Is the Self Real? (Hood, The Self Illusion, 2012)

 Bruce Hood. The Self Illusion. (2012) An excellent overview of the implications of neurological research on questions of awareness, both of the external world and of the self. Hood’s reporting of the research is IMO fair, based on my (gappy) knowledge derived from reading several dozen miscellaneous sources.

I think that the term “illusion” is unfortunate, since it suggests that the Self is not real. It is as real as all the other simulations generated by the brain. I note that the Self is centred on the body, and that my sensations of my body’s shape and colour etc are the same kind as my sensations of the shapes and colours of other bodies and objects in the world around me. So I conclude that these sensations are simulations, not illusions. As simulations, they must match reality well enough that I can do whatever it takes to survive and procreate. Evolution rewards mechanisms that enable those processes, so I conclude that the simulation my brain creates is good enough for those purposes.

Study of other organisms has revealed that their senses are not exactly the same as ours, so presumably their simulations of reality are different. This stance suggests that the famous conundrum about what it’s like to be a bat can be reframed as not knowing what a bat’s simulation of reality is like. But then we can’t know exactly what another human’s simulation is like either. A favourite question of my students was “How do we know that we see red the same way?” The answer is, we don’t. But we can tell whether we see the same differences between red and green. If we don’t, the we agree that one of us is red-green colour-blind.

This principle of comparing perceptions underlies all scientific research. Science has expanded from describing and classifying perceptions to recording measurements and devising mathematical models that predict the measurements. If we record the same measurements, then presumably we have stumbled on some constant in the simulations, and may infer that this implies some constant aspect of reality.

Hood spends some time discussing free will, and concludes that free will is also an illusion. There is no free will because all decisions are determined by a multiplicity of factors, starting with how our genes and environments interact to produce our individual brains. He reports cases of how brain tumours have changed people’s personalities and perceptions, and how removing the tumours has changed people more or less to back to what they were. It’s clear that if perceptions and attitudes change when the brain is damaged in some way then the notion of free-willed choice becomes questionable at least. That’s important because of our assignment of moral and hence sometimes of criminal guilt.

It seems to me that this approach to the free will problem misses the point. As framed, there is no way to distinguish between a freely willed and a determined choice. Both ways of choosing finally depend on preferences. Reasoning cannot choose, it can only present options. Whether our brain simulates a free choice, or we actually perform one, the result is the same. For free choice will act on options exactly like determined choice. Basically, we choose. Hood argues that insight into factors that influence or determine choice, and the extent to which the chooser cannot control them, should guide our notions of guilt and responsibility. I think he’s right.

All in all, a book well worth reading. ****

Unusual Brains: Thomson's Unthinkable (2018)

 Helen Thomson. Unthinkable. (2018) Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat showed that suitably edited case histories could help people understand the effects of stroke and other insults to the brain. His sensitive descriptions, his reports of interviews, his attempts to translate his patients’ accounts into accessible narratives, these and more have inspired generations of readers. One of them was Helen Thomson, who cherishes her interview with him a couple of years or so before he died. This book is in part a result of her admiration for Sacks, coupled with a wide-ranging curiosity, and enough neuroscience background (she has a B.Sc) to make sense of the topic of this book: how people with unusual brains manage to survive and thrive.
     Thomson tells the stories of nine people with congenital or acquired brain oddities. There’s Bob, who never forgets a moment. Or Tommy, whose personality changed utterly when he suffered an aneurysm. Or Sharon, whose sense of location is so bad that she has trouble navigating around her house. Thomson interviewed them all, as well as similar ones that she found along the way, and the scientists and psychiatrists who worked with these extraordinary outliers. The result is a reminder that we are our brains. When our brains don’t function as expected, we become different people. That’s the reason we are afraid of dementia, I think. Dementia shows us that what we think of as the most reliable component of our experience, our sense of self, is in fact the most fragile.
     The book confirms my belief that the brain constructs a simulation of reality with the Self, the “I”, not only at its centre but as the essential component, the part that holds it all together. Our “I” knows itself to be “here”, at the centre (the pathological version of this knowledge we call narcissism). If the connection between Self and some component of the simulation is broken or compromised, then not only the awareness of what’s “out there” is altered, but so is the Self.
     I believe that all brains, human and animal, construct such simulations, every one of them good enough to ensure that most members of a species will live long enough to produce offspring. But all of them incomplete and distorted in some way. The outliers that Thomson describes show the common features of the human simulation of reality. They also show how far from the norm any given simulation can be and still function as a human Self. So in the limited sense of the stable Self thereby implied, the Self is what makes each of us a person.
     Footnote: The Christian creeds assert the “resurrection of the body”, which suggests that one of the innovations of the Christian faith was the insight that a Self without a body is impossible. The Incarnation may be understood as another version of this insight. This insight has been slighted or ignored ever since the notion of a disembodied soul was introduced by Augustine and others..
     Recommended. ****

