interaction, F (2, 38) = 8.52, MSE = 1004.97,
p < .01. The simple effects analysis of the three-way interaction showed significant effects of
Table 3
Mean reaction time (in milliseconds) and error rates (%) for target responses at all experimental conditions of
Experiments 1 and 2
Task
Experiment 1
PVS
RT
% Error
NVS
RT
% Error
LD
RT
% Error
Experiment 2
PVS
RT
% Error
NVS
RT
% Error
LD
RT
% Error
Unmasked
Masked
R
UR
NW
UR-R
R
UR
NW
UR-R
699
2.8
681
4.4
870
22
18*
+1.6
671
3.7
691
5.1
850
21.6
+20*
+1.4
713
6.9
716
9.9
880
18.9
+3
+3
703
6.3
690
7
885
21.4
13
+.7
663
7.5
690
7.7
883
24.8
+27*
+.2
701
8.7
685
10.8
903
24
16*
+2.1
687
2.4
690
3.2
911
23.2
+3
+.8
685
3.2
720
3.5
913
20.6
+35*
+.3
728
7.2
727
9.6
950
18.3
1
+2.4
708
6.6
710
9.8
927
19.9
+2
+3.2
648
1.9
669
2.9
906
32
+21*
+1
674
4.2
675
10.5
934
27.7
+1
+6.3
Note. PVS, positive visual search; NVS, negative visual search; LD, lexical decision; R, related; UR, unrelated; NW,
non-word; UR-R, amount of priming. Asterisk indicates p < .05 significance level.
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
287
relatedness both in Positive Visual Search Unmasked, F (1, 19) = 7.27, MSE = 448.03, p < .05 (the
Related condition was slower than the unrelated one), and in Lexical Decision, for both masked
[F (1, 19) = 9.03, MSE = 843.38, p < .05] (the Related condition was slower than the Unrelated
one) and unmasked conditions, F (1, 19) = 4.65, MSE = 543.42, p < .05 (the Related condition
was faster than the Unrelated one) (see Table 3). No reliable effects were found on Negative Visual
Search conditions. Despite no significant effect being found for the Positive Visual Search Masked
condition (when using a specific error term for the analysis, p < .08) a positive priming effect was
observed and clearly contrasts with the significant negative priming obtained in the unmasked
condition. However, when we considered the global error from the appropriate interaction as
the error term for that contrast, this positive priming effect of 20 ms reached significance
(F (1, 19) = 7.77, MSE = 506.71, p < .05).
A 3 · 2 · 2 ANOVA (Task · Masking · Relatedness) of error percentages showed no significant
effects of Task · Masking · Relatedness interaction, but did for the Task by Masking interaction,
F (2, 38) = 5.76, MSE = 20.63, p < .05, and the main effect of Task, F (2, 38) = 5.02,
MSE = 81.50, p < .05. Simple effects analysis of the Task by Masking interaction showed that more
errors were committed in the masked than in the unmasked condition in Negative Visual Search,
F (1, 19) = 5.60, MSE = 10.62, p < .05, and in Lexical Decision, F (1, 19) = 6.26, MSE = 31.67,
p < .05. Also, more errors were found in Negative Visual Search than in Positive Visual Search both
in the unmasked, F (1, 19) = 13.33, MSE = 34.20, p < .05, and the masked condition,
F (1, 19) = 6.19, MSE = 16.35, p < .05. Finally, more errors were committed in the Lexical Decision
than in the Positive Visual Search in the masked condition, F (1, 19) = 8.72, MSE = 66.86, p < .05.
2.3. Discussion
The present results show that the magnitude and direction of semantic priming may depend on
both, consciousness and the level of processing where attention is allocated. We have introduced
an extreme test of the non-automaticity of meaning processing, in order to determine whether
attention and/or consciousness are necessary to fully process a word. Regarding the standard unmasked conditions, we replicated the classical positive semantic priming effect when a lexical decision is performed both in prime and probe displays (Henik et al., 1994; Neely, 1991). However,
when a visual letter search is performed and attention is directed to a low level analysis, this facilitation is inverted obtaining a negative semantic priming effect instead of the typical reduction of
positive priming observed in the standard prime task effect (Henik et al., 1994; Marı́-Beffa et al.,
2000). The occurrence of negative priming supports the automaticity of semantic processing and
the idea of an inhibitory mechanism that suppresses, or inhibits, those activations that interfere
with the goal of the task (Houghton et al., 1996). In this case, as attention is allocated to the letter
level, any semantic activation has to occur automatically and, as it interferes with the low level
task, has to be inhibited.
To fully understand the present pattern of results, mainly in the lexical decision conditions, it is
important to acknowledge that the high error rates can be due, first, to the very small presentation
time (25 ms), and, second, to the fact that subjects can be still processing the search letter when the
prime display is presented.
Although semantic priming did not reach significance following negative search, the opposite
pattern deserves some consideration. The positive search is self-terminated, because it finishes
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when the participant finds the target letter. In the negative search, however, the participant needs
to exhaust all the possibilities before reaching the ‘‘no’’ response as can be confirmed by the slower
reaction times upon the prime task. According with The Activation Threshold Mechanism, proposed by Chun and Wolfe ‘‘Unsuccessful searches are terminated when no remaining items have
probabilities above a termination threshold’’ (Chun & Wolfe, 1996, p. 71). Possibly, in this experiment, due to the high error rates the activation threshold is low and search is terminated after
using the word representation as a secondary source of information about the presence of a letter.
Thus, the pattern of results resembles more the pattern showed in a high level prime task, such as
lexical decision. In any case only positive search trials could be unambiguously used to claim that
a low level of representation is used to complete the prime task.
Considering the results obtained in the masked conditions, where prime words were presented
below the conscious threshold, first, the masked priming effects are clearly opposite to the unmasked ones. When a lexical decision task is performed on prime displays, instead of a typical
positive semantic priming effect (Marcel, 1983) we found a robust negative one (28 ms.) As
suggested by Dagenbach et al. (1989) we interpret this data as the result of a ‘‘centre-surround’’
mechanism that according with the task-goal is trying to enhance the semantic properties of the
prime display. Once, the prime display is present, this mechanism acts inhibiting the activation
of semantic associates of the prime in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the attended
stimuli.
On the other hand, and very interestingly, when a letter search task is performed upon the
mask, the identification of the word is not required and no inhibition is observed. Then, we obtained automatic semantic priming in the absence of attention and consciousness.
In summary, the results obtained in this experiment confirm the automaticity of semantic processing. Our results also support the idea of a control mechanism that may inhibit all the information that is interfering with the task-goal.
3. Experiment 2
The main aim of the second experiment was to determine if the lack of preparation for a task
could influence the control mechanisms that are responsible for the negative priming observed in
Experiment 1. The main idea was that the preparation for a task allows the development of the
inhibitory processing because this requires some time to work efficiently (Houghton et al., 1996).
In the present experiment both the letter to be searched for and the prime word were presented
simultaneously. Thus, participants did not know in advance the target letter. If inhibition has
no time to develop, then it is expected that negative priming will disappear in those conditions
were it was obtained in Experiment 1.
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Participants
Twenty two undergraduate students at the University of Granada, aged between 18 and 45
years, participated in the experiment and received course credit for their participation. All of them
were native Spanish speakers with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
289
Fig. 2. Stimuli sequence for Experiment 2.
3.1.2. Stimuli design and procedure
The stimuli and visual parameters were identical to those employed in Experiment 1, except
that the target letter of the letter search task was displayed simultaneously with the prime word,
just above it. A cross (+) was now presented at fixation before each display. The experimental
design and temporal parameters used in this experiment were identical to those used in Experiment 1. As previously mentioned, the only modification affected the prime display, where the letter to search for was presented simultaneously with the prime word but slightly above (0.5 cm)
and was always visible. The trial sequence in this case was as follows: Each trail started with a
‘‘+’’ at fixation for 250 ms. Then, the prime display appeared after a 10 ms blank interval, (see
Fig. 2). The prime display consisted of a single letter and a word below, both displayed at the centre of the screen. All other procedural details were as in Experiment 1.
3.2. Results
As in Experiment 1, two separate analyses on the RT data and on the error data were performed for prime and probe tasks responses. Two subjects were discarded due to the corruption
of their data files.
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3.2.1. Prime task
Mean reaction times of correct responses were submitted to a two way 3 · 2 repeated measures
analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the factors Task (PVS, NVS, and LD) and Masking (M and
UM). The analysis showed a significant effect for Task · Masking interaction, F (2, 38) = 8.09,
MSE = 2806.13, p < .01, and a main effect of the factor Task F (2, 38) = 90.07, MSE = 7965.80,
p < .01 (see Table 2). These differences across tasks were found for both unmasked
F (2, 38) = 55.18, MSE = 5060.46, p < .01, and masked F (2, 38) = 80.70, MSE = 5711.46,
p < .01, trials. Post hoc LSD analysis indicates that once again, in Lexical Decision task responses
were significantly faster than in the other two tasks both in unmasked and masked trials. Also,
Positive Visual Search responses were faster than negative ones. Responses to the masks were
slower than to unmasked words in Positive Visual Search, but faster in Lexical Decision.
The 3 · 2 (Task · Masking) repeated measures analysis of variance on percentage of errors
showed significant effects of Task only, F (2, 38) = 28.49, MSE = 38.09, p < .01. Post hoc LSD test
indicated that there were more errors in Positive and Negative visual search than in Lexical Decision.
3.2.2. Probe task: The prime-task effect
Mean reaction times of correct responses longer than 200 ms and shorter than 1500 ms (see Table
3) were submitted to a three-way 3 · 2 · 2 repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the
factors Task (PVS, NVS, and LD) Masking (M and UM) and Relatedness (R, Related; UR, Unrelated). Only trials with a correct response to the prime were included in the analysis. The analysis
showed a significant Task by Masking, F (2, 38) = 4.82, MSE = 1605.63, p < .05, and Task · Masking · Relatedness interaction, F (2, 38) = 3.17, MSE = 1045.42, p = .053. Also the main effects of
Task and Relatedness reached significance, F (2, 38) = 4.88, MSE = 11077.64, and F (1, 19) =
7.18, MSE = 894.89, respectively. Detailed analysis of the three-way interaction demonstrated a significant positive priming effect in the unmasked lexical decision (21 ms, F (1, 19) = 8.12,
MSE = 524.86, p < .05) and the masked positive visual search conditions (35 ms, F (1, 19) = 7.14,
MSE = 1754.02, p < .05). No significant priming effects were found in the other conditions (all
FÕs < 1).
The 3 · 2 · 2 (Task · Masking · Relatedness) repeated measures analysis of variance on percentage of errors showed reliable main effects of Task, F (2, 38) = 26.05, MSE = 21.12, p < .01
(percentages were 3.1, 7.9, and 3.5, respectively for Positive Visual Search, Negative Visual
Search, and Lexical Decision), and Masking, F (1, 19) = 4,86, MSE = 9.09, p < .05 (percentages
were 4.4 and 5.2, respectively for Unmasked and Masked condition). Also the Task by Masking
interaction reached significance, F (2, 38) = 3.78, MSE = 7.94, p < .05. Simple effects analysis of
this interaction showed that the percentage of errors was greater in masked than in unmasked
conditions only in the Lexical Decision task, F (1, 19) = 18.54, MSE = 5.22, p < .01. Also, a greater percentage of errors was found in Negative Visual Search than in Lexical Decision and Positive
Visual Search, both in unmasked and masked conditions (min F = 17.74, p < .01).
3.3. Discussion
In this experiment, we have obtained three important results. First, consistent with previous
work described in prime-task effect literature, we have replicated the reduction of semantic priming in unmasked visual search trials: the traditional prime-task effect. Second, in spite of the dif-
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
291
ference between Experiment 1 and 2, the magnitude of the positive semantic priming found in
masked positive letter search trials is consistent. Once again, as in Experiment 1 we observed
semantic priming independent of consciousness and attention. And finally, negative priming effects present in experiment 1 completely disappeared. These results show that the prime task effect
can be modulated by the pre-cueing of the search letter. Reduction of semantic priming is mainly
observed when there is no time to prepare for the letter search. When this time is available, negative priming emerges.
This pattern of results cannot be fully predicted by a theory that solely assumes that semantic
processing can be interrupted at early stages of word processing. If the interruption of semantic
processing is still a plausible control mechanism, it seems to work only when the letter to search
appears simultaneously with the target. When there is more time to prepare for the letter search,
inhibition can be observed (see Section 4).
As we indicated in the discussion section of Experiment 1, the high error rates to the prime in
lexical decision can be explained considering the amount of time the prime is displayed, and also,
that attention can be captured by the letter above the prime.
To summarize, there are two main conclusions to be drawn from this experiment. Lack of time
to prepare for the next task affects inhibitory mechanisms of control, while excitatory mechanisms
remain intact. And second, this mechanism of control can operate upon unattended and unconscious representations. In the next section, we will further discuss the parallelism between attention and consciousness in the context of the prime task effect.
4. General discussion
The study presented here has extremely tested the automaticity theory of word processing. To
ensure this, it was necessary to obtain evidence of semantic processing in three circumstances.
First, when attention was allocated to a low level of processing (word letters instead of meaning).
Second, when words were presented below an objective conscious threshold, and third, and even
stricter, a condition in which the previous two conditions were combined, resulting in no consciousness and no attention directed to word meaning. In order to achieve these goals we used
a Prime-task paradigm in combination with masking procedures. Comparison between Experiment 1 and 2 helps clarify some inconsistencies across Prime-task studies and also to explain some
aspects about the cognitive control in word processing.
The pattern of results obtained in the present study contributes in several ways to the debate
about the automaticity of semantic processing. First, regarding the Unmasked Letter Search Conditions, in Experiment 2 we replicate previous studies (Chiappe et al., 1996; Henik et al., 1983;
Henik et al., 1994; Kaye & Brown, 1985; Parkin, 1979; Smith, 1979; Smith et al., 1983; Stolz &
Besner, 1996) which have shown a reduction of semantic priming effect when a letter search task
is performed on the prime display. However, in Experiment 1, when the target letter was presented
250 ms before the prime word, we found significant negative priming. This result indicates that
allocation of attention to the letter levels does not prevent the processing of word meaning,
and instead, is completed automatically.
Two main explanations of the prime-task effect have been put forward. First, it has been proposed that attention interrupts the higher processing of a word if it is directed to a low level of
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processing (Henik et al., 1983; Henik et al., 1994; Stolz & Besner, 1996). Second, it has been also
proposed that semantic representation of a word must be inhibited depending on its level of interference with the goal task (Marı́-Beffa et al., 2000). The present study supports the second idea. If
semantic processing were interrupted at the letter level, no priming at all should be observed.
Rather, it appears that meaning has been processed, but it interferes with the goal of the task,
and therefore it has to be inhibited. Comparisons between Experiment 1 and 2 indicate that preparation time is a relevant factor for obtaining negative priming. The lack of negative priming frequently observed in the literature may be accounted for this factor. We assume that the
presentation of the letter in advance helps to establish an attentional task-set which includes excitatory and inhibitory control mechanisms (Marı́-Beffa et al., 2000; Milliken, Joordens, Merikle, &
Seiffert, 1998; Tipper et al., 1994). Therefore, by increasing the time participants had to prepare
for the task, we allowed a more effective inhibition of those properties of the word that could
interfere with the task-goal (Tipper, 2001; Tipper et al., 1994). We are not assuming that inhibition starts before the onset of the stimulus, but that it is more effective if enough time is given for
the mechanism of control to prepare. The results of the present study do not allow us to discern
the way this preparation proceeds. However, it can be assumed, for example, that some kind of
orientation to the processing level where inhibition has to operate can be done in advance.
Positive semantic priming obtained in masked letter search trials confirmed the automaticity of
semantic processing even in these extreme conditions (no attention to meaning plus no word consciousness). It appears that the meaning of the masked word is automatically activated but does
not interfere with the task. We assume that interference occurs when activation levels of a distracter are strong enough to compete for the response.
In contrast with the positive priming observed when subjects searched for a letter in the primetask, when a lexical decision was required, negative priming (Experiment 1) and no priming at all
(Experiment 2) was observed. This pattern of results can be explained by assuming the idea of a
‘‘center-surround’’ mechanism that, in order to pop-out the relevant properties for the task needs
to inhibit those active representations that may compete for the response (Dagenbach et al., 1989)
even if they are unconsciously activated. In Experiment 1 of the current study, the letter at fixation
indicated that a prime (not probe) would be presented next. Although a lexical decision was performed in both cases, this discrimination is important because primes were either words or nonwords (mask), while probes were either words or pseudo-words. Therefore, the completion of a
lexical decision may ask for different strategies in prime versus probe displays.
While it is clear how pre-cueing the letter search task can influence the emergence of negative
semantic priming, it might be less clear how this pre-cueing can affect semantic priming from the
Lexical Decision prime-task. In Experiment 1, there were different cues for the prime and the
probe displays. A letter always signalled that a prime trial (containing probably a mask) would
come next, and the probe display (that was always unmasked) was cued by a plus sign. In Experiment 2, all the displays were cued with a plus sign (‘‘+’’). The differential cueing from Experiment
1 not only affected the way participants performed the letter search prime-task, but also seems to
have affected the execution of the lexical decision prime-task for masked trials. With differential
cueing (Experiment 1), participants clearly know whether a mask might appear in the next display. This will help to prepare the operations of the ‘‘centre-sourround’’ mechanism, which is believed to be responsible for negative semantic priming in masked situations (Dagenbach et al.,
1989). In Experiment 2, as the cue was the same for prime and probe displays, it was not possible
B. Valdés et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 278–295
293
for the participants to predict whether a possible masked display was coming next, therefore making it more difficult for attention to be ready for a masked trial. This lack of prediction is reflected
in the longer reaction times in the second experiment.1 And, because the control mechanisms have
more time to prepare, more efficient inhibition (and negative priming) would be expected in the
first experiment than in the second experiment.
In summary, our results indicate that semantic properties of a word can be processed when
words are presented under an objective threshold of awareness, and also when attention is not
allocated to semantic but to low-level features of the word. We conclude that word processing
is fully automatic. However, automatism should not imply that no control mechanism can operate. Our results indicate that a putative inhibitory like control mechanism (Posner & DiGirolamo,
1998; Posner & Snyder, 1975) is operating even when neither attention nor consciousness is directed to meaning. Therefore, we support the idea of a redefinition of automaticity as a process that
occurs without intention or without conscious monitoring (see Tzelgov, 1997 for an extensive theoretical discussion). However, in no-attention and no-consciousness situations, inhibitory control
mechanisms are working, as in attended and conscious situations, in order to allow participants to
fulfil the task requirements. Words are processed automatically, but the destiny of their mental
representations will depend on subjectÕs task-goals.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by a Ph.D. grant from the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologı́a
(CONACyT), México (National Council of Science and Technology) to Berenice Valdés Conroy,
No.:110866/110994. This research was also partially supported by a project grant from Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to Dr. Paloma Marı́-Beffa (5/S16740)
and by BBSRC Underwood Fund to Dr. Andrés Catena and Dr. Paloma Marı́-Beffa. We thank
Jason Lauder and three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on earlier versions of the
manuscript.
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1
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 483–494
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
The ontology of neglect
Cristina Becchioa,*, Cesare Bertoneb
a
b
Centre for Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, via Po 14, 10123 Torino, Italy
CTAO, Centre for Theoretical and Applied Ontology, via S. Ottavio 20, 10124 Torino, Italy
Received 5 June 2004
Available online 22 January 2005
Abstract
As shown by neuroscientific evidence, neglect may occur without elementary sensorimotor impairments.
The deficit is to be found at a higher, more abstract level of representation, which prevents the patient not
only from seeing, but from conceiving the contralesional space. By analysing a series of neuropsychological
results, in this paper we suggest a crucial role of time for the construction of a world: on this basis, we try to
explain how it is possible that half the ontology gets lost. The analysis of the ontological implication of
neglect will allow us to shed light on manifestations of the pathology apparently disconnected.
Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Unilateral neglect; Ontology; Time; Temporal features; Allochiria
. . .it might be the case that we find certain aspects of neglect puzzling, because we do not find
the whole business of neglect puzzling enough.
Bisiach and Rusconi (1990)
1. Unilateral spatial neglect
Unilateral neglect is a condition which has generated a great deal of interest in the past decade,
as it reveals a vast amount of often bewildering behavioural manifestations. Patients suffering
*
Corresponding author. Fax: +11 8159039.
E-mail address: becchio@psych.unito.it (C. Becchio).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.12.001
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C. Becchio, C. Bertone / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 483–494
from unilateral spatial neglect fail to respond to stimuli, objects and even people located on their
contralesional side—more frequently, the left hemispace. Depending on the severity of the pathology, neglect may be noticed merely by observing the patientsÕ spontaneous behaviour: patients
with neglect may not notice objects on the left of a scene, may not eat food on the left side of
the plate, may ignore the left part of words. If the examiner approaches them from the left side,
they may address their responses to the opposite side, even if nobody is there (De Renzi, Colombo, Faglioni, & Gilbertoni, 1982). They may bump into walls, doorways, and objects on the left
side. Even in absence of dressing apraxia, they may forget to put on the left sleeve of their jacket
or the left shoe. Other behavioural signs of left neglect include shaving or applying make-up only
to the right side of the face. An endless list of examples could be given.
Some of these behaviours may seem similar to those performed by subjects affected by homonymous hemianopia, a visual field disorder frequently observed after postchiasmatic brain damage. Similarly to neglect patients, patients with left hemianopia may show difficulties in detecting
stimuli and finding objects in the left visual space. They may not avoid obstacles on the left
side, bumping into people approaching them from that side, and may have difficulties with
reading.
Given these similarities, which may render the diagnosis of neglect problematic (Walker, Findlay, Young, & Welch, 1991), one might conceive that patients show left neglect just because, as
hemianoptic patients, they do not see the left side of the visual world. This hypothesis is nevertheless falsified both at the anatomical level and at the functional level (see Kerkhoff, 2001). In hemianopia, no visual information can be detected in the contralateral visual field. The spatial
representation of both hemispaces is nevertheless intact and hence it is sufficient that the patient
turns his head to process information from the left side of space. In neglect, as we will see, the
deficit is to be found at a higher, more abstract level of representation, preventing the patient
not only from seeing, but from conceiving the contralesional space.
2. The hemiontology1 of neglect
Unlike subjects affected by hemianopia, neglect patients not only do not see stimuli presented in
the contralateral half of space, but behave as if that half of space did not exist and never had existed. Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of neglect is perhaps this: patients suffering from it, not
only are unable to perceive the left side of space, but are not even able to conceive it (Bisiach,
1993).
If unlike the hemianoptic patient, the patient suffering from neglect does not turn his head towards the left, this is because there is no left side of the world on which to shift his gaze.
The neglect patient is unable to conceive the part of the world that the hemianoptic patient
simply does not see. The difference is not marginal (see Table 1 for two contrasting case
examples).
1
In philosophy the term ontology is used with different meanings. In this paper the term indicates ‘‘what there is,’’
i.e., the real world, the whole of existing things.
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485
Table 1
Case examples of a patient with left-side, homonymous hemianopia (HH), and a patient with left-side neglect (N)
Left hemianoptic patient without neglect (HH)
E: Did you experience any significant changes in vision since your illness (brain infarction)?
HH: Yes, I have problems perceiving things on my left; and reading is a problem.
E: Why is reading a problem?
HH: It is slower than before my illness and more exhausting. Sometimes I omit words on my very left. . .or I omit a
whole line. I only realize it at the end of a sentence when it does not make sense. . .
E: Do you have any other visual impairment?
HH: Yes, sometimes I bump into things or persons on my left, or detect them rather late. . .
E: What about your orientation outside the clinic, can you find your way?
HH: ItÕs difficult, especially when many people are around, on places. . .or when I have to find one particular thing, i.e.,
in a supermarket. . .when it is on the left. . .
Left hemineglect patient without hemianopia (N)
E: Did you experience any significant changes in vision since tour illness (brain infarction)?
N: No, I havenÕt realized any changes. Except. . .the spectacles do not fit.
E: Do you have problems with reading?
N: No, not really.
E: Do you omit words or syllables on your left side?
N: no, I donÕt think so.
E: Have you noticed that your vision is impaired on your left side?
N: The left eye is fine, no problem.
E: Do you sometimes bump into things or persons on your left side?
N: Rarely. Well, sometimes it occurs, but that is because there are so many people in this hospital, and they donÕt
care. . .
E: Can you find your way inside the clinic, and outside?
N: I find everything that I want to find.
E, examiner. Both patients had objective difficulties in reading as well as in visual exploration of the environment. From
Kerkhoff (1999).
The world that the neglect patient perceives is also the world that he conceives: he misses nothing. In this sense, the perceived world is not half the world, but the whole world, all the world that
the neglect patient is able to conceive.
We do not see the world behind us but nevertheless know a world exists behind us: the world
stretches beyond the boundaries of the visual field. For a subject with neglect, the world does not
stretch beyond the boundaries of the right hemifield (see Fig. 1).
In neglect the left side of the world does not exist: or rather, there is no half side of the world,
since there is no world stretching beyond the ipsilesional space.2
Similar considerations can be proposed for object-centred neglect, where that being neglected is
not the half side of space but the half side of each object (Driver & Halligan, 1991; Driver, Baylis,
Goodrich, & Rafal, 1994; Tipper & Behrmann, 1996). One might think that the left-hand side of
2
By positing that the neglect results in a disruption of the reality of the contralateral hemispace, we do not mean
to deny that the stimuli presented in the contralateral hemispace may influence the processing of other data.
Depending on the relevance of the stimuli, pre-attentive processing up to the level of meaning can take place in the
neglect field without awareness (Berti & Rizzolatti, 1992). What we suggest is that those same stimuli do not gain
access to existence.
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Fig. 1. Highly schematic representation of the relationship between world (ontology) and perception in normal,
hemianoptic, and neglect subjects. In normal conditions the world stretches beyond the perceptive field. In hemianopia
the world ontology is intact: the subject does not perceive the left hemifield, but he knows that there must be a left
hemifield. In unilateral neglect, not only the perception but the ontology is cut in half: the contralateral hemifield does
not exist. The (half) world perceived is all that exists.
the object is as if occluded: the subject with neglect does not perceive it, but knows that it is there.
This interpretation is nevertheless ruled out by empirical evidence: patients affected by neglect not
only fail to respond to the left hand-side of the object, but behave as if the contralateral half of the
object had never existed.
3. Nothing to neglect
Although not always explicitly stated, the common assumption is that this occurs because the
patient with neglect is, in general, not aware of his deficit, but, as Halligan and Marshall (1998)
note, this is often just not true: many patients with neglect have considerable conceptual and experiential insight into their deficit and its consequences3 The example reported by the authors is that
of PP, a woman affected by visual neglect, showing a good insight into her neglect. In an interview
recorded by the authors, PP provides a detailed account of how neglect affects the day-to-day running of her life: she reports problems with dressing and grooming, difficulties in finding things in
peripersonal space (‘‘It takes a long time to find things if they are on the left hand side. . .’’), and in
navigating in extrapersonal space (‘‘I kept turning to the right. . .’’). PP begins then to expound her
own phenomenology of neglect:
. . .I knew the word ‘‘neglect’’ was a sort of medical term for whatever was wrong but the
word bothered me because you only neglect something that is actually there, donÕt you? If
it is not there, how can you neglect it? It does not seem right to me that the word neglect
should be used to describe it. I think they thought I was definitely, deliberately not looking
3
For more details see Marcel, Tegnér, and Nimmo-Smith (2004).
C. Becchio, C. Bertone / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 483–494
487
to the left. I wasnÕt really. It was painful looking to the left. . . People think you are not looking. . . you are neglecting to look but itÕs not there. If it is not there you are not neglecting it.
As it can be seen, PP has taken issue with the term ‘‘neglect,’’ but from her perspective, there is
nothing to neglect: it is rather that the left space and the contents thereof are simply not there.
4. A break-down of spatial awareness
The world that the neglect patient perceives, we argued, is also the world that he conceives. Stating this we intend to mark the difference between neglect and non-cognitive disorders, like
hemianopia.
The case of PP forces us however to investigate more precisely the sense of this statement. That
the neglect patient does not conceive half the world is in fact true in a sense, but false in another.
Patients like PP know perfectly well that people have two eyes, two arms and two legs, nevertheless, when asked to sketch a person, reliably they draw only one eye, one arm or one leg to the
right of the frontal configuration.
A similar dissociation is evident in clock drawing tasks: patients who clearly know how many
numbers there are on a standard clock will nonetheless only reproduce numbers from 12 to 6,
insisting that their drawing is finished and complete.
Rode, Rossetti, Perenin, and Boisson (2004) asked a patient with unilateral neglect to evoke
mentally the map of France in two different conditions. In the first condition, he was asked to
imagine the map of France and to list all the towns that he could Ôsee.Õ In the second condition,
he had to remember and name as many French towns as possible, without being instructed to
form a mental image. Left neglect was observed in the first condition, but not in the second. When
explicitly asked to imagine the map of France, the patient systematically omitted towns located on
the western part of the map. However, that part of geographical knowledge could be recalled from
a linguistic description, clearly indicating that the representational neglect shown by the patient
did not result from a memory disturbance but was rather due to a disturbance in the analogical
representation.4
The patient knows that in France there is town called Bordeaux, but Bordeaux disappears from
his conception when the task requires him to form a spatial representation.
These and other observations enlighten the spatial character of neglect: as Berti (2000) notes,
what is impaired in neglect is not the representation and the awareness of the stimuli per se,
but the representation of the left space.
In this paper, we do not intend to challenge the view that neglect is a spatial disorder. What we
do want to insist upon, however, is that the unilateral loss observed in neglect cannot be attributed
to a disorder of spatial representation only. It must necessarily involve another dimension. This
dimension, we suggest, is time.
4
It has been proposed that representational neglect could be due to a defective spatial working memory (Beschin,
Cocchini, Della Sala, & Logie, 1997). Although a role for mnemonic impairment cannot be ruled out in some cases, it is
nevertheless difficult to see how it could account for Rode et al.Õs findings, especially as the patient of Rode et al. tend to
follow a proximity criterion in naming towns.
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5. Beyond space
The notion that neglect patients suffer from a Ôrepresentational map reduced to one halfÕ was
explicitly and definitively presented to the scientific community by Bisiach and Luzzati (1978).
The authors asked two patients with right brain lesions to imagine themselves at one end of a
well-known square (Piazza del Duomo in Milan) and describe all the business places around
the square. As one would expect in the hypothesis of a defect of space representation, both patients failed to recall shops, cafes, etc., on the left.
The next step in the experiment was for subjects to imagine themselves looking at the cathedral
from the opposite end of the square. Remarkably, in this latter condition, patients named the previously neglected places but omitted those recalled just a few moments before.
Even more astonishing is the fact that subjects did not show any dismay. It should be noted that
the subjects in question did not present any mnemonic impairment and that they probably would
have been surprised—at least as anyone of us would have been—if they had seen an object disappearing instantaneously on their right (the countercheck had not been done). How is it possible,
when they take the second perspective, for them not to be aware of the contents of their own output when they reported the view from the opposite end of the piazza?
What is striking with respect to other examples of dissociated performance is that here the dissociation originates from a mere shift in perspective. In the Rode et al. (2004) study, the dissociation could be interpreted as dissociation between propositional representation (intact) and
analogical representation (impaired). In the experiment of Piazza del Duomo the dissociation affects two images of the same square.
6. Ontological implications
Imagining themselves standing with their back turned to the cathedral, patients recalled half the
square. Imagining themselves standing at the opposite end, patients recalled the other half of the
imagined scene. Even though they remembered both halves, they were nevertheless unable to recall the whole square at any one time. Why? Why didnÕt they stick the two halves together?
Berti and Rizzolatti (1992) propose that the encoding of space is a necessary prerequisite for conscious perception. If spatial encoding is prevented or impaired, as it is in neglect, the presence of the
stimulus does not enter consciousness. With respect to Bisiach and LuzzatiÕs (1978) experiment, a
lack of spatial awareness per se does not however, seem to constitute a sufficient explanation: a spatially constrained disorder of awareness (Berti, 2000) might explain why, at any one moment, the patient is unable to represent the whole scene, not why the two halves do not form a whole.
The lack of awareness must concern not only the left side of space, but its absence. The contralesional space is not merely neglected: its absence is indeed lacking.
The mere absence implies that something is missed: something that has been, is no longer present. In neglect the left side of space is not merely not present: it is this Ônot presentÕ that is lacking.
This absence of what is lacking reveals a fracture which is not only spatial, but temporal. Whilst
the mere absence simply implies that the object is not present, the absence of what is lacking requires in fact not only that the object does not exist in the present, but that it had never existed and
never would exist.
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489
7. Time and ontology: Abnormal temporal dynamics in neglect5
Time is an indispensable attribute for external realities (see Becchio & Bertone, 2003): objects
exist before their apparition (permanence of anteriority) and continue to exist even when they
ceased to be visible (permanence of posteriority).
Despite our impression of a full and coherent world as immediate and instantaneous, ÔseeingÕ is
itself a temporal fact, requiring an integration over time (Humphreys, 1997). Since visual information is sampled at high resolution over only a few degrees of visual angle at the fovea, a complete representation of a scene requires the contents of individual eye fixations to be integrated over space and
time (Resink, 2000). In the primary visual cortex, the retinal image is constructed anew at each eye
fixation, overwriting all information previously encoded. Without re-mapping to maintain and relocate neural activity corresponding to these inputs, this general overwriting phenomenon would
lead to the disappearance of relevant information across ocular shifts: the world would appear as
a sequence of non-integrated visual snapshots, at different spatial scale (Pisella & Mattingley, 2004).
Re-mapping deficits in neglect are suggested by studies requiring patients to make two successive saccades in order to fixate two sequentially flashed targets (double-step paradigm). If the two
targets (A and B) are extinguished during the execution of the first saccade, then the generation of
a spatially accurate second saccade requires re-mapping for updating the spatial representation of
the extinguished target B. In a study by Duhamel, Goldberg, Fitzgibbon, Sirigu, and Grafman
(1992), the patient, showing neglect in consequence of a frontoparietal damage, performed well
with targets flashed first into the right field and then into the left field. When she was asked to
do the same task with a target flashed first in the left field and then in the right field, she completed
the first saccade correctly, but never acquired the second target, even though this required her to
make a saccade in the ipsilesional direction.
Examining patients with unilateral lesions of various structures, Heide, Blankenburg, Zimmermann, and Kömpf (1995) found that both right and left lesions of the parietal posterior cortex
(PPC) caused errors in double-step saccades. Each pair of targets was located either in the same
hemifield (within-hemifield condition) or in different hemifields (between-hemifields condition).
Both patients with right and left PPC lesions showed an elevated percentage of errors when in double-step saccades that involved crossing the midline (between-hemifields condition). In addition, patients with right PCC—all of whom showed initially neglect—showed significant errors under
conditions in which double-step saccades had to be performed entirely within the left visual field.
From these results, a remapping deficit would be demonstrated in neglect patients within the
left visual hemifield. As a consequence, updating and maintenance of spatial representation over
time (persistence) may result impaired. An additional deficit may arise in the stage of selection.
Individuals without any neurological abnormality experience a significant loss of attention
after engaging a target for purpose of identification (Duncan, Ward, & Shapiro, 1994; Raymond, Shapiro, & Arnell, 1992; Shapiro, Raymond, & Arnell, 1994). This loss of temporal
attention, known as Ôattentional blinkÕ lasts about 400 ms and is usually attributed to an
inability to retain usable representation of a second target while completing attentive processing of a first target.
5
A review of the temporal deficits in neglect is beyond the scopes of this work. Our analysis will be thus limited to
those temporal aspects that—this is our suggestion—contribute to the unilateral of reality.
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Using standard procedure, which consists in presenting a rapid serial visual sequence (RSVP) of
letters presented successively at the same location, Husain, Shapiro, Martin, and Kennard (1997)
showed that neglect patients have an abnormally severe and protracted attentional blink, lasting
nearly three times as long as for healthy observers.
Husain et al. (1997) examined the attentional blink at one central location. In a recent singlecase study Hillstrom, Husain, Shapiro, and Rorden (2004) varied the location of the second target: whereas the first target was always presented at fixation, the second target appeared either at
fixation or peripherally to the left or the right. This variation led to an interesting finding: the patient with left-side neglect showed a prolonged attentional blink in identifying the second stimulus
when the second stimulus appeared contralesionally, an attentional blink of normal duration
when the stimulus appeared at fixation and no significant attentional blink when the second stimulus appeared ipsilesionally. This result suggests that the temporal dynamics of attentional processing may be enhanced compared to normal performance for ipsilesional stimuli, whereas it
is significantly prolonged for stimuli appearing to the left. When two objects are simultaneously
presented, this abnormal temporal dynamic may lead to neglecting contralesional objects
(Humphreys, 1997): if selection of ipsilesional stimuli is speeded up and there is also a spatial bias
towards ipsilesional locations, then contralesional stimuli may be missed. The temporal distortion
results thus in an ontological landslide, sweeping away the left side of the world.
8. Two halves: not a whole
We started from the experiment by Bisiach and Luzzati (1978) to introduce the hypothesis that
the disorder that underlies neglect is not confined to space but also involves time. The neglect patient remembers both halves of the square, but is still unable to remember the whole square at
anyone time. If this occurs, we reasoned, this must be because the two halves of the square do
not co-exist at the same time (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. In normal conditions, the features of the square, independently from the order in which they have been
mentioned, form a unitary spatio-temporal structure, in which they simultaneously exist. In neglect, the features that
from time to time fall within the ipsilesional space are bound together in an independent structure. The relation of
simultaneousness is preserved within each aggregate, but not between the features of different aggregates. (t, time).
C. Becchio, C. Bertone / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 483–494
491
Experimental evidence presented in the previous section supports this conclusion. In normal
conditions, re-mapping mechanisms allow the integration of successive perception in a world of
temporally enduring entities. Items successively selected co-exist within a continuous space-time.
Disrupting the temporal continuity between one side of the space and the other, neglect not
only prevents the representation of half the space, but renders impossible a spatial continuity between successively represented hemi-spaces. Changing point of view, as requested in the experiment of Piazza del Duomo, has thus a twofold ontological effect: one side of the space ceases
to exist, the other side explodes into existence. The result is a sequence of hemi-structures independent in both time and ontology.
9. Conclusive considerations
Previous research on neglect has above all been concerned with what patients with neglect can
do despite their apparent lack of awareness. The lack of awareness per se, its nature, the paradoxes
it raises, have attracted comparatively little interest (Halligan & Marshall, 1998).
The idea proposed in this paper is that neglect leads to an absence, which is not a simple absence but a lack of absence. This lack of absence originates from a disruption of the conditions
of existence which involves both space and time.
One of the advantages of describing neglect both in its spatial and temporal features is that it
allows one to see the relation between deficits that at different levels of analysis may appear as
merely concomitant symptoms. The example that we analyse in this concluding section is that
of allochiria and prior entry.
9.1. Allochiria
The term allochiria indicates the spatial transposition, usually symmetrically, of a stimulus
from one side of the space to the opposite side. Neglect patients may show allochiria in several
tasks, such as completion of geographical maps (Battersby, Bender, Pollack, & Kahn, 1954; Benton, Levin, & Van Allen, 1974), verbal description (Bisiach, Capitani, Luzzati, & Perani, 1981;
Guariglia, Padovani, Pantano, & Pizzamiglio, 1993), manual pointing of visual targets (Joanette
& Brouchon, 1984), drawing from memory (Halligan, Marshall, & Wade, 1992a; Riddoch &
Humphryes, 1983), copying drawings (Halligan, Marshall, & Wade, 1992b).
Halligan et al. (1992b) described a patient who, in copying a butterfly, omitted the left wing.
However, he drew some of the left-side details on the right wing (see Fig. 3).
As Berti (2002) notes, the phenomenon is obviously related to the capacity of processing leftside-neglected stimuli. What is striking is the dissociation between the ‘‘what’’ and the ‘‘where’’ in
the patientÕs experience: the ‘‘what,’’ which is preserved, is mislocated, being transposed in the opposed side of space.
9.2. Prior entry
A similar transposition, though in the temporal dimension, exists, we suggest, with the phenomenon of prior entry.
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Fig. 3. Stimulus for copying (full butterfly) and patientÕs copy. From Halligan et al. (1992b).
Table 2
Features of allochiria and prior entry
Allochiria
Prior entry
Transposition in space
Dissociation between what and where
Transposition in time
Dissociation between what and when
Fig. 4. Schematic representation of the destiny of the contralesional stimulus in neglect, allochiria, and prior entry
(t, time).
The phenomenon, found both in the visual modality (Rorden, Mattingley, Karnath, & Driver,
1997) and the auditory modality (Karnath, Zimmer, & Lewald, 2002), consists in the fact that an
ipsilesional event is perceived as occurring earlier than physically synchronous contralesional
stimulus. In Rorden et al. (1997) study, two patients with left-sided visual extinction after right
parietal damage were each presented with two unconnected bars, one in each visual field. The patientsÕ task was to judge which appeared sooner. Both patients reported that the right bar pre-
C. Becchio, C. Bertone / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 483–494
493
ceded the left unless the latter led by over 200 ms, suggesting a severe bias to the right, affecting
the time-course of visual awareness.
The phenomenon, we propose, may be described as a transposition in time: separate events, physically synchronous, are relocated in time so that the left-side event appears as happening later.
As in the case of allochiria, the transposition entails a dissociation: in prior entry, this dissociation takes place between the ‘‘what’’ and the ‘‘when’’ (see Table 2).
The interpretation here proposed of neglect suggests that both in allochiria and in prior entry
the mislocation of the stimuli does not result from a defective mapping of the spatial/temporal
relations between the different elements sampled. Indeed, the stimuli are not mislocated at all,
but re-located to avoid the ontological landslide that neglect brings about.
In allochiria the contralesional stimulus escapes from neglect by moving into another space, in
the phenomenon of prior entry the transposition occurs in another time. In both cases the contralesional stimulus gains an access to existence, but this access is transposed into the hemifield
in which the spatio-temporal conditions of existence are preserved (see Fig. 4).
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Ministero Italiano dellÕIstruzione dellÕUniversitaÕ e della
Ricerca (Firb Project, ‘‘Assessment dei disturbi della comunicazione in unÕottica riabilitativa’’ research code no. RBAU01JEYW_001). The authors thanks Anna Berti and Lorenzo Pia for
comments.
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Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 708–715
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Short Communication
Are delusional contents replayed during dreams?
Armando D’Agostino a,b,⇑, Giacomo Aletti c, Martina Carboni a,b, Simone Cavallotti a,b,
Ivan Limosani a, Marialaura Manzone a, Silvio Scarone a,b
a
Department of Mental Health, San Paolo Hospital, Milan, Italy
Department of Health Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
c
Department of Mathematics ‘‘Federigo Enriques’’, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 20 June 2012
Available online 21 May 2013
Keywords:
Sleep
Dreaming
Memory consolidation
Psychosis
Delusions
Continuity
a b s t r a c t
The relationship between dream content and waking life experiences remains difficult to
decipher. However, some neurobiological findings suggest that dreaming can, at least in
part, be considered epiphenomenal to ongoing memory consolidation processes in sleep.
Both abnormalities in sleep architecture and impairment in memory consolidation mechanisms are thought to be involved in the development of psychosis. The objective of this
study was to assess the continuity between delusional contents and dreams in acutely
psychotic patients. Ten patients with a single fixed and recurring delusional content were
asked to report their dreams during an acute psychotic break. Sixteen judges with four
different levels of acquaintance to the specific content of the patients’ delusions were
asked to group the dreams, expecting that fragments of the delusional thought would
guide the task. A mathematical index (f, t) was developed in order to compare correct
groupings between the four groups of judges. Most judges grouped the dreams slightly
above chance level and no relevant differences could be found between the four groups
[F(3, 12) = 1.297; p = n.s.]. Scoring of dreams for specific delusional themes suggested a
continuity in terms of dream and waking mentation for two contents (Grandiosity and
Religion). These findings seem to suggest that at least some delusional contents recur
within patients’ dreams. Future studies will need to determine whether such continuity
reflects ongoing consolidation processes that are relevant to current theories of delusion
formation and stabilization.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
1.1. Sleep-dependent memory consolidation in the healthy brain/mind
Dream content is thought to reflect several aspects of the dreamer’s waking life and many laboratory studies have confirmed what is generally termed the continuity hypothesis of dreaming (Schredl & Hofmann, 2003). However, some
authors suggest that universal aspects of dreams are wrongly attributed to individual experiences when they should
be interpreted as generic responses to common brain activation patterns shared across the sleep of all human subjects
(Hobson & Kahn, 2007). Consolidation of new memory traces into long-term storage has been proposed as a plausible
⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Dipartimento di Salute Mentale, A.O. San Paolo, via Antonio di Rudinì 8, 20142 Milan, Italy. Fax: +39 02 81844026.
E-mail address: armando.dagostino@unimi.it (A. D’Agostino).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.04.006
A. D’Agostino et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 708–715
709
function of sleep, whereby key elements of recent experiences are integrated with previously encoded remote and semantic memories (Wamsley & Stickgold, 2011). Some evidence seems to support the contribution of Slow Wave Sleep in consolidating hippocampus-dependent episodic memories, whereas REM sleep appears to be more important for procedural
and emotional memory consolidation (for a review, see Diekelmann & Born, 2010). The progression from quiet waking to
sleep onset, NREM and REM sleep, has been experimentally correlated to an increase in vivid, hallucinatory percepts that
are bound together hyperassociatively in bizarre dream experiences (for a review, see Stickgold, Hobson, Fosse, & Fosse,
2001). Given this strong brain/mind correlation, the dream process itself could somehow reflect the activation and recombination of mnemonic elements during sleep (Schwartz, 2003). However, the mechanism through which this process contributes to the generation of a complex, multimodal sensory experience remains unclear. Indeed, hippocampal activity has
been shown to increase during REM sleep in comparison to both wakefulness and NREM sleep but complete episodic
memories are rarely found in dreams (Hobson, Pace-Schott, Stickgold, & Kahn, 1998). It has been proposed that dreams
incorporate memory fragments relative to waking life experiences that have occurred 5–7 days before the dream at a
greater rate than those from 2 to 4 days before the dream (Nielsen, Kuiken, Alain, Stenstrom, & Powell, 2004). This
‘‘dream-lag effect’’ was suggested by experimental findings developed on the basis of the well-known concept of day residue, defined by Sigmund Freud as the incorporation of waking life elements within the dream. The confirmation of this
finding in several studies, some of which rigorously designed to overcome methodological shortcomings (for example,
Blagrove, Henley-Einion, Barnett, Edwards, & Heidi Seage, 2011), supports the view that dreaming and wakefulness are
continuous subjective experiences. Indeed, learning-related hippocampal excitability has been shown to last approximately 1 week in several animal studies, when excitation of neocortical neuronal complexes is observed (Nielsen & Stenstrom, 2005).
Two major obstacles have thus far delayed the possibility of correlating neurofunctional modifications to ongoing memory processing in dreams. First of all, direct access to the dream experience is not possible with the exception of lucidity, a
rare phenomenon that has been hypothesized to be a hybrid state of consciousness (Dresler et al., 2011; Voss, Holzmann,
Tuin, & Hobson, 2009). Dream reports, that are commonly used to infer knowledge on brain function, are memory reports
that invariably involve two types of cognition, given that they are produced during sleep and reported during wakefulness
(Schwartz & Maquet, 2002). Second, the possibility of accurately relating episodic or semantic memory fragments found in
dreams to waking life experiences is limited by the broad variability of thoughts, emotions, interactions, events, etc. which
characterize the dreamer’s wakefulness.
1.2. Relationship between dream mentation and psychosis
Abnormal sleep architecture and impaired memory consolidation processes have been linked to the development of
psychosis (Keshavan, Montrose, Miewald, & Jindal, 2011). The subjective experience of dreaming has been shown to
share neurobiological and phenomenological similarities with psychosis (Limosani, D’Agostino, Manzone, & Scarone,
2011), but the relationship between sleep-dependent memory consolidation, cognitive deficits and psychotic symptoms
found across diagnostic categories remains unclear. One possible approach is to explore the distinctive features of dream
mentation during psychotic breaks. To the best of our knowledge, very few studies previously assessed the manifest content of dreams in Schizophrenia. Apprehension, death and mutilation-related anxieties as well as increased rates of
ambivalent hostility were found to characterize the emotional tone of patients’ dreams (Carrington, 1972; Kramer &
Roth, 1973; Schnetzler & Carbonnel, 1976; Stompe et al., 2003). The increased rates of threats towards the dream Self
found in comparison to control populations were intuitively correlated to delusional persecutory experiences in waking
life (Carrington, 1972; Langs, 1966; Noble, 1951; Stompe et al., 2003). According to this line of research, generic delusional themes, i.e. Grandiosity or Persecution appear to recur within patients’ dreams rather than specific contents. However, one Canadian group recently found that differences between the dreams of schizophrenic subjects and those of
normal controls disappear after controlling for report length (Lusignan et al., 2009) and that ‘‘sleep stage cognitive style
in schizophrenia is comparable to that observed in healthy individuals, with NREM sleep dream reports being more
thought-like, less elaborate and less bizarre than REM sleep dream reports’’ (Lusignan et al., 2010). In most studies,
dreams were collected from chronic schizophrenic subjects with varying degrees of active psychosis, so little or no inference can be made on the continuity between sleep mentation and waking thought processes during acute psychotic
breaks.
1.3. Objectives
Two distinct experimental procedures were designed to assess the continuity of dream content with delusional thoughts
in acutely psychotic inpatients. (1) Several judges were asked to independently group the dreams of 10 subjects selected on
the basis of their remarkably fixed and recurrent delusion. We hypothesized that judges with both a professional knowledge
of delusional thought formation and direct acquaintance with patients’ specific delusional systems would recognize fragments more accurately within their dreams during an acute psychotic break. (2) The same dream reports were scored for
the presence of typical delusional themes. Our objective was to confirm that correct identification of dreamers depended
on the presence of delusional themes in their dreams.
710
A. D’Agostino et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 708–715
2. Methods and results
2.1. Patient sample
Table 1 shows the demographic and clinical characteristics of the 10 participants. All actively psychotic patients admitted
to the psychiatric ward of the San Paolo Hospital in Milan, Italy, over a period of 12 months, were screened for inclusion in
this study. Inclusion criteria were (i) at least 4 hospitalizations in the previous 2 years with an entry diagnosis of acute psychosis, (ii) the recurrence of a fixed delusion within these episodes, (iii) marked to severe global rating of delusions upon
admission and at the end of the dream collection period. Content of delusions was documented by examining all available
clinical charts from the previous 2 years. Exclusion criteria were relevant cognitive impairment, alcohol and psychoactive
substance abuse and a present or past history of a serious medical or neurological condition, including perinatal injury, cranial trauma, mental retardation and parasomnias. The subjects gave informed consent to use their reports in research but
were not aware of the specific aim of this study.
2.2. Clinical assessment
Clinical assessment was performed by using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS, Overall & Gorham, 1962) and the
Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS, Andreasen & Olsen, 1982). Only participants with SAPS Item 20
Score P 4 throughout the dream collection period were included in the study (see next paragraph). Available reference values for the overall psychopathological assessment indicate that participants were on average markedly ill when the dream
collection period ended (Leucht et al., 2005). Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE, Folstein, Folstein, & McHugh, 1975)
was administered at baseline and participants were included if they scored above the age- and education-adjusted cut off
for cognitive impairment.
None of the patients included in the study were drug-naïve but all had discontinued treatment prior to relapse. Various
combinations of mood stabilizers and antipsychotic agents were administered to all patients during the week in which the
experimental material was collected.
2.3. Collection of dream reports
During the first week of hospitalization participants were asked to keep a dream diary where each morning they could
report dreams recollected upon awakening. As instruction, participants were asked to report as many dreams as they could
recollect and to accurately report the whole development of the dream plot whenever possible. Diaries were discontinued
when clinical assessment began to suggest a significant remission of symptoms as evaluated by a SAPS Item 20 Score 6 3.
Table 1
Demographic and clinical description of the population.
a
SAPSa
Patient
Sex
Age (y)
Education (y)
DSM-IV-TR Diagnosis
BPRS total score
Items 8–19 [Score]
Item 20
S.M.
M
45
12
Schizophrenia – Paranoid Type
53
Persecution [5]
Mind Reading [4]
4
F.L.
F
60
13
Bipolar Disorder I – Manic Episode, Severe With
Psychotic Features
49
Persecution [4]
4
F.B.
F
37
13
Schizophrenia – Paranoid Type
49
Religious [4]
4
B.S.
F
53
2
Schizophrenia – Paranoid Type
44
Religious [5]
Control [4]
5
C.M.
F
54
8
Bipolar Disorder I – Manic Episode, Severe With
Psychotic Features
49
Grandiosity [5]
5
R.S.
M
42
8
Schizophrenia – Disorganized Type
70
Persecution [5]
Thought Insertion [5]
Thought Withdrawal [5]
5
S.E.
M
28
13
Bipolar Disorder I – Manic Episode, Severe With
Psychotic Features
48
Grandiosity [4]
4
A.I.
F
70
13
Schizophrenia – Paranoid Type
53
Persecution [5]
Grandiosity [4]
5
R.A.
M
48
13
Bipolar Disorder I – Manic Episode, Severe With
Psychotic Features
64
Persecution [5]
4
L.C.
F
47
8
Schizophrenia – Paranoid Type
41
Religious [5]
Reference [5]
5
SAPS Items 8–19 score specific contents of delusions and Item 20 indicates a Global rating of delusions. Score range for each item is 0 (none)–5 (severe).
A. D’Agostino et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 708–715
711
Collected dreams were transcribed on a word processing software and then edited by removing all specific identifiers such as
the proper names of people and places. Clear references to the dreamer’s gender were also neutralized given the potential
influence on dream classification (Domhoff & Schneider, 2008; Schredl, Becker, & Feldman, 2010). Enrolment of participants
was completed when 10 subjects had reported at least 4 dreams longer than 40 words each. Forty reports belonging to 10
subjects (4 dreams per patient) were then randomly assigned cardinal numbers (1–40).
2.4. Judge selection and procedure
2.4.1. Study stage I
16 judges were chosen and divided into four groups (A–D) on the basis of their cultural and professional background and
their acquaintance with the patients. All judges had an education mounting to 19 years. Group A included 4 female boardcertified psychiatrists who were working on the ward at the time of data collection (mean age = 35 years); Group B included
2 male and 2 female professional nurses who worked on the ward at close daily contact with the patients (mean age = 37.8);
Group C included 2 male and 2 female board-certified psychiatrists who did not work on the same ward and consequently
had no contact with the patients (mean age = 48.8); Group D included 2 male and 2 female judges with a University-level
instruction in different fields who had no direct experience with psychiatric disorders and had never met the patients (mean
age = 49.5).
All judges were carefully instructed on the objectives of this study and were informed that the 40 dreams belonged to 10
patients with the previously specified characteristics. In particular, psychiatrists in Groups A were the physicians who treated the patients at the time of data collection. Obviously, not all were directly in charge of all participating patients. Nontheless, all judges belonging to this group were aware of the patients’ specific delusions given close contact on the ward and
daily participation in routine clinical meetings. These judges were clearly told that the dreams belonged to a restricted pool
of psychotic patients they knew well and were aware of the previously specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. Likewise,
nurses in Group B were rotating on the ward 24 h a day at the time of data collection and were given the same information
on the patients.
All judges were given the reports and asked to group them by author knowing that each patient had contributed 4
dreams. Judges were also informed on their level of acquaintance with the participating subjects to test the hypothesis that
those in Groups A and B would complete the assignment more easily by recognizing their patients’ delusional themes. This
procedure is largely based on a previously published scheme (Hobson & Kahn, 2007).
2.4.2. Study stage II
One judge was chosen from our research group (M.C.) on the basis of her expertise in both dream scoring procedures and
the use of psychopathological rating scales. Blind to both the origin of the transcripts and the design of the study, she was
instructed to score dream narratives according to SAPS Items 8–19. Each item of this scale reflects a specific delusional theme
which can be scored 0–5 according to the fixity of the patient’s delusion. In order to adapt this psychometric tool to dream
content, the judge was instructed to evaluate the presence of each specific theme (i.e. persecution, grandiosity, guilt) in the
dream on a 0–5 scale.
2.5. Statistical analysis
2.5.1. Study stage I
When all the judges had grouped the dreams by assigning each of the 40 reports to each of 10 authors, the data were
analyzed with the aid of a mathematician. An index (f, t) was developed to compare the groups of judges, where (f) indicates
the number of correct groupings of 4 dreams per subject and (t) indicates the number of correct groupings of 3 dreams per
subject. Table 2 shows the distribution of (f, t) indexes for each judge, extracted by the full table of possible results that can be
found in Appendix A (Supplementary material). The following procedure was followed to assign each judge an (f, t) index:
– The probability p(f, t) was calculated for each (f, t) pair.
– pairs were ranked on the basis of a decreasing p(f, t) from (10, 0) to (0, 0) where, for example, (5, 4) ranks higher than
(6, 2).
– pct(f, t) was calculated on the ordered list and a preliminary index (f, t) was calculated as the logarithm of the percentile function: log10(pct(f, t)).
– The final index (f, t) is the 0–1 normalized score obtained with the following formula:
Indexðf ; tÞ ¼
log10 ðpctðf ; tÞÞ
log10 ðpctð10; 0ÞÞ
According to the results table shown in Appendix A, p(0, 0) 96%. Consequently, the result of at least one correct grouping of 3 dreams per subject [index = (0, 1)] is statistically significant at the p = .05 level. Results obtained by judge Groups A to
D were compared by One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).
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A. D’Agostino et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 708–715
Table 2
Indexes developed for judges belonging to groups A, B, C and D.
Judge
Index
A1
A2
A3
A4
0.111
0.452
0.111
0.153
B1
B2
B3
B4
0.207
0.05
0.153
0.207
C1
C2
C3
C4
0
0.153
0.05
0.111
D1
D2
D3
D4
0.111
0.207
0.177
0.383
2.5.2. Study stage II
Once a score was assigned to each of the 40 dreams for all coded delusional themes, a mean score was calculated for each
subject on each of the evaluated SAPS items (see Appendix B – Supplementary material). Linear regression analyses were
performed to assess the relationship between specific themes found in dreams and their homologues scored in wakefulness.
All data analyses were performed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 19.0 (IBM SPSS Statistics Version
19, 2010).
2.6. Results
2.6.1. Study stage I
Fig. 1 shows the mean Group indexes. Overall, judges’ grouping of dream reports was slightly above chance level. Their
scores varied from 0 to 0.45, with the mean and the median scores at 0.17 and 0.15 respectively. While 3 of the 12 judges
grouped the reports at chance level or below, the other nine judges all scored slightly above chance level. The two most successful judges correctly grouped the four reports of two patients and three reports of another four and three patients respectively [Judge A2 Index (2, 4) = 0.452; Judge D4 Index (2, 3) = 0.383]. Interestingly, the highest average group score was
obtained by those who were neither formed in clinical psychiatry nor had ever met the patients (Group D, see Fig. 1). However, this score was not found to be statistically different from that of the other three groups (ANOVA yielded no statistically
significant differences between the four groups [F(3, 12) = 1.297; p = n.s.]).
2.6.2. Study stage II
Regression analyses yielded a positive linear relationship between dreams and wakefulness for Grandiosity and Religious
themes. Grandiose delusion scores predicted analogous themes in dreams (b = .71, t(9) = 2.49, p < .05) and also explained a
Fig. 1. Mean judge group indexes on the task of relating dream narratives to individual subjects belonging to a population of acutely delusional inpatients.
A. D’Agostino et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 708–715
713
significant proportion of variance in grandiose dream content scores [F(1, 8) = 8.119, p < .05]. Likewise, Religious delusion
scores predicted the same themes in dreams (b = .71, t(9) = 2.49, p < .05) and also explained a significant proportion of variance in religious dream content scores [F(1, 8) = 8.119, p < .05]. None of the other six analyzed delusional themes predicted
dream content scores (Persecution, Mind Reading, Control, Thought Insertion, Thought Withdrawal, Reference).
3. Discussion
3.1. General observations
Several observations can be made on the basis of these results. Patients enrolled in this study had a severe disorder of
thought content, with a fixed and persistent delusion which had recurred several times over the previous years, and in
one case for almost 20 years. Despite the obvious recurrence of common themes (Table 1), each patient presented with a
highly specific content. For example, persecution could be by one’s neighbours or by extraterrestrial forces and grandiosity
could relate to being a famous scientist or a divine authority. Delusions are considered irrational and persistent beliefs that
cannot be modified by experience. Indeed, deluded subjects are unable to use new information to constrain and remodel the
existing belief and reactivation of the delusion tends to reconsolidate and strengthen it (Corlett, Krystal, Taylor, & Fletcher,
2009). During an acute psychotic break, the aberrant belief shifts to the core of patients’ waking thoughts and tends to determine most of his/her behaviour. Dreams of acutely psychotic inpatients have been shown by our group to be continuous with
their waking cognition in terms of bizarreness, possibly implying a common formal organization of the two types of mentation (Limosani, D’Agostino, Manzone, & Scarone, 2011; Scarone et al., 2008). One previous study suggested a continuity
across delusions and dreams in terms of affective form rather than content in schizophrenic patients: threat anxieties were
found to be significantly more present in the dreams of patients with waking delusions of persecution compared to controls
(Stompe et al., 2003). However, the extent to which dreams reflect specific delusional contents during acute psychotic breaks
had never previously been investigated.
3.2. Relationship with previous research
It has been observed that given the broad range of memories, thoughts, and concerns any human being has during wakefulness, brief dream reports from one individual are unlikely to be similar enough to be distinguished from similar sets of
reports of other individuals with equally diverse and complex thought patterns (Domhoff & Schneider, 2008). In the chosen
population, we expected the relative narrowing of waking thought contents would easily guide judges towards a correct
grouping of the reports to confirm the inclusion of delusional fragments within the dreams. Unlike previous findings in
healthy subjects (Hobson & Kahn, 2007), most of the judges completed their assignment slightly above chance level. These
results were neither influenced by the judges’ knowledge of typical delusional themes in general nor by their level of
acquaintance with the delusional patients. Furthermore, the objective scoring of dreams for typical delusional contents confirmed a continuity for some themes. Although Fig. 1 clearly shows that group means were only marginally above chance, it
seems reasonable to conclude that some delusional themes can be traced in the dream mentation of subjects whose waking
experience is strongly influenced by specific delusions. These findings are in line with previous authors who suggested that
dreams are influenced by the dreamer’s waking concerns (Cartwright, Agargun, Kirkby, & Friedman, 2006; Mancia, 2004;
Nielsen & Levin, 2007). In a recent Commentary, Valdas Noreika proposed several different ways to approach the (dis)continuity hypotheses in Schizophrenia (Noreika, 2011). Our findings seem to support the statistical prediction of a positive correlation between waking experiences and dream content. Some studies have correlated impaired sleep-dependent memory
consolidation mechanisms to the neuropsychological abnormalities that are typically described in Schizophrenia (Diekelmann, Wilhelm, & Born, 2009). Sleep spindles, a putative neurophysiological marker of the memory consolidation dialogue
between the hippocampus and the neocortex (Fogel & Smith, 2011), have been found to be reduced in this population (Ferrarelli et al., 2007). Dysfunctional memory reconsolidation processes have been hypothesized to underlie delusion formation
and stabilization (Corlett et al., 2009). Future studies will need to clarify whether impaired sleep-dependent consolidation of
declarative memories somehow contributes to the continuous reconsolidation of delusionalbeliefs.
3.3. Limitations of the study
Several limitations must be taken into account. First of all, both schizophrenic and manic subjects were on treatment with
psychoactive drugs at the time of data collection, which might have interfered with both dream mentation and dream recall.
Overall, antipsychotic molecules, taken by all patients who joined our study, tend to normalize sleep architecture (Maixner
et al., 1998), whereas no significant effects have been found for the anticonvulsant valproate which two of the patients were
administered (Nofzinger & Keshavan, 2002). Whereas previous studies have shown that most antidepressants decrease
dream recall frequency and could intensify the affective component of dreams (for a review, see Tribl, Wetter, & Schredl,
2012), only few studies directly assessed the influence of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers on dream content and recall
frequency. To the best of our knowledge only one study clearly showed that sulpiride, a preferential blocker of dopamine
receptors, decreases the number (not the intensity) of dream recalls containing emotional aggressive and sexual contents
714
A. D’Agostino et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 708–715
(Gaillard & Moneme, 1977). Second, all participants shared a common waking context, i.e. the same psychiatric ward with
the same staff and daily routine, that has been hypothesized to influence dream content in previous studies on schizophrenic
inpatients (Schredl, 2011). Third, as we did not use EEG to monitor sleep stages in our patients, we did not correlate dream
narratives to a particular stage of sleep. Spontaneously reported dreams are generally thought to derive from REM sleep
more frequently (Nielsen, 2000), but given the frequent disruptions of sleep patterns in recently hospitalized psychotic patients, no conclusions can be drawn on the basis of our experimental design. Finally, the number of dreams collected for each
patient was small, and an increase in the number of dream reports has been shown to improve reliability when measuring
inter individual differences (Schredl, 1998).
3.4. Conclusion
Some delusional themes tend to recur across dreams and wakefulness in acutely psychotic inpatients. Whether or not the
incorporation of delusional themes within dreams can be related to ongoing processes of consolidation of waking experiences will have to be assessed in future studies.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all the patients and the many judges who volunteered for this study.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.concog.2013.04.006.
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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Self-reference recollection effect and its relation to theory of
mind: An investigation in healthy controls and schizophrenia
Laurie Compère a,b,1, Célia Mam-Lam-Fook a,b,c,1, Isabelle Amado c,d,e,f,1, Marion Nys a,b,1,
Jennifer Lalanne a,b,1, Marie-Laure Grillon a,b,1, Narjes Bendjemaa c,d,1, Marie-Odile Krebs c,d,e,f,1,
Pascale Piolino a,b,f,g,⇑
a
Paris Descartes University, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Institute of Psychology, Memory and Cognition Laboratory, Boulogne Billancourt, Paris, France
INSERM S894, Center of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Paris, France
Sainte-Anne Hospital, Service Hospitalo-Universitaire, Paris, France
d
INSERM U894, Laboratory Pathophysiology of Psychiatric Diseases, Center of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Paris, France
e
University Paris Descartes, Faculty of Medicine Paris Descartes, Paris, France
f
Institut de Psychiatrie – GDR 3557 CNRS, France
g
Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), France
b
c
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 3 July 2015
Revised 25 January 2016
Accepted 4 March 2016
Keywords:
Self-reference effect
Memory
Recollection
R/K/G paradigm
Theory of mind
Implicit learning
Self-concept
Schizophrenia
a b s t r a c t
This study explores the links between the Self-Reference Effect (SRE) and Theory of Mind
(ToM) in typical adults and patients with schizophrenia. Participants were assessed with
a self-referential memory paradigm investigating the mnemonic effect of both semantic
and episodic self-reference with a recognition task associated with the Remember/Know/
Guess paradigm. They also completed a self-descriptive scale and shortened versions of
the attribution of intention task and the reading the mind in the eyes test as measures
of cognitive and affective ToM respectively. Unlike typical adults, the patients showed
no semantic SRRE (correct recognition associated with remembering), and there was no
episodic SRRE and no SRE (on the number of correct recognitions) in either group.
Semantic SRRE was correlated with the affective ToM in patients and with the positivity
of the self-concept in the healthy group. We discuss that patients and typical adults use different strategies during self and other-reflection.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The integration and the basis of mental representations of ourselves cannot be accomplished without the mobilization of
high-level cognitive abilities that allow us to make inferences about what other people think of ourselves. Yet in the literature, the general knowledge that we have of ourselves is traditionally designated by the unitary concept of self while understanding others is often summarized in social cognition under the term of Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e. the attribution of
mental states both to others and to oneself (Premack & Woodruff, 1978) and requires conscious understanding of others
(Frith & Frith, 2007). From a cognitive perspective, general mental representations or perceptions that we have of ourselves
form the ‘‘self-concept”, i.e. the knowledge that the subject has of himself, his personality, his history, and his autobiography
⇑ Corresponding author at: 2 Ter rue d’Alésia, Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurosciences, 75014 Paris, France.
1
E-mail address: pascale.piolino@parisdescartes.fr (P. Piolino).
Address: 2 Ter rue d’Alésia, Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurosciences, Hôpital Sainte Anne, 75014 Paris, France.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.03.004
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
52
L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
(Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Markus, 1977; Martinelli, Sperduti, & Piolino, 2013). The self-concept includes abstract
knowledge about our personality traits and temperament that are constitutive of our personal and social identity
(Conway, 2005; Klein, Cosmides, Tooby, & Chance, 2002; Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 1996).
Moreover, the self-concept is not only a higher elaborate structure in memory but is also known to be an active process
which facilitates the memorization of information (Conway, 2005; Markus, 1977) by acting as a filter or a prism, selecting the
stimuli that are relevant to oneself during self-reference processing (Liao, Audi, Magritte, Meyer-Bahlburg, & Quigley, 2012).
Indeed, findings in healthy adults suggest that information about oneself is typically better remembered than other information. This phenomenon is named the Self-Reference Effect (SRE) (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977) and reflects a deeper encoding of information related to a cognitively rich mental representation of the self (Henderson et al., 2009). It can be processed
based on different kinds of representations of the self: either self-related semantic processing that requires participants to
decide if a personality trait describes them, or self-related episodic processing of searching for a specific personal memory in
connection with a personality trait (Klein, Loftus, & Burton, 1989). The SRE applies not only to the quantitative properties of
memories (i.e., correct recalls and recognitions) but also to the qualitative properties (i.e., subjective sense of remembering).
This Self-Reference Recollection Effect (SRRE) (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995) improves the correct recognitions associated with
recollective experience (Remember responses in the Remember/Know/Guess paradigm, Gardiner, 2001) whereby participants consciously recollect specific details of an item presented earlier such as sensory aspects of the original item or associated thoughts and feelings.
The action of the self as a cognitive filter extends to social cognition by acting as a prism through which others are seen
using our self-concept and personal memories to make inferences about others (Corcoran & Frith, 2003). The view that we
engage in similar processes during our own understanding and understanding of others is supported by brain imaging data
that evidence a common brain network in self and other reference processing (Legrand & Ruby, 2009). The study of some
pathologies such as autism (Henderson et al., 2009) and alexithymia (Moriguchi et al., 2006) also highlighted strong connections between self and social skills disruptions. Therefore, self-reference processing is considered crucial for adaptive functioning in social environments since a clear understanding of one’s own traits is critical in assessing one’s role in a social
context (van der Meer, Costafreda, Aleman, & David, 2010) and since the ability to understand others’ mental states requires
self-reflection as a basis for interpreting their experience (Carruthers, 2009). Many authors distinguish between two ToM
(e.g., Duval, Piolino, Bejanin, Eustache, & Desgranges, 2011): cognitive ToM and affective ToM. Cognitive ToM concerns
the cognitive status, beliefs, thoughts or intentions of others, while affective ToM concerns the affective states, emotions
and feelings of others.
In addition to growing evidence of links between the processing and representations of others and of oneself (e.g.,
Centelles, Assaiante, Nazarian, Anton, & Schmitz, 2011; Corcoran & Frith, 2003; Duval, Desgranges, Eustache, & Piolino,
2009), one of these links seems to be their dependence on metacognitive and executive functions, i.e., the capacity to engage
in mental activity on one’s own mental processes, i.e., to ‘‘think on one’s own thoughts” (Perner & Lang, 2000). On the one
hand, the self is a higher-level construct (e.g., a working self, Conway, 2005) that through executive processes such as selection and inhibition, guides and modulates different cognitive systems, such as memory encoding and retrieval, affects and
behaviors. It plays a crucial role in motivation, subjective self-evaluations and the management of self-goals in an individual’s life, allowing the construction of a coherent and positive self-image (Conway, 2005; Klein et al., 1989). Many studies
have reported strong links between executive functions and self-related processes, such as autobiographical memory retrieval, especially in neurological or psychiatric diseases (Baddeley & Wilson, 1988; Fivush & Nelson, 2004; Matuszewski et al.,
2006; Piolino et al., 2010; Winthorpe & Rabbitt, 1988). On the other hand, understanding the mental states of others rests on
the ability to inhibit our own perspective and integrate the various contextual elements that determine the behavior of
others. This relationship between ToM skills and executive functioning has already been largely highlighted in studies of participants with typical (Carlson, Moses, & Breton, 2002) and atypical development such as autism (Pellicano, 2010). Moreover,
many authors including Duval et al. (2011) showed that the cognitive component of ToM is particularly based on the operation of executive functions.
Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a particularly interesting model to study the interplay between self-reference processes and ToM,
since SCZ is linked to particularities of subjective experience (e.g., the feeling of not being quite like oneself, and disintegration of self-consciousness, Lalova et al., 2013; Sass & Parnas, 2003). In fact, symptoms in SCZ such as delusions of control or
thought insertion typically refer to the dysfunction of the self in the social world (Corcoran & Frith, 2003) and appear to stem
from a failure to recognize one’s own actions and thoughts (Morgan et al., 2011). Moreover, the literature on SCZ reports a set
of cognitive impairments including memory (Palmer, Dawes, & Heaton, 2009), social skills (Bazin et al., 2009), and executive
functions (Braff et al., 1991), that are considered as central elements in SCZ and that contribute to the severe handicap
observed in patients’ daily life.
Harvey, Lee, Horan, Ochsner, and Green (2011) were among the first to investigate the SRE in SCZ with an incident memory task of personality traits encoded in three conditions: structural processing (‘‘Are the letters of the word uppercase or
lowercase?”), social desirability (‘‘Is the trait socially desirable for other people in general?”) and semantic self-reference
(‘‘Does this personality trait describe you?”). Their results supported the growing literature highlighting the lack of SRE in
SCZ (Bedford & David, 2014; Pauly, Kircher, Weber, Schneider, & Habel, 2011). Patients, unlike controls, failed to show an
improved recognition of adjectives encoded in the self-reference condition in comparison with alternative encodings (e.g.,
adjectives encoded in a social desirability condition). However, this study did not investigate SRRE and the two possible
routes to SRE (semantic and episodic) as evidenced by Klein et al. (1989). Moreover, it did not investigate the links with
L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
53
ToM. However, we know that in SCZ, both cognitive and affective ToM performances are impaired regardless of the tasks (for
a meta-analysis, see Sprong, Schothorst, Vos, Hox, & van Engeland, 2007) even if the affective component of ToM is often
more impaired (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2007). Furthermore, the literature suggests that this may be a stable trait since this
impairment was also observed during remission (Herold, Tényi, Lénárd, & Trixler, 2002) and in non-psychotic relatives
(Janssen, Krabbendam, Jolles, & van Os, 2003).
Accordingly, we propose to study SRE in healthy controls and SCZ through an innovative protocol that distinguishes four
incident encoding conditions: low-level processing, social desirability, semantic self-reference and episodic self-reference
conditions. Another innovative aspect of our protocol in comparison to Harvey et al.’s (2011) is that memory performance
is assessed through a recognition task associated with the Remember/Know/Guess paradigm (Gardiner, 2001; Tulving, 1985)
which makes it possible to investigate for the first time the SRRE in SCZ. Moreover, in order to evaluate the relationships
between the SRE and ToM and to determine how the subjective evaluation of self-concept (e.g., valence of self) and executive
functions may be involved in this link, we proposed a supplementary battery of tests.
Among controls, we expected to replicate the episodic and semantic SRE highlighted by Klein et al. (1989). Concerning
SCZ, we expected no benefit of self-reference encoding, even when investigating the different kinds of SRE (Klein et al.,
1989) both on recognition and recollection.
The strong hypothesis of this study is the existence of a link between SRE and ToM. As no study has so far investigated the
existence of this relationship nor even distinguished semantic and episodic SRE or cognitive and affective ToM, it is difficult
to establish accurate and strong assumptions. Nevertheless, since the literature in SCZ has already demonstrated an alteration of SRE in the semantic condition (Harvey et al., 2011) and shown that the affective component of ToM is particularly
impaired (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2007), it is likely that this connection particularly relates these two performances whose
alteration has already been evidenced. Moreover, based on the assumption that episodic SRE depends more on control access
processes than semantic SRE (Klein, Altinyazar, & Metz, 2013; Klein et al., 1989), we also expected that episodic SRE and cognitive ToM performance would depend on the executive functioning and that the magnitude of both SREs would rely on the
quality of the self-concept (valence) in both groups.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
The data are presented in Table 1. Fifteen schizophrenic patients (9 males and 6 females) and 21 healthy participants (10 males and 11 females) took part in this study. Patients were recruited from Sainte-Anne Hospital and all
had given their informed consent in compliance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Some of the healthy
participants were Paris Descartes University undergraduates who participated for course credit and the other healthy
participants responded to online or displayed ads. All participants were French native speakers. Each participant’s
medical history was closely screened: healthy participants with a neurological and psychiatric history, and patients
with severe medical or addictive antecedents, were excluded. The patients’ diagnosis was established by a senior psychiatrist and patients with comorbidities were excluded. Enrolment in the study was conditional on clinical stabilization of at least three months and therapeutic stabilization of at least one month. SCZ patients and healthy participants
did not differ in terms of age [34.73 years (±10.80) for the patients and 30.91 years (±10.68) for the healthy participants (t = 1.06, df = 34, and p = 0.3)] and the proportion of men and women in each sample did not differ (v2 = 0.54,
p = 0.46). The only difference between the two groups was in their years of education (t = 2.63, df = 34, and p = 0.01):
controls were far more likely to have attended college than patients. All subsequent analyses were thus controlled for
years of education.
2.2. Clinical measures
An average score of 20.36 (SD = 9.48) on the BfS (Befindlichkeits-Skala, French version: Heimann, Bobon-Schrod,
Schmocker, & Bobon, 1975) indicated no clinically relevant depressive symptomatology. Each patient’s psychopathology
was assessed by the Positive And Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS; Kay, Fiszbein, & Opler, 1987).
2.3. Experimental assessment
Healthy participants and patients were tested individually in sessions lasting approximately one hour and a half. In every
session, participants had to perform a familiarization task before the incident encoding task. After completing distractor
tasks during 20 min, participants performed an unexpected recognition task. Afterward, ToM tasks (Attribution of intention
task and Eyes Test) were proposed to the participants in a counterbalanced order. Then, only healthy participants passed
the Trail Making test. Finally, self-administered questionnaires were completed in both groups. The executive functions
assessment for patients was carried out at a later time.
54
L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
Table 1
Characteristics of the participant groups.
Main characteristics
Mean age (in years)
Gender (Male/female)
Number of years of education
BFS
PANSS
Positive symptomatology scale
Negative symptomatology scale
Executive assessment
Trail Making Test (TMTB-TMTA) in seconds
WAIS code (standard score)
D2
GZ (number of items processed)
F% (percentage of errors)
KL (number of correct answers)
WAIS digit span (standard score)
Wisconsin test
WSCT Nerr (standard score)
WSCT NerrP (number of perseverative errors)
WSCT Ncat (number of categories achieved)
Short-term feature binding score
Healthy controls
SCZ patients
Group comparisons
30.91 (±10.68) (N = 21)
10/11
15.48 (±2.11) (N = 21)
7.94 (±6.66) (N = 18)
34.73 (±10.80) (N = 15)
9/6
13.2 (±3.1) (N = 15)
20.36 (±9.48) (N = 14)
67.71 (±11.10) (N = 14)
10.36 (±2.53) (N = 14)
19.71 (±5.76) (N = 14)
t=
1.06, p = 0.30
v2 = 0.54, p = 0.46
t = 2.63, p = 0.01
F = 14.59, p < 0.001
33.29 (±24.83) (N = 21)
5.33 (±2.50) (N = 12)
385.92 (±96.06) (N = 13)
3.45 (±2.54) (N = 13)
194.69(±108.70) (N = 13)
8.25 (±3.14) (N = 12)
8.05 (±2.84) (N = 21)
26.83 (±21.55) (N = 12)
16.58 (±35.47) (N = 12)
5.42 (±1.24) (N = 12)
5.53 (±2.5) (N = 15)
F = 3.13, p = 0.09
± = standard deviation; BFS = Befindlichkeits-Skala Scale; PANSS = Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale total score; WAIS = Weschler Adult Intelligence
Scale.
Table 2
Subjective self-assessment and theory of mind performances.
Healthy controls
SCZ patients
Group comparisons
Self-concept scale
Positive valence score
283.43 (±22.17) (N = 21)
221.67 (±55.88) (N = 15)
F = 17.84, p < 0.001
Cognitive ToM assessment: attribution of intention task
ToM condition (max = 6)
Control condition (character without intention) (max = 3)
Control condition (physical properties of object)
5.72 (±0.57) (N = 18)
2.83 (±0.51) (N = 18)
2.94 (±0.24) (N = 18)
5.8 (±0.41) (N = 15)
2.93 (±0.26) (N = 15)
2.93 (±0.26) (N = 15)
F = 1.19, p = 0.28
F = 1.45, p = 0.24
F = 0.21, p = 0.65
Affective ToM assessment: Eyes Test
Global score (max = 15)
10.72 (±1.41) (N = 18)
9.2 (±1.66) (N = 15)
F = 5.82, p = 0.02
± = standard deviation.
2.3.1. Stimuli and self-reference memory task
All material came from a French translation of Anderson’s personality traits inventory (Anderson, 1968). Eight lists of 12
adjectives were created by controlling the frequency of the items, their length, their familiarity and valence. The lists were
validated in a previous study (for details, see Lalanne, Rozenberg, Grolleau, & Piolino, 2013).
All stimuli were presented 2 s through the SuperLab Pro softwareÒ (1999) on a laptop and then a fixation cross was shown
until the participant gave an answer (see Fig. 1). During the incident encoding phase, 4 lists of 12 adjectives, half positive and
half negative, describing personality traits were pseudo-randomly distributed among four conditions in equal parts. In one
condition, the order of words in the list was random. Participants had to decide for each personality trait whether (a) the first
and last letters were in alphabetical order (alphabetical condition), (b) it was socially desirable in general (social desirability
condition), (c) it described them (semantic self-reference) and (d) it was associated to the memory of a personal event (episodic
self-reference). In all conditions, participants responded with a two-alternative forced-choice button press (i.e., ‘‘yes” or ‘‘no”).
The alphabetical task served as a low-level control condition (perceptual processes) whereas the social desirability task was
used as a high-level control condition (no self-reference processes) to allow for replication of an earlier finding that memory
for traits referring to the self is comparatively better (Harvey et al., 2011). The task started after a short training phase using a
separate task in which participants had to say whether or not some towns were located in France. The instructions for each
task were presented at the beginning of the task for as long as participants needed to read and understand them. The
sequence of conditions and lists of items were pseudo-randomized to avoid the effect of order, and four versions of the task
were used, applying the Latin square method. Participants were not explicitly asked to remember the adjectives: the task
was just presented to them as a vocabulary task.
During the unannounced recognition task which followed after a 20 min delay, half of the lists presented in the encoding
phase or 24 adjectives (targets) were presented together with 24 new personality traits (distractors) in random order. Half of
each were positive adjectives and half were negative. The participants had to decide whether each personality trait had
already been presented earlier or was new. When participants recognized the personality trait, they had to indicate the
L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
55
Fig. 1. Incident encoding phase of the self reference memory task.
conscious experience accompanying memory retrieval by means of the R/K/G procedure (Gardiner, 2001; Gardiner & Java,
1990; Tulving, 1985) that is, a sense of remembering, a sense of knowing or a sense of guessing that they had already seen
the adjective. Participants were required to give an R response if they remembered in what context they had seen the personality trait, a K response if retrieval was achieved without any such recollection, or a G response if retrieval was doubtful.
In each task, there was no time limit for giving a response.
For the incident encoding phase, mean response time was calculated for each task condition. For the alphabetical condition and the social desirability condition, we calculated the number of correct answers. In the semantic self-referential condition, we calculated the number of adjectives self-attributed and in the episodic self-referential condition, we calculated the
number of adjectives to which participants associated the memory of a personal event.
For the recognition phase, we first calculated the hit rate (i.e., the number of old adjectives correctly recognized) for each
condition. On the number of correct recognitions, we calculated the number of R, K and G responses.
2.3.2. Subjective self-concept assessment
We used the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale (Duval, Eustache, & Piolino, 2007; French adaptation of Fitts & Warren, 1996)
consisting of 82 positive or negative descriptive statements (e.g., ‘‘I am an honest person”, ‘‘I do not feel at ease with other
people”), which were rated for self-descriptiveness on a 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (‘‘Does not describe me at
all”) to 4 (‘‘Describes me absolutely”) in order to calculate a total valence score that gave an indication of whether people
tended to have a generally positive self-image or not (i.e., positive sense of self, direction of the self) (for details, see
Picard et al., 2013).
2.4. ToM assessment
2.4.1. Attribution of intention task
This task, originally proposed by Brunet, Sarfati, Hardy-Baylé, and Decety (2000), aims at assessing cognitive ToM. We
used a shortened version of a French version (Duval et al., 2012) which consisted of a set of 12 short comic strips, each of
them composed of three pictures presenting a scenario. Participants were asked to find the most logical conclusion for each
scenario by choosing a fourth picture among three others. The comic strips were divided into three conditions: six stories
required participants to draw inferences from a character’s actions (ToM condition), three stories showed a character without any intention, and three scenarios were based on the physical properties of objects. The latter two formed control conditions. Scores were expressed in number of correct responses in each condition.
2.4.2. Eyes test
This task, originally proposed by Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore, and Robertson (1997), aims at assessing emotional
ToM. We used a shortened version of a French version (Duval et al., 2012) which consisted of 15 black-and-white photographs of the eye region of a male actor who was asked to produce different facial expressions. Under each picture, three
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L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
adjectives (one target and two foils) described basic or complex emotions. Participants were asked to identify which adjective best described the person’s mental state. We calculated a score that corresponded to the number of correct answers on
the entire test.
2.4.3. Brief executive functioning assessment
Cognitive flexibility skills of healthy controls were briefly checked by the Trail Making Test (Reitan, 1958). SCZ patients
went through an executive function assessment battery including code and verbal span tests (WAIS-III, Wechsler, 1997),
attention test (D2, Brickenkamp, 1994), and WSCT (Heaton, 1993; WCST; number of perseverative errors). Finally, both
groups performed an integration span task to assess short-term feature binding performance (Picard, Cousin, GuilleryGirard, Eustache, & Piolino, 2012). This task was presented on computer and subjects had to integrate and remember increasingly lengthy series of objects associated with specific spatial contexts (i.e., association between an object and one room in a
house) and recall them immediately afterwards in the same order.
For each cognitive test, raw scores were transformed into z scores (using means and standard deviations depending on
the membership of the participant group i.e., control or patient, in order to compare participants’ performances on the same
measurement scale). Some z scores were reversed (e.g., time scores in the TMT and number of perseverative errors in WSCT)
so that, for all the tests, the higher the score, the better the performance and we calculated an overall score of executive functioning by averaging the z scores of those tests for each participant.
3. Results
3.1. Statistical analyses
Statistical tests were performed using Statistica version 10. As Student t-tests for independent samples demonstrated that
the groups differed in terms of years of education (see above), we performed all subsequent analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) with group as a between-subject factor, condition as within-subject factor and years of education as a covariate and
used Fisher’s least significant difference (LSD) when post hoc analyses were needed. Effect sizes were represented with partial eta squared (g2). In reference to Guéguen (2009), we defined effect sizes as small for g2 < .06, medium for .06 6 g2 < .14,
and marked for g2 P .14. For reasons of clarity, we did not include valence as a within-subject factor in the subsequent statistical analyses as there was neither a significant main effect nor a significant interaction with this factor. Moreover, our first
interest focused on the SRE in SCZ and HC and our second interest focused on the relationships between SRE and ToM performance in SCZ and HC.
3.2. Encoding phase
Table 3 shows the data for the encoding phase and the corresponding statistics. We performed an ANCOVA on response
time. Response time analysis showed a significant main effect of group with patients taking longer to answer than controls
and no significant main effect of encoding condition and no interaction. ANCOVAs on the number of correct responses in the
alphabetical condition, the number of correct responses in the social desirability condition, the number of self-attributed
adjectives in the semantic self-referential condition and the number of memories recalled in the episodic self-referential
condition did not yield a significant group effect.
3.3. Recognition phase
Table 4 and Fig. 2 show the data for the recognition phase and the statistics. The repeated measures analysis of the number of correct recognitions revealed a main significant group effect. Overall, patients had a poorer recognition performance
than controls. The main effect of encoding condition and the group by condition interaction were not significant.
For the number of R responses, there was a significant main effect of group and a significant group by condition interaction. Overall, patients gave significantly fewer R responses than controls. Post hoc analysis showed that patients gave significantly fewer R responses than controls in the social desirability condition, in the semantic and in the episodic self-referential
conditions (ps < 0.05) but no difference was observed in the alphabetical condition (p = 0.21). Controls showed significantly
fewer R responses in the alphabetical condition than in the other conditions (ps < 0.001) and more R responses in the semantic self-referential condition than in the social desirability condition (p = 0.02). Controls also gave significantly more R
responses in the semantic self-referential condition than in the episodic self-referential condition (p = 0.006). In patients,
there were no significant differences in the number of R responses between conditions.
Regarding the K responses associated with correct recognition, there was no significant main effect of group and encoding
condition and no significant interaction. Regarding the number of G responses, there was only a significant effect of group.
Globally, patients gave significantly more G responses than controls whatever the condition.
These results indicated that overall patients with SCZ showed no SRE regardless of the type of R/K/G responses, whereas
analysis of the number of R responses by controls evidenced a significant SRRE in the semantic self-referential condition.
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L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
Table 3
Mean (and standard deviation) results per group on encoding phase.
Experimental conditions
ANCOVAs
Alphabetical condition
(1)
Social desirability
condition (2)
Semantic selfreference condition
(3)
Episodic selfreference condition
(4)
Group
effect
Encoding condition
effect
Interaction
Response time (ms)
HC
SCZ
1057
1634
(908)
(1189)
HC
935
(1010)
HC
750
(524)
HC
941
(625)
F(1, 33)
4.36⁄
g2 = 0.12
F(3, 99)
0.29
g2 < 0.01
F(3, 99)
2.27
g2 = 0.06
Number of correct
responses
11.10
10.33
(1.45)
(2.55)
Number of correct
responses
10.24
8.60
(2.36)
(2.53)
<0.21
–
–
SCZ
1605
(1635)
SCZ
1932
(1905)
Number of selfattributed adjectives
6.00
5.60
(1.95)
(2.06)
SCZ
2756
(3157)
Number of memories
recalled
7.48
7.27
(3.19)
(2.60)
g2 < 0.07
Table 4
Mean (and standard deviation) results per group on recognition phase.
Score
Experimental conditions
Alphabetical
condition (1)
ANCOVAs
Social
desirability
condition (2)
Semantic selfreference
condition (3)
Episodic selfreference
condition (4)
Group
effect
Encoding
condition
effect
Interaction
HC
SCZ
HC
SCZ
HC
SCZ
HC
SCZ
F(1, 33)
F(3, 99)
F(3, 99)
Number of correct
recognitions (max = 6)
2.52
(1.4)
2.07
(1.94)
4.43
(1.08)
4.07
(1.28)
5.61
(0.67)
4
(1.81)
5 (1.1)
4.4
(1.55)
13.76⁄⁄⁄a
0.22
1.47
1.04
(1.07)
0.47
(1.06)
2.91
(1.55)
1
(1.51)
3.71
(1.71)
0.4
(0.63)
2.76
(1.37)
0.87
(1.41)
g2 = 0.29
33.29⁄⁄⁄b
g2 < 0.01
Number of R responses
(max = 6)
g2 = 0.04
7.62⁄⁄⁄c
0.48
(0.6)
0.73
(1.39)
0.76
(0.83)
1.8
(1.47)
0.91
(1)
2.27
(1.58)
1.48
(1.12)
2.13
(1.55)
g2 = 0.50
1.26
g2 = 0.01
Number of K responses
(max = 6)
0.76
(1)
0.80
(1.15)
0.67
(0.97)
1.27
(1.28)
0.76
(1.09)
1.33
(1.18)
0.57
(0.87)
1.4
(1.5)
g2 = 0.04
9.66⁄⁄d
g2 = 0.02
Number of G responses
(max = 6)
1.5
g2 = 0.07
2.13
g2 = 0.23
g2 = 0.04
g2 = 0.06
0.5
0.69
g2 = 0.19
2.43
p < 0.001, p < 0.01, p < 0.05 – Note size effect (g ) is low if less than 0.04 and strong if higher than 0.16.
ANCOVAs:
Post hoc LSD tests pairwise comparisons on group effect: a,bHC > SCZ, dSCZ > HC.
Post hoc LSD tests pairwise comparisons on group encoding condition effect:
c
In HC: 1 < 2, 3, 4⁄⁄⁄, 2 < 3⁄, 3 > 4⁄⁄; Between HC and SCZ: HC(2, 3, 4) > SCZ(1, 2, 3, 4)⁄⁄⁄.
⁄⁄⁄
⁄⁄
⁄
2
3.4. Subjective self-concept assessment
We performed ANCOVAs with group as a between-subject factor to compare patients and controls on the positivity score
(Table 2 shows the data and statistics). There was a significant main effect of group on the valence score, the patients having
a less positive self-concept than controls.
3.5. ToM performances
We performed ANCOVAs with group as a between-subject factor to compare patients and controls on the ToM performances collected (Table 2 shows the data and statistics). These analyses did not reveal any group effect in the attribution
intention task but there was a significant effect of group in the eyes test score on the global score (p = 0.02) with lower performances for patients than controls.
3.6. Exploratory correlations
As we found a SRRE only in the semantic self-referential condition, we calculated a SRRE index by subtracting the number
of R responses in the social desirability condition from the number of R responses in the semantic self-reference condition.
We then computed correlations between the z scores of this index, ToM performances, subjective self-concept assessment
and executive functioning for each group separately. The results of these correlations are shown in Table 5.
We first focused on the relationship between the SRE and ToM in controls and patients: although no significant correlation appeared in controls, in patients, the SRRE index was positively correlated with the affective ToM performance. We then
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L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
Fig. 2. Mean (and standard deviation) results per group on recognition phase.
explored whether the executive functions and subjective self-concept valence were linked to ToM and SRRE. Regarding the
executive functions, correlations demonstrated a positive correlation with cognitive ToM performance in controls and a positive one with global ToM performance in patients. Regarding the valence (positivity) score, it correlated positively with the
SRRE index in controls and negatively with executive functions in patients. Fig. 3 gives a summary of these results.
4. Discussion
In this study, we used an original self-reference memory task in order to first investigate further the lack of SRE in SCZ and
secondarily to see how SRE and ToM skills might be related in healthy adults and SCZ patients. The main findings in healthy
controls indicated no SRE on recognition but a SRRE only in the semantic condition. Unlike healthy adults, patients did not
exhibit a semantic SRRE. In patients only, this semantic SRRE index was positively related to affective ToM. We will discuss
these new findings together with executive performance and subjective self-concept assessment in the light of the literature
in both groups.
4.1. The semantic self-reference recollection effect in healthy adults
As we hypothesized, healthy adults demonstrated a SRRE (Self-Reference Recollection Effect, i.e. the increased probability
of recollective experience or R responses for material encoded in the self-reference condition in comparison with the semantic condition), but contrary to our assumptions, no SRE (Self-Reference Effect, i.e. the self-referent condition improves recall
compared to the semantic condition). The findings suggest that self-reference is particularly effective in improving the quality of memories through a better sense of remembering (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995). Interestingly, SRRE was observed in
semantic self-reference, but not in episodic self-reference. This appears to contradict the findings of Klein et al. (1989)
who showed that self-descriptive and autobiographical self-reference tasks, targeting semantic and episodic self-memory
representations respectively (like our semantic and episodic self-reference conditions), are two tasks that support selfreferential memory processing. The most likely explanation is that the cognitive cost of searching for autobiographical material is greater in the episodic self-reference condition than in the other self-referential condition. Therefore, access to autobiographical memories might not have been fully achieved by participants. The analysis of reaction time in the encoding
phase supports this hypothesis, demonstrating no significant difference between self-conditions whereas Klein et al.
(1989) reported that autobiographical self-reference encoding took longer than semantic self-reference encoding (i.e.,
Healthy controls
Semantic SRRE
Cognitive ToM
Affective ToM
Global ToM score
Self-concept positivity
Semantic SRRE
Cognitive ToM
Affective ToM
Global ToM score
Self-concept positivity
Executive functioning
–
r = 0.20, p = 0.43
–
r=
r=
–
r = 0.23, p = 0.36
r = 0.58, p = 0.01
r = 0.58, p = 0.01
–
r = 0.49, p = 0.02
r = 0.16, p = 0.53
r = 0.21, p = 0.41
r = 0.31, p = 0.21
–
r = 0.23, p = 0.31
r = 0.68, p = 0.002
r = 0.34, p = 0.17
r = 0.30, p = 0.23
r = 0.01, p = 0.96
0.46, p = 0.05
0.32, p = 0.20
SCZ patients
Semantic SRRE
Cognitive ToM
Affective ToM
Global ToM score
Self-concept positivity
Semantic SRRE
Cognitive ToM
Affective ToM
Global ToM score
Self-concept positivity
Executive functioning
–
r=
–
r = 0.52, p = 0.045
r = 0.27, p = 0.33
–
r = 0.25, p = 0.38
r = 0.80, p < 0.01
r = 0.80, p < 0.01
–
r=
r=
r=
r=
–
r = 0.22, p = 0.44
r = 0.47, p = 0.08
r = 0.37, p = 0.18
r = 0.53, p = 0.04
r = 0.56, p = 0.03
0.13, p = 0.64
0.21, p = 0.44
0.44, p = 0.11
0.24, p = 0.38
0.43, p = 0.11
L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
Table 5
Correlation matrix between the z scores of the semantic SRRE index, ToM performances, subjective self-concept assessment (valence) and executive functioning for each group separately.
59
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L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
Fig. 3. Summary of the exploratory correlations performed in controls and patients SCZ. SRRE: Self-Reference Recollection Effect; ToM: Theory of Mind; EF:
Executive Functioning – positive correlations are illustrated in red and negative correlations in blue. (For interpretation of the references to color in this
figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
autobiographical memory versus self-description). This limitation of the episodic self-reference condition could be compensated in future research by asking participants a question during encoding about the autobiographical memory recollected in
order to encourage complete retrieval of the autobiographical memory generating the SRE.
4.2. Absence of relationship between semantic SRRE and ToM in healthy adults
Contrary to our hypothesis, there were no correlations between the SRRE and ToM. However, executive performance positively correlated with cognitive ToM performance as expected given the fact that the executive functions are a prerequisite
for this component (Duval et al., 2011). Moreover, in accordance with the literature suggesting that the extensive knowledge
that we have about ourselves favors a more elaborative encoding of self-referenced information (Harvey et al., 2011), the
magnitude of the SRE relied on the quality of the self-concept, i.e., positive attitudes and judgments toward ourselves.
Indeed, the higher the positivity of the self-concept, the better the semantic SRRE index. This can be related to the results
of Campbell (1990) showing that self-concepts of high-self-esteem people are characterized by a greater definite selfconcept. Moreover, the quality of mental self-representation can directly determine the efficiency of SRE (D’Argembeau,
Comblain, & Van der Linden, 2005).
4.3. No self-reference effect in patients suffering from schizophrenia
As we hypothesized, patients with SCZ showed no mnemonic benefit from the self-referential conditions. Indeed, unlike
controls, patients have no SRRE when examining R responses associated with correct recognitions in the semantic selfreference condition. The present result is consistent with the current literature that has already highlighted the lack of a
SRE in patients with SCZ (Bedford & David, 2014; Harvey et al., 2011; Pauly et al., 2011). However, to our knowledge, it is
the first time that the absence of SRE has been observed in SCZ by studying the number of correct recognitions associated
with either autonoetic consciousness or noetic consciousness, which reinforces the idea of a complete disruption of selfreferential processing in SCZ. Overall, whatever the condition, patients’ recognition performances were lower than those
of controls, which is consistent with the genuine impairment of new episodic memory encoding reported in the literature
in SCZ (Bilder et al., 2000; Danion, Huron, Vidailhet, & Berna, 2007; Grillon, Krebs, Gourevitch, Giersch, & Huron, 2010). Nevertheless, recognition was significantly poorer for the alphabetical condition in comparison with other conditions, which
means that patients did benefit from depth of processing as has already been highlighted in the literature in SCZ patients
(Harvey et al., 2011). Regarding the responses associated with correct recognition specifying the quality of the recall, as
already evidenced by Danion et al. (2005), the number of R responses was lower in patients while the number of G responses
was higher compared to healthy controls, thus highlighting the disruption of their recollective experience and low levels of
confidence in the accuracy of their memory. By contrast, the analysis of K responses did not highlight a significant group
effect which signals a preserved feeling of knowing in SCZ (Danion et al., 2005). Nevertheless, this preservation was not compensatory enough to preserve SRE in patients based on familiarity. Overall, the present findings extend previous studies by
showing that SCZ patients do not benefit from the SRRE in a self-descriptive encoding condition.
4.4. The relationship between SRRE and ToM skills in schizophrenia
Consistent with our hypothesis of a link between SRE and ToM in SCZ, and targeting particularly semantic SRRE and affective
ToM, patients had a positive and significant correlation between the SRRE index and affective ToM performance while controls
L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
61
exhibited none. Indeed, in patients, the better their semantic SRRE index was, the better their affective ToM skills. This supports
the hypothesis that patients may use different strategies from controls during self and other-reflection and that the alteration of
these inference strategies used might be responsible for reduced performance in both areas in SCZ. Unlike cognitive ToM, the
performance of the affective ToM (the Eyes Test) was impaired in patients. Although our cognitive ToM task (attribution of
intention task) may lack sensitivity, these results are consistent with the idea that the affective component is more impaired
than the cognitive component in SCZ (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2007). A dissociation between the cognitive and affective ToM components was highlighted in healthy participants through transcranial stimulation (Kalbe et al., 2010) and in studies of lesions
(Shamay-Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, & Perry, 2009), showing that a distinct neural network is critical for emotional ToM and for
cognitive ToM (i.e., the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule for emotional ToM and the ventromedial prefrontal
cortex, temporoparietal junction, and the medial temporal lobe for cognitive ToM, Shamay-Tsoory, 2011). In the same line,
Coricelli (2005) highlighted that affective ToM relies on automatic and preconceptual processes while cognitive ToM relies
on voluntary and conceptual processes. Thus, the present findings suggest that patients with SCZ favor strategies during
self-reflection that seem to share the same processes as affective ToM, which is assumed to rely on automatic and preconceptual processes. To our knowledge, only one study tested simultaneously SRE and ToM performances and it did so among
higher functioning children with autism and matched healthy controls (Henderson et al., 2009). The authors used the Strange
Stories Task (Happé, 1994) and the children’s eyes test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Spong, Scahill, & Lawson, 2001) as cognitive and affective ToM tasks respectively. As in our study, the patients showed a strong positive correlation between memory
performance in the self-reference condition and eyes task performance whereas this correlation was not significant for the
healthy controls. No correlation was significant between memory performance in the self-reference condition and the strange
stories task performance for either group. The authors suggested that children with autism lack preferential processing of selfrelevant versus other types of semantic information, possibly because they assign less affective salience to self-referent information. These results are not directly comparable with ours but like SCZ patients, children or adults with autism do not benefit
from SRE (Toichi et al., 2002) and for both, the SRE seems to rely on the same processes used to achieve affective ToM tasks.
In the light of the literature that refers to several levels of relationship between representations of the self and the others,
this relationship between semantic SRE and affective ToM might concern low-level functions rather than high-level functions in SCZ patients. Indeed, according to the mirror neuron theory, the ability to understand others relies on implicit inference process performed during the simulation of others’ views via bodily resonance (Centelles et al., 2011). By contrast, other
theories consider that the relationship between self and others concerns high-level functions such as the fact that understanding another’s mental state relies on autobiographical memories in order to find a similar event which could help to disambiguate a social scenario (Adler, Nadler, Eviatar, & Shamay-Tsoory, 2010; Corcoran & Frith, 2003). Of course, other studies
are needed to confirm this result and the nature of the processes involved in both self and other reference that are altered in
SCZ.
In this regard, our results on correlations added interesting avenues on strategies used by the patients. On the one hand,
executive functioning did not seem to mediate the relationship between semantic SRE and affective ToM. Indeed, executive
performance did not correlate with SRE, but it correlated with overall ToM performance, suggesting that in patients, executive functions could be useful to perform ToM tasks regardless of their cognitive or affective nature. On the other hand, the
correlations did not reveal the expected link between quality of self-concept and magnitude of the SRE while controls
showed a positive link. In patients, the correlations highlighted an unexpected negative relationship between positivity of
self-concept and executive functioning. Consistent with the literature supporting a lesser quality of self-concept in SCZ
patients (Sass & Parnas, 2003), our analysis of subjective self-evaluation showed differences between groups, with patients
having a lower positivity of self-concept than healthy adults. This result implies that in SCZ, executive functions are directly
involved in the subjective quality of self-concept and is consistent with the idea that executive functions should allow the
construction of a more objective and therefore potentially less positive self-representation in patients. All in all, these findings further support the hypothesis that patients may use different strategies from controls during self and other-reflection.
Therefore, it is likely that remediation targeting SRE and ToM processes and their potentially underlying disturbed mechanisms would benefit patients with SCZ.
4.5. Limits
The present study adds some interesting new findings but future studies should continue to elucidate the mechanisms
underpinning self and other-reflection in healthy individuals and their dysfunction in SCZ. Indeed, further studies with larger, well matched samples and a more extensive self, ToM and executive functioning assessment battery will be necessary to
improve our understanding of the interlinks between SRE, ToM and executive functions. We do not consider that the absence
of a link between SRE and ToM is a conclusive finding in healthy adults. Nor is this study conclusive concerning the episodic
self-reference effect and future research should ask participants a question about the autobiographical memory recollected
during encoding in order to encourage complete retrieval of the autobiographical memory generating the episodic SRE.
4.6. Conclusion
This study has confirmed the absence of SRE resulting from a semantic self-referential encoding in SCZ but has extended
previous findings by revealing the absence of SRRE when studying the quality of correct recognitions based on recollection or
62
L. Compère et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 51–64
familiarity. Moreover, the SRRE resulting from semantic self-reference was significantly related to affective ToM performance in patients and positive sense of self in controls. These results support the idea that SCZ patients may use different
strategies from controls during self and other-reflection and that the alteration of these inference strategies might be responsible for reduced performance in both areas in SCZ. We propose that the residual relationship between representations of the
self and others in SCZ might concern low-level functions rather than high-level functions. This study could represent the first
step toward an experimental approach to the study of self/other processes as a field of research at the crossroads of executive
functioning, emotional valence, SRE and ToM. Future studies should elucidate the neural and cognitive underpinnings of dysfunction in SCZ and should address how such representation processes might be targeted in the context of remediation.
Role of the funding source
None.
Conflict of interest
The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the patients and controls who agreed to participate in this study, Alice Rampazzo for her role in
recruiting patients for the study, and Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet for English corrections to the manuscript.
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Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
The others: Universals and cultural specificities in the perception
of status and dominance from nonverbal behavior q
Gary Bente a,*, Haug Leuschner a, Ahmad Al Issa b, James J. Blascovich c
a
Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, Germany
Department of English, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
c
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online 13 July 2010
Keywords:
Culture
Status
Dominance
Evaluation
Nonverbal behavior
Computer-animation
a b s t r a c t
The current study analyzes trans-cultural universalities and specificities in the recognition
of status roles, dominance perception and social evaluation based on nonverbal cues. Using
a novel methodology, which allowed to mask clues to ethnicity and cultural background of
the agents, we compared impression of Germans, Americans and Arabs observing computer-animated interactions from the three countries. Only in the German stimulus sample
the status roles (employee vs. supervisor) could be recognized above chance level. However we found significant correlations in dominance perception across all countries. Significant correlations were only found for evaluation between German observers and observers
from the other two countries. Perceived dominance uniformly predicted the assignment of
status-roles in all cultures. Microanalysis of movement behavior further revealed predictive value of specific nonverbal cues for dominance ratings. Results support the hypothesis
of universalities in the processing of dominance cues and point to cultural specificities in
evaluative responses to nonverbal behavior.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Man is a ‘‘social animal” (Aronson, 1972) equipped with a unique capacity to process and to adapt to complex affordances
created by our social environment (Freeman, Rule, & Ambady, 2009). Culture has been identified as a core factor influencing
this capacity. With regard to social information processing it has been conceptualized as a human universal as well as a cause
of diversity (see Chiao & Ambady, 2007), either applying a general or a particular concept (Vogeley & Roepstorff, 2009). With
respect to the biological foundations of social cognition humans can be considered as equal and as distinct from all other
living beings. Given that evolution created the biological basis for symbolic interaction, mutual understanding, and social
organization, culture describes a general human achievement emerging from, and at the same time driving the particular
phylogeny of the human brain (Nettle, 2009; Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Culture
in this perspective is conceptualized as a general or universal characteristic of humans’ cognitive capacities enabling us
to construe a system of social structures, rules and rituals to cope with environmental and social challenges and to buffer
collective and individual needs and urges. Different cultures however seemingly have found their own way to adapt to these
life affordances, and furthermore also created different environments and communication systems to which homo-sapiens
had to adapt (Chiao & Ambady, 2007; Rohner, 1984). Viewed this way culture no longer comes as a universal but as a cause of
diversity, instantiated in self construal, cognitive styles, perceptual schemata and communication patterns which serve to
q
This article is part of a special issue of this journal on Self, Other and Memory.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: bente@uni-koeln.de (G. Bente).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.06.006
G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
763
assign meaning to the physical and social world (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003;
Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). Consequently the question has repeatedly been raised regarding to which degree
and under which conditions universals in social information processing override cultural specificities or, conversely, whether
different cultures imply distinct cognitive implementations, which influence the way we perceive ourselves and others
(Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Matsumoto, 2003, 2006; Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1988) and which might even affect the way
our brain works (Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008; Chiao et al., 2010; White, Lehman, & Cohen, 2006).
We consider expressions and perceptions of power and dominance as a paradigmatic case to approach this question. Social hierarchies are ubiquitous in human societies and successful navigation of the social world implies particular skills to
produce and process social cues which reflect, construct or consolidate the vertical dimension of social systems. There is ample evidence that dominance and power are rarely communicated explicitly but mainly expressed through subtle nonverbal
cues (Aguinis, Simonsen, & Pierce, 1998; Argyle, Salter, Nicholson, Williams, & Burgess, 1970; Burgoon, 1994; Carli, Martin,
Leatham, Lyons, & Tse, 1993; Dovidio & Ellyson, 1982; Dovidio, Ellyson, Keating, Heltman, & Brown, 1988; Edinger & Patterson, 1983; Lee, Matsumoto, Kobayashi, Krupp, & Maniatis, 1992; Mehrabian, 1969, 1970; Mignault & Chaudhuri, 2003;
Remland, 1982). It could be shown that culture is influential in molding these nonverbal expressions as well as their perception and cognitive processing (Kowner & Wiseman, 2003; Matsumoto, 2006; Sussman & Rosenfeld, 1982). What poses a particular problem for our understanding of the subtle dynamics of nonverbal behavior is the fact that it is largely produced and
processed automatically and without conscious awareness (see Burgoon, Berger, & Waldron, 2000; Choi, Gray, & Ambady,
2005; Newman & Uleman, 1989; Uleman & Bargh, 1989). Andersen (1999) commented on the potential implications for
cross-cultural communication: ‘‘Because we are usually not aware of our own nonverbal behavior, it becomes extremely difficult to identify and master the nonverbal behavior of another culture” (p. 258). Against this background the current study
aimed to identify universals and cultural specificities in the perception of nonverbal behavior and to answer the question
whether people from different cultures are equally able to identify dominance and underlying status roles in nonverbal
interactions shown in their own or in foreign cultures.
2. Background
Cultures have been shown to differ with regard to the value they assign to the vertical dimension of social relations
(Hofstede, 1980; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998), either accepting that inequalities in power and status are natural or existential
or seeing them as man-made and largely artificial (see Naylor, 2009). Against this background it doesn’t come as a surprise
that cultures are regarded as a major source of diversity in the manifestation of power and consequently as a potential cause
of misunderstanding when it comes to the perception and interpretation of dominance cues in intercultural communication
(Aguinis et al., 1998; Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988; Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey, & Nishida, 1996).
However, data on cultural diversity in this regard is elusive baring some evidence that nonverbal expressions of dominance, although based on culture-specific attitudes towards status and power, are recognized and processed as trans-cultural universals (Burgoon, Buller, & Woodall, 1996; Guerrero & Floyd, 2005; Keating, 1985; Kowner & Wiseman, 2003). A
clarification of the conflating concepts involved in this realm might be helpful to approach the partly contradictory results
(see Burgoon, Johnson, & Koch, 1998). According to Dunbar and Burgoon (2005) the terms status, power and dominance
should be treated as interrelated but nevertheless ‘‘separate constructs” (p. 208). With regard to dyadic power theory (Dunbar, 2004; Rollins & Bahr, 1976) power can be conceptualized as a latent variable (Komter, 1989), i.e. having the potential to
influence others, which can rely on different power bases (French & Raven, 1959), such as explicit rules (legitimate power),
means control (coercive and reward power), quality of relation (referent power) or skills and knowledge (expert power). Status thus can be understood as a structural basis of (legitimate) power, derived from asymmetric role assignments in social
systems (superior vs. subordinate). In contrast, dominance describes an overt phenomenon which is manifest in the interaction patterns, i.e., a set of ‘‘. . .expressive, relationally based communicative acts by which power is exerted and influence
achieved” (Dunbar & Burgoon, 2005, p. 209; see also Burgoon & Dunbar, 2000; Burgoon et al., 1998).
According to Kowner and Wiseman (2003) cultural values influence different instantiations of status and dominance on
different levels: ‘‘Culture, we argue, determines the values attached to status, but it also affects the magnitude at which a
person’s status is manifested through behavior in a given society” (p. 206). In a cross-cultural business negotiation, for example, cultural display rules might reveal different expressions of status in different groups; nevertheless observers could agree
upon who is dominant and who is submissive. Moreover, inferences about underlying status relations could converge independently from what a particular culture would consider appropriate or successful in asymmetric interactions. Thus we can
assume different layers of dominance perception: a descriptive layer, potentially relying on universal perceptual mechanisms, and an evaluative layer relying on culture-specific comparisons to the self and experiences with other members of
the in-group. Kowner and Wiseman (2003) found that for the US and Japan although the descriptions of typical status-related behavior were ‘‘far from identical” (p. 207), the named behaviors were unanimously interpreted as either dominant
or submissive across the cultures. These results support the hypothesis of culture-specific expressions of status and power
(see also Triandis & Gelfand, 1998; Triandis & Suh, 2002), and also show that status-relevant cues can be identified by members of other cultures, even though not part of their own repertoire. In a recent brain imaging study Freeman, Rule, Adams,
and Ambady (2009) provided additional evidence that members of different cultures (in this case Americans and Japanese)
are equally able to differentiate dominant and submissive postures, displayed on digitally edited photographs (contour
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G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
images), but that both groups show distinct behavioral as well as neural responses to both classes of stimuli, which indicated
different evaluative processes. Following different approaches both studies thus point to universals in the description and
identification of dominance cues across cultures, but also suggest specificities in the evaluative component of person perception. Moreover as shown by Matsumoto and Kudoh (1987) different cultures also might give different priority to both
impression dimensions when judging other people. While judgments of Japanese observing specific body postures were
mainly concerned with status and power issues Americans focused on evaluative aspects (like or dislike). It seems promising
against this background to more systematically differentiate dominance perception respectively the recognition of status
roles from evaluative responses reflecting the perceived appropriateness and likability of the observed behavior.
Beyond the unclear distinction between descriptive and evaluative aspects in impression formation the studies of Kowner
and Wiseman (2003), Freeman, Rule, and Ambady (2009) and Freeman, Rule, Adams, et al. (2009) also bare a common methodological problem. They are based on preselected, prototypical dominance cues and widely neglect the subtle dynamics and
inter-individual variance of nonverbal behavior, which to some degree limits ecological validity of the studies. In principle
the use of video recordings of social interactions could help to solve this problem. However video samples carry category
relevant information (e.g., clues to ethnicity and nationality) attached to the outward appearance of the actors (e.g. skin color, facial features, clothing) and thus are likely to activate particular stereotypes (see Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Chen &
Bargh, 1997) which could contaminate the effects of nonverbal cues. To escape from this dilemma we have suggested to employ computer-animations of neutral artificial characters instead of videos (Bente, 1989; Bente, Feist, & Elder, 1996). As revealed through earlier studies, character animations are able to accurately reproduce video recorded nonverbal behavior in
its spatial details and subtle dynamics (Bente, Krämer, & Petersen, 2002; Bente, Krämer, Petersen, & de Ruiter, 2001; Bente,
Petersen, Krämer, & de Ruiter, 2001) and to induce social impressions comparable to the original video sequences they are
based on (Bente, Krämer, et al., 2001). This methodology has recently been introduced in cross-cultural research (Bente,
Senokozlieva, Pennig, Al-Issa, & Fischer, 2008) and has been used in the current study to identify universalities and cultural
specificities in the recognition of status roles, in the perception of dominance and in social evaluation based on nonverbal
behavior. In particular we asked whether status-roles assigned to interlocutors can be identified independently from the
country of origin of actors and observers or whether there is an in-group advantage for the recognition of power status comparable to the one described for the recognition of emotions from facial expressions (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a, 2002b;
Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003; Matsumoto, 2002; Matsumoto, Olide, & Willingham, 2009). Further we aimed to explore the
influence of culture on the production and perception of social dominance cues and liking and to determine how these
two impression dimensions covary within and across cultures. The last step of our analyses should answer the question
how selected nonverbal cues influence the perceptions of dominance and social evaluation and how perceived dominance
leads to status-role ascriptions in different cultures.
3. Method
3.1. Selection of cultures
The selection of cultures for the current study was guided by theoretical considerations and previous data on cultural differences as well as considerations of societal relevance. We selected three cultures described as either similar or dissimilar
with regard to three basic cultural value dimensions ‘‘Power Distance (PDI)”, ‘‘Individualism/Collectivism (IDV)” and ‘‘Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI) (see Hofstede, 1980, 2003; Triandis, 1995; Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, & Lucca, 1998). With
regard to PDI Germany and the USA are described to be more similar and both different from UAE (PDI-scores: USA = 40;
GER = 35; UAE = 80), Germany is placed on the IDV-rankings between the two other countries (IDV-scores: USA = 91;
GER = 67; UAE = 38) and is placed on the UAI-ranking closer to the UAE (UAI-scores: USA = 46; GER = 65; UAE = 68) (see
Clearly Cultural, 2009). As all three dimensions have to be considered as influential with regard to behavioral manifestations
of power and dominance in particular in interpersonal conflict situations (Ting-Toomey & Oetzel, 2001, 2002) we overall assumed USA and UAE would provide the most different cultural background and Germany would range somewhere in-between the two.
3.2. Stimulus material
The stimulus material consisted of 30 one-minute dyadic interaction sequences (10 from each country: Germany, USA
and UAE). Voluntary male student participants were recruited for role play interactions at the University of Cologne
(Germany), the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), and the American University of Sharjah (UAE). Only applicants
who were born and grew up in the respective country were included in the sample. The participants were informed that they
could stop participation at any time and could ask for deletion and non-use of the video recordings. Furthermore they were
informed that the video recordings would not be used in the subsequent perception study, but instead the study would utilize reconstructed computer animations, thus guaranteeing anonymity. Role players were instructed to solve a conflict in a
managerial interaction either by taking the role of the employee or the supervisor. Participants were randomly assigned to
the dyads as well as to the different roles (employee vs. supervisor). The task implied an interaction between a supervisor
and an important, but recently unreliable employee. To increase self involvement the participants were told that this task is
G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
765
Fig. 1. Snapshots from the original videos and corresponding screenshots from computer-animations (from: Bente et al., 2008).
often utilized as a diagnostic tool with respect to the capability for professional conflict resolution. During debriefing the
participants were asked whether they encountered any problems in identifying with the assigned role and in performing
the task, which was not the case.
Dyadic interactions were video recorded at the three institutions using a standardized central camera perspective. Oneminute sequences were selected from each of the recordings beginning after the actors had taken their places and completed
greetings. Movement behavior was transcribed from these video sequences using a specially developed computer-assisted
coding software as described in Bente et al. (2008). Computer animations of the dyadic interactions were rendered from
these protocols with 25 frames per second using culture fair computer characters (avatars) appearing as wooden manikins.
Fig. 1 shows three screen capture images of the original videos and the corresponding frames from the computer animation
sequences. The resulting computer animation sequences accurately featured all details and dynamics of movement behavior
visible in the video recordings, excluding facial activity.
3.3. Design of the perception study
The computer animated stimuli were shown to observers in Germany, the USA and the UAE in a 3 3 2 2 experimental design, including one within-subject factor: stimulus origin (Germany, USA and UAE) and three between-subjects factors:
observer nationality (Germany, USA and UAE), stereotype activation (with and without previous information about the origin
of the stimuli) and role of the stimulus person (employee vs. supervisor). Pretests in Germany revealed that a maximum of 15
clips could be shown to each observer. Thus we decided to split the 3 10 stimulus sequences into two batches, to be shown
to two independent observer groups in each country (five clips for each stimulus country). While this worked out for the
observer samples in Germany and the USA the batch size for the UAE observers had to be cut down to 10 interaction sequences per observer instead of 15 after a first test, due to organizational time constraints (lecture pauses). Thus the first
stimulus batch in the UAE contained four interactions from Germany, three interactions from the US and four interactions
from the UAE and the second batch contained three interactions from Germany, three interactions from the US and four
interactions from the UAE.
3.4. Participants
Overall a total of 570 (USA: 187; GER: 189; UAE: 194) student participants took part in the observation study. The average
age of the participants was 21.4 years, SD = 3.93 (USA: 20.1, SD = 2.85; GER: 23.8, SD = 5.15; UAE: 20.4, SD = 1.88). The sample
consisted of 283 male and 287 female participants (USA: 94/93; GER: 91/98; UAE: 98/96), who were randomly assigned to the
experimental conditions (stereotype activation: information vs. no information about the nationality of the stimulus dyads) in
each country. In each condition, approximately half of the subjects were instructed to evaluate the person in the animation
video sitting on the left side (employee) respectively on the right side (supervisor) of the screen from their point of view.
Groups were balanced for gender. Cell frequencies combined for male and female observers varied between 45 and 50.
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G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
3.5. Procedure
Three rotations were applied to stimulus presentations in each experimental condition to avoid serial effects. Participants
completed the experiment in groups of up to 16 participants (maximum number for one stimulus rotation). For each condition (with and without pre-information about the stimuli’s country of origin) and for each of the three clip orders, participants took part in separate sessions. Before viewing the stimulus material the participants filled out a socio-demographic
questionnaire. The participants were informed that the research objective was to learn more about the effects of nonverbal
behavior on impression formation. Instructions were read to the participants in a standardized form indicating which person
on the screen to focus and how to fill out the questionnaires. To analyze the effects of stereotype activation half of the subjects were informed about the country of origin of the dyads prior to each animation sequence (e.g., ‘‘the next dyad is coming
from the US”). After the first sequence participants were asked about difficulties following the instruction and in the few
cases were questions were raised (two groups in UAE) the instruction was repeated and if necessary explained in more detail. The animation clips (AVI-files) were then successively displayed via LCD wall projection. Following each animation sequence, the participants were prompted to fill out the questionnaire containing impression ratings (21 items), and a question
about the assumed role of the interlocutors. After completion of the questionnaire, the next sequence was played. This procedure was repeated until all animations had been presented. The participants were then debriefed and received an incentive of 15 Euro (Germany), the corresponding sum in Dollars (USA) or a lunch voucher of the same value (UAE).
3.6. Dependent variables
Status-role recognition was assessed by a single forced choice item asking which role combination was presented in the
animation sequence viewed from the perspective of the target person (either right or left person on screen), thus achieving
status-role ascriptions for both actors from all participants. Possible selections were: supervisor/employee, employee/supervisor, employee/employee, supervisor/supervisor.
Seven-point bipolar adjective pairs were used to assess the observers’ impressions formed on the basis of the computeranimated nonverbal interactions. Overall 21 items were compiled covering basic dimensions of person perception as described in the literature (Andersen & Andersen, 2005; Andersen, Andersen, & Jensen, 1979; Dunbar & Burgoon, 2005; Kudoh
& Matsumoto, 1985; Matsumoto & Kudoh, 1987; McCroskey & Jenson, 1975; Mehrabian, 1970; Osgood, 1966): In particular
the list contained four items for Dominance (dominant–submissive, weak–strong, respectful–disrespectful and confident–
unconfident) and four items for Evaluation (unfriendly–friendly, believable–unbelievable, likable–dislikeable and
cold–warm-hearted). Further four items for Competence (incompetent–competent, intelligent–unintelligent, uninformed–
informed and expert–inexpert) were selected from McCroskey and Jenson’s (1975) Source Credibility Scale (four items with
highest loadings >.71) assuming particular correlations with the Dominance items. Beyond these items relevant to the current research questions the list further contained four items for Activity (rigid–flexible, dynamic–static, passive–active and
lively–still), four items for Composure (anxious–calm, tense–relaxed, poised–nervous and composed–excitable) and one item
for Masculinity (masculine–feminine; see Hofstede, 1980). The latter dimensions were included in exploratory factor analysis
to ensure differential construct validity of the target dimensions but not treated as dependent variables in further analysis at
this stage.
To ascertain semantic equivalence of the items across cultures, all adjectives originally formulated in English were translated into German and Arabic by bilingual translators, and were then translated back to English by another translator. In the
very few cases of resulting discrepancy both translators had to agree upon the most appropriate translation.
4. Results
4.1. Recognition of status roles
First data inspection indicated a strong tendency for all observers to categorize the observed posers as employees. To correct for this response bias we calculated the ‘‘unbiased hit rate” (Wagner, 1993, 1997), which relates hit rates to false alarms
(see also Elfenbein, Mandal, Ambady, Harizuka, & Kumar, 2002). So-called confusion matrices, including unbiased hit rates as
well as unbiased chance values were calculated for each stimulus person.
To test unbiased hit rates against chance value separate t-tests were conducted for each stimulus country separately. Significant effects above chance level were only found for German posers (employees: Mu = .357, SDu = .188; Mc = .278,
SDc = .071), t(53) = 3.565, p = .000, d = .556; supervisors: Mu = .299, SDu = .198; Mc = .215, SDc = .072), t(53) = 3.587, p = .000,
d = .564. No significant hit rates above chance level were found for USA and UAE posers, indicating that only in the German
dyads the assigned status roles were recognizable from nonverbal behavior.
To examine potential in-group advantage in status-role recognition we further conducted six separate ANOVAS for each
combination of country of stimulus (USA, GER, and UAE) and role (supervisor and employee) with N = 60 stimuli and unbiased
hit rate as dependent variables. No significant results were found to support the hypothesis of an in-group advantage in status-role recognition. Observers were no better in recognizing the status roles in the interactions from their own culture than
from the other countries.
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G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
Table 1
Pearson-correlation coefficients for status-role ascriptions.
Ascribed role
Country of observers
Employee
USA
GER
Supervisor
USA
GER
*
**
GER
UAE
r
p
N
r
p
N
.759**
.000
60
.699**
.000
40
.679**
.000
40
r
p
N
r
p
N
.736**
.000
60
.702**
.000
40
.653**
.000
40
Significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).
Significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
Two possible reasons might account for the low hit rates in particular for the US and the UAE sample. Either no meaningful status cues appeared in the interactions thus leaving the status-role recognition open for random guesses, or nonverbal status cues did not systematically covary with the roles as expected, i.e. there were employees showing high status
behavior and bosses behaving in a low status manner. If the latter explication holds true we should be able to find high correlations in status role ascription across stimuli independently from the actual role assigned to the actors. This was in fact
the case. Table 1 depicts the results of the corresponding analysis showing highly significant correlations across all countries
in the ascription of both status roles. This result not only suggests a systematic influence of nonverbal behavior on status role
ascription but also points to trans-cultural universals in the perception of the status-relevant cues.
4.2. Dimensions of impression formation
As a basis for the comparative analysis of the impression ratings construct validity of the target dimensions Dominance
and Evaluation as well as measurement invariance across cultures for these latent dimensions had to be established (Meredith, 1993; Wu, Li, & Zumbo, 2007). To determine the factor structure of the impression ratings we first analyzed the complete item set with Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Reliability Analysis (RA). Based on these results we set up a factor
model according to our hypothetical model and used Multiple Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MG-CFA) to refine the
factor model and examine the equivalence of measurement across all three countries. Rational and detailed results of
EFA, RA and MG-CFA are provided as Complementary Material.1
EFA and RA lead to a reduced set of seven items revealing a two factor solution representing the dimensions Dominance
(confident–unconfident, weak–strong, dominant–submissive, expert–inexpert) and Evaluation (unfriendly–friendly, likable–
dislikeable, respectful–disrespectful). A few deviations from the item groupings found in the literature occurred in EFA. The
item ‘‘expert–inexpert”, expected to load on an independent Competence factor loaded highly on the Dominance dimension.
Further the item ‘‘respectful–disrespectful”, expected to load on the Dominance dimension showed high loadings on the Evaluation dimension (see Complementary Material).
The model test for the two latent judgment dimensions Dominance and Evaluation by means of MG-CFA revealed strict
factorial invariance across the countries (USA vs. GER vs. UAE) in all relevant fit criteria (SRMR = .039, RMSEA = .063,
CFI = .903, see Complementary Material) and therefore the resulting factor scores could be used for ANOVA group comparisons (Meredith, 1993; Vandenberg & Lance, 2000; Wu et al., 2007). Factor score weights from the multiple-group model
were then used to calculate individual values for the latent factors Dominance and Evaluation. The Pearson-correlation coefficient between the resulting scores was r = .012, p = .283 suggesting two largely independent latent impression
dimensions.
4.3. Influence of independent variables on impression formation
The influence of the independent variables on Dominance and Evaluation was analyzed by four-way (3 3 2 2) repeated measure ANOVA with country of stimulus CS: (USA, GER or UAE) as within-subjects factor and country of observer
(CO: USA, GER or UAE), role (Ro: supervisor or employee) and advance information about the dyad’s country of origin (AI:
information available or not available) as the between-subjects factors with N = 570 participants. In addition, pair wise comparisons with Bonferroni adjustments were conducted to determine simple main effects.
1
Complementary Material can be downloaded from the journal’s website.
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G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
Table 2
Means and standard deviations of dominance and evaluation referred to country of stimulus and role.
Role
Country of stimulus
USA
GER
UAE
Total
M
SD
3.946
.802
3.821
.743
4.094
.646
3.953
.731
Supervisor
M
SD
3.939
.771
4.185
.675
4.186
.751
4.103
.732
Total
M
SD
3.942
.786
4.000
.733
4.139
.701
4.027
.740
M
SD
3.669
.608
3.688
.565
3.762
.551
3.707
.575
Supervisor
M
SD
3.573
.612
3.726
.539
3.795
.607
3.698
.586
Total
M
SD
3.622
.611
3.707
.552
3.778
.579
3.702
.581
Dominance
Employee
Evaluation
Employee
Table 3
ANOVA tables of four-way repeated measures ANOVA for dominance and evaluation with the factors country of stimulus. Country of observer, role, and advance
information.
Source of variance
SS
df
MS
F
p
g2
Dominance: within-subjects effects
Country of stimulus (CS)
CS CO
CS Role
CS Info
CS CO Role
CS CO Info
CS Role Info
CS CO Role Info
Error(CS)
11.760
2.104
10.403
.199
10.616
2.383
.476
1.906
595.394
1.924
3.848
1.924
1.924
3.848
3.848
1.924
3.848
1071.534
6.113
.547
5.408
.103
2.759
.619
.248
.495
.556
11.002
.984
9.732
.186
4.966
1.115
.446
.891
.000
.413
.000
.822
.001
.347
.633
.465
0.012
0.002
0.011
0.000
0.011
0.003
0.001
0.002
Dominance: between-subjects effects
Country of observer (CO)
Role
Info
CO Role
CO Info
Role Info
CO Role Info
Error
.547
9.494
.202
.535
1.072
.000
.673
299.108
2
1
1
2
2
1
2
557
.274
9.494
.202
.267
.536
.000
.337
.537
.509
17.680
.377
.498
.998
.001
.627
.601
.000
.540
.608
.369
.979
.535
0.001
0.010
0.000
0.001
0.001
0.000
0.001
Evaluation: within-subjects effects
Country of stimulus (CS)
CS CO
CS Role
CS Info
CS CO Role
CS CO Info
CS Role Info
CS CO Role Info
Error(CS)
7.102
3.970
1.720
.003
1.245
2.627
.156
1.096
261.480
2
4
2
2
4
4
2
4
1114
3.551
.993
.860
.001
.311
.657
.078
.274
.235
15.128
4.229
3.663
.006
1.326
2.798
.333
1.168
.000
.002
.026
.994
.258
.025
.717
.323
0.012
0.007
0.003
0.000
0.002
0.005
0.000
0.002
Evaluation: between-subjects effects
Country of observer (CO)
Role
Info
CO Role
CO Info
Role Info
CO Role Info
Error
34.468
.030
.229
.154
.184
2.229
.381
266.004
2
1
1
2
2
1
2
557
17.234
.030
.229
.077
.092
2.229
.191
.478
36.088
.064
.479
.161
.193
4.668
.399
.000
.801
.489
.851
.824
.031
.671
0.059
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.004
0.001
Note: The ANOVA for dominance is greenhouse-Geisser corrected; effect size is calculated by g2 = SSbetween/SStotal.
G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
769
Fig. 2. Interaction between Role and stimuli’s Country of Origin in Dominance ratings (scale ranges from 1 to 7 with 4 as the scale mean).
The specified independent variables only accounted for 5.5% of variance in the dominance ratings and for 9.5% in the evaluative ratings. Due to the sample size of 570 participants, the test power of the ANOVAs was sufficiently high to confirm even
smallest effects. In fact, group means deviated only minimally from the scale means (scale means = 4; see Table 2) and all
significant results showed very weak effect sizes (see Table 3). Thus we refrain from far going interpretations and only point
out two results relevant to the further analysis.
First it is remarkable that advance information about the stimuli’s country of origin showed no significant main effect,
which puts some emphasis on the predominant role of nonverbal behavior in impression formation. However it cannot
be excluded that the stereotype induction intended was to weak or there were no preconceptions in the minds of the observers, which could have exerted a systematic influence on their judgments.
Secondly a significant main effect of status role and an interaction effect between culture and status role could be found.
The interaction is depicted in Fig. 2. Separate paired t-tests for the different stimulus countries revealed that the effects were
due to differences in the German stimulus sample only, showing that across all observes German supervisors were perceived
as more dominant as the employees (t = 6.119, p < .000, d = .513), which was not the case for the other countries (USA:
t = .121, n.s.; UAE: t = 1.621, n.s.).
Although unsystematic with regard to our independent variables the impression variance across the stimuli revealed a
unique possibility to analyze cross-cultural correlations in the perception of the stimulus person independently from nationality and role of the actors. Further analyses therefore were based on stimuli as cases using averages of impression ratings
across the observers from each culture as dependent measures.
