Consciousness and the Self: New Essays by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781139202640
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

2.2 Self, lost and found

Descartes supposes that the I is always present. There is no experience without an experiencer. For some, this does not ring true phenomenologically. There is a common phenomenon that we refer to as “losing yourself” in experience. Sometimes we become so absorbed in an activity that we seem to lose awareness of everything else, including, it is said, one’s own self. Taken at face value, this phenomenon would be hard to square with the Cartesian perspective on the topic. When we lose our selves, we do not stop thinking, as a Cartesian might suppose, and we do not lose conscious unity. More importantly, the phenomenon suggests that the consciously experienced self can come and go. If that is right, there is a clear strategy for trying to find out what the conscious self consists in: we can compare what happens when we lose ourselves to what happens when the self reappears.

This is exactly the strategy that has been pursued by a group of researchers in contemporary neuroscience. Goldberg et al. (2006) used fMRI to test brain activation while subjects listened to brief musical recordings or looked at pictures. In one condition, they had to say whether the pictures depicted animals and whether the recordings contained a trumpet. They were given ample time to reflect on their choices. In another condition, they had the same instructions, but the recordings and pictures were presented very quickly. The authors reasoned that when subjects are forced to answer quickly they would tend to lose themselves in the task. Finally, there was a condition in which subjects were asked to decide whether they liked recordings and pictures, a task that requires introspection, and is thus maximally self-involving. They found that the introspection condition showed greater activation in the superior frontal gyrus (SFG) than the other two conditions, and SFG was actually suppressed in the rapid task, suggesting that self-awareness was actively being suppressed. In another pair of studies, they also found that SFG was highly active when people read a word list and decided whether each was true of themselves, as compared to when people read a word list and decided whether each word is a noun or a verb. The word list included a wide range of objects and activities, which are not especially emotional in nature, unlike the picture preference task (e.g. study, run, coffee, and bus). Here again, SFG seems to correlate with the degree of self-involvement. One of the authors of this work was also involved in a further study that showed minimal SFG activation (along with other frontal structures) during passive watching of a movie, suggesting that viewers lose themselves in the film. All this evidence suggests that SFG is active in self-related tasks, and inactive when people lose themselves. The authors conclude that it is a neural correlate of self-awareness.

Interestingly, the authors also imply that SFG is not reducible to any other aspect of experience. It is an area associated with perception (it is active

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.