Transcript

Analysis: Emotion, cognition and consciousness
October 10, 2003 from Talk of the Nation/Science Friday IRA FLATOW, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY.
I'm Ira Flatow.
What is consciousness? It's a state of mind most of us take for granted; we don't even think about it. But there are people who do think about and study consciousness. Some are researchers, some are philosophers and some are poets. And the juncture where they meet, the meeting of those minds on the subject of the mind, is what we'll be exploring this hour.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has used the tools of his profession, brain imaging, to study the human brain in action. He's shown that feelings and emotions are necessary for decision-making and, in fact, for our survival. He also maintains they play a key role in our construction of self; that conscious awareness arises from the brain and its network of neurons.
This hour we'll talk with Dr. Damasio about what the science of neurology is telling us about consciousness. We'll also talk with German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, whose theories of the self seek to bridge the gap between philosophy and science. And we'll talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham about how the process of writing a poem is also the process of constructing a conscious experience. Could it be that she's known all along what the neurologist and philosopher are trying to prove? We'll find out.
My guests today are joining me from the second Utah Symposium in Science and Literature on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. So if you'd like to join our discussion, give us a call. Our number, 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. And if you're in the audience at the university, you can step up to the mike with your questions.
Let me introduce my guests. Antonio Damasio is the author of "The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness," published by Harcourt in 2000, also "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain," out from Harcourt this year. He's an adjunct professor at The Salk Institute and the Van Allen distinguished professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Welcome back to the program, Dr. Damasio.

Dr. ANTONIO DAMASIO (University of Iowa): Good to be here. Thank you.

FLATOW: Jorie Graham is the author of several collections of poetry, including "Never," published in 2002 by HarperCollins, and "The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994," winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She's the Boylston professor of oratory and rhetoric at Harvard University in Cambridge.
Welcome to the program.

Professor JORIE GRAHAM (Harvard University): Thank you.

FLATOW: You're welcome.
Thomas Metzinger is the author of "Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity," published this year by MIT Press. He's a professor and head of the department of philosophy and the director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
Welcome to the program.

Professor THOMAS METZINGER (Johannes Gutenberg University): Thanks for inviting me.

FLATOW: Well, you're welcome.
Dr. Damasio, let me begin with you because, you being a scientist, we're sort of on familiar territory with you a little bit in this program. When we talk about consciousness, when we talk about feelings, you have said what feelings are--you can speak with confidence about what feelings are, where they come from, how they happen, what they are made of biologically. How can you be so sure?

Dr. DAMASIO: Well, perhaps I should start by saying that I am not so sure. But the fact is that we can relatively easily today--with the tools we have available in neuroscience, we can find out about what is going on in the brain and what is going on in an organism as a whole when we are engaged, for example, in emoting or when we are engaged in feeling an emotion. So it is possible to studying this phenomena from the point of view of what happens in the behavior of an individual, from the point of view of what that individual is experiencing and can tell us he's experiencing, but also from the point of view of what is going on in the brain at that same moment, because we have these new tools that allow us to look--in an indirect way, but nonetheless to look--into what the brain is doing at that moment.

FLATOW: Tell us how you do that. How do you actually monitor and what kinds of tests do you give your subjects to see what's going on in the brain?

Dr. DAMASIO: Well, there are a variety of tools, some old, some very modern. The old ones you probably have heard about for a long time. They used to be known as brain wave tests. And, in fact, they use the electrical activity of the brain which is captured by an apparatus that allows you to find out how that activity is distributed in the brain at a given time. But there are very modern tools. For example, tools such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography that actually allows to look into the structure of the brain and into the activity patterns of the brain at a given moment. These are very modern.
In fact, as you've probably heard, the Nobel Prize for medicine in physiology was just awarded to two of the developers of magnetic resonance imaging. And they allow you still an indirect but nonetheless far closer view of what is going on both in terms of the structure, because you can reconstruct the very anatomy of the brain at the computer screen and create an image from it, but also allows to determine the level of activity that the brain is having in a particular part, in a particular system, thanks in large part to the fact that there are differences in the blood flow in different areas of the brain when we are engaged in different tasks.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Well, now that you see that the brain is lighting up when you give it different tasks to do, how do you make the jump from watching the brain operate to talking about consciousness? How do you then--How do you define consciousness?