4.4. Correlations of dominance and evaluation within and across countries
To analyze within- and between-culture correlations of the impression ratings the factor scores of Dominance and Evaluation were aggregated for each stimulus person in the dyadic interactions and Pearson-correlation coefficients were calculated on this basis with N = 60 stimulus persons (USA and GER) respectively N = 40 stimulus persons (UAE). Results are
shown in Table 4.
Regardless of knowing the stimuli’s country of origin, observers of all three countries showed significant correlations in
their dominance ratings (see also Fig. 3). Within-country correlations were even higher than cross-country correlations indicating a stable impression formation based on nonverbal cues and being immune towards advance information about the
stimuli’s country of origin. The results suggest trans-cultural universals in dominance perception, which are independent
from knowledge about the poser’s country of origin.
For the Evaluation dimension within-country correlations were significant but except from Germany only of a medium
size, indicating a potential influence of source information on the US and UAE judgments. Cross-country correlations were
only significant for German and US observers and for German and UAE observers but not for US and UAE observers supporting the hypothesis that similarities in the basic cultural values might be influential with regard to the evaluation of nonverbal behavior (Freeman, Rule, & Ambady, 2009; Freeman, Rule, Adams, et al., 2009; Matsumoto, 2002). Again the correlation
pattern was independent from advance information about the stimuli’s country of origin.
Correlations between judgments of Dominance and Evaluation revealed further insights into cultural specificities in
impression formation. Results are shown in Table 5. No significant correlations were found between cultures. However
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G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
Table 4
Pearson-correlation coefficients for dominance and evaluation between country of observers with regarding of advance information about country of stimulus.
Country
Dominance
Without advance info
USA
GER
UAE
With advance info
USA
GER
Evaluation
Without advance info
USA
GER
UAE
With advance info
USA
GER
r
p
N
r
p
N
r
p
N
Without advance info
With advance info
GER
UAE
USA
.766**
.000
60
.720**
.000
40
.781**
.000
40
.793**
.000
60
UAE
.822**
.000
60
.884**
.000
40
.790**
.000
60
r
p
N
r
p
N
r
p
N
r
p
N
r
p
N
GER
.486**
.000
60
r
p
N
r
p
N
.085
.603
40
.441**
.004
40
.689**
.000
40
.816**
.000
40
.509**
.000
60
.694**
.000
60
.412**
.008
40
.429**
.001
60
.303
.057
40
.529**
.000
40
*
Significant at the .05 level (2-tailed).
Significant at the .01 level (2-tailed).
**
within cultures we found a significant positive correlation between Dominance and Evaluation for the US observers, while for
German observers we found a zero correlation and for Arabs we found a significant negative correlation. This result is in line
with the findings of Freeman, Rule, and Ambady (2009) and Freeman, Rule, Adams, et al. (2009) showing that the expression
of dominance is more favorable in a typical western culture (USA) than in a typical eastern culture, such as Japan.
4.5. Predicting the status-role assignment by dominance perception
So far we found that the recognition of roles was only possible for the German stimulus sample (see also results from
ANOVA), but that despite the failure to identify underlying status roles in the other countries, the Dominance ratings across
all observer groups and all stimuli as well as the ascription of the status role – although wrong – correlated significantly.
Consequently we asked the question whether role ascription could be predicted by Dominance ratings, independently from
the actual role assigned to the actors. To determine to which degree the assignment of status-roles in the three countries was
influenced by the perception of Dominance regression analyses were conducted across all observers and for each country
separately with frequency of perceiving the poser as supervisor (M = 52.35, SD = 23.421) as response variable and Dominance
(M = 4.034, SD = .602) as predictor variable. Regression analysis across countries explained about 65% of the total variance
(r2 = .649; bstd = .806, p = .000). Separate analyses for the three countries confirmed the predictive value of dominance perception for status-role assignment explaining between 58% and 78% of the variance (USA: r2 = .583; bstd = .763, p = .000, GER:
r2 = .774; bstd = .880, p = .000, UAE: r2 = .783; bstd = .885, p = .000). Fig. 3 visualizes the cross-cultural correlations in Dominance impressions and also shows that the observers from all countries most uniformly based their guesses of the underlying
status-roles on this impression dimension.
To determine the degree of accuracy with which the predictor variable Dominance was able to discriminate between the
status-role ascriptions (supervisor or employee) we further conducted a discriminant analysis with 7331 valid individual
judgments of all 570 participants The mean of Dominance (M = 4.034) as decision criterion was able to classify 70.5% of
all cases correctly as mentioned supervisor or as mentioned employee: if the factor score of Dominance was greater than
G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
771
Fig. 3. Scatter-plots for pair-wise cross-country correlations of Dominance ratings and status-role ascriptions (predominant role ascriptions determined via
median split: j = supervisor; } = employee).
4.034, the observer identified the role as supervisor in 75.6% of all cases, and if the factor score of Dominance was less than
4.034, the observer identified the role as employee in 66.9% of all cases. Overall the results suggest that perceived dominance
predicts ascription of status-roles in all cultures under investigation.
772
G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
Table 5
Pearson-correlation coefficients between dominance and evaluation.
Evaluation
Country
Dominance
*
**
USA
GER
UAE
USA
r
p
N
.352**
.006
60
.023
.862
60
.273
.088
40
GER
r
p
N
.176
.179
60
.004
.978
60
.287
.073
40
UAE
r
p
N
.088
.589
40
.008
.960
40
.349*
.027
40
Significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed).
Significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
4.6. Predicting dominance and evaluation by nonverbal behavior
The last step of data analysis should answer the question which nonverbal cues account for the variance in Dominance
ratings and consequently the status role ascription and for the variance in the Evaluation of the actors as well. To answer
this question, movement and postural parameters, described as potentially relevant to the impression dimensions under
investigation were extracted from the data protocols underlying our animations (see Dovidio & Ellyson, 1982; Dovidio
et al., 1988; Fehr & Exline, 1987; Hall, Coates, & LeBeau, 2005; Harrigan, Oxman, & Rosenthal, 1985; Matsumoto & Kudoh,
1987; Schwartz, Tesser, & Powell, 1982) focusing on: (1) the orientation towards the partner (head rotation as mean angular
deviation from direct eye line), (2) the vertical head position (mean angular up-down shift of the head), (3) the openness
(mean distance between both hands and elbows as well as between both feet and knees), (4) the expansivity of extremities
(mean distance of hands and elbows from chest plus distance between feet and knees from hips) and (5) the overall movement activity (time spent in motion as percentage of observation time any movement activity was observed).
As shown in Table 6 relevant proportions of variance of the Dominance ratings could be explained by the chosen nonverbal parameters (USA: 33.2%, GER: 41.4%, UAE: 44.9%). Uniformly dominance was based on the vertical head posture as well
as on the opening of upper and lower extremities. For all cultures a lifted head and an open posture were perceived as more
dominant. German observers as well as American observers further based their judgments on the orientation towards the
partner (rotational head orientation). A more direct orientation was perceived as more dominant. Two particularities further
appeared for the German observers. Less movement activity and stretching of the lower extremities was perceived as more
dominant here. Overall the exploratory analysis revealed a strong influence of nonverbal cues on Dominance perception and
a remarkable overlap in the use of nonverbal cues across the cultures.
Table 7 summarizes the results of the regression analysis for the Evaluation dimension. Explained variance was lower than
for Dominance (USA: 25.8%, GER: 22.5%, UAE: 22.4%) and the cultural overlaps with regard to the predictive value of various
nonverbal cues were smaller and more specific. US observers and UAE observers did not show any overlaps, while German
observers showed overlaps with regard to one parameter with USA and one with UAE, which is consistent with the intercorrelations in the Evaluation ratings reported above. In USA and GER it was essential for higher Evaluation scores that
the lower extremities were not outstretched. In UAE and GER higher Evaluation scores were predicted by closure of the lower
extremities. A lifted head position only predicted evaluation for the US observers, showing the same direction as for Dominance, possibly explaining the significant correlation between evaluation and dominance ratings in the US as reported
above. A peculiarity appeared for the US with regard to global movement activity indicating that higher activity levels were
Table 6
Beta coefficients of analysis of regression for explaining dominance.
USA
R2 = .332
GER
R2 = .414
UAE
R2 = .449
Explanatory variable
std. Beta
t
p
std. Beta
t
p
std. Beta
t
p
Vertical head posture
Rotational head orientation
Opening upper extremities
Opening lower extremities
Expansivity up. extremities
Expansivity low extremities
Time spent in motion
.328
.271
.320
.190
.026
.088
.069
2.702
2.266
2.720
1.607
.217
.683
.534
.005
.014
.004
.057
.415
.249
.298
.351
.181
.368
.223
.068
.215
.259
3.087
1.614
3.340
2.014
.612
1.791
2.151
.002
.050
.001
.025
.272
.040
.018
.330
.125
.392
.340
.081
.050
.176
2.297
.908
2.800
2.446
.558
.334
1.101
.014
.185
.004
.010
.291
.370
.139
Note: All significances are 1-tailed.
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G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
Table 7
Beta coefficients of analysis of regression for explaining evaluation.
USA
R2 = .258
GER
R2 = .225
UAE
R2 = .224
Explanatory variable
std. Beta
t
p
std. Beta
t
p
std. Beta
t
p
Vertical head posture
Rotational head orientation
Opening upper extremities
Opening lower extremities
Expansivity up. extremities
Expansivity low. extremities
Time spent in motion
.250
.210
.044
.068
.140
.260
.356
1.954
1.665
.354
.547
1.117
1.923
2.627
.028
.051
.362
.293
.135
.030
.006
.091
.238
.152
.260
.150
.313
.022
.699
1.848
1.200
2.043
1.172
2.269
.158
.244
.035
.118
.023
.123
.014
.438
.103
.171
.194
.365
.072
.163
.172
.603
1.043
1.169
2.214
.417
.919
.909
.275
.152
.126
.017
.340
.183
.185
Note: All significances are 1-tailed.
evaluated more positively. It is noteworthy that directed head orientation as an affiliation cue and an indicator of visual
attention only accounted for positive evaluations in the German observer sample. Seemingly the interpretation of this strong
social cue underlies particular cultural variance which might constitute a basis for misunderstanding and conflict in crosscultural encounters (Argyle & Cook, 1973; Ellsworth & Ludwig, 1972).
5. Discussion
Applying a novel computer-animation methodology (see Bente et al., 2008), we investigated the effects of nonverbal
behavior from Germany, the USA, and the UAE on status-role recognition and on the impression formation of observers
in the three countries focusing on the dimensions Dominance and Evaluation. The study demonstrated the usefulness of
the methodology which permitted the use of culture fair characters showing nonverbal behavior transcribed from real-life
interactions and thus to avoid stereotype relevant inferences from the outward appearance of the original actors. Furthermore the animation methodology provided access to the quantification of movement patterns relevant to the impression
dimensions under investigation and allowed for the analysis of differential effects of specific nonverbal cues on impression
formation.
Regarding the recognition of status roles we found hit rates above chance only for the German stimuli but nor for the US
and UAE stimuli. No in-group advantage was found for status-role recognition in any of the countries comparable the one
reported for the recognition of emotions from facial expressions (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a, 2003; Matsumoto, 2002; Matsumoto et al., 2009). The fact that observers were not able to correctly identify status roles in the US and the UAE sample
even if observer and stimulus country matched might cast some doubt on the effectiveness of our status role inductions.
In principle the unexpected distribution of perceived Dominance across the roles might be due to the nature of the role-play
situation. Comments during debriefing revealed that most role players took the task quite seriously, however they also suggested another explanation. The conflict imposed on the role play interaction in fact assigned status-power to the supervisor.
But in addition it also assigned expertise and potential coercive power to the employee. Thus we might have created a power
equilibrium based on different power sources (legitimate vs. expert/coercive; see French & Raven, 1959) which left room for
control attempts on both sides. It remains unclear whether the induction of a more pronounced power asymmetry would
have led to better recognition rates. Future studies will have to address this issue, e.g. by combining status role inductions
with an organizational problem-solving task instead of a power conflict.
By means of EFA and CFA we were able to provide a factorial model of social impressions distinguishing the two factors
Dominance and Evaluation. Separate ANOVAs for both dimensions revealed unsystematic and weak effects of the independent variables (country of stimuli, country of observer, status-role and advance information about the stimuli’s country of
origin). A significant main effect of role on Dominance ratings occurred, which was largely relying on a pronounced difference
between employees and supervisors in the German stimulus sample only. No main effect of advance information about the
stimuli’s country of origin was found, suggesting a strong effect of observed nonverbal behavior as compared to advance
information. However, overall effect sizes were very small and all group means were close to the scale means. As a major
cause we assume the large inter-individual variance in the behavior of the stimulus persons across and within cultures,
which suppressed the influence of culture of origin as well as the status-role assigned to the posers. This assumption is supported by the analysis of the hit rates in the role recognition task and might also have been caused by the specific setting.
The fact, however, that we found status-role recognition above chance for the German stimuli as well as an interaction
effect between status-role and stimulus country for the Dominance ratings, pointing in the same direction, might also suggest
another explanation referring to actual cultural differences in the expression of power status and dominance. Although described as a high power distance (PDI) culture the collectivistic orientation in the UAE could inhibit the open expression of
status differences through nonverbal behavior (see Ting-Toomey & Oetzel, 2001, 2002). Americans on the other hand, though
characterized by an individualistic (IDV) orientation, could be expected, because of low power distance, to emphasize equality. Two different reasons thus could account for the same effect, namely the lack of significant differences in nonverbal dominance expression in status–asymmetric interactions. PDI and IDV however would not explain then the differences in
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G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
perceived dominance between employees and supervisors in the German sample. It can be speculated whether the third
dimension ‘‘uncertainty avoidance” (UAI) where Germany scores are approximately as high as UAE can explain this phenomenon. Not being inhibited by a collectivistic attitude, as the UAE people are, we could suppose that the indication of status
roles through nonverbal behavior would be more likely then in the German culture. Overall this data makes a strong argument to avoid an isolated analysis of singular cultural value dimensions when it comes to the prediction of concrete behavior. More studies in fact are needed to disentangle the complex interplay between the various cultural value dimensions and
social behavior in the future.
Despite the still unclear influence of culture and status role on the expression of nonverbal dominance cues, the behavioral variance across the stimulus persons provided a solid basis for the analyses of cultural specificities and communalities
on the perceptual level. In fact, our analysis based on the factor values revealed significant positive correlations for Dominance ratings between all three countries, supporting the hypothesis of cultural universalities in the perception of Dominance
from nonverbal behavior. This result is in line with data reported by Keating et al. (1981), which revealed universals in Dominance perception from facial expressions and with those of Kowner and Wiseman (2003) who could show that nonverbal
status cues could be identified as such even if not part of the own cultural repertoire.
With regard to the Evaluation dimension of person perception we only found a significant correlation between German
and US observers and between German and UAE observers but not between US and UAE observers. This result supports
the hypothesis that culture has a more pronounced influence on Evaluation than on Dominance perception and that similarity
in values breeds similarities in Evaluation (Swift, 1999). A similarity between Germany and the US has been found for PDI,
while with regard to IDV-scores Germany lies between the two other cultures and with regard to UAI even is more similar to
the UAE, thus positioning Germany in-between USA and UAE, when taking into account all three dimensions (see Clearly
Cultural, 2009). This view is in fact consistent with the correlations found and holds that cultural differences can hardly
be explained through a singular cultural value dimension, when it comes to understanding self-construal, other perception
and communication in real-life encounters (Hofstede, 2001; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998). As for Dominance prior information
about the stimuli’s country of origin did not affect the pattern of inter-correlations in Evaluation.
Exploratory analysis of nonverbal cues relevant to Dominance perception and Evaluation revealed tentative explanations
for the correlation patterns found. While we found significant variance explanation and large cross-cultural overlaps in the
predictive value of postural dynamics (in particular head lift, openness of extremities and head orientation to the partner) for
Dominance, regression analysis for Evaluation showed a weaker predictive value of the selected nonverbal parameters. A few
overlaps were only found between Germany and the US and Germany and the UAE, which matches the correlation patterns
found for the Evaluation dimension.
Overall results from correlation analysis strongly support the hypothesis of cultural universalities in the perception of
Dominance and of cultural specificities in the Evaluation dimension and thus aligns with previous results based on different
paradigms (Freeman, Rule, & Ambady, 2009; Freeman, Rule, Adams, et al., 2009; Kowner & Wiseman, 2003). The fact that
disclosure of the stimuli’s country of origin did not influence correlation patterns in either of the dimensions also underpins
the strong impact of nonverbal behavior in cross-cultural person perception, which is largely independent from stereotypes
or predetermined evaluations of the other cultures as possibly caused by stereotypes or hearsay.
It is noteworthy that the observers from the three cultures not only converged in their Dominance judgments but also
unanimously based their guesses about the underlying status-roles on these impressions. Although hit rates mostly failed
to surmount the chance level, the assignments of the roles (supervisor vs. employee), whether correct or incorrect, were predictable by the Dominance ratings as shown via regression- and discriminant-analyses. Thus it can be supposed that in view
of a lack of additional context information, low level inferences from nonverbal behavior to Dominance also affected higher
level inferences to underlying status roles. This observation might be of particular relevance in cross-cultural business
encounters, where status differences are not known or obscured.
In sum the data presented here suggests a multi-layer model of person perception which holds particular explanatory
value for understanding cultural diversity in social cognition. While the perception of Dominance cues seems to rely on universals with regard to the extracted cues as well as to the inferential mechanisms they invoke, Evaluation as basic criterion to
approach or avoid another person seems to be more affected by cultural standards. This is in accordance with the findings of
Freeman, Rule, and Ambady (2009) and Freeman, Rule, Adams, et al. (2009), who showed that viewing photographs with
dominant or submissive postures resulted in differential activities in areas related to evaluative processing of social cues,
when seen either by Westerners (US-Americans) or by Easterners (Japanese). In fact this result implies the ability of both
groups to uniformly and adequately qualify the displayed cues as either dominant or submissive. However based on this,
both groups showed distinct evaluative responses. Both our own and Freeman et al.’s data thus point to two possibly independent layers of person perception, one which is more basic and culturally invariant (Dominance) and the other which is
learning dependent and culture-specific (Evaluation). Yet it can be asked whether even more independent layers are active
in social impression formation. Data from our explorative factor analysis, which have not yet been modeled in CFA at this
point, support the assumption that perceptions of activity on one hand and inferences about the other persons’ inner states
(composure, relaxation) on the other hand might be candidates for such layers. More systematic research will be needed to
disentangle the interplay of these components and to determine the particular influence of culture on each level of information processing. In this endeavor a significant contribution of cultural neuroscience can be expected, as it would allow identification of potentially distinct neural mechanisms underlying social information processing on the different levels (Chiao &
Ambady, 2007; Chiao, Li, & Harada, 2008; Chiao et al., 2010; Han & Northoff, 2008). Although the work reported here
G. Bente et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 762–777
775
emphasized the implementation of behavioral paradigms, the experimental techniques applied possess particular value for
cultural neuroscience studies as well, as they allow for unprecedented degrees of stimulus control In particular the computer
animation approach can go beyond the use of verbal reports of prototypical behaviors (see Kowner & Wiseman, 2003) or
static images of postures and gestures and include subtle variations of nonverbal behavior while preserving its natural
dynamics.
Acknowledgments
The reported research has been funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)
within the Special Research Program ‘‘Media and Cultural Communication” (SFB/FK 427). We wish to thank Sybille Pennig
and Maria Senokozlieva for their valuable support in data collection at the different institutions in Germany, the USA and
the UAE, which posed a particular challenge in this cross-cultural endeavor.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.06.006.
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Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 944–954
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Synesthetic grapheme-color percepts exist for newly
encountered Hebrew, Devanagari, Armenian and Cyrillic
graphemes
Christopher David Blair ⁎, Marian E. Berryhill
Department of Psychology, Program in Cognitive and Brain Science, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 11 February 2013
Available online 14 July 2013
Keywords:
Synesthesia
Synaesthesia
Learning
a b s t r a c t
Grapheme-color synesthetes experience color, not physically present, when viewing symbols. Synesthetes cannot remember learning these associations. Must synesthetic percepts
be formed during a sensitive period? Can they form later and be consistent? What determines their nature? We tested grapheme-color synesthete, MC2, before, during and after
she studied Hindi abroad. We investigated whether novel graphemes elicited synesthetic
percepts, changed with familiarity, and/or benefited from phonemic information. MC2
reported color percepts to novel Devanagari and Hebrew graphemes. MC2 monitored these
percepts over 6 months in a Hindi-speaking environment. MC2 and synesthete DN,
reported synesthetic percepts for Armenian graphemes, or Cyrillic graphemes + phonemes
over time. Synesthetes, not controls, reported color percepts for novel graphemes that
gained consistency over time. Phonemic information did not enhance consistency. Thus,
synesthetes can form and consolidate percepts to novel graphemes as adults. These percepts may depend on pre-existing grapheme-color relationships but they can flexibly shift
with familiarity.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
For most of us, the letter ‘T’ is not blue and happy, nor the number ‘7’ shiny, yellow and good. Yet those with synesthesia
reliably experience perceptual phenomenon absent in the stimulus. Although it sounds like a holdover from the psychedelic
era, reports of synesthesia date back 200 years (reviewed in Jewanski, Simner, Day, & Ward, 2011). The most commonly studied form of synesthesia is grapheme-color synesthesia (Simner et al., 2006), in which a grapheme reliably elicits a color percept (reviewed in Hochel & Milan, 2008; Hubbard, 2007; Hubbard & Ramachandran, 2005; Mattingley, 2009; Rich, Bradshaw,
& Mattingley, 2005; Sagiv, Heer, & Robertson, 2006; Ward, 2013; Ward & Mattingley, 2006). Synesthetes do not remember
forming grapheme-color associations. Indeed, anecdotal reports describe synesthetes feeling frustration when encountering
‘wrongly’ colored alphabets in preschool (e.g. our participant MC2). Others discover their unique percepts later in life when
they find that such percepts are not universal (e.g. our participant DN; see also Mills, Metzger, Foster, Valentine-Gresko, &
Ricketts, 2009; Mills et al., 2002). Because synesthesia emerges early in childhood, it is difficult to definitively answer questions related to the development of synesthetic experiences. There are few papers describing the acquisition and stability of
grapheme-color synesthesia. Simner et al. demonstrated that grapheme color synesthesia may be identified in children as
young as 6 years of age (2009). Furthermore, testing children at the beginning and end of a year revealed significant
improvements in the consistency of their synesthetic percepts (Simner, Harrold, Creed, Monro, & Foulkes, 2009). Spector
⁎ Corresponding author. Address: 1664 N. Virginia St., Mail Stop 296, Reno, NV 89557, United States. Fax: +1 775 784 1126.
E-mail address: netiger@gmail.com (C.D. Blair).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.06.002
C.D. Blair, M.E. Berryhill / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 944–954
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and Maurer have worked with pre-literate and literate children to clarify effects of literacy on the development of synesthesia (2009, 2011). They demonstrated that toddlers made predictable color matches to letters and shapes (‘‘O” and ameboids
are white; ‘‘Z” and jagged shapes are black), but these were based on letter shape and not letter sounds; whereas they failed
to make other associations commonly observed in literate children and adults (‘‘B” is blue, ‘‘A” is red, etc.) (Spector & Maurer,
2009, 2011). Other findings show that grapheme-color synesthesia can exact a cost in task performance. Green and Goswami
showed that children aged 7–15 years with grapheme-color synesthesia experience interference during numerical tasks if
the digits were printed in color incongruent with their synesthetic percepts (2008).
One possibility is that an early sensitive period during development is essential for the formation of grapheme-color
percepts. If true, novel graphemes encountered in adulthood might not produce synesthetic percepts. Alternatively, synesthetes may continually and automatically develop new grapheme-color percepts, especially for symbols similar to familiar
graphemes. Another possibility is that there is an early sensitive period in which color associations are made, and that
these associations may then map onto newly encountered graphemes later in life based on similarities in shape, name,
meaning, use, etc. Indeed, support for the latter view comes from a recent finding demonstrating that some synesthetes
can directly transfer one pre-existing synesthetic color percept onto a novel symbol. These authors presented words written in English but replacing the Latin letter ‘A’ with a novel Glagolitic grapheme and found that the new grapheme produced the same synesthetic color percept associated with the familiar letter ‘A’ (Mroczko, Metzinger, Singer, & Nikolic,
2009). This finding shows that an explicit transfer of synesthetic color to a novel grapheme serving as a placeholder
can occur in as little as 10 min. Yet it remains unclear if or how quickly grapheme-color percepts arise for novel graphemes presented without a pre-existing context. Even if novel graphemes elicit a synesthetic percept, the quality of these
adult-acquired synesthetic percepts may be different. Case studies of synesthetes describing their experiences with multiple learned alphabets (Mills et al., 2002, 2009; Rich et al., 2005; Witthoft & Winawer, 2006) show that adult synesthetes
may overlay pre-existing percepts onto novel graphemes based on similarities between letter shape (Mills et al., 2002;
Witthoft & Winawer, 2006) or phoneme (Mills et al., 2009; Witthoft & Winawer, 2006). In the other direction, Mills
and colleagues reported that synesthete MLS associated new synesthetic colors with known graphemes, but these associations were temporary and qualitatively different from the synesthetic experiences associated with her native language
(Mills et al., 2002). These findings point towards a flexible relationship between grapheme and synesthetic experience,
but they do not clarify whether novel graphemes can produce synesthetic percepts independent of specific training or implied association or whether these percepts remain stable and consistent. Furthermore, these studies examined the color
associations and consistency of grapheme sets that have already been learned at some earlier point, and thus cannot characterize the acquisition process of grapheme and color associations.
Here, we investigated the existence and consistency of grapheme-color associations for newly encountered novel grapheme sets in two grapheme-color synesthetes. In one unique case, we tested a synesthete before, during, and after she studied
Hindi while abroad in India. Upon her return she and a second synesthete were trained in two new novel alphabets in a training study. In contrast to previous association forming studies (Mroczko et al., 2009) all graphemes were presented without
any additional context, with the exception of Cyrillic characters, which were presented with an audio recording of their
name. The present findings take advantage of two complementary approaches: one ecological and one laboratory based,
to provide converging evidence regarding the consistency and quality of synesthetic percepts for novel graphemes as they
become more familiar.
2. Experiment 1: Synesthetic color percepts to novel graphemes
Can novel graphemes elicit a synesthetic color percept? If acquiring color percepts for graphemes without additional context requires that they be encountered during a sensitive period over which grapheme-color links form in early childhood,
there should be no synesthetic color percept to entirely novel graphemes. Alternatively, it may be the case that synesthetic
percepts are automatically elicited for novel graphemes throughout the lifetime, or that previous color associations may map
onto new graphemes. If true, novel graphemes should elicit a synesthetic color percept.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participant
MC2 (female, 26 years old) a psychology undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno participated. The University’s
Institutional Review Board approved this and all protocols. MC2 and all participants (participating in Experiment 3) signed
informed consent documents. MC2’s first language is English. MC2 reports taking four semesters of college Spanish, but does
not claim fluency in any language other than English.
2.1.2. Synesthesia assessment
MC2 describes her synesthetic experience of graphemes not only in terms of color, but also in texture, personality, and
emotional terms; we tested grapheme-color percepts. MC2 further reports that she has experienced these percepts for as
long as she can remember, and does not recall a time before she had color associations. She reports that she first recognized that her experiences were not typical for everyone when she encountered an ‘‘inappropriately colored alphabet” in
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school. MC2 experiences color rapidly and automatically. This is confirmed by visual pop-out experiments similar to those
reported by Ramachandran and Hubbard (2001) and Ward, Jonas, Dienes, and Seth (2010). She identifies briefly presented
(26–1000 ms) shapes defined by the synesthetic color of a letter embedded in letter arrays with different synesthetic colors. She can also use her synesthetic percepts to perform arithmetic. For example, when presented with the equation ‘‘7
+ 2=” followed by a blue color patch, she can quickly and accurately answer true or false (McCarthy, Barnes & Caplovitz,
2013).
To confirm that MC2 was a grapheme-color synesthete, she completed the grapheme color program in the Texsyn Toolbox running in Matlab (Eagleman, Kagan, Nelson, Sagaram, & Sarma, 2007). Each Latin grapheme (letters A–Z, digits 0–9)
appeared with a color palette. Participants selected the color best corresponding to their synesthetic percept; there was also
a ‘no color’ option. Next, a square patch of the selected color appeared and the participant adjusted its brightness before final
selection. Graphemes were presented three times each in pseudorandomized order per 30-min session. Three values were
derived. First, the within-grapheme consistency score reflects the similarity between the three colors selected per grapheme.
Within-grapheme consistency is measured in the form of a ‘‘difference score.” Lower difference scores indicate higher consistency. In other words, if the ‘‘3” was always electric blue there is high consistency/low difference score whereas selections
of electric blue, yellow and pink would have low consistency/high difference score. Second, the within-session consistency reflects overall consistency and is calculated by averaging the within-grapheme consistency scores. Participants scoring <1 are
considered grapheme-color synesthetes. MC2’s overall consistency score was 0.34; see Fig. 1. Third, the between-session consistency scores reflect the stability of synesthetic percepts over time (Simner et al., 2009). For example, during session 1, ‘B’
elicited a selection of brown and during the next session ‘B’ remained paired with brown. The average color values (RGB)
across sessions were compared to assess the reliability of the synesthetic color percept over time. The absolute differences
between the old and new average colors for R, G, B were calculated separately, then summed and divided by 255 (color values in RGB color space may be modulated between a minimum of zero, and a maximum of 255) to yield the between session
consistency score for a particular grapheme. Once again, lower values indicate greater consistency.
2.1.3. Tests of novel graphemes
We modified the synesthesia assessment to measure MC2’s synesthetic percepts to novel graphemes. MC2 first viewed
the Latin alphabet. She next viewed 10 Hebrew letters (Bet ב, Dalet ד, Gimel ג, He ה, Lamed ל, Mem מ, Qof ק, Resh ר,
Shin ש, Tav )ת. The Hebrew letters served as a control condition for Experiment 2 as MC2 received no additional
information about the Hebrew characters in the form of their names, sounds, meanings etc. over the course of testing,
and was only exposed to them during testing sessions. This subset of Hebrew letters was chosen because these characters
were less similar to Latin characters, and to minimize the length of the lengthy testing process MC2 graciously endured. We
note that in a later experiment, a control grapheme set of length comparable to that of the test was used. MC2 also viewed 49
characters from the Devanagari alphabet that is used in Hindi. MC2 ran each of these programs twice on different days to
obtain baseline values and to permit calculation of initial between-session consistency; see Fig. 1. Finally, we asked MC2
to report any similarities in shape between these graphemes and familiar graphemes. A period of roughly two and a half
months passed between these two sessions.
Fig. 1. A subset of synesthete color choices for MC2 (left) and DN (right) (see Supplementary Materials for full sets). Each row reflects the averaged colors
for each grapheme during a single session. The results display the first and last sessions (when available) for each grapheme set: Latin, Hebrew, Devanagari,
Armenian and Cyrillic. Graphemes shown in outline represent those for which the ‘‘no color” response was selected. Underlined Cyrillic graphemes
represent those included in the non-Latin resembling subset.
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2.2. Results and discussion
The within- and between-session grapheme-color consistency scores were calculated for each alphabet. MC2’s withinsession difference scores were: Latin session 1, 2: 0.34, 0.28 (M = .31); Hebrew session 1, 2: 0.71, 0.78 (M = .68), Devanagari
session 1, 2: 0.68, 1.00 (M = .84); see Fig. 2a. The between-session consistency scores indicating consistency over time were
also very good: Latin = 0.18; Hebrew = 0.48; Devanagari = 0.79; see Fig. 2b. As expected, her most consistent performance
was for her native Latin alphabet. However, performance on Devanagari and Hebrew letters was also highly consistent. In
short, MC2 has stable initial synesthetic grapheme-color percepts for novel symbols.
Our first question was to investigate whether adult grapheme-color synesthetes have synesthetic percepts for novel
graphemes. Synesthete MC2 reported synesthetic color percepts associated with the presentation of novel Devanagari and
Hebrew letters. Consequently, the answer to our first question is a resounding, ‘‘Yes”. Synesthetic percepts occurred even
when the novel graphemes were not associated with a phoneme or other contextual information and even when she did
not think the letters resembled previously encountered graphemes. Thus, at least some synesthetes are able to form novel
associations immediately. Given that during these initial sessions, only shape/form information was available, it would appear that color associations may be based entirely on form information. This is somewhat surprising, given that synesthetes
(A)
Within-Session Consistency: Experiments 1 & 2
5
4.5
Difference Score
4
Devanagari
Hebrew
Latin
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3
2.5
2
1.5
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0.5
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3
4
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6
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(B)
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Between-Session Consistency: Experiments 1 & 2
0.9
Difference Score
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Hebrew
Latin
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Fig. 2. (A) Within-session grapheme-color consistency for Experiments 1 and 2: MC2’s average difference scores for each grapheme set for each session. The
larger symbols of the first two points for each grapheme set represent performance in the sessions described in Experiment 1. The dashed line at 1
represents the cutoff score below which people are considered to qualify as grapheme-color synesthetes. (B) Between-session consistency for Experiments
1 and 2: Consistency in average color choices for the same grapheme between sessions for each grapheme set. The first data point for each grapheme set
(drawn larger) represents data described in Experiment 1.
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do not report color associations for every symbol and grapheme encountered. For example, MC2 reports that ‘‘#” elicits no
color percept for her.
3. Experiment 2: The effect of exposure on synesthetic experience
Our second question was to investigate if and how synesthetic percepts to novel graphemes change with increased familiarity. MC2 provided us the rare opportunity of studying a grapheme-color synesthete studying a new language in a foreign
country. She agreed to test herself in the grapheme-color association tests for Latin, Hebrew and Devanagari letters during a
semester in India. This allowed us to evaluate consistency across three alphabets: Latin – her native language, Hebrew – a
novel untrained set, and Devanagari – a novel set accompanied by increased familiarity through academic training and cultural immersion. We predicted that synesthetic percepts to Latin graphemes would not be labile after a lifetime of consolidation. We expected that living in a Hindi-intensive environment would enhance the consistency of percepts associated
with Devanagari. However, it also seemed possible that some grapheme-color associations might shift with the addition
of contextual information such as phoneme. We expected her responses to Hebrew letters to become somewhat more consistent due to familiarity from testing, but to improve less than Devanagari because she was not in a Hebrew-immersive
setting.
3.1. Method
In India (August–January, 2011–2012), MC2 studied Hindi in an academic/immersion setting. Anecdotally, MC2 reported
that Devanagari graphemes were difficult to learn because they were differentiated by subtle sound and shape differences.
She tested herself on her laptop six times in India, in addition to the two previous sessions performed in the laboratory at the
University of Nevada, Reno. Thus, lighting, screen size, and monitor color output differed from the initial testing. This change
inflates the between-session consistency score for sessions 1–2; Fig. 2b. All three grapheme sets (Latin, Devanagari, & Hebrew) were tested during each testing session. The first testing session abroad was performed on September 2, 2011 and
subsequent sessions occurred at 2–3 week intervals. It must be noted that MC2 had some knowledge of the study’s purpose.
She was aware that the study focused on the effect of continued exposure on novel grapheme color consistency. Further, she
did see a brief visual representation of the relative consistencies for each grapheme tested, as well as her overall difference
score for the grapheme set after each testing session. However, given the precision with which the paradigm measures color
choices, it seems unlikely that her performance could have been significantly affected.
3.2. Results and discussion
To assess the consistency of MC2’s grapheme-color associations over time, we first examined the within-session consistency scores. Improved consistency was confirmed by good fits to power functions with negative exponents, indicating an
overall drop in difference scores over time: Latin: R2 = 0.69, Hebrew: R2 = 0.29, Devanagari: R2 = 0.47; see Fig. 2a. MC2’s consistency improved for Devanagari and Hebrew graphemes. As expected, there was little change in her consistency for Latin
letters.
The between-session consistency scores indicating whether MC2 selected the same color for each grapheme across sessions were also informative; see Fig. 2b. As expected, Latin consistency remained stable. Consistency improved over time for
Devanagari and Hebrew graphemes. However, various graphemes underwent notable shifts in their synesthetic color associations. In Hebrew, the decrease for session 4–5 between-session consistency was driven by the sudden shift in MC2’s synesthetic color percept for 2 of the 10 Hebrew graphemes ( ש,)ג. In these cases, MC2 reported seeing elements of two Latin
graphemes, which variably biased her synesthetic color percept towards one percept or the other inconsistently. In Devanagari, at various times the graphemes
, and
underwent significant color shifts. For example, MC2 experienced
as both the digit ‘‘3” and the letter ‘‘T,” which led to conflicting synesthetic percepts. Otherwise,
MC2 reported that her synesthetic percept shifted from being consistent with a similarly shaped Latin grapheme to the
grapheme’s associated phoneme or acquired meaning. For example, the grapheme ‘‘
” was originally identified as the
letter ‘‘O” and elicited a synesthetic color percept consistent with that letter. However, MC2 reported that as she learned
the meaning of this grapheme, which is actually the number ‘‘0,” her synesthetic color percept remapped accordingly.
This experiment investigated if and how synesthetic percepts to novel graphemes change with increased familiarity over
time. First, MC2’s synesthetic percepts to Latin graphemes were unaffected by increased familiarity with other graphemes.
Second, studying Hindi in India increased MC2’s familiarity with the Devanagari alphabet and consistency improved with the
associated synesthetic percepts both within- and between- session. This confirms that at least for some adult synesthetes, it
is possible to develop new grapheme-color associations for novel grapheme sets that continue to stabilize over time, which
may be comparable to the stabilization of color associations for a newly learned native alphabet demonstrated in school age
children with synesthesia (Simner et al., 2009). We were surprised to see that she showed the same improved consistency
with Hebrew letters that were encountered only during testing sessions. Since no phonemic information or additional context was available for the Hebrew characters, shape familiarity or similarity appears sufficient to improve the consistency of
synesthetic color percepts, at least in the case of MC2. This result is particularly important, given that MC2 was partially
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C.D. Blair, M.E. Berryhill / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 944–954
aware of the aims of the experiment, and an improvement was expected for the Devanagari, but not necessarily for the Hebrew graphemes. Given that both were observed, this allays fears that MC2’s knowledge of the experimental aims may have
biased her responses.
4. Experiment 3: Training of novel graphemes, and grapheme + phoneme pairs
If shape familiarity alone stabilizes synesthetic color percepts, phonemic information may not influence how quickly percepts became consistent. However, it was not clear whether phonemic information contributed any benefit or detriment,
since colors for the Devanagari and Hebrew grapheme sets appeared to stabilize at the same rate. To test whether grapheme-phoneme associations affected the rate of synesthetic percept consistency, we conducted a laboratory based training
experiment. Here, two grapheme-color synesthetes, MC2 and DN and two control participants were exposed to novel graphemes (Armenian) or grapheme-phoneme pairs (Cyrillic) over multiple sessions. The prediction was that if phonemic information affects the consistency of synesthetic percepts there should be a differential rate of improvements in consistency for
the grapheme + phoneme pairs. To counter concerns that improved consistency is simply due to associational learning rather
than synesthesia, we also included two control participants. If consistency were simply due to training there should be no
difference in the consistency between the controls and the synesthetes.
4.1. Methods
4.1.1. Participants
A second grapheme-color synesthete, DN, joined MC2. DN reports synesthetic color percepts for letters, digits, days, and
months. Her first language is English and she took 5 years of Italian in high school. Her Latin difference score was 0.30. MC2,
but not DN, also has sound-color synesthesia. MC2 reports that spoken words, voices, noises such as typing, and timbres of
music all produce color experiences for her. Both synesthetes came forward after attending a lecture on synesthesia. Synesthetic participants were female, ages 21 and 26. Two age-, gender-, and major-(psychology) matched control participants,
(female undergraduates, ages 22, 23) were also tested. The controls and MC2 performed 8 sessions on different days. Due
to scheduling conflicts and availability, DN first participated in 3 sessions and resumed testing after 103 days for a series
of 9 sessions conducted within several weeks; see Table 1.
4.1.2. Stimuli
There were two novel alphabets: 38 Armenian graphemes, and 33 Cyrillic graphemes. During each session, participants
performed three tasks: Cyrillic phoneme-grapheme association test, Armenian and Cyrillic synesthetic color assessments.
For Cyrillic, separate within- and between-session difference score were calculated for a Cyrillic subset comprised of 16
graphemes previously judged to be non-Latin in appearance (after Mills et al., 2002). The separate analysis allays concerns
that performance on Cyrillic is simply a re-mapping of Latin synesthetic percepts onto identically shaped Cyrillic graphemes.
4.1.3. Armenian and Cyrillic grapheme-color assessments
Synesthetic percepts for Armenian and Cyrillic were assessed using the protocol described previously (2.1.2) after replacing Latin graphemes with Armenian graphemes, by themselves, or Cyrillic graphemes + phonemes. Both synesthetes (Initial
and Final Difference Scores: MC2 = Armenian (A): 0.81, 0.42, Cyrillic (C): 0.82, 0.31, Cyrillic Subset (CS): 1.03, 0.34, DN = A:
0.92, 0.15, C: 0.31, 0.21, CS: 0.45, 0.18), but neither control (C1 = A: 3.54, 2.01, C: 2.86, 2.78, CS: 3.12, 2.51, C2 = A: 3.31. 3.78,
C: 3.63, 3.51, CS: 3.77, 3.48), scored in the synesthetic range of below 1.
Table 1
Between session intervals: days between each session for each participant. The total time between the first and last session
is also included for each participant.
Participant
Session
MC2
DN
C1
C2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
0
2
7
7
7
7
7
7
0
14
7
103
2
4
2
2
3
7
2
1
0
1
7
2
4
1
6
1
0
2
7
2
3
2
5
2
First to last
44
145
22
22
950
C.D. Blair, M.E. Berryhill / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 944–954
4.1.4. Phoneme + grapheme association test
It was assumed that participants learned to associate Cyrillic graphemes with their respective verbal labels as the two
were repeatedly paired during the Cyrillic Grapheme-Color Assessment condition. To confirm that participants were learning
phoneme + grapheme pairs, they were tested at the beginning of each session. Trials began with the presentation of a Cyrillic
grapheme + phoneme pair. Graphemes were displayed 4 times, on 50% of presentations the phoneme + grapheme pair
matched. Participants pressed a button indicating whether they matched or not.
4.2. Results and discussion
4.2.1. Phoneme–grapheme association test
The Cyrillic phoneme + grapheme pair test confirmed that all participants demonstrated learning; see Table 2. However,
there was a notable difference between the synesthetes’ final performance (M = 98.48%, standard deviation = 0) and the control participants’ final performance levels (M = 78.03%, standard deviation = 6.43). Paired t-tests between synesthetes and
controls reach significance when either the first eight (original three sessions and first five of the second period) or last eight
values (only sessions from the second period) from DN were included (p’s < .0001). Consequently, the synesthetes acquired
the grapheme + phoneme pairs more readily than did the controls. This result is consistent with reports of memory encoding
advantages for synesthetes, which may be a result of general learning and memory advantages inherent in the organization
of the synesthetic brain, or a result of additional association opportunities due to both color and grapheme shape being available (Gross, Neargarder, Caldwell-Harris, & Cronin-Golomb, 2011; Radvansky, Gibson, & McNerney, 2011). We note that DN
showed a substantial improvement in her association scores between sessions 4 and 5. Although speculative, one might argue that while performance on session 4 may have suffered due to the long delay between that test and the previous session,
session 4 may have served to refamiliarize or ‘‘jog” DN’s memory, the effects becoming apparent in the session 5. It should
also be noted the participants showed different learning patterns. MC2 learned letter name and shape associations quickly,
while other participants performed near chance. Consequently, if both grapheme meaning and shape play a role in determining synesthetic color associations, we may expect MC2 to show meaning related color associations sooner, or to a greater
degree than DN.
4.2.2. Within-session and between-session consistency
Synesthetes performed more consistently within- and between-sessions than controls; see Fig. 3a. For the synesthetes,
within-session consistency scores were initially within the synesthetic range (<1) and steadily improved, whereas the controls never achieved the cutoff level. The fitted power functions accounted for the following variance (R2): Synesthetes MC2:
Armenian, Cyrillic, Cyrillic subset: R2 = A: 0.56, C: 0.70, CS: 0.65, and DN: R2 = A: 0.83, C: 0.37, CS: 0.44; Controls C1: R2 = A:
0.19, C: 0.07, CS: 0.28, and C2: R2 = A: 0.53, C: 0.02, CS: 0.08. The between-session consistency scores were always lower in
synesthetes, indicating greater consistency; see Fig. 3b.
Across participants there was no notable difference between Armenian and Cyrillic in within- or between-session consistency even though Cyrillic was accompanied by phonemic information. The correlation between phoneme + grapheme association test accuracy and Cyrillic subset consistency (R2 = 0.37) was actually weaker than the correlation between phoneme
+ grapheme association test accuracy and Armenian (R2 = 0.43).
Here, we asked whether the addition of phonemic information facilitated synesthetic percept consistency. There was no
apparent benefit or detriment of phonemic information as associations for both alphabets appeared to increase in consistency at a similar rate for both synesthetes. We also replicated the finding that some synesthetes perceive synesthetic colors
for novel graphemes using novel alphabets and we also replicated that these percepts gained consistency over time. These
findings were not simply due to associational learning because controls were unable to ever perform as well as synesthetes.
Table 2
Cyrillic letter training accuracy: percent correct for each participant for each session in matching Cyrillic graphemes to
their corresponding phonemes (chance = 50%).
Participant
Session
MC2
DN
C1
C2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
91.67
90.15
93.94
93.18
96.21
95.45
97.73
98.48
51.52
59.85
69.70
65.91
84.09
85.61
93.18
96.97
100
98.48
98.48
98.48
54.55
68.18
69.70
75.00
84.00
82.58
78.03
82.58
65.15
62.12
66.67
65.91
70.45
71.97
68.94
73.48
C.D. Blair, M.E. Berryhill / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 944–954
(A)
951
Within-Session Consistency: Experiment 3
5
Controls Cyrillic
Controls Armenian
Controls Cyrillic
Subset
DN Cyrillic
DN Armenian
DN Cyrillic Subset
MC2 Cyrillic
MC2 Armenian
MC2 Cyrillic Subset
4.5
Difference Score
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Session
(B)
Between-Session Consistency: Experiment 3
1
0.9
Controls Cyrillic
Controls Armenian
Controls Cyrillic
Subset
DN Cyrillic
DN Armenian
DN Cyrillic Subset
MC2 Cyrillic
MC2 Armenian
MC2 Cyrillic Subset
Difference Score
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
1-2
2-3
3-4
4-5
5-6
6-7
7-8
8-9
9-10 10-11 11-12
Session
Fig. 3. (A) Within-session consistency for Experiment 3: MC2’s and DN’s average difference scores for each grapheme set per session. Controls’ data are
averaged with error bars representing the standard error of the mean. The dashed line represents the cutoff score used to identify grapheme-color
synesthetes. (B) Between-session consistency for Experiment 3: Consistency in average color choices for the same grapheme between subsequent sessions
for each grapheme set for MC2, DN, and the Controls’ average. Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
Yet, this does not appear to be driven by faster learning in synesthetes because the correlation between the phoneme-grapheme association test and within-session consistency was higher for the untrained Armenian, rather than the trained Cyrillic.
5. General discussion
Synesthesia is a captivating but poorly understood phenomenon. We undertook this investigation to address several open
questions related to what happens when grapheme-color synesthetes encounter and learn novel graphemes. In particular,
we tested whether synesthetic percepts were immediately present and the consistency of these percepts to a variety of novel
graphemes. We found that for the synesthetes we tested, novel graphemes elicit color percepts at first glance and the consistency of these percepts improves with familiarity. This holds true for graphemes encountered in laboratory or immersion
settings. Specifically, synesthetic percepts to Devanagari graphemes associated with phoneme and meaning in an immersion
setting, or Cyrillic graphemes + phonemes trained in a laboratory, are not notably more consistent than synesthetic percepts
to unaccompanied Hebrew or Armenian graphemes. Given the reports of synesthetes that grapheme name and shape were
sometimes in conflict in determining grapheme color, it may be the case that increased information about graphemes increased association consistency, but this is balanced by the decrease in consistency caused by conflicts. However, if true,
there should be lower difference scores for the Cyrillic alphabet after such conflicts had been resolved. While this may be
952
C.D. Blair, M.E. Berryhill / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 944–954
the case for MC2 (Cyrillic: 0.31 Cyrillic Subset: 0.34 Armenian: 0.42), this was not the case for DN (Cyrillic: 0.21 Cyrillic Subset: 0.18 Armenian: 0.15). We also found that synesthetes may have an advantage in forming name associations for novel
graphemes, suggesting that learning the novel graphemes of a new alphabet may even be facilitated by the presence and
stabilization of grapheme-color percepts.
Importantly, our findings demonstrate that it is not necessary for a grapheme to be encountered during an early sensitive
period during development to establish a grapheme-color association. If this were required, synesthetes would not experience synesthetic color percepts when encountering novel symbols. However, such a sensitive period may play a role in
establishing color associations for synesthetes’ first learned alphabets and influence color associations formed later for novel
alphabets. In fact, synesthetes and controls have reported that shape associations between previously learned graphemes
can be quickly noted for many graphemes used in these experiments. For some graphemes presented in this study, synesthetes may remap colors from previously learned graphemes to novel graphemes with similar shapes. Thus, new color associations may still be reliant on a previous sensitive period.
Our results are also consistent with the view that the particular pattern of color associations may be influenced by an
early sensitive period of language acquisition (Barnett, Feeney, Gormley, & Newell, 2009; Rich et al., 2005). In other words,
if particular shapes, sounds, and/or grapheme meanings (Mroczko et al., 2009) are associated with particular color percepts
during an early sensitive period, graphemes encountered later in life may then elicit colors consistent with graphemes with
similar shapes and sounds that were encountered during this early sensitive period. Evidence supporting this view comes
from several reports that childhood familiarity with commonly available colored refrigerator magnets (Fisher-Price) influences color-grapheme associations in synesthetes (Witthoft & Winawer, 2006, 2013; see also Rich et al., 2005). In contrast,
the present studies relied primarily on two synesthetes. MC2 reported that she did not have these refrigerator magnets. DN
reviewed the colors of the magnets and noted six matches between the magnet colors and her synesthetic percepts. Other
possible mechanisms for the original acquisition of grapheme color pairings were examined by Simner et al. (2005). They
considered correlations between factors such as the inherent and presentation order of graphemes, the frequency of grapheme use in the language, the ease of generation of color terms, the lexical frequency of color terms and the order in which
color terms enter various languages (Berlin and Kay ordering). Their results showed the greatest correlations between grapheme frequency and color frequency, and between grapheme frequency and Berlin and Kay ordering. While colors acquired in
this way for the Latin alphabet may have transferred to the novel graphemes used in this study, given the relatively limited
exposure of our participants to these grapheme sets, it seems unlikely that grapheme frequency in the languages associated
with these sets had any significant effect on the color associations our participants formed.
One limitation of this paper and synesthesia research in general is that it remains unclear how findings generalize across
synesthetes in general. We sought to enhance the relevance of these data by testing two rather different synesthetes; MC2
reports synesthetic percepts for phonemes, DN has pure grapheme-color synesthesia. Regardless, there is notable similarity
in their within- and between-session consistency. As noted in the introduction, there are other case studies confirming that
multilingual synesthetes have synesthetic color percepts across their languages (Mills et al., 2002, 2009; Rich et al., 2005;
Witthoft & Winawer, 2006). It was known that synesthetes can directly transfer one synesthetic percept onto a novel
replacement grapheme with explicit training (Mroczko et al., 2009). We extended these findings by tracking the improved
consistency of synesthetic percepts to a range of novel graphemes as they gained familiarity.
This expediency raises the question: How do synesthetic percepts emerge instantaneously? One neural theory that may
account for these findings is termed the cascaded cross-tuning model. It proposes that synesthetic percepts may arise due to
activity in ventral stream region V4 fed by posterior temporal grapheme areas responding to shape features (e.g. line segments, curvature) before feedback regarding grapheme identity modulates the color percept (Brang, Hubbard, Coulson,
Huang, & Ramachandran, 2010). Neuroimaging evidence supports this view. Color responsive regions (V4) are activated
when synesthetes view graphemes, and elicit the synesthetic color percepts, but not when they view other symbols that
do not elicit synesthetic percepts (Hubbard, Brang, & Ramachandran, 2011; Nunn et al., 2002; Rouw, Scholte, & Colizoli,
2011). Furthermore, in a region of interest study examining predefined color and grapheme regions in the brain, differences
were observed in V4, but there were no general differences in response to color observed between synesthetes and nonsynesthetes and differences in response to graphemes were not observed between synesthetes and non-synesthetes outside
of V4 (Hubbard et al., 2011). Thus, familiar physical components elicit synesthetic percepts to novel graphemes. It also addresses why novel graphemes with similar shapes to familiar graphemes elicit similar synesthetic colors. Indeed, graphemecolor synesthetes often have similar percepts for similar letters within the Latin alphabet itself (Brang, Rouw, Ramachandran,
& Coulson, 2011).
Much of our data are consistent with predictions of the cascaded cross-tuning model. For example, our synesthetes noted
that shape similarities promoted the transfer of one synesthetic percept to another. This stands to reason, given that no other
information was available to participants about the graphemes apart from their shape with the exception of Cyrillic characters, which were presented with their name, and the Devanagari characters as MC2 studied them. However, transfer can also
create problems. MC2 indicated that the initial similarity-based percepts required reconciliation with the meaning and use
of the grapheme within the context of the Hindi language, and in Cyrillic with the sound of the letter’s name. This prompted
notable shifts in the grapheme-color association over time. By way of example, the Cyrillic grapheme ‘‘H” originally elicited
the same synesthetic color as the Latin letter ‘‘H.” However, this grapheme is associated with an ‘‘N” sound in Russian. By the
end of testing, MC2 reported a synesthetic color that is closer to that of the Latin grapheme ‘‘N.” Furthermore, some graphemes bore little physical similarity to known graphemes. Indeed, this was one reason why we chose Hebrew, Devanagari and
C.D. Blair, M.E. Berryhill / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 944–954
953
Armenian graphemes. Thus, there appears to be an influence of other associations on synesthetic percepts. Consistent with
this view is the finding that Japanese synesthetes’ percepts for Kanji (logographs) appear to be strongly driven by phonological information and meaning rather than orthographic similarity to Hiragana (syllables) (Asano & Yokosawa, 2012). In Japan,
Kanji is taught several years after children learn Hiragana, but also during childhood. Thus, learned phonological information
and grapheme meaning appear to trump physical similarity in driving the synesthetic percept. Other studies have shown
that grapheme meaning may have a greater effect on perceived photisms than grapheme shape. For example, when ambiguous graphemes are presented to synesthetic participants, (e.g. may be seen as an ‘‘S” or a ‘‘5”), changing the context in
which the grapheme is viewed can completely change its perceived synesthetic color (Dixon, Smilek, Duffy, Zanna, & Merikle,
2006). However, it has also been shown that grapheme case and font can affect the saturation of resultant photisms (Witthoft & Winawer, 2006). Furthermore, there have been various situations cited in which the meaning of a word conflicts with
its perceived synesthetic color (‘‘Blue” is red) (Gray et al., 2006), suggesting that meaning and usage of graphemes may not
always be the only, or even principal determinant of perceived synesthetic color. These results seem to reinforce that grapheme shape, as well as meaning, have an effect on synesthetic percepts, though it is not entirely clear what the relative contribution of each may be, or to what degree one takes precedence over the other.
Although the present data addressed our primary research questions, it raised several others. MC2 reports sound-grapheme synesthetic colors, but the addition of phonemes in Experiment 3 did not further enhance the consistency of her synesthetic percepts beyond the presentation of the grapheme alone. As discussed above, multiple competing processes
resulting from the presentation of additional phonemic information may be leading to a null final result in our paradigm.
However, despite the lack of effect of phonemic information on color consistency, we did find that when there was a conflict
between the sound and shape of a grapheme, MC2’s final colors for Cyrillic appear to be divided equally between being consistent with the grapheme’s name, its shape, and something in between. In the case of DN, who does not report sound-color
synesthesia, the majority of such graphemes elicited colors consistent with Latin graphemes of similar shape by the end of
testing. While our results provide some additional clues, it still remains unclear exactly how different types of synesthetic
percepts are modulated by experience or how they interact with each other. Further, the durability of the synesthetic percepts for novel graphemes has not been tested. It seems likely that the percepts remain constant over time, but lack of continued exposure may produce some degree of extinction. In the future, it would also be interesting to compare the
grapheme-color percepts for native language speakers versus later learners and their respective patterns of cortical activations. Synesthesia continues to raise intriguing questions relating perception and conscious experience. What is clear is that
color associations for novel graphemes can be formed with only shape information. However, shape is clearly not the only
determinant of synesthetic color association, as acquisition of meaning and phonemic information can modulate colors originally associated based solely on shape information. These findings also confirm that the laboratory can shed light on the
process by which new synesthetic percepts naturally emerge.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank MC2 and DN as well as our two control participants for their patience and cooperation throughout
these experiments. Research reported in this publication was generously supported by an Institutional Development Award
(IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Grant Number
P20GM103650, Grant NEI R15EY022775 and start-up funding from the University of Nevada to MEB.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
concog.2013.06.002.
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Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization
of intentional actions and the understanding of others’ intention
Luca Bonini a, Pier Francesco Ferrari b, Leonardo Fogassi b,⇑
a
b
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Brain Center for Motor and Social Cognition (BCMSC), via Volturno 39, 43125 Parma, Italy
Rete Multidisciplinare Tecnologica (RTM) and Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, via Volturno 39, 43125 Parma, Italy
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Mirror neurons
Monkey
Action organization
Social cognition
a b s t r a c t
Philosophical and neuroscientific investigation on intentional actions focused on several
different aspects, making difficult to define what should be meant with the concept of
intention. Most of our everyday actions are constituted by complex and finely organized
motor sequences, planned and executed in order to attain a desired final goal. In this paper,
we will identify the final goal of the action as the motor intention of the acting individual.
First, we will review the relative contribution of the vast neuroscientific literature on the
role of different cortical areas in the organization of goal-directed movement. In particular,
we will describe recent data on the cortical organization of natural action sequences, showing that this organization could be at the basis not only of our capacity of acting intentionally, but also of our ability to understand the motor intentions underlying others’
behaviour which is crucial during social interactions.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The concepts of ‘‘intention’’ and ‘‘intentionality’’ of human actions are, since centuries, the focus of philosophical reasoning and dispute, but in the last few decades even neuroscientists and biomedical engineers started focussing their efforts on
decoding neuronal intentional signals from the human brain for building brain-machine interfaces (Andersen, Hwang, &
Mulliken, 2010; Hochberg et al., 2006). However, in spite of the advances of modern neurophysiological and neuropsychological techniques and their crucial contribution to the clarification of the basic mechanisms underlying intentional actions,
there are still some fundamental neuroscientific and theoretical issues that remain unresolved.
First, concepts such as ‘‘action’’ and ‘‘intention/motor intention’’ are still elusive and not well defined. Second, the relationships between an overt intentional behaviour and its correspondent covert representations must be clarified. This last
issue is critical for any attempt to identify the neural mechanisms underlying our capacity to plan and perform intentional
actions, as well as to predictively understand the motor intentions of others.
2. Movements, motor acts, actions and intentions: hierarchical organizations of goals in the motor system
According to Libet’s seminal works, an act is regarded as intentional when (1) it arises endogenously, (2) there are no
externally imposed restrictions or compulsions that directly or immediately control its initiation, and (3) subjects feel introspectively that they are performing the act on their own initiative, starting or not as they wish (Libet, 1985). In the time domain, ‘‘intentionality is the premotor detail of the desired result of movement (...): the choice of what to do before the doing of it’’
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: leonardo.fogassi@unipr.it (L. Fogassi).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001
Please cite this article in press as: Bonini, L., et al. Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the
understanding of others’ intention. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001
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L. Bonini et al. / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
(Llinas, 2002). Most philosophical and neurophysiological studies in the literature dealt with the concepts of intention and
intentionality in such a way, suggesting that the intention of doing a certain act is something that precedes its actual motor
execution, and that it is usually associated with the conscious experience of ‘agency’.
Wittgenstein (1953) already envisioned the complexity of this issue by posing the question: ‘‘what is left over if I subtract
the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?’’ A plausible answer to this question could be ‘‘some sort of
conscious experience to intentionally lift the arm’’, but the philosophical debate has considered the concept of ‘‘intention’’
as by far more complex. One of the most influential of these views (Searle, 1983) maintains that intentions can be considered
at two distinct levels: prior intentions (e.g. to replace a burned out light bulb later on) and intention-in-action (i.e. the internal state that guides and monitors the arm lifting movement while reaching the light bulb). Several other theorists followed
this dualistic approach, distinguishing between prospective and immediate intentions (Brand, 1984), future- and present-directed intentions (Bratman, 1987), distal and proximal intentions (Mele, 1992), while others proposed even more articulated
models (Pacherie, 2008), identifying distal, proximal and motor intentions. What appears to be shared by all these views is
some concept of motor goal that – although at different levels of complexity – constitutes the core of what intentions represent, that is, ‘‘goals and means to those goals’’ (Pacherie, 2008).
The concept of goal is also central to the neurophysiological literature dealing with the correlates of intentional actions.
Let’s consider a simple example. Opening a candy box can constitute the goal of an agent and, therefore, the content of his/
her intention. However, to attain this goal, the agent must organize a reaching-grasping action formed by a sequence of motor acts (see Rizzolatti et al., 1988), each of which is aimed at an immediate motor goal (e.g. reaching, grasping, lifting the
handle of the lid). Motor acts are formed by more elementary muscle synergies, often called simple movements, which could
serve for the execution of several different acts and actions, regardless of their goal. Thus, what is the agent’s intention in this
example? One might say to grasp the lid, to remove the lid or even to eat a candy. This action clearly includes many goals and
sub-goals, but it is unclear firstly at which level we should search for the agent’s intention in this motor hierarchy and, secondly, if some unifying concept of intention does exist at all.
Usually, by definition, we consider an action as associated with only one goal. Bernstein (1996), for example, defined actions as ‘‘whole sequences of movements that together solve a motor problem (...) and all the movements parts of such a chain are
related to each other by meaning of the problem’’. In this definition ‘‘motor problem’’ clearly refers to what we usually identify
with the concept of motor goal. Nevertheless, even very simple discrete movements – such as arm reaches, saccades or
extension/flexion of a finger – can be considered as goal-directed, provided that they are performed in order to reach a specific state and their execution is under voluntary control. This latter consideration is extremely useful in order to reconcile
the many and diverse findings reported by neurophysiological studies on intentional actions, using behavioural paradigms
extremely different one from the other in terms of motor complexity.
2.1. When, what and how of intentional actions
Many authors employed different behavioural paradigms to investigate intentional actions focussing on motor details
that are specified in advance to the actual movement execution. Neurophysiological studies showed, for example, that mesial premotor regions (supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas) and rostral cingulate motor cortex encode ‘when’
a general intention to act rises (Fried, Mukamel, & Kreiman, 2011; Hoshi, Sawamura, & Tanji, 2005), particularly prior to selfgenerated actions (see Passingham, Bengtsson, & Lau, 2010). Others (Andersen & Buneo, 2002; Snyder, Batista, & Andersen,
1997) studied neuronal activity during the planning phase of simple reaching and saccadic movements directed to a target
and showed that lateral intraparietal neurons specifically encodes ‘what’ the monkey intends to do (a reaching act or a saccade) prior to movement onset. Other authors, although not explicitly focussing on the issue of motor intention, demonstrated that planning-related neuronal activity in different premotor and parietal areas can specify ‘how’ an act has to be
done, either in terms of specificity for the direction of the forthcoming reaching (Cisek & Kalaska, 2005) or for the grip selectivity of the planned grasping (Baumann, Fluet, & Scherberger, 2009), as soon as contextual information sufficient to make a
decision becomes available (see Andersen & Cui, 2009). Taken together, these studies suggest that an intentional action
stems from decisional processes carried out on potential concurrent motor plans simultaneously activated in a network
of parietal and frontal areas and specifying the ‘whether’, ‘when’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the action to be performed (see Haggard, 2008).
Most of these processes can occur covertly, automatically and without any need of conscious access: when grasping a
handful of popcorn while watching a movie, we will not be certainly attending to when starting to move or how shaping
the hand for doing it. Nevertheless, we could, if we want, carefully look at a single popcorn, precisely grasping it between
our thumb and index finger tips, and specifically attending to when we decide to start the movement, what action to perform
or even how to do it (Lau, Rogers, Haggard, & Passingham, 2004): in both cases, i.e. attending or not to the action, our phenomenological experience of acting intentionally appears to us as a sort of unitary perception that is always inherent in our
own voluntary behaviour. However, motor intention cannot be considered, as our phenomenological experience would suggest, a unitary phenomenon from a neurophysiological point of view, since different brain areas have been shown to play a
role in processing different aspects of intentional actions. The pioneering studies by Penfield and Boldrey (1937) and more
recent data by Desmurget et al. (2009) have shown that it is possible to dissociate the processes leading to motor execution
of an action from those related to the awareness of the corresponding motor intention. For example, by means of electrical
stimulation of the human right inferior parietal cortex, Desmurget and coworkers evoked the patients’ subjective feeling of
Please cite this article in press as: Bonini, L., et al. Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the
understanding of others’ intention. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001
L. Bonini et al. / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
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intending to move the hand, the arm or the foot without any overt muscle activation, while through the stimulation of the
right premotor cortex they produced overt contralateral movements, but the patients firmly denied that they had moved
(Desmurget et al., 2009). Furthermore, recent studies on patients with anosognosia for hemiplegia due to lesions in the territory of the right middle cerebral artery (with large involvement of subcortical structures) showed that motor intentions
related to movement plans for the paralyzed hand can influence the performance of what the intact hand does (Garbarini
et al., 2012). Taken together, these data indicate that conscious representations of motor intention - in terms of what to
do and when doing it – can be anatomo-functionally dissociated from the motor representations underlying the actual motor
behaviour, and both of them normally interact in the parieto-frontal circuits subserving the organization of intentional
action.
2.2. Neural basis of the organization of intentional action sequences
The studies reviewed so far dealt with a specific aspect of the concept of motor intention, that is, ‘‘the premotor details of
the desired result of movement’’ (Llinas, 2002). However, intention does not terminate with action onset. In fact, ‘‘the desired
result of movement’’, that is, the final goal of the action, does not fade out with movement onset, but remains still present in
the agent’s phenomenological experience during action unfolding until its completion.
A number of behavioural studies on humans’ reaching-grasping actions (Ansuini, Santello, Massaccesi, & Castiello, 2006;
Ansuini, Giosa, Turella, Altoe, & Castiello, 2008; Armbruster & Spijkers, 2006; Gentilucci, Negrotti, & Gangitano, 1997; Marteniuk, MacKenzie, Jeannerod, Athenes, & Dugas, 1987; Rosenbaum, Chapman, Weigelt, Weiss, & van der Wel, 2012) indicated that the first motor acts (i.e. arm reaching and hand shaping when grasping an object) of a longer action sequence
are influenced by the final action goal and, more specifically, by the forthcoming motor acts following grasping (e.g. lifting,
placing). This peculiar organization of intentional actions seems to develop very early in life (Butterworth & Hopkins, 1988;
Sparling & Wilhelm, 1993; Takeshita, Myowa-Yamakoshi, & Hirata, 2006). Indeed, kinematics studies (Zoia et al., 2007) carried out on foetuses in the womb by mean of ultrasonography revealed that while at the 14th week of gestation foetuses’
movements are by no means uncoordinated, since the 22th week of gestation they begin to assume the recognizable form
of intentional actions, with kinematic patterns depending on the goal of the action (hand movements to-the-mouth or tothe-eyes). This conclusion supports the idea that an action, since very early in ontogeny, is planned and organized as a whole
chain of acts well before its actual onset, and the bio-mechanical and temporal structure of motor acts embedded in the action depend on its final goal (for example bringing the hand to the mouth), that is, the motor intention of the acting
individual.
Recent neurophysiological studies shed new light on the possible neural mechanisms underlying the goal-related chained
organization of motor acts into actions. Fogassi and co-workers (Bonini et al., 2010; Fogassi et al., 2005) recorded the activity
of inferior parietal (area PFG) and ventral premotor (area F5) grasping neurons in monkeys while they performed simple
grasping actions. In the basic experimental conditions the target was a piece of food or a metallic solid of the same size
and shape of the food: the monkey was required to grasp the food and eat it (Condition 1) or grasp the object and place
it into a container located near the target in order to receive a reward (Condition 2). Since the grasping motor act was
the same in both conditions, one should expect that grasping neurons discharged similarly independently from the motor
act following grasping. In contrast, most of the recorded neurons discharged stronger during grasping depending on the action (i.e. grasp-to-eat or grasp-to-place) in which the act was embedded. Control experiments were carried out to investigate
which factors could determine grasp-to-eat or grasp-to-place neuronal selectivity. First, grasp-to-place neurons did not
change their selectivity when the container in which the target had to be placed was located near the mouth rather than
near the target: thus, neuronal selectivity was largely independent from target location and, therefore, from the motor sequence following grasping. Second, in a modification of Condition 2, monkeys were trained to grasp and place the same piece
of food used for grasp-to-eat trials in order to receive a more palatable food reward. This condition was introduced in order
to have the same target in both conditions. Neuronal selectivity remained unchanged even when a piece of food was used as
target for placing actions. Third, motivational aspects are known to play a relevant role in driving the selection and execution
of goal directed actions (Glimcher, 2003; Schultz, 2004), but the manipulation of the rewarding value of the food obtained by
the monkey upon correct task accomplishment did not change the neuronal preference for eating or placing (Bonini et al.,
2011). Taken together, these findings indicate that the discharge of PFG and F5 grasping neurons can reflect the goal of
the action in which the coded act is embedded. Furthermore, they also support a model in which neurons coding distinct
motor acts might be organized in chains in which each neuron is facilitated by the activation of the previous one in the sequence (Chersi, Ferrari, & Fogassi, 2011; Fogassi et al., 2005; Rizzolatti, Ferrari, Rozzi, & Fogassi, 2006).
The chain model of action organization has been further assessed in monkeys by directly comparing, using the same
grasp-to-eat and grasp-to-place motor task, the relative impact of action goal on the discharge of parietal and premotor
grasping neurons (Bonini et al., 2010). Results showed that parietal area PFG has a greater proportion of neurons discharging
differently according to the action goal and with a higher degree of action goal selectivity compared to F5. Furthermore, neuronal selectivity for the action goal significantly increases over time during grasping unfolding in PFG. Interestingly, we also
found that the later was the peak of a neuron’s activity, the higher was its action goal preference, while this did not occur in
F5.
Tracers injections in the recorded regions of parietal and premotor areas of the monkeys employed for the neurophysiological experiments demonstrated the existence of a direct anatomical link between these two sectors (Bonini et al., 2010).
Please cite this article in press as: Bonini, L., et al. Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the
understanding of others’ intention. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001
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Therefore, areas PFG and F5 form an anatomo-functional circuit playing a crucial role in the organization of intentional actions. In particular, area PFG appears to have a leading role in linking the motor acts one to the other based on the goal of the
action in which they are embedded.
Models of neuronal chains underlying complex sequential behaviors have been also proposed, based on direct evidence
derived from intracellular recording studies in songbirds. Strikingly, it has been found that the production of strings of syllables during singing reflect the propagation of activity through a chain network localized within a telencephalic premotor
area (HVC) with high temporal precision (Long, Jin, & Fee, 2010). The structure of this network appears to be compatible with
the hypothesized organization in neuronal chains proposed for primates parieto-premotor networks related to hand-arm
movements, suggesting that an evolutionary ancient mechanism could underlie a wide range of functionally distinct sequential behaviours.
In all single neuron studies in monkeys reviewed so far neuronal activity was recorded only during the execution of a
single type of grip (i.e. precision grip). However, intentional grasping actions often imply not only the organization of the
appropriate chain of acts leading to the achievement of the action goal, but also the selection of the appropriate type of
grip, depending on the object’s physical properties. For instance, when grasping a fruit, a specific grip type has to be selected depending on the physical properties of the fruit (i.e. its size and shape). However, the agent could grasp the fruit
in order to eat it or to place it in a basket, and the chosen action could imply the use of a different type of grip, so that
the coding of action goal and of grip type must be strictly linked. A recent study (Bonini, Ugolotti Serventi, Bruni, et al.,
2012) demonstrated that both parietal and premotor grasping neurons can integrate information concerning the type of
grip and the action goal. In fact there are neurons in both cortical sectors that discharge stronger during a given type of
grip (e.g. finger prehension) and at the same time show a modulation of their discharge due to the action goal. Furthermore, with a more detailed analysis of the temporal dynamics of grip and goal selectivity, it appears that grasping neurons activity, particularly in the parietal area PFG, reflects first ‘‘how’’ the object has to be grasped (grip), to guide and
monitor the hand shaping phase, then ‘‘why’’ the action is performed (goal), very likely to facilitate the motor acts following grasping.
While during simple actions the target is usually visible and directly cues the final goal, during many of the actions we
perform in our everyday life the target is concealed, and has to be internally generated or kept in mind to shape action
unfolding. For example, to eat a candy, one needs to open the candy box, grasp the candy and eat it: the first part of this
action sequence is memory-driven, because the agent has to know that the candy is inside the box, although not visible,
and has to use this knowledge for action planning. A neurophysiological study in monkeys (Bonini et al., 2011) investigated
PFG and F5 grasping neurons activity with a behavioral paradigm more complex than those previously used, including two
sequential grasping acts in the same action: the monkey had to grasp and open a container (1st grasping) in order to grasp
the target hidden inside it (2nd grasping) and eating it (in case of a piece of food) or placing it in a container located near the
mouth (in case of a metallic solid). Before each trial, the set was prepared by the experimenter behind a transparent screen,
which allowed the monkey to see which object was put into the container and, therefore, to select in advance the action to
perform. Recordings revealed that a relevant percentage of neurons, almost only in area PFG, reflected the final goal already
during the first grasping act of the sequence, when only memory-driven information was available. Crucially, when an opaque screen was used during set preparation to prevent the monkey from seeing the target of the forthcoming action, these
neurons lost their early action goal selectivity. Interestingly, the discharge during the first grasping act was still present, but
was the same for both actions, suggesting that the monkey brain very likely activated at the same time two motor chains,
until contextual information (vision of the target) did not allow to disentangle the type of action to be selected. In fact, during
the second grasping act the differential discharge reappeared. These findings indicate that parietal neurons can reflect action
goals also at a rather abstract level, depending on the availability of contextual information necessary to define the agent’s
motor intention.
3. From action organization to others’ intention understanding
3.1. Mirror neurons and the role of the motor system in understanding others’ motor acts and motor intention
Recent models on the selection of object-directed motor acts (see Cisek & Kalaska, 2010), together with the recent data so
far reviewed, can provide an integrated account on how natural actions are organized in a world full of objects and of potential action choices. However, the natural environment of humans as well as of other primate species is not only crowded
with inanimate objects, but it is also populated by other conspecifics as well as by other animal species. As Gibson wrote,
‘‘animate objects differ from inanimate objects in a variety of ways, but notably in the fact that they move spontaneously (...). Animals are thus by far the most complex objects of perception that the environment presents to an observer’’ (Gibson 1979).
Since the beginning of the nineties, the general idea on the neuronal substrates for the representation of others’ actions
maintained that sectors of the infero-temporal cortex processed increasingly complex information about others’ face and
limb movements (see Puce & Perrett 2003), constituting the cortical mechanism for the recognition of biological motion.
The discovery of mirror neurons (MNs) in the ventral premotor cortex of the macaque (di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese,
& Rizzolatti, 1992; Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996) challenged this view, suggesting that the dichotomy between
sensory, associative and motor brain regions was untenable.
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understanding of others’ intention. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001
L. Bonini et al. / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
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Mirror neurons are a class of cells originally discovered in the ventral premotor area F5 of the macaque that discharge
during execution of hand (Gallese et al., 1996) or mouth (Ferrari, Gallese, Rizzolatti, & Fogassi, 2003) motor acts, as well
as during the observation of similar acts done by another agent. Assuming that the output of a neuron provides the same
information every time action potentials are generated, then its output during grasping execution encodes unequivocally
this act. Thus, also its activation during the observation of the same act done by another agent would correspond to the activation of an internal motor representation of the observed act. The others’ motor behaviour, besides being described pictorially by the activation of visual brain areas, is mirrored by the activation of correspondent motor representations in the
observer’s brain. Since an individual masters and controls his own behaviour, as a consequence he/she knows the meaning
of the motor representations underlying this behaviour. Thus, the activation of the same representations while observing
others’ actions enable the observer to immediately recognize and understand what others are doing. In other words, the motor behaviour of others is ‘‘reflected’’ in the observer’s motor repertoire.
Similarly to monkeys, a human mirror system (MS) has been demonstrated by means of electrophysiological (Fadiga,
Fogassi, Pavesi, & Rizzolatti, 1995; Gangitano, Mottaghy, & Pascual-Leone, 2004; Mukamel, Ekstrom, Kaplan, Iacoboni, &
Fried, 2010) and neuroimaging (Buccino et al., 2001; Rizzolatti et al., 1996; see for a meta-analysis Molenberghs, Cunnington,
& Mattingley, 2012) techniques, showing that the crucial nodes of this system are represented by the posterior parietal cortex, premotor cortex and inferior frontal gyrus. In both monkeys (Kohler et al., 2002; Rochat et al., 2010; Umilta et al., 2001)
and humans (Buccino et al. 2004; Cattaneo, Caruana, Jezzini, & Rizzolatti, 2009; Gazzola et al., 2007), a considerable set of
data supports the idea that the activation of cortical motor areas during the observation of hand, mouth or foot actions, enables the observer to decode the immediate goal (i.e. grasping, biting, etc.) underlying the observed movements. In particular, two studies on monkey MNs of area F5 can illustrate this concept. In one study (Umilta et al., 2001) it has been shown
that MNs discharged both when the monkey fully observed a grasping act and when it saw only the initial part of it, because
the hand-target interaction was hidden behind a screen. This suggests that, during action observation, the corresponding
motor representations are retrieved, despite the absence of a full visual description of the motor event. In a second study
(Kohler et al., 2002), the monkey could both observe a noisy motor act (e.g. breaking a peanut) and listen to its noise. The
results showed that a sub-class of MNs, called ‘‘audio-visual MNs’’, discharged not only during execution and observation
of the noisy act, but also when the monkey listened to its noise, suggesting that the meaning (goal) of an act can be accessed
through different sensory modalities.
As in monkey studies, several human data support the concept that understanding other’s observed acts require the retrieval of one’s own motor representations of the corresponding acts. An example of one of these studies is that reported by
Gazzola et al. (2007) on two aplasic individuals, born without arms or hands, who participated in an fMRI study in which
they were visually presented with goal-related hand motor acts. Interestingly, compared with control subjects, during the
observation of hand motor acts they activated the motor representations of the mouth and the foot. These are the effectors
that aplasic subjects use to achieve the same motor goals that control subjects typically achieve with the hand.
As previously discussed concerning the motor organization of intentional action sequences, humans as well as other primates do not usually perform single hand or mouth acts (i.e. grasping, biting) in isolation, but as part of motor chains in
which these acts (i.e. reaching, grasping, biting), besides their immediate goal, are linked together to enable the achievement
of a final behavioural goal (i.e. eat a piece of food). Fogassi and coworkers studied parietal (Fogassi et al., 2005) and premotor
(Bonini et al., 2010) grasping neurons not only during the execution of simple grasp-to-eat and grasp-to-place actions, but
also during the observation of similar actions done by an experimenter. The target of the observed grasping act could be
either a piece of food or a metallic solid, and an empty container was present only in the context of grasp-to-place actions,
informing the observer about the most likely final goal of the observed agent. Surprisingly, although the recorded neurons
were all activated during grasping observation, the intensity of their discharge varied strongly according to the final goal of
the observed action (either eating or placing the target). Noteworthy, their visual selectivity for grasp-to-eat or grasp-toplace matched their motor selectivity for the same action. According to the chain model of action organization (Chersi
et al., 2011; Fogassi et al., 2005; Rizzolatti et al., 2006), the observation of a motor act in a given context would activate a
neuronal chain associated to a specific behavioural goal (i.e. eating or placing), which corresponds to the agent’s motor intention. Thus, the activation of this chained representation of an action has a predictive value and allows the observer to generate an internal representation of the agent’s motor intention.
3.2. Understanding others’ intention: contextual information and movement kinematics
If we accept that the activation of a chained set of neurons could underlie both the motor organization of intentional actions and the understanding of the same actions when observed, a fundamental issue concerns how the correct motor chain
is selected in the observer’s brain. Overall, what the observer looks and the neurons code are simply motor acts. Converging
data from neuroimaging and behavioural studies point to the idea that understanding others’ actions and intentions rely not
only on one’s own motor competence, but also on previous experiences with actions in similar contexts. In fact, several elements in the contextual setting in which actions are performed and observed crucially contribute to our possibility to decode
what others are doing and why they are doing it.
A functional MRI study (Iacoboni et al., 2005) directly assessed the impact of contextual information in the cortical representation of grasping actions. In this experiment, human subjects watched three kind of visual stimuli: a hand grasping a
cup without a context, a scene containing objects related to a table set for breakfast, and a hand grasping a cup in two difPlease cite this article in press as: Bonini, L., et al. Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the
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ferent contexts. In this latter condition, the context could suggest two different intentions underlying the grasping action: to
drink or to clean. Results indicated that actions embedded in contexts yielded a significantly greater signal change, compared
with the other conditions, in the posterior part of the right inferior frontal gyrus and ventral premotor cortex, where hand
actions are represented. This result suggests that the motor system can not only encode the immediate goal of observed motor acts but, when sufficient contextual information is available, it can also contribute to the understanding of the intentions
of others. Note that in this study the same activations have been obtained both when subjects were instructed to explicitly
infer the intention of the observed grasping act and when the request was just to observe. This finding supports the idea that
understanding intentions rely on the automatic, effortless and not inferential activation of the mirror system.
Other studies employed high density electroencephalography (EEG) to explore the time course of cortical activation while
human subjects watched similar type of stimuli (Ortigue, Sinigaglia, Rizzolatti, & Grafton, 2010): objects and tools were
grasped either in presence or absence of contextual information suggesting potential motor intentions underlying the observed action. Results revealed that, following an early bilateral posterior activation after the visual presentation of the stimulus (a grasping hand in a context), a strong activation occurred in the left posterior temporal and inferior parietal cortices:
this activation was associated with a complete disappearance of the activity in the right hemisphere, suggesting that this
early lateralized temporo-parietal network mediates the understanding of the immediate goal of object-directed motor acts.
Subsequently, the increased activation of the right temporo-parietal and frontal regions with simultaneously co-active left
hemispheric sources showed longer duration when actions were presented embedded into contexts that allowed the decoding of the underlying motor intention. These findings suggest that areas of the mirror system in the right hemisphere of the
human brain play an important role in understanding the intention of others based on contextual information.
Although actions usually occur in contextual situations that provide a number of useful elements to understand the
agent’s intention, sometimes these elements could be absent or not sufficient for identifying the agent’s final goal. In particular, several studies demonstrated that it is possible to understand biological motion from impoverished visual stimulation
such as that provided by the movement of light-point displays (Blakemore & Decety, 2001; Elsner, Falck-Ytter, & Gredeback,
2012; Johansson, 1973). These studies indicate that we can recognize others’ actions based on internal representation of
movement kinematics. Is it possible to exploit kinematic information on others’ action also to predict his/her intention?
In fact, it might be argued that movement kinematics can be sufficient to decode what the agent is immediately doing
(i.e. grasping), but not necessarily why he/she is doing it (i.e. for eating, drinking, cleaning up, etc.) (see Jacob & Jeannerod,
2005). Recent kinematic studies in humans have shown that different motor intentions translate into different kinematics
patterns (Ansuini, Giosa, Turella, Altoe, & Castiello, 2008; Ansuini et al., 2006; Sartori, Straulino, & Castiello, 2011). Interestingly, early kinematics features can be exploited by an observer to decode the intention underlying an observed action sequence (Becchio, Manera, Sartori, Cavallo, & Castiello, 2012; Sartori, Becchio, & Castiello, 2011; Stapel, Hunnius, & Bekkering
,2012). For example, in the study of Stapel et al. (2012), participants observed movements of an actor in presence or absence
of a context, and in presence or absence of an object. They were instructed to indicate how an observed action would continue. The results showed that participants’ predictions were more accurate when the action was contextualized and objectdirected. However, these predictions appeared to depend more on movement cues provided by the observed actor rather
than from direct visual information on object and context.
Altogether, these studies suggest that both context and kinematics cues can be used for recognising the motor intention
of another agent and can be exploited by the observer to anticipate others’ behaviour during social interaction.
3.3. Understanding others’ actions in social contexts
Movement kinematics do not vary solely in relation to object features or forthcoming motor acts in an action sequence,
but also depending on the more general context in which actions occur. In particular, social contexts are by far the most complex situations humans, and animals in general, have to deal with.
Social interactions often consist of at least two interacting individuals who cooperate or compete to attain a certain goal.
Studies on the movement kinematics pattern during a cooperative or competitive social interaction (reaching-to-grasp a
wooden block) revealed that each of these contexts was associated to a specific kinematics pattern, which was different from
that of the same action performed by the subject alone (Georgiou, Becchio, Glover, & Castiello, 2007). In a further study, participants were asked to collaborate or compete with a partner in the same task, but the partner was an actor instructed to
show either a cooperative or competitive attitude. In congruent trials, in which both participants had a collaborative or competitive attitude, the kinematics pattern was that expected based on previous findings, and coherent with the task instructions. In incongruent trials, in which the actor displayed an attitude manifestly in contrast with the task instruction provided
to the subject, the subject’s kinematics pattern became more similar to that typical of the attitude shown by the actor (Becchio, Sartori, Bulgheroni, & Castiello, 2008). These findings suggest that participants can infer the partner’s incongruent
intention and use this information to plan and organize a more appropriate interaction. However, the fact that the actor displays an actually different kinematics pattern during cooperation and competition raises an alternative interpretation of the
findings: possibly, a social affordance directly provided by the observed movement might automatically induce a variation in
the subject’s kinematics pattern to match that of the partner.
The concept of ‘social affordance’, first proposed by Loveland (1991), refers to all those (typically) human activities that
occur during social interaction and indicate to other individuals a required or appropriate pattern of behaviour. An example
is unfolding the hand showing the palm as if to ask for an object. Becchio, Sartori, Bulgheroni, and Castiello (2008) reported
Please cite this article in press as: Bonini, L., et al. Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the
understanding of others’ intention. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001
L. Bonini et al. / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
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that when an agent performs an action sequence constituted by reaching and grasping an object and places it on the hand of
a conspecific, there are significant variations in the kinematics of the reach-to-grasp action compared to the same sequence
aimed at placing the object into a container. Interestingly, when the same hand-begging gesture is performed unexpectedly
by an agent in front of a subject committed to perform a simple task consisting in grasping an object and placing it on a platform, the arm trajectory of the grasping action varies significantly, suggesting that this social affordance is powerful enough
to override and alter the ongoing motor plan (Sartori, Becchio, Bulgheroni, & Castiello, 2009). Similar findings have been reported by studies focused on feeding behaviours. When an agent reaches and grasps a piece of food to directly put it into the
mouth of a human receiver, the final phase of the reaching and the placing acts slow down compared to when the food has to
be put into a mouth-like aperture placed on the ‘face’ of a fake human body shape (Ferri, Campione, Dalla Volta, Gianelli, &
Gentilucci, 2010). Ferri, Campione, Dalla Volta, Gianelli, and Gentilucci (2011) also showed that the request gesture of mouth
opening by a receiver during feeding behaviour was necessary to produce the kinematics variation in the agent’s feeding action, but also sufficient to induce the same variation when the sequence was not finalized to feed but to put the food into a
mouth-like aperture.
Summing up, the activation of a social affordance is extremely powerful and automatic, suggesting that in our everyday
interactions the automatic and fast decoding of social cues influences our intentional behaviour, in order to maximize the
efficiency of our responses.
4. Understanding intention through inferential processes
According to ‘‘simulation theories’’ (see Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Gallese, Keysers, & Rizzolatti, 2004), we usually rely on
fast, automatic mirror mechanisms to understand others’ actions and intentions. However, there could be ambiguous situations in which direct observation of others’ behaviour does not allow to directly disentangle the different goals underlying
it. A number of studies have been carried out in order to investigate the neural substrates of humans’ inferential and ‘‘mentalizing’’ abilities (see Csibra & Gergely, 2007; de Lange, Spronk, Willems, Toni, & Bekkering, 2008; Dodell-Feder, Koster-Hale,
Bedny, & Saxe 2011; Frith & Frith, 2006), suggesting that the temporo parietal junction (TPJ), the superior temporal sulcus
(STS) and the medial prefrontal cortex form a so-called ‘mentalizing network’. The proponents of this view, often claimed
that simulation mechanisms cannot explain how we understand others’ mind in many complex social situations. However,
they further extend the limits of simulation theories arguing that they are not relevant to the explanation of any socio-cognitive process (Saxe, 2005).
More recent proposals stand in favour of the idea that understanding others’ mind in real-life situation can be hardly
achieved in an efficient manner relying on purely simulative or purely inferential mechanisms, and suggest that simulation
and mentalizing networks are often concurrently activated (Keysers & Gazzola, 2007; Thioux, Gazzola, & Keysers, 2008), with
a variable degree of prevalence of one or the other depending on the contextual situation. For example, recent fMRI studies
showed that, when volunteers were required to judge the intentions behind different observed actions, areas of the MS were
activated, regardless of the condition, but there was, in addition, a specific activation of areas that do not belong to the classical mirror circuit, being considered as part of the mentalizing network (de Lange et al., 2008). In another fMRI study (Brass,
Schmitt, Spengler, & Gergely, 2007) the observation of unusual actions performed in plausible versus implausible contexts
was compared. Results showed that the activation of the MS was the same in all conditions, but interpreting unusual actions
in implausible contexts required, in addition, the activation of areas of the mentalizing network. Another recent fMRI study
(Becchio et al., 2012) showed that both areas of the MS and of the mentalizing network activate more strongly when the
kinematics features of the observed movements are typical of social actions. This finding led to the hypothesis that social
intentions, through the activation of the MS, might automatically engage regions of the mentalizing network which are required for social reasoning in complex situations.
In conclusion, the observation of others’ actions in everyday life always recruits the mirror system, enabling an immediate
understanding of the observed acts and of the agent’s intentions when sufficient contextual information is available. Instead,
in presence of novel or ambiguous actions/contexts, inferential processes are also needed, requiring the activation of further
brain areas (Van Overwalle & Baetens, 2009), strongly indicating that intention understanding is a complex process which
cannot be attributed to a single neuronal mechanism.
5. Conclusions
The present review proposes a specific neurophysiological account of intention coding that can explain both how we can
organize our intentional actions and how we decode the motor intentions underlying other agents’ actions.
Usually, the validation of a theoretical model of brain functioning implies the correlation of clinical deficits with focal
brain damages or functional alterations of specific neuronal circuits, either in animal models or in human patients. Several
studies on clinical populations with lesion in the parieto-premotor regions deemed to host MNs showed deficits in the subjects’ capacity to reproduce and, in some cases, to recognize several types of gestures (Buxbaum, Kyle, & Menon, 2005; Heilman, Rothi, & Valenstein, 1982; Pazzaglia, Pizzamiglio, Pes, & Aglioti, 2008; Pazzaglia, Smania, Corato, & Aglioti, 2008; Rothi,
Heilman, & Watson, 1985), but whether these patients are also unable to recognize the intentions underlying others’ observed actions remains still unknown.
Please cite this article in press as: Bonini, L., et al. Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the
understanding of others’ intention. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001
8
L. Bonini et al. / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
A more deeply investigated link is that between deficits of the basic mirror mechanism and some neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia (Arbib, 2007; Burns, 2006; Enticott et al., 2008; Ferri et al., 2012) and autism (Gallese, Rochat, &
Berchio, 2012; Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006; Oberman et al., 2005; Williams, Whiten, Suddendorf, & Perrett, 2001), although
only a few studies specifically dealt with the issue of altered recognition of others’ motor intention. In particular, Boria
et al. (2009) showed that autistic children appears to be capable of reporting ‘‘what’’ is the goal of an individual observed
act, while they make errors in identifying ‘‘why’’ the act is performed (i.e. which is the underlying motor intention), particularly in the absence of functional information derived from the object’s standard use. In another study (Cattaneo et al.,
2007) typically developed (TDC) and autistic children (AC) were required to perform and observe grasp-to-eat and graspto-place actions. In TD in both execution and observation conditions there was an increase of the activity of a muscle (mylohyoid) involved in mouth opening before the hand touched the target, as to prepare the mouth to bite the food. In AC there
was a delay of activation of the same muscle during grasping, and no activity was recorded during observation. These results
suggest that these intention deficits found in autistic subjects might derive from a basic impairment in the cortical ‘chain’
organization of actions.
The findings here reviewed point to the idea that intentional actions can be envisioned at several, extremely different levels of complexity in the motor system, and the dedicated mechanisms for the neural organization of purposeful behaviour at
all levels can be largely exploited to map and decode the intentional actions of others.
Acknowledgments
The work was supported by Italian MIUR (2006052343), the European Commission grant Cogsystems (FP7-250013), and
by the Italian Institute of Technology.
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Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 996–1002
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
More than meets the eye: Implicit perception in legally blind
individuals
Alan S. Brown a,⇑, Michael R. Best a, David B. Mitchell b
a
b
Department of Psychology, Dedman College, Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX 75275, United States
WellStar College, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA 30144, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 25 April 2013
Available online 2 August 2013
Keywords:
Implicit perception
Blindsight
a b s t r a c t
Legally blind participants (uncorrected vision of 20/200+) were able to identify a visual
stimulus attribute (clock hand position) in the absence of consciously identifying its presence. Specifically, participants—with their corrective lenses removed—correctly guessed
the hour-hand position above chance (8%) on a clockface shown on a computer screen. This
occurred both when presented in a 1-clockface display (28%), as well as when shown a display containing 4 clockfaces (21%), in which only 1 face contained a hand. Even more striking, hand identification accuracy in the 4-clockface condition was comparable whether the
clockface containing the hand was (21%) or was not (20%) correctly identified. That legally
blind individuals are capable of identifying stimulus attributes without conscious awareness provides an additional vehicle for exploring implicit perception. Consistent with previous research, the visualsystem can apparently cope with degraded visual input through
information available through a(n unconscious) secondary pathway via the superior
colliculi.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Research on perception without awareness has focused for many years on establishing an unambiguous empirical paradigm (Marcel, 1983; Merikle & Reingold, 1990; Mitchell, 2013). The psychophysical concept of defining an ‘‘objective’’ consciousness threshold has been elusive, even with signal detection, linear regression, and relative sensitivity measures
(Hannula, Simons, & Cohen, 2005). Furthermore, although self-report is the clearest indication of a lack of conscious awareness, its very subjectivity raises concerns about participants’ confidence and decision criteria. Indeed, subjective awareness
estimates vary widely with different measures, e.g., Perceptual Awareness Scale, confidence ratings, and post-decision
wagering (Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, & Cleeremans, 2010).
Kihlstrom and his colleagues (Kihlstrom, 2008; Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, & Tataryn, 1992) suggested redefining subliminal
vs. supraliminal perception as implicit vs. explicit perception, parallel to implicit vs. explicit memory (Mitchell, 2006;
Roediger & McDermott, 1993; Schacter, 1987). Regarding an event or object ‘‘in the current environment,’’ Kihlstrom
(2008) defined implicit perception as ‘‘. . .any change in the person’s experience, thought, or action that is attributable to such
an event, in the absence of (or independent of) conscious perception of that event’’ (p. 588).
Kihlstrom et al. (1992) reviewed a number of paradigms used to measure implicit perception, including phenomena with
normal participants (perceptual defense; hypnotic suggestion), participants with psychopathology (conversion disorders, or
hysterical blindness), and patients with the neurological impairment known as ‘‘blindsight.’’ The methodological difficulties
⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Department of Psychology, Dedman College, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275, United States.
E-mail address: abrown@smu.edu (A.S. Brown).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.07.002
A.S. Brown et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 996–1002
997
in this area of research range from response bias (perceptual defense; hysterical blindness) to subject selection (hypnotic
suggestion). In spite of these methodological issues, research interest in implicit perception has been robust in the two decades following Kihlstrom et al.’s (1992) review. The phenomenon of ‘‘blindsight’’ presents a particularly compelling instance
of implicit perception. Patients with primary visual cortex (V1) damage who are unable to consciously acknowledge the
presence of a stimulus can nevertheless identify stimulus characteristics such as location, color, contrast, and orientation
(Pöppel, Held, & Frost, 1973; Sanders, Warrington, Marshall, & Weiskrantz, 1974; Weiskrantz, 1980, 1986). Some even
equate ‘‘unconscious visual processing’’ with blindsight in terms of the functional dissociation between awareness and performance (Marzi, Minelli, & Savazzi, 2004).
In attempting to mimic blindsight phenomena in visually intact observers, Meeres and Graves (1990) used traditional
threshold setting procedures and presented an open circle subliminally (25–55 ms, followed by a pattern mask) at various
locations in the visual field. When asked to identify the circle’s location, participants were correct above chance even when
they claimed that no stimulus was present. Blindsight in normal observers was also demonstrated by Kolb and Braun (1995)
with a binocular rivalry paradigm, but their phenomenon was not replicated (Morgan, Mason, & Solomon, 1997; Robichaud
& Stelmach, 2003). More recently, Lau and Passingham (2006) used metacontrast masking to produce ‘‘relative blindsight’’
inhealthy observers, but again, their paradigm was challenged on methodological grounds (Jannati & Di Lollo, 2012).
Related to the present investigation, Hannula et al. (2005) indicate that ‘‘observers are often under-confident about their
perceptual experiences and report no awareness even when detection of stimuli by forced-choice methods is better than
chance’’ (p. 248). This illustrates the critical dissociation between subjects’ reports of their own awareness vs. their
forced-choice accuracy. Hannula et al. underscored that both proponents of implicit perception and its skeptics can agree
on two key points: (1) ‘‘the evidence for implicit perception cannot rely solely on participants to accurately report their state
of awareness,’’ and (2) ‘‘qualitative differences in performance can support claims of implicit perception even if they are not
definitive on their own’’ (p. 247).
In the present research, we eschew perceptual threshold per se (whether dichotomous or continuous, cf. Overgaard, 2011)
and focus instead on stimulus clarity (vs. intensity or duration), which circumvents some difficulties with prior implicit perception research. Our use of participants classified as ‘‘legally blind’’ addresses the first concern above regarding participants’
subjective judgments of their own awareness: without their corrective lenses, their inability to see a stimulus is a genuinely
objective condition. In other words, asking our participants to remove their glasses served as a proxy for setting an objective
threshold. The second criterion above will emerge if these individuals exhibit qualitative differences in performance with
and without their lenses. Thus, we manipulated lens maladjustment rather than stimulus duration to mimic thresholds in
legally blind individuals without (subthreshold) and with (suprathreshold) their corrective lenses. We examined their ability
to identify the hour hand location on a clockface.
A variety of orientation tasks were tested with D.B., the famous blindsight patient (Weiskrantz, 1986, 1987; Weiskrantz,
Warrington, Sanders, & Marshall, 1974). Using forced-choice procedures, he was able to discriminate a vertical bar from a
horizontal bar, the letters ‘‘X’’ vs. ‘‘O,’’ a horizontal vs. a non-horizontal grating, square vs. diamond, and even ‘‘T’’ vs. ‘‘4.’’
However, we reasoned that these simpler orientation tasks used by Weiskrantz and colleagues would be too easy for our
subjects. The clockface has the advantage of a forced-choice paradigm, but with 12 multiple-choice answers instead of a binary decision. Also, all of our subjects were completely familiar with the basic stimulus format. In addition, based on D.B.’s
performance, Weiskrantz (1986) argued that orientation ‘‘must be reckoned to be one of the most sensitive’’ residualcapacities (p. 72).
In the 1 clockface condition, participants simply provided the hand location. In the 4 clockface condition, participants
identified both the hand location as well as the face containing the hand. Following Kihlstrom (2008), we refer to uncorrected and lens-corrected viewing conditions as implicit and explicit perception, respectively.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
A total of 23 ‘‘legally blind’’ individuals participated in the present investigation. They were affiliated with either Southern
Methodist University or a medical facility in San Antonio, Texas. All of the participants had uncorrected vision of 20/200+ in
both eyes and corrected vision (via glasses) of 20/20 in both eyes. Participants ranged in age from 20 to 49 yrs (mean = 35
yrs) and participated on a voluntary basis. Students were given extra course credit as a reward for their participation, and the
IRB at both institutions approved the research.
2.2. Design
A 2 2 within-subjects factorial design was used, with the variables of vision (implicit, or lens uncorrected vs. explicit, or
lens corrected) and clockface (1 vs. 4). On the 1 clockface trials, a single 3-in diameter clock face was presented in black in the
center of a white background on a computer screen. The border of the clock was 1/8 in wide. Twelve 1/16-in wide ‘‘spokes’’
projected inward 3/8 in from the outer border, in locations representing the hour positions of an analog clock face. On each
trial, one 1/16-in wide hand projected from the center of the clock face outward toward one of the 12 h positions (see Fig. 1).
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A.S. Brown et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 996–1002
Fig. 1. Sample stimulus for the 1-clockface condition.
Fig. 2. Sample stimulus for the 4-clockface condition.
For the 4-clockface trials, a clock face identical to the 1-clockface condition appeared in each of four quadrants on the monitor. A hand appeared on only one of the 4 clockfaces,pointing to one of the 12 h positions (see Fig. 2). The visual angle was
10° in the 1-clockface display, and 22° in the 4-clockface display.
2.3. Procedure
Each participant was tested individually, accompanied by an experimenter who evaluated their visual acuity and initiated
each trial. All responses were made orally and recorded by the experimenter. Prior to the study, the participant’s visual acuity was evaluated using a Snellen derivative vision chart on the computer screen. The test established the distance each participant sat from the computer monitor so that their corrected vision was 20/20, and uncorrected vision was 20/200 or
worse: legally blind in each eye according to visual disorders rules in the Federal Register (71 FR 67037, 11/20/2006).
Although this applies with glasses on, our subjects had this acuity with their glasses off, so we use this term colloquially
for research purposes only. The average distance between the participant’s face and the computer screen was 5 ft.
PowerPoint software was used to present test stimuli on the computer screen. Participants had 10 successive trials under
each of four experimental conditions (40 trials total): (a) 1 clockface implicit, without corrective lenses; (b) 1 clockface explicit, with corrective lenses; (c) 4 clockface implicit, without corrective lenses; (d) 4 clockface explicit, with corrective
lenses. The trials for each condition were blocked together, and the order of blocks was randomly determined for each participant. Prior to each trial, participants focused on a point at the center of the screen, and a ready signal preceded the stimulus display by 1 s. The test stimulus appeared for 1 s, followed by a blank (white) screen. On each trial in both the 1
clockface and 4 clockface conditions, participants first indicated whether they actually saw the clock hand. If seen, they provided the hour position (1–12) that the hand was pointing to. In addition, in the 4 clockface condition they identified which
clockface contained the hand. On those trials where the participant was unable to see the hand, they first guessed the hand
position (1–12) in both the 1-clockface and 4-clockface conditions. In the 4-clockface conditions, participants next guessed
which clockface contained the hand. Participants had templates in front of them for reference (see Fig. 3), which consisted of
a single clockface without hands but with hour positions numbered around the outside, and a 4-clockface display with each
face identified by letter (A, B, C, D).
A.S. Brown et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 996–1002
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Fig. 3. Templates for identifying clock hand position and clockface location (4-clockface).
Three practice trials preceded the 10 test trials in each of the four conditions, to assure that participants (a) understood
the instructions, (b) were able to detect the clock hand in the explicit condition, and (c) unable to see the clock hand in the
implicit condition. In all four conditions, the hand position was randomly determined on each trial. For the 4-clockface conditions, the clockface containing the hand was also randomly determined on each trial. Participants were told that a hand
would appear on all trials. Blank (catch) trials were not used in the 1-clockface condition because we established the functional absence of perceptual ability in the implicit condition via (a) preliminary visual evaluation, (b) practice trials, and (c)
instructions to report any implicit trials where the clock hand was detected. However, to minimize methodological uncertainty, the 4-clockface condition served procedurally as catch trials, since 3 of the 4 clockfaces contained no hour hand.
3. Results
To keep the implicit condition uncontaminated, we excluded those trials where the participants claimed to have seen the
clock hand. This happened with 12 participants, and these excluded trials comprised 4.3% of all trials in the 1-clockface implicit condition, and 3.0% in the 4-clockface implicit condition. An alpha level of .05 was used throughout.
3.1. 1-Clockface condition
As expected, correct hand identification accuracy was very high (90.4%) in the explicit condition, which was significantly
above chance (1 in 12; 8.3%), z = 15.86. More importantly, performance in the implicit condition (27.5%) was also significantly above chance, z = 4.82. Thus, it appears that participants can process a visual property of a stimulus in the absence
of conscious awareness of seeing it.
Implicit access to orientational information should also be evident in the pattern of errors. More specifically, errors should
tend to cluster around the actual hand position. This is confirmed in Fig. 4, which plots the deviation in hand-position
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A.S. Brown et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 996–1002
Fig. 4. Percentage of responses at each guessed hand position, in increments from the correct hand position (0).
increments between guessed and actual clock hand location. To illustrate, if the correct hand position is ‘‘4,’’ a guess of ‘‘2’’
would be scored as ‘‘ 2’’ while a guess of ‘‘9’’ would be scored as ‘‘+5.’’ Fig. 4 reveals that the percentage of error responses
decreases with increased separation between the guessed and actual positions in both the clockwise (+) and counterclockwise ( ) directions.
Collapsing the data to reflect absolute (rather than relative) hand position deviation yielded six hand position error increments. After an arcsine transformation, the data revealed a significant linear decrease in percentage of error responses across
deviations 1 through 6 in the implicit condition (12.5%, 7.7%, 6.8%, 4.2%, 2.2% and 5.0%, respectively), F(1, 22) = 38.79,
MSe = .04, g2 = .64. Thus, support for the existence of implicit perception in the 1-clockface condition was found both in
the above-chance hand position guessing accuracy, as well as the clustering of guesses around the correct hand position.
3.2. 4-Clockface condition
In the 4-clockface condition, participants correctly identified the clockface containing the hour hand at a level significantly above chance (25%) in the explicit (90.0%) condition, as expected, z = 10.00. However, guessing accuracy was not evident in the implicit condition, where performance (29.6%) did not deviate from chance, z = 0.51. In contrast, accuracy for
hand location was significantly above chance (8.3%) in both the explicit (84.8%), z = 14.70, and implicit (20.5%), z = 3.60, conditions. In addition, the implicit condition hand identification accuracy was above chance both on those trials when face
identification was correct (21.2%), z = 3.84, and incorrect (19.8%), z = 3.47, with no significant difference between these
two types of trials, F < 1.
The distribution of hand position responses for the 4-clockface condition in Fig. 4 again reveals that the errors cluster
around the correct hand position. There was a significant linear decrease in errors away from the correct position (deviation
positions 1 through 6) for the implicit condition (11.4%, 11.8%, 6.0%, 4.4%, 4.6% and 4.8%, respectively), F(1, 22) = 38.69,
MSe = 10.03, g2 = .64. Furthermore, this linear decrease was significant both when target clock face identification was correct
(7.2%, 10.6%, 8.9%, 6.5%, 5.8%, and 0.7%, respectively), F(1, 22) = 7.99, MSe = 0.12, g2 = .27, and incorrect (12.2%, 13.0%, 4.7%,
4.0%, 3.7%, and 5.9%, respectively), F(1, 22) = 29.53, MSe = 0.05, g2 = .57. Thus, both the clockface and hand identification accuracy under the 4-clockface implicit conditions again support implicit perception. It is particularly impressive that in the implicit condition, participants can identify hand position above chance whether or not they correctly guessed which clockface
contained the hand.
4. Discussion
The outcome of this investigation documents implicit perception in humans as defined by the absence of perceptual
awareness due to lens maladjustment. That positional information is available without conscious recognition was supported
in several ways. First, the clock hand position was identified above chance in both the 1- and 4-clockface conditions when
participants reported no conscious perception of the hand (without corrective lenses). Second, the distribution of incorrect
hand position guesses in the implicit conditions in both the 1- and 4-clockface conditions clustered around the correct hand
position and tapered away in a systematic manner, suggesting that some fragmentary information was available to influence
the guesses. Finally, the hand position guess accuracy was above chance in the 4-clockface implicit condition, whether or not
A.S. Brown et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 996–1002
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the correct clockface was selected. Again, this indicates that information about the hand directionality was available evenwhen the source location on the screen was not accessible to conscious awareness. This finding is crucial, as it demonstrates
that the clock-hand positions were truly unavailable for conscious report. With the 1-clockface data alone (without catch
trials), our claim would not be as strong. Since location information was at chance, but hand-pointing perception was above
chance, we have clearer evidence for implicit perception. In light of the list of preserved residual capacities in blindsight (cf.
Weiskrantz, 1998), the reader might wonder why localization was so difficult for our subjects. Our task was considerably
more subtle: identifying which clock had an hour hand is harder than simply indicating where a light had flashed (e.g., Pöppel
et al., 1973; Sanders et al., 1974; Weiskrantz, 1986; Weiskrantz et al., 1974). In addition, the dependent variables employed
in the blindsight studies were more elementary: eye movements and manual reaching.
To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of implicit (unconscious) perception among individuals with a correctable visual impairment. Participants can be functionally unperceptive, yet respond to a visual stimulus in a manner suggesting that some information is being processed. One alternative explanation for the present outcome is that participants can
actually see the stimulus configuration under the implicit condition but are acquiescing to the demands of the experimenter.
This argument seems unlikely for several reasons. First, one would expect the accuracy of guesses to be much higher than the
range of 21–28% if participants could actually see the hand. Second, one would not expect the obtained error pattern (clustering near the correct position) if participants were faking errors. Rather, one would expect a more even distribution of errors across deviation positions. Perhaps most importantly, the probability of identifying the correct hand in the 4-clockface
implicit condition was the same whether participants identified the correct face or not. Incidentally, it should also be noted
that this task was moderately challenging under the best perceptual conditions, given that participants made errors on 10%
of the explicit lens-corrected trials.
Nevertheless, we acknowledge the possibility that some of our subjects might have been able to make out the broad contours of the clockface. Ultimately, there is no sure way to rule this out. However—as we mentioned previously—we excluded
those trials where subjects reported seeing the hand, and performance in the 4-clockface condition adds additional credence
to our subjects’ difficulty in consciously perceiving the stimuli. Although no one reported this, it is not inconceivable that our
subjects may have been able to read the clockface from after-images. Weiskrantz, Cowey, and Hodinott-Hill (2002) reported
this phenomenon in D.B., and labeled it ‘‘prime-sight.’’ However, this seems unlikely in our subjects, as their after-images
(presumably) would also suffer from poor acuity.
Although arguably not conclusive, our results have implications for the neurological and methodological debate surrounding blindsight findings (Blythe, Kennard, & Ruddock, 1987; Gazzaniga, Fendrich, & Wessinger, 1994; Overgaard,
2011; Sanders et al., 1974; Weiskrantz, 2009; Weiskrantz et al., 1974). Within the human visual system, the primary visual
pathway projects from the retina to the striate visual cortex, while a secondary projection runs from the retina to the superior colliculus and finally to the extrastriate visual cortex. It has been assumed that the primary pathway handles most visual
processing in humans. However, since all blindsight patients have damage to their primary striate visual cortex, Weiskrantz
(1986, 1998) proposed that blindsight is mediated by a secondary visual pathway which conveysimplicit or unconscious visual information. All participants tested in the present study presumably had intact primary visual pathways, so damage to
the primary pathway is not necessary to demonstrate implicit perception analogous to blindsight. In addition, recent brain
imaging data (fMRI) are consistent with the theory of neocortical involvement in awareness vs. subcortical (superior colliculus) involvement for an unaware mode in normal observers (Fang & He, 2005; Hesselmann, Hebart, & Malach, 2011; Tavassoli & Ringach, 2010).
In conclusion, we have demonstrated implicit perception through impaired stimulus clarity (lens maladjustment) rather
than stimulus duration to sub-threshold levels. Without corrective lenses, participants could identify the correct hand position (1- and 4-clockface conditions) above chance levels, and hand identification accuracy was above chance whether or not
the face containing the clock hand was correctly located (4-clockface condition). Guessing errors clustered around the correct position, and decreased linearly away from this as the discrepancy between actual and guessed position increased. The
outcome suggests that defining sub-threshold processing through lens limitations rather than exposure duration can be a
viable approach to investigate implicit perception. Perhaps individuals with focusing disorders develop ways of extracting
information from low frequency visual displays, and this may lead them to evolve responses to their environment that
are notaccessible to their conscious awareness. Individuals with low vision often develop alternative perceptual skills known
as ‘‘sensory compensation,’’ and although this mainly comes from other modalities (e.g., auditory, tactile), there is some evidence that compensation may occur within the visual system (Cattaneo & Vecchi, 2011). Our findings imply that such
dimensions of unconscious awareness may involve orientation, if not location.
Acknowledgments
We thank J.F. Kihlstrom and Cathleen Moore for valuable suggestions on an earlier draft, and Sandi Nelson for bibliographic assistance. Michael R. Best died subsequent to the completion of this research project.
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Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Short Communication
Theory of Mind experience sampling in typical adults
Lauren Bryant a,⇑, Anna Coffey a,1, Daniel J. Povinelli b, John R. Pruett Jr. c
a
b
c
Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
Department of Biology, University of Louisiana, 104 University Circle, Lafayette, LA 70504, USA
Department of Psychiatry, Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine, 660 S. Euclid Ave., St. Louis, MO 63110, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 2 July 2012
Available online 15 May 2013
Keywords:
Theory of Mind
Experience sampling
Social cognition
Folk psychology
a b s t r a c t
We explored the frequency with which typical adults make Theory of Mind (ToM) attributions, and under what circumstances these attributions occur. We used an experience sampling method to query 30 typical adults about their everyday thoughts. Participants carried
a Personal Data Assistant (PDA) that prompted them to categorize their thoughts as Action,
Mental State, or Miscellaneous at approximately 30 pseudo-random times during a continuous 10-h period. Additionally, participants noted the direction of their thought (self versus other) and degree of socializing (with people versus alone) at the time of inquiry. We
were interested in the relative frequency of ToM (mental state attributions) and how prominent they were in immediate social exchanges. Analyses of multiple choice answers suggest that typical adults: (1) spend more time thinking about actions than mental states and
miscellaneous things, (2) exhibit a higher degree of own- versus other-directed thought
when alone, and (3) make mental state attributions more frequently when not interacting
(offline) than while interacting with others (online). A significant 3-way interaction
between thought type, direction of thought, and socializing emerged because action but
not mental state thoughts about others occurred more frequently when participants were
interacting with people versus when alone; whereas there was an increase in the frequency
of both action and mental state attributions about the self when participants were alone as
opposed to socializing. A secondary analysis of coded free text responses supports findings
1–3. The results of this study help to create a more naturalistic picture of ToM use in everyday life and the method shows promise for future study of typical and atypical thought
processes.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Individuals capable of reasoning and making attributions about their own or another’s beliefs, desires, or intentions are
said to possess a Theory of Mind (ToM) (Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). The development of
this higher-order cognitive ability and its relationship to other areas of cognition has been the topic of much research. A great
deal of the ToM literature has been devoted to its function and development, particularly focused on the age at which ToM
abilities arise. The capacity to represent false beliefs—mental states containing content contrary to reality—has been widely
considered a marker of ToM abilities in children (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Proponents reason that to arrive at correct
⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 314 747 6777.
E-mail addresses: lauren.k.bryant@vanderbilt.edu (L. Bryant), meridian.coffey@gmail.com (A. Coffey), djp3463@louisiana.edu (D.J. Povinelli),
pruettj@psychiatry.wustl.edu (J.R. Pruett Jr.).
1
A. Coffey was enrolled at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA at the time of research.
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.04.005
698
L. Bryant et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
predictions or explanations of other people’s behavior, it is necessary to understand that mental states are sometimes independent of reality and may misrepresent the state of the world. Wimmer and Perner’s classic Sally-Anne task and others like
it have demonstrated that the ability to understand false beliefs and thus the possession of ToM consolidates around the age
of 5 years. However, experiments examining visual perspective taking and those utilizing anticipatory looking paradigms to
test false beliefs suggest the possibility of ToM understanding in children as young as 15 months (Baillargeon, Scott, & Zijing,
2010; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002).
ToM has been understood as a key component of humans’ intricate social lives, contributing to the ability to understand
irony, tell and detect lies, and participate in positive social interactions (Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 1993). It is
thought that such a skill is crucial for social adequacy and overall normal cognitive development. For this reason, deficits in
ToM have been linked to social dysfunction seen in disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. Many individuals with
schizophrenia display deficiencies in areas such as emotional perception and attribution that may be reflective of a ToM deficit. They also perform more poorly than non-affected subjects when trying to ‘‘read between the lines’’ (i.e., identifying what
a given individual is thinking or feeling) (Penn, Sanna, & Roberts, 2008; Pickup & Frith, 2001). Children with autism often fail
to develop proper social relationships and appropriately interpret social cues. Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985) hypothesized a link between the social deficits of individuals with autism and a deficit in ToM. Using the Sally-Anne task, BaronCohen et al. compared performance of subjects with autism to that of controls and children with Down’s syndrome. Results
revealed that even when the mental age of children with autism was higher than that of the controls, they failed to attribute
beliefs to others. This has been replicated using variations of the Sally-Anne task (see Grant, Grayson, & Boucher, 2001 for
review), including a non-verbal adaptation (Colle, Baron-Cohen, & Hill, 2007). While this is a well-replicated finding, ToM
impairment likely does not cause autism, and some high-functioning individuals with autism pass ToM tasks (Boucher,
2012). Nonetheless, understanding why many with autism fail ToM tasks may reveal something fundamental about this
disorder.
In recent years, a number of researchers have stressed the importance of naturalistic – as opposed to laboratory-based
– studies of social cognition. Ickes, Stinson, Bissonnette, and Garcia (1990) explored the overt behavior and covert
thoughts and feelings of pairs of subjects during a period of unstructured interaction to examine ‘‘empathic accuracy’’.
More recently, Malle and Pearce (2001) asked participants to report on their thoughts and speculate about those of their
partner during a dyadic interaction. Importantly, both methods required subjects to make perceptual judgments based
upon their memory of previous interactions and not within the moment. Frith, Happe, and Siddons (1994) explored the
ecological validity of ToM tasks with respect to parent-teacher reports of the everyday social interactions of individuals
with autism.
However, most ToM research to date involves studies in highly controlled laboratory settings. In the lab, tasks are
explicitly designed to elicit ToM attributions. Tailoring tasks towards a mentalizing state of mind may lead to a greater
number of mental state attributions. A lack of naturalistic social distractions may also allow more time to make ToM
attributions given research which demonstrates that ToM is cognitively taxing (Apperly, Back, Samson, & France,
2008; Malle & Pearce, 2001). In addition, experimental settings that do not mirror life’s complexities could lead to an
inaccurate record of the type and target of thought attributions. Support for this notion comes from research conducted
by Malle and Pearce (2001) hypothesizing that attentional bias motivated by the complex nature of social interactions
leads a person to focus on and recall their own inner states over their actions and another’s actions over that person’s
inner states.
The goal of the present study was to explore the extent to which typical adults make ToM (mental state) attributions and
under what conditions in everyday life. One approach to doing so involves experience sampling variants such as those used
to study the default mode network and the role of mind wandering (Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, & Schooler, 2009;
Schooler et al., 2011). Therefore, to examine ToM attributions in a more ecologically valid manner, we adopted the experience sampling method to randomly query subjects about their thoughts throughout the day (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi,
1983). Similar to the Electronically Activiated Recorder (EAR) (Mehl & Robbins, 2012), this methodology allowed us to gather
information from a day in the life of the participants as they choose to live it, filled with the intricacies of the human experience that are difficult to replicate in laboratory settings.
As a starting point, we hypothesized that ToM attributions might occur relatively infrequently outside the lab, and that
ToM might not prominently figure into immediate social exchanges under most circumstances. This hypothesis is based largely on a conceptual consideration of the socio-cognitive abilities of humans and nonhuman primates. Non-human primates
are capable of producing a variety of behaviors during social interactions that mimic those of humans, including deception,
reconciliation, and gaze following (see Marrus et al., 2011; Povinelli, 2000; Watts, 2002). However, Povinelli and Giambrone
(2001) argue that chimpanzees may not reason about the mental and perceptual states that appear to be fundamental for
ToM attributions. If social interactions amongst chimpanzees occur despite lack of the higher-order representational ability
Povinelli and colleagues claim is necessary for ToM (see Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli, 2008; Penn & Povinelli, 2007), it is plausible that humans may also rely primarily on underlying cognitive and perceptual abilities to interpret and react to behaviors
and only secondarily on ToM, lending to infrequent ToM attributions. Furthermore, given that everyday social interactions in
humans draw on a multitude of cognitive resources, and such resources are more readily available in the absence of social
‘‘distractions’’, we predicted that when ToM attributions do occur, they will happen more frequently outside of social
interactions.
L. Bryant et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
699
2. Method
2.1. Participants
We recruited subjects and performed the experiment according to an IRB approved human-studies protocol. Participants
included 30 adults (15 male, 15 female; mean age = 22.1, SD = 1.8) with no reported history of neurological or psychiatric
disorders and no family history of an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
Participants were recruited through word of mouth (snowball sampling), resulting in a sample comprised mostly of undergraduate and graduate students at Washington University in St. Louis. Assessments included the matrix reasoning and
vocabulary subsets of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI), full scale derived mean = 127, SD = 6. We also
quantitatively assessed the burden of autistic traits in our subjects by using the Social Responsiveness Scale, (SRS: Constantino; Western Psychology Services), mean = 23, SD = 3. All subjects scored below 65, two standard deviations below the mean
SRS score for Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) in a population sample (Constantino
et al., 2004). Ethnicity was not an important subject variable, however, participants self-identified as White, Black, Asian,
and Hispanic. Participants were compensated hourly, based on length of participation.
2.2. Design
We were interested in measuring the frequency and type of thought attribution, especially with respect to social context.
We adapted the Experience-Sampling Method to test our hypothesis. The Experience-Sampling Method is often used in personality and behavioral psychology and relies on self-reports to measure the frequency and the patterning of mental processes in everyday situations (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 1983). Barrett and Barrett (2001) computerized this method,
enabling us to query participants using a handheld electronic device called a Personal Data Assistant (PDA) (see http://
www.experience-sampling.org/ for software details). We used a PDA made by Palm, Inc. (model VIIx). Participants’ responses
were stored on the PDA, and after the sampling period, transferred to a computer for analysis.
2.3. Procedure
Participants carried a PDA loaded with a questionnaire for a continuous 10-h period. At approximately 30 pseudo-random
time points, they were prompted to answer a brief questionnaire without assistance. The randomized times were based on
an algorithm written for the ESP software. Participants may have been alerted to answer a questionnaire within minutes
after completing the previous one, but no more than an hour passed in between each query. Participants were instructed
to categorize the thought immediately preceding the beep as Action, Mental State (MS) or Neither (Miscellaneous). Before
the PDA was assigned, participants were instructed on how to categorize their thoughts according to strict definitions
and examples (see Appendix for Instructions and General Information). Action thought content was defined as ‘‘what you
or another is doing, has done or will do’’, a mental state was defined as a thought that ‘‘exists in your own or someone else’s
head’’, and the content of miscellaneous thought was neither mentalistic nor an action. If categorized as an action or mental
state, participants also noted the direction of that thought (own versus other). Participants were also asked about the degree
to which they were socializing (alone or interacting with others). Lastly, participants responded in free text form to two
questions, ‘‘What are you doing?’’ and ‘‘What are you thinking about?’’ in order to give context for their self-categorized
thoughts. We verbally instructed subjects that all queries applied to thought they reported having immediately prior to
the beep in order to minimize confusion. Participants were allotted 10 min to respond to the questionnaire for safety reasons
(i.e., if they were driving) and were not penalized for missing queries. Yet on average, participants took 11.94 (SEM = 5.94)
seconds to respond to each survey. This allows us to be relatively confident that participants were responding in most cases
promptly after the beep. The PDA automatically turned off at the end of each questionnaire.
3. Analyses
3.1. Primary analyses
We explored relationships between the frequencies of thought type (Action, MS, and Miscellaneous), direction (own versus other) and degree of socializing (alone versus interacting with others) and subject variables with SPSS 18.0 (SPSS, Inc.).
Tests included an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), paired sample t-tests, and bivariate correlations between thought type frequencies and IQ and SRS scores. Primary analyses were performed solely on the quantitative (button press) results, excluding
responses to the free text response questions ‘‘What are you doing?’’ and ‘‘What are you thinking about?’’.
3.2. Secondary analyses
To examine validity of participants’ button press responses and their interpretation of their thoughts based on the
instructions provided, we recalculated the frequencies of thought type, direction, and degree of socializing according to
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Fig. 1. Mean frequency of thought type. This figure illustrates the mean frequency of Action, Mental State and Miscellaneous thought type. Data from
subjects’ button press responses are shown (original) compared to the recoded data.
participants’ qualitative responses. Categorization was based on the independent coding of two raters following the instructions of a strict coding scheme (see Section 3.2.1). Coding disagreements were completely resolved, and raters’ responses
were then compared to the subjects’ button press responses. One subject was excluded due to insufficient qualitative data
necessary for coding.
3.2.1. Coding scheme
A coding scheme was modeled after various experiments that examined children’s utterances of mental terms (see
Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Shatz, Wellman, & Sibler, 1983; Tager-Flusberg, 1992). Two coders (authors LB and AC) were
trained on this scheme. They practiced analyzing literature rich in dialogue and containing mental state references, such
as a psychiatry training book and online romance novels (Miller & Rollnick, 2002; Reeves, 2008). Training continued until
an acceptable inter-rater reliability was reached, percent agreement (M = 75.23, SEM = 1.08, kappa = 0.63). Blind of participants’ original button press responses, raters then categorized participants’ thoughts using the qualitative responses based
upon these strict coding instructions (see Appendix for coding instructions).
4. Results
4.1. Subjects button press responses
We analyzed the frequencies of Action (M = 47.40, SEM = 3.53), MS (M = 31.76, SEM = 2.69), and Miscellaneous (M = 20.63,
SEM = 3.07) thoughts as seen in Fig. 1. Frequency counts were established based upon the number of events per category
over total number of events during the 10 h sampling period. Paired sample t-tests demonstrated a significant difference
in the frequency of Action versus MS thoughts, t(29) = 2.85, p = .008, Action versus Miscellaneous thoughts, t(29) = 4.43,
p < .001, and MS versus Miscellaneous thoughts, t(29) = 2.44, p = .021 (uncorrected p values are reported). Collapsing across
thought type, we performed a 2-way repeatedmeasures analysis of variance (ANOVA) between direction of thought (own or
other) and degree of socializing (alone or interacting), and found a significant interaction effect between direction of thought
and socializing, F(1, 29) = 52.64, p < .001, where the difference in frequency of own-directed thought when alone (M = 41.94,
SEM = 3.00) compared to thoughts about others when alone (M = 9.04, SEM = 1.57) was much greater than the difference in
frequency of own-directed thought when interacting (M = 16.97, SEM = 1.77) compared to thoughts about others (M = 11.41,
SEM = 1.65) when interacting, as seen in Fig. 2. There was also a significant main effect of direction, F(1, 29) = 76.69, p < .001,
with a higher frequency of own-directed thoughts (M = 73.76, SEM = 2.49) compared to other-directed thoughts (M = 26.25,
SEM = 2.50), and a significant main effect of socializing, F(1, 29) = 19.42, p < .001, with a higher frequency of overall thought
attribution (MS, Action, and Miscellaneous) (M = 64.29, SEM = 3.03) occurring when subjects were not interacting with others than when socializing (M = 35.80, SEM = 3.01). The frequency of MS thought attributions was isolated and examined with
respect to degree of socializing (alone or interacting with others). A paired sample t-test revealed a significant difference between the proportion of MS attributions when participants were interacting with others (M = 10.39, SEM = 1.53) versus when
they were alone (M = 20.96, SEM = 2.07), t(29) = 4.30, p < .001.
We also performed a repeated measures ANOVA across the 3 categories of thought type, socializing, and direction. Results
produced a significant 3-way interaction, F(1, 29) = 4.25, p = .048. There was a numerically higher frequency of action
thoughts about others while interacting with others (M = 7.34, SEM = 1.17) than when alone (M = 4.85, SEM = 1.09), whereas
there was no increase in frequency of MS attributions about others while interacting (M = 4.06, SEM = 0.96) than when alone
L. Bryant et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
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Fig. 2. Direction Socializing. This graph illustrates the mean frequency of own-directed and other-directed thoughts with respect to socializing
(Int. = Interacting), collapsed across Action and Mental State thoughts. Data from subjects’ button press responses are shown (original) compared to the
recoded data. Error bars corrected for repeated-measures design.
Fig. 3. This graph illustrates the mean frequency of Action (ACT) and Mental State (MS) thought types with respect to direction (own and other) and
socializing (Interacting (INT) and alone). Data from subject’s button press responses are shown (original) compared to the recoded data. Error bars corrected
for repeated-measures design.
(M = 4.19, SEM = 1.1.4). Concurrently, there was a similar increase in frequency of both Action (M = 25.17, SEM = 2.75) and MS
(M = 16.77, SEM = 1.70) thought attributions about one’s self when alone, than when interacting with others (Action,
M = 10.14, SEM = 1.40 and MS, M = 6.83, SEM = 1.09). There was also significant 2-way interaction effect of direction by
socializing, F(1, 29) = 52.63, p < .001; and significant main effects of thought type, F(1, 29) = 8.21, p = .008, direction,
F(1, 29) = 76.69, p < .001, and socializing, F(1, 29) = 19.42, p < .001, as seen in Fig. 3.
We found no significant correlation between frequencies of MS, Action, and Miscellaneous thought and IQ assessments
(vocabulary scaled scores and matrix reasoning scaled scores) and SRS scores. However, there was one subject that was
2.55 standard deviations above the mean SRS score of 22.67. This subject’s score was not greater than 2 standard deviations
below the PDD-NOS mean from a population sample; it would not have triggered an autism work-up, per protocol, in our
other research studies (e.g., Pruett, LaMacchia, Hoertel, Squire, McVey et al., 2011); and it was not more than 1.5 interquartile ranges above the third quartile. However, the subject reported the highest frequency of Action thoughts,
M = 93.1, SD = 2.36, leading us to consider the data without the subject. Previous statistical tests of thought type, direction,
and degree of socializing remained significant at p < .05, however the 3-way interaction (Thought Type Direction
Socializing) dropped to trend level, F(1, 28) = 3.09, p = .09.
4.2. Recoding
To validate our results further, we coded and re-categorized the subjects’ responses based upon their free text responses to the questions ‘‘What are you doing?’’ and ‘‘What are you thinking?’’ One subject was excluded from subsequent
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L. Bryant et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
analyses due to insufficiently descriptive responses. We analyzed the frequencies of Action (M = 38.78, SEM = 2.06), MS
(M = 29.17, SEM = 2.78), and Miscellaneous (M = 33.32, SEM = 2.15). A paired sample t-test demonstrated a significant difference in the frequency of Action versus MS thoughts, t(28) = 2.24, p = .034. Differences in Action versus Miscellaneous
thoughts, t(28) = 1.79, p = .084, and MS versus Miscellaneous thoughts, t(28) = 0.91, p = .371 were insignificant, depicted
in Fig. 1. A 2-way repeated measures ANOVA between direction of thought and degree of socializing revealed a significant
interaction effect between direction of thought and socializing, F(1, 28) = 39.07, p < .001, where the difference in frequency
of own-directed thought when alone (M = 35.65, SEM = 1.71) compared to thoughts about others whenalone (M = 10.15,
SEM = 1.90) is much greater than the difference in frequency of own-directed thought when interacting (M = 13.78,
SEM = 1.63) compared to thoughts about others (M = 8.95, SEM = 1.41) when interacting, as seen in Fig. 2. There was also
a significant main effect of direction, F(1, 28) = 75.60, p < .001, with a higher frequency of own-directed thoughts
(M = 73.54, SEM = 2.63) compared to other-directed thoughts (M = 26.52, SEM = 2.62), and a significant main effect of
socializing, F(1, 28) = 34.54, p < .001, with a higher frequency of overall thought attribution (MS, Action, and Miscellaneous)
(M = 63.66, SEM = 3.11) occurring when subjects were not interacting with others, than when socializing (M = 36.55,
SEM = 3.09). A paired sample t-test revealed a significant difference between the proportion of MS attributions when participants were alone (M = 19.42, SEM = 1.65) versus when they were interacting with others (M = 9.76, SEM = 1.71),
t(28) = 4.76, p < .001.
A repeated measures ANOVA across the 3 categories of thought type, socializing, and direction produced a significant 2way interaction effect of direction by socializing, F(1, 28) = 49.78, p < .001, and significant main effects of thought type,
F(1, 28) = 4.84, p < .038, direction, F(1, 28) = 93.78, p < .036, and socializing, F(1, 28) = 33.62, p < .001, as seen in Fig. 3. The
3-way interaction was insignificant, F(1, 28) = 0.42, p = .520.
5. Discussion
5.1. Summary of findings
Subjects’ button press responses reflected a higher frequency of thoughts about actions than mental states and miscellaneous things. This relationship was validated upon recoding their free text responses. Action thoughts were the most frequent, which is what we predicted given how much of our thought is devoted to planning behavioral responses. After
isolating MS attributions with respect to direction and degree of socializing, the results revealed that MS attributions occurred more offline (i.e. when alone) than online, and that these thoughts were most frequently oriented towards the self.
Further, a significant 3-way interaction between thought type, degree of socializing, and direction of thought arose, signifying that action but not mental state thoughts about others occurred more frequently when participants were interacting with
people versus when they were alone, while self-directed action and mental state attributions were both less frequent when
participants were interacting with people, than when in isolation. Although this 3-way relationship was not statistically significant in our secondary recoding, the remaining effects are encouraging for future studies involving the use of ToM during
social exchanges.
5.2. Closer examination of ToM attributions
An examination of MS responses revealed interesting details about the circumstances and orientation of such attributions. The higher frequency of own-directed thoughts as compared to other-directed thoughts (across both action and MS
thought types) may not be too surprising given humans’ demonstrated disposition towards egocentricity (Greenwald,
1980; Krueger, Windschitl, Burrus, Fessel, & Chambers, 2008). Even more intriguing is the frequency of own-directed MS
thoughts (M = 75.19, SEM = 4.03), compared to other-directed MS thoughts (M = 24.81, SEM = 4.03). Examining these statistics with respect to social context, there were more MS thoughts reported outside of social interactions, and a majority of
those thoughts were self-directed. These results allude to the reflective nature of ToM and seem to echo prior research conducted by Andersen and colleagues that suggest that, in constructing self-knowledge, people give greater weight to their
internal subjective experiences than to overt behavioral expressions (Andersen & Ross, 1984). Although it may be premature
to draw conclusions about the frequency of MS attributions with respect to current views on ToM, our implementation of the
experience sampling method has produced novel results which may represent caveats to Theory of Mind. Nevertheless, such
results invite further examination of how ToM is used within a naturalistic setting before making any resounding claims on
its utility.
