Is Dreaming Similar to a Lobotomized State?

Freeman performing a trans-orbital lobotomy in 1949

I had a dream last night where an old friend from high school asked me, “what brain areas are involved in creating the thoughts we have during dreams?” I got a little excited and began to tell him that all of the posterior areas contribute but that the anterior, frontal areas are pretty much turned off. Actually, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the main area that is conspicuously missing during dreaming. It allows planning, self-organization and forethought, things that most dreaming is devoid of. Responding to the friend in my dream I rattled off a few names of areas that are turned on during dreaming: “the occipital visual cortex, the temporal auditory cortex, the limbic system, the somatesthetic…” But midsentence I realized that “somatesthetic” wasn’t a real word. It was a blurted-out mixture of somatosensory and somesthetic – a mistake I would never make during waking life. That I mispronounced this name so unhesitatingly clued me in to the fact that I was in the middle of a dream, not my high school cafeteria.

I was operating off-the-cuff, without inhibition or care for correctness. I made this mistake because my PFC was down. A funny thing about lucid dreaming is that thinking too hard after one realizes they are in a dream often catapults the PFC into full metabolic swing and the person into full consciousness. This is exactly what happened to me. Attempting to muster the cognitive wherewithal to correct my misstatement pulled me out of my dream and suddenly I found myself lying in bed in the dark muttering the word “somatosensory.” After tossing for a few minutes, thinking about the role of the PFC in sleep and wakefulness, I realized that, while dreaming, people operate as if they didn’t have a prefrontal cortex. It seems that the experience of dreaming replicates many of the elements of what it would feel like to be lobotomized. Patients that undergo a lobotomy have their PFC severed from the rest of their brain which causes them to act impulsive, eccentric and whimsical, to have a short attention span and poor reasoning ability. Honestly, this is how I behave while dreaming.  

Lying in bed I came to the conclusion that lobotomized people probably feel and act as if they are in a dream state all of the time. Further, because other mammals have disproportionately small PFCs relative to humans (nonmammals don’t even have them), the experience of being another mammal may feel a little like dreaming. Further still, the way I act in my dreams would probably be very similar to how I would act if I were actually lobotomized. If a mid-century doctor plunged an ice pick slightly above and a few inches past each of my eye balls, and wiggled the thing around a little severing the connections between my PFC and the rest of my brain, I might just walk around rattling off over-simplified explanations in ways that that dream-people wouldn’t blink at but real people would institutionalize me for.

Do We Have an Unconscious Mind Or Simply a Few Unconscious Processes?

I was up late the other night questioning the validity of the term “unconscious mind.”
When I was very young, the material I read about the unconscious (or the subconscious as it is sometimes called) led me to believe that it was a mysterious and intelligent entity that connived and planned with foresight and its own set of goals. After reading the psychological literature about unconscious processes more recently, I have come to see them as inadvertent reflexes, misunderstood impulses, and generally just a side effect of the way memory interacts with consciousness. The unconscious is more a series of discrete, unrelated processes than anything that has the cohesion and sophistication to be comparable to consciousness. To me, this illusion of an unconscious entity dissipated to become no longer a mind, no longer another entity that shares my head. The unconscious is not a mind, is not an entity and anthropomorphizing it using human adjectives may be fun but is misleading. Or is it?

Is it equally as anthropomorphic to attribute beliefs and other high-order cognitive states to our conscious mind? Another major theme that has emerged in this discourse is the piecemail, fragmentary, irrational, unsystematic, unreliable nature of conscious processes. Many studies have shown that we are just a bundle of instincts and impulses and that there is often very little true continuity even in our conscious lives. These findings along with things like the cohesiveness and meaningfulness of my dreams, my Freudian slips and my intuition has urged me to reconsider. Perhaps if I am going to consider my consciousness to constitute a mind despite the fact that it is insubstantial in many ways, then it is only fair to permit unconsciousness the same nominal privilege. Withholding this distinction from unconsciousness could be considered existential hypocrisy.

The Unconscious Mind is Like a Little Animal Inside of Our Heads

I have given a lot of thought in the past to the nature and extent of two things: 

1) the intelligence of small animals, and 

2) the intelligence of our unconscious mind. 

Today I realized that these two things share many similarities. The subconscious pathways in our heads that affect our behavior, and even our thoughts without us knowing, are the primary pathways that determine behavior in many animals. This is part of the reason why less intelligent animals can think and behave but not be consciously aware of themselves. I have wondered for a long time whether our unconscious processes are sufficient or intelligent enough to constitute a separate mind or a true entity apart from our conscious mind. I am starting to think that they are - at least in the same sense that unaware animals are.

An Analogy Between the Neurophysiology of Thought and the Polypedal Locomotion of an Octopus

Here is an unabbreviated version of the abstract that I submitted for a January symposium at USC:

The present analogy for the neurophysiology of thought involves a many-armed octopus grabbing and releasing footholds as it pulls itself from place to place. This is meant to illustrate that the thought process involves a cyclical pattern of cortical activation, coactivation and deactivation. Coactivations (footholds held simultaneously by the octopus) fluctuate as cortical areas that continue to receive sufficient activation energy are maintained, areas that receive reduced energy are released from activation and new areas that are tuned so as to receive sufficient energy from the current constellation of coactivates are converged upon, recruited and incorporated into the remaining amalgam of active areas from the previous cycle. Newly recruited areas contribute their inputs to those of the remaining previous inputs altering the mental representations that are produced. Such a newly activated area, or primed node, corresponds to a cortical module (composed itself of neural assemblies) that, when coactivated with other such modules, unites discrete features of long-term memory into composite, global mental imagery. This model defines an individual thought as the imagery produced in primary and secondary sensory areas in response to a particular set of coactivates in association areas. The thought changes once association areas respond to this imagery with newly activated modules and send their new sum of inputs back to the sensory areas for the creation of modified imagery (reperception). The process whereby these modules fluctuate spatio-temporally is taken to be analogous to the nonlinear stride of an octopus that plants the majority of its arms temporarily while actively repositioning arms that lie behind it, toward the front - in the direction of its movement. The fact that some modules are conserved (the arms remain planted), during these reciprocal oscillations between top-down association areas and bottom-up sensory areas, is taken to account for the continuity found in successive thoughts. The result is a stream of consciousness where each thought is slightly different than the ones preceding them as new modules are added and old ones are taken away. Some modules are retained even after a number of thought cycles. This happens when one’s thoughts transition and change but hold a common element constant and is usually due to module potentiation by the PFC. Sometimes modules are not conserved from thought to thought and the octopus drops most of them all at once. This happens when one abandons a train of thought and quickly reorients to a new, salient, perhaps emotionally laden stimulus. This model predicts that someone with a working memory deficit has fewer of these allegorical octopus arms and that the arms cannot maintain their grasp for as long. The longer top-down (higher-order) modules can be continuously activated, over a series of thoughts, the longer they can influence sequences of bottom-up imagery in a sustained and consistent way allowing modeling, planning and working memory in general.

To find out more visit my new website: http://www.cognitivemechanics.net/.



Read the full article that I wrote on this topic here:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938416308289

I Feel That...

The more time I spend thinking about and studying consciousness the less mysterious it seems. However, the more time I spend away, thinking about other topics, the more its mysteries resurface.