Thursday, August 30, 2012

Music Can Help People With Brain Damage Gain Consciousness



Listening to familiar music can help people who've lost consciousness due to brain damage.

BY AMBER MOORE | AUG 30, 2012 03:15 PM EDT
Listening to familiar music can help people who've lost consciousness due to brain damage.
The present research on effect of music was conducted on four people who were at different stages of consciousness; two in a state of coma, one in vegetative state and one in minimally conscious state. Researchers recorded brain activity of the participants while they listened to a list of names being played out. The list included the patient's name as well and it was preceded by either a song that the patient was familiar with or with musical noise, New Scientist reports
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The experiment was repeated on 10 healthy volunteers. Researchers found that participants who listened to familiar music had better brain response when they heard their names than when they listened to musical noise. In volunteers, music did not have any effect on the brain's response when hearing the person's name.
Lead researcher Fabien Perrin says that familiar music "activates our autobiographical memory - so it could make it easier for the subsequent perception of another autobiographical stimulus such as your name."  Perrin adds that there could be another reason that explains brain's activity while listening to music - "music enhances arousal or awareness, so maybe it temporarily increases consciousness and the discrimination of your name becomes easier," New Scientist reports.
There has been plenty of recent research on regaining consciousness but with conflicting results. One study suggests that voice messages, not music, help improve consciousness in people while another suggests that music might help people in the vegetative state.
"The familiar music might be causing an emotional arousal effect, and once [the patient with brain damage is] aroused, there is a small window that opens for increased communication and the brain responds to the name," said Carsten Finke, a neurologist at Charité Medical School in Berlin, Germany. Finke is not a part of the research team, reports New Scientist.
The study was presented at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Brighton, UK, last month.
 
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Read more at http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/11820/20120830/music-people-brain-damage-gain-consciousness.htm#b9KAsxeffjCHs0bL.99

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Scientists Proclaim Animal and Human Consciousness the Same



Scientists Proclaim Animal and Human Consciousness the Same
A remarkable thing happened at The First Annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference held at the University of Cambridge, July 7 in U.K. A group of prominent neuroscientists signed a proclamation declaring human and animal consciousness alike. Called The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, it states:
We declare the following:  The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. 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.
To many pet parents and animal lovers, the conference only confirms what they already believed through their own observations and interactions with animals – albeit, not with the credibility of scientific research.
Stephen Hawking — considered the greatest mind in physics since Albert Einstein — was the guest of honor at the signing ceremony.  The declaration was authored by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch, all well-respected neuroscientists.  The signing was memorialized by 60 Minutes.
Joseph Dial, former Executive Director of the Mind Science Foundation, explains why this declaration is historic and groundbreaking:
What is Consciousness?
There is an important distinction between intelligence and consciousness.  Intelligence is measured by the “capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.”  So, is it fair to say humans are more intelligent than animals?  Animals certainly have a capacity for learning.  They cannot create an atomic bomb; maybe that should define them as smart?
The dictionary defines consciousness as “aware of one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.”   Take a good, hard look at your pet; for that matter, watch a zoo elephant or a deer in the woods.  They are always aware of their own existence.  They feel pain and other sensations.  Your dog may get annoyed with you if you tease him with a treat for too long before tossing it his way.  A deer caught in your headlights feels fear before deciding to take flight.  Elephants mourn their family members just like humans.
What This Means for the Future
For millennia, humans have held onto their hubris regarding the belief in human superiority.  Perhaps The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness will inspire a different attitude and further research into the minds of all non-human creatures.
Starting with animal rights through to veganism, changing the minds of those who believe humans are “top dog” will be a challenge.  Notable scientists formally recognizing animal consciousness on a level with humans should make for some interesting conversations.
Related Reading:
Photo of Inca birds by Rennett Stowe via Flickr


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Consciousness: The Currency of Life