5.3. Limitations
The experience sampling method has high ecological validity, yet methodological weaknesses do exist. It is impracticable
to query participants on their thoughts without bringing them to conscious awareness of those thoughts. It is possible that
the method of randomly alerting participants may have prompted an increase in MS attributions simply because we were
asking them to critically analyze thoughts that, under normal circumstances, may not contain much mentalistic substance.
There were also a few rare instances in which participants responded that they were thinking about why they or someone
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else was doing something, thinking, or appeared some way. This raises the question as to whether participants are able to
distinguish between the things they had questions about (often behaviors or observations) and the potential answers to
those questions (typically mental states). In review of participants’ free-text responses about what they were thinking about,
statements revolving around ‘‘why’’ were flagged. For sake of parsimony, these infrequent (16 events in total across all subjects) types of thoughts were not included in the analyses for sake of parsimony and did not have a significant impact on the
results. Interestingly, in a review by Higgins and Pittman (2008) regarding people’s concerns with comprehending, managing, and sharing the inner states of self and others, it is stated that people try to make sense of another person’s actions by
analyzing the feelings or attitudes that provide reasons for or caused his or her actions. However, one is not similarly motivated to consider one’s own inner states produced the action because people tend to comprehend their own action from a
situational standpoint and believe their action was the natural, objective response to seeing the world. This might explain
why the majority of the ‘‘why’’ thoughts we flagged consisted of others’ thoughts and behaviors, rather than the participant’s
own thoughts and behaviors. Future studies will investigate the relationship between this type of metacognition and ToM.
Additionally, there were some participants who reported thinking about ‘‘nothing.’’ Further considering the procedure, we
instructed participants to refer to the thought immediately preceding the auditory signal at the start of each questionnaire.
Some participants reported that the beep interrupted their current thought, and this interruption might have led to confusion and possible miscategorization. Future studies may utilize Mehl’s EAR system, which provides audio recordings of selected interactions. This might allow more accurate recall about such things as thought contents (Mehl & Robbins, 2012).
The type of participants recruited may have also introduced an influential subject variable, as most of the participants
were undergraduate and graduate students. Immersion in an analytical environment where many students are striving towards degrees in areas that involve reasoning about mental states (i.e. psychology, marketing) could have led to an overestimation of MS attributions. Nevertheless, comparisons of subjects’ button press and recoded responses show subjects’
introspection was relatively accurate when determining mental state thoughts. Of the thoughts the raters categorized as
mental states, subjects’ button press responses coincided 71% of the time. Many of the discrepancies between subjects’ button press responses and the coders’ categorizations can be partially attributed to misinterpretation of the instructions if subjects were not focusing on the object of their thought. Specifically concerning action and miscellaneous thought types, a
participant might respond that she was thinking, ‘‘What am I going to eat for dinner’’ and categorize the thought as an action,
referring to eating, when the object of the thought is actually the type of food she will eat. Because the object of her thought
is neither mental or an action, it would be re-categorized as miscellaneous. Although there is no way to know exactly what
her thought was referring to, coders were explicitly instructed to focus on the object of the subject’s thought. In the future,
we will take measures to ensure that this concept is clear to the subjects as well. Ideally, a future study would also make use
of coders who are not only blind to the subjects’ original button press responses but also naïve to both the theory and the
hypotheses in order to achieve the most impartial analysis and interpretation.
5.4. Future directions
Our hypothesis was that ToM attributions would occur relatively infrequently outside the lab. A challenge with the current study involves exactly how to determine a baseline for the frequency measure. In this study, we used the frequency of
action thoughts as an anchor for comparison. However, future studies might use frequencies recorded within a laboratory
setting where social context or thought type is controlled and compare it to that of an experience sampling or similarly ecologically valid method. Such studies may help to reveal previously unknown facets of ToM.
The Experience Sampling method has the potential to become a viable avenue of research in understanding the social deficits seen in psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia and also in the study of dyadic situations. There has already been precedent set by Hurlburt, Happe, and Frith (1994), who used experience sampling and interview techniques in
order to examine the form of thought in three adults with Asperger’s Disorder, and more recently by Hintzen, Delespaul, van
Os, and Myin-Germeys (2010) to explore social needs in the daily lives of people with PDD-NOS. Implementation of the present experience sampling approach in atypical populations would require successive approximation, starting first with the
highest functioning individuals and adapting the method to subjects with increasingly more severe social-communicative
impairments. If we were to successfully repeat this experiment in individuals with high functioning ASD or schizophrenia,
would we see different frequencies of MS thought attributions versus those seen in matched control subjects? Based on the
claim that these individuals experience deficits in ToM, we might expect to see a decrease in MS attributions. Research conducted on the ecological validity of ToM tasks demonstrated that regardless of performance on in-lab ToM tasks, children
who were normally developing and handicapped showed significant evidence of ToM in their everyday lives as measured
by an adapted Vinland Adaptive Behavior Scale. However, most subjects with autism, even those who passed in-lab ToM
tasks, showed impairment in ToM use in everyday life (Frith et al., 1994). If we were to conduct the current study with subjects with autism, we may also see a different pattern in the direction of thought, given research that suggests that individuals with autism also have more difficulties representing their own beliefs than the beliefs of other people (Williams &
Happe, 2009). However, one would have to pay careful attention to potential deficiencies in introspective and communicative capabilities when analyzing and interpreting the results.
Interestingly, the participant who was excluded before recoding received the highest SRS score and had the highest frequency of action thought attributions at 93.1%. Although the excluded subject’s SRS score was not high enough to trigger
more formal evaluations for a research categorization of an ASD diagnosis, this anomaly further serves as motivation to
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L. Bryant et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
explore relationships between the frequency of Action, MS, and miscellaneous thought attributions in atypical populations
using the experience sampling method.
While other studies have looked at the effects of personality, motivation, and emotional factors on thought attributions
(Kozak, Marsh, & Wegner, 2006; Sheldon & Johnson, 1993), our research did not parse out these factors. In addition, a study
conducted by Andersen, Glassman, and Gold (1998) emphasized how emotional connectedness between two people may
affect thought attribution. Although we are motivated to study thought attribution in the most naturalistic manner, future
studies might manipulate social context where subjects are surrounded by significant others and see if spontaneous
thoughts about others are more frequent and whether they are more mentalistic than behavioral in content. We also did
not probe whether subjects’ thoughts were reflective of the past or present. Research conducted by Pronin, Olivola, and
Kennedy (2008) examined the hypothesis that people’s decisions for future selves differ from their decisions for present
selves and instead more closely resemble decisions for other people. It would be interesting to see if there were a unique
delineation between thought type, direction, and socializing with respect to the tense of the thought. A number of social cognitive research studies have relied heavily on participants describing their response to hypothetical scenarios. Our methods
might also be adapted to address these sorts of questions.
Despite reported and hypothesized relationships between ToM and measures of general intelligence, we did not find significant correlations between scores on verbal (r = .149) or matrix reasoning (r = .164) and the frequency of ToM (MS) attributions (de Villiers, 2007; Muller, Liebermann-Finestone, Carpendale, Hammond, & Bibok, 2012; Pellicano, 2007). However,
since all subjects were above average in intelligence and adults who possess higher-order relational reasoning, a ceiling effect is unsurprising. Future studies may involve subjects with diverse relational reasoning abilities (e.g., children and those
with intellectual disability and language disorders) and may include specific measures of executive functioning (e.g., working memory and inhibition) in order to tease apart potential relationships.
6. Conclusion
The purpose of this study was to explore the use of ToM in the real world. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no
previous experience sampling account of how frequently and under what circumstances people make ToM attributions in
everyday life. We have demonstrated that experience sampling presents an ecologically valid way to address this question.
This study opens up new avenues for research and discourse surrounding typical and atypical thought processes, and sets the
stage for future studies in younger children and in individuals with autism and/or intellectual disability.
Funding
K12 EY16336 and McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience (Pruett), JSMF Centennial Fellowship (Povinelli), C-SURE
Training Program at Washington University in St. Louis (Bryant & Coffey).
Acknowledgments
Sridhar Kandala, Eric Feczko, Sarah Hoertel.
Appendix A.
A.1. Instructions
You will be completing a series of questionnaires over a period of ten hours on the device provided. Each questionnaire
should take no longer than five minutes to complete. You must complete the questionnaire individually when the alarm
sounds, without assistance or input from anyone else. The PDA will automatically shut off at the end of each questionnaire.
Two of the questions require a short written response. Using the stylus located on the back of the PDA, tap the ‘‘abc’’ icon in
the bottom left corner of the screen. This will bring up an onscreen keyboard with which you can respond. Please be thorough in your responses; one to two sentences should be sufficient. You will be compensated based on the length of participation in this study (see consent form). Participation requires answering each question throughout this study. Before
participating, please ensure that you can fulfill these requirements. We will accommodate your needs in order to arrange
a day where you do not have any conflicts.
You will not have access to anything but the questionnaire on the PDA. Do NOT remove the batteries to the PDA.
Name (print): ________________
Signature: ________________
Date: ________________
Subject number: ________________
L. Bryant et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
705
A.2. General information
In this study we are asking you to report on your own thoughts throughout the day.
Please refer to the thought occurring right before the alarm sounds.
We ask about mental states and actions, which are explained as follows:
A mental state exists in your own or someone else’s head.
An action is what you or another is doing, has done or will do.
A.3. Examples
What if I can’t respond immediately (e.g. using the restroom, showering, driving)? You will have a window of 10 min to
respond to the questionnaire. Please do not endanger your health in order to complete a questionnaire. If you must miss one
or two questionnaires, you won’t be penalized.
It says ‘‘Fatal alert,’’ what do I do? Do not panic. Tap ‘‘reset’’ and it should return to a home screen. Then press the home
symbol (a small house) below the touch screen and this should take you back to the ESP screen.
If you run into any major problems regarding your PDA, please contact (contact information excluded).
Appendix B.
B.1. Coding instructions
Use the subject’s response to the prompts ‘‘What are you doing’’ and ‘‘What are you thinking’’ to categorize the object of
the subject’s thought.
In the columns provided, code each response based on whether the object of the subject’s thought is a mental state, action, or something else (other):
Mental State?Code as 1.
Action?Code as 2.
Miscellaneous?Code as 3.
Indeterminate?Code as 4.
No thought?Code as 5.
B.1.1. Mental state
‘‘Mental state’’ should be coded if the subject reported thinking about their own or someone else’s beliefs, thoughts, desires, memories, emotions, or states of knowledge.
For example, the subject may report thinking of wants, fears, hopes, or beliefs.
DO NOT code ‘‘mental state’’ for responses that use mental terms in a conversational manner where the mental state term
is not the object of the subject’s thought. For example, if someone writes ‘‘I think I will go to the park after lunch,’’ the use of
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L. Bryant et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 697–707
the word ‘‘think’’ is a mental term but is not what the subject is thinking about. (This example would be categorized as
Action). Alternately, if someone responds, ‘‘I was thinking about the significance of Charles asking Danielle out for lunch
when he has a wife,’’ you could categorize it as a mental state. Another example is ‘‘the light seemed welcoming,’’ where
the meaning of ‘‘seemed’’ simply means ‘‘looked’’ (This example would be categorized as Miscellaneous).
Thoughts about emotions should also be categorized as mental states. For example, the statement ‘‘I wonder if he is upset
that I did not call’’ (‘‘upset’’ is an emotion). Likewise, if the subject reported that they were thinking about ‘‘I love that box!’’
this would be coded as ‘‘mental state’’ because the object of the thought the subject’s love for the box.
The subjects should be coded as thinking about mental states even if the subject is not human or animate (e.g., ‘‘I was
thinking about how much I hate my computer’’, ‘‘I was thinking that the dog doesn’t know where his bone is buried.’’).
B.1.2. Action
‘‘Action’’ should be coded when the subject reports thinking about what someone or something is doing, has done or will
do. For example, ‘‘I will drive to work at 9’’ and ‘‘That driver just cut me off’’ are action thoughts. This also includes planning,
e.g. ‘‘What I need to get done before work tomorrow’’.
Cost–benefit (e.g., ‘‘Whether or not I should. . .’’) should be categorized as action, unless explicitly referencing a mental
state.
B.1.3. Miscellaneous
When the object of the subject’s thought is neither a mental state nor an action, categorize the thought as ‘‘miscellaneous’’. This includes observation such as ‘‘It is hot’’, ‘‘The music is loud’’ and ‘‘There are flowers in the garden’’. This would
also include less descriptive responses such as ‘‘Dinner’’ or ‘‘Tomorrow afternoon’’.
B.1.4. Indeterminate
If the meaning is still unclear, judge the statement to be indeterminate, especially given instances where more than one
interpretation could be equally appropriate. ALL ‘‘why’’ statements or questions (e.g. ‘‘Why did she go to work today?’’)
should be categorized as indeterminate but flagged using an asterisk (i.e., 4).
B.1.5. No thought
Statements in which the subject reports he or she is thinking of ‘‘nothing’’ should be coded as ‘‘No thought’’. This category
does not include responses that are left blank.
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Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Emotional valence, sense of agency and responsibility: A study
using intentional binding
J.F. Christensen a,⇑, M. Yoshie b,c, S. Di Costa a, P. Haggard a
a
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London (UCL), United Kingdom
Human Informatics Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
c
Automotive Human Factors Research Center, AIST, Japan
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 5 August 2015
Revised 31 January 2016
Accepted 26 February 2016
Keywords:
Sense of agency
Intentional binding
Valence
Emotion
Retrospective
Prospective
a b s t r a c t
We investigated how the emotional valence of an action outcome influences the
experience of control, in an intentional binding experiment. Voluntary actions were
followed by emotionally positive or negative human vocalisations, or by neutral tones.
We used mental chronometry to measure a retrospective component of sense of agency
(SoA), triggered by the occurrence of the action outcome, and a prospective component,
driven by the expectation that the outcome will occur. Positive outcomes enhanced the
retrospective component of SoA, but only when both occurrence and the valence of the
outcome were unexpected. When the valence of outcomes was blocked – and therefore
predictable – we found a prospective component of SoA when neutral tones were expected
but did not actually occur. This prospective binding was absent, and reversed, for positive
and negative expected outcomes. Emotional expectation counteracts the prospective
component of SoA, suggesting a distancing effect.
Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.
1. Introduction
Sense of agency is the experience of control over our own voluntary actions, and, through them, events in the outside
world. Sense of agency is a core feature of normal mental life, at least in healthy adult humans, and a prerequisite of a
well-functioning society. For example, legal systems assume that we will always know whether we have caused an event
or not, because we experience our actions, and, at least partly, understand their consequences, at the time that we make
them. Other things being equal, a defendant who has a sense of agency regarding the appropriate action is expected to plead
guilty, and one who does not is expected to plead not guilty to the appropriate charge.
If the sense of agency perfectly tracked the facts of agency, there would never be doubt about who caused a particular
outcome, and was thereby responsible. However, the sense of agency is limited for several reasons. First, sense of agency
does not perfectly track the objective facts of agency. For example, a person may make an action and cause an outcome,
but not realise they have done so. One reason for this gap between objective and subjective agency is limited cognitive
capacity: people clearly cannot foresee all the consequences of their own actions. Here we focus on a different limitation,
namely the strong biasing effect of affective valence on sense of agency. These effects are often considered under the label
self-serving bias (Bandura, 1982; Bradley, 1978; Heider, 1958). People attribute positive actions and outcomes to
⇑ Corresponding author at: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London (UCL), Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR,
United Kingdom.
E-mail address: j.christensen@ucl.ac.uk (J.F. Christensen).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.02.016
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.
2
J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
themselves, while distancing themselves from bad actions and outcomes, notably by attributing them to others. Previous
studies of such biases have used a framework of attribution judgement to consider these biases, often within the social
context of praise and blame.
However, the relation between such social judgements of agency, and the primary experience of agency, remains unclear.
This issue is important, since people often know from direct experience that they are responsible for an outcome, yet then
explicitly attribute responsibility to another (e.g., ‘‘passing the buck”, ‘‘only obeying orders”; Miller, 1947, 2009). Such
psychological phenomena imply a basic, pre-attributional experience of agency, which is sensitive to valence. However, this
experience, and its valence-sensitivity have proved difficult to measure scientifically, resulting in a knowledge gap in the
literature on psychology of agency and responsibility.
Here we have used action binding (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002; Moore & Obhi, 2012) as an implicit measure of
sense of agency. The perceived time of a voluntary self-generated action is shifted towards the action’s outcome, as
compared to a condition where the action is not followed by a sensory outcome. There is also a corresponding shift in
the perceived time of the outcome back towards the action that caused it.
Yoshie and Haggard (2013) compared intentional binding for actions which predictably had either positive, negative or
neutral sounds as their outcomes. Binding was reduced for negative action outcomes as compared to positive ones. This
implies a stronger sense of agency over positive compared to negative events, consistent with the concept of a selfserving bias (Bandura, 1984), and/or a distancing from negative outcomes as a form of reappraisal mechanism (Ochsner,
Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002). Takahata et al. (2012) obtained similar results in the context of a gambling task. Different
tones were first associated with either positive or negative outcomes of one’s own action (gains or losses). Subsequent
intentional binding measures showed less binding, implying reduced sense of agency, for tones that had previously been
associated with losses, compared to rewards.
The experience of agency over an outcome could be based on predicting the outcome (e.g., I feel in control of my bicycle,
because I predict that turning the handlebars will change my direction), or on inferring retrospectively the consequences of
my own actions (e.g., I win money because I gambled. Although the stakes were 50–50 my winning makes me retrospectively attribute the winning to my skill in choosing) (Moore & Haggard, 2008). It remains unclear whether valence effects
on sense of agency are primarily prospective, or primarily retrospective. In previous studies (Yoshie & Haggard, 2013),
the valence of an action was entirely predictable, since participants generated positive, negative or neutral outcome sounds
in separate blocks. In this situation, both prospective and retrospective components can contribute to sense of agency, but
cannot be specifically disentangled. In Takahata et al. (2012), the valence of the outcome was randomised, and therefore
unpredictable. In their results, outcome valence influenced sense of agency retrospectively. However, it remains unclear
whether valence can also influence prospective sense of agency.
This issue has important implications. Purely retrospective valence effects imply a failure to feel responsible for actions
with negative outcomes. This would be highly adaptive in ensuring well-being, but would have catastrophic implications for
society. A well-functioning society, at least one similar to our own, presupposes that individuals avoid making actions with
negative outcomes, even when these actions are superficially tempting. Presumably, individuals learn from previous experience the relation between actions and negative outcomes, and then use these experiences to prospectively guide future
agency. A genuine, valence-sensitive experience of agency at the time of an action therefore plays an important role in minimising future harmful actions.
Moore and Haggard (2008) proposed an experimental design to distinguish the influence of prospective and retrospective
mechanisms on sense of agency, based on manipulating outcome probabilities. The probability of producing an outcome is
set to 50% in one block of the experiment, and to 75% in another (Moore & Haggard, 2008; Voss et al., 2010). An estimate of
the retrospective component of sense of agency is obtained by comparing the binding of action towards tones on those trials
in the 50% block where a tone does occur, with those trials where it does not. An estimate of the prospective component is
obtained by comparing the binding of actions towards tones on trials where tones do not in fact occur, but are more likely
(i.e., 75% block), compared to less likely (i.e., 50% block). Prediction should clearly be stronger in the 75% block than in the
50% block, although it is not total in the former, nor absent in the latter – thus the design affords a partial estimate of the
prospective component, rather than a perfect measure. Nevertheless, comparing estimates for prospective or retrospective
components between groups (Voss et al., 2010), or between different conditions may clarify whether a particular factor influences prospective or reconstructive components of sense of agency.
We investigated how the valence of an action outcome would influence the retrospective and prospective components of
sense of agency. The probability of producing an action outcome was either highly likely (75%) or moderately likely (50%),
and retrospective and prospective components of action binding were calculated. In Group 1, outcome valence was unpredictable, because positive, negative and neutral sounds were randomised. This means that for this group, the valence of
the outcome, if it occurred, was experienced anew on each trial. This allowed us to assess whether the outcome valence
of an action modulates sense of agency retrospectively. In Group 2, the same outcome sounds were blocked, so that the
valence of the sound was always predictable, though its occurrence could be more or less predictable, as before (50% or
75%). With this we sought to establish whether the prospective component of sense of agency would emerge if the valence
of the outcome, as well as its occurrence, were predictable.
Our general research question was whether outcome valence influences the prospective or the retrospective part of sense
of agency, and whether this influence depended on valence itself being predictable.
J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
3
2. Method
2.1. Participants
A total of 56 right-handed volunteers (30 male) participated in the experiment in exchange for a small time reimbursement (£7.50/h). They were randomly assigned to the two conditions (randomised, unpredictable emotion trials, vs. blocked,
predictable emotion trials); Group 1 (28; 14 male; mean age = 23.54, SD = 4.53) and Group 2 (28; 16 male; mean age = 24.25,
SD = 5.49). Emotion predictability was used as a between rather than within subjects factor, largely because a within subjects approach would have shown an order effect (once emotions are predicted, they may continue to be predicted, even
after they become unpredictable). All participants were of European Linguistic background to match the actors of the vocal
sound stimuli.
To determine the sample size of the two groups, we performed two power calculations, using GPower 3.1. (Faul, Erdfelder,
Lang, & Buchner, 2007) for two contrasts of interest. First we determined the sample size necessary to identify a significant
effect of emotion within a single group (effect size = .80; alpha = .05; power = .90). This gave a suggested sample size of 15. In
addition, we also planned to compare the group receiving blocked emotion outcomes with the group receiving randomized
emotion outcomes. For this, we performed an additional power calculation for an independent samples t-test (effect
size = .80; alpha = .05; power = .90). This gave a suggested sample size of 28 per group. The total sample size was fixed based
on this second power calculation.
2.2. Procedure
An Intentional Binding task was used as an implicit measure of sense of agency (Haggard et al., 2002; Libet, Gleason,
Wright, & Pearl, 1983). Participants were seated in front of a computer screen with an external silent SODIAL(R) Flexible
Foldable USB keyboard in front of them to provide their responses on. At each trial, participants were instructed to press
a key [ENTER] on this keyboard at the time of their choosing (=the moment they felt the urge to do so) while they looked
at the centre of a clock which was displayed on the screen with a continuously rotating clock hand. The clock was
2 2 cm large and the clock hand 12 mm, rotating about a clock face with the common numbers 5. . ..10. . ..15, etc., at a
rate of 2560 milliseconds (ms). After the key press, after a fixed duration of 250 ms a tone occurred. This brief interval
between action and tone gave participants the impression of causing the tone. The clock hand continued rotating for a random amount of time, then stopped. At this time, participants were prompted to state verbally where the clock hand was in
the moment they pressed the key. The experimenter entered the number on a different keyboard and launched the next trial.
In the classical action binding procedure, the binding measure is obtained by calculating the difference in estimation accuracy between the following two conditions: first, the participant performs this task in a baseline condition where no tone
occurs. In the operant condition, they generate the tone by their own voluntary action. Their judgment ‘‘shifts” towards the
tone, signalling that the outcome of their action (the tone) modulated their temporal estimation of the time of the action. This
difference between baseline and operant conditions is defined as ‘‘action binding”, and serves as a proxy for sense of agency.
In order to give the action outcomes different affective significance, three types of emotional sounds were selected,
following previous empirical work (Yoshie & Haggard, 2013). Eight emotional sounds were selected from an extensivelynormed database of nonverbal emotional vocal sounds (Sauter, Eisner, Calder, & Scott, 2010). There were four sounds with
positive valence (two sounds of laughter and two of achievement), and four of negative valence (two of disgust and two of
fear). In addition, four neutral ‘‘beep”-tones were generated to be used as a neutral comparison condition. This resulted in a
total of 12 outcome sounds, of three different valence significance. Subjective ratings from an independent group of participants in a previously published study confirmed this classification of the sounds as positive and negative, and also verified
matching for pitch and duration; see Supplementary material of Yoshie and Haggard (2013).
Prospective and retrospective processes in sense of agency can be investigated using the intentional binding paradigm by
varying the outcome probability across two conditions, one 50% and one 75% condition (Moore & Haggard, 2008; Voss et al.,
2010). The same procedure was followed here. See Fig. 1 for an illustration of the basic trial structure.
Participants performed a total of 240 trials. Both groups started with an action baseline block (48 trials). Group 1 (randomised unpredictable emotion group) subsequently went through 4 blocks of 48 trials. In 2 of the blocks the sound occurrence
predictability was 50% (in only 50% of the trials a sound actually occurred) and in another 2 blocks sound occurrence predictability was 75% (in 75% of the trials a sound occurred). In the 50% predictability condition participants had a total of 16
negative, 16 positive and 16 neutral sound outcomes (=48), and a further 48 trials with no sound outcome (randomised across
2 blocks, with equal numbers of each trial type in each block). In the 75% predictability condition participants had 24 stimuli of
each valence (72 trials) plus 24 trials with no sound outcome (randomised across 2 blocks, equal number of trials of each in
each block). This means a total of 96 in each of the 2 conditions (=192), plus 48 from the baseline condition (=240 in total).
There were two groups of participants. Group 2 (the predictable blocked emotion group) received the same number of
stimuli of each kind as the group in Group 1. To allow the blocked paradigm, however, the stimuli were arranged as follows:
participants in Group 2 performed 3 shorter blocks of 32 stimuli for each of the two outcome probabilities (50% and 75%), 6
in total; 2 for each valence (negative, neutral, positive). In each of these blocks, there were 16 stimuli of the respective
valences and 16 without any sound (50% condition), or 24 of each valence and 8 without sound outcome (75% condition).
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J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
Fig. 1. Trial structure.
This resulted in 32 trials in 6 blocks (=192) plus the 48 from the baseline (=240 in total). In both experiments, blocks were
counterbalanced between participants but participants always performed either the 50% or the 75%. Participants always performed the baseline condition first, then followed by the blocks of the experiment, in counterbalanced order. See Fig. 2 for an
illustration of the procedure and Table 1 for the design.
To ensure participants would not ignore the sounds’ emotional significance, participants were informed that a few
randomly interleaved ‘‘extra questions” would appear throughout the experiment, asking them to state whether the sound
they just heard was positive or negative (this question was never asked after a neutral beep). Participants were told they
would receive a bonus (25 pence) for each correct answer in addition to their normal payment. There were 10 such trials
throughout each experiment. Participants in both groups generally judged between 8 and 10 of these trials correctly (average: 9.80; SD 1.10). One outlier scored only 2/10.
Fig. 2. Schematic representation of the procedure. (A) Voluntary actions are followed by an outcome sound (beep) 250 ms later. This produces a shift in the
perceived time of the action (dotted arrow). (B) In one block, the probability of a sound given an action is 50%. Binding towards outcome is compared
between trials with and without outcome sound. This identifies the retrospective component of action binding. (C) In another block, the probability given an
action is 75%. Comparing action binding on trials across the two probability blocks where no outcomes occur, reveals how outcome binding varies with the
degree of prediction.
J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
5
Table 1
The experimental design was based on the factorial combination of two factors. Outcome
occurrence was a within-subjects factor, referring to whether the outcome was more (75%)
or less (50%) likely. Outcome valence was a between-subjects factor, and was either
unpredictable (Group 1) or predictable (Group 2).
OUTCOME OCCURRENCE
VALENCE
Less Predictable
More Predictable
Probability of sound given
an action = 50%
Probability of sound given
an action = 75%
No Sound 25%
UNPREDICTABLE
(GROUP 1)
No Sound 50%
Sound 75%
Sound 50%
No Sound 25%
PREDICTABLE
(GROUP 2)
No Sound 50%
Sound 75%
Sound 50%
2.3. Statistical analyses
We calculated a retrospective and a prospective component of action binding, following previous studies (Moore &
Haggard, 2008), and we analysed these components separately. The retrospective component of action binding was calculated
as the difference in action binding in the 50% occurrence probability condition between trials where there was an outcome
sound and trials where there was no outcome sound. For Experiment 1 the no sound trials were averaged across all three
valences, as these trials were presented at random and could not be allocated to any specific valence. For Experiment 2, each
valence was presented in a separate block, and we therefore used the no sound trials from the relevant block to calculate the
retrospective component: (positive outcome) – (no outcome in the positive block), (negative outcome) – (no outcome in the
negative block), and (neutral outcome) – (no outcome in the neutral block).
The prospective component was calculated by subtracting the average action binding in the no sound trials of the 50% condition from the average action binding effect in the no sound trials of the 75% condition. The prospective component therefore captures the extent to which action binding depends on the probability of the outcome, given the action.
A Repeated Measures design was used with separate blocks of judgments of action with outcome sound valence as withinsubjects factor (negative, neutral or positive) and predictability of outcome valence as between-subjects factor (unpredictable; Group 1, vs. predictable; Group 2). Specifically, in Group 1 emotional outcomes were fully randomised to create
circumstances of fully unpredictable emotional outcomes. In Group 2 the emotional outcomes were blocked into separate
blocks of predictably negative, neutral or positive outcomes.
As effect sizes we report partial eta (gp2), where .01 is considered a small effect size, .06 a medium effect and .14 a large
effect, and Cohen’s d for t-tests (Cohen, 1988).
3. Results
The data are shown in Table 2.
Our analyses focussed on the retrospective and prospective components, rather than the individual cell means. The results
are shown in Fig. 3. The Retrospective component was analysed using a mixed Repeated Measures ANOVA with betweensubjects factor of predictability of outcome valence (unpredictable, vs. predictable), and a within-subjects factor of outcome
sound valence (negative, neutral or positive). We found no significant effect of either factor (predictability: F(2, 53) = 2.425,
p = .125, g2 = .043; outcome valence: F(2, 53) = 1.638, p = .199, g2 = .029), but a significant interaction between these factors
(F(2, 53) = 5.581, p = .005, g2 = .094). Simple effects tests were used to explore this interaction. First, we compared the groups
receiving predictable and unpredictable valence of outcome sounds, for each outcome sound individually. There was no difference between these groups for the neutral outcome sound (t(54) = 1.631, p = .109, ns). However, the groups did differ for
the negative (t(54) = 1.743, p = .087, d = .46) and for positive sounds (t(54) = 2.835, p = .006, d = .77). Action binding was stronger when these sounds were unpredictable (Group 1), compared to predictable (Group 2). In addition, we also used simple
effects to explore differences between the different valences of outcome sounds within each group. In Group 1 for whom
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J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
Table 2
Results of Experiments 1 and 2. Values are rounded to the nearest ms.
Conditions
Outcome
Group 1 (unpredictable
emotion trials)
Group 2 (predictable
emotion trials)
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
Baseline
–
36
57
7
58
Probability of sound 50%
No outcome (average)
No outcome – negative
No outcome – neutral
No outcome – positive
Negative outcome
Neutral outcome
Positive outcome
28
N/Aa
N/A
N/A
40
29
44
69
N/A
N/A
N/A
72
71
68
0
15
6
13
2
10
9
60
83
56
52
70
56
70
Probability of sound 75%
No outcome (average)
No outcome – negative
No outcome – neutral
No outcome – positive
Negative outcome
Neutral outcome
Positive outcome
28
N/A
N/A
N/A
35
28
26
71
N/A
N/A
N/A
73
62
76
1
1
12
1
14
18
1
53
62
55
58
65
63
64
Retrospective component
Negative outcome
Neutral outcome
Positive outcome
11
1
16
36
35
26
17
24
22
78
65
65
Prospective component
Average over outcomes
Negative outcome
Neutral outcome
Positive outcome
0
N/A
N/A
N/A
29
N/A
N/A
N/A
0
16
18
13
41
72
46
55
a
These values cannot be calculated for Group 1 because the emotional sounds were randomised across trials and thus the ‘‘no sound” trials cannot be
attributed to any specific emotional valence condition.
Fig. 3. Retrospective component of sense of agency. See text for explanation. Error bars represent S.E.M. ⁄p < .05. yp < .10.
outcome valence was unpredictable, we found more binding for positive than for neutral sounds (t(27) = 2.069, p = .048,
d = .48). No such difference was found between positive and negative sounds (t(27) = .588, p = .562, ns), nor between negative and neutral sounds (t(27) = 1.407, p = .171, ns). In Group 2, for whom outcome valence was predictable, we found a significant difference in action binding between negative and neutral sounds (t(27) = 2.388, p = .024, d = .57), and between
positive and neutral sounds (t(27) = 2.779, p = .010, d = .70), though in the opposite direction as compared to Group 1. Group
2 showed less action binding for negative and positive outcomes, as compared to neutral outcomes.
The prospective component could not be analysed factorially. In the condition where valence of outcome sounds was
blocked (Group 2), we could compare the prospective components for each valence condition. However, in the condition
where valence of outcome sounds was randomised (Group 1) and therefore unpredictable, we cannot assign individual
no-sound trials to any particular valence condition, and could therefore not calculate a prospective component for
J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
7
each valence. We therefore performed two separate analyses. First, we used a between-subjects t-test to compare groups
receiving unpredictable or predictable valence of outcome sounds, averaging over the different outcome sound valences
in the latter case. There was no significant difference between the groups (t(54) = .067, p = .947, ns). Second, for the predictable valence group (Group 2) only, we used a one-way ANOVA to compare how valence influenced the prospective component. This showed a significant overall effect of outcome sound valence (F(2, 27) = 3.195, p = .049, g2 = .106. Follow-up ttests showed significant differences between the prospective component when a negative sound might be predicted compared to when a neutral sounds might be predicted (t(27) = 2.424, p = .022, d = .75), and between the prospective component when a positive sound might be predicted compared to when a neutral sound might be predicted (t(27) = 2.359,
p = .026, d = .62). The difference between negative and positive conditions was not significant (t(27) = .157, p = .876, ns).
No correction for multiple comparisons was performed: when omnibus ANOVA shows a difference between three conditions, subsequent pairwise comparisons do not use additional degrees of freedom (Cardinal & Aitken, 2006) (see Fig. 4).
4. Discussion
We have investigated the relation between the valence of an outcome and the sense of agency in a laboratory experiment
with healthy adult volunteers. Previous work on agency–valence relations has traditionally been dominated by the pervasive
concept of self-serving bias. This implies enhanced sense of agency for positive outcomes, and a distancing, or reduced sense
of agency for negative outcomes (Bandura, 1984; Jones et al., 1972). Crucially, our method combined a number of innovations relative to previous work: we used an implicit proxy measure of sense of agency, we distinguished between prospective and retrospective components of sense of agency, and we used naturalistic human vocalisations as action outcomes,
ensuring a basic affective valence because of the emotional nature of these sounds.
Our study generated three main findings. First, unexpectedly positive outcomes enhanced the retrospective sense of
agency. Second, when the valence of an outcome was expected, this retrospective effect was abolished, and in fact reversed
– for both positive and negative outcomes. Third, the prospective component of sense of agency was enhanced when a neutral outcome was expected, compared to when a positive or negative outcome was expected. Conversely, when there was no
expectation regarding the valence of an outcome, the prospective component of sense of agency was reduced.
In principle, the negative scores found for prospective and retrospective components of action binding in Group 1 and 2
could be due to some process other than affective modulation of sense of agency by action outcome. For example, in Group 2,
the predictable emotional valence of each action might favour learning time perception. However, participants never get
feedback, so the opportunities for learning are limited. Therefore we disregard this interpretation of the current results.
Our results may reflect two qualitatively different interactions between the neurocognitive systems for emotion and for
action. The first of these might be called agentic serendipity. When outcomes were (a) relatively unlikely, (b) of unpredictable
valence, and (c) happened to be positive, we found a significant increase in the binding of an action towards the sound. We
interpret this as a retrospective boost of sense of agency, consistent with self-serving bias (Bandura, 1984, 2002; Heider,
1958). Importantly, the conditions for this effect occurring are relatively restrictive: the effect was absent for unexpectedly
negative sounds, ruling out an effect of mere salience. Further, the effect was absent in a group of participants for whom the
valence of the sound was predictable. Thus, we confirmed a self-serving bias in sense of agency, and showed that it operates
retrospectively, only once the positive valence of the outcome is known. These findings are consistent with an inferential
Fig. 4. Prospective component of sense of agency. See text for explanation. Error bars represent S.E.M. ⁄p < .05.
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J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
mechanism, which attributes ‘‘nice surprise” effects to one’s own voluntary agency. Interestingly, we found no comparable
retrospective distancing effect. That is, unexpectedly negative outcomes were not associated with a reduced sense of agency.
This may be reassuring in social and legal contexts: individuals are expected to accept responsibility for their actions. Even
when an action has an unforeseen negative outcome, as in manslaughter, society still attributes the action to the agent. Our
result suggests that this social attribution is consistent with the agent’s low-level perceptual experience of their action.
Our concept of retrospective agency was based on changes in intentional binding when an outcome unpredictably
occurred after an action, compared to when it did not. Importantly, however, we found that ability to predict the outcome’s
valence had a clear effect, over and above the ability to predict its occurrence. Group 2 of our study experienced each outcome
valence in a separate block, and could therefore predict in advance the valence of an outcome, if one were to occur. In this
group, the actual occurrence of a sound could be more or less predictable, according to the block, but the valence of the
sound, if it occurred, was always predictable. Emotional valence of an unpredictable sound reduced the sense of agency, both
when the sound was positive and when it was negative, as compared to when it was neutral. That is, the retrospective component of action binding was reversed when a predictably positive or predictably negative vocalization occurred. Because
this effect was equivalent in positive and negative outcome blocks, it remains unclear whether it is based on valence, or
merely on salience. The retrospective component of agency has often been associated with poor understanding of the relation between one’s actions and their outcomes, with ‘leaping to conclusions’ about agency (Voss et al., 2010), and with
uncertain contexts. Our results suggest these processes are reduced, rather than increased, by a stable emotionallyvalenced context, whether positive or negative. When the valence of an outcome can be predicted, the tendency for emotional events to rapidly restructure experience is abolished, and even reversed. Predictable, emotionally-valenced outcomes
may produce a general emotional context, by a process similar to mood induction. While exogenous, bottom-up positive
affect can augment retrospective inferences underlying sense of agency, the ability to predict emotional outcomes appears
to decouple sense of agency from the influence of actual sensory evidence about outcomes, via a kind of emotional distancing. Thus, the agentic serendipity effect is cancelled when valence is predictable. This result may be related to altered sense
of agency in affective pathologies such as depression and euphoria (Alloy, Abramson, Metalsky, & Hartlage, 1988; Alloy &
Abramson, 1979; Msetfi, Murphy, & Kornbrot, 2012; The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V, 2013).
The second link between agency and valence might be called ‘cold prediction’. The prospective component of sense of
agency was identified as an increase in binding of actions towards outcomes when outcome occurrence is more rather than
less likely. We found no evidence for a prospective component when the valence of outcomes was unpredictable. When outcome valence was predictable we found a significant prospective component of binding only for neutral outcomes. In fact,
greater predictability of negative or positive outcomes leads to less binding than lower predictability. This result suggests
that sense of agency involves both a cold, prospective component and a warm, retrospective one. For both components,
the negative–positive comparison is never significant, so the mechanisms seem to be sensitive to valence in general, that
is, unsigned valence rather than signed valence. We recognise that unsigned valence and salience may be confounded,
because positive and negative vocalisations may both be more salient than neutral sounds. Briefly, the prospective mechanism seems to be a cold and rational one: it is reduced, and even reversed when the affective valence can be predicted. Affect
and cold prediction are thus mutually antagonistic. Conversely, in situations of low statistical predictability, the sense of
agency appears to be driven by a postdictive mechanism based on positive affective surprise. This latter mechanism requires
that both the occurrence and the valence of an action outcome be surprising: the effect was abolished when occurrence was
unpredictable, but valence was predictable.
The legal concept of responsibility for action can be linked to specific views about the roles of volition and cognition in
psychology of action. In particular, the law assumes that individuals have voluntary control over their actions, and that they
understand the relation between their action and the consequences of those actions. For example, the M’Naghten rules (case
1843-60 All ER Rep 229) famously ask whether an individual knows ‘‘the nature and quality of the act” at the time of their
action. At first sight, a hypothetical individual who simply lacks any sense of agency could not be found guilty under these
rules (though they could instead be found ‘criminally insane’). We have described prospective and retrospective aspects of
sense agency. According to these concepts, an agent might not know the nature and quality of their act if they have lack an
advance representation of their goal with which to guide their action control, and also lack any experience of linkage
between their action and the actual outcome.
At the same time, the law frequently deals with situations where intentional action, emotional state, and outcome valence
are co-occurring and important factors. Thus, any influences of affective valence on sense of agency may be relevant for legal
concepts of responsibility. In loss of control defences (Sec. 54 Coroners, 2009), an ongoing, extreme emotional state is invoked
to explain an agent’s escape from normal voluntary control. In particular, loss of control may potentially explain why people
perform actions with clearly negative outcomes. Our data showed that the prospective component of sense of agency is lost
when an outcome is predictably negative, or predictably positive. We speculated that regular exposure to negative outcomes
could cause a kind of negative mood induction, like a very diluted version of the depressive realism effect (Alloy & Abramson,
1979, 1988). In extreme form, these co-occurring elements may provide a psychological mechanism relevant to the loss of
control defence. That is, regular extreme negative experience, combined with reduced ability to predict and register a
potential negative outcome of one’s own action could constitute a departure from normal sense of agency. Our key result
is that affective context may change the experience of the nature and quality of the act. In particular, recurrent and predictable
negative experiences appear to reduce the prospective sense of agency. The prospective component of sense of agency is
thought to arise at the time of action, since it does not depend on actual outcome occurrence (Moore & Haggard, 2008). It
J.F. Christensen et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 1–10
9
may depend on the same brain processes that generate intentional actions (Moore, Ruge, Wenke, Rothwell, & Haggard,
2010). To this extent, our study may clarify why, in criminal contexts, the normal cognitive mechanisms of action control
seem to be replaced by emotionally-charged drives to action that lack the normal experiences of agency and responsibility.
The existence of such a brain mechanism clearly does not excuse wrong doing. However, it does suggest that a feeling of
reduced responsibility could potentially reflect an agent’s actual experience during emotionally-charged action. Reduced
responsibility could correspond to a fact of human psychology, rather than a hopeful story to avoid punishment. Clearly,
these considerations do not change the way justice should be done, but rather highlight features of human psychology that
justice sometimes may, or may not, wish to take into account.
Our study has some obvious limitations. First, it is based on an implicit proxy marker for sense of agency. Using implicit
measure gives several advantages relative to asking participants to report sense of agency directly – these have been
reviewed elsewhere (Jensen, Di Costa, & Haggard, 2015). On the other hand, intentional binding measures have been criticised. For example, Dewey and Knoblich (2014) noted poor correlations between intentional binding and explicit agency
measures, and therefore suggested that these measures did not measure the same thing. Second, while implicit judgements
may be useful in scientific investigations of cognitive mechanisms, their relevance for social concepts of responsibility is less
clear. For example, the law deals largely with explicit self-reports about actions. Third, some of the effects in our study are
relatively small, in some cases only just achieving the boundary of statistical significance. Replication in an additional sample
would therefore be valuable. Fourth, the results might generalise poorly to real-life situations outside of the experimental
laboratory. Finally, our emotional vocalisation stimuli may have been imperfectly designed. We could not readily match positive and negative emotional vocalisations for strength and recognisability. Thus, positive and negative valences may not
have been equally convincing or successful in manipulating affect. Negative emotional stimuli tend to be relatively
ineffective in mood induction experiments (e.g., Davies, Dapretto, Sigman, Sepeta, & Bookheimer, 2011), and may induce
the opposite states, i.e., laughter (Levenson, 2014). More naturalistic stimuli or alternative mood induction methods especially for negative emotions, may support a stronger claim about the link between laboratory measures of sense of agency
and personal responsibility for action.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by AHRC Science in Culture grant to PH (Award number: 162746; project number: 515388). P.H.
was additionally supported by an ESRC Professorial Fellowship, and by ERC Advanced Grant (HUMVOL). We are grateful to
Lisa Claydon and Caroline Roediger for discussions and comments on legal concepts of responsibility.
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Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Beliefs about hearing voices
Michael H. Connors ⇑, Serje Robidoux, Robyn Langdon, Max Coltheart
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australia
Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 20 October 2015
Revised 17 March 2016
Accepted 6 May 2016
Keywords:
Auditory verbal hallucination
Belief
Delusion
Hallucination
Insight
Phenomenology
Psychosis
a b s t r a c t
People who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) vary in whether they believe
their AVHs are self-generated or caused by external agents. It remains unclear whether
these differences are influenced by the ‘‘intensity” of the voices, such as their frequency
or volume, or other aspects of their phenomenology. We examined 35 patients with
schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who experienced AVHs. Patients completed a
detailed structured interview about their AVHs, including beliefs about their cause. In
response, 20 (57.1%) reported that their AVHs were self-generated, 9 (25.7%) were uncertain, and 6 (17.1%) reported that their AVHs were caused by external agents. Several analytical approaches revealed little or no evidence for associations between either AVH
intensity or phenomenology and beliefs about the AVH’s cause; the evidence instead
favoured the absence of these associations. Beliefs about the cause of AVHs are thus unlikely to be explained solely by the phenomenological qualities of the AVHs.
Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.
‘‘A hallucination is a fact, not an error. What is erroneous is a judgement based on it”
[Bertrand Russell, 1914, p. 173]
1. Introduction
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) – experiences of hearing voices – are one of the most common forms of hallucinatory experience and a characteristic symptom of schizophrenia (for a review, see McCarthy-Jones, 2012). AVHs are generally
thought to result from a failure in self-monitoring of internally-generated thoughts, as distinct from other generated speech
(Moseley, Fernyhough, & Ellison, 2013; Waters et al., 2012). Patients who experience AVHs, however, vary in their beliefs
about the origin of their voices (Kinderman, 2011; Larøi & Woodward, 2007; Lera et al., 2011; Thomas, Farhall, &
Shawyer, 2015; Wilkinson & Bell, 2016). Some patients have insightful beliefs about their AVHs and acknowledge that their
voice-hearing experiences are self-generated. Some do not espouse any firm beliefs and express confusion. A third group
accept the voice-hearing experience as a veridical representation of external reality and adopt the delusion that the voices
originate from some other agent.
These different beliefs about the voices can lead to other delusions (concerning, e.g., the intent of the ‘‘speakers”), affect
patients’ levels of subjective distress and anxiety, and shape their subsequent behaviour, including whether they act on
⇑ Corresponding author at: Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia.
E-mail address: michael.connors@mq.edu.au (M.H. Connors).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.05.001
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
harmful command AVHs (Beck-Sander, Birchwood, & Chadwick, 1997; Chadwick & Birchwood, 1994; Junginger, 1990, 1995).
As a result, patients’ beliefs about their voices, and their hallucinations more generally, are a specific focus of clinical interventions (Chadwick & Birchwood, 1994; Gaudiano & Herbert, 2006; Kingdon, Turkington, & John, 1994; Michail &
Birchwood, 2011; Penn et al., 2009).
Although previous research has examined the consequences of such beliefs about AVHs on patients’ behaviour and mood,
it remains unclear whether some characteristics of AVHs increase the likelihood of delusions about the cause of AVHs
(Garrett & Silva, 2003). Maher (1988, 1999, 2001, 2006) has written extensively about the role of anomalous experiences
in explaining delusional beliefs. According to Maher, unusual experiences, such as AVHs, lead people to search for explanations for their experiences and it is these explanations that constitute delusions. A person hearing buzzing sounds, for example, might incorrectly infer that their head is filled with bees, when the sounds are actually due to pathology of the middle
ear (Maher, 1988). Although various inferential processes are involved in shaping the specific content of the delusional belief,
these are normal responses to unusual events and similar inferential reasoning occurs in people who do not have anomalous
experiences. As such, a single pathology – an unusual experience – is sufficient to cause a delusion (by contrast, other theorists propose that a second pathological factor, such as a deficit in belief formation, is additionally required to account for a
delusion; Coltheart, Langdon, & McKay, 2011; Langdon & Coltheart, 2000).
When the same anomalous experience is present – AVHs in the context of this paper – an important issue for Maher’s
one-factor account to explain is why some patients accept the aberrant percept as veridical and believe that an external
agent is responsible, while other patients come to believe that the voices are self-generated. One possibility is that the intensity of the hallucinatory experiences – whether this is conceptualised in terms of the amount of speech, the number of different voices heard, the frequency with which the voices are heard, or the length of utterances – might influence patients’
beliefs. It might be the case that when the voices are many, frequent, and involve large amounts of speech, patients may be
more overwhelmed by the voices and likely to attribute them to external agents; that is, to adopt delusional beliefs about the
origin of their hallucinations. Such an idea was proposed by Maher (2006, p. 182):
For a delusion to develop, the experience must be repeated or continue over an extended period. It must also be vivid and
intense enough to preoccupy the consciousness of the individual while it is happening. In short, it must create a compelling sense of reality.
In other words, the more intense or vivid the aberrant voice-hearing experiences, the more likely a delusional belief about
how the voices originate.
Some preliminary support for Maher’s account comes from a study in which psychotic patients experiencing treatmentresistant hallucinations (operationalised as: voices not modified in any way by treatment over the course of one year; voices
present at least once a day; and patients’ use of at least two antipsychotics) demonstrated less insight into their psychosis
than patients who had experienced voices at least once and had responded to treatment and patients who had never experienced voices (Lera et al., 2011). Insight in this study was assessed, however, using the single 7-point insight item from the
PANNS, a general measure of psychotic symptoms (Kay, Fiszbein, & Opler, 1987). This single rating does not take account of
the multidimensional nature of insight, conflating, for example, insight concerning the presence of a mental illness, insightful beliefs about different psychotic symptoms, and acknowledgement of the need for treatment. Thus, it remains unclear
whether there exists a relationship between the amount of speech heard and the degree of insight concerning the cause
of voices.
Another possibility for why patients adopt different beliefs about the cause of their AVHs is that other dimensions of
‘‘intensity” or other phenomenological qualities of the hallucinatory speech influence whether the voices are believed to
be externally generated. These qualities include, for example, the volume, intelligibility, speed, emotional tone, and
‘‘personification” of the voices – the perception of the voice as coming from someone of a certain age, sex, familiarity,
and social class. Consistent with this proposal, Hustig and Hafner (1990) asked patients with persistent auditory hallucinations to complete daily diaries about the momentary qualities of their hallucinations, as well as their associated mood and
beliefs. They found correlations between levels of conviction in delusional beliefs and the loudness and intrusiveness of the
hallucinations. While these results are suggestive, it was not clear in this study if the authors were focusing on voices and
whether the associated delusional beliefs related specifically to the agent(s) responsible for generating the voices or
co-occurred with the voices (e.g., secondary persecutory delusions about ‘‘the speaker’s” intent).
In another study, acute inpatients with AVHs were found to commonly describe discernible features of the voices that
were similar to those of actual speech, including properties of speech that were different to the patient’s own voice (e.g.,
a different age, sex, etc.), as well as the speed of the voices, and their emotional quality (Garrett & Silva, 2003). Commanding
voices were also described as being generated by external agents by some patients in this study. However, aside from the
descriptive results, the only characteristics of voices that were found to associate statistically with whether or not patients
experienced their auditory hallucinations as caused by another agent were emotional and religious content. A third study
found that patients who heard AVHs as located outside their head showed less insight into their psychosis than patients
who heard AVHs as located inside their head (Lera et al., 2011), though, once again, this study considered general insight
rather than insightful beliefs concerning the cause of the voices and other studies have not found evidence of this association
(Copolov, Trauer, & Mackinnon, 2004).
In sum, despite some suggestive findings and the availability of detailed measures of the phenomenology of AVHs
(Langdon, Jones, Connaughton, & Fernyhough, 2009; McCarthy-Jones et al., 2014; Nayani & David, 1996), comparatively little
M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
91
research has examined whether these experiential qualities are related to patients’ beliefs about the cause of their AVHs. In
addition to understanding AVH and developing effective interventions, this question is relevant to theories of delusions more
broadly, including, for example, whether a single anomalous experience (e.g., an AVH) is sufficient to cause a delusion or
whether a second pathological factor is also required. In the current study, we examined this question in a stable chronic
group of patients with schizophrenia who completed a detailed phenomenological survey of their AVHs based on the phenomenological properties probed by Nayani and David (1996). We assessed whether intensity of AVHs – defined in terms of
amount of speech and other statistical properties, such as their frequency, volume, number of voices, and length of utterances – or various phenomenological qualities of AVHs were related to whether patients were insightful or delusional about
the origin of their AVHs. Given the complexity of this phenomenological data, we used a range of statistical methods to
determine if there was an association.
2. Methods
2.1. Participants
Data was drawn from a pre-existing dataset that was used to examine associations between the phenomenology of AVHs
and inner speech in patients with schizophrenia and to compare the inner speech experiences of patients and controls
(Langdon et al., 2009). From the original sample, which had included 41 clinical patients, we focused on the 35 patients
(19 males, 16 females) who reported AVHs. These patients had a mean age of 42.14 years (SD = 10.80; range 24.00–72.00)
and a mean illness duration of 17.00 years (SD = 9.02; range 4.00–41.00 years). All patients had a diagnosis of schizophrenia
or schizoaffective according to DSM-IV criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and were on stable doses of antipsychotic medication. All patients spoke English as their first language and had, on average, 12.97 (SD = 2.78; range 9.00–18.50)
years of formal education.
Patients were recruited from outpatient clinics of the Sydney South West Area Health Service and the general community
Volunteer Register administered by the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank (Loughland et al., 2010). Exclusion criteria
included history of head injury, neurological illness, substance dependence, and severe thought disorder. All participants
gave written informed consent. The experiment was approved by the local human research ethics committee and followed
principles outlined in The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki).
2.2. Materials and procedure
2.2.1. Assessing AVHs
Participants’ beliefs about the cause of their AVHs and the statistical and phenomenological properties of patients’ AVHs
were assessed using the first part of the semi-structured ‘Voices and Inner Speech Interview’ (Langdon et al., 2009). This part
of the interview begins by confirming the presence of the symptom of hearing voices and then focuses on the properties of
AVH, similar to Nayani and David’s (1996) interview. Structured questions are posed to participants and, if the answers are
unclear, further clarification is sought. Participants’ verbatim responses to the questions, posed alongside the response
options, were used to code responses.
Two questions in the interview probed patients’ beliefs about the cause of their AVHs. The first of these questions was quite
general: It asked participants how they explained the voices. The second question followed up with a more specific probe
about where the voices came from (i.e., who was responsible for generating the voice). Additional probing was used where
necessary to determine whether patients believed that their AVHs were self-generated or not.
On the basis of the responses to these two questions and any additional probes, each participant was classified as either:
(a) believing the voices originated from themselves (i.e., explaining that the voices were their own thoughts, arose from their
own mind, or were due to illness, thereby demonstrating insight); (b) being confused (‘‘I don’t understand what’s happening”) or unable to explain the voices (‘‘I don’t know where the voices come from”); or (c) believing the voices originated from
an external agent (i.e., not having insight about the cause of the voices and believing the voices were a veridical representation – the voice of some external agent or agents).
Other questions in the interview related to the statistical and phenomenological properties of the voices heard, including
the number of voices, their frequency, their age, sex, accent, class, identity, intelligibility, speed, location, and the overall
emotional content of the voices. Two further questions assessed some of participants’ reactions to their voices, such as
whether they responded to their voices and their perceived ability to control them.
2.2.2. Current severity of other symptoms
After the Voices and Inner Speech Interview, the general severity of patients’ current symptoms was assessed using the
Scales for the Assessment of Positive and Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia (SAPS and SANS; Andreasen, 1983, 1984).
2.2.3. Basic and clinical demographics
We also recorded age, sex and NART-estimated IQ, as well as age of illness onset and duration of illness.
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
3. Results
3.1. Patient characteristics
The patient group had a mean SAPS global rating of 1.95 (SD = 1.01; range 0.0–4.0) and a mean SANS global rating of 1.89
(SD = 0.87; range 0.4–4.4), where ‘0’ = absent, ‘1’ = questionable, ‘2’ = mild, ‘3’ = moderate, ‘4’ = marked, and ‘5’ = severe.
Hence, this was a chronic stable clinical sample with mild levels of current symptomatology on average.
Of the 35 patients reporting AVHs, 20 (57.1%) believed that the voices originated from themselves, 9 (25.7%) were unsure,
and 6 (17.1%) believed that the voices were caused by an external agent(s). As an example of believing the voices originated
from themselves, one patient said that although she had previously thought the voices were from aliens, she now realised
that the voices were all due to her illness. As an example of believing the voices were from an external agent, one patient said
that the voices were agents from behind the Iron Curtain telling him what to do, and another patient said that the voices
were all people she knew speaking to her from a distance.
We first compared the basic and clinical demographic data for these three groups (see Table 1). ANOVAs revealed no significant differences in age, IQ, age of illness onset, duration of illness, or current severity of symptoms (all Fs < 2.438, all
ps > 0.103).
Next, we focused on the intensity data for the AVHs. Table 2 shows the data on four statistical properties of intensity of
the AVHs in each of these three groups, while Table 3 shows the data on 13 other phenomenological properties of the AVHs
in each of these three groups. We also considered separately two other questions pertaining to participants’ actions and
beliefs related to their voices – whether they answered their voices and whether they believed that they could control their
voices (Table 4).
3.2. Statistical analyses
We wanted to determine whether, in any of the two-way contingency tables presented in Tables 2–4, there was an association between a patient’s level of insight into the cause of their AVH (full insight, partial insight, or no insight) and how
intense (in a statistical or a phenomenological sense) that patient’s AVHs were. To foreshadow the results, we found no clear
evidence in this dataset for a relationship between any of the variables discussed here and level of insight (with one variable
– frequency of command hallucinations – that produced mixed results). To minimise the risk that we were failing to uncover
an effect that was present, we analysed the data in a wide range of ways. In the first analysis, we used traditional null
hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) while treating the data as categorical. Since NHST cannot provide evidence for null
hypotheses, we repeated our analysis using Bayesian techniques which are able to compare both the null and the alternative
hypotheses. In some cases, variables could be considered ordinal and so we re-analysed them as such. We also explored the
possibility that while no single variable is related to insight, some combination of variables may be important. In particular,
we asked whether the speech properties (count of voices, volume, and frequency) might influence insight together, or if
patients whose AVHs were more strongly ‘‘personified” would be less likely to demonstrate insight. In the following sections,
we discuss the results from each of these analyses.
3.2.1. Analysing the data as categorical
First, we took the most conservative approach and considered all the variables to be categorical. The typical approach
here would have been to apply X2 (chi-squared) tests to the two-way contingency tables, but we could not do that because
our contingency tables are sparse (many cells with very low expected values). Fisher’s exact test is also inappropriate, for
Table 1
Basic and clinical demographics according to insight.
Measure
Overall (n = 35)
Insightful (n = 20)
Partial Insight (n = 9)
No Insight (n = 6)
Age
41.14 ± 10.80
(24–72)
12.97 ± 2.78
(9–18.5)
105.26 ± 12.15
(75–128)
24.97 ± 7.78
(15–50)
17.00 ± 9.02
(4–41)
1.95 ± 1.03
(0.00–4.00)
1.93 ± 0.92
(0.40–4.40)
45.40 ± 11.24
(27–72)
13.43 ± 2.90
(9–18)
105.95 ± 11.99
(84–128)
26.85 ± 8.98
(16–50)
18.70 ± 9.92
(5–41)
1.70 ± 0.99
(0.00–3.25)
1.71 ± 0.88
(0.40–3.20)
36.67 ± 8.43
(24–53)
12.00 ± 2.06
(10–15)
102.67 ± 13.98
(75–118)
22.89 ± 5.62
(15–32)
12.78 ± 5.61
(5–23)
2.25 ± 0.88
(1.00–4.00)
2.13 ± 0.97
(1.00–4.40)
39.50 ± 9.69
(28–50)
12.92 ± 3.35
(10–18.5)
106.83 ± 11.34
(84–115)
21.83 ± 4.54
(15–28)
17.67 ± 9.22
(4–25)
2.33 ± 1.26
(1.00–4.00)
2.37 ± 0.87
(1.20–3.20)
Education
NART IQ
Age of onset
Duration of illness
SAPS average
SANS average
Note. Data expressed as mean ± SD (range).
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
Table 2
Severity of auditory verbal hallucinations and the number and percentage of patients experiencing each level of severity according to insight.
Measure
Overall (n = 35)
Insightful (n = 20)
Partial Insight (n = 9)
No Insight (n = 6)
Frequency of voices*
Daily (2) or more (1)a
Once a week (3)
Monthly (4)
Less than monthly (5)
Question not answered
13 (37.1%)
8 (22.9%)
2 (5.7%)
11 (31.4%)
1 (2.9%)
6 (30.0%)
5 (25.0%)
1 (5.0%)
7 (35.0%)
1 (5.0%)
5 (44.4%)
3 (33.3%)
0 (0%)
1 (11.1%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (33.3%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Number of voices*
1 (1)
2 (2)
3 (3)
P4b (4/5)
Unsure
Question not answered
8 (22.9%)
6 (17.1%)
2 (5.7%)
18 (51.5%)
1 (2.9%)
0 (0.0%)
6 (30.0%)
2 (10.0%)
0 (0.0%)
11 (55.0%)
1 (5.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (11.1%)
2 (22.2%)
2 (22.2%)
4 (44.4%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
2 (33.3%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Amount of speech*
Just a few words (1)
A few sentences (2)
Continuous speech (3)
Varies
Question not answered
12 (34.3%)
10 (28.6%)
14 (34.3%)
1 (2.9%)
0 (0.0%)
8 (40.0%)
5 (25.0%)
6 (30.0%)
1 (5.0%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (22.2%)
4 (44.4%)
3 (33.3%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (33.3%)
1 (16.7%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Volume*
Softer than speechc (1/2/3)
Normal speech
Shouting
Varies
Question not answered
8 (22.9%)
19 (54.3%)
2 (5.7%)
6 (17.1%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (15.0%)
11 (55.0%)
1 (5.0%)
5 (25.0%)
0 (0.0%)
4 (44.4%)
5 (55.6%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
3 (50.0%)
1 (16.7%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
Note. Italicised numbers in parentheses indicate the rank coding for each response.
*
Indicates variables that could be treated as ordinal.
a
This category collapses Daily (2 responses) and more than daily (11 responses).
b
This category collapses 4 (1 response) and 5 or more (17 responses) voices.
c
This category collapses ‘‘no volume” (1 response), ‘‘whispers” (3) and ‘‘softer than normal” (4).
two reasons. First, Fisher’s test assumes that both column and row totals are fixed, whereas in our data only the column
totals are fixed. Second, Fisher’s test is at its core an exhaustive test of the likelihoods of all possible data patterns, which
it is not feasible to compute with the large number of possible combinations here. Hence, we adopted an alternative
(nonparametric) approach to NHSTs. The nonparametric approach we adopted was to use a randomisation test. We briefly
summarise the approach here, but provide a more detailed treatment of our methods in the Appendix A (see Edgington &
Onghena, 2007, for a description of the general rationale for the randomisation test approach).
Any randomisation test requires some measure of the effect being investigated. Pearson’s X2 statistic is a measure of the
degree to which the observed data deviates from the expected data under the null hypothesis. The difficulty is that Pearson’s
X2 is not suitable for sparse contingency tables such as ours. Fortunately, Shields and Heeler (1979) offer an alternative measure of deviation that does not suffer this limitation. For our analysis, we have used their Ks statistic to index the degree of
variation. Details about this statistic are available in the Appendix A.
Tables 2–4 detail 19 different possible measures of the properties of AVHs. For all 19, the randomisation tests yielded pvalues exceeding 0.05 for the proportion of random results that yielded greater values of the measure of association than the
value occurring in the data table. Table 5 gives the value of this proportion for each measure of intensity. For none of the 19
measures we used was there any evidence of a significant relationship between the hallucinatory property and whether or
not patients are delusional about their AVHs. Using traditional p-value criteria, ‘ability to control voices’ appears to show a
trend (p = 0.09). We are disinclined to trust this result in the absence of replication for two reasons. First, in order to maximise the possibility of finding relationships, we have not corrected the alpha-level for family-wise error, meaning that even
a p-value of 0.05 has a high likelihood of being spurious. Further weakening the criterion would exacerbate this risk. Second,
any trend association here seems to be unidirectional rather than bi-directional, such that the presence of a delusional belief
that voices are caused by an external agent(s) leads participants to believe that they cannot control the voices (which accords
with the zero cell for ‘No insight’ and ‘Yes/Able to control voices’), while the majority of those with insightful beliefs about
their AVHs still reported a lack of control.
3.2.2. Bayesian analysis
Given that randomisation tests demonstrated a lack of association between AVH properties and beliefs, we used other
statistical methods to verify this and confirm the absence of an association. The randomisation test described above is undertaken using the same logic as traditional hypothesis testing. That is, we can look for evidence against the null hypothesis but
our method cannot uncover evidence for the null hypothesis. Bayesian analysis techniques allow researchers to go one step
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
Table 3
The number and proportion of patients reporting different phenomenological characteristics of their hallucinations according to level of insight.
Quality
Overall (n = 35)
Insightful (n = 20)
Partial Insight (n = 9)
No Insight (n = 6)
Relative age of voice*
Mainly younger (1)
Mainly same age (2)
Mainly older (3)
Varies
Unsure
Question not answered
4 (11.4%)
15 (42.9%)
6 (17.1%)
4 (11.4%)
1 (2.9%)
5 (14.3%)
3 (15.0%)
8 (40.0%)
2 (10.0%)
2 (10.0%)
1 (5.0%)
4 (20.0%)
1 (11.1%)
3 (33.3%)
3 (33.3%)
1 (11.1%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (11.1%)
0 (0.0%)
4 (66.7%)
1 (16.7%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Sex of voice
Male
Female
No sex
Both sexes
Unsure
Question not answered
10 (28.6%)
3 (8.6%)
4 (11.4%)
14 (40.0%)
3 (8.6%)
1 (2.9%)
5 (25.0%)
3 (15.0%)
3 (15.0%)
6 (30.0%)
3 (15.0%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (22.2%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (11.1%)
5 (55.6%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (11.1%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Same sex as subject
Yes
No
Varies
Unsure
Question not answered
6 (17.1%)
6 (17.1%)
17 (48.6%)
3 (8.6%)
3 (8.6%)
4 (20.0%)
3 (15.0%)
7 (35.0%)
3 (15.0%)
3 (15.0%)
1 (11.1%)
1 (11.1%)
7 (77.8%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
2 (33.3%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Social class of voice
Working class
Middle class
Upper class
No class
Varies
Unsure
Question not answered
4 (11.4%)
9 (25.7%)
2 (5.7%)
5 (14.3%)
4 (11.4%)
10 (28.6%)
1 (2.9%)
1 (5.0%)
5 (25.0%)
1 (5.0%)
3 (15.0%)
2 (10.0%)
7 (35.0%)
1 (5.0%)
3 (33.3%)
3 (33.3%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (22.2%)
1 (11.1%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Same class as subject
Yes
No
Varies
Unsure
Question not answered
13 (37.1%)
3 (8.6%)
2 (5.7%)
3 (8.6%)
14 (40.0%)
6 (30.0%)
3 (15.0%)
2 (10.0%)
2 (10.0%)
7 (35.0%)
6 (66.7%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (33.3%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
4 (66.7%)
Accent
Same as patient
Unsure
Varies
Question not answered
18 (51.4%)
2 (5.7%)
2 (5.7%)
13 (37.2%)
7 (35.0%)
2 (10.0%)
1 (5.0%)
10 (50.0%)
7 (77.8%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (22.2%)
4 (66.7%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
1 (16.7%)
Recognises identity of voice
Yes
No
Sometimes/varies
Unsure
Question not answered
15 (42.9%)
12 (34.3%)
4 (11.5%)
3 (8.6%)
0 (0.0%)
7 (35.0%)
7 (35.0%)
3 (15.0%)
2 (10.0%)
1 (5.0%)
2 (22.2%)
6 (66.7%)
1 (11.1%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (33.3%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
Intelligibility*
Always intelligible (4)
Mostly intelligible (3)
Makes sense half the time (2)
Mostly makes no sense (1)
Question not answered
22 (62.9%)
6 (17.1%)
3 (8.6%)
4 (11.4%)
0 (0.0%)
11 (55.0%)
3 (15.0%)
3 (15.0%)
3 (15.0%)
0 (0.0%)
6 (66.7%)
2 (22.2%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (11.1%)
0 (0.0%)
5 (83.3%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Speed*
Slow (1)
Normal rate (2)
Sped up (3)
Varies
Question not answered
1 (2.9%)
27 (77.1%)
3 (8.6%)
3 (8.6%)
1 (2.9%)
1 (5.0%)
12 (60.0%)
3 (15.0%)
3 (15.0%)
1 (5.0%)
0 (0.0%)
9 (100.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
6 (100.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Location of voicea,*
Always outside head (1)
Usually outside head (2)
Both inside and outside (3)
Usually inside head (4)
Always from inside head (5)
Unsure
14 (40.0%)
0 (0.0%)
5 (14.3%)
2 (5.7%)
12 (34.3%)
2 (5.7%)
8 (40.0%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (15.0%)
1 (5.0%)
7 (35.0%)
1 (5.0%)
2 (22.2%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (11.1%)
1 (11.1%)
5 (55.6%)
0 (0.0%)
4 (66.7%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (16.7%)
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
Table 3 (continued)
Quality
Overall (n = 35)
Insightful (n = 20)
Partial Insight (n = 9)
No Insight (n = 6)
Form of address
Second person only
Third person only
Both persons
Question not answered
19 (54.3%)
4 (11.4%)
12 (34.3%)
0 (0.0%)
12 (60.0%)
4 (20.0%)
4 (20.0%)
0 (0.0%)
5 (55.6%)
0 (0.0%)
4 (44.4%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (33.3%)
0 (0.0%)
4 (66.7%
0 (0.0%)
Overall content of voice*
Happy/excited/positive (1)
Neutral (2)
Negative/angry (3)
Varies
Unsure
Question not answered
7 (20%)
7 (20%)
15 (42.9%)
5 (14.3%)
1 (2.9%)
0 (0.0%)
4 (20%)
5 (25.0%)
7 (35.0%)
4 (20.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
1 (11.1%)
1 (11.1%)
5 (55.6%)
1 (11.1%)
1 (11.1%)
0 (0.0%)
2 (33.3%)
1 (16.7%)
3 (50.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Command hallucination*
Always tell what to do (3)
Sometimes tell what to do (2)
Never like that (1)
Question not answered
9 (25.7%)
10 (28.6%)
16 (45.7%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (15.0%)
5 (25.0%)
12 (60.0%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (33.3%)
3 (33.3%)
3 (33.3%)
0 (0.0%)
3 (50.0%)
2 (33.3%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
Note. Italicised numbers in parentheses indicate the rank coding for each response.
*
Indicates variables that could be treated as ordinal.
a
This category collapses into either 3 groups (inside, both, outside) or 5 groups (always inside, usually inside, both, usually outside, always outside). Both
ways were analysed – see Table 5.
Table 4
The number and proportion of patients reporting different actions and beliefs related to their voices according to level of insight.
Property
Overall (n = 35)
Insightful (n = 20)
Partial Insight (n = 9)
No Insight (n = 6)
Answer voices
Yes
No
Unsure
Question not answered
25 (71.4%)
9 (25.7%)
1 (2.9%)
0 (0.0%)
13 (65.0%)
6 (30.0%)
1 (5.0%)
0 (0.0%)
7 (77.8%)
2 (22.2%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
5 (83.3%)
1 (16.7%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
Able to control voices
Yes
No
Question not answered
12 (34.3%)
23 (65.7%)
0 (0.0%)
7 (35.0%)
13 (65.0%)
0 (0.0%)
5 (55.6%)
4 (44.4%)
0 (0.0%)
0 (0.0%)
6 (100.0%)
0 (0.0%)
further and evaluate the evidence both against and for the null hypothesis (Dienes, 2014), thus helping to address concerns
that non-significant of tests against the null hypothesis may reflect limited power.
Here, we make use of Bayes Factors, which are the ratio of the evidence for one model versus the evidence for another. As
a result, Bayes Factors fall between 0 and infinity, where factors greater than 1 favour the presence of the effect over the
absence of the effect, while factors less than 1 favour the absence of the effect. Conventional rules for interpreting Bayes
Factors assign strength of the evidence as follows: Factors greater than 3 (or less than 1/3; i.e., less than 0.33) are considered
‘‘some evidence”, factors greater than 10 (or less than 1/10; i.e., less than 0.01) are considered ‘‘strong evidence”, and factors
greater than 30 (or less than 1/30; i.e., less than 0.03) are considered ‘‘very strong evidence.”
For this study, we compared the evidence for the presence of a relationship between insight and each variable to the evidence against the relationship using the ‘‘conting” analysis package (Overstall & King, 2014) developed for R (R Core Team,
2015). The results from our Bayesian Analysis are presented in the second column of Table 5. For all properties, except the
frequency of AVHs that are commanding, the evidence favours the absence of the effect over the presence of the effect. In
most cases that favour the absence of an effect, that evidence meets the 1/3 standard for ‘‘some evidence” (and often the
1/10 standard for ‘‘strong evidence”). In other cases, the trend is toward the absence of an effect, but the evidence cannot
clearly mediate between the two hypotheses. In the single case where the evidence favours the presence of a relationship
between frequency of commanding AVHs and level of insight, this Bayes factor (1.09) is so near 1 as to be essentially equivocal (as is the Bayes factor for the ability to control AVHs at 0.99).
3.2.3. Analysing the data as ordinal
While many of the variables are categorical, some could be treated as ordinal, including the insight variable. Ordinal data
provides additional information about relative ranking, and so statistical approaches for ordinal data are considered more
powerful than statistical approaches for categorical data. We considered ranked-correlation results between the insight variable and those AVH variables that could be ranked. To do this, we calculated both Spearman’s ranked correlations, and Kendall’s tau (which is an alternative method that is better able to cope with ties in the data, of which there are many here). The
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
Table 5
Results of the analyses for each property of AVHs.
Measure
Contingency table analysis
Ranked correlation analysis
Randomisation test
Bayes factor
N
Spearman
p
Kendall
p
N
Severity
Frequency of voices
Number of voices
Amount of speech
Volume of speech
0.37
0.41
0.77
0.46
0.36
0.14
0.09
0.19
34
35
35
35
0.063
0.030
0.141
0.045
0.72
0.87
0.42
0.82
0.060
0.022
0.130
0.046
0.70
0.89
0.41
0.79
34
34
34
29
Personification qualities
Relative age of voice
Sex of voices
Relative sex
Social class of voice
Recognise identity of voice
0.73
0.22
0.48
0.22
0.64
0.11
0.05
0.12
0.68
0.14
30
34
34
34
34
0.229
0.27
0.203
0.28
25
Phenomenological qualities
Intelligibility of voice
Speed of speech
Location of voice (5 categories)
Location of voice (3 categories)
Form of address
Command hallucinations
Overall emotional content
0.86
0.46
0.44
0.24
0.60
0.29
0.60
0.04
0.06
0.10
0.53
0.04
1.09
0.07
35
34
35
35
35
35
35
0.245
0.177
0.113
0.109
0.16
0.34
0.53
0.55
0.222
0.166
0.102
0.099
0.15
0.33
0.52
0.54
35
31
33
33
0.375
0.084
0.03
0.67
0.340
0.079
0.03
0.65
35
29
Response to voice
Answer voices
Ability to control voices
0.82
0.09
0.04
0.99
35
35
Note. The Randomisation Test is the likelihood that the data observed were could be due to random chance. The Bayes Factor is the degree to which the
evidence favours a relationship between Insight and the property (numbers in bold indicate Bayes Factor < 0.33; i.e., providing some evidence against an
association). The first N is the number of responses that are included in the Contingency Table analysis. Spearman is the ranked correlation score for
properties that could be treated as ordered. Kendall is Kendall’s tau for the same. The final N is the sample size for the Spearman and Kendall correlations
after removing non-ordinal responses such as ‘‘unsure” or ‘‘varies”.
variables which could be treated as ordinal are indicated with an asterisk (⁄) in Tables 2 and 3, and the associated coding
schemes are indicated in italics beside the responses. The results of the correlational analysis appear in the latter columns
of Table 5. Here we do find a significant result for the effect of the ‘command’ variable on beliefs, so that more frequent commanding voices are associated with less insightful beliefs. This effect is such that the absence of commanding voices appears
to protect against delusional beliefs (only one of the 16 who never experienced their voices as commanding was delusional
about the cause of their AVHs). In contrast, of the nine whose voices were always commanding, the likelihood of delusional
beliefs was higher, but only to the extent of equal numbers with delusional beliefs, partial insight, and insightful beliefs. No
other correlations are significant.
3.2.4. Combining speech properties
Another possibility is that more intense experience could reflect a combination of variables rather than the variables on
their own. For example, while voice characteristics such as frequency, count, and amount of speech are not individually
important it may be that these variables combined provide for a better measure of intensity. To test this, we used Principal
Components Analysis (PCA) and, given limitations of sample size for a PCA, focused on the three AVH intensity variables
related to ‘‘amount of speech” (number of voices, frequency of voices and length of utterances), after having recoded them
so that higher AVH scores indicate greater intensity. An additional aim was to subsequently plot the AVH composite scores
against degree of insight so as to graphically illustrate, not only the strength of any overall relations, but also any dissociations (e.g., patients with severe intensity of AVHs and yet insightful beliefs). Results revealed a single component for the variables concerning amount of speech (Eigenvalue = 1.58) that explained 52.6% of the variance and comprised the highest
loadings for frequency (0.82) and number of voices (0.84) and the lowest loading for amount of speech per utterance
(0.45). The single component score was saved and correlated with patients’ degree of insight. There was no significant relationship between these variables, r = 0.006; p = 0.975.
Fig. 1 illustrates the scatterplot of beliefs against the amount of speech component score. Of the six cases who were delusional, half fell in the quadrant for relatively lower intensity of AVHs; of the 20 cases with full insight, just over half (11) fell
in the quadrant for higher intensity of AVHs. So once again we found no evidence of any relationship between AVH intensity
and AVH insight and clear evidence that the amount of speech doubly dissociates from beliefs about the cause of voices.
3.2.5. Combining personification properties
Another dimension that could contribute to the intensity of the experience is the degree to which the voices are personified, in the sense that their ages, sexes, classes, or other personality dimensions are identifiable. To test this hypothesis, we
created a personification index that combined sex, class, age, and identity. For each case, we counted the number of person-
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
Composite Intensity Score
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
- 0.5
-1
- 1.5
-2
Partial Insight
No Insight
Insight
Beliefs about AVHs
Fig. 1. Graph showing component intensity score against degree of insight. The component intensity score is a composite of the different statistical
properties of AVHs; the higher the score, the more intense the AVH.
Table 6
Correlations between the personification of the voices, and the degree of insight.
Criterion
Pearson
p
Spearman
p
Kendall
p
N
Liberal
Strict
0.212
0.101
0.22
0.56
0.185
0.099
0.29
0.57
0.155
0.083
0.32
0.58
35
35
ification variables that were clearly identified. We did this using both a liberal scoring criterion (wherein any response other
than ‘‘unsure” was treated as known), and a stricter criterion (which also treated responses such as ‘‘none” for sex as not
personified). These scores were then correlated with our ranked insight variable, using a traditional Pearson’s correlation,
the Spearman ranked correlation, and Kendall’s tau. Though the liberal personification score produced higher correlations
than the stricter score, none approached significance; so yet again we found no relationship between beliefs about the cause
of AVHs and a measure of AVH intensity (see Table 6).
4. Discussion
Contrary to Maher’s proposal, the statistical intensity of participants’ AVHs – whether conceptualised as the frequency
with which they occurred, the number of voices, their volume, or other aspects related to how often patients were preoccupied by hearing their voices – was not related to patients’ beliefs about the cause of the voices. The personification of voices
was also unrelated to beliefs. Analyses with Bayes factor revealed that, for the majority of AVH variables, there was significant evidence for a lack of association. This was consistent with the dissociations evident in Fig. 1 and the contingency tables
(Tables 2 and 3) showing cases in every cell. Of the 18 AVH properties considered, only two – ability to control voices and
frequency of a commanding nature – showed equivocal support for a relationship with beliefs. In both cases, however, some
patients with insightful beliefs gave similar ratings to patients with delusions, indicating that these properties by themselves
are not sufficient to account for the different beliefs. Overall, patients with AVHs varied considerably in the frequency,
amount, volume, and other phenomenological qualities of the voices they heard with no strong evidence of robust relationships between qualities of AVHs and beliefs.
These findings have important implications for theories of delusions. As already noted, there are two main approaches to
explaining delusional beliefs at a cognitive level: a one-factor approach and a two-factor approach. Both approaches accept
that delusions can arise as an explanation for an unusual experience or neuropsychological anomaly. This can be illustrated
by the example of Capgras delusion, the belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter. In this case, loss of autonomic responsiveness to faces, acquired through brain injury, leads an individual to encounter their loved one with an affective response weaker than that to which they have been accustomed, and hence to the idea of an impostor (Ellis & Young,
1990). According to the one-factor theory (see, e.g., Corlett, Taylor, Wang, Fletcher, & Krystal, 2010; Maher, 1974, 1988), such
a neuropsychological anomaly is sufficient to explain the delusion.
By contrast, according to the two-factor theory (Coltheart, 2007, 2010; Coltheart et al., 2011; Langdon, 2011; Langdon &
Coltheart, 2000), an additional pathological factor is needed to explain why the delusion is accepted and not rejected. This
second factor is thought to involve a deficit in belief evaluation and explains why some patients with a neuropsychological
anomaly develop a delusion while other patients with this anomaly do not (Coltheart et al., 2011; see also Connors &
Coltheart, 2011; Connors & Halligan, 2015; Connors, Langdon, & Coltheart, 2015; Langdon, 2011; Langdon & Coltheart,
2000; Langdon & Connaughton, 2013). This second factor may involve damage to specific brain areas, such as the right
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M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Coltheart, 2010), right medial prefrontal cortex (Gilboa, 2010), or the right inferior frontal
gyrus (Sharot, Korn, & Dolan, 2011).
These two theories offer different predictions about how delusions arise in response to AVHs. Any such account needs to
explain not only the presence of AVHs and their phenomenological qualities (including intensity and amount and other qualitative features) but also the associated belief about their cause. As one-factor approaches assume that delusional beliefs can
be explained without proposing some additional anomaly beyond the aberration(s) that causes the AVH experience, advocates of this approach would presumably assert that a single underlying factor is responsible for both the generation of the
AVHs and the generation of the delusional belief about the AVHs. In Maher’s (2006) view, for example, delusions about AVHs
arise as a normal response to sufficiently intense AVHs, and explaining the intensity of AVHs is sufficient to explain the presence or absence of an associated delusion. By contrast, a two factor approach would suggest that explaining the presence of
AVHs and their intensity is not sufficient to explain the presence of delusional beliefs about the cause of the AVHs: some
other distinct factor needs also be present to explain why some voice-hearers with AVHs are delusional, while other
voice-hearers with equally intense (and sometimes even more intense) AVHs have insightful beliefs about their cause.
Our data thus are more consistent with the two-factor approach. Our findings indicate that the intensity of hallucinatory
experiences and the beliefs about the cause of the AVHs are dissociated for almost all of the properties of the hearing-voices
experiences that we assessed. The only AVH property for which the presence of a delusional belief aligned completely with
the presence of a particular AVH property was ‘‘ability to control voices” (i.e., all delusional cases reported inability to control
voices). The pattern of data suggested, however, that it was the presence of a delusional belief that explained the voices being
self-reported as uncontrollable, while the presence of insightful beliefs conferred no protection against experiencing the
voices as uncontrollable. In other words, the pattern of data suggests the experience of uncontrollability was a consequence
of the delusional belief, rather than the experience of uncontrollability explaining the delusional belief.
These findings suggest that, while the voice experience helps to explain the content of an associated delusional belief,
some additional distinct factor(s) is involved in explaining why a patient is delusional about the cause of the voicehearing experience. This is consistent with the two-factor theory of delusions, but cannot be easily reconciled with a onefactor account. It is also not readily explained by a ‘‘prediction error” account, a type of one factor approach, which posits
a common underlying mechanism for delusions and hallucinations (Corlett et al., 2010; Fletcher & Frith, 2009). This account
holds that an aberrant sense of unexpectedness – ‘‘prediction error” – drives the formation of both hallucinations (by causing
internal experience to appear not self-generated) and delusions (by leading innocuous stimuli to appear highly salient and
unrelated stimuli to appear associated). While this general mechanism may still be involved, it would seem that a second
distinct factor is necessary to account for the divergences between insightful beliefs, partial insight, and delusions about
voices.
This dissociation appears to be somewhat consistent with neuroimaging and neuropsychological research. Previous
research examining the neural correlates of AVHs has identified activation of circuits involved in auditory processing, such
as in left fronto-temporal areas (Jardri, Pouchet, Pins, & Thomas, 2011; Kompus, Westerhausen, & Hugdahl, 2011). In several
studies, researchers have asked participants to rate the subjective reality of their AVHs and examined the neural correlates of
these ratings (Raij et al., 2009; Vercammen, Knegtering, Bruggeman, & Aleman, 2011). While not explicitly examining
insight, these studies have found correlations between the self-reported subjective reality of AVHs and activation in other
brain regions, including the right hemisphere (Vercammen et al., 2011) and coupling between the IFG, ventral striatum, auditory cortex, right posterior temporal lobe, and cingulate cortex (Raij et al., 2009), in addition to the circuits involved in auditory processing.
Research examining delusions – rather than AVHs – has found strong evidence of right frontal involvement in delusions
(Coltheart, 2007, 2010; Devinsky, 2009), rather than areas shared with hallucinations. Similarly, studies examining belief
evaluation in healthy participants without AVHs have found evidence of activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
(Corlett et al., 2004; Fletcher et al., 2001; Turner et al., 2004) and right inferior frontal gyrus (Sharot et al., 2011). Altogether,
the findings suggest distinct brain regions are responsible for AVHs and the associated beliefs about them. This research,
however, is limited by the relatively small number of studies in the area and, in particular, by the lack of research examining
neural correlates of insight into the cause of AVHs, as opposed to self-reported subjective reality.
Our study was limited somewhat by its small sample size, although our Bayesian analyses helps to address this concern.
Our results are also based on a chronic well-functioning schizophrenia sample. Insight is likely to be worse, for example, in
patients during the early stages of psychosis or with uncontrolled schizophrenia. Future studies might therefore consider
beliefs about AVHs in other schizophrenia cohorts and other clinical conditions (e.g., borderline personality disorder). Other
factors that we did not assess, such as the specific content of the AVHs – including whether the voices offer predictions about
future events that the voice-hearers believe to subsequently eventuate – could also influence patients’ beliefs about whether
the voices originate from some other power/agent.
Despite these limitations, however, the findings provide evidence that beliefs about AVHs are not dependent on the
underlying intensity or phenomenology of the AVHs themselves. Instead, the findings suggest that delusional beliefs about
AVHs involve factors other than the AVHs themselves, including additional pathologies in belief evaluation. Nevertheless,
given the large degree of distress caused by AVHs, future research could examine whether specific interventions designed
to change interpretations of voices might alter the observed phenomenological qualities of voices and examine whether
patients themselves might be able to identify idiosyncratic features in their own voices that promote insightful beliefs.
M.H. Connors et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 89–101
99
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Glen Carruthers, Emily Connaughton, Simon McCarthy-Jones, Vince Polito, Robert Ross, Neralie Wise
and other members of the CCD Belief Formation group for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This work
was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021)
<www.ccd.edu.au>.
Appendix A. Statistical methods and results
Here we describe the Ks measure of deviation, as well as the algorithm used in our randomisation tests.
A.1. The Ks measure of deviation
Shields and Heeler (1979) developed the Ks statistic as an alternative to the more traditional X2 statistic. The advantage of
this statistics is that it is able to evaluate goodness of fit for so-called ‘‘sparse contingency tables”: contingency tables containing zeroes in the expected values (X2 requires all expected values to be positive). The equation for their statistic is as
follows:
Ks ¼ 2
X
lnðOij !Þ
X
lnðEij !Þ
There are other measures of deviance that can accept zero values that could have been used (e.g., a sum of simple squared
deviances). We chose Ks, first because it was shown by Shields and Heeler (1979) to behave very much like Pearson’s X2
statistic on well-formed data, and second because, in testing other measures, we found Ks to be relatively less conservative,
giving us a better chance of discovering even weak associations if they exist.
A.2. Our randomisation tests
A statistic chosen, we now turn to a brief overview of how the randomisation test was applied to the data in this study
(Edgington & Onghena, 2007, provide a fuller and more general treatment of this approach). The goal is identical to traditional null hypothesis statistical testing: estimate a p-value representing how likely we would be to observe an Ks statistic
greater than or equal to our actual observed statistic, if there were no relationship between the variable of interest and level
of insight. To do this we generate random contingency tables assuming no relationship, and measure how often the Ks statistic exceeds the one observed for our actual data.
In each case where we report a p-value from the randomisation test, the algorithm was as follows:
1. Create a two-way contingency table of random frequencies by assigning the 35 observations at random to the cells in that
table with the following constraints:
a. the number of rows in the randomly generated table had to be the same as in the obtained contingency table being
analysed. That is, if there participants provided three different responses to the question, the random table would
also contain all three responses (even if some were given zero times by all groups).
b. the column sums of the random table had to be the same as the column sums in the actual data table (namely, 20, 9
and 6). That is, while particular participants were randomly assigned responses, there were always the same number
of participants with insight, partial insight, and no insight as in our sample.
2. Calculate the value of Ks for that random contingency table. This measures how strong the association is in that particular
random contingency table.
3. Repeat the first two steps 100,000 times for each analysis to get a range of the possible Ks under the null hypothesis.
4. The value of Ks computed from our observed data (Tables 2–4) was then compared to the 100,000 values obtained via
Step 3, and the proportion of random tables that produce larger deviances can be observed.
Computing the proportion of random tables that deviate from the expected by more than our observed data provides an
estimate of the likelihood that our data were due to random chance. The smaller this proportion is, the stronger is the evidence for an association between the column factor (whether a patient had insight, some insight, or no insight into his or her
AVHs) and the row factor (one of the measures of AVH intensity). For example, a proportion of 0.05, would indicate that only
5% of randomly constructed datasets depart from zero association as much or more than our dataset did. This value can thus
be interpreted the same way a p-value from a traditional X2 would be: if less than 0.05, then the data provide evidence
against the null hypothesis. Conversely, if this proportion were, say, 0.60, this would indicate that our dataset does not
provide any evidence against the null hypothesis.
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Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood
empathy
Antonella Corradini ⇑, Alessandro Antonietti
Department of Psychology, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano, Italy
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Mirror neurons
Empathy
Reenactive empathy
Rational explanation
Social cognition
Mindreading
Theory–theory
Simulation theory
Emotion
Intention understanding
a b s t r a c t
The current renewal of interest in empathy is closely connected to the recent neurobiological discovery of mirror neurons. Although the concept of empathy has been widely
deployed, we shall focus upon one main psychological function it serves: enabling us to
understand other peoples’ intentions. In this essay we will draw on neuroscientific, psychological, and philosophical literature in order to investigate the relationships between mirror neurons and empathy as to intention understanding. Firstly, it will be explored whether
mirror neurons are the neural basis of our empathic capacities: a vast array of empirical
results appears to confirm this hypothesis. Secondly, the higher level capacity of reenactive
empathy will be examined and the question will be addressed whether philosophical analysis alone is able to provide a foundation for this more abstract level of empathy. The conclusion will be drawn that both empirical evidence and philosophical analysis can jointly
contribute to the clarification of the concept of empathy.
Ó 2013 Published by Elsevier Inc.
1. Introduction
The mirror neuron system (MNS) has been recently proposed as the biological basis of social cognition (e.g., Pineda, 2009).
This encompasses a broad range of phenomena, which includes, among others, empathy (Gallese, Gernsbacher, Heyes, Hickok, & Iacoboni, 2011, Question 6). The term ‘‘empathy’’ is used to denote different phenomena (Roganti & Ricci Bitti, 2012). It
is sometimes deployed to refer to simple forms of behavioural sharing, as occurs in emotional contagion: when a person is
performing an action which is usually associated with the experience of a given emotion, another displays the same behaviour (de Vignemont & Singer, 2006). This is the case of a baby who begins crying because another baby close to her is crying
or the case of laughter which spreads in a group even though people are not aware of why the others are laughing. On the
other hand, empathy can be conceived of as a mainly cognitive phenomenon, which allows us to figure out the propositional
attitudes that are at the basis of another’s deciding, planning, and acting. Emotional aspects are not excluded, but they play a
minor role in the empathic process.
In the light of this special issue’s topic, empathy can be conceived of as a person’s capacity to understand what others
intend to do by experiencing the sensations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and desires which the other is experiencing
(or has previously experienced). The assumption is that, if we experience the mental states of a fellow person, we can understand her reasons for her acting in a given way, and thus understand the intentions underlying her behaviour. For instance, if
we realise, by watching Tom, that he has been offended by Dick and that he is now becoming angrier and angrier as a consequence of such an offence, we can understand why Tom behaves aggressively towards Dick. In turn, the comprehension of
another’s mental states is based, beside verbal communication, on the overt behaviour displayed by her (Avenanti & Aglioti,
⇑ Corresponding author. Fax: +39 02 72342280.
E-mail addresses: antonella.corradini@unicatt.it (A. Corradini), alessandro.antonietti@unicatt.it (A. Antonietti).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Published by Elsevier Inc.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.003
Please cite this article in press as: Corradini, A., & Antonietti, A. Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood empathy. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.003
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A. Corradini, A. Antonietti / Consciousness and Cognition xxx (2013) xxx–xxx
2006), thus the observation of others’ bodily signals can be an important source of intention ascription. For instance, as suggested by Wolpert, Doya, and Kawato (2003), facial expressions – one of the main body signals we use to communicate,
intentionally or incidentally, our emotional state to the others – can be seen as actions aimed at revealing the subject’s
intentions.
The function of empathy in understanding others’ intentions can be analysed both from a scientific and a philosophical
point of view. The aim of this essay is to address this topic from both perspectives. From the viewpoint of scientific inquiry,
the distinction between different forms of detecting others’ intentions is taken into account by referring to recent psychological literature. This will allow us to identify the specific form of empathy which is allegedly associated with MNS. Then,
empirical data supporting the role of MNS in empathy will be shortly reviewed. The first section of the essay will end with
some critical remarks about the need for conceptual clarification when appealing to MNS to ground empathy. These comments, by stressing the necessity of a fine-tuned analysis of such conceptual issues, will build the bridge to the philosophical
section. This mainly focuses on whether reenactive empathy, that is to say cognitively understood empathy, can be conceived of as a genuine epistemic capacity, able to justify rational explanation. After a short introduction to the topic of empathy in contemporary social sciences, part 3.2. will be devoted to a defence of the soundness of rational explanation against
criticisms raised by Hempel and other authors belonging to the empiricist tradition. In part 3.3, then, two arguments will be
subjected to scrutiny, whose aim is to show that only reenactive empathy is able to ensure the validity of rational explanation. The upshot will be that neither argument proves to be conclusive. This result, however, does not definitively rule out
empathy as an original kind of knowledge, since empirical evidence based on mirror neurons might offer some support to
this epistemological thesis, in particular if basic kinds of empathy are taken into consideration.
2. Empathy and MNS from the point of view of psychology and neuroscience
2.1. Mirroring and mentalising mechanisms underlying empathy
Empathy is a complex phenomenon involving different aspects and dimensions. In fact, the understanding of others’
intentions through the experience of their mental states may be underwritten by different processes. On the one hand, as
shown by the example reported in the previous section, we can immediately understand the reasons for Tom’s aggressive
behaviour on the basis of the perception of his face and/or the tone of his voice. We establish a direct connection between
what Tom looks like (in terms of bodily appearance and bodily movements), his mental states, and his acts. On the other
hand, we can understand Tom’s intentions by integrating the perceptual information Tom provides us with and some inferences based on contextual cues (for instance, the presence of other people on the scene who are mocking him), specific notions we have about Tom (for instance, remembering that Tom is a choleric guy), and abstract concepts (for instance, our
conviction that an offended man should always take revenge).
In the fields of psychology and the neurosciences some distinctions have been drawn in the attempt to clarify the mechanisms underlying the understanding of others’ intentions. A relevant starting point may be the distinction which has been
made, under different concepts and linguistic labels, between a system which allows human beings to comprehend immediately others’ intentions and a system which allows humans to reach such an outcome through an inferential process which
implies the mediating role of some forms of reasoning.
This distinction relies on a more fundamental distinction which has been recurrently proposed by different authors in
recent years in the domain of thinking and decision-making processes (Sloman, 1996), namely, the distinction between
the so-called System 1 and System 2. System 1 (Stanovich & West, 2000) – also labelled as intuitive (Pretz, 2008), experiential (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2002), tacit (Hogarth, 2001), impression-based (Kahneman, 2003) – is fast and
action-oriented; it is activated unintentionally and its functioning is rigid and partially behind the control of the individual.
Usually it operates effortlessly on the basis of associations. System 2 (Stanovich & West, 2000) – also called analytical (Slovic
et al., 2002), deliberative (Hogarth, 2001), judgment-based (Kahneman, 2003), rational (Epstein, 1994) – operates slowly,
intentionally, and flexibly, predominantly on the basis of abstract representations and logical rules. Usually it is not emotionally charged. The functioning of System 2 may fail to be optimal because of the excessive cognitive load it requires, its slowness, and the large amount of effort its activation needs.
In this vein, with specific reference to social cognition, Bohl and van den Bos (2012) proposed the distinction between Type
1 and Type 2 process. The former is fast, efficient, stimulus-driven, and lacks flexibility. The latter is slow, involves a high cognitive load and elaboration, is flexible and accessible to consciousness. With a more specific focus on processes involved in
understanding other people’s intentions, Waytz and Mitchell (2011) distinguished between mirroring and self-projection
mechanisms. The first mechanism enables us to understand other people by experiencing vicariously their mental states:
thanks to such a mechanism, the others’ mental states are mirrored in our mind. Through the second mechanism we project
our mental states onto the situation of another individual, so to infer her mental states. According to the authors, the two
mechanisms involve different degrees of immediacy in others’ understanding. Mirroring is a sort of on-line process which allows us to resonate immediately according to what another person is experiencing; self-projection, by contrast, implies imagining off-line what we should experience if we were in the other’s shoes and then attributing such an experience to her.
The distinction between mirroring and self-projection overlaps partially the distinction between mirroring and mentalising (Chiavarino, Apperly, & Humphreys, 2012). The mirroring system responds to observation of others’ acts and seems to
Please cite this article in press as: Corradini, A., & Antonietti, A. Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood empathy. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.003
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code their goals immediately by establishing purely behavioural relations between the perceptual appearance of the actor
and her corresponding intentions. Mentalising instead requires inferences about the mental states which are at the basis
of the behavioural relations. More precisely, the second system has two subcomponents: a representational one, which
serves the task to represent the actor’s intention as a mental state (but not as a behavioural relation), and a conceptual component ‘‘representing the semantic and logical properties of intentions, abstractly reasoning over these properties, and relating them to other mental states’’ (Chiavarino et al., 2012, p. 286).
2.2. Mirror neurons and empathy: empirical data
The neural circuits constituting MNS have been proposed as the best candidate for the biological basis of empathy, which
is to be thought of as the expression of the mirroring process. In fact, MNS has been invoked as a putative interpretation of
empathy and some experimental findings have been taken as evidence supporting the involvement of MNS in empathy (Gallese, 2001, 2003; Iacoboni, 2009; Preston & de Waal, 2002).
First of all, it is documented that humans, when watching people showing facial expressions corresponding to well-defined emotions, covertly activate the same muscles which are involved in the creation of those expressions (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000). Moreover, if people are prevented from automatically imitating the muscle contractions of the faces
they are exposed to (for instance, by compelling them to keep a pencil with the teeth transversal to the mouth), they become
less able to detect the emotional expression of the observed faces (Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric,
2005). This experimental finding supports analogous results observed in patients affected by the Moebius syndrome, which
impedes them to move their facial muscles: as a consequence of such an impairment, these patients fail to recognise the
emotions expressed by others (Cole, 2001). Finally, it is worth noting that the same cortical areas are activated when people
observe and imitate faces expressing emotions (Leslie, Johnson-Frey, & Grafton, 2004). Hence, it is proved that, in emotion
recognition, observation and action are linked together, as in the case of the functional actions directed at manipulating
things, which have been the main topic of investigation in MNS field.
These findings, however, only concern emotion recognition, which is not empathy, but rather its precursor or precondition. Further empirical evidence is required. Indeed, other studies showed that the link between observation and perception
also regards empathy. For instance, if individuals are paired with a confederate who imitates their postures, gestures, and
body movements during the execution of a joint task, they perceive the confederate as more agreeable than controls paired
to a non-imitating confederate do (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). In addition, individuals who spontaneously imitated the
behaviour of the confederate scored higher on an empathy scale subsequently, showing a positive relation between the frequency of imitative behaviours and the empathy rates (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999).
Two emotional reactions have been often investigated in the attempt to prove the involvement of MNS in empathy: pain
and disgust. As to pain, Avenanti, Bueti, Galati, and Aglioti (2005) recorded the excitability of the muscle of the hand which
generates an approaching movement toward a noxious stimulus (a needle): when people looked at a video showing other
people whose hand was penetrated by a needle in the same point, the excitability of the muscle decreased (as if they were
trying to move away the hand from the needle); in addition, the reduction of the excitability of the muscle was proportional
to the estimated level of pain the subjects attributed to other people when their hand was penetrated by the needle (see also
Avenanti, Minio-Paluello, Sforza, & Aglioti, 2009; Valeriani et al., 2008).
As far as the brain counterparts of pain experience are concerned, it was showed that neurons in the anterior cingulate
cortex responding to painful stimuli applied to the subject’s hand also fired when the subject observed another person being
stimulated by the same noxious stimuli (Hutchison, Davis, Lozano, Tasker, & Dostrovsky, 1999). Anterior cingulate cortex,
together with some regions of the insula, was also activated by observing relatives who were not currently exposed to painful stimuli, but would be stimulated painfully later (Singer et al., 2004). Hence, not only the direct observation of suffering
people, but also the prefiguration of a future pain affecting others activate the brain areas corresponding to the actual experience of pain in first person.
The same message is provided by studies concerning the neural counterparts of disgust. It has been proved that the same
brain structure (the insula, in this case), which is active when the individual experiences disgust personally, is activated even
when the individual looks at faces expressing disgust and that the intensity of such an activation is proportional to the level
of disgust expressed by the face (Phillips et al., 1997). The evidence was later supported by recording the activity of neurons
in the anterior part of the insula through electrodes implanted in the brain of epileptic patients (Krolak-Salmon et al., 2003).
A clear proof that the same neural counterparts are involved in experiencing disgust and observing other people experiencing that emotion was provided by Wicker et al. (2003) in a fMRI study where the same participants were both exposed to
disgusting odours and to pictures of persons smelling the same odours.
The impairment in experiencing negative emotions is associated with the impairment of recognising similar emotions in
other people. In fact, a case was reported of a patient with brain lesions in the putamen and in the insula who failed to subjectively experience disgust (and, as a consequence, to react to disgusting situations appropriately) and also was not able to
detect disgust in other people by observing their facial expressions or by listening to non-verbal sounds which they produced, as well as to the prosodic aspects of their speech (Calder, Keane, Manes, Antoun, & Young, 2000). A similar case
was successively reported by Adolphs, Tranel, and Damasio (2003).
When trying to find evidence that MNS is specifically involved in empathy, we can point to the fact that the activation of
brain areas included in MNS has been recorded in participants both when they were simply looking at actors showing facial
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expressions whose emotional meaning corresponded to that of the story they were telling (Decety & Chaminade, 2003) and
when they were asked to identify the emotional states of actors by observing their body postures, gestures, and facial expressions (Lawrence et al., 2006). Further support came from the experiment executed by Schulte-Rüther, Markowitsch, Fink, and
Piefke (2007): mirror-neuron mechanisms were activated when participants, exposed to facial expressions, had to identify
both the emotions concurrently experienced by themselves and the emotions expressed by the others’ faces.
The involvement of MNS in empathy is also proved by correlational studies. Two investigations demonstrated that the
level of emotional empathy developed by the participants was correlated to the intensity of the activity of premotor areas,
presumably containing mirror neurons, when the participants were asked to look at other people carrying out the act of
grasping with different intentions, as suggested by contextual hints (Kaplan & Iacoboni, 2006) or to listen to sounds produced by human actions (Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, & Keysers, 2006). More specifically, participants who showed higher activation of brain areas involved in MNS when looking at facial expressions by focussing on their emotional valence (SchulteRüther et al., 2007) obtained high scores on empathy scales.
MNS, together with other brain structures such as the limbic system and the insula, constitutes a large neural circuitry
which has been proved to be activated by both the execution, through imitation, and observation of facial expressions associated to emotional experiences (Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta, & Lenzi, 2003; Iacoboni & Lenzi, 2002). The association
between MNS and both the subjective experience of emotions and the detection of the same emotions in others through the
observation of their behaviour is further supported by a fMRI study which showed that the activation of MNS in preadolescents while observing and imitating emotional facial expressions is positively correlated with the level of empathic skills
(Pfeiffer, Iacoboni, Mazziotta, & Dapretto, 2008). An additional support is provided by clinical studies carried out with people
affected by autism. On the one hand these patients – who are impaired in recognising emotions from others’ facial expressions and to imitate such expressions – fail to show the usual reactions when looking at other people being affected by painful stimuli (Minio-Paluello, Baron-Cohen, Avenanti, Walsh, & Aglioti, 2009). On the other hand people with autism show
deficits in MNS functioning and their level of activity of MNS is reduced in correspondence with the level of severity of
the pathology (Dapretto et al., 2006).
2.3. Mirror neurons and empathy: conceptual problems
One of the main messages which are associated to the findings concerning the involvement of MNS in the understanding
of others’ mental states, including intentions, is that such an understanding does not exclusively depend on linguistic and
mentalistic processes (Gallese, 2001, p. 34). On the contrary, intentions are embodied. Such an embodiment is shared both
by the actor and the observer and relies on the motor schema of action. When the motor schema of the actor matches a motor schema in the repertoire of the observer, the intended meaning of the action is detected (Gallese, 2001, p. 36). If this general framework is applied to empathy, the consequence is that empathy is grounded in the experience of the lived body:
others are conceived ‘‘not as bodies endowed with a mind but as persons like us’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 43). In this way we
can recognise why persons behave in a certain manner.
In some circumstances, the comprehension of the intentions of others’ behaviour occurs predominantly on the basis of
the emotions they are experiencing rather than of the functions of the actions they are performing. When this happens,
empirical findings summarised above suggest that MNS is involved, either because some cerebral areas belonging to MNS
are directly activated or because other brain structures, connected to the main mirror-neuron areas, are activated, such that
they successively involve the proper mirror-neuron areas. In any case, the resulting outcome is that the same brain structures, which are activated when we experience the affective state the other is experiencing, are activated. This would lead
the affective states of other people to resonate in the mind of the perceiver (Gallese, 2001, p. 38; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006,
p. 121) or, put differently, would generate in the perceiver a sort of inner imitation of what the other is feeling (Iacoboni,
2008, chap. 4). Another way of thinking of this is that the cerebral system of the observer would be activated as if she were
behaving as the observed human being. This occurs because the observed behaviour is translated into a program which acts
as a sort of signal (efference copy signal) which enables the simulation of the behaviour (Gallese, 2001, pp. 40–41). As a consequence, the other’s behaviour is modelled as an action thanks to the behavioural equivalence between the perceiver’s and
the other’s actions (Gallese, 2001, p. 39). A first critical remark is that further clarification of the mental process supported by
MNS during an empathic relation is required. Resonance, inner imitation, simulation, and modelling are different processes
and the authors claiming that MNS grounds empathy should be more explicit and precise about the psychological counterparts of the corresponding cerebral activations.
Whatever these processes may be which are supported by MNS and lead to empathy, authors maintaining that MNS is
involved in empathy generally agree that intention understanding does not involve any form of abstract thought. To put
it in the authors’ words, it is ‘‘non-predicative’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 44), ‘‘without verbal mediation’’ (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia,
2006, p. 120), ‘‘without the need of theorising’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 41), ‘‘without propositional attitudes’’ (Gallese, 2001, p.
41), ‘‘non-inferential’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 44; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006, p. 174), ‘‘without any knowledge operation’’ (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006, p. 127), ‘‘not needing cognitive processes’’ (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006, p. 174), ‘‘pre-reflective’’
(Iacoboni, 2009, p. 666). In these authors’ view, MNS leads us to comprehend others’ experience in the absence of any conceptual representation and inference. Now, how should this form of understanding be conceived? This is a list of the adjectives which are attributed to it: ‘‘direct’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 41), ‘‘immediate’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 41; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia,
2006, p. 127), ‘‘effortless’’ (Iacoboni, 2009, p. 666), ‘‘automatic’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 41; Iacoboni, 2009, p. 666), ‘‘implicit’’ (GalPlease cite this article in press as: Corradini, A., & Antonietti, A. Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood empathy. Consciousness and Cognition (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.003
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lese, 2001, p. 41), ‘‘unconscious’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 41), ‘‘subpersonal’’ (Gallese, 2001, p. 42 and 46). Here, too more precision
seems to be required (Debes, 2009). In fact these attributes have different meanings and do not implicate one another. For
instance, pure knowledge operations and cognitive processes, with no form of embodiment, can also be immediate and
effortless, if adequately trained. Also the meaning of ‘‘automatic’’ and ‘‘unconscious’’ should be specified. A process can be
automatic by its very nature or because it has become such after having been carried out for a long time with effort and
the labour of reasoning. The same is true of the unconscious character of intention understanding: is it a process which
has become unconscious as a consequence of its automatisation or because it has always been unconscious? In other words:
the process might be conscious (and involving effort) when the individual is trying to learn to carry it out, but it becomes
unconscious (and effortless) when she had learnt to master it. In addition: does the unconscious character of the process
make reference to how the process develops or to the outcome of the process? We can be unaware of how we compute
the sum 5 + 2, but we are aware of the output of the process (and also of the fact that we are computing the sum). Also
the claim that intention understanding supported by MNS through empathy fails to involve knowledge and cognitive mechanisms can be questioned. As noted by Roganti and Ricci Bitti (2012, pp. 583–584), appraisal processes are always implied in
emotion comprehension, and thus an interpretative component can never be discarded, otherwise only a form of emotional
synchronisation or synthonisation, but not a real understanding, occurs. Thus, the specific forms of cognition which should
be excluded by the kind of empathy supported by MNS have to be clarified, since it has been proved that other cortical regions, beside MNS, are involved in cognitive manifestations of empathy (Shamay-Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, & Perry, 2008).
In conclusion, it appears that a more fine-grained analysis of the features of the empathic relation supported by MNR is
needed. To this end, this issue has to be addressed from the philosophical perspective, which we turn to now.
3. From mirror neurons to reenactive empathy
3.1. Empathy as reenactive empathy
As the first part of this essay has shown, the renewed, current interest in empathy is strictly related to empirical research
in the fields of neurobiology and psychology. In particular, the discovery of MNS in monkeys has given new impulse to the
scientific treatment of empathy. However, the notion of empathy has a long philosophical tradition, characterised by many
ramifications and several divergent approaches (for an informed reconstruction of the history of empathy see Stüber, 2006,
Introduction, and 2008). As far as philosophy of the social sciences is concerned, the most influential twentieth century supporter of empathy has been the philosopher of history Robert Collingwood (1949) who, against explanatory monism, maintained that explanation in history requires an essential empathic component. In fact, we cannot explain the behaviour of a
historical character without re-enacting her intentions, beliefs, desires and choices. Yet, the role of reenactive empathy has
not always been positively evaluated within the philosophy of the social sciences, partly because it introduces a sharp dualism between natural and social sciences, partly because it appears to represent a capitulation to any sort of subjectivism and
arbitrariness (see Popper’s criticism of the epistemological role of empathy in Popper, 1972, 4.12). In recent years, however,
authors such as Jane Heal and Karsten Stüber have revived the fortunes of empathy and have argued in favour of a strict
correlation between rational explanation and empathy as a fundamental epistemic capacity. Most part of what follows is
a discussion about the theses put forward by both authors.
3.2. Rational explanation
As is well known, there are two main ways of conceiving explanation in folk-psychology. The first is theory–theory and
the second is simulation theory.
According to theory–theory, human actions are explained on the basis of the classical Hempelian method, which,
although imperfect in a number of ways, nonetheless maintains its fundamental validity. What is essential in this method
is the presence within the explanans of empirical laws having the form of universal conditionals. From the point of view of
theory–theory supporters, then, action explanation is an empirical theory, which explains agents’ actions through empirical
laws, just as any empirical theory explains the behaviour of certain objects. The laws may be different from some other
empirical theories, since in folk-psychology they often are probabilistic or ceteris paribus laws; nonetheless, the explanatory
structure is the same. By contrast, according to simulation theory, an agent’s behaviour is explained through simulation of
the reasons, beliefs and desires which move the agent to action.
An example of the theory–theory paradigm consists in the last of the three inferences involved in a successfully performed false belief task.
‘‘Predicting where Maxi will look for the chocolate.
i. Maxi wants to eat the chocolate, and he believes that the chocolate is in cupboard, and he believes that looking for the
chocolate in cupboard is a means of satisfying one’s desire of eating it.
ii. Central action principle: If somebody desires x and believes that A-ing is a means of achieving x, then, ceteris paribus,
he will do A.
iii. Max will look for the chocolate in cupboard.’’ (Stüber, 2006, pp. 109–110).
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The issue at stake is to clarify the nature of Central Action Principle (also named by Kim (1984, 1998) Desire/Belief/Action
Principle – DBA), which in the inferential scheme fulfils the function of a general law. For theory–theory supporters this principle is an empirical law expressing a kind of nomological necessity and its presence is necessary. The notion of nomological
necessity is, in fact, essential in order to define the relation of causal explanation.
Critics of the theory–theory paradigm, however, cast doubts on the empirical nature of laws like DBA. What they question
is not their general character; rather, critics point at the fact that they do not express a nomological necessity but a logical–
analytical necessity, which sometimes is defined as a ‘‘rational’’ necessity (Dray, 1957). In other words, principles of this kind
are principles that define the notion of rationality. They are the axioms of practical rationality, formally encoded in practical
syllogisms (or practical inferences) (Anscombe, 1957; von Wright, 1971).
Hempel’s criticism of rational explanation is well known (Hempel, 1965, chap. 5). If the DBA principle is a rationality axiom, it cannot be the object of empirical confirmation and, thus, it cannot be considered as a principle endowed with explanatory capacity. To avoid this consequence it is necessary to modify DBA to the following principle, DBA.
Central action principle revised: If somebody desires x and believes that A-ing is a means of achieving x and she is a rational
agent, then, ceteris paribus, she will do A.
However, this move is fatal to rational explanation, since a rationality clause cannot be included among the particular
facts of a law that claims to contribute to the definition of rationality itself. Indeed, to obtain confirmation of a law like DBA
we must be in the business of establishing the truth of the antecedent, including the rationality clause. But, how is it possible
to establish an agent’s rationality, if we need the principle DBA itself to define the rationality notion?
The contrast between rational and nomological explanation seems to be so stark as to only allow two possibilities. Either
we maintain that explanation should be nomological in the human sciences just as in the physical sciences, which almost
necessarily leads to a naturalistic re-interpretation of folk-psychology. Or we give up the claim that actions are explainable
as human actions and fall back on the less ambitious idea that they can only be the object of understanding; that is to say
they are behaviours that we can interpret in the light of an agent’s subjectivity but that have their cause elsewhere. Is there a
way out of this dilemma?
Borrowing from Stüber (2003) we assume that principles like DBA can be conceived of both as analytical principles and as
empirical generalisations. If they are understood as analytical principles, they express a necessity of a conceptual kind and
have, on top of that, a normative meaning, as they formalize a correct way of reasoning. An agent who does not abide by
them does not reason correctly and, as a consequence, does not decide correctly. These principles, however, can also be conceived of as empirical generalisations, inasmuch as they describe the way agents ‘‘in flesh and blood’’ reason and take decisions. In this latter meaning, and only in this latter meaning, they are falsifiable by experience. ‘‘The distinction between
understanding a general statement as the articulation of a normative standard or as the description of a regularity in behavior points to different functions of the same statements in different contexts’’ (Stüber, 2003, p. 268).
But why can they also be conceived of as empirical generalisations? Expanding on the previous argument, we can give the
following answer. Analytically understood DBA principles define the concept of rationality. As we said before, they are rationality axioms and, thus, define the way a real mind (or a mechanism like a mind) should function in order to be a mind that
operates rationally. It is worth noting that, from this viewpoint, also principles belonging to scientific theories could be conceived of as axioms that define certain models of empirical reality. In this way theory confirmation would not be anything
other than the confirmation of the fact that the model defined by the theory is actually instantiated in empirical reality.
Owing to this analysis of DBA, the rationality clause, which Hempel considered as a necessary condition in order to justify
the explanatory character of practical argumentation, can now be put in the right place. For the previously mentioned reasons, such a clause must not be put among the other clauses of the conditional that makes the law. It must be considered,
instead, as a fundamental presupposition, that is to say as a background assumption, that permits us the very use of those
laws. In other words, it is the same assumption made in the practical–inferential model of rationality, understood as an
explanatory model of empirical agents’ concrete actions. This assumption could be of course totally wrong, if the model
did not work at all, that is to say if no set of actions did exist, which can be explained by any exemplification of the model.
However, this can hardly be the case, since this would be tantamount to saying that the set of the actions to be rationally
explained is empty. Instead, it is easier to falsify such a hypothesis on particular occasions, in which the action under scrutiny
does not derive from true premises of the DBA principle. However, also on these particular occasions it is not the falsification
of DBA as an analytical (logically correct) principle that occurs, but the falsification of the principle considered as an explanatory scheme. Thus, in the end, it is the falsification of the validity of the principle in that particular case.
Yet, at this point a problem arises. The correctness of the DBA scheme can be justified by means of a priori reasons. It is an
analytical principle and, therefore, it has to be founded in a similar way as those of the formal sciences. But what about DBA
as an explanatory law, that is to say as the fundamental presupposition concerning the explanatory dimension of the practical–inferential model in its application to reality?
3.3. Is reenactive empathy an epistemic capacity?
Authors such as Heal and Stüber answer this question by recourse to the empathy thesis. We are supposed to have the
direct perception of the connections established by the DBA principle among our desires, our beliefs and the actions we perform. This perception is a first-person perception. It is the agent’s ego who perceives the logic of her acting. At this point
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empathy enters the scene. The agent is able to put himself in others’ shoes, meaning not only that she succeeds in grasping
the others’ point of view, but also in reenacting the same experiences which characterise others’ mental and emotive processes. In this way empathy becomes the epistemic element able to endow schemes like DBA with an explanatory dimension:
that is to say empathy guarantees the soundness of their explanatory use. As Stüber puts it: ‘‘The special status of DBA just
derives from the fact that we ourselves have access to our cognitive states and reasoning from the first person perspective
and have to use this ability in a projective or reenactive manner in order to understand the reasons of other agents’’ (Stüber,
2003, pp. 275–276; Stüber, 2006, pp. 212–213).
But why should we resuscitate reenactive empathy or co-cognition (Heal, 2003, p. 97 ff) in order to account for the soundness of the practical inferential explanation of actions? Heal (2003) and Stüber (2006, p. 152 ff) put forward two arguments
in favour of the epistemic relevance of empathy. In the remainder of this essay I will expound and comment on both
arguments.
(A) The argument from the essential contextuality of thoughts as reasons
As the argument goes, theory–theory aims to deliver a complete theory of action, including both a formal inferential
scheme to allow people’s thoughts to be related together until the final decision is taken and a criterion to objectively establish the premises of the inferential scheme.
But such a theory does not exist, because there is no complete formal inferential scheme and, above all, there are no criteria to objectively establish the premises of the inferential scheme, as they are dependent on the context. In fact, according
to the frame problem, in order to establish the premises it is necessary to know what are the relevant aspects for ends choice.
But to understand what are the relevant beliefs for explaining an action it is necessary to understand what are the beliefs
that are meaningful to themselves as a subject, and this is not possible without reenactive empathy.
Analysis of and comment on the argument.
Three aspects of the previous argumentation should be distinguished.
a. Theory–theory is criticised because it is unable to deliver a complete theory of action: it only partly covers the process
of practical decision. In particular, it cannot solve the problem of the premises identification. Thus the theory is insufficient, since it is incomplete as regards its premises.
b. Theory–theory is criticised because it is objective, that is, it does not account for the first person’s perspective.
c. Theory–theory is criticised because it cannot justify the attribution of a causal role to agents’ desires and beliefs when
these concern strictly subjective contents. But – as we learned from the contextuality argument – how is it possible to
explain agents’ behaviours if we do not have any access to their subjectivity, that is, if we do not succeed in understanding how and why these contents are meaningful to the agent? Such an access presupposes an original and irreducible capability to empathically identify ourselves with a subject different from us.
Now, our comment is that reenactive empathy may be needed, if it is needed at all, to provide a solution for the problem
formulated at point c, but neither for the problem mentioned at point a nor for that at point b. Let us ask ourselves, in fact,
what is needed to overcome incompleteness (point a).
A method is needed that is able to establish the premises, which, however, are formulated from the subject’s viewpoint.
They are premises which do not express states of affairs of the agent’s life that can be described as causes or objective conditions of the agent’s conduct. The states of affairs corresponding to such premises are not characterised by empirically
detectable properties, thus we cannot grasp them without taking into account the subjective framework in which they
are situated. In other words, they are states of affairs that can be described as structurally identical with the desires and beliefs from which our actions originate. Thus they presuppose the access to the first person’s perspective. We can then conclude that in order to overcome the incompleteness of the theory we need to modify it so to make it able to express the first
person’s perspective. What is it necessary for such a goal? To say that we need reenactive empathy appears to us to be too a
hasty strategy. Instead, we need to replace the Hempelian D–N scheme with the P–I scheme of practical inference. Practical
inference, in fact, consists in a general scheme including assertions of the goals to be reached (B(x, goal p) as premises, beliefs
on the chain of actions to perform for reaching those goals (B(x, N(p Ò to do q) and, as a conclusion, the action the subject
decides to perform (x does q). Premises and conclusion are not connected to each other by empirical laws, but by principles
belonging to practical logic (epistemic and deontic logic at first place). It is this very essential aspect of P–I that makes it
capable of expressing the first person’s perspective. Actually, the above outlined scheme works perfectly if we replace x with
the indexical ‘‘I’’, a typical expression of the first person’s perspective. So far, however, no kind of reenactive empathy is
needed. We are dealing with the first person’s perspective, which only requires the subject’s capacity to grasp the nexus between the practical–inferential scheme and the world of her own desires and beliefs. To this end a form of self-perception or
of self-awareness, but not of empathy is needed. Reenactive empathy could perhaps play a role at point c, when the P–I
scheme is transferred to other subjects. We can in fact ask ourselves what would justify the extension of the scheme to other
subjects and how would it be possible to explain their actions through a scheme like P–I if we could not accede the other’s
world as if it were our own world. This part of the argument from contextuality will be expanded on in the second argument
from the indexicality of thoughts as reasons (Stüber, 2006, p. 161 ff).
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(B) The argument from the essential indexicality of thoughts as reasons
This argument is divided into two parts.
The first part of the argument can be formulated in the following way.
The scheme:
1. B(x, goal p) 3 B(x, N(p ? q)) ? x makes q appears to me as explicative of the actions x does only if it appears to me as
explicative of the actions I do. But it is explicative of my actions only if I understand that my belief that goal p and my
belief that N(p ? q) imply my doing q. In other words, my reasons for my doing q must be ego-indexed.
2. The second part of the argument reads that when I think of goal p and N(p ? q) as reasons for others, I have to think of
them as if they were my own reasons.
Analysis of and comment on the argument.
a. Our first remark is that indexicality essentially requires the first person’s perspective. However, this does not imply
empathy, but only self-perception or inner perception.
b. Secondly, empathy as an ability to reenact others’ thoughts is required, if at all, in the passage from my reasons to
others’ reasons. That is, it has to be introduced as early as in the second part of the argument from indexicality.
c. Thirdly, it is debatable whether reenactive empathy should be understood as a sui generis kind of knowledge. Empathy
is in fact a form of knowledge which, on the one hand, is different from empirical perception, but which, on the other,
is of the very same kind as perception, that is to say it is a form of perception and not a sort of pure a priori evidence.
Thus it would represent a third kind of knowledge, in addition to empirical knowledge and genuinely a priori knowledge. The question then is whether it is strictly necessary to assume this new form of knowledge or whether it could
be replaced by the synergic work of both inner perception and a priori knowledge. Empathy could be understood as an
intentional capacity addressed to a ‘‘something’’ which is different from ourselves and is conceived of as a subject
rather than as an object. The knowledge we suppose to have of the other could be actually interpreted in a different
manner, that is, as the result of the information we derive from our capacity to represent to ourselves the other’s world
and to draw from this the explanation of her behaviour. On this construal, we would be entitled to believe in the existence of others’ inner worlds thanks to their capacity to explain others’ behaviours to me.
4. Conclusion
Heal’s and Stüber’s arguments in favour of the epistemic role of reenactive empathy do not appear to be conclusive. However, the way the argumentation has been developed does not preclude the possibility of exploiting empirical research to
ascertain whether reenactive empathy is or is not an original kind of knowledge of others’ minds. Clearly, the deployment
of empirical data to deal with an epistemological problem requires a theory about the relationship between conceptual and
empirical knowledge. Its function is to legitimate the contribution of the empirical data to the construction of a conceptual
and apriori kind of knowledge like that supplied by philosophy. We cannot exhaustively treat this topic in the present essay,
but, since MNS delivers the most influential empirical result so far about empathy, we shall deal with the issue of whether
the empirical results lend some support to this philosophical account of empathy.
First, it is appropriate to stress that apriori and empirical considerations about empathy are not incompatible. In fact, the
philosophical reflections provided above leave open the question about empathy. The possibility of empathy as an original
kind of knowledge of other subjects’ minds has not been excluded, even though doubts have been cast on the claim that a
priori reasons are sufficient for reaching a positive verdict on empathy.
However, something more than mere compatibility is needed for arguing for the relevance of MNS to the empathy issue.
It is necessary that neurobiology tells us what the role of mirror neurons is in the construction of intersubjectivity and if this
role supports the thesis of a capacity which cannot be explained through the perception of a purely objective phenomenon
like behaviour.
We believe that the answer to the first question is quite uncontroversial. Empirical evidence shows that mirror neurons
play a major role in the construction of a basic kind of relationship with the other. The answer to the second question is instead more thorny. It implicitly contains a hint at an impossibility proof. A theory about mirror neurons, in fact, should provide an argument to the effect that mirror neurons possess a capacity for intersubjectivity that is not explainable through the
mere elaboration of objective perceptive data. In other words, the theory about mirror neurons should be able to exclude the
possibility that mirror neurons can perform their function without implying empathic capacities. As is known, proofs of
impossibility (or of indispensability) are very difficult and, sometimes, not conclusive. An opponent of the empathy thesis
based on mirror neurons could argue that she can explain the evidence of intersubjectivity in a different way, i.e. by means
of evolutionary theory. The argument would go as follows. The promptness with which neurons react to others’ mental
world does not depend on any specific empathic capacity, but on the fact that this circumstance expresses in an immediate
and non-reflexive way the capacity that the organism has acquired in its millenary history to represent to itself others’ mental world on the basis of their behaviours. The mirroring capacity of mirror neurons should not then be explained empathically, since it can be conceived of as the result of an evolutionary application of theory–theory.
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However plausible this interpretation may appear, we think that the evolutionary way of arguing is debatable. In fact, it
could be employed to all of the a priori capacities. As the evolutionary theory of knowledge affirms, these too are the result of
the sedimentation of the species’ experiences in the individual. Thus, just as we believe that the evolutionary argument does
not hold as regards the a priori in general, it seems to us quite wobbly also in the case of an empathic reading of mirror
neurons.
To sum up, there is no question that philosophical reflection successfully argues for the validity of the first person’s perspective, while the a priori arguments in favour of the empathy thesis remain problematic. Empirical research on MNS is
surely an important clue to the validity of the empathy thesis, at least as far as empathy is conceived of as a basic capacity
(on this see Corradini, 2011). Nevertheless, further work is still to be done on both sides.
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Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 135–141
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Altered states of consciousness are related to higher sexual
responsiveness
Rui M. Costa a,⇑, José Pestana b, David Costa a, Marc Wittmann c
a
WJCR – William James Center for Research, ISPA – Instituto Universitário, Rua do Jardim do Tabaco 34, 1149-041 Lisbon, Portugal
ISPA – Instituto Universitário, Rua do Jardim do Tabaco 34, 1149-041 Lisbon, Portugal
c
Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, Wilhelmstr. 3a, 79098 Freiburg, Germany
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 24 January 2016
Revised 2 March 2016
Accepted 14 March 2016
Keywords:
Sexual responsiveness
Orgasm
Altered states of consciousness
Psychological absorption
a b s t r a c t
Altered states of consciousness lead to profound changes in the sense of self, time and
space. We assessed how these changes were related to sexual responsiveness during sex.
116 subjects reported (a) intensity of awareness concerning body, space and time, and
(b) satisfaction, desire, arousal, and orgasm occurrence. We differentiated vaginal intercourse orgasm from noncoital orgasm. Female vaginal intercourse orgasm was further differentiated as with or without concurrent clitoral masturbation. Overall, sexual
responsiveness was related to greater body awareness and lesser time and space awareness. Satisfaction, desire, and arousal were especially associated with less time awareness
in women. Female orgasms during vaginal intercourse were related to greater body awareness and lesser time awareness, but noncoital orgasms were unrelated. Our findings provide empirical support for the hypotheses that altered states of consciousness with
attentional absorption are strongly related to sexual responsiveness in women, and to a
lesser extent in men.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Altered states of consciousness induced through meditation, in sensory deprivation, in rhythm-induced trance or under
the influence of drugs lead to profound changes in the sense of the self, time and space (Block, 1979; Vaitl et al., 2005;
Wittmann, 2015). Altered states of consciousness can also occur in varying degrees during sexual activity (Mosher, 1980;
Nielsen et al., 2013; Passie, Hartmann, Schneider, & Emrich, 2003; Swartz, 1994). States of ‘absorption’ are altered mental
states characterized by an intense attentional focus on sensory and/or imaginary experiences which leads to changes in
the perception of self, space, and time (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974). Given that sexual arousal is enhanced by focusing attention on sensory and imaginary sexual stimuli (Brody & Weiss, 2010; Smith & Over, 1987), absorption likely plays an important role in sexual responsiveness. This view is strengthened by studies revealing that the capacity for vivid imagination was
related to proneness to sexual excitability in both sexes (Harris, Yulis, & Lacoste, 1980), and that hypnotic suggestibility was
greater in women who attain orgasm during coitus more easily (Bridges, Critelli, & Loos, 1985). Both vividness of imagination
and hypnotic suggestibility are characteristics of persons predisposed to absorption (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974). Moreover,
creative self-forgetfulness, a personality trait reflecting the tendency for experiencing absorbed states was related to higher
sexual desire in women (Costa, Oliveira, Pestana, Costa, & Individual Differences, 2016). During sex, absorbed states occur in
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rmscosta@gmail.com (R.M. Costa).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.03.013
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
136
R.M. Costa et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 135–141
varying degrees and are characterized by an intense focus on physical sexual sensations, and to some extent, as long it is not
distractive, in erotic imagination. Such an absorption in bodily sensations comes together with a reduced awareness of surrounding space and alterations in the sense of time, which can take the form of loss of awareness of time (timelessness)
(Swartz, 1994). Similar effects of a loss of time and space can be found in meditative states in experienced meditators
(Berkovich-Ohana, Dor-Ziderman, Glicksohn, & Goldstein, 2013; Droit-Volet, Fanget, & Dambrun, 2015) suggesting that
changes in the senses of space and time are general characteristics of altered states of consciousness, i.e. of states of absorption and flow (Glicksohn, 2001; Wittmann, 2015).
Swartz (1994) proposed that absorbed states are essential for high sexual arousal and orgasm in many, if not all, women.
He further proposed that absorbed states may facilitate male sexual arousal and orgasm by enhancing the subjective hedonic
quality, but these altered states are not essential for sexual responsiveness in most men (Swartz, 1994). The present retrospective study aims at assessing how the senses of self, time and space during the last sexual encounter were related to sexual responsiveness. Specifically, it is hypothesized that greater satisfaction, desire, arousal, and orgasm occurrence during
the last sexual encounter are related to greater awareness of the body and to lesser awareness of space and time. It is further
hypothesized that these associations are stronger for women than for men.
Consistency of female orgasm during coitus was previously related to a greater capacity to enter altered states of consciousness, such as hypnotic suggestibility, enjoying the feeling of being ‘‘carried away” by alcohol, and lack of control of
movements and thoughts near the end of the coitus (Bridges et al., 1985). In addition, greater likelihood of orgasm from vaginal intercourse without clitoral masturbation (vaginal orgasm) has been more consistently related to higher sexual desire
and satisfaction than other orgasm triggers (Brody, 2007; Brody & Weiss, 2011; Nutter & Condron, 1983; Tao & Brody,
2011); hence, in our study we assessed whether occurrence of vaginal orgasm is more strongly related to greater awareness
of the body and lesser awareness of space and time.
2. Material and methods
2.1. Participants and procedure
After giving informed consent, 68 women and 48 men participated in the study. All participants were Portuguese
recruited in the Lisbon area. Subjects were on average 24.89 years of age (SD = 6.98). For more detailed characteristics of
the participants, see Table 1. Exclusion criteria were defined as taking prescribed psychotropic medication, i.e. for treating
psychiatric conditions, or having been under the influence of recreational psychoactive substances during the last sexual
activity (including alcohol, but with exception of nicotine). In order to have a homogeneous sample, individuals reporting
homosexual and bisexual inclinations were excluded in this analysis. However, these participants form a subgroup of a laboratory study (not described here) and also provided information on the variables of interest of the present study. The study
had the approval of the local Ethics Committee and complied with the principles of the declaration of Helsinki. All participants received a ten-euro voucher or course credits.
2.2. Measures
Two visual analog scales (VAS) with scores from 1 to 7 were used to measure intensity of awareness of body and space
during the last sexual activity. The questions in Portuguese were ‘‘How intensively did you perceive yourself?” and ‘‘How
Table 1
Descriptive statistics.
Women (N = 68)
Men (N = 48)
Age (years) Mean (SD)
24.84 (7.11)
24.96 (8.12)
Education
High school %
Current university attendance %
University degree %
Masters degree or more %
4.4
45.6
36.8
13.3
8.3
45.9
35.4
10.5
Occupation
University student %
Employed %
Unemployed %
63.2
35.3
1.5
66.7
29.1
4.2
Relationship characteristics
With regular sexual partner %
Relationship duration (months) Mean (SD)
Cohabitating (total sample %)
Smoking tobacco before last sex %
73.5
42.24 (32.61)
27.9
8.8
77.1
38.58 (40.75)
21.1
4.2
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R.M. Costa et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 135–141
How intensely did you perceive yourself?
