The 17th-century French philosopher famously said, "I think, therefore I am". As you can see, consciousness has been a topic of philosophical discussion for a long time. Modern science suggests that consciousness emerges from the collaboration of hundreds of millions of neurons in the brain. But this is still too general, and how, specifically, do neurons produce consciousness? In recent years, scientists have found methods and tools to objectively study this most subjective and personal of things, and with the help of brain-damaged patients, scientists have been able to glimpse the mysteries of consciousness. In addition to figuring out exactly how consciousness works, scientists want to know the answer to a deeper question: Why does it exist, and how did it originate?
Unraveling the mystery of the unconscious
The world beyond the conscious mindThere's a certain tune that plays in your head every time you close your office door. You always prefer Coca-Cola to Pepsi. There's a certain look on your spouse's face that inexplicably triggers your love or anger. And how your reasons for marrying your spouse now seem so implausible.
These are all examples of your unconscious actively at work. Although these examples may seem unrelated on the surface, they reveal the richness of a less rational inner world beyond the conscious mind. Long before Freud made the world realize that what we do depends on the mysterious power of memory and emotion, there has been a resurgence in exploring the depths of the mind and the heart. University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan says, "Much of what we do from moment to moment is unconscious. If everything was at the forefront of consciousness, life would be chaos."
With decentralized neuroimaging, questions such as "how do we make hasty decisions," "why do we feel uneasy about decisions we have no reason to make," and "what makes us happy? Questions such as "How do we make hasty decisions?", "Why do we feel uneasy about unexplained decisions?", and "What makes us happy?" are about to be answered not by studying the secrets of a person's childhood, but by looking at the neural impulses in specific parts of the brain. New research is published almost weekly. Pop culture is so enamored of neuroscience that Malcolm Gladwell's book, Neuroscience. Malcolm Gladwell's book, "In the Blink of an Eye: The Power of Unconscious Thinking," has remained on the best-seller list for four weeks.
Most of us are willing to accept the idea that we make judgments about things through thoughts that take place somewhere out of reach. But now scientists have found the neural connections to these thought processes in parts of the brain that have never received much attention, the parts that communicate with other parts of the brain, trigger neurotransmission, and lead to our behavior. Any of your behaviors, thoughts, conscious and unconscious, everyday activities, are all neurally coded," says Clinton Kilts, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University. Our biggest challenge is to figure out how to study and unravel those codes."
The initial understanding of the human unconscious is of great significance, both to individuals and to the medical community. The realization that human behavior may not always be the result of higher rational thought could shake our belief in some cherished values, such as free will, the ability to make choices, and a sense of responsibility for those choices. We can never control the rhythm of our heartbeat or the activity of our limbic system. However, Gladwell writes, "our snap judgments and first impressions are both motivated and manipulated. ...... To explain our behavior, we must recognize that a flash of thought has the same value as a long period of rational analysis".
Cognitive neuroscientists believe that people are conscious of only about 5 percent of their cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions and behaviors depend on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond consciousness. From heartbeats to shopping carts to deciding not to harm a litter of kittens, we rely on something called the "adaptive unconscious," which is the brain's way of making sense of a world with which our minds and bodies must interact. The adaptive unconscious allows us to drive around a corner without having to use complex calculations to figure out the exact angle of the turn, the speed of the car, and the driving radius. It also allows us to understand the correct meaning of ambiguous sentences.
Commercial applications of unconsciousness research Gerald Saltzman is a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, but he thinks about layers of consciousness like a neuroscientist. He is also one of the founding partners of Olson Saltzman & Associates, a consulting firm that guides organizations to better understand how their customers think. As a marketing professor, Saltzman likes to study what motivates people to buy one thing over another, which, in the field of neuroscience, goes to the heart of the question of motivation.
In his work on customer awareness, Saltzman tries to find a way to get past the often-unreliable sample-panel surveys and avoid the distractions of extraneous factors to get to the heart of what customers really want. This would make sales and marketing efforts more effective.
He filed a U.S. patent for his method, called "Saltzman Metaphorical Elicitation Technique" (ZMET). The patent certificate describes it as a "technique for deriving interconnected constructs that influence thought and behavior. ZMET has long been used to create information that elicits responses from the 95% of the brain that drives many of the choices customers make. It works by accessing deep metaphors that people unconsciously associate with a product or feeling.
Language, Saltzman says, is too limited to be confused with thought itself. But images are a step closer to accessing fragments of the complex and contradictory world of unconscious sensation. He asked his subjects to draw pictures that represented their thoughts and feelings about something, even if they couldn't explain why. Saltzman found that when people did this, they often found "a profound metaphor placed in a unique situation". After conducting research around the world, he believes that the variety of these unconscious metaphors is limited and that metaphors expressing emotions such as hope and sadness are universal to all people.
Saltzman found that even metaphors had practical uses. He was asked by an architectural firm to help design a new children's hospital that would make the environment less intolerable for hospitalized children, their parents, and hospital staff than it had been in the past. Using ZMET technology, the children, parents and staff drew images of what the hospital reminded them of. The researchers then questioned them about the drawings for nearly two hours, uncovering their thoughts, feelings and associations. A series of metaphors emerged from the conversations. After a bit of processing, the core themes emerged, even though the participants' expressions and emotions varied widely. For the children's hospital, the primary metaphor was transformation, with supporting metaphors of control, communication and energy.
