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Consciousness
Feb. 10th, 2006 10:00 amMany Years ago, a psychologist carried out an interesting experiment. Under hyponosis, he left a suggestion in a test subject that, when they heard a certain trigger phrase, they would jump in the nearest body of water. Then, whilst out walking later, he used the trigger phrase and the subject promptly jumped into a nearby pond.
"Why on earth", he asked, "did you do that?"
"Oh," replied the patient. "I was hot, and I needed to cool off."
So it was that the idea of cognitive dissonance was born. Further investigated by Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is a phrase which covers several behaviours, one of which is the human tendancy to justify post-hoc actions which we didn't really have a reason for when we did them - such as claiming that jumping in a pond was a conscious decision when it actually wasn't.
What's interesting about this is that there's a lot of evidence that we spend a lot of our lives in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Consciousness appears to be a long-term planning mechanism, and short-term decision making seems to be run entirely without conscious control and then justified after the decisions have been made. Evidence suggests that the neurons which control muscle movement start to fire before a conscious decision to move have been made so, for example, when you decided to get out of bed this morning, your muscles had started to move before you had the thought: "Time to get up". As consciousness is only a long-term planning mechanism, it is unwilling to accept that a lot of stuff which happens isn't actually consciously controlled, resulting in us "deciding" to do things after we've already begun to do them.
It's a fantastic cover-up on the part of the brain, designed to help the world make sense.
The point where this starts getting really wierd is when the normal controls of consciousness are removed and the brain starts doing really odd stuff. Split brain patients are a good case in point. The split-brain procedure is carried out in victims of severe and untreatable epilepsy. Epileptic episodes are caused by huge, random firing of the neurons and they start in one part of the brain and spread like a wave accross the whole thing. In order to stop this happening and to give the patient some semblance of a normal life, the Corpus Callosum* - that bundle of nerve fibres which connects the hemispheres of the brain - is severed, cutting all connection between the left and right halves of the brain. This prevents major epilepsy, but has other effects. Interestingly, patients usually have a relatively normal life after this despite there now being effectively two independant consciousnesses operating in the same head.
One half of the brain, usually the left, takes control of communication. Speech and writing (done through the right hand) are controlled by one half of the brain meaning that the other hemisphere is able to see, hear, experience and even control limbs, but is rendered completely incommunicado.
Over time, strange things sometimes start to happen. There are recorded instances of people being hindered and even attacked by their 'other' limb. The left hemisphere, having no knowledge of what is going on in the right, cannot tell what is going on but even then sometimes attempts to justify the actions.
For my money, the freakist bit of all of this is the idea of a single head with two consciousnesses within it, one unable to communicate with the outside world and slowly going mad with frustration and anger to the point where it stages physical attacks upon the body of the 'other' side, whilst all the while the communicative half of the brain is making up justifications for behaviour it doesn't even control.
I dunno about you, but this is an idea which really gives me the creeps. I think I'd rather be epileptic.
The other use of conscious awareness appears to be influencing the universe around us, but when I consider that my brain might not know what I'm going to do next but it can tell an electron which slit to go through, I reach for the Glenmorangie and try not to think about it. Some things just call for booze.
"Why on earth", he asked, "did you do that?"
"Oh," replied the patient. "I was hot, and I needed to cool off."
So it was that the idea of cognitive dissonance was born. Further investigated by Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is a phrase which covers several behaviours, one of which is the human tendancy to justify post-hoc actions which we didn't really have a reason for when we did them - such as claiming that jumping in a pond was a conscious decision when it actually wasn't.
What's interesting about this is that there's a lot of evidence that we spend a lot of our lives in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance. Consciousness appears to be a long-term planning mechanism, and short-term decision making seems to be run entirely without conscious control and then justified after the decisions have been made. Evidence suggests that the neurons which control muscle movement start to fire before a conscious decision to move have been made so, for example, when you decided to get out of bed this morning, your muscles had started to move before you had the thought: "Time to get up". As consciousness is only a long-term planning mechanism, it is unwilling to accept that a lot of stuff which happens isn't actually consciously controlled, resulting in us "deciding" to do things after we've already begun to do them.
It's a fantastic cover-up on the part of the brain, designed to help the world make sense.
The point where this starts getting really wierd is when the normal controls of consciousness are removed and the brain starts doing really odd stuff. Split brain patients are a good case in point. The split-brain procedure is carried out in victims of severe and untreatable epilepsy. Epileptic episodes are caused by huge, random firing of the neurons and they start in one part of the brain and spread like a wave accross the whole thing. In order to stop this happening and to give the patient some semblance of a normal life, the Corpus Callosum* - that bundle of nerve fibres which connects the hemispheres of the brain - is severed, cutting all connection between the left and right halves of the brain. This prevents major epilepsy, but has other effects. Interestingly, patients usually have a relatively normal life after this despite there now being effectively two independant consciousnesses operating in the same head.
One half of the brain, usually the left, takes control of communication. Speech and writing (done through the right hand) are controlled by one half of the brain meaning that the other hemisphere is able to see, hear, experience and even control limbs, but is rendered completely incommunicado.
Over time, strange things sometimes start to happen. There are recorded instances of people being hindered and even attacked by their 'other' limb. The left hemisphere, having no knowledge of what is going on in the right, cannot tell what is going on but even then sometimes attempts to justify the actions.
For my money, the freakist bit of all of this is the idea of a single head with two consciousnesses within it, one unable to communicate with the outside world and slowly going mad with frustration and anger to the point where it stages physical attacks upon the body of the 'other' side, whilst all the while the communicative half of the brain is making up justifications for behaviour it doesn't even control.
I dunno about you, but this is an idea which really gives me the creeps. I think I'd rather be epileptic.
The other use of conscious awareness appears to be influencing the universe around us, but when I consider that my brain might not know what I'm going to do next but it can tell an electron which slit to go through, I reach for the Glenmorangie and try not to think about it. Some things just call for booze.