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
How intensely did you perceive space?
○
○
○
○
○
○
○
How intensively did you perceive time?
Not at all
Extremely intensive
How fast did time pass for you?
Extremely slowly
Extremely fast
Fig. 1. Visual analog scales to measure the intensity of the awareness of body and space; visual analog scales to measure intensity of awareness of time and
the speed of the passage of time.
intensively did you perceive space” (see Fig. 1); higher scores indicate greater awareness of body and space during last sexual
activity.
Two visual analog scales (VAS) with a length of 100 mm were used on which respondents had to mark the point which
reflected their impression of time during the last sexual activity. The questions were ‘‘How intensively did you perceive
time?” and ‘‘How fast did time pass for you?”. The time awareness scale was anchored from 0 mm (not at all) to 100 mm
(extremely intensive). The time speed scale was anchored from 0 mm (extremely slow) to 100 mm (extremely fast). See
Fig. 1.
Pertaining to the last sexual encounter, women were asked to report if they had an orgasm from (1) penile-vaginal intercourse (henceforth, intercourse) without clitoral masturbation, (2) intercourse with clitoral masturbation, (3) partnered noncoital sex (scores: 0 = orgasm did not occur, 1 = orgasm did occur). In addition, a composite measure was created for
assessing orgasm occurrence regardless of triggering activity (scores 0 = no orgasm during last sexual activity, 1 = orgasm
during last sexual activity).
Men were asked if during the last sexual encounter they had an orgasm from (1) intercourse, (2) partnered noncoital sex
(scores: 0 = orgasm did not occur, 1 = orgasm did occur). Like for women, a composite measure of orgasm occurrence regardless of triggering activity was created (scores: 0 = no orgasm during last sexual activity, 1 = orgasm during last sexual
activity).
Sexual satisfaction, desire and arousal during last sexual encounter were measured with a scale from 1 (absolutely nothing) to 6 (extremely).
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R.M. Costa et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 135–141
The tendency to respond in a socially desirable fashion was measured with a 13-item form of the Marlowe-Crowne Social
Desirability Scale (Ballard, 1992).
2.3. Statistical analyses
Partial correlations controlling for social desirability and smoking tobacco during the last sexual activity were used to
examine the intercorrelations between all variables of interest, i.e. sexual responses and the awareness of body, space
and time. The reason for controlling these variables is that people scoring high in social desirability may misreport their sexual responses (Meston, Heiman, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 1998), and although it is unclear if nicotine affects the perception of
body, space and time during sex, smoking cigarettes may affect sexual responsiveness (Cao, Gan, Dong, Liu, & Lu, 2014;
Costa & Peres, 2015). Initial significance levels were set to p < 0.05. The false discovery rate (FDR) method, a multiple comparisons correction procedure by Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) was used to control for multiple tests.
3. Results
As depicted in Table 2, men had a tendency to retrospectively report more satisfaction and arousal during sex than
women. Men and women did not differ in the degree of sensing their body, space, and time during the last sexual activity.
Table 3 displays the intercorrelations between the intensities of awareness of body, space, and time, and the passage of
time. Notably, for both sexes, a lower awareness of time correlated with a lower awareness of space (female: r = .31, p = .012;
male: r = .42, p = .003). Greater body awareness correlated with lower time awareness in women (r = .53, p < .001).
As can be seen in Table 4a, for women, greater satisfaction (r = .66, p < .001), desire (r = .75, p < .001) and arousal (r = .76,
p < .001) during last sexual activity were strongly related with a greater body awareness. For men (see Table 4b), satisfaction
(r = .56, p < .001), desire (r = .46, p < .001), and arousal (r = .58, p < .001) also correlated moderately-to-strongly with greater
body awareness, but with smaller correlation coefficients than for women. Correlations of body awareness with desire and
arousal were significantly larger in women than in men (z = 2.45, p = .007, and z = 1.72, p = .013, respectively).
In women, desire (r = .28, p = .023) correlated weakly with lesser space awareness; in men desire (r = .37, p = .011) and
arousal (r = .39, p = .007) both correlated similarly moderately with lesser space awareness. Regarding time awareness,
strong inverse relations can be seen in women with satisfaction (r = .52, p < .001), desire (r = .61, p < .001) and arousal
(r = .52, p < .001). That is, the greater sexual response, the smaller time awareness during sex. A moderate negative correlation can be seen in men between satisfaction and time awareness (r = .36, p = .013). Whereas perceiving time as passing
faster correlated with greater satisfaction (r = .36, p = .003) and desire (r = .32, p = .008) in women, it was uncorrelated with
sexual responses in men.
Orgasm occurrence was strongly related to greater body awareness in women (r = .62, p < .001), and moderately to
greater body awareness in men (r = .38, p = .010). Orgasm was also related to lower time awareness in women (r = .48,
p < .001), but not in men (see Tables 4a and 4b). When orgasms were differentiated by trigger, female orgasm from vaginal
intercourse without clitoral masturbation was moderately associated with perceiving time as passing faster (r = .47,
p < .001). Female orgasm from vaginal intercourse with clitoral masturbation was moderately associated with greater body
awareness (r = .32, p = .009).
4. Discussion
Our findings are evidence supporting Swartz’s hypothesis that absorbed states are related to female sexual responsiveness, and to a lesser degree to male sexual responsiveness (Swartz, 1994). Women’s sexual satisfaction, desire and arousal
during last sexual activity were related to the capacity of attentional absorption in bodily sensations and to a profound loss
of the sense of time. Female desire and arousal also imply a loss of the sense of space, but on average it seems of less importance than the loss of the sense of time. Higher sexual responsiveness in women correlates especially strongly with less time
awareness and the feeling that time speeds up. For men, sexual satisfaction, desire and arousal during last sexual activity
were also related to greater awareness of the body. As compared to women, men’s satisfaction, desire and arousal during
Table 2
Sex differences at last sexual activity. Univariate analyses of variance with social desirability and nicotine use during last sexual activity as covariates.
Body awareness (1–7)
Space awareness (1–7)
Time awareness (1–100)
Perception of time speed (1–100)
Satisfaction (1–6)
Desire (1–6)
Arousal (1–6)
Women
Mean (SD)
Men
Mean (SD)
F (p)
5.99 (1.28)
4.10 (1.54)
25.78 (28.80)
64.87 (28.05)
4.49 (1.32)
4.85 (1.14)
4.81 (1.21)
6.29 (.82)
3.92 (1.57)
24.77 (22.17)
63.06 (25.68)
4.96 (1.03)
5.21 (.74)
5.23 (.75)
1.85 (.177)
.50 (.479)
.07 (.800)
.28 (.600)
4.10 (.045)
3.33 (.071)
4.28 (.041)
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R.M. Costa et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 135–141
Table 3
Partial intercorrelations controlling for social desirability and nicotine use between awareness of body, space, and time, and perception of time speed during
last sexual activity.
Body awareness
Body awareness
Space awareness
Time awareness
Speed of time
*
Space awareness
–
.15 (.238)
.29 (.051)
.24 (.103)
.07 (.644)
–
.42 (.003)*
.01 (.934)
Time awareness
Time speed
.53 (<.001)*
.31 (.012)*
–
.01 (.974)
.21 (.084)
.02 (.892)
.36 (.003)*
–
Significant after FDR-adjustment; correlations for women are above the diagonal; correlations for men are below the diagonal.
Table 4a
Partial correlations controlling for social desirability and nicotine use between sexual responses and awareness of body, space, and time during last sexual
activity for women.
*
Women
Body awareness r (p) Space awareness r (p) Time awareness r (p) Time speed r (p)
Satisfaction
Desire
Arousal
Orgasm by vaginal intercourse without clitoral masturbation
Orgasm by vaginal intercourse with clitoral masturbation
Orgasm by partnered noncoital sex
Orgasm (unspecified trigger)
.66 (<.001)*
.75 (<.001)*
.76 (<.001)*
.24 (.054)
.32 (.009)*
.06 (.624)
.62 (<.001)*
.11 (.39)
.28 (.023)*
.25 (.044)
.08 (.510)
.07 (.572)
.06 (.663)
.13 (.290)
.52 (<.001)*
.61 (<.001)*
.52 (<.001)*
.27 (.031)
.21 (.097)
.06 (.653)
.48 (<.001)*
.36 (.003)*
.32 (.008)*
.27 (.027)
.47 (<.001)*
.006 (.961)
.09 (.496)
.14 (.248)
Significant after FDR-adjustment.
Table 4b
Partial correlations controlling for social desirability and nicotine use between sexual responses and awareness of body, space, and time during last sexual
activity for men.
*
Men
Body awareness r (p)
Satisfaction
Desire
Arousal
Orgasm by vaginal intercourse
Orgasm by partnered noncoital sex
Orgasm (unspecified trigger)
.56 (<.001)*
.46 (.001)*
.58 (<.001)*
.19 (.197)
.03 (.851)
.38 (.010)*
Space awareness r (p)
.34 (.023)
.37 (.011)*
.39 (.007)*
.10 (.524)
.06 (.705)
.03 (.877)
Time awareness r (p)
.36 (.013)*
.17 (.263)
.14 (.349)
.14 (.369)
.03 (.854)
.19 (.203)
Time speed r (p)
.24 (.110)
.20 (.195)
.05 (.733)
.02 (.912)
.17 (.255)
.24 (.108)
Significant after FDR-adjustment.
sex do not seem to be as strongly related to the loss of sense of time. That is, in men, only satisfaction is moderately associated with lower time awareness, and desire and arousal are moderately connected to the loss of sense of space.
In accordance with Swartz’s proposal (Swartz, 1994), in our retrospective study greater attentional absorption in bodily
sensations and a greater loss of the perception of time were strongly related to women’s orgasms, but only moderately so to
men’s orgasms. That is, absorbed states seem to be more strongly related to the female orgasm, particularly to orgasm during
vaginal intercourse. Orgasm from penile-vaginal intercourse without clitoral masturbation (also known as vaginal orgasm;
Brody & Weiss, 2010) was related to time passing subjectively faster. Orgasm during vaginal intercourse with clitoral masturbation appears to be of importance in the context of absorbed states with a stronger focus on body awareness, but
changes in the sense of time or space seem unimportant. Future research might explore if alterations of time perception
are more likely if attention is more focused on the vagina; more attentional focus on vaginal sensations during intercourse
was related to greater capacity to attain vaginal orgasm (Brody & Weiss, 2010). According to the present findings, absorbed
states do not appear to be important for female orgasm from partnered noncoital sex.
It has been shown that state absorption in visual erotica is more clearly related to sexual arousal in response to those
stimuli than trait absorption (Koukounas & McCabe, 1997, 2001), which makes it plausible that absorbed states during
sex might be relatively independent of personality predispositions to enter absorbed states in a variety of situations. However, there is evidence that proneness to absorbed states in diverse situations does promote more sexual excitability in both
sexes (Harris et al., 1980) and women’s ability to attain coital orgasm (Bridges et al., 1985). This question warrants future
research.
Psychological inhibitions can decrease attention to sexual stimuli and awareness of sexual motivation (Bloemers et al.,
2013; Brody & Costa, 2008, 2013; Costa & Brody, 2010, 2013; Costa & Oliveira, 2015; Poels et al., 2013; van der Made
et al., 2009; van Rooij et al., 2013). Thus, future research might explore to what extent psychological inhibitions and maladaptive ways of coping with psychological conflicts interfere with absorbed states during sex.
Greater frequency of and orgasmic responsiveness from vaginal intercourse without clitoral masturbation is associated
with several indices of better health and well-being (Brody, 2010; Brody & Costa, 2008; Costa & Brody, 2010, 2012a,
140
R.M. Costa et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 135–141
2012b). Future research might examine to what extent the intensity of absorption during sex causes or otherwise explains
these relationships. Better well-being has been shown to occur as a result of other activities that trigger altered states of
consciousness with attentional absorption and timelessness, such as mindfulness (Keng, Smoski, & Robins, 2011;
Manuello, Vercelli, Nani, Costa, & Cauda, 2016), flow (Moneta & Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), and psilocybin-induced
mystical-type experiences (Griffiths et al., 2011). Future research might also explore the effects of these altered states of consciousness on sexual activity. At least mindfulness was shown to improve sexual desire, arousal and satisfaction in women
(Brotto & Basson, 2014).
Absorption during sex means that all mental faculties are coherently focused on the sexual act. Such a state of consciousness during sex thereafter is an extreme as well as special form of ‘‘flow” which can be experienced as peak states in sports,
work, or musical play, when one is fully immersed (focused) in challenging activities typically accompanied by a loss of time
and the surrounding space. Similarly, absorption during sex means that one loses track of time and space. The intercorrelations between the variables assessing the states of consciousness confirm this notion, since the awareness of time and space
are positively correlated in both women and men, and the loss of time awareness is related to the speeding up of subjective
time in women. One difference between the typical ‘‘flow” of time during non-sexual activities and sexual flow as assessed in
our study is the increased sense of the bodily self. Typically, a full immersion in activities leading to the experience of flow
and a diminished awareness of time is characterized by a loss of the sense of self (Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi,
1988). That is, the feeling of self and time are conjointly modulated (Craig, 2009; Wittmann, 2015). The case of altered states
of consciousness during sex however is a special situation where the immersion happens within pleasurable body states. The
body itself is then the focus of awareness which nevertheless leads to a loss of time and space. In our first attempt to retrospectively assess states of consciousness during the last sexual activity we did not take into account the time course or
the dynamics of the experience, our assessment implies some sort of average memory of the whole experience. It is however
known from prior experiments with retrospective recall of bodily sensations such as pain that (a) peak experiences and (b)
the final moments of an experience exert a strong influence on the overall retrospective judgment (Redelmeier & Kahneman,
1996). Potentially different peak times occur for increased bodily sensations on the one hand and a marked loss of sense of
time and space on the other hand. ‘La petite mort’ as culmination of the sexual act could nevertheless occur as concerted loss
of the sense of self, time and space.
In conclusion, our findings provide empirical support for the hypotheses that absorbed states are related to female sexual
responsiveness, and to a lesser extent also to male sexual responsiveness.
Acknowledgments
This study was funded with grants from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT – DFRH – FRH/BPD/76130/2011 and
UID/PSI/04810/2013) e Fundação Bial (no. 103/12).
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 3
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Dedication
This special issue titled The Neurobiology of Animal
Consciousness is dedicated to the memory of Donald A.
Griffin (1915–2003), whose thoughtfulness, courage, and
integrity were essential to reawakening scientific interest in
animal awareness.
doi:10.1016/S1053-8100(05)00050-4 |
Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 987–995
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Predictable and self-initiated visual motion is judged
to be slower than computer generated motion
John A. Dewey a,⇑, Thomas H. Carr b
a
b
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Frankel Leó út 30-34, Budapest 1023, Hungary
Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48823-1116, United States
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 30 November 2012
Available online 19 July 2013
Keywords:
Agency
Sensory attenuation
Action effect
Forward model
a b s t r a c t
Self-initiated action effects are often perceived as less intense than identical but externally
generated stimuli. It is thought that forward models within the sensorimotor system
pre-activate cortical representations of predicted action effects, reducing perceptual sensitivity and attenuating neural responses. As self-agency and predictability are seldom
manipulated simultaneously in behavioral experiments, it is unclear if self-other
differences depend on predictable action effect contingencies, or if both self- and externally
generated stimuli are modulated similarly by predictability. We factorially combined variation in (1) predictability of action effects, (2) spatial congruence, and (3) performance by
the self or computer to dissociate these influences on a visual discrimination task. Participants performed 2AFC speed judgments. Self-initiated motion was judged to be slower
than computer-initiated motion when action effect contingencies were predictable, while
spatial congruence influenced speed judgments only when action effect contingencies
were unpredictable. Results are discussed in relation to current theories of sensory
attenuation.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The sensory consequences of voluntary actions, henceforth ‘‘action effects’’, are often perceived differently from identical
but externally generated stimuli. This general finding has been conceptually replicated in several sensory modalities. Selfinitiated action effects, for instance stimuli triggered by a button press or other voluntary movement, are judged to be less
loud (Sato, 2008; Weiss, Herwig, & Schütz-Bosbach, 2011), less forceful (Bays, Wolpert, & Flanagan, 2005; Shergill, Bays,
Frith, & Wolpert, 2003), and less ticklish (Blakemore, Wolpert, & Frith, 1998; Claxton, 1975) than equivalent stimuli initiated
by another person or mechanical apparatus. Self-initiated action effects are also perceived differently from external events
with respect to their timing. Compared to externally triggered stimuli, there is a perceived shortening of the temporal interval between an intentional action and its effect, a phenomenon known as intentional binding (Engbert & Wohlschläger,
2007; Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002).
Similar findings have been reported at the neural level. For example, the sounds of one’s own speech elicit a reduced
blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response in auditory cortex compared to listening control conditions (Christoffels,
van de Ven, Waldorp, Formisano, & Schiller, 2011). Self- and externally initiated action effects have also been compared
by means of ERPs (e.g. Baess, Widmann, Roye, Schroger, & Jacobsen, 2009; Hughes & Waszak, 2011; Martikainen, Kaneko,
& Hari, 2005). The N1 is a negative deflection around 100–150 ms post stimulus thought to be associated with early cortical
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: DeweyJ@ceu.hu (J.A. Dewey).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.06.007
988
J.A. Dewey, T.H. Carr / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 987–995
processing of sensory stimuli. Self-initiated action effects evoke lower amplitude N1 responses compared to externally
generated stimuli. For example, Baess et al. (2009) found a reduced auditory N1 for self-initiated tones, and Hughes and
Waszak (2011) found attenuated cortical responses over frontal and parietal areas to self-initiated visual effects starting
around 150 ms post stimulus. These results suggest cortical sensory attenuation occurs at an early stage in perception, with
the caveat is that no study has simultaneously assessed phenomenological and neurophysiological indices of attenuation.
The different experiential qualities of self-initiated action effects are normally explained in terms of predictive forward
models within the sensorimotor system (see Waszak, Cardoso-Leite, & Hughes, 2012 for a review). Forward models predict
the future state of a system, for instance, an upcoming perception, based on a combination of current sense data (i.e. the
current state of the world), outgoing (efferent) motor signals, and knowledge about the likely consequences of an action
in a particular environment based on past experiences (Körding & Wolpert, 2004). A proposed mechanism to explain attenuation of self-initiated action effects is that action preparation triggers a forward model which activates perceptual areas
representing the predicted action effect (Waszak et al., 2012). This prior activation makes the objective presence or absence
of incoming sensory signals less discriminable (or intense), compared to situations with no prior predictions, or an incorrect
prediction. An implication is that sensory attenuation should not be observed, or should be less pronounced, when an action
effect turns out differently than expected, or when the statistical properties of an environment make it difficult to predict the
action effect. Consistent with this account, sensory attenuation may be reduced or absent when action effects are temporally
delayed (Bays et al., 2005; Blakemore et al., 1998) or incongruent with expectations (Cardoso-Leite, Mamassian, Schütz-Bosbach, & Waszak, 2010). This suggests sensory attenuation is linked to specific external events caused by self-generated
movements, rather than movements per se. By contrast, intentional binding does not seem to depend on specific action effect
predictions, as similar binding effects occur for both congruent and incongruent action effects (Desantis, Hughes, & Waszak,
2012). Thus sensory attenuation and intentional binding may rely on different mechanisms.
There has been some question whether sensory attenuation is a unique property of self action, or alternatively results
from a more general predictive mechanism that could generalize to other types of perceptual events (e.g. Lange, 2011; Sato,
2008). To investigate the specific role of self-agency in sensory attenuation, Weiss, Herwig, and Schütz-Bosbach (2011) compared the perceived loudness of predictable tones that were either self-initiated, or produced by another person or computer
agent. They found that self-initiated tones were judged to be less loud compared to the other conditions. This suggests perception is influenced by processes recruiting by performing actions, such as efferent motor signaling or a sense of agency.
However, all the tones during the test phase were congruent with the prior acquisition phase, so it is uncertain whether predictability and congruence would also modulate the perceived intensity of externally generated tones. In an ERP study by
Gentsch, Kathmann, and Schütz-Bosbach (2012), participants were briefly presented with primes which were either congruent or incongruent with subsequent visual events, for both low and high contingency conditions. Attenuation of the visual
N1 in the self-initiated condition was modulated by prime-effect congruence for both low and high contingency conditions.
However, in the externally generated condition, the prime-effect congruence only influenced the N1 in the high contingency
condition. Thus, there is some evidence that that congruence and predictability may influence perception of external stimuli
differently from self-initiated action effects.
To summarize, self-initiated action effects often have a unique perceptual quality that distinguishes them from external
stimuli which seems to depend on specific sensory predictions generated during voluntary actions. A recent review of the
literature concluded that several factors likely play a role in sensory attenuation, including motor prediction, temporal predictability and control, action effect congruence, and top-down beliefs about one’s causal agency (Hughes, Desantis, &
Waszak, 2013a). Some studies emphasize the role of action effect congruence (e.g. Cardoso-Leite et al., 2010; Lally, Frendo,
& Diedrichsen, 2011) while others emphasize the self-other distinction (e.g. Sato, 2008; Weiss et al., 2011). However, no
study to date has simultaneously investigated the effects of internal vs. external origin (i.e. self-initiated vs. externally triggered), statistical predictability, and congruence of the action effect using behavioral measures of perception, as opposed to
ERP. The theoretical contribution of such a study would be to disentangle these known influences on perception. For example, it’s unclear whether self-initiated and externally generated stimuli are similarly modulated by predictability (i.e. the
strength of contingency between a triggering event and its effect) and/or the congruence of the action effect. Another question is whether perceived differences between self-initiated and externally triggered events might remain even when action
effects are unpredictable. For example, in one ERP study, self-initiated tones evoked a reduced N1 even when they were temporally unpredictable (Lange, 2009). Furthermore, top-down knowledge about one’s status as a causal agent appears to enhance sensory attenuation (Desantis, Weiss, Schütz-Bosbach, & Waszak, 2012). These findings suggest the possibility that
self-initiated action effects might be attenuated compared to externally generated stimuli regardless of predictability, provided the actor feels a sense of agency for the action effect.
The purpose of the present study was to distinguish the influences of self origin, predictability, and action effect congruence on perception of a visual action effect. To this end, we factorially combined (1) variation in predictability of action-effect
contingencies, (2) spatial congruence of action effects, and (3) performance by the self or a computer. The specific action effect relationship we investigated was the perceived speed of a moving stimulus triggered by key press. In everyday life, the
onset of motion is a particularly salient action effect which often marks the beginning or end of an event. For this reason
motion stimuli are frequently used to study the perception of causality (see Wagemans, van Lier, & Scholl, 2006 for a review).
In a previous study, participants’ ability to detect coherent motion in a random dot motion display was influenced by the
spatial congruence of self-generated arm movements with respect to an array of moving distracter dots (Lally et al.,
2011). This indicates that visually-defined motion is subject to sensory attenuation as a result of sensorimotor predictions
J.A. Dewey, T.H. Carr / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 987–995
989
generated during voluntary actions. However, there was also a degree of novelty to our task, as we are not aware of any previous studies which investigated the effects of self-agency on speed perception per se, as opposed to motion coherence. We
used modified version of paradigms previously used to study sensory attenuation of tactile and auditory sensations (Bays
et al., 2005; Sato, 2008; Weiss et al., 2011).
A challenge in comparing self-initiated action effects to external stimuli is that the self-initiated action effect may tend to
be more temporally predictable due to the onset being under the participant’s control. This is a potentially important confound, because temporal expectations and control may modulate attentional capture with implications for perceptual processing (Lamy, 2005; Hughes et al., 2013a). To make the self and externally triggered conditions as comparable as possible
with respect to temporal predictability, and to lessen the impact of temporal control, the pace of participants’ actions was
dictated by computer generated go signals. Thus the timing and temporal control of participants’ actions were stimulusdriven.
Intuitively, more force is required to move objects with greater speed. Furthermore, it is known that attention increases
perceived speed (Anton-Erxleben, Herrman, & Carrasco, 2013; Turatto, Vescovi, & Valsecchi, 2007), and greater speed is associated with a larger neural response in motion sensitive area MT (Zacks, Swallow, Vettel, & McAvoy, 2006). We predicted that
if speed perception is influenced by a forward model in the sensorimotor system, this would predict a three-way interaction
between the agent, predictability of the action effect, and congruence, such that only predictable, spatially congruent, and
self-initiated action effects become attenuated, with little or no difference between the other conditions. By contrast, if speed
perception is governed by a general predictive mechanism, a predictable (or spatially congruent) effect should be perceived
be slower than a less predictable effect regardless of whether it was self- or computer-initiated (i.e. a main effect of predictability). Another possibility is that self-initiated motion would invariably be perceived as slower than computer-initiated
motion. In previous studies which reported self-other differences in attenuation, there was always a reliable action effect
contingency. By orthogonally manipulating the agent from spatial congruence and the predictability of the action effect contingency, we hoped to reveal whether the impact of agency is partially independent of these factors, or alternatively, if it
depends on a predictable action effect.
2. Methods
2.1. Participants
An a priori power analysis determined that a sample of 82 participants would achieve 80% power to detect a ‘‘small’’
interaction within-between interaction between Agent and Predictability. In total, 88 healthy participants with normal or
corrected vision were recruited in exchange for course credits. Of these participants, 44 were assigned to the predictable condition (mean age 20, range 18–31, 9 males and 35 females), and 44 more were assigned to the unpredictable condition (mean
age 20.73, range 18–31, 15 males and 18 females). Two participants from the unpredictable condition were excluded from
the final analysis after leaving the experiment early, resulting in a final sample size of 86. All participants were naïve as to the
purpose of the experiment. Informed written consent was obtained from each participant prior to the experiment.
2.2. Design
The experiment had a 2 2 2 mixed factorial design with two within-subject factors, Agent (self or computer) and Congruence (congruent or incongruent), and one between-subjects factor, Predictability (predictable or unpredictable).
2.3. Stimuli and procedure
Participants performed the task on a desktop Dell PC with a 17 in. monitor at an approximate viewing distance of 40 cm
and a screen resolution of 1024 764. All the stimuli were programmed and presented using MATLAB (the MathWorks, Natick, MA) with the Psychophysics toolbox extension (Brainard, 1997). The main visual stimulus was a white square set
against a black background with a field of random white dots. Each dot was 4 pixels. The average number of dots displayed
on the screen at any one time was 62.5. The square was located at the center of the display and subtended about 2° of visual
angle. The dots in the background moved left or right when triggered by a key press (in the self condition) or by the computer
(in the computer condition), while the square remained stationary at the center of the screen. This produced the impression
of a square moving through outer space (i.e. induced motion). Participants fixated on the square at the center of the screen to
avoid complications related to eye movements. Following the approach of Sato (2008) and Weiss et al. (2011), experimental
sessions were divided into two phases: an acquisition phase, during which participants learned the action effect, and a test
phase, during which sensory attenuation was assessed.
Fig. 1 summarizes the sequence of trial events during the acquisition and test phases. Go signals were used to ensure similar timing and temporal predictability of the onset of motion across conditions. The go signal was a green bar which appeared on either the left or right side of the white square. The side on which the go signal appeared was random, but
crucially, there were equal numbers of trials in which the go signals appeared on the left and right side within each condition. This controlled for possible effects of adaptation or neural habituation to motion in a particular direction. During the
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J.A. Dewey, T.H. Carr / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 987–995
Fig. 1. Sequence of trial events. The go signal could appear on either the left or right side of the white square, cueing the participant or computer to perform
a left or right response, respectively. The direction of the standard move was either congruent or incongruent with the preceding response. The ratio of
congruent to incongruent moves was 4:1 for the predictable group, and 1:1 for the unpredictable group.
self condition, participants pressed the ‘‘a’’ key whenever the go signal appeared on the left, and pressed the ‘‘4’’ key whenever the go signal appeared on the right. The go signal was also shown during the computer condition to warn participants
when the computer was about to trigger a move and to indicate, analogous to the self blocks, which key the computer was
about to ‘‘press’’. The delays between the go signal and the computer’s response were sampled with replacement from previous participants’ RTs in the self condition, after removing trials more than two standard deviations above the mean.
Each key press response or computer action made the square turn green for 50 ms (the command received signal), followed by a move at the standard speed which lasted 500 ms. Sometimes the induced motion of the white square was congruent with the direction of the triggering key press or computer action (e.g. left key press to move left). Other times the
motion was incongruent with the direction of the triggering action. The ratio of congruent to incongruent trials depended
on whether the participant was assigned to the predictable or unpredictable group. The predictable group underwent an
acquisition period consisting of 100% congruent moves, followed by a test period with 80% congruent and 20% incongruent
moves. The unpredictable group experienced 50% congruent and 50% incongruent trials during both the acquisition and test
phases.
During the test phase, each standard move triggered by the participant or the computer was followed by a comparison
move that was always triggered by the computer. A staircase procedure was employed to adaptively change the speed of the
comparison moves in order to find the point of subjective equality (PSE) where the speeds were judged to be equally fast. The
staircase procedure was controlled by Quest, an efficient algorithm for the estimation of psychophysical thresholds (Watson
& Pelli, 1983). Quest begins with a prior guess and associated standard deviation for threshold (for PSE, the threshold is 50%
correct). Then the observer is tested, and Quest saves the actual intensity of the stimulus along with whether the observer
got it right. On this basis Quest re-estimates the threshold, and the cycle repeats. The final estimate of the PSE was the mean
of the posterior probability distribution estimated by Quest (King-Smith, Grigsby, Vingrys, Benes, & Supowit, 1994).
2.3.1. Acquisition phase
The acquisition phase consisted of four blocks of 100 trials each, two blocks each of training for the self and computer
conditions. The block order was counterbalanced across participants using the ABBA method. The computer program
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991
prompted participants to take a short break between blocks if they desired. As before, a warning in red font appeared at the
start of each block so participants knew whose turn it was to act.
For participants in the predictable group, the direction of the square was always congruent (i.e. the apparent motion of
the square matched the direction of the triggering action). For participants in the unpredictable group, the direction was congruent on only half the trials, randomly selected. The acquisition phase usually lasted about 15 min.
2.3.2. Test phase
The test phase consisted of two blocks (one each for the self and computer conditions), with 250 trials per block. The
block order was counterbalanced across participants. The computer program prompted participants to take a short break
between blocks if they desired.
Following a go signal, either the participant or computer triggered a standard speed move. In the predictable group, the
direction of the move was congruent on 80% of trials, but incongruent on 20% of trials. In the unpredictable group, the direction was congruent on 50% of trials, and incongruent on 50% of trials. Congruent and incongruent trials were randomly ordered within each block. The speed of the first standard move was the same as the previous experiments (20.4 deg/s). The
speed of the comparison move was systematically varied following the staircase procedure to zero in on the PSE. The comparison move was always in the same direction as the standard move, i.e. congruent if the standard move was congruent, and
incongruent if the standard move was incongruent. The total duration of the test phase was about 45 min.
2.4. Data analysis
The dependent measure was the point of subjective equality (PSE) where the comparison move was judged to be faster
than the standard move with 50% probability. The PSE values estimated by Quest were entered into a three factor mixed
ANOVA with repeated measures on two factors, Agent (self or computer) and Congruence (congruent or incongruent). Predictability (predictable or unpredictable) was a between-subjects factor. We report generalized eta-squared as the measure
of effect size (Bakeman, 2005).
3. Results
The mixed effects ANOVA showed no significant main effect of Agent, F(1, 84) = 2.39, p = .13, g2G = .004, Predictability,
F(1, 84) = .02, p = .88, g2G < .001, or Congruence, F(1, 84) = 1.22, p = .27, g2G < .001. However, there were two significant
Fig. 2. Means and standard errors of the PSE values in the predictable (top panel) and unpredictable (bottom panel) groups. The dashed line indicates the
point of objective equality (POS).
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interactions: Predictability Agent, F(1, 84) = 6.16, p = .02, g2G = .01, and Predictability Congruence, F(1, 84) = 4.48, p = .04,
g2G = .003. The other interactions were not significant: Agent Congruence, F(1, 84) = .36, p = .55, g2G < .001; Predictability Agent Congruence, F(1, 84) = .28, p = .21, g2G < .001. Means and standard errors are shown in Fig. 2.
Post-hoc simple effects analyses using single –factor F tests were used to break down the two significant interactions. For
Agent Predictability, there was a significant effect of Agent in the predictable group, F(1, 43) = 12.31, p = .001, g2G = .02,
caused by a lower PSE in the predictable-self condition compared to the predictable-computer condition. The effect of Agent
was not significant in the unpredictable group, F(1, 41) = .36, p = .55, g2G = .002.
For Congruence Predictability, the effect of Congruence was not significant in the predictable group, F(1, 43) = .42,
p = .62, g2G < .001, but was significant in the unpredictable group, F(1, 41) = 6.04, p = .02, g2G = .006, where the unpredictable-incongruent condition had a higher PSE (i.e. was judged to be faster) than the unpredictable-congruent condition. There
was no difference between the predictable-congruent and predictable-incongruent conditions.
4. Discussion
Many previous studies have demonstrated a reduction in the perceived intensity or neural response to predictable and
congruent self-initiated action effects compared to external stimuli. In particular, many studies vary the predictability
and/or congruence of action effects that are always self-initiated, or else compare self-initiated to external stimuli while controlling for predictability. However, until now the impacts of predictability, congruence and self-agency on perception had
not been simultaneously assessed within a single experiment using behavioral measures. Thus, the aim of the present study
was to better understand how self-agency, action effect predictability, and action effect congruence contribute to perceived
differences between self- and externally initiated action effects, and to characterize possible interactions among these factors. Two particular questions we set out to investigate were (1) whether the subjective speed of self-initiated motion is perceived differently from external stimuli, and (2) how predictability and/or congruence influence the perceived speed of selfinitiated and externally generated stimuli.
Regarding our first question, we found no significant main effect of Agent. This suggests the presence of self-generated
motor signal alone is insufficient to modulate perceived speed of a moving stimulus. What we found instead was a twoway interaction between the Agent and Predictability, where a difference between self-initiated and computer generated
motion only emerged when there was a predictable action effect contingency. These results are inconsistent with the
hypothesis that sensory attenuation results from a general predictive mechanism. However, the results are also problematic
for the forward model account of sensory attenuation where reductions in perceived intensity depend on specific sensorimotor predictions generated during intentional actions. A forward model account would predict sensory attenuation when
the action effect is self-initiated, predictable, and congruent. However, we found that self-initiated motion was perceived as
slower than computer generated motion in both the congruent and incongruent condition, as long as the action effects were
produced in a predictable context.
Our results contrast with a previous report in which congruent visual action effects were attenuated compared to incongruent action effects (Cardoso-Leite et al., 2010). Similarly, ERP studies have reported significant attenuation of the auditory
and visual N1 for congruent compared to incongruent action effects (Hughes, Desantis, & Waszak, 2013b; Gentsch,
Kathmann, & Schütz-Bosbach, 2012). The difference between these results and those of the present study could be due to
differences in the mechanisms governing speed perception as compared to sensory attenuation in other domains or sensory
modalities. Although our results do not follow the expected pattern for a forward model account of sensory attenuation, they
are reminiscent of some findings from the intentional binding literature. Intentional binding may occur when an action effect
is predicted but fails to actually occur (Engbert & Wohlschläger, 2007) or is even when the action effect is incongruent with
the prediction (Desantis, Hughes, & Waszak, 2012). In this sense, the affect of voluntary action on speed perception seems
more akin to time perception than to classic sensory attenuation effects. As with intentional binding, it is therefore somewhat unclear what the driving mechanism(s) are. One possibility, which might explain the two way interaction between
Agent and Predictability, is that perceived causality drives the effect: an argument could be made that the perception of a
causal link between the triggering action and the moving stimulus would be strongest in the predictable-self condition.
For now, this remains an issue for future work.
We were also interested how expectation might influence the perceived speed of externally generated stimuli. There was
no main effect of Predictability or Congruence. There was, however, a significant two way interaction between Predictability
and Congruence, caused by a significant effect of Congruence in the unpredictable (50/50) group, but not in the predictable
(80/20) group. This shows that spatial congruence can in some cases influence the perceived speed of an external stimulus.
Since there were equal numbers of congruent and incongruent moves in the unpredictable group, the difference between the
unpredictable-congruent and unpredictable-incongruent conditions must have been related to the spatial compatibility (or
lack thereof) between the go signal and the induced motion of the square. This suggests a pre-existing association between
left and right handed sided action responses and the direction of motion influenced the perceived speed of the stimulus. It is
surprising, however, that congruence did not have a similar impact on the predictable group. This indicates that the trialwise effect of spatial congruence seems was somehow suppressed or overridden by the expectation of motion in a particular
direction. The predictability manipulation was defined by a difference in the proportion of congruent vs. incongruent trials
for the two groups (80/20 vs. 50/50). This may have had the unintended side effect of interacting with attention. For
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993
example, a cue that validly predicts the location of a subsequent target with 80% probability is sufficient to increase attention
toward the cued location (see Summerfield & Egner, 2009, for a review of the relationship between expectation and attention). Therefore it is possible that participants in the predictable group paid more attention to the congruent condition than
to the incongruent condition. Since an increase in attention would be expected to increase the PSE, this might have counteracted the effect of congruence in the predictable group.
We note that while PSE values differed across conditions, in all conditions the PSE was greater than the point of objective
equality (POE = 20.4 deg/s, see dashed line in Fig. 2). A possible explanation for this is that neural adaptation occurred during
the presentation of the standard move. As adaptation reduces perceived speed (Krekelberg, van Wezel, & Albright, 2006), and
perceptual adaptation to motion can occur after only tens of milliseconds (Glasser, Tsui, Pack, & Tadin, 2011) the second
stimulus could be systematically perceived as slower. A second possibility is that the go signal increased attention to the
standard move relative to the comparison move. It is known that attention can alter the perceived speed of moving objects
(Anton-Erxleben et al., 2013; Turatto et al., 2007). Visual warning signals were presented prior to each standard move (the go
signal and command received signal), but not prior to the comparison move. If these visual signals increased attention to the
standard move relative to the comparison move, this would tend to increase the perceived speed of the standard move relative to the comparison move. Critically, however, this is not a confounding variable because the same visual warnings were
present in all conditions.
There are significant limitations to the present study. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how selfagency influences speed perception. Further studies would be required to determine the precise nature of this effect. For
example, there is known a relationship between contrast and perceived speed where lower contrast stimuli are generally
perceived as slower (Blakemore & Snowden, 1999). The present study cannot distinguish whether self-action influenced perceived speed directly, or if the effect was mediated by a shift in the perceived contrast. Another limitation of the study is
inherent to the PSE method of assessing attenuation. Specifically, we cannot rule out the possibility of a response bias to
respond that self-initiated movements were slower. However, we note that in a previous study, perceptual performance
in detecting coherent motion was improved when distracter motion matched the direction of voluntary arm movements,
compared to non-matching movements or a condition with no overt movement (Lally et al., 2011). This suggests a central
cancellation of motion by self-produced movement influences perceptual sensitivity, not just response bias. In any case, the
finding that predictable and self-initiated motion was perceived to be slower than computer generated motion is consistent
with the general finding that self-initiated action effects are perceived differently from externally generated stimuli. Given
that activity in the MT complex, which is known to be specialized for motion, increases with an object’s speed (Zacks et al.,
2006), it could be interesting to compare activity in MT to self-initiated and externally triggered motion stimuli.
Self-initiated action effects differ from externally generated stimuli in several possibly important ways. Predicting selfinitiated action effects involves forming an intention to act, and a richer set of sensory and proprioceptive cues compared
to predicting computer generated stimuli. It could be argued that the difference between predictable-self and predictable-computer conditions might be related to different levels of attention. In particular, it seems possible attention would
be more focused during self-initiated trials. However, differences in attention seem unlikely to account of self-other differences, because attention tends to increase perceived speed, whereas the predictable-self condition was actually perceived as
slower than the predictable-computer condition. The relative impacts of the various cues to self-agency on perception are
topics of active research. Nonetheless, we believe the self-other comparison is still a theoretically interesting and useful
one, particularly in light of the proposal that sensory attenuation itself contributes to our ability to recognize the consequences of one’s own actions (e.g. as argued by Weiss & Schütz-Bosbach, 2012; Weiss et al., 2011).
Considering the influence of self-agency on perception, it has been suggested that sensory attenuation can be used as an
implicit measure of the sense of agency (Weiss & Schütz-Bosbach, 2012). Based on the present results, this equivalence
seems valid for predictable action effects, but we would caution that agency may be dissociated from perceived intensity
of the action effect in a context where action effect contingencies are unpredictable. Although the present study did not include an explicit measure of the sense of agency, there was no ambiguity that participants were triggering the moves during
the self condition, while the computer was in charge during the computer condition. With respect to the speed judgments,
however, self and computer were only differentiated when the action effect was predictable. Nonetheless, we believe sensory attenuation holds promise as an implicit measure of agency, as long as it is studied in a context with predictable action
effects, or else complemented by explicit self-reports.
A distinction is often drawn between voluntary versus stimulus-driven control with respect to both attention and overt
behavior (e.g. Bugg & Crump, 2012; Haggard & Clark, 2003; Hughes, Schütz-Bosbach, & Waszak, 2011; Krieghhoff, Waszak,
Prinz, & Brass, 2011). In the former case, participants choose when to act or what action to perform, whereas in the latter
case these parameters are determined by the stimulus itself. Most sensory attenuation experiments focus on voluntary actions, whereas in the present study, go signals were used to control for potential differences in the temporal predictability of
self-initiated and externally triggered motion. Thus, although participants’ actions were voluntary in the sense of being actively generated and accompanied by efferent motor signals, they were stimulus-driven in the sense of being reactions to
external signals. It is unclear whether our results would differ if participants triggered the moving stimulus at a time of their
own choosing. However, Herwig and Waszak (2012), using intentional binding as a dependent measure, found that shortterm action effect associations were equal for both voluntary and stimulus-based actions, but long term action-effect associations were only observed for intentional actions. Similarly, we would predict that the effect of Agency on speed perception
would be, if anything, more robust for voluntary actions.
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Sensory attenuation is considered a general principle of self-action which influences different sense modalities in a similar way (Waszak et al., 2012). However, this does not necessarily imply that the mechanism must be the identical in all
cases. We note that the effect sizes reported here and in studies reporting attenuation of auditory action effects tend to
be very small, whereas attenuation of tactile stimuli (such as perceived ticklishness) is rather more dramatic. It seems plausible that efferent motor information would play a larger role in predicting body position and somatosensory sensations,
compared to visual or auditory action effects. Determining whether attenuation in different modalities relies on the same
or different mechanisms is one avenue for future research.
Another potentially interesting future direction for this research involves investigating differences between self and other
in the context of joint action. While there is now considerable evidence that people predict and attenuate the sensory consequences of their own actions, it is unknown whether the additive effects of one’s own and another’s action are attenuated
in a similar manner, or how this type of action effect anticipation might relate to the sense of agency for joint actions (Vesper,
Butterfill, Knobich, & Sebanz, 2010).
To summarize and conclude, self-initiated motion is perceived to be slower than equivalent but externally generated motion, but only when the motion is produced in a predictable context. This may result from internally generated predictions
produced during action. Interestingly, this applied to both spatially congruent and incongruent motions. Thus it seems selfaction coupled with a predictable context is sufficient to reduce perceived speed. Perceived speed was also modulated by an
interaction between Congruence and Predictability. Overall, our results add further weight to the hypothesis that self-initiated action effects are perceived differently from effects with an external origin, and these differences cannot be accounted
for by differences in overall predictability. This suggests that among the many functions of ‘‘the predictive brain’’, anticipating the consequences of one’s own actions has a particular functional significance.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the following people for their kind support in facilitating this research: Timothy Pleskac, Taosheng Liu,
and Susan Ravizza for their helpful feedback and suggestions, and current and former research assistants Mura Dominko,
Hillary Hicks, Lucas Petto, Zack Hardin, and Claire Grazal, for dedicating their time to help with data collection.
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 565–584
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Review
Functional consequences of perceiving facial expressions
of emotion without awareness
John D. Eastwood a,*, Daniel Smilek b
a
Department of Psychology, York University, Ont., Canada M3J 1P3
b
University of Waterloo, Ont., Canada
Received 21 July 2004
Available online 19 February 2005
Abstract
A substantial body of research has established that even when we are not consciously aware of the faces
of others we are nevertheless sensitive to, and impacted by their facial expression. In this paper, we consider
this body of research from a new perspective by examining the functions of unconscious perception revealed
by these studies. A consideration of the literature from this perspective highlights that existing research
methods are limited when it comes to revealing possible functions of unconscious perception. The critical
shortcoming is that in all of the methods, the perceived facial expression remains outside of awareness. This
is a problem because there are good reasons to believe that one important function of unconsciously perceived negative faces is to attract attention so that they are consciously perceived; such conscious perception, however, is never allowed with existing methodologies. We discuss recent studies of emotional face
perception under conditions of visual search that address this issue directly. Further, we suggest that methodologies that do not examine cognitive processes as they occur in more natural settings may result in fundamental misunderstandings of human cognition.
Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Face perception; Unconscious perception; Perception without awareness; Ecological validity; Facial
expression; visual attention
*
Corresponding author. Fax: +1 416 736 5814.
E-mail address: johneast@yorku.ca (J.D. Eastwood).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2005.01.001
566
J.D. Eastwood, D. Smilek / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 565–584
1. Introduction
At any given moment, the human perceptual system is able to process a vast amount of information from the environment. However, given the capacity limits of conscious experience (Miller,
1956), we do not notice (Bowers, 1984) or have a conscious experience of all the information that
is processed by the perceptual system. Rather, we can perceive information without an accompanying awareness of the information that was perceived, and without awareness of the fact that
such perception has occurred (Dixon, 1971, 1981; Merikle & Daneman, 2000; Merikle, Smilek,
& Eastwood, 2001). Considerable research has investigated perception without awareness; and,
in so doing, has established that information perceived without awareness can significantly influence behaviour, physiology, and subsequent conscious experiences (see Merikle et al., 2001 for a
review). Such observations challenge the conventional view that the influence of environmental
information is necessarily mediated by a conscious experience of that information.
Earlier, investigators such as Arne Öhman (e.g., Öhman, Anders, & Lundqvist, 2000) have suggested that, given the existence of unconscious perception has been extensively demonstrated, it is
now time to shift the focus of inquiry to gaining a better understanding of the functions of unconscious perception (see also Merikle et al., 2001). One critical step in this new direction is to review
existing studies of unconscious perception (much of which was conducted to find evidence for the
existence of unconscious perception) in terms of what they can tell us about the functions of
unconscious perception. After reviewing past studies in this manner, another important step is
to consider how the existing methodologies determine, and limit, what functions of unconscious
perception can be revealed.
In this paper, we seek to move in this new direction by taking a function-oriented perspective
on one area of unconscious perception research—namely, the unconscious perception of affective
stimuli. We choose to focus our discussion on affective stimuli in general, and affective faces in
particular, for several reasons. First, affective stimuli are a basic and important aspect of our environment. For example, with respect to our survival and well-being, some aspects of our environment are ‘‘good or bad’’ (Clore, Schwartz, & Conway, 1994) and, therefore, need to be
approached or avoided (Gray, 1987). Thus, the unconscious perception of affect is likely to have
numerous important functions for an individualÕs successful interaction with their environment. A
second reason for focusing on the function of unconscious perception of affective stimuli is that
there is a large body of research showing that affective information can be perceived quickly, efficiently (Junghöfer, Bradley, Elbert, & Lang, 2001; Zajonc, 1980) and without awareness (see Öhman, 1999).
Our re-evaluation of the existing literature in terms of the functions of unconscious perception
requires that we begin by describing the empirical methodologies that have been used historically to
establish that affective stimuli can be perceived without awareness. Because our aim is to describe
existing methodologies, we do not provide an exhaustive review of all the literature concerning
unconscious perception of emotional stimuli and all of the debates that have emerged in that literature. Instead, we focus on studies that clearly illustrate the methodologies used to study unconscious perception. We then narrow our consideration of affective stimuli and focus specifically
on unconscious perception of facial expression and outline what the established methodologies
have revealed about the functions of perceiving emotionally expressive faces without awareness.
Our goal in this regard is to elucidate what the existing literature tells us about the functions of
J.D. Eastwood, D. Smilek / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 565–584
567
unconscious perception of emotionally expressive faces—rather than attempting to demonstrate
that the functions of perceiving facial expression without awareness are necessarily unique.
Based on our consideration of existing demonstrations of unconscious perception of emotionally expressive faces, we suggest that the commonly used methods for demonstrating unconscious
perception fail to capture important functions of such perception. We suggest that new empirical
methodologies may be required in order to generate a more complete, accurate understanding of
the functions of perceiving facial expression without awareness. Finally, we suggest that experimental methodologies that do not examine cognitive processes as they occur in more natural settings may result in fundamental misunderstandings of human cognition.
2. Methodologies for studying unconscious perception of emotion
Historically, three different types of experiments have been used to establish the presence of
unconscious perception of affective stimuli. The first method of demonstrating different recognition
thresholds for emotionally laden words fell out of favour relatively quickly and is rarely employed
today. In contrast, the logic of showing a dissociation between conscious and unconscious measures
of perception or showing qualitatively different consequences of perception with or without awareness
have proved to be more compelling and are often used today.
2.1. Recognition thresholds
Many early empirical investigations of the question whether or not affective information can be
perceived without awareness focused on the notion of Ôperceptual defenseÕ (see Brown, 1961;
Kragh, 1960 for a review); namely, the idea that conscious recognition thresholds for stimuli vary
as a function of the emotional meaning of the stimuli to be recognized (Bruner & Postman, 1949;
Postman, Bruner, & McGinnies, 1948; McGinnies, 1949). Specifically, in these studies it was
found that longer stimulus durations were required for observers to consciously recognize emotionally laden ‘‘taboo’’ words compared to more neutral words. Modulation of the information
reaching awareness would require observers to be able to discriminate between emotional and
non-emotional information prior to conscious awareness in order to selectively alter conscious
recognition thresholds. Therefore, the presence of a Ôperceptual defenseÕ was taken as evidence
for the claim that emotional information can be perceived without awareness. However, the original concept of Ôperceptual defenseÕ was brought into question by critiques of the empirical evidence on which it was based (see Bootzin & Natsoulas, 1965; Erdelyi, 1974). Perhaps the most
devastating critique arose from considering lowered recognition thresholds for taboo words to result from a response bias in which participants were hesitant to report emotionally laden information. Based on these early studies of perceptual defense, therefore, it was unclear if in fact
emotional information could be perceived without awareness.
2.2. Dissociation between measures
The claim that emotional information can be perceived without awareness was given stronger
support from other studies based on different methodologies. Most commonly, researchers
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attempted to demonstrate dissociation between two measures of perception (Goldiamond, 1958).
In such an approach, one measure is assumed to assess the presence or absence of a conscious
experience of stimulus information, while a second measure is assumed to assess whether or
not an observer is sensitive to, or has ‘‘taken in,’’ stimulus information. Therefore, if the second
measure indicates that observers have indeed been influenced by stimulus information while the
first measure indicates that observers have no awareness of the critical stimulus information, then
it is concluded that perception without awareness has occurred (see Marcel, 1983; for an example
of this approach used with non-affective stimuli).
An early experiment by Smith, Spence, and Klein (1959) serves as an example of how dissociation between two measures can be used to demonstrate the presence of unconscious perception of
emotion. They found that tachistoscopically presented emotional words, presented below the
threshold for awareness, influenced the judgment of a consciously perceived face. In the first session of their experiment, they determined the minimal exposure duration at which each individual
participant consciously detected the presence of a briefly presented word. Then, in the second session, participants were shown a neutral, expressionless face and told that small and subtle changes
would occur in the expression on the face and that they were to detect these changes and report
them to the experimenter. The experimenter did not actually change the facial expression but
rather presented the word ‘‘happy’’ for a group of trials and the word ‘‘angry’’ for another group
of trials very briefly below each participantÕs previously determined threshold for awareness. Subjectively, participants reported seeing a constant presentation of the face interrupted by brief flickers. The experimental results, however, indicated that participants judged the face to be more
positive when preceded by the word ‘‘happy’’ than when preceded by the word ‘‘angry.’’ This second measure, the judgment of facial expression, revealed that participants perceived the emotional
words even though the measure of conscious perception (the threshold for detecting the presence
of words) indicated that participants had no conscious experience of perceiving the emotional
words.
In other early experiments, researchers employed a variety of measures thought to be sensitive
to the perception of emotional information without awareness. For example, it was shown that
emotional information contained in displays of unconsciously perceived words and pictures
can: (1) determine the threshold at which other, neutral stimuli are consciously detected (Dixon,
1958; Hardy & Legge, 1968), (2) influence the evaluation of other stimuli, such as a cartoon character (Eagle, 1959) and responses to Thematic Apperception Test cards (Goldstein & Barthol,
1960), and (3) alter heart rate as well as other physiological measures such as the electroencephalogram (Dixon & Lear, 1963, 1964). It was claimed that all of these effects occurred even when
participants had no conscious experience of perceiving the emotional information.
Recent investigations of unconscious perception of emotion continue to rely heavily on the
same basic method of demonstrating dissociation between a measure of conscious perception
and a measure of unconscious perception. However a notable change over the past several decades has been a shift away from psychodynamic conceptualizations of unconscious perception
of emotion (Dixon, 1971) towards conceptualizations informed by evolutionary (Öhman, 1999;
Plutchik, 1994) and neurobiological (LeDoux, 1996) approaches to the study of emotion and consciousness. An example of a more recent approach to the study of the unconscious perception of
emotion using dissociation between measures is the work of Öhman and Soares (1993). These
investigators conducted a conditioning study and concluded that physiological responses to
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conditioned fear stimuli can be elicited ‘‘after merely an automatic, non-conscious analysis of the
stimuli’’ (p. 128). Their experiment consisted of a conditioning and an extinction phase. During
the conditioning phase, participants consciously perceived ‘‘fear-relevant’’ (snakes and spiders)
or ‘‘fear-irrelevant’’ (flowers and mushrooms) stimuli that were paired with either an uncomfortable electrical shock or no aversive stimulus. In the subsequent extinction phase, the conditioned
and unconditioned stimuli were presented briefly for 30 ms and masked. When the fear relevant
and irrelevant stimuli were presented under these conditions participants were not able to verbally
guess above chance which category (snake, spider, flower, or mushroom) the masked stimuli belonged to. Therefore, Öhman and Soares claimed this measure of conscious perception indicated
that participants were not consciously aware of the stimuli. However, even though participants
did not consciously perceive the conditioned stimuli, during the extinction phase of the experiment
differential skin conductance responses (a measure of unconscious perception) were elicited by the
unconsciously perceived fear-relevant stimuli that had been paired with a shock. In contrast,
unconscious perception of fear-irrelevant conditioned stimuli, such as flowers and mushrooms,
was not evident during the extinction phase. Öhman and SoaresÕ work illustrates the most common approach that is currently used to establish unconscious perception of emotion; namely,
demonstrating dissociations between measures of conscious and unconscious perception.
Although demonstrating dissociation between a measure of conscious perception and a measure of unconscious perception continues to be a very common methodology used in studies of
unconscious perception of emotion, significant criticisms have been raised regarding the validity
of such an approach (see Merikle et al., 2001; Merikle & Joordens, 1997a; Merikle & Reingold,
1998; Öhman, 1999). Since early investigations into unconscious perception, considerable debate
has taken place regarding what constitutes a satisfactory measure of an observer’s conscious experience (Merikle, 1992). In particular, investigators have debated whether observers’ conscious
experience should be measured by ÔsubjectiveÕ self-reports, that is, observers’ report of whether
or not they consciously perceived the stimuli, or, by ÔobjectiveÕ performance on a task for which
conscious perception is assumed to be both necessary and sufficient for successful completion (see
Bowers, 1984; Merikle et al., 2001).
In addition, considerable debate has taken place as to whether or not the basic assumptions
underlying dissociation strategies can be satisfactorily achieved. For example, the dissociation
strategy is predicated on the assumption that the measure of conscious perception has exhaustively assessed an observerÕs conscious experience. However, a measure may fail to indicate that
an observer was aware of stimuli simply because the measure lacks statistical power or is not sensitive to all of an observerÕs conscious experience. Furthermore, the measure of conscious perception must assess the same aspect or dimension of the stimulus that is assessed by the measure of
unconscious perception. For instance, if the measure of unconscious perception is sensitive to the
affective valence of a stimulus then the measure of conscious perception must also assess awareness of the valence of the stimulus, rather than some other stimulus dimension. Second, in order
for the dissociation procedure to be successful it is important that the measure of conscious perception is just that—an exclusive measure of conscious influences. If, for example, the measure of
conscious perception is actually influenced by unconscious perception then an investigator may, in
an overly conservative manner, fail to find evidence for an effect of unconscious perception because the dissociation method would inappropriately attribute an observerÕs ability to discriminate among stimuli to conscious perception. In light of problems with the dissociation strategy
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and continued disagreement regarding its application, researchers have turned to different
methodologies.
2.3. Qualitative differences
Another approach to establishing the presence of unconscious perception of emotion is to demonstrate that observers respond in a qualitatively different manner to emotional information that
is perceived with awareness, compared to without awareness (Cheesman & Merikle, 1986; Dixon,
1971; Merikle et al., 2001; Merikle & Joordens, 1997a). In general, this approach is predicated on
the assumption that information perceived without awareness will result in more automatic, less
deliberate responses than the same information perceived with awareness. Therefore, it is often
possible to predict qualitatively different response patterns depending upon whether observers
perceive the emotional information with awareness or without awareness. For example, under certain situations an inverse relation between awareness and the impact of a stimulus is predicted;
that is, a larger effect is expected when a stimulus is perceived without awareness compared to
when it is perceived with awareness because when a stimulus is perceived with awareness its potential influence can be excluded (e.g., Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989) or otherwise avoided or
resisted.
The ‘‘exclusion task’’ developed by Jacoby and colleagues (e.g., Debner & Jacoby, 1994; Jacoby, 1991; Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989) is a historically and theoretically important example of
demonstrating that observers respond in a qualitatively different manner to conscious and
unconsciously perceived information. In the ‘‘exclusion task’’ the influence of consciously and
unconsciously perceived information is placed in opposition to one another. For example Debner and Jacoby (1994) asked participants to complete a three letter word stem (e.g., spi_ _) with
the first five letter word that came to mind (e.g., spice or spike, etc.). After collecting a baseline
measure of how frequently various words were used to complete the stems, participants were
shown a potentially biasing prime word (e.g., spice) immediately before the three letter word
stems. In one condition the potentially biasing prime word was presented for 50 ms. and then
masked. In another condition the potentially biasing prime word was presented for 500 ms and
then masked. In both conditions participants were instructed to complete the three letter word
stem with any word that came to mind, except the word that had just been presented. Debner
and Jacoby observed that participants were able to follow the exclusion instructions when the
prime word was presented for 500 ms (i.e., they completed the word stem below baseline levels
for the prime word); whereas, they failed to follow the exclusion instructions when the prime
word was presented for 50 ms (i.e., they completed the word stem above baseline levels for
the prime word). This pattern of results suggests that the prime word was perceived when it
was presented for 50 ms and when it was presented for 500 ms; however, relative to baseline,
it had an opposite influence in these two conditions. Based on the assumption that conscious
perception is necessary and sufficient for deliberate exclusion (i.e., following instructions) then
successful exclusion is taken as evidence for conscious perception; whereas, unsuccessful exclusion (that is significantly above baseline stem completion) is taken as evidence for unconscious
perception. Jacoby (e.g., 1991) has also used the exclusion task as part of a more complex Ôprocess-dissociation procedureÕ which, he argues, can estimate separate conscious and unconscious
influences on behaviour. However, some debate exists as to whether or not it is more fruitful to
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think about conscious and unconscious perception giving rise to separate, independent influences (e.g., Jacoby, Toth, & Yonelineas, 1993; Jacoby, Toth, Yonelinas, & Debner, 1994) or relatively more or less influence (e.g., Joordens & Merikle, 1993; Merikle & Joordens, 1997b;
Merikle, Joordens, & Stolz, 1995).
Research on terror management theory (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991) provides a good example of how qualitatively different consequences of perceiving emotional information with and without awareness can be used to establish unconscious perception of
emotion. Terror management theory postulates that we instinctively fear death, and that we
attempt to cope with an awareness of the fact that we will inevitability die by clinging to
our cultural belief system (cultural world-view). Therefore, reminding people of their mortality
will increase their faith and adherence to their cultural world-view and lead to more negative
judgments of others who threaten, or do not endorse their cultural world-view. Critically,
however, subtle and unconscious reminders of mortality are thought to be more effective at
bolstering oneÕs world-view than conscious reminders of death. Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski,
and Solomon (1997), for example, found that participants showed a pro-United States bias
when evaluating essays regarding cultural values, if they were previously shown the word
‘‘dead.’’ However, this bias was only evident if the word ‘‘dead’’ was masked and presented
so briefly that participants had no awareness of perceiving it. In contrast, if participants perceived the word ‘‘dead’’ with awareness, no pro-United States bias was observed in the evaluation of the essays.
2.4. Summary
In summary, numerous studies have sought to demonstrate that emotional information can be
perceived without awareness. These studies have relied exclusively on three methodologies, which
involve demonstrating: (a) different recognition thresholds for emotionally laden words, (b) a dissociation between conscious and unconscious measures of perception, and, (c) qualitatively different consequences of perception with or without awareness.
In some sense, the conclusion that emotional stimuli can be perceived without awareness is
not entirely surprising given the importance of emotional information for human survival. Indeed, it seems clear that having a capability of perceiving affective stimuli without awareness
would be extremely functional. What remains unclear, however, is what specific function(s) does
such unconscious perception serve in the human context? And, are the existing methodologies
for studying perception without awareness adequate for demonstrating critical functions of
unconscious perception of emotional content? It is to these functional considerations that we
turn next.
3. Functions of unconscious perception of facial expression
In considering the functions of unconscious perception, we will narrow our focus to a commonly studied affective stimulus—emotional facial expression. Based on a consideration of these
studies, we ultimately suggest that while the existing methodologies for studying unconscious
perception reveal important functions of unconscious perception of facial emotion, the methodol-
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ogies typically employed are limited in terms of the possible functions that they could potentially
uncover.
Facial expression is one type of affective stimulus that has received special attention in studies
of unconscious perception. Faces are a critically important source of social information and it appears as though we are biologically prepared to perceive and respond to faces in a unique manner
(Ekman, 1993). A considerable amount of research has established that the visual system is highly
efficient at perceiving facial expression (e.g., Bruce, Desimone, & Gross, 1981; Desimone, 1991;
Farah, Wilson, Drain, & Tanaka, 1998; Gorea & Julesz, 1990; Hasselmo, Rolls, & Baylis,
1989; Hochberg & Galper, 1967; Homa, Haver, & Schwartz, 1976; Purcell & Stewart, 1988; Schwartz, Izard, & Ansul, 1985; Tanaka & Farah, 1993). It has also been shown that infants demonstrate an early proficiency at discriminating faces from non-face stimuli (e.g., Öhman & Dimberg,
1978; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977; Sackett, 1966) and at discriminating different emotional expressions (Younge-Browne, Rosenfeld, & Horowitz, 1977). Furthermore, it has been shown that
the affective information contained in facial expression is perceived involuntarily (Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2003) and is able to constrict the focus of attention (Fenske & Eastwood, 2003).
Considering the critical social relevance of facial expression of emotion, it is perhaps not surprising that the emotion displayed in facial expression can be perceived even when observers have no
conscious experience of perceiving facial expressions.1 Such unconscious perception of facial
expression has been shown to have several important functions. These functions include: eliciting
emotional responses in the observer; influencing the conscious experience of other stimuli; and
influencing face-to-face communication.
3.1. Eliciting emotional responses
When confronted by a fear-inducing stimulus, such as an angry facial expression, observers
show emotional responses that consist of distinct patterns of physiological arousal. These patterns
of physiological arousal include a large skin conductance response, hormone changes, and sympathetic nervous system responses involving the amygdala and hypothalamus (Globisch, Hamm,
Esteves, & Öhman, 1999; Hamm, Cuthbert, Globisch, & Vaitl, 1997; Öhman, 1999). This emotional response can even be elicited by facial expressions that are perceived without awareness.
Specifically, research has demonstrated that unconsciously perceived angry facial expressions alter
amygdala activity (Morris, Öhman, & Dolan, 1998, 1999), levels of stress hormones (van Honk et
al., 2000), and skin conductance (Dimberg & Öhman, 1996; Esteves, Dimberg, & Öhman, 1994;
Öhman, 1986). Consistent with the unconscious perception of other threatening stimuli, like spiders and snakes (e.g., Öhman & Soares, 1993, 1994), it appears that a physiological response to a
fear-inducing facial expression is initiated before we have a conscious experience of what it is that
we are responding to. This rapid physiological response to an unconsciously perceived facial
expression prepares us to react in an adaptive manner to the presence of a threatening individual.
1
As mentioned earlier, we are not arguing that faces are unique in terms of their ability to be perceived without
awareness; nor do we wish to argue that the functions of perceiving faces without awareness are unique. Rather, in the
present manuscript, we attempt to: (1) summarize what existing findings tell us about the functions of perceiving
emotionally expressive faces without awareness and (2) highlight critical limitations in current methodologies.
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Many sympathetic responses to threat are mediated by the amygdala (Davidson & Irwin, 1999);
therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that unconsciously perceived facial expressions have been
shown to alter amygdala activity. Morris et al. (1998, 1999) found that overall; the amygdala
was more active when observers were presented with an aversively conditioned angry face than
when they were presented with a non-conditioned angry face. Critically, however, they also found
that a significant neural response was evident in the right amygdala even when the conditioned
angry faces were masked and therefore not consciously perceived. Whalen et al. (1998) also examined whether or not the amygdala is activated in response to emotionally expressive faces, even
when observers are unaware that such stimuli have been presented. These investigators used fMRI
and found significant increases in activation in the amygdala in response to fearful faces and significant decreases in activation in the amygdala in response to happy faces when the facial expressions were perceived without awareness. This finding that amygdala activity is sensitive to
unconsciously perceived facial expressions is consistent with LeDouxÕs (1996) claim that there
is a direct neural pathway from the sensory thalamus to the amygdala, which is able to support
rapid and defensive responses to potentially dangerous stimuli, even before conscious identification and evaluation of the stimuli.
Unconsciously perceived angry faces have also been shown to alter levels of stress hormones. In
a series of studies, van Honk and his colleagues have explored the relations between salivary hormone levels, trait anxiety, trait anger, and the unconscious perception of facial expression. They
have found evidence indicating that individuals high in baseline levels of cortisol (van Honk et al.,
1998) and high on measures of trait anger (van Honk, Tuiten, de Haan, van den Hout, & Stam,
2001) are able to distinguish angry and neutral faces that are perceived without awareness. van
Honk et al. (2000) also found evidence which indirectly suggests that perceiving angry faces without awareness leads to increases in salivary testosterone and cortisol levels from pre-exposure
baseline levels (van Honk et al., 2000). This latter finding has the potential to extend previous
observations showing a temporary increase in testosterone and cortisol levels when observers face
social threat (Gladue, Boechler, & McCaul, 1989) by suggesting that they may not need to be
aware of the source of social threat.
Research has also established that a threatening face perceived without awareness can elicit increased skin conductance, which is another component of the fear response. For example, observers show an increased skin conductance (Dimberg & Öhman, 1996; Öhman, 1986; Esteves et al.,
1994) in response to an unconsciously perceived angry face that has previously been paired with
an unconditioned aversive stimulus. Furthermore, Öhman and his colleagues (Esteves et al., 1994)
have demonstrated that associative learning can occur with faces expressing anger, even when
observers remain unaware of the angry faces that are paired with an unconditioned aversive stimulus. In response to subsequent presentations of these conditioned angry faces, observers show an
increased skin conductance. Taken together, these studies suggest that conditioned skin conductance responses can be both elicited by, and also associated with an unconscious perceived angry
face.
In summary, a substantial amount of research has established that unconsciously perceived facial expression elicits emotional responses that include various forms of physiological arousal.
When a negative or threatening facial expression is perceived without awareness, observers show
a pattern of physiological arousal that includes a large skin conductance response, hormone
changes, and alteration in amygdala activity. This rapid physiological response to an uncon-
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sciously perceived facial expression is likely adaptive because it prepares us to react in an effective
manner to the presence of a threatening individual.
3.2. Influencing conscious experience
Another important consequence of perceiving a facial expression without awareness is that
unconsciously perceived facial expression can influence subsequent conscious experience. For
example, research conducted with both healthy observers (e.g., Edwards, 1990; Kragh, 1960,
1962; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993; Niedenthal, 1990) as well as neurological patients (de Gelder,
Pourtois, van Raamsdonk, Vroomen, & Weiskrantz, 2001) has demonstrated that unconsciously
perceived facial expression can bias how other stimuli are consciously experienced. Furthermore,
facial expressions that are perceived without awareness have also been shown to bias observersÕ
self-evaluation (Baldwin, Carrell, & Lopez, 1990).
Experimental studies with normal observers have shown that unconsciously perceived facial
expressions can influence how other stimuli are consciously experienced. For example, in an
experiment reported by Niedenthal (1990), observers were briefly (i.e., 2 ms) presented with a face
displaying joy, disgust or a neutral emotion followed by a neutral cartoon character that they were
required to evaluate. Although observers had no conscious experience of the facial expressions
and were not able to identify the expressions when tested with a forced choice task, evaluations
of the cartoon characters were biased by the affective tone of the facial expressions. That is,
observers formed affective judgments of the cartoon characters that were consistent with the emotional expression of the unconsciously perceived faces. Zajonc and his colleagues (Edwards, 1990;
Murphy & Zajonc, 1993; Murphy, Monahan, & Zajonc, 1995; Winkielman, Zajonc, & Schwarz,
1997) have also used a priming procedure to demonstrate that unconsciously perceived faces
expressing happiness and anger bias the evaluation of a neutral Chinese ideograph (see also
Kemps, Erauw, & Vandierendonck, 1996; Raccuglia & Phaf, 1997).
Experiments with neurological patients have also demonstrated that facial expression can be
perceived without awareness (de Gelder, Vroomen, Pourtois, & Weiskrantz, 1999) and influence
how other stimuli are consciously experienced (de Gelder et al., 2001). For example, de Gelder et
al. (2001) report a study with GY, a blindsight patient who has sustained damage to the left striate
and extra-striate cortex, and therefore is unaware of stimuli presented in his right visual field.
GYÕs reaction time to facial expressions presented in his intact visual field was influenced by
the emotional expression of faces that were presented in his blind visual field even though he
was unaware of the facial expressions in his blind visual field. GY was able to identify the emotional expression of faces in his intact visual field more quickly when a congruent emotional
expression was simultaneously presented in his blind visual field. This finding suggests that the
emotional expression of a face that was perceived without awareness, facilitated or interfered with
the identification of the emotion displayed by another, consciously perceived face.
In addition to influencing the experience of external stimuli, unconsciously perceived facial
expressions may also bias observersÕ self-evaluations. For example, Baldwin et al. (1990) demonstrated that graduate studentsÕ self-evaluations were lower after they unconsciously perceived their
department chair expressing a disapproving scowl compared to when they unconsciously perceived a postdoctoral fellow expressing an approving smile. Participants first completed what
was described as a reaction time task in which they were required to press a key as quickly as
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possible when an orange patch appeared on a screen. Unbeknownst to the participants, a picture
of a significant department figure displaying either an approving or disapproving facial expression
was very briefly presented before the orange patch. The face was presented briefly and masked by
the patch of orange such that participants had no conscious experience of the approving and disapproving face. After completing the reaction time task, participants were then required to evaluate their research ideas. The findings indicated that participants evaluated their research ideas
more negatively after unconsciously perceiving a chairpersonÕs disapproving face (Baldwin et
al., 1990).
In summary, studies using healthy observers and studies using neurological patients support the
idea that an unconsciously perceived facial expression can influence how other stimuli are consciously experienced. Furthermore, it appears as if facial expressions that are perceived without
awareness can bias observersÕ self-evaluations. Taken together, the available evidence provides
support for the general claim that unconsciously perceived facial expressions are able to influence
subsequent conscious experiences.
3.3. Social interactions
It has been demonstrated that perceiving facial expression without awareness can play a role in
social interactions. For example, researchers have demonstrated how facial expression perceived
without awareness might influence experience in everyday social situations outside the laboratory
(de Gelder, Pourtois, Vroomen, & Bachoud-Lévi, 2000). Furthermore, it appears that unconsciously perceived facial expression can modulate face-to-face communication (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000).
de Gelder et al. (2000) describe the case of AD, a prosopagnosic patient. AD cannot recognize
facial expression in isolation and yet a concurrently presented happy or fearful face was shown to
influence her judgment of the affective tone of a voice. Therefore, for AD, an unconsciously perceived facial expression exerts a ‘‘cross-modal’’ bias on the conscious experience of voice expression. de Gelder and Vroomen (2000) have also found that normal observers show an involuntary
influence from facial expression on the judgment of the emotional tone of a voice. In everyday
social contexts, then, our evaluation of an individualÕs tone of voice may be influenced by the
speakerÕs facial expression, even when we are unaware of facial expression. Such an influence
of unconsciously perceived facial expression on the conscious experience of voice quality might
prove to be an example of how social interactions can be subtly influenced by unconscious perception of facial expression.
Another example of how facial expression perceived without awareness plays a role in social
interactions is found in the micro-components of face-to-face exchanges between people.
Dimberg et al. (2000) have demonstrated that facial muscle activity in observers mirrors the emotional expression of faces that are perceived without awareness. In their study, observers were
prevented from consciously perceiving happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions by a backward-masking procedure. Yet, despite being unaware of the facial expressions, observers showed
larger zygomatic major muscle activity and smaller corrugator supercillii activity in response to
happy compared to angry faces. Thus, they conclude that facial responses to the facial expression
of others are ‘‘controlled by rapidly operating affect programs that can be triggered independently of conscious cognitive processes’’ (p. 88). These results suggest that facial expressions
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perceived without awareness can evoke physiological responses that have important social
consequences. Dimberg et al. note that these facial responses to the expressions of others might
represent either a mimicking of external behaviour or a change in observersÕ underlying
emotional state. In either case, such implicit facial dialogue likely forms a foundation for faceto-face communication.
Research has begun to explore some of the functions that unconsciously perceived facial expression might play in everyday social contexts. To date, it has been demonstrated that facial expression perceived without awareness can bias the experience of voice quality and can also elicit
‘‘mirroring’’ facial responses in an observer.
3.4. Summary and limitations
As is clear from the foregoing discussion, the common methods for studying unconscious perception of emotionally expressive faces show that such perception serves several distinct and interesting functions. Unconscious perception of emotional faces serves to: (a) elicit emotional
responses in the observer, (b) influence how other stimuli are consciously perceived, and (c) influence social communication.
Yet a consideration of the methods used also suggests they are limited in their ability to reveal
the possible functions of unconscious perception of facial expression. Specifically, to date, the
experimental methods used to explore unconscious perception of facial expression have all required that the perceived facial expression remains outside of awareness. That is, the goal has been
to create laboratory situations where observers are never aware of the facial expressions. Indeed,
the very logic of the experimental designs hinge on the fact that observers never become aware of
the faces. While this approach has facilitated attempts to establish the existence of unconscious
perception, it necessarily imposes limits on our ability to understand the functions of unconscious
perception of facial expression in more natural settings; because in more natural settings one
might think that an unconsciously perceived facial expression would attract the attention of an
observer, resulting in the observer efficiently becoming aware of the affective face. Therefore, while
the stimuli in these studies often have good ecological validity, the methods are lacking ecological
validity in a critical way.
4. A new function: Unconsciously perceived affective faces grab awareness
Ideas from the field of ethology provide a clear rationale for why the emotion expressed
by an unconsciously perceived negative face might serve to attract attention so that it is consciously perceived. Namely, conscious perception of facial expression is important because
many of the behaviours that one must make in response to perceived facial expression require conscious mediation (Öhman, 1986). For example, facial expression is inextricably involved in displays of dominance and submission, or what has been termed ‘‘ritual agonistic
behaviour’’ (Trower & Gilbert, 1989). Ritualized agonistic behaviour, such as the dominant
expression of anger with a fixated staring gaze and the corresponding submissive expression
of fear with averted eye gaze, serves to establish and maintain dominance hierarchies (Hinde,
1974; Mazur, 1985) without actual physical conflict. Such dominance hierarchies are believed
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to be a critical component of group living because they secure social order and regulate social exchange.
When confronted with a dominant individual, however, one cannot escape by simply fleeing, as
one might when confronted by a predator threat. Instead, one must determine their relative social
status and, if appropriate, signal defeat and submissiveness. Typically such submissive gestures
include gaze aversion and ‘‘an uncomfortable, appeasing smile’’ (Öhman, 1986, p. 129). Therefore, unlike simple and automatic ‘‘fight’’ or ‘‘flight’’ physiological responses, submissive gestures
require a more complex and subtle behavioural repertoire (Öhman, 1986). Given that subtle and
complex social responses are often required in response to perceiving negative facial expression, it
would be advantageous for attention to be guided to an unconsciously perceived negative face so
that observers become aware of the face and thus are able to engage in the conscious processing
that is necessary to make adaptive responses.
However, this possible mechanism cannot be evaluated with previously used experimental
methodologies. To evaluate the possibility that unconscious perception of facial expression results
in an observerÕs focal attention being attracted to the face, a methodology is needed in which the
ultimate result of perception is awareness—while still providing some indication of a pre-awareness sensitivity to facial expression. One task that provides precisely these conditions, though it is
not often used to study unconscious perception, is the Ôvisual search taskÕ (e.g., Eastwood et al., in
press). When participants are required to search through a varying number of distractors to find
emotionally expressive faces, it is possible to plot a function that displays the increasing time required to find each affective face as the number of distractors increases. These search functions
provide an indication of the efficiency of search for a face in a given distractor context. Critically,
when the distractor context is held constant (i.e., faces with neutral expressions) and participants
do not know whether to expect a positive or negative target face, a comparison of the slopes of the
search functions for the positive and negative faces can indicate whether positive and negative
faces differ in their ability to attract attention and compete for awareness (see Duncan & Humphreys, 1989; Wolfe, 1994). A comparison of the respective search slopes is critical because any difference in the drawing power of different affective faces becomes more evident as set size increases
because each additional distractor has a relatively smaller impact on overall search times for the
face with the stronger drawing power. Therefore, if the search slopes differ for positive and negative faces it would indicate that the emotional expression associated with the shallower slope is
the expression that observers became aware of more rapidly. In this manner, the visual search task
is capable of assessing whether observers have a bias to preferentially process and become aware
of particular types of facial expressions.
To date, applications of visual search methodology to the study of face perception have not led
to clear, consistent conclusions (e.g., Fox et al., 2000; Hampton, Purcell, Bersine, Hansen, & Hansen, 1989; Hansen & Hansen, 1988; Nothdurft, 1993; Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001; Purcell, Stewart, & Skov, 1996; White, 1995). We argue that this lack of clarity is the result of
methodological complications associated with applying the visual search task to the question:
‘‘Can emotionally expressive faces be perceived without awareness and bias the deployment of
attention?’’
One critical methodological issue is that many studies have confounded variations in the emotion expressed by the target face with variations in the emotion expressed by faces in the distractor
context. For example, Hansen and Hansen (1988) found that the slope of the search function for
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locating a target face expressing anger presented among distractor faces expressing happiness was
shallower than the slope of the search function for locating a target face expressing happiness presented among distractor faces expressing anger. Although these findings suggest that focal attention is more readily guided by an angry face than by a happy face, there is an equally plausible
alternative interpretation. Perhaps the reason it took longer to detect the target face expressing
happiness than to detect the target face expressing anger is that it takes longer to search through
angry distractor faces than it takes to search through happy distractor faces (Hampton et al.,
1989). Indeed there is a considerable amount of evidence showing that the efficiency of visual
search depends both on the nature of the target as well as on the nature of the distractor context
(e.g., Duncan & Humphreys, 1989; Treisman & Gormican, 1988; Wolfe, 1994).
Another methodological issue that has confounded investigators is that it has proven difficult to
determine if the observed differences in the speed with which faces expressing different emotions
are detected reflects a difference in the emotions expressed by the faces or a difference in the component parts or features that distinguish the faces. By definition, faces expressing different emotions, such as anger and happiness, are composed of different composites of features. Given
these differences, any evidence showing differential guidance of attention by unattended faces
expressing different emotions can often be accounted for in terms of the different features rather
than in terms of the different emotions expressed by the faces (e.g., Nothdurft, 1993; Purcell et al.,
1996; White, 1997). For this reason, it is absolutely critical that investigators employ various
methodological strategies for ruling out potential feature based explanations of findings.
Finally, confusion exists around the question of what constitutes satisfactory evidence that
unconsciously perceived information has guided attention. In a number of studies, the underlying
assumption has been that the only satisfactory evidence that a face guides attention is a pattern of
findings showing that the speed with which a face is detected is relatively unaffected by the number
of distractor faces (e.g., Fox et al., 2000; Nothdurft, 1993; Hampton et al., 1989; Öhman et al.,
2001; Purcell et al., 1996; White, 1997). In other words, the slope of the search function across
increasing numbers of distractors should be relatively flat. A flat search function showing that
a target face pops out when it is embedded in displays of distractor faces certainly provides strong
evidence for the guidance of attention. However, a flat search function is not the only evidence
that can be used to show the importance of unconsciously perceived information in guiding attention. Another way to establish the role of unconsciously perceived information in guiding attention is to compare the slopes of the search functions for locating different targets. In this way, it is
possible to assess whether the different targets lead to relatively more or less guidance of attention
(see Smilek, Eastwood, & Merikle, 2000; Wolfe, 1998). Therefore, by comparing the slopes of the
search functions for locating faces expressing positive and negative emotions, it is possible to
determine whether the positive or negative emotional expression is the more effective expression
for guiding attention.
When these methodological complications have been addressed, results from the visual search
task have indeed demonstrated that unconsciously perceived facial expressions attract attention,
resulting in an awareness of the emotionally expressive face (e.g., Eastwood et al., in press; Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2001; Fox et al., 2000; see also Öhman et al., 2001). For example, recently we (Eastwood et al., in press; 2001) have argued that the emotion expressed in a face that is
outside of awareness can be perceived and bias the selection process by which emotionally expressive faces are brought into awareness. In the experiments reported by Eastwood et al., participants
J.D. Eastwood, D. Smilek / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 565–584
579
searched displays of faces for the location of a unique face expressing either a positive or a negative emotion. The unique face was embedded among a varying number of distractor faces
expressing neutral emotion. We found that increasing the number of distractor faces had a smaller
impact on the time required to detect the negative face compared to the positive face. From these
results we concluded that faces expressing negative emotion attract attention and thereby gain access to awareness more effectively than faces expressing positive emotion.
Theoretically comparable results have also been found by examining observerÕs error rates
when searching for the presence or absence of friendly and threatening faces embedded in neutral
face distractors (i.e., Öhman et al., 2001). Specifically, in experiments two and three Öhman et al.
(2001) found significant interactions between set size and target emotion such that for threatening
faces, a minimal decrement in performance was evident, whereas for friendly faces, observers
made notably more errors as set size increased. In summary, this pattern of findings suggests that
for the friendly target faces observers traded accuracy for speed at the larger set sizes; therefore,
differences between the threatening and friendly target faces were evident in error rates rather than
reaction times.
In summary, recent research, using the more ecologically valid visual search task, has demonstrated that attention is preferentially attracted by unconsciously perceived negative faces so that
observers become aware of negative faces more rapidly (or accurately) than positive faces. By
demonstrating such differential attraction of attention, support was found for the more general
conclusion that the emotion expressed by a face that is outside of awareness can be perceived
and bias the selection process by which emotionally expressive faces are brought into awareness.
5. Conclusions and implications for future research
To establish the existence of unconscious perception in the laboratory, investigators have typically sought conditions under which unconsciously perceived information remains outside of
awareness while still exerting an influence on the observer. As discussed earlier, two distinct methodologies have been most commonly employed; namely, the method of dissociating measures of
conscious and unconscious perception, and the method of demonstrating qualitatively different
influences of conscious and unconsciously perceived stimulus information. If, as we are suggesting
here, one of the consequences of perceiving facial expression without awareness is that attention is
attracted to the facial expression, thereby resulting in an awareness of the emotionally expressive
face, the potential limitation of these existing methodologies becomes readily apparent. The
important finding that unconsciously perceived facial expressions do not remain unconscious,
but rather draw an observersÕ attention to the faces so that they are perceived with awareness
would have never been discovered using previous methodologies.
We believe that our consideration of the functions of unconsciously perceived emotional faces
has implications beyond this domain. In many domains in psychology there emerge specific methodologies (or paradigms) that become the gold standard for studying various phenomena. The
dissociation and qualitative difference approaches are good examples of such paradigms in studies
of unconscious perception. It is important to realize, however, that the methods we use to study a
phenomenon constrain and determine the conclusions we make. On first glance this claim may
seem trivially obvious and in no need of re-asserting. However, the present review provides a good
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example of how this point can easily be missed; we must be constantly vigilant to the limits imposed by our methodological tools.
One way to ensure that our methods do not lead us astray is to consider the possible functions
of the phenomenon in question. We believe that a critical aspect of any behaviour or process is its
ÔfunctionÕ and, therefore, that psychologists should study human behaviour by considering the
whole person embedded in their real-life context and performing real world tasks. This point goes
well beyond simply using ecologically valid stimuli in artificial laboratory settings. We are arguing
that in addition to using ecologically valid stimuli, researchers also need to use more ecologically
valid tasks/situations. It is humbling for us to consider the fact that our own work on how emotional faces guide attention is still far from meeting this ecological goal. And we hope to move
further towards this goal in our future studies.
Ultimately, new methods and procedures will have to be developed in order to study ‘‘cognition
in the wild’’ (Hutchins, 1995; see also Kingstone, Smilek, Ristic, Friesen, & Eastwood, 2003).
Neisser (1982), for example, has argued that psychologists should ground their research and theories in everyday behaviour, rather than experimental procedures. By doing so, he asserted, we
will be able to ‘‘find out what really happens in the world around us, and that will be worth knowing in any imaginable future’’ (p. 10). It is essential for cognitive psychology to embrace the critically important task of studying cognition in a manner that has relevance to real-life situations.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants to: J.D.E. from the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council and to D.S. from NSERC, Killam Foundation and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. The authors thank Philip M. Merikle for his considerable contribution to the manuscript and his invaluable support and guidance. Significant portions of the
manuscript were presented earlier as part of the first authorÕs doctoral dissertation.
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 1
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Editorial
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Bruce Bridgeman will join us as an editor of Consciousness
and Cognition starting with this issue. Dr. Bridgeman is professor of psychology and psychobiology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Editing this journal requires knowledge in many
areas, and he comes to us with a distinguished record of well over 100 publications of both
research and theory in a wide swath of topics we cover. He is known for his research in vision,
and particularly to our readership for his work on perceptual awareness in visually guided action.
He has contributed theoretically on the topics of the ‘‘grand illusion,’’ the visual representation of
the world, and other areas related to perceptual awareness. His most recent book (2003) is Psychology and Evolution: The Origins of Mind. He has been reviewing for journals for his entire career, and he edited the Handbook of Perception and Action, Vol. 2 with Wolfgang Prinz. With his
breadth and expertise he will certainly be a great asset to our readers and our authors.
William P. Banks
Bernard J. Baars
Antti Revonsuo
doi:10.1016/S1053-8100(05)00009-7 |
Consciousness and Cognition
EDITOR
William P. Banks
Pomona College, Claremont, California
Bernard J. Baars
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Bruce Bridgeman
The Neurosciences Institute,
San Diego, California
University of California
Santa Cruz
Antti Revonsuo
University of Turku
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jackie Andrade
J. Allan Hobson
W. Trammell Neill
University of Sheffield
Massachusetts Mental Health
Center
University at Albany
University of Tartu
Larry L. Jacoby
Alan Baddeley
New York University
Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education
MRC Applied Psychology
Unit
E. Roy John
Steven Palmer
John Bargh
New York University Medical
Center
University of California
Berkeley
New York University
John F. Kihlstrom
John Pani
Arthur L. Blumenthal
University of Louisville
Bronxville, New York
University of California
Berkeley
Gordon H. Bower
Christof Koch
Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversit/t, M1nchen
Talis Bachmann
Stanford University
Deborah Burke
California Institute of
Technology
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Keith Oatley
Ernst Pçppel
William Prinzmetal
Harvard University
University of California
Berkeley
University of California
Santa Barbara
Alfred B. Kristofferson
Arthur Reber
Ontario, Canada
Brooklyn College of CUNY
David Chalmers
David LaBerge
Eyal Reingold
University of California
Irvine
University of Toronto
Stephen LaBerge
Graduate School of CUNY
Pomona College
Wallace Chafe
University of Arizona
Tucson
Antonio Damasio
University of Iowa
Stanford University
Meredyth Daneman
Benjamin Libet
University of Toronto
University of California
San Francisco
Richard Davidson
University of Wisconsin
Donald G. MacKay
Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University
University of California
Los Angeles
Andreas K. Engel
George Mandler
Hamburg University
Matthew Erdelyi
University of California
San Diego
David Rosenthal
Daniel Schacter
Harvard University
Arnold Scheibel
University of California
Los Angeles
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of Pittsburgh
Tim Shallice
University College
London
Brooklyn College of CUNY
Bruce Mangan
Owen Flanagan
University of California
Berkeley
Jerome L. Singer
Anthony Marcel
David Spiegel
Duke University
David Galin
Yale University
MRC Applied Psychology
Unit
Stanford University School of
Medicine
Hazel R. Markus
Petra Stoerig
University of Michigan
Heinrich-Heine-Universitat
Philip M. Merikle
Giulio Tononi
University of Washington
University of Waterloo
The Neurosciences Institute
Henk J. Haarman
Thomas Metzinger
Geoffrey Underwood
Johannes GutenbergUniversit/t Mainz
University of Nottingham
Jeff Miller
Harvard University
Langley Porter Psychiatric
Institute, San Francisco
Michael S. Gazzaniga
Dartmouth College
Anthony G. Greenwald
University of Maryland
Stevan Harnad
Princeton University
Steven A. Hillyard
University of California
San Diego
University of Otago
Michael C. Mozer
University of Colorado
Daniel M. Wegner
Charles Yingling
University of California
San Francisco |
Consciousness and Cognition
EDITOR
William P. Banks
Pomona College, Claremont, California
Bernard J. Baars
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Bruce Bridgeman
The Neurosciences Institute,
San Diego, California
University of California
Santa Cruz
Antti Revonsuo
University of Turku
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jackie Andrade
J. Allan Hobson
W. Trammell Neill
University of Sheffield
Massachusetts Mental Health
Center
University at Albany
University of Tartu
Larry L. Jacoby
Alan Baddeley
New York University
Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
E. Roy John
Steven Palmer
John Bargh
New York University
New York University Medical
Center
University of California
Berkeley
Arthur L. Blumenthal
John F. Kihlstrom
John Pani
University of California
Berkeley
University of Louisville
Christof Koch
Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversit/t, M1nchen
Talis Bachmann
Bronxville, New York
Gordon H. Bower
Stanford University
Deborah Burke
Pomona College
Wallace Chafe
University of California
Santa Barbara
David Chalmers
University of Arizona
Tucson
Antonio Damasio
University of Iowa
Meredyth Daneman
University of Toronto
Richard Davidson
University of Wisconsin
Daniel C. Dennett
California Institute of
Technology
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Ernst Pçppel
William Prinzmetal
Harvard University
University of California
Berkeley
Alfred B. Kristofferson
Arthur Reber
Ontario, Canada
Brooklyn College of CUNY
David LaBerge
Eyal Reingold
University of California
Irvine
University of Toronto
Stephen LaBerge
Graduate School of CUNY
Stanford University
Benjamin Libet
University of California
San Francisco
Donald G. MacKay
Tufts University
University of California
Los Angeles
Andreas K. Engel
George Mandler
Hamburg University
Keith Oatley
David Rosenthal
Daniel Schacter
Harvard University
Arnold Scheibel
University of California
Los Angeles
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of Pittsburgh
Tim Shallice
Matthew Erdelyi
University of California
San Diego
Brooklyn College of CUNY
Bruce Mangan
Owen Flanagan
University of California
Berkeley
Jerome L. Singer
Duke University
David Galin
Anthony Marcel
David Spiegel
University College
London
Yale University
Langley Porter Psychiatric
Institute, San Francisco
MRC Applied Psychology
Unit
Stanford University School of
Medicine
Michael S. Gazzaniga
Hazel R. Markus
Petra Stoerig
Dartmouth College
University of Michigan
Heinrich-Heine-Universitat
Anthony G. Greenwald
Philip M. Merikle
Giulio Tononi
University of Washington
University of Waterloo
The Neurosciences Institute
Henk J. Haarman
Thomas Metzinger
Geoffrey Underwood
University of Maryland
Johannes GutenbergUniversit/t Mainz
University of Nottingham
Jeff Miller
Harvard University
Stevan Harnad
Princeton University
Steven A. Hillyard
University of California
San Diego
University of Otago
Michael C. Mozer
University of Colorado
Daniel M. Wegner
Charles Yingling
University of California
San Francisco |
Consciousness and Cognition
EDITOR
William P. Banks
Pomona College, Claremont, California
Bruce Bridgeman
University of California
Santa Cruz
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Axel N. Cleeremans
James T. Enns
Université Libre de Bruxelles
University of British Columbia
Antti Revonsuo
University of Turku
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jackie Andrade
Steven A. Hillyard
Keith Oatley
University of Plymouth
University of California
San Diego
Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education
J. Allan Hobson
Steven Palmer
Bernard J. Baars
The Neurosciences Institute
San Diego
Talis Bachmann
Massachusetts Mental Health
Center
University of Tartu
Larry L. Jacoby
Alan Baddeley
New York University
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
E. Roy John
John Bargh
New York University Medical
Center
New York University
Arthur L. Blumenthal
John F. Kihlstrom
The New School University
University of California
Berkeley
Gordon H. Bower
Christof Koch
Stanford University
Deborah Burke
Pomona College
Wallace Chafe
University of California
Santa Barbara
David Chalmers
Antonio Damasio
Stephen LaBerge
University of Iowa
Stanford University
Meredyth Daneman
Donald G. MacKay
University of Wisconsin
Daniel C. Dennett
University of Louisville
Ernst Pçppel
Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversitt, Mnchen
William Prinzmetal
University of California
Berkeley
Arthur Reber
David Rosenthal
David LaBerge
University of Arizona
Tucson
Richard Davidson
John Pani
California Institute of Technology Brooklyn College of
CUNY
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Harvard University
Eyal Reingold
University of Toronto
Alfred B. Kristofferson
Ontario, Canada
University of California
Irvine
University of Toronto
University of California
Berkeley
University of California
Los Angeles
George Mandler
University of California
San Diego
Tufts University
Bruce Mangan
Andreas K. Engel
Hamburg University
University of California
Berkeley
Matthew Erdelyi
Graduate School of
CUNY
Daniel Schacter
Harvard University
Arnold Scheibel
University of California
Los Angeles
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of Pittsburgh
Tim Shallice
University College
London
Jerome L. Singer
Anthony Marcel
Yale University
Brooklyn College of CUNY
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
David Spiegel
Owen Flanagan
Hazel R. Markus
Duke University
University of Michigan
Stanford University School of
Medicine
David Galin
Philip M. Merikle
Petra Stoerig
Langley Porter Psychiatric
Institute, San Francisco
University of Waterloo
Heinrich-Heine-Universitat
Thomas Metzinger
Giulio Tononi
Michael S. Gazzaniga
The Neurosciences Institute
Dartmouth College
Johannes GutenbergUniversitt Mainz
Anthony G. Greenwald
Jeff Miller
University of Nottingham
University of Washington
University of Otago
Henk J. Haarman
Michael C. Mozer
University of Maryland
University of Colorado
Stevan Harnad
W. Trammell Neill
Princeton University
University at Albany
Geoffrey Underwood
Daniel M. Wegner
Harvard University
Charles Yingling
University of California
San Francisco |
Consciousness and Cognition
EDITOR
William P. Banks
Pomona College, Claremont, California
Bruce Bridgeman
University of California
Santa Cruz
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Axel N. Cleeremans
James T. Enns
Université Libre de Bruxelles
University of British Columbia
Antti Revonsuo
University of Turku
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jackie Andrade
Steven A. Hillyard
Keith Oatley
University of Plymouth
University of California
San Diego
Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education
J. Allan Hobson
Steven Palmer
Bernard J. Baars
The Neurosciences Institute
San Diego
Talis Bachmann
Massachusetts Mental Health
Center
University of Tartu
Larry L. Jacoby
Alan Baddeley
New York University
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
E. Roy John
John Bargh
New York University Medical
Center
New York University
Arthur L. Blumenthal
John F. Kihlstrom
The New School University
University of California
Berkeley
Gordon H. Bower
Christof Koch
Stanford University
Deborah Burke
Pomona College
Wallace Chafe
University of California
Santa Barbara
David Chalmers
Antonio Damasio
Stephen LaBerge
University of Iowa
Stanford University
Meredyth Daneman
Donald G. MacKay
University of Wisconsin
Daniel C. Dennett
University of Louisville
Ernst Pçppel
Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversitt, Mnchen
William Prinzmetal
University of California
Berkeley
Arthur Reber
David Rosenthal
David LaBerge
University of Arizona
Tucson
Richard Davidson
John Pani
California Institute of Technology Brooklyn College of
CUNY
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Harvard University
Eyal Reingold
University of Toronto
Alfred B. Kristofferson
Ontario, Canada
University of California
Irvine
University of Toronto
University of California
Berkeley
University of California
Los Angeles
George Mandler
University of California
San Diego
Tufts University
Bruce Mangan
Andreas K. Engel
Hamburg University
University of California
Berkeley
Matthew Erdelyi
Graduate School of
CUNY
Daniel Schacter
Harvard University
Arnold Scheibel
University of California
Los Angeles
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of Pittsburgh
Tim Shallice
University College
London
Jerome L. Singer
Anthony Marcel
Yale University
Brooklyn College of CUNY
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
David Spiegel
Owen Flanagan
Hazel R. Markus
Duke University
University of Michigan
Stanford University School of
Medicine
David Galin
Philip M. Merikle
Petra Stoerig
Langley Porter Psychiatric
Institute, San Francisco
University of Waterloo
Heinrich-Heine-Universitat
Thomas Metzinger
Giulio Tononi
Michael S. Gazzaniga
The Neurosciences Institute
Dartmouth College
Johannes GutenbergUniversitt Mainz
Anthony G. Greenwald
Jeff Miller
University of Nottingham
University of Washington
University of Otago
Henk J. Haarman
Michael C. Mozer
University of Maryland
University of Colorado
Stevan Harnad
W. Trammell Neill
Princeton University
University at Albany
Geoffrey Underwood
Daniel M. Wegner
Harvard University
Charles Yingling
University of California
San Francisco |
Consciousness and Cognition
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Bruce Bridgeman
University of California, Santa Cruz
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Axel Cleeremans
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Chris Frith
Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging
Michael Graziano
Princeton University
Leah Light
Pitzer College
Antti Revonsuo
University of Turku
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jackie Andrade
University of Plymouth
Steven A. Hillyard
University of California, San Diego
Talis Bachmann
University of Tartu
J. Allan Hobson
Harvard Medical School
Alan Baddeley
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
Larry L. Jacoby
Washington University
St. Louis, MO
John Bargh
New York University
Arthur L. Blumenthal
The New School University
Gordon H. Bower
Stanford University
Deborah Burke
Pomona College
Wallace Chafe
University of California
Santa Barbara
E. Roy John
New York University Medical
Center
John F. Kihlstrom
University of California
Berkeley
Christof Koch
California Institute of Technology
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Harvard University
David Chalmers
University of Arizona, Tucson
Alfred B. Kristofferson
Ontario, Canada
Antonio Damasio
University of Southern California
David LaBerge
University of California, Irvine
Meredyth Daneman
University of Toronto
Stephen LaBerge
Simons Rock College of Bard
Richard Davidson
University of Wisconsin
Donald G. MacKay
University of California
Los Angeles
Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University
Andreas K. Engel
Hamburg University
Matthew Erdelyi
Brooklyn College of CUNY
Owen Flanagan
Duke University
David Galin
Langley Porter Psychiatric
Institute, San Francisco
Keith Oatley
Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education
Steven Palmer
University of California
Berkeley
John Pani
University of Louisville
Ernst Pçppel
Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversitt, Mnchen
William Prinzmetal
University of California
Berkeley
Arthur Reber
Brooklyn College of CUNY
Eyal Reingold
University of Toronto
David Rosenthal
Graduate School of CUNY
Daniel Schacter
Harvard University
Arnold Scheibel
University of California
Los Angeles
George Mandler
University of California, San Diego
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of California at
Santa Barbara
Bruce Mangan
University of California, Berkeley
Tim Shallice
University College, London
Anthony Marcel
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
Jerome L. Singer
Yale University
Hazel R. Markus
University of Michigan
David Spiegel
Stanford University School of
Medicine
Philip M. Merikle
University of Waterloo
Petra Stoerig
Heinrich-Heine-Universitat
Michael S. Gazzaniga
University of California at
Santa Barbara
Thomas Metzinger
Johannes GutenbergUniversitt Mainz
Anthony G. Greenwald
University of Washington
Jeff Miller
University of Otago
Geoffrey Underwood
University of Nottingham
Henk J. Haarman
University of Maryland
Michael C. Mozer
University of Colorado
Daniel M. Wegner
Harvard University
Stevan Harnad
University of Southampton
W. Trammell Neill
University at Albany
Charles Yingling
Standford University
Giulio Tononi
The Neurosciences Institute
FOUNDING EDITORS
Bernard J. Baars
The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego
William P. Banks
Pomona College |
Consciousness and Cognition
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Bruce Bridgeman
University of California, Santa Cruz
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Talis Bachmann
University of Tartu
Axel Cleeremans
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Georg Northoff
University of Ottawa
Antti Revonsuo
University of Turku
Michael Graziano
Princeton University
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jackie Andrade
University of Plymouth
J. Allan Hobson
Harvard Medical School
Alan Baddeley
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
Larry L. Jacoby
Washington University
St. Louis, MO
John Bargh
New York University
Arthur L. Blumenthal
The New School University
Gordon H. Bower
Stanford University
Deborah Burke
Pomona College
Wallace Chafe
University of California
Santa Barbara
David Chalmers
University of Arizona, Tucson
Antonio Damasio
University of Southern California
Meredyth Daneman
University of Toronto
Richard Davidson
University of Wisconsin
Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University
Andreas K. Engel
Hamburg University
Matthew Erdelyi
Brooklyn College of CUNY
Owen Flanagan
Duke University
David Galin
Langley Porter Psychiatric
Institute, San Francisco
Michael S. Gazzaniga
University of California at
Santa Barbara
Anthony G. Greenwald
University of Washington
Henk J. Haarman
University of Maryland
Stevan Harnad
University of Southampton
Steven A. Hillyard
University of California, San Diego
Steven Palmer
University of California
Berkeley
John Pani
University of Louisville
E. Roy John
New York University Medical
Center
Ernst Pçppel
Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversitt, Mnchen
John F. Kihlstrom
University of California
Berkeley
William Prinzmetal
University of California
Berkeley
Christof Koch
California Institute of Technology
Arthur Reber
Brooklyn College of CUNY
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Harvard University
Eyal Reingold
University of Toronto
Alfred B. Kristofferson
Ontario, Canada
David Rosenthal
Graduate School of CUNY
David LaBerge
University of California, Irvine
Daniel Schacter
Harvard University
Stephen LaBerge
Simons Rock College of Bard
Donald G. MacKay
University of California
Los Angeles
George Mandler
University of California, San Diego
Bruce Mangan
University of California, Berkeley
Anthony Marcel
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
Hazel R. Markus
University of Michigan
Philip M. Merikle
University of Waterloo
Thomas Metzinger
Johannes GutenbergUniversitt Mainz
Arnold Scheibel
University of California
Los Angeles
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of California at
Santa Barbara
Tim Shallice
University College, London
Jerome L. Singer
Yale University
David Spiegel
Stanford University School of
Medicine
Petra Stoerig
Heinrich-Heine-Universitat
Giulio Tononi
The Neurosciences Institute
Jeff Miller
University of Otago
Geoffrey Underwood
University of Nottingham
Michael C. Mozer
University of Colorado
Daniel M. Wegner
Harvard University
W. Trammell Neill
University at Albany
Charles Yingling
Standford University
Keith Oatley
Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education
FOUNDING EDITORS
Bernard J. Baars
The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego
William P. Banks
Pomona College |
Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Conceptual expansion and creative imagery
as a function of psychoticism
Anna Abrahama,b,*, Sabine Windmannb, Irene Daumc, Onur Güntürkünb
a
International Graduate School for Neuroscience (IGSN), Ruhr University, 44780 Bochum, Germany
b
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Biopsychology, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr
University, 44780 Bochum, Germany
c
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr University,
44780 Bochum, Germany
Received 1 July 2004
Available online 5 February 2005
Abstract
The ability to be creative is often considered a unique characteristic of conscious beings and many efforts
have been directed at demonstrating a relationship between creativity and the personality construct of
psychoticism. The present study sought to investigate this link explicitly by focusing on discrete facets of
creative cognition, namely the originality/novelty dimension and the practicality/usefulness dimension.
Based on EysenckÕs conceptualisation of psychoticism as being characterised by an overinclusive cognitive
style, it was expected that higher levels of psychoticism would accompany a greater degree of conceptual
expansion and elevated levels of originality in creative imagery, but would be unrelated to the practicality/usefulness of an idea. These hypotheses were confirmed in 80 healthy participants who were contrasted
based on their EPQ psychoticism scale scores. Our findings suggest that the link between psychoticism and
creativity is based on associative thinking and broader but weak top-down activation patterns rather than
on goal-related thinking.
Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Creativity; Creative cognition; Psychoticism; Schizotypy; Top-down processing; Originality; Overinclusive
thinking; Conceptual expansion; Creative imagery
*
Corresponding author. Fax: +49 234 3214377.
E-mail address: anna.abraham@rub.de (A. Abraham).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.12.003
A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
521
1. Introduction
The notion of a fascinating association between creativity and mental illness has existed since
antiquity. Efforts aimed at demonstrating this purported link are largely case study reviews that
correlate the incidence of mental illness among either creative geniuses or individuals in creative
professions (Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1989; Ludwig, 1995; Richards, 1981; Wills, 2003), and
psychometric investigations that demonstrate better performance on standardised creativity tests
in some psychotic populations relative to healthy controls (Hasenfus & Magaro, 1976; Jena &
Ramachandra, 1995; Keefe & Magaro, 1980; Ryabova & Mendelvich, 2002).
These endeavours have spilled over into the non-clinical spectrum of investigations with healthy
functional individuals under the domain of personality research. Following a dimensional-approach where psychosis and normalcy are viewed as two ends of a continuum (Claridge, 1985,
1997), it is possible to identify and test healthy individuals with a psychoticism (Eysenck, 1992;
Eysenck & Eysenck, 1976) or schizotypal (Mason, Claridge, & Jackson, 1995; Raine, 1991)
personality disposition that is believed to be pathological in clinically psychotic populations.
Expected differences between psychotic and healthy populations can thus be extended to non-clinical samples, albeit only to a limited extent, by contrasting groups of healthy individuals who are
differentiated in terms of the degree of their psychotic personality characteristics. Using this
approach, greater creativity was associated with higher levels of psychoticism in terms of performance on tasks of creative or divergent thinking (Eysenck, 1994; Merten & Fischer, 1999;
Rawlings, Twomey, Burns, & Morris, 1998; Stavridou & Furnham, 1996; Woody & Claridge,
1977), and when correlating the incidence of psychoticism personality characteristics with highly
creative individuals like artists and musicians (Booker, Fearn, & Francis, 2001; Wills, 1984). This
is finding is not entirely unanimous, however, as some studies do not lend support to this pattern
of results (Kline & Cooper, 1986; Kwiatkowsi, Vartanian, & Martindale, 1999; Wuthrich & Bates,
2001).
One of the critical issues requiring clarification though is the underlying concept of creativity
itself. Several theories of what creativity entails have been derived from different conceptual levels
of study, i.e., in terms of the person, the product, the process, the person–environment interactions, and the brain (classification based in part on Plucker & Renzulli, 1999; Rhodes, 1987).
Although this has led to the espousal of a diverse array of variables that are equated with creative
ability and expression, one major factor uniting the many perspectives is the concept of ÔnoveltyÕ
or ÔoriginalityÕ of ideas being central to any characterisation of creativity. The second vital factor
underlying most theories is concept of Ôrelevance.Õ
AmabileÕs (1983, 1990) theory typifies the standard view in that a product is defined to be creative in the extent that it is novel, useful and appropriate in a given situation. Eysenck (1993,
1995) on the other hand, derived the concept of originality from the concept of relevance by positing that Ôoverinclusive thinkingÕ or thought processes that are characterised by a wider conception of relevance than is conventional, as evident from the unusualness or unconventionality of
responses on a word association task for instance, is the cognitive style that forms the cornerstone of creative ability. He went on to postulate that this cognitive style typifies individuals
of a high psychoticism personality type. In the former view then, originality and relevance are
two discrete components of creativity, whereas in EysenckÕs theory these two components define
one another.
522
A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
One need not, however, subscribe to only one of these stances for as long as creativity is not
viewed as a unitary construct per se these are not mutually exclusive standpoints. More often
than not, differing conceptions of creativity stem from addressing the same question from different planes. By defining the planes or the processes in question at the outset, one can integrate
dissimilar viewpoints of creativity as diverse facets of the same complex construct. This is partly
possible within the outlook of the Geneplore model (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Smith, Ward,
& Finke, 1995), which is a heuristic model rather than an explanatory theory of creativity,
where the processes underlying creative thinking are twofold in that they involve the initial generation of potential ideas or ‘‘preinventive’’ structures followed by extensive exploration and
interpretation of these ideas. Examples of preinventive structures include the formation of simple associations between stored conceptual structures in memory, synthesis of new mental structures, and analogical transfer of information from one domain to another. The examples of the
exploratory processes include the search for desired attributes in structures, the search for conceptual limitation of structures and the evaluation of structures from different contexts or
perspectives.
The multifaceted nature of creativity is strongly emphasised in the Geneplore model where
examining various normative cognitive processes under explicitly generative conditions is held
to allow for a more thorough understanding of how creative thought can emerge in all its diversity. By acknowledging that many different thought processes underlie creative thinking, it allows
for the examination of several discrete mental operations that comprise different elements of creative cognition. ÔConceptual expansionÕ and Ôcreative imageryÕ were two such processes that were
identified and for which experimental tasks were developed.
Conceptual expansion refers to the ability to broaden existing conceptual structures or
loosen the confines of acquired concepts, a process that is especially vital in the formulation
of novel ideas which is a core feature of creative thinking (Ward, 1994). This kind of process
is tapped typically by experimental tasks that require the person to imagine an animal that
lives on another planet which is different from Earth and what is assessed is how far the
personÕs drawing of an animal deviates from existing schemas of animals in general, i.e.,
of having certain fundamental features like bilateral symmetry of form, presence of common
appendages and sense organs, and so on. How ÔcreativeÕ one is on this task is assessed by
how well one can expand this concept. The better one is able to imagine an animal that
does not have a bilaterally symmetrical form, that lacks the customary appendages and sense
organs found on most animals on this planet and, furthermore, has unusual features that are
not found on most animals on earth, the greater oneÕs conceptual expansion. As enhanced
performance on this task involves having a broader conception of relevance, the process
of conceptual expansion fits in neatly with the Eysenckian conception of overinclusive
thinking.
Drawing from historical and anecdotal accounts of the role of imagery in aiding insights, discoveries and artistic expression, creative imagery relates to the vividness of abstract imagination in
generativity. The creative imagery task (Finke, 1990) requires the construction of an object that
falls into a predetermined category (e.g., transportation) using three randomly assigned simple
three-dimensional figures (e.g., a sphere, a cone, and a cross). The invented object is then judged
in terms of ‘‘originality,’’ or how unusual the object is, and ‘‘practicality,’’ or how functional the
object is. A total creative imagery score is derived from the sum of the scores obtained on these
A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
523
two sub-measures. The concepts of originality and relevance are separately assessed in this task
and are thus differentiable constructs in creative imagery.
To be able to create something unusual or novel, one must deviate from what is already known.
Prior knowledge and expectations that one derives from past experience is thus a critical factor in
the ability to be original. From an information processing perspective, Ôtop-downÕ or expectationdriven information processing refers to the influence of oneÕs knowledge and expectations on the
processing of incoming information (Engel, Fries, & Singer, 2001). Deficits in top-down processing as noted in patients with schizophrenia (John & Hemsley, 1992; Karatekin & Asarnow, 1999;
Vianin et al., 2002) appear to manifest in the case of high psychoticism or high schizotypy, a related but disparate personality construct, as a propensity for diffuse or less constrained top-down
control as evidenced by reduced negative priming and subtle insufficiencies in sustained attention
(Obiols, Garcı́a, de Trincherı́a, & Doménech, 1993; Stavridou & Furnham, 1996).
The effect of top-down processes can be likened to the action of a spotlight. If the focus of the
spotlight is narrow, the influence of expectation and prior activation are relatively concentrated
on selected representations. In the case of diffuse top-down control, the spotlight is broader so
that more loosely associated and more widely distributed representations are co-activated,
although perhaps with less intensity. Diffuse top-down control may thus support both the overinclusive thinking that Eysenck claimed to be characteristic for individuals with high psychoticism
as well as certain aspects of creative cognition. In the conceptual expansion task, the key to
expanding a concept is to move beyond what is already known about its specific conceptual structures. As the influence of oneÕs knowledge and expectations would pose a hindrance to oneÕs ability to this perform this operation, diffuse top-down influence would be rather profitable to the
process of conceptual expansion owing to the diminished influence of the usual restraining effect
posed by oneÕs conceptual repertoire.
With regard to the creative imagery task, the originality component in this task, which measures how novel and unique the invented object is, would also be expected to benefit from broadened top-down processing in a similar manner as the conceptual expansion task. Although there is
considerable pressure given the randomness of the task design in the assignment of figures and
categories to create novel objects or inventions, the overriding tendency is to produce an invention
that matches or is similar to familiar objects drawn from existing knowledge. Diminished topdown control should weaken this tendency to invent conventional objects and thus give rise to
greater originality on such a task. The same would not hold true for the practicality component
as it relates to the functionality or usefulness of the object which is a fundamentally different element within this task as it relates to the creativity dimension of relevance.
The present study addressed the issue of what specific types of creative cognitive processes relate to psychoticism and how this fits within the mould of EysenckÕs view of creativity versus the
standard view of creativity. We refer to EysenckÕs conception of psychoticism (as measured by the
EPQ), as opposed to the more recent conceptions of schizotypy, as EysenckÕs psychoticism scale
most directly relates to overinclusive and unconventional thinking. In addition, the EPQ psychoticism scale was developed to measure nonconformist tendencies (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1976),
and correlates with novelty seeking and impulsivity scales (Zuckerman, Kuhlman, Joireman, &
Teta, 1993). All these traits seem highly relevant for the ability to develop novel, unusual and original ideas as gauged by the conceptual expansion and creative imagery tasks in this study. There
is some controversy concerning additional personality features that are tapped by the EPQ
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psychoticism scale which are not explicitly psychopathological in nature, such as antisocial and
impulsive characteristics. More recent versions of the EPQ have, however, reduced the loading
of these traits on the psychoticism scale.
By contrasting individuals based on the magnitude of psychoticism, we expected greater levels
of psychoticism to be related to enhanced performance on the conceptual expansion task and
higher levels of originality on the creative imagery task, but not necessarily to greater levels of
practicality on the creative imagery task.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
This study was originally carried out on two separate populations—University students
(n = 44) and schooled adults with no University training (n = 36). As the results from both populations were comparable, the data from both samples were pooled. A total of 80 individuals, 29
men (mean age 31) and 51 women (mean age 30), were thus recruited for this study and received
payment (the equivalent of $8/h) for their participation.
2.2. Sample description and procedures
Participants were instructed to first complete the German version of the revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire—short form (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991; Ruch, 1999). The Cronbach a values (a) and the test-rest reliability (r) values for each of the scales of the short form of the German
EPQ-R were as follows. Psychoticism: a = .72 and r = .85, Extraversion: a = .85 and r = .88,
Neuroticism: a = .79 and r = .84, Lie Scale a = .72 and r = .84. Scores obtained on the psychoticism scale (P-scale) were taken as a measure of psychoticism and the sample was divided into two
groups for the analyses using a median-split division. As the median P-scale score for the group
was 3 (mean = 3. 41), participants with a P-scale score of 0–3 formed the low-psychoticism or lowP group (n = 45) and participants with a P-scale score of 4 and above formed the high-psychoticism or high-P group (n = 35).
To obtain an elementary measure of IQ, subjects were required to complete the Picture Completion task, which taps attention to fine detail, and the Similarities task, which provides a measure of concept formation, from the German WAIS-R (Dahl, 1986). The low- and high-P groups
were found to be matched as scores obtained on the P-scale did not correlate significantly with
either of these WAIS-R scales. Conceptual expansion was then assessed with the use of the German translation of the Ward Ôanimal taskÕ (Ward, 1994). In this task participants were required to
imagine and draw animals that lived on another planet that is wholly unlike Earth. The fact that
the planet to be imagined was to be very different from Earth was strongly emphasised. Participants were asked to generate animals that were of two different species.
The drawings were subsequently coded in accordance with the procedures previously described
by Ward (1994, pp. 7–8) with the help of two scorers who had to simply note the presence of fundamental features common to animals found on Earth and the presence of atypical features (see
Fig. 1). Both scorers were blind to the hypothesis of the experiment and had no information about
A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
525
Fig. 1. Properties that are coded from the Conceptual Expansion drawings (adapted from Ward, 1994, p. 7 Copyright
1994 by Academic Press).
the participants. Using an intra-class correlation coefficient, the inter-rater reliability was found to
be highly significant (a = .85, p < .0001). A coding was deemed valid when both scorers were in
agreement. In the occasional situation when both scorers were not in agreement, a third scorer
was consulted and the majority result was accepted. This data were then further processed by
the experimenter by extracting 5 elements from the valid coded data—bilateral asymmetry, lack
of appendages, lack of sense organs, unusual appendages, and unusual sense organs (as shown in
Fig. 1). Presence or absence of an element gave rise to a score of 1 or 0, respectively. Thus the total
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A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
Fig. 2. Stimuli used in the Creative Imagery task (adapted from Finke, 1990, p. 41 Copyright 1990 by Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates).
expansion score for each picture ranged from 0 to 5. Statistical analyses on this task were carried
out on by averaging the scores obtained on both the drawings for each subject.
The participants were then required to complete the German translation of the creative imagery
task (Finke, 1990). In this task, the participant is asked to assemble an object that falls into a predetermined category using three figures from an array of simple three-dimensional figures (see Fig.
2 for stimuli). Except for altering the form of the figures, the participants were allowed to vary the
figures provided to them in any way with regard to size, orientation, position, texture, and so on.
The participants were required to put the figures together in a meaningful way so as to form a
useful object from a certain category. Following the procedure utilised by Finke (1990), the figures
and the category were randomly assigned for every participant. As each participant was given six
trials, a maximum of six inventions per person were obtained. The inventions were rated by two
trained raters along two dimensions—Originality (how unusual and unique the invention is) and
Practicality (how functional and usable the invention is) using a 5-point scale and the average of
their ratings were taken as the scores for the inventions. The interrater correlations (intra-class
correlation coefficient) on the creative imagery measures were significant for both the originality
scale (a = .56, p = .0002), and the practicality scale (a = .35, p = .0307). Each participant consequently obtained an average score of practicality, originality and total creative imagery (practicality + originality) from the six inventions they generated across trials.
3. Results
Preliminary analyses were carried out at the outset to gauge if any sex differences were present
across the variables under study. Apart from a strong trend for women to score higher than males
on the EPQ neuroticism scale, t (78) = 1. 960, p = .054, a pattern consistent with previous research findings, there were no significant results. When contrasting the four different scales of
the EPQ-R, the psychoticism scale, the extraversion scale, the neuroticism scale, and the lie scale
(taps the propensity to make socially desirable responses), a highly significant negative correlation
A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
527
was present between the EPQ psychoticism scale and the EPQ lie scale, revealing that lower the
psychoticism score, higher the lie scale score (r = .342, p = .003). As a check, all the analyses
presented below were repeated after excluding participants who had a very high lie scale score
(excluding L > 6, remaining N = 74). As the results obtained were virtually the same as the ones
outlined below, the values presented here are those obtained from the whole sample (n = 80). Table 1 shows the descriptive data for the psychoticism groups across all the experimental variables.
As described earlier in the methods section, the sample was divided in two groups (low-P and
high-P) based on their psychoticism scale scores. Using t tests to contrast the groups on the total
conceptual expansion score, the low-P group relative to the high-P group obtained lower scores
on this task, t (78) = 2. 346, p = .022 (d = .521). A non-parametric test of statistical significance,
the Mann–Whitney U test, was employed to contrast the psychoticism groups on the measures of
the creative imagery task as the minimum obtainable score on the creative imagery variables was 1
which does not allow for the use of parametric tests such as t tests. The high-P group were found
to surpass the low-P group on the originality-imagery measure, U = 581, p = .045 (d = .455).
There were however, no differences between the groups on either the practicality-imagery score,
U = 772, p = .88, or the total creative imagery score, U = 680, p = .297.
The degree of association between psychoticism and the dependent variables were also analysed
using bivariate correlation analyses (the PearsonÕs correlation coefficient for the analyses involving the total conceptual expansion score and the SpearmanÕs q for analyses involving the creative
imagery scores). A low but significant positive correlation was found between the total conceptual
expansion score and psychoticism (r = .285, p = .01) suggesting that higher the psychoticism
score, greater the conceptual expansion. While no significant relationship was found between
psychoticism and both the total creative imagery score and the practicality-imagery score, there
was a low but significant positive correlation between psychoticism and the originality-imagery
score (r = .234, p = .037). The correlations between the three imagery variables and the conceptual expansion score were non-significant although there was a trend towards a positive correlation between the conceptual expansion score and the originality imagery score (r = .213,
p = .058).
Table 1
Descriptive data for both psychoticism groups across all the variables
Mean (SD)
Conceptual expansion: Total score
(a) Bilateral asymmetry
(b) Lack of appendages
(c) Lack of sense organs
(d) Unusual appendages
(e) Unusual sense organs
Creative imagery: Total score
Originality-imagery
Practicality-imagery
WAIS-Picture completion
WAIS-Similarities
Low psychoticism
High psychoticism
1.567 (1.080)
0.200 (0.290)
0.322 (0.340)
0.167 (0.282)
0.456 (0.367)
0.422 (0.384)
5.489 (0.844)
2.524 (0.477)
2.965 (0.530)
109.700 (8.573)
113.422 (6.174)
2.200 (1.335)
0.429 (0.405)
0.543 (0.391)
0.371 (0.408)
0.429 (0.346)
0.429 (0.367)
5.735 (0.805)
2.725 (0.403)
3.010 (0.502)
110.286 (7.439)
114.057 (5.578)
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A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
The results of the correlations between the variables under study are displayed in Table 2.
Interestingly, the creative imagery variables were found to correlate significantly with the
WAIS-Picture Completion subscale. Significant positive correlations were found between the
originality-imagery score and the WAIS-Picture Completion measure (r = .286, p = .01).
The practicality-imagery score also correlated significantly with the WAIS-Picture Completion
measure (r = .31, p = .005) as did the total creative imagery score (r = .361, p = .001). However,
no significant correlations were found between the WAIS subscale measures and the total
conceptual expansion score.
In addition, simultaneous multiple regression analyses were carried out with six independent
variables including sex, scores obtained on the psychoticism, extraversion, and neuroticism scales,
and scores obtained on the WAIS-Similarities and the WAIS-Picture Completion measures. Taking the total expansion score as the dependent variable, the multiple regression analysis revealed
that in the presence of all other variables, only the beta weights for psychoticism were significantly
associated with conceptual expansion (b = 0.285, p = .013). The multiple regression analyses
using the creative imagery measures as criterion revealed that only the WAIS-Picture Completion
measure significantly predicted the originality-imagery (b = 0.290, p = .015) and practicality-imagery measures (b = 0.266, p = .032). The regression summaries for each of the these variables
is shown in Table 3.
Table 2
Correlations between psychoticism, the WAIS-IQ subscales and the creative cognition variables
Psychoticism
Psychoticism
Conceptual expansion
Originality-imagery
Practicality-imagery
WAIS-Picture completion
WAIS-Similarities
—
.285**
.234*
.044
.133
.124
Conceptual
expansion
—
.213
.003
.032
.198
Originality-imagery
Practicality-imagery
—
.454***
.286**
.129
—
.310**
.099
WAIS-Picture
completion
—
.376**
*
p < .05.
p < .01.
***
p < .001.
**
Table 3
Regression summaries using (a) total conceptual expansion score, (b) originality-imagery score, and (c) practicalityimagery score as dependent variables
Psychoticism
Extraversion
Neuroticism
Sex
WAIS-Picture completion
WAIS-Similarities
Conceptual expansion
Originality-imagery
Practicality-imagery
b value
p level
b value
p level
b value
p level
0.285
0.007
0.002
0.098
0.061
0.190
.013
.952
.989
.399
.617
.129
0.162
0.039
0.127
0.078
0.291
0.125
.137
.714
.267
.483
.015
.294
0.086
0.113
0.066
0.150
0.266
0.031
.445
.314
.580
.198
.032
.802
A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
529
4. Discussion
The findings demonstrate that, as expected, the subjects who scored higher on the EPQ-R
psychoticism scale performed better on the conceptual expansion task than subjects who obtained
lower scores on the scale. Fig. 3 displays selected exemplars that were generated by the groups
which serves to illustrate this difference. The high-P group tended to be better able to generate
animals that are not prototypically like familiar animals by altering fundamental features, like creating bilaterally asymmetrical forms and excluding limbs and sensory organs typical of most
Fig. 3. Some exemplars of Ôanimals on another planetÕ that were generated in the conceptual expansion by (A) the highpsychoticism group and (B) the low-psychoticism group.
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A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
Earth animals. In the creative imagery task, the high-P group was found to surpass their low-P
counterparts in the ability to generate inventions that are original, unique or uncommon in an
abstract imagery task. Some exemplars are displayed in Fig. 4 that contrast both groups in terms
of originality-imagery where the differences in strategies adopted to complete this task range
Fig. 4. Some exemplars from the creative imagery task by (A) the high-psychoticism group and (B) the lowpsychoticism group to illustrate the difference between the groups on the originality dimension of this task.
A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
531
widely from making the figures fit to a preconceived notion of an object in a particular category
(e.g., a ÔchairÕ as a common object that falls into the category ÔfurnitureÕ) versus creating a unusual
invention that stems from a novel idea for an object in a category (e.g., a Ôclose combat pokerÕ as
an unusual object that falls into the category ÔweaponsÕ).
The trend for a positive correlation between performance on the conceptual expansion task
and scores on the originality dimension of the imagery task appears to indicate that there is
some underlying commonality between the two processes in that they both tap the tendency
to produce original, unusual or statistically rare responses, as is also indicated by the similar
performance by individuals on both these tasks as a function of psychoticism. However, the fact
that the correlation is relatively low may also be suggestive of the inherent differences between
the two creative cognitive processes with regard to their intrinsic complexities as they both tap
originality yet necessitate differential levels of abstraction during execution. In the conceptual
expansion task, oneÕs existing conceptualisation of animals guides the ability to expand the animal concept, whereas in the imagery task random figures must be mentally visualised and
manipulated to form particular object within a category. A greater degree of abstraction is
hence involved in the latter situation as there the conceptual structures drawn upon are not
as well-defined.
This point receives support from the finding that the pattern of performance on the creative
cognition tasks diverged particularly with reference to the association with the WAIS-Picture
Completion task. While performance on the conceptual expansion task did not correlate with performance on either of this IQ subscale, the contrary was true of the imagery task, as was critically
shown in the regression analyses. The imagery task lays more restrictions on the creative process
as both the elements and the purpose of the creative invention are predefined by the experimenter.
Solving the imagery task therefore requires more goal-directed thinking relative to the conceptual
expansion task where subjects are allowed substantially more mental liberty. In a way, the imagery task seems to tap processes that are associable to a scientific conception of creativity as originality plus functionality, whereas the conceptual expansion task draws on processes that fit
within an artistic conception of creativity. Given the intrinsic complexity of creative imagery task
where vividness of mental imagery and imagination are tapped, the level of intellectual abilities
appears to play a vital role in the execution of the process.
Furthermore, the results indicate that only originality in creative cognition appears to be enhanced as a function of psychoticism. In showing that the psychoticism groups differed in performance on the conceptual expansion task and the originality-imagery measure, there is support for
EysenckÕs notion of overinclusive and nonconformist thinking as a fundamental cognitive style in
high psychoticism individuals as originality in these processes was derived from a wider conception of relevance. However, high originality alone cannot be equated with higher levels of creativity per se and the lack of differences between the psychoticism groups on the practicality-imagery
and total creative imagery measures demonstrate that both groups show similar performance in
producing appropriate responses. Psychoticism then appears to only facilitate the ability to produce original, unusual or uncommon responses in a generative task and has little bearing on the
usefulness or suitability of these responses.
The results of the study are also in line with existing literature that link greater levels of psychoticism with enhanced creative ability (Eysenck, 1994; Merten & Fischer, 1999; Rawlings et al.,
1998; Woody & Claridge, 1977). The Götz and Götz studies (1979a, 1979b), for example, found
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A. Abraham et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 520–534
that visual artists had higher levels of psychoticism relative to non-artists and, moreover, that
greater degrees of success within a sample of artists was associated with psychoticism.
The present findings were predicted in light of diffuse top-down control and its effect on differing aspects of cognition in high psychoticism or high schizotypy individuals. Stavridou and Furnham (1996), for instance, examined psychoticism in relation to creative thinking and cognitive
inhibition in a negative priming task and found that in addition to high-P scorers producing more
unique responses on divergent thinking tasks in comparison to the low-P scorers, they also demonstrated reduced negative priming. The effect that task-irrelevant stimuli have on the processing
of information can be tapped in a Stroop experimental paradigm with a manipulation for negative
priming, which refers to the slower reaction time to a target that was a distractor in a previous
display in comparison to the reaction time to a target that is unrelated to the previous display.
This typical slowness in responding when the to-be-attended information in a trial is the same
as the to-be-ignored information on a previous trial was found to be diminished in the case of
the high-P scorers relative to the low-P scorers.
Reduced negative priming can be explained in terms of diffuse top-down influence on information processing. When trying to ignore a distractor, oneÕs focus is centred on the task at hand by
keeping the task goals in mind. With diffuse top-down influence, the spotlight of this focus is
broader so as to include more irrelevant information. As a result, the distractor item is more easily
accessed when it becomes the target item as it is not adequately inhibited and remains within the
purview of oneÕs attentional stream.
Although speculative at this point, we propose that this kind of diffuse top-down control gave
rise to better performance on part of the high-psychoticism group on the conceptual expansion
task and the originality measure of the creative imagery task given that a less concentrated yet
broader influence of oneÕs knowledge and expectations would allow for a wider conception of relevance and, consequently, the ability to generate more original responses.
Drawing from previous findings in diverse areas that explore personality traits, creative thinking and other aspects of complex cognition, this paper attempted to weave a common thread
through these domains by postulating a role for top-down influence on information processing
in select aspects of creative cognition, or more specifically, in the ability to generate original responses. The present findings could allow for the development of a broad framework within which
the neuropsychological underpinnings of creative cognition with reference to the operation of
other complex cognitive processes and personality variables can be more comprehensively examined. The study is limited in that only psychoticism in the sense of EysenckÕs model was examined
as a crucial personality variable in facilitating certain facets of creative cognition. Ongoing investigations are directed at understanding the role of schizotypy as both a separable and a related
personality construct to psychoticism with regard to its role in creative cognition.
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Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1041–1046
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Short Communication
Paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency
detection than skeptics
Michiel van Elk ⇑
University of Amsterdam, Department of Social Psychology, The Netherlands
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 29 May 2013
Available online 9 August 2013
Keywords:
Biological motion
Agency detection
Paranormal beliefs
Signal detection theory
Illusory pattern perception
a b s t r a c t
It has been hypothesized that illusory agency detection is at the basis of belief in supernatural agents and paranormal beliefs. In the present study a biological motion perception
task was used to study illusory agency detection in a group of skeptics and a group of paranormal believers. Participants were required to detect the presence or absence of a human
agent in a point-light display. It was found that paranormal believers had a lower perceptual sensitivity than skeptics, which was due to a response bias to ‘yes’ for stimuli in which
no agent was present. The relation between paranormal beliefs and illusory agency detection held only for stimuli with low to intermediate ambiguity, but for stimuli with a high
number of visual distractors responses of believers and skeptics were at the same level.
Furthermore, it was found that illusory agency detection was unrelated to traditional religious belief and belief in witchcraft, whereas paranormal beliefs (i.e. Psi, spiritualism, precognition, superstition) were strongly related to illusory agency detection. These findings
qualify the relation between illusory pattern perception and supernatural and paranormal
beliefs and suggest that paranormal beliefs are strongly related to agency detection biases.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Imagine yourself walking on your own through a dark forest. Each and every movement that you perceive will result in
the feeling that another person or animal is present. From an evolutionary point of view, incorrectly assuming the presence
of another agent while there is none (i.e. a false positive) is associated with only little costs, whereas the false belief that no
other agent is present while in fact there is one (i.e. a false negative) can cost one’s life. Accordingly, it has been suggested
that evolution has favored the selection of a hyper-active agency detection device (HADD) and that our perceptual systems
are biased towards detecting the presence of patterns and other agents, such as animals or humans in the environment (Barrett, 2000).
The perceptual mechanisms to detect patterns and agency may in turn be at the basis of belief in supernatural agents and
belief in paranormal phenomena (Barrett & Lanman, 2008). The perceived presence of other agents in ambiguous situations
and the anthropomorphic interpretation of ambiguous information may reinforce people’s belief in the continuous presence
of external agents, such as ghosts, spirits or gods. Examples of anthropomorphism abound: people have reported seeing the
face of Jesus in clouds, buildings and even on a cheese sandwich. Experimental studies on illusory agency perception indicate
that the tendency to detect meaningful patterns in random noise is quite high, with face detection rates above 40% (Rieth,
Lee, Lui, Tian, & Huber, 2011) and with substantial individual variation in the tendency to report illusory faces (Gosselin &
Schyns, 2003).
⇑ Address: University of Amsterdam, Department of Social Psychology, Weesperplein 4, 1018 XA Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
E-mail address: m.vanelk@uva.nl
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.07.004
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M.van Elk / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1041–1046
Several studies have shown that paranormal believers are indeed more biased towards detecting faces in scrambled pictures or in artifact pictures than skeptics (Krummenacher, Mohr, Haker, & Brugger, 2010; Riekki, Lindeman, Aleneff, Halme, &
Nuortimo, 2013). This finding fits with other studies indicating that paranormal believers compared to skeptics tend to perceive more meaningful patterns in ambiguous information (Blackmore & Moore, 1993; Brugger et al., 1993; Gianotti, Mohr,
Pizzagalli, Lehmann, & Brugger, 2001). However, three important issues regarding the relation between paranormal beliefs
and pattern perception remain to be elucidated.