Dr. DAMASIO: Right. Well, the first thing that's important to know for your listeners and for all of us is that it cannot do any of this without having prior theory and prior hypothesis. The way science proceeds is not really by having an instrument to measure something willy-nilly and expect (technical difficulties). It proceeds by having a prior idea of what may be going on, creating a hypothesis about a certain mechanism and then using these modern tools or any tools to find out whether or not your hypothesis is correct. You make predictions and you check, and you may be correct or incorrect or somewhere in between. That's the way it works.
So we begin, to answer your question specifically, by having an idea of what we want to study--for example, the fact that in consciousness we're interested in understanding, how is it that we have a notion of existence, the notion that we are in a given moment, the notion that we can perceive what is going on and that we can refer that to something that traditionally we have called the self? So in dictionary definition, you have to talk about, how is it that we are aware of ourself and of our surroundings? And then we dissect this idea a little further and we ask, for example, questions about what a certain area that we presume is involved in the construction of, say, the self will be doing in a certain task, in certain circumstances?
And we can also do something quite interesting, which is ask ourselves, how in a certain patient, a neurological patient for example, who has lost the ability to be conscious, the ability to have a sense of self--what has been lost in that patient? And you can--that is a very important means, perhaps the golden means, of understanding what is going on in the brain, especially when you start your inquiry, is how is it that a person with damage in a particular part or parts of the brain will be deprived of the ability to have a self, the ability to emote, the ability to have feelings, the ability to use language?
And that is a very important question to ask, and lo and behold, we have answers from those questions when we study neurological patients. And very often that leads the way into the further investigations we can undertake when we have all these modern tools that we just talked about.

FLATOW: Yeah. And you've said before when we've spoken that the self is related to the monitoring ability of our life functions, that we're sort of unconsciously monitoring everything that's going on around us all the time and making judgments about them?

Dr. DAMASIO: That's quite correct, Ira. What really happens, from our perspective now, is that if we did not have the possibility in our brains to represent in great detail and in myriad fashion what is going on in our bodies, we probably would not be conscious individuals. We can actually say that we are conscious and have a self as a byproduct of this enormous ability of our brains to monitor the very different functions of our bodies. And the magnificent thing is that the brain is doing this literally for every department of our organism.
It's monitoring what is going on in the chemistries of, for example, our endocrine systems and our metabolic regulation, but it is also monitoring what is going on in our viscera--for example our heart and lungs and gut and the very skin that forms the membrane and limit of our bodies. And it is monitoring also what is going on in the muscular activity. So, for example, when you move about or when you have a facial expression of a given emotion, all of this is being represented in the brain whether you want it to or not.
I like to say that the brain is the captive audience of our body because it really has--it's entirely at the mercy of this constant barrage of signals that represent the body. And it is that very fact, this ability to represent continuously, even when we are doing all sorts of things and having all sorts of ideas that are not about our body, that probably forms this basic connection, this anchor that allows us to generate a self and that allows us, in fact, to maintain a continuity of self over a lifetime, as we all know we do.

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Jorie Graham, you're a poet. You have a different perspective on the idea of consciousness. And you have a poem called "Prayer" in your most recent collection. Do you think you could read it for us?

Prof. GRAHAM: Sure, Ira. I'll try. I'm now thinking of it as a act of monitoring my own bodily functions, but I...

FLATOW: I may want to ask you--we have a break coming up in about exactly three minutes. I don't want you to get into your poem and then have to interrupt you for the break. But I want to come back and have you read your poem. But how do you react to what Dr. Damasio was saying? Are you now monitoring your bodily functions more?

Prof. GRAHAM: Well, there is a way in which the imagination is an instrument for trawling through an experience in the world with a sort of charged emotional, intellectual openness, attention that Keats called negative capability. And he did add `without irritable reaching after fact and reason,' meaning by that, that you don't necessarily know what you're looking for but you know that you are looking. And it's a certain quality of attention that the term `monitoring' seems to capture very well.
It does seem crucial in a poem that--and the best poems exhibit this. One only has to think of someone like John Keats--that what is being monitored is not only a phenomenon in the outside world, but what one's own heart is feeling, what one's own muscles are doing, the entire list that Tony just underwent for us. And the poem is, in fact, an undergoing of an experience. It's not the report of an experience.
The speaker in a poem is the protagonist of the poem, not the narrator of an event. So it is very much an--as Stevens would say, a poem is an act of the mind in the process of finding what will suffice. He also says that a poem is the cry of its occasion, and he doesn't say that it's the report of its occasion or the interpretation of its occasion. He says it's a reaction to and an undergoing of, which is what the dramatic term `cry' would lead one to believe and feel.
And in that sense, it's very moving to hear Dr. Damasio's descriptions because it's not fair to say that poets knew it all along, although one certainly would have to say that from Shakespeare to Dickinson to Keats, there's no doubt that these people knew how to access consciousness and to create very complicated constructed selves. There is sort of an illusion and a fascination with biographies of poets and one thinks that the John Keats who is the dying young man is the John Keats who is writing the "Ode to a Nightingale." They're actually obviously not the same.