How did these themes materialize? When patients and families walked in after the hospital was completed in 2008, they were surrounded by butterflies, a symbol of transformation. The wards are more like family rooms, where children have some control over their personal space. A large garden, visible from all wards, symbolizes transformation, communication and energy. Previously, design was a gamble, a matter of luck," says one of the designers. Now we know that the deepest theme of this hospital has to do with transformation."
Of course. Saltzman isn't the only one who's studied the minds of his clients. In "In the Blink of an Eye," Gladwell describes a costly mistake made by Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola changed the formula of the drink based on data from blindfolded taste tests, but the "New Coca-Cola" was a flop in the marketplace. In fact, Coca-Cola remained the leader in soft drinks, even though the flavor was not as popular as Pepsi. A new study released after Gladwell's book was completed may explain that.
Researchers at Baylor University School of Medicine gave 67 supporters of Coca-Cola and Pepsi a choice. When blindfolded, they preferred Pepsi. But when they saw the company's logo before they drank it, 3/4 of them preferred Coca-Cola. Researchers scanned the subjects' brains during the test and found that the Coca-Cola logo triggered intense activity in parts of the brain associated with memory and self-image, while Pepsi, despite tasting better to most people, had little effect on these areas. When the study was released last October, Reid Montague of the Brown Foundation's Human Neuroscanning Laboratory at Baylor University explained. Montague explained it by saying, "The Coca-Cola trademark powerfully affects activities in the human brain related to behavioral control -- memories and flashes of self-image."
The key, he says, is that the brain responds in a way that can influence behavior." Strangely, this response has nothing to do with preferences at the conscious level. A dog primed for the unconscious mind will come up and sniff you. If he remembers you, and he thinks you're a nice person, he'll immediately start wagging his tail and maybe even give you a lick on the wrist. But he may also avoid you at a distance, associate you with food, or take a quick bite out of you. All of these impressions, all of these connections are triggered by a single sniff. Except for the fact that they don't walk up and sniff another person, people are actually like dogs in this respect. Psychiatrist Dolores B. Dolores, of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, says that the dog is the same as the dog in this respect.
Malaspina said, "An odor is not just a symbol, it includes a wide range of things. "He explains that olfactory information is unique because it is the only one of the five human senses that does not stop at the brain's relay station, the thalamus, but arrives directly at the cortex of the forebrain. The sense of smell does not need to be relayed or filtered and hits the forebrain cortex hard. Researchers have found that smell plays a major role in choosing a mate without us even realizing it. Women who live in the same house tend to synchronize their menstrual cycles because they unconsciously smell something that triggers their endocrine systems. Our brains develop from the time we are fetuses, but we are destined to cede control to our sense of smell," says Marasdona.
But what happens if the sense of smell doesn't work properly? Malaspina and other researchers are studying the sense of smell in people with mental disorders and have come to some intriguing conclusions. Although schizophrenia is seen as a disorder of hallucinations and delusions, one of the more obvious and destructive symptoms of the disorder is social impairment. Some schizophrenics are unable to pick up on social cues and manage social relationships. The hallucinations and delusions can be controlled with medication, but the underlying social impairment makes coping with daily life more difficult.
Studies have shown that many schizophrenics also suffer from "clinically significant olfactory deficits," including dysfunctions of the parietal lobe (which is responsible for synthesizing sensory information in order to make sense of something, such as picking up on social cues or synthesizing them). Since a scent can instantly evoke a picture of a particular time and place, the lack of this ability can cause a person to lose the basic social and emotional support in life. Says Malaspina: "We are coming to realize that scent is a good way to study the unconscious basis of social skills and social interest."
A brain-damaged patient lying in bed is not completely unconscious or in a coma, but the sparks of awareness are fleeting, with only the slightest gesture to prove that he or she is alive or aware that friends and relatives are close by. Medically, these patients are said to be in a minimally conscious state. An estimated 1 million to 300,000 Americans are now in this state.
The journal Neurology published a startling study in which researchers used MR*** vibration imaging equipment to study the brains of two minimally conscious individuals and then compared them with the brains of seven healthy men and women. The scans showed that the brain activity of the minimally conscious patients was less than half that of the others. The researchers then played the subjects tapes recorded by family members or friends, each recounting a pleasant memory or ****ing the same experience. One of the least conscious patients listened to his sister's recollections of her wedding and his toast. The results were striking: all those scanned, including the least conscious, showed similar brain activity, and some showed activity in the visual cortex.
Despite evidence that the unconscious is widespread in everyday life for both damaged and healthy brains, even ardent believers in the unconscious mind like Saltzman advise against jumping to conclusions. "I don't think we know what proportion of the mind is purely rational, and what proportion of the mind seems to be purely intuitive". The balance between the two, between the known and the unknown, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the 5% and the 95% - this is what pioneers in the study of the vast and complex world of the mind continue to explore. Yet it is likely that we will never get to the bottom of it. After all, the mystery of consciousness, the mystery of the brain, will always be the ultimate riddle of what makes a human being a human being.