Great Throughts Treasury

"A mind is so closely shaped by the body and destined to serve it that only one mind could possibly arise in it. No body, never mind."

"Some philosophers maintain that solving the problem of consciousness is beyond the reach of human intelligence. This is very odd and, I believe, untrue. It fits a sensible intuition that the mind is something special and different, separable from the brain, but the fact that the intuition is sensible does not make it right. All the natural history required to understand consciousness is now readily available in evolutionary biology and psychology. Gene networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that represent the environments they interact with; additional evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without words and is later translated into language when language becomes available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.) This natural knowledge amounts to the emergence of a basic self, and its presence changes the status of the brain's sensorimotor maps from nonconscious mental patterns to that of conscious mental images. Constructed knowledge is a solution to the problem of consciousness. It does not require a homunculus in the control room of the mind and is not scientifically harder to imagine than the long march from genes to culture."

"This is Descartes' error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body."

"We store the body states of every event that happens to us before five and recapitulate them given appropriate signals thereafter, unless we stumble on a way to remove them."

"My interpretation of this phenomenon is that in the absence of on-line input from the missing limb, there prevails the on-line input from a dispositional representation of that limb: that is, the reconstruction through the process of recall of a previously acquired memory."

"When the bad outcome connected with a given response option comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Because the feeling is about the body, I gave the phenomenon the technical term somatic state ("soma" is Greek for body); and because it "marks" an image, I call it a marker. Note again that I use somatic in the most general sense (that which pertains to the body) and I include both visceral and nonvisceral sensation when I refer to somatic markers."

"The critical formative set of stimuli to somatic pairings is, no doubt, acquired in childhood and adolescence. But the accrual of somatically marked stimuli ceases only when life ceases, and thus it is appropriate to describe that accrual as a process of continuous learning."

"This was astounding. Try to imagine it. Try to imagine not feeling pleasure when you contemplate a painting you love or hear a favorite piece of music. Try to imagine your self forever robbed of that possibility and yet aware of the intellectual contents of the visual or musical stimulus, and also aware that once it did give you pleasure."

"The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with the body functions necessary for an organism's survival. . . . They (feelings) serve as internal guides, and they help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them. . . They are the result of a most curious physiological arrangement that has turned the brain into the body's captive audience. . . . Were it not for the possibility of sensing body states that are inherently ordained to be painful or pleasurable, there would be no suffering or bliss, no longing or mercy, no tragedy or glory in the human condition."

"I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental."

"The autonomic nervous system consists of both autonomic control centers, located within the limbic system and brain stem (the amygdala being the prime example), and neuron projections arising from those centers and aimed at viscera throughout the organism. Blood vessels everywhere, including those in the thick of the most extensive organ in the body, the skin, are innervated by terminals from the autonomic nervous system, and so are the heart, the lung, the gut, the bladder, and the reproductive organs. Even an organ as the spleen, which is concerned largely with immunity, is innervated by the autonomic nervous system."

"Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us."

"We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence — yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder."

"The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem."

"For me it is impossible to think that kind of emotion of fear would be left if they were not present the sensation of rapid heartbeat or shortness of breath, or feeling trembling lips or weak legs, or chicken or beef tripe cramps. Can anyone imagine the state of anger without feeling that the chest explodes, face blush, nostrils dilate, clenching, without feeling the urge toward vigorous action? You may feel anger instead with relaxed muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face?"

"The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it. The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange."