The last paragraph surprised me even though it shouldn't have. It's shocking to have a clever scientific story suddenly grounded in the reality that this person is rapidly dying. In some sense he has donated his body to science even before he died.
As someone with really bad dyslexia and dyscalculia I can't say I'm particularly surprised. I've done a lot of research on what neurologic differences are present and they're fairly interesting:
Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will.
Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the consciousness. It's not like the problems were solved within the scope of consciousness, which is of course contradictory to what we experience. We feel the contradictions because we experience everything through consciousness, i.e. we can't experience things which happen outside realm of consciousness. The brain scans prove in a sense that there is a disconnect (For instance in this article the brain scans showed signals related to seeing faces in the numbers, but the conscious experience was not seeing them).
The link between what the brain does, and what we experience (consciousness) is indeed the hard problem of consciousness.
All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as "dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough." It's phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of head shaped calipers.
The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science. At best, "consciousness" is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much deeper, more complex, and less understood concepts in neuroscience. The field has yet to
differentiate the roles neural plasticity plays between newborns, the average college student, and brain trauma victims - let alone grapple with the implication that our brains are the result of a billion years of evolution.
The nature of human intelligence is far wilder than you or I can imagine, Horatio, but publish-or-perish cannon fodder is clearly not the answer.
> the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will.
Seems to conflate consciousness and free will. Just because you're not conscious of it, your brain still made that decision. And your conscious mind can still go back on the decision and "change your mind".
> I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it
I believe these studies were not able to be replicated. Also, we have no way to scientifically measure consciousness. So a study that purports to time it is measuring reaction speed, not consciousness per se.
> Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it.
But it's your brain that's making decisions based on your experiences, desires, and goals. Obviously your conscious mind can't do everything, it's there for the new and hard stuff. All the rest is pushed down to lower layers, but it's all still you.
an amoeba has consciousness.. and what you call the hard problem is a problem with the brain doctrine .. as the hands of a concert pianist have no trouble running the show with the rest of his or her parts cooperating to make it possible. .. the mind/brain looking on then .. as in many/most other experiences where a whole person is in flow.
its freaky to think my parts, glands, organs were not freely and willingly coordinating by way of the cns.. and i have no experiential evidence .. in the amoeba and up .. that a brain is even needed for consciousness.
> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct, Koch says. “You can get one without the other.”
I think this misses another possibility besides "cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct".
Namely, "the part of them that is conscious of the cognitive processing is not well-connected to the part of them that is generating speech and controlling their motor systems."
I recommend first watching it with you eyes closed and after that seeing how you can manipulate your perception. It was easy to hear “brain needle” with my eyes closed.
> his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill
Is it? I thought the brain has specialized parts for identifying faces (hence prosopagnosia) which makes this more of an automatism than higher reasoning.
If he had simply lost the ability to recognize the glyphs for 2-9, he would have still seen their shapes, and he could have learned them again, just as he learned new glyphs for them.
What seems to be happening here is a sort of crosstalk or feedback. His brain is still recognizing the glyphs, but those neurons are sending unwanted signals elsewhere in his visual cortex which scramble the perceived image.
My interpretation of this case is that the image we perceive consciously is a combination of the raw visual data and various recognition modules, so that we don't just perceive "a curved line crossing back on itself in the lower right of the image" plus "the abstract notion of the number 8", but we see the number 8 localized where the line forming it is. Same with any other symbols, objects, faces etc.
Because of this, the neurons that represent the conscious perception of a certain section of the visual field must receive both "low-level" information (the curves forming the digit, their color, the color of the background), but also "mid-level" recognition output ("the digit 8"). So if the neuron(s) recognizing the 8 act up and send scrambled signals, they can scramble the whole conscious perception of the corresponding area of the visual field. The fact that it also disrupts his conscious perception of faces overlying the digit confirms this.
I have also seen this example, where a man blinded by strokes still avoids obstacles and recognizes emotions, without any conscious awareness[1]. Is this the same phenomenon?
I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion? This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the symbols seems to be messed up for a largely contiguous block of symbols. Like you get jumbled up weird shapes when you feed the wrong encoding to a program.