Many studies have used static pictures and focused on face perception and the detection of meaningful patterns in meaningless noise (Krummenacher et al., 2010; Riekki et al., 2013). However, from an evolutionary point of view detecting agency
from movement related information (e.g. does a movement signal the presence of another animal?) is at least equally important for survival as pattern recognition. A well-established experimental paradigm to study the perception of agency is the
use of point-light-walker displays, in which participants are required to detect the presence of a walking human in a cloud of
moving dots (e.g. Troje & Westhoff, 2006). Accordingly, in the present study the relation between belief in parapsychology
and agency detection was investigated, by using point-light stimuli.
A related advantage of using point-light stimuli is that it allows determining the boundary conditions for illusory agency
detection to occur, by varying the amount of randomly moving dots. Previous studies have used scrambled or distorted pictures to measure pattern perception in believers (Krummenacher et al., 2010; Riekki et al., 2013). In the present study the
amount of ambiguity in the stimulus could be systematically manipulated, by including stimuli with both a low and a high
number of visual distractors. In this way it could be investigated whether illusory agency detection occurs only for stimuli
that are intermediately ambiguous (cf. Blackmore & Moore, 1993) or irrespectively of the level of stimulus ambiguity.
Finally, it remains to be determined which aspects of parapsychological belief are relevant for illusory agency detection.
The ‘paranormal’ is a fuzzy concept that involves different aspects, such as belief in Psi, superstition, belief in spirits and
magical thinking among other things (see: Lindeman & Svedholm, 2012, for review). As described above, the notion of
the HADD predicts that illusory agency detection should be primarily related to the belief in supernatural agents (Barrett
& Lanman, 2008). In the present study the revised paranormal belief scale was used (Tobacyk, 2004) and the relation between the different subscales (e.g. measuring traditional religious belief, belief in Psi, spiritualism, etc.) and illusory agency
detection was determined.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
A total of 67 (48 women, mean age = 28.3 years) healthy participants with normal or corrected-to-normal vision were
included in this study. 38 participants were recruited from the student population of the University of Amsterdam and they
participated for course credits or for a financial remuneration. The other 29 participants were recruited at a paranormal fair
(i.e. Paraview, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; www.paraview.nl) and were offered a financial remuneration for participation.
2.2. Stimuli
The point-light stimuli were generated using the software package PointLightLab (http://www.pointlightlab.com/). The
target stimulus consisted of an animated-point-set of 12 points, representing a human avatar walking on a treadmill at a
pace of about 1 step cycle per 2 s. Animated-noise-point populations were generated by using the motion drawn from
the same animation source and by randomly scrambling the location of each individual dot across the display. In 50% of
the stimuli an unscrambled walker was presented and in 50% of the stimuli a scrambled walker was presented. The walker
could appear at 5 different horizontal locations (i.e. 10°, 5°, 0°, 5° and 10° with respect to the center of the screen) and
could be walking in a leftward- or rightward direction. 6 different levels of animated-noise-points were added to each stimulus (12, 24, 48, 96, 192 and 384 noise points). Thus in total 120 different stimuli were used in the experiment, according to
the following factors: Walker (Unscrambled vs. Srambled), Location (10°, 5°, 0°, 5° and 10°), Direction (Left vs. Right) and
Noise (12, 24, 48, 96, 192, 384). Each stimulus was presented once and accordingly for each noise level there were 10 trials in
which a signal was present (unscrambled walker) and 10 trials in which no signal was present (scrambled walker). Stimuli
were presented against a black background at a resolution of 1024 768 pixels and each stimulus was presented for 2 s.
2.3. Experimental setup and procedure
Participants were instructed that they were going to see short movies in which a human walking figure could be present
or not. In order to establish that all participants were able to correctly identify the walker, before the start of the experiment
an example movie of an unscrambled walker was shown, until participants indicated that they recognized the walking human figure. During the experiment each movie was presented for 2 s after which the participant was required to indicate
whether he or she believed that a walking human figure was present or not, by pressing the left or the right button on
the computer keyboard (mapping of response buttons was counterbalanced across participants). In the instructions it was
emphasized that in case of uncertainty, participants should trust their first impression of the stimulus and not think too long.
M.van Elk / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1041–1046
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In case of correct responses, no feedback was given and the next trial started after 1500–2000 ms. In case of incorrect responses, feedback was presented on the screen for 2 s, indicating either a miss (‘incorrect: a human walking figure was present’) or a false alarm (‘incorrect: no human walking figure was present’). Performance feedback was included to enhance
participant’s attention during the experiment. At the beginning of the experiment, participants conducted 10 practice trials
to familiarize with the task. The experiment was conducted using Presentation software (Neurobehavioral systems, Albany,
CA, USA). At the end of the experiment, participants completed the revised paranormal belief scale (RPBS; Tobacyk, 2004).1
The RPBS consists of 26 items assessing different aspects of belief in the paranormal, namely: traditional religious beliefs, belief
in Psi, superstition, belief in witchcraft, spiritualism and precognition.
2.4. Data analysis
A signal detection analysis was used to analyze the data from the biological motion detection task (Green & Swets, 1966;
Macmilan & Creelman, 2005). The perceptual sensitivity (d0 ) was calculated by computing the difference of the z-transforms
of the hit and false alarm rates for each of the different noise levels. As a measure of response bias, the z-transform of the
false alarm rates was used, z(FA), which represents the distance in standard deviations of the response criterion from the
mean of the hypothetical noise-distribution. This measure was preferred over other indexes of response bias (c or b), as it
is independent of hit rates and thereby provides a more direct measure of illusory pattern perception.
3. Results
3.1. Covariate analysis
In the first analysis, the score on the revised paranormal belief scale (RPBS) was entered as a covariate in the repeated
measures ANOVA with Noise (6 levels: 12, 24, 48, 96, 192 and 384 distractors) as within-subjects factor.
For the perceptual sensitivity (d0 ), a main effect of Noise, F(5, 280) = 45.3, g2 = .45, p < .001, indicated that with an increased number of visual distractors d0 decreased. A significant interaction was observed between Noise and the RPBS score,
F(5, 280) = 3.6, p < .005, g2 = .06. This interaction reflected that the effect of noise on the perceptual sensitivity was modulated by the score on the paranormal belief scale (see also: Section 3.2).
For the response bias, z(FA), a main effect of Noise, F(5, 280) = 20.9, p < .001, g2 = .27, indicated that the bias function increased as a function of the number of visual distractors in the stimulus. An interaction was found between Noise and the
RPBS score, F(5, 280) = 2.7, p < .05, g2 = .05. This interaction reflected that the effect of noise on the response bias was modulated by the score on the paranormal belief scale (see also: Section 3.2).
3.2. Group comparison
The covariate analysis indicated that the effect of noise on the perceptual sensitivity and the response bias was modulated
by the score on the revised paranormal belief scale. In order to further investigate this effect, a between-subjects comparison
was conducted. Groups of Paranormal believers and Skeptics were created based on the median split according to the scores
on the RPBS and subsequently, Group was used as a between-subjects factor in the repeated measures ANOVA with Noise (6
levels: 12, 24, 48, 96, 192 and 384 distractors) as within-subjects factor.
As expected, a main effect of Noise, F(5, 290) = 215.1, p < .001, g2 = .79, indicated that the perceptual sensitivity (d0 ) decreased with an increased number of visual distractors (see Fig. 1). A main effect of Group, F(1, 58) = 9.5, p < .005, g2 = .14,
indicated that skeptics had a higher perceptual sensitivity (d0 = 1.5) than believers (d0 = 1.1; see Fig. 1). No significant interaction was observed between Group and Noise (F(5, 290) = 1.3, p = .25).
For the response bias (z(FA)), a main effect of Noise, F(1, 58) = 90.6, p < .001, g2 = .61, indicated that the bias function increased as a function of the number of visual distractors (see Fig. 1). A main effect of Group, F(1, 58) = 8.4, p < .005, g2 = .13,
indicated that skeptics showed a reduced response bias (z(FA) = .88) compared to believers (z(FA) = .52; see Fig. 1). Finally, an interaction between Group and Noise, F(5, 290) = 3.1, p < .01, g2 = .05, indicated that the difference between skeptics
and believers was most pronounced for stimuli with a low to intermediate number of visual distractors (see Fig. 1).
To investigate whether the groups selectively differed only in their bias for reporting illusory patterns (z(FA)) and not in
their bias for reporting real patterns (z(HR)), an additional analysis was conducted using the z-transformed Hit rates: z(HR). A
main effect of noise, F(5, 290) = 106.2, p < .001, g2 = .65, indicated that with increased noise it became more difficult to distinguish whether a signal was present. Importantly, no main effect of group was observed (F(1, 58) = 1.3, p = .26) and no significant interaction was found (F < 1), indicating that the groups did not differ in their responses with respect to the trials in
which a signal was present.
1
The subscale to measure belief in ‘Extraordinary Life Forms’ (ELF) was not used in the analysis of the RPBS, as it contained ambiguous items to which both
skeptics and believers would agree (e.g. ‘There is life on other planets’).
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M.van Elk / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1041–1046
Fig. 1. Perceptual sensitivity (left graph) and response bias (right graph) as a function of the number of visual distractors. Dark lines represent skeptics and
light lines represent believers in paranormal phenomena.
Table 1
Correlations between the revised paranormal belief scale (RPBS) and the response bias (z(FA)). Different rows represent stimuli with different numbers of visual
distractors. Different columns represent the different subscales of the RPBS (TRB = traditional religious belief; PSI = Psi; WTC = witchcraft; STS = superstition;
SPT = spiritualism; PC = precognition). Significant correlations are marked in bold.
z(FA) 12 visual distractors
z(FA) 24 visual distractors
z(FA) 48 visual distractors
z(FA) 96 visual distractors
z(FA) 192 visual distractors
z(FA) 384 visual distractors
RPBS
TRB
PSI
WTC
STS
SPT
PC
r = .448
p <.001
r = .291
p < .05
r = .429
p < .001
r = .408
p < .001
r = .155
p = .25
r = .066
p < .621
r = .140
p = .29
r = .046
p = .73
r = .204
p = .12
r = .189
p = .155
r = .062
p = .64
r = .050
p = .71
r = .491
p < .001
r = .302
p < .05
r = .394
p < .005
r = .427
p < .001
r = .121
p = .37
r = .009
p = .95
r = .166
p = .214
r = .029
p = .83
r = .202
p < .13
r = .243
p = .07
r = .103
p = .44
r = .072
p = .589
r = .325
p < .05
r = .349
p < .01
r = .352
p < .01
r = .221
p = .1
r = .115
p = .25
r = .07
p = .59
r = .498
p < .001
r = .380
p < .005
r = .448
p < .001
r = .363
p < .005
r = .149
p = .27
r = .101
p = .45
r = .441
p < .001
r = .379
p < .005
r = .448
p < .001
r = .363
p < .005
r = .157
p = .24
r = .061
p = .65
3.3. Correlation analysis
Significant correlations were observed between the RPBS score and the response bias for stimuli with 12 distractors, 24
distractors, 48 distractors and 96 distractors (see Table 1). In an exploratory analysis it was investigated which of the subscales correlated specifically with the response bias. As can be seen in Table 1, belief in Psi, superstition, spiritualism and
precognition correlated with the response bias for stimuli with a small to intermediate number ofdistractors.
3.4. Control for context-effects
Part of the present data was collected in a field-study at a paranormal fair, which presents a less controlled research environment than lab-based research. To control for the possibility that differences in the testing environment may have contributed to the effects observed a control analysis was conducted.
As expected, visitors of the paranormal fair had higher scores on the RPBS (mean = 3.5, SE = .19) than university students
(mean = 2.5, SE = .15), t(62) = 4.2, p < .001. Within the group of university students a significant correlation between the RPBS
and the response bias was observed for stimuli with 48 distractors (see Table 2). Within the group of paranormal fair visitors
significant correlations between the RPBS score and the response bias were observed for stimuli with 12 and 96 distractors
(see Table 2). Thereby this analysis indicates that the correlation between the RPBS and response bias is not driven by context, but holds to some extent within groups.
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M.van Elk / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1041–1046
Table 2
Correlations between the score on the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS) and the response bias (z(FA)) for University Students (left column) and visitors at
the Paranormal Fair (right column). Different rows represent stimuli with different numbers of visual distractors.
z(FA) 12 visual distractors
z(FA) 24 visual distractors
z(FA) 48 visual distractors
z(FA) 96 visual distractors
z(FA) 192 visual distractors
z(FA) 384 visual distractors
RPBS university students
RPBS paranormal fair visitors
r = .112
p =.50
r = .014
p < .94
r = .389
p < .05
r = .149
p = .37
r = .137
p = .41
r = .141
p = .40
r = .460
p < .05
r = .271
p = .25
r = .250
p = .29
r = .509
p < .05
r = .343
p = .139
r = .110
p = .644
4. Discussion
Three main findings support and qualify the notion that paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection
than skeptics. First, it was found that paranormal believers had a lower perceptual sensitivity than skeptics, which was primarily related to a response bias to ‘yes’ for stimuli in which no agent was present. This finding suggests that paranormal
believers were more biased towards detecting agency than skeptics. Whereas previous studies focused only on static stimuli
(Krummenacher et al., 2010; Riekki et al., 2013) in the present study a biological motion perception task was used in which
participants were required to detect the presence or absence of another human agent. Paranormal believers’ tendency towards detecting human agents may be related to a general response-tendency towards ‘yes’, a confirmation bias (Hergovich,
2003; Wiseman, Greening, & Smith, 2003) and a tendency to jump to conclusions based on only limited evidence (Brugger &
Graves, 1997).
Second, the relation between paranormal beliefs and illusory agency detection held only for stimuli with low to intermediate ambiguity, but for stimuli with a high number of visual distractors responses of believers and skeptics were at the same
level. This finding indicates that illusory pattern perception is driven by both bottom-up and top-down factors: paranormal
believers show a stronger response bias than skeptics for stimuli that in principle could afford agency-detection (i.e. if a human agent is present, it should be detectable) but not for stimuli that are obviously too noisy (see also: Blackmore & Moore,
1993). In other words: illusory pattern perception seems limited to stimuli that in principle could be meaningful (Riekki
et al., 2013).
Finally, it was found that traditional religious belief and belief in witchcraft were unrelated to illusory agency detection,
whereas paranormal beliefs (i.e. belief in Psi, spiritualism, belief in precognition, superstition) were strongly related to illusory agency detection. This finding extends earlier studies showing a relation between paranormal beliefs and illusory pattern perception (Krummenacher et al., 2010; Riekki et al., 2013). The tendency to over-attribute agency to random motion
displays may be primarily related to belief in paranormal phenomena, as these are often characterized by aberrant perceptions (e.g. seeing aura’s, spirits, etc.) and an emphasis on pattern perception in general (e.g. reading hands, coffee reading,
sand reading, etc.). One can only speculate about why no relation was observed between traditional religious beliefs and illusory agency detection. According to the cognitive science of religion, belief in supernatural agents (e.g. gods, demons or angels) may find its basis in perceptual agency detection biases (Barrett & Lanman, 2008). However, religion is a complex
phenomenon and encompasses beliefs, rituals, experiences and group processes among other things. As a consequence religiosity may be determined by a number of different factors such as upbringing, education and culture, rather than hyperactive agency detection alone.
An interesting parallel may be drawn between the present findings – showing a relation between illusory agency detection and belief in the paranormal – and research on schizotypy and schizophrenia. The schizotypal personality is often characterized by delusional beliefs, magical thinking and aberrant perceptual experiences (Brugger & Mohr, 2008; Eckblad &
Chapman, 1983; Peters, Joseph, Day, & Garety, 2004). For instance, several studies have shown that persons with schizotypal
personality features are more prone to detect meaningful patterns in meaningless noise (Galdos et al., 2011; Vercammen, de
Haan, & Aleman, 2008). Furthermore, it has been found that schizotypy is associated with a stronger tendency to see connections between unrelated events – a phenomenon that is also known as ‘apophenia’ (Brugger, 2001; Brugger & Graves,
1997; Fyfe, Williams, Mason, & Pickup, 2008). For instance, by using the ‘moving triangles task’ it has been found that participants with schizotypal personality features were more prone towards ascribing meaning to random movements of geometrical figures (Abell, Happe, & Frith, 2000; Blakemore, Sarfati, Bazin, & Decety, 2003; Fyfe et al., 2008; Russell, Reynaud,
Herba, Morris, & Corcoran, 2006). Given the close link between schizotypy and belief in the paranormal (Lawrence & Peters,
2004), the present findings extend these previous studies and indicate that in addition to intentional attribution biases, belief
in the paranormal may also be characterized by perceptual biases to detect agency.
In sum, the present study shows that paranormal believers are more prone to illusory agency detection. Thereby this
study adds to the growing literature showing that one’s religious or paranormal beliefs determine to a strong extent how
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M.van Elk / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1041–1046
one perceives the surrounding world (Colzato, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2008; Colzato et al., 2010; Hergovich, 2003;
Krummenacher et al., 2010; Lindeman, Svedholm, Riekki, Raij, & Hari, 2012; Riekki et al., 2013).
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by a VENI Grant No. 016.135.135 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO).
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Unconscious processing of multiple nonadjacent letters
in visually masked words
Richard L. Abrams *
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, USA
Received 13 August 2004
Available online 25 February 2005
Abstract
The claim that visually masked, unidentifiable (‘‘subliminal’’) words are analyzed at the level of whole
word meaning has been challenged by recent findings indicating that instead, analysis occurs mainly at the
subword level. The present experiments examined possible limits on subword analysis. Experiment 1 obtained
semantic priming from pleasant- and unpleasant-meaning subliminal words in which no individual letter contained diagnostic information about a wordÕs evaluative valence; thus analysis must operate on information
more complex than that contained in individual letters. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that analysis must operate on information more complex than that represented by individual bigrams (adjacent letters) or trigrams
(three consecutive letters). These findings suggest that while subliminal priming is driven by subword analysis,
the effective units of analysis are distributed widely across at least short (four- and five-letter) words.
Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Unconscious; Subliminal; Priming
1. Introduction
The research described here examined the possibility that unconscious processing of visually
masked words—words hereafter referred to by the convenient vernacular term ‘‘subliminal’’—is
*
Present address: Department of Psychology, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA 17013, USA. Fax: +1 717 245 1971.
E-mail address: abramsr@dickinson.edu.
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2005.01.004
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R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
limited to operating on subword elements as small as individual letters. This possibility arises
from recent findings (Abrams & Greenwald, 2000) that suggest that subliminal words undergo
analysis not at the level of whole-word meaning, but at the subword level. The present series of
experiments followed up on those findings by testing various limits on subword analysis, beginning with the intriguing possibility that only individual letters are analyzed.
To test the level at which analysis of subliminal words occurs, the present experiments used a
semantic priming, or congruency, procedure that has been the basis for numerous studies of unconscious processing. In this procedure a briefly flashed, visually masked word (the subliminal prime)
is presented just prior to a visible target word that participants categorize semantically (for example, as pleasant or unpleasant in meaning, or as a male or female name). Faster or more accurate
classification of targets preceded by same-category primes is the priming (or congruency) effect that
has been widely reported (for a review, see Draine & Greenwald, 1998). Ostensibly it is a semantic
effect, because it involves the primeÕs semantic category. However, several recent findings demonstrate that such subliminal ‘‘semantic’’ priming effects may arise from processing that occurs—paradoxically—at the subword level. These findings are reviewed briefly below.
The key evidence that makes plausible subliminal ‘‘semantic’’ priming in which analysis is at the
subword level, not the level of word meaning, is that subliminal priming occurs robustly only
when subliminal words have first been practiced as visible words. ‘‘Practiced’’ here means classified repeatedly into the same categories used in a subsequent priming task in which the words
reappear as subliminal primes. Such earlier-practiced primes will be referred to as practiced words,
and words that appear as primes without having been practiced earlier will be referred to as notpracticed words.
The evidence that subliminal priming requires practice is of two types. First, in the only studies
that have directly compared practiced and notpracticed words, only the practiced words yielded
subliminal priming (Abrams & Greenwald, 2000; which used words classified as pleasant and
unpleasant in meaning; Damian, 2001; which used words classified as bigger or smaller than a
computer monitor). Second, a similar pattern can be discerned in the literature when studies that
have used practiced words as subliminal primes are compared with studies that have used notpracticed words. Many (perhaps all) of the studies that recently have reported substantial subliminal priming effects have used practiced words (e.g., Dehaene et al., 1998; Draine & Greenwald,
1998; Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996; Klinger, Burton, & Pitts, 2000). In contrast, earlier
studies typically used notpracticed primes and reported effects that have been characterized as
small in magnitude and difficult to replicate (for representative characterizations, see Draine &
Greenwald, 1998; Forster, 1998).
The difficulty in obtaining reliable subliminal priming from notpracticed words suggests that subliminal words do not routinely undergo processing at the level of word meaning. The ease with which
subliminal priming can be obtained from practiced words suggests the possibility that, for these
words, priming is driven by processing that occurs at the subword level. Both types of words are assumed to undergo processing limited to operating on subword elements. For practiced words, however, this subword processing apparently is sufficient to produce ‘‘semantic’’ priming, because it
‘‘triggers’’ semantic activation associated earlier in practice with whole words in which the subword
elements appeared. This view that practice enables subsequent semantic activation through ‘‘triggering’’ by subword parts is similar to the priming theory of attention proposed by Treisman (1960) and
elaborated with regard to spatially unattended words by Broadbent and Gathercole (1990).
R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
587
Empirical support for this view is provided by the results of Experiment 1 and 2 in Abrams and
Greenwald (2000; see also Greenwald & Abrams, 1999, 2002). In Experiment 1, after practice in
which words were classified as pleasant-meaning (e.g., angel, warm) or unpleasant-meaning (prison, brutal), subword parts of those words were rearranged to form nonwords that were then presented as subliminal primes. As would be expected if processing of subword elements triggers
activation associated with earlier practice, the nonwords functioned as subliminal ‘‘semantic’’
primes that had the valence of the words from which they had been formed. For example, anrm
(formed from angel and warm) functioned as a pleasant-meaning subliminal prime, and prital
(formed from prison and brutal) functioned as an unpleasant-meaning subliminal prime. In Experiment 2, subliminal primes were again formed from rearranged parts of practiced words, but this
time the parts were combined to form words whose valence was opposite that of the words from
which they came. The unpleasant-meaning practiced words smut and bile, for example, contributed parts to form the prime smile, and the pleasant-meaning practiced words sun and glad contributed parts to form the prime sad. As in Experiment 1, these rearranged-parts subliminal
primes functioned with the valence of the practiced words from which they were formed, even
though that valence was now opposite their whole-word valence: smile functioned as an unpleasant-meaning word, and sad as a pleasant-meaning word. Thus, the processing that produced the
priming in this experiment must have occurred at the level of subword parts and not at the level of
whole-word meaning.
Additional support for the view that subliminal priming involves stimulus parts and not wholestimulus meaning comes from a recent experiment with subliminal number primes (Greenwald,
Abrams, Naccache, & Dehaene, 2003). Greenwald et al. gave practice classifying two-digit numbers as greater than or less than 55 (e.g., 16, 49; 73, 82). Subliminal primes were then tested that
were formed by rearranging digits of practiced numbers to yield numbers from the opposite category: for example, 64, 91, 27, and 38. As in Abrams and Greenwald (2000), these rearrangedparts primes functioned paradoxically with the less-than- or greater-than-55 value of the numbers
from which they had been formed, rather than with their whole-number value (64 and 91 acted as
less-than-55 primes; 27 and 38 acted as greater-than-55 primes).
Taken together, these findings—the difference in effectiveness of practiced and notpracticed
subliminal primes, and the effectiveness as subliminal primes of words and nonwords (and numbers) formed from parts of practiced stimuli—characterize subliminal priming as driven by subword processing, processing that suffices to produce robust priming when there has been earlier
practice with the words that then reappear as the subliminal primes.
The findings above are clear in establishing an important role for subword analysis in subliminal priming, but they provide little evidence about what information at the subword level receives
analysis. It is possible, for example, that relatively large portions of words are analyzed. This is a
conclusion compatible with the results of Abrams and GreenwaldÕs (2000) experiments, because
the subword parts in those experiments were mostly sequences of between two and four letters.
The part-word subliminal priming that Abrams and Greenwald observed could plausibly have
been driven by analysis that computed the identity of as many as three or four letters in each fourand five-letter subliminal word. On the other hand, Abrams and GreenwaldÕs results are also compatible with analysis limited more severely, to individual bigrams or even individual letters.
This range of conclusions regarding limits on subword analysis is possible because in principle,
any fully diagnostic subword element might suffice to ‘‘trigger’’ activation associated with the
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word earlier in practice. To illustrate this point, consider a set of four words classified evaluatively
in practice: the pleasant-meaning words hearth and miracle, and the unpleasant-meaning words
horror and enemy. Many of the individual letters in this four-word set are potentially diagnostic.
For example, the ‘‘y’’ in enemy is diagnostic because no other word contains that letter. After
practice with this set of words in visible form, analysis of just the letter ‘‘y’’ in a subliminal word
would suffice to diagnose the word as enemy. If it is assumed that some information about letter
position is analyzed unconsciously, then many other individual letters in the example would be
diagnostic as well (e.g., the ‘‘m’’ in miracle, the ‘‘m’’ in enemy). To the extent that small subword
elements, such as individual letters and bigrams, are diagnostic in actual (larger) word sets, analysis limited to such elements could underlie subliminal priming.
Examination of a number of word sets used in studies that have reported robust subliminal
priming shows that, indeed, quite small subword elements frequently are diagnostic. For example,
in the set of 50 pleasant and unpleasant words used by Draine (1997), approximately a third of the
individual letters were diagnostic in that they appeared in a specific serial position in a word of
only one category. This set represents the upper end of the size range typically used in studies
of subliminal priming with practiced words. In smaller sets, the proportion of small diagnostic
elements is likely to be higher. In Abrams and GreenwaldÕs (2000) Experiment 3, for example,
out of a total of 71 letters occurring in specific positions of the 16-word set, 54 were diagnostic
in their serial positions. Given the ample diagnostic information at the individual-letter level,
priming driven by analysis limited to individual letters is a possibility that deserves serious
consideration.1
The present series of experiments begins with an experiment that tests this possibility. In Experiment 1 the words presented in practice and subsequently as subliminal primes were chosen such
that, in contrast to typical word sets, no individual letter in its serial position was diagnostic. No
letter was diagnostic because each letter in a word of one category (pleasant or unpleasant in meaning) appeared in the same serial position in a word of the opposite category. For example, all the
letters in the unpleasant-meaning word slum appeared in the same position in the pleasant-meaning
words song, glee, laud, and warm. All the letters in the pleasant-meaning word warm appeared in
the unpleasant-meaning words weep, hate, hurt, and slum. Thus, analysis limited to individual letters in these words when they appeared as subliminal primes—that is, analysis of any or all of the
individual letters, as individual letters—would be equally consistent with the pleasant and unpleasant categories. (Analysis of the ‘‘s’’ in the prime song, for example, would be equally consistent with
the earlier-practiced pleasant-meaning word song and the earlier-practiced unpleasant-meaning
word slum). Such nondiagnostic analysis would not be expected to produce priming. Priming could
occur in Experiment 1Õs set of words only if unconscious analysis operated on diagnostic combinations of at least two letters (such as the ‘‘s’’ and ‘‘o’’ which appeared as first and second letters only
1
Notice that logically this possibility could be extended further, to features smaller than individual letters, if such
features were diagnostic in the way that letters are. However, sub-letter features are unlikely to be diagnostic because
typical subliminal priming procedures present visible targets in one case (in the present experiments, lower-case) and
masked primes in the complementary case. Upper- and lower-case letters share only some features; therefore features
that might have been diagnostic among the set of visible words may not be present in masked primes. For this reason it
is assumed that analysis of subliminal words occurs at least at the level of abstract letter detectors operating
independently of case and font (cf. Coltheart & Freeman, 1974; Smith, Lott, & Cronnell, 1969).
R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
589
in song). A finding of subliminal priming from these words would therefore rule out the possibility
that analysis of subliminal words is limited to operating on individual letters.
2. Experiment 1
2.1. Participants
Forty-eight University of Washington undergraduates participated in exchange for credit towards a course requirement. All had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, were fluent in English,
and were naive about the experimental hypothesis. Four participants did not complete the entire
experiment and their data were excluded from analysis.
2.2. Materials
A set of 14 words with unambiguous evaluative valence, half pleasant in meaning and the other
half unpleasant in meaning, was chosen so that, as described above, each letter in each word appeared in the same serial position in a word of the opposite category. All words were four letters
long. See Appendix A for a full list of the words. Because analysis of any one letter in these words
would have been nondiagnostic, the words are hereafter referred to as 1-nd words (1-letter
nondiagnostic).
The 14-word set of 1-nd words was used for both targets and primes. When the words were
presented as targets, they appeared in lower-case Arial font; when they appeared as masked
primes, they appeared in upper-case Arial. Targets and primes were presented in black against
a white background at the maximum text-background contrast allowed by the software controlling the experiment.
Masks in Experiment 1 were composed of fragments of upper-case Arial letters distributed over
a rectangular area slightly larger than that covered by five-letter words displayed in Arial (in anticipation of Experiments 3 and 4 in this paper, which used five-letter words). A set of eight such
masks was created; these served as the forward and backward masks in Experiment 1.
2.3. Procedure and apparatus
Participants were tested individually in brightly lit, sound-resistant small rooms, seated before a
computer keyboard on which they made their responses by pressing either the ‘‘D’’ key with a finger of their left hand (to classify a word as unpleasant in meaning) or the ‘‘K’’ key with a righthand finger (to classify a word as pleasant in meaning). IBM-compatible computers presented all
stimuli on 17 in. (diagonal) monitors operating at a vertical refresh rate of 120 Hz. Each participant underwent a single experimental session consisting of a priming task followed by a test of
prime perceptibility.
2.3.1. Priming task
Participants first received three 42-trial blocks of practice in which they classified the 1-nd
words, appearing as fully visible targets preceded by the masked letter string XXXX, as pleasant
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or unpleasant in meaning. These practice blocks were followed by six 42-trial data-collection
blocks in which the 1-nd words continued to be classified as visible targets, but were now preceded
by 1-nd words appearing as masked primes.
In the first practice block, participants were instructed to take as long as they needed to classify
each target word. In subsequent blocks a response window was introduced in the form of an exclamation mark that appeared on the screen for 133 ms following target offset; participants were instructed to make their classification response to the target while the exclamation mark was
present. (The response window procedure has proved useful in obtaining subliminal priming by
constraining latencies to be relatively fast and consequently maximizing the short-lived effect of
primes on target response accuracy; for a detailed description of the procedure, see Draine &
Greenwald, 1998; Greenwald et al., 1996.) The 133-ms response window interval was temporally
centered at 483 ms in the second practice block, at 433 ms in the third practice block, and at
400 ms at the start of data collection. After each subsequent block, the program controlling the
experiment advanced or delayed the window center by 33 ms in order to maintain an error rate
of approximately 35%.2
The sequence of events on practice and data-collection trials was as follows: fixation point (a
plus sign) at the center of the screen for 300 ms; forward mask for 300 ms; prime (or in practice
blocks, the string XXXX) for 33 ms; backward mask for 33 ms; target for approximately 333 ms;
exclamation mark representing the response window for 133 ms.3 To signal to participants that a
response had successfully been made within the window, the exclamation mark briefly turned red.
Masks were selected randomly on each trial from the set of eight with the constraint that the same
mask not serve as forward and backward mask on any one trial. Primes and targets were selected
randomly from the set of 1-nd words to yield approximately the same number of trials, across
each block, of each of the four possible combinations of prime-target valence. The same word
never appeared as prime and target on a single trial. Selection of primes (from the set of
upper-case 1-nd words) and of targets (from the set of lower-case 1-nd words) occurred without
replacement until each set was exhausted, then selection began anew (thus each item in each 14word set appeared exactly three times as target and prime in each block). Following the end of
each trial (marked by offset of the exclamation mark), a 500-ms pause preceded the start of the
next trial.
In the practice blocks, an ‘‘error’’ message was given after each incorrect response. This feedback was discontinued in the data-collection blocks, but end-of-block feedback was provided on
percent of targets correctly classified, mean response latency, and percent of in-window responses.
2
Specifically, the window center was increased by 33 ms if in the just-finished block error rate in classifying targets
was greater than or equal to 45%, or if error rate was greater than or equal to 35% and mean response latency exceeded
the window center value by more than 100 ms. The interval was decreased by 33 ms if error rate was less than or equal
to 20% and mean latency did not exceed window center value by as much as 100 ms.
3
In the initial data-collection block, with the 133-ms window interval centered at 400 ms following target onset, target
duration was 333 ms. If the window center was advanced or delayed from this initial setting, target duration varied
accordingly. Observed minimum and maximum values for the window center were 334 ms (target duration = 267 ms)
and 467 ms (target duration = 400 ms). However, for most participants the window center remained between 367 and
433 ms in all blocks.
R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
591
2.3.2. Perceptibility task
To assess the extent to which participants had conscious awareness of primes in the priming
task, that task was followed by a test of prime perceptibility in which trials were essentially the
same as priming-task trials, but the task was now to categorize the masked word (i.e., the prime)
that preceded the target. The same words were used for primes and targets as had been used in the
priming task. Trial sequence was identical, except that the exclamation mark no longer turned red
after a within-window response. Participants were instructed to disregard the exclamation mark
and to take as long as necessary to make an accurate response (earlier testing has shown that
obliging participants to respond within the window in this task substantially impairs accuracy
when the prime duration is long enough to be visible).4 Two 42-trial practice blocks were provided. In the first, the to-be-classified masked words were presented at a duration (100 ms) that
allowed them to be fully visible, and in the second at a duration (50 ms) not quite as brief as
in the subsequent data-collection blocks. Data collection consisted of four 42-trial blocks. Posttrial error feedback was given in the practice but not the data-collection blocks; end-of-block feedback on response accuracy and latency was provided in both types of blocks.
2.4. Results and discussion
In this and the following experiments, data were analyzed in terms of the signal detection measure d 0 . Computation of d 0 was identical for the priming and perceptibility tasks in Experiment 1:
hits were defined as pleasant-key responses on trials with pleasant-valence primes, and false
alarms as pleasant-key responses on trials with unpleasant-valence primes. Thus, in both tasks
d 0 reflects sensitivity of participants to prime valence, either indirectly (through the response to
the target, in the priming task) or directly (through the response to the masked word itself, in
the perceptibility task). For the benefit of readers who are more familiar with accuracy measures
of priming, results of the priming task are also given (in parentheses following the priming d 0 ) in
terms of accuracy difference (accuracy rate on category-congruent trials minus accuracy rate on
category-incongruent trials).
Data from two participants with outlying latencies in the priming task were excluded from analysis. (The slow responding of these participants indicated substantial noncompliance with the response window instruction.) For the remaining participants, priming-task trials with latency
greater than 1000 ms and visibility-task trials with latency greater than 5000 ms were omitted
from analysis.5
4
To minimize backward priming or other effect of the visible targets in this task on the responses to primes, subjects
were repeatedly and emphatically instructed to ignore the targets and attend to the masked primes. It is impossible to
exclude effects of target processing in this task, but any effects of target processing on prime visibility are assumed to
create no greater visibility than they do in the priming task (where targets are fully attended), and so the visibility task is
at least as sensitive a measure of prime visibility as the priming task.
5
These 1000 and 5000 ms criteria were chosen to exclude responses that clearly were slower than would be reasonably
expected in the two tasks. They are the same criteria that have typically been applied in other studies that used the
response-window procedure. The 1000 ms criterion excluded approximately 2% of responses in the priming task, and
the 5000 ms criterion excluded approximately. 1% of responses. The percentage of responses excluded was about the
same in the subsequent two experiments, which used the same criteria.
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R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
Fig. 1. Priming (A) and visibility (B) from Experiments 1–3. For Experiment 1, the data point in each panel represents
the 1-nd words (words in which no individual letter in its serial position provided diagnostic category information). For
Experiments 2 and 3, the filled data points represent the 2-nd words (in which no individual bigram was diagnostic) and
3-nd words (no individual trigram diagnostic), respectively. Open circles represent the counterpart words. Vertical bars
show the 95% confidence interval for each data point.
Fig. 1 shows that the 1-nd words yielded significant priming in the priming task and zero visibility in the visibility task. In the priming task, d 0 for the 1-nd words was .29 (SD = .19), which
differed significantly from zero, t (41) = 9.81, p < .001. (Accuracy difference = .12, SD = .07.) In
the visibility task, d 0 = .03 (SD = .20), t (41) = .99, p = .328.
The fact that the 1-nd words functioned as effective subliminal primes is clear evidence that
unconscious analysis must not be limited to operating on individual letters in their serial positions.
Analysis limited in this way could not have produced priming, because no individual letter provided necessary diagnostic information about the category of the word in which it was contained.
To have been effective, analysis must have operated on combinations of at least two letters (the
minimal diagnostic unit in the 1-nd words).
3. Experiment 2
In obtaining priming from 1-nd words in which no single letter in its position was diagnostic,
Experiment 1 showed that unconscious analysis is capable of operating on information more complex than that represented in individual letters. Experiment 2 extended Experiment 1Õs test by one
letter: Experiment 2 tested whether analysis is limited to operating on individual bigrams (two
adjacent letters).
Analysis limited to bigrams is a plausible basis for subliminal priming because, first, bigrams
have been implicated as a critical unit in word recognition (for a review, see Jordan, 1990).
And second, bigrams are likely to be highly diagnostic features even in quite large sets of targets
and primes. In the sets of 12–50 words typically used in studies of subliminal priming, a large proportion of bigrams will almost certainly be diagnostic.
R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
593
Experiment 2 used a variant of Experiment 1Õs strategy to test whether priming could be obtained from words in which no individual bigram was diagnostic. It was necessary to modify
Experiment 1Õs strategy because of the constraints imposed by bigrams as compared with individual letters. A set of words analogous to the 1-nd words, but with nondiagnostic bigrams, would
have required all the bigrams in one category to appear in the same position in opposite-category
words. Attempts to construct sets meeting this requirement suggested that they would have to be
extremely small in size and constrained to include uncommon or evaluatively ambiguous words
(thereby limiting generalizability of findings).
The approach used instead in Experiment 2 was to create a set of stimulus words that consisted
of two related subsets. The first, critical subset consisted of words in which no individual bigram
was diagnostic (here called 2-nd words, because each 2 adjacent letters formed a nondiagnostic
unit). It was this critical subset that provided the test of whether unconscious analysis is limited
to operating on bigrams. The function of the second subset, which consisted of what will be called
counterpart words, was to render all the bigrams in the 2-nd words nondiagnostic. Each counterpart word rendered nondiagnostic (‘‘countered’’) a single bigram in an opposite-category 2-nd
word. Thus three counterpart words were required to ‘‘counter’’ each 2-nd word. For example,
the three bigrams in the unpleasant-meaning 2-nd word nerd were ‘‘countered’’ by the pleasantmeaning counterpart words nest, hero, and lord. The three bigrams in the pleasant-meaning 2nd word soul were countered by the unpleasant-meaning counterpart words sore, pout, and maul.
All the words, 2-nd and counterpart, were presented as masked primes after first being classified
extensively in practice as visible targets. Because each bigram in 2-nd primes had appeared equally
often in an earlier-practiced 2-nd word from one category, and a counterpart word from the opposite category, those bigrams were evidence equally consistent with both categories and did not
provide diagnostic information. Analysis limited to individual bigrams in 2-nd words therefore
would not be expected to produce significant priming. Priming could occur only if analysis operated on diagnostic combinations of at least two letters separated by one other letter (such as the
‘‘n’’ and ‘‘r’’ which appeared as first and third letters only in nerd).
3.1. Participants
Sixty University of Washington undergraduates participated in exchange for credit towards a
course requirement. All had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, were fluent in English, and
were naive about the experimental hypothesis. Two participants did not complete the entire experiment and their data were excluded from analysis.
3.2. Materials
The 32-word set used for primes and targets consisted of eight 2-nd words (four pleasant and
four unpleasant in meaning), along with 24 counterpart words (12 pleasant, 12 unpleasant). The
2-nd and counterpart words were chosen as described above so that each bigram in a 2-nd word
appeared in the same serial position in an opposite-category counterpart word. All words were
four letters long. As in Experiment 1, the words were presented in lower-case Arial font when they
appeared as visible targets, and in upper-case Arial when they appeared as masked primes. A full
list of the words is given in Appendix B.
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The same set of masks was used as in Experiment 1.
3.3. Procedure and apparatus
Apparatus was the same as in Experiment 1, and the procedure was nearly identical. The minor
differences were as follows.
Each block in Experiment 2 had 64 trials (versus 48 in Experiment 1).
In the selection of primes and targets, there was no longer the constraint that the same word not
appear as both prime and target on any one trial. This was done to ensure that all the words in the
32-word set were presented exactly the same number of times throughout the experiment. (In
Experiment 1, the constraint resulted in very slight differences between words in the number of
times they were presented as targets.) Trials on which the same word appeared as prime and target
were, however, excluded from subsequent data analysis.
A third block of practice was added to the perceptibility task. Practice for that task now consisted of a block in which the masked words were presented for 133 ms, a block in which they were
presented for 100 ms, and a block in which they were presented for 67 ms.
3.4. Results and discussion
Data from one participant with an outlying value for latency in the priming task were excluded
from analysis. For the remaining participants, as in Experiment 1, priming trials were excluded
that had latency greater than 1000 ms. (Perceptibility task trials with latency greater than
5000 ms were excluded.) Also, data from two participants whose values of d 0 in the visibility task
were extreme cases (equivalent to accuracy over 80%) were excluded.
Fig. 1 shows that, similarly to the 1-nd words in Experiment 1, the 2-nd words yielded significant priming in the priming task and zero visibility in the visibility task. In the priming task, d 0 for
the 2-nd words = .10 (SD = .29), t (54) = 2.61, p = .012. (Accuracy difference = .07, SD = .10). In
the visibility task, d 0 = .03 (SD = .37), t (54) = .67, p = .508.
The magnitude of priming from the 2-nd words, though significant, was relatively small (.10
versus .29 for the 1-nd words in Experiment 1). One reason for the apparent small magnitude
of priming may be a greater number of slower responses in Experiment 2, owing to the greater
confusability of the words compared with Experiment 1. As a recent study has shown, d 0 from
priming data sets that have slow mean latencies may underestimate the actual magnitude of the
priming effect (Greenwald et al., 2003). This occurs because the effect peaks at quite short latencies
(350–400 ms), and this peak may be offset or ‘‘diluted’’ by responses with slow latencies that show
no priming. To determine whether this ‘‘diluting’’ occurred in Experiment 2, the data were analyzed using a method like the one described in Greenwald et al., 2003. Briefly, priming data from
all participants were pooled and then partitioned into bins defined by latency. The d 0 for each bin
was then calculated. (This pooling was necessary because there were too few trials to allow each
participantÕs data to be partitioned separately.) Fig. 2A shows the results of this analysis for the 2nd words. The pattern of priming as a function of latency is similar to that reported in Greenwald
et al. (2003). Priming reaches a peak at about 350 ms, and drops rapidly to zero by about 500 ms.
At latencies between about 500 and 600 ms, d 0 is below zero, a feature also present in some of the
Greenwald et al. (2003) data sets and possibly related to the negative compatibility effect reported
R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
595
Fig. 2. Priming as a function of latency for 2-nd words in Experiment 2 (A) and 3-nd words in Experiment 3 (B). For
each experiment, data are from all participants pooled and then partitioned into 11 bins defined by latency. The first bin
(leftmost data point) includes all responses with latency below 300 ms; successive bins are defined by intervals of 33 ms
except for the last bin (rightmost point) which includes all responses with latency greater than 600 ms. Average number
of trials per bin is about 280 (no bin has less than 100 trials). The data points show d 0 computed for all trials within a
bin. The abscissa for each data point is the mean latency for the responses in that pointÕs bin.
by Eimer and Schlaghecken (1998, 2002) and others (compare the results of the present Experiment 3). The partitioning-by-latency analysis thus reveals evidence of strong priming from Experiment 2Õs 2-nd words, despite the rather small effect represented by the mean d 0 computed for all
responses. Notice that the peak magnitude of priming in Fig. 2A (d 0 = about .6) is roughly six
times as large as the mean d 0 for the entire data set.
The counterpart words yielded significant priming too, as would be expected given that they contained more diagnostic information than the 2-nd words (each counterpart word had only one bigram that was nondiagnostic). For the counterpart words, d 0 = .24 (SD = .22), t (54) = 8.37,
p < .001. (Accuracy difference = .11, SD = .08.) Visibility for the counterpart words was just below
the .05 level for significance (d 0 = .05 (SD = .19), t (54) = 2.04, p = .046), again perhaps because
they contained more diagnostic information. Magnitude of priming from the counterpart words
was significantly larger than priming from the 2-nd words, t (54) = 3.20, p = .002.
The critical result of Experiment 2 is the combination of priming from the 2-nd words and chance
performance in categorizing those words in the visibility task. Processing of the 2-nd words in the
priming task must not have been limited to operating on individual bigrams. Analysis limited to individual bigrams could not have produced priming, because no individual bigram provided diagnostic
category information. To have yielded priming, analysis must have operated on combinations of at
least two letters separated by one other letter (the minimum diagnostic unit in the 2-nd words).
4. Experiment 3
By showing that priming can be obtained from subliminal words in which no bigram is diagnostic, Experiment 2 demonstrated that analysis of subliminal words is capable of operating on
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R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
information more complex than that represented by pairs of adjacent letters. Experiment 3 extended the test of unconscious analytic capacity again by one letter: in Experiment 3 the question
was whether analysis is limited to operating on individual trigrams (three consecutive letters).
Experiment 3Õs strategy was essentially the same as Experiment 2Õs. The set of words presented
in practice and then as subliminal primes consisted of a subset of critical words, and a subset of
counterpart words. No trigram in the critical words (called 3-nd words) was diagnostic, because it
also appeared in an opposite-category counterpart word. Each counterpart word rendered nondiagnostic (‘‘countered’’) a single trigram in an opposite-category 3-nd word. Thus, the design of
Experiment 3 paralleled that of Experiment 2 in that three counterpart words were required to
‘‘counter’’ each critical (here, 3-nd) word. For example, the three trigrams in the unpleasantmeaning 3-nd word alone were ‘‘countered’’ by the pleasant-meaning counterpart words aloha,
blond, and shone. The three trigrams in the pleasant-meaning 3-nd word great were countered
by the unpleasant-meaning counterpart words greed, dread, and cheat.
As in Experiment 2, both the 3-nd and counterpart words were presented as masked primes
after first being classified in practice as visible targets. Because each trigram appeared in practice
equally often in words from both categories, analysis of 3-nd subliminal primes that was limited to
individual trigrams would provide information equally consistent with both categories and would
not be diagnostic. Such limited analysis would not be expected to produce priming. Priming could
occur only if analysis operated on diagnostic combinations of at least two letters separated by two
other letters (such as the ‘‘g’’ and ‘‘a’’ which appeared as first and fourth letters only in great).
4.1. Participants
Fifty-six University of Washington undergraduates participated in exchange for credit towards
a course requirement. All had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, were fluent in English, and
were naive about the experimental hypothesis. Two participants did not complete the entire experiment and their data were excluded from analysis.
4.2. Materials
Two 24-word sets were used as primes and targets; each contained six 3-nd words (three pleasant and three unpleasant in meaning) along with 18 counterpart words (nine pleasant, nine
unpleasant). The 3-nd and counterpart words were chosen as described above so that each trigram
in a 3-nd word appeared in the same serial position in an opposite-category counterpart word. All
words were five letters long. Words were presented in lower-case Arial font when they appeared as
targets, and in upper-case Arial when they appeared as masked primes. A full list of the words is
given in Appendix C.
The same set of masks was used as in Experiment 1 and 2.
4.3. Procedure and apparatus
Apparatus and procedure were the same as in Experiment 2 except for two minor modifications. Experiment 3 used two similar sets of 3-nd and counterpart words, and the assignment
of these sets was counterbalanced, with half the participants receiving one set and the other half
R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
597
the other set. The number of trials in each block was changed to 48 in Experiment 3 in order to
allow the entire set of words to appear as primes and targets exactly twice per block (as had the
32-word set in Experiment 2Õs 64-trial blocks).
4.4. Results and discussion
The two counterbalanced stimulus sets had no noticeably different effect on priming or perceptibility, and the following analyses collapse across this design factor.
To maintain consistency with Experiments 1 and 2, data were excluded from participants whose
values of latency in the priming task were outliers (five participants had outlying slow latencies;
three had outlying fast latencies). Also, data from one participant with an extreme value of d 0 in
the visibility task were excluded.
Fig. 1A shows that the 3-nd words yielded significant priming in the priming task: d 0 = .10
(SD = .27), t (44) = 2.52, p = .016. (Accuracy difference = .07, SD = .10.) In the visibility task
(Fig. 1B), performance in categorizing the 3-nd words did not differ significantly from zero,
d 0 = .03 (SD = .43), t (44) = .40, p = .693.
Because the magnitude of priming from the 3-nd words was small—about the same as from the
2-nd words in Experiment 2—the partitioning-by-latency analysis performed on Experiment 2Õs
data was performed here as well. Fig. 2B shows that the relationship between priming and latency
in Experiment 3 was similar to that found in Experiment 2. Priming peaked at short latencies
(about 350 ms) and decayed rapidly to zero by about 500 ms. As in Experiment 2, responses with
latencies greater than 500 ms show evidence of reverse priming (below-zero d 0 ). The magnitude of
priming at the peak (d 0 about .5) was considerably larger than the magnitude indicated by d 0 computed for all data (.10). Again, as in Experiment 2, the many responses that lagged behind the
response window had the effect of offsetting the priming from fast responses, so that the mean
d 0 underestimates the strength of priming from responses occurring in the window.6
Like the counterpart words in Experiment 2, ExperimentÕs 3 counterpart words yielded significant priming, as would be expected given that they contained more diagnostic information than
the 3-nd words (each counterpart word had only one nondiagnostic trigram): d 0 for the counterpart words = .15 (SD = .20), t (44) = 5.15, p < .001. (Accuracy difference = .08, SD = .07.) Visibility for the counterpart words did not differ significantly from zero, d 0 = .004 (SD = .20),
t (44) = .14, p = .893. The magnitude of priming from the counterpart words and 3-nd words
did not differ significantly, t (44) = .96, p = .345.
Experiment 3Õs finding of unconscious priming from 3-nd words demonstrates processing that
must not have been limited to individual trigrams. No individual trigram in the 3-nd words provided diagnostic category information. Processing of the 3-nd words must have operated on combinations of at least two letters separated by two other letters (the minimum diagnostic unit in the
3-nd words).
6
The features common to the charts in Figs. 2A and B—d 0 that peaks at about 350–400 ms, decays to zero by about
500 ms, and that may be below zero between 500 and 600 ms—were found also when similar analyses were performed
on the data from Experiment 1.
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R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
5. General discussion
The present experiments are a continuation of earlier research (Abrams & Greenwald, 2000)
demonstrating that analysis of subliminal words occurs mainly at the subword level, not at the
level of whole-word meaning. Here several possible limits on subword analysis were tested. Experiment 1 tested the possibility that analysis of subliminal words is limited to operating on individual letters. Subliminal priming was obtained in Experiment 1 from words in which no individual
letter in its serial position was diagnostic (the 1-nd words); thus analysis must operate on information more complex than that represented in individual letters. In Experiment 2 priming was
obtained from subliminal words in which no individual bigram was diagnostic (2-nd words),
and in Experiment 3 from subliminal words in which no individual trigram was diagnostic (3nd words). Thus analysis must operate on information more complex than that represented by
individual bigrams or trigrams.
These results demonstrate that relatively complex subword processing occurs even for masked
words whose processing is time-constrained, as it was in the current procedure by the use of the
response-window method. It has been argued (by, for example, Naccache & Dehaene, 2001) that
the response-window method yields processing dominated by subword analysis because of the
constraint on response time. Whether procedures without response deadlines yield more elaborate
analyses is a question beyond the scope of this paper. What this paper does show, however, is that
even under the time constraint of the response window, processing occurs that is not limited to
simple individual subword elements.
In interpreting these results, the distinction made in Section 1 between practiced and notpracticed primes should be kept in mind. All the primes in Experiments 1–3 were practiced primes;
they were all practiced extensively as visible targets before they appeared as masked primes.
The present findings, therefore, apply specifically to practiced primes. The findings show that
unconscious processing can discriminate between structurally similar words (subliminal primes)
from small, recently practiced sets. The findings show, especially, that this unconscious discrimination involves the processing of multiple, nonadjacent letters rather than being limited to simple
subword elements like individual bigrams or trigrams. What the findings do not imply is anything
about the processing of notpracticed words. The two types of priming—from practiced and from
notpracticed words—presumably are driven by different forms of processing and draw on different
sources of memory (Greenwald et al., 2003). In the case of practiced words, practice apparently
establishes short-term word-category associations, enabling, when the words reappear as masked
primes, rapid unconscious analysis of orthographic features that triggers the practiced associations (Abrams, Klinger, & Greenwald, 2002; Greenwald et al., 2003). In the case of notpracticed
words, priming presumably requires more complex integration of features in order to access longterm semantic representations. While the processing of practiced primes involves discrimination
among small sets of practiced candidates, processing of notpracticed primes requires discrimination among essentially all the words in the lexicon.
The present results may complement the interesting recent argument by Kouider and Depoux
(2004) regarding subword processing of masked practiced primes. Kouider and Depoux argue
that ‘‘unconscious’’ Stroop priming from masked primes occurs only when subjects have partial
awareness of the primes: that is, they can process subword elements but not whole-word identity.
(In Kouider and DepouxÕs study, partial awareness in the absence of global awareness was dem-
R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
599
onstrated by subjectsÕ ability to discriminate the spatial orientation of a word, without being able
to identity the word.) It is possible that subjects in the present experiments had the kind of partial
awareness without global awareness that Kouider and Depoux describe. Subjects in Experiments
1–3 (and other experiments using similar display conditions) typically reported, in post-study
debriefing, that they could ‘‘tell that there was a word [the prime] present’’ or could identify a letter or two. But this partial awareness could have been responsible for priming in the way that
Kouider and Depoux suggest only if the awareness was of word parts large enough to be diagnostic. For example, in Experiment 3, awareness of the three letters rea in the 3-nd word great would
not have sufficed to ‘‘reconstruct’’ (in the terminology of Kouider and Dupoux) the practiced
word great, because those letters were also practiced in the opposite-category word dread. So if
Kouider and DepouxÕs argument does generalize, as they conjecture, to forms of unconscious
priming other than Stroop priming, then it must be the case that the partial awareness that underlies those other forms of priming involves awareness of complex subword units (not simply individual letters, bigrams, or trigrams).
From a broader perspective, the findings of Experiment 1–3 belong to an ongoing effort to characterize the kinds of operations that can be processed outside of awareness (and, by extension, the
kinds of operations that require conscious cognition because they are beyond the capabilities of
unconscious processing). That the focus of this effort has shifted radically over the last twenty
years can be appreciated by recalling GreenwaldÕs ‘‘two-word’’ challenge (Greenwald, 1992).
Greenwald (1992) argued that a benchmark test of complex unconscious processing might consist
of whether processing occurred for the combined meaning of two words, neither of whose individual meaning alone could be used to infer the combined meaning. Draine (1997) applied the
two-word challenge to such combinations (e.g., enemy loses) and found no evidence for unconscious processing at the phrase level. Subsequently, even the view that unconscious analysis occurs
for the meaning of individual words—a view held by the majority of researchers polled in Greenwald, 1992—has been cast into doubt by research showing little or no priming from notpracticed
subliminal words. A more appropriate focus for tests of unconscious capability may therefore be
at the subword level. The present research, in examining limits on processing at that level, might
be considered as, in part, a reformulation of GreenwaldÕs test as a ‘‘two-letter’’ challenge: whether
processing occurs for the combined information from two letters contained within a word. Experiment 1 showed that such processing does occur, and Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that the
two letters do not have to be adjacent.
Appendix A
1-nd words used as primes and targets in Experiment 1
Unpleasant-meaning
Pleasant-meaning
hurt
cold
weep
hate
slum
lose
gang
cute
help
warm
host
laud
glee
song
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R.L. Abrams / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 585–601
Appendix B
2-nd and counterpart words used as primes and targets in Experiment 2
Unpleasant-meaning 2-nd words and their
corresponding pleasant-meaning counterpart
words
Pleasant-meaning 2-nd words and their
corresponding unpleasant-meaning counterpart
words
2-nd words
Counterpart words
2-nd words
Counterpart words
nerd
doom
pain
hate
nest, hero, lord
doll, good, prom
park, sail, coin
harp, bath, cute
kiss
soul
flag
boat
kill, risk, loss
sore, pout, maul
flee, slay, snag
bore, goad, brat
Appendix C
3-nd and counterpart words used as primes and targets in Experiment 3
Unpleasant-meaning 3-nd words and their corresponding
pleasant-meaning counterpart words
Pleasant-meaning 3-nd words and their
corresponding unpleasant-meaning counterpart words
3-nd words
Counterpart words
3-nd words
Counterpart words
Set 1
alone
creep
minus
aloha, blond, shone
crest, trees, sleep
minty, pinup, venus
champ
great
party
chasm, shame, swamp
greed, dread, cheat
parch, warts, dirty
Set 2
bleak
worst
faint
bless, clear, steak
worth, horse, first
faith, gains, point
crown
grand
train
croak, prowl, blown
grave, prank, bland
tramp, frail, stain
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Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 1156–1159
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Acknowledgment
The Editor thanks the following people for serving as guest reviewers of manuscripts from November 7, 2008 to
December 31, 2009.
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doi:10.1016/S1053-8100(10)00237-0
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Ivan Limosani
Jeffrey Lin
Marjaana Lindeman
Axel Lindner
D. Stephen Lindsay
Pierre Livet
Sue Llewellyn
Shayne Loft
Jack Loomis
Lester Loschky
Peter Lovibond
Olivier Luminet
Juan Lupianez
Antoine Lutz
William Lycan
Steven Jay Lynn
Paul H Lysaker
Donald G. MacKay
Colin MacLeod
Rafael Malach
Susan Malcolm-Smith
David Mallard
Acknowledgment / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 1156–1159
Bruce Mangan
Raffaele Manni
Riccardo Manzotti
Giorgio Marchetti
Hans J. Markowitsch
Sander Martens
Yousri Marzouki
George Mashour
Oliver Mason
Michael E. J. Masson
Jennifer Matey
Mohan Matthen
Andrew Mayes
Ali Mazaheri
Kathleen McDermott
Patrick McNamara
Monica Meijsing
Alfred Mele
Lucia Melloni
Harald Merckelbach
Philip Merikle
Bjorn Merker
Janet Metcalfe
Thomas Metzinger
Banissy Michael
Christoph Frederik Michel
Jeff Miller
Bruce Milliken
Aaron Leonard Mishara
David Mitchell
Robert William Mitchell
Steve Mitroff
Nicholas Moberly
Cathleen Moore
James W Moore
Aidan Moran
Michael Morgan
Alain Morin
Tony Morland
Matteo Mossio
Steve Most
Michelle Moulds
Konstantinos Moutoussis
Notger Muller
Jochen Musseler
Samuel Myers
Hamid Reza Naghavi
Eddy Nahmias
Peter Naish
Robert A Nash
Maja Nedeljkovic
W. Trammell Neill
Katherine Nelson
Kevin Nelson
Albert Newen
Tore A. Nielsen
Ruth Elaine Nieuwenhuis-Mark
Ellert Nijenhuis
Valdas Noreika
Elisabeth Norman
Georg Northoff
Wim Notebaert
David Arthur Oakley
Sukhvinder S Obhi
Haluk Ogmen
Aude Oliva
Christian Olivers
Chris Oriet
James Ost
Morten Overgaard
Krista Overvliet
Edward Pace-Schott
Elisabeth Pacherie
Galina Paramei
Raja Parasuraman
Marise Parent
Josef Parvizi
Frederic Pierre Pascal
Jessica Payne
Marcus Pearce
Charlie Pelling
Fabien Perrin
Elaine Perry
Navindra Persaud
Kathy Pezdek
Mark Phelan
Louise Phillips
Gualtiero Piccinini
Steven M. Platek
Susan Pockett
Bruce Polichar
Jamie Matthew Poolton
Stephen Porter
Emmanuel Pothos
Pierre Pouget
Elfed Huw Price
Jesse Prinz
Wolfgang Prinz
Michael J. Proulx
Matthew Prull
Zenon Pylyshyn
Robert Rafal
Hannes Rakoczy
Arthur Reber
Patrick Rebuschat
Lynne Reder
Eugene Redmond
Eric Reichle
A.A.T.S. Reinders
Eyal Reingold
Ronald Rensink
Bruno Repp
Heiko Reuss
Georges Rey
Bert Reynvoet
Martina Rieger
Evan Frank Risko
Tony Ro
Acknowledgment / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 1156–1159
Philippe Rochat
David M. Rosenthal
Susan Rossell
V.S. Rotenberg
Gerhard Roth
Michael Roy
Jérôme Sackur
Noam Sagiv
Valerio Santangelo
E. L. Santarcangelo
Julio Santiago
Vedat Sar
Atsushi Sato
Magdalena Sauvage
Silvio Scarone
E. Glenn Schellenberg
Elizabeth Schier
Frederike Schlaghecken
Hank Schlinger
Ralph E. Schmidt
Thomas Schmidt
Werner Schneider
Jonathan W. Schooler
Michael Schredl
Jurgen Schroder
Johannes Schroeder
Johannes Schultz
Hartmut Schulz
Paul Schweizer
Eric Schwitzgebel
Alan Scoboria
Ryan Scott
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William Seager
Natalie Sebanz
Catherine Sebastian
Andrea Serino
Thomas Serre
Anil Kumar Seth
Terence Sewards
Simone Shamay-Tsoory
Stefanie Sharman
Gordon Shepherd
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David Shore
Mauricio Sierra-Siegert
Pilleriin Sikka
Michael Silver
Julia Simner
Jefferson Singer
Wolf Singer
Angela Sirigu
S.D. Slotnick
Jonathan Smallwood
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Saul Smilansky
Daniel Smilek
Patricia Smiley
John Smythies
John Michael Snodgrass
Ahmad Sohrabi
Hyunjin Song
Salvador Soto-Faraco
Celine Souchay
Sean Spence
Michael Spivey
R. Nathan Spreng
Arun Sripati
Giovanni Stanghellini
Craig Steel
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Marco Steinhauser
Victor Stenger
Catherine (Kate) Stevens
Richard Stevenson
John Stewart
Robert Stickgold
Joachim Stoeber
Tom Stoffregen
Anna M. Stone
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John Sutton
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Endel Tulving
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David John Turk
Joseph Tzelgov
Lucina Qazi Uddin
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Costa Vakalopoulos
Elizabeth Valentine
Katja Valli
Geert van Boxtel
Saskia van Dantzig
Wim van de Grind
Eva Van den Bussche
Martial Van der Linden
Maarten J. van der Smagt
Rob van Gerwen
Neil van Leeuwen
Marie Vandekerckhove
M. Vergeer
Justus Verhagen
Francois Benoit Vialatte
Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal
Ennio Vivaldi
Kai Vogeley
Kristen Volz
Gottfried Vosgerau
Martin Voss
Ursula Voss
Jiri Wackermann
Kimberley A. Wade
Graham Wagstaff
Eamonn Walsh
Erin Wamsley
Man-Ying Wang
Joel Warm
Florian Waszak
Edward Watkins
Marcus Watson
Daniel M. Wegner
Jonathan Weinberg
Peter Weiss-Blankenhorn
Daniel Weissman
Rex Welshon
Mike Wendt
Markus Werning
Geraint Wiggins
Sylvie Willems
A.D. Williams
David Williams
John Williams
Claudia Wilmzig
Richard Wiseman
Richard Wolman
Philip S. Wong
Erik Woody
Robert Woolfolk
James Worthen
Hal Wortzel
Pascal Wurtz
Eunice Yang
Yi-Yu Yeh
Garry Young
Tiziana Zalla
Hubert Zimmer
Sharon Zmigrod
1159 |
Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Edges, colour and awareness in blindsight
Iona Alexander *, Alan Cowey
University of Oxford, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 25 September 2009
Available online 18 February 2010
Keywords:
Blindsight
Colour contrast
Luminance contrast
Narrow-band colours
a b s t r a c t
It remains unclear what is being processed in blindsight in response to faces, colours,
shapes, and patterns. This was investigated in two hemianopes with chromatic and achromatic stimuli with sharp or shallow luminance or chromatic contrast boundaries or temporal onsets. Performance was excellent only when stimuli had sharp spatial boundaries.
When discrimination between isoluminant coloured Gaussians was good it declined to
chance levels if stimulus onset was slow. The ability to discriminate between instantaneously presented colours in the hemianopic field depended on their luminance, indicating
that wavelength discrimination totally independent of other stimulus qualities is absent.
When presented with narrow-band colours the hemianopes detected a stimulus maximally
effective for S-cones but invisible to M- and L-cones, indicating that blindsight is mediated
not just by the mid-brain, which receives no S-cone input, or that the rods contribute to
blindsight. The results show that only simple stimulus features are processed in blindsight.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Blindsight is the ability, possessed by many patients following destruction of the striate cortex (V1), to detect, localise and
even discriminate among visual stimuli in their clinically blind field by ‘guessing’, despite not consciously experiencing a
visual percept. Occasionally the patients say that they are aware that something happened but that it was not a visual percept, named type 2 blindsight by Weiskrantz (1998). In this paper we do not formally consider this distinction. Despite three
decades of research it is still unclear which stimulus properties sustain this ability and precisely where the processing takes
place. For example, the ability of hemianopic monkeys and patients to detect stimuli whose space-averaged luminance is the
same as the background, i.e. isoluminant, has been repeatedly demonstrated (for reviews see Cowey (2004), Stoerig (2006)
and Stoerig and Cowey (1997). However, the stimuli had either a spatially sharp luminance or chromatic boundary with respect to their background and it may be the ability to detect sharp luminance or chromatic borders that survives in blindsight rather than perception of other qualities of the entire stimulus itself, such as surface colour or texture or brightness or
shape. In this paper we describe five experiments, one on luminance and four on colour, in order to elucidate the properties
of the pathways that subserve the ability of hemianopic subjects to detect and discriminate such unseen stimuli in their
blind field.
Visual information is transmitted from the retina to the brain via nine direct projections (see Cowey (2010), Cowey &
Stoerig (1991), Stoerig (2006), and Stoerig and Cowey (1997) for reviews) and visual information can reach and be processed
at further stages in the brain via the interlaminar layers of the dLGN, the superior colliculus, the pre-tectum and the pulvinar.
These connections have been explored extensively (Stoerig & Cowey, 1997), but their role in blindsight, and how some stimuli sustain blindsight more readily than others is still contested. Traditionally, residual visual functions in monkeys were
* Corresponding author. Fax: +44 1865 310447.
E-mail address: iona.alexander@psy.ox.ac.uk (I. Alexander).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.01.008
I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
521
attributed to mediation by the scotopic rod system (Klüver, 1942, 1949; Leporé, Cardu, Rasmussen, & Malmo, 1975; Malmo,
1966), but Humphrey (1974) reported that destriate monkey Helen could navigate her complex outdoor environment in daylight, which surely requires more than rod vision! She certainly did not behave like human rod monochromats, who are severely visually disabled in bright light. However, it must be acknowledged that their vision is not identical to normal rod
vision. As well, Schilder, Pasik, and Pasik (1972) and Keating (1979) reported that monkeys with total removal of V1 could
discriminate between different wavelengths, as can human subjects with blindsight in their field defects (Stoerig, 1985),
even when luminance was varied in order to make it irrelevant. Cowey and Stoerig (1999) and Stoerig and Cowey (1989)
showed that rod and cone mechanisms operate in both the normal and the hemianopic fields of patients and monkeys,
and that the blind field even shows a Purkinje shift, indicative of both rod and cone function, results also shown by Brent,
Kennard, and Ruddock (1994) in patient GY. The retino-collicular pathway, rather than the koniocellular or pulvinar LGN
pathways, has been implicated in colour processing in blindsight. However, electrophysiological evidence (de Monasterio,
1978; Marrocco & Li, 1977; Schiller & Malpeli, 1977) indicates that there is no direct retinal input from the S-cones to
the colliculus, implying that colour discrimination should be impaired when it requires S-cone, blue/yellow, processing. Indeed, Sumner, Adamjee, and Mollon (2002), using the same reasoning, demonstrated that stimuli visible only to the S-cones
failed to produce the saccadic distraction widely attributed to the superior colliculus. But it should be acknowledged that
more recent evidence (Hall & Colby, 2009) does point to a pathway from S-cones to the superior colliculus. Ignoring the latter
for the moment, if chromatic information in blindsight is processed via the superior collicular, rather than a pulvinar or
koniocellular LGN pathway, blindsight should be insensitive to stimuli that isolate the S-cone mechanism. This prediction
is born out in patients who have blindsight following complete hemispherectomy (Leh, Mullen, & Ptito, 2006; Ptito, 2007)
but might not be true for patients in whom the blindsight followed damage only or chiefly to striate cortex. We therefore
tested two such subjects with narrow-band coloured stimuli, one of which would be barely detectable by M- and L-cones.
The experiments were designed to investigate the role of simple stimulus features such as colour, luminance, edges and temporal onsets in facilitating the ability of blindsight patients to detect stimuli in their blind field and accordingly to shed light
on what is being processed in blindsight.
2. Subjects
Two hemianopes (GY and MS) were studied. Both took part in the target localisation, and narrow-band stimuli studies but
only GY in the colour discrimination experiments because MS’s V1 lesion additionally and bilaterally destroyed the ventral
temporal region concerned with colour vision and previous publications showed that he was unable to discriminate between
colours even in his seeing hemianopic field (reviewed by Heywood and Cowey (2003)). In all four experiments the stimuli
were displayed on a computer screen and eye fixation was monitored on a large screen, visible to one of the two experimenters by means of an infra-red camera at the side of the display throughout all trials. Any trials where fixation was not maintained during stimulus presentation were eliminated but this rarely occurred.
Hemianope GY has been reported in detail elsewhere (e.g. Barbur, Ruddock, & Waterfield, 1980; Barbur, Watson, Frackowiak, & Zeki, 1993; Azzopardi & Cowey, 2001; Brent et al., 1994; Bridge, Thomas, Jbabdi, & Cowey, 2008; Cowey & Walsh,
2000). In brief, he suffered a unilateral lesion in his left medial occipital cortex caused by a traffic accident when he was
8 years old. In his left hemisphere the occipital pole is the only part of his striate cortex to survive, accounting for his macular
sparing of about 3°. GY has been extensively examined for his residual visual function in his hemianopic field and he retains
the ability to detect, localise and discriminate stimuli there. But even when he reports being aware of a stimulus he denies
having a visual percept, referring instead to ‘a feeling that something happened’.
Subject MS has also been reported in detail elsewhere (reviewed by Heywood and Cowey (2003)). In brief, MS contracted
herpes encephalitis in 1971 which destroyed most of the ventral temporal cortex of both hemispheres and in addition the
calcarine cortex on the right, leaving him with a complete left homonymous hemianopia. In his intact hemifield he is agnosic
for faces and objects and has total achromatopsia, which has been studied extensively. Surprisingly he has not hitherto been
tested for any residual visual capacity in his blind field, apart from his pupillary response, which is intact (Cowey, Alexander,
Heywood, & Kentridge, 2008). He was aged 61 at the time of the current investigation. Control subjects were not needed as
both experimenters could perform all tasks faultlessly.
3. Experiment 1: localisation task
Stimuli were generated using a Cambridge Research Systems VSG II/5, programmed with a Dan computer and visual basic
software. Stimuli were displayed on an EIZO 19inch monitor, calibrated using OPTICAL (Cambridge Research Systems), with
a viewing distance of 57 cm. The five stimuli were: a plain white 8 8° white square, a vertical square-wave grating (contrast 0.5) of the same size as the white square and with a mean luminance the same as the background, a Gaussian of the
same peak luminance as the square, a Gaussian of the same mean luminance as the square but of higher peak luminance, and
a Gabor of the same mean luminance and contrast as the grating (see Fig. 1). Background screen luminance was 10 cd/m2, the
same as the mean luminance of the gratings and the second Gaussian and the Gabor. The square was 25 cd/m2 and the peak
luminance of the two Gaussians was 25 or 50 cd/m2. Each block of one stimulus type contained 100 trials and GY completed
two blocks of each stimulus condition. The parameters for the Gaussian, Gabor and gratings were determined using VSG
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Fig. 1. Examples of the stimuli in the localisation paradigm. Top left: plain square; bottom left: Gaussian; top right: square-wave grating; bottom right:
Gabor patch. Subjects completed 100 trials with each stimulus type, and each stimulus appeared in any one of the four locations at random. For subject MS
the stimuli were 1.7 times larger in linear extent but centred on the same position. The central spot marks the start light.
software and the spatial frequency of the grating and Gabor was 0.75 cpd and the radial size of each standard deviation of the
Gaussian patch was the height of the screen in pixels divided by 20, and for the Gaussian it was set to 40. With GY the stimuli
were presented in either the upper or lower quadrants, at random, in both the left and right hemifields. Because of time constraints the task was simplified for MS by making the stimuli larger, 13 13°, and presenting them only in the blind hemifield after establishing that he could perform the task perfectly when they were in the seeing hemifield.
3.1. Methods
On each trial the subject fixated a white start light that appeared at the centre of the VDU. When the subject pressed the
space bar on the keyboard, the start light disappeared and was instantaneously followed by a 200 ms stimulus in one of the
four quadrants of the VDU, either in the good field (upper or lower) or in the blind field (upper or lower). Stimuli were equiprobable in both visual fields for GY, but were predominantly in the blind field for MS. The subject started each trial and was
instructed to respond as quickly and accurately as possible using the keyboard responses; upper left ‘q’, lower left ‘z’, upper
right ‘p’, lower right ‘m’. The four keys were prominently marked by blobs of plasticene so that the subject could rest four
fingers on them throughout testing and did not have look at them. Examples of the displays are shown in Fig. 1. MS found the
keyboard response too confusing and was only comfortable with a verbal response. Accordingly, the experimenter entered
MS’s verbal responses on the keyboard. Manual reaction time data were therefore not collected for MS. After each block of
trials the two hemianopes were asked whether they had experienced any kind of awareness of the stimuli but this was not
done after every trial, given the large number of trials and constraints on time.
3.2. Results
When performance with the Gabor stimulus, and its control stimulus (square-wave grating) were compared there was, as
predicted, a significant difference in performance for both GY (v2 = 24.355; df = 1, p < .001, 1-tailed) and MS (v2 = 3.945;
df = 1, p < .05, 1-tailed). A binomial analysis demonstrated that MS’s performance with the Gabor was no better than expected by chance (p > .05). A one-way ANOVA revealed a large and significant difference in GY’s reaction times
(F(1, 163) = 40.180, df = 1, p < .001). GY’s mean reaction time for the Gabor was 818.01 ms and for the grating 545.93 ms
(Fig. 2 right panel), i.e. GY was much slower to respond to the stimulus which lacked sharp luminance contours. The reaction
time in the good field for the Gabor was 681.25 ms and for the grating was 549.74 ms.
There was a significant difference between the percentage correct for the square and the first Gaussian, whose peak luminance was matched to that of the plain square, for GY (v2 = 10.940; df = 1, p < .001, 1-tailed) and for MS (v2 = 32.175; df = 1,
p < .001, 1-tailed). Binomial analysis demonstrated that MS’s performance with the Gaussian was no better than expected by
chance (p > .05). There was a significant difference between percentage correct for the second Gaussian, mean luminance
matched to that of its control the square 20 compared to the plain square for GY (v2 = 9.872; df = 1, p < .001, 1-tailed) but
not for MS (v2 = 2.240; df = 1, p > .05, 1-tailed). There was a significant difference between GY’s reaction times for the plain
square (578.4 ms) compared to the Gaussian (674.76 ms) (F(1, 170) = 2.845, df = 1, p > .05) and between the plain square and
the Gaussian20 (672.60 ms) (F(1, 171) = 17.664, df = 1, p < .001) (see Fig. 2 left panel). The reactions times in the good field
for the plain square was 601.80, for the Gaussian 651.51 and for the Gaussian20 597.42.
I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
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Fig. 2. Right panels: results of the localisation task using a square-wave grating stimulus or a Gabor patch. Performance declined for GY and was reduced to
chance level for MS when the stimulus lacked sharp contours. Mean reaction time was also significantly longer for GY in the Gabor condition. Left panels:
results with a flashed plain white square or a Gaussian white patch of the same peak luminance or the same mean luminance. Performance was impaired
for GY, but his reaction time was longer in responding to the Gaussian. MS localised the flashed square well but was totally unable to localise the Gaussian
until it’s peak luminance was raised to 20 cd/m2.
4. Experiment 2: red/green colour discrimination using Gaussian patches
Stimuli, generated using the VSG II/5 system as described in experiment 1, were 10° in size and presented in the blind
hemifield straddling the horizontal meridian. The stimuli were coloured Gaussian patches of either red or green, presented
on a grey background. Each stimulus lasted for 500 ms followed by a 50 ms interval and then another Gaussian patch of
either the same colour or the complementary (green or red) colour for 500 ms (Fig. 3). Subject GY, had to indicate whether
or not the Gaussian had changed colour. There were five conditions, where luminance was varied either for the background
or for the red or the green Gaussian (see Table 1). Note that GY did not have to name the colour, merely to say whether it had
changed.
Next, in order to assess whether GY could determine whether a Gaussian patch was green (9 cd/m2) or red (9 cd/m2) on a
grey background of 9 cd/m2, we used a similar procedure but this time only one coloured Gaussian was presented, for
1000 ms, and GY verbally reported ‘red’ or ‘green’. Following this, for 100 trials we presented a single red or green Gaussian
of unlimited duration while the screen was covered by a white card before slowly moving the card upwards over a period of
about 2 s to uncover the complete Gaussian, which then had to be categorised as red or green. Only then was the stimulus
turned off. Finally, for 50 trials, the screen was no longer obscured by the card. Instead GY had to close his eyes, and then
open them after the stimulus appeared on the screen as indicated by the experimenter. The purpose of both procedures
was to minimise any transients present when the entire stimulus is presented in a single frame and to eliminate all transients caused by stimulus offset.
4.1. Results
GY could discriminate whether or not the colour had changed at every ratio of red/green luminance and at two different
background luminances when the stimuli were briefly flashed (Fig. 4). Although he performed least well when the two stimuli were photometrically isoluminant against a background of much higher luminance his score of 87% correct was only just
significantly different from the condition where the background was the same luminance as the stimuli (Fig. 4, top left,
v2 = 3.911; df = 1, p < .05). All other comparisons were insignificant and he scored close to 100% correct (Fig. 4 top right
and bottom left). Despite denying any visual percept he described the red stimulus as ‘‘having a bigger effect”, which is
why the luminance of the green stimulus was increased to 20 cd/m2 in an attempt to make it even more salient so that it
matched the red in salience. But he still described the red as being easier to detect. Nor was there any significant change
in his excellent performance when the red luminance was reduced from 9 cd/m2 to 6 cd/m2 and the green was 20 cd/m2.
These results indicated that GY could tell the difference between a flashed red and green even when they had a Gaussian
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Fig. 3. Examples of the Gaussian blob sequences used in experiment 2. The subject indicated whether or not the Gaussian blob had changed colour in a 2interval task.
Table 1
Stimulus luminance of the background and the red and green stimuli in experiment 2.
Condition
1
2
3
4
5
Luminance (cd/m2)
Background
Red
Green
18
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
6
9
9
12
20
20
profile. However, it became evident that he was detecting differences in the salient stimulus onset or offset, or both. When
the stimuli and the background were all isoluminant and now only one colour was presented on each trial and it remained
there until GY responded by naming it red or green he scored 100% correct and explained that he could do it because the red
produced a stronger feeling whereas the green did not. But when the stimulus was presented behind the white card before
being slowly uncovered he scored only 54/100. The difference between the scores for the two conditions was highly significant (v2 = 17.160; df = 1, p < .001, see Fig. 4, bottom right). When asked about this he said that when the stimulus was
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Fig. 4. Percentage correct for the red/green colour discrimination task. GY could detect a sudden change from green to red or visa versa but this ability was
abolished when the stimulus onset was gradual or completely obscured. Top left: background luminance varies, bottom left: green luminance varies, top
right: red luminance changes, bottom right: onset varies.
flashed he could detect an event and that the events were different for red and green. But he could detect nothing when the
identical coloured stimuli were slowly uncovered, no matter what the colour on any trial (Fig. 4, bottom right). Since it could
be argued that the slow removal of the card might have ‘masked’ the coloured stimulus, the procedure was repeated by presenting the stimulus immediately after he closed his eyes, which he then re-opened on command. He was still unable to discriminate red from green (22/50) because, he said, ‘‘neither of them produced any feeling” (Fig. 4, bottom right).
5. Experiment 3: edges and temporal onsets
In order to assess the role of stimulus transients and edges on stimulus detection we used stimuli with temporal envelopes designed to minimise any transients present when the entire stimulus is presented in a single frame, and used stimuli
with and without Gaussian envelopes to evaluate edge detection mechanisms. A forced choice detection paradigm was used
and on each trial the subject indicated whether or not a stimulus was presented. There were two types of stimuli: a circle
with sharp edges or a Gaussian i.e. without sharp edges. The stimulus was either red (9 cd/m2, x = 0.596, y = 0.346) green
(9 cd/m2, x = 0.291, y = 0.556) on a grey background (9 cd/m2, x = 0.300, y = 0.316) or blue (5.5 cd/m2, x = 0.151, y = 0.075)
on a grey background (5.5 cd/m2, x = 0.300, y = 0.311), and the onset was either sudden or the stimulus reached its peak
slowly, over 1 s. When there was no offset, the stimulus remained on the screen until a response was made. When there
was an offset the stimulus remained at its peak for 200 ms and then disappeared suddenly. Four conditions were used:
(1) a stimulus with sharp edges and a sudden onset, but no offset; (2) sharp edges with slow onset of 1 s, but no offset;
(3) sharp edges and slow onset of 1 s but sudden offset and (4) a Gaussian with a sudden onset and no offset. The stimuli
were 8° in diameter and presented in the blind field with their nearest ‘edge’ 9° lateral to the fixation spot. There were
50 trials per condition, per colour.
5.1. Procedure
The subject looked at the fixation spot and when the experimenter said ‘now’ the trial was initiated and a stimulus appeared in the blind field, in which case the correct response was ‘yes’, or there was no stimulus and he had to respond ‘no’.
Responses were recorded manually and percentage correct calculated. The fixation mark remained on the screen throughout
and eye movements were monitored. The subjects were told that there would be a stimulus on half of the trials at random
and that responding ‘No’ on every trial was inappropriate; the procedure was therefore Yes or guess.
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5.2. Results
Fig. 5 shows that when the stimuli had sharp edges and a sudden onset GY was able to detect the red, green and blue
stimuli (binomial tests, all p < .001). But this ability was abolished when the temporal onset was slow (1 s) and the stimulus
was either green or red (all p > .05), but not when it was blue (p < .001). When the stimuli had a slow onset, but a sudden
offset performance was re-established for the red (p < .001), but not for the green (p > .05). Thus GY can use the onset or
the offset for stimulus detection. He could detect a red or blue (p < .001 in both cases) but not a green (p > .05) Gaussian.
(Fig. 5, bottom). MS was able to do two of the 12 discriminations. He could accurately detect a green Gaussian stimulus
(p < .05) and a blue stimulus (p < .001) with a sharp onset and no offset. Unlike GY, MS was unable to detect a stimulus with
a slow onset and a sudden offset, even for blue stimuli. (Fig. 5 top).
6. Experiment 4: colour discrimination: red/green and blue/yellow
This experiment was carried out only with GY. Visual stimuli were presented on a white background on 17-in colour
monitor incorporating a touch screen (Phillips UP2799) at a viewing distance of 28 cm. The stimulus could appear in any
Fig. 5. Pecentage correct scores in detecting a red, green or blue stimulus with sharp or Gaussian spatial profile, and different temporal onsets and offsets.
Only GY could perform well with several of the conditions but even he was unable to achieve better than chance performance with a green stimulus unless
its contours were sharp and its onset sudden and he was equally poor with a red stimulus whose onset was slow. (For interpretation of the references to
colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
527
one of the four quadrants at random, as in experiment 1. The luminance and chromaticity of each stimulus was measured as
before. On each trial a single stimulus was presented for 200 ms and was designated either positive or negative. A go/no-go
procedure was used. If the stimulus was positive GY had to touch its remembered position as quickly as possible i.e. a go
trial. If it was negative he had to refrain from responding for 3 s until the trial ended. i.e. a no-go trial. For each pair of colours
the positive stimulus remained the same luminance throughout the experiment but the luminance of the negative stimuli
was changed after each block of 100 trials in order to determine whether GY could discriminate between the two colours
irrespective of their relative luminance. Two discriminations were used; red (positive, go trial) vs. green (negative, no-go
trial) and blue (positive, go trial) vs. yellow (negative, no-go trial).
6.1. Procedure
On each trial GY had to touch the start light at the centre of the screen. This initiated the trial and produced a 200 ms
target in one of four quadrants; top left, bottom left, top right or bottom right. If it was the positive target GY had to respond
by touching its remembered location; if it was negative, he had to refrain from responding. Incorrect responses were instantly signalled by turning the display black. Correct touches were signalled by filling the previous stimulus area with bright
white light for 1 s. The inter-trial interval was 4 s, after which the start light re-appeared for the next trial. Trials were selfpaced and there were 100 trials with each condition.
6.2. Results
In this experiment the display was the same as in experiment 2 but only one stimulus was presented, for 200 ms, in any
one of the four quadrants on each trial and GY had to respond by touching its remembered position if it was positive and
refrain from responding if it was negative. The stimuli were spatially of uniform colour and luminance with a sharp chromatic border with the 10 cd/m2 background. The luminance of the standard red stimulus was 2 cd/m2 in a further attempt
to reduce its salience. When the luminance of the green stimulus was titrated down in relation to the red stimulus, GY remained able to detect a difference between red and green when green was 46 cd/m2, 27 cd/m2, 18 cd/m2 (p < .001), 5.5 cd/m2
or 2.3 cd/m2 (p < .01), but not when green was 13.5 cd/m2 or 7.5 cd/m2 (p > .05). In the latter conditions he said that he was
still aware of the stimuli but that they produced the same ‘feeling’. When a similar procedure was used with blue positive,
5.5 cd/m2, and yellow negative and the luminance of the yellow was titrated, his excellent performance when yellow luminance was 5.5, 6.5. 10, or 28 cd/m2 (about 70–90% correct, p < .001 in all cases) was replaced with chance levels of responding (when it was 12.4, 14, 18.5 or 23 cd/m2 (p > .05). Again in the difficult pairings he reported that ‘‘the two colours gave him
the same impression”. In other words he was responding to salience rather than only to hue, the salience varying with the
luminance of the colours (Fig. 6). Of course, salience might be mediated by an interaction between the hue and luminance of
the stimuli if both are being processed in blindsight.
7. Experiment 5: narrow-band colours
There is evidence that the S-cones provide no direct input to the superior colliculus (e.g. Sumner et al., 2002). If blindsight
is mediated chiefly by the superior colliculus, as some experiments indicate, blindsight should not be present with stimuli
that can only be detected by S-cones. Experiment 5 investigated this. Unfortunately VDU phosphor emissions are broad-band
and any ‘pure’ blue stimulus generated by exciting only the blue gun will stimulate not only S-cones but also L and M-cones,
albeit to a lesser degree. In order to circumvent this, a tritanic confusion line (Smithson, Sumner, & Mollon, 2003) for any
given subject can be calculated, thus ensuring that stimuli really do isolate the S-cones. Although this is straightforward
in subjects with normal vision, it is very difficult to achieve in blindsighted subjects. One could assume that the two hemifields are similar with respect to their chromatic properties, in which case the tritanopic confusion line could be determined
in the good field, then translated to the blind field. However, there is extensive transneuronal retrograde retinal degeneration
of retinal ganglion cells following ablation of the striate cortex and there is therefore no assurance that the two hemifields
are the same. Furthermore, as this retinal degeneration is selective for the colour-opponent P ganglion cells (Cowey, Stoerig,
& Perry, 1989), it would not be surprising if the tritanopic confusion lines in blindsight and real sight differed substantially.
Accordingly we avoided the problem of trying to match the line in the two hemifields and instead we assessed whether GY
and MS could detect or discriminate a range of narrow-band stimuli in their blindfield. This was done by using a series of
5 5 cm interference filters (Schott, Glaswerke) which transmitted light of different peak wavelengths with a band-width
of 10–12 nm at half height. The filters were calibrated by a spectrophotometer (Perkin–Elmer Lambda Series/PECSS) and
their characteristics are shown in Fig. 7 (top). A Kodak carousel S-AV 2020 projector was mounted immediately behind
the subject’s shoulder on his blind side, making it possible to project an intense beam of narrow-band light on a large white
card 57 cm in front of the subject. The shutter in the projector could be programmed to deliver a stimulus for any period of
time. The circular stimulus subtended 10° for GY and 20° for MS and its nearest edge in the blind field was 10° from the fixation point on the white card. Focal lighting was arranged so that the sighted hemifield was flooded with white light at a
mean intensity of about 70 cd/m2, leaving the background of the blind hemifield in the region of the stimulus at 10 cd/m2
for GY and 2 cd/m2 for MS. Eye movements were monitored throughout.
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I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
Fig. 6. Results of experiment 4. Discrimination between red and green and between blue and yellow at different relative luminances of the two stimuli,
which were presented singly. GY was unable to score at better than chance levels at certain luminance ratios, indicating that colour discrimination
independent of other stimulus properties was absent.
7.1. Procedure
On each trial, signalled verbally by the experimenter, a single stimulus was presented for 500 ms, either before or after a
blank stimulus (i.e. no stimulus) for 500 ms, at random and with an interval of 500 ms between them. The subjects had to
report whether the stimulus appeared in the first or second interval. Six different filters were used (Table 2) with the same
filter throughout each block. In addition we carried out three further conditions on patient GY. First, GY had to guess whether
the narrow-band stimulus was red or blue (18 cd/m2). Second, in order to minimise the transients present at stimulus onset
we repeated this condition but GY closed his eyes prior to stimulus presentation, and opened them only after the stimulus
had appeared (as signalled by the experimenter), and indicated whether the stimulus was red or blue within 5 s (before the
stimulus was removed). Finally he was asked to repeat the previous condition, but on half the trials the stimulus was red as
before and on half it was blank, rather than blue. GY indicated whether there was a stimulus or not. The purpose of this test
was to minimise any transients present when the entire stimulus is presented in a single frame and to eliminate all transients caused by stimulus offset.
7.2. Results
As shown in Fig. 8. GY scored 100% correct for 4 of the coloured stimuli and his poorest score was 87% with the deep blue
stimulus that peaked at 426 nm. MS was less successful but still scored between 65% and 83% with all the stimuli other than
deep red (Fig. 8). After each block of 100 trials with a given stimulus both subjects were asked what they had experienced, if
anything. GY was confident that he could tell that ‘‘something happened in his blind field” with all the colours except deep
blue 426 nm and green 514 nm, which he said hardly ever elicited any experience; yet he scored 87% with the former and
100% with the latter, which amounts to pure guesswork, i.e. blindsight. In contrast, MS struggled to describe how he decided
on the correct interval and said he ‘‘thought he might know the right one”. He often took several seconds to make up his mind
529
I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
Fig. 7. Top: transmission characteristics of the seven narrow-band stimuli used in experiment 5. The four symbols near the top of the curves indicate, from
left to right, the absorption maxima for the S-cones, rods, M-cones and L-cones. The numbers indicate the filter reference number. Bottom: mean
absorbance spectra for the four human photoreceptors (redrawn from Dartnall, Bowmaker, & Mollon, 1983); filled circles, rods; squares, S-cones; triangles,
M-cones; plain circles, L-cones.
Table 2
Properties of narrow-band stimuli used in experiment 4.
Filter
Peak wavelength (nm)
Peak transmittance
cd/m2
4
2
6
5
1
1
3
426
462
464
514
529
529
629
.51
.49
.58
.59
.50
.54
.35
2.1
12
18
12
12
18
18
and said that he ‘‘was just doing his best to guess”. No feedback about performance was given until the end of each block and
GY thought he had scored no better than chance with the two colours that elicited no feeling. MS was pleased to find that he
had scored so well. Unlike GY, MS did not score better than expected by random responding to the deep red stimulus, a point
taken up in the discussion. Finally, and revealingly, GY scored 46/50 when asked to discriminate between a red and blue narrow-band stimulus, but only 24/50 when he was asked to close his eyes, and open them after the onset of the stimulus (indicated by the experimenter). Repeating this paradigm but with a red and blank, rather than red and blue stimulus,
demonstrated that GY was unable to detect the presence of the stimulus (23/50) under these conditions.
8. Discussion
The performance of both hemianopic subjects on a variety of visual discrimination tasks varied substantially, even within
a particular discrimination paradigm, according to changes in the luminance, contrast, wavelength and onset–offset
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I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
Fig. 8. Performance on two-interval forced-choice task with narrow-band stimuli. Both GY and MS could discriminate short-wavelength stimuli in their
blind field, but unlike GY, MS could not detect or discriminate red (629 nm).
characteristics of the stimuli. The five main tasks are discussed separately before a general discussion of the implications of
the results for ideas about blindsight.
8.1. Experiment 1: target localisation
GY’s reaction time in the localisation task was lengthened when stimuli lacked any sharp luminance borders, as with
Gabors and Gaussians, but his performance in both conditions was significantly above chance; it was merely impaired
rather than abolished under these conditions. This is contrary to MS’s performance, which was reduced to chance levels
with both the Gabor and Gaussian stimuli compared to their sharp-edged controls. Not only does this highlight the
importance of sharp boundaries, it shows that the latter stimuli could not have been detected by stray light because discernable light scatter would be similar for both stimulus pairs. As eliminating the sharp boundaries significantly impaired
rather then abolished performance in GY, it is impossible to determine from this experiment whether other properties
such as colour and texture may also contribute to an object’s salience. Although the sharp edge was eliminated it is possible that GY could not detect the Gaussian function from its onset to peak in its entirety, but rather from a point along
that curve, thus resulting in a perceived ‘smaller’ stimulus. By varying the point of interpolation of the Gaussian or Gabor
function it should be possible to investigate the existence of a null point, and the sensitivity of edge detection mechanisms in blindsight with varying stimulus edges, and determine whether it is possible to impair blindsight, perhaps to
the point of abolishing it in this way. Whatever the outcome of such further experiments these results indicate that processing stimulus properties such as colour, surface or texture is intact, and that the ability of blindsight patients to detect
isoluminant stimuli is not solely attributable to luminance boundaries. Unlike GY, MS described himself as ‘‘flummoxed”
by the elimination of sharp borders in the stimuli, and he performed no better than chance. This is consistent with the
extensive damage to his extra-striate ventral visual pathway, which is intact in GY, and his denial of being aware of any
stimulus.
8.2. Experiment 2: coloured Gaussians
GY could detect a colour change from red to green or vice versa when both stimuli had sharp temporal onsets and offsets,
and he could correctly name a single colour as red or green. But the latter ability was abolished when the stimulus was
slowly uncovered, regardless of whether the colour was red or green, and was similarly abolished when the stimulus was
presented with his eyes closed and he had to identify the colour after opening his eyes while the stimulus remained in view
for up to 5 s. This suggests that the onset and/or offset of the stimulus, as well as the sharpness of its boundary, is paramount.
Thus, although Gabor and Gaussian patches of luminance stimuli impaired blindsight (experiment 1), they did not do so with
the coloured stimuli used in this experiment. Although this was a discrimination task, rather than a localisation task, coloured stimuli appear to have their own salience, which further supports the idea that some chromatic processing mechanisms are intact in blindsight.
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I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
8.3. Experiment 3: edges and temporal onsets
The results could hardly be clearer. MS only responded reliably to the blue stimulus with sharp spatial and temporal onset. GY performed more effectively, i.e. to blue stimuli whatever their spatial and temporal properties and to red except
when it had a slow onset. As with luminance stimuli (Barbur, Harlow, & Weiskrantz, 1994) the subjects were responding
to spatial and temporal properties of the coloured stimuli rather than to their chroma, as confirmed in experiment 4. The
excellent performance with blue stimuli may indicate that it is mediated by rods, whose quantum catch at mesopic viewing
conditions will be substantial.
8.4. Experiment 4: colour discriminations
Green/red: GY could usually discriminate the difference between red and green. But when the red stimulus was 2 cd/m2
his performance was impaired when the green was 13.6 cd/m2 or 7.5 cd/m2 (p > .05) although not when the green was at the
higher values of 46 cd/m2, 27 cd/m2 18.3 cd/m2or the lower values of 2.3 cd/m2 and 5.5 cd/m2 (p < .01). Thus the mechanism
of red/green colour discrimination in GY must be different from that in normal vision in that for GY there is a luminance ratio
at which the difference between green and red becomes undetectable. Further, at this point GY reported that the stimuli produced the same ‘feeling’, i.e. their salience became matched. Interestingly, when cone contrasts are calculated for each stimulus (i.e. (bgL stL)/(bgL + stL) for the L-cones and (bgS stS)/(bgS + stS) for the S-cones where bg = background and
st = stimulus) the results can be predicted according the S-cone excitation, i.e. the stimuli GY was unable to tell apart
(red 2 cd/m2 and green 13.6 cd/m2) have the smallest difference between the S-cone excitation induced by red or green
(see Table 3). Whether rods might also be activated is discussed below.
Blue/yellow: As with green and red, there was a luminance ratio at which discrimination of blue from yellow became
impossible for GY in his hemianopic field. Although he could discriminate between blue and yellow when the yellow was
5.5, 6.5, 10, 23 and 28.5 cd/m2 (p < .01) he failed to do so when it was 12.5, 14 or 18.5 cd/m2 (p > .05). This suggests that blue
– like red – is a particularly salient stimulus for him but that if yellow is made much more luminously intense it becomes as
salient as the blue and accordingly indistinguishable from the blue.
8.5. Experiment 5: narrow-band stimuli
Both GY and MS could discriminate and detect short wavelength blue stimuli in their blind field. Unlike GY, MS was unable to detect or discriminate red. This is contrary to what was expected if blindsight is entirely mediated by the superior
colliculi, which lack any input from S-cones, and if the narrow-band blue which peaked at 427 nm, does not stimulate Lcones which peak at 564–580 nm (with a range of 500–700 nm) or M-cones which peak at and 534–545 nm (range 450–
630 nm) (see Fig. 7 bottom). Either there are other pathways, as argued by Stoerig and Cowey (1992) and Cowey and Stoerig
(1999) who found that spectral sensitivity of hemianopic patients and macaque monkeys was not selectively impaired at
short wavelengths or, alternatively, GY and MS were detecting the narrow-band stimuli via their rods, whose peak absorbance is 498 nm and which do contribute to the collicular input. All the testing was carried out at mesopic adaptation levels
and rods must have contributed. All investigators of residual visual sensitivity following damage to V1 (from Klüver, 1942,
onward) have found that low levels of ambient light assist, or are even necessary for, residual visual processing in the blind
field. This might also explain why MS, whose lesion is very much larger and destroys almost the entire ventral temporal cortex, could not detect or discriminate the narrow-band red stimulus, which peaked at 630 nm, well outside the effective range
of rods. Perhaps the most illuminating result with narrow-band stimuli was GY’s inability, when the abrupt onset and offset
were removed, to discriminate between red and blue or red and blank, which is consistent with the old notion that the superior colliculi are especially effective at detecting transients.
There is an important rider to the arguments above. It is known that the sensitivity of the M and L-cones is sufficiently
broad for them to respond weakly to wavelengths as short as 426 nm (e.g. Stockman & Sharpe, 1999), a fact not obvious from
the customary normalised sensitivities shown in Fig. 7. However, although the L and M-cones do have a quantum catch right
Table 3
Cone excitation for the stimuli used in experiment 4.
Luminance
Y
x
y
L-cone
S-cone
Performance
Red
125
150
175
75
200
255
100
Background
1.81
8.15
13.9
18.3
2.51
26.8
46.2
5.47
4.6
0.583
0.285
0.289
0.284
0.29
0.286
0.284
0.303
0.29
0.357
0.6
0.595
0.597
0.592
0.595
0.594
0.571
0.325
0.813419
0.649824
0.651305
0.649689
0.651781
0.650401
0.649853
0.657124
0.679429
0.155507
0.165661
0.169145
0.173496
0.173649
0.174235
0.179707
0.19584
1.154527
ns
ns
s
s
s
s
s
532
I. Alexander, A. Cowey / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 520–533
across the visible spectrum their relative sensitivity is so low in the short wavelength range that it can hardly account for
why in blindsight the patient is actually better at detecting narrow-band blue than green stimuli. Similarly it is difficult
to see why, for GY, narrow-band red was so good. Furthermore, even if the L and M-cones could detect the narrow-band blue
stimuli in the normal hemiretina any effectiveness in a degenerated and blindsighted hemiretina is unknown. Unfortunately
there are no single cell recordings in the mid-brain of monkeys in which V1 has been removed.
The general message from the set of experiments on GY and MS is that although there are circumstances where they can
localise, and discriminate between, a variety of chromatic and achromatic stimuli in their blind hemifields, their highly successful performance is based on relatively simple aspects of the stimuli, notably sharp contrast borders, relative intensity,
and steep temporal onsets and offsets. All these features allow the subjects to detect ‘events’ but the events appear to vary
only in subjective salience (here meaning roughly strength of feeling, or valency) and when salience is equated discrimination becomes impossible. With the stimuli used here categorisation of colours was absent when GY was asked to identify
them (experiment 4) but, importantly, some chromatic processes are intact in blindsight as revealed by the detection task
in experiment 2. This notion of the simple nature and importance of salience was first clearly expressed by Humphrey (1974)
but has been curiously neglected in subsequent work on blindsight. Of great interest in this respect is the study by Morland
et al. (1999), which demonstrated that GY could successfully discriminate and match colours, but not brightness, between
hemifields. Taken together our experiments provide evidence that it is certain simple stimulus attributes that remain intact
in blindsight but the role of the two channels with distinct spatio-temporal properties mediating blindsight, as first revealed
by Barbur et al. (1994), remains to be established.
Finally the experiments, especially when taken in conjunction with the finding that uncertainty about the precise timing
of an expected stimulus drastically reduces its detection (Cowey & Stoerig, 2003) even though the stimulus has sharp edges
and steep temporal gradient at onset and offset, indicate that even in the most intensively studied subject GY, blindsight
might be of little practical use in everyday life and that attempts at rehabilitation might best be directed at training hemianopes to use their surviving visual field more effectively.
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by a UK Medical Research Council Grant to AC and an EPA Cephalosporin Trust Award to IA.
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Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 887–897
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Review
Possibilities and limits of mind-reading: A neurophilosophical
perspective
Kathinka Evers a,⇑, Mariano Sigman b,c
a
Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics (CRB), Uppsala University, Sweden
Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa (LNI), Departamento de Fisica, FCEN-UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina
c
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Alte. Juan Saenz Valiente 1010, Buenos Aires C1428BIJ, Argentina
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 8 April 2012
Available online 25 June 2013
Keywords:
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Trace conditioning
Mind-reading
Consciousness disorders
Communication
Infant minds
1st-Person access
Privacy
a b s t r a c t
Access to other minds once presupposed other individuals’ expressions and narrations.
Today, several methods have been developed which can measure brain states relevant
for assessments of mental states without 1st person overt external behavior or speech.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging and trace conditioning are used clinically to identify patterns of activity in the brain that suggest the presence of consciousness in people
suffering from severe consciousness disorders and methods to communicate cerebrally
with patients who are motorically unable to communicate. The techniques are also used
non-clinically to access subjective awareness in adults and infants. In this article we
inspect technical and theoretical limits on brain–machine interface access to other minds.
We argue that these techniques hold promises of important medical breakthroughs, open
up new vistas of communication, and of understanding the infant mind. Yet they also give
rise to ethical concerns, notably misuse as a consequence of hypes and misinterpretations.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Contents
1.
2.
3.
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 888
Detecting consciousness from brain activity in behaviorally noncommunicative patients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 888
2.1.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging as a measure of consciousness and a method of communication . . . . . . . . . . . 888
2.2.
Trace-conditioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 889
2.3.
Ethical and clinical implications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 890
2.3.1.
Interpretation and diagnosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 890
2.3.2.
Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 890
2.3.3.
Care and therapeutic interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 891
Reading thoughts from brain activity in healthy individuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 891
3.1.
Neurotechnological access to mental contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 891
3.2.
Decoding the infant mind from non-invasive measures of brain activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 891
3.2.1.
Infant phoneme discrimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892
3.2.2.
Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892
3.3.
Reading hidden intentions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893
3.4.
Predicting visual responses to images and detecting unconscious vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893
3.4.1.
Predicting visual responses to images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 893
3.4.2.
EEG cortically coupled computer vision for rapid image search: detecting unconscious vision . . . . . . . . . . . . . 894
⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics (CRB), Uppsala University, Box 564, SE-75122 Uppsala, Sweden. Fax: +46 18
4716675.
E-mail address: kathinka.evers@crb.uu.se (K. Evers).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.05.011
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Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 894
4.1.
Stereotypical mind–brain relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 894
4.2.
Conclusion: possibilities and limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 895
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 896
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 896
1. Introduction
In typical conditions, a subject has direct access to a subset of her or his own thoughts and experience. Access to other
minds is perforce indirect, passing via that other individual’s expressions and narrations. Under some aspects, knowledge
of another mind might be more accurate than introspective thought; for example, when emotional involvement such as love,
fear, repression, or self-deceit make it difficult for us to face or see in ourselves what may be more apparent to others
(friends, family, psychotherapists), who are less directly involved. Nevertheless, knowledge of others is necessarily indirect
in a manner that self-knowledge need not be. For human beings, who dispose of symbolic and recursive languages, the spoken word is primordial in gaining accurate knowledge about other minds. Until recently, these behavioral expressions, body
language, and narrations exhausted our possibilities of interpreting other minds and their mental states, but that situation is
now rapidly changing.
Several methods have been developed which can measure brain states relevant for assessments of mental states. These
states need not be conscious to the subject being mind-read. Electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography
(MEG), deep-electrode recordings and near-infrared (NIRs) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have opened a door that
was previously sealed to entering the minds of others, and to communication without 1st person overt external behavior or
speech. Notably, functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to identify patterns of activity in the brain that suggest the
presence of consciousness in people suffering from severe consciousness disorders and methods to communicate cerebrally
with patients who are motorically unable to communicate. It is also used non-clinically to access conscious or non-conscious
subjective awareness, e.g. perceptions, or intentions in adults and infants.
These new techniques hold promises of important medical breakthroughs and new knowledge about consciousness but
also give rise to ethical concerns, e.g. in terms of health care and privacy. In this article we inspect technical and theoretical
limits on the brain–machine interface access to other persons’ minds. We begin by reviewing recent assessments of consciousness in patients with serious consciousness disorders, proceed to non-clinical attempts to access mental contents,
and conclude with a discussion of the possibilities, promises and perils.
2. Detecting consciousness from brain activity in behaviorally noncommunicative patients
2.1. Functional magnetic resonance imaging as a measure of consciousness and a method of communication
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) maps the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response associated
with neural activation to study normal and disordered functions. Because it is non-invasive, it can be used to study also vulnerable subjects, such as children, who could not be studied by other functional brain imaging methods that use radiation.
Today, the fMRI technique is widely used in clinical practice as an assessment tool; for example, to identify disease risk, e.g.
the early identification of Alzheimer’s Disease (Wierenga & Bondi, 2007); augment surgical planning (Bookheimer, 2007);
monitor rehabilitation outcome and assist in drug development (Paulus & Stein, 2007). fMRI measurements have contributed
considerably to our knowledge about abnormalities of brain response in many neuropsychiatric conditions (Brown, 2007).
fMRI can also be valuable to differentiate objectively patterns of cerebral activity in patients suffering from disorders of
consciousness (DOC) (Boly et al., 2005). In this context, fMRI functions as method for assessment of consciousness in these
patients, when the technique is used to investigate whether they may have preserved mental abilities that evade detection
using standard clinical methods that exclusively rely on behavioral indexes.
Persistent vegetative state (PVS) is characterized by wakefulness without awareness and has been described as ‘‘one of
the least understood and most ethically troublesome in modern medicine’’ (Owen et al., 2006). PVS patients can move, grimace and have their eyes open, but are considered to be by definition unaware of themselves or their surroundings.fMRIstudies have shown that substantial portions of the cortex may still function in PVS patients. A patient’s own name was
found to elicit a stronger cerebral response than unfamiliar names, suggesting that the patient could process auditory stimuli
to a semantic level (Perrin et al., 2006). This observation per se does not demonstrate conscious processing since experiments
in normal subjects using masked stimuli demonstrate that a stream of perceptual, semantic and motor processes can occur
without awareness (Dehaene et al., 1998).
In fact, at the group level cerebral activation is usually limited to subcortical and ‘low-level’ primary cortical areas and is
often disconnected from fronto-parietal network whose coordinated activity appears to be necessary for conscious processing (Laureys, 2005).
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Stronger conclusions were drawn in a recent study where a patient who fulfilled all the diagnostic clinical criteria for a
vegetative state was allegedly found able to retain the ability to understand spoken commands and to respond to them
through her brain activity, rather than through external behavior, such as speech or movement. The patient’s apparent decision to cooperate by imagining particular tasks when asked to do so – playing a game of tennis, or moving through the rooms
of her house starting from the front door – by the authors was said to represent ‘‘a clear act of intention, which confirmed
beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of herself and her surroundings’’ (Owen et al., 2006: 1402). A spectacular
finding suggested in a subsequent study was that one minimally conscious state (MCS) patient who was totally unable to
establish any functional communication at the bedside appeared able to establish communication with the researchers reliably responding yes or no to questions using directed imagery (think about A to say yes or think about B to say no) communication device (Monti et al., 2010).
fMRI has also been used to detect cognitive and emotional processing in patients diagnosed with coma. Coma has been
defined as a state of unarousable unconsciousness due to dysfunction of the brain’s ascending reticular activating system
(ARAS), which is responsible for arousal and the maintenance of wakefulness. fMRI used on a patient with a prolonged comatose unresponsiveness following traumatic head injury revealed cortical responses to visual, auditory and tactile stimulation.
The responses varied in correlation with the level of familiarity and relevance of the stimuli: stimuli from familiar people
evoked significantly stronger amygdala activation than those from unfamiliar people, and direct addressing showed the
same difference compared to neutral phrases (Eickhoff et al., 2008). Similar results were obtained in a more recent study
suggesting that: ‘‘activity of the language network may serve as an indicator of high-level cognition and possibly volitional
processes that cannot be discerned through conventional behavioral assessment alone’’ (Moreno, Schiff, Giacino, Kalmar, &
Hirsch, 2010).
2.2. Trace-conditioning
Even very simple and inexpensive technology, conceivable for large-scale use across the planet, can be used to investigate
the possibility of conscious processing in PVS patients. Classical conditioning is a simple form of associative learning in
which contingencies are established between a behaviorally important stimulus (unconditioned stimulus, UCS) and a closely
paired neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS). In the trace conditioning of the eyeblink response, the CS is a tone that is
presented several hundred milliseconds before the UCS, which is an air puff to the cornea. The temporal demand imposed by
the silent trace interval between both stimuli has been shown to engage a broad cerebral network, including the cerebellum,
neocortex and hippocampus (Clark, Manns, & Squire, 2001), and to require awareness of the contingencies between stimuli
(Clark & Squire, 1998). Instead, when the UCS and CS are continuous in time, referred as delay conditioning (the term is
slightly confusing but this is how it is traditionally referred and we follow this convention), blink responses are elicited despite the lack of awareness of the contingency and are observed in patients with medial temporal lobe lesions (Clark &
Squire, 1998; Clark & Squire, 1999). Consistent with these results, fMRI investigations of conditioning have shown overlapping patterns of activation in regions including the anterior cingulate, medial thalamus, and visual cortex during delay and
trace procedures. Instead, the hippocampus, SMA, frontal operculum, middle frontal gyrus, and inferior parietal lobule are
activated during trace, but not during delay, conditioning (Knight, Cheng, Smith, Stein, & Helmstetter, 2003).
Consequently, delay conditioning has been considered a hallmark of non-declarative learning (Lavond et al., 1993) and
trace learning – due to its specific dependency on conscious awareness of the contingency between stimuli (Christian &
Thompson, 2003) a potential ‘‘Turing-test ’’ of consciousness (Koch, 2004). This relies on a translational hypothesis that is
discussed below in detail in its logical content. This translational hypothesis assumes that if a normal person (with no obvious pathology of consciousness) only shows trace learning when showing explicit signs of consciousness of the contingency,
the same must be true for agents who cannot express consciousness explicitly. This has been used to investigate consciousness in PVS patients.
Despite being unable to report awareness explicitly, PVS patients were reported able to learn this procedure (Bekinschtein et al., 2009). Learning was specific and showed an anticipatory electromyographic response to the aversive conditioning
stimulus, which was substantially stronger than to the control stimulus and was augmented as the aversive stimulus
approached.
While this may be considered as a signature of consciousness, the translational argument has been debated and it is also
logically possible that in these patients the same logical relation (blink only if consciousness of the contingency might not be
true). The best case in favor of this lack of translation is that trace conditioning can be learnt by invertebrate sea slugs (Glanzman, 1995). In simple words, the finding that PVS patients elicit trace learning has two interpretations: (1) trace learning is
an adequate test for consciousness as robustly confirmed from an investigation of healthy subjects and then, using the translation argument, PVS patients have some form of consciousness; or (2) the translation argument is wrong: this logical association may break in patients wherefore trace learning is not a good test to determine consciousness.
As we discuss below, this is a formal limitation for any signature of consciousness observed in healthy subjects and then
used diagnostically in subjects who cannot indicate their own consciousness via overt behavior. In this specific case, there
are several lines of evidence that suggest (probabilistically) that patients who show trace learning may have consciousness.
First, the amount of learning correlated with the degree of cortical atrophy. Secondly, and more importantly, the extent of
trace learning was a better indicator of recovery than other clinical assessments (Bekinschtein et al., 2009). This is exactly
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what one would like to obtain from a new measure: to show some disagreement with previous criteria (if not it is not an
improvement) and perform better when there is no agreement.
Finally, there is an argument of consistency between different signatures. Assessing consciousness by trace learning ability or by fMRI measurements elicited consistent results, suggesting that individuals with DOCs might have partially preserved conscious processing, which cannot be mediated by explicit reports and is not detected by behavioral assessment
(Boly et al., 2007; Owen et al., 2006). All this suggests that trace learning with high probability constitutes a good marker
of consciousness in healthy subjects and also in PVS patients.
2.3. Ethical and clinical implications
2.3.1. Interpretation and diagnosis
The results of these studies can be taken to suggest that patients with DOC can retain the capacity for voluntary brain
activity, follow commands, execute high-level cognitive tasks and learn procedures that are believed to require awareness
of the contingency. However, it needs to be confirmed that the activated regions could not be activated without any voluntary effort of the patient with DOC, i.e. that the activation could not have been wholly automatic and unconscious (Nachev &
Husain, 2007). ‘‘Inferring volition, command following, mental effort, or even awareness from brain activation patterns remains hazardous without a strict demonstration that these patterns might not be exogenously triggered in an injured brain’’
(Goldman, 2010: 1860).
More generally, while brain activity measures obtained can index processes such as long-range integration that are idiosyncratic of executive function (Dehaene & Changeux, 2011), they cannot say much about phenomenal consciousness or the
quality and specific content of subjective experience. In fact, it may be impossible to infer the presence and content of phenomenal consciousness (Block, 1998) – the qualia, the subjective experience that is not locked to specific behaviors. Our
argument is that from an ethical point of view, a patient who shows obvious signs of higher cognitive functions (which
can be determined empirically as argued here) should be counted as conscious even if the patient may not have phenomenal
consciousness comparable to healthy subjects. When exploring tools to assess consciousness we’re not dealing with logical
possibilities but with probabilities. Assigning consciousness to another agent is a probabilistic inference based on markers,
which, as in any Bayesian form of inference, carry signals of different strength based on experience (priors) and the current
data. As the capacity of brain–machine interface communication devices increases, this communication form should constitute a more reliable input to infer presence and should be considered equivalent to external behavioral evidence.
Often, the cues to infer the state of the mind in another agent use the principle of translation: if x denotes consciousness
(through language) and each time that the agent expresses x he/she expresses y, then y constitutes a physiological signature
of this state and can be considered as a measure of the state denoted by x in agents which cannot express x. An example of
this principle is to use trace conditioning learning (Bekinschtein, Peeters, Shalom, & Sigman, 2011) to denote consciousness
in VS patients. Normal subjects only show this form of learning (y) when expressing a verbal consciousness of the contingency (x). Hence it is assumed that the expression of trace learning (y) in patients who cannot produce deliberate speech
(and hence cannot produce x) is indicative of consciousness. Note that this argument may produce obvious errors as discussed in Bekinschtein et al. (2011): moving the wings may be indicative of a state of flying in hummingbirds but this does
not mean that if an animal moves it wings it necessary flies. However, this translational signature constitutes in many cases
the best resources we may have to assess mental states (including consciousness) on subjects that cannot produce a direct
report. Similarly, when Julian Jaynes infers the form of consciousness in the history of culture, he is using text as a fossil of
thought and introspection (Diuk, Slezak, Raskovsky, Sigman, & Cecchi, 2012; Jaynes, 2000). This inference of assigning the
content of thought from imperfect data (because texts have been censured, degraded, changed through time and because
even the simple act of writing is a form of filtering through words and text the content of the mind) can be seen in analogy
with our current effort to assign a probability that another person is conscious from noisy data (Dehaene & Changeux, 2011).
These devices mediate communication when the content of language is preserved but the motor devices or even cerebral
switches to make it effective are not functional. Measures, such as the trace conditioning learning, or spontaneous activation
measured in fMRI can go beyond this providing markers and signature of consciousness that do not use (even by-passing the
muscle) traditional linguistic schemes. Communication accordingly plays a key role in the confirmation process.
2.3.2. Communication
Patients with DOC are unable to translate neuronal activity to external behavior, e.g. verbal communication. The studies
above suggest:
(a) A method by which externally noncommunicative patients can use their residual cognitive capabilities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to those around them by modulation of their own neural activity (Owen et al., 2006).
(b) An ethical imperative to give a noncommunicative person the opportunity to reveal high-level mental activity, which
in turn could indicate mental capacity (Goldman, 2010).
From an ethical point of view, if a DOC patient shows obvious signs of higher cognitive functions (something that can be
checked fairly reliably), then even if that does not justify the conclusion that the patient has phenomenal consciousness comparable to healthy subjects (something that is harder to check using brain imaging), the patient should still be counted as
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being conscious. Moreover, if neurotechnology has opened the door to communication with previously noncommunicative
patients, to the effect that the presence of consciousness has been confirmed that was previously excluded, the care provided
for these patients needs to be substantially revised.
2.3.3. Care and therapeutic interventions
The clinical implications of these studies are immense. The suggestion of awareness in a patient with DOC has radical
effects on decisions concerning:
(a) The type of care that should be provided. Self-evidently, awareness in a patient necessitates entirely different services,
including continuous diagnoses. Even the possibility of awareness justifies continuous diagnoses and regular checks
for signs of consciousness that without obvious behavioral signs would otherwise go unnoticed. In many hospitals,
it is not current practice regularly to check consciousness in patients diagnosed with coma, or persistent vegetative
state, once a certain time has elapsed, but the studies described above suggest a change of practice in this regard.
(b) The benefit of therapeutic interventions. Assessment of cortical function may in the long run help to identify patients
who may benefit from interventional treatment, e.g., deep-brain stimulation, DBS. DBS of the unspecific thalamocortical system through midline thalamic nuclei has been shown to have an alerting effect and increase the level of arousal defined by the ability to respond to the environment, as well as motor control in a patient who had been in a
minimally conscious state for 6 years (Schiff et al., 2007). Whilst the results of this study were positive, it involved
only one patient, and the authors did not consider it likely that the treatment would be useful also for patients in coma
or in a persistent vegetative state. Nevertheless, if larger clinical trials confirm that DBS can be used to treat the minimally conscious state, it provides hope for a better prognosis for these patients.
(c) Decisions of euthanasia. Awareness of imagery, of learning, and of others may imply a conscious perception of pain
and suffering. If this should lead to induced death is an important and difficult question that consequently arises.
(d) Given the wide public health dimensions of the problem of traumatic brain injuries, the possibilities that these studies
suggest arguably present a humanitarian imperative to further investigate the state of consciousness of DOC patients
(Schiff et al., 2005).
The interpretation of fMRI and the relationship between cerebral activation and consciousness have spurred a number of
controversies that are to date unresolved. The mentioned studies raise important questions about the level of awareness that
patients with DOC can experience and how this can be measured. They challenge the validity of behavioral indexes for discerning levels of consciousness. They challenge the care that is presently being provided for these patients. However, even if
the hypotheses that DOC patients can have conscious awareness and purposeful volition are supported by the evidence presented so far and accepted as an inference to the best explanation (Owen et al., 2007), further more detailed studies must be
performed in order to determine the extent of awareness in DOC patients. For this to be successful, a close collaboration between philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience, neurophysiology and brain imaging is essential (Sörös, 2010). It seems by
all accounts clear that improved diagnostic clarity concerning consciousness disorders is called for.
3. Reading thoughts from brain activity in healthy individuals
3.1. Neurotechnological access to mental contents
Neurotechnology is also used non-clinically to enter and read the contents of the human mind via its cerebral activities.
As these technical possibilities advance, the question arises: how far do they permit us to enter other minds?
There is a logical limit to this pursuit: the human mind has an essentially private sphere. An individual can in some sense
and measure be known by others, but not completely. Subjectivity introduces an unknowable realm in the world of every
individual, as impressions of another – and maybe of oneself – always pass through a filter of subjective interpretations.
To live the experience of another is a logical impossibility. Individual experience cannot be completely shared by or conveyed
to another individual. This means that individuals have a private room that cannot logically be violated. It should, however,
be noted that the privacy thus entailed can still be extremely limited.
We shall here focus the discussion of how far brain reading can enable mind reading on three research areas: decoding
infant minds, intentions, and vision.
3.2. Decoding the infant mind from non-invasive measures of brain activity
Every parent seeks to infer the states of an infant mind (desires, pains, thoughts, dreams) conducting informal experiments to explore these seemingly inaccessible states that cannot be expressed by formal symbolic communication.
The formal exploration of the infant mind remained for a long time exclusive to philosophical inquiry and beyond empirical and scientific determination. Today, abstract philosophical conceptions develop in synergic construction with scientific
knowledge, notably through an increasing neurotechnological capacity to gain a non-invasive access to the infant brain.
However, there is a crucial difference between projects of brain imaging to investigate the minds of infants versus those
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of comatose patients. In both cases, brain measures can be used as a decoder to infer which aspects of the universe are observable in another’s mind that cannot be expressed verbally. In both cases, observation can be directed to known markers of
certain thought processes (for instance, signatures of consciousness) to investigate by translation whether such processes
may be instantiated in the other’s mind. The crucial difference is that, unlike comatose patients, babies’ body language, gaze,
gestures, are a formidable communicative niche which expresses their knowledge about the world and which can be decoded with ingenious behavioral experiments of various kinds. Still, a part of infant thought may be intangible and remains
completely introspective, encapsulated in the infant mind, unexpressed by any motor effector. This observation is important
when assessing the capacity of brain imaging to gain access to infant minds that cannot be inferred from pure observation of
behavior.
3.2.1. Infant phoneme discrimination
Observations from brain imaging and behavior are complementary. Studies using paradigms of adaptation and behavioral
responses to distracters have showed convincingly that infants can discriminate phonemes In fact phoneme discrimination
extends to phonemes that are not used in their native language, an ability that regresses during the first year of life (Kuhl,
Wiliams, Lacerda, Stevens, & Lindblom, 1992). This method, however, does not reveal how fast infants can detect phonetic
changes, whether the brain mechanisms involved resemble those used in the adults, or the variability from trial to trial in
responses which may provide an idea of the degree of fluctuations in perception of the infant mind.
The first documentation of brain responses to phoneme discrimination was performed by Ghislaine and Stanislas Dehaene. They analyzed high-density recordings of event-related potentials in 3-month-old infants listening to syllables whose
first consonants differed in place of articulation (Dehaene-Lambertz & Dehaene, 1994). They presented, on each trial, a sequence of five syllables (/ba/ or /ga/). In half the trials, one syllable was repeated five times. In the other half, the syllable was
repeated only four times, followed by one instance of the other syllable. Any significant difference in event-related potentials
(ERPs) to repeated and deviant trials indicated that the two syllables had been discriminated. The results revealed a component localized to the temporal lobes, which indexed phonological novelty in less than 400 ms. The results also revealed that
following this component there was a relatively late (700–1100 ms) frontal response to novelty, reminiscent of a similar
anterior negativity, which has been observed in response to unexpected visual and auditory stimuli. This suggests that, beyond phoneme discrimination, 3-month-old infants already possess a supramodal anterior network for novelty detection
that can be activated in less than one second. These results go beyond an enumeration of infants’ abilities (i.e. phoneme discrimination), decomposing a complex capacity into a series of processing steps, whose duration and brain implementation
can be estimated. Moreover, the dynamics and tentative localization provided by EEG is reminiscent of phoneme discrimination in adults.
Further evidence of a network language instantiated in pre-verbal infants comes from fMRI studies, which can localize
brain activation close to millimeter resolution (Dehaene-Lambertz, Dehaene, & Hertz-Pannier, 2002). While this is insufficient for deciphering the neural code, it provides sufficient evidence to understand the role of different cortices in the formation of a language network. A study of the brain activity evoked by normal and reversed speech in awake and sleeping 3month-old infants showed that the left-lateralized brain regions similar to those of adults, including the superior temporal
and angular gyri, were already active in infants. Thus, precursors of adult cortical language areas are active in infants well
before the onset of speech production.
A subsequent study examined the functional organization of cerebral activity in 3-month-old infants when they were listening to short-sentences in their mother tongue (Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2006). fMRI was used to obtain the dynamics of
brain activity which is typically of very poor temporal resolution (Sigman, Jobert, Lebihan, & Dehaene, 2007). The infant’s
network of responsive regions was then parsed into functionally distinct regions based on their speed of activation and sensitivity to sentence repetition. As in the previous study, an adult-like structure of functional MRI response delays was observed along the superior temporal regions, suggesting a hierarchical processing scheme. The fastest responses were
recorded in the vicinity of Heschl’s gyrus (the primary auditory cortex), whereas responses became increasingly slower toward the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus and toward the temporal poles and inferior frontal regions (Broca’s
area). Activation in the Broca area increased when the sentence was repeated after a 14-s delay, suggesting the early involvement of Broca’s area in verbal memory.
3.2.2. Implications
Broca’s area has been shown to be involved in tasks requiring language production. In fact it constitutes one of the most
famous examples of brain function localization and lesions in the Broca area systematically result in a deficit on production
(but not on comprehension) of oral language. The fact that Broca’s area is active in infants before the babbling stage has several consequences. First, it implies that activity in this region may drive, through interactions with the perceptual system, the
learning of the complex motor sequences required for future speech production. Second, the observation of mirror neurons
in the macaque ventral premotor cortex, (Kohler et al., 2002) a possible homologous to Broca’s area, has raised the hypothesis of a broader function of this region in action understanding and imitation (Heiser, Iacoboni, Maeda, Marcus, & Mazziotta,
2003).
In view of these observations, activation of Broca area while 3-month infants listen to sentences suggests early common
frame relating speech perception and production, possibly providing an early and covert training to the (future) speech pro-
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duction apparatus. However, this extension seems impossible without a direct access to brain measures, unless Broca activity is expressed by very subtle transformation which may be a covert precursor of language.
Pre-linguistic infants show brain activity that is consistent with a very rudimentary form of language. Parents naturally
help and assist their infants on tasks, which they begin to accomplish, reaching, grasping, crawling, walking, etc. Gaining
awareness of aspects of the newborn and the infant mind, such as language production, numerosity, objecthood, moral
and social constructs, which remain silent and opaque to the external observer may change attitudes in parent care and improve and change policies in early informal education.
3.3. Reading hidden intentions
When humans engage in goal-related activities, there is an increased activity in the prefrontal cortex. This increased level
of activity could be a sign of a number of different things, such as motoric response preparation, (Haggard & Elmer, 1999)
reflection on potential choices, or current intentions (Lau, Rogers, & Passingham, 2006). In a recent study, subjects were
given the choice between two tasks to perform: adding or subtracting two numbers, and asked to hold onto their intention
during a variable period of delay during which fMRI measurements were taken (Haynes, 2007). The activity measured in the
medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex allowed the researchers to identify which of the two tasks the subject was
intending to perform. From the choice of answers it was possible to infer which task the subject had chosen. There was
no explicit instruction or behavioral response prior to the onset of the response screen, subjects responded randomly and
the arrangement of numbers on the screen was also random so as to exclude that any information decoded from brain activity during the delay period would be related to covert preparations of motor responses. Several regions were found to predict
intentions to perform the addition or subtraction tasks. The most accurate (71%) was the medial prefrontal cortex, which did
not register intention during task execution but only during the preparation delay. Reversely, a region more superior and
posterior along the medial wall registered only during the execution of the chosen task. The medial prefrontal cortex showed
the same overall level of activity for the two intentions suggesting that their neural difference is not in the global levels of
activity but in the detailed spatial patterns of cortical responses.
A conclusion drawn from the study was that hidden intentions and covert goals are represented by distributed patterns of
activity in the prefrontal cortex, and that in humans a network of brain regions including both lateral and medial prefrontal
cortex contains task-specific representations (Haynes, 2007). Hidden intentions could accordingly be detected by reading
these patterns of brain activity.
A future research program is whether this binary decoding strategy can be extended to more realistic situations in which
subjects opt amongst many possible, perhaps an unlimited number, of options and intentions. Moreover, the focus is entirely
on conscious intentions. The next step would be to detect intentions before they reach the conscious level. The question then
arises whether these increased difficulties are purely technical, or whether they reflect a fundamental problem. Is it even
theoretically possible to read intentions without any limits on options, or outside the realm of conscious awareness? What
would be a reason for thinking that it is, or isn’t, and how could this question be decided? The difference between a merely
technical and a more fundamental difficulty is complex and dynamic; and it may be subject to change over time: what is
considered a fundamental problem at one time might be conceived as a technical matter at another (or vice versa) as science
and technology develop (Revonsuo, 2001a, 2001b; Revonsuo, 2006).
If we had a device by which we could read the undetermined and perhaps unconscious intentions of others, we would
truly be capable of advanced mind reading. Studies of visual responses are relevant to consider in that light.
3.4. Predicting visual responses to images and detecting unconscious vision
3.4.1. Predicting visual responses to images
fMRI has been used to predict responses to images, and to decipher what image of a given set a person is looking at. The
first studies decoded orientation (Haynes & Rees, 2005), position (Thirion et al., 2006), and object category (Cox & Savoy,
2003) from measuring activities in the visual cortex. These first studies showed that it is possible to infer and categorize simple features in the visual scene from patterns of brain activity evoked by different kinds of images. However, they typically
used quite simple stimuli and a relatively small number of images to which the subject’s responses were already known. The
next step was to use fMRI to predict responses to new images, where the responses were not previously established, which
was done in a recent study (Kay, Naselaris, Prenger, & Gallant, 2008). In this study, a newly developed decoding method
based on quantitative receptive field models that characterize the relationship between visual stimuli and fMRI activity
in early visual areas succeeded in identifying with high accuracy which specific natural image an observer saw for an image
chosen at random from 1000 distinct images. According to the authors, it may soon be possible to decode a person’s visual
experience from brain activity alone (Gallant, 2008), which ‘‘prompts the thought that it may soon be possible to decode
subjective perceptual experiences such as visual imagery and dreams, an idea previously restricted to the realm of science
fiction.’’ (Editor’s summary, 2008) The possibility to interpret what a person is seeing without having to select from a set of
known images theoretically requires better models and measurements of brain functions than are presently available, and
the question again arises whether the difficulty is technical or fundamental. One aspect of this endeavor concerns the detection of unconscious responses to images.
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A new important study that was recently published made a significant step in this direction (Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, & Kamitani, 2013). Patterns of brain activity were examined during dreaming and compared to waking responses
to visual stimuli. The findings suggest that the visual content of dreams is represented by the same neural substrate as observed during awake perception. A conclusion drawn by the authors is that specific visual experience during sleep is represented by brain activity patterns shared by stimulus perception, providing a means to uncover subjective contents of
dreaming using objective neural measurement.
3.4.2. EEG cortically coupled computer vision for rapid image search: detecting unconscious vision
The human brain is slow compared to a digital computer in which individual transistors can switch 106 times faster than
neurons can spike. In contrast, the human visual system is superior to computers: we are far better at recognizing objects at a
glance than any computer vision system. In other words, whereas the computer functions fast, it’s performance on object
recognition is poor, whereas we excel at recognizing objects, say, faces, although it takes quite some time for us to do it.
What if the two capacities could be combined? Can we use computers to optimize the use of available human visual processors for searching through large collections of imagery?
Optimizing image throughput is an important problem in a number of disciplines, e.g. radiology or satellite reconnaissance. In the aim of coupling human vision with computer speed, a group of researchers have developed a real-time electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain–computer interface (BCI) system for triaging imagery presented using rapid serial visual
presentation (Gerson, Parra, & Sajda, 2006) According to this study, a target image in a sequence of nontarget distractor
images elicits in the EEC a stereotypical spatiotemporal response, which can be detected. Because the response is stereotypical, the computer can detect a subject’s recognition of a target image before the subject becomes aware of recognizing the
target image. As illustration, we can imagine a BCI system operating with the aim of recognizing one specific face in a huge
crowd; say, people passing through a major international airport. The subject is placed in a position to observe the faces of
the people passing, and if the target face appears, the response will be read by the computer – possibly without the subject
ever becoming aware of this act of recognition.
A core question prompted by each of these studies is whether the difficulties that their further developments will encounter are of a purely technical nature, or whether they reflect fundamental problems. Is it only a matter of time and technical
advances before the brain can reveal the mind’s innermost secrets, or are there limits in principle to that quest? The possibility of principled limitations and their distinction from technical limitations would need to be specifically motivated and
spelled out. We have pointed out a logical limit with reference to Leibniz’ law, but with respect to scientific theory we do not
assert any specific principled limitation to mind reading. The possibility of decoding a person’s subjective experience from
brain activity alone theoretically requires not only better models and measurements of brain functions than are presently
available, but also better models of mental contents and the many languages of thought.
4. Discussion
4.1. Stereotypical mind–brain relations
In the studies described above, the focus is on thoughts (ideas, mental contents) with clear objects, such as a specific visual image, or a mathematical task, to which related processes are stereotypically activated in the brain, where the term ‘‘stereotypical’’ refers to constancy, or perpetuation without change. The thought (e.g., the intention, or recognition) is
recognizable and identifiable via its cerebral process because of this stereotypical relationship.
