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Research on sense of selfResearch on sense of self Based on work by Olaf Blanke and group, Ecole Polytechnique, Lausanne Olaf Blanke and group have studied the sense of self, related to self-consciousness or the sense of 'I' by using stereoscopic visors to create the sense that they are in a body other than their own. Blanke's work relates the self to the way in which the body is represented in the brain, and his prime purpose is to "solve the mystery of 'I' once and for all". The move during the last decade to take account of bodily responses when discussing consciousness and self consciousness is in itself an advance on the twentieth century approaches which first during behaviourism viewed brain processing as being a black box of little interest, and then in the latter decades viewed it as a classical computer unrelated to bodily sensation or emotions. However, the bodily approach has its own dangers of trying to reduce the brain and consciousness to an automaton driven by bodily sensations. Much neuroscientific research in recent years in fact argues against this. The body and brain are certainly interactive, with the orbitofrontal and amygdala in particular projecting to the hypothalamus which acts on the autonomic and endocrine systems, while responses from the body are mapped onto the orbitofrontal (reward system) and other brain regions. However the brain is not a simple feed forward system but involves the complex interaction/feedback between many regions. When we consider the self or self-consciousness it is useful to take account of the role of the global gamma synchrony where spatially separated assembles of neurons are in synchrony not only internally but one with another. Recent studies support the notion that this global synchrony correlates to consciousness, whereas merely locally synchrony in particular neural assemblies relates to non-conscious processing. Interestingly the gamma processing could instantiate Baars' concept of consciousness as a global workspace, an idea which was previously infuriatingly abstract. A final warning might be not to make too much of the self or the 'I'. Numerous studies of altered states of consciousness report a dissolution of the sense of self, but there is still something conscious that observes and reports the experience. |
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