Planetary Consciousness and the Tears of the World:
A Review of Carolyn Baker's Collapsing Consciously
By Gary Corseri
Planetary Consciousness--Not for Sissies! (image by Gary Corseri)
One can open this 173-page book just about anywhere, read a few pages, and have something to contemplate and meditate for the rest of the day, or several days, or a lifetime. The book is divided into 2 parts: "Collapse, Transition, the Great Turning" and "Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times." The first part, about 2/3 of the book, works as a kind of Zen-slap to wake up the disconnected, mesmerized and unfocussed to the terrible predations we have made on Planet Earth these past 200 years of the Industrial Revolution and 100 years of Corporate-Federal Reserve-Media-Military-Academic State-ism. The last 63 pages consist of pertinent, sometimes glittering, quotes from Ms. Baker's wide and varied reading in Jung and psychology, the Arts, environment and political matters--and her thoughts in response to those quotes and insights. This is a book with "designs" on the reader: the author intends to warn, inform, and transform.
The book's author-profile states that Dr. Baker is a "former psychotherapist and professor of psychology and history. She is nationally renowned for her writing and workshops on emotional resilience in challenging times". Her books include Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition and "Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse. Her website is SpeakingTruth to Power, at www.carolynbaker.net ."
I confess that I have not read Ms. Baker's previous books, but I have, in recent years, profitably read her articles appearing at some of the best progressive websites as well as her own site. In spite of her obvious erudition, Ms. Baker has a way of "telling it like it is," without frills--a wise woman talking frankly to those wise enough to listen.
"Our inexorable reality in this moment is one of contraction, decline, and demise. Industrial civilization is collapsing." Thus, with punches un-pulled, she launches us outward, upward and within from the get-go. There, in the intro, we also learn a little about her recent battles: "As I send this book to publication, I have recently confronted a personal collapse in the form of a health challenge. I have been humbled and constrained by a recurrence of breast cancer. And although my treatment is complete and my prognosis very good" I recognize it as yet another spiritual rite of passage".
Rites of passage, of course, are not easy to navigate" and impossible to circumvent. Fact is humankind in 2014, decades after those prophetic masters'--Orwell's and Huxley's--dark premonitions" has succeeded in trumping those foreboding visions. With Ms. Baker's book and the daily headlines, it's easy to catalogue the innumerable crises we face: Polar Vortex? What the hell is that? Is there a tie-in with Global Climate Change? What about all this methane gas being released from Siberia's permafrost melting? What about "Peak Oil"? What about the plume of radiation emanating from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plants? Why hasn't something been done about the hole in the ozone that I first read about some 30 years ago? When will the endless "peace process" end and we simply have Peace in the Middle East and elsewhere? Are we incapable of transcending our warrior past, our reptilian brain, our genetic, social and historical limitations?
These are some of the questions Ms. Baker would have us examine, and, always, she urges us to know ourselves, to understand deeply. With her background in psychology--especially Jungian--, she exhorts us to know our "Shadow" side--to embrace even the darkness. Collapse consciously! That's the ticket. There's hell to pay. We've messed up our only home and things will get a lot worse" before they" if they ever get better!
But we can conceive the multitude of challenges we face as a spiritual journey, too.
Let me be clear: this is no namby-pamby "New Age" book where everything turns out honky-dory if only we chant "Om" while the Earth gets fracked beneath our rising kundalinies. More than once, Ms. Baker enjoins the human race to "grow up!" We are forewarned in the intro: "I am drawn to the perennial wisdom of the towering giants of poetry, story, art, music, and literature. They never have and never will offer us happy stories with happy endings. Rather, they offer us life-- in all of its angst, beauty, ire, terror, joy, celebration, ecstasy and demise." And, again, in her first chapter: "Preparing logistically or emotionally for the collapse of life as we have known it since arriving on this planet is not supposed to be fun." And, in a later chapter: "Unless we include the possibility of death in our presentation, we aren't really preparing." Yes, this is also a book about learning how to die, how to face death.
