Consciously Alive

Dr. Rajesh Bhola
India
Dec 06, 2013

   Consciousness probably evolved in order to enable living beings to avoid risk or harm. Consciousness consists of the impulses that arise in circumstances of uncertainty. Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our Consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is difficult to specify what it is, what it does or why it has evolved. 

I remember a young teenager who had survived a car crash and was admitted in the trauma centre of a reputed hospital of the town. Even after three months, since parts of his brain had been crushed, he could only open his eyes and did not respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the parlance of neurology, he was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. However, there was astonishment when trauma doctors and neurologists scanned his brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to the active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences to the boy, his brain parts involved in language ‘lit up’; when they asked him to imagine visiting the surroundings of his house, the brain parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up; and when they asked him to imagine playing soccer, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, his scans were barely different from those of a healthy person. The teenager, it appears, had glimmerings of Consciousness. It is difficult to comprehend what it is like to be that teenager. Did he drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prodded him, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients? In medicine, Consciousness is assessed by observing a patient’s arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states - ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of Consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which Consciousness is impaired or disrupted. The report of this unusual case was just the latest shock from a bracing new field - the science of Consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculation are now at the forefront of Cognitive Neuroscience. With some of the problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape; with others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.

It should not be surprising that research on Consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. For each of us, Consciousness is life itself.  The major religions locate Consciousness in a soul that survives the body’s death - to receive its’ just desserts or to meld into a Global Consciousness. The conviction that other people can suffer and flourish, as each of us does, is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality. To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as Consciousness, it would help to first clear some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours, which indicate that someone’s home. Nor can Consciousness be equated with self-awareness. 

To most philosophers, the word Consciousness connotes the relationship between the mind and the world. To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world. Krishna Consciousness, for example, is a term used to mean an intimate linkage between the mind of a worshipper and the god Krishna. Human Consciousness flows like a stream of thought, governed by some features. Every thought tends to be part of a Personal Consciousness, and is always changing in a sensibly continuous manner. A similar concept appears in Buddhist philosophy, which is usually translated as ‘mind stream’ or ‘mental continuum’. The mind stream is viewed primarily as a source of noise, which distracts attention from a changeless underlying reality. 

Human Consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people do not know how to think about. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist and hope that there will never be a demystification of Consciousness. The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities; Consciousness consists of the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some and the suppression of others, by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. No philosopher ever has managed to explain what this weird stuff, Human Consciousness, is really made of. Consciousness is our inner spark, the golden link within us that connects our most and least illumined parts. 

 Sigmund Freud made famous the difference between Conscious and Unconscious thoughts. You can ponder and discuss Conscious thoughts, and let them guide your behaviour. The control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are the Unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere - because you could not walk and talk and see without them - but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits. The challenge is to distinguish Conscious from Unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved. How do we explain how subjective experience arises from neural computation? The astonishing hypothesis that finds favour is the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul; Consciousness is the activity of the brain. And Consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality - such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain - from caffeine and alcohol to Ecstasy and LSD - can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the brain and separates the two hemispheres - a treatment for epilepsy and cerebral palsy - spawns two Consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife! Attempts to contact the souls of the dead, a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago, turned up only cheap magic tricks; and near-death experiences are not the ‘eyewitness’ reports of a soul parting company from the body, but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. 

The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains cannot hold a hundred numbers in memory, cannot visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps cannot intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This theory could be demolished when a genius - a Darwin or Einstein of Consciousness - comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes everything about Consciousness clear to us. However, maybe the biology of Consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the improvable dogma of an immortal soul. It is not just that an understanding of the physiology of Consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression; that understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings, which is a feeling at the core of morality. Let us think about why we sometimes remind ourselves that life is short; it is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. Nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of Consciousness is a precious and fragile gift. 

Dr. Rajesh Bhola is President of Spastic Society of Gurgaon and is working for the cause of children with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities for more than 25 years. He can be contacted at rabhola@yahoo.com