Continuing the countdown, Day 3 (of 10). Topic: Modern and fascinating ideas about the brain for us all to discuss. How likely is each idea to be true? And if true, what are the implications?
Brain idea 8: Of all the brain's functions, consciousness is one of the trickiest to study. In part, because we don't even know how to define what it is. Progress is happening around measuring levels of consciousness by combining complexity-based measures of EEG recorded brain activity (derived from physics), following noninvasive brain stimulation (TMS). These consciousness meters predict not only changes in consciousness level when we are awake versus asleep, but also which coma patients are 'locked in'. They also suggest that certain substances enhance consciousness.
The friendly version:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1031776/the-hunt-for-hidden-signs-of-consciousness-in-unreachable-patients/
The deeper dive:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejn.15800
@NicoleCRust it is IMO an unreachable topic. I like to hear about what motivates people to describe their work as consciousness research given the heavy implications of that (and given that frequently other topic headings could fit it just as well).
@dbarack @NicoleCRust can't directly measure subjective experience
@Neurograce @dbarack @NicoleCRust I feel like, as someone who works in a psychology dept, I am obliged to vigorously disagree with this statement.
@tdverstynen @dbarack @NicoleCRust I too work in a psychology department...uh oh
@Neurograce @dbarack @NicoleCRust It’s ok. Just don’t let your social psychology colleagues see this toot. Luckily everything is confidential on the internet right?
@NicoleCRust @dbarack @tdverstynen @Neurograce I tend to agree with Grace. We can study behavioral outputs related to consciousness but subjective experience is tough. There is a nice thought experiment recently published that challenges us to consider the connection between subjective experience and neural activity. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001651
@marinopagan not sure why they call this "no-report" - the monkeys are performing a behaviour (tracking a fixation marker).
@jerlich The monkeys are tracking the marker, but they are not explicitly reporting which stimulus they are perceiving. The monkeys first learn to track an unambiguous marker (i.e. same stimulus to both eyes), and the marker is always jumping around, so I don't think the monkeys have any way to know whether the marker jumped, or whether the percept switched. This seems to me like a solid way to measure changes in neural coding upon percept switching instead of simply measuring the monkey report.
@jerlich @NicoleCRust @dbarack @tdverstynen @Neurograce
On the topic of "consciousness", I found a recent study by Janis Karan Hesse and Doris Tsao very clever and interesting. It adds a neat trick to the classic binocular rivalry paradigm, allowing the experimenters to infer the subject's percept from eye movement patterns, without any active report:
https://elifesciences.org/articles/58360 .