A thought eliciting a different cerebral process each time it occurs would presumably be illegible by neurotechnology. Not
just for technical reasons but also on theoretical grounds: there could be no constant cerebral patterns to recognize it by. So,
the assumption of some constancy, that we may label stereotypical, in the mind–brain relationship seems crucial to mind
reading via brain measurements.
The question arises: How much of our thinking is stereotypically related to specific brain processes? All of it, or can a distinction between diversely and stereotypically related mental events be drawn? If so, what distinguishes mental contents
that are thus stereotypically related from those that are not? In addition to these theoretical challenges, the practical challenge for mind reading via brain reading will be to establish these structures of thought/brain-processes, which requires the
thought and its process to be repeatable.
In a strict, logical sense, each thought is unique by virtue of its distinction and can never recur. However, thoughts can be
categorized as types, and a type of thought can have many distinct tokens, or occurrences. In philosophy, the type/token distinction separates the type as a concept and an abstract object from the token, which is the realization, or instantiation, or
occurrence of the type. For example, the concept ‘‘cat’’ is a type of thought that can be instantiated, e.g., by a real cat becoming a focus of attention, or by the memory of a cat. We here use the terms types and tokens leaving open the tokens’ ontological categorization as, e.g., ‘‘abstract’’, ‘‘real’’, etc. Whilst distinct occurrences, as distinct, are all essentially unique, they
will also, as tokens of the same type, have some relevant similarity between them permitting their identification as ‘‘that
(type of) thought’’. In order words, the repeatability of a thought (having ‘‘the same’’ thought twice) is not a question of
the occurrences being logically identical or indiscernible, but similar. Likewise, a repeated thought eliciting ‘‘the same’’
cerebral process elicits not identical or indiscernible but similar processes. Presumably, both the thoughts and the cerebral
K. Evers, M. Sigman / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 887–897
895
related processes must be relevantly similar i.e., similar in such a way as to allow the former to be legible via the latter. In
other words: only if the cerebral processes related to the tokens of a given type of thought are relevantly similar can they
theoretically permit identification of that thought.
By this argument, we arrive at the following requirement for neurotechnological mind reading:
In order for a thought to be neurotechnologically legible it must be stereotypically related to a cerebral process, of which
each occurrence as such is relevantly similar to every other.
In the process of reading the contents of an individual mind via its cerebral activities, a mind–brain profile can be developed. Communication is an essential element in this process, where neurotechnology offers methods to communicate without overt external behavior. The mind might become increasingly legible in proportion to this profile becoming increasingly
detailed and sophisticated. This could have important clinical use, for example, as a means to refining a method of communication for behaviorally noncommunicative patients, as described above.
The question arises, if mind–brain profiles can be developed for individuals, can they also be developed for groups? Are
the neuronal structures sufficiently similar across individuals for communities of mind–brain profiles to be developed? If they
are, how much can an individual profile help outline the profile for another individual?
The replies to these questions depend on the extent and types of neuronal variability that individuals exhibit, and on their
capacity for communication. Human beings are neuronally quite dissimilar, even in the case of monozygotic twins, which
raises important questions concerning how (well) we are able to communicate (Evers, 2009; Evers, Kilander, & Lindau,
2007). The uniqueness of our individual brains, (our distinction) also poses a challenge for detailed brain reading.
Interindividual brain variability is caused both by genetic variability and by idioyncrasies of epigenetic, experience
dependent pruning processes. An object, say, a coffee cup will cause different patterns of activity in different brains and unless it is possible to establish an unambiguous relation between a particular cup and the corresponding activity pattern –
which will not be possible in the majority of cases because of methodological limitations (one would have to explore and
exclude a huge space of alternatives) – one would not be able to interpret the observed pattern. Because the global layout
of networks is genetically specified and similar for brains of the same species it is possible to infer from non-invasive measurements which networks are active at a particular moment in time. If the visual areas are engaged one can assume that the
subject is busy either with visual perceptual tasks or with visual imagery – and this holds for all sensory modalities. If the
default network is active, it is likely that the subject is idling and concerned perhaps with introspection, if reward centers
light up, one can assume that the subject either expects reward or has experienced rewarding conditions – and the same
holds for aversive conditions. Often, however, one can only infer that the subject deals with emotionally loaded conditions
because in most the limbic structures neurons responding in the context of aversive/rewarding conditions are intermingled
and spatial resolution is too low to disentangle them.
Deciphering the semantic content of the respective processes would presuppose that one has already scanned an individual brain and established correlations between the signatures of brain activity and a particular content.
However, if with the aid of communication and neurotechnology, communities of mind–brain profiles could be developed
grouping together features of relevant similarity, such as aspects of neurological disorders, this could have possible therapeutic benefits.
4.2. Conclusion: possibilities and limits
The possibilities of neurotechnological mind-reading that we have today allow access to mental states without 1st person
overt external behavior or speech.
With the advancement of decoders of cerebral activity (and also of other non-cerebral markers of inner thought) it is very
likely that in the near future we will see a rapid progression in the capacity to observe – without mediation of language –
contents of the others’ mind. As discussed above, we might be able to efficiently use a subject’s cerebral cortex for rapid object recognition, even when the subject is not aware of having seen the recognized object. This may be extended as a great
promise to the domain of dreams, to observe in real time the content of a visual narrative during sleep. We might be able to
infer a myriad of simultaneous intentions whose deliberation process to reach explicit agency is not tangible even to the
same subject. We might be able to use this technology in medical situations (most notably in VS patients) where this might
be the only available tool to infer another person’s will. Certainly, applications in commercial setups to control objects
(games, cars, airplanes) that are currently under massive development will become more frequent and effective.
There is a logical limit to these pursuits, in that an individual cannot wholly share another’s experience without merging
with it. Their distinction necessarily introduces a filter, an interpretation that individuates their respective points of view. In
other words, by virtue of our distinction we have a private room that cannot logically be violated.
The presence of this logical limit says nothing about the extension of our privacy, except that it isn’t null. It does not exclude that our unalienable privacy may be extremely small. Moreover, it does not entail that we need have privileged access
to our on experiences: the fact that there is an essential incompleteness in any other person’s knowledge or experience of
you does not mean that there is no, or less, incompleteness in your own self-understanding. To the contrary, we have
suggested that a brain decoder may access more information about, say, the intention of a subject than that which may
be simply accessed by introspection (Corallo et al., 2008, Marti et al., 2010).
The specific benefits of neurotechnological mind reading for which we argue in this article are the following:
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For a person who suffers from behavioral incapacity for communication, the prospect of neurotechnological mind reading
opens up promising vistas of developing alternative methods of communication.
The development of these techniques holds promises of important medical breakthroughs, notably improvements in the
care and therapeutic interventions of patients with disorders of consciousness.
For those – parents, pediatrics, and others – interested in understanding the infant mind, the research opens promising
vistas.
For radiology or satellite reconnaissance, notably, optimizing image throughput by coupling human vision with computer
speed is a promising area of research.
For philosophy of mind and all sciences of mind, whether they are clinically orientated or not, the research into neurotechnological mind reading is exciting and appears theoretically promising.
The development of mind reading can also be perilous, however, increasingly so if or when the techniques advance. There
is, notably, a risk for misuse as a consequence of hypes, exaggerations, or misinterpretations, and a potential threat to privacy
unknown in history. At present, the possibilities of neurotechnological mind reading are so rudimentary that the techniques
pose threats to privacy mainly in the form of misuse, but this threat might expand and increase if the techniques are refined.
In that context, the question arises: who is best placed to know what goes on in a person’s mind? Who is authorized to say?
Does the 1st person have privileged access, or the one to perform/interpret the cerebral measurements? Already, a person’s
unconscious recognition of an image can be detected. How far can that be taken? Today, at the present level of science and
technology: not far. Yet in the future, if better models and measurements of brain functions and mental contents are developed, the day could come when another, with the use of neurotechnology, enters your mind further than you can yourself. Is
that a threat, or a promise? How we evaluate the integrity of our mind depends in part on our trust in others and our views
on society: in which society we live; and which society we want to see develop in the future.
Acknowledgments
This work is funded by CONICET and UBACYT. Mariano Sigman is sponsored by the James McDonnell Foundation 21st
Century Science Initiative in Understanding Human Cognition - Scholar Award.
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Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 113–127
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Review article
The nature of primary consciousness. A new synthesis
Todd E. Feinberg a,⇑, Jon Mallatt b
a
b
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center, New York 10003, USA
School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164-4236, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 7 April 2016
Accepted 20 May 2016
Keywords:
Primary consciousness
Neurobiological naturalism
Explanatory gaps
Hard problem
Subjectivity
Evolution
a b s t r a c t
While the philosophical puzzles about ‘‘life” that once confounded biology have all been
solved by science, much of the ‘‘mystery of consciousness” remains unsolved due to multiple ‘‘explanatory gaps” between the brain and conscious experience. One reason for this
impasse is that diverse brain architectures both within and across species can create consciousness, thus making any single neurobiological feature insufficient to explain it. We
propose instead that an array of general biological features that are found in all living
things, combined with a suite of special neurobiological features unique to animals with
consciousness, evolved to create subjective experience. Combining philosophical, neurobiological and evolutionary approaches to consciousness, we review our theory of neurobiological naturalism that we argue closes the ‘‘explanatory gaps” between the brain and
subjective experience and naturalizes the ‘‘experiential gaps” between subjectivity and
third-person observation of the brain.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Introduction: What makes consciousness unique? The explanatory gap, the hard problem, and neurobiological naturalism. . 114
Multiple explanatory gaps exist, not one: the neuroontologically subjective features of consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Large anatomical diversity means the gaps cannot have a single explanation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Consciousness is so diverse that many biological features must characterize it: the general and special features. . . . . . . . . . . 117
The general and special features explain the subjective features of consciousness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5.1.
The transition to mental images: the general and special features and the ‘‘explanatory gaps” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5.1.1.
Mental images and the transition to referral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
5.1.2.
Mental images and the transition to unity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
5.1.3.
Mental images and the transition to mental causation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.1.4.
Mental images and the transition to qualia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.2.
Affective consciousness and the transitions to the subjective features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Auto-ontological and allo-ontological irreducibilities: the ‘‘experiential gaps” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Neurobiological naturalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: tfeinber@chpnet.org (T.E. Feinberg).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.05.009
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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1. Introduction: What makes consciousness unique? The explanatory gap, the hard problem, and neurobiological
naturalism
In his book What Makes Biology Unique? evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (2004) argues that while modern biology has
disproved theories of vitalism – the idea that living organisms are animated by virtue of some fundamental force (vis vitalis) –
nonetheless life is characterized by principles and functions that are in fact unique to biology among the sciences. Mayr cites
among these unique features the great complexity of living systems, the refractoriness of biological systems to purely reductive approaches, the rampant emergence of novel features in biological systems, and the evolution of teleonomic (goaldirected) processes.
However, despite life’s special and unique features, all its processes are explainable by natural principles: the heart is a
pump; digestion is the physical and enzymatic breakdown of food; quadriplegia results from interrupted neural transmission through the upper spinal cord; ecosystems arise from the interactions of populations of living organisms with each
other and the physical environment. The scientific basis life is not a conceptual mystery (Fry, 2000; Ginsburg & Jablonka,
2015). Mayr concludes that while a full understanding of biology does not require the positing of novel physical forces
beyond those already known to physics, it does require an analysis of natural features and principles that are unique to biological systems.
Mayr’s view is now the accepted dogma in biology. But when it comes to consciousness studies, many scholars from different disciplines have proposed that there is something fundamentally ‘‘different” about the biology of consciousness when
compared to other biological phenomena (Chalmers, 2010; Koch, 2012; Schrödinger, 1967; Sperry, 1977). These scientists
and philosophers agree with Mayr that while biology in general and the non-conscious brain functions can in fact be wholly
explained by the known laws of physics and chemistry, consciousness presents a mysterious ‘‘explanatory gap” (Levine,
1983) between the physical properties of the brain and the subjective experiences that the brain thereby creates. They claim
that whenever one attempts to explain subjective experience in terms of physics, chemistry or even neurobiology, there is
always something ‘‘left out” of the equation, and something more is needed beyond the unique biological principles enumerated by Mayr. David Chalmers (1995) relates the explanatory gap to the ‘‘hard problem of consciousness”, which is the problem of how and why conscious experiences exist. John Searle traces the gap to the mutual irreducibility of subjective and
objective points of view.
. . . consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be reduced to anything that has third-person or
objective ontology. If you try to reduce or eliminate one in favor of the other you leave something out . . . biological brains
have a remarkable biological capacity to produce experiences, and these experiences only exist when they are felt by
some human or animal agent. You can’t reduce these first-person subjective experiences to third-person phenomena
for the same reason that you can’t reduce third-person phenomena to subjective experiences. You can neither reduce
the neuron firings to the feelings nor the feelings to the neuron firings, because in each case you would leave out the
objectivity or subjectivity that is in question.
[Searle, 1997, p. 212]
Most problematically, the discontinuity is such that it seems unbridgeable when compared to the seamless unification of
biology with the physical sciences. The challenge for a science of consciousness is to bridge or close the gap with a natural
explanation.
To address this problem, we have formulated a theory called neurobiological naturalism. It was inspired by the earlier theory of biological naturalism, which Searle (1984, 2007) presented as a philosophical solution to the mind-body or mind-brain
problem. Biological naturalism stated that mental phenomena are strictly biological, ‘‘caused by neurophysiological processes
in the brain and are themselves features of the brain.” While we agree with Searle that consciousness arises exclusively
through biological principles, we felt that more must be said about the special nature of consciousness in the natural world,
so we extended the theory to include the neurobiological features that only consciousness has (Feinberg, 2012; Feinberg &
Mallatt, 2016a).
Our theory of neurobiological naturalism is based on three tenets. First, in using natural science to solve the mind-brain
problem one must begin with the biological features described by Mayr and others. Second, while consciousness is built
upon the features shared by all life, it also depends on additional special neurobiological features. Third, because consciousness is so complex and multifaceted, a complete theory of consciousness that closes the explanatory gaps must use multiple
approaches that integrate philosophical, neurobiological, and evolutionary principles. By using these principles, a natural
elucidation of consciousness, the subjective mind, and the hard problem is possible.
2. Multiple explanatory gaps exist, not one: the neuroontologically subjective features of consciousness
We focus on the most basic kind of consciousness rather than on higher kinds of awareness. That is, we seek the neurological basis and evolutionary origins of phenomenal consciousness (Revonsuo, 2006, 2010), which is also called primary consciousness (Edelman, 1989) or subjectivity (Feinberg, 2012; Metzinger, 2003; Nagel, 1989; Searle, 1992, 1997; Tye, 2000;
Velmans, 2000). As defined by Revonsuo:
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Table 1
The neuroontologically subjective features of consciousness (NSFC). Adapted from Feinberg (2012).
1. Referrala
2. Mental unityb
3. Mental
causationc
4. Qualiad
Conscious experiences are about (referred to) the outer world, the body, or affective states, but are not referred to the neurons that
produce the experiences
Consciousness is unified and bound into a relatively unified field of awareness in contrast to the divisible set of individual neurons
that create it
How the subjective mind can have causal influence on behavioral actions, the material body, and the outside world
Qualities, the subjectively experienced attributes such as colors, pains, sounds, etc.
a
Referral: Brain (1951), Feinberg (2012), Sherrington (1947), Velmans (2000), Velmans and Schneider (2007).
Mental unity: Baars (1988), Baars et al. (2013), Bayne (2010), Bayne and Chalmers (2003), Dennett (1991), Edelman (2004), Feinberg (2012), Meehl
(1966), Metzinger (2003), Sellars (1963), Teller (1992).
c
Mental causation: Dardis (2008), Davidson (1980), Heil and Mele (1993), Kim (1998), Popper and Eccles (1997), Walter and Heckmann (2003).
d
Qualia: Chalmers (1995, 1996), Churchland (1985), Churchland and Churchland (1981), Crick and Koch (2003), Dennett (1991), Edelman (1989), Jackson
(1982), Kirk (1994), Levine (1983), Metzinger (2003), Revonsuo (2006, 2010), Searle (1992, 1997), Tye (2000). Edelman (2004) also considers the specific
memories of such attributes to be qualia.
b
Phenomenal consciousness is the current presence of subjective experiences, or the having of subjective experiences. An
organism possesses phenomenal consciousness if there is any type of subjective experience currently present for it. The
mere occurrence or presence of any experience is the necessary and minimally sufficient condition for phenomenal consciousness.
[Revonsuo, 2006, p. 37]
It is the ‘‘gap” between the phenomenal or primary consciousness and the brain that we seek to close. But rather than
there being a single gap, philosophers and scientists have actually identified multiple explanatory gaps between subjective
experience and the material brain. We (Feinberg, 2012; Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a, 2016b, chap. 1) have grouped these into
four neuroontologically subjective features of consciousness (NSFC): referral, mental unity, mental causation, and qualia. All
these gaps must be closed or scientifically bridged if we are to understand the nature of consciousness.
The NSFC are summarized and referenced in Table 1. Referral means sensory experiences are perceived, never as if in the
brain where they are constructed but as if in the outside world (from stimuli received by exteroceptors on the body surface),
or inside the body (from stimuli received by interoceptors), or as an affective state of positive or negative feeling that involves
the whole self. The experiential gap here is between the brain where sensation is actually created and to where the brain
refers that experience. In mental unity the gap is between the divisible, discontinuous brain that consists of individual neurons and the unified, continuous field of awareness. This has been called the ‘‘grain problem” meaning that the divisible
‘‘grain” of the neurons of the brain is far coarser than the apparently seamless ‘‘grain” of subjective experience (Meehl,
1966; Sellars, 1963; Teller, 1992). Mental causation is the puzzle of how the subjective, seemingly immaterial mind can cause
physical effects in the material world, including the physical body. Qualia are subjectively experienced qualities, both sensed
traits (textures, smells, patterns of light) and affective states. Explaining qualia scientifically is the classical hard problem, the
particular explanatory gap that has received the most attention.
3. Large anatomical diversity means the gaps cannot have a single explanation
If it were possible to identify a single or even a few physical features of conscious brains that could explain all four
explanatory gaps, that could provide a biological solution to the puzzles of consciousness. However, to complicate matters
greatly, our analysis of the neural basis of consciousness both within and across species reveals extensive diversity in the
brain architectures that create subjective experience (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a).
The first illustration of this diversity is that the three different aspects of consciousness – exteroceptive, interoceptive, and
affective – are associated with different brain regions and varied brain architectures (Fig. 1). For example, although some
researchers who focus on humans and other mammals claim that all three aspects stem exclusively from the cerebral cortex
and the thalamus (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007; Berlin, 2013; Craig, 2010; Koch, Massimini, Boly, & Tononi,
2016), there is mounting evidence that affects arise subcortically in vertebrates (Aleman & Merker, 2014; Damasio,
Damasio, & Tranel, 2012; Fabbro, Aglioti, Bergamasco, Clarici, & Panksepp, 2015; Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a; Merker,
2007; O’Connell & Hofmann, 2011; Panksepp, 1998, 2011; Panksepp & Panksepp, 2013). Further, the circuits for the exteroceptive and affective aspects are organized differently. That is, the neural pathways of exteroceptive consciousness are physically organized into point-by-point representations of the outer world or of the receptor fields in the body and brain, in a
topographic arrangement called ‘‘isomorphic mapping” (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2013; Kaas, 1997; Risi & Stanley, 2014), but the
brain structures involved in affective consciousness do not require isomorphic organization (Fig. 7.1 in Feinberg & Mallatt,
2016a).
The second example of conscious diversity in mammalian (including human) brains is that the conscious pathway for
smell differs from the pathways for the other senses. That is, only the smell pathway lacks a mandatory relay through
the thalamus, while corticothalamic paths are held to be vital for consciously perceiving the other senses (vision, hearing,
touch, etc.) (Gottfried, 2010; Shepherd, 2007). Smell has a minor thalamic path to the brain (Mori, Manabe, Narikiyo, &
Onisawa, 2013), but this not essential for olfactory consciousness so the stated difference remains.
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Fig. 1. How diverse structures in the vertebrate (mammalian) brain contribute to three different aspects of consciousness: exteroceptive, interoceptive, and
affective. Large brain regions are represented by the two rectangular boxes. Notice that exteroceptive images (such as consciously seeing a flower) arise
from mostly different brain regions than do affective feelings (such as liking or disliking the flower). Adapted from Feinberg and Mallatt (2016a).
Third is the case of birds differing from mammals. The behavioral evidence for consciousness existing in birds is as strong
as it is for mammals in general (and many authorities now accept that cats, dogs, and horses are conscious) (Århem, Lindahl,
Manger, & Butler, 2008; Boly et al., 2013; Butler, 2008; Butler, Manger, Lindahl, & Århem, 2005; Lefebvre, Nicolakakis, &
Boire, 2002; Pepperberg, 2009). Yet birds’ cerebral areas for consciousness differ considerably from those of mammals in
structure and relative location. For example, the primary visual area is much farther forward in the bird cerebrum than in
mammals. The differences are so substantial that only recently have enough commonalities been found to allow comparisons (Dugas-Ford, Rowell, & Ragsdale, 2012; Jarvis et al., 2013; Karten, 2013). Birds and mammals have experienced a lot
of independent evolution in these cerebral structures since diverging from a common reptile-like ancestor a third of a billion
years ago. This shows diversification of the brain structures responsible for consciousness.
As a fourth example of diversity, the brain regions for exteroceptive consciousness seem to differ in different groups of
vertebrates. Fish and amphibians (‘‘anamniotes”) differ from mammals and birds in lacking topographically organized sensory maps of the world in their small cerebrums. That is, anamniotes lack the maps that have been associated with conscious
images in the cerebral cortex of mammals (see above). Most workers say that a large cerebral cortex (or the bird homologue)
is required for consciousness (Boly et al., 2013; Butler, 2008; Edelman, Baars, & Seth, 2005; Edelman & Seth, 2009; Ribary,
2005; Rose et al., 2014; Seth, Baars, & Edelman, 2005), and would take the lack of cerebral sensory maps as evidence that
anamniotes are not conscious. However, fish and amphibians do have such topographical maps in their subcortical midbrain,
or optic tectum (Fig. 2). To us, this is evidence of tectal consciousness in lower vertebrates. Our reasoning is that these tectal
maps would have no purpose unless used to produce images, to which fish and amphibians can refer for accurate behavioral
interactions with their environment. Indeed, many workers who study the optic tectum use the terms of consciousness to
describe its function in anamniotes: ‘‘perception,” ‘‘recognition,” (Dicke & Roth, 2009), and ‘‘object identification and location” (Wullimann & Vernier, 2009). Sensory consciousness in the anamniotes is consistent with their elaborated sensory
organs (eyes that are more acute than those of most mammals, hearing ears, a lateral line, olfactory organs, many electroreceptors and mechanoreceptors). Consciousness is also consistent with the alert attention that fish pay to the abundant sensory stimuli they encounter, along with the complex behaviors they perform in response to the stimuli (Abbott, 2015; Bshary
& Grutter, 2006; Griffin, 2001; Hotta et al., 2015; Kardong, 2012; Vindas et al., 2014). Our reasoning and evidence say that the
cortex-based consciousness of mammals and birds differs from the predominantly tectum-based consciousness of fish and
amphibians. That is diversity.
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Fig. 2. Two different brain regions for conscious images among the vertebrates. (A) Cerebral cortex of a mammal (human). (B) Optic tectum of a fish.
Fifth, though least certain, some invertebrates may be conscious. After assembling a set of criteria for identifying consciousness in the vertebrates (Tables 2 and 3), we applied them to various invertebrates (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a). The
nearest relatives of vertebrates, the invertebrate sea squirts and lancelets (amphioxus), have comparatively simple brains
and neural circuits (Lacalli, 2008, 2016; Lacalli & Holland, 1998), so they failed our test. By contrast, arthropods (mainly
insects and crabs) and cephalopod molluscs (mainly octopuses) met most of the criteria, including multiple, complex sensory
organs and highly organized sensory pathways to the brain, behavioral preferences indicating remembered likes and dislikes,
and more. For arthropods, the small sizes of their brains throw doubt on whether they could be conscious, and although the
large-brained cephalopods exceed most of the requirements for which they have been tested, they have not been studied
enough. Still, we have uncovered some evidence for arthropod and cephalopod consciousness. Because arthropods, vertebrates, and cephalopods are only distantly related, this would suggest the greatest diversity of all. Other investigators have
likewise suggested early origins and some invertebrate consciousness, for reasons other than ours (Barron & Klein, 2016;
Cabanac, 1996; Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2010a, 2010b, 2015; Huber, Panksepp, Nathaniel, Alcaro, & Panksepp, 2011; Packard
& Delafield-Butt, 2014).
In summary, the striking diversity among the neural architectures indicates that there is not a single emergent process
that can explain all aspects of primary consciousness, the ‘‘explanatory gaps,” and the ‘‘hard problem.” Thus, past studies
of consciousness may have focused too much on single, dominant causes, such as the reciprocal corticothalamic interactions
mentioned above, or primary drives from the core of the brain (Denton, 2006), or motor actions and rhythms (Llinás, 2002;
Merker, 2007). Instead, there are many different ‘‘emergences” that contribute to subjectivity. Based on these considerations,
we next look for the common factors among the diverse neural architectures (both within and across species) that have primary consciousness.
4. Consciousness is so diverse that many biological features must characterize it: the general and special features
While the law of parsimony dictates that the simplest answer (i.e., with the fewest variables) is usually the best, it can
lead to overly simplistic explanations when a process is multi-factorial in origin. In such cases more elaborate theories
are better, and in the end are more parsimonious because only they explain all the observations.
By scrutinizing the many diverse anatomies that produce consciousness, we found features shared by all (Tables 2 and 3).
These features are either observable structures or known natural processes. They indicate that consciousness is always created in hierarchical levels in complex systems, and all the levels are necessary. Here is a preliminary summary of the features
in the tables: starting with the basic hierarchical systems of life, neurons were added and evolved into increasingly complex
neural hierarchies.
Most basic are the general biological features that apply to all living organisms, even those without nervous systems
(Table 2). These features were the first to evolve and they laid the foundations for life and consciousness. The second level
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Table 2
The defining features of consciousness, Levels 1 and 2: General biological features and reflexes.
First level: General biological features, which apply to all living things
1. Life, embodiment, and process
2. System and self-organization
3. Hierarchy, emergence, and constraint
4. Teleonomy and adaptation
Life: use of energy to sustain self, responsiveness, reproduction, adaptiveness. All
known life is cellular
Embodiment: body with interior separate from the exterior. Has a boundary, such as a
cell membrane or skin
Processes: Life functions are processes not material things
System: Entity considered as a whole, in which arrangements and interactions
between the parts are important
Self-organization: Interactions of the parts organize the patterns at global level of the
whole
Hierarchy: Complex system with different interacting levels, organized from simpler
to more complex: e.g., macromolecules to cells to organs to the organism. New, more
elaborate features emerge at each higher level. Higher levels constrain lower levels for
integration of the parts
Teleonomy: Biological structures perform programed, goal-directed functions
Adaptation: A teleonomic structure or function as evolved by natural selection
Second level: Reflexes, which apply to all animals with nervous systems
1. Rates and connectivity
Fast rates: Reflexes are fast, automatic responses to stimuli. Neural communication is
rapid
Connectivity: Simple reflex arcs are chains of several neurons connected at synapses.
More complex arcs have more neurons in the chain (C) and in networks (N); they also
have more neuronal interactions (I) and process more information (P). Further
increase in CNIP was the royal road to complex nervous systems and consciousness
2. Advanced examples include basic motor programs from
central pattern generators (but still not conscious)
Table 3
The defining features of consciousness, Level 3: Special neurobiological features.
Third level: Special neurobiological features, which apply to animals with sensory consciousness
1. Elaborate sensory organsa
2. Complex neural hierarchies
3. Neural hierarchies create unique neural-neural
interactions
4. Multisensory convergencea
5. Neural hierarchies create isomorphic representations
and mental images, and/or affective statese
6. Unique combination of nested and non-nested
hierarchical functions
7. Attention
8. Memory
Image-forming eyes, multiple mechanoreceptors, olfactory and taste chemoreceptors. Plus
high locomotory mobility, to travel and gather the sensory information
Overall neural complexity: A brain, many neurons,b many neuronal subtypes
Hierarchy complexity: For example, at least four successive levels of neurons before premotor centers in the conscious sensory pathways of humanc
Interactions: Extensive reciprocal (reentrant, recurrent) communication within and
between the hierarchies for the different senses
Synchronized communication by gamma-frequency oscillations may be required, or else
an ‘‘activated EEG”d
Pathways of the different senses converge in the brain: allows unification of the senses into
a single experience
Isomorphic representations: neurons arranged in topographic maps of the world or body
structures
Affective statese: Involve affect-associated neurotransmitters or neuromodulators such as
dopamine and serotonin
Nested function is the assembling of conscious unity by progressively unifying the sensory
precepts
Non-nested features include: some top-down control by higher brain; the physically
separate parts of the conscious neurohierarchy; and topical convergence on grandmother
neurons in mammals
Selective attention mechanisms in brain: for directing consciousness to salient objects in
the environment. Related feature of arousal is also present
Memory regions in brain: needed for temporal continuity of experience, for providing
learned reference-templates by which newly sensed objects can be recognized, etc.
a
Actually, our theory says that vision and visual consciousness evolved first, but this was consequently followed by elaboration of the other senses for
olfactory, mechanosensory, electrosensory, taste, and auditory consciousness (Feinberg and Mallatt, 2016a). These followed so quickly as to be effectively
simultaneous with vision.
b
Our rough guess here is that 20,000 neurons is not enough for consciousness (amount in gastropod Aplysia), but 10,000,000 neurons may be enough
(amount in zebrafish): Table 9.2 in Feinberg and Mallatt (2016a).
c
Based on the number of levels in humans, to and including the primary sensory cerebral cortex. This marker is rough, because it does not consider the
extensive neural interactions within the levels.
d
See Koch et al. (2016).
e
Non-structural, behavioral markers of affective consciousness are: operant conditioning based on learned positive and negative valences, behavioral
trade-off between choices of different valence, frustration behavior, self-delivery of rewards, and conditioned place preference: Chapter 8 in Feinberg and
Mallatt (2016a).
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is reflexes that occur in animals that have the general biological features plus the added dimensions that nervous systems
bring to an animal’s life. But reflexes operate without creating sensory consciousness. Finally, only systems with consciousness possess the special neurobiological features (Table 3), which evolved through the elaboration of reflexes into neurohierarchies with more neurons, more levels, and more interactions between the neurons and levels (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a;
see also Cornelis & Coop, 2014, and Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2010b). Although consciousness always evolved step by step just
like any other emergent biological process, the special features – in association with the general features and reflexes – provided the advanced and unique properties that make primary consciousness possible.
5. The general and special features explain the subjective features of consciousness
The fossil record shows that the first, bacteria-like, life (with general features) evolved about 3.5 billion years ago, and the
first multicellular animals that had nervous systems and reflexes arose around 580 million years ago. Then, according to our
theory, with the appearance of the special features, consciousness was created in the earliest fishes (and perhaps the first
arthropods), which evolved in the Cambrian Period about 540–520 million years ago (Buatois, Narbonne, Mángano,
Carmona, & Myrow, 2014; Erwin & Valentine, 2013; Feinberg & Mallatt, 2013, 2016a; Schopf & Kudryavtsev, 2012).
Thus, we propose that critical to the nature and origin of consciousness is that with the addition of the special features to
the general features, there occurred a transition from reflexes to conscious mental images and affects, and it was at that point
that subjectivity, the philosophical ‘‘explanatory gaps,” and the hard problem were all naturally created (Fig. 3). In the following sections we explain how this occurred.
5.1. The transition to mental images: the general and special features and the ‘‘explanatory gaps”
We first consider how sensory mental images evolved and created ‘‘explanatory gaps” and along with them some aspects
of the hard problem. We use the term ‘‘mental images” in the context of primary consciousness, to mean consciously experienced mental representations of things in the world or in the subject’s body as these things are being sensed (Edelman,
1992). We do not use ‘‘images” to mean the capacity for imagining scenes in the absence of sensory information
(Shepard, 1978).
We know that basal forms of sensory responsiveness were reflexive and innate, and they characterized the early, nonconscious bilaterian animals such as ancestral worms. These reflexes can be fully described in an objective way and do
not entail any ‘‘gaps” in their biological explanation. But when the increasing brain complexity and the evolution of the
special features first turned reflexive processing into ‘‘mental images” before 520 million years ago, many aspects of
Fig. 3. The nested hierarchy of the general and special objective features explains the subjective features of consciousness (namely the four NSFCs, Referral,
Unity, Causation, and Qualia). The ‘‘Special Features of Consciousness” are present in all vertebrates (and arguably in arthropods and cephalopods). The
‘‘General Features of Life” were retained when consciousness evolved.
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ontological subjectivity were created. This is because mental images are referred, unified, mentally causal, and possess qualia
(Table 1) – and thus images are one aspect of primary consciousness that entails all four explanatory gaps that characterize
subjectivity.
In the first vertebrates, these sensory images were enabled by a great expansion of the senses for detecting things at
a distance: detailed vision, hearing, olfaction, electroreception, and advanced mechanoreception using the lateral line of
fish. Accompanying this sensory expansion was the evolution of special embryonic tissues named neural crest and ectodermal placodes, which develop into most of the receptors and sensory neurons for the distance senses of vertebrates
(Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a, chap. 5; Schlosser, 2014). These same kinds of distance senses arose in the first arthropods
and cephalopods (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a, chap. 9; Mather, 2012; Strausfeld, 2013). Taking all this varied sensory
information, then organizing it, sharpening it, attending to it, recording it (in memory), and joining it into a detailed
image – that is what drove the evolution of the special neurobiological features, with their complex neuroprocessing
hierarchies (Table 3).
The next question is how did the construction of mental images create the specific explanatory gap for each of the NSFC,
referral, unity, causation and qualia.
5.1.1. Mental images and the transition to referral
Despite the vital contribution of the special features to consciousness, the general features remain operative and were
critical to the creation of each NSFC (Fig. 3). Referral, for example, is a teleonomic system feature of an embodied animal
(Table 2, First Level). The eye-blink reflex automatically protects the cornea from abrasive dust in the same way that a noxious pin-prick can still activate reflexive withdrawal in coma patient, or an earthworm uses its withdrawal reflex to retreat
into the safety of its burrow when sensing vibrations from a predator in the external environment. In these primitive and
non-conscious reflexes, the world-versus-organism and internal-versus-external relationships are already established, thus
setting the stage for the later evolution of referred mental images.
With these reflexes serving as the neural scaffolding upon which referral is based, the addition of the special neurobiological features including elaborate sensory organs, complex neural hierarchies, and nested and non-nested sensory functions, led to the creation of the higher-order, differentiated, mental images that simulated the world and body but were
not about the brain itself (Feinberg, 2000, 2012; Feinberg & Mallatt, 2013, 2016a, 2016b, chap. 1, 2016c, chap. 2; Table 3).
Thus, referral away from the brain is a multisource process based on both the general and special features, the latter having
been added to the former. The transition was uninterrupted due to the continuous evolutionary increase in neurohierarchical
complexity.
5.1.2. Mental images and the transition to unity
Mental unity, like referral, is determined by the general and special features. A general feature of unity is that it is a process, as is life, and not a material thing that can be assigned to any one location. In other words, there is no single place where
consciousness is physically unified (Dennett, 1991). That is, the many brain regions that contribute to mental unity are spread
out in space, as exemplified by the different sensory pathways for the different senses and by the various brain-centers of
multisensory convergence; and consciousness itself results from processes performed by these widespread neurons
(James, 1904).
And as was the case with the evolution of referral, the creation of subjective mental unity occurred in the Cambrian at the
critical transition between the general biological and special neurobiological features. As noted above, the special feature of
complex neural hierarchies constructs mapped representations of different environmental objects from multiple types of sensory input and joins all these percepts into a unified conscious image. Consciousness arose as unified because using fragmented sensory maps to guide one’s behavior would be inefficient or lethal. The feature of neurohierarchy is important to
unity for another reason as well: constraint imposed by higher brain centers upon lower levels of the neurohierarchy allows
the unification and nestedness of sensory systems (Feinberg, 2011).
Conscious unity may be assigned to neurobiological causes. Synchronized oscillatory patterns of spiking activity in the
gamma frequency range occur across complex, intercommunicating networks of neurons, and these oscillations may contribute to unity by binding different percepts and different sensory modalities together (Zmigrod & Hommel, 2013). Such
oscillations have been tied to many other aspects of consciousness as well, although they are much better studied in mammals than in more basally arising vertebrates like fishes (mammals: Buzsáki, 2006; Cabral-Calderin, Schmidt-Samoa, &
Wilke, 2015; Engel, Fries, & Singer, 2001; Melloni et al., 2007; Northoff, 2013a, 2013b; Uhlhaas et al., 2009; fishes and
amphibians: Bullock, 2002; Caudill, Eggebrecht, Gruberg, & Wessel, 2010; Northmore & Gallagher, 2003). Recently, doubt
has been thrown on all this because the gamma oscillations seem to be absent in certain conscious states in humans; however, a similar phenomenon of integrated, low-voltage, fast waves (‘‘activated EEG”) remains a consistent marker of consciousness (Koch et al., 2016).
As was the case with referral, we now see how the philosophical, neurobiological, and evolutionary points of view can be
reconciled and integrated to explain mental unity. Due to the evolution and neurobiology of the special neurobiological features, mental unity – another ‘‘gap” between the brain and subjective consciousness (the hard problem) – was created. But,
most importantly for the hard problem, this occurred without the addition of any new ‘‘mysterious” or ‘‘fundamental”
processes.
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5.1.3. Mental images and the transition to mental causation
Mental causation, in which subjective consciousness with mental images can ‘‘mysteriously” affect the ‘‘material world,”
entails every general and special feature enumerated in Tables 2 and 3. Among the general features that produce mental causation, embodiment is especially noteworthy. An individual brain is only capable of subjectively acting upon motor neural
pathways that are embodied within that brain. I have no ability to directly control your actions through my thoughts, or vice
versa. The general feature of self-organization also relates closely to mental causation because every living organism carries
out programmed, teleonomic, goal-directed processes within the self-organization feature (Mayr, 2004) – and mental causation is certainly goal-directed. The groundwork for mental causation was laid by the non-conscious reflexive stage that we
have modeled as a simple worm, because even reflexes are behaviors that affect the surroundings.
We can readily see how philosophical, neurobiological, and evolutionary features together explain the history of mental
causation. Starting with an embodied organism (worm) that reflexively interacted with its environment to carry out its goaldirected survival processes, the subsequent addition of elaborate, non-reflexive, neural hierarchies led to complex and
context-dependent behaviors. This was because the brain’s new, mapped, images of the environment guided the behavioral
actions to the right location and because the newly evolved affective feelings (see below) motivated and directed the behaviors toward ‘‘positive” and away from ‘‘negative” stimuli. This transition opened a seeming ‘‘gap” between subjective experience and drive, on the one hand, and the objective world that was affected by the behaviors, on the other. But, once again,
there is nothing philosophically ‘‘mysterious” about this process when viewed within the evolutionary context and the general biological and special neurobiological features.
5.1.4. Mental images and the transition to qualia
Exteroceptive and interoceptive qualia arise when the brain represents sensory information from the subject’s environment or body. As with the other three NSFC, the key factors are the combination of the general and special features, with
qualia arising when the special features appeared.
The general feature of adaptation is paramount for explaining qualia because qualia act to distinguish among a wide range
of sensory stimuli, as is needed for survival. To mate successfully and leave offspring, a female fish must be able to distinguish a brightly colored male from another, dully hued female. We propose that the first qualia were relatively simple, perhaps the crudest sensory assemblages that could form any image. Then, the qualia rapidly evolved more discriminations
among viewed features (edges, shapes, shades, colors, depths, movements), among different odors, tastes, and mechanical
stimuli. This increasing richness would have occurred during the explosive evolution of the distance senses in the Cambrian
Period (see above). A strength of this proposal is that once the ability to make any conscious discriminations evolved – any at
all – they could become increasingly fine-grained simply by adding more processing neurons to the existing neural hierarchies. The first, simple qualia evolved into millions of subtly differentiated qualia by a natural process not much more difficult than mathematical addition. The increasingly refined sensory discriminations provided survival benefits for finding
food items and mates, avoiding predators, detecting dangers, and these benefits would apply in many different habitats
and adaptive situations.
Qualia overlap the other three NSFC, so we have already explained much of this phenomenon and its natural, physical,
and evolutionary origin. Thus, a subjective mental image is qualia assembled into a unified scene that refers to the outer world
or body and guides behaviors and creates mental causation (for references, see Table 1). Logically, this means that because
the mental images stem from complex sensory hierarchies, isomorphic maps, and hierarchical nestedness, so do the qualia. And,
as we have just reviewed, both referral and unity are system features of embodied brains. In this respect qualia are no different.
So if one asks ‘‘why should there be qualia at all?” as Chalmers wonders (1995, 1996) we could answer ‘‘because they are
highly adaptive.” But from a broader perspective, we could say there are multiple parts to the answer: Qualia are another
unique consequence of the multiple general and special neurobiological features of complex nervous systems.
Finally, consider another aspect of consciousness that Chalmers called the character of experience. This is the perplexing
question of why ‘‘red” subjectively feels exactly and uniquely the way red does. Or, why does the activation of the auditory
pathway lead to subjectively heard sounds? Isn’t that beyond scientific explanation? Chalmers states this problem of the
character of experience as:
. . . why do individual experiences have their particular nature? When I open my eyes and look around my office, why do I
have this sort of experience? At a more basic level, why is seeing red like this, rather than like that! It seems conceivable
that when looking at red things, one might have had the sort of color experiences that one in fact has when looking at blue
things. Why is the experience one way rather than the other? Why, for that matter, do we experience the reddish sensation that we do, rather than some entirely different sensation, like the sound of a trumpet?
[Chalmers, 1996, p. 5]
Again, we reply that the reason this problem is so ‘‘hard” is because it requires a multi-disciplinary answer that combines
the neurobiological, neuroevolutionary, and neurophilosophical domains. If you ask, ‘‘why does red subjectively feel ‘‘red”
and not as the note C sharp,” we first give the neurobiological answer that the neural pathways of color processing and those
of sound processing are quite different, so they shouldn’t and indeed couldn’t feel the same. We can measure different people
to tell whether red-coding neurons (light at 570 nm) ever get crossed with blue-coding neurons (light at 440 nm) or with
auditory-path neurons, and can show that they seldom or never do so. Second, we would point out from an evolutionary
perspective that color and sound stimuli usually signify different things, so there is strong selection pressure for a response
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to a sound to be appropriate to the sound, rather than to an irrelevant color. Third, to answer ‘‘Why is it subjective?” we offer
the philosophical solution that arises from systems and hierarchy theory (Fig. 3), as well as our philosophical analysis of the
subjective/objective divide discussed below in Section 6.
5.2. Affective consciousness and the transitions to the subjective features
While sensory mental images can be neutral, the feelings of affective consciousness always have a valence – the aversiveness (negativity) or the attractiveness (positivity) of the stimulus or event. The most basal affects are the capacity to have
experiences of a negative (noxious) or positive (pleasurable) valence.
As mentioned, affects do not have the map-like isomorphism that characterizes mental images. Without isomorphism to
use as a marker, it is much more difficult for us to date and model the evolution of affects than of mental images, and to
determine which living animals have affects. Therefore, the evolution of affects must be reasoned out step by step as follows.
Investigators who study the relatively simple behaviors and nervous systems of sea slugs and other gastropod molluscs have
identified a core circuit for affects (Gillette & Brown, 2015; Hirayama, Catanho, Brown, & Gillette, 2012; Hirayama & Gillette,
2012). They call this a sensory integrator circuit for incentives (Gillette & Brown, 2015), and it associates with neuronal ‘central pattern generators’ that control rhythmic movements and survival behaviors. The integrator circuit labels the sensory
input it receives as either rewarding (+) or aversive ( ) then it codes the motivations that dictate approach (+) versus avoidance ( ) behaviors. It also potentiates memories of the salient stimuli, for associative learning. In gastropods, this incentive
circuit is very simple, and may have too few neurons to produce true, affective, experiences in these invertebrates. Yet in all
the vertebrates the corresponding set of structures is enormously complex, including parts of the brain’s mesencephalon,
diencephalon, and telencephalon: specific parts are the ventral tegmental area or posterior tubercular nucleus, laterodorsal
tegmental nucleus, habenula, amygdala, ventral striatum, and more (Butler & Hodos, 2005; O’Connell & Hofmann, 2011;
Ryczko & Dubuc, 2013; Ryczko et al., 2013; Stephenson-Jones, Flores, Robertson, & Grillner, 2012).
We have concluded that in fishes these brain structures are similar enough to those in humans to indicate all vertebrates
have affective consciousness (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a, chap. 8). These affective brain structures are at the top of complex
neurohierarchies that have all the general and special features of consciousness listed in Tables 2 and 3. For example, affective neural circuits require the general features of an embodied brain, and they perform teleonomic processes that aid survival.
Furthermore, they participate in the special features of arousal and forming memories. Affects in vertebrates also seem to
depend on specific neurotransmitter and neuromodulatory molecules such as brain-generated dopamine and serotonin
(Barron, Søvik, & Cornish, 2010; Gillette & Brown, 2015; Hikosaka, 2010; Naderi, Jamwal, Chivers, & Niyogi, 2016;
Remage-Healey, 2014; Waddell, 2013), and these neurochemicals are present in all vertebrates, fish and lampreys.
Behavioral evidence, based on global operant learning and other criteria, also indicates that all vertebrates experience
affects (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a). Therefore, we date the evolutionary appearance of conscious affects to the origin of
the brain complexity with the above-mentioned neurochemicals, around 540–520 million years ago. This date was also
when vertebrates evolved the other aspect of consciousness, mental imagery. The same date may apply to the arthropods,
as their brains and behaviors meet many of our criteria for affects (Perry & Barron, 2013; Strausfeld, 2013; Waddell, 2013).
Consistent with the proposals of Michel Cabanac and others, we conclude that affective consciousness benefited the first
vertebrates (and arthropods?) by efficiently directing motor responses to salient stimuli. Affects do this by motivating the
animals and telling them which such stimuli to approach and which to avoid (Cabanac, 1996; Gallese, 2013; Giske et al.,
2013; Ohira, 2010; Packard & Delafield-Butt, 2014).
However, when compared to the consciousness of mental images, the affective aspects of sensory pain and pleasure, and
the pure global affects such as fear, raise a question about the ‘‘explanatory gaps” they create. This question does not involve
the three subjective features of unity, causality, or qualia. No confusion or new gaps to fill here, because affects, just like
mental images, are unified, causal, and qualitative. Instead the question involves the other subjective feature, referral, which
differs for affects versus mental images: Whereas the consciousness of mental images ‘‘refers” a stimulus to a specific place
Fig. 4. Auto-ontological and allo-ontological irreducibilities: Fundamental barriers to reducing the objective to the subjective (and vice versa). (1) Subject
has access to his or her conscious experiences. (2) Auto-ontological irreducibility: subject has no conscious access to his or her own objective neurons. (3)
Observer has access to subject’s material neurons. (4) Allo-ontological irreducibility: observer has no access to subject’s conscious experiences.
T.E. Feinberg, J. Mallatt / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 113–127
123
in the external world or to the point in the body where the stimulus was applied, affective consciousness refers to the global,
embodied self (‘‘I” am scared.). However, this difference in referral sites proves irrelevant in the end because for mental
images and affects alike the brain never refers experience to the neural substrate of the brain that creates it. We call this key
feature of the conscious brain ‘‘auto-ontological irreducibility” (Fig. 4) and it provides more pieces to our understanding
of the hard problem.
6. Auto-ontological and allo-ontological irreducibilities: the ‘‘experiential gaps
We have demonstrated how the neurobiological basis and evolutionary origins of the NSFC (the ‘‘explanatory gaps”) can
be explained without any mysterious or missing ingredients. However, when subjectivity evolved from the general and special features over 520 mya, two barriers arose to uniting subjective awareness and objective science in a single conceptual
framework (Fig. 4). We call these barriers auto- and allo-ontological irreducibilities (Feinberg, 2012).
Auto-ontological irreducibility means one’s subjective consciousness never experiences or ‘‘refers to” the objective neurons that create it. As Gordon Globus expressed it (1973, p. 1129), ‘‘It does not appear that the brain in any way codes or
represents . . . its own structure. (The nervous system has no sensory apparatus directed to its own structure).” This irreducibility is explained in part by the way consciousness evolved: an organism’s survival depends on neural networks attending to the outer world and to the body, so it would be maladaptive if sensory neural networks evolved to consciously attend
to their own functions. That would be redundant because neuronal activity is already optimized by physiological mechanisms that maintain the ionic constancy of body fluids bathing the neurons (Abbott, 2004; Hall, 2011, pp. 358–382). Additionally, supportive glial cells automatically help with this ionic homeostasis and they also attend to the other needs of
neurons by regulating neurotransmission at synapses, energy metabolism, blood flow, and immune defense (Oberheim,
Goldman, & Nedergaard, 2012; Verkhratsky & Parpura, 2014).
Neurons have operated efficiently like this since the pre-conscious, reflexive stage. For example, phylogenetic analysis
indicates the ancestors of vertebrates, of arthropods, and of molluscs all had glial cells (Hartline, 2011). Besides being redundant, any conscious attention to neuronal maintenance would distract from the other important purposes of consciousness.
Inefficiency and waste of effort are selected against, so no ‘‘objective” experiencing of the brain’s own neuronal signals ever
evolved. This means the auto-ontological barrier was present ever since the dawn of consciousness.
Additionally, even if it were possible for someone to objectively observe his or her own neurons in the act of creating
experience – via the use of a hypothetical ‘‘autocerebroscope” for example (Feigl, 1967) – these observations would amount
to the same thing as an outsider’s third person observations, thus raising the same ontological barriers to one’s experience as
is encountered by an outsider. This means there will always be an ‘‘experiential gap” between the subjective and objective
points of view. There is no way that the subject can become objectively aware of his or her own neurons in the same
way they are subjectively experienced from the embodied inside.
Allo-ontological irreducibility means that an outside observer has no access to a subject’s conscious experience (Fig. 4). It
emerges not only from referral but from all the NSFC. This is because, by definition, all the NSFC are ontologically subjective
and therefore cannot be experienced by anyone other than the subject. And, as we have already demonstrated, the neurobiological basis and evolutionary origins of the NSFC can be explained without any mysterious or missing ingredients. This
point is not trivial because allo-ontological irreducibility is real, even absolute: Although two individuals can have similar or
equal experiences (with both sensing the environmental temperature, light level, or a sound, for example), they naturally
have different bodies, brains, viewpoints, different memories for reference, and incomplete intercommunication, so the
allo-ontological barrier between them will always remain. Thus, the allo-ontological gap can be ‘‘bridged scientifically” or
naturalized without needing to reduce the subjective to the objective points of view, or visa versa. The allo-ontological barrier
exists and it contributes to the ‘‘experiential gap” between the objective and subjective, yet it poses no problem to science.
Therefore, despite the biological uniqueness of auto-ontological and allo-ontological irreducibilities, and the fact that they
form absolute barriers between the objective and the subjective points of view, they have a perfectly natural explanation
that is provided by the evolution and nature of the general and special features. The ontological subjectivity of consciousness
is the result of its being an embodied, neurohierarchical, system-feature process, and all its unique subjective qualities follow
from that.
In summary, for both mental images and affects, we can clearly understand the relationships among the philosophical
issues of subjectivity and the evolution and neurobiology of complex nervous systems. Once nervous systems become sufficiently hierarchical, organized, and complex with the addition of the special features, there emerged the unique subjective
features including auto- and allo-ontological irreducibilities, and the hard problem naturally arose without the addition of
any mysterious features, new fundamental properties, or quantum factors. We emphasize that to solve the difficulties of subjective experience, it is necessary to bring together the philosophical, neurobiological, and evolutionary perspectives, with
each informing the others (Feinberg & Mallatt, 2016a).
7. Neurobiological naturalism
Having updated our theory of neurobiological naturalism, we will summarize its unique approach to the problems of
consciousness. Rather than considering subjectivity as a single perplexing ‘‘mystery,” we divided it into more manageable
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Table 4
Summary of the main findings.
A. Our logical steps to the solution of the hard problem
1. Biology has no explanatory gaps but consciousness does, posing the hard problem
2. Multiple explanatory gaps exist, not one (Table 1)
3. Diversity of brain structures for consciousness means the gaps cannot have just one explanation
4. Instead, many general and special features contribute (Tables 2 and 3)
5. Evolutionary transitions from the general to the special features explain both aspects of subjectivity: mental images and affects. This closes the
explanatory gaps
6. Biological consideration of the allo-ontological and allo-ontological irreducibilities shows that the subjective/objective divide is real but can be
explained by normal science. That bridges the experiential gaps
7. The theory of neurobiological naturalism addresses the hard problem by dividing consciousness (subjectivity) into more parts and from more
perspectives than do other theories
B. Newly recognized division of the hard problem
1. Explanatory gaps: gaps to explaining subjectivity; are solvable; now are explained so these gaps are closed
2. Experiential gaps (Fig. 4): the objective/subjective divide; is real and cannot be closed, but now is bridged by scientific characterization
sub-problems. First, we broke down subjectivity into four ‘‘explanatory gaps”: referral, unity, qualia, and causation. We next
divided and analyzed the diverse neurobiological sources of primary consciousness and identified the numerous general biological and special neurobiological features that create it. We then traced the evolutionary origins of primary consciousness
and demonstrated how the general and special features naturally created subjectivity and the ‘‘explanatory gaps.” Finally, we
showed how once subjectivity evolved, two additional features – auto- and allo-irreducibilities – naturally and ‘‘nonmysteriously” emerged and contributed to the hard problem. Ultimately, this approach of de-constructing and repeatedly
dividing the problem of consciousness into its components allowed a natural solution that enabled us to see that three different disciplines – philosophy, neurobiology, and evolution – are needed to explain consciousness.
Although we are presenting a broad and unified resolution from a new perspective, we wish to point out that neurobiological naturalism is consistent with many other neurological theories of consciousness, in almost all ways except for precise evolutionary dating. That is, neurobiological naturalism reconciles with theories that focus on recurrent neuronal
interactions and feedback loops, information integration, oscillatory binding, neural coding strategies, or other brain processes that contribute to the creation of consciousness (Baars, 2002; Baars, Franklin, & Ramsoy, 2013; De Assis, 2016;
Gennaro, 2012; Koch et al., 2016; Llinás, 2002; Min, 2010; Northoff, 2013a, 2013b; Ribary, 2005). However, each of those
theories emphasizes a particular neurobiological aspect whereas neurobiological naturalism joins many such aspects and
it brings in more philosophy and evolution.
Table 4 summarizes the logical steps and findings of this paper. We conclude that the theory of neurobiological naturalism ‘‘closes” the explanatory gaps between the biological and subjective features of consciousness, and naturalizes and ‘‘scientifically bridges” the ontological barriers and ‘‘experiential gaps” of auto-ontological and allo-ontological irreducibilities,
thus providing a comprehensive solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are extended to Jill K. Gregory of the Department of Academic Medical Illustration at the Icahn School of Medicine
at Mount Sinai for her excellent work on the figure illustrations.
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Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Bad is freer than good: Positive–negative asymmetry
in attributions of free will
Gilad Feldman a,⇑, Kin Fai Ellick Wong b, Roy F. Baumeister c
a
Department of Work and Social Psychology, Maastricht University, Maastricht 6200MD, The Netherlands
Department of Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
c
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 4 April 2015
Revised 20 February 2016
Accepted 6 March 2016
Keywords:
Accountability
Action valence
Attributions
Free will
Outcome valence
a b s t r a c t
Recent findings support the idea that the belief in free will serves as the basis for moral
responsibility, thus promoting the punishment of immoral agents. We theorized that free
will extends beyond morality to serve as the basis for accountability and the capacity for
change more broadly, not only for others but also for the self. Five experiments showed
that people attributed higher freedom of will to negative than to positive valence, regardless of morality or intent, for both self and others. In recalling everyday life situations and
in classical decision making paradigms, negative actions, negatives outcomes, and negative
framing were attributed higher free will than positive ones. Free will attributions were
mainly driven by action or outcome valence, but not intent. These findings show consistent
support for the idea that free will underlies laypersons’ sense-making for accountability
and change under negative circumstances.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The idea that people have the capacity to make free, autonomous, and responsible choices is one fundamental assumption
of most, if not all, modern civilizations. Although most cultures operate based on some degree of belief in freedom of choice,
people vary in how much they regard human beings, including themselves, as capable of making free choices (e.g.,
Baumeister, 2008; Paulhus & Carey, 2011). They also differ in their perceptions of how much free will they have compared
with others (Gray, Knickman, & Wegner, 2011; Pronin & Kugler, 2010), and how much free will is exerted in certain situations
(Helzer & Gilovich, 2012). Such fluctuations in free will beliefs and attributions of free will are far more than idle metaphysical speculations, having been shown to alter cognition and behaviors (e.g., Alquist, Ainsworth, & Baumeister, 2013; Vohs &
Schooler, 2008) and with important legal and societal implications (Greene & Cohen, 2004; Roskies, 2006).
Over two millennia, philosophers have been debating what the concept of free will means, how it should be defined, and
what purpose it serves. Despite the long-standing debate there has so far been very little convergence with several schools of
thought and countless views conceptualizing free will in different—sometimes conflicting—ways. In recent years, a group of
experimental philosophers and social-cognitive psychologists have begun to look beyond the academic and philosophical
debate on the meaning of free will and have instead examined laypersons’ beliefs, cognition, and the behavioral
consequences related to the elusive concept of free will.
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: gilad.feldman@maastrichtuniversity.nl (G. Feldman), mnewong@ust.hk (K.F.E. Wong), baumeister@psy.fsu.edu (R.F. Baumeister).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.03.005
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
27
A growing body of literature examining free will beliefs and attributions has converged on the idea that in laypersons’
minds the concept of free will is associated with moral responsibility. The belief in free will has been shown to promote
socially responsible and moral behavior, such as more honesty (Vohs & Schooler, 2008), better learning from emotional experiences (Stillman & Baumeister, 2010), and more prosocial behavior (Baumeister, Masicampo, & DeWall, 2009). The theory
underlying these findings is grounded on the philosophical argument that free will is a prerequisite for holding people
morally responsible for their actions (Kant, 1788/1997). The link between free will and moral responsibility is also reflected
in the attributions people make to agents, with immoral agents perceived as having higher free will and higher perceived
blameworthiness (Phillips & Knobe, 2009), resulting in more retributive behavior (Shariff et al., 2014), as well as activating
the belief in free will so as to allow punishment of these agents (Clark et al., 2014).
However, studies on free will beliefs and cognition are not limited to morality and moral situations but have extended to
broader behavior in everyday life to reflect a wider view of the self as an active agent who is free to choose actions and pursue goals. The laypersons’ concept of free will is theorized as a core mechanism that enables the person to better pursue what
he/she wants (Dennett, 2003; Edwards, 1754/1957; Hume, 1748). Those who believe in free will enjoy greater self-efficacy
and less helplessness (Baumeister & Brewer, 2012), have higher levels of autonomy and more proactivity (Alquist et al.,
2013), exhibit better academic performance (Feldman, Chandrashekar, & Wong, 2016) and job performance (Stillman
et al., 2010), and have more positive attitudes and higher perceived capacity for decision making (Feldman, Baumeister, &
Wong, 2014). These findings are not about morality but rather about agents capable of change to improve their own behavior
and take responsibility for their actions. To exemplify that free will attributions are about more than just morality, it has
been shown that free will attributions are affected by self-serving biases differentiating between perceptions of the self
and of others. Pronin and Kugler (2010) showed that people tend to perceive themselves as having more free will than
others, perceiving their own behaviors as less predictable, and their own futures as less determined and more driven by
intent. If free will were mainly about holding people responsible and punishing them for immoral actions, it would make
little sense for people to attribute high free will to themselves, because that simply increases their own vulnerability to
punishment.
We propose that the concept of free will extends beyond morality and punishment to encompass change and accountability more broadly. In our use of the term ‘accountability’ we refer to the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility. Thus, if a behavior or an outcome deviates from the expected, then an accountable person accepts his or her own role and
seeks to learn from mistakes and correct future action. Using this view, the popular notion of free will may have evolved to
enable proactivity and learning by promoting people to see themselves as more accountable for their own actions
(Baumeister, 2008). A judgment based in accountability (moral, legal, performance, learning, and otherwise) is essentially
a decision about whether a person should have acted differently in a particular situation, especially if the outcome was undesirable or if it did not meet with expectations (Malle, Guglielmo, & Monroe, 2014). To assert that someone should have acted
differently only makes sense if one assumes that the person could have chosen to act differently. This assertion implies that
the actions and outcomes, although subject to many causes, were not fully coerced or predetermined, in the sense that there
was no room left for agentic choice (Nichols, 2006). Choice has been shown to be an important factor in people’s perception
of agency and freedom (Barlas & Obhi, 2013; Bode et al., 2014; Feldman et al., 2014), and the assumption that a person could
have chosen to act differently in the same situation is the essence of most laypersons’ conception of free will (Monroe, Dillon,
& Malle, 2014; Monroe & Malle, 2010; Stillman, Baumeister, & Mele, 2011).
The conceptual link between free will and accountability provides the basis for the proposition that attributions of free
will would be higher for negative actions or outcomes because these attributions allow people to perceive that change is
possible and accept their personal role in affecting such change. This would not be merely for the sake of punishment,
but also to promote change and learning (Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013). Negative outcomes are generally
undesirable, and they motivate people to engage in counterfactual thoughts about what could have happened differently
(Epstude & Roese, 2008; Roese, 1997), yet to allow for the possibility of controlled change, negative outcomes would more
specifically trigger a search for what the agents involved could have chosen to do differently to prevent, correct, or overcome
the negative outcome (Alquist, Ainsworth, Baumeister, Daly, & Stillman, 2015).
Fig. 1. Free will attribution model: Attributions of responsibility for actions/outcomes depend on the perceptions of free will (#1 and #2). Theorized link:
The conceptual link between free will and responsibility (#3) leads to a cognitive association between valence and free will attributions (#4) – negative
actions and outcomes trigger higher attributions of free will.
28
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
Our theoretical model is summarized in Fig. 1. A perception of an action or an outcome as negative leads to an attribution
of responsibility, which is dependent on the perceptions of the agent as having free will. On the basis of this link, we expect
that the perception of a negative action or outcome would also directly trigger the attribution of free will as to allow for
accountability and future change in behavior.
We expected that attributions of free will would be triggered in a wide array of negative circumstances, including those
that are morally neutral or devoid of intent. From moral situations to everyday life learning, the perception of having free
will (the capacity to have chosen otherwise) is an essential component of accepting responsibility for one’s past, present,
and future behavior so that negative outcomes can be corrected. In this view, the attribution of higher free will to agents
would not be limited to the judgments of others, but will also extend to those of the self, and would not be limited to specific
actions, but would also extend to outcomes regardless of action.
2. The present studies
Five experiments were conducted to test our hypothesis that negative actions and outcomes, compared to positive ones,
lead to higher attributions of free will to the enacting agent, for both self and for others. Experiment 1 employed a classic
Asian disease scenario to examine the attributions following negative versus positive outcomes to a risky decision in which
the action and the intent were held constant. Experiment 2 assessed the attributions to negative versus positive framings of
identical outcomes in the same scenario, with both intent, action, and outcome held constant. Experiment 3 used a prisoner’s
dilemma game theory paradigm to examine free will attributions to defection versus cooperation, showing that the effect
extends to social behavior. Experiment 4 was designed to extend the test to real-life events by having participants recall
ordinary interactions they had with other people. Lastly, Experiment 5 contrasted action valence and outcome valence in
free will attributions and their link to intent. Taken together, these experiments provide a comprehensive test for the
hypothesized positive–negative asymmetries in general free will attributions.
2.1. Experiment 1
Experiment 1 provided the first test of the hypothesis, using a variation on the Asian disease scenario originally used by
Tversky and Kahneman (1981). The scenario refers to an impending epidemic and a choice between two public health interventions, one of which may save everyone but may also save no one, whereas the other would guarantee saving some lives
but not all. Tversky and Kahneman used this scenario to show that people’s preferences between those options shift as a
function of whether the interventions are described in terms of lives saved or lives lost. We adapted this scenario to hold
the action constant while manipulating outcome. Participants were told to imagine that the decision had been made either
by themselves or by someone else, and that the decision made was to pursue the high-risk high-payoff option (i.e., take a
chance on saving everyone). Half were told that the decision had turned out well, thus all lives had been saved, whereas
the others were told to imagine it had gone badly and no one was saved. Our hypothesis predicted that people would attribute more freedom to the decision-maker whose decision turned out badly rather than favorably.
The specific scenario was chosen as it allowed us to hold both the action and the intent constant. The two options presented in the scenario did not contrast between a positive or a negative action but rather an action that is either risk-seeking
or risk-averse, thereby holding intent (to save lives) constant. Furthermore, in all scenarios the agent chose the risky option,
as this option allowed us to hold the action constant while contrasting two different possible outcomes. Thus, in the contemplated scenario there is no question that the decision maker intends to minimize the number of lost lives, there are two
viable alternatives and both can be argued as acceptable, and in our manipulation of the outcomes the agent has chosen
the same action.
Holding action and intent constant served two main purposes in this experiment. First, we aimed to establish that free
will attributions are different from previous effects about intent, such as Knobe’s (2003) finding that people attributed
greater intent when a decision maker chose an action that had bad rather than good side effects. Second, since the action
is the same, there is no contrast between moral and immoral behavior, which would demonstrate that the effect is not
merely about encouraging moral over immoral behavior (Clark et al., 2014; Phillips & Knobe, 2009; Shariff et al., 2014)
but also extends to envisioning the possibility for change more broadly.
2.1.1. Method
2.1.1.1. Participants and design. A total of 204 participants (Mage = 30.15, SDage = 8.99; 84 females) were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and each received US$0.05 for completing one of the four versions of the questionnaire (2 2,
between-subject, self versus other, and negative versus positive, randomly assigned).
2.1.1.2. Manipulations. The participants were presented with the Asian disease problem (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981) in
which a decision maker faces the dilemma of choosing between two types of medicine aimed to help in a situation in which
600,000 people are expected to die from an impending epidemic. There were two options. The riskier option offers a
one-third chance of saving everyone and a two-thirds chance of not saving anyone. The safer option presented a certainty
of saving one-third of the lives but consigning the other two-thirds to certain death. The participants were also told that
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
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the decision had been made to pursue the riskier option. Half were told to assume that they themselves had made that decision, whereas the rest were told to imagine that someone else had made the decision. The outcome was also manipulated:
half were told to assume that the intervention had been successful and everyone had been saved, whereas the rest were told
to imagine that it had failed and that all 600,000 lives had been lost.
The scenario was followed by two multiple-choice quiz questions that the participants had to answer correctly to proceed
and a manipulation check. The participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement with free will statements.
2.1.1.3. Free will attributions. In order to avoid priming people’s beliefs in free will and confounding answers to the different
perspectives people hold regarding the loaded term of ‘free will’ we applied indirect measures of free will attributions and
avoided using the term of free will (Pronin & Kugler, 2010), instead asking the relevant operative regarding the agency’s
capacity to choose differently (Chernyak & Kushnir, 2013; Nichols, 2004). We adopted the definition of free will reached
by a recent combined effort of social psychologists, neuroscientists, and experimental philosophers as being the capacity
to perform free actions (Haggard, Mele, O’Connor, & Vohs, 2010), meaning that the person could have acted otherwise in
the availability of options and with the capacity to choose among those options without coercion (Baumeister, 2008;
Kane, 2002; Wong & Cheng, 2013). Both sophisticated philosophical treatments (e.g., Kane, 2011) and layperson views
(e.g., Feldman et al., 2014; Monroe & Malle, 2010) tend to regard the capacity for choice to act otherwise as an essential core
of free will (Nichols, 2004). These measures were specifically meant to provide the clearest and simplest measure of free will
attributions without addressing the issue of determinism, capturing the participant’s own views of free will regardless of
views on compatibilism (Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2005).
We therefore asked the participants about the ability of the decider to choose otherwise. The first question asked whether
the person (self or other) ‘‘could have chosen to act differently in that situation”. To go beyond the specific context of the
situation and examine the implications for possible learning and change in the future, we also asked about future situations
of what may be, so the second question asked that if the two people ‘‘were to face the same situation again” whether the
actor ‘‘would be able to choose a different course of action that would lead to a different outcome” (1 = strongly disagree,
5 = strongly agree). These two items were designed to capture the dimensions of both past reflection and future prospection.
Clearly, in the scenario described agents had an alternative option. Therefore, any differences in attributions between the
manipulation conditions would reflect a bias in the perception of the agent’s capacity to be able to choose differently based
on who decided and what the outcome was.
2.1.2. Results and discussion
Means and standard deviations for the manipulation check and the free will attributions are reported in Table 1. The
manipulation of valence was successful. The participants in the negative conditions rated the outcome as more negative than
those in the positive conditions (F (1, 200) = 303.97, p < .001, gp2 = .60).
Contemplating the bad outcome led people to attribute greater freedom to the decision maker than contemplating the
good outcome. Two-way between-subject analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed the main effects of outcome valence on
both free will attribution measures (findings are plotted in Fig. 2). That is, participants rated the bad-outcome decision as
freer than that of the good-outcome (F(1, 200) = 16.45, p < .001, gp2 = .08), and likewise they rated the decision leading to
a bad-outcome as freer with regard to possible future decisions in similar situations (F(1, 200) = 30.76, p < .001, gp2 = .13).
The main effects of the self/other variable were not significant on either measure (F < .63, p > .427). The interactions between
outcome valence and self-other were likewise not significant (F < .24, p > .627).
Experiment 1 showed that people attributed more free will to the authors of an action which resulted in a negative outcome than to the authors of the same action taken by the same author leading to a positive outcome. The pattern was the
same regardless of whether self or another made the decision. This provided the first support for our hypotheses about a
positive–negative asymmetry in attributions of free will. The action and the intent were controlled for, and the effects consistent for when the contemplated enacting agent was the self or someone else and for the current situation and future similar situations, lending support for the theory that free will attributions are not merely about the contrasts between moral
and immoral behavior and the punishment of misbehaving agents, but rather a broader bias triggering the perceived capacity for change when well-intended actions turn out badly.
2.2. Experiment 2
Experiment 2 was a companion to Experiment 1. It again used the Asian disease scenario, but this time we went further
by holding both the action and the outcome constant, varying only the framing of the outcome. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the outcome of a risky decision that turned out either positively or negatively. However, in Experiment 2, the actions
and outcomes were the same across conditions, and we only manipulated whether the outcome was described in terms of
lives saved (positive) or lives lost (negative).
If the effect found in Experiment 1 is replicated in Experiment 2 when both the action, intent, and outcome are the same,
then this would show a fundamental bias in which simply focusing on the negative rather than the positive in any given
situation would trigger higher free will attributions and the envisioned capacity to act differently and obtain different
outcomes in future situations.
30
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
Table 1
Experiment 1 – means and standard deviations for the manipulation check and free will attributions.
Manipulation check – valence
Negative
Self
Other
Total
36.62 (68.95) [47]
62.18 (58.02) [55]
50.40 (64.26)
Free will attributions – current
situation
Free will attributions – future
situation
Positive
Total
Negative
Positive
Total
Negative
Positive
Total
78.73 (38.00) [51]
75.80 (35.80) [51]
64.26 (36.76)
23.41 (79.71)
4.21 (84.50)
3.87 (.90)
3.78 (1.01)
3.82 (.96)
3.27 (1.23)
3.12 (1.24)
3.20 (1.24)
3.56 (1.12)
3.46 (1.17)
4.13 (.85)
4.16 (.83)
4.15 (.84)
3.43 (.98)
3.33 (1.21)
3.38 (1.10)
3.76 (.98)
3.76 (1.11)
Note. Parentheses indicate standard deviation. Brackets indicate number of participants. See Fig. 2 for the plots of free will attributions.
Fig. 2. Experiment 1 – attributions plot. Error bar indicates standard error. ⁄⁄⁄p < .001, ns – p > .05. The top comparison is for the main effect contrasting
positive and negative for self–other combined. The bottom comparison is between the self–other conditions within the positive and negative conditions.
2.2.1. Method
2.2.1.1. Participants and design. A total of 221 participants (Mage = 29.98, SDage = 9.11; 93 females) on Amazon Mechanical
Turk received US$0.05 for completing one of the four versions of the Asian disease scenario (2 2, between-subject, self versus other, and negative versus positive frame, randomly assigned).
2.2.1.2. Procedure and materials. The Asian disease scenario in Experiment 1 was adapted for Experiment 2. As in the previous
study, it described an impending epidemic and a choice of interventions made by either the self or another person. This time,
however, participants were instructed to visualize that the non-risky option rather than the risky option had been chosen,
thus saving a third of the at-risk lives (or, framed negatively, killing two thirds). For half of the participants, this outcome was
described in terms of the lives that were saved. For the rest, the outcome was described in terms of the number of deaths.
This differential framing was similar to what was originally used by Tversky and Kahneman (1981) with this scenario.
The scenario was followed by two multiple-choice quiz questions that the participants had to answer correctly in order to
proceed (again, intended as checks on attention and understanding) and a manipulation check. The participants were then
asked to rate their perceptions of whether the person could have chosen to act differently, using the same two items as in
Experiment 1.
2.2.2. Results and discussion
The means and standard deviations for the manipulation check and the free will attributions are reported in Table 2. The
participants in the positive framing conditions rated the outcome as more positive than those in the negative framing conditions (F (1, 217) = 44.93, p < .001, gp2 = .17), even though the outcome was the same—thus indicating a successful manipulation of the framing valence.
A two-way between-subject ANOVA revealed the significant main effects of framing on both free will attribution measures (findings are plotted in Fig. 3). Regarding the decision itself, the participants perceived more scope for the decision
maker to have chosen otherwise when the outcome was framed in terms of losses than gains (F(1, 217) = 16.54, p < .001,
gp2 = .07). They also attributed higher freedom to the decision maker in similar future situations following the death frame
than the lives-saved frame (F(1, 217) = 7.11, p = .008, gp2 = .03).
As in Experiment 1, the main effects of the decision maker (self versus other) were not significant on either measure
(F < .89, p > .347). The interactions were also not significant (F < 1.08, p > .300).
Thus, even when the decision outcome was objectively the same (i.e., 400,000 deaths and 200,000 lives saved) and only
the framing was manipulated, the attributions of free will varied as a function of valence. Contemplating the outcome in
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G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
Table 2
Experiment 2 – means and standard deviations for the manipulation check and free will attributions.
Manipulation check – valence
Self
Other
Total
Free will attributions – current
situation
Free will attributions – future situation
Negative
Positive
Total
Negative
Positive
Total
Negative
Positive
Total
6.30 (64.84) [54]
3.24 (69.89) [51]
4.81 (67.03)
47.97 (41.35) [59]
59.16 (34.65) [57]
53.47 (38.45)
28.05 (57.55)
32.75 (60.80)
3.59 (1.09)
3.45 (1.12)
3.52 (1.10)
2.98 (1.12)
2.84 (1.11)
2.91 (1.12)
3.27 (1.14)
3.12 (1.15)
3.72 (1.12)
3.47 (.95)
3.60 (1.04)
3.17 (1.16)
3.23 (1.17)
3.20 (1.16)
3.43 (1.17)
3.34 (1.07)
Note. Parentheses indicate standard deviation. Brackets indicate number of participants. See Fig. 3 for the plots of free will attributions.
Fig. 3. Experiment 2 attributions plot. Error bar indicates standard error. ⁄⁄⁄p < .001, ns p > .05. The top comparison is for the main effect contrasting
positive and negative for self–other combined. The bottom comparison is between the self–other conditions within the positive and negative conditions.
terms of lives lost made people attribute more freedom to the decision maker than contemplating it in terms of lives saved.
As in the preceding experiment, the same effect was found for judging the specific decision as for evaluating future possible
similar actions, and for contemplating the action taken by both the self and others.
Experiment 2 extended Experiment 1 to show an even broader bias triggering the perceived capacity for change not only
when well-intended actions turn out badly but even when simply thinking about outcomes as negative. In both experiments,
the action and the intent were controlled for, and the effect was observed when contemplating both self and others for either
the current situation or other similar situations in the future.
2.3. Experiment 3
Experiment 3 sought to extend Experiments 1 and 2 using a more specific fixed interaction between the participant and
another person to capture a social situation involving the participant with consequences for the participant in a more realistic situation. That is, the experiment measured free will attributions in a two-person ‘‘prisoner’s dilemma” interaction
(Rapoport & Chammah, 1965) in which the actions of a person hold direct and clear consequences for the other party and
one of the parties is the participant. The decision is either prosocial or selfish, and it is made either by the participant toward
a friend or by a friend toward the participant. Defection in this game is not an immoral act but rather a selfish act, as there is
no cheating, reciprocation or lack of, and both options of cooperation or defection are within the set rules of the game.1
This specific paradigm was chosen as a widely used and simplified classical representation of a social interaction. Based
on the findings in the first two experiments, the prediction was that participants would perceive more free will when it is
perceived that the person acted negatively toward the other person than when the person is perceived as having acted positively toward the other person.
2.3.1. Method
A total of 208 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk received US$0.05 for completing the study. They were randomly
assigned among four conditions (2 2, between-subject, self versus other, and negative versus positive action).
The participants were presented with the prisoner’s dilemma scenario, in which they were asked to imagine playing
together with a friend to win a possible prize and in which both the self and the friend have the option to cooperate or defect.
The unilateral defection brought significant gains for the defector (US$75), whereas the cooperating partner received
1
Prosocial and moral behavior are not the same construct, as – for example – two players can act cooperate to act unethically (Feldman, Chao, Farh, & Bardi,
2015; for an example using game theory defection and cooperation see Weisel & Shalvi, 2015).
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G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
nothing. Mutual cooperation brought both parties a good outcome (US$45). Mutual defection resulted in a small benefit (US
$15) to both. Four multiple-choice questions were administered to ascertain that the participant understood the game and
the instructions. These had to be answered correctly before proceeding.
Next, the participants were told to imagine that the game had been played. They were told to imagine a particular
response either by themselves or by the friend (other player). Thus, four conditions existed: the friend cooperated, the friend
defected, the participant cooperated, or the participant defected. The scenario only described a single action taken by one of
the actors without indicating the other player’s decision in order to minimize the possible confound of reciprocity. The perceptions of the outcome valence in game theory scenarios can vary considerably across participants based on many factors,
and we therefore administered outcome comprehension check questions also serving as manipulation checks (1 – ‘‘indicate
whether [your/your friend’s] choice has positive or negative implications for [your friend/you]” with an answer of either positive or negative, and 2 – ‘‘on a scale of 100, most negative, to +100, most positive, how would you rate the implications of
[your/your friend’s] decision for [your friend/you]”). Correct answers in the manipulation checks were a prerequisite to
inclusion in the analyses (above or below zero for the second manipulation check), because only participants who properly
answered the manipulation can be considered as a test of the hypotheses regarding valence. After excluding those who gave
wrong answers about the manipulation, we were left with a sample of 137 (Mage = 30.36, SDage = 9.56; 63 females). Nonetheless, the pattern of results for the full sample was similar to the findings reported below.
Finally, the participants were asked about their attributions of free will. Two items were similar to the items used in the
preceding studies: the choice to act differently in the current situation and choice to act differently in similar future situations. Based on Pronin and Kugler’s (2010, Experiment 1) conceptualization of free will attributions, we also added an item
which measured free will attributions by an indirect measure of predictability (more predictable indicative of lower capacity
for free will) – ‘‘I could have predicted the other person’s behavior in that situation even before it happened” or ‘‘the other
person could have predicted my behavior in that situation even before it happened” (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree;
reversed).
2.3.2. Results and discussion
The means and standard deviations for the free will attributions are reported in Table 3. The results of a two-way
between-subject ANOVA are plotted in Fig. 4. For the attributions of the current decision made, the participants perceived
a negative action toward another person to indicate higher free will than a positive action (F(1, 133) = 4.03, p = .047,
gp2 = .03). If the same situation were to arise again in the future, the participants perceived that an agent who behaved negatively would have a higher capacity to behave differently in the future than an agent who acted positively (F(1, 133) = 5.75,
p = .018, gp2 = .04). The predictability measure in this study followed the overall expected pattern, and negative behaviors
were rated as less predictable indicating higher free will than positive behaviors (F(1, 133) = 7.22, p = .008, gp2 = .05). There
was a marginal interaction for attributions to the current situation (F = 3.69, p = .057), indicating that the effect was stronger
for attributions to others. However, no other significant self-other main effects or interactions were found (F < 1.19, p > .278).
Experiment 3 tested the hypotheses using a game theory of prisoner’s dilemma simulation of an everyday life social interaction. Overall, free will was again perceived more strongly in connection with the negative than with the positive valence,
which in this study took the form of making selfish moves rather than cooperation.
Although the prisoner’s dilemma paradigm resembled a realistic social interaction context, a limitation of this paradigm is
that the outcome of either cooperation or defection could be interpreted to be both positive and negative, depending on the
perspective taken, an issue which we attempted to control for using the manipulation checks. Another limitation of the game
theory paradigm has to do with the ambiguous intent, as it is not clear whether the action taken by either side was intended
as positive or negative toward the other party or merely as a reaction to an anticipated decision by the other party.
Notwithstanding these limitations, Experiment 3 extended the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 to demonstrate the effect
in a more realistic scenario involving the participant contrasting between selfish and prosocial actions.
2.4. Experiment 4
In Experiment 4, we sought to extend the findings from Experiments 1 to 3 to actual behaviors in everyday life rather than
hypothetical vignettes (for the importance of evaluating an effect from both reader and observer perspectives, see Girotto,
Ferrante, Pighin, & Gonzalez, 2007). The participants rated their perceptions of free will after recalling either a good or a bad
Table 3
Experiment 3 – means and standard deviations for the free will attributions.
Self
Other
Total
Free will attributions – current situation
Free will attributions – future situation
Free will attributions – predictability
Negative
Positive
Total
Negative
Positive
Total
Negative
Positive
Total
3.42 (1.26) [19]
4.00 (.75) [26]
3.76 (1.03)
3.40 (.97) [47]
3.24 (1.17) [45]
3.33 (1.07)
3.41 (1.05)
3.52 (1.09)
3.84 (1.17)
3.73 (.87)
3.78 (1.00)
3.36 (1.26)
3.20 (1.16)
3.28 (1.21)
3.50 (1.24)
3.39 (1.09)
3.05 (1.03)
3.23 (.86)
3.16 (.93)
2.62 (.99)
2.64 (1.17)
2.63 (1.08)
2.74 (1.01)
2.86 (1.10)
Note. Parentheses indicate standard deviation. Brackets indicate number of participants. See Fig. 4 for the plots of free will attributions.
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
33
Fig. 4. Experiment 3 – attributions plot. Error bar indicates standard error. ⁄⁄⁄p < .001, ⁄⁄p < .01, ⁄p < .05, ns p > .05. The top comparison is for the main effect
contrasting positive and negative for self–other combined. The bottom comparison is between the self–other conditions within the positive and negative
conditions.
action by themselves or by someone else. The main prediction was, again, that people would attribute more free will for the
bad than the good actions, regardless of whether the actions were performed by self or others.
To complement the attribution questions common in the literature and demonstrate that negative valence triggers perceiving higher capacity for agents to do otherwise, we also measured agentic counterfactuals. Counterfactual thinking
involves the tendency to think of all possible alternative realities that could have taken place, both in general circumstances
or for the person, upwards or downwards. Past work has shown that negative actions and outcomes generally elicit more
upward counterfactuals than good ones, with regard to what could have happened differently to produce a better outcome
(Boninger, Gleicher, & Strathman, 1994; Roese, 1997; Roese & Olson, 1997). We hypothesized that the concept of accountability underlying free will and the need for responsibility are likely to elicit a very specific set of counterfactuals, one that
mainly focuses on what the agent could have chosen to do differently.2
2.4.1. Method
2.4.1.1. Participants and design. Undergraduate students (N = 212, 112 females; Mage = 19.17, SDage = .97) received course
credit for completing one of the four versions of a survey questionnaire, assigned at random. The design was a 2 2
between-subject factorial, varying whether the self or the other person was the responsible agent and whether the action
was negative versus positive.
2.4.1.2. Procedure and materials. The participants were instructed to recall and describe in writing a recent interaction with
another person, in which one person did something that affected the other. Half of the participants were randomly assigned
to write about them doing something that affected another person, and the rest were assigned to write about the other
2
To clarify, free will attributions cannot be reduced to counterfactual thinking. Although the two are related, there are important differences between the
two constructs. Counterfactuals are broader and include all that could have happened differently leading to a different outcome, while free will attributions
focus more specifically on what the agent could have chosen to do differently, free from internal and external constraints (for a more detailed review see Alicke,
Buckingham, Zell, & Davis, 2008; Alquist et al., 2015; Baumeister, Crescioni, & Alquist, 2011). For example, counterfactual thinking may trigger many types of
alternative realities that lack free will, such as external constraints that confound free will: luck (‘if I only had luck on my side’), nature (‘if only it did not rain’),
fate (‘if only I my astrological sign were different’), and laws of physics (‘if only the sun did not rise this morning’), or internal constraints that confound free
will, such as personality (‘if only I were an extravert/’), background (‘if only I had been born rich’), genes (‘if only I were taller’) or counterfactuals that do not
involve a deliberate choice (‘if only I were not so tired’).
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G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
Table 4
Experiment 4 – means and standard deviations for the manipulation check and free will attributions for current and future situations.
Negative
Positive
Total
Free will attributions – recalled situation
Self
Other
Total
3.68 (1.00) [53]
3.94 (1.03) [52]
3.81 (1.02)
2.48 (1.09) [54]
3.41 (1.05) [53]
2.94 (1.16)
Self
Other
Total
Free will attributions – agentic counterfactuals
1.36 (1.26)
0.91 (1.12)
1.92 (2.26)
1.42 (1.47)
1.64 (1.84)
1.16 (1.33)
Negative
Positive
Total
Free will attributions – future situation
3.07 (1.20)
3.68 (1.07)
1.13 (1.20)
1.67 (1.91)
3.33 (.98)
3.15 (1.16)
3.25 (1.07)
2.55 (1.04)
2.79 (1.04)
2.67 (1.04)
Free will attributions – predictability
3.42 (.95)
2.59 (.92)
2.67 (1.04)
2.83 (.99)
3.05 (1.06)
2.71 (.96)
2.94 (1.08)
2.97 (1.11)
3.00 (1.02)
2.75 (1.02)
Note. Parentheses indicate standard deviation. Brackets indicate number of participants. See Fig. 5 for the plots of free will attributions.
Fig. 5. Experiment 4 – attributions plot. Error bar indicates standard error. ⁄⁄⁄p < .001, ⁄⁄p < .01, ⁄p < .05, ns p > .05. The top comparison is for the main effect
contrasting positive and negative for self–other combined. The bottom comparison is between the self–other conditions within the positive and negative
conditions.
person doing something that affected them. Cross-cutting this, half were randomly assigned to write about positive actions,
and the rest wrote about negative ones.
The short essay was followed by the measuring of free will attributions in the recalled situation and similar future situations (Experiments 1 and 2) and predictability (Experiment 3). Because we examined real life complex interactions rather
than a fixed scenario, this allowed us to add an additional measure. The fourth measure was adapted from the Pronin and
Kugler measure of free will as alternatives to action (2010, Studies 2 and 3) and asked about agentic counterfactuals: how the
self or the other person could have acted differently in the specific recalled situation. The participants were asked the following: ‘‘Looking back, how—if at all—could [you/the other person] have acted differently? Please provide as many options
as you can about how you think [you/the other person] could have acted differently in that situation” and were further
instructed to ‘‘write down ‘no other possible actions’ if and only if you think [you/the other person] could not have acted
differently in any way.” The responses were coded for the number of alternatives mentioned.
2.4.2. Results and discussion
The means and standard deviations for free will attributions are reported in Table 4. Bad actions were rated as freer than
the good ones, as indicated by a two-way between-subject ANOVA (see Fig. 5 for plots).
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
35
A significant main effect was found for the valence of the action. The participants gave higher free will ratings to the actor
who performed the bad action than to the actor who did something good, both for the specific action they wrote about (F (1,
208) = 36.16, p < .001, gp2 = .15), and for possible similar situations in the future (F(1, 208) = 15.54, p < .001, gp2 = .07). Participants also wrote down more agentic counterfactuals in the negative conditions than in the positive condition (F (1,
208) = 4.86, p = .029, gp2 = .02). Lastly, a main effect for valence indicated lower predictability (higher free will) for negative
actions (F (1, 208) = 6.14, p = .014, gp2 = .03). We examined the situations recalled by participants in terms of morality, by
coding whether the situations recalled involved blatant unethical actions that intentionally harmed others, or clearly violated laws or regulations. We found that none of the recalled situations involved unethical behavior or a moral dilemma,
and that participants recalled every-day life situations (for example, negative behaviors recalled were a professor giving a
bad grade, roommates making noise, someone chewing gum in class, romantic disappointments, etc.).
Unlike in the previous experiments, there was also a significant main effect indicating that more free will was attributed
to the other person than to the self using three measures (recalled situation: F(1, 208) = 17.40, p < .001, gp2 = .08; predictability (F (1, 208) = 3.53, p = .062, gp2 = .02; agentic counterfactuals (F(1, 208) = 15.23, p = .015, gp2 = .03). A significant interaction also emerged in two measures (recalled situations: F (1, 208) = 5.46, p = .02, gp2 = .03; predictability: F(1, 208)
= 13.30, p < .001, gp2 = .06) indicating that differences between self and other were larger with regard to the positive action
than the negative one.
Across the four measures we found that negative valence was associated with a higher degree of free will than positive
valence. The coding of the recalled situations showed that they did not involve any moral dilemmas or morally valenced
actions but rather represented simple interactions between people in their everyday lives. Together with the previous three
experiments, we conclude a consistent positive–negative asymmetry bias for free will attributions.
Some differences in attributions to self versus others were found in this study unlike in the previous experiments. High
free will was attributed to others than to the self in two out of four measures for both positive and negative actions. The
findings that positive and negative actions were both perceived as higher free will for others might be due to the easier recall
of circumstances and constraints for their own actions while being typically unaware of the circumstances and constraints of
others, thus possibly leading to more perceived freedom of action (Malle, Knobe, & Nelson, 2007). In Experiments 1–3, the
alternatives to the action were predefined and controlled. That is, the complexity of real-life situations may have introduced
additional biases to free will attributions.
2.5. Experiment 5
Experiment 1 manipulated outcome, Experiment 2 manipulated outcome framing, and Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated
action. In Experiment 5, we sought to manipulate both action and outcome.
To address previous challenges about the role of desire for blameworthiness and intent confounds in the Knobe Effect
(Guglielmo & Malle, 2010), we also directly manipulated intent. That enabled us to examine and contrast all three in their
effect on perceived free will.
2.5.1. Method
A total of 301 participants (Mage = 35.08, SDage = 11.58; 169 females) were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk in
return for US$0.15. The participants were presented with a scenario based on a design by Cushman (2008) and adapted from
a scenario in Phillips and Knobe (2009), in which a doctor was ordered by the chief of surgery to prescribe medicine to a
patient (each of the brackets below represents a single manipulation):
At a certain hospital, there were very specific rules about the procedures doctors had to follow. The rules said that doctors
have to follow the orders of the chief of surgery. One day, the chief of surgery went to a doctor and said: ‘I don’t care what
you think about how this patient should be treated. I am ordering you to prescribe the drug Accuphine for her!’.
The doctor had always [liked this patient and actually wanted the patient/disliked this patient and actually did not want
the patient] to be cured.
The doctor knew that giving this patient Accuphine would result in an immediate [recovery/death].
The doctor went ahead and prescribed Accuphine.
As a result of the medicine, the patient [recovered immediately/died shortly after].
The scenario manipulated the valence of three factors. First, intent was manipulated by whether the doctor had positive
or negative attitudes toward the patient and wanted to see the patient helped or harmed. Second, the action varied, as in the
doctor knew the outcome of the action taken would be either positive or negative. Third, the outcome was positive or negative. The design was therefore 2 2 2 for intent, action, and outcome as either positive or negative.
The participants were then presented with three manipulation checks in which they were asked to indicate the valence of
the doctor’s intent, the action taken by the doctor, and the outcome on a scale of 100 (very bad) to 100 (very good).
The participants were then asked about the doctor’s perceived capacity to have chosen not to prescribe the medicine
as a measure or perceived free will (0 = No choice – had to prescribe; 100 = Had choice – could have chosen NOT to
prescribe).
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G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
2.5.2. Results and discussion
The correlations between the manipulation checks and the dependent variables are detailed in Table 5. Free will attributions were negatively correlated with both action valence (r = .27, p < .001) and outcome valence (r = .17, p = .004) and
only marginally correlated with intent valence (r = .10, p = .07 ns). The strong correlations between intent and action
and between action and outcome perceived valence indicate that perceptions of intent, action, and outcome valence may
be linked to one another regardless of the manipulations.
The manipulations were successful. Participants indicated more negative intent when the doctor disliked and wanted to
harm the patient (N = 153, M = 57.58, SD = 61.73) than when the doctor liked and wanted to help the patient (N = 148,
M = 40.97, SD = 62.34; t(299) = 13.04, p < .001). Likewise, they perceived the action as more negative when the doctor
thought that the medicine would be harmful (N = 150, M = 46.57, SD = 69.93) than when the doctor thought that the medicine would be helpful (N = 151, M = 31.10, SD = 74.38; t(299) = 9.33, p < .001). Last, and unsurprisingly, they rated the outcome as more negative when the patient died (N = 152, M = 87.52, SD = 37.97) than when the patient recovered (N = 149,
M = 88.62, SD = 29.17; t(299) = 45.07, p < .001). However, the action valence manipulation also affected perceived intent (t
(299) = 8.47, p < .001) and the outcome valence manipulation also affected perceived action (t(299) = 10.536, p < .001) and
perceived intent (t(299) = 2.06, p = .04). Therefore, the analyses below were supplemented the regression analyses using
manipulation checks.
A three-way ANOVA of the three manipulations examined the free will attributions and revealed significant effects for
action (F(1, 293) = 20.57, p < .001, gp2 = .07) and outcome (F(1, 293) = 7.57, p = .006, gp2 = .03), but not for intent (F(1, 293)
= .89, p = .348 ns), on free will attributions. No interactions were significant (F < 1.65). The participants in the negative action
condition perceived higher free will (M = 81.47, SD = 27.53) than those in the positive action condition (M = 65.11,
SD = 34.75; t(299) = 4.53, p < .001). Those in the negative outcome condition perceived higher free will (M = 78.16,
SD = 30.83) than those in the positive outcome condition (M = 68.28, SD = 33.21; t(299) = 2.67, p = .008). A step-wise regression using the manipulation checks showed that when put together in a regression, only action emerged as a significant predictor of free will attributions (F(1, 299) = 23.91, p < .001, b = .27, p < .001, DR2 = .07), with no other effects found.
In summary, free will attributions were affected by both action valence and outcome valence, but were not affected by
intent manipulation or associated with intent attributions. Thus, we conclude that the findings differ from the pattern shown
in Knobe’s (2003) findings about intention to produce unwanted side effects.
3. General discussion
The primary finding of this investigation was that bad was perceived as freer than good for both actions and outcomes
and regardless of the agent. The findings are summarized in Table 6. Higher attributions of free will for bad than for good
actions and outcomes were consistent across multiple methods, including the hypothetical Asian disease scenario (Experiments 1 and 2), a two-person social interaction in a prisoner’s dilemma game theory scenario (Experiment 3), and autobiographical experiences from participants’ lives (Experiment 4). We showed that the valence effect on free will attributions
generalized for outcomes (Experiment 1), the mere framing of an outcome (Experiment 2), and actions taken (Experiments 3
and 4), and using several measures, including free will attributions to current or recalled situation and a similar
situation taking place in the future (Experiments 1–4), predictability (Experiments 3 and 4), and agentic counterfactuals
(Experiment 4).
3.1. Free will as the capacity for change
The present results indicate that people perceive free will more strongly in connection with bad than good. The perception that someone is free and able to do otherwise is personally and socially useful, insofar as it emphasizes accountability
and facilitates learning and possible change. The present findings make sense in that context: It is seemingly most useful to
perceive freedom of action when something goes wrong, because learning and change are most urgently desirable then. The
very undesirability of negative actions or outcomes raises attention to the fact that the person really could have (and probably should have) done otherwise. That conclusion dovetails well with the research on counterfactual thinking: people
engage in counterfactual thinking by reflecting on bad actions and bad outcomes, and the benefits of such thinking are
Table 5
Experiment 5 – correlations table.
Free will attributions
Intent valence
Action valence
Outcome valence
Note. **p < .01; ***p < .001.
M
SD
Free will
73.27
9.11
7.60
.33
32.36
75.06
81.95
94.48
–
.10
.27***
.17**
Intent
Action
–
.64***
.17**
–
.58***
37
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
Table 6
Summary of findings.
Ex
N
Sample
IV1
IV2
DV
Behavior
Details
Contributions
1
204
MTurk
Outcome
valence
Self/Other
FW attributions
Past + future
2
221
MTurk
Self/Other
FW attributions
Past + future
3
137
MTurk
Outcome
Framing
valence
Action
valence
Self/Other
4
212
Students
Action
valence
Self/Other
Asian Disease scenario,
Tversky and Kahneman
(1981), high risk option
Asian Disease scenario,
Tversky and Kahneman
(1981), low risk option
Prisoner’s dilemma:
Rapoport and Chammah
(1965)
Recalled real-life interactions
Baseline effect:
Negative ? higher FW
attributions
1. Framing effect
2. Addressing # of deaths
confound
Action focus: fixed
situation, fixed actions
+ predictability measure
Real life situations
+ agentic counterfactuals
measure
5
301
MTurk
Intent,
Action, &
Outcome
–
FW attributions
Past + future
+ predictability
FW attributions:
Past + future
+ predictability
+ ACF
FW attributions
High versus
low risk
options
High versus
low risk
options
Cooperation
versus
defection
Ordinary
everyday life
behaviors
Moral
behavior
Hospital scenario, Phillips
and Knobe (2009)
Contrasting intent, action
and outcome with FW
attributions
Note. FW = free will; ACF = agentic counterfactuals.
derived from thinking about how one could have acted differently (Roese, 1997). The unique form of action control that
humans exercise, which in layperson perspective corresponds to free will, may well be an adaptation to enable people to
improve themselves so as to function better in society and, in turn, enable society to function better, thereby benefiting
the group (e.g., Baumeister, 2008). People may only reflect on it when faced with subpar or negative outcomes, or when
an agent behaves badly or makes bad decisions—because those are the cases in which it is most obvious that by acting otherwise, the person could benefit self and society.
3.2. Attributions of free will versus intent
Our findings extend previous literature regarding asymmetries in attributions. Knobe (2003) showed that people attribute more intent to a decision maker whose choices produced a bad than a good side effect that he had explicitly said
was not his intention (he expressed complete indifference). Experiments 1 and 2 held intent and action constant while
manipulating outcome or framing of an outcome. Experiment 5 directly addressed the question of the difference between
intent and free will. The relationship between free will and intent attributions was not significant and negative. Thus, previous findings about attributions of intent do not explain the present findings.
Attributions of intent and free will are conceptually different. Intention is a mental representation of purposive action,
and as such it could exist without free will. Meanwhile, some concepts of free will (e.g., random action; see Brembs,
2011) could operate without intention, simply by enabling the agent to make a different choice in the moment. Many concepts of free will also invoke the absence of external coercion, or even opposition to external pressure, which is largely irrelevant to intention. In the Knobe (2003) dilemma, the decision maker was presented as being fully able to do what he chose,
and so his level of free will was conceptually the same across conditions, whereas people judged his intention quite differently depending on outcomes.
Furthermore, intent is internal and people know whether they intended for something to happen or not, and therefore the
Knobe Effect is not meaningful for self attributions. The effect regarding the self can only be interpreted as the capacity for
choice, not as intent. This is best exemplified in the Experiment 4 recall task, as it relates to real everyday life actions taken
by the self, and the intent by the self is known.
We therefore conclude that intent and free will attributions are different, and that the valence asymmetry effect found is
unique, together allowing for fuller understanding of intentionality (Alicke, 2000; Malle & Knobe, 1997) with possible implications for recent theories about the attribution of blame and responsibility (Malle et al., 2014).
3.3. Free will extends beyond morality
We theorized that higher free will attributions would be elicited in a wide array of situations. Recent findings have linked
the concept of free will serves mainly to moral responsibility and to the need to punish wrongdoers (Clark et al., 2014; Shariff
et al., 2014), and we readily acknowledge the importance of free will in moral judgment. However, there is more to free will
than moral choice. Our findings extend beyond morality and punishment in multiple ways.
First, the actions assessed in Experiments 1–4 were morally neutral. In Experiment 1, the action was the same across conditions and therefore did not involve a contrast between moral and immoral, and indeed if anything the moral goal of saving
lives was held constant across conditions. Experiment 2 went even further in minimizing moral variation, insofar as the both
the action and the outcome were the same across conditions, only varying the framing of the outcome. Furthermore, in both
38
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
experiments the two possible decisions were not between a moral and an immoral decision but rather a decision between a
risk-seeking versus risk-averse decision—both undertaken in the service of the morally commendable goal of saving lives. In
Experiment 3 the decision made was between prosocial versus selfish behavior, both morally acceptable within the set rules
of the game. Experiment 4 used a sample of autobiographical memories from everyday life, and none of the stories involved
any sort of blatantly immoral behavior.
Second, we examined free will attributions for both self and others. The hypothesis that people attribute free will to negative actions and outcomes may not be easily extended to cases in which the agent is the self, which might reflect a potential
bias in attributions to self in order to try and reduce own responsibility and avoid punishment. If a key factor driving free will
beliefs and attributions is the need to punish wrongdoers, then we would expect people to act in accordance with selfserving bias (e.g., Kunda, 1987; Zuckerman, 1979), by which people seek to take credit for success but deny blame for failure.
Similarly, negative agency bias (Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman, 1990; Morewedge, 2009) argues that people tend to attribute success to internal factors and failures to external causes or to an agent. If so, positive actions taken by the self might
elicit higher attributions of free will to elicit praise and receive credit (‘‘I could have done bad, but I made the decision to do
good”) and negative actions to lower attributions of free will in order to reduce feelings of guilt or possible social punishment
(external: ‘‘I was forced to do it”, or internal: ‘‘I was drunk/mentally insane”). On that basis, one would predict that people
would attribute high free will to others who caused negative outcomes but not to themselves for producing negative outcomes. However, we found no evidence indicating such a bias. In fact, the attributions were for the most part similar for
the self and other (Experiments 1–3). While this null difference cannot rule out the possibility of the above prediction,
the best available evidence suggests that the core of free will attributions and belief is more about the assumption of responsibility as to envision change and enable learning. Punishment and retribution can be seen as one of several possible mechanisms to facilitate such learning, which are rendered ineffective when one does not perceive the capacity for change.
3.4. Implications and future directions
The present investigation focused on cognitive biases in attributions of free will, and it is plausible that these attributions
may interact with beliefs, motivations, and affect. For example, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have shown that contemplating
moral responsibility of emotionally valenced crimes led to more compatibilist attributions (attributing responsibility in a
deterministic universe). Possibly, contemplating more affective situations would lead to an even stronger positive–negative
bias in attributions of free will. Future studies may examine impact of affect for free will attributions and whether generalized beliefs in free will would moderate the positive–negative asymmetry bias.
The positive–negative asymmetry in free will attributions may also be related to lay-assumptions regarding human nature, specifically whether people are inherently good or inherently bad. The predictability measures in Experiments 3 and 4
showed that people find bad actions to be more unpredictable than good ones, which according to some scholars (Brembs,
2011; Pronin & Kugler, 2010) is a measure indicative of more free will, because it suggests that people expect good behavior
and are surprised by bad actions or bad outcomes. Future research may examine the interaction of these implicit lay-beliefs
of agency and human nature against one another to see the effect those may have over attributions, teasing apart the two
effects. It is possible that the two lay-beliefs may interact so that free will would be attributed to negative situations when
assumptions are that human nature is good, but that this effect might be reversed if the assumption is that human nature is
bad.
In Experiment 4 using a free recall of everyday real-life situations has also revealed that people tend to attribute higher
free will to others than to themselves. Experiments 1–3 in which the alternative actions were controlled did not show a similar effect, which suggests that complex situations may involve additional biases in free will attributions. These findings also
seem to counter Pronin and Kugler’s (2010) finding that people believe they have more free will than other people. Pronin
and Kugler acknowledged an alternative account for their findings regarding the self/other main effect: People may see predictability as undesirable and therefore may try to protect their self-image by rejecting being predictable. The interaction
found between valence and agent using the predictability measure in Experiment 4 may suggest that participants were
indeed acting to maintain their self image, but that in this case they emphasized wanting to be seen as being inherently good,
as they report their negative actions to be less predictable than their good actions. We note, however, that Pronin and Kugler’s research differs from this study in several key respects. In particular, they examined neutral situations in life rather than
explicitly good or bad actions (e.g., school, career, romance, social life, and everyday life). Moreover, the actions in their study
held no clear implications. In contrast, the actions in the present study involve direct consequences for the other party. Quite
possibly, people may perceive their actions as having more free will than others’ for neutral everyday actions, which would
bolster their sense of being capable or deserving—but when actions involve valence and other parties, the effect is weakened
or even reversed. Future studies may more closely examine moderating factors for the self–other bias in attributions of free
will and the role of the positive–negative asymmetry.
Experiments 1 and 2 may also offer an insight into the classical paradigms of the framing effect (Tversky & Kahneman,
1981), potentially shedding light over an unexplored factor involved in decision making. A possible interpretation of our
findings regarding the framing effect could be that the tendency to undertake riskier decisions under negative framing
may be related to the perception that negative situations involve a greater ability to see other options or to choose nonconforming or unexpected options. A negative context may be a cognitive trigger to perceived free will, thereby leading
one to consider taking more risks (Hills, Noguchi, & Gibbert, 2013). Therefore, the association between risk seeking or
G. Feldman et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 26–40
39
avoidance behaviors and free will deserves further exploration. Future studies may attempt to examine free will attributions
for different negative outcomes.
Considerable evidence indicates that bad actions and bad events have a stronger impact than good ones (for reviews, see
Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; Rozin & Royzman, 2001). The present findings extend that work to show
that bad is also seen as freer than good ones. However, there are important differences between these two effects, as ‘stronger’ situations usually imply more rather than less constraints, and hence less capacity for free choice. If the implications of a
bad action are perceived as more impactful and with higher anticipated affect, then this suggests that people would feel
more constrained and hesitant to engage, and therefore the perception of less free will to act. Future research could examine
the interaction of these two effects and their possible implications.
4. Conclusion
Although it may at first seem disappointing that people seem to associate freedom of action with negative circumstance,
that perception may actually serve an important role for both self and for societal functioning. Our findings suggest that
invoking the concept of free will in connection with negative actions or outcomes facilitates the contemplation of what went
wrong, the evaluation of what could have been done differently, and the perception that things could be done differently in
the future. Ultimately, free will highlights the importance of being able to learn, evolve, and act differently.
Acknowledgments
The research was supported by the RGC General Research Fund (HKUST 644312) and UGC Infra-Structure Grant
(SBI14BM23) awarded to Kin Fai Ellick Wong.
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Editorial
Mirroring mirror neurons in an interdisciplinary debate
Since the discovery of mirror neurons in the early 1990s, numerous experiments have been carried out to investigate
what functions such neurons serve in their different domains of application. Among these experiments, one in particular
has given rise to a lively debate involving not only neuroscientists, but also philosophers, psychologists and experts in
the social sciences. This is Fogassi’s experiment concerning whether mirror neurons differentiate between actions with
the same motor pattern but which are associated with different intentions (Fogassi et al., 2005). Fogassi’s result was that
mirror neurons fire differently (that is, at a much higher rate) when the same action of grasping leads to eating food
compared with placing an inedible object into a container. Fogassi’s experiment seems therefore to support the hypothesis
that mirror neurons are the neural correlates of mindreading.
However, the evidence bearing on this issue is quite controversial, as the literature shows. In the literature there are at
least two distinct criticisms of the proposed role of mirror neurons in intentionality. The first criticism maintains that the
function of mirror neurons is negligible or even irrelevant (Borg, 2007; Jacob, 2008). The second criticism accepts that mirror
neurons do have a function to perform, but argues this function is different from that assigned to them by the Parma team,
since it has rather to do with predictive simulation (Csibra, 2007).
As part of an attempt to clarify and extend the above mentioned debate by integrating scientific and philosophical
contributions (Antonietti & Iannello, 2011; Corradini, 2011), the editors of this Special Issue ran a workshop on this topic
at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart on 4th September 2011 in Milan, under the auspices of the European Society
for Analytic Philosophy (ECAP7). This Special Issue contains not just the contributions presented on that occasion, but a
series of new essays both by participants in the 2011 workshop and by authors who have subsequently joined the original
group.
As the title of the Special Issue indicates, the starting point of this collection of papers are articles that report experimental evidence, respectively from the neurosciences, social psychology and developmental psychology (Fogassi’s, Prinz’ and
Southgate’s contributions). These studies are followed by more theoretical essays which either update the ongoing
discussion (Hutto’s, Jacob’s and Borg’s articles) or introduce a new associated theme, as Corradini and Antonietti do in their
essay about the relationship between mirror neurons, intentionality and empathy. Let us see the contributions in more
detail.
In the first paper Leonardo Fogassi and co-workers (Bonini, Ferrari, & Fogassi, 2013) of the Parma group, while acknowledging that the intentionality of behaviour has been subject to wide interest in many different disciplines, point at the fact
that there is no general consensus about how to describe and explain intentions underlying human beings’ motor acts. A
possible contribution to the debate has come in the last decades from neuroscientific studies whose aim was to identify
some pre-motor processes associated to ‘whether’, ‘what’ or ‘when’ performing an action. A different line of research
consisted in identifying the content of motor intentions with the agent’s behavioural goal, that is, with the ‘why’ of her
action. The article reviews the most recent neurophysiologic experiments of the Parma group on the organisation of
intentional actions in monkeys and on the role of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) in intention understanding. In the last
part of the paper the authors discuss some recent human data based on neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques
demonstrating that, as in monkeys, some of the areas belonging to the human mirror system play an important role in an
immediate form of decoding other people’s intention on the basis of their motor behaviour.
In the second paper Prinz (2013) addresses some conceptual issues tied to the examination of mirroring mechanisms
from the viewpoint of cognitive science (Prinz, 2012). As to the topic of this Special Issue, on the author’s approach embodied
mirroring does not require explicit communication and perception; rather, it appears to be a form of automatic response to
others’ behaviour. On the other hand, symbolic mirroring needs a common-sense framework for action description and
explanation, as well as mirroring devices which enable humans to couple perception and action. Prinz then moves to
describe the design principles underpinning the mirroring mechanisms, which leads him to investigate the concepts of
common coding and distal reference. Afterwards, the crucial distinction between embodied devices, based on implicit
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procedural knowledge, and symbolic devices, based on explicit declarative knowledge, is taken into account. Body schemes
and action schemes are the two main devices which serve embodied mirroring. By summarizing a broad corpus of empirical
studies, the author supports the idea that common representational resources are needed by mirroring. Even though the
construction of the self through mirroring (namely, how we can succeed in understanding ourselves by watching others)
is the topic on which the article prevalently focuses, important conceptual distinctions are deepened, which contribute to
clarify the kind of understanding of others’ intentions which is allegedly supported by mirror neurons.
In the third paper, Southgate (2013) proposes a view about the role of mirror mechanisms which mainly relies on developmental studies. The author takes into account the dominant view about why humans recruit the motor system when
observing others’ actions: on this view this happens because people simulate others’ actions and thus understand others’
goals. However, in Southgate’s opinion, this interpretation fails to account for human infants’ behaviour, whose ability to
attribute goals to actions is neither related to their own motor skills nor, by implication, to their ability to simulate the
action. On the author’s alternative construal, the motor system plays the role of leading us to predict actions by emulation.
Under this view, the action is understood (namely, its goal is identified) outside the motor system and the motor system is
recruited to find out a likely way to achieve the goal. Southgate backs up her position both by critically reviewing previous
studies and by reporting recent empirical evidence which is incompatible with the simulation view but well matches the
emulative view.
Borg’s (2013) paper expresses scepticism about MNs’ capacity to provide the key to intentional understanding (on this
also see Borg, 2007). This criticism is labelled by the author as ‘‘the intentional worry’’. She thoroughly examines the answers
which have been recently given by supporters of MNs along two main lines of defence. The first argues that the intentional
worry rests on a misunderstanding of MNs, the second, and more concessive one, maintains that it rests on a misunderstanding of the MNS mindreading hypothesis. As to the first series of answers, in the author’s view none of them is satisfactory:
not that appealing to subtle kinematic differences, neither that resting on prewired motor chains and contextual triggers, nor
the third one, which draws on associative mechanisms. On the other hand, more concessive points of view, such as those
represented by the second line of defence, succeed on the author’s understanding in saving the MNS mindreading hypothesis, but at the price of making MNS much less relevant to cognitive psychology and the cognitive neurosciences.
The main worry voiced in Jacob’s (2013) essay is that, if we support a strong identity between mirroring and mindreading
(Gallese, Rochat, Cossu, & Sinigaglia, 2009), it becomes difficult to bridge the gap between the mere sharing of an agent’s
intention and the ascription of an intention to another. After an in-depth critical examination of the three-step model of
intention-ascription put forward by Gallese, Jacob draws two conclusions. In his eyes, Gallese’s model does not justify
the strong identity claim between action-mirroring and mindreading that it postulates. Moreover, a tension is shown to exist
between features of the three-step model and the embodied approach to mental simulation that Gallese and several mirror
theorists share.
Hutto’s (2013) paper is a discussion about the function of mirror neurons in social cognition: Do they suffice for or
constitute any kind of action understanding? Many mirror neurons theorists support a weak interpretation of the relationship between mirror neurons and mindreading: Mirror neurons enable us only to a non-folk psychological kind of action
understanding. In the attempt to clarify what such an understanding looks like, the author first examines Rizzolatti and
Sinigaglia’s (2006) theory of the understanding brain and, secondly, Gallese’s idea of embodied simulation, on the background of which intention understanding takes place at the organism and not at the brain level. The author greets Gallese
and Sinigaglia’s (2011) turn to bodily-formatted and action oriented representations, to be distinguished from propositional
representations. However, he radicalizes this position, by maintaining that manual activity, such as reaching and grasping,
can be explained without appeal to the existence of representations of any kind. On radical enactivism, the function of
mirror neurons is not embodied understanding but embodied responsiveness to the doings of others.
Finally, Corradini and Antonietti’s (2013) paper conducts an interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between mirror
neurons and empathy, mainly conceived of as a cognitive capacity to understand others’ intentions. The first part of the
essay thoroughly reviews the psychological and neuro-scientific literature dealing with the involvement of mirror neurons
in empathy. Several empirical findings are mentioned, which are meant to provide evidence in favour of the claim that
mirror neurons are the mechanisms underpinning empathy. The last section of this part is devoted to a critical examination
of the linguistic uses of the concepts involved in the debate, with the aim to show that more clarity and precision are needed.
The second part of the essay tackles the question whether philosophically grounded empathy (re-enactive empathy in
Collingwood’s (1949) words) is a necessary justificatory element of rational explanations of behaviour. After defending
the soundness of rational explanation against the criticisms of the supporters of the deductive-nomological model, it is argued that rational explanation is likely to require only ego-indexicality, but not empathy. However, this negative result still
admits the possibility of basic kinds of empathy whose existence is backed by empirical evidence regarding mirror neurons.
References
Antonietti, A., & Iannello, P. (2011). Social sciences and neuroscience: A circular integration. International Review of Economics, 58, 307–317.
Bonini, L., Ferrari, P. F., & Fogassi, L. (2013). Neurophysiological bases underlying the organization of intentional actions and the understanding of
others’ intention. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3), 1095–1104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.001.
Borg, E. (2007). If mirror neurons are the answer, what was the question? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14, 5–19.
Borg, E. (2013). More questions for mirror neurons. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3), 1122–1131. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j/concog.2012.11.013.
Collingwood, R. G. (1949). The idea of history (revised ed.: 1993). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
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Corradini, A., & Antonietti, A. (2013). Mirror neurons and their function in cognitively understood empathy. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3),
1152–1161. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.03.003.
Corradini, A. (2011). Philosophy and neuroscience. In C. Kanzian, W. Löffler, & J. Quitterer (Eds.), The ways things are. Studies in ontology. Frankfurt/Paris/
Lancaster/New Brunswick: Ontos Verlag.
Csibra, G. (2007). Action mirroring and action understanding. In P. Haggard, Y. Rossetti, & M. Kawato (Eds.), Sensor motor foundations of higher cognition.
Attention and performance XXII. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fogassi, L., Ferrari, P. F., Gesierich, B., Rozzi, S., Chersi, F., & Rizzolatti, G. (2005). Parietal lobe: From action organisation to intention understanding.
Science, 308, 662–667.
Gallese, V., Rochat, M., Cossu, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2009). Motor cognition and its role in the phylogeny and ontogeny of action understanding.
Developmental Psychology, 45, 103–113.
Gallese, V., & Sinigaglia, C. (2011). What is so special about embodied simulation? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 512–519.
Hutto, D. (2013). Action understanding: How low can you go? Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3), 1142–1151. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/
j.concog.2013.01.002.
Jacob, P. (2008). What do mirror neurons contribute to human social cognition? Mind and Language, 23, 190–223.
Jacob, P. (2013). How from action-mirroring to intention–ascription? Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3), 1132–1141. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j/
concog.2013.02.005.
Prinz, W. (2012). Open minds: The social making of agency and intentionality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Prinz, W. (2013). Self in the mirror. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3), 1105–1113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.01.007.
Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2006). Mirrors in the brain: How our minds share actions and emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Southgate, V. (2013). Do infants provide evidence that the mirror system is involved in action understanding? Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3),
1114–1121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.04.008.
Guest Editors
⇑
Alessandro Antonietti
Antonella Corradini
Department of Psychology, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano, Italy
⇑ Tel.: +39 02 72342909; fax: +39 02 72342280.
E-mail address: alessandro.antonietti@unicatt.it (A. Antonietti)
Available online 16 May 2013 |
Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1022–1040
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Subliminal understanding of negation: Unconscious control
by subliminal processing of word pairs
Anna-Marie Armstrong a,⇑, Zoltan Dienes a,b
a
b
School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 19 February 2013
Available online 7 August 2013
Keywords:
Subliminal priming
Subjective thresholds
Guessing criterion
Contrast masking
Unconscious cognition
a b s t r a c t
A series of five experiments investigated the extent of subliminal processing of negation.
Participants were presented with a subliminal instruction to either pick or not pick an
accompanying noun, followed by a choice of two nouns. By employing subjective measures
to determine individual thresholds of subliminal priming, the results of these studies indicated that participants were able to identify the correct noun of the pair – even when the
correct noun was specified by negation. Furthermore, using a grey-scale contrast method of
masking, Experiment 5 confirmed that these priming effects were evidenced in the absence
of partial awareness, and without the effect being attributed to the retrieval of stimulus–
response links established during conscious rehearsal.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Just how much information and knowledge can be acquired through subliminal perception, or just how intelligent unconscious cognitive processing is, remains a familiar and controversial theme (Greenwald, 1992; Norman, 2010). In a classic
priming experiment, subjects are briefly presented with a word, or prime, that is prevented from entering conscious perception through the use of a forward or backward mask. When subsequently presented with a further target word, participants
are quicker to categorise the target if both the prime and target are semantically related. Whilst the unconscious analysis of
letters is more sophisticated than the analysis of individual lines or angles, the semantic analysis of subliminal words or even
multiple word-strings would indicate a far more intelligent and sophisticated interpretation of ‘unconscious cognition’
(Loftus & Klinger, 1992). Evidence suggests that the subliminal presentation of a word facilitates lexical and semantic access
(e.g., Abad, Noguera, & Ortells, 2003; Carr & Dagenbach, 1990; Dell’Acqua & Grainger, 1999; Forster & Davis, 1984; Fowler,
Wolford, Slade, & Tassinary, 1981; Gaillard et al., 2006; Marcel, 1983; Ortells, Daza, & Fox, 2003), although the precise interpretation of these results will be addressed below.
Subliminal psychodynamic activation (SPA) studies offer evidence of some of the most sophisticated subliminal priming
effects, apparently demonstrating the semantic analysis of multiple word primes (Bronstein & Rodin, 1983; Nissenfeld, 1979;
Silverman, Ross, Adler, & Lustig, 1978; Silverman & Weinberger, 1985; Waller & Barter, 2005). However, SPA studies have
been heavily criticised by others that have tried and failed to replicate results (Allen & Condon, 1982; Condon & Allen,
1980; Heilbrun, 1980). Furthermore, whatever the replicability of the results, given that the sentences used differ in the specific words used, any effect evidenced may instead be attributable to simple single-word priming. In fact, there still exists
controversy regarding whether or not the semantic analysis of subliminal primes even occurs (Abrams & Greenwald,
2000; Damian, 2001; Hutchison, Neely, Neill, & Walker, 2004; Kouider & Dupoux, 2004). In an article investigating the extent
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: am_armstrong@btinternet.com (A.-M. Armstrong).
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A.-M. Armstrong, Z. Dienes / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1022–1040
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of unconscious cognition, Greenwald (1992) argued that unconscious cognitive processing is far less sophisticated in its analytical capabilities than is often reported. Greenwald’s (1992) argument rests on the premise that additional research has
demonstrated unconscious analysis and processing of nothing more elaborate than word fragments.
As an example, Abrams and Greenwald (2000) required participants to categorise a set of consciously perceived ‘parent’
primes as either positive or negative in valence. Participants were subsequently required to categorise a set of subliminally
perceived ‘hulip-type hybrid primes’, a non-word hybrid of two positive or two negative parent primes (e.g., humour–tulip–
hulip, smut–bile–biut). Results indicated that participants were successfully able to categorise emotional valence despite the
nonsensical nature of the hybrid primes. In a follow up study, having consciously categorised parent primes, participants
were required to positively or negatively categorise a set of so called ‘tumour-type hybrid primes’. These primes were similarly created by combining two congruent parent primes to create a semantically comprehensible prime of different valence
to parent primes (e.g. humour–tulip–tumour, smut–bile–smile). Results indicated that participants continued to classify
emotional valence according to the valence of the parent prime rather than tumour-type prime, even to the extent that
‘smile’ was categorised as negative. The results of this study compellingly suggest that words are analysed at the level of
(consciously primed) word-parts as opposed to whole-word meaning.
However, Sklar et al. (2012) have suggested that subliminal processing may have appeared limited in past research because of the small time windows that processing is given for backward masked stimuli (typically in the order of 30 ms). Their
solution was to use continuous flash suppression, maintaining stimuli as subliminal for as long as 2 s. Impressively, they
found that semantically incoherent sentences (e.g., ‘‘The bench ate a zebra’’) broke through suppression faster than coherent
sentences (e.g. ‘‘The lion ate a zebra’’). However, as with SPA studies, there may have been a word-level effect influencing
breakthrough as literally different words were used in the different conditions (in this example, ‘‘bench’’ versus ‘‘lion’’). In
a second series of experiments, they found that three-term subtractions (e.g. 9–3–4) (though not additions) primed the
speed of pronunciation of the subsequent correct answer. In neither the sentence coherence nor three-term subtraction
experiments did the stimuli constitute obvious ‘‘set phrases’’ that may have been previously well learnt as a unit.
These results raise the question of what sort of combinations of stimuli are possible to process subliminally. For example,
Van Opstal, Gevers, Osman and Verguts (2010) demonstrated that a same/different judgement task on consciously perceived
number targets (e.g., 1–1 or 1–3) extended to subliminal letter stimuli (e.g., a–A or a–D) even when participants were unaware of the presence of the letters. Van Opstal, Calderon, Gevers and Verguts (2011) extended this finding by demonstrating
that responding to the subliminal same/different judgements (e.g., a–A) could be modulated by unconscious context (e.g.,
either a–a or a–D). Therefore, priming effects were dependent upon the processing of both elements. We similarly wished
to demonstrate semantic priming of two-element (word) primes and unconscious cognitive control by investigating whether
it is possible to process instructions to exclude (i.e., negation) subliminally. As we will discuss, negation has a special place in
consciousness research.
The use of negation allows easy control of stimuli, because stimuli can consist of the same words, just with or without
‘‘not’’. The use of negation also addresses one of the theoretical limits assigned to unconscious processes. According to Jacoby, Lindsay, and Toth (1992), what the conscious is uniquely equipped to do is control behaviour by excluding certain responses. Unconscious control exerted by subliminal stimuli was investigated by, for example, Lau and Passingham (2007),
in which a subliminal shape indicated which of two tasks to perform; and by van Gaal, Ridderinkhof, Scholte, and Lamme
(2010), in which a subliminal no-go cue slowed down responses and activated a frontal-parietal inhibition network (see
van Gaal, de Lange, & Cohen, 2012, for a review of related work). Van den Bussche, Segers, and Reynvoet (2008) indicated
limits to unconscious control in that the proportion of conscious stimuli could be used to modulate responding but not
the proportion of subliminal stimuli. In contrast to previous studies that have looked at subliminal control, we will be exploring it in the specific case of linguistic negation processing. Although not dealing with linguistic negation, the previous work is
encouraging in showing that there exists a mechanism by which unconscious control could operate. In this respect, the current work is consistent with Dienes and Perner’s (2007) cold control theory of hypnosis, which postulates that hypnosis consists of unconscious executive control. It is also consistent with the findings of, for example, Norman, Price, and Jones (2011)
and Wan, Dienes, and Fu (2008), who showed people could exert control over the use of structural knowledge, even when it
was unconscious. That is, while the processing of subliminal linguistic negation has not been shown, it is plausible that the
unconscious can deal with control and exclusion. Thus, the subliminal processing of negation in two-word phrases presents
itself as possible on those theories that allow unconscious control (contrast Jacoby et al.), but beyond what has so far been
shown to occur subliminally.
The present set of studies attempted to assess whether, contrary to Abrams and Greenwald (2000), subliminal perception
is sensitive to the semantic comprehension of word combinations and sentence structure. In summing up his argument
against complex unconscious cognition, Greenwald (1992) issued an empirical two-word challenge. This two-word challenge asserts that to demonstrate successful subliminal priming of two-word primes, neither word should individually impart the final meaning. Therefore, to claim successful unconscious processing of multiple words, each word would need to be
individually processed. The present experiments aimed to meet this challenge by presenting participants with a two word
instruction, instructing them which of two subsequent words to choose. Therefore, performance would depend on the successful semantic processing of both words.
One explanation to account for the failure of many studies to demonstrate successful subliminal semantic activation of
single or multiple word primes may be due to the adherence to strict objective thresholds using backward masking when
measuring subliminality. Objective methods of assessing unconscious cognition presume that trial accuracy, beyond what
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would be expected by chance, indicates conscious knowledge (Seth, Dienes, Cleeremans, Overgaard, & Pessoa, 2008). However, objective methods of assessing subliminal perception fail to take into account subjectivity; that is, an individual’s
conscious awareness of accuracy. The two thresholds differ, with unconscious processing occurring below the subjective
threshold but limited unconscious processing below the objective. Therefore, the use of objective methods in measuring
subliminal perception and unconscious processing have been heavily criticised for testing not just unconscious cognition,
but degraded unconscious cognition (Dienes, 2004, 2008; Lau & Passingham, 2006). This indicates that to determine the full
extent of unconscious processing, it is necessary to use the subjective threshold (compare Masters, Maxwell, & Eves, 2009;
contrast Van den Bussche, Van den Noortgate, & Reynvoet, 2009, who found no significant effect of using objective versus
subjective thresholds in a meta-analysis of subliminal priming effects1).
Therefore, using subjective methods of measuring subliminality, the following series of experiments required the participants to choose between two common nouns (e.g. ‘kite-moon’), having been subliminally instructed with which noun to
choose (e.g. ‘pick kite’, or ‘not kite’). Correct identification of the instructed noun would then indicate that unconscious cognition is capable of both processing and comprehending more complex demands, such as the pick and not instructions in this
study. Whilst it could be argued that success in the ‘pick’ conditions may not necessarily demonstrate the semantic comprehension of pick but rather simple recognition processes or partial word analysis (e.g., Abrams & Greenwald, 2000), success in
the ‘not’ conditions would require the participant to inhibit initial recognition processes. In turn, this inhibition of recognition processes would imply lexical and semantic comprehension of negation. Therefore, if correct identification is above
chance expectations then this would indicate that cognition is capable of processing word combinations outside of conscious
perception, as measured by the guessing criterion (Cheesman & Merikle, 1984, 1986) and/or the zero-correlation criterion
(ZCC). Like Sklar et al. (2012), we will attempt to determine the limits of subliminal perception when it is given more time
to operate than allowed by objective thresholds found with backward masking.
2. Experiment 1
Current investigations into subliminal perception and unconscious cognition have shown the superior priming effects
of practiced versus novel primes (Abrams & Grinspan, 2007; Abrams, Klinger, & Greenwald, 2002; Draine & Greenwald,
1998). That is, the priming effects of subliminal primes that have earlier been perceived as conscious targets prove
more successful than non-practiced novel primes. This effect has been attributed to consciously perceived primes creating an episodic memory trace which is later re-activated upon subsequent subliminal presentation (Forster & Davis,
1984).
Therefore, to achieve maximum likelihood of successful subliminal priming effects, all subliminal primes in Experiment 1
were first practiced as a series of conscious trials. It was expected that for the conscious trials, participants would identify the
correct noun in both ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions on close to 100% of the trials. For the subliminal trials, it was hypothesised
that, using a subjective threshold, participants would identify the correct noun for ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions beyond chance
expectations (that is, beyond 50% correct). In addition, the inhibition of recognition processes necessary in ‘not’ conditions
makes it likely that noun identification in ‘pick’ conditions would be faster than noun identification in ‘not’ conditions.
Therefore, it was hypothesised that response times to noun identification in ‘pick’ conditions would be faster than in ‘not’
conditions for both conscious and subliminal trials. In this first experiment we attempted to make the effect likely to occur,
so that its absence would be informative. To anticipate, in subsequent experiments we tighten up alternative explanations to
determine if the effect goes away.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Design and participants
In a repeated measures design with the number of correct identifications being the dependant variable, 25 undergraduate
psychology students from the University of Sussex took part in this study in exchange for course credits. Fifteen of the participants were female and ten male, with ages ranging from 18 to 40 years (M = 22.63, SD = 8.52).
2.1.2. Apparatus and materials
The experiment was presented on a Dell laptop with a 60 Hz screen refresh rate, limiting minimum stimulus presentation
to 16 ms, with 16 ms increments. The study was created using E-Prime version 2.0. Trials were created from 20 common
nouns, making up a total of 10 noun-pairs (e.g. ‘baby-yard’ and ‘ant-sky’). All nouns were between 3–5 letters in length,
and noun-pairs were phonemically and semantically distinctive and matched in length. Each screen display was centrally
presented in lower-case, black, bold Courier New font, and point size 18 on a white background. The arrangement of each
1
The mean effect for subjective thresholds was 0.85 (SE 0.5) and for objective, 0.68 (SE 0.24). While the difference is non-significant, a rough Bayes
Factor calculated on the difference (0.17, SE 0.55), using a uniform from 0 to 0.85, is 0.87, indicating the non-significant result is insensitive (as the Bayes
factor is between 1/3 and 3), and no conclusions follow from this contrast (see Dienes, 2011, for more on Bayes Factors, which are also explained in more detail
below). Note also that these studies were not designed to test the difference between subjective and objective thresholds under otherwise equivalent
conditions, unlike, for example, Cheesman and Merikle (1984).
A.-M. Armstrong, Z. Dienes / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1022–1040
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of the 10 noun-pairs and instructions were counterbalanced so that participants viewed each of the eight permutations for
each noun-pair (e.g. ‘pick yard. . .1. baby, 2. yard’, ‘pick yard. . .1. yard, 2. baby’, ‘not yard. . .1. baby, 2. yard’ and ‘not yard. . .1.
yard, 2. baby’ etc.), creating a total of 80 distinct conscious and subliminal trials.
2.1.3. Procedure
Participants were tested individually in a small quiet space in which they sat before a laptop such that their eyes were
approximately 60 cm from the monitor screen. All participants had normal or corrected to normal vision, and English was
the first language for all participants. All trials consisted of four separate components: a fixation cross presented for
350 ms, the stimulus instruction (e.g. ‘pick baby’ or ‘not baby’), a backward mask, longer in length than the stimulus and
in the form of a series of ampersands (i.e., &&&&&&&) presented for 150 ms, and the final component consisting of the
noun-pair choice (e.g. ‘1. baby, 2. yard’) in which the participant was required to indicate the number corresponding to
the noun in which they had been instructed to choose. The experiment was separated into four continuous phases; conscious
trials, SOA setting, subliminal trials, and re-testing the SOA threshold to check for drift.
2.1.3.1. Conscious trials. Having read the instructions, the procedure began with a set of 6 practice conscious trials to accustom the participant to the task required. The common noun-pairs used in all practice trials were different from those used in
experimental conscious and subliminal phases. Following the fixation cross, the stimulus instruction was presented for
350 ms to ensure conscious perception. Programming in E-Prime ensured that the offset of the stimulus instruction was
immediately followed by the onset of the backward mask in all experimental trials. This was especially important for subliminal trials in order to eliminate conscious visual perception. After the backward mask, participants were presented with
the noun-pair choice in which they were required to press ‘1’ if they had been instructed to choose the first word, and ‘2’ if
they had been instructed to choose the second. The noun-pair choice remained on the screen until the participant had made
their choice. Having made their choice, a 250 ms pause preceded the onset of the next trial. Having completed the set of 6
practice trials, participants were instructed to continue to the experimental conscious trials. The procedure for the conscious
trials followed the exact procedure used in the practice trials. Participants completed two blocks of 40 randomly presented
conscious trials, with an emphasis placed on accuracy as opposed to speed. Participants were not informed whether their
choice was correct or incorrect.
2.1.3.2. SOA setting. The SOA of each participant was assessed separately to ascertain individual subjective thresholds. Following the two blocks of conscious trials, participants moved on to the SOA setting phase. Participants were required to complete the same task format used in the conscious phase. Participants were presented with the fixation cross and the
instruction prime, followed immediately by a backward mask and then the noun-pair choice. Following each trial, participants were required to rate, on a scale of 50–100%, how confident they were that they had chosen the correct noun;
100% would indicate that the participant absolutely knew which noun to choose, whilst 50% would indicate that they were
purely guessing. During this part of the experiment, if a participant rated confidence to be anything above 50%, stimulus
duration was reduced by 16 ms after each trial, from a starting point of 140 ms. Once a participant had rated confidence
to be at 50% (guessing), the SOA remained at that same presentation speed for the following trials. Once confidence had been
rated at 50% (chance performance) for five successive trials, the experiment proceeded to the subliminal phase. If during any
of these five successive trials participants rated confidence to be anything above 50%, SOA was again reduced until five successive trials at 50% confidence had been completed. Before the SOA setting phase began, participants completed a set of 6
practice trials to accustom themselves to the confidence procedure. For the practice trials, prime presentation was held at
140 ms. The common noun-pairs used in both practice and SOA setting phases were different from those used in conscious
and subliminal phases.
