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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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We take the magical gift of consciousness for granted. From the time I awaken until I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, I am flooded with conscious sensations. And contrary to assertions made by philosophers, novelists and other literati, by and large this stream of consciousness does not relate to quiet self-reflection and introspective thoughts. No, most of it is filled with raw sensations.
Two weeks ago a friend and I climbed a sea cliff above the Pacific surf at Malibu, Calif. When I am on the sharp end of the rope, my inner critic—that voice in my head reminding me of deadlines, worries and my inadequacies—is gone, is silent. My mind is all out there—conscious of the exact orientation, shape and texture of the rock, looking for tiny indentations where I can get purchase for my fingers and toes, always aware of how high I am above the last bolt. One moment I am exquisitely aware of my feet on all too smooth rock, reaching upward with my left hand for a handhold. The next I am airborne, my right hand bloody, my right rib cage aching. After catching my breath and shouting to my anxious belayer that I’m okay, I am filled with adrenaline for having survived yet another fall, can’t contain my enthusiasm, and scream.
Today only the bruised rib remains as a testament to how much of the stream of consciousness is pure sensation. Whether you are weaving on a motorbike through flowing traffic, running in the mountains, dancing to fast rock and roll, reading an engaging book, making love or debating with your friend, your eyes, ears, skin and body sensors paint an engrossing picture of the outside, including your own body, onto your mind’s canvas.
Animal Consciousness?
I suspect this feeling is not that dissimilar to the way animals consciously experience their world. Except perhaps for the great apes and a few other privileged big-brained animals, most species do not posses the highly developed sense of self, the ability to reflect on oneself, that people have. Most biologists and pet owners are willing to grant consciousness to cats, dogs and other mammals. Yet our intuitions fail us completely when we consider fish and birds, let alone invertebrates such as squid, flies or worms. Do they experience the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures, of life? Surely they can’t be conscious—they look too different from us, too alien.
Insects, in particular, were long thought to be simple, reflexive creatures with hardwired instinctual behaviors. No more. Consider the amazing capabilities of the honeybee, Apis mellifera.
Martin Giurfa of the University of Toulouse in France and Mandyam Srinivasan and Shaowu Zhang, both at the Australian National University in Canberra, trained free-flying bees, using sugar water as a reward, in a variety of complex learning tasks. The neuroethologists taught the bees to fly in and out of tall cylinders with one entryway and two exit holes. Each bee had to choose one of two exits to leave the cylinder and to continue her flight. (In bee colonies, males are a small minority and do only one thing—and that only during the virginal flight of the colony’s queen.)
These cylinders were staggered into mazes with multiple levels of “Y” branch points that the bees encountered before reaching the desired feeder station. In one set of experiments, the scientists trained bees to track a trail of colored marks, as in a scavenger hunt. The bees could then follow—more or less—the same strategy in a completely unfamiliar maze. Amazingly enough, bees can use color in an abstract manner, turning right, for instance, when the branch point is colored blue and left when it is colored green. Individual animals developed quite sophisticated strategies, such as the right-turn rule, that always led to the goal, though not necessarily by the shortest route.
In humans, the short-term storage of symbolic information—as when you enter an acquaintance’s phone number into your iPhone’s memory—is associated with conscious processing. Can bees remember task-relevant information? The gold standard for evaluating working memory is the delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) paradigm. The subject looks at a picture for a few seconds. The test image then disappears for five or 10 seconds. Subsequently, two pictures are shown next to each other, and the animal has to choose, by pushing a lever or moving its eyes, which of the two images was the test picture. This test can be carried out correctly only if the animal remembers the image. A more complex version, the delayed nonmatching-to-sample (DNMTS) task, requires one additional processing step: choosing the opposite image from the one previously shown.
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20 Comments
Add CommentLovely writing by a seemingly sensible and sensitive thinker.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd, BTW, the kind of agnosticism mentioned in this article is one that I [someone who wouldn't mind leaving rationally enraged philosophical "tyre marks" behind - even if only very few folk can will ever be able to follow where I was coming from and what I was getting at] can approve of.
Who has any scientific proof that queen bees really fly ever higher to select the strongest male? Personally I have seen males land on swarms on branches and disappear into the throng. You would need pretty good eyesight to follow the queen's maiden flight. I usually lose track of foraging bees after thirty feet or so!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBees in hives behave collectively. If bees have individual awareness, then in what form is their collective conciousness, as the support is distributed. Human sensory input is distributed, as is our global awareness, even though we perceive it to be unique. In studying hive conciousness, we may find keys to understanding how our brains form complex images...and on what media they are founded.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"We take the magical gift of consciousness for granted. From the time I awaken until I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, I am flooded with conscious sensations. And contrary to assertions made by philosophers, novelists and other literati, by and large this stream of consciousness does not relate to quiet self-reflection and introspective thoughts. No, most of it is filled with raw sensations"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow is consiousness defined ? Does it include "raw" sensations or only introspection ?