What it's Like To Be Someone Else: An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks)

 Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) The title quotes Temple Grandin, one of seven people whose brains function outside the range now labelled “neurotypical”, a term Sacks never used.
     The book begins with “Jonathan I”, an artist whose suffers a high fever, and wakes up unable to see colour. He’s even unable to remember colour. Being achromatic (lovely word, I think) is barely imaginable by anyone who grew up with black-and-white films. But being unable to recall colour, that’s impossible for us to imagine.
     Sacks’s gift is to convey something of the feeling of what it’s like to be the persons he describes. In doing so, he provides evidence that we perceive only what the brain can construct from the inputs of the senses, and that perceptions will vary with differences in the brain. People who are born with unusual brains, or who suffer lesions in the brain, are natural experiments in the range of possible human existence.
     For Sacks also sees that we are what we perceive. Changes in our perceptions are also changes in our selves. Our sense of self, our self-awareness, is part of the totality of perceptions that give us the experience of reality. Sacks’s case histories show that while we cannot fully imagine another person’s experience, we can know where and how our experience differs from that of others.
    Science is the attempt to describe, and the arts are attempts to share, our common experience. Sacks is one of the rare people who can combine these two modes of insight. Any of his books are worth reading. ****

Do you see what I see? (Hallucinations: Oliver Sacks)

     Oliver Sacks. Hallucinations (2012) A posthumous work assembled from Sacks’s notes and drafts. The result is a somewhat gappy discussion and occasionally rough style, but it still adds up to what to me appears a thorough survey of what’s known and unknown about hallucinations.
     Hallucinations are illusions, but they are almost always known to be illusions. Neurological research shows subtle differences between perception, illusion, hallucination, and memory. All involve the brain areas of sensory perception, but the limbic system and the frontal cortex behave differently. While we generally think first of visual hallucinations, hallucinations happen for every sense, as do illusions. Sacks as usual uses case histories to demonstrate the nature of different types of hallucination.
     I learned much. One thing is that the zig-zagged glittering visual aura that precedes most migraines is probably more common as the sole symptom of migraine. (Variations of it also precede epileptic seizures.) Since I experience that aura myself roughly once every other month or so, this information is somewhat reassuring.
     Another interesting fact is that people deprived of sight (even temporarily) experience visual hallucinations. These are oddly similar both in the content and in how the content changes over time.
      But mostly what I learned reinforces the hypothesis that the brain constructs the experience of what we are pleased to call reality. The centre of that experience is the self, the “I”. Sensory deprivation changes the “I”, not merely what the “I” sees or doesn’t see. Many people who lose their sight eventually are no longer able to remember their past visually, for example. But memories are at the core of our sense of self. We are not only our present experience, we are our memories.
     Another very good read. Recommended. ***½

Homo musicis: Why humans make music

Daniel Levitin. This is Your Brain on Music (2006) Levitin was in the music business in LA for many years, but discovered a yen for understanding what it was all about. So he became a neurologist, believing that understanding how the brain works when we make or respond to music would explain it all. It doesn’t, but it comes close.
     Music is species-specific behaviour: only humans make music.We could label oursleves homo musicis. Other animals use sounds for communication and for courtship displays, but none, as far as we can tell, play around with sound-sequences like we do. Not even whales.
     Every known culture and society has music. The three features of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. What’s interesting is how we perceive them. Rhythm is built on sequences of strong and weak beats. We recognise the same rhythm whether played fast or slow. Melody is a sequence of intervals, not notes: we recognise the same melody whether played with higher or lower notes. Harmony in the sense of timbre is omni-present: human voices and all musical instruments generate different combinations of overtones in addition to the main tone. Think of chords as deliberately created and controlled overtone groups. Then a melody becomes a sequence of chords combined with a rhythm. By the way, a melody can be played with different rhythms. And in every culture, music and dance are connected. You can’t have one without the other. (The Western habit of suppressing movement while listening to a performance is a relatively short-lived aberration.)
     Levitin sees two puzzles: First, how do we perceive and produce music? Second, how come music is such an apparently necessary part of human experience? Even people who are tone-deaf experience music as more or less pleasurable. Neurology provides some of the answers. Every part of the brain is involved when we make or listen to music. The cerebellum controls repetitive movements. The cortex plans them, and generates expectations. The limbic system supplies both the memory and the emotions. (It’s unclear just how many melodies we can recognise, for most of us it’s in the hundreds.) The auditory system decodes the complex wave-forms of the sounds of music, and delivers the results to other areas of the brain that recognise melody, rhythm, harmony, and the words of a song. Music is intimately connected with movement and language.
     We use music to build community. Although we can make it a solitary pursuit, it is first and foremost a collective one. We sing together, we dance together, we make music in groups. We prefer the music of our ingroup. Music is part of our courtship behaviour. It persists in our memories after dementia has destroyed almost every other part of our selves. A fragment of a song will trigger memories, and the emotions that accompany them. Music is such a pervasive part of our individual and collective experience that we take it for granted, and hardly realise how much it shapes our lives.
     As you can see, it’s complicated. Levitin has become a premier researcher in the neurology of music. Every result raises new questions. This book is now 14 years old, and recent work on questions of consciousness, mental health, the role of emotions, dementia, etc, have superseded some of his insights, but on the whole I think it’s an excellent introduction to music as a human endeavour. Levitin is an academic, so he tends to pile on the details, but that’s the only flaw in a very good book. Recommended. ***