This has some implications for artificial general intelligence. If consciousness does not automatically emerge from some sufficient high cognitive processing skills, those sci-fi super-human AI may never arrive.
Anyway, I feel sorry for this patient. This must be a tough disease to die with.
> Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious.
I'm maybe wrong about this, but isn't the ability to recognize faces a fairly low-level skill? Case is point being other social animals having it, like apes, monkeys, or even sheep [1] (who can even recognize human faces [2]).
So maybe they're here referring to the ability of seeing representations of faces (little faces on the letters). Or is this just a blunder of the person who wrote the sciencemag article?
There is a difference between “low level” and “human specific”. Faces are highly complex geometrically, while numbers, such as 8, are simple. Animals sure can recognise simple shapes (https://docsmith.co/2007/01/can-animals-recognize-shapes/), but they cannot endow them with abstract meanings, such as "number 8". The person in the article lost the basic ability of recognising very simple shapes while still being able to recognise more complex shapes, like faces, and to operate with abstract concepts.
> That he could still interpret letters, Schubert says, lends support to the idea that the brain has a specialized module for processing numbers.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like this is a flip-flop from how most people process information. It seems to me that lots of people are very very good at remembering names and have a hard time remembering numbers. some people look at me offended when I forget their name as if the only reason I would ever forget their name was because I didn't like them. It's very embarrassing. When I show I can remember numbers or lines of code just by looking at them once, people are amazed but then move on.
Remembering names is generally not a thing that humans are good at.
My intro physics prof had a party trick where he'd memorize the names of everyone in the class within the first couple weeks based on their school ID picture, but he was quick to point out that he didn't have any natural affinity for remembering names, he just brute forced it.
This is one of those things where people say "oh I can't remember names" and what they mean is "I don't put any effort in remembering names".
I know, because I've been the same. Now I repeat names in my mind again and again. The next time I see the person, but don't speak to him or her, I repeat the name in my mind. An couple of minutes after being introduces to a new person, I repeat the name. An hour later, I repeat the name. A day later, I repeat the name. I'll even write some names down inside a notebook.
And guess what, now I'm excellent at remembering names and are one of these people who have seen you once and then approach you with "hey djhaskin, how are you?"
And as far as I know its not something that's come up in the subliminal priming research, which is how we know most of the structure of how we recognize numbers and letters. I do wonder if it works like this for everybody, though, or if it could something specific to him.
As for names I did a blog post[1] speculating that remembering names might correlate to how you deal with the following:
>So, imagine someone is walking along, down a street. They see the store their going to and they enter through the shop door. So, when you were imagining this, did you see it? Which direction was the person walking, relative to your mind's eye? Did they turn to the left or right to enter the store? What color was everything?
It doesn't make any sense at all to me. It wasn't numbers as such he was having trouble with, he could still do math, he just couldn't recognize the symbols. And he was even able to learn symbols for numbers again,as long as they were new ones he made up himself instead of the standard symbols.
It's a bizarrely specific cognitive deficit. It's not like "I can't remember your name", it's more like "I used to know your name, and I can remember this new name I've made up for you, but when you tell me your 'real' name, not only can't I remember it, I can't even make it out, it all turns to static."
I too. If a name is unfamiliar to me, even if it's no more than 5-6 letters long, I can't for the life of me recall it. But I can remember random sequences of numerals up to length 12. Why?
I wonder if there's some term for this malady, like 'literophasia' or 'numeraphilia'? I wonder too if it occurs equally as often in both genders. I would guess not.
This reminds me of two mind-boggling discoveries I’ve had about the human mind.
The first is that the two halves of your brain act somewhat independently. And in rare cases, people’s left and right halves are “split” apart, and they act entirely independently - e.g. their left and their right hands will act separately, or even argue with each other. CGP Grey made a great video about this:
The other is that most people have a “voice” inside their head - e.g. when they read, they hear their own voice inside their head reading; their thoughts are like sentences they “hear;” they could look in the mirror have a conversation with themselves. Some ~10% of people do not have this internal monologue.
Something that is (crucially) missing from the article but appears in the paper: his ability to read words describing numbers like "five" remains in tact, and so is his ability to read Roman numerals.
Maybe so, but the ads were so annoying I couldn't keep reading. It was almost comical how they kept popping up every few seconds, like some kind of parody.