Like Chris Hedges in Empire of Illusion, Ms. Baker has no patience with our cult of "positive thinking." I think that cult is a legitimate target of real thinkers (who acknowledge the Shadow), but, occasionally, Ms. Baker over-shoots her mark, conflating all New Agers with Dale Carnegie-type positivists. Of course, "New Age" goes back some 40 years, and is feeling its knees. But much of it was about much more than positive thinking and Ms. Baker knows that in her bones every time she relates a bit of Eastern wisdom, or quotes Lao Tzu or Buddha.
This is a book about becoming whole again; reaching deep within, not to overcome the Shadow, but to integrate and join forces with it. It's a book about developing a planetary consciousness to confront the global muck we've created. It's a book about making connections--within ourselves, and with others. Ms. Baker quotes Francis Weller, author ofEntering the Healing Ground: Grief, Ritual, and the Soul of the World:
"Our sorrow eases the hardened places within us, allowing them to open again and freeing us to once more feel our kinship with the living presence around us. This is deep activism, soul activism that actually encourages us to connect with the tears of the world."
Gary Corseri has taught in US public schools and prisons, and at US and Japanese universities. His dramas have been produced on Atlanta-PBS; he has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library; and his prose and poems have appeared at hundreds of publications/websites worldwide, including, The Greanville Post, Redbook, OpEdNews, Village Voice, The New York Times, Smirking Chimp, L.A./Hollywood Progressive, Countercurrents, BraveNewWorld.in.
SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time. Why would our bodies evolve to spend close to one-third of our lives completely out of it, when we could instead be doing something useful or exciting? Something that would, as an added bonus, be less likely to get us killed back when we were sleeping on the savanna?
“Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”
We’ve known for some time that sleep is essential forforming and consolidating memories and that it plays a central role in the formation of new neuronal connections and the pruning of old ones. But that hardly seems enough to risk death-by-leopard-in-the-night. “If sleep was just to remember what you did yesterday, that wouldn’t be important enough,” Dr. Nedergaard explains.
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In a series of new studies, published this fall in the journal Science, the Nedergaard lab may at last be shedding light on just what it is that would be important enough. Sleep, it turns out, may play a crucial role in our brain’s physiological maintenance. As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.
Recall what happens to your body during exercise. You start off full of energy, but soon enough your breathing turns uneven, your muscles tire, and your stamina runs its course. What’s happening internally is that your body isn’t able to deliver oxygen quickly enough to each muscle that needs it and instead creates needed energy anaerobically. And while that process allows you to keep on going, a side effect is the accumulation of toxic byproducts in your muscle cells. Those byproducts are cleared out by the body’s lymphatic system, allowing you to resume normal function without any permanent damage.
The lymphatic system serves as the body’s custodian: Whenever waste is formed, it sweeps it clean. The brain, however, is outside its reach — despite the fact that your brain uses up about 20 percent of your body’s energy. How, then, does its waste — like beta-amyloid, a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease — get cleared? What happens to all the wrappers and leftovers that litter the room after any mental workout?
“Think about a fish tank,” says Dr. Nedergaard. “If you have a tank and no filter, the fish will eventually die. So, how do the brain cells get rid of their waste? Where is their filter?”
UNTIL a few years ago, the prevailing model was based on recycling: The brain got rid of its own waste, not only beta-amyloid but other metabolites, by breaking it down and recycling it at an individual cell level. When that process eventually failed, the buildup would result in age-related cognitive decline and diseases like Alzheimer’s. That “didn’t make sense” to Dr. Nedergaard, who says that “the brain is too busy to recycle” all of its energy. Instead, she proposed a brain equivalent of the lymphatic system, a network of channels that cleared out toxins with watery cerebrospinal fluid. She called it the glymphatic system, a nod to its dependence on glial cells (the supportive cells in the brain that work largely to maintain homeostasis and protect neurons) and its function as a sort of parallel lymphatic system.
