Attention as the source of Consciousness (By way of Neural Synchrony)

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust

One of the great mysteries in the field of conscious studies relates to our ability to experience the world as a coherent whole. Many details are known for example, about how the brain processes visual information in the form of relflected light photons eventually creating our visual experience. But this process includes many seemingly independent modules with specific functions operating in different spatial locations. For example, when we look at an object (lets say a red chair) we process the color of the object separately from it's shape, separately from depth, separately from  it's texture. And if an object is moving we process that movement in yet another distinct process.

Our visual experience however is unified. We do not see color separately from form, or depth, or texture. We do not consciously combine these features to experience a red chair, instead we receive our perceptions as ready-made wholes. In studies of consciousness the problem of how this constructed experience can take place in real-time is known as the binding problem. Our visual experience is not alone in  this regard. When we communicate through speech we do not contemplate each word. Instead we have some general meaning in our consciousness we wish to express and the words seem to flow from some unknown source in an attempt to capture that meaning. Similarly, when we process the symbols of a written language the individual words take a backseat to the flow the contextual meaning and the individual letters hardly enter our conscious process at all.

Jesse Prinz a neuro-philosopher, and Jonjoe McFadden, a molecular biologist each have been making strong arguments that to increase our understanding of consciousness instead of focusing on the firing individual neurons we need to consider the phenomenon of neural synchrony. Neural synchrony is the phenomena where the firing rate of neurons in distinct regions of the brain seem to harmonize within a similar frequency. There is an ever continually expanding amount  scientific evidence that correlates this neural synchrony in the brains electromagnetic field with the manner in which we orient our attention .

Prinz has been instrumental in synthesizing this evidence into a leading theory of conscious. I am currently reading his densely informative book 'The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience '. If interested one can also check out this shorter paper When is Perception Conscious? In a nutshell Prinz presents evidence that attention is the key to consciousness. in his own words:

"Perceptual states become conscious when and only when the perceiver is attending."

 When we attend, either narrowly to a selected feature of our environment, or more diffusely to a larger view the neurons in the regions of the brain correlated with that functional attention fire together in synchrony. Prinz argues that this attentional process makes information available to our working memory, and this availability to working memory corresponds with consciousness. Interestingly in those regions not directly associated with our functional attention the neuronal firing is chaotic. Prinz believes our phenomenal experience is unified and orderly because the spotlight of our attention is the locus of this order which emerges from chaos. We cannot access the unconscious chaos because the act of attending is an intrinsically unifying process.

Prinz focuses much of his theory on the relationships between perception, attention, neural synchrony and consciousness. McFadden in contrast places more emphasis on the brains electromagnetic field as a source for the unity of our conscious experience. Whereas both Prinz and McFadden each lean heavily for empirical support from neuroscience imaging studies, behavioral psychology experiments, and brain disease findings, McFadden's theory on the unity of consciousness also leans on holistic connections from gestalt. quantum mechanics, and information theory. Like Prinz, McFadden's theory and it's justifications are complex and cannot be giving proper due in a short blog post from a non-expert and limited writer like myself. Two good recent papers from McFadden can be found here & here. Nevertheless I will attempt a very brief summary.

In the first paper McFadden lays out a good deal of evidence similar to Prinz detailing the phenomenon of neuronal synchronicity. He links this phenomenon to the brains electromagnetic field ( which he sees as the 'seat of consciousness') which like all fields represents a unity of formless information. Like Prinz, McFadden sees our awareness as the breeze that swings the gate between unconscious mechanistic fragmentation and conscious unity.

"The key mechanistic difference between unconscious and conscious information in the brain is not the presence or absence of firing in any particular neuron or region of the brain but a particular level of synchrony of firing between distantly separated neurons . Information that you are not aware of is encoded in asynchronously firing neurons but when you become aware of that information those same neurons fire in synchrony."

McFadden goes beyond simply describing the brains EM field as an effect of neuronal activity. Instead he uses recent evidence that points the EM field as also having a causal functional role that influences neuronal activity. This is not a one-way relationship, but an interdependent feed-back loop. This is an important argument given that a number prominent current philosophers such as David Chalmers argue that consciousness is epiphenomenal (not having a causal influence on the physical world).

In the second linked paper, McFadden describes the properties he sees necessary to accommodate both the binding problem of visual perception, and the problem of deriving meaning from information. He points out that this is not just a matter of complexity. We have many powerful information processing computers, yet these digital computers  have made little progress in performing many 'common sense' tasks. The features (or properties ) that McFadden describes, feel as though if they were communicated by a different author they could poetically be describing the principles of some eastern philosophies.

The features include context-dependence, inter-dependence, emergence, unity and compression. Ok, compression is not a common term associated with eastern philosophy, but McFadden is using the term to describe how many separate fragments can be experienced at once 'in a flash'. It is interesting to me how this sense of 'compression' seems to be the complementary opposite to the common term in modern science 'reductionism'.

Here is McFadden's concluding sentence:

"The information underpinning meaning, understanding and commonsense knowledge is holistic and gestalt in character. This gestalt information can only be encoded in a physical field: the CEMI field. "

CEMI stands for conscious electromagnetic field information. The paper describes how the CEMI field has the potential to satisfy all the necessary features to serve as the 'seat of consciousness'. Fields are by definition, waves of possibility, holistic and unifying, and uncertain in their nature. As McFadden describes:

"Each point in the space of the field is thereby potentially receptive to the information encoded by the entire field."

"In a very real sense, the field unifies the distributed information at the point of absorption such that a change in the firing state of any neuron in the network will be communicated to all neurons that are influenced by the brain’s EM field. The field integrates and unifies the information encoded in the firing rates of all neurons to which it is causally connected."

What most interests me in the theories of Prinz and McFadden is the enormity their potential implications. Implications that point to the potential importance of mindfulness practices in developing our capacity to attend both selectively to the particular, and diffusely to context. That we may only see and be conscious of that which we attend to helps explain introspective shortcommings such as confirmation bias. This also points to the importance of humility, and the acceptance of uncertainty giving how easy it can be to confuse  a narrow internal coherence with a wider 'truth'.

Perhaps like the theorized CEMI field itself, I see these implications suggesting the promise of unification. If the theories are correct the scope of that unification will only be limited by the receptivity of our attention/awareness to the potential implications.