Curiously this article presents a different hypothesis about why he is able to read 0 and 1:
> It's also "surprising" that his brain doesn't have problems with "0" and "1," McCloskey added. It's not clear why, but those two numbers might look similar to letters like "O" or "lowercase l," he said. Or those two numbers might be processed differently than other numbers in the brain, as "zero wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other digits were," he said.
As a software developer I imagine the brain not as some separated layers but as a huge collection of routines/procedures, for this or that (including procedure for understanding numbers), interconnected with a spaghetti code of links. Many of these processes specialise in making decisions and calling other processes. One specialised procedure is called the consciousness, it is blind to the rest of the processes and it is tricked into believing that it does all the calculations while it merely reads the results from other processes.
Also, I highly recommend the book The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.
The consciousness procedure also has links out to the other procedures. It calls them with inputs based on what they send it. It' a co-recursive system.
I've never had migraines, but a few years ago suddenly, and briefly, lost the ability to read and write. After a number of doctors and tests ruling out a TIA, best guess is one-time transient aphasia from a migraine aura.
Migraines in general are weird. It's rare[1], but I can occasionally tell when a severe migraine is about to occur because rooms feel too big. I walked into my bathroom a few days ago (which is about 2mx2m/6'x6'), and each wall seemed about 2 feet longer than it should, and the far corner looked about 3 feet too far away (it was more a feeling than a visual disturbance - it's hard to describe). I felt _small_, which is a really odd feeling when it comes on suddenly. About an hour later, I had a severe migraine.
I'm assuming it's a subtle form of Alice in Wonderland syndrome[2].
[1] I get regular migraines, but I can only remember this happening a few times, possibly because it's fairly subtle
Same thing happened to me in college, although I never went to the doctor about it. I thought it was a drug flashback at first, and was terrified it was permanent, but it went away after about two hours.
Just to clarify a bit, it's possible he can't communicate thoughts about numbers. That's a different perspective than can't read them.
I say this because my father had a stroke ~3 years ago. It compromised him significantly. He definitely can communicate the way he used to. But one of the patterns we've seen is he can have a thought, but he can't communicate it. He tries but it doesn't come out. I haven't recognized it's specific like the man in the article. But I wanted to mention that processing and communication are two seperate steps.
The original paper Lack of awareness despite complex visual processing: Evidence from event-related potentials in a case of selective metamorphopsia [1] is not as Freudian as the article about “consciousness”:
> How does the neural activity evoked by visual stimuli support visual awareness? In this paper we report on an individual with a rare type of neural degeneration as a window into the neural responses underlying visual awareness. When presented with stimuli containing faces and target words—regardless of whether the patient was aware of their presence—the neuro-physiological responses were indistinguishable. These data support the possibility that extensive visual processing, up to and including activation of identity, can occur without resulting in visual awareness of the stimuli.
[+] [-] unclesaamm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|5 years ago|reply
http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Dyslexia.htm
https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2011/dyslexia-and-the-br...
[+] [-] pulkitsh1234|5 years ago|reply
Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the consciousness. It's not like the problems were solved within the scope of consciousness, which is of course contradictory to what we experience. We feel the contradictions because we experience everything through consciousness, i.e. we can't experience things which happen outside realm of consciousness. The brain scans prove in a sense that there is a disconnect (For instance in this article the brain scans showed signals related to seeing faces in the numbers, but the conscious experience was not seeing them).
The link between what the brain does, and what we experience (consciousness) is indeed the hard problem of consciousness.
[+] [-] akiselev|5 years ago|reply
The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science. At best, "consciousness" is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much deeper, more complex, and less understood concepts in neuroscience. The field has yet to differentiate the roles neural plasticity plays between newborns, the average college student, and brain trauma victims - let alone grapple with the implication that our brains are the result of a billion years of evolution.
The nature of human intelligence is far wilder than you or I can imagine, Horatio, but publish-or-perish cannon fodder is clearly not the answer.
[+] [-] radarsat1|5 years ago|reply
Seems to conflate consciousness and free will. Just because you're not conscious of it, your brain still made that decision. And your conscious mind can still go back on the decision and "change your mind".