Rupture: living with a broken brain (Documentary, 2012)

     Rupture: living with a broken brain (2012) Maryam d’Abo and her husband made this documentary intending it to be the story of her recovery. There’s some of that, but mostly it’s interviews with other people who have suffered strokes.

Very well done, not your average medical doc, this movie tries to express the emotional impact of stroke on both the sufferer and the family and friends. It succeeds, because it doesn’t try to be literal. It focusses on the tiny minority (about 3-5% of all stroke victims) who recover a reasonable facsimile of their former more or less normal life. But all of them report that their sense of self, the world, and the people around them has changed. (This is a significant data point for the answering the puzzle of self-awareness.) Life for them has become more purposeful, but not more planned. The purpose is joy; plans often prevent that. Worth watching more than once. ***

Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1999) - two reviews (updated post)

     Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1999) A pleasant collection of articles on the barmaid’s brain and other subjects of interest. Ingram writes well and clearly, and never forgets that scientific investigations are always unfinished. The answers are always merely the best available, and usually raise more questions. A  potato chip book: when you finish one article, you immediately want to read another. The title essay discusses an interesting finding: that while Munich barmaids can remember dozens of orders, they do badly on visualising the level of beer in a tilted glass (they think the surface of the beer is tilted, too). The inference is that by improving one ability, they disimprove another, an inference not in fact supported by this study. The barmaids may just be in the 40 to 60% of the population that makes the same mistake.   **½  (2007)
     Update 2013: Very little of this book is out of date. The last 14 years have added to the puzzles, and clarified a few of the questions Ingram raises. E.g. it's pretty certain now that the senses are the first level of processing, and that one's view of the world, and one's Self within it, are illusions, fabricated by the brain out of the filtered data that the senses deliver.

In 2008 I read the book agian, and wrote this review. You'll note I rated the book higher this tim e. Maybe I was just feeling more mellow:
     Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1998) Ingram likes science and scientific puzzles. His knack for explaining the puzzle and its (possible) solution is similar to Stephen Gould’s, but he casts his net wider, and unlike Gould doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond Science is Fun. He also doesn’t mind having to say “Answer unknown and possibly unknowable.” The hunt for answers is as important to him as the answer itself. The book is aimed at anyone with a high school education, although interested middle school pupils will have little difficulty following the discussion (with the occasional help of a dictionary). I bought this book at the BR Library book sale in July 2007, and gave it to Cassandra after reading it. Now I’ve read it a second time at her house, and a good read it was too.
     The Barmaid of the title is the beer waitress at the Oktoberfest, who despite her experience with beer thinks that the surface of the beer is not always level when the beer is poured, but who can remember a dozen or more orders distributed over several tables. Waiters had almost as high an error rate as waitresses, and both scored well below the average person. The essay also shows how the preliminary results suggest variations on experiments. It seems that believing water can tilt in a tilted glass is not wholly an innate mistake after all, but depends on the kind of container seen or visualized when the question is put: When presented with a drinking glass, about 50% of respondents believed that water can tilt, but when presented with a neutral container (such as a Petri dish), 30% or fewer made that mistake.
     Thus, context (i.e., environmental cues) is crucial. Even the memory feats of waitresses appear to be tied to context: When one experimenter set up a miniature cocktail bar to test people’s ability to remember many facts, waitresses did exceptionally well. Ingram doesn’t report on any control milieu; I would like to know how remembering changed when it was, say, a miniature street-scape. I suspect that a waitress would score only about average on the task of recalling items such as benches, bus stops, hydrants, shop fronts, etc. However, a cop might score higher, since it’s a cop’s job to notice things on the street. Or maybe not; it’s actually his job to notice what’s out of place, and an ordinary street doesn’t have much if anything out of place. Consider the recruiting test at the beginning of Men in Black, where Will Smith shoots at the schoolgirl figure, since a schoolchild reading about quantum physics is somewhat unusual, while the monsters were run-of-the-mill Hallowe’en types. *** (2008)
 

Centrifugal Brain Research

Ever wonder who comes up with those crazy amusement park rides? Well, wonder no more. They are of an experiment in neurology. Purpose: to explore the effects of gravity on the brain. The rides provide variable acceleration, and everybody knows that Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity proved that acceleration and gravity are the same. So the next time you ride one of those groovy monsters, you're not only scaring the hell out of yourself, you're also contributing to science. Be happy!