She was hardly the first to think in those terms. “It had been proposed about one hundred years ago, but they didn’t have the tools to study it properly,” she says. Now, however, with advanced microscopes and dyeing techniques, her team discovered that the brain’s interstitial space — the fluid-filled area between tissue cells that takes up about 20 percent of the brain’s total volume — was mainly dedicated to physically removing the cells’ daily waste.
When members of Dr. Nedergaard’s team injected small fluorescent tracers into the cerebrospinal fluid of anesthetized mice, they found that the tracers quickly entered the brain — and, eventually, exited it — via specific, predictable routes.
The next step was to see how and when, exactly, the glymphatic system did its work. “We thought this cleaning process would require tremendous energy,” Dr. Nedergaard says. “And so we asked, maybe this is something we do when we’re sleeping, when the brain is really not processing information.”
In a series of new studies on mice, her team discovered exactly that: When the mouse brain is sleeping or under anesthesia, it’s busy cleaning out the waste that accumulated while it was awake.
In a mouse brain, the interstitial space takes up less room than it does in ours, approximately 14 percent of the total volume. Dr. Nedergaard found that when the mice slept, it swelled to over 20 percent. As a result, the cerebrospinal fluid could not only flow more freely but it could also reach further into the brain. In an awake brain, it would flow only along the brain’s surface. Indeed, the awake flow was a mere 5 percent of the sleep flow. In a sleeping brain, waste was being cleared two times faster. “We saw almost no inflow of cerebrospinal fluid into the brain when the mice were awake, but then when we anesthetized them, it started flowing. It’s such a big difference I kept being afraid something was wrong,” says Dr. Nedergaard.
Similar work in humans is still in the future. Dr. Nedergaard is currently awaiting board approval to begin the equivalent study in adult brains in collaboration with the anesthesiologist Helene Benveniste at Stony Brook University.
So far the glymphatic system has been identified as the neural housekeeper in baboons, dogs and goats. “If anything,” Dr. Nedergaard says, “it’s more needed in a bigger brain.”
MODERN society is increasingly ill equipped to provide our brains with the requisite cleaning time. The figures are stark. Some 80 percent of working adults suffer to some extent from sleep deprivation. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults should sleep seven to nine hours. On average, we’re getting one to two hours less sleep a night than we did 50 to 100 years ago and 38 minutes less on weeknights than we did as little as 10 years ago. Between 50 and 70 million people in the United States suffer from some form of chronic sleep disorder. When our sleep is disturbed, whatever the cause, our cleaning system breaks down. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology, Sigrid Veasey has been focusing on precisely how restless nights disturb the brain’s normal metabolism. What happens to our cognitive function when the trash piles up?
At the extreme end, the result could be the acceleration of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. While we don’t know whether sleep loss causes the disease, or the disease itself leads to sleep loss — what Dr. Veasey calls a “classic chicken-and-egg” problem — we do know that the two are closely connected. Along with the sleep disturbances that characterize neurodegenerative diseases, there is a buildup of the types of proteins that the glymphatic system normally clears out during regular sleep, like beta-amyloids and tau, both associated with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.
“To me,” says Dr. Veasey, “that’s the most compelling part of the Nedergaard research. That the clearance for these is dramatically reduced from prolonged wakefulness.” If we don’t sleep well, we may be allowing the very things that cause neural degeneration to pile up unchecked.
Even at the relatively more benign end — the all-nighter or the extra-stressful week when you caught only a few hours a night — sleep deprivation, as everyone who has experienced it knows, impedes our ability to concentrate, to pay attention to our environment and to analyze information creatively. “When we’re sleep-deprived, we can’t integrate or put together facts,” as Dr. Veasey puts it.
