The Explanation of Consciousness Will Involve a Stimulus

Albert Einstein

Source: Wikipedia PD

Thanks to the guidance of my undergraduate mentor, Prof. Robert B. Tallarico, when I was an undergraduate student I had the great treat of reading The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (1938) by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld. Each time I revisit that book, I learn something new and realize how many interesting things I missed during my previous readings. One thing I realized during my very first reading of that book is that, whenever Einstein and Infeld introduced a great insight into the nature of all things (e.g., the nature of light and energy), that insight usually stemmed from the intensive study of a specific, ‘strange scenario,’ one which is rare and somewhat contrived (e.g., how charged particles are emitted from a zinc plate that is exposed to ultraviolet light). I realized that the biggest ideas about many things often came from the repeated study of the same small event, over and over, as in the case of Galileo and his inclined planes. From the intensive study of very few such scenarios seemed to stem many great insights. Picking the right ‘strange scenario’ to study seemed to be essential for the generation of new insights. Theorizing did not seem to occur in a vacuum but was always tied to very specific, concrete phenomena, phenomena that are experimentally tractable, reliable, and not messy (e.g., having few variables).

The same appears to be the case in neuroscience and psychology. Insights about everyday behavior (in uncontrolled environments) often come from what occurs during a single trial of a highly-controlled laboratory task, such as the classic Stroop task in which one has to name the colors in which words are written and in which performance suffers when the word and the color mismatch (e.g., the word GREEN presented in blue). Many insights about the mind and brain have stemmed from tasks such as the Stroop task, which is a very specific, contrived, and strange circumstance: One does not walk through Times Square naming the colors in which the words in billboards are presented. In most laboratory tasks, the subject responds to a stimulus, and the experimenter controls the nature of the stimulus and, critically, when that stimulus is presented. This is because it is difficult to draw conclusions about the subject’s ongoing behavioral and mental phenomena when the phenomena are not tied to a specific stimulus, whose nature is well known, and when the phenomena arise under conditions that are less controlled than those of laboratory tasks.

It is for this reason that I speculate that, when one day there is an explanation concerning how consciousness emerges from brain function, that explanation will stem from observations of a simple scenario in which a human being responds to an external stimulus. My hunch is that the explanation will not concern that kind of consciousness we often experience in everyday life when the contents of the mind wander and are not linked so tightly to the stimuli composing the external world, the world whose true nature perplexes the physicist.

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For those of you who follow this blog, here’s a primer that covers in just ten pages many of the novel ideas that have been presented over the years in this blog, Consciousness and the Brain.