CHAPTER 2
CONSCIOUSNESSES - OUR SENSE OF SELF

Let's start by understanding the importance of connecting deeply with our sense of self and our physical feelings, because when this connection is lost or weakened, it undermines the foundation of our mindset.

Consciousness can be described as the mind's subjective experience, our most profound sense of self. When you wake up in the morning, there are a few moments before you start thinking when you experience it most fully. Our interior world of feelings and thoughts is suffused with this sense of self. Neuroscientist, Anil Seth, borrowing from the philosopher, Thomas Nagel, describes consciousness as what 'it feels like something to be me'.1 This sensation is distinct from the awareness of your thoughts, knowledge, identity, or behaviour.

Consciousness has long been held to have mystic properties and assumed to be beyond our comprehension. In the 17th century René Descartes described the mind-body problem which has continued to challenge us for over four centuries. Whilst consciousness was an undeniable quality of mind, Descartes argued that the structure of the brain and body could not explain its existence. The brain and body exist in space, the mind does not. Therefore, consciousness must be a God-given phenomenon. The belief that it must exist outside the discernible physical universe has exerted a powerful, if sometimes unspoken, influence over science ever since, warning researchers off the territory. Stuart Sutherland's 1989 entry on consciousnesses in no less than the International Dictionary of Psychology asserted that 'it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it'.

Until the 1990s, efforts to explain consciousness were still largely the preserve of philosophers. They too regarded it as unfathomable by science. However, in 1994, an unknown 27-year-old philosopher, David Chalmers, threw an intellectual mind bomb that has continued to reverberate ever since. He described the hard part of consciousness as 'why and how do neurophysiological activities produce the experience of consciousness?'.2 The easy (not easy, but conceivable) part of consciousness being 'how individual sensory mechanisms such as sight, focus and process information?'. For Chalmers, the hard part of the problem was finding a reason why our mental functions needed to feel like anything in the first place. Memory, or learning, could theoretically function, as computers and phones do, without consciousness, without any sense of self.

Chalmers' new framing of consciousness energised the debate with Nobel laureate Francis Crick and Christof Koch kick-starting the current neuroscience-led revolution in understanding. Using emerging scanning technologies, their work on the neural correlates of consciousness gave researchers a practical method of, for example, observing the experience of sensing a specific colour and how that resulted in a consistent and specific pattern of brain activity. Experiments were able to seemingly tease apart sensory responses such as vision and taste from those of consciousness, but they couldn't tell us why. Thirty years on, answers are now starting to emerge as researchers look beyond the brain's cortex, where it was long held to reside.

Mark Solms is part of a new wave of researchers who are taking a different approach which opens up a new way of thinking about mindset. Solms believes that the hard problem arose because we were looking in the wrong place and at the wrong mental functions. Instead of seeking consciousness as a property of higher cortical functions, such as reading or facial recognition, that can run independently of consciousness, he argues we should be looking at functions that are intrinsically conscious. This led him to focus on physical feelings that arise from internal sensors in the body. Feelings, he points out, unlike perception and memory, are inherently conscious mental states.

Feelings such as hunger, sleepiness, thirst, rage, and fear that, whilst registered in the cortex, are generated in the brain stem. Solms believes the cortex is not intrinsically conscious but borrows its consciousness from the brain stem. To illustrate this, he points out that even minor damage to certain parts of the brain stem - say the removal of a match head-sized piece - will consistently result in a coma. 'That's how concentrated the consciousness producing power of the brain stem is. Conversely, you can remove large parts of cortex, without obliterating any consciousness'. This is evidenced in children born without a cortex, a devastating condition known as hydranencephaly. Remarkably, these children show a clear sense of self, responding with appropriate emotions to stimuli. They will giggle when tickled, startle when frightened, cry when frustrated. Without any cortex, affective consciousness is clearly present.

The earliest forms of consciousness evolved in simple creatures and were no more sophisticated than feeling hot or thirsty. These feelings were rooted in the most basic biological need to survive. Feelings enabled them to discern what was good and bad for them and raised an organism's action beyond automaticity, reflex, and instinct; responses which only work in predictable situations.

The evolutionary advantage of feeling was that it created feedback loops that facilitated voluntary behaviour, allowing organisms to navigate new and uncertain situations by feeling their way through them. As Solms puts it, this profound form of decision-making is based on the notion that 'I feel like this about that. Thinking about consciousness from the bottom-up makes the hard problem less hard'.

Just how deeply feeling and the maintenance of our metabolic equilibrium influences our mindset can be seen in the work of researchers looking at the impact of temperature on decision-making.3 Decision-making under pressure has long been studied as it involves a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Putting people in hot tubs and testing their decision-making confirmed the phenomenon that time appears to speed up when core body temperature increases, reducing the perceived time available and lessening the quality and accuracy of our decisions.

THE PREDICTING BRAIN

Imagine you're picking up your 9.30am cup of coffee from the desk in front of you. Largely unconsciously, your brain is calculating the effects that it will have on your body. But as you start to drink, you realise it's tea not coffee and, despite it being made to your liking, it has created a prediction error which you register as a feeling of surprise, or even mild disgust. You expected coffee, based on prior experiences, and your senses created an error signal registered in your brain stem as a feeling.

FIGURE 2.1 A highly conceptualised view of how unpredicted sensory information (prediction errors) flow up to 'course correct' the top-down predictions based on prior experience

Source: Compiled from various sources included: Seth, A., 2021. Being You : A New Science of Consciousness. 1st ed. Penguin Publishing Group; Peter Sterling, Allostasis: A model of predictive regulation, Physiology & Behavior,,Volume 106, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 5-15; Clark, A., 2019. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. 1st ed. Oxford University Press; Fleming Stephen M., 2021. Know Thyself, The New Science of Self-Awareness John Murray; Barrett, L., 2017. HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE. 1st ed. London: Macmillan.

This is a key building block in understanding how our mindset operates. Our brain is a prediction-making machine, unremittingly making a series of 'top-down' guesses, based on past experience, which are met with 'bottom-up' sensory information that either confirms or counters those predictions. Karl Friston describes the underlying mechanism of this experience mathematically in his free energy theory.4 Free energy describes the state resulting from the brain's failure to make a correct prediction. The brain does all it can to avoid free energy. Predictive errors equate to surprise, in other words consciousness. When things do not work as expected, we get consciousness - a state, he believes, the brain tries to limit.

In 1995, a major step towards our current understanding of the predicting brain theory was made by Bharat Biswal.5 For most of the 20th century, neuroscientists assumed that the brain was mainly a passive system reacting to the environment, reinforcing the computer analogy. In this model, information was processed in one direction, resulting in instructions to make us react. Initially rejected, Biswal's work led to a paradigm shift in how neuroscientists think. Instead of neurons being mostly inactive until aroused, it became clear that they're constantly firing - the phenomenon called intrinsic brain activity. This activity forms part of a system of sensory feedback loops and predictions that are unceasingly, unconsciously, and effortlessly happening, enabling us to construct reality and manage precious resources - prediction being more energy efficient than reactivity.

Imagine the doorbell rings late at night. You're not expecting a guest, so your mind starts to formulate inferences of what might be happening. A forgotten Amazon parcel being...