But there is a difference between the kind of fleeting sleep loss we sometimes experience and the chronic deprivation that comes from shift work, insomnia and the like. In one set of studies, soon to be published in The Journal of Neuroscience, the Veasey lab found that while our brains can recover quite readily from short-term sleep loss, chronic prolonged wakefulness and sleep disruption stresses the brain’s metabolism. The result is the degeneration of key neurons involved in alertness and proper cortical function and a buildup of proteins associated with aging and neural degeneration.
It’s like the difference between a snowstorm’s disrupting a single day of trash pickup and a prolonged strike. No longer quite as easy to fix, and even when the strike is over, there’s likely to be some stray debris floating around for quite some time yet. “Recovery from sleep loss is slower than we’d thought,” Dr. Veasey notes. “We used to think that after a bit of recovery sleep, you should be fine. But this work shows you’re not.”
If you put her own research together with the findings from the Nedergaard lab, Dr. Veasey says, it “very clearly shows that there’s impaired clearance in the awake brain. We’re really starting to realize that when we skip sleep, we may be doing irreparable damage to the brain, prematurely aging it or setting it up for heightened vulnerability to other insults.”
In a society that is not only chronically sleep-deprived but also rapidly aging, that’s bad news. “It’s unlikely that poor sleep as a child would actually cause Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,” says Dr. Veasey, “but it’s more likely that you may shift one of those diseases by a decade or so. That has profound health and economic implications.”
It’s a pernicious cycle. We work longer hours, become more stressed, sleep less, impair our brain’s ability to clean up after all that hard work, and become even less able to sleep soundly. And if we reach for a sleeping pill to help us along? While work on the effects of sleeping aids on the glymphatic system remains to be done, the sleep researchers I spoke with agree that there’s no evidence that aided sleep is as effective as natural sleep.
There is, however, reason to hope. If the main function of sleep is to take out our neural trash, that insight could eventually enable a new understanding of both neurodegenerative diseases and regular, age-related cognitive decline. By developing a diagnostic test to measure how well the glymphatic system functions, we could move one step closer to predicting someone’s risk of developing conditions like Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia: The faster the fluids clear the decks, the more effectively the brain’s metabolism is functioning.
“Such a test could also be used in the emergency room after traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Nedergaard says, “to see who is at risk of developing decline in cognitive function.”
We can also focus on developing earlier, more effective interventions to prevent cognitive decline. One approach would be to enable individuals who suffer from sleep loss to sleep more soundly — but how? Dr. Nedergaard’s mice were able to clear their brain’s waste almost as effectively under anesthesia as under normal sleeping conditions. “That’s really fascinating,” says Dr. Veasey. Though current sleeping aids may not quite do the trick, and anesthetics are too dangerous for daily use, the results suggest that there may be better ways of improving sleep pharmacologically.
Now that we have a better understanding of why sleep is so important, a new generation of drug makers can work to create the best possible environment for the trash pickup to occur in the first place — to make certain that our brain’s sleeping metabolism is as efficient as it can possibly be.
A second approach would take the opposite tack, by seeking to mimic the cleanup-promoting actions of sleep in the awake brain, which could make a full night of sound sleep less necessary. To date, the brain’s metabolic process hasn’t been targeted as such by the pharmaceutical industry. There simply wasn’t enough evidence of its importance. In response to the evolving data, however, future drug interventions could focus directly on the glymphatic system, to promote the enhanced cleaning power of the sleeping brain in a brain that is fully awake. One day, scientists might be able to successfully mimic the expansion of the interstitial space that does the mental janitorial work so that we can achieve maximally efficient round-the-clock brain trash pickup.
If that day comes, they would be on their way to discovering that all-time miracle drug: one that, in Dr. Veasey’s joking words, “could mean we never have to sleep at all.”
A look at some of the differences between states of consciousness and brain death:
Brain death: These patients are no longer alive. There has been an irreversible cessation of all activity in both the brain and the brain stem. Reflexes that go through the spinal cord may persist even in a brain-dead state.