FLATOW: Jorie...

Prof. GRAHAM: And the construction of these persona of the speaker is something which all the techniques of poetry are in service of.

FLATOW: All right. We're going to take a short break and come back with Jorie Graham, Antonio Damasio, and Thomas Metzinger will jump into the fray. And stay with us. We'll be right back with a nice poem. Don't go away.
I'm Ira Flatow, and this is TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)

FLATOW: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
We're talking this hour about consciousness with a poet, a philosopher and a scientist. My guests are Jorie Graham, author of several collections of poetry, including "Never." She is the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Thomas Metzinger, author of "Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity," out this year from MIT Press. Antonio Damasio, author of "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorry and the Feeling Brain," out this year from Harcourt. Our number: 1 (800) 989-8255.
Jorie, you were going to read us a poem. Can you set this poem up for us at all, give us any background?

Prof. GRAHAM: Sure. It takes place--the speaker is standing over a dock railing looking at minnows. You have to imagine in the poem an original shock much further out at sea which would be a kind of metaphor for something like a big bang that gives way to a series of ever outward expanding wakes and they finally reach this particular set of railings and pilings, and they carry minnows within them and in their current.
I'm going to read a poem which is in two parts, although it's all one block, and the first half is all one sentence with nesting parentheses and attempts to, in fact, capture an act of consciousness which has so much simultaneous activity in it, which is why I use parentheses and brackets to sort of indicate the amount that one is thinking about while one is also feeling and doing and looking and remembering. And they cannot really be carded out from each other.
And then at a certain point there's a turn in the poem and a series of pressures that the bodily experience of the witnessing of the minnows compels the speaker to suddenly undergo, and they become feelings and then emotions and then they lead to a kind of thinking, and then eventually to a sense of a moral or ethical predicament, which I think is something that Dr. Damasio maps quite brilliantly in his work. Obviously we just do it instinctively. I'll read the poem "Prayer."
`Over a dock railing I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a miniscule muscle but also without the way to create current, making of their unison, turning, re-enfolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison, making of themselves a visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by minutest factions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the dockside cycles of finally arriving boat wakes there where they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into itself. It has those layers, a current, a real current, though mostly invisible, sending into the visible minnows' arrowing motion that forces change. This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed more and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say, "Take this. This is what I have saved. Take this. Hurry." And if I listen now, listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go. I cannot, of course, come back, not to this, never. It is a ghost posed on my lips, here, never.'

FLATOW: Very pretty.
Dr. Damasio, you're a fan of Jorie Graham so much that you have one of Jorie Graham's poems in front of your book "The Feeling of What Happens." So she's expressing ideas that speak to you?

Dr. DAMASIO: Oh, absolutely. You know, I think Jorie is in the tradition of many poets that have, in fact, as she pointed out, been there before we were. It is not that scientists interested, for example, in self and consciousness are breaking ground in this field without others, and especially poets, having treaded there before. I mean, you think of Shakespeare and you think, for example, of the soliloquies of "Hamlet," and what is that but, in fact, an enormous attempt to grasp what is going on in the internal monologue of a conscious self.
And you also find wonderful--you know, there's a passage that I just wrote here as we were talking, when Jorie talked about poets having been there. Wordsworth, for example, talking about emotion in relation to--in one of his poems, the "Tintern Abbey" poems. He talks about `sensations sweet felt in the blood and felt along the heart.' Now this is one of my preferred verses, almost as much as Jorie's verses, because here he is honing in on something that people at that time did not even know, and that is that there were chemical molecules being poured into the bloodstream to affect changes in our body. And he is referring to it very specifically when he talks about `felt in the blood' and also `felt along the heart,' referring, of course, to something that we've known for millennia and written about, which is the fact that when we emote we very often have changes in our heartbeat.
So there is this great tradition, and Jorie Graham and other poets who are generally described as metaphysical poets have actually added on to that. For example, in the beautiful poem she just read, I underlined the following line: `What you get is to be changed.' This almost describes to me what is really happening when we construct a self. Self is about the constant change that is occurring in our bodies. And we only develop the self and we only know that we exist because we have this way of capturing the fact that our body has just undergone change as a result of interacting with the world or interacting with our own structure.
So you have a very good example of this connection between poetry on the one hand and science, which is not terribly surprising because good art in general and science are really aiming at the same thing. We really want to know about human nature in one way or another. The immediate purpose tends to be slightly different, but in the end, that's what distinguishes great science and great art.