Posted: 08/28/2012 3:11 pm

On the night of Thursday, May 8, 1997, my father had a stroke. When I visited him in the hospital, I felt profoundly disturbed by what I witnessed. This sluggish, exhausted man in front of me looked like my father, but I knew, deep down, that he wasn't.
There were disconcerting clues that betrayed this impostor: He had effectively reverted from a sharp, responsible man into a confused child. Even more bizarrely, his attitude toward me would radically alter depending on whether I sat on the right or left side of his bed. When I sat on his right, he would take an interest in me, and we'd have a semi-coherent conversation. When I went instead to his left, it was as though I wasn't in the room. He simply wasn't aware of my presence.
From the first painful glimpse of my father's fractured consciousness, I understood how vital and fundamental this field is, and soon after I began to carry out research into how the brain generates our experiences.
There is nothing more important to us than our own awareness. We see the breathtaking beauty of snow-capped mountains, the exhilarating grace and speed of a cheetah on a hunt. We fall in love, or experience the joy of our child's first smile. All these, and everything else we care about, are conscious events. If none of these events were conscious, if we weren't conscious to experience any of them, we'd hardly consider ourselves alive -- at least not in any way that matters.
When I'm reveling in a glowing pleasure, or even if I'm enduring a sharp sadness, I always sense that behind everything there is the privilege and passion of experience. Our consciousness is the essence of who we perceive ourselves to be. It is the citadel for our senses, the melting pot of thoughts, the welcoming home for every emotion that pricks or placates us. For us, consciousness simply is the currency of life.
But what actually is it? In The Ravenous Brain, I argue that consciousness is that choice mental space dedicated to innovation, a key component of which is the discovery of deep patterns within the contents of our awareness. This allows us to take great strides in every intellectual field we explore, as we weave a vast tapestry of meaning inside us. One consequence of this patient, piecemeal endeavor is that when we spot a chair, we don't see it according to its basic sensory features. Instead, we unavoidably recognize it as a chair, and immediately have access to a pyramid of meaning relating to this one object -- what forms chairs take, what functions they serve, and so on. In fact, as we gaze around our world, we ineluctably view each component of the scene via the dense filter of the structure of knowledge we've acquired throughout our lives. Every single object on which we cast our eyes triggers a conscious wave of understanding, its own pyramid of meaning.
Consciousness concerns itself only with the most meaningful mental constructions and is ever hungry to build new patterns over existing architectures. To help in this aim, it itches to combine and compare any objects in our awareness. How the brain supports consciousness closely mirrors these functions. Those specialist regions of the cortex that manage the processing endpoints of our senses -- for instance, areas involved in recognizing faces, rather than merely the colors and textures that constitute a face -- furnish our awareness with its specific content. But there is also a network of our most advanced general-purpose regions that directly draws in all manner of content from these specialist regions. This is the core network, incredibly densely connected together, both internally and across major regions throughout the brain. In this inner core, multiple sources of meaningful, potentially highly structured information are combined by ultra-fast brain rhythms. And this, neurally speaking, is how and where consciousness arises.
Our awareness gives us incredible gifts of understanding, though there is a heavy price to pay for such a vast consciousness. The organ that has grown so large and complex in order to support the amazing innovation machine of human consciousness is intensely fragile. We are especially prone to serious brain injury, which can persistently rob us of awareness. Thankfully, though, many new techniques are arising to diagnose the levels of awareness that may still secretly reside in brain-damaged patients. Extensions of this research are beginning to offer us a chance to "hear" these patients, just by reading their brain signals, and for them to communicate with the outside world. Some emerging methods may even allow us to restore some degree of consciousness to patients in which it is clear that awareness is tragically absent as a result of injury.
Cases where severe brain injury leads to a persistent twilight of awareness are, thankfully, relatively rare. Unfortunately, though, the fragility of the human brain manifests very commonly, in more subtle forms. For optimum consciousness to occur, a complex interplay of various brain chemicals and activity between regions must be balanced just right. Some people have genes that make brain instabilities likely, and much of the population can be repeatedly battered by life's stressful events, which further strains their intricate neural machinery. The result can easily be mental illness, a pandemic that gets far less focus than it deserves.
But vital new clues in both understanding and treatment are arising, with almost all psychiatric conditions being repainted in terms of disorders of awareness. Various techniques that literally expand and reinvigorate consciousness are being successfully applied to almost all psychiatric patient groups. However, this is not just the story of what consciousness is, and when it breaks down, but how we can apply this knowledge to aid our daily lives. For instance, many of these awareness building approaches could just as easily be adopted by all of us, both to reduce the daily weight of stress we endure and to enable us to view the world more directly, with fresh eyes. And, in time, we can learn tenderly to nurture a consciousness that is quiet, open, and ready to discover many beautiful new patterns around us.
Excerpted with permission from 'The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning,' by Daniel Bor.  Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group.  Copyright © 2012.
 

