2: The Distributed Networks of Mind

Lecture abstract

"Our brains are organized in such a fashion that very little of the processing, which is to say neural work, goes on in our conscious minds.

Any simple act, such as pointing to your nose, involves forming the desire to touch your nose, planning a motor response, gathering information about the location of your nose, calculating in a flash if you want to bring attention to your nose and so on. All that information is gathered and processed and leads to the desired action, and yet little or none of it is done consciously.

Even more daunting is the fact that how the brain accomplishes such a simple task is utterly beyond scientific understanding at this point in time. While textbooks are full of knowledge about the specific neurons involved—the areas in the brain that are active during such specific actions and even areas known to be active with intention to act—no one knows how it actually works.

The neurologic ward proves to be a laboratory of immense richness, with each patient revealing secrets that when stitched together point to an understanding about how the brain is organized and how conscious experience—the ineffable state we long to preserve, alter and feed—emerges from neurons. Studying such patients reveals our brains are not organized in a hierarchical fashion, but rather are a massively parallel and distributed system.

Understanding and appreciating this fact helps us on the journey to discover the importance of the concept of emergence, the idea that the whole produces a new kind of state that affects the separate individual elements that make it up. These novel states, or phenomenal experience, are the stuff of the self. Thus, understanding how the organization of the brain leads to emergent phenomenal states adds to the picture of what it means to have a self."

Lecture video