Coma: These patients are alive, but in a state of eyes-closed, depressed consciousness from which they cannot be aroused. Coma is distinguished from brain death by the presence of brain stem responses, spontaneous breathing or non-purposeful motor responses. Coma has three possible outcomes: progression to brain death, recovery of consciousness, or evolution to a state of chronically depressed consciousness, such as a vegetative state or minimally conscious state.
Vegetative state: Patients in vegetative states are alive but also have severely impaired consciousness, although their eyes may open spontaneously. The eye opening may give the impression of consciousness, but there is no awareness of the environment. These patients do not acknowledge the examiner; they do not attend or track objects that are presented to them; their movements are non-purposeful; they do not speak.
Minimally conscious state: These patients are also alive, with a severe alteration in consciousness, with intermittent, but inconsistent, behaviors suggesting awareness. Contrary to patients in coma or a vegetative state, minimally conscious patients may occasionally have purposeful movements, and they may track motions with their eyes or speak.
Source: Robert Stevens, associate professor of neuroscience and critical care at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
No matter how different they seem — the learned and contemplative neuroscientist versus the toy orangutan with a penchant for off-color jokes — almost any adult who experiences them knows that Princeton University professorMichael Graziano is the voice behind his simian puppet Kevin. Yet to most listeners, Kevin — who acts as the comic relief when Graziano publicly presents his work — nonetheless has a distinct personality and consciousness — he seems aware of and comments on his surroundings in his own unique way.
While Kevin is not "real" in the sense of being an animate biological being, Graziano, a professor of psychology and thePrinceton Neuroscience Institute, suggests that humans attribute consciousness to the puppet in the same way that we attribute consciousness to each other and to ourselves. Graziano has developed a new theory of consciousness he calls the "attention schema theory" that suggests that specialized systems in the human brain compute information about the things of which a person is aware, and project the property of consciousness onto ourselves and others. In that sense, the puppet's consciousness is every bit as real as that of anyone wincingly laughing at his jokes about living atop Graziano's hand.
Graziano identifies two brain areas that most likely create the model of attention that leads to awareness (above). The superior temporal sulcus is linked to the ability to follow people's gaze and determine where another's attention is directed. The temporoparietal junction has been linked to processing internal and external information, and the ability to distinguish between oneself and others. These regions have been shown to be active when people try to understand the minds of other people, as well as when people redirect their attention. Just as important, damage to these regions has been shown to result in a poor ability to interpret other people's actions and emotions, as well as a condition known as neglect wherein a person becomes totally unaware of anything on the side of the body opposite to the brain damage. This image is of Graziano's brain. (Image courtesy of Michael Graziano, Department of Psychology)
Most people consider consciousness to be the complete, non-physical mental package that makes up a person — personality, memories, experiences and emotions. They also consider awareness to be more focused — you are aware of specific items in your consciousness. Most people tend not to be bothered by the notion that some "magic" seems to happen so that when a person looks at a red apple, their brain doesn't merely register the information, it experiences the color.
Scientists who study consciousness believe if we can explain how a brain becomes aware of something, we can explain the larger phenomenon of consciousness. In most scientific theories, awareness emerges from the physical functioning of the brain, almost like heat rising from circuits. Most researchers therefore look for the physical mechanisms in the brain that might generate the non-physical awareness.
Laid out in his recent book, "Consciousness and the Social Brain" (Oxford University Press, 2013), Graziano's theory takes a completely different approach to explaining consciousness. "In this theory, the brain is an information-processing device. It doesn't produce non-physical essences — it computes information," Graziano said.
"We know that it accesses internal data and concludes that it has a 'magical' inner feeling. What scientific questions are we going to ask about that process," Graziano said. "Most researchers wonder how the magic is produced, but I think that's a red herring. Instead, I want to know the advantage of the brain computing an informational model of itself that contains an attribution of magic. Does it help to control behavior? How did it evolve? I want to know the systems in the brain that compute it, and what happens when those systems are damaged."