Consciousness is a somewhat relative term in psychology right now. Psychologists and neuroscientists really can't determine what an animal or human subject experiences, rather just their respected behavior(s). You can observe a bee remember something but you don't know what is going on inside it's head.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOH! I know some people I wish were conscious!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThose interested to explore the nature of consciousness may like to click:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://rewiringthebrain.net/
http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=39251
Karz
As Thomas Nagel would describe consciousness: "There is something that it is like to be that conscious creature." In response to the question concerning whether thoughts or impressions were involved in consciousness, consciousness concerns the subjective experience of impressions and the universally subjective experience of reasoning and thought; so, the answer can be both.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChristof Koch... I am suggesting that you have a death wish syndrome that you should be aware of. If we are menaced as children, what we do as an adult is to set the danger up to prove to ourselves that we can conquer our fear of death. We will do it over and over again. Until one day... "SPLAT." One person in particular stands out as an example of this: Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter. I know this pattern very well because I suffered from it myself. Even with our intelligence, we are still Pavlovian creatures who are run by our prior programming. Fortunately, I broke the program code. I no longer put myself at risk needlessly. I hope this may help you to understand what your motivation is all about in terms of putting your life at risk.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe can only understand consciousness from a human perspective and that is conditioned by our culture. What it would mean for a bee to have consciousness we can't have any idea.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis a well-written but completely uninformative article. our inability to fully articulate the finest intricacies of consciousness is truly a fundamental one, but it is in no way true that we are in the dark about it. current philosophy of mind has space for different kinds of animal consciousness and bees certainly have fit this bill for generations of philosophers. I expected a little more from a scientific journal. leave the interpretation to philosophers, just give us the results.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMichael Feygin
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe that consciousness is the nature's way to assure the intactness of our patterns of thought as well as our physical bodies while we go through life. By analogy, this is what happens when a computer is turned on. It first needs to assess its various physical and software resources and assess that they are in a working order and intact from the previous interruption. Then, the operating system makes sure that none of these vital resources is disrupted during the computer's operation. I believe that this is the principal task of consciousness. That is why we are so afraid of losing it even temporarily. By reassuring the continuity of our physical and mental patterns we reassure the continuation of our existence. I believe that animals must do the same. This is the nature's way of preserving organisms during their lifetime.
I can only assume that the author is the same individual who collaborated with the late Sir Francis Crick in determining aspects of the primarily visually located neural correlates of consciousness... or what Dr. Crick termed the "astonishing hypothesis": that our conscious "minds" are ultimately fully instantiated by our (remarkably evolved) physical brains.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a physician and scientific naturalist, seeing a universe and all that has evolved totally irrelevant to religious superstition, I have often admired the worked on scientists who simply observe the connections we have to the world about us, whether it be bees or bonobos.
Further, like ants (read E.O. Wilson if you want to have your proverbial eyes opened) and bees, we humans are clearly "hive" creatures... our "individualism" (and "free will") being essentially illusory.
From the perspective of medicine and philosophy, the human mind/consciousness is the last great frontier, and like genetics and genomics, the steady advances in neuroscience will finally pull the curtain back in the Land Of OZ: there is no magical wizard... no bizarre ethereal "soul"... no "ghost" in the machine... but indeed a remarkable edifice of evolution: NATURE, to be marveled upon and revered.
THE abstractions processed by these "trained" bees suprise me... ... ... not at all. There is nothing unique about human behaviors and analogies to be found among many of our fellow animal travelers... on this small blue dot, in the vastness of space.
Cheers!
Without a doubt, if you enjoyed this article you should read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. It's a fascinating exploration into the possible original bicameral mind and how its demise led to the introduction of consciousness. It also pairs incredibly well with The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain. Read young ones, read!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMr. Dick (Kline)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"..Fortunately, I broke the program code. I no longer put myself at risk needlessly. I hope this may help you to understand what your motivation is all about in terms of putting your life at risk..."
I am not sure if you are CONSIOUSLY deciding that breaking the "Program Code" makes you immortal. Just as we don't understand consciousness, we don't understand when our time will be up, and we are gone from this world. There are a million ways for a primate to cease living, one can avoid one way ("by breaking the code"), but we don't control rest of the natural ways to cease being a living thing. Please be conscious, don't let the Zombies take over !
Maybe the Bee is a Philosophical zombie (p-zombie = a bee-zombie!). It is informationally aware but there is, nothing that it is like, to be a bee.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit s edifice :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit s edifice :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMany religions (you know those delusions people have to cope with their fear of death and overly developed sense of self-importance) put man at the top of the pyramid and as a "guardian" of creation, based on his supposed superiorities and exclusive right to mental processing. For ease's sake animals are seen and treated as almost inanimate objects by a majority of people, atheists too. Man will gradually come down from his imaginary throne and show some more respect for its fellow creatures, whose lives and habitat we are casually and carelessly destroying, partly justified by this stubborn assumption that only we can feel and think.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSee www.bodytalksystem.com an amazing healing modality that has integrated consciousness into the modality with amazing results. Our world is perceived through our 5 senses and subtle senses.Does anyone know the natural consciousness of the bee is ?Flies natural consciousness is the carriers of the soul/ death to the other side.
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