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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Nature of Consciousness: How the Internet Could Learn to Feel



Share1AUG 22 2012, 8:40 AM ET
"Romantic reductionist" neuroscientist Christof Koch discusses the scientific side of consciousness, including the notion that all matter is, to varying degrees, sentient.
hal-2001-615.jpgMGMIf you had to list the hardest problems in science -- the questions even some scientists say are insoluble -- you would probably end up with two:

  • Where do the laws of physics come from?  
  • How does the physical stuff in our brains produce conscious experience? 

Even though philosophers have obsessed over the "mind-body problem" for centuries, the mystery of consciousness wasn't considered a proper scientific question until two or three decades ago. Then, a couple of things happened. Brain-imaging technologies finally gave neuroscience some high-powered tools to peer inside our brains while we think. And a few renowned scientists -- most famously, Francis Crick -- claimed that neuroscientists had to tackle consciousness if they were ever going to understand the brain.
By the 1980s, Crick had jumped from molecular biology to neuroscience and moved from England to California. There he found a brilliant young collaborator, Christof Koch, the son of German diplomats who'd recently landed a job as an assistant professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology. For the next 16 years -- until Crick's death in 1994 -- they worked together, searching for the neural correlates of consciousness.
Koch remains on the front lines of neurobiology. In fact, he will soon leave Caltech to work full-time as Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. After years of publishing scientific papers, he has now written a trade book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Somewhere between memoir and popular science, the book offers a highly personal glimpse into the mind of an unconventional scientist: a lapsed Catholic who teamed up with the staunch atheist Crick, and the eminent neuroscientist who speculates about the consciousness of bees and squid and even bacteria. In the first of a two-part interview, we talked about the wiring of our brains and the possibility that the Internet itself may become conscious.
***
Why have you devoted so much of your life searching for the neural roots of consciousness?
Koch: Consciousness is the central factor of our lives. The only way I know I exist is because I'm conscious. I might be mistaken about who exactly I am -- for example, how attractive I am to the opposite sex -- but there's no doubt I have feelings of pain, pleasure, anger, of being a man, of waking up. Until recently, science has neglected to incorporate the fact of consciousness into its theories. If science wants a complete understanding of everything in the universe, it has to include consciousness.
What matters is not the stuff the brain is made of, but the relationship of that stuff to each other.
What makes consciousness such a difficult problem for scientists to explain?
Koch: Well, unlike black holes or the Higgs boson or molecules, consciousness has both an external perspective and an intrinsic perspective. In other words, you can weigh the Higgs boson and the molecule. You can poke them. You can measure them. Scientists and engineers are very good at doing that, but we don't think a black hole feels like anything. We don't believe the Higgs boson or a single nerve cell feels like anything. But a healthy human brain feels something if it's awake.
You actually see a world. How does this picture get into your head? That's the mystery. And because it has both an exterior, third-person perspective as well as an interior, first-person perspective, it's unique among all the phenomena in the universe. This means it's a little bit more difficult to attack using a scientific point of view. It doesn't mean it's impossible.
Or maybe a lot more difficult if we consider the complexity of the brain. How many neurons and synapses are in the human brain?
Koch: The average human brain has a hundred billion neurons and synapses on the order of a hundred trillion or so. But it's not just sheer numbers. It's the incredibly complex and specific ways in which these things are wired up. That's what makes it different from a gigantic sand dune, which might have a billion particles of sand, or from a galaxy. Our Milky Way, for example, contains a hundred billion suns, but the way these suns interact is very simple compared to the way neurons interact with each other.
So it doesn't matter so much what the neurons are made of. It's how they're organized and wired together.
Koch: Correct. Unless you believe in some magic substance attached to our brain that exudes consciousness, which certainly no scientist believes, then what matters is not the stuff the brain is made of, but the relationship of that stuff to each other. It's the fact that you have these neurons and they interact in very complicated ways. In principle, if you could replicate that interaction, let's say in silicon on a computer, you would get the same phenomena, including consciousness.
