Brains and minds: not a direct connection

Report of a brain scientist who experimented with electro-stimulation of brains while patients were conscious (and before you think something unethically Nazi, recall the scene from Hannibal was somewhat based on fact in terms of the fact that the brain itself does not feel pain). There was an interesting set of results in terms of sense of agency.

He found that he could elicit all kinds of things from electrically stimulating the brain- memories, emotions, movements of the body, etc. The mental processes elicited were remarkably vivid.Yet in all instances, patients knew that the evoked response was not caused by their own will. Penfield called it 'double consciousness'. Patients always saw the response from a third person perspective, as well as experiencing the response in the first person. Patients always knew that the response was done to them, not by them. Penfield noted that patients always experienced their own responses as observers, as well as participants, and they could always distinguish their own coincident experience from the simultaneous induced response. There always remained a first-person subjectivity that was untouched by electrical stimulation of the brain.

I'm still thinking about this, but I don't think it poses any basic problem to the emergentist account I suspect is about right: that mind is an emergent property of socialised and embodied brains and as such is non-linear and dynamic and perhaps even 'holographic'...

Filed in: