Top Quotes: “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness” — Anil Seth
Introduction
“General anesthesia is very different from going to sleep. It has to be; if you were asleep, the surgeon’s knife would quickly wake you up. States of deep anesthesia have more in common with catastrophic conditions like coma and the vegetative state, where consciousness is completely absent. Under profound anesthesia, the brain’s electrical activity is almost entirely quieted — something that never happens in normal life, awake or asleep. It is one of the miracles of modern medicine that anesthesiologists can routinely alter people’s brains so that they enter and return from such deeply unconscious states. It’s an act of transformation, a kind of magic: anesthesia is the art of turning people into obiects.”
“I will make the case that the experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. Being you is literally about your body.”
“By the end of the book, you’ll understand that our conscious experiences of the world and the self are forms of brain-based prediction — “controlled hallucinations” — that arise with, through, and because of our living badies.”
“In unconscious states, like dreamless sleep and general anesthesia, these echoes are very simple. There is a strong initial response in the part of the brain that was zapped, but this response dies away quickly, like the ripples caused by throwing a stone into still water. But during conscious states, the response is very different: a typical echo ranges widely over the cortical surface, disappearing and reappearing in complex patterns. The complexity of these patterns, across space and time, implies that different parts of the brain — in particular the thalamocortical system — are communicating with each other in much more sophisticated ways during conscious states than during unconscious states.”
“Up to a third of elderly patients entering acute care develop hospital-induced delirium, and the proportion is even higher for those having surgery. Even though it usually recedes given time, there can be severe long-term consequences including reduced cognitive capacity, an increased chance of dying in the subsequent months, and heightened risk of subsequent episodes of delirium and dementia.”
“TAKE THE EXPERIENCE of identifying with a particular object in the world that is your body. Not only is the changeable and precariously assembled nature of these experiences evident in conditions like somatoparaphrenia and phantom limb syndrome, it can also be revealed by simple laboratory experiments. The best-known example is the “rubber hand illusion,” first described more than twenty years ago, and now a cornerstone of research on embodiment.
The rubber hand illusion is easy to try out for yourself — all you need is a willing volunteer, some pieces of cardboard to form a barrier, a couple of paintbrushes, and a rubber hand. The volunteer places her real hand on one side of the cardboard partition, out of sight. The rubber hand is placed in front of her, in the location and orientation that her real hand would normally occupy. Then the experimenter takes the paintbrushes and gently strokes both her real hand and the rubber hand, back and forth. The idea is that when the hands are stroked synchronously, she will develop the uncanny feeling that the rubber hand is somehow actually part of her body, even though she knows that it isn’t. But when the hands are stroked asynchronously, out of time, the illusion should not develop and she will not assimilate the rubber hand into her experience of what is her body.”
“…the intriguingly named “body swap” illusion, which was described in a 2008 study led by the Swedish researcher Henrik Ehrsson. In the body swap setup, two people wear head-mounted displays, each with a camera attached. By swapping the camera feeds between the headsets, each person can see themselves from the other’s point of view. The effect kicks in properly only when they shake hands. The idea is that seeing and simultaneously feeling the handshake provides the multisensory stimulation so that, when combined with top-down expectations, each person feels they are now somehow located in the other person’s body, shaking hands with themselves. This experience puts you, albeit virtually, in the shoes of another.
I tried out virtual body swapping for myself at a small gathering in Ojai, California, in the winter of 2018. I was there along with Danish Masood, a United Nations peace broker who also happens to be a virtual reality researcher. For several years Masood had been working closely with BeAnotherLab, the brainchild of Barcelona-based neuroscientist Mel Slater. The aim of BeAnotherLab is to adapt body swapping technology into novel “empathy generation” devices. By experiencing what it’s like to perceive the world from within the virtual body of another, their idea is that empathy for the other’s situation will naturally follow.”
“Two participants put on headsets, and first look down at their laps, so that they see their partner’s body instead of their own. They then make a series of coordinated movements, following detailed instructions, and if they follow along closely enough, their new body will appear to respond to their commands, strengthening the experience of being the other. After some time, mirrors are held up, and each sees the mirror image of the other, as if it were himself or herself. In the final act, the curtain separating the two people is removed, and they look at themselves from within the other’s body, before approaching each other and giving themselves a hug.”
“And who is the “you”? The “you” in question is the assemblage of self-related prior beliefs, values, goals, memories, and perceptual best guesses that collectively make up the experience of being you.”
“In one celebrated sixteenth-century case, theFrench lawyer Bartholomew Chassenée successfully exonerated some rats with the clever argument that they could not reasonably be expected to turn up to trial, given the dangers posed to them by the many cats lying in wait along the route.”
“LET’S START WITH MAMMALS — a grouping which includes rats, bats, monkeys, manatees, lions, hippos, and of course humans too. I believe that all mammals are conscious. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, but I am pretty confident. This claim is not based on superficial similarity to humans, but on shared mechanisms. If you set aside raw brain size — which has more to do with body size than with anything else — mammalian brains are strikingly similar across species.”
“Octopus chromatophore control is thought to be “open-loop,” meaning that the neurons in the chromatophore lobe do not generate any obvious internal copy of the signals sent out to the chromatophores in the skin. The central brain might not even know what its skin is doing.
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around what this means for how an octopus might experience its world, and its body within that world. Its own skin will change color in ways that it cannot itself see and which are not even relayed to its brain. And some of these adaptations may happen through purely local control, in which an arm senses its own immediate environment and changes its appearance without the central brain ever getting involved. The human-centered assumption that we can see and feel what’s happening to our own bodies just doesn’t apply.”