[+] [-] ghego1|5 years ago|reply
This made me think of an async process
[+] [-] pulkitsh1234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|5 years ago|reply
I believe these studies were not able to be replicated. Also, we have no way to scientifically measure consciousness. So a study that purports to time it is measuring reaction speed, not consciousness per se.
[+] [-] toddh|5 years ago|reply
But it's your brain that's making decisions based on your experiences, desires, and goals. Obviously your conscious mind can't do everything, it's there for the new and hard stuff. All the rest is pushed down to lower layers, but it's all still you.
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
You are thinking of Libet's famous experiments.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_o...
[+] [-] michael-ax|5 years ago|reply
its freaky to think my parts, glands, organs were not freely and willingly coordinating by way of the cns.. and i have no experiential evidence .. in the amoeba and up .. that a brain is even needed for consciousness.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Xenograph|5 years ago|reply
I think this misses another possibility besides "cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct".
Namely, "the part of them that is conscious of the cognitive processing is not well-connected to the part of them that is generating speech and controlling their motor systems."
[+] [-] User23|5 years ago|reply
I recommend first watching it with you eyes closed and after that seeing how you can manipulate your perception. It was easy to hear “brain needle” with my eyes closed.
[+] [-] the8472|5 years ago|reply
Is it? I thought the brain has specialized parts for identifying faces (hence prosopagnosia) which makes this more of an automatism than higher reasoning.
[+] [-] Camillo|5 years ago|reply
What seems to be happening here is a sort of crosstalk or feedback. His brain is still recognizing the glyphs, but those neurons are sending unwanted signals elsewhere in his visual cortex which scramble the perceived image.
My interpretation of this case is that the image we perceive consciously is a combination of the raw visual data and various recognition modules, so that we don't just perceive "a curved line crossing back on itself in the lower right of the image" plus "the abstract notion of the number 8", but we see the number 8 localized where the line forming it is. Same with any other symbols, objects, faces etc.
Because of this, the neurons that represent the conscious perception of a certain section of the visual field must receive both "low-level" information (the curves forming the digit, their color, the color of the background), but also "mid-level" recognition output ("the digit 8"). So if the neuron(s) recognizing the 8 act up and send scrambled signals, they can scramble the whole conscious perception of the corresponding area of the visual field. The fact that it also disrupts his conscious perception of faces overlying the digit confirms this.
[+] [-] jamiek88|5 years ago|reply
The way we can do captchas suggests you may be on to something there.
[+] [-] asab|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html
[+] [-] kovac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leonidasv|5 years ago|reply
Anyway, I feel sorry for this patient. This must be a tough disease to die with.
[+] [-] henriquemaia|5 years ago|reply
I'm maybe wrong about this, but isn't the ability to recognize faces a fairly low-level skill? Case is point being other social animals having it, like apes, monkeys, or even sheep [1] (who can even recognize human faces [2]).
So maybe they're here referring to the ability of seeing representations of faces (little faces on the letters). Or is this just a blunder of the person who wrote the sciencemag article?
[^1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm [^2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41905652
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
“The N170 is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) that reflects the neural processing of faces, familiar objects or words.” [2]
They also measured the inverse of recognition “...improbable events will elicit a P3b, and the less probable the event, the larger the P3b.” [3]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-related_potential
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N170
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3b
[+] [-] macleginn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawthornio|5 years ago|reply
[Textbook](https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Vision-Introduction-Visual-Perc...)
[+] [-] djhaskin987|5 years ago|reply
This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like this is a flip-flop from how most people process information. It seems to me that lots of people are very very good at remembering names and have a hard time remembering numbers. some people look at me offended when I forget their name as if the only reason I would ever forget their name was because I didn't like them. It's very embarrassing. When I show I can remember numbers or lines of code just by looking at them once, people are amazed but then move on.
[+] [-] Marsymars|5 years ago|reply
My intro physics prof had a party trick where he'd memorize the names of everyone in the class within the first couple weeks based on their school ID picture, but he was quick to point out that he didn't have any natural affinity for remembering names, he just brute forced it.