2.1.3.3. Subliminal trials. Once the SOA setting phase had been completed, the subliminal phase of the experiment consisted
of the same 80 trials used in the conscious phase, divided into the same two blocks of 40 randomly placed trials. There were
no practice trials for the subliminal phase. Stimulus duration for the subliminal trials was determined by the point at which
participants had rated confidence to be at 50% for five successive trials during the SOA setting phase. To prevent rhythmic
pressing of the ‘‘1’’ and ‘‘2’’ keys, and to remind participants of the task required, each block of 40 subliminal trials additionally contained 10 randomly placed conscious trials (at 350 ms exposure) (cf. Eimer, Kiss, Press, & Sauter, 2009), creating two
blocks of 50 trials.
2.1.3.4. Threshold drift. The final phase of the experiment aimed to assess whether individual subjective thresholds of awareness had drifted through the course of the experiment. If the SOA at the finish of the experiment was lower than at the beginning of the subliminal trials, this could indicate that participants may have been consciously aware of the subliminal primes
(Kouider & Dupoux, 2004). The SOA threshold drift phase followed the exact format used in the SOA setting phase, using the
same materials, with 16 ms decrements in presentation speed from a starting point of 140 ms. Once the participant again
rated confidence to be at 50% for five successive trials, the participants were thanked and the experiment ended. After completion of the experiment, participants were fully debriefed and received an information sheet giving some background to
the study as well as experimenter details.
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2.2. Results
2.2.1. SOA setting
Subjective threshold durations ranged from an SOA of 16 ms to 64 ms, with an average experimental subliminal presentation speed of 48 ms (SD = 15).
2.2.2. Trial accuracy
It was expected that for the conscious phase of the experiment, participants would get approximately 100% of the trials
correct. In fact, the mean number of correct identifications for conscious trials was slightly off 100% (M = 97%, SE = .5). For the
‘pick’ trials, mean correct identification averaged at 95% (SE = .9), whilst for ‘not’ trials, mean correct identification averaged
at 98% (SE = .4).
Mean correct noun identification for subliminal trials was 62% (SE = 2), with accuracy for ‘pick’ (M = 66%, SE = 2) and ‘not’
(M = 59%, SE = 2) conditions being presented in Fig. 1, with a 50% reference line indicating chance performance. For all statistical tests, we used an alpha level of .05 to determine significance. Accuracy in both ‘pick’ (t(24) = 7.46, p < .001, d = 3.05)
and ‘not’ (t(24) = 3.9, p = .001, d = 1.59) conditions significantly differed from what would be expected by chance. In addition,
a paired-sample t-test looking at the percentage of occasions participants simply chose the subliminally presented noun (i.e.
ignoring the preceding instruction) significantly differed between ‘pick’ (M = 66%, SE = 2) and ‘not’ (M = 41%, SE = 2,
t(24) = 5.97, p < .001, d = 2.44) conditions. Such discrimination was also assessed in terms of (logistic) d0 , which differed significantly from zero, M = .60, SE = .11, t(24) = 5.62, p < .001, d = 2.29.
2.2.3. Response time
The time taken to identify the instructed noun was recorded for both conscious and subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions.
For the conscious trials, a paired-sample t-test suggested that on average, participants were significantly quicker to identify
the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 712 ms, SE = 20) than in ‘not’ conditions (M = 844 ms, SE = 32, t(24) = 5.92, p < .001,
d = 2.42). Similarly, for the subliminal trials, a paired-sample t-test suggested that on average, participants were significantly
quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 864 ms, SE = 50) when compared to ‘not’ conditions (M = 894 ms,
SE = 50, t(24) = 2.27, p = .03, d = 0.93).
2.2.4. Threshold drift
Data from the threshold drift phase reveals that subjective threshold durations ranged from an SOA of 32 ms to 80 ms,
with a mean experimental subliminal presentation speed of 48 ms (SD = 16.24), matching the sample mean value found
in the SOA setting phase, t(24) = .04, p = .97, d = 0.02. For 15 of the 25 participants, SOA’s at the finish of the subliminal trials
differed from the SOA at the start of the subliminal phase. Subjective thresholds reduced by 16 ms for seven of the participants, and by 32 ms for one participant. For six of the participants, SOA increased by 16 ms, and for one participant the SOA
increased by 48 ms. There was a significant relationship between the SOA setting stage and the SOA threshold drift phase,
r = .4, p = .04, indicating there was some consistency in measuring the threshold.
2.2.5. Trial accuracy and response time
When the data from the eight participants whose SOA had reduced by P16 ms was removed, d’ significantly differed from
zero (M = .56, SE = .15, t(16) = 3.60, p = .002, d = 1.8), and accuracy in both subliminal ‘pick’ (M = 64%, SE = 3, t(16) = 4.81,
Fig. 1. Mean percentage values for correct identification of the noun in subliminal pick and not conditions for Experiments 1–5 with a 50% reference line.
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p < .001, d = 2.41) and ‘not’ (M = 58%, SE = 3, t(16) = 2.63, p = .02, d = 1.32) conditions significantly differed from what would
be expected by chance. Similarly, when the instruction is ignored, the percentage of occasions participants simply chose the
subliminally presented noun significantly differed between ‘pick’ (M = 64%, SE = 3) and ‘not’ (M = 42%, SE = 3, t(16) = 3.8,
p = .002, d = 1.90) conditions. In addition, on removal of the eight participants, participants remained significantly quicker
to identify the noun in subliminal ‘pick’ conditions (M = 845 ms, SE = 64) when compared to ‘not’ conditions
(M = 1139 ms, SE = 86, t(16) = 2.66, p = .02, d = 1.33).
2.3. Discussion
Participants in the subliminal ‘pick’ condition correctly identified the noun on an average 66% of the trials, whilst correct
noun identification in subliminal ‘not’ trials averaged 58%. Therefore, as hypothesised, participants successfully identified the
correct noun at above chance expectations for both subliminally presented ‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials. Whilst it could be argued
that correct identification in the subliminal ‘pick’ trials may have demonstrated the ability of unconscious processing to
merely recognise letter patterns, correct identification in the subliminal ‘not’ trials would require the inhibition of these recognition processes. Furthermore, the occasions in which the participant simply chose the subliminally presented noun significantly differed between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions, further demonstrating the appropriate use of the subliminal
instruction. Consequently, the success of Experiment 1 in demonstrating successful subliminal priming in the ‘not’ condition
may demonstrate the semantic comprehension of ‘not’.
The use of the guessing criterion for establishing subliminal perception could be criticised on the grounds that participants come with different interpretations as to what ‘‘guess’’ means. However, in the instructions, and on each screen shot
when participants were required to rate confidence, they were given a definition of what ‘guessing’ (and ‘know’) means. The
participants were told to give a value of 50% if they believe that they were purely guessing; that they had no idea which word
to choose and that they may as well have tossed a coin. They were also told that if they had any confidence at all, if they
believed they saw anything of potential relevance at all, they were to give a value above 50. Poorly defined end points on
a confidence scale can render the guessing criterion meaningless; thus, the instructions precisely defined the required concept of ‘‘guess’’.
Further support for the unconscious processing of negation in subliminal conditions was provided by response time data,
which demonstrated the difference in cognitive difficulty between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ instructions. Once the word pick has been
read and cognitively processed, the word indicates that the accompanying noun is the correct noun to choose. Therefore,
upon presentation of the noun-pair choice, the letter mapping and recognition processes required to identify the just-presented noun respond quickly. However, the word not indicates that the accompanying noun is not the correct noun to
choose. Consequently, upon presentation of the noun-pair choice, it is first necessary to identify the just-presented noun
using the same letter mapping and recognition processes used in ‘pick’ trials before then indicating the other noun. Therefore, the additional time required to indicate the correct noun in ‘not’ conditions should be evident in both conscious and
subliminal response times. Response times for the conscious trials suggested that, as predicted, it took significantly longer
to identify the noun in ‘not’ conditions when compared to ‘pick’ conditions, an average 131 ms longer. Although it only took
an average of 30 ms longer to identify the noun in subliminal ‘not’ conditions when compared to ‘pick’ conditions, this
difference in response times was also significant, thereby demonstrating the difference in task difficulty, even though participants were not consciously aware of which noun to choose.
Past research investigating the extent of subliminal priming paints a controversial and confusing picture. Whilst some
studies clearly demonstrate successful (e.g., Diaz & McCarthy, 2007; Ortells et al., 2003), and even sophisticated (e.g., Silverman & Weinberger, 1985; Silverman et al., 1978) semantic subliminal priming, other studies suggest that the unconscious
analysis of words is actually only completed at the sublexical level (e.g. Abrams & Greenwald, 2000; Hutchison et al., 2004).
Experiment 1 aimed to successfully demonstrate the cognitive processing of subliminally presented two-word instructions
using individual subjective thresholds. That is, if the individual believed they did not know the correct noun to choose, it can
be assumed that they did not possess conscious knowledge (Dienes, 2008).
However, whilst the results of Experiment 1 appear to have demonstrated successful unconscious semantic processing,
threshold drift data suggests that for eight of the participants, subliminal subjective thresholds may have reduced between
SOA settings phases and completion of the subliminal trials. This in turn may indicate conscious, as opposed to unconscious,
knowledge of which noun to choose for some of the participants. In addition to potential conscious awareness, significant
criticisms arise due to the use of practiced versus novel primes (Damian, 2001; Kunde, Kiesel, & Hoffmann, 2003; Schlaghecken & Eimer, 2004). Abrams and Grinspan (2007) argue that simple processing at the feature level is all that is needed to
identify a stimulus that is predicted by experience and expectation. As mentioned previously, when primes are practiced
consciously they acquire memory traces between a given stimulus and response. These stimulus–response (S–R) mappings
remain in short-term memory and are later re-activated upon presentation of the same trials presented subliminally. Whilst
these S–R mappings may result in successful subliminal priming, it indicates that the semantic analysis of subliminal primes
need not necessarily occur as the semantic system is by-passed. That is, participants may simply have formed an S–R link
between, for example, ‘‘not baby’’ and ‘‘yard’’ (although ‘‘yard’’ was associated with each button press equally in this situation). A subsequent correct response merely relies on the successful retrieval of the established S–R link and not the semantic
processing of ‘‘not’’. Experiment 1 used conditions that were most likely to find a priming effect if there were one, and so the
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results motivate further and more rigorous testing of subliminal priming. Therefore, the issue of practiced versus novel
primes and S–R mappings are explored further in Experiment 2.
3. Experiment 2
In Experiment 2, participants performed the same task performed in Experiment 1; a set of conscious trials were followed
by an SOA setting phase, a set of subliminal trials and finally a threshold drift phase. However, separate sets of common
nouns were used in conscious and subliminal trials to avoid potential successful subliminal priming being attributed to
the retrieval of S–R links. To achieve maximum likelihood of successful priming without the establishment of S–R links, participants first practiced ‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials consciously with one set of nouns. Participants then consciously viewed the list
of nouns that would be used in subliminal trials, in an attempt to activate word representations, before continuing with the
experiment. In this way, any positive results could not be credited to the retrieval of S–R links as at no point had the subliminal nouns been paired with any particular response.
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Design and participants
In a repeated measures design with the number of correct identifications being the dependant variable, 25 undergraduate
psychology students from the University of Sussex took part in this study in exchange for course credits. None of the participants took part in Experiment 1. Eighteen of the participants were female and seven male, with ages ranging from 18
to 44 years (M = 20.96, SD = 6.2).
3.1.2. Apparatus and materials
Apparatus for Experiment 2 replicated that used in Experiment 1. The 10 noun-pairs used in Experiment 1 were used as
conscious trials in Experiment 2, with an additional 20 common nouns between 3–5 letters in length creating a further 10
phonemically and semantically distinctive noun-pairs for subliminal trials.
3.1.3. Procedure
Procedure replicated that of Experiment 1, however following the conscious trials and before the SOA setting, participants
were presented with a list of the 20 nouns that would be used in the subliminal trials. Each noun in the list appeared at the
centre of the screen for 2000 ms, with a 150 ms pause between each noun. This list of 20 nouns was presented twice.
3.2. Results
3.2.1. SOA setting
Subjective threshold durations ranged from an SOA of 16 ms to 64 ms, with an average experimental subliminal presentation speed of 48 ms (SD = 15).
3.2.2. Trial accuracy
The mean rate of correct identifications made on conscious trials was 95% (SE = .01). Mean correct identifications was 94%
(SE = .8) for ‘pick’ trials, and 97% (SE = .6) for ‘not’ trials. The mean number of correct noun identifications for the subliminal
‘pick’ (M = 64%, SE = 2) and ‘not’ (M = 58%, SE = 2) conditions are presented in Fig. 1 with a reference line indicating 50%
chance performance. On subliminal trials, accuracy on both ‘pick’ (t(24) = 8.17, p < .001, d = 3.34) and ‘not’ (t(24) = 4.31,
p < .001, d = 1.76) conditions significantly differed from what would be expected by chance. A paired-sample t-test looking
at the percentage of occasions participants simply chose the subliminally presented noun (i.e. ignoring the preceding
instruction) significantly differed between ‘pick’ (M = 64%, SE = 2) and ‘not’ (M = 42%, SE = 2, t(24) = 6.67, p < .001, d = 2.72)
conditions. Overall subliminal d0 values also differed significantly from zero (M = .51, SE = .08, t(24) = 6.63, p < .001, d = 2.71).
3.2.3. Response time
The time taken to identify the noun they had been instructed to choose was again recorded for both conscious and subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions. A paired-sample t-test revealed that on average, for the conscious trials, participants were
significantly quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 685 ms, SE = 11) than in ‘not’ conditions (M = 875 ms,
SE = 28, t(24) = 6.53, p < .001, d = 2.67). Whilst the results suggested that participants were similarly quicker in subliminal
trials to identify the noun in ‘pick’ (M = 885 ms, SE = 49) conditions when compared to ‘not’ conditions (M = 952 ms, SE = 33),
a paired-sample t-test revealed that this difference in response times was not significant (t(24) = 1.76, p = .09, d = 0.72).
However, from the non-significant result we are unable to determine whether this implies that there is evidence for the
null hypothesis, that there would be no difference in response times between subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions, or that
there is no evidence for any conclusion (Dienes, 2011). To do this, we can use a Bayes Factor. Whilst values under 1/3 are
substantial evidence in support of the null hypothesis, values over 3 are seen as substantial evidence in support of the experimental hypothesis (Jeffreys, 1961); a Bayes Factor of 1 indicates the evidence is exactly neutral between the two theories.
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Values between 1/3 and 3 indicate data insensitivity and no conclusions should be drawn. To calculate the Bayes Factor, it is
first necessary to specify the likely mean response time difference. The difference in subliminal response times for ‘pick’ and
‘not’ conditions in Experiment 1 was 30 ms. Thus, a half normal was used with a standard deviation equal to 30 (as per the
guidelines in Dienes, 2011, Appendix). The sample mean difference between subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions was 67 ms
(SE of the difference = 38), leading to a Bayes Factor of B = 2.46, indicating more support for the experimental hypothesis than
the null hypothesis (Bayes Factor greater than 1), but also indicating that the data were not sensitive.
3.2.4. Threshold drift
Data from the threshold drift phase reveals that subjective SOA durations ranged from an SOA of 16–80 ms, with an average experimental subliminal presentation speed of 48 ms (SD = 17), matching the mean value found in the SOA setting phase,
t(24) = .65, p = .52, d = 0.27. However, for 17 of the participants, SOA’s at the end of the experiment differed from the SOA at
the start of the experiment. Subjective thresholds reduced by an average of 16 ms for ten of the participants, and for seven of
the participants, SOA increased by 16 ms. There was a significant relationship between the SOA setting stage and the SOA
threshold drift phase, r = .67, p < .001, indicating there was some consistency in measuring thresholds.
3.2.5. Trial accuracy and response time
When the data from the 10 participants whose SOA had reduced by 16 ms was removed, overall d0 values remained significantly above zero (M = .47, SE = .1, t(14) = 4.64, p < .001, d = 2.48). Accuracy in both subliminal ‘pick’ (M = 63%, SE = 2,
t(14) = 6.03, p < .001, d = 3.22) and ‘not’ (M = 57%, SE = 3, t(14) = 2.72, p = .02, d = 1.45) conditions significantly differed from
what would be expected by chance. Similarly, when the instruction is ignored, the percentage of occasions participants simply chose the subliminally presented noun significantly differed between ‘pick’ (M = 63%, SE = 2) and ‘not’ (M = 43%, SE = 3,
t(14) = 4.64, p < .001, d = 2.48) conditions. On removal of the 10 data sets, the difference in response times between subliminal ‘pick’ (M = 975 ms, SE = 39) and ‘not’ conditions (M = 1019 ms, SE = 76), remained non-significant (t(14) = .55, p = .59,
d = 0.29).
3.3. Discussion
The accuracy data from the conscious trials in Experiment 2 replicates that found in Experiment 1. For the subliminal trials, participants correctly identified the noun in ‘pick’ trials at an average rate of 63%, whilst correct identification in subliminal ‘not’ trials averaged at 57–58%. The results of Experiment 2 replicate those found in Experiment 1 in that the data
appears to support the hypothesis that participants would successfully identify the correct noun, above chance performance,
for subliminally presented ‘pick’ and ‘not’ instructions. Similarly, when the instruction was ignored, the occasions in which
the participant simply chose the subliminally presented noun significantly differed between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions, providing further evidence to support the appropriate processing of the subliminal instruction. As in Experiment 1, response
time data suggested that for conscious trials, participants were significantly quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions
when compared to ‘not’ conditions, by an average 189 ms. Although participants were on average 67 ms quicker to identify
the noun in subliminal ‘pick’ conditions when compared to ‘not’ conditions, this difference in reaction time was not statistically significant. However, a Bayes Factor indicated insensitive data not strong enough to yet draw conclusions, albeit with
more support for the hypothesis of a difference in response times than for the null hypothesis.
Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the findings from Experiment 1, whilst avoiding the assumption that successful subliminal priming was a result of the retrieval of S–R links established during conscious rehearsal of stimuli. By consciously
viewing the nouns to be used in subliminal trials, presented individually, participants gained the advantage of practiced
rather than novel primes (Kunde et al., 2003), but were prevented from establishing S–R links by viewing the nouns in
the absence of either ‘pick’ or ‘not’ instructions, supporting research demonstrating that semantic priming can extend to novel and unpractised stimuli (e.g., Naccache & Dehaene, 2001). The results of Experiment 2 appear to support the contention
that participants would successfully discriminate between the two nouns at above chance performance in subliminal trials.
However, whilst the results of both Experiments 1 and 2 provide support demonstrating successful unconscious processing of logical negation, threshold drift data from both experiments could suggest that conscious processing may be responsible for success in subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions. It has been found, for example, that practice with an initially
subliminal task can result in participants learning to be conscious, admittedly over considerably more trials than we used
(Schwiedrzik, Singer, & Melloni, 2009, 2011). In both Experiments 1 and 2, the threshold drift phase aimed to determine
whether individual subjective thresholds of subliminality remained the same at the start and at the end of the subliminal
phases of the experiment. If subjective thresholds at the end of the experimental subliminal condition were lower than at
the start, it could be argued that participants may have consciously been aware of the stimulus instruction, and thus possessed conscious knowledge as to which noun to choose. While there was not an overall drift down in subjective thresholds,
some participants drifted down whilst some drifted up. When the data from those participants whose SOA had drifted down
were excluded, the effect remained intact. However, the presence of changes in the assessed thresholds mean that it is possible there existed trials where perception was conscious. The issues regarding conscious awareness and threshold drift was
explored further in Experiment 3.
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4. Experiment 3
Experiments 1 and 2 provide evidence that the cognitive unconscious is capable of analysing the syntactic function of
subliminally presented ‘pick’ and ‘not’ instructions without attributing the priming effect to the retrieval of established
S–R links. However, individual visual thresholds may vary from trial to trial as a result of, for example, dark adaption
(Holender, 1986). This variation in visual threshold may in turn allow conscious perception of stimuli that is intended to
be subliminal. The threshold drift data from both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate this possible variance in subjective
thresholds as for a number of participants; the measured SOA differed between the start and finish of the subliminal phase.
For those participants whose SOA reduced between SOA setting and threshold drift, conscious perception of subliminal
primes may be responsible for any successful priming effects. For those participants whose SOA increased between SOA setting and threshold drift, we cannot be sure there was a simple linear increase. Therefore, Experiment 3 aimed to replicate
Experiments 1 and 2 by investigating subliminal processing whilst continually assessing subjective thresholds (cf. Marcel,
1983, who also assessed stability of thresholds throughout the priming phase). This was achieved by requiring participants
to rate their confidence in selecting the right noun after each trial in the subliminal phase.
As in Experiments 1 and 2, it was hypothesised that for the subliminal trials, participants would correctly identify the
noun for both ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions beyond 50% chance expectation. As evidenced in Experiment 1, it was predicted that
response times to noun identification in ‘pick’ conditions would be faster than in ‘not’ conditions for both conscious and subliminal trials.
4.1. Method
4.1.1. Design and participants
In a repeated measures design with the number of correct identifications being the dependant variable, 24 undergraduate
psychology students from the University of Sussex took part in this study in exchange for course credits. None of the participants took part in Experiments 1 or 2. Nineteen of the participants were female and five male, with ages ranging from
18 to 32 years (M = 20.21, SD = 3.27).
4.1.2. Apparatus and materials
Replicated Experiment 2.
4.1.3. Procedure
Replicated Experiment 2. Participants were also asked to rate their confidence in choosing the correct noun on a scale of
50–100%. Participants were required to rate over 50% if they believed they had any awareness of which noun to choose, and
to rate 50% if they believed they were guessing.
4.2. Results
4.2.1. SOA setting
Subjective threshold durations ranged from an SOA of 16–64 ms, with an average experimental subliminal presentation
speed of 48 ms (SD = 17).
4.2.2. Trial accuracy
The mean rate of correct identifications made on conscious trials was 98% (SE = .4). Mean correct identifications was 96%
(SE = .8) for ‘pick’ trials, and 99% (SE = .3) for ‘not’ trials. For the subliminal trials, only those trials in which participants rated
confidence to be at 50% (i.e. guessing) were included in the analysis. Of the 80 subliminal trials, the number of trials upon
which each participant rated confidence to be above 50% ranged between 0 and 26 trials (M = 7, SD = 7). Mean percentage
correct responses for subliminal ‘pick’ (M = 58%, SE = .6) and ‘not’ (M = 51%, SE = .6) conditions are presented in Fig. 1, with
a 50% reference line indicating chance performance. On subliminal trials, overall d0 values significantly differed from zero
(M = .20, SE = .02, t(23) = 10.57, p < .001, d = 4.40). Accuracy on ‘pick’ (t(23) = 12.58, p < .001, d = 5.25) trials was significant,
whilst ‘not’ (t(23) = 1.84, p = .07, d = 0.77) trials did not significantly differ from what would be expected by chance. In
the previous two experiments, the subliminal ‘not’ trials produced an effect approximately 8% above baseline. A Bayes Factor,
using a half-normal with SD equal to 8%, was B = 2.09, indicated that the data were insensitive, but if anything supported the
hypothesis of a subliminal effect. Furthermore, looking at the percentage of occasions participants simply chose the subliminally presented noun (i.e. ignoring the preceding instruction) significantly differed between ‘pick’ (M = 58%, SE = .6) and ‘not’
(M = 49%, SE = .6, t(23) = 10.82, p < .001, d = 4.51) conditions. Only if pick and not were differentially processed could there be
a significant difference between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials in the proportion of times the presented word was selected.
Conscious knowledge of the subliminal instruction was also assessed using the zero-correlation criterion (ZCC) to establish whether there was a relationship between confidence and accuracy on trials when the participant rated confidence to be
above 50%. The difference in accuracy between ‘guess’ and ‘any confidence’ was .54%, which was not significant
(t(23) = 1.69, p = .11, d = 0.70). A Bayes Factor was conducted to assess whether the data supported the null hypothesis that
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there was no relation between confidence and accuracy. Firstly, the range of effect sizes expected if there were conscious
knowledge needed to be specified. The maximum slope was determined by the overall accuracy in Experiment 3 (3%) divided
by the proportion of confident responses (.08).2 Therefore, the maximum slope = 37.5%. Using a uniform distribution between 0
and 37.5 (sample M = -.54, SE = .31) produced a Bayes Factor of 0.00, providing strong evidence for the null hypothesis that there
was no relation between confidence and accuracy3. The correlation between confidence and accuracy was additionally measured using Type II d0 . Type II d0 did not significantly differ from zero (M = .01, SE = .01, t(23) = 1.69, p = .10, d = 0.70. A Bayes
Factor was conducted to assess whether the Type II data supported the null hypothesis that there was no relation between confidence and accuracy. Given plausible assumptions, Type II d0 does not exceed Type I (Barrett, Dienes, & Seth, in press). Thus, the
alternative hypothesis that there existed some relation between confidence and accuracy (i.e., some conscious perception) was
modelled as a uniform distribution between 0 and the mean Type I d0 of .2. The Bayes Factor of 0.03 provided strong support for
the null hypothesis and hence the existence of subliminal perception.
4.2.3. Response time
The time taken to identify the noun they had been instructed to choose was recorded for both conscious and subliminal
‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions. For the conscious trials, a paired-sample t-test suggested that on average, participants were significantly quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 728 ms, SE = 23) than in ‘not’ conditions (M = 851 ms, SE = 35,
t(23) = 4.7, p < .001, d = 1.96). Participants were similarly quicker in subliminal trials to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 834 ms, SE = 45) when compared to ‘not’ conditions (M = 854 ms, SE = 43), however, as evidenced in Experiment
2, a paired sample t-test revealed that this difference in reaction times was not significant (t(23) = 1.63, p = .12, d = 0.68).
The mean effect from Experiments 1 and 2 was 48 ms; this was as the standard deviation of a half-normal, as before. With a
sample mean difference between subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions of 20 ms (SE of the difference = 13), the Bayes Factor
was B = 1.47 indicating data insensitivity and no conclusions should be drawn, with the evidence slightly telling against the
null hypothesis.
4.3. Discussion
Using individual subjective thresholds (Cheesman & Merikle, 1984), the results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that
when presented with a subliminal prime instruction to choose a particular noun, unconscious cognition is able to successfully choose the correct noun above mere chance performance. Experiment 3 validated the threshold-setting procedure used
in the previous experiments. The ZCC indicated a sensitive confirmation of the null hypothesis of no conscious awareness,
ruling out partial awareness (Kouider & Dupoux, 2004). Note that partial awareness of the displayed noun in itself is not sufficient to know in any way which choice to make; a participant would need to consciously have partial information to both
the noun and the instruction (‘not’ versus ‘pick’). Any such awareness should be reflected in confidence ratings; the ZCC, by
contrast, supports the claim that perception was subliminal. It could be argued that maybe participants gave up on using the
confidence scale (despite clearly using it appropriately on conscious trials). Even this objection cannot be plausibly sustained
because the Bayes factor which indicated strong evidence for the ZCC assumed that the population effect could be indefinitely small. Thus, the alternative hypothesis that was rejected is consistent with participants trying to some degree but
in a noisy way (i.e. ‘‘giving up’’ to some degree). The ‘‘giving up’’ hypothesis, to survive this test, would need to assert a priori
that participants gave up completely. Without any prior basis for asserting complete failure to follow instructions, the ‘‘giving up’’ hypothesis can be rejected.
There were trials on which participants indicated some confidence. The results for the ZCC implied that participants used
confident responses when they had no better access to information than when they used guess responses. Thus, participants
may have been driven by a need to vary the response used, and thus sometimes gave a confidence greater than 50%. Such a
tendency will add noise to measuring the threshold, partly explaining the lack of 100% reliability in threshold measurement,
and also indicating how the apparent threshold drift in some participants in previous experiments could have been spurious.
Because noun pairs were repeated, it might be argued that if a noun pair that had been confidently seen were repeated the
subliminal choice effect we observed may in fact depend on consciously primed specific stimulus–response links. However,
trials were not repeated exactly, as noun pairs were only repeated for counter-balancing reasons. Thus having once associated a given noun with a left response, there is a higher probability that that same noun will be associated with right response on its next appearance. Thus, S–R links would induce subjects to make incorrect rather than correct responses.
2
Let X be a weighted average of the performance above baseline when guessing (G) and when confident (C), with the weights being the proportions of each
type of response. That is, X = (1 pc) * G + pc * C. By definition, our measure of confidence accuracy relation, the slope, is C–G. This will be maximum when all
guessing responses are at baseline, i.e. when G = 0. In this case, slope = C G = C. Also in this case, X = pc * C, with the G term dropping out. Rearranging, C = X/pc.
Thus, since maximum slope = C in this case, maximum slope = X/pc. QED. See, for example, Guo et al. (2013) and Li, Guo, Zhu, Yang, and Dienes (2013) for the
previous use of this method for the zero correlation criterion.
3
Kanai, Walsh, and Tseng (2010) offer a subjective discriminability of invisibility (SDI) index to further discriminate between a lack of confidence as a result
of either perceptual or attentional blindness. However, due to the lack of trials in which a stimulus was ‘absent’, or an appropriate equivalent, we were unable
to apply the SDI in this case. For Type II sensitivity, Maniscalco and Lau (2012) show their meta-d’ measure is superior in principle to Type II d’ (see also Barret
et al., in press, for confirmation with detailed analyses); however, meta-d’ is more unstable for small N than Type II d’ in our experience, so we have used the
latter.
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Further, the results of the ZCC indicate that ‘‘confident’’ responses may not have reflected conscious perception, but rather,
for example, a desire to use all response options.
Whilst an effect of ‘not’ versus ‘pick’ remained in Experiment 3, the demonstration would be stronger if the accuracy of
‘not’ trials were individually significantly above baseline performance. However, research has demonstrated that the type of
mask used, for example a string of letters or ampersands, can adversely influence the processing of stimuli by interfering
with phoneme, grapheme and semantic interpretation (Di Lollo, Enns, & Rensink, 2000; McClelland, 1978; Perfetti & Bell,
1991; Walley & Weiden, 1973). Therefore, Experiment 4 aimed to develop a more sensitive method of delivering subliminal
stimuli.
5. Experiment 4
To render a prime unconscious, it is necessary to mask the prime in order to avoid conscious perception. The most common method of masking is to use backward masks in the form of symbols (e.g. hatch marks or ampersands), or letter strings
(Kiesel, Kunde, & Hoffmann, 2007). However, previous research has highlighted the detrimental effect that backward masking has on the cognitive comprehension of subliminal primes (Di Lollo et al., 2000; McClelland, 1978; Perfetti & Bell, 1991;
Walley & Weiden, 1973), due to interference during the pattern and letter recognition part of processing (Grainger, Diependaele, Spinelli, Ferrand, & Farioli, 2003). Koudier and Dehaene (2007) state that for a prime to be subliminal, it needs to be
presented for a sufficiently short duration, and the mask needs to either share stimulus features or fit the contours of the
prime closely. Therefore, Experiment 4 attempted to successfully demonstrate subliminal semantic priming using a greyscale contrast masking method established by Lamy, Mudrik, and Deouell (2008). The experiment followed the same format
as Experiment 3 in that participants viewed the list of nouns to be used in subliminal trials to gain the advantage of practice
without the establishment of S–R links, and continually assessed subliminal subjective thresholds.
As in Experiments 1–3, it was hypothesised that for the subliminal trials, participants would correctly identify the noun
for both ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions beyond 50% chance expectation. As evidenced in the previous 3 experiments, it was
predicted that response times to noun identification in ‘pick’ conditions would be faster than in ‘not’ conditions for both
conscious and subliminal trials.
5.1. Method
5.1.1. Design and participants
In a repeated measures design with the number of correct identifications being the dependant variable, 22 undergraduate
psychology students from the University of Sussex took part in this study in exchange for course credits. None of the participants took part in Experiments 1, 2, or 3. Sixteen of the participants were female and six male, with ages ranging from
18 to 31 years (M = 20.23, SD = 3.44).
5.1.2. Apparatus and materials
Replicated that used in Experiments 2 and 3.
5.1.3. Procedure
5.1.3.1. Conscious trials. The stimulus instruction was presented within a rectangular box of the same size as used for the fixation. The background of the rectangle was filled with grey at a contrast level set by equally altering the red, green and blue
(RGB) channels to 212 on the computer monitor. The stimulus instruction was presented within this box in grey at an RGB
contrast level of 108 (see Fig. 2 for an example). The stimulus instruction was presented on the screen for 250 ms to ensure
conscious perception. The stimulus instruction was immediately followed by the two-noun choice (e.g. ‘1. baby’ and ‘2. yard’)
presented in the centre of the screen.
5.1.3.2. SOA setting. In an attempt to block conscious perception of the prime instruction, each stimulus instruction was presented at an RGB level of 208 against a background RGB contrast of 212 (see Fig. 3 for an example).
5.1.3.3. Subliminal trials. The subliminal phase of the experiment contained three blocks of 40 subliminal trials (with the
third block being a replication of the first block, at an RGB level of 208 against a background RGB contrast of 212). The
Fig. 2. Example of a conscious contrast mask.
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Fig. 3. Example of an unconscious contrast mask.
presentation time of the stimulus instruction was determined by the point at which the participant rated confidence to be at
50% for five successive trials in the SOA setting phase. Confidence ratings were taken after each trial. Randomly placed within
each block of 40 subliminal trials was an additional 10 conscious trials (with the stimulus instruction at an RGB of 108
against a background RGB contrast of 212, presented for 300 ms) to prevent rhythmic pressing of the ‘‘1’’ and ‘‘2’’ keys,
and to remind participants of the task required (cf. Eimer et al., 2009).
5.2. Results
5.2.1. SOA setting
Subjective threshold durations ranged from an SOA of 32–112 ms, with an average experimental subliminal presentation
speed of 56 ms (SD = 21).
5.2.2. Trial accuracy
The mean number of correct identifications for conscious trials was slightly off 100% (M = 97%, SE = 1). For the ‘pick’ trials,
mean correct identification averaged at 97% (SE = 1), whilst for ‘not’ trials, mean correct identification averaged at 96%
(SE = 1). For the subliminal trials, only those trials in which participants rated confidence to be at 50% (i.e. guessing) were
included in the analysis. Of the 120 subliminal trials, the number of trials upon which each participant rated confidence
to be above 50% ranged between 0 and 89 trials (M = 20, SD = 22). Mean percentage correct responses for subliminal ‘pick’
(M = 51%, SE = 1) and ‘not’ (M = 52%, SE = 1) conditions are presented in Fig. 1, with a 50% reference line indicating chance
performance. On subliminal trials, overall d0 values significantly differed from zero (M = .07, SE = .03, t(21) = 2.60, p = .02,
d = 1.13). Although, taken individually, neither accuracy on ‘pick’ (t(21) = 1.84, p = .08, d = 0.80) or ‘not’ (t(21) = 1.89,
p = .07, d = 0.82) conditions significantly differed from what would be expected by chance. However, when looking at the
percentage of occasions participants simply chose the subliminally presented noun, noun identifications significantly differed between ‘pick’ (M = 51%, SE = 1) and ‘not’ (M = 48%, SE = 1, t(21) = 2.6, p = .02, d = 1.13) conditions, indicating the appropriate processing of ‘pick’ versus ‘not’.
As in Experiment 3, conscious knowledge was assessed by ZCC. The difference in accuracy between ‘guess’ and ‘any confidence’ was 1.11%, which was not significant (t(21) = 1.88, p = .07, d = 0.82). A Bayes Factor was conducted to assess
whether the data supported the null hypothesis that there was no relation between confidence and accuracy. The maximum
slope was determined by the overall accuracy in Experiment 4 when confidence was ignored (3%) divided by the proportion
of confident responses (.17). Therefore, the maximum slope = 17.65%. Using a uniform distribution between 0 and 17.65
(sample M = 1.11, SE = .59) produced a Bayes Factor of 0.48, suggesting that the data were insensitive and we are thus unable
to say whether or not the ZCC is satisfied. Type II d0 , another way of measuring the ZCC, did not differ significantly from zero
(M = .01, SE = .01, t(21) = 1.88, p = .08, d = 0.82). Using a uniform distribution between 0 and the mean Type I d0 of .07 (sample
M = .01, SE = .01) produced a Bayes Factor of 0.50, providing only weak evidence for the null hypothesis. However, the guessing criterion indicates that there was some unconscious knowledge.
5.2.3. Response time
The time taken to identify the noun the participant had been instructed to choose was recorded for both conscious and
subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions. For the conscious trials, a paired-sample t-test suggests that on average, participants
were significantly quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 746 ms, SE = 20) than in ‘not’ conditions (M = 920 ms,
SE = 34, t(21) = 5.14, p < .001, d = 2.24). Similarly, participants were slower in subliminal trials to identify the noun in ‘not’
conditions (M = 942 ms, SE = 36) when compared to ‘pick’ conditions (M = 874 ms, SE = 52). However a paired sample t-test
revealed that this difference in reaction times between subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions was not significant (t(21) = 1.69,
p = .11, d = 0.74). Using the average effect for Experiments 1–3, 39 ms as the standard deviation of a half-normal, with a sample mean difference between subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions of 68 ms (SE of the difference = 40), a Bayes Factor of
B = 2.55, indicated insensitive data, but with more support for the experimental hypothesis than the null hypothesis.
5.3. Discussion
For the subliminal trials, the accuracy data suggested that participants chose the correct noun beyond chance expectations at an average rate of 51–52%. When analysed individually, participants did not significantly choose the correct noun
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beyond what would be expected by chance for either ‘pick’ or ‘not’ conditions, because of data insensitivity. Nevertheless,
participants did choose the presented noun significantly more often in the ‘pick’ rather than the ‘not’ condition, supporting
the theory that people do process the instructions appropriately. However, the aim of Experiment 4 was to develop a more
sensitive method of subliminal priming than that used in Experiment 3 by utilising a grey-scale contrast method of masking
(Lamy et al., 2008). Despite using the grey-scale contrast method, Experiment 4 failed to demonstrate successful priming in
subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions.
However, further research has demonstrated the superior priming effects achieved when primes are presented repeatedly
(Atas, Vermeiren, & Cleeremans, 2012; Marcel, 1983). This superior priming effect was demonstrated by Wentura and Frings
(2005), who used objective thresholds to compare the effectiveness of a single standard masked prime with a masked prime
that was presented ten times in quick succession. The results indicated that only the repeated masked prime condition produced a significant priming effect. That is, repeatedly presenting a masked prime increased subliminal priming without
increasing subjective awareness. The issue of repeated prime presentation was explored further in Experiment 5.
6. Experiment 5
Experiment 5 aimed to refine the grey-scale contrast method of masking utilised in Experiment 4 whilst taking advantage
of the superior effects of repeated priming (Marcel, 1983; Wentura & Frings, 2005). Experiment 5 replicated the procedure
and format used in Experiment 4, but rather than one presentation of the prime, each prime was repeated three times. As in
Experiments 1–4, it was expected that for the subliminal trials, participants would correctly identify the noun for both ‘pick’
and ‘not’ conditions beyond 50% chance expectation. As evidenced in Experiment 1, it was predicted that response times to
noun identification in ‘pick’ conditions would be faster than in ‘not’ conditions for both conscious and subliminal trials.
6.1. Method
6.1.1. Design and participants
One problem with the previous study was low power. The dz for the accuracy on not trails was 0.40. For a power of 80%, a
sample size of 51 is needed. In a repeated measures design with the number of correct identifications being the dependant
variable, 51 undergraduate psychology students from the University of Sussex took part in this study in exchange for course
credits. None of the participants took part in Experiments 1, 2, 3, or 4. Forty-four of the participants were female and seven
male, with ages ranging from 18 to 32 years (M = 19.69, SD = 2.53).
6.1.2. Apparatus and materials
Replicated Experiments 2–4.
6.1.3. Procedure
Replicated Experiment 4. However, there were three equal duration presentations of the prime for conscious, SOA, and
subliminal trials, with a 150 ms pause between each presentation.
6.2. Results
6.2.1. SOA setting
Subjective threshold durations of the single prime presentation ranged from an SOA of 16 ms to 192 ms (a cumulative
range of 48–576 ms), with an average experimental presentation speed of 64 ms (SD = 35, with a cumulative mean presentation speed of 192 ms).
6.2.2. Trial accuracy
The mean number of correct noun identifications for conscious trials was 95% (SE = 1). For the ‘pick’ trials, mean correct
identification averaged at 95% (SE = 1), whilst for ‘not’ trials, mean correct identification averaged at 95% (SE = 1). For the
subliminal trials, only those trials in which participants rated confidence to be at 50% (i.e. guessing) were included in the
analysis. Of the 120 subliminal trials, the number of trials upon which each participant rated confidence to be above 50%
ranged between 0 and 86 trials (M = 23, SD = 26). Mean percentage correct responses for subliminal ‘pick’ (M = 53%,
SE = 1) and ‘not’ (M = 52%, SE = 1) conditions are presented in Fig. 1, with a 50% reference line indicating chance performance.
On subliminal trials, overall d0 values significantly differed from zero (M = .11, SE = .03, t(23) = 3.59, p = .001, d = 1.02).
Accuracy on ‘pick’ conditions significantly differed from chance expectations (t(50) = 2.43, p = .02, d = 0.69), as well as
performance accuracy on ‘not’ (t(50) = 2.37, p = .02, d = 0.67) conditions. In addition, a paired-sample t-test looking at the
percentage of occasions participants simply chose the subliminally presented noun significantly differed between ‘pick’
(M = 53%, SE = 1) and ‘not’ (M = 48%, SE = 1, t(50) = 3.6, p = .001, d = 1.02) conditions.
Conscious knowledge was again assessed in Experiment 5 using the ZCC. The difference in accuracy between ‘guess’ and
‘any confidence’ was 5.04%, which was not significant (t(50) = 1.72, p = .09, d = 0.49). A Bayes Factor was conducted to
assess whether the data supported the null hypothesis that there was no relation between confidence and accuracy. The
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maximum slope was determined by the overall accuracy in Experiment 5 when confidence was ignored (2%) divided by the
proportion of confident responses (.19). Therefore, the maximum slope = 10.53%. Using a uniform distribution between 0 and
10.53 (sample M = 5.04, SE = 2.93) produced a Bayes Factor of 2.84, suggesting that the data were insensitive (albeit providing more evidence for there being some rather than no conscious knowledge), and we are thus unable to say whether or not
the ZCC is satisfied. Type II d0 , an alternative measure of the ZCC, also did not significantly differ from zero (M = .10, SE = .16,
t(50) = 1.15, p = .26, d = 0.33). Using a uniform distribution between 0 and the mean Type I d0 of .11 (and a sample Type II d0 of
M = .04, SE = .04) produced a Bayes Factor of 1.15, indicating that the data were insensitive and that we are unable to draw
conclusions as to whether or not there was any conscious perception. However, the guessing criterion indicated that there
was some unconscious knowledge.
6.2.3. Response time
The time taken to identify the noun the participant had been instructed to choose was recorded for both conscious and
subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions. For the conscious trials, a paired-sample t-test suggests that on average, participants
were significantly quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 711 ms, SE = 15) than in ‘not’ conditions (M = 883 ms,
SE = 24, t(50) = 9.97, p < .001, d = 2.82). Similarly, for the subliminal trials, a paired-sample t-test suggested that on average,
participants were significantly quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ conditions (M = 866 ms, SE = 29) when compared to ‘not’
conditions (M = 959 ms, SE = 25, t(50) = 4.46, p < .001, d = 1.26).
6.3. Discussion
Participants in the subliminal ‘pick’ condition correctly identified the noun at an average rate of 53%. Similarly, the results
suggest that participant’s chose the correct noun on an average 52% of occasions for subliminal ‘not’ conditions. Experiment
5 showed that participants could successfully identify the correct noun at above chance expectations for both subliminally
presented ‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials. However, the degree of priming in experiment 5 was not significantly greater than in experiment 4, t(71) = .68, p = .49, d = 0.16, indicating that repeated presentation of a prime did not greatly boost the amount of
unconscious processing.
As evidenced in Experiments 1–4, the response time data for conscious trials shows the difference in task difficulty between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions in that it took significantly longer to identify the instructed noun in ‘pick’ trials when compared to ‘not’, an average 171 ms longer. Similarly, there was a statistically significant response time difference between
‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials in subliminal conditions. Therefore, even though confidence ratings ensured that priming was below
the subjective threshold, participants were still an average 93 ms slower to identify the noun in ‘not’ conditions when compared to ‘pick’ conditions.
7. General discussion
The present research investigated the ability of unconscious cognition to process the semantic meaning of subliminal
stimuli. In a series of five experiments, participants were subliminally primed with a two word instruction, instructing
the individual with which of two subsequent nouns to choose. This prime was in the form an instruction to either pick
the accompanying noun (the second word in the instruction, e.g., ‘pick yard’), or to not pick the accompanying noun (e.g.,
‘not yard’), when presented with the accompanying noun and a paired noun (e.g., ‘1. baby, 2. yard’). If able to correctly identify
the instructed noun, this should demonstrate the semantic comprehension of the subliminal instruction.
Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that participants were able to choose the correct noun beyond what would be expected by chance alone for both subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions, without this effect being attributed to the retrieval
of S–R links (Exp. 2). To minimise the likelihood of conscious awareness, Experiment 3 measured confidence after each trial
and excluded trials in which the participant rated any degree of confidence in their decision from the analysis. However, the
results indicated that participants failed to identify the correct noun, beyond chance performance, for ‘not’ conditions. The
Bayesian analysis conducted on the trial accuracy data indicated support for the experimental hypothesis that participants
would choose the correct noun depending on subliminal instruction. Experiments 4 and 5 aimed to develop a more sensitive
method of subliminal priming by adopting a grey-scale contrast method of masking employed by Lamy et al. (2008). The
results of Experiment 5 additionally adopted a method of repeated priming and demonstrated that participants identified
the correct noun beyond chance for both ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions.
In addition to looking at above chance accuracy, we also looked at the percentage of occasions that participants chose the
noun based on the primed noun. That is, if the participant chose the primed noun, this would lead to a correct response for
‘pick’ trials, but an incorrect response for ‘not’ trials. Therefore, if the participant merely chose the primed noun, there would
not be a significant difference in accuracy between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials. However, the results suggest that there was a significant difference in choosing the primed noun for ‘pick’ and ‘not’ in each of the five experiments (including Experiments 3
and 4 where accuracy for each instruction separately did not significantly exceed chance expectations), indicating appropriate processing of the presented instruction.
Response time data for the conscious trials in Experiments 1–5 demonstrated the difference in cognitive task difficulty
between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions. For the ‘pick’ instruction, the reader is informed that the accompanying noun is the
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correct noun to choose. So when subsequently presented with the noun-pair choice, the participant needs to first match the
noun they had just been presented with, with the two nouns on the screen, and then indicate which noun they had been
instructed to choose. For the ‘not’ trials, the reader is informed that the accompanying noun is the incorrect noun to choose.
When presented with the noun-pair choice, the participant has two tasks. The first is to identify the noun they had just been
presented with, and the second is to indicate the other noun in order to fulfil the task. This relative difficulty in task expectations was reflected in the response time difference between conscious ‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials, as participants were on
average quicker to identify the noun in ‘pick’ trials in each of the five experiments. Perhaps more interestingly, this response
time difference between ‘pick’ and ‘not’ trials was similarly evidenced in subliminal conditions. Although this response time
difference was only statistically significant in Experiments 1 and 5, the Bayes Factor in Experiments 2 and 4 indicated that
the non-significant results were not evidence for the null hypothesis. Furthermore, a meta-analysis indicated an overall
significant result for the response time difference over all subliminal conditions (p < .001).4 These response time data lend
further support to the argument that participants were able to comprehend the logical function of both subliminal pick and
not, demonstrating unconscious cognitive control.
The series of experiments presented here demonstrate that unconscious processing of two-word primes is feasible, a controversial idea in current literature. Whilst there exists numerous studies demonstrating the ability of unconscious processing to semantically analyse single and even multiple word strings (e.g., Abad et al., 2003; Bronstein & Rodin, 1983; Carr &
Dagenbach, 1990; Dell’Acqua & Grainger, 1999; Marcel, 1983; Silverman & Weinberger, 1985; Sklar et al., 2012; Waller &
Barter, 2005), still other studies doubt the ability of subliminal perception and the cognitive unconscious to complete more
complex analyses than pattern and feature recognition (e.g., Abrams & Greenwald, 2000; Condon & Allen, 1980; Greenwald,
1992). One argument attempting to explain the inability of many studies to find unconscious semantic activation involves
the use of objective thresholds, which not only test unconscious cognition, but degraded unconscious cognition (Dienes,
2008), or the use of limited processing time resulting in degraded unconscious cognition (Sklar et al., 2012). Conversely, subjective methods of assessing subliminal perception assume that if an individual possesses knowledge, yet is unaware that
they possess this knowledge, then there is evidence of unconscious knowledge (Ziori & Dienes, 2006). Experiments 3–5 here
only included trials in which confidence was rated to be at 50% (i.e., guessing), thereby indicating a lack of conscious knowledge according to subjective measures of subliminality. Whilst confident responses on a number of trials may indicate
partial conscious awareness, participants may also sometimes give confidence ratings above 50% just because they think
they should, or because they hallucinate. A meta-analysis of the overall ZCC indicated an overall non-significant relationship
between confidence and accuracy (p > .05)5, whilst a Bayes Factor of B = 0.366 suggested that the data were not quite sensitive
enough by conventional standards (i.e., less than 0.33) but more strongly supports the claim of no conscious knowledge rather
than partial conscious knowledge.
Fig. 1 indicates that when changing the paradigm from pure back masking to contrast masking, the proportion of times
the displayed noun was chosen changed. The tendency to pick the displayed noun in experiments 1/2/3 combined was 53%
overall (SE = .4) significantly different from the tendency in experiments 4/5 combined (50%, SE = .54), t(145) = 5.02, p = .02,
d = 0.83. If a subject had awareness of just the displayed noun, nothing follows about whether they should pick it. If a subject
had awareness of just the instruction (pick or not) nothing follows about which noun to choose. But if the subject had awareness of the whole phrase, they should pick the displayed noun to an equal extent above 50% on PICK trials as they reject it
below 50% on NOT trials. Thus awareness has the tendency to move displayed noun choice towards 50%. The finding of a bias
above 50% in the earlier rather than latter experiments thus argues against any claim that participants had more awareness
in the first three experiments than in the last two. Given we tightened up the measurement of awareness in the last experiments, this is an important point.
Jacoby (1991) developed the process-dissociation procedure to demonstrate the separate contributions of both conscious
and unconscious knowledge using stem completion tasks (cf. Marcel, 1983, who showed a failure to exclude in subliminal
conditions). Inclusion tasks require the participant to complete the stem with a word that has been presented outside of conscious awareness. Exclusion tasks require the participant to complete the stem with a different word to the unconsciously
primed word. If knowledge of the primed word is conscious, this should lead to a below baseline performance, however evidence suggests that participants continue to complete the stem with the primed word above baseline performance (Debner
& Jacoby, 1994; Jacoby, Toth, & Yonelinas, 1993). Jacoby argues that it is this inability to exclude primed words that is evidence of unconscious knowledge. Therefore, conscious equates to cognitive control, whilst unconscious equates to a lack of
cognitive control. From a higher order perspective (e.g., Lau & Rosenthal, 2011), the ability to exclude an item indicates conscious perception only if the instruction is, or is taken to be, to exclude if you think you saw the stimulus, that is if there was
an appropriate higher order thought of seeing. In these experiments, exclusion instructions were not conditional on higher
order thoughts: participants were simply instructed to exclude a particular item. Thus, on a higher order perspective, there is
4
A meta-analysis conducted on all response time differences between subliminal ‘pick’ and ‘not’ conditions (M = 37, SE = 8) revealed a significant
relationship, t(142) = 4.51, p < .001, d = 0.76.
5
The meta-analysis conducted on all of the ZCC data revealed that the relationship between confidence and accuracy was non-significant, t(94) = 0.52,
p > .05, d = 0.11.
6
The maximum slope was determined by the mean overall accuracy in Experiments 3, 4 and 5 when confidence was ignored (3%) divided by the mean
proportion of confident responses (.15). Therefore, the maximum slope = 20%. Using a uniform distribution between 0 and 20 (sample M = 1.87, SE = 3.6)
produced a Bayes Factor of B = 0.36.
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no reason why exclusion could not occur unconsciously. We argue that the series of experiments presented here provides
evidence of unconscious knowledge precisely because participants were able to demonstrate unconscious cognitive control
by following the subliminal instruction to not choose the presented word. Additional research using subjective measures of
unconscious have similarly demonstrated unconscious cognitive control in grammar studies (Dienes, Altmann, Kwan, &
Goode, 1995; Norman et al., 2011; Wan et al., 2008), the serial reaction time task (Fu, Dienes, & Fu, 2010), and in hypnosis
(Dienes & Perner, 2007). In the current case, not only could participants exclude a specified item when the item was subliminal, they could exclude it when the instruction to exclude was itself subliminal, which is the novel feature of the
experiments reported here.
We used subjective measures to establish the conscious status of perception. Some researchers believe objective measures most sensitively determine the conscious status of perceptual states (see e.g. Snodgrass, Bernat, & Shevrin, 2004).
To some extent, which measure one prefers depends on which theory of consciousness one subscribes to (Dienes & Seth,
2010a): On higher order and global workspace theories, conscious knowledge either entails or disposes awareness of the perception, which would be reflected in confidence ratings (consistent with the current methodology); on other hand, according
to Wordly Discrimination Theory, the very fact that participants chose the correct word at above chance levels entails that
the perception of the word was conscious, whatever the confidence rating. Holders of the latter sort of theory may say that
while participants may sincerely and earnestly believe they saw nothing of relevance, that just goes to show they lacked
higher-order or reflective awareness, but the perception itself was still conscious. We do not wish to quibble over words.
We have shown that the sort of awareness picked out by higher order thoughts is not necessary for the processing of linguistic negation, whether one calls it ‘‘unconscious perception’’ (as seems natural to us) or ‘‘reflectively unconscious perception’’,
or some other name.
A second line of criticism over our methods may accept the logic of subjective methods in principle (e.g., Timmermans,
Schilbach, Pasquali, & Cleeremans, 2012), but deny we used the best subjective method. Methods involving gambling may
motivate careful and honest reports of awareness, and future research could use, for example, the ‘‘no loss gambling’’ of
Dienes and Seth (2010b; see also Mealor & Dienes, 2012). Another approach is to ask subjects to report not on their accuracy,
which is something ultimately unknowable to a subject (cf. Dienes & Perner, 2004), but on the quality of the visual experience itself, quite apart from its unknown mapping to the world (Ramsøy & Overgaard, 2004). The Perceptual Awareness Scale
(PAS) of Ramsøy and Overgaard asks subjects to distinguish four degrees of visual clarity, from no visual experience (1), to a
glimpse (but no idea of what) (2), to almost clear image (3) to clear image (4). Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, and
Cleeremans (2010) compared confidence ratings and PAS for measuring conscious perception of shapes, and argued PAS
was more exhaustive. People can be aware of seeing something before knowing that they have seen something relevant.
Dienes and Seth (2010c) argued that as perception is defined in part by its contents, having some conscious experience is
consistent with other perceptual contents remaining unconscious, which PAS would miss out on, but confidence ratings
would be sensitive to. Further, Szczepanowski, Traczyk, Wierzchoń, and Cleeremans (2013) argued that confidence ratings
were more sensitive than PAS for emotional facial expression; maybe this is true in general for stimuli more complex than
shapes. But what constitutes the best subjective measure of perceptual awareness is still a matter of debate. Future research
should determine the replicability of the current results when PAS and other scales are used. Additionally, whilst the current
work was motivated on the grounds that subjective measures are more sensitive than objective measures, this still remains a
conjecture in the current case. Future studies may benefit from a direct comparison of subjective and objective measures in
the case of unconscious negation. Furthermore, due to the limitations in subliminal presentation using computers (i.e., presentation speeds using a 60 Hz computer monitor being limited to 16 ms screen refresh rates), a tachistoscope allowing
millisecond manipulation would be optimal so that there is an accurate estimate of both subjective and objective thresholds
(cf. Masters, Maxwell, & Eves, 2009).
In his study investigating the limitations of unconscious cognition, Greenwald (1992) concludes that unconscious processing is not able to complete more sophisticated analyses than letter recognition and partial word detection. In summing
up, Greenwald issues a two-word challenge in which the investigations into multiple-word subliminal primes need to ensure
that each word needs to be processed in unison, that no single word should be sufficient to impart sentence-meaning. The
studies presented here attempted to meet this challenge by using two-word subliminal primes as instructions to choose a
subsequent word. Whilst the ‘not’ conditions in this study appear compelling in their need to require semantic comprehension of not in order to inhibit recognition, the semantic analysis of the second word is not necessarily vital in choosing the
correct word; recognition is all that is required to discriminate between the two words. Further research into this arena may
benefit from adapting the study to make semantic interpretation of the second word vital.
Future research into the unconscious processing of subliminally presented multiple word-strings may also benefit from
developing a more sensitive method of delivering subliminal stimuli. Experiments 4 and 5 presented here aimed to address
this issue by employing a grey-scale contrast method of masking established by Lamy et al. (2008). Although Experiment 5
produced some positive results, participants were indicating the correct noun at an average rate of 52%, only 2% above a
baseline of 50% performance. Therefore, whilst it was expected that the longer presentation durations afforded by contrast
masking would result in greater semantic processing, this was not necessarily the case. However, Lamy, Mudrik, and Deouell
(2008) successfully demonstrated unconscious processing by reducing the contrast between prime and background whilst
keeping presentation speed constant until subjective thresholds were reached. In Experiments 4 and 5 presented here, prime
and background contrasts were held constant whilst presentation speeds were reduced. It is possible that reducing the
contrast rather than reducing duration may have resulted in a greater depth of processing and thus higher accuracy.
1038
A.-M. Armstrong, Z. Dienes / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1022–1040
Furthermore, Wentura and Frings (2005) indicate that maximum priming effects were evidenced when subliminal primes
were presented 10 times in quick succession, whilst Marcel (1983) found an increasing priming effect up to 20 prime repetitions. Therefore, further research may improve subliminal priming effects by investigating the benefits of contrast masking and repeated priming.
The current study makes a start towards showing processing of syntax under subliminal conditions in showing people can
process a linguistic ‘‘not’’, and extract meaning from the combination of words. Nonetheless, a stronger case for subliminal
syntax would be made if the effect was stronger for ‘‘not baby’’ rather than ‘‘baby not’’, which would indicate that syntactically correct word order is also important for processing word combinations. Armstrong and Dienes (submitted) provide
further support for the syntactic processing of subliminal phrases by showing that when active (e.g. the boy hits the girl)
and passive (e.g. the boy is hit by the girl) sentences are presented below the subjective threshold, participants can nonetheless pick an appropriate picture at above chance levels.
8. Conclusion
To conclude, we present a series of experiments that utilised subjective thresholds of subliminal priming to demonstrate
a significant priming effect that cannot be attributed to partial conscious awareness or the retrieval of S–R links. Previous
research into the effects of priming has often demonstrated at best the semantic comprehension of single-word primes,
and at worst simple letter and pattern recognition processes. However, our results suggest that far from simple and unsophisticated analyses, unconscious cognition is capable of processing the logical function of negation when instructed to
choose between two nouns.
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Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Review article
Through the forest of motor representations
Gabriele Ferretti ⇑
Department of Pure and Applied Science, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Via Timoteo Viti, 10, 61029 Urbino, PU, Italy
Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, S.S. 208, Lange Sint Annastraat 7, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 1 March 2016
Revised 26 May 2016
Accepted 30 May 2016
Keywords:
Motor representations
The two visual systems model
Visuomotor processing
Action possibilities
Ventro-dorsal visual sub-system
a b s t r a c t
Following neuroscience, and using different labels, several philosophers have addressed
the idea of the presence of a single representational mechanism lying in between (visual)
perceptual processes and motor processes involved in different functions and useful for
shaping suitable action performances: a motor representation (MR). MRs are the naturalized mental antecedents of action. This paper presents a new, non-monolithic view of
MRs, according to which, contrarily to the received view, when looking at in between
(visual) perceptual processes and motor processes, we find not only a single representational mechanism with different functions, but an ensemble of different subrepresentational phenomena, each of which with a different function. This new view is able
to avoid several issues emerging from the literature and to address something the literature is silent about, which however turns out to be crucial for a theory of MRs.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
The positions in play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
2.1.
MRs are dorsal phenomena, not consciously accessible and represent action goals, bodily movements and action
properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
2.2.
MRs are subserved by both streams, can be conscious and represent only action properties, not goals or bodily
movements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
2.3.
MRs arise from the activity of the premotor cortex and mainly encode goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
2.4.
Philosophical problems with (the literature on) MRs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
A new perspective on MRs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
The decomposing strategy and the dorsal stream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.1.
The visuomotor component and the simulative one. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
4.2.
Goals/outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
4.3.
The egocentric/peripersonal component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
MRs between ventral and dorsal perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
5.1.
The dorsal/ventral interplay in action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
5.2.
Dorsal visual processing and the possibility of deception of vision for action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
5.3.
The connection between V-D and ventral perception. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
5.4.
The many facets of our visuomotor interactions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
5.5.
Dorsal multimodal spatial processing, conscious vision-for-action and MRs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
⇑ Address: Department of Pure and Applied Science, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Via Timoteo Viti, 10, 61029 Urbino, PU, Italy.
E-mail address: gabriele.ferretti88@gmail.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.05.013
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
178
G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
6.
7.
5.6.
MRs: an unexpected functioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Extending the neural correlates of MRs even further: the OFC cortex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Acknowledgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Appendix A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
A.1.
Acronyms used in the paper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
1. Introduction
The hand has a very complex anatomical structure. Functionally, movements of the hand require a coordinated interplay
of the 39 intrinsic and extrinsic muscles acting on 18 joints. Among all the joints of the hand, of particular importance is
the carpometacarpal joint of the thumb. This joint is of a saddle type and its immense significance for the hand function
emanates from the extra mobility this joint is endowed with, resulting in the opposition of the thumb to the other fingers.
The plethora of bones, joints, and muscles of which the hand is constituted gives to this structure amazing biomechanical
complexity. From the kinematic perspective, the hand has over 20 degrees of freedom. Thus the question arises: how does
the brain control the hand?
[Raos, Umiltà, Murata, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2006: 709]
The importance of investigating the mind starting from the naturalization of the mental antecedents of actions has been
recently and excellently brought to the attention of the philosophy of mind (Nanay, 2013b). Accordingly, following neuroscience, and using different labels, several philosophers have addressed the idea of the presence of a single representational
mechanism lying in between (visual) perceptual processes and motor processes involved in different functions and useful for
shaping suitable action performances: a motor representation (MR).1 MRs are the naturalized mental antecedents of action – I
am excluding mental action here.
This paper presents a new, non-monolithic view of MRs, according to which, contrarily to the received view, when looking
at in between (visual) perceptual processes and motor processes, we find not only a single representational mechanism with
different functions, but an ensemble of different sub-representational phenomena, each of which with a different function.
This new view is able to avoid several issues emerging from the literature and to address something the literature is silent
about, which however turns out to be crucial for a theory of MRs. Before developing my account, I need to sketch the basic
positions in the literature about MRs.
2. The positions in play
In order to sketch the basic positions held in the literature, a premise on neurophysiology is needed.
A common ground to link visual perception with action is the ‘‘Two Visual Systems Model” (TVSM), which suggests the
presence, in humans and other mammals, of a separation of two main (see Sections 4.1 and 5.5) visual pathways, grounded
on distinct anatomo-functional structures (Milner & Goodale, 1995): one for visual recognition, the ventral stream, and one
for visually guided action, the dorsal stream. They can be dissociated due to cortical lesions. Lesions in the dorsal stream (the
occipito-parietal network from the primary visual cortex to the posterior parietal cortex) impair one’s ability to use what one
sees to guide action (optic ataxia), but not object recognition; lesions in the ventral stream (the occipito-temporal network
from the primary visual cortex to the inferotemporal cortex) impair one’s ability to recognize things in the visual world
(visual agnosia), but not action guidance (Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; see also Jeannerod & Jacob, 2005). Moreover, we have
behavioral studies of normal subjects involving visual illusions that can deceive the ventral stream but not the dorsal
one; thus, it seems that, unlike ventral perception, dorsal perception is completely inaccessible to consciousness (I’ll come
back to this in Section 5.2).
Starting from this specification, we now come to the list of the positions about MRs. I should specify that I will just mention the positions in the literature which propose a naturalized account of these mental antecedents of action, namely, those
that follow neuroscience in order to build an idea of MRs. Indeed, I agree that, in order to understand MRs, we have to turn to
empirical science (Nanay, 2014), something not always pursued in the literature about action-representations.
2.1. MRs are dorsal phenomena, not consciously accessible and represent action goals, bodily movements and action properties
A widely agreed idea about MRs is that they are due to the dorsal stream (Pacherie, 2000, 2011) and, given its encapsulation, MRs are not normally consciously accessible (Pacherie, 2000: sec. 5, 2002: 63, 2006: 14, 2007: 8, 2011: 14; Jacob &
1
I will ignore the different labels found in literature and simply talk about MRs.
G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
179
Jeannerod, 2003: 252–255, 186, and sec. 6.4; see chap. 6; see Brogaard, 2011: 1094; see Jeannerod, 1994, 1997). MRs might
become conscious by accessing the short-term memory long enough, when action is blocked, delayed, or through top-down
attentional amplification, something that is usually impossible (Jeannerod, 1994; Pacherie, 2000: sec. 5; p. 104, 2006: 8,
2008: 195, 198). Also, since dorsal perception is not sensitive to certain perceptual illusions, thus MRs cannot therefore
access ventral conscious semantic representations (I’ll suggest this is not completely true in Section 5.2) – as suggested
by cases of visual agnosia (Pacherie, 2000: 411–412, 2008: 196). However, sometimes a slight inter-streams interaction is
allowed (Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003) (I’ll come back to this in Section 5.1) and it is suggested that, while MRs are dorsal processes, pragmatic and semantic representations should not rely on the ventral/dorsal anatomical distinction (Pacherie, 2000:
411, 412). Moreover, MRs guide action as long as it unfolds (Pacherie, 2002: 61, 2006: 14, 2011: 14 and sec. 4; see also Nanay,
2014: 4). In general, MRs represent an action goal (Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; Pacherie, 2000: 409, 2002: 71–72, 2007: 2,
2011:13), which determines the type of grip chosen for motor interaction (as we shall see below, talking about grips is
too general) (Pacherie, 2000: 409, sec. 5, 2002: 71–72, 2006: 8, 2007: 2, 8, 2008: 186, 2011: 10, 13; Jacob, 2005), and which
is computed in egocentric coordinates (Pacherie, 2000: 413, 2002: 70,71, 2011: 10; see Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003: chap. 8.2;
see Sections 4.1,4.2,5.4) – the literature on MRs privileges the case of grasping, insofar as this specific motor act is the most
studied one in the neuroscientific literature about visuomotor behavior; while I will follow the literature in privileging this
kind of motor act, it is worth noting that the discussion about the perception of action possibilities can be extended to most
of the motor acts we are able to perform (see Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014). Furthermore, MR functions ‘fall between’ a sensory function (extracting objects’ features relevant for action) and a motor one (encoding motor acts) (see Section 4.1) and
those two aspects of the content of motor representations (goal and object features) are not separate components of the content (see Sections 4.1,4.2,5.4). Finally, MRs also represent bodily movements for a given situation, being grounded on the
simulation of the required motor acts (Gallese, 2000, 2005, 2007, 2009; Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003: chap. 6; Jeannerod,
2006) – (I’ll offer an analysis of simulation in Section 4.1). However, it is not clear how MRs can select a singular motor
act with respect to different action possibilities that a singular object can offer (this problem is recognized by Pacherie,
2002: 71–72) (I will be back to this issue in Sections 5.3 and 5.4).
2.2. MRs are subserved by both streams, can be conscious and represent only action properties, not goals or bodily movements
Another view is that MRs represent action properties extracted from the object’s geometrical properties relevant for
action performance (Nanay, 2011, 2013a: 75, 2013b: 39; 2014: 4). However, while for Nanay (2011) MRs also encode action
goals, for Nanay (2013b: 41, 42) this is not the case and they do not represent bodily movements (Nanay, 2013b: 41), in contrast to the position described in (Section 2.1). Furthermore, while dorsal perception is important for the implementation of
MRs, it is not the only one (Nanay, 2013a: 1055, 2013b: 3.4, p. 64). Also, Nanay is the only one to explicitly suggest that MRs
are subserved by both streams and can be conscious, although they are typically unconscious (Gentilucci, Daprati, Toni,
Chieffi, & Saetti, 1995; Morgado, Muller, Gentaz, & Palluel-Germain, 2011; Pulvermüller & Hauk, 2005; Stein, Stanford,
Wallace, Vaughan, & Jiang, 2004; for a discussion see Nanay, 2013b: 3.4). However, dorsal processing is supposed to be quick
and automatic and thus should not be sensitive to top-down influences. Therefore, MRs are not fully exhausted by dorsal
perception. Finally, the expression ‘‘dorsal vision” deals with anatomical criteria, while action-guiding vision deals with
functional criteria and we should not use anatomical data in analyzing the cognitive impenetrability claim (Nanay,
2013a: 1058) confusing the functional level (vision-for-action) and the anatomical level (dorsal stream) (p. 1055).
2.3. MRs arise from the activity of the premotor cortex and mainly encode goals
Finally, there is the view according to which MR processing lies in the activity of premotor areas, without clarifying the
precise cortical circuits, nor addressing the ventral/dorsal issue (Butterfill & Sinigaglia, 2014). Following this view, the main
function of MRs is to represent action outcomes. However, they can also represent ways of acting, objects (properties) on
which actions are performed (2013: 137) – this is because action outcomes often specify both a way of acting and also what
to act on. Also, they are useful in planning and in monitoring (p. 123, 124; see also Gallese, 2000; Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2011;
Pacherie, 2000: 410–413). I’ll discuss this account more extensively later (Section 4.2).2
2.4. Philosophical problems with (the literature on) MRs
Reading this list, several philosophical issues remain unspecified for a theory of MRs: (1) there are accounts for which the
same MR has not the same function (e.g., for some commentators the function is to represent the goal, for others it represents motor commands, and for others still it is both). We should precisely address all MR functions; (2) more than just one
function is addressed for a single MR, which can be engaged in different tasks. The doubt is whether and how the same representation can deal with so many functions, enslaving different tasks, insofar as every representation should have a singular
content, a singular vehicle, and thus, a singular function (what the content is, in this case, what the function is about: goals,
action properties, etc.), being this aspect crucial in determining the accuracy conditions of the representation (this is widely
2
Here I do not talk about the direction of fit, the format and the link with imagery of MRs.
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agreed in the philosophical literature about perception and neuroscience, see Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; Nanay, 2010; Siegel,
2006, 2010a, 2010b); (3) there is no clear-cut distinction between the functions addressed in the literature, it being unclear
when one ends and the other begins. This issue is closely related to the following point: (4) while MRs are taken to be mainly
dorsal phenomena, it is not clear as to how those functions are precisely subserved by the dorsal stream: even confining
them to the activity of the dorsal stream, we do not know the precise dorsal neural correlates these functions arise from.
Another issue (5) is that MRs are mainly, but not totally, dorsal phenomena. Ventral processing is involved in MR activity,
in the light of evidence about the interplay between the two streams. If the precise dorsal contribution has failed to be
addressed, the precise nature of the ventral contribution – and the possibility of conscious accessibility – is even more
neglected. Finally, (6) there is no reference to any emotional component for MRs. However, neuroscientific results strongly
suggest the presence of a further affective-emotional component of MRs.
3. A new perspective on MRs
My proposal is that MRs are mainly dorsal phenomena, but depend on ventral processing as well. The advantage of this
proposal is that it allows me to develop a theory of MRs able to avoid the aforementioned issues (Section 2.4), by clarifying
what are the functions and what is the precise geography of the neural underpinnings of MRs. Indeed, contrarily to what is
generally proposed, I argue that a singular MR can be decomposed into different motor representational sub-components3
with different functions (this resolves issues 1 and 2 mentioned in Section 2.4). For each of these components, I address the
precise function and the precise neural underpinning in relation to both streams (this resolves issues 4 and 5), showing that
these components are deeply interconnected, but in principle discernible (and this resolves issue 3). I also add an emotional
component for MRs (resolving issue 6).
Summarizing, my aim is twofold: to defend a non-monolithic view of MRs and to suggest, on the basis of this view, the
precise relation they entertain with the two visual streams. Here’s the way I will develop my theory.
Since MRs are mainly dorsal phenomena, in the first part of the paper, I develop my decomposing strategy (Section 4),
focusing on the dorsal contribution to MRs and suggesting that MRs can be decomposed into an ensemble of different
sub-representations, each one subserving a singular function, necessary for MR processing: (Section 4.1) the visuomotor
component and the simulative one; the goal-related component (Section 4.2); the indexical component (Section 4.3).
However, MRs also depend on ventral perception. Thus, in the second part of the paper, I suggest the importance of ventral processing for the functions addressed above which mainly pertain to dorsal perception, showing that MRs depend on
the dorsal/ventral interplay (Section 5). Then, I propose an unexpected function (Section 5.6) and an emotional component,
for MRs (Section 6) completely neglected in the literature.
Constructing my account is important for two reasons. Too often, MRs are invoked in terms of the perception of action of
others, at the expense of the perception of action for the acting subject (Cook, Bird, Catmur, Press, & Heyes, 2014) – and there
is sometimes confusion about this distinction (see Section 4.2). Also, though evidence about visuomotor behavior is constantly accumulating, we still lack a philosophical theory able to support it. My theory reconciles philosophy with neuroscience. So, we can start with the decomposing strategy.
4. The decomposing strategy and the dorsal stream
This first part of the paper limits the discussion to the neurological geography of the dorsal stream (and its projections),
leaving aside the ventral contributions.
Saying that the functions of MRs primarily rely on dorsal activity is not trivial and, for this reason, may be too general a
claim. Indeed, the dorsal stream is an extremely complex pathway whose activity starts from the primary visual cortex, V1,
and, passing through the parietal lobe, projects to the premotor areas. Nevertheless, the complex connectivity of its cortical
sub-portions should not lead us to couple MRs with dorsal activity, without specifying the nature of this coupling. Indeed,
when we focus on a deeper level of grain, we find that different dorsal (sub)pathways subserve different representational
functions. The sum of these processes shapes, at the high level of grain, the (apparent) single phenomenon we call MR. If
we do not properly draw a distinction between those different processes, we risk using the word ‘‘MR” – with respect to
those functions – as a folk notion: it makes no sense to talk about a general MR we can point our finger at when we locate
it on the dorsal stream, just as we cannot generally point our finger at our belly and say: ‘‘well, this is where you find digestion”. In other words, an MR is the ensemble of different processes whose complex organization gives us the impression of a
single phenomenon; but this is only an impression. Ignoring this leads us to fall into the problems mentioned in (Section 2.4).
I would like to make transparent my argument here and point out that the separability of the functions of the subrepresentations composing an MR are individuated through the separability of the anatomo-functional portions of our visuomotor system. That is, my argument is based on separability of functions in neural areas (see also Grafton & Hamilton, 2007;
Thill, Caligiore, Borghi, Ziemke, & Baldassarre, 2013; cfr. with footnote 3).
3
Important specification: for Pacherie different action representations deal with different stages of action specification (2002: 67, 2008: 195), concerning a
vertical differentiation about intentions. Differently, I argue that the same floor of action, that is MRs, can be decomposed into different sub-representations: I
am drawing a horizontal, not vertical decomposition. This pertains to the lowest level of motor intentions and the linked level of MRs.
G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
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Note that the dorsal stream, which is involved in several important visuomotor tasks, is divided, at least, into two (but see
Section 5.5): the dorso-dorsal stream (D-D), also known as the dorso-medial circuit, which projects to the dorsal premotor
cortex and which, following the division of the intraparietal sulcus that subdivides the posterior parietal lobe, is related to
the superior parietal lobule (SPL); the ventro-dorsal stream (V-D), also known as the dorso-lateral circuit, which projects to
the ventral premotor cortex and is related to the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) (Gallese, 2007; Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003;
Turella & Lignau, 2014). Though both chunks of the dorsal stream are crucial for motor interaction (especially grasping),
V-D and the ensemble of its parietal-premotor networks (AIP-F5 and VIP-F4), is the crucial pathway, both in humans and
non-human primates, concerning the representational components of MRs listed above in (Section 2) – with respect to DD, mostly involved in proprioceptive input, but with an important visual contribution (Gallese, 2007).
I will now propose a neurological guided tour of the V-D pausing in each cortical site dealing with an MR component.
Following what I said in (Section 2), I individuate here three main components for MRs:
(a) The Visuomotor Component and the Simulative one.
(b) The one linked with Goals/Outcomes.
(c) The Egocentric Component.
For the sake of coherence toward neuroscience, I should specify that, of course, while my analysis is more accurate than
those usually found in the philosophical literature, it is not so technical as those in the neurophysiological literature. But this
is not a neuroscientific review of the neural underpinnings of action-guiding vision (Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016). It is a
philosophical analysis that considers the necessary empirical background in order to avoid a too simplistic monolithic view
of MRs.
Now we can start with the decomposition, which starts from the visuomotor component, accompanied by the simulative
one.
4.1. The visuomotor component and the simulative one
Objects exhibit geometrical properties (e.g., size, shape, texture) that are, from a motor point of view, action/motor properties,4 to the extent that they permit a precise action possibility satisfiable with a precise motor act. For example the geometrical features of a mug are action properties permitting an action possibility (grasping), which can be satisfied by a proper motor
act: a power grip. This important function of MRs is due to their visuomotor component. This visuomotor transformation relies
on a well defined parietal-premotor network lying in between the posterior parietal cortex and the ventral premotor cortex, that
is, a precise portion of the V-D, whose main components for these tasks are the anterior intraparietal (AIP) area (related to the
anterior intraparietal sulcus) and area F5, in the most rostral part of the ventral premotor cortex (for a review of the leading role
of AIP-F5 in the detection of action possibilities and the related visuomotor transformation of object properties into action properties and then of action properties into motor acts see Baumann, Fluet, & Scherberger, 2009; Borghi & Riggio, 2015; Castiello,
2005; Castiello & Begliomini, 2008; Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016; Ferretti, 2016; Fluet, Baumann, & Scherberger, 2010; Grafton,
2010; Janssen & Scherberger, 2015; Kandel, Schwartz, Jessell, Siegelbaum, & Hudspeth, 2013: chap. 19; Murata et al., 1997;
Murata, Gallese, Luppino, Kaseda, & Sakata, 2000; Raos et al., 2006; Romero, Pani, & Janssen, 2014; Sakata, Taira, Murata, &
Mine, 1995; Shikata et al., 2003; Srivastava, Orban, De Mazière, & Janssen, 2009; Theys, Pani, van Loon, Goffin, & Janssen,
2012, 2013; Theys, Srivastava, van Loon, Goffin, & Janssen, 2012; Theys, Romero, van Loon, & Janssen, 2015 concerning lesion
studies see Andersen, Andersen, Hwang, & Hauschild, 2014; Graziano, 2009; Turella & Lignau, 2014) – see footnote 19.
AIP is one of the end-stage areas of the dorsal stream, and perhaps the fundamental area of the dorsal stream (see Culham,
Cavina-Pratesi, & Singhal, 2006). AIP neurons respond selectively to objects during both passive fixation and grasping,
extracting visual object information concerning action possibilities for grasping purposes (for a review see Raos et al.,
2006; Romero et al., 2014); then, they relay this information to F5 neurons, with which AIP is directly connected (Borra
et al., 2008), which then activate the primary motor cortex. In F5 we find visuomotor canonical neurons, which use the information received by AIP about action properties of the objects and compute the motor commands in order to interact with
them. Also canonical neurons respond during object fixation, regardless the actual execution of an action. In canonical neurons activity, there is a strict congruence between their high selectivity for a particular type of prehension (executed grip)
and the visual selectivity for objects that, although differing in shape, require prehension in order to be grasped (for a review
see Raos et al., 2006). Imagine you have to grasp first a little box that can be contained inside your hand, and then a little
4
There is a crucial point here. The concept of action/motor property/possibility recalls the famous notion of affordance, proposed by Gibson (1979), which
has captured the interest of both neuroscientists and philosophers in the last twenty years (Borghi & Riggio, 2015; Chemero, 2009; Ferretti, in press; Jacob &
Jeannerod, 2003; Nanay, 2013b; Thill et al., 2013). Affordances involve both perception and action, insofar as they consist in the visual perception of the
invitation to action that is offered to the active subject by the objects she/he deals with in the environment. However, the notion of affordance is strictly related
to the gibsonian idea of a direct visual perception of action possibilities, to the extent that we do not need to use any visual representation in order to detect
them (for a complete analysis see Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003). However, despite the original gibsonian anti-representational view of affordances (for an analysis
see Chemero, 2009; Nanay, 2013b), a lot of neuroscientists and philosophers agree that action possibilities are perceived through perceptual representations
(Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; Nanay, 2013b; for an argument built on empirical evidence see Ferretti, in press) and avoid the use of the term ‘‘affordance” with an
anti-representationalist stance. Here I follow this second view insofar as my account is framed in terms of MRs. Hence, I avoid the use of the term ‘‘affordance”
and refer to the more neutral expression ‘‘action property/possibility”.
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stone: although their shape is different, these objects show the same action property; therefore the motor acts satisfying this
action possibility (grasping the object with the whole hand) are the same. This is a first example of how features of objects
are read (during visuomotor transformation) as contents of a (sensori)motor nature. Representational presence concerning
the visuomotor component is also suggested by an automatic process of grip formation taking place during the transportation of the hand in which the fingers are preshaped long before the hand touches the object. At about 60% of its transportation the hand reaches its widest opening, or maximum grip aperture (henceforth: MGA) and the size of the finger-grip at MGA
(though much larger than the object to be grasped) is linearly correlated with the size of the object: as Jeannerod suggests,
this process is largely anticipatory and pertains to an automatic action representation, not to a mere on-line adaptation of
the motor commands to the object (Jeannerod, 2006: 5; for the shown automaticity of the process see Gentilucci et al., 1995;
for a review see Nowak & Hermsdörfer, 2009). These visuomotor phenomena are the crucial process of the visuomotor
component.5
A further specification is that these cortical circuits exhibit both the visuomotor transformation processes and a mechanism of visuomotor resonance during object fixation, regardless of the action execution: motor simulation. Simulation is an
automatic mechanism with a perceptual function to facilitate the motor preparation (Gallese, 2009).6 Motor activation
frames the represented action within the constraints of a real action7: represented actions correspond to covert actions as a
neurophysiological simulation of the mechanisms normally involved in the physical action generation (Jeannerod, 2006:
130–131).8 However, we have an issue here: for Jeannerod the representation of the action is basically the simulation of the
action, even though he admits that ‘‘the representations for executing and simulating do not completely overlap, allowing this
distinction even in the absence of sensory reafferences” (Jeannerod, 2006: 131).
In spite of this incomplete overlap I would like to suggest a distinction between motor simulation and visuomotor representation. Simulation concerns motor response during fixation with respect to the activity of both AIP and F5 visuomotor
canonical neurons. The visuomotor representational mechanism concerns the interplay of (the resonance of both) AIP and F5
(the former resonating in the encoding of layout properties of objects as action properties and the latter in encoding the
motor act with respect to these action properties) for the visuomotor transformation of object properties (both without
the necessity of action performance). Therefore, I maintain that motor simulation and MRs are deeply linked (Jeannerod,
2006, 130–131; see the concept of ‘‘S-state” introduced by Jeannerod, 2001 in order to denote ‘‘those mental states which
involve an action content and where brain activity can be shown to simulate that observed during the same, executed action”,
p. 103), but reformulate Jeannerod’s idea that the (overt) execution of an action is necessarily preceded by its (covert) simulation, while a (covert) simulation is not necessarily followed by an (overt) execution of that action. The simulation is possible only given the result of the visuomotor transformation.
All I said here recalls – and is deeply in line with – the idea of the common coding theory of perception and action planning, according to which perceptual contents and motor programs which instantiate action plans are coded in a common
representational process to the extent that seeing an object activates the action associated with that object. In this view, perceptual representations and motor representations are linked by shared representations in a common code for both perception and action, insofar as actions are coded in terms of the perceivable effects they can generate (Hommel, Müsseler,
Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001; Prinz, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1997; for a complete review see Prinz, Beisert, & Herwig, 2013; for
an analysis of the compatibility between these sets of evidence and the common coding theory see Borghi & Riggio,
2015: 7).
Summarizing, when I am looking at the cup of coffee on my desk, V-D responds to those 3D geometrical properties of
objects that serve such visuomotor tasks as grasping them. The AIP-F5 parietal-premotor network is crucial in translating
those geometrical features into action properties and then into motor acts. Thus we can grasp the cup. First of all, AIP detects
the geometrical features of the handle that exhibit precise motor characteristics. This means that shape, texture, size are
encoded. Thus, the geometrical features are read as action properties. This information is sent to F5, which, given the information received by the AIP, computes the most suitable motor act (with respect to my motor repertoire, say, a power grip) in
order to grasp the handle of the cup. At the same time, during this translation, the simulation of the appropriate motor
behavior is encoded: the visuomotor brain is both perceiving the action possibility and simulating its readiness for potential
related motor interaction, setting a motor act ‘‘in the quiver”.9
5
However, AIP needs the help of F5 for encoding action properties; thus, the encoding of motor acts and action properties cannot be properly divided
(Romero et al., 2014). This is a clear form of motor perception (Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, & Rizzolatti, 2000: 165, 176; Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003: 177) and is in line
with the evidence reported by other studies concerning the close computational relation between vision, action preparation and visuomotor processing
(Collins, Doré-Mazars, & Lappe, 2007; Gutteling et al., 2015; Gutteling, Park, Kenemans, & Neggers, 2013; Romero, Van Dromme, & Janssen, 2013; Theys et al.,
2015; van Elk, van Schie, Neggers, & Bekkering, 2010).
6
‘‘What is a ‘plan’ to act? It is a simulated potential action” (Gallese, 2007: 7; see also Gallese, 2000; Jeannerod, 2006; for a review see Borghi & Cimatti,
2010; Decety & Grezes, 2006). Motor simulation is a mental rehearsal of the motor acts able to satisfy an action possibility related to the object (Tipper, Paul, &
Hayes, 2006).
7
. . .though neural commands for muscular contractions are effectively present, but simultaneously blocked by inhibitory mechanisms (Jeannerod, 2006:
2.3.3).
8
Overt action execution is necessarily preceded by its covert representation and simulation, but covert representation and simulation are not necessarily
followed by overt execution. Thus, representation can be detached from execution, existing on its own (Jeannerod, 2006: 2; chap. 2, 6). Also, motor activation is
highly specific to the action that is represented (Id.), involving the main neural structures needed in action execution.
9
For the behavioral counterpart of these experiments see (Borghi & Riggio, 2015).
G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
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4.2. Goals/outcomes
Action performance presupposes a some sort of representation of the goal (for a review see Nanay, 2011, 2014, for critics
see Nanay, 2013b) and this is due to the second of MRs component that deals with goals/outcomes. Butterfill and Sinigaglia
(2014) have recently described the goal-related nature of MRs. As they suggest, ‘‘the representation of the goal is not a mere
representation of a sequence of joint displacements, insofar as it captures something shared by different patterns of joint
displacements/postures involving different effectors – e.g., hand, mouth, use of normal pliers (grasping requires closing
the hand), use of reverse pliers (grasping requires opening the hand) (p. 121) – and discerns between the same sequence
of joint displacements in different contexts, depending on distal outcomes, e.g., eating or throwing the object after having
grasped it”. Indeed, ‘‘the joint displacements which realise grasping in one context might in another context realise a different action, such as scratching” (p. 122). This is confirmed by evidence that ‘‘markers of motor processing, such as a pattern of
neuronal discharge or motor-evoked potentials, carry information about action outcomes” (p. 122) and not joint displacements. On this matter, the Authors report experiments with varying kinematic features while holding constant the outcome
achieved using different effectors (Cattaneo, Sandrini, & Schwarzbach, 2010; Rizzolatti et al., 1988; Rizzolatti, Fogassi, &
Gallese, 2001), studies where the same action outcome requires closing or opening the hand depending on the tool used
(Cattaneo, Caruana, Jezzini, & Rizzolatti, 2009; Rochat et al., 2010; Umiltà et al., 2008), experiments with varying action outcome while holding kinematic constant (Bonini et al., 2010; Cattaneo et al., 2007; Fogassi et al., 2005), and studies about the
same grasping movements performed in the presence/absence of a target object (Umiltà et al., 2001; Villiger,
Chandrasekharan, & Welsh, 2010) or in the presence of objects which could, or could not, be grasped with such movements
(Koch et al., 2010; see Butterfill & Sinigaglia, 2014: 121)10 – (for the empirical reference see Butterfill & Sinigaglia, 2014).
While the goal-related component might be exhausted by Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s account, there is a problem with the
evidence exposed above, which I need to address in order to build my theory.
First of all, note that area F5 (Section 4.1), contains (at least) two large groups of neurons: the first is that of (A) purely
motor neurons, whose activation is exclusively connected to actual movements. They constitute the overall majority of all F5
neurons, and belong to two kinds: (A1) neurons that fire whenever a movement is performed, and (A2) goal-related neurons,
which code only the achievement of a goal regardless of the effector (i.e., the particular limb employed) (Fadiga et al., 2000;
Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003). But we also have (B) visuomotor neurons, also distinguished into two groups: (B1) canonical neurons described in (Section 4.1); (B2) mirror neurons, which respond when the monkey – for the bridge between the experimental results on human and non-human primates see footnote 19 – observes an action performed by another individual, or
when it performs the same or a similar action (Cook et al., 2014).
The experiments reported by Butterfill and Sinigaglia – I reported above – pertain to different families of neurons. However, most of them are about mirror neurons (B2) (Cattaneo, 2010; Cattaneo et al., 2009; Fogassi et al., 2005; Koch et al.,
2010; Rizzolatti et al., 1988; Umiltà et al., 2001, 2008; Villiger et al., 2010). Since here I am interested in the individual
dimension of our motor behavior, I would like not to focus on the evidence about the representation of goals during observation (B2) – even if it is very useful, as shown by Butterfill and Sinigaglia – for the purpose of building my theory of MRs and
explaining the representations allowing us to act. However, if we endorse my suggestion, there are important experiments
quoted in their account, namely, that of Umiltà et al. (2008) – about grasping with normal and inverse pliers – which is the
same experiment as Cattaneo et al. (2009), but without the mirror counterpart – that of Bonini et al. (2010) – which, however, is about both action organization and understanding concerning the activity of the ventral premotor and inferior parietal cortices – and that of Cattaneo et al. (2007) – concerning how parietal and premotor neurons coding a specific motor act
(e.g., grasping) show a significant different activation when this act is part of actions linked to different goals (e.g., grasping
for eating vs. grasping for placing), see above (for the empirical reference see Butterfill & Sinigaglia, 2014).
So, I would like to point out here that into enquiring the goal-relatedness – of the dorsal underpinnings – of MRs, research
should focus on those last mentioned kinds of experiments on the individual side. For example among the neurons involved
in representing outcomes are those called goal-related neurons (A2), which don’t encode elementary movements as joint
displacements, but motor acts (coordinated movements with specific purposes) (Rizzolatti et al., 1988). They are interesting
because the same elementary movement activating a neuron during a specific motor act (e.g., grasping) doesn’t activate it
during a different motor act (e.g., scratching). There are thus different groups of neurons from F5: grasping neurons,
grasping-with-the-mouth neurons, hugging neurons, etc. This is possible because during our ontogenetic development,
the pruning of our neural networks under the pressure of experience selects in F5 the neural populations linked to the (representations of the) most effective motor acts. This learning mechanism is called ‘‘motor reinforcement”.
This is important because F5 is a vocabulary whose words are neural populations representing one kind of motor act as the
ensemble of different motor words (rather than a simple movement). The referent of these ‘‘words” can be of different generality: the goal, the execution, etc. (Gallese & Metzinger, 2003, 367; Rizzolatti et al., 1988). As Jeannerod puts it, in the ‘motor vocabulary’ actions are encoded element by element (2006: 12). Due to its somatotopic organization, this vocabulary
provides computational efficiency, insofar as the appearance of the graspable object in the visual space will immediately
10
They also suggest that MRs are useful in motor planning and monitoring. Since the literature contains a vast amount of evidence I can avoid this point
(Butterfill & Sinigaglia, 2014: 123, 124; Nanay, 2014: 4; Pacherie, 2002: 61, 2006:14, 2008: 189, 90, 2010: 10, 11; 2011: 14 and sec. 4; for a more general
discussion about action control see Shepherd, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Wong, 2009, 2010, 2015). I am primarily interested in the MR functions necessary to
transform the sensory input into motor output in order to explain the mental antecedents of actions.
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retrieve motor words with the description codifying the appropriate motor act (Gallese & Metzinger, 2003, 367–368),11
recorded in the motor vocabulary as an internal copy of an action (Fadiga et al., 2000). This is closely related with the activity
of the visuomotor component (Section 4.1). Of course, goal encoding is not exhausted by these phenomena, insofar as the motor
system plays a crucial role in the goal-component of MRs (Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003; Jeannerod, 2006). However, I am particularly interested in the dorsal contributions – which are at the heart of the debate – leaving aside its projections to the motor
system.
So, even if I completely endorse the philosophical analysis by Butterfill and Sinigaglia, they leave out something really
crucial for the goal-related component, namely, that we should report only the evidence concerning the individual aspect
of the goal-relatedness of these neural underpinnings, and not the mirror-social aspect.
An important related point: for Jeannerod actions are represented in terms of their goal, but the goal is only part of the
content of the action representation.12 By representing the goal, we can answer the question of ‘What the action is about’, but
not the question of ‘How to do it’, insofar as this question requires motor simulation to be answered (Jeannerod, 2006: 134). I
agree with Jeannerod that actions are represented in terms of their goal, which are only part of the content of the MR. However, I
think that goal representation is also concerned with the ‘‘how to do it” question. Computing a motor command depends on the
goal to reach and, vice versa, trying to achieve a goal depends on the possibility of performing a motor act among those skills one
has. The details of this interplay become clearer in (Sections 5.3 and 5.4).
Summing up, visuomotor transformation and motor simulation are necessarily accompanied by the goal we have in mind
(e.g., grasping the cup in order to lift it), on the basis of which we compute the motor act (e.g., a precision grip permitting me
to grasp the cup and lift it to bring it to my mouth). All I said is strengthened by evidence that during action planning the
action goal dominates over the hand grip (van Elk, Paulus, Pfeiffer, van Schie, & Bekkering, 2011) and specific motor programs are selected on the basis of the action outcome (Bonini et al., 2012; Borghi & Riggio, 2015: 7). However, we are usually
faced with more than one motor possibility, and we have to figure out, with respect to the goal, which is the most appropriate way to interact (to grasp the cup with a power or a precision grip to better transport it to the mouth); matters on this
point will become clearer in (Section 4.3). The next section is about the egocentric component.
An important specification here is that, in accordance with what I said in footnote 3, there are many different levels of
goals (a joint configuration can be the lowest level of a goal while a full action is also a goal) (see the analysis provided
by Gallese & Metzinger, 2003: 369; see also Bonini et al., 2012; Grafton & Hamilton, 2007; van Elk et al., 2011) which might
be all coded by specific cortical sites (e.g., F5, see below). The concept of action hierarchy allows to achieve different level
goals coherently. That is to say, from the lowest level MRs dictionary you can build all possible MRs, having increasingly
complex goals and characteristics.
4.3. The egocentric/peripersonal component
When we try to reach and grasp an object, we need to represent where the object is located with respect to us,13 since we
can actively interact only with those objects presented within our peripersonal-action space. Visuomotor representation and
motor simulation are deeply dependent on the peripersonal spatial location of the object (Borghi & Riggio, 2015; Costantini,
Ambrosini, Scorolli, & Borghi, 2011; Costantini, Ambrosini, Tieri, Sinigaglia, & Committeri, 2010; Holmes & Spence, 2004; ter
Horst, van Lier, & Steenbergen, 2011; Turella & Lignau, 2014).
This is due to corto-cortical functional interconnections of different areas within the circuits of grasping (Castiello, 2005;
Turella & Lignau, 2014): namely, the two main – but not the only, see footnote 19 – parietal-premotor circuits in the ventrodorsal stream: AIP-F5 and VIP-F4 (Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016; Gallese, 2007; Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003). The circuit crucially
involved in the mapping of our peripersonal space is composed of the ventral intraparietal area (VIP), located in the fundus of
the intraparietal sulcus, and area F4, which occupies the posterior sector of the ventral premotor cortex, next to F5, with
which it is adjacent (see Gallese, 2007; Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003). VIP neurons respond to both visual and tactile stimuli
and the visual receptive field is related to a three-dimensional spatial region around the tactile receptive field (often defined
as the peripersonal space) (see Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003: 151). As for VIP neurons, most of the receptive fields of the F4 neurons do not change position with respect to the observer in case of eye movement, insofar as they do not detect retinal positions, but positions of the observer in relation to its different body parts – there is no single reference point (see Rizzolatti &
Matelli, 2003: 152; see also Graziano, 2009 and Pesaran, 2006 for the relation of these egocentric representations with the
goal of action). F4 activity is due to simulated motor action directed toward a particular spatial location, linked to a very
specific motor space: ‘‘when a visual stimulus is presented, it directly evokes the simulation of the congruent motor schema
which, regardless of the execution, maps the stimulus position in motor terms” (Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003: 154; but see also
Gallese, 2007; for a philosophical analysis of space in relation to the TVSM see Briscoe, 2009; Grush, 2000).
Interestingly for this paper, the AIP-F5 and VIP-F4 circuits are extremely interconnected from an anatomo-functional
point of view: ‘‘parietofrontal connections create a link between the rostral intraparietal cortex (areas AIP and VIP) and
the ventral premotor cortex (areas F5 and F4)” (Luppino, Murata, Govoni, & Matelli, 1999). Indeed, the VIP-F4 circuit represents the peripersonal space related to the motor space for arm reaching in which motor interaction is encoded by AIP-F5
11
Different populations of goal-related neurons can be described as being different representations. I avoid this point here.
This is in line with my idea that different portions of the information encoded by MRs are subserved by different sub-representations.
13
For a philosophical defense see (Nanay, 2011); for criticism see (Nanay, 2013b: 41–42).
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(Borghi & Riggio, 2015: 9). For example, F5 canonical neurons respond only to those objects presented in the peripersonal
space (Bonini, Maranesi, Livi, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 2014). This is due to the connections between area F5 and area F4
(Borghi & Riggio, 2015: 7; Costantini, Ambrosini, Scorolli, & Borghi, 2011; Costantini, Committeri, & Sinigaglia, 2011, see also
2010; Bonini et al., 2014). This spatial constraint holds in general for the ventral premotor cortex as well (Bonini et al., 2014;
Maranesi, Bonini, & Fogassi, 2014; Turella & Lignau, 2014) – see footnote 19. All this means that the visuomotor transformation (performed by AIP-F5) is bound to the peripersonal/egocentric action space (performed by VIP-F4) – but see footnote 19.
The importance of peripersonal encoding of the target for detecting its action properties is widely agreed upon in the literature (Ambrosini & Costantini, 2013; De Stefani et al., 2014). More generally, action possibilities are detected, and the related
motor acts are encoded, only when objects fall into the action space (Borghi & Riggio, 2015: 7; Bosco, Breveglieri, Reser,
Galletti, & Fattori, 2014; Fattori, Gamberini, Kutz, & Galletti, 2001; Fattori, Kutz, Breveglieri, Marzocchi, & Galletti, 2005;
Hadjidimitrakis, Bertozzi, Breveglieri, Fattori, & Galletti, 2013; Hadjidimitrakis et al., 2011; for a philosophical analysis of
these sets of empirical evidence see Ferretti, 2016).
Returning to the example of the cup, I can perform an appropriate motor act upon its handle because I can represent it as
affording an action, due to the interplay of the visuomotor (and simulative) and goal related components. However, representing the cup as affording an action, means to represent the cup as reachable for me (that is, in my peripersonal space) (cfr.
with 2.1).
To conclude this first part of the paper, this decomposing strategy has suggested ensembles of different subrepresentations dealing with different functions subserved by different neural correlates of the V-D at the basis of MRs. This
is important, insofar as these functions are often mistakenly attributed to a single general MR, and too generally to dorsal
perception. This is a first way to avoid the confusions reported in (Section 2.4).
However, I take MRs to depend on ventral perception and on interstream interplay. The second part of the paper explores
this dependence with respect to the functions of MRs reported above and adds some features that can be explained only by
referring to ventral perception.
5. MRs between ventral and dorsal perception
My decomposing strategy defends a new non-monolithic view of MRs by addressing their different and specific representational functions in relation to dorsal perception. However, we know that any sophisticated visual behavior requires interstream collaboration (Bruno & Battaglini, 2008; Kitadono & Humphreys, 2009; Kravitz, Saleem, Baker, & Mishkin, 2011;
Kravitz, Saleem, Baker, Ungerleider, & Mishkin, 2013; McIntosh & Schenk, 2009; Schenk & McIntosh, 2010: Box 3, p. 42).
The literature about MRs neglects these results.14 By discussing them here, I defend the second important idea of this paper:
MRs also rely on ventral processing, which shapes important computational aspects of their components outlined in the decomposing strategy. I also report important insights on dorsal perception neglected even by those claiming that MRs are only dorsal
phenomena.
5.1. The dorsal/ventral interplay in action
Neurophysiology of vision suggests there is no clear-cut functional distinction between the streams at various points in
perceptual processing (Gallese, Craighero, Fadiga, & Fogassi, 1999; Schenk & McIntosh, 2010): they integrate in early visual
areas by feedbacks allowing each pathway to affect the other (Deco et al., 2004) and by sharing common early visual inputs,
insofar as both connect with the frontal eye field, ‘‘so that eye movements concerning one stream have a sort of influence on
the other” (Kravitz et al., 2013: 42, Box 3). This interplay is at the basis of vision for action (for a complete review of the
anatomo-functional aspects see Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016), suggesting that MRs cannot be genuinely dorsal phenomena.
Accordingly, dorsal vision is not involved, alone, in the detection of action possibilities, because motor responses to action
properties during off-line visual processing are possible by using visual memory even after 700 ms after the object has been
removed from view and this suggests that dorsal vision is supplemented by higher processing (see Derbyshire, Ellis, &
Tucker, 2006, especially the experiment number two). Accordingly, (at least some) detection of action possibilities is not only
dorsal, but results from an interstream interaction for off-line visual processing. Accordingly, we know that dorsal perception
encodes action possibilities (unconsciously), whereas ventral perception does this consciously (Young, 2006), following
object semantic categorization (Gallese, 2007: 3) – for an important analysis of how dorsal and ventral vision interact in
vision-for-action, especially in the case of delayed grasping with respect to action guided by memory-stored information
see (Singhal, Culham, Chinellato, & Goodale, 2007; Singhal, Monaco, Kaufman, & Culham, 2013; concerning interaction in
attention see Adamo & Ferber, 2009; cfr. with my Section 5.3).15 Also, it has been suggested that it is not a necessary condition
that our motor acts are monitored by dorsal processing. Indeed, ventral processing can, sometimes, be responsible for action.
This can happen before we are able to perform a specific kind of action automatically (I’ll come back to automaticity in Section 5.4) and, thus, at this first stage, action needs an aware supervision (Milner & Goodale, 2010: 83). Accordingly, there is
14
Nanay simply pointed out that MRs are not exclusively dorsal phenomena. Here I add a meticulous cortical geography of MR functions with respect to both
streams.
15
I cannot report the full details here.
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an open debate concerning the relation between ventral vision and dorsal vision with respect to motor planning and motor programming, in order to enquire the amount of ventral and dorsal processing in vision-for-action (for an analysis of the debate see
Dijkerman, McIntosh, Schindler, Nijboer, & Milner, 2009; Goodale & Milner, 2004a, 2004b; McIntosh & Schenk, 2009; Milner &
Goodale, 2008); interestingly, we know that impairment of action planning (computation of high-order motor aspects) does not
lead to the impairment of action programming (computation of movement parameters in relation to visual information),
because the former is computed by ventral processing (see the analysis of the case of visual agnosia offered by Dijkerman
et al., 2009, but cfr. with Milner & Goodale, 2008). Finally, another important evidence is the one about the fact that both visual
agnosia and optic ataxia only support dissociation between central visual processing and peripheral visual processing: ataxic
patients cannot reach and grasp in peripheral vision, but can in central vision (for different angles on this point see
Himmelbach, Karnath, Perenin, Franz, & Stockmeier, 2006; Jackson et al., 2009; Pisella et al., 2000; Rossetti, Pisella, &
Vighetto, 2003; Rossetti, Revol, McIntosh, et al., 2005). This suggests that the dissociation between visual recognition and
vision-for-action is not that sharp as originally proposed by the TVSM. This interstream interplay subserving MRs becomes
clearer when talking about the deception, of vision-for-action, to illusions.
5.2. Dorsal visual processing and the possibility of deception of vision for action
A big issue about the dorsal/ventral dichotomy concerning vision-for-action is whether or not illusions can deceive it.
While the original response with the 3-D version of the Ebbinghaus illusion was negative (Aglioti, DeSouza, & Goodale,
1995), results in a variety of different experimental settings showed that the Ebbinghaus/Titchener illusion similarly
deceives both vision and grasping because it seems that they are able to deceive a shared representation involved in the
detection of the size of the object that both processes access (Franz & Gegenfurtner, 2008) – of course, that means that
the representation is non-veridical, not really deceived; subjects or persons are who get deceived. Accordingly, we have a
huge meta-analysis showing that the Müller-Lyer illusion (Bruno, Bernardis, & Gentilucci, 2008; Bruno & Franz, 2009; but
see also Bruno, 2001) can deceive action, even if it has been suggested that all depends on the availability of visual feedback
(Franz, Hesse, & Kollath, 2009, see especially the experiment number three; cfr. with Bruno et al., 2008; Bruno & Franz, 2009).
Also, evidence that visuomotor reaction time is sensitive to both the Ponzo and Ebbinghaus–Titchener illusion suggested that
vision-for-action can be subserved by ventral perception (Sperandio, Savazzi, & Marzi, 2009, but cfr. with the analysis of
Franz et al., 2009 concerning the proposal about no shifts from dorsal to ventral processing during the Müller-Lyer illusion;
see also Bruno et al., 2008; Smeets, Brenner, de Grave, & Cuijpers, 2002; and see Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016: sec. 7.4.4 for
technical details concerning illusions, vision and action). While these results concern few illusions and few kinds of motor
acts, a more general analysis (Briscoe, 2009) revealed that visual perception seems to be fooled by illusions more than visionfor-action, only because dorsal processing is not attuned to contextual depth cues when action is automatic, but in the case
of non-automatic responses, visuomotor processing is misled due to dorsal/ventral interaction, in part given by the dorsal
access to the ventral memory-stored information (here I am reporting the interpretation offered by Briscoe, 2009: especially
pp. 437, 439, 441) – this is perfectly in line with what I said in (Section 5.1). An important point: as Briscoe correctly pointed
out, the real result by Aglioti et al. (1995) – which is the cornerstone of this debate – found that the Ebbinghaus illusion has a
slighter effect on perception than on action, showing only a greater sensitivity of ventral processing to illusions than dorsal
(see Briscoe, 2009: 436).
Summing up, of course there are illusions incapable of deceiving action, but only visual perception. However, at least in
the case of particular illusions, also vision-for-action can be deceived – something denied by Pacherie, Jacob and Jeannerod
(cfr. with Section 2.4), because dorsal processing has access to the information coming from the ventral stream (for an analysis see Briscoe, 2009: 437). Thus, MRs can be deceived as well – saccadic adaptation is a very good example of this (Collins
et al., 2007). Moreover, even those who deny conscious access to dorsal processing16 agree that conscious ventral vision
affects dorsal vision-for-action (for a critical review see Brogaard, 2011: 1094), insofar as illusions can affect the latter.17 However, besides a general interstream interplay, precise ventral/ventro-dorsal connections shape MRs; the next section focuses on
these.
5.3. The connection between V-D and ventral perception
Everyday objects offer us a variety of action possibilities and thus different motor acts to perform upon them. The selection of the appropriate motor act does not rely only on the layout object properties (cfr. with Section 4.2), but also on what
we intend to do with it, in relation to its functions. The interplay between the analysis of physical properties (pragmatic analysis) and object identity (semantic analysis) is due to connections lying between V-D and ventral perception and suggests
the importance of ventral perception for MR functions (see Borghi & Riggio, 2015). Indeed, we saw in (Section 4.1) that
AIP selects the geometrical properties to be translated into action properties and to be sent to F5 for the encoding of proper
motor acts. Importantly, the action properties linked to the semantic functions of the object – e.g., think about the different
16
Arguably, there is no crucial evidence to suggest that dorsal processing cannot be conscious (Nanay, 2015: 187), cfr. with (Sections 5.2 and 5.5).
I cannot survey here the complete literature concerning illusions and dissociation, for a more detailed account see (Briscoe, 2009; Bruno & Battaglini, 2008;
Bruno & Bernardis, 2002; Bruno & Franz, 2009; Bruno et al., 2008; Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016; Franz & Gegenfurtner, 2008; Franz et al., 2009; McIntosh &
Schenk, 2009; Nanay, 2014; Vishton et al., 2003: sec. 7.4.4).
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187
grips we can use in order to use a pen in different ways: writing or placing the pen somewhere else – are possible because
AIP is involved in object recognition (Fogassi & Luppino, 2005: 627; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2008; for a complete review,
which I cannot offer here, about the complete functional processing of the pathways linking the early visual areas to the
motor areas and about the relationships between the ventral stream and the ventro-dorsal stream see (Chinellato & del
Pobil, 2016: 69). After the semantic analysis, the information processing from AIP to F5 results in a competition of the neural
populations encoding different potential motor acts with respect to the action possibilities detected, in relation to the action
goal, and on the basis of this semantic analysis – (cfr. with the last part of Section 2.1) – (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2008: 36–38;
but see also Kandel et al., 2013: chap. 19; for the analysis of the competition see Baumann et al., 2009; Borghi and Riggio,
2015; Cisek, 2007; Cisek & Kalaska, 2010).18 We have related evidence of a semantic component for motor processing (Helbig,
Graf, & Kiefer, 2006; Iachini, Borghi, & Senese, 2008; Kalènine et al., 2013; Tucker & Ellis, 2004), and action preparation
(Lindemann, Stenneken, van Schie, & Bekkering, 2006) given by the influence of ventral perception on action (Schenk &
McIntosh, 2010), as well a dorsal involvement in semantic encoding (Pulvermüller, 2013: Box.1, Box.2) – interaction is also suggested by the fact that while the computation of the spatial location of the object does not need ventral information, dorsal
vision needs the selection of the object’s features on the basis of the semantic encoding performed by the ventral stream in
order to build a reliable motor act (Goodale & Milner, 2004a). Also, MRs manage situations in which structural information
and functional information may conflict (Jax & Buxbaum, 2010). This is in line with the evidence by McIntosh and Lashleya
(2008) discussed by Nanay (2013b: 66) that top down factors influence our MRs – e.g., the brand of a matchbox influences
our grip size when grasping it.
Summing up, the visuomotor component of MRs is always supplemented by semantic object recognition through ventral
processing: all I mean here is that the ventral contribution is mainly related to the selection of goals for MRs, through different types of visual properties not processed by the dorsal stream. I am not saying that there is a visuomotor component in
the ventral stream. Rather, direct connections between the two streams make the ventral stream access, indirectly, motor
and visuomotor properties of objects (cfr. with Sections 5.1 and 5.2). The most ventral chunk of the dorsal stream, V-D, with
its projections to the ventral stream, is the cutting edge of dorsal perception involved in MRs functions, bringing together all
the dorsal computational characteristics with an important ventral computational shade in relation to the goal-related component (Section 4.2) and the visuomotor one (Section 4.1). Thus, MRs rely on the ventral/dorsal interplay (cfr. with the
account by Pacherie, Jacob and Jeannerod Section 2.1). This also strengthens my remark about Jeannerod’s idea that the
encoding of goals and motor properties are interconnected (cfr. with Section 4.2) and underlines the importance of goal
encoding in order to compute action properties, both denied (Nanay, 2013b) and endorsed (Butterfill & Sinigaglia, 2014;
Nanay, 2011) in the literature (cfr. with Section 2). This specification is important because the dorsal stream contains another
important chunk: the D-D. Pointing out the characteristics of the two chunks is crucial to understand the contribution of the
different ventral and dorsal bifurcations, not of the visual brain in general, but of the dorsal stream in particular, to MRs.
5.4. The many facets of our visuomotor interactions
Here I want to specify that different specific MRs circuits, D-D and V-D,19 compute specific kinds of action possibilities. We
can distinguish between variable and stable mechanisms detecting action possibilities (see the proposal by Borghi & Riggio,
2015). Stable action possibilities derive from stable/invariant properties of objects due to the associations between the visual
aspects of a precise object and the motor response it produces that can be incorporated into an object memory-stored representation (e.g., we ‘‘know” that this object is graspable with a precision grip) (cfr. with Section 4.2) (Borghi & Riggio, 2015;
cfr. with a similar previous analysis by Glover, 2004 and Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003: 253).20 Differently, variable action possibilities are linked to the actions we are about to perform, but deal with rather temporary object characteristics which are not
memory-stored. V-D is responsible for the former, and by managing our knowledge of objects influences the way we represent
them. D-D is responsible for the latter, in the online interaction with objects (in new motor situations) during visually guided
action, and continuously adjusting the motor performance online (this evidence concerns the case of grasping, see Borghi &
Riggio, 2015: 4). This is really important for the issue concerning the online processing of MRs – cfr. with footnote 10. Accord18
It is unclear whether all action possibilities are automatically activated and then some of them decay, or if a single action possibility is directly encoded
among others. Borghi and Riggio (2015: 13, see also p. 8 for a discussion of the empirical results I cannot review here) go for the second hypothesis.
19
In line with (Sections 5.1 and 5.2) V-D, D-D and ventral pathways are strictly interconnected and finish in cortical frontal areas (Borghi & Riggio, 2015: 351).
The same dependence between spatial encoding and the visuomotor one in the V-D, holds for the D-D (Bosco et al., 2014; Fattori et al., 2001, 2005;
Hadjidimitrakis et al., 2011, 2013). However, data – that I cannot review here – suggest the leading role of (both AIP-F5 and VIP-F4 in the) V-D concerning the
visuomotor transformation (in the peripersonal space); for a critical review see (Castiello, 2005; Castiello & Begliomini, 2008; Janssen & Scherberger, 2015;
Kandel et al., 2013; Turella & Lignau, 2014: 871; for the role played by the posterior parietal cortex MRs see Buneo & Andersen, 2006). An important point is
that, while the evidence I report about the two visual streams is mostly grounded on humans, the evidence about the AIP-F5 circuit in particular and the ventral
premotor cortex in general, is mostly based on monkeys. Nonetheless, there are good examples of bridge cortical geographies between these two cortical
portions (see Borghi & Riggio, 2015: 3; Rizzolatti & Matelli, 2003; Shikata, 2003; for example, the human phAIP circuit seems to correspond to the AIP-F5 circuit
we find in monkeys, Orban & Caruana, 2014; see also Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016: 2.3.2, in particular, the 2.3.2.2, for a nice brief review of the relations between
the AIP in humans and the AIP in monkeys concerning the most important studies reported Begliomini, Wall, Smith, & Castiello, 2007; Castiello & Begliomini,
2008; Culham et al., 2003; Grefkes & Fink, 2005; Grefkes, Weiss, Zilles, & Fink, 2002; Tunik, Rice, Hamilton, & Grafton, 2007 and the 2.3.3 for an analysis of the
relations concerning the ventral premotor cortex in humans and monkeys, e.g., Castiello & Begliomini, 2008; Chao & Martin, 2000).
20
‘‘Stable” does not mean that action possibilities are not processed and responded to online, but that they might need a certain degree of adjustment of the
organism in relation to objects.
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G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
ingly, MRs’ detection of action possibilities is not so automatic, as agreed in the philosophical literature – indeed, the issue of
automaticity of MRs is hotly debated in the neuroscientific literature, in which it is suggested that the task and the context are
crucial in determining the ‘‘behavior” of the MR (see Borghi & Riggio, 2015: 8; Girardi, Lindemann, & Bekkering, 2010; van Elk
et al., 2014; cfr. with my footnote 18). Also, MRs handle contexts where multiple objects are present, hence where multiple
action possibilities are activated with respect to memory stored information (Derbyshire et al., 2006; Pezzulo, Barca,
Bocconi, & Borghi, 2010) and the different semantic, functional, spatial, geometrical, context and task relations existing between
objects, strongly affect motor responses (Borghi, Flumini, Natraj, & Wheaton, 2012; Borghi & Riggio, 2015; Cisek, 2007; Cisek &
Kalaska, 2010). In line with this and the notion of MGA expressed in (Section 4.1), and with the idea of a competition motor acts
with respect to action possibilities expressed in (Section 5.3), we know that, different neurons in the AIP, related to the encoding
of different grips, simultaneously respond after the presentation of objects, and the specific grip is selected with respect to contextual informations (Baumann et al., 2009).
This is how MRs manage different complex motor scenarios and deal with several motor possibilities with respect to a
single object, as well as different objects in different contexts – something addressed, but left unspecified by Pacherie.
5.5. Dorsal multimodal spatial processing, conscious vision-for-action and MRs
I need to point out here some important characteristics of MRs in relation to their dependence on the dorsal/ventral interaction: the possibility, for MRs, of being conscious, regardless of the fact that dorsal processing is taken to be consciously
accessible (something problematic in the literature – see the claims reported in Section 2.1); the multimodality of the dorsal
stream, which is an important characteristic, sometimes neglected in the literature even by those who argue that MRs are
genuinely and only dorsal phenomena.
First of all, I want to suggest that – and this is an important point for a theory of MRs (see the review of the positions I
offer in Section 2) – MRs can be consciously accessible. With this idea I just mean that there is the possibility for conscious
vision for action, or, in other words, that there is the possibility of having conscious representations for action, that is, conscious MRs. If we think that MRs are subserved only by dorsal processing, then, it is not easy to suggest that MRs are conscious. On the one hand, the old picture that dorsal processing is completely unconscious and subpersonal has been recently
questioned and several counter-arguments have been proposed against this view (Nanay, 2015: 187; Wallhagen, 2007; for
critics see Jacob & de Vignemont, 2010; there is also an open debate about the exclusive identification of the contents of
visual awareness with ventral perception (Clark, 2009; Schenk & McIntosh, 2010). Indeed, we effectively know that dorsal
lesions disrupt (in the case of neglect due to lesions of the dorsal stream) the conscious awareness of the quality of objects
in the peripersonal space (Gallese, 2007: sec. 4) – in particular, Gallese claims that the IPL, related to the V-D, plays this crucial role; that means that ventral perception is insufficient to obtain conscious (spatial) perception without dorsal processing
(2007). On the other hand, it has been suggested that this evidence only shows that the IPL plays a role in visuospatial awareness, but not that dorsal representations are conscious: even if dorsal processing is functionally necessary, nonetheless, it is
functionally insufficient, on its own, for normal visuospatial awareness. As Brogaard suggests, ‘‘one hypothesis is that the IPL
transmits information to the ventral stream, perhaps via feedback to striate cortex, and that this feedback of information is
required in order for ventral stream processing to give rise to conscious spatial representations. This hypothesis is consistent
with Bullier, Hupé, James, and Girard’s (2001) suggestion to the effect that feedback from the dorsal stream to striate cortex
can influence ventral stream processing. On this view, the two visual streams interact via extrastriate-striate or parietalstriate feedback” (2011: 1094). Accordingly, it has been claimed that dorsal vision is not sufficient for the visual awareness
of shape (Jacob & de Vignemont, 2010: 142).
Given this, however, we can maintain that, in some situations, MRs can be conscious, because, in the view I am defending
here, MRs are not exclusively dorsal phenomena, but are shaped by dorsal/ventral interactions, and we have sufficient evidence that the processing resulting from the ventral/dorsal interactions can, sometimes, give raise to high visual spatial processing for motor interaction (see Briscoe, 2009; cfr. with the case of illusions for action in Section 5.2) – and, accordingly,
that action guiding vision should not be equated with dorsal processing (for a review see Nanay, 2013b, 2014). This is in line
with the idea that, in case of high-level pragmatic visual processing, ‘‘the border between pure perception and pure action
becomes very thin indeed” (Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003: 255).
This is not to say that dorsal representations for action are consciously accessible, and, indeed, dorsal visuomotor representations for automatic motor interaction seem not to be accessible: this is suggested by lesion studies in which we can
isolate the contribution of each stream to a particular visual processing – see the case of the so called automatic pilot for
the visual guidance of the hand in optic ataxia (Himmelbach et al., 2006; Milner and Goodale, 2006: 8.3.2; Pisella et al.,
2000; Rossetti et al., 2003, 2005) and the case of visuomotor capacities in visual agnosia (Jacob & Jeannerod, 2003). Also,
as said in (Section 5.2), even those who deny that dorsal representations are unconscious do not deny the interstream interaction and that conscious vision can affect action (Brogaard, 2011).
Now, passing to the multimodality of the dorsal stream, many neurons in the rostral part of V-D are multimodal, sensitive
to ‘‘somatosensation, motor activity and visual stimuli in peripersonal space” (Kravitz et al., 2011: 223) – cfr. with (Section 4.3)21 and crossmodal influences on dorsal processing suggest that dorsal processing for action is effectively multi-
21
Cfr. with footnote 19.
G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
189
modal (Gentilucci et al., 1995) insofar as several posterior parietal spatial representations exhibit a multimodal nature (Holmes
& Spence, 2004) – all this is in line with the idea that dorsal stream processing is definitely multimodal, as AIP is (Chinellato &
del Pobil, 2016); also, often multimodality and action semantics (cfr. with Section 5.3) March in step (van Elk et al., 2014). This is
possible because the IPL receives inputs from both streams and is important in shaping – at least, concerning the right hemisphere – spatial representations at different levels of grain (see Milner and Goodale, 2006: especially section 8.2.3; but see also
Gallese, 2007). This is because V-D (the IPL in particular) integrates several non-visual stimuli (e.g., tactile, kinesthetic, proprioceptive) (Fogassi & Luppino, 2005; Gallese, 2007: 7; Jeannerod, 2006: 1.2.3, especially p. 15; see also Kravitz et al., 2011: 223,
Box 1) and the IPL transmits information to ventral perception required to construct conscious spatial representations (see the
analysis offered few lines above of Bullier et al., 2001 reported by Brogaard, 2011: 1094). Finally, the IPL plays an important role
in attending action goals (for this role of the IPL, as well as its importance in the geography of the two visual streams see SinghCurry & Husain, 2009, but see also Jeannerod & Jacob, 2005; cfr. with Milner and Goodale, 2006: 8.2.3). Furthermore, posterior
parietal and dorsal processing play a crucial role in the visuomotor control of eye and hand motor responses with respect to
depth (Fearraina, Battaglia-Mayer, Genovesio, Archambault, & Caminiti, 2009) and different families of AIP neurons encode
the 3-D structure of shapes linked to binocular disparity and stereopsis (Romero et al., 2014; Srivastava et al., 2009; see
Chinellato & del Pobil, 2016: sec. 5).22 This suggests that dorsal-parietal projections process a lot of cues that seemed to pertain
exclusively to ventral perception. This is an important implication for the relation between ‘‘higher” vision and dorsal vision.
Also, in addition to what I said and against the view – which I criticized in the decomposing strategy – that MRs can be equated
with dorsal perception without any specifications, it should be noted that, the dorsal stream can be divided not only into two
sub-pathways, but, actually, into three sub-pathways – the divisions are compatible – all of them involved in conscious and
non-conscious visuospatial representations and spatial working memory (Kravitz et al., 2011: especially pp. 220–222).
All I am saying here is important for the peripersonal component of MRs (Section 4.3), as well as its conscious counterpart, in the light of the open debate about the exclusive identification of the contents of visual awareness with ventral perception (Clark, 2009; Schenk & McIntosh, 2010).
5.6. MRs: an unexpected functioning
Here I have a further important new point concerning MR processing. While dorsal perception distinguishes between
images of graspable and non-graspable objects (Chao & Martin, 2000; Rice, Valyear, Goodale, Milner, & Culham, 2007), it cannot discriminate between normal and depicted objects, because this capacity is subserved by ventral perception: dorsal perception does not construct a complete 3D structural description of the target object. However, this description is necessary
for response selection, in order to detect the action afforded by an object, or in the case of pictures, to understand that there is
no possible interaction.23 It is ventral perception that plays the key role in response selection, based on a comprehensive analysis of object volumetric structure, distinguishing between 3D objects and 2D images of objects by detecting conflicts between
various visual cues24 and selecting different visuomotor strategies for a 2D image versus a 3D object. Instead, dorsal perception
plans the precise metrics of the intended action, based on a pragmatic analysis of the object’s spatial features (see Westwood
et al., 2002). For this reason, dorsal perception responds to depicted objects without the need of any volumetric representation,
which is not possible in picture seeing.25 Indeed, we have evidence that the visuomotor component (Section 4.1) is activated for
depicted objects presented in the peripersonal space of the observer (Chao & Martin, 2000; Costantini, Ambrosini, Tieri,
Sinigaglia, & Committeri, 2010; Romero et al., 2014; Zipoli Caiani, 2013). This might be due to the fact that, in most cases, in
the experimental settings the vehicle/surface of the depicted object (a monitor, a screen, a picture) actually falls within the
peripersonal space of the observer as well and, since dorsal perception cannot really distinguish between a depicted object
and a normal one once an object, whether depicted or real, is perceived – even if apparently – as located in the peripersonal
space of the observer, dorsal perception responds (for a complete review of this specific point see Ferretti, 2016).
It follows that, if MRs were not subserved by both streams, it would be hard for us to discriminate the nature of the
objects we try to act upon, it being difficult to activate response selection and discriminate between normal and depicted
objects. We are able to perform motor acts without clashing against a picture because MR is based on ventral/dorsal interactions. So this is another crucial argument for the dependence of MRs on the processing of both streams.
But there is a further crucial notion I want to point out. A common intuition is that, first ventral conscious perception
selects the target/goal of interest for action and establishes if it is actable upon – if it is a real 3-D object, then, it sends
the information to visuomotor dorsal perception which, only at this point, sets the parameters for interaction (see
Pacherie, 2008: 186–187; Young, 2006: 140). That is, it is widely believed that visual consciousness establishes whether
the computation of the coordinates for motor action can start due to the response selection establishing whether we are
dealing with a reliable motor scenario (a real object) or not (a picture). However, things are exactly the other way. Indeed,
22
Also, caudal intraparietal (CIP) neurons in the dorsal stream encode multiple depth cues (Tsutsui, Taira, & Sakata, 2005). For the crucial link concerning
action, depth cues, stereopsis and egocentric localization see (Vishwanath, 2014).
23
Volumetric object representation is necessary for the visual control of grip formation and response selection, to ensure that we do not attempt to reach for
objects that cannot be grasped (Westwood, Danckert, Servos, & Goodale, 2002).
24
It is ‘‘computationally efficient for one visual system to handle the tasks of response selection and object recognition, because both require complete,
detailed information about 3D object structure” (Westwood et al., 2002: 262).
25
For the difference between shape perception and volumetric object recognition see (Briscoe, 2008).
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G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
the visuomotor encoding is activated, despite the fact – and even before – that ventral conscious perception has computed
whether the object is ‘‘real” or not. Few indeterminate cues are in fact sufficient in order to trigger the visuomotor transformation: before ventral volumetric reconstruction a motor act computed on the basis of the 2-D geometrical properties of the
target is already stored in our motor quiver, regardless of the fact that actual overt interaction will follow. So, our visuomotor
system doesn’t need any trigger, nor any confirmation from our conscious visual system in order to start the visuomotor
translation. Rather, the translation is already ready to be used at the discretion of the ventral conscious response selection,
which arrives later (for a complete review see Ferretti, 2016) – I have to point out that the selection and release signals come
probably from the prefrontal cortex (and basal ganglia for selection, too), not directly from the ventral stream – indeed, the
prefrontal cortex has to manage and match information coming from both streams in order for us to build the appropriate
motor act (Lebedev & Wise, 2002; Sereno, Trinath, Augath, & Logothetis, 2002).
Of course, while visuomotor transformation and motor simulation are automatically activated when the objects’ geometrical properties perceived (e.g., shape) are salient from a motor point of view and recall specific motor interaction (even if the
object is depicted, see Ferretti, 2016), when the object does not present such particular properties, or when the person does
not discriminate relevant action properties, visuomotor transformation and motor simulation are not activated (Tipper et al.,
2006).
This well explains the character of mental antecedents of action (Jeannerod, 2006; Nanay, 2013b) that MRs seem to have.
The next section addresses an emotional component for MRs.
Summing up, this second part of the paper has clearly shown that MRs are subserved also by ventral vision (Section 5.3) –
and are, in general, dependent on interstream interplay (Section 5.1), even though dorsal processing itself is more complex
than widely believed in the philosophical debate. With my addition, we gain a lot of explanations concerning the functions
reported in the decomposing strategy and we can add features to these functions that are usually neglected in the literature:
MRs are not always automatic, but they can alternate between automatic and online processing and conscious or unconscious processing (Sections 5.3–5.5); they can rely on semantic computations (Section 5.3), due to their specific context
dependency (Section 5.4). They can also be deceived, in some cases, by some kinds of illusion (Section 5.2), and can make
use of both visual and motor memory (Section 5.1). I also suggested an unexpected functioning for MRs (Section 5.6). But
I want to suggest something very new concerning MRs.
6. Extending the neural correlates of MRs even further: the OFC cortex
We saw that MRs extend beyond the two streams. Indeed, evidence shows that each stream projects to the orbito-frontal
cortex (OFC), an area involved in emotional-affective encoding. This suggests an emotional component for MRs, crucially
neglected in the literature.26 Here I use the term affective and emotional representation interchangeably (in order to suggest
my neutrality with philosophy and neuroscience, which often use these two different terms while referring to the same mental
phenomenon), in order to denote these representations involved in the detection of the relevant properties, from an emotional
point of view (e.g., the property of being dangerous, which might trigger a mental state which is linked to fear), of the objects we
face with and that have an important role in inhibiting or eliciting our motor responses.
During visual recognition, affective responses in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) – the orbital sector of the prefrontal cortex
(Barrett & Bar, 2009, but see also O’Reilly, 2010 and Elliott, Dolan, & Frith, 2000) – assist the visual perception of an object by
integrating sensory information in order to build an affective representation of the object (Barrett & Bar, 2009). The two main
OFC circuits connect with both visual streams. The medial OFC projects to the dorsal stream and is involved in the representation of the affective information related to the object that then activates the internal bodily changes suitable for action
performance in that specific context. Accordingly, due to connections with the lateral parietal cortex, the OFC’s encoding
of these bodily changes is sent back to the dorsal stream, so that the information about the emotional relevant properties
of the object can be used to guide reliable motor interaction (Barrett & Bar, 2009: 1329). The lateral OFC projects to the ventral stream – entertains connections with the inferior temporal areas (TEO, TE and temporal pole) of the ventral stream
(Barrett and Bar, 2009: 1330)27 – and is involved in the representation of affective information related to the object, which
is useful, during object recognition, in order to detect the emotional value, in a given context, of the object represented. Interestingly, the medial OFC encoding starts before the lateral OFC (for technical details, see Barrett and Bar, 2009: 1330). This
strengthens the presence of a privileged way from V1, through the dorsal stream, to the OFC and back to the dorsal stream.
Therefore, since MRs are mainly dorsal phenomena, they are deeply linked to emotional encoding.
However, since both streams are connected to those emotional areas, the failure to address a further emotional component for MRs is due both to those who argue that MRs are dorsal phenomena and to those who argue that they are also the
result of the interplay between the two streams as well. Thus, MRs emerge from a complex encoding, given by both streams
and their projections to the OFC. Crucially, not only can MRs be conscious or unconscious, but also their related emotional
encoding can, due to the link with the OFC; indeed, the OFC’s emotional encoding can be, with respect to the different proections to the visual streams, conscious or unconscious (Barrett & Bar, 2009: 1328–1329). This link between MRs and emotions
is confirmed by behavioral evidence that while graspable neutral objects that can be approached without any risk activate a
26
27
To my knowledge, the only one that sketches the possible link between MRs and emotions is Nanay (2013b: 155).
Remember that AIP is involved in a functional interplay with the inferotemporal areas (TEm, TE and TEO).
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facilitating motor response, dangerous objects that pose a potential risk evoke aversive action possibilities, generating an
interference-effect: information about an object’s potential risks conflicts with the motor actions that are activated while
observing that object (Anelli, Borghi, & Nicoletti, 2012). I cannot go into great detail here. Furthermore, this point is very
important, insofar as affective perception might play a crucial role in shaping the process of competition of action possibilities I reported in (Section 5.3) – however, a fully fledged argument about this point will have to wait for another occasion.
7. Conclusion
In (Section 2.4) I addressed several philosophical issues remained unspecified for a theory of MRs: (1) the same MR has
not the same function; (2) more than just one function is addressed for a single MR, which can be engaged in different tasks;
(3) there is no clear-cut distinction between the functions addressed in the literature, it being unclear when one ends and the
other begins; (4) while MRs are taken to be mainly dorsal phenomena, it is not clear as to how those functions are precisely
subserved by the dorsal stream; (5) while MRs are mainly, but not totally, dorsal phenomena, the precise nature of the ventral contribution – and the possibility of conscious accessibility – is even more neglected; (6) there is no reference to any
emotional component for MRs.
My theory is able to address and sort out all these issues following the experimental results. Through the decomposing
strategy (Sections 4,4.1,4.2,4.3), in the first part of the paper, I suggested the basic components of an MR and how they are
related in the same MR, with the necessary philosophical clarifications concerning the notion of MR and its nature (addressing issues 1, 2 and 3); I also addressed the experimental results in order to effectively suggest the main dorsal nature of MRs
(concerning issue 4); then, in the second part of the paper (Sections 5,5.1,5.2,5.3,5.4,5.5,5.6), I addressed the contribution of
the ventral processing to the dorsal processing, in shaping our MRs (concerning issue 5). Finally, in (Section 6), I suggested an
emotional component for MRs (concerning issue 6).
