Category Archives: Cognitive Science

Captures intersections of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, AI, and philosophy.

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

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I’ve been doing a good bit of reading about consciousness, reality, ego and such. A lot of it is tough sledding. LIke Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, which –according to this review– is “for the curious and fearless lay person wanting to know who, precisely, we are.”

The best I can do with books like this is highlight the portions that make some sense to me and stick ’em here, completely out of context. The Ego Tunnel (Thomas Metzinger) PDF

“When we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?”

“Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is the entity thinking your thoughts?Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality?”

“Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our “reality tunnel.” We are never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory systems and our brain, the architecture of which we inherited from our biological ancestors, as well as our prior beliefs and implicit assumptions. In the end, we see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see.”

“In dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: The fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist.”

“It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all.”

“What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color.”

“The brain constantly creates the experience that I am present in a world outside my brain.”

“Consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.”

“Now-ness is an essential feature of consciousness.”

“There is no immediate contact with reality.”

“Flagging the dangerous present world as real kept us from getting lost in our memories and our fantasies.”

“From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually observe it going on in our brains. In conscious reasoning, we witness the formation of thoughts; some processing stages are available for introspective attention. Therefore, we know that our thoughts are not given but made.”

“There is more to an existence worth having, or a life worth living, than subjective experience.”

“Most of us do not value bliss as such, but want it grounded in truth, virtue, artistic achievement or some sort of higher good. We want our bliss to be justified. … We want a reason for our happiness.”

New studies on effects of psychedelics

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“…the brain is like a TV set that is “hardwired” into the single “channel” of everyday physical reality — Rick Strassman calls it “channel normal.” What psychedelics may do when used and administered properly is “retune the receiver wavelength of the brain,” thus providing us with regular, repeated, reliable access to other levels of reality that surround us at all times but are not normally accessible to our senses. It is even possible that these long-reviled drugs open a secret doorway inside our own minds allowing us to approach the Holy Grail of quantum physics — freestanding parallel universes and the intelligent beings who inhabit them. If that is so then the ability of psilocybin to release terminal cancer patients from their fear of death through “an abrupt change of consciousness” makes perfect sense — for they would know from direct experience that even when the television set is broken the television signal keeps right on broadcasting.”

— Boing Boing

Rewiring with meditation

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“Spending some time meditating may improve the integrity and efficiency of certain connections in the brain, according to a new study. When a group of participants meditated regularly over the course of a month, brain scans showed increased nerve connections in the areas that govern reward processing and decision making. The authors of the study hope this particular kind of meditation can be adapted to help those conditions with manifestations in the same area of the brain, such as ADD, addiction, and dementia.”

Pill to erase bad memories

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I first wondered about this back in 2004. A couple of years later, 60 Minutes did a segment on one such drug. Now Dutch researchers claim to have erased bad memories by using ‘beta-blocker’ drugs, which are usually prescribed to patients with heart disease.

“The astonishing treatment could help sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder and those whose lives are plagued by hurtful recurrent memories. But British experts said the breakthrough raises disturbing ethical questions about what makes us human. They also warned it could have damaging psychological consequences, preventing those who take it from learning from their mistakes.”

Would I take such a pill? I think I might. I haven’t experienced more than my share of pain or trauma but if I’m a better person for it, I’m hard pressed to say how.

“But you are YOU because of the sum of your experiences, smays.com,” one might argue.

Yes, and I’d just be a different person if I took the pill and erased the memories. In fact, maybe I did take the pill. I wouldn’t remember, would I?

And before we leave this topic… how is this different from taking pills that alter our perception of this moment (Valuium, anti-anxiety meds, etc)?

60 Minutes segment: A Pill to Forget

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In May of 2004 I posted: “If you experienced the worst day of your life… something truly horrible…and there was a drug that made you forget the previous 24 hours, would you take it? If not, why?”

Last Sunday on 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl did a segment titled “A Pill to Forget?” From the 60 Minutes website:

“If there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it?”

Turns out there is such a pill. Sort of. It’s called propranolol, a medication commonly used for high blood pressure … and unofficially for stage fright.

It turns out our memories are sort of like Jello – they take time to solidify in our brains. And while they’re setting, it’s possible to make them stronger or weaker. It all depends on the stress hormone adrenaline. Propranolol seems to make the memories less intense.

The people in the 60 Minutes story had no trouble answering the question I posed back in 2004: Hell yes!