The theory is based on two very basic actions that all brains perform. The first is paying attention, which for a neuroscientist is a data-handling trick. So many signals come into the brain from outside and inside the body that only a minority of them can be processed at any one time. Attention is a complex process that allows us to focus on a few signals, process them deeply and then react to them. Second, all brains organize these processed signals in order to construct informational models of things in the world. Brains understand the world through models of objects, people and even the self.
In Graziano's attention schema theory, awareness is the brain's simplified model of the complicated process of attention. When a person is aware of something such as an apple in front of them, it is because the brain has put together two models: the information describing the apple, and the self-descriptive information about how the brain is focusing its resources. Put those two specialized types of information together and the brain is equipped to introspect, conclude and report, "I am aware of the apple."
"Michael's theory explains the connection between attention and consciousness in a very elegant and compelling way," Schurger said.
"His theory is the first theory that I know of to take both the easy and the hard problems head on," he said. "That is a gaping hole in all other modern theories, and it is deftly plugged by Michael's theory. Even if you think his theory is wrong, his theory reminds us that any theory that avoids the hard problem has almost certainly missed the mark, because a plausible solution — his theory — exists that does not appeal to magic or mysterious, as-yet-unexplained phenomena."
To most people, awareness is more specific than consciousness. We are aware of specific information. The diagram above shows that all the information of which we are aware, plus the process of becoming aware of it, make up consciousness.(Image courtesy of Michael Graziano, Department of Psychology)
The brain versus the magic
Graziano has identified two brain areas that most likely create this model of attention. The first is the superior temporal sulcus, which is in the lower portion of the brain and part of the temporal lobe. This area is linked to the ability to follow people's gaze and determine where another's attention is directed. Working with the superior temporal sulcus is the temporoparietal junction, which is toward the upper rear of the brain where the parietal and temporal lobes meet. This area has been linked to processing internal and external information, and the ability to distinguish between oneself and others.
Together, these regions have been shown to be active when people try to understand the minds of other people, as well as when people redirect their attention. Just as important as how these regions function is the effect on a person when these areas malfunction, Graziano writes. Damage to these regions has been shown to result in a poor ability to interpret other people's actions and emotions, as well as a condition known as neglect wherein a person becomes totally unaware of any person or object on the side of the body opposite to the brain damage. An example would be a person who can describe the right side of a street but for whom the left side might as well not exist.
Graziano and his group plan to explore these regions with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), such as by capturing images of a person's brain as they attribute awareness to themselves versus others, in order to zero in on the different activity that takes place. Despite the work to be done, Graziano sees his theory as having the advantage of at least identifying a possible root of consciousness and a physical process by which it occurs.
"The question has always been how does a brain produce the inner 'magic.' What we're asking is, 'How does the brain attribute magic to itself,' and that's a fundamentally different way to frame the question," he said.
"Every past theory of consciousness has a gap. Even the most modern theories at some point just point to a circuit and say, 'And then awareness appears.' But understanding where the magic comes from is pointless," Graziano continued. "The phenomenon that scientists can say with certainty happens is that the brain attributes the 'magic' to itself. We can understand how that happens and the computations behind it. And that's what this theory attempts to do."
Graziano has given consciousness a more solid footing in the real, tangible world even if it remains a creation of the brain, Schurger said. The attention schema theory provides a physical mechanism to explain consciousness.
"If anything, his theory stands to demystify consciousness, in the same way that our understanding of genetics and self-organizing systems has begun to demystify 'life,' which was once thought to depend on an unseen force," Schurger said.
"The only thing for science to explain about consciousness is not, 'Why is there something more inside of us, apart from just input, processing and output,' but rather, 'Why do we insist that there is something more inside of us,'" he said. "The answer given by Michael's theory is that this is the way the brain describes the process of attention happening inside the brain itself. Even if the phenomenon being described is real, the description does not have to be real."
Graziano and researchers in his group such as graduate student Taylor Webb (right) plan to explore the brain regions Graziano suggests are linked with awareness using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Their studies will include capturing images of a person's brain as they attribute awareness to themselves versus others in order to zero in on the different activity that takes place.