Summing up, I have reported sufficient evidence to defend the main twofold claim of the paper: that MRs are not monolithic representational processes, but an ensemble of sub-representations with different functions and that those functions
primarily rely on the dorsal stream but are also deeply dependent on interstream interaction, the ventral processing being
crucial for the dorsal components of MRs. This specification is very important, insofar as, while in the neuroscientific literature it is widely agreed that, at a certain level of fine-graining, very few representational processes can be monolithic, the
philosophical literature always talk about MRs without meticulously specifying their components and their complex
anatomo-functional nature (see Section 2.4). So, my theory aims to bridge the gap between philosophy and neuroscience
concerning the notion of MRs and to establish their functions with respect to their neural underpinnings. I do that, by reconciling our best philosophical theory about MRs with the most important sets of empirical evidence we get from vision and
motor neuroscience, especially these about motor perception and the TVSM, which are hotly debated in both philosophy and
neuroscience. If we endorse my decomposing strategy, we are able to avoid the problems reported in (Section 2.4) and to add
important features for MRs, which are usually neglected in the philosophical literature. This is also useful in order to build an
account of MRs which can collect all the crucial empirical results coming from neuroscience, which, otherwise, risk being left
out of our philosophical theory of MRs, remaining just a bunch of detached sets of evidence, with no background philosophical theory.
Funding
This work was supported by the FWO Odysseus grant G.0020.12N and the FWO Research grant G0C7416N.
Acknowledgment
Very special thanks go to Bence Nanay, Eris Chinellato, Anna Maria Borghi, Joshua Shepherd, Pierre Jacob, Corrado Sinigaglia and Riccardo Cuppini.
Appendix A
A.1. Acronyms used in the paper
MRs
AIP
VIP
V-D
D-D
Motor Representations
Anterior Intraparietal Area
Ventral Intraparietal Area
Ventro-Dorsal Stream, also known as the dorso-lateral pathway
Dorso-Dorsal Stream, also known as the dorso-medial pathway
(continued on next page)
192
IPL
SPL
OFC
G. Ferretti / Consciousness and Cognition 43 (2016) 177–196
Inferior Parietal Lobule
Superior Parietal Lobule
Orbitofrontal Cortex
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Consciousness
and
Cognition
Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Introduction
Subjective experience is probably not limited to humans:
The evidence from neurobiology and behavior q
Bernard J. Baars *
The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, CA, USA
Received 16 November 2004
Available online 28 January 2005
Abstract
In humans, conscious perception and cognition depends upon the thalamocortical (T-C) complex, which
supports perception, explicit cognition, memory, language, planning, and strategic control. When parts of
the T-C system are damaged or stimulated, corresponding effects are found on conscious contents and state,
as assessed by reliable reports. In contrast, large regions like cerebellum and basal ganglia can be damaged
without affecting conscious cognition directly. Functional brain recordings also show robust activity differences in cortex between experimentally matched conscious and unconscious events. This basic anatomy and
physiology is highly conserved in mammals and perhaps ancestral reptiles. While language is absent in
other species, homologies in perception, memory, and motor cortex suggest that consciousness of one kind
or another may be biologically fundamental and phylogenetically ancient. In humans we infer subjective
experiences from behavioral and brain evidence. This evidence is quite similar in other mammals and perhaps some non-mammalian species. On the weight of the biological evidence, therefore, subjectivity may be
conserved in species with human-like brains and behavior.
Ó 2004 Published by Elsevier Inc.
q
I am most grateful to Dr. Gerald M. Edelman and his colleagues at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego for
numerous discussions that have helped to strengthen this special issue of Consciousness and Cognition.
*
Fax: +1 858 626 2099.
E-mail address: bbaars@comcast.net.
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Published by Elsevier Inc.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2004.11.002
8
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
1. Introduction
Some years ago a popular book suggested that conscious cognition emerged 2500 years ago,
between the writing of the Illiad and the Odyssey (Jaynes, 1976). JaynesÕ criterion of consciousness
was whether HomerÕs heroes talked to themselves—the warriors of the Illiad did not, while Odysseus did. But speech is not a necessary condition for consciousness. After all, aphasics with impaired inner and outer speech show no sign of losing consciousness. This Special Issue of
Consciousness and Cognition explores extensive evidence that consciousness is a major biological
adaptation going back many millions of years.
Subjective consciousness is of course inferred from observable evidence, much like working
memory or other scientific constructs like electrons (Banks, 1995). Thus consciousness is not a
metaphysical absolute, but a scientific construct like any other. In humans, the standard behavioral
index of conscious cognition is accurate or verifiable report. It has been used scientifically since the
beginning of psychophysics in the 1820s. Accurate report is highly reliable, but of course it is subject to limitations like any other empirical measure (Baars, 1988). However, behavioral measures of
conscious cognitions are reliable enough to be routinely used in optometry, audiology, and the design of video screens and audio equipment. Physicians routinely use such evidence to test patients
for impaired consciousness. Thousands of human experiments use verifiable report to study conscious perception, episodic memory, explicit cognition, focal attention, and the like (Baars, Banks,
& Newman, 2004). But behavioral evidence is less useful when we study the question of animal consciousness. Bees meet the ‘‘accurate report’’ criterion when they convey information about food
sources by doing a ‘‘waggle dance.’’ But human-like consciousness seems implausible in bees. Thus
when we look beyond the human species, brain evidence may be a more useful source of evidence.
Can we infer subjectivity in other mammals? It is an inferential leap for one person to believe in
the consciousness of another. Such inferences are made routinely when physicians test head-injured patients with impaired responsiveness. But if we make such inferences to other humans, then
why not to other creatures, if the objective basis is the same? It is sometimes argued that animal
subjectivity is not a testable claim, but we now have a number of studies that have tested such
inferences, for example, on the question of visual consciousness in monkeys (e.g., Cowey & Stoerig, 1995). When we include other kinds of sensory awareness (especially touch, hearing, and pain)
the circle of conscious animal species seems to grow larger. Non-mammals have been studied in
less detail, but the range of conscious species will likely expand as we learn more.
2. Articles in this issue of Consciousness and Cognition
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Donald R. Griffin (see the obituary by Speck, 2005).
Donald Griffin devoted his life to field studies of animals, and took intense criticisms from scientific colleagues when he began to address the question of animal consciousness—initially phrased
as ‘‘animal cognition.’’ He was a scientific pioneer of outstanding courage and integrity, and we
owe him a great debt of gratitude.
Jaak Panksepp is another modern pioneer, in his case in the study of the brain substrates of emotion in humans and other mammals. He has made many contributions to understanding the mammalian social attachment system associated with the region surrounding the cerebrospinal aqueduct,
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
9
called the peri-aqueductal grey (PAG). This brainstem region is of fundamental importance in
mother–infant attachment, and appears to be involved in such behavioral events as separation distress cries in mothers and infants. Brainstem regions are of course phylogenetically old, and Panksepp makes a case that conscious emotional feeling states have a long biological history. One of
PankseppÕs famous discoveries is the existence of high-frequency distress cries in newborn rat pups
separated from the mother; another is the reward value of tickling and social play in rats. Panksepp is
the author of the landmark volume Affective Neuroscience (1998), which lays out a coherent brainbased framework for emotion. For this special issue he has written two papers. His major empirical
case is made in ‘‘Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals and Humans’’; a second article in this issue is a commentary called ‘‘Toward a science of ultimate concern.’’ It pursues the
ethical implications of the evidence for consciousness and emotions in animals. How do we deal with
a world in which animals as well as humans experience pain and pleasure?
Bjorn Merker is a Swedish neurobiologist who also conducts field work with Gibbons in Indonesia and experimental studies of music. Merker has recently published a significant article on the
functional implications of neocortical layer structure (Merker, 2004). In this article he suggests
one of the few serious evolutionary hypotheses for the biological origins of consciousness. As
he points out, our conscious experience of the world is relatively stable compared to the sensory
input. We constantly change our visual gaze, head orientation, body motion and the like, without
noticing a change in the world. Self-other discrimination in motion perception has been thought
to be fundamental since Helmholtz pointed out that the eye can be moved by gentle external pressure, and the world will be seen to jump. Yet much larger endogenous eye movements do not result in consciously experienced changes in the world. Such self-other discrimination is needed even
for earth worms being investigated by a curious dog. The worm must distinguish between the friction of its own movements compared to being licked by a dog. One is a danger to survival; the
other is a sign needed to keep moving.
One implication of MerkerÕs point is to notice that consciousness may originate in the intersection between decision processes and sensory input. Humans make decisions based on conscious
alternatives, though shaped by unconscious biases. Numerous recent studies show that conscious,
but not unconscious sensory input activates executive regions of prefrontal and parietal cortex
(Frackowiak, 2004). In order to make decisions, one must have a reasonably stable representation
of the current state of the world. Perhaps one function of consciousness is to facilitate this interaction between world and self.
Banks (1995) has suggested that understanding the functional role of consciousness may also
give us a line of evidence on its emergence. FranklinÕs commentary proposes such a functional
generalization of MerkerÕs argument, suggesting that consciousness may be a distant pre-mammalian development (2005). Franklin also argues that an analogue of consciousness may be implemented in non-biological hardware.
Seth and Baars (2005) pursue the function of consciousness from the perspective of Neural Darwinism (ND), an influential theory of brain function developed by Gerald M. Edelman and colleagues (e.g., Edelman, 1993). While Edelman has repeatedly described ND as the brain basis for
consciousness, this article posits a set of specific objective criteria for consciousness and explores
the adequacy of ND for their understanding. It may therefore be one of the most detailed evaluations of EdelmanÕs hypothesis regarding consciousness, coming to the conclusion that ND fares
rather well by the criteria discussed.
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B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
Developing empirical hallmarks for poorly understood empirical questions is a standard goal of
science. In neuroscience the empirical criteria for neurotransmitters were a hot topic of debate
some decades ago, leading to the discovery of acetylcholine and a host of other chemicals that
met those standards. Perhaps the major reason for confusion about consciousness is the absence
of an agreed-upon set of empirical indices. Seth, Baars, and Edelman (2005) therefore propose a
set of 17 testable aspects of consciousness that command widespread agreement among scientists.
Others have been proposed by Edelman (2003) and Crick and Koch (2003).
Edelman, Baars, and Seth (2005) apply this approach to the question non-mammalian consciousness. For reasons discussed in this Introduction, the case for mammalian consciousness is
quite compelling, using objective indices available today. It is always possible, of course, that
there is some distinctive human brain feature that excludes consciousness in other species. However, we have two centuries of neuroanatomical evidence and 70 years of EEG studies of waking,
sleeping, and dreaming. In addition, we now have much greater insight into the phylogeny of nervous systems as well as its genetic basis. Brain homologies that were highly controversial a few
years ago are now widely accepted, because the genetic codes are known to be the same across
species. Non-mammals have less obvious homologies, but still share basic classes of neurons, neurotransmitters, and even types of connectivity that may potentially resemble the human neocortex. Although our ignorance about the brain basis of consciousness continues to be vast, it is not
infinite. What we know today suggests that consciousness is a basic biological adaptation, with an
evolutionary basis like any other.
Living organisms are characterized by functional redundancy, as pointed out by Edelman and
Gally (2001) and Price and Friston (2003). (The technical term is ‘‘degeneracy.’’) We have two
lungs, two cortical hemispheres, four heart chambers, and many regenerating regions of the liver.
That suggests that consciousness, like other major adaptations, may have multiple functions, and
that we should not become trapped into looking for only one. A closely related example is the case
of sleep, whose function is not at all agreed on at this time. Sleep probably has many functions,
including circadian timing of gene expression, possible stress reduction, and perhaps others, such
as detoxifying glutamate products that accumulate during the waking state. We argue below that
there is an indisputable association between waking consciousness and goal-directed survival and
reproductive behavior. Its biological primacy is therefore hard to dispute.
Valli et al. (2005) take the functional debate another step. REM dreaming1 is a state closely
related to waking consciousness. The EEG of REM dream states is hard to distinguish from waking, and people can even learn to signal on cue from REM dreams. While skeletal muscles are
typically paralyzed during REM, eye movements are not, and can be performed on contingent
voluntary control. Finally, REM dreams can be reported, as we know from virtually universal
human experience. They therefore meet the standard behavioral criterion of consciousness.
REM emerges with early mammals, and Valli et al. (2005) suggest that the function of dreams
is to simulate, and therefore prepare to deal with, threatening situations. These authors make creative use of dreams from traumatized children as an empirical basis for their hypothesis.
1
The term ‘‘REM dreams’’ is used here because the previously accepted association between physiological REM and
dream reports has come under considerable question in recent years. These comments refer to physiological REM that
is also reflected in classical dream reports.
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
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Finally, Greenspan and Baars explore some reasons why the question of consciousness in animals and people was expelled from science after 1900. The seminal role of Jacques Loeb, Ivan P.
Pavlov, and other physical reductionists is explored. It is interesting that the experimental evidence we use today to explore the brain basis of conscious experience was well known to William
James and Charles Sherrington. For example, binocular rivalry has been one of the major experimental techniques for exploring consciousness in recent years (see below). Much of the evidence
known before 1900 is not very different from todayÕs findings, yet we are currently seeing some
5000 articles per year citing the world ‘‘consciousness’’ in the biobehavioral literature, after a century of virtual taboo. The reason for the long taboo is therefore somewhat puzzling.
3. The rediscovery of consciousness
Charles Darwin wrote that ‘‘Consciousness appears to be the product of complexity of organization,’’ an hypothesis that continues to draw serious scientific attention today (e.g., Edelman &
Tononi, 2000; Tononi & Edelman, 1998). In the 19th century scientists like Darwin treated consciousness as an obvious scientific topic. Research on conscious sensory perception, conscious and
unconscious influences on memory, selective attention, and even hypnosis began in 1800s. The
1400 pages of William JamesÕ Principles of Psychology (1890/1983) provide a guide to the rich domain of empirical knowledge gathered during that period. It is filled with facts that have since
been rediscovered, and which are the subject of much current research (e.g., Baars, 1986, 1988;
Baars et al., 2004).
Yet in the years before 1900 the openminded scientific attitude toward human and animal consciousness began to change. Thomas Henry Huxley, known as ‘‘DarwinÕs Bulldog’’ for his public
defense of biological evolution, suggested that consciousness might be a useless by-product of normal brain functioning. He wrote that ‘‘Consciousness would appear to be related to the mechanism
of the body simply as a (side) product of its working, and to be completely without any power of
modifying that working, as the (sound of) a steam whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive is without influence upon its machinery.’’ (quoted in James, 1890/1983, p. 135). The empirical
phenomena of consciousness, which are plentiful and easy to obtain, became entangled in the snares
of the mind-body problem, a set of philosophical conundrums that are not subject to empirical test.
Further, consciousness came to be seen, in the words of the American behaviorist John B. Watson, as
‘‘nothing but the soul of theology.’’ It soon fell victim to a culture war between science and religion.
In biology C. Lloyd Morgan proposed the ‘‘Lloyd Morgan Canon,’’ claiming that anthropomorphic generalizations about animals are dubious in principle (Morgan, 1896). I.P. PavlovÕs work on
conditional associations in dogs was interpreted to mean that psychological concepts like volition
were meaningless, and that learning could be automatic, without conscious involvement. Both of
these interpretations are now known to be false (e.g., Baars, 1986, 1988). But PavlovÕs work was very
much in tune with the times, and H.G. Wells, for example, welcomed Pavlov as ‘‘a star which lights
the world, shining above a vista hitherto unexplored.’’ (quoted by Skinner, 1976). Behaviorism was
celebrated as soon as it was proclaimed, launching the influential careers of John B. Watson and B.F.
Skinner in the United States, and logical positivist philosophers in Britain and elsewhere.
The early 20th century saw a massive scientific purge of consciousness and related ideas—including purpose, mental imagery, emotional feelings, unconscious processes, attention, meaning,
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thinking, and inner speech. Consciousness came to have the status of a scientific taboo. A hundred
years of useful empirical discoveries were forgotten. Behaviorists popularized several standard
criticisms of 19th century consciousness science; but those criticisms have now themselves come
under serious question (e.g., Blumenthal, 1979; Hilgard, 1987). They now appear to be almost entirely erroneous.
Since the decline of behaviorism, hundreds of facts about consciousness described in JamesÕ
Principles have been rediscovered (Baars, 1986, 1988; Baars et al., 2004). Indeed, nineteenth century findings about topics like sensory psychophysics have continued to accumulate in the last
hundred years without serious controversy. No one can have a simple eye examination today
without benefiting from psychophysical methods first developed in the 1820s. Psychophysics
was considered to be the scientific study of conscious sensations, and indeed that is how we are
once again seeing it.
Yet we are still recovering from a century in which consciousness became a taboo. Obviously,
for those who doubt that humans are conscious, the question of other animals cannot be addressed with an open mind. The evidence is now extensive that behavioristic skeptics were wrong.
Today some 5000 articles per year cite the term ‘‘consciousness’’ in the scientific literature. The
importance of consciousness in humans, as assessed by objective evidence, is beyond empirical dispute. What about other animals?
4. Behavioral and brain evidence
It is essential to distinguish between ‘‘intelligence’’ (as problem solving) and ‘‘consciousness’’ (as wakeful alertness and conscious perception, including the perception of pain and
pleasure). We know of hundreds of differences between humans and other mammals in problem-solving tasks, ranging from word retrieval to migratory travel. Problem-solving tends to
be species-specific. Early in life humans all over the world are able to learn a very large
vocabulary, demonstrating a distinct species-specific capacity. Pigeons, on the other hand, excel in finding their way in air space, far beyond unaided human abilities. Throughout the
animal kingdom, different brains support high evolved species-specific abilities. Yet the fundamental brain mechanisms of conscious alertness and of conscious sensory perception are
not limited to a few animal species. They have extremely wide distribution among vertebrates
and perhaps more widely. Species differences such as the size of neocortex seem to be irrelevant to wakefulness and perceptual consciousness. To stay close to the established evidence,
this review is limited to waking alertness and perceptual consciousness in mammals, including
humans.
5. Behavioral indices of consciousness: Accurate report
In humans, the standard observational index of consciousness is ‘‘accurate or verifiable report’’
(e.g., Baars, 1988, 1998; Baars et al., 2004). In humans reports of conscious experiences do not
have to be verbal; pressing a button, or any other voluntary response, is routinely accepted as adequate in research. Reporting responses are equally useful in animals.
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
13
Humans are extraordinarily good in detecting conscious sensory events. Seeing a single star on
a dark night has been calculated to require no more than a single stream of photons activating a
single retinal receptor, that is, the lowest physical amount of light energy. Likewise, in a very quiet
place humans can hear a background hiss due to the random motion of air molecules in the outer
ear canal; that, too, is a stimulus at the lower physical limit of auditory stimulation. Seeing a star
and hearing noise are provably conscious events in humans, because they meet the standard operational definition of accurate report; thus these extraordinary sensory abilities are in some sense
capacities of consciousness. Animal sensory capacities are likewise remarkable, and can be reported by way of overt behavior just as clearly as humans can tell us about their conscious visual
or auditory experiences. In primates, birds, and marine mammals that can use artificial symbols
like sign language, gestures or computer keyboards, referential accuracy is well established.
6. The ‘‘commentary key’’ as evidence for mammalian consciousness
Skeptics sometimes question whether the ability of monkeys and cats to accurately report sensory events really involves conscious perception. That hypothesis can be tested in a number of
ways. Recent research in macaques and other species is especially remarkable, because it allows
us to ask if the animals studied respond to conscious events differently than they do to comparable
brain events that are unconscious. Weiskrantz (1991) and Cowey and Stoerig (1995) have developed a ‘‘commentary key’’ method for the macaque, allowing it to give a behavioral comment on
a previous response. This reflects the idea that human reports of conscious experiences are shared
comments about those experiences. When a child exclaims, ‘‘Mommy, airplane!’’ s/he is making a
public comment about a conscious visual event, telling an outside observer what was just experienced. The commentary key is especially useful in the study of cortical blindness, where humans
can make accurate discriminations while claiming that they do not actually see the discriminated
targets consciously. Cortical blindness is a condition in which the first cortical projection area
(V1) of the primary visual pathway is damaged. In the occluded part of the field humans report
a loss of conscious visual qualities like stimulus color, motion, and location. Yet there is excellent
evidence that such properties of the visual stimulus are still processed by the visual brain, as
shown by forced-choice responses. Thus blindsight patients can sometimes point to the location
of a visual object, and detect motion and color, while strongly denying that they have normal visual experiences of those features.
A remarkable study by Cowey and Stoerig (1995) made use of a commentary response to test
whether macaques with cortical blindness lose conscious visual qualia like color and motion,
which humans report losing with similar brain damage. The macaqueÕs visual brain resembles
the human one in a number of respects. Careful lesion studies show that the macaque behaves
much like a human blindsight subject when selected parts of area V1 are removed. But can we
be sure that the ‘‘blindsighted’’ macaque has also lost visual conscious qualities, the qualia discussed by philosophers, such as color, motion, and texture? Cowey and Stoerig make this case,
using a behavioral commentary key, which allows the monkeys to make a metacognitive comment
about their discriminative responses. Like a human blindsight subject, the blindsighted macaque
can choose accurately between colors, for example. The commentary key allows it to signal
whether its accurate behavior has a corresponding conscious qualitative experience—specifically,
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whether a stimulus in the occluded visual field can be distinguished from a blank display in the
intact field. In the event, macaques did not learn to discriminate between the two, just as if a human blindsight patient were saying, ‘‘I canÕt tell the difference between input in my blind field and
a completely blank input in my sighted field.’’ This is in effect a denial of visual qualities. Thus the
commentary key apparently provides an equivalent of the reportability criterion in humans.
7. Other behavioral evidence
A number of other behavioral sources of evidence suggest consciousness. For example, mere
distractibility in animals indicates a limited capacity for competing sensory streams, a well-established feature of conscious but not necessarily unconscious input processes (e.g., Baars, 1988,
1998; Baars et al., 2004). Simply presenting a distracting stimulus when an animals appears to
be orienting to an event of interest creates competition between the two sources of information.
Such competition is the standard method for assessing limited conscious capacity. When a giraffe
bends down to drink from a water hole, it cannot at the same time monitor what its offspring are
doing, whether a predator is in the neighborhood, or whether another giraffe is showing unexpected signs of social or sexual competition. Animals routinely ‘‘catch each other unawares’’ during such moments of distraction; many predation strategies are based on prey distractability.
Likewise, in humans, moving our eyes and ears to a source of stimulation leads to conscious experiences. Such receptor orienting can be observed in other mammals at every moment of the waking day. The same may be said for exploratory behavior, the willingness of animals to work for
novel or biologically significant information. Finally, animals show unmistakable behavioral signs
of sleep, drowsiness, and alertness that correspond to distinct conscious states in humans.
Scientists have been extremely cautious before attributing consciousness even to animals that
closely resemble humans in their abilities and brain functions. There is an effective consensus today that consciousness can be attributed in the case of visual perception in macaque monkeys,
using the very rigorous criteria illustrated above. The weight of evidence in these cases seems
so clear at this time that we may begin to relax our current high demands for proof to some degree. For example, it seems likely that perceptual consciousness may become routinely accepted,
even in mammals that do not communicate by way of referential symbols like sign language. In
the coming years, as the pattern of brain and behavioral evidence grows, we may begin to attribute consciousness on the basis of a mammalÕs ability to match and discriminate between classes
of stimuli, combined with evidence about the underlying brain events. It has been known for decades that a vast range of animals show this ability. It is effectively equivalent to saying, ‘‘I hear a
tone, and can match it with the same tone an octave above; but I can distinguish between that
tone and another one a half-tone up in the octave scale.’’ Such descriptive responses appear equivalent to reports of conscious events in humans.
8. Electrical activity
It has been known since the late 1920s that there is a major difference in scalp electrical activity
(EEG) between waking consciousness and deep, unconscious sleep, as reported by human
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
15
subjects. These EEG phenomena apply to humans and other mammals alike, so much so that
mammalian EEG studies are often applied to humans. In all mammalian species studied waking
shows fast, irregular, and low-voltage field activity throughout the thalamocortical core. In contrast, deep sleep reveals slow, regular, and high-voltage field activity. Thus the electrical activity of
the thalamocortical core in waking appears to support reports of conscious experiences in humans. But the underlying brain activity is so similar in humans, monkeys, and cats, that these species are routinely studied interchangeably to obtain a deeper understanding of states of
consciousness.
The specific neuronal activities underlying these global differences in EEG are now increasingly
understood. During unconscious sleep, slow-wave global EEG appears to reflect highly regular
and coordinated burst-pause firing patterns in many billions of individual neurons in thalamus
and cortex. In contrast, waking EEG reflects irregular firing in the same billions of single neurons,
as well as rapidly changing periods of gamma coherence between them. (Destexhe, Contreras, &
Steriade, 1999). The regular burst-pause pattern of neurons during slow-wave sleep is highly synchronized, with effective zero-lag correlations between individual neurons at a distance of a centimeter or more. Significantly, the same pattern of slow-wave, synchronized EEG appears in other
states of global unconsciousness such as general anesthesia, coma, and epileptic ‘‘states of absence’’ (Baars et al., 2004). In all these cases human beings do not report events that are conscious
during the waking state.
All mammalian species studied so far show the same massive contrast in the electrical brain
activity between waking and deep sleep. Thus we have some seventy years of cumulative evidence
related to brain activity during consciousness and its absence in humans and other mammals.
9. Neuroanatomy of consciousness
In years past it was commonly said that consciousness must be some vague and non-specific
aspect of the human brain. In fact, the waking state can be abolished by less than cubic centimeter
lesions in the brainstem reticular formation and even smaller bilateral cuts in the intralaminar
nuclei of the thalami (Bogen, 1995; Moruzzi & Magoun, 1949). In contrast, very large volumes
of cortex can be lost without impairing the state of consciousness. Entire hemispheres are routinely removed surgically without loss of consciousness.
While the sleep–waking cycle is controlled by basal brain ‘‘spritzers’’ that distribute neuromodulating transmitters throughout the forebrain, in humans and other mammals the contents of perceptual consciousness depend on cortex. There may be species differences in this respect, with
visual contents being in part dependent on the tectum in other mammals (the colliculi). But in
all mammals the state of consciousness seems to require only small anatomical areas, the brainstem reticular formation, intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus, and basal neuromodulatory nuclei.
10. The thalamocortical (T-C) complex
In humans the thalamus and cortex are crucial for supporting the contents of consciousness
(Edelman & Tononi, 2000). Thalamus is often considered to be an extension of cortex, an added
16
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
sandwich of interacting layers that controls most traffic to and from cortex. Local damage to cortical sensory regions, like the fusiform gyrus for face perception, results in a loss of conscious
knowledge about faces but not about other visual features like color, location, or size. If the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus are lesioned bilaterally, the conscious state is lost. By comparison,
large lesions to cerebellum, basal ganglia, and spinal cord do not impair either conscious contents
or state. Cerebellar damage can cause paralysis but not loss of consciousness. Lesion evidence on
these points is supported by stimulation experiments using electrodes, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and microdialysis. It is also reflected in functional brain imaging. The evidence is
therefore very strong that the T-C system supports consciousness. That is why many neuroscientists consider the T-C system to be the ‘‘seat’’ of conscious experience, and have done so for at
least a century.
What about the T-C system in other animals? All mammals have a highly developed T-C system, suggesting that they must be conscious. Mammals are 100–200 million years old. Although
we cannot directly observe ancestral forms of mammals, by studying skulls and gene conservation
across species, it certainly seems that the fundamental T-C system has not changed much in 100–
200 million years. Contrary to the Jaynes hypothesis, therefore, it seems that at least some types of
consciousness are not merely 2500 years old, but closer to 100 million years. Notice that brainstem
mechanisms like the reticular formation are also extremely ancient phylogenetically, going back at
least to early vertebrates. Thalamic structures like the intralaminar nuclei also exist in mammals
generally. Both these facts suggest that the brain anatomy of conscious wakefulness is very ancient
indeed.
11. Visual consciousness in human and mammalian cortex
In the last 20 years we have made considerable progress on understanding perceptual consciousness in humans and other mammals. We have already discussed studies of blindsight in
the macaque, suggesting that these primates have qualitative conscious visual experiences that closely resemble human visual experiences. Along the same lines, in a landmark series of multipleneuron recording studies, Logothetis and colleagues have used binocular rivalry at different levels
of visual analysis to track neurons responding to both conscious and unconscious input features
in the occipito-temporal lobes of the macaque (Logothetis & Schall, 1989; Sheinberg & Logothetis, 1997). Binocular rivalry involves presentation of two incompatible visual stimuli, one to each
eye. Only one stimulus becomes visually conscious in the sense of being reportable, but the unconscious stimulus still evokes appropriate feature cell activation in visual cortex, starting with the
first visual projection area and succeeding to more and more elaborate feature-detecting neurons.
Rivalrous pairs of visual stimuli can be designed to activate each level of visual feature analysis in
the ventral temporal cortex. By experimentally counterbalancing stimulus conditions between the
two eyes, one can rule out stimulus and eye effects, and focus only on those neural processes that
are due to consciousness of a stimulus in either eye. Binocular rivalry experiments can be designed, therefore, to tease out the effects of visual consciousness
For example, a downward flow of stairstep lines can be presented to the right eye, along with an
upward flow to the left eye. While only one eyeÕs input becomes conscious at any given moment,
some motion-sensitive neurons in area MT (V5) respond to a conscious stimulus, while others fire
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
17
to a competing unconscious stimulus. Likewise, right-diagonal lines can be presented to the right
eye, and left-diagonal lines to the left eye, thereby activating neurons in areas V1 and V2 that are
sensitive to edge orientation. Finally, different objects can be presented to each eye, creating competing streams of input into object-recognition neurons in the anterior pole of the lower temporal
cortex (area IT), and in the superior temporal sulcus (STS). Thus each level of visual feature analysis can be interrogated with a distinct set of binocular stimuli, one conscious and the other not.
Earlier work showed that binocular rivalry activates small numbers of cells in early visual cortex, where single visual features are represented, such as color, motion, line orientation, and spatial frequency. Some of these early cells respond to the ‘‘conscious eye’’ while others respond to
unconscious input in the ‘‘unconscious eye.’’ More than half of the cells at early levels of visual
analysis do not respond to either stream. However, Sheinberg and Logothetis (1997) demonstrated that this pattern changes dramatically toward the anterior end of the visual ventral stream,
where whole objects are represented in inferotemporal cortex (area IT). In this region 90% of neurons responded to conscious, but not to unconscious visual input.
Area IT therefore appears to be the best current candidate for a distinctive locus of visual consciousness in cortex, because it clearly distinguishes between the conscious and unconscious input
stream, and unlike earlier regions it massively favors the conscious stream. Since IT represents
whole visual objects, it involves the integration of many specific visual features into a single, integrated representation. Nevertheless, conscious vision still appears to be crucially dependent on
other parts of the brain, including earlier visual areas, other parts of cortex, and subcortical regions such as the thalamus.
The macaque is often chosen for these studies because its visual brain and abilities so closely
resemble the human case. Findings from macaque vision studies are routinely found to generalize
to humans. The opposite must be true as well: If humans are visually conscious, given the same
kind of brain, the same kinds of results from studies of single neurons, and the same overall psychophysical parameters of vision, it becomes plausible to say that macaques and their close relatives must be visually conscious much as humans are.2
12. Neurochemistry
In all mammals, waking, sleeping, and dreaming are controlled by brainstem nuclei that widely
project their axons to the forebrain, secreting neuromodulators widely to the forebrain. Hobson
(1997) writes that ‘‘in waking, the aminergic systems of the brain stem are spontaneously, continuously, and responsively active; in REM (rapid eye movement state), they are shut off by an active
inhibitory process that is probably gaba-ergic. As a function of this shut-down of aminergic systems in REM, the cholinergic systems of the brain stem become disinhibited and excite the brain
with strong tonic and phasic activation signals. The net result is that, in REM sleep, the brain is
aminergically demodulated and cholinergically hypermodulated.’’ (p. 392). Again, the fact that
2
The most obvious difference between humans and other mammals, of course, is the great expansion of frontal cortex.
While cetaceans have comparable brain size, their anterior cortices are homologous with parietal rather than prefrontal
regions. The closest cortical homologies among mammals therefore seem to apply to perceptual regions that are located
in the posterior half of cortex in humans.
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B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
neuromodulation of conscious and unconscious states is controlled by brainstem nuclei suggests
an ancient evolutionary origin. Current evidence suggests that all mammals without exception
have similar fundamental brainstem mechanisms.
High-dose general anesthesia often shows a slow-wave pattern of EEG similar to deep sleep,
though often mixed with other waveforms. While different anesthetic agents seem to have quite
different mechanisms of action, recent findings indicate that they may have similar global effects
in the thalamocortical core. Thus Alkire, Haier, and Fallon (2000) have found evidence for a thalamocortical switch in general anesthesia across different anesthetic agents.
13. Functional evidence: In mammals, all goal-directed survival and reproductive behavior takes
place during the conscious waking state
Mammalian locomotion, hunting, evasive action, exploring, sensing, actively attending, learning, eating, grazing, nursing, mating, social interaction, and all other goal-directed survival and
reproductive actions take place only during waking, as defined by EEG and other indices. Perceptual consciousness, as defined objectively by recent brain research, only takes place during waking
periods. It therefore appears that brain activity that supports consciousness is a precondition for
all goal-directed survival and reproductive behavior in humans and other mammals. The biologically fundamental nature of the conscious waking state is beyond serious question.
Another hint of the fundamental biological nature of waking consciousness is the recent finding
that wakefulness triggers the expression of early-immediate genes in rats (Cirelli, Pompeiano, &
Tononi, 1996). Early-immediate genes are highly conserved among species, and appear to be
needed for fundamental functions such as learning. This kind of basic biological evidence suggests
a long evolutionary development, leading to recognizably conscious and unconscious states in humans and other species (Baars, 1987, 1993).
Not so long ago it was common for some observers to claim that consciousness might be an
epiphenomenon, with no causal role at all (e.g., Block, 1995). On the weight of the evidence, however, it seems that waking consciousness involves a basic biological adaptation with many survival
functions.
14. Consciousness beyond mammals
What about non-mammals? The gross anatomy of bird brains they seems different from mammals. Like most non-mammals, birds have collections of nuclei rather than the beautiful fiber
radiations of the thalamus into cortex. But gross-level nuclei could still have neuronal connectivities that are similar to the T-C system. At the level of neurons there is interesting evidence suggesting homologies. Some birds certainly pass the behavioral test. Irene PepperbergÕs African
Grey Parrot Alex is able to use spoken words accurately, which is another way of satisfying
the accurate report criterion. Ravens spontaneously perform gaze-sharing (looking in the same
direction to see an ‘‘intersubjective’’ object). Other birds bury nuts for the winter, and can find
them very accurately when the visible scenery has changed very much. That is another measure
of accurate report.
B.J. Baars / Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005) 7–21
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So the evidence is very strong for mammals, and a little less so for birds. What about large-brained invertebrates, like squid or octopi? How about fast-moving reptiles like lizards, or at a larger
brain scale, Komoda Dragons? We need more evidence, but these questions are becoming ripe to
be studied.
15. Summary
Cumulative evidence suggests that consciousness is a fundamental biological adaptation. The
known brain correlates of consciousness appear to be ancient phylogenetically, going back at least
to early mammals. In all mammals alertness and sensory consciousness are required for the goaldirected behaviors that make species survival and reproduction possible. In all mammals the anatomy, neurochemistry and electrical activity of the brain in alert states show striking similarities.
After more than seven decades of discoveries about waking as well as sensory consciousness, we
have not yet found fundamental differences between humans and other mammals. Species differences such as the size of neocortex seem to be irrelevant to the existence of alertness and sensory
consciousness, though different mammals obviously specialize in different of kinds of sensory, cognitive and motor abilities.
Skeptics sometimes claim that objective evidence for consciousness tells us little about subjective experience, such as the experience of conscious pain. Scientifically, however, plausible inferences are routinely based on reliable and consistent patterns of evidence. In other humans we
invariably infer subjective experiences from objective behavioral and brain evidence—if someone
yells Ouch! after striking a finger with a hammer, we infer that they feel pain. The brain and
behavioral evidence for subjective consciousness is essentially identical in humans and other
mammals.
On the weight of the objective evidence, therefore, subjective experience would seem to be plausible in all species with human-like brains and behavior. Either we deny it to other humans, or, to
be consistent, we must also attribute it to other species that meet the same objective standards.
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Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1003–1012
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Unnoticed intrusions: Dissociations
of meta-consciousness in thought suppression
Benjamin Baird a,⇑, Jonathan Smallwood b, Daniel J.F. Fishman c, Michael D. Mrazek a,
Jonathan W. Schooler a
a
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660, United States
Department of Psychology, University of York, United Kingdom
c
Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
b
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 18 December 2012
Available online 2 August 2013
Keywords:
Thought suppression
Mind-wandering
Meta-awareness
Monitoring
Consciousness
Experience sampling
a b s t r a c t
The current research investigates the interaction between thought suppression and individuals’ explicit awareness of their thoughts. Participants in three experiments attempted
to suppress thoughts of a prior romantic relationship and their success at doing so was
measured using a combination of self-catching and experience-sampling. In addition to
thoughts that individuals spontaneously noticed, individuals were frequently caught
engaging in thoughts of their previous partner at experience-sampling probes. Furthermore, probe-caught thoughts were: (i) associated with stronger decoupling of attention
from the environment, (ii) more likely to occur under cognitive load, (iii) more frequent
for individuals with a desire to reconcile, and (iv) associated with individual differences
in the tendency to suppress thoughts. Together, these data suggest that individuals can lack
meta-awareness that they have begun to think about a topic they are attempting to suppress, providing novel insight into the cognitive processes that are involved in attempting
to control undesired mental states.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
From stressful upcoming events to past loves, there are often things that people would prefer to avoid thinking about.
Although it would certainly be nice if it were possible to be able to promptly forget anything one wished to not think about,
the conscious attempt to suppress or avoid certain thoughts is difficult and can even backfire, in some cases leading to suppression-induced obsession (see Wegner, 1992). This ‘‘ironic’’ return of unwanted thoughts was first shown experimentally
in a study in which individuals asked not to think about a white bear for a period of time later reported thoughts of a white
bear more frequently than those not given this instruction (Wegner et al., 1987). Other studies on suppression have found
similar results, showing that attempts to suppress a thought often lead to an increase in its occurrence, either immediately or
after the suppression has ended (for reviews see Wegner (1994) and Wenzlaff and Wegner (2000)).
Research on thought suppression has generally assumed that the difficulty people have in suppressing unwanted
thoughts results from some interplay between unconscious and conscious thought. In an influential theory, Wegner
(1992, 1994, 1997) has argued that the recurrence of unwanted thoughts is due to a two-stage process in which an automatic
monitor searches preconsciousness for thoughts that require suppression, followed by a cognitively-demanding (and conscious) process of actually suppressing the thought. As Wegner (1997) states, ‘‘because the monitor searches for potential
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: baird@psych.ucsb.edu (B. Baird).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.06.009
1004
B. Baird et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1003–1012
mental contents that signal failure of mental control, it increases the accessibility of these contents to consciousness’’
(p. 299). While considerable research supports this theory (e.g., Wegner, 1994; Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000), research in other
domains (in particular in the related area of mind-wandering), suggests that the challenges surrounding attempts at thought
control may in addition occur at the conscious level. Specifically, recent investigations of mind-wandering have documented
the value of a distinction between two different levels of conscious thought: experiential consciousness – thoughts that occur
without explicit self-reflection, and meta-awareness – thoughts that are accompanied by the explicit awareness of having the
thought (e.g., Schooler, 2002; Schooler, Mrazek, Baird, & Winkielman, in press; Schooler et al., 2011).
In order to assess mental lapses that occur with versus without meta-awareness, research on mind-wandering has employed two self-report measures: (i) self-catching, in which individuals are asked to press a response key every time they
notice that they have been engaging in unrelated thoughts and (ii) experience sampling, in which individuals are periodically
interrupted by a prompt which asks them about the content of their current conscious experience (e.g., Reichle, Reineberg, &
Schooler, 2010; Sayette, Reichle, & Schooler, 2009; Sayette, Schooler, & Reichle, 2010; Schooler, 2002; Schooler et al., 2011;
Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). For example, Schooler, Reichle, and Halpern (2005) asked participants to self-report whenever
their minds wandered while reading, and intermittently probed participants to report on whether they were mind-wandering at that moment. Despite the fact that readers were asked to self-report an episode of mind-wandering as soon as it occurred, they were nonetheless sometimes ‘‘caught’’ engaging in off-topic thoughts at the experience-sampling probes.
Furthermore, the frequency of probe-caught episodes of mind-wandering was associated with worse comprehension on a
post-reading test, but those episodes that were self-caught were not, suggesting that reading comprehension is particularly
disrupted by mind-wandering episodes that evade detection.
Building on the hypothesis that the capacity to notice off-task thoughts is crucial to the effective regulation of behavior,
subsequent research has shown that when participants describe their mind-wandering at probes as lacking explicit metaawareness, this is associated with greater propensity for error (Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2007, 2008), worse reading comprehension (Smallwood et al., 2008) and more careless responding in a go/no-go task (Smallwood, McSpadden, &
Schooler, 2007). Moreover, manipulating external focus through alcohol (Sayette et al., 2009) or craving (Sayette et al.,
2010) has been shown to increase reports of mind-wandering at probes while reducing the proportion of these lapses that
are explicitly noticed. Together these data highlight the importance of the distinction between the occurrence of specific
thoughts and the explicit recognition (i.e., meta-awareness) of what one is thinking about (for recent reviews see Schooler
et al., 2011, in press).
The distinction between thoughts that occur with versus without meta-awareness could provide novel insight into the
cognitive processes that are involved in attempting to suppress thoughts for several reasons. First, previous studies examining self-reports of failures of thought suppression have largely relied on a self-catching methodology. This leaves open the
possibility that individuals may experience conscious thoughts regarding the content they are trying to avoid but fail to selfcatch those experiences due to dissociations of meta-awareness (Schooler, 2002; Schooler et al., 2011, in press). Given prior
demonstrations of qualitative differences between thoughts that occur with versus without meta-awareness, the fact that
previous investigations have relied exclusively on self-catching raises the possibility that processes and characteristics previously ascribed to suppressed thoughts might only apply to those thoughts that reach meta-awareness. Second, recognition
that one’s mind has drifted back to the topic one wishes to avoid is potentially a necessary first step in the process by which
control can be initiated. Understanding failures of thought suppression can therefore be advanced by understanding the circumstances in which the monitoring of such thought is compromised. As research on mind-wandering has shown, effective
metacognitive monitoring of thought may be hindered when the mental resources required to monitor thought are dampened (Sayette et al., 2009, 2010) and thus unable to engage in effective top-down control.
Most fundamentally, the distinction between consciousness and meta-awareness introduces another level at which the
monitoring of suppressed thoughts could take place. As noted above, in prior theoretical discussions of thought suppression,
Wegner (1994) has reviewed considerable evidence indicating that thought suppression involves the interplay of two juxtaposed processes: a control process that attempts to think about anything but the undesired thought, and an automatic process that searches for failures of the control process. For example, when executive resources are available (thereby enabling
the control process that avoids unwanted thoughts) participants are generally quite effective at minimizing such thoughts
(Wegner & Erber, 1992). However, when resources are limited (thereby undermining the control process), suppressed
thoughts ‘‘rebound’’ in frequency. This latter finding suggests that in the absence of the control process, the automatic monitor primes and then finds the very thoughts the individual is seeking to avoid. Although considerable research has amassed
in support of this ironic process model, one question has gone largely unaddressed, namely: What exactly is the automatic
monitor monitoring? Wegner (1997) suggests that the automatic monitor searches the contents of preconsciousness.
Although such a speculation is certainly plausible, it raises the question of why the monitor would search the contents of
preconsciousness when such thoughts might otherwise never reach consciousness. While it may be of questionable value
to dredge up suppressed thoughts that are outside of consciousness, there can be little question that one would want to
know when an unwanted thought is currently in consciousness. In short, the fact that consciousness and meta-awareness
can become dissociated suggests an additional potential locus for monitoring suppressed thoughts: namely, monitoring
the contents of consciousness in order to alert the mind when it currently engaging in the very thought it is intending to
avoid.
B. Baird et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1003–1012
1005
2. Experimental overview
In the current studies, we combined experience-sampling and self-catching methodologies (referred to as the self-caught/
probe-caught paradigm) to explore the interaction between thought suppression and individuals’ explicit awareness of
thoughts that they are currently attempting to suppress. In each study we used a paradigm in which participants tried to
suppress thoughts about a previous romantic relationship partner (see Wegner & Gold, 1995). As commonly done in this procedure, we asked participants to press a response key every time they noticed they were thinking about their previous partner, thereby providing a measure of suppressed thoughts that reached meta-awareness. In addition, participants were also
periodically probed and asked to indicate whether they were thinking about their previous partner at that particular moment, providing a measure of suppressed thoughts that escaped explicit detection.
With this design, we first investigated whether people can experience thoughts they are attempting to avoid in the absence of meta-awareness. If this is the case, participants should be caught engaging in thoughts of their previous partner at
experience-sampling probes, even in the context of an experiment in which they are asked to report such thoughts as soon as
they occur.
Second, we explored whether, relative to self-caught thoughts, probe-caught thoughts involving the previous romantic
partner would be associated with a greater decoupling of attention from the external environment. In the current studies,
we measured thought suppression during reading. This paradigm enabled us to assess whether probe-caught thoughts in a
suppression context would be associated with a greater decoupling of attention from the primary task of reading, as previous
research has shown in the context of probe-caught thoughts more generally (Schooler et al., 2005; Smallwood et al., 2008).
Third, we investigated the effects of cognitive load on probe-caught and self-caught suppressed thoughts. As noted, previous studies have found that cognitive load increases the recurrence of suppressed thoughts (Wegner & Erber, 1992). However, given previous findings which suggest that the capacity to monitor thought requires cognitive resources (Sayette et al.,
2009, 2010; Schooler, 2002; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006), load may not only undermine the control processes necessary for
suppression, but also the ability to notice the occurrence of a suppressed thought.
Fourth, we evaluated the relationship between the emotional significance of the thought individuals were attempting to
suppress and the capacity to notice the occurrence of those thoughts. Wegner and Gold (1995) found that participants who
suppressed thoughts of a ‘‘hot-flame’’ (a previous partner they still desired) self-reported fewer thoughts than cold-flame
participants. However, other research has shown that emotionally significant thoughts are in general more difficult to suppress (e.g., Petrie, Booth, & Pennebaker, 1998). One possibility is that emotionally salient thoughts are more absorbing, making them more difficult to suppress from consciousness, as prior work suggests, and therefore also easier to become ‘‘caughtup’’ in and more difficult to explicitly reflect upon. According to the present framework, an alternative possibility that is consistent with both of these findings is that individuals with a desire to reconcile with a previous partner may think about their
partner more but be less likely to acknowledge that they are doing so.
Finally, we examined how explicit awareness of unwanted thoughts relates to individual differences in two alternative
chronic tendencies: the tendency to suppress thoughts and the tendency to repress emotional experiences. Given that
probe-caught mind-wandering has been shown to increase when individuals are in a negative mood (Smallwood and
O’Connor, 2011) or score highly on indexes of depression (Smallwood et al., 2007), and that chronic suppression is associated
with negative emotions such as anxiety and dysphoria (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994), individuals with chronic suppression tendencies may be more likely to experience unnoticed suppressed thoughts. Alternatively, if a failure to notice suppressed
thoughts corresponds to a defense mechanism that leads individuals to ignore the fact that they are experiencing certain
thoughts, then individuals who tend to repress emotional experiences should exhibit a high number of thoughts that evade
self-catching.
3. Study 1
We used a self-caught/probe-caught paradigm to assess thought intrusions during a reading task in which participants
were asked to try not to think about a previous romantic relationship partner. Given that participants were instructed to
report the occurrence of thoughts of their previous partner as soon as they recognized them, reports of having those thoughts
at experience-sampling probes correspond to situations when participants have not recognized the occurrence of the
thought. On the basis of previous mind-wandering research (Schooler et al., 2005; Smallwood et al., 2008), we hypothesized
that thoughts about a past relationship partner that the participant failed to notice would be particularly associated with
detriments in reading comprehension.
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Participants
Participants were 81 undergraduate students (22 males, 59 females) who participated in exchange for extra credit. Data
from two participants were excluded because their data files were not saved properly. To be eligible for this and all subsequent studies, participants were required to have had a significant romantic relationship in which they were no longer
involved.
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3.1.2. Procedure
Participants were asked to recall a past romantic relationship and were given 2 min to think about the relationship.
Participants were then asked to type in the initials of their previous partner and were asked several questions about their
relationship, including how long the relationship lasted and how long ago it ended. Participants were then instructed to suppress thoughts of their prior relationship partner for the duration of the experiment. The experimental task consisted of four
sections. The first three parts were reading sections composed of three different non-fiction articles of unrelated subject matter taken from online professional journals. The reading passages were presented one page at a time and each article was
divided into five sections of approximately equal length, with the participant advancing to the next section at their own pace.
The fourth section consisted of a ‘‘quiet’’ section in which participants viewed a fixation point on a computer screen. The
order of the reading sections was counterbalanced using a Latin-square design.
All participants were asked to press the space bar each time they noticed that they had a thought about their previous
partner. Half of the participants additionally received experience-sampling probes in which they were periodically interrupted by a screen that asked: ‘‘Just now, were you thinking about your previous relationship partner?’’ Participants responded by pressing ‘‘y’’ for Yes and ‘‘n’’ for No. Probes appeared approximately every 30 s, with a range of 8–150 s, and
thought probe timing was independent of self-catching. After the computer portion of the study, participants completed a
15-question comprehension test.
3.2. Results and discussion
Participants self-caught significantly more thoughts of their previous partner in the self-caught-only condition compared
to the self-caught-plus-probe condition in both the reading (M = 33.9 and 15.6 respectively, t(77) = 3.14, p < .01) and quiet
sections (M = 17.1 and 9.5, t(77) = 2.49, p < .05). This finding suggests that thought probes caught thoughts that (at least
sometimes) would have been eventually noticed by the participants themselves. With the addition of probes, participants
were caught engaging in thoughts of their previous partner 18% of the time while reading (M = 3.83, SD = 3.73) and 22%
of the time while sitting quietly (M = 1.80, SD = 1.42).
No difference was observed in reading comprehension between the self-caught-only condition (M = 10.78, SD = 2.17)
compared to the self-caught-plus-probe condition (M = 10.44, SD = 2.10, t(77) = 0.68, p > .50), indicating that the experience-sampling method did not in itself alter reading comprehension performance. Simultaneous linear multiple regression
analysis revealed that the frequency of probe-caught thoughts of the past romantic partner significantly predicted reading
comprehension (b = .25, SE = .09, t(41) = 2.86, p < .01) while self-caught thoughts of the suppression target did not predict
comprehension (b = 0.03, SE = .02, t(41) = 1.31, p = .20). This analysis suggests that probe-caught suppressed thoughts are
particularly associated with decoupling of attention from what is being read. These findings mirror prior research indicating
that probe-caught mind-wandering episodes are significantly more disruptive to reading comprehension than are those that
individuals catch themselves (Schooler et al., 2005; Smallwood et al., 2008).
4. Study 2
Study 2 was designed to replicate the finding that individuals can lack meta-awareness of the fact that they have begun to
think about a suppression target, while also addressing the influence of cognitive load. Previous studies (e.g., Wegner &
Erber, 1992) have generally found that cognitive load increases the recurrence of suppressed thoughts. In the current study,
we wanted to explore whether load elicits a comparable effect on noticed and unnoticed suppressed thoughts. Prior evidence
suggests that mental content is more difficult to regulate under cognitive load. For example, probe-caught estimates of
depressive rumination for dysphoric individuals increase when the task has a working memory component (Smallwood
et al., 2007). Moreover, given previous findings which suggest that the capacity to monitor thought requires cognitive resources (Sayette et al., 2009, 2010; Schooler, 2002; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006), cognitive load may not only increase
the occurrence of suppressed thoughts, but also reduce people’s meta-awareness of their thoughts (Sayette et al., 2009;
Smallwood & Schooler, 2006).
In this experiment we also assessed participants’ desire to reconcile with their previous partner. Previous research
(Wegner & Gold, 1995) has shown that individuals who still want to be with their ex-partner self-report fewer thoughts
about their partner. However, it is unclear whether this decrement in the number of reported thoughts is attributable to
a reduction in the occurrence of thoughts or a reduction in self-report. Indeed, other research suggests that emotionally significant thoughts are in general more difficult to suppress (e.g., Petrie et al., 1998). According to the present framework, an
alternative hypothesis is that suppressed thoughts of a ‘‘hot flame’’ (a previous romantic partner that the person still desires)
may be more difficult to suppress because of their emotional salience but also less likely to be reported.
4.1. Method
4.1.1. Participants
Participants were 74 undergraduate students (29 male, 45 female; mean age = 20.3) who participated in exchange for extra credit. Two participants were excluded: one for not understanding the instructions and the other for receiving the wrong
test materials.
B. Baird et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1003–1012
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4.1.2. Procedure
The procedure for Study 2 was identical to Study 1 with the following exceptions: (1) all participants were asked to selfreport thoughts of their previous partner and received thought probes, (2) following Wegner and Erber (1992), participants
received a low or high cognitive load manipulation by giving them 30 s to memorize for subsequent recall either a 1-digit
(low load) or 9-digit (high load) number just prior to beginning the computer session, and (3) participants were asked to
indicate the extent to which they still wanted to be involved with their previous romantic partner on a 7-point scale.
4.2. Results and discussion
Participants reported that the probes caught them thinking about their previous partner before they had realized it at a
similar rate (M = 14%) as participants who received probes in Study 1. Replicating Study 1, a linear regression analysis revealed that the frequency of probe-caught suppressed thoughts (M = 4.36, SD = 4.36) predicted performance on the reading
comprehension test (b = .14, SE = .06, t(70) = 2.24, p < .05), while self-caught thoughts (M = 21.0, SD = 18.9) were not a significant predictor of comprehension (b = .002, SE = .015, t(70) = 0.161, p = .87).
Participants under high load reported that they were thinking about their previous partner at the probes more often
(M = 5.40) than those under low load (M = 3.38, F(1, 70) = 4.02, p < .05). For self-caught thoughts, no differences were observed between high (M = 22.14) and low load (M = 19.91) [F(1, 70) = .24, p = .62]. Mean probe-caught and self-caught suppressed thoughts under high and low load are presented for both reading and quiet sections in Fig. 1. These results suggest
that participants under high load were more likely to report thinking about their previous relationship but were no more
likely to notice these thoughts. These findings extend previous results indicating that mental content is more difficult to regulate under load (e.g., Smallwood et al., 2007), and are consistent with the idea that mental resources may be important in
monitoring consciousness during suppression (Sayette et al., 2009, 2010; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006).
Finally, we explored the relationship between participants’ desire to reconcile with their ex-partner and the frequency of
self-caught and probe-caught thoughts they had about that person. A simultaneous multiple regression model revealed that
together self-caught and probe-caught thoughts of the past relationship partner accounted for approximately 20% of the variance in desire to reconcile [R2 = .202; F(2, 69) = 8.73, p < .001]. Individuals who reported a strong desire to reconcile had fewer self-caught thoughts (b = .038, SE = .01, t(70) = 3.09, p < .01) and more probe-caught thoughts (b = .21, SE = .05,
t(70) = 3.92, p < .001) about their past partner. The results of this analysis are presented in Table 1 for all participants, as well
as separately for high and low cognitive load conditions. The results reveal that for both high and low load conditions, desire
to reconcile was associated with fewer self-caught thoughts and more probe-caught thoughts of the previous relationship.
We additionally observed an association between desire to reconcile and the amount of time since the relationship ended
(r(70) = .34, p < .01), indicating that more recent relationships were associated with a stronger desire to reconcile. In order
to evaluate the association between self-caught and probe-caught thoughts and desire to reconcile independent of recency
effects, we therefore conducted an additional multiple regression analysis with time since the relationship ended included as
a covariate (entered as Step 1 in a hierarchical linear regression model). Controlling for time since the relationship ended, the
results remained consistent: individuals who had a strong desire to reconcile had fewer self-caught thoughts (b = .032,
SE = .013, t(70) = 2.52, p = .014) and more probe-caught thoughts of their previous partner (b = .18, SE = .06, t(70) = 3.21,
p = .002).
Fig. 1. Cognitive load increases the report of probe-caught but not self-caught suppressed thoughts.
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Table 1
Regression analysis predicting desire to reconcile for all participants, and participants who received a high or low cognitive load manipulation.
Variable
All
B
Probe-caught
Self-caught
R2
F
N
*
**
High load
SE B
0.21***
0.04**
0.05
0.01
.20***
8.73***
72
B
b
.48***
.37**
Low load
SE B
0.19*
0.04*
0.07
0.02
.21*
4.33*
35
B
b
.44*
.34*
0.24*
0.04*
SE B
b
0.10
0.02
.15
3.03
37
.49*
.46*
p < .05.
p < .01.
p < .001.
***
The negative relationship between self-caught unwanted thoughts and desire to reconcile is consistent with Wegner and
Gold’s (1995) finding that people who wanted to be with their partner self-reported fewer thoughts about them under suppression instructions. However, this result was reversed for probe-caught thoughts, indicating that desire to still be with a
partner was positively associated with the likelihood of being caught by experience-sampling probes thinking about that
partner. In summary, the desire to be with a partner was simultaneously associated with an increased likelihood of thinking
about the partner and a decreased probability of spontaneously noticing such thoughts.
5. Study 3
Study 3 was designed to (1) replicate the results from Studies 1 and 2 that probe-caught thoughts of a previous romantic
partner are particularly damaging to reading comprehension using a different set of reading passages and comprehension
questions, (2) replicate the finding that desire to reconcile with a previous partner is associated with an increased likelihood
of probe-caught unwanted thoughts, and (3) examine how individual differences in the tendency to repress emotional experiences and chronically suppress thoughts are related to the ability to successfully suppress thoughts of a past romantic
partner.
Specifically, in this study we used an individual differences approach to explore two alternative relationships between
individuals’ chronic thought suppression patterns and the capacity to notice that a suppression target had entered consciousness. According to one view, some individuals may chronically fail to acknowledge their suppressed thoughts to themselves. This hypothesis is one way of interpreting the relationship between meta-awareness of suppressed thoughts and
desire to be in the relationship that was observed in Study 2. Accordingly, individuals who still desire to be in the relationship may fail to acknowledge the thoughts to themselves as a defense mechanism, thereby leading them to fail to report the
thoughts even though they regularly experience them. If such defense mechanisms contribute to failures to self-catch suppressed thoughts, then individuals with a tendency to repress emotions (Weinberger, Schwartz, & Davidson, 1979) may be
especially susceptible to experiencing suppressed thoughts without acknowledging them to themselves.
An alternative account of individual differences in the capacity to suppress thoughts is suggested by research on individuals’ tendency for chronic thought suppression. Wegner and Zanakos (1994) introduced a measure of individuals’ chronic
tendency to struggle with unwanted thoughts, the WBSI (White Bear Suppression Inventory), and found that individuals
who scored high on this measure also were inclined towards depressive and anxious affect. The authors concluded, ‘‘anxiety-producing thoughts and depressing thoughts... represent two broad classes of thinking that could often prompt suppression in a person so inclined’’ (p. 619). Given that probe-caught mind-wandering has been shown to increase when people are
in a negative mood (Smallwood and O’Connor, 2011) or score highly on indexes of depression (Smallwood et al., 2007), individuals with chronic suppression tendencies may be more likely to be caught thinking about suppression targets. Importantly, although a priori it was possible that reduced meta-awareness of suppressed thoughts could be associated either
with a tendency to repress or a tendency to suppress thoughts, it was very unlikely that both relationships would be observed, as Wegner and Zanakos (1994) found that the WBSI was inversely correlated with repression.
5.1. Method
5.1.1. Participants
Participants were 84 undergraduate students (27 male, 59 female; mean age = 19.6) who participated in exchange for
partial fulfillment of a course requirement.
5.1.2. Procedure
The procedure for Study 3 was identical to Study 1 with the following exceptions: (1) a new set of reading passages was
used that consisted of excepts of non-fiction science writing from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson,
2003), (2) all participants were asked to self-report thoughts of their previous partner and received thought probes, (3) participants completed an 8-item questionnaire (Wegner & Gold, 1995) assessing the extent to which they wished they were
B. Baird et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1003–1012
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still involved with their previous romantic partner, and (4) individual differences in the tendency to repress emotional experiences and suppress thoughts were assessed. Weinberger et al. (1979) defined repressors as individuals who score normatively low on a measure of trait anxiety (the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale) but normatively high on a measure of
defensiveness (the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale). Thus, following Weinberger et al., our repression measure
was a composite computed from scores on these two different scales, and consisted of two groups composed of individuals
with low repressive tendencies and individuals with high repressive tendencies. Following Wegner and Zanakos (1994), the
White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI) was used to assess individual differences in chronic thought suppression.
5.2. Results and discussion
Consistent with Studies 1 and 2, participants were caught thinking about their previous relationship partner on average
16% of the time (M = 4.13, SD = 4.56), and caught themselves thinking about their partner on average 11.42 times
(SD = 12.41). Replicating Studies 1 and 2, a simultaneous linear multiple regression model revealed that the frequency of
probe-caught thoughts of the past romantic partner predicted reading comprehension (b = .18, SE = .08, t(82) = 2.26,
p < .05) while self-caught thoughts did not predict comprehension (b = .00002, SE = .001, t(82) = .02, p = .98), again suggesting that only failures of suppression that people did not notice were associated with impaired comprehension of the
material.
Next we examined the relationship between probe-caught and self-caught suppressed thoughts and desire to reconcile
with one’s previous partner. Simultaneous multiple regression revealed that together self-caught and probe-caught thoughts
of the previous partner accounted for approximately 11% of the variance in desire to reconcile [R2 = .107; F(2, 81) = 4.86,
p < .01]. Individuals who reported a stronger desire to still be in their previous relationship were more likely to be caught
thinking about their previous partner (b = 1.58, SE = .60, t(82) = 2.64, p < .01), but were no more likely to catch themselves
thinking about their partner (b = .002, SE = .009, t(82) = .26, p = .79). As in Study 2, we additionally observed an association
between desire to reconcile and the amount of time since the relationship ended (r(82) = .39, p < .001), indicating that more
recent relationships were associated with a stronger desire to reconcile. To examine the association between self-caught and
probe-caught thoughts and desire to reconcile independent of recency effects, we conducted an additional regression analysis controlling for time since the relationship ended. Again we observed that individuals who had a strong desire to reconcile were more likely to be caught thinking about their previous partner (b = 1.54, SE = .56, t(82) = 2.78, p < .01), but were no
more likely no catch themselves thinking about their partner (b = .0001, SE = .009, t(82) = .02, p = .98). These findings are
consistent with the proposal that individuals with a desire to reconcile actually think about their previous partner more
often, but are not more likely to self-report this fact.
Finally, we examined the relationship between the relative frequency of probe-caught and self-caught thoughts of the
previous relationship and both the tendency for repression and for suppression. There was no difference between high
and low repressors in their tendency to report thoughts of the romantic partner as revealed by either the self-caught
(F(1, 82) = .01, p = .91) or probe-caught (F(1, 82) = .17, p = .68) measures. In contrast, a simultaneous linear regression analysis
revealed that individuals who frequently suppress thoughts were more likely to be caught having thoughts about their previous partner at the probes (b = 1.49, SE = .42, t(82) = 3.54, p = .001), while no such relationship between chronic thought
suppression and self-caught thoughts was found (b = .008, SE = .007, t(82) = 1.2, p = .22). Additionally, consistent with
Wegner and Zanakos (1994), there was a strong positive relationship between scores on the WBSI and Taylor Manifest
Anxiety scale (r(82) = .58, p < .000001), a measure that reflects individuals’ sensitivity to (rather than repression of) their
negative emotional affect. This observation lends further support to the proposal (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994) that thought
suppression as measured by the WBSI and repression as traditionally defined are distinct trait variables.
6. General discussion
In three experiments, participants were instructed not to think about a prior romantic relationship, were asked to indicate
when they failed at this activity, and periodically received experience-sampling probes that assessed the contents of their
thoughts. Despite the fact that they were instructed to report thoughts of their previous partner as soon as they occurred,
participants were frequently caught engaging in those thoughts at experience-sampling probes. This finding reveals that
individuals can lack meta-awareness that they have begun to think about a topic they are attempting to suppress and provides important insight into what happens when the mind fails to expel a thought from consciousness. Specifically, the finding that probe-caught suppressed thoughts were associated with the largest deficits in reading comprehension suggests that
this measure captures episodes during which participants’ conscious thoughts are particularly decoupled from one’s primary
task (Schooler et al., 2005; Smallwood et al., 2008). Moreover, high cognitive load increased the frequency that thoughts of a
previous relationship partner were caught at probes, suggesting that a dual-task context makes it harder to notice the occurrence of a thought one is attempting to avoid (Wegner, 1994, 1997). Finally, an individual’s desire to rekindle a prior relationship was associated with an increased likelihood that they were caught engaging in thoughts about that person,
indicating that the emotional salience of thoughts may contribute to failures of suppression, which can initially re-enter consciousness in the absence of explicit awareness.
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A compelling explanation for the distinction between the probe and self-caught measures is that they access different
elements of an individual’s conscious experience. As the probe-caught measure does not rely on the individual to spontaneously report the occurrence of the thought, it can capture elements of the experience that people have difficulties in recognizing or admitting to themselves. By contrast, self-caught thoughts have already been identified by the individual and so
this measure captures elements of the experience that the individual has independently recognized. One feature that may
contribute to an individual’s capacity to explicitly reflect on the current contents of thought is how absorbing the thought
is. Accordingly, interesting, unpleasant or otherwise salient thoughts may be easier to become ‘‘caught-up’’ in, making them
more difficult to explicitly reflect upon. This could help to explain why individuals who still desired their previous partner
were more likely to be caught thinking about them at experience-sampling probes, as well as why those thoughts involved
greater decoupling of attention from the primary task.
Consistent with this interpretation, research has shown that the mind-wandering state often involves conscious processing of relatively complex trains of thought, which may occupy the same executive systems required for maintaining attention on the primary task (Smallwood, 2010; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). For example, mind-wandering is more frequent
when the primary task does not involve a working memory component (Baird et al., 2012; Smallwood, Nind, & O’Connor,
2009). Additionally, the content of mind-wandering frequently involves executive functions such as processing current concerns (Klinger, 1999) and making plans for the future (Baird, Smallwood, & Schooler, 2011; Smallwood, Nind, & O’Connor,
2009). Furthermore, neuroimaging findings that show that mind-wandering in the absence of meta-awareness activates
executive prefrontal structures such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior prefrontal cortex (Christoff, Gordon,
Smallwood, Smith, & Schooler, 2009). If the recruitment of processes necessary for meta-awareness are occupied by processing the conscious thoughts themselves, then this could help to explain why the capacity to effectively monitor the contents
of our thoughts is often compromised.
An alternative account of thoughts that are in principle available for report but fail to be reported in the moment is that
such states are unconscious or ‘‘preconscious’’, and are only mobilized into consciousness when a probe directs an individual’s attention towards them (e.g., Dehaene, Changeux, Naccache, Sackur, & Sergent, 2006; Dennett, 1991). Although it is difficult to conclusively differentiate between these alternative accounts (Schooler et al., in press), the fact that, in line with
previous findings (e.g., Schooler et al., 2005; Smallwood et al., 2008) unnoticed thoughts required cognitive resources and
were disruptive to primary task performance lends support to individual’s self-reports that they were experiencing the
thoughts consciously prior to the onset of experience-sampling probes.
The current experiments suggest that differentiating between probe-caught and self-caught thoughts could help shed
light on the cognitive processes that are involved in attempting to control undesired mental states. As recognition that an
unwanted thought has occurred is likely a necessary first step in the process by which control can be initiated, meta-awareness could plausibly make it easier for individuals to dispel the thought from consciousness. According to this view, metaawareness could potentially contribute directly to the regulation of suppression, as the ability to assess the current state of
the mind enables the detection of mental content that could be missed by more low-level implicit monitoring systems
(Schooler, 2002). An alternative possibility, and the one that we favor, however, is that the capacity to monitor thought is
indirectly related to control (see Schooler et al., 2011 for a discussion of these different views). From this perspective, the
ability to take stock of our conscious experience allows the individual to initiate downstream changes that will ultimately
allow thought to be better controlled, for example by engaging in practices aimed at curbing dysfunctional thinking (e.g.,
Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010; Beck, 1979).
The value of distinguishing between awareness and meta-awareness of thoughts during attempts at suppression is further underscored in the present research by the relation between suppressed thoughts and whether the target of thought
suppression was a ‘‘hot flame’’ (a previous partner that the person still desired). Wegner and Gold (1995) found that individuals self-reported fewer thoughts of a ‘‘hot flame’’ under suppression instructions. Although we replicated this effect
in Study 2, this result is somewhat counterintuitive because the most obvious consequence of a desire to reconcile would
be to increase rather than decrease the frequency of thoughts with this particular content. By contrast, the relationship between probe-caught thoughts of a past romantic partner and desire to reconcile with that partner was positive in both Studies 2 and 3. This result may indicate that individuals who still wanted to be in the relationship thought about the relationship
more, but were less likely to recognize (and therefore report) that they were thinking about it. This finding is consistent with
previous research demonstrating that suppressing emotionally relevant thought is more difficult (e.g., Petrie et al., 1998),
and further highlight that the self-catch measure does not necessarily accurately reflect the frequency of conscious thoughts
of suppressed content. As a result, conclusions regarding the frequency of suppressed thoughts that are based exclusively on
measures that require self-catching should be treated with caution.
The tendency to be caught thinking about the suppression target was found to have no association with individual differences in the tendency to repress thoughts but a strong relationship with the tendency to report chronically struggling
with suppressing thoughts. These findings further Wegner and Zanakos’s (1994) conclusion that ‘‘thought suppression is tapping something quite unlike repression as traditionally defined and measured.’’ While our data revealed a strong association
between individual differences in chronic thought suppression and probe-caught thoughts of the suppression target, individual differences in the number of self-caught thoughts were not related to suppression tendencies. A possible implication of
these findings is that the tendency to struggle with thought suppression is related to less sensitive meta-awareness of the
contents of thought. While high scores on the WBSI thought suppression measure by definition indicate that an individual
B. Baird et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 1003–1012
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have awareness of the fact that they frequently struggle to suppress thoughts, individuals who scored high on this measure
had the most difficulty recognizing the onset of thought about the suppression target when it occurred.
The proposal that deficits in the capacity to effectively metacognitively monitor the contents of thought is related to
chronic suppression tendencies is consistent with the fact that unwanted thoughts are associated with negative affective
conditions such as dysphoria and anxiety (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994). If spontaneous thoughts associated with negative states
are not recognized, this may enable them to proceed without repair. Moreover, given that attempts to control thinking can
often backfire, problems in identifying unwanted thoughts, followed by ineffective control strategies, could lead to a perseverative cycle that extends the amount of time devoted to those thoughts. If correct, this helps to explain why chronic suppressors are generally bad at suppressing thoughts (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994), as well as the effectiveness of therapy
techniques that encourage individuals to engage in mental practices that encourage recognition of thought content (e.g.,
Beck, 1979; Teasdale et al., 2000).
Finally, the present findings may also help to clarify several features of Wegner’s (1994, 2009) ironic model of thought
suppression. As noted above, according to this model, thought suppression involves two juxtaposed processes: a cognitively
demanding control process that attempts to suppress the thought and a non-cognitively demanding monitoring process that
searches for control failures. This ironic process model has proven successful in accounting for many diverse findings (see
Wegner (2009), for a review), yet little is known about the search functions the automatic monitor provides. Wegner
(1997) suggests that the monitor searches preconsciousness to catch unwanted thoughts before they reach the threshold
of awareness. Although plausible, there is a self-destructiveness to a process that brings suppressed thoughts into consciousness before they arrive on their own accord. The fact that consciousness and meta-awareness can become dissociated suggests that monitoring for unwanted thoughts may also occur at a conscious level. Indeed, as discussed above, a search of the
contents of consciousness itself could be a useful way to prevent perseverating on negative thoughts.
The notion that the automatic monitoring process must work in conjunction with meta-awareness in order to explicitly
note the occurrence of unwanted thoughts offers another reason for why cognitive load exacerbates the impact of suppression. Given that meta-awareness is resource demanding, load may not only undermine the control processes necessary for
suppression, but also the ability to notice and explicitly reflect on the current contents of thought. Under load the automatic
monitor may be unable to trigger meta-awareness and the ensuing control processes necessary to reinstate suppression.
Such an account is consistent with recent neuroimaging data indicating transient increases in the brain’s control systems
following reports of unwanted thoughts (Mitchell et al., 2007). Thus, adding further irony to an already ironic process, it
seems our capacity for noticing unwanted thoughts may be minimized at precisely those times at which unwanted thoughts
are most likely to occur.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council awarded to JWS. BB is
supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-0707430. MDM and JWS
are supported through United States Department of Education Grant R305A110277 awarded to JWS. We thank E. Geraerts,
and M. Erdelyi for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
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Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
The rapid-chase theory does not extend to movement execution
Jenna C. Flannigan a, Romeo Chua b, Erin K. Cressman a,⇑
a
b
School of Human Kinetics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa K1N 6N5, Canada
School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z1, Canada
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 8 October 2015
Revised 7 February 2016
Accepted 6 March 2016
Keywords:
Masked priming
Movement corrections
Unconscious processing
Rapid-chase theory
Prime-mask SOA
a b s t r a c t
It is assumed that the processing of a prime followed by a mask occurs sequentially in a
feedforward manner when the three (initiation, takeover, and independence) criteria outlined by the rapid-chase theory are met. The purpose of the current study was to determine
if the processing of the prime and mask fit the predictions of the rapid-chase theory when
the prime and mask are presented during an ongoing movement. In two experiments, participants made rapid pointing movements to a target indicated by the mask. In Experiment
1, the prime was presented at movement onset and the prime-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was manipulated. In Experiment 2, the prime-mask SOA was constant but the
delay between movement and prime onset was manipulated. Although the results support
the initiation and takeover criteria, the data did not support the independence criterion.
Consequently, the rapid-chase theory does not appear to extend to movement execution.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
In many daily activities, online movement corrections are necessary to successfully perform an intended goal-directed
action. Movement corrections can occur online due to changes in task goals or the presence of additional information. Furthermore, movement corrections can occur automatically and unconsciously in response to visual stimuli as evidenced by
the anti-pointing (Day & Lyon, 2000; Johnson, Beers, & Haggard, 2002) and the double-step paradigms (Bard et al., 1999;
Goodale, Pelisson, & Prablanc, 1986; Pélisson, Prablanc, Goodale, & Jeannerod, 1986).
With advances in technology, it has become easier to use pointing tasks, instead of discrete tasks (e.g., reaction time (RT)
tasks) to gain a better understanding of movement corrections as well as the cognitive events that underlie corresponding
decision making processes (Song & Nakayama, 2009). Specifically, the analysis of pointing trajectories allows for real-time
observation of the control processes leading to the successful completion of the task. This advantage has made pointing
movements a valuable tool in the investigation of invisible stimuli on behaviour (Cressman, Franks, Enns, & Chua, 2007;
Cressman, Lam, Franks, Enns, & Chua, 2013; Finkbeiner & Friedman, 2011; Finkbeiner, Song, Nakayama, & Caramazza,
2008; Fukui & Gomi, 2012; Ocampo & Finkbeiner, 2013; T. Schmidt, Niehaus, & Nagel, 2006; Xiao & Yamauchi, 2014). In
these studies, participants pointed as fast and as accurately as possible in response to a visible stimulus. Unbeknownst to
the participants, a briefly presented smaller stimulus (i.e., prime) preceded the larger stimulus and the two stimuli shared
task relevant characteristics. Although these studies differed with respect to such experimental manipulations as the type of
masking that was used (i.e., metacontrast or pattern masking), the number of stimuli in the sequence, the distance of the
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: erin.cressman@uottawa.ca (E.K. Cressman).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.03.007
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
76
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
targets, and the onset of the prime relative to movement onset, in all cases, participants remained unaware of the prime and
the prime still influenced their behaviour.
These results are in agreement with traditional masked priming studies, which have typically used a RT task to investigate unconscious processing. In a prime-mask RT task, the mask has the dual function of suppressing the visibility of the
prime in addition to specifying the required response. The impact of the prime on behaviour is mainly determined by comparing performance on congruent (i.e., prime and mask specify the same response) and incongruent trials (i.e., prime and
mask indicate opposite responses). The difference between incongruent and congruent conditions with respect to a specific
performance variable (e.g., RT, movement time (MT) or errors), is termed the priming effect. Some studies have also included
neutral trials (i.e., prime does not specify a response) to determine the cost or benefit associated with the congruent or incongruent prime. Initial investigations using RT tasks have shown that RTs are faster in congruent than neutral or incongruent
trials (Klotz & Wolff, 1995; Neumann & Klotz, 1994; Vorberg, Mattler, Heinecke, Schmidt, & Schwarzbach, 2003). Several factors have been shown to influence the overall priming effect, including participant expertise (Kiesel, Kunde, Pohl, Berner, &
Hoffmann, 2009), task instructions (Neumann & Klotz, 1994; Schlaghecken & Eimer, 2004), probability of stimulus presentation (Cheesman & Merikle, 1986; Cressman et al., 2013), and stimuli characteristics (Breitmeyer & Ogmen, 2006). One of
the most influential factors affecting the priming effect is the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA), defined as the time between
prime onset and mask onset. Typically, as the SOA increases, the priming effect increases as well (Vorberg et al., 2003).
Recently the priming effect has also been examined during movement initiation in a pointing task. Specifically, T. Schmidt
et al. (2006) used a metacontrast masking paradigm, a common backwards masking method of rendering the prime invisible
whereby the outer contour of the prime is equal to the inner contour of the mask, to examine the influence of the mask stimulus on the processing of the prime stimulus. In this task, a green and a red prime disc were presented simultaneously in
opposite quadrants of a display. After a prime-mask SOA of 17, 33, 67, or 100 ms, a green and a red annulus mask appeared
in the same quadrants as the primes. In congruent trials, the same coloured prime and mask appeared in the same quadrant,
whereas they appeared in opposite quadrants in incongruent trials. In addition to manipulating the prime-mask SOA, colour
contrast and mask strength were manipulated in order to determine the influence of the mask on the processing of the prime
stimulus. Participants were to complete a fast pointing movement to the predetermined coloured mask target. Overall, the
pointing trajectory was initially guided by the direction of the prime, such that participants started moving in the incorrect
direction in incongruent trials. Importantly, the spatial priming effect (i.e., the difference between the spatial pointing trajectories of incongruent and congruent trials) increased as the SOA increased and the initial spatial priming effects were time
locked to prime onset and independent of the characteristics of the mask, meaning the prime and mask were processed
sequentially and independently. As a result, T. Schmidt et al. (2006) proposed their rapid-chase theory outlining three criteria that, if respected, can lead one to assume that the processing of the prime stimulus occurs in an unconscious, feedforward manner based on the motor output observed in response to the prime stimulus. The rapid-chase theory integrates ideas
from the feedforward sweep1 (Lamme & Roelfsema, 2000) as well as from direct parameter specification (DPS; Neumann, 1990;
Neumann & Klotz, 1994).
According to the feedforward sweep hypothesis (Lamme & Roelfsema, 2000), visual information that is processed through
an initial feedforward sweep is not consciously available since recurrent processing must occur for the information to reach a
conscious level. In the context of the masked priming paradigm, the feedforward sweep initiated by the onset of the mask stimulus interferes with the recurrent processing of the prime stimulus, leading to the inability to consciously perceive the prime.
Yet, the prime can still activate its associated response without eliciting conscious awareness if its stimulus features are relevant to the task and coincide with the person’s intentions as proposed by DPS (Neumann, 1990; Neumann & Klotz, 1994).
The prime is thought to be processed as a feedforward sweep if all three criteria outlined in the rapid-chase theory are
met. The three criteria are the initiation criterion, the takeover criterion, and the independence criterion (T. Schmidt et al.,
2011, 2006; T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009; Vath & Schmidt, 2007). According to the initiation criterion, the prime influences
the initial trajectory of the response. However, the influence of the prime is limited since, during movement, the mask takes
control of the movement such that movements are successfully completed to the goal location indicated by the mask as
specified by the takeover criterion. The independence criterion ensures that the processing of the prime stimulus is unaffected by the properties of the mask as reflected in the initial kinematics (e.g., position and velocity) of the movement. While
the initial response is dependent only on the prime, the onset of the mask has been shown to enhance later response processes since it is more salient and task relevant than the prime. Hence later portions of the movement may be affected differently depending on the mask’s onset time, and the prime and mask will still be processed in a feedforward sweep
according to the rapid-chase theory (F. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2010; T. Schmidt, 2014; T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009).
Evidence supporting the rapid-chase theory as it relates to unconscious visual processing during response initiation is
provided by behavioural studies examining the priming effect when categorizing pictures (T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009),
pointing to differently shaped targets (T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009), or pointing to targets cued by a specific stimulus feature
(e.g., colour or shape) (F. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2010) or by a spatial cue (T. Schmidt & Seydell, 2008). On the other hand, certain factors such as event timing, task difficulty, and the presence of occluding stimuli demonstrate the limitations of the
applicability of the rapid-chase theory to certain situations. When the prime-mask SOA is too short (<30 ms), the prime
1
Although the feedforward sweep hypothesis (Lamme & Roelfsema, 2000) requires a strict feedforward processing (i.e., no recurrent processing), the
rapid-chase theory does allow for some local recurrent processing to occur (T. Schmidt et al., 2011; T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009; T. Schmidt & Seydell, 2008).
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
77
and mask are integrated into a single stimulus (T. Schmidt et al., 2006). Furthermore, if feedback connections are required to
process the prime since the task is too difficult and requires cognitive control (e.g., categorizing pictures based on their relative size), or the properties of the prime are partially occluded by overlapping stimuli then the observed motor output will
not follow the criteria described in the rapid-chase theory (F. Schmidt, Weber, & Schmidt, 2014; T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009).
The research outlined above demonstrates that the rapid-chase theory can, under certain circumstances, be applied to
unconscious processing during movement initiation of a RT or pointing task. However, it remains to be determined whether
the rapid-chase theory can be applied to the processing of visual stimuli during movement execution. The application of the
rapid-chase theory to ongoing movements is essential to our understanding of the limits of unconscious information processing and the role of conscious information processing in our daily lives (Kunde, Reuss, & Kiesel, 2012). It is thought that
differences in processes underlying movement initiation and movement execution might exist due to mechanical ease
(Christensen, Kristiansen, Rowe, & Nielsen, 2008), the involvement of the dorsal stream (Milner & Goodale, 1995, 2008),
or a lowered prime activation threshold (Cressman et al., 2007). Nevertheless, no studies have examined the rapid-chase theory in the context of movement execution. To date, only a few studies investigating the influence of unconscious information
processing actually presented the prime after movement onset.
These studies (Cressman et al., 2007, 2013; Fukui & Gomi, 2012) used metacontrast masking to investigate the impact of
invisible primes on movement control. Participants completed a rapid aiming movement to a center target flanked by a left
and a right target. The prime was presented at movement onset or after a 100 ms delay and was followed by the mask after
a constant prime-mask SOA. In a proportion of the trials, participants were required to correct their movement to the left or
right target in response to the mask. Overall, the results indicated that the primes did influence the control of ongoing movements since adjustments to the correct target occurred sooner in congruent compared to incongruent and neutral trials. Furthermore, participants initially made movement deviations towards the incorrect target in incongruent trials. These studies
provide preliminary evidence that movement execution follows the rapid-chase criteria; specifically, the observed motor output abides by the initiation and takeover criteria. Nevertheless, the independence criterion could not be verified since the SOA
was not varied.
The present experiment varied the time between prime and mask onset relative to movement onset to determine if
unconscious visual stimuli are processed according to the rapid-chase theory at different time points during an ongoing
movement. The importance of looking at several time points to establish the feedforward processing of the visuomotor system has been documented by previous researchers to avoid certain misconceptions about the priming effects as it changes
across time (F. Schmidt, Haberkamp, & Schmidt, 2011; Lingnau & Vorberg, 2005; VanRullen & Koch, 2003). In the present
study, the time between prime and mask onset was manipulated in order to investigate unconscious processing during
movement execution (Experiment 1). We hypothesized based on the rapid-chase theory that the priming effect would
increase as the SOA increased because the prime would be able to influence the movement for a longer duration leading
to larger overt deviations to the incorrect target in incongruent trials. Additionally, the time between movement onset
and prime onset was manipulated, while keeping the prime-mask SOA constant, to determine if the influence of the primes
changes depending on the time they are presented during movement (Experiment 2). We predicted that the priming effect
would be unaffected given the constant SOA, but that deviations elicited by the prime and corrections in response to the
mask would occur later as the time between movement onset and prime onset increased.
2. Methods
2.1. Participants
Twelve right-handed young adults (mean age = 21.8 years, 7 females) with normal or corrected-to-normal vision volunteered to participate in the experiment. Handedness was assessed using the modified Edinburgh handedness inventory
(Oldfield, 1971; mean score = 71.9 ± 18.7). The study was approved by the University of Ottawa Health Sciences and Science
Research Ethics Board. Prior to data collection, participants provided written informed consent.
2.2. Experimental set-up
Participants were seated approximately 10 cm from the edge of the table in a dimly lit room. Participants performed the task
with their right hand. An infrared-emitting diode, positioned on the tip of the participants’ right index finger, was monitored
using an OPTOTRAK (Northern Digital, Waterloo, Ontario) motion analysis system, with a spatial resolution of 0.01 mm. In each
trial (see Section 2.4 Procedure) data were collected at a sampling frequency of 500 Hz for 3 s. The stimuli were projected from a
Samsung 245B LCD monitor (refresh rate of 60 Hz and a response time of 5 ms), onto a reflective surface that was placed 28 cm
below the monitor so that the stimuli appeared to lie in the same plane as the occluded right hand.
2.3. Stimuli
Stimuli were presented using C/C++ software, within which a custom written timer was created to ensure the proper timing of all events. All stimuli were white on a black background. The 17 ms prime stimulus consisted of a left-pointing arrow,
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J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Direct pointing trials to
the center target
Congruent
Neutral
Incongruent
Perturbed pointing
trials to the left target
Perturbed pointing
trials to the right target
Fig. 1. Prime-mask stimuli presented in the direct pointing trials (top row) and in the perturbed pointing trials (left mask: middle row; right mask: bottom
row), separated by prime-mask congruency (congruent, neutral, and incongruent). Note: Primes were white on a black background.
a right-pointing arrow, or a neutral prime. The dimensions of the arrow primes were 4 9 mm. The neutral star shaped
prime was constructed by superimposing the left and right arrow primes. The mask stimulus consisted of a left-pointing
arrow, a right-pointing arrow, or a neutral mask. The arrow masks were similar in shape to the arrow primes but were larger
in size (23 28 mm) (see Fig. 1). The center of each mask had a cut-out of the neutral shape such that the outer contour of
the neutral prime equalled the inner contour of the masks.
2.4. Procedure
Participants completed two mask pointing tasks and a prime identification task. The two mask pointing tasks were completed on separate days. The mask pointing tasks differed with respect to the timing of the stimulus sequence. In one task,
the time between prime and mask onset was manipulated by presenting the prime at movement onset and varying the
prime-mask SOA between 33, 50, and 67 ms (Experiment 1). The start of the movement began when the finger moved a
resultant distance of 10 mm from its initial location on the home position, which was determined by monitoring the finger
position data online using a windows socket (Winsock). In the other task, the time between prime and mask onset was constant at 50 ms, but prime presentation followed movement onset by a time of 17, 33, or 50 ms (Experiment 2). The two tasks
were completed in different sessions, each lasting between 1.5 and 2 h. The mask pointing tasks were counterbalanced
between participants.
In both mask pointing tasks, participants placed their right index finger on the home position indicated by a white circle
(1 cm in diameter) that was approximately 20 cm in front of their body and aligned with their body midline. The three targets (33 33 mm) consisted of a white square outline. The distance from the center of the circular home position to the center of the middle target was 27 cm and the distance from the center of the middle target to the center of the left and right
targets was 7 cm (see Fig. 2). Participants fixated on the middle white square target displayed in the center of the screen.
Participants could initiate their response to the middle target at any time once the outline of the target boxes became bold
(go-signal), so long as their movement was complete within 3 s following the go-signal. Participants were told to initiate
their response by lifting their finger and moving it towards the middle target. The task was not a reaction time task, but participants were given a movement time goal of 400–600 ms.
After movement onset, a prime was presented in the middle target. The prime was either a left-pointing arrow, a rightpointing arrow, or a neutral star shape. A blank screen followed the prime which in turn was followed by the mask. The mask
indicated the target location and remained on the screen, in the middle target box, until the response was completed. In
Experiment 1, the prime was presented in the middle target at movement onset, defined as the time when the finger moved
10 mm from the home position. In this case, the prime-mask SOA varied between 33, 50, and 67 ms. In the other task, the
prime-mask SOA was constant at 50 ms but the onset of the prime relative to movement onset varied between 17, 33, and
50 ms (see Fig. 2).
In 2/3 of the testing trials (direct pointing trials), a neutral prime was followed by a neutral mask and, in this case, participants were instructed to complete their movement initiated to the middle target box (see Table 1). After each direct
pointing trial, participants received verbal feedback on their MT. MT was defined online as the time from when the finger
moved 10 mm from its initial position on the home position until velocity fell below 0.01 m/s (provided that it remained
below 0.01 m/s for 500 ms). Terminal feedback regarding final position was provided on all direct pointing trials by a yellow
circle (1 cm in diameter) appearing directly above the location where the movement was completed, regardless of where the
finger landed (i.e., inside or outside the target). In the remaining 1/3 of the testing trials (perturbed trials), the left- or rightpointing arrow mask was presented requiring participants to modify their initial movement and move to the left or right
target box, respectively. In these trials, the mask was preceded by the neutral, left- or right-pointing arrow prime. The perturbed trials were divided equally among the neutral, congruent, and incongruent prime-mask conditions. No feedback with
regards to MT was provided on these trials, but participants did receive terminal feedback regarding their endpoint position.
Participants began each mask pointing session with a practice block of 20 trials to the middle target to get accustomed to
the task and MT goal. In the practice trials, a neutral prime and mask were presented with a prime-mask SOA of 50 ms. Participants then completed 540 randomized mask pointing trials with the restriction that no more than 3 perturbed trials were
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
79
Feedback
Until next trial
Experiment 1
SOA
33, 50, 67 ms
Mask
Until response is
completed
Blank screen
17, 33, 50 ms
Prime
17 ms
Mask
Until response is
completed
Go signal
Until movement
onset
Blank screen
33 ms
Prime
17 ms
Fixation
500 - 1500 ms
7 cm
27 cm
Go signal
Until 17, 33, 50
ms after
movement onset
Fixation
500 - 1500 ms
SOA
50 ms
Experiment 2
Fig. 2. The time course of stimulus presentation for the mask pointing task in Experiment 1 (on the left) and Experiment 2 (on the right). The trial sequence
depicts a direct pointing trial requiring a movement to the middle target since both prime and mask were neutral. SOA: stimulus onset asynchrony.
presented in a row and that at the beginning of every 108 trials (which coincided with self-terminated breaks) the first 5
trials were direct pointing trials. A breakdown of the number of trials completed in each mask pointing task separated by
prime-mask congruency is presented in Table 1. Overall, there were a total of 18 different perturbed trial combinations
per experiment since there were 3 prime shapes, 2 directional mask shapes, and 3 varying times for stimuli presentation
(Experiment 1: prime-mask onset and Experiment 2: movement-prime onset).
Following the second session of the mask pointing task, participants were made aware of the prime stimulus and completed a prime identification task to assess their conscious awareness of the primes. Presentation of the prime and mask in
the prime identification task differed slightly from that of the mask pointing task. First, participants did not execute a movement, but were instructed to keep their right index finger on the home position during the entire task. Since participants did
not execute a movement, the prime appeared 1500 ms after the targets turned bold and the mask remained on the screen for
500 ms. Similar to the mask pointing task, prime shape and prime-mask SOA were randomized. In contrast to the mask
pointing task, the mask shapes were not randomized and one block of trials contained neutral masks while the other block
contained directional masks (i.e., randomized between left and right-pointing arrow masks), as the shape of the mask has
been shown to bias participants’ responses (Albrecht & Mattler, 2012; Vermeiren & Cleeremans, 2012). Participants were
told that each prime was presented with the same probability and that they had to try and identify the shape of the prime.
If they were unsure, they were asked to provide their best guess. To avoid any indirect priming effects (see Vorberg et al.,
2003), participants verbally reported their answer 500 ms after mask onset, which was denoted by the disappearance of
the mask. In addition to the objective measures, subjective measures were included to capture participants’ perception of
their visual experience. Following the 3-alternative forced choice task, participants rated their perceptual awareness using
a perceptual awareness scale with values ranging from 1 to 5. The scale was adopted from Christensen et al. (2008), where
the values 1 to 5 were associated with (1) ‘‘no perception of a stimulus”, (2) ‘‘possible vague perception of a stimulus without
the ability to identify it”, (3) ‘‘definite perception of a stimulus without the ability to identify it”, (4) ‘‘definite perception of a
stimulus with the possible ability to identify it”, and (5) ‘‘definite perception of a stimulus with a definite ability to identify
it”. Participants’ responses were manually entered by the experimenter. There was no time limit for identifying the prime or
providing a perceptual awareness rating since accuracy was the main objective of the task. No feedback was provided
regarding the shape of the prime stimulus.
Before each prime identification block, participants viewed three trials in which each prime was presented for 167 ms
with a prime-mask SOA of 334 ms so that the participants could clearly see each prime once before the start of the testing
session. This also allowed the participants to familiarize themselves with the shape of the primes and the type of responses
required. Participants completed one prime identification block with neutral masks and one with directional masks. Each
block contained 10 trials for each prime shape and prime-mask SOA combination resulting in 90 trials per block for a total
of 180 trials. The order of the blocks was counterbalanced between participants.
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J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Table 1
The breakdown of the 540 trials for each of the mask pointing tasks based on the number of trials for each prime-mask combination. The table is further divided
by the time between prime offset and mask onset for Experiment 1 and the time between movement onset and prime onset for Experiment 2. The neutral mask
appeared in 2/3 of the trials and each prime stimulus occurred with equal probability in trials with a directional mask.
Experiment 1: Time between prime offset and mask
onset
Experiment 2: Time between movement onset and
prime onset
Mask shape
Neutral
Directional (left and right)
Total
Prime shape
Neutral
Congruent
Incongruent
Neutral
17 ms
120
20
20
20
180
33 ms
120
20
20
20
180
50 ms
120
20
20
20
180
Total
360
60
60
60
540
2.5. Data analyses
For the perceptual data, the proportion of correct responses in the objective task were submitted to an arcsin-square root
transformation and a repeated measures analysis of variance (RM ANOVA) was used to compare the data across conditions of
block (neutral or directional mask), SOA (33, 50, 67 ms), and prime direction (left, right or neutral). Additionally, the proportion of correct responses was compared to chance levels (33%) using a t-test. For the subjective task, the frequency of each
response on the perceptual awareness scale was calculated as a percentage and is reported as a descriptive measure.
In the mask pointing task, each pointing trajectory (x (lateral) and y (forward) coordinates) was plotted using Matlab software (Mathworks Inc, version 8.4.0), along with the corresponding velocity and acceleration profiles. The start position corresponded to the time when the finger first moved 10 mm from the home position and end position was manually selected
and corresponded to the time at which velocity fell below 0.01 m/s without rising above 0.01 m/s for another 50 ms. In perturbed trials, errors were defined as trials in which participants landed within the 2 SD bandwidth of the average endpoint
position of the direct pointing trials or landed on the opposite target; thus, they failed to reach the proper target. To determine the time at which participants made corrections in the perturbed trials, we averaged each individual’s average x position across time for a specific prime-mask combination and SOA (Experiment 1) or Delay (Experiment 2) to obtain their
average lateral spatial trajectory. In addition, the standard deviation of the mean position in the x direction was calculated
across trials. Path length was calculated by adding each increment of distance travelled between two subsequent time points
over the course of the trajectory. We looked to establish the maximum horizontal deviation achieved after 250 ms, which
was defined as the maximum horizontal position achieved in the incorrect direction, relative to the group average start position, before trajectories were adjusted to the appropriate left or right target. Consequently, if the trajectory only deviated
towards the target then the maximum horizontal position was a positive value, but if participants initially moved in the
incorrect direction then the maximum horizontal position was a negative value. The time associated with this maximum
deviation was also recorded. The time of correction corresponded to the time point when participants’ lateral position
met the spatial criterion, defined as the spatial location when the lateral position fell outside of the 2 SD bandwidth of
the group average lateral position calculated over the first 250 ms of the movement (see Fig. 3). To obtain the lateral spatial
priming effect, we first normalized each individual’s pointing trajectories by subtracting their average lateral position over
the first 250 ms from their average lateral spatial trajectory. This was done for each SOA, congruent, and incongruent condition. Then the normalized average lateral position in the congruent condition was subtracted from the normalized average
lateral position in the incongruent condition.
Unless specified otherwise, a 2 Mask (Left, Right) 3 Congruency (Congruent, Neutral, Incongruent) 3 SOA (33, 50,
67 ms) within-subjects RM ANOVA was used to analyse the data in Experiment 1 and a similar RM ANOVA was used in
Experiment 2 where the factor SOA was replaced by the factor Delay (17, 33, 50 ms). If the assumption of sphericity was
violated then the Greenhouse-Geisser correction factor was used and post hoc tests were conducted using the Bonferroni
correction with a set at 0.05. The data are reported as mean values with their associated standard deviation.
3. Results
3.1. Prime identification
Due to errors in data collection, 3 objective response trials (0.14%) and 4 subjective response trials (0.19%) were not
recorded.
Participants’ objective awareness in the prime identification task was first analyzed by comparing their total percent of
correct responses (44.5% ± 4.2 SD) across both blocks to chance levels (33%) using a t-test, which resulted in a significant difference, t(11) = 9.519, p < 0.001. A 2 Block 3 SOA RM ANOVA was then performed and revealed no significant main effects
for Block, F(1, 11) = 2.855, p = 0.119, or for SOA, F(2, 22) = 1.276, p = 0.299.
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J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
A
B
Displacement (mm)
80
Left
60
40
Maximum horizontal deviation
20
Time of correction
0
100
20
200
300
400
500
600
700
Right
Time (ms)
Fig. 3. (A) An example of a single pointing trajectory in an incongruent trial where a right prime arrow preceded a left mask arrow (black solid line). The
solid gray line represents the participant’s average trajectory in the xy plane, defined as the average x position for every 2 mm of forward movement
progression in the y direction, in direct pointing trials with its 2 standard deviation (SD) bandwidth (dotted gray line). Notice that the trajectory was first
modified in the direction of the prime arrow but was then corrected to the target indicated by the mask. (B) An individual’s average lateral position over
time for a single prime-mask combination and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; Experiment 1) or Delay (Experiment 2). The gray arrow indicates the
maximum horizontal deviation while the gray dotted line represents the time of correction.
Since there was no significant main effect for Block or SOA, we focussed the remainder of our analysis on the block with the
directional masks because these trials were similar to those in which participants had to make a correction to the left or right
target in the mask pointing task. A 3 Congruency RM ANOVA revealed that there was a main effect for Congruency, F(2, 22)
= 3.457, p = 0.049, but post hoc tests did not reveal any significant differences between the congruency conditions. However,
the neutral prime condition was the only condition where performance was significantly above chance, t(11) = 3.787,
p = 0.003. Consequently, participants were not aware of the directional primes above chance levels in perturbed trials. This
was further confirmed by participants’ subjective awareness responses (see Table 2), which revealed that participants reported
‘‘no perception of a stimulus” on the majority of trials at all SOAs. In fact, when participants subjectively reported ‘‘no perception of a stimulus”, they guessed the neutral prime on 51% of these trials. As a result, any differences in movement trajectory
between congruent and incongruent trials cannot be attributed to the perception of the prime stimulus.
3.2. Experiment 1
3.2.1. Direct pointing trials
A total of 2.66% of the direct pointing trials, trials in which a neutral prime and mask were presented, were lost because
the marker was not visible or the participant did not finish their movement within 3 s after the go signal. On the remaining
trials, participants completed their movements within the movement time goal (average MT = 505.8 ms ± 23.3 SD) and
landed within the center target. Average performance measures of these remaining trials were submitted to a 3 SOA RM
ANOVA. Analyses revealed that there were no significant differences in MT, path length or endpoint position between the
different SOAs (MT: F(2, 22) = 3.310, p = 0.055; Path length: F(2, 22) = 0.450, p = 0.643; x endpoint position: F(2, 22)
= 1.141, p = 0.338; y endpoint position: F(2, 22) = 2.154, p = 0.140). Furthermore, endpoint variable error did not differ
between the different SOA conditions as there was no significant main effect for SOA in the x direction, F(2, 22) = 0.845,
p = 0.443, or the y direction, F(2, 22) = 0.072, p = 0.931. Consequently, SOA did not influence movement time, pointing trajectories or final position when the prime and mask were neutral.
3.2.2. Perturbed pointing trials
A total of 4.91% of the trials were lost because the marker was not visible or participants did not complete the movement
within 3 s after the go signal. An additional 7 trials (0.34%) were excluded from analysis because participants went straight to
the correct target location without initiating their movements to the center target.
To extend the rapid-chase theory to movement execution it must be shown that all three criteria were followed. By examining the number of successful corrections to the appropriate target it can be determined whether the mask was capable of
exerting its influence before the movement was completed as outlined by the takeover criterion. In fact, 88.2% ± 12.7 SD of
the perturbed trials were successful such that participants corrected their movement to the appropriate target (see Table 3
for average error results). Thus, the masks were capable of taking over the movement. On trials that were not corrected, participants landed on the center target. The number of these error trials were modulated by SOA, F(2, 22) = 5.945, p = 0.009, and
Congruency, F(2, 22) = 4.419, p = 0.024, such that more errors occurred with a 67 ms SOA compared to a 33 ms SOA,
p = 0.027, and more errors were committed in the neutral prime trials compared to incongruent trials, p = 0.026.
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J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Table 2
The percentage (%) of correct responses and frequency (%) of perceptual awareness responses with their associated standard deviations for the prime
identification task separated by block and prime-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). The percent correct was further divided by prime shape (neutral and
directional). Note that 1 indicated ‘‘no perception of a stimulus” and 5 indicated ‘‘definite perception of a stimulus with a definite ability to identify it”.
Block
Neutral mask
Directional mask
SOA
Prime
direction
33 ms
50 ms
67 ms
Total
33 ms
50 ms
67 ms
Total
Percent correct (%)
Neutral
Directional
60.8 (19.3)
35.9 (8.7)
57.5 (19.1)
40.4 (12.1)
56.7 (18.3)
43.8 (11.5)
58.3 (13.9)
40.0 (8.6)
49.6 (22.8)
35.8 (14.6)
55.8 (21.5)
35.8 (13.8)
64.2 (23.5)
35.9 (13.7)
56.5 (16.8)
35.8 (11.8)
60.7 (18.6)
17.3 (13.8)
6.7 (6.7)
6.7 (5.3)
8.6 (11.5)
60.6 (15.6)
14.2 (16.2)
5.3 (5.2)
10.0 (7.1)
10.0 (10.2)
59.4 (17.9)
13.9 (14.3)
7.2 (5.3)
10.6 (6.5)
8.9 (9.0)
60.2 (16.1)
15.1 (13.9)
6.4 (4.8)
9.1 (5.1)
9.2 (9.6)
57.4 (26.4)
20.3 (18.5)
12.8 (7.4)
7.2 (7.6)
2.2 (3.3)
60.0 (20.1)
20.3 (22.1)
9.4 (7.2)
6.4 (5.8)
3.9 (4.0)
61.2 (16.5)
15.6 (16.0)
10.3 (7.4)
7.8 (6.9)
5.0 (5.6)
59.6 (18.9)
18.7 (17.1)
10.9 (5.1)
7.1 (4.9)
3.7 (3.3)
Response
Frequency of perceptual
awareness responses (%)
1
2
3
4
5
Having established that the masks took over control of the movement on the majority of trials, we next looked to determine the prime’s influence on performance. The subsequent analyses were performed only on successfully completed perturbed trials (i.e., trials completed to the correct left and right targets). Importantly with these trials, the prime-mask SOA did
not affect average final endpoint position or the variability around this position when pointing to the left and right targets
(p > 0.05). To demonstrate that the prime influenced the trajectory of the movement as stated by the initiation criterion, we
must show that the prime influenced kinematic variables such as time and position by showing a difference between congruency conditions.
In support of the initiation criterion, MT analyses revealed a main effect for Congruency, F(2, 22) = 17.701, p < 0.001. As
expected, MT in congruent trials was significantly shorter in the congruent than in the incongruent and neutral conditions,
p < 0.001 and p = 0.018, respectively. No significant differences were observed between the incongruent and neutral trials,
p = 0.212. Furthermore, there was a significant main effect for Mask, F(1, 11) = 38.981, p < 0.001, since MT was significantly
longer when pointing to the left target compared to the right target.
In addition to the MT data, the time of correction provides further support in favour of the initiation criterion suggesting
that the prime influenced the pointing trajectory (see Fig. 4). Specifically, the analysis of the time of correction resulted in a
significant main effect for Congruency, F(2, 22) = 42.038, p < 0.001, revealing that corrections occurred sooner in the congruent condition compared to the incongruent and neutral conditions, p < 0.001, and corrections occurred sooner in the neutral
condition compared to the incongruent condition, p = 0.010.
Participants’ maximum horizontal deviation also showed a significant main effect for Congruency, F(2, 22) = 15.490,
p < 0.001. Participants deviated more in the incorrect direction in the incongruent condition compared to the congruent
(p = 0.003) and neutral (p = 0.001) conditions. In other words, participants were closer to the correct target in the neutral
and congruent conditions compared to the incongruent condition. This deviation towards the incorrect target in incongruent
trials is highlighted in the average lateral spatial trajectories (see Fig. 5A), where participants clearly started moving in the
direction indicated by the prime before making a second correction towards the correct target.
Overall, the current analysis of the kinematic variables supports both the initiation and takeover criteria of the rapidchase theory. The prime initially influenced the direction of the movement supporting the initiation criterion. On most trials,
participants were able to finish their movement at the correct target location providing evidence for the takeover criterion.
We next looked to determine whether or not the data fit the prediction of the independence criterion. To do this, we established the influence of SOA on the lateral spatial priming effect functions. Specifically, the lateral spatial priming effect
should initially be the same for all SOA conditions, such that all priming functions follow the same average time course,
as they are initially controlled by the prime. Once the mask starts to exert its influence on the prime the different priming
functions would be expected to deviate one at a time from the remaining invariant functions. Specifically, the priming effect
functions would start to individually deviate from the common time course in a predictable manner based on the primemask SOA with the shorter SOAs deviating before the longer SOAs. It is possible that the time of correction not only increases
with SOA in the incongruent condition, but also in the congruent condition, as the mask may enhance the response process at
different times depending on its onset as shown by F. Schmidt and Schmidt (2010) and T. Schmidt and Schmidt (2009). Moreover, it is predicted that the maximum horizontal deviation and the corresponding time at which this position occurred
should be similar across SOAs in congruent trials. In contrast, these variables should show an increase in incongruent trials
as the SOA increases because the prime would control the movement for a longer duration resulting in larger deviations in
the incorrect direction, which is reflected by a larger priming effect. With respect to the neutral condition, similar horizontal
deviation values should be seen across SOAs since participants would be travelling straight ahead to the center target. Similar to the congruent and incongruent conditions, the time of correction should also increase in the neutral condition.
Overall, these predictions are not supported by the data derived from participants’ average lateral position over time as
shown in Fig. 4A or observed in the lateral spatial priming functions shown in Fig. 5B. MT and the time of correction revealed
a main effect for SOA (MT: F(2, 22) = 78.444, p < 0.001; Time of correction: F(2, 22) = 10.481, p = 0.001). As outlined above,
SOA
33 ms
50 ms
67 ms
Congruency
Mask
C
N
I
C
N
I
C
N
I
Errors (%)
Movement time (ms)
Both
Left
Right
Both
8.4 (9.3)
640.8 (51.7)
588.1(62.3)
614.4 (54.0)
11.8 (15.7)
649.7 (47.9)
607.7 (59.4)
628.7 (50.5)
6.5 (8.3)
665.2 (52.6)
612.4 (61.5)
638.8 (52.1)
11.8 (14.3)
643.4 (51.8)
599.8 (56.2)
621.6 (53.1)
17.3 (19.5)
657.7 (50.0)
620.0 (65.4)
638.8 (51.2)
10.0 (12.9)
676.2 (58.0)
622.0 (62.7)
649.1 (57.6)
12.1 (14.6)
674.6 (54.7)
611.7 (47.8)
643.2 (45.1)
16.4 (17.6)
697.6 (69.1)
632.8 (51.8)
665.2 (53.9)
14.4 (17.2)
699.8 (58.0)
648.5 (59.0)
674.1 (54.5)
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Table 3
Average errors (%) and movement times (ms) in Experiment 1 separated by SOA (33 ms, 50 ms, and 67 ms) and Congruency (Congruent (C), Neutral (N), and Incongruent (I)) with the associated standard deviation.
The results are collapsed across the directional masks (Both) when no significant differences were observed between the left and right-pointing arrow masks.
83
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J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Experiment 1
Experiment 2
Congruent
Maximum horizontal
deviation (mm)
A
Incongruent
Neutral
1
0
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5
-6
-7
Time of maximum
horizontal
deviation (ms)
B
370
350
330
310
290
270
250
Time of correction (ms)
C 480
460
440
420
400
380
360
340
33 ms
50 ms
SOA
67 ms
17 ms
33 ms
50 ms
Delay
Fig. 4. (A) The maximum horizontal deviation, (B) the time of maximum horizontal deviation and (C) the time of correction relative to movement onset
collapsed across the left and right masks as a function of the different stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) (Experiment 1: left side) and Delay (Experiment 2:
right side) conditions. Congruent: black lines; Neutral: dark gray lines; Incongruent: light gray lines. Error bars represent the standard error of the mean.
the time of correction is expected to increase with SOA in the incongruent conditions and may increase in the congruent
trials. In accordance with these predictions, it appears that the time when participants started moving in the correct direction slightly increased with SOA for all prime-mask congruency conditions, as seen in Fig. 4C.
In contrast to our hypothesis, the maximum horizontal deviation data did not reveal a main effect for SOA, F(2, 22)
= 3.336, p = 0.079. Furthermore, both the maximum horizontal deviation, F(4, 44) = 0.286, p = 0.792, and the time at which
this value was attained, F(4, 44) = 0.927, p = 0.457, failed to show a significant Congruency SOA interaction as predicted
by the independence criterion (see Fig. 4A and B). In the incongruent condition, the maximum horizontal deviation did
not increase between the 50 ms and 67 ms SOA nor did the time at which this value occur increase between the 33 ms
and 50 ms condition. There were no significant main effects for Mask so the results are collapsed across directional masks.
The independence criterion is further refuted by observing the priming effect functions found in Fig. 5B. When pointing to
both the left and right targets, it can be seen that the priming effect functions do not follow the rapid-chase theory. Even
though the three functions initially share a similar time course, the point at which they deviate and the maximum priming
amplitude achieved is incompatible with the prediction of the rapid-chase theory. For the left mask, the spatial priming
effect for the 50 ms SOA appears to deviate from the average time course before the 33 ms SOA which in turn deviated before
the 67 ms condition. Furthermore, the 33 ms and 50 ms conditions resulted in similar amplitudes suggesting that the prime
influenced the pointing trajectory to the same extent in the 33 and 50 ms conditions. For the right target, while the 33 ms
condition showed the smallest priming amplitude the spatial priming effect in the 50 ms condition is similar to that of the
67 ms condition as they both achieved similar amplitudes. In addition, the error bars overlap between the different priming
effect functions suggesting that the priming effect at the different SOAs are not distinct. Consequently, the data do not seem
to support the independence criterion of the rapid-chase theory since the priming functions do not deviate from the average
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J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Left Target
Right Target
33 ms
A 80
50 ms
67 ms
X position (mm)
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
-10
Priming effect (mm)
B
5
0
-5
-10
-15
-20
-25
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Time from prime onset (ms)
Fig. 5. (A) The average lateral spatial trajectory and (B) the lateral spatial priming effect (incongruent–congruent) when pointing to the left and right targets
in Experiment 1 as a function of prime onset (i.e., movement onset). The line colours in (A) represent the different congruency conditions (congruent: black;
neutral: dark gray; incongruent: light gray). The standard error of the priming effect functions in (B) for the various SOA conditions are represented by
different colours (33 ms: light gray; 50 ms: dark gray; 67 ms: black). The vertical lines on the x-axis indicate the time of mask onset. For clarity the neutral
prime condition is excluded in the top figures but is presented from 300 to 500 ms in the inset. Positive values indicate movement in the correct direction
while negative values indicate movement in the incorrect direction.
time course according to the relative timing of the stimuli. However, this is mainly due to the 50 ms condition being similar
to the 33 ms condition and the 67 ms condition when pointing to the left and right target, respectively.
3.3. Experiment 2
3.3.1. Direct pointing trials
A total of 3.33% of the direct pointing trials were not recorded because the marker was not visible or the participant did
not finish their movement within the 3 s allotted time. In the remaining trials, participants completed their movements
within the goal MT (average MT = 511.1 ms ± 28.7 SD) to the center target. Performance measures for these trials were analyzed using a 3 Delay RM ANOVA. The MT analysis revealed a main effect for Delay, F(2, 22) = 12.965, p < 0.001. Post-hoc tests
showed that when the prime was presented 17 ms after movement onset, MT was significantly faster (501.4 ms ± 26.9 SD)
compared to when the prime was presented 33 ms (512.2 ms ± 32.1 SD, p = 0.017) or 50 ms (519.8 ms ± 29.7 SD, p = 0.004)
after movement onset. The difference between 33 ms and 50 ms was not significant, p = 0.135. Similar to Experiment 1, there
were no significant differences in the distance travelled in either delay conditions, F(2, 22) = 1.950, p = 0.166, as determined
by the path length. Additionally, no significant differences were observed with respect to endpoint position in the x, F(2, 22)
= 0.648, p = 0.533, and y direction, F(2, 22) = 0.311, p = 0.736, or variable error in the x, F(2, 22) = 0.468, p = 0.633, and y direction, F(2, 22) = 1.410, p = 0.265. The results indicate that the delay did not impact path length or final position when pointing
to the center target.
3.3.2. Perturbed pointing trials
A total of 7.27% of the trials were not recorded because the marker was not visible or participants took longer than 3 s to
complete their movement following the go signal. In addition to these trials, 4 trials (0.20%) were excluded from analysis
because participants went straight to the correct target location without making a correction.
Participants corrected their movement to the appropriate target on 82.2% ± 11.9 SD of the remaining perturbed trials (see
Table 4 for average error results). The error data revealed a Delay Congruency interaction, F(4, 44) = 2.667, p = 0.045. At the
50 ms delay, more errors were committed in the neutral condition compared to the congruent (p = 0.041) and incongruent
(p = 0.032) conditions. There was also a main effect for Congruency, F(2, 22) = 4.361, p = 0.025, but post hoc tests showed no
significant difference between conditions. Once again, the percentage of correct responses supports the takeover criterion
since the mask was able to take over the movement such that participants landed on the correct target on most of the trials.
86
Delay
17 ms
33 ms
50 ms
Congruency
Mask
C
N
I
C
N
I
C
N
I
Errors (%)
Movement time (ms)
Both
Left
Right
Both
15.2 (14.1)
636.7 (57.1)
597.7 (59.1)
617.2 (53.4)
17.7 (16.1)
664.4 (69.1)
618.6 (56.2)
641.5 (58.8)
15.1 (12.8)
668.3 (51.3)
616.2 (63.2)
642.3 (55.3)
16.8 (11.7)
670.4 (39.0)
611.9 (43.0)
641.1 (38.9)
18.4 (14.7)
684.0 (61.3)
626.2 (62.1)
655.1 (57.8)
16.4 (10.8)
685.8 (56.2)
634.9 (54.4)
660.3 (49.4)
17.9 (15.3)
676.9 (51.7)
623.3 (61.6)
650.1 (53.1)
27.9 (16.8)
698.0 (56.6)
661.7 (62.8)
679.9 (55.3)
15.3 (12.3)
706.9 (55.6)
665.2 (43.1)
686.1 (46.0)
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
Table 4
Average errors (%) and movement times (ms) in Experiment 2 separated by Delay (17 ms, 33 ms, and 50 ms) and Congruency (Congruent (C), Neutral (N), and Incongruent (I)) with the associated standard deviation.
The results are collapsed across the directional masks (Both) when no significant differences were observed between the left and right-pointing arrow masks.
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
87
The influence of the prime at various points in the pointing trajectory was determined by looking at movement time, time
of correction, and the maximum horizontal deviation on trials in which participants completed their movement to the target
indicated by the mask. Importantly, the final position in the x and y directions and corresponding variable errors were not
affected by the delay between movement onset and prime onset (p > 0.05). The main purpose of Experiment 2 was to determine the impact of the prime when presented at different time points throughout the pointing trajectory. Experiment 2 does
not explicitly test the rapid-chase theory since the prime-mask SOA was not manipulated, but it can still provide insight into
the theory. An influence of prime-mask congruency across all delays would suggest that the primes can still exert an influence following various delays after movement onset, supporting the initiation criterion of the rapid-chase theory. Similar to
Experiment 1, the mask is expected to control the later portion of the movement, according to the takeover criterion, such
that participants reach the correct target location. Although movement time and time of correction relative to movement
onset should differ between congruent and incongruent conditions, these time variables should increase in all congruency
conditions as the delay increased. In support of the independence criterion, we would expect that, when time locked to
prime onset, the initial deviations in the average spatial trajectories (in Fig. 6A) would be unaffected by the prime onset delay
since the prime-mask SOA was constant. We would predict that the maximum horizontal deviation would not be influenced
by the time delay; however, the time at which this value was achieved relative to movement onset should increase in the
incongruent condition. Furthermore, the time of correction should also increase linearly in all congruency conditions. To
summarize, it is expected that the priming effect functions should be the same for all delay conditions, but the onset of
the priming effect functions will be delayed depending on the time between movement onset and prime onset.
The movement time analysis revealed a main effect for Congruency, F(2, 22) = 12.978, p < 0.001, suggesting that the prime
influenced movement regardless of the delay condition. The MT data, once again, support the initiation criterion since MT
was significantly shorter in the congruent condition compared to the neutral, p = 0.002, and incongruent conditions,
p = 0.001. There was also a significant main effect for Mask, F(1,11) = 33.837, p < 0.001, since MT was faster to the right target
compared to the left target.
Similar to the movement time data, the time of correction supports the initiation criterion. With respect to time of correction, analyses showed a main effect for Congruency, F(2, 22) = 14.810, p = 0.001. The time of correction was significantly
earlier in congruent trials compared to the neutral and incongruent trials, p = 0.026 and p < 0.001, respectively. No significant
differences were seen between neutral and incongruent trials, p = 0.137.
Similar to the time data, analyses of the maximum horizontal deviation revealed a significant main effect for Congruency,
F(2, 22) = 6.884, p = 0.017. Participants’ position in congruent and incongruent conditions differed significantly, p = 0.008. In
sum, when participants started correcting their movement, they were closer to the correct target in the congruent and neutral conditions compared to the incongruent condition suggesting that the prime initially triggered its response resulting in a
deviation in the incorrect direction in incongruent trials.
Taken together, the analyses of the kinematic variables provide evidence that the prime exerted an influence on the
movement regardless of when it came on during the execution of the pointing task; nevertheless, participants were able
to land on the correct target location indicated by the mask. Participants corrected and completed their movement later
in incongruent trials as can be seen in Fig. 6A.
Even though the prime-mask SOA did not vary during Experiment 2, the kinematic data can still provide some insight
with respect to the independence criteria of the rapid-chase theory. Specifically, MT and time of correction relative to movement onset should increase as the delay increases, but the maximum horizontal deviation should not increase since the mask
followed prime onset at a constant time of 50 ms. In fact, MT and time of correction increased as the delay increased as evidence by the significant main effect for Delay (MT: F(2, 22) = 25.699, p < 0.001; time of correction: F(2, 22) = 15.575,
p = 0.001), and the maximum horizontal deviation data did not reveal a significant main effect for Delay, F(2, 22) = 0.061,
p = 0.868. The data are collapsed across directional masks since there were no significant main effects for Mask. In addition,
it is expected that the time at which the maximum horizontal deviation was achieved should increase in incongruent trials
relative to movement onset but remain the same for congruent and neutral trials. In contrast to this prediction, the time following movement onset at which the trajectory reached its maximum deviation did not increase linearly in the incongruent
condition, Congruency Delay: F(4, 44) = 0.462, p = 0.763 (see Fig. 4A and B). While the MT, time of correction, and position
data support the independence criterion, the time at which the maximum deviation was achieved does not.
Furthermore, the rapid-chase theory predicts that priming onset, the time when the priming function deviates from 0
indicating a difference between congruent and incongruent trials, should be similar across all delay conditions when time
locked to prime onset. The amplitude of the different priming functions should be similar because the prime-mask SOA
was constant. However, when examining Fig. 6B it is evident that the spatial priming effects do not follow the independence
criterion of the rapid-chase theory. The left and right spatial priming effects show a different pattern of results, as the order
in which the different delay conditions deviate from the average time course is different. To the left target, the 17 ms and
50 ms Delay conditions deviated at approximately the same time while the 33 ms condition deviated later and achieved a
smaller peak amplitude. When pointing to the right target, the 50 ms condition deviated first followed by the 33 ms and then
the 17 ms Delay conditions. The onset of the priming effect does not appear to be tied to prime onset, as it does not reflect the
timing of the input conditions. Although the maximum position and time of correction data support the independence criterion, the time of the maximum horizontal deviation and priming effect data do not support the independence criterion.
In general, the results from Experiment 2 reveal that primes can influence the control of movements, when they are presented after a delay following movement onset, provided that sufficient time remains to execute a correction to the target
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Left Target
Right Target
17 ms
A 80
33 ms
50 ms
X position (mm)
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
B
5
Priming effect (mm)
-10
0
-5
-10
-15
-20
-25
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Time from prime onset (ms)
Fig. 6. (A) The average lateral spatial trajectory and (B) the lateral spatial priming effect (incongruent–congruent) when pointing to the left and right targets
in Experiment 2 as a function of prime onset. The line colours in (A) represent the different congruency conditions (congruent: black; neutral: dark gray;
incongruent: light gray). The standard error of the priming effect functions in (B) for the various Delay conditions are represented by different colours
(17 ms: light gray; 33 ms: dark gray; 50 ms: black). The vertical line on the x-axis indicates the time of mask onset. For clarity the neutral prime condition is
excluded in the top figures but is presented from 300 to 500 ms in the inset. Positive values indicate movement in the correct direction while negative
values indicate movement in the incorrect direction.
location. Additionally, Experiment 2 supports the initiation and takeover criteria, but provides further evidence against the
independence criterion during an ongoing movement.
4. Discussion
The two experiments investigated the influence of the timing of prime and mask onset on the online control of pointing
movements. Specifically, Experiment 1 was designed to test the predictions of the rapid-chase theory as it relates to movement execution. Previous pointing studies have shown support for the initiation and takeover criteria during movement execution but could not investigate the independence criterion because a fixed SOA was used. In order to determine if primes
and masks are processed according to the rapid-chase theory during response execution, we manipulated the prime-mask
SOA between 33, 50, and 67 ms which allowed us to determine if the data met the three criteria of the rapid-chase theory. It
was hypothesized that the observed motor output would abide by the three criteria outlined in the rapid-chase theory, as
has been shown in response initiation tasks (T. Schmidt et al., 2006; T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009; T. Schmidt & Seydell,
2008). In particular, the prime would dictate the initial portion of the movement (initiation criterion), such that, in incongruent trials, participants would deviate more in the incorrect direction compared to congruent trials. However, the mask
would seize control of the movement so that the correct target was reached before the movement was completed (takeover
criterion). Finally, the processing of the prime would initially be independent of the characteristics of the mask (independence criterion), such that the prime would have a greater influence (e.g., greater deviations in the incorrect direction) with
increases in SOA.
The results from the current experiment support both the initiation and takeover criteria of the rapid-chase theory and
replicate previous findings (Cressman et al., 2007, 2013; Fukui & Gomi, 2012), which have shown that a prime can influence
the online control of movement before the mask exerts its control. On the other hand, the results do not support the independence criterion, and thus refute the hypothesis that primes and masks are processed according to the rapid-chase theory
during response execution. In particular, the maximum horizontal deviation and the time of its occurrence did not reveal any
significant Congruency SOA interactions in Experiment 1. However, Schmidt and colleagues mainly determine whether the
data conform to the rapid-chase theory by observing the priming effect functions. In the current experiments it was found
that the observed spatial priming effect was not the same as the theoretical spatial priming effect predicted by the independence criterion. According to the independence criteria of the rapid-chase theory, the shortest SOA should deviate from the
average time course first and the longest SOA should deviate last with the intermittent SOA deviating after the first SOA but
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
89
before the last SOA condition. As the results in Experiment 1 demonstrate, not only did the spatial priming effect not deviate
in this predicted manner but the deviation pattern was different when correcting to the two target locations. The argument
that the independence criterion was not supported by the data in Experiment 1 is further substantiated by the findings of
Experiment 2. In Experiment 2 the time that the primes were presented relative to movement onset was manipulated, while
holding the prime-mask SOA constant at 50 ms. In this case, the rapid-chase theory would predict that the priming onset and
amplitude of the priming functions would be the same for all three delay conditions when time locked to prime onset. The
results failed to show the predicted time course since the priming onset for the different delay conditions occurred at different times relative to prime onset and, once again, the pattern between the two targets was different. Although the results
indicate that the prime can influence movement when presented after a delay following movement onset, the data do not
seem to abide by the independence criterion.
Previous studies in which prime-mask processing did not support the rapid-chase theory claimed that it was due to the
short prime-mask SOA (<30 ms; T. Schmidt et al., 2006), task difficulty (T. Schmidt & Schmidt, 2009), or the occlusion of the
prime stimulus by other distracting stimuli (F. Schmidt et al., 2014). Consequently, it was argued that recurrent processing
was necessary to complete these tasks. It is unlikely that these explanations apply to the current situation because the
prime-mask SOA was longer than 30 ms, the task did not require cognitive control in order to semantically process the prime
since there was a direct relationship between the prime and response (Klapp, 2015), and the relevant features of the prime
were not occluded. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the fact that fast recurrent processing (Bullier, 2001) could have
occurred in the present paradigm, leading to the lack of large overt deviations at the longer SOAs. It is not surprising that
the feedforward sweep elicited by the mask would have occurred faster than the one activated by the prime, since the mask
would have been more salient than the prime given it was larger in size and more task relevant, meaning it specified the
required response (Lamme, 2004).
It was thought that the unconscious processing of the prime might differ between movement initiation and movement
execution because of the increased mechanical ease of corrections (Christensen et al., 2008), the increased involvement of
the dorsal stream (Milner & Goodale, 1995, 2008) or the decrease of the activation threshold during movement execution
compared to movement initiation (Cressman et al., 2007). Specifically, it was thought that the prime would be processed
faster during movement execution because it would have access to the dorsal stream which has been shown to be involved
in the online control of action and does not necessitate conscious perception (Milner & Goodale, 1995, 2008).
In fact, Brenner and Smeets (2004) observed that participants adjusted their movements earlier during movement execution than movement initiation. However, in the current study, participants were slower to correct their movement compared to previous pointing studies (Brenner & Smeets, 2004; Cressman et al., 2007). This may be a result of the more
complicated stimulus–response (SR) mapping used in the current experiment compared to previous keypress and pointing
studies (Klotz & Wolff, 1995; Ocampo & Finkbeiner, 2013; T. Schmidt et al., 2006) that have mostly used relatively simple SR
mapping conditions where there is a one-to-one relationship between the mask and response. The current experiments used
a relatively difficult SR mapping since there were three possible responses with the middle target being the most probable
response. Furthermore, the timing of the mask relative to movement onset was varied, possibly leading participants to wait
or slow their movement until mask onset. Studies using complicated SR mappings, where two stimuli (e.g., a left or upper
semicircle) require a left keypress and two different stimuli (e.g., a right or lower semicircle) require a right keypress
response, show that priming effects tend to be reduced in these situations (Ansorge & Neumann, 2005; Ro, Singhal,
Breitmeyer, & Garcia, 2009). Consequently, task difficult may contribute to the current findings and should be considered
in future experiments.
Moreover, the amount of activation needed to trigger an action in response to the prime could differ depending on the
task to be performed. In fact it was hypothesized that the activation threshold would be lower in a pointing task as suggested
by Cressman et al. (2007) compared to a response initiation task. The current results suggest that there is a difference in
unconscious processing between movement initiation and movement execution since the current data do not follow the
rapid-chase theory, but previous movement initiation studies have supported the rapid-chase theory (T. Schmidt et al.,
2006; see also T. Schmidt et al., 2011 for a review). In contrast to our hypothesis, the prime activation threshold might have
been increased instead of lowered during movement execution. Similarly, the use of a gating mechanism or the manner in
which movements are controlled during flight could differ between movement initiation and execution.
The prime threshold might have been adjusted in advance of prime onset due to prior experience. Consciously perceived
positional errors (i.e., landing on the incorrect target in perturbed trials) (Jaśkowski, Skalska, & Verleger, 2003) or temporal
errors (i.e., failure to meet the MT goal in direct pointing trials) from previous trials could have resulted in participants
increasing the activation threshold needed to trigger a response to the onset of the prime stimulus in order to prevent unintentional errors. Processing fluency, the subjective feeling associated with the ease of processing information, could also
have led to a modification of the prime activation threshold (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Desender, Van Opstal, & Van
den Bussche, 2014). This increased activation threshold following errors would lead to a decrease in the overt deviations
observed in response to the prime stimulus.
The use of a gating mechanism is another possibility that could explain why the rapid-chase theory does not apply to
movement execution. Kiefer (2007) proposed a gating framework to explain the ability of an unconscious stimulus to elicit
an automatic response. Kiefer suggested that primes are under preemptive control, such that top-down influences such as
intention, task sets, and attention can be established prior to prime onset to enhance or reduce the unconscious processing of
the prime stimulus. The specification of these top-down factors allow prefrontal areas to gate specific information processing
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pathways that are relevant to the task as specified by the top-down factors (Kiefer, 2007). For example, in high conflict environments such as when a larger proportion of trials are incongruent the priming effect was smaller (Bodner & Lee, 2014;
Jaśkowski et al., 2003; Wolbers et al., 2006; see Ansorge, Kunde, & Kiefer, 2014 and Kunde et al., 2012 for a review), suggesting the gating mechanism decreased the processing of the prime leading to a decrease in the automatic response to the
prime.
In the current experiments, only 33% of the perturbed trials were congruent (11% of all trials). Consequently, for optimal
performance it would have been beneficial to limit the amount of control exerted by the prime because, in perturbed trials,
the prime was mainly task-irrelevant in the sense that it did not indicate the target location. In comparison to Schmidt’s
studies, we included neutral trials; thus it could be argued that the neutral prime and neutral mask condition was congruent
leading to an increase in the percentage of congruent trials (78% of all trials). The argument that direct pointing trials were
treated as congruent is supported by the finding that a greater number of errors in the perturbed trials occurred with a neutral prime suggesting that it was activating a response to the center target. Although the direct pointing trials could be
argued to be congruent trials, the presentation of the neutral prime before the neutral or directional mask should not have
altered participants’ original intentions because they were asked to initiate their movement to the center target; therefore,
the neutral prime did not specify a new response but was in line with the current and most common response.
According to Klapp (2015), a stronger stimulus–response binding would be established between the neutral prime and a
response to the center target because all neutral masks were preceded by a neutral prime leading to direct response priming.
Hence, the directional primes would not elicit as strong a response to the center target as the neutral prime. Klapp’s (2015)
automatization account is in contrast to the gating mechanism account since Klapp proposed that direct response priming
results from the automatization of the stimulus and response links and not from intentional control.
On the other hand, the current data may not obey the rapid-chase theory, not because the visual processing of the prime
and mask did not occur in a strict feedforward manner, but because of the way online movements are controlled. According
to the minimal intervention principle (Liu & Todorov, 2007; Todorov & Jordan, 2002), movements that deviate from the average trajectory are only corrected if they impede performance. To minimize effort, accuracy is prioritized in the task relevant
direction allowing for variability in the task-irrelevant dimension (Todorov & Jordan, 2002). In the present experiment, deviations in the horizontal direction might only become task relevant once the mask appears, specifying the target location.
Therefore, the system does not concern itself with these minimal errors due to sensory and motor noise because it might
have to correct the movement later in this direction once the mask appears indicating which target to land on. Nevertheless,
once the pointing trajectory exceeds an allowable margin of error, an adjustment is executed based on the person’s intention,
meaning the prime can only control overt deviations to a certain extent determined by the goals of the task. Similarly,
Oostwoud Wijdenes, Brenner, and Smeets (2011) found that the intensity of a correction depends on the time remaining
until the movement is complete. As a result, early corrections and late corrections occurred with a similar latency of correction but late corrections were made with a greater intensity providing additional evidence that corrections are executed differently as the movement progresses. Possibly the greater correction intensity in response to the mask might have obscured
the influence of the prime on movement trajectory because the prime was presented before the mask. Consequently, ongoing pointing movements might not be sensitive enough to detect the small changes induced by the prime when a limited
number of short prime-mask SOAs is used. Only 3 SOAs were used in Experiment 1 and the two extreme SOAs were only
separated by 50 ms.2 Having more SOAs might provide more insight into the application of the rapid-chase theory to ongoing
movements.
Furthermore, the movement variability observed in the current study might have occurred because the moving hand was
hidden from view. The inability to see the moving limb during movement could also explain why movement time
(Reichenbach, Thielscher, Peer, Bülthoff, & Bresciani, 2009) was longer in the current study compared to previous studies
using a similar experimental set-up where the hand was visible (Cressman et al., 2007, 2013). Our MT goal also allowed
for longer movement durations. However, in Experiment 2, MT in direct pointing trials increased as the delay increased suggesting that participants might have been waiting for the onset of the mask stimulus before completing their movement to
the center target.
Overall, the present results reveal that the prime is able to influence a movement even if it is presented at various time
points following movement onset and the mask can take over control of the movement as long as there is sufficient time to
make a correction. While these results support the first two tenets of the rapid-chase theory, the prime does not appear to be
initially processed independently from the mask as suggested by the third tenet (independence criterion). Thus, the results
do not appear to support the application of the rapid-chase theory to ongoing movements which means that determining
whether or not the prime and mask are processed in a feedforward manner cannot be resolved by simply observing the
behavioural output of the motor system. The prime and mask may still be processed in a feedforward manner but fast recurrent processing, modifying the prime activation threshold, gating the prime’s access to certain pathways or controlling
movements in a certain manner could have prevented feedforward processing or reduced the impact of the prime leading
to smaller movement deviations. All these explanations deserve further exploration using a reaching task since it has the
2
We also limited our analysis to the 33 and 67 ms SOAs but still found no significant Congruency SOA interaction with the maximum horizontal deviation,
the time of maximum horizontal deviation, or the time of correction.
J.C. Flannigan et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 42 (2016) 75–92
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potential to provide a greater insight into the inner workings of the decision making process and the automatic processing of
subliminal primes.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants from OGS (J.C.F.) and NSERC (E.K.C.).
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