Conscious Awareness Studied

Oct 30, 03:19 AM

Current Headlines: By WALTER WITSCHEY

The most interesting questions about our brains are still unanswered.

Understanding of the brain is advancing rapidly. Much is the

result of better fMRIs - functional Magnetic Resonance Images - moving pictures of oxygen consumption and activity in the brain. Implanted microscopic electrodes also provide information about brain response.

I will not be satisfied until we have a clearer understanding of consciousness and its evolutionary origins.

Consciousness is tricky to evaluate. Even for a healthy brain, there are curious questions.

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Being conscious: We understand "fully conscious" as having rational thought and action, viewing ourselves as an outside observer, and considering multiple future outcomes before making a decision.

Less well-understood are daydreaming, dreaming while sleeping, and sleeping. If we are asleep, are we unconscious? If so, how do we switch into a conscious state when we hear an alarm clock? Was part of our brain still conscious and alert to noises?

Animal studies, especially of higher primates, show they exhibit behaviors we associate with consciousness. Are they conscious, even if they lack the language to express it?

Professors Christof Koch of California Institute of Technology in Southern California and Susan Greenfield of Oxford University offer fresh and competing neurological views of consciousness in the October issue of Scientific American.

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Researchers study consciousness from the neuro-physiological viewpoint and the systems network complexity viewpoint.

In the first they ask, "How do neurons and brain chemistry produce consciousness?" In the second they ask, "How does the ultra- high order connectedness of neurons produce consciousness?"

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Consciousness evolution: Because consciousness is such an extraordinary human adaptation, when did it occur? Can we discover physical brain changes between ourselves and other animals? Changes that would leave fossil imprints in ancient human skulls?

Dr. Stuart Hameroff of the Arizona Health Sciences Center asserts a very early date for the origins of consciousness.

Fossil records, he says, indicate that animal species including conscious humans all arose from a burst of evolutionary activity about 540 million years ago.

Eric Chaisson of Tufts University sums its up this way:

"Crude consciousness originated among the prehuman animal kingdom millions of years ago. Prehistoric humans evolved a better sense of consciousness less than 1 million years ago. Only recently did humans become sophisticated enough to reveal sense of wonder and self-awareness in their writings."

Likely, cultural and evolutionary factors were intertwined, as language, tool-making, heightened social skills, complex societies and writing all came into play.

Surely during the next 30 years, our increasing ability to scan brains, understand neural network behaviors, and ultimately upload and download brain contents from computers will reveal the functional dimensions of consciousness. Perhaps from that base we can discern the evolutionary path of human consciousness.

Walter R.T. Witschey is professor of anthropology and science education at Longwood University. Contact him at WitscheyWR@Longwood.edu and look for his column on the fourth Thursday of each month.

MEMO: SCIENCE

Originally published by Special Correspondent.

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