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Expand Your Mind: Getting a Grasp on Consciousness

Alexander Shulgin Christof Koch Patricia Churchland Ira Flatow: December 1, 2005; Running Time: 1:44:28

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

At some point, these panelists suggest, the issue of defining consciousness may just disappear. Suggests Christof Koch: “Let’s treat consciousness as an empirical problem to be tackled by the biological sciences.”

Koch makes distinctions between different kinds of consciousness: sleep and its varied stages; awareness of sounds, sights and smells; levels of arousal. All these different states are properties “of complex adaptive networks with massive feedback shaped by natural selection.” And there are many behaviors that occur without consciousness. “When we talk, we don’t know what we’re going to say,” says Koch. His research has focused on finding “neural correlates of consciousness.” In one experiment with patients whose brains were implanted with 100 electrodes, he flashed pictures of Jennifer Aniston and the Sydney Opera House. While the patients could not remember what they’d seen, neurons responded selectively to these images. Studies like this, with even more sensitive tools, may some day help develop an information-based theory of consciousness, Koch says.

Mental phenomena are nothing but phenomena of the physical brain, says Patricia Churchland. It’s “an illusion of the brain” to think that we have a “nonphysical soul that does our feeling.” But how the brain creates constructs of itself and things in the world remains a major puzzle. For instance, how does a brain “habitually represent goals, plans and projects -- things that don’t yet exist?” And what about the huge amount of spontaneous activity in the brain that occurs while we’re resting? We don’t understand how the “organization of a motor response is achieved,” nor how these responses are integrated across sensory systems together with memory. Churchland anticipates a fundamental shift in looking at the brain that will merge philosophical and neurobiological issues.

In his day, Alexander Shulgin explored consciousness through “the art of chemistry.” He synthesized a version of mescaline and invented other psychedelic drugs, experimenting on himself, before the era of government and university regulations. “Each material had to be learned, as a new meeting…. The beauty of the final results, finding out what the effects were, was that you couldn’t be wrong.” If he reported visual enhancements, and recall of memories, his data was “always a winner,” because it was mostly a matter of subjective experience. Shulgin rues the laws and propaganda against psychedelic drugs, because he believes these drugs would serve as a useful “probe to look at the function of mind.”

Lecture Details

Location: Picower Institute

About the Speakers

Alexander Shulgin

Pharmacologist and Chemist

Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, received a B.A. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. After serving in the Navy, he earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry (from Berkeley. In the late '50s and early '60s he did post-doctorate work in psychiatry and pharmacology at U.C. San Francisco. He worked at Dow Chemical Company.

In 1960, Shulgin tried mescaline for the first time. He then experimented with synthesizing chemicals with structures similar to mescaline such as DOM. After leaving Dow in 1965 to become an independent consultant, Shulgin taught public health at Berkeley and San Francisco General Hospital.

Since the '60s, Shulgin has synthesized and bioassayed (self-tested) hundreds of psychoactive chemicals, recording his work in four books and more than 200 papers. He is a fixture in the psychedelic community, speaking at conferences, granting frequent interviews, and instilling a sense of rational scientific thought into the world of self-experimentation and psychoactive ingestion.

Christof Koch

Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology, California Institute of Technology

Born in 1956 in the American Midwest, Christof Koch grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco, where he graduated from the Lycèe Descartes in 1974. He studied Physics and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany and was awarded his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1982.

After four years at MIT, Koch joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology in 1986.

The author of close to 300 scientific papers and journal articles, and several books, Dr. Koch studies the biophysics of computation, and the neuronal basis of visual perception, attention, and consciousness. Together with his long-time collaborator, Francis Crick, he pioneered the scientific study of consciousness.

Patricia Churchland

Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego

Patricia Churchland is a researcher in neurophilosophy -- the interface between traditional philosophy questions concerning consciousness, knowledge, meaning, and free will and developments in neuroscience. Her best known book is Neurophilosophy(MIT Press 1986).

She served as president of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991.

Churchland has a B. A. from the University of British Columbia, an M. A. from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B. Phil. from the University of Oxford. Aided by a Woodrow Wilson Faculty Development Grant (1975-76), she studied neurology at the University of Manitoba Medical School, and learned basic neuroscience in the Jordan spinal cord lab.

Ira Flatow

Host/Executive Producer, Talk of the Nation: Science Friday

Ira Flatow is also founder and president of TalkingScience, a company dedicated to creating radio, TV and Internet projects that make science “user friendly.” His most recent book is entitled They All Laughed ... From Light Bulbs to Lasers: The Fascinating Stories Behind the Great Inventions That Have Changed Our Lives (HarperCollins, New York).

Flatow's recent honors include: the National Science Board Public Service Award (2005), World Economic Forum Media Fellowship, AAAS Journalism award (2000), the Carl Sagan Award (1999).

About the Host

About the Host

Picower Institute for Learning and Memory

The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT focuses the talents of a diverse array of brain scientists on a single mission: unraveling the mechanisms that drive the quintessentially human capacity to remember and to learn, as well as related functions like perception, attention and consciousness.