Origin of an idea
After 20 years of influential research on sensory processing, movement control and other connections in the brain-body cooperative, Graziano needed to focus on something new. Graziano received his bachelor's degree in 1989 and his doctorate in 1996 from Princeton, afterward working as a researcher at the University before joining the faculty in 2001. "I got to the point where I felt I wasn't contributing fundamental new research anymore," he said of his transition. "I was merely defending my turf."
Consciousness is one of three main areas Graziano has studied. The first relates to how the brain monitors the space around the body through vision, hearing and touch. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Graziano published a series of papers in the journals Science and Nature suggesting that the brain keeps track of a bubble of space around the body in order to guide movement, and revealed a set of connected brain regions that seemed to be responsible for that ability. Discover Magazine named the research one of the top discoveries of 1997.
Graziano also explored how the brain controls movement via the brain region known as the motor cortex, which scientists had thought contained a simple "map" of the body's individual muscles. The map turned out to be much more complex than expected. In the early 2000s, Graziano showed that if specific spots in the motor cortex were stimulated then very complex movements would result. For example, when one site in the motor cortex is stimulated, the hand closes into grip-like position and moves toward the mouth as the mouth opens, all in a coordinated fashion. These findings upended the existing notion of a simple map of individual muscles in the motor cortex.
The latest book on consciousness stems from an early outline of his theory that Graziano published in 2011 in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience with Sabine Kastner, a Princeton professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. That paper was a result of his 2010 book, "God Soul Mind Brain" (Leapfrog Press, 2010), which was a discussion about existing work on consciousness written for a non-scientific audience. It was then that Graziano inadvertently introduced himself to his new and third major field of study.
"That book is about how we attribute awareness to others and how we might also attribute awareness to ourselves. It proposes that human spirituality is a result of attributing awareness to objects and empty spaces," Graziano said.
"I didn't realize when I wrote the book that the theory would be considered a new theory of human consciousness. It seemed like common sense to me, but surprised a lot of people," he said. "That is how I began to explore in more detail how a brain might attribute this property of awareness to itself and what the usefulness of that attribution might be."
Graziano's study of consciousness is in keeping with his creative approach to research and also helps round out the department's expertise, said Deborah Prentice, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs and psychology department chair. Consciousness is a persistent topic in psychology that was even pondered by the 19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James, known as the "father of American psychology," Prentice said. Yet, she said, no one at Princeton has delved into it since Anne Treisman, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, who retired in 2010.
"Michael is a fantastic scientist and a very creative researcher. He is best known for his work on the motor cortex, which fundamentally and persuasively challenged the prevailing orthodoxy about how that region of the brain is organized," Prentice said.
"The study of consciousness is a bold, new direction for him," she said. "Michael's work is always interesting and always thought-provoking. I am eager to see where it goes."
As time goes on, Graziano is able to better explain his theory and his colleagues can better understand it. But he allows that of the doubt he's received, the majority of it cannot be assuaged — people believe in a special human magic and want to know where it comes from.
"People say, 'Great, you've explained how brains claim to have magic inside them, but you haven't explained the actual magic.' That's almost impossible to get people to see from the opposite perspective," he said. "Ninety percent of the pushback comes from that belief in magic. It's really almost like an ideological difference."
Colleagues such as Schurger who are supportive of his idea have commended Graziano on providing an explanation of consciousness that considers and correlates with the available evidence on how the brain physically works, he said.
"To me that's really important. This theory explains an area that has been so murky that nobody could see through to an explanation," Graziano said.
"There are two questions to ask about this theory: First, does it provide an actual explanation, or does it just appeal to magic like so many other theories? And second, is it correct? The answer to the first question is yes," he said. "As for the second, that's up in the air. I'm very encouraged by it, but one never knows, I suppose."
A look at some of the differences between states of consciousness and brain death:
Brain death: These patients are no longer alive. There has been an irreversible cessation of all activity in both the brain and the brain stem. Reflexes that go through the spinal cord may persist even in a brain-dead state.