[+] [-] kharak|5 years ago|reply
I know, because I've been the same. Now I repeat names in my mind again and again. The next time I see the person, but don't speak to him or her, I repeat the name in my mind. An couple of minutes after being introduces to a new person, I repeat the name. An hour later, I repeat the name. A day later, I repeat the name. I'll even write some names down inside a notebook.
And guess what, now I'm excellent at remembering names and are one of these people who have seen you once and then approach you with "hey djhaskin, how are you?"
[+] [-] Symmetry|5 years ago|reply
As for names I did a blog post[1] speculating that remembering names might correlate to how you deal with the following:
>So, imagine someone is walking along, down a street. They see the store their going to and they enter through the shop door. So, when you were imagining this, did you see it? Which direction was the person walking, relative to your mind's eye? Did they turn to the left or right to enter the store? What color was everything?
[1]http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/12/ways-of-thin...
[+] [-] gweinberg|5 years ago|reply
It's a bizarrely specific cognitive deficit. It's not like "I can't remember your name", it's more like "I used to know your name, and I can remember this new name I've made up for you, but when you tell me your 'real' name, not only can't I remember it, I can't even make it out, it all turns to static."
[+] [-] copperx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randcraw|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if there's some term for this malady, like 'literophasia' or 'numeraphilia'? I wonder too if it occurs equally as often in both genders. I would guess not.
[+] [-] surround|5 years ago|reply
The first is that the two halves of your brain act somewhat independently. And in rare cases, people’s left and right halves are “split” apart, and they act entirely independently - e.g. their left and their right hands will act separately, or even argue with each other. CGP Grey made a great video about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8
The other is that most people have a “voice” inside their head - e.g. when they read, they hear their own voice inside their head reading; their thoughts are like sentences they “hear;” they could look in the mirror have a conversation with themselves. Some ~10% of people do not have this internal monologue.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162927
[+] [-] aaron-santos|5 years ago|reply
Why invent a specialized number system? How difficult would it have been to teach him Chinese numerals for example.
Also very curious on his perception of Roman numerals.
[+] [-] henriquemaia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] seemslegit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxkwallace|5 years ago|reply
^ This article (reporting on the same research) seems to be a bit better.
[+] [-] andai|5 years ago|reply
Fortunately, https://outline.com/5nJgjL
Curiously this article presents a different hypothesis about why he is able to read 0 and 1:
> It's also "surprising" that his brain doesn't have problems with "0" and "1," McCloskey added. It's not clear why, but those two numbers might look similar to letters like "O" or "lowercase l," he said. Or those two numbers might be processed differently than other numbers in the brain, as "zero wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other digits were," he said.
[+] [-] whoisjuan|5 years ago|reply
Or perhaps this is proof that we live in a simulation that is written in binary.
[+] [-] eivarv|5 years ago|reply
Why would one assume awareness and processing abilities to be related, if there is no evidence for it?
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dandare|5 years ago|reply
Also, I highly recommend the book The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.
[+] [-] pessimizer|5 years ago|reply
Read Patricia Churchland instead:)
[+] [-] Lambdanaut|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanbernstein|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Marsymars|5 years ago|reply
I've never had migraines, but a few years ago suddenly, and briefly, lost the ability to read and write. After a number of doctors and tests ruling out a TIA, best guess is one-time transient aphasia from a migraine aura.
[+] [-] stordoff|5 years ago|reply
I'm assuming it's a subtle form of Alice in Wonderland syndrome[2].
[1] I get regular migraines, but I can only remember this happening a few times, possibly because it's fairly subtle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome
[+] [-] outerouterspace|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|5 years ago|reply
I say this because my father had a stroke ~3 years ago. It compromised him significantly. He definitely can communicate the way he used to. But one of the patterns we've seen is he can have a thought, but he can't communicate it. He tries but it doesn't come out. I haven't recognized it's specific like the man in the article. But I wanted to mention that processing and communication are two seperate steps.
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
> How does the neural activity evoked by visual stimuli support visual awareness? In this paper we report on an individual with a rare type of neural degeneration as a window into the neural responses underlying visual awareness. When presented with stimuli containing faces and target words—regardless of whether the patient was aware of their presence—the neuro-physiological responses were indistinguishable. These data support the possibility that extensive visual processing, up to and including activation of identity, can occur without resulting in visual awareness of the stimuli.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/16055