Are you saying the Internet could become conscious, or maybe already is conscious?
Koch: That's possible. It's a working hypothesis that comes out of artificial intelligence. It doesn't matter so much that you're made out of neurons and bones and muscles. Obviously, if we lose neurons in a stroke or in a degenerative disease like Alzheimer's, we lose consciousness. But in principle, what matters for consciousness is the fact that you have these incredibly complicated little machines, these little switching devices called nerve cells and synapses, and they're wired together in amazingly complicated ways. The Internet now already has a couple of billion nodes. Each node is a computer. Each one of these computers contains a couple of billion transistors, so it is in principle possible that the complexity of the Internet is such that it feels like something to be conscious. I mean, that's what it would be if the Internet as a whole has consciousness. Depending on the exact state of the transistors in the Internet, it might feel sad one day and happy another day, or whatever the equivalent is in Internet space.
You're serious about using these words? The Internet could feel sad or happy?
Koch: What I'm serious about is that the Internet, in principle, could have conscious states. Now, do these conscious states express happiness? Do they express pain? Pleasure? Anger? Red? Blue? That really depends on the exact kind of relationship between the transistors, the nodes, the computers. It's more difficult to ascertain what exactly it feels. But there's no question that in principle it could feel something.
Would humans recognize that certain parts of the Internet are conscious? Or is that beyond our understanding?
Koch: That's an excellent question. If we had a theory of consciousness, we could analyze it and say yes, this entity, this simulacrum, is conscious. Or because it displays independent behavior. At some point, suddenly it develops some autonomous behavior that nobody programmed into it, right? Then, people would go, "Whoa! What just happened here?" It just sort of self-organized in some really weird way. It wasn't a bug. It wasn't a virus. It wasn't a botnet that was paid for by some nefarious organization. It did it by itself. If this autonomous behavior happens on a regular basis, then I think many people would say, yeah, I guess it's alive in some sense, and it may have conscious sensation.
I think we need to back up for a moment. How do you define consciousness?
Koch: Typically, it means having subjective states. You see something. You hear something. You're aware of yourself. You're angry. You're sad. Those are all different conscious states. Now, that's not a very precise definition. But if you think historically, almost every scientific field has a working definition and the definitions are subject to change. For example, my Caltech colleague Michael Brown has redefined planets. So Pluto is not a planet anymore, right? Because astronomers got together and decided that. And what's a gene? A gene is very tricky to define. Over the last 50 years, people have had all sorts of changing definitions. Consciousness is not easy to define, but don't worry too much about the definition. Otherwise, you get trapped in endless discussions about what exactly you mean. It's much more important to have a working definition, run with it, do experiments, and then modify it as necessary.
Certain parts of the brain seem to have a much closer association with consciousness than others.
We assume humans are conscious, and most of us also think dogs and elephants and mice have some degree of consciousness, but what about other animals? Do lizards have consciousness? Are ants conscious? What about bacteria? Are these useful questions?
Koch: Not right now. In the fullness of time, they have to be answered. But right now, let's stick with cases that are undoubtedly conscious. That includes people, although not all people. You might remember Terri Schiavo. It was very controversial whether she was actually conscious or not. She was clearly alive, but because of anoxia and the damage sustained by her brain, she couldn't communicate with the outside world, and medical and scientific opinion held that she wasn't conscious. Yet she was moaning on occasion and making reflex-like movements. So there can be controversial cases even with people. What about a newborn infant? What about a fetus? Even there it's not totally clear. As you said, most people would agree that cats, dogs, mice and elephants are conscious, but what about non-mammals? So for now, let's just stick with some simple examples that we can actually work with in a clinic or a lab. Let's understand the neural basis of consciousness in them. In the fullness of time, we can then look at the squid and the octopus, which are very complex. Also bees, birds, worms. And in the future, we'll be able to answer a question like bacteria.