Coma: These patients are alive, but in a state of eyes-closed, depressed consciousness from which they cannot be aroused. Coma is distinguished from brain death by the presence of brain stem responses, spontaneous breathing or non-purposeful motor responses. Coma has three possible outcomes: progression to brain death, recovery of consciousness, or evolution to a state of chronically depressed consciousness, such as a vegetative state or minimally conscious state.
Vegetative state: Patients in vegetative states are alive but also have severely impaired consciousness, although their eyes may open spontaneously. The eye opening may give the impression of consciousness, but there is no awareness of the environment. These patients do not acknowledge the examiner; they do not attend or track objects that are presented to them; their movements are non-purposeful; they do not speak.
Minimally conscious state: These patients are also alive, with a severe alteration in consciousness, with intermittent, but inconsistent, behaviors suggesting awareness. Contrary to patients in coma or a vegetative state, minimally conscious patients may occasionally have purposeful movements, and they may track motions with their eyes or speak.
Source: Robert Stevens, associate professor of neuroscience and critical care at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."
-Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and humanitarian, an important member of the "Underground Railroad" (1820 -- 1913)
We are entering a new year and continuing along the path of a Consciousness Revolution, an event that has been anticipated for centuries by indigenous cultures. This is an ideal time for us to ask ourselves what it means to be human on this tiny space station, Earth, at this moment in history, to recognize that we must take the individual and collective actions necessary to turn crises into opportunities, to commit to daily actions that will transform that recognition into reality, and finally, to realize that doing all of this isn't just necessary; it's fun.
Achieving all of our goals will be possible as we pursue the goal of revolutionizing consciousness -- as we think about the world and ourselves in a new and enlightened way. In order to pursue our mission to create a just, peaceful, and sustainable world, we recognize the importance of transforming ourselves from the inside out, starting with our hearts and minds.
Every crisis presents us with an opportunity to make a difference. Taking initiative during times of natural disaster and civil unrest leads to the changes that the world needs to see now. Stepping into the gaps caused by crises with courage and responsibility allows us to create a bright future for our children and grandchildren. We have the power to make sweeping lifestyle changes at home and to empower our leaders to do the same.
The corporatocracy wants us to consume more and more as their profits and power grow; yet, we are called upon to resist with purposeful action. It is time to educate those around us so that the movement to reduce consumption and to empower responsible businesses can become stronger. Not only is rampant consumption feeding into the corporatocracy, but it is also threatening the future of our children in every way from their food sources to their health.Through our purchasing decisions, we send powerful messages to the corporations. It is time now for those messages to be about creating an economy that cleans up pollution, helps starving people feed themselves, and develops new energy, transportation, communications, banking, education, and marketing systems -- instead of about more militarization and pillaging of the earth.
After we commit to daily actions we see our goals become achievements and our dreams become reality. As I suggested in a recent blog, when you identify a cause that inspires you and email at least 10 people every day urging them to act around that cause and also asking them to email 10 of their friends, you manifest magical powers.
Setting clear goals helps us to be intentional about changing poor habits into powerful ones. Writing those goals down and sharing them with friends and family creates momentum and accountability. We can transform ourselves with each dream that starts in the heart and becomes reality.
It takes just one voice to start a movement. One voice is joined by hundreds and then thousands more voices to create an insurmountable energy for change. All over the world, we can and will continue uniting and demanding for the right of the people to be served. Strong grassroots movements will be unstoppable with enough of us behind them.
Let 2014 be the year that you dedicate yourself like never before to your transformative journey and your practice of living in a new consciousness. No matter what goals you set for yourself in the new year, one of the most important actions you can take is to educate those around you about these issues and how to make an impact regarding them.
Let's dance together, soar together, and share our passions with others. Please be sure to see my upcoming Online Course: Food, Plant and Animal Alchemy and Awakening Your Spirit
