The Hidden Spring

1. The Stuff of Dreams

• Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
  • The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
  • The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
• In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
• In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
  • Memory functions (they encode and store information)
  • Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
  • Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
• In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
• Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
• The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.

2. Before and After Freud

• Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
• He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
• Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
• Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
  • Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
  • "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
  • "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
• For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?

3. The Cortical Fallacy

• Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
• Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
• Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
• Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
  • Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
  • Consciousness as experience
• The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
• Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
• Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.

4. What is Experienced?

• The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
• If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
• It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
• Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
• Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
• What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
  • About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
  • Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
• Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
• Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life

5. Feelings

• Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
• Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
• Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
• Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
• The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
• Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
  • Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
  • A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
  • Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
  • Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
  • Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
• Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
• In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
• Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
• If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
• It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
• Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
• Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
• Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
• When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
• You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
• The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
• Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
• I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
• There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
• Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
• The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
  • Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
  • Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
  • Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
  • Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
  • Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
  • Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
  • Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
    • The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
• Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
• Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
• It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
• Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
• Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.

6. The Source

• The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
• Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
• The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
• The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
• An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
  • Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
  • Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
  • Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
• The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
• Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
  • Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
  • Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
• The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
• Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
  • Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
  • Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
  • Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
  • Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
  • Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
  • and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
• Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
• The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
• All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
  • FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
  • LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
• The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
• Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
• The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
• Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
• "Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
• Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
• Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
• Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
• Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.

7. The Free Energy Principle

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8. A Predictive Hierarchy

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9. Why and How Consciousness Arises

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10. Back to the Cortex

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11. The Hard Problem

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12. Making a Mind

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