Embodied Consciousness

Performance Technologies

J. McCutcheon, B. Sellers-Young, J. McCutcheon, B. Sellers-Young

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137320056
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This volume of essays combines research from neuroscience, conscious studies, methods of training performers, modes of creating a staged narrative, Asian aesthetics, and post-modern theories of performance in an examination of the relationship between consciousness and performance.

1

Consciousness and the Brain: A Window to the Mind

D. W. Zaidel

Introduction

Actors frequently slip into several different embodied expressions of consciousness in order to communicate to the audience intentions of playwrights. In the ‘temporary assuming of another’, both actor and audience engage in symbolic interaction. This extraordinary ability displayed onstage is appreciated as artistic talent and skill. While those biological organisms that are capable of one type of deception or another do so in order to survive predation, humans are the only ones endowed with a flexible range of symbolic self-transformations. Symbolic and abstract cognition is the essence of human cognition, and symbolic reference is what allows us to communicate through language and art. To obtain insight into embodied consciousness and put it in its proper perspective it is useful to explore the approaches scientists adopt when they investigate the nature of consciousness itself.

For example, what neural mechanism in the brain allows the smooth slipping into the assuming of another we see onstage? Crick and Koch, two important neuroscientists devoted to grasping how the brain gives rise to consciousness, would say that a specific small area in the brain known as the claustrum is responsible for seamless slipping from one conscious state into another (Crick and Koch, 2005). While this is an important insight, which may end up being true, many further details about the claustrum remain to be revealed.

Biologists and neuroscientists have long been intrigued by what in the brain gives rise to the mind and, along with it, to consciousness. When they inspect the brain with the naked eye or even with a powerful microscope all they see is brain tissue. While neurons, axons, synapses, blood vessels can be visualized, concepts such as justice, or words, art, creativity, or faces, emotions, feelings, sensations, and anything that reflects the mind in the brain cannot be visualized this way. We do not yet know what the neural correlates of consciousness are when we enjoy a play by Shakespeare, assume the character of another onstage, obtain a whiff of perfume, or rejoice to the sounds of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. What combination of neural events underscores these experiences and how they emerge is a question that drives research and much debate in the neurosciences.

We do know that consciousness is multifaceted and covers a wide spectrum of behaviour (Koch, 2004). It consists of broad categories such as awareness versus non-awareness, a psychological self that is conscious and unconscious, active perception versus subliminal perception, myriad of subjective feelings, and is expressed through various neurological conditions and disorders triggered by brain damage or drugs. All of these states influence what we sense, perceive, feel, think and act upon, and for this reason consciousness holds a key to understanding the workings of the mind (and, some would say, to the workings of the brain). Indeed, we can categorize the different states of consciousness: altered states (e.g. sleep, drug overdose, alcoholic intoxication) (Kalat, 2008); general primary consciousness (e.g. wakefulness, focusing, attending, responding) (Mahowald et al., 2011); special consciousness (e.g. theatre acting, pretending, deceiving, embodiment); and specific consciousness of the self (e.g. self-recognition, self-identification, self-location, self-awareness) (Blanke, 2011). The lingering research objectives concern how the mind is altered, or how the mind functions when these states are expressed, and which brain pathways control their expression.

In this chapter the focus is on (1) the relevant critical neuroscientific issues, (2) biological and neurological underpinnings of consciousness, (3) consciousness of the self, including embodiment and its disorders and (4) awareness versus non-awareness.

Historical background: consciousness and the brain

The ancient Greek philosophers regarded consciousness as divine, as a force of the gods that generates and creates matter (life) in the universe. Aristotle claimed that studying and observing the world would lead to the understanding of consciousness, especially if done scientifically. Darwin, on the other hand, viewed consciousness as an epiphenomenon arising from the material of life (Yawar, 2008). Modern scientists and philosophers do not share Darwin’s view. The clock has now turned to the ancients’ view of consciousness, namely, that it is an important force in life and is not a mere epiphenomenon. Now the ‘force’ is viewed as being generated by the brain itself. The brain is part of the body, the body, in turn, is represented in the brain and without the brain the body would not function. Thus, there can be no consciousness without embodiment. The current modern view is that the nature and components of consciousness can be studied scientifically, and just as the mind has been studied up until now in the fields of psychology, neuropsychology, neuroscience and neurology, consciousness, too, can be reduced to the workings of neuronal networks in the brain.

However, the nature of consciousness has proven elusive, because while many features of the mind have been defined and successfully measured behaviourally and physiologically, consciousness is slippery by comparison. The key problem is lack of agreement regarding its definition. Nevertheless, some scientific roadways have been made in the past 40 years. The field has seen particularly rapid growth of neuroscientific research and discussion in the past 20 years.

Consciousness: the scientific, biological and evolutionary issues

The biological significance of the consciousness issue lies in a few key issues. The first is deciding what is unique about the human brain compared to other organisms. This is particularly relevant in this edited volume given that only humans produce art spontaneously, that they do so for what seems to be ‘art for art’s sake’, often without any economic or utilitarian benefits, investing enormous energy and costs in the production (Dissanayake, 1995; Zaidel, 2010). However, for centuries, starting with philosophical discussions, the emphasis had been on language as the key indicator of a state of consciousness. This notion arose with the writings of the French philosopher René Descartes in the 1600s. For many centuries, including into the first half of the twentieth century, Descartes’s requirement that saying ‘I think, therefore I am’ is proof of the presence of consciousness dominated intellectual debates about its nature.

How and why should language explain all there is to the consciousness issue in the first place? Admittedly, human language is the most sophisticated of all modes of biological communication. However, the precursors of language are present in the human biological ancestry, certainly in all the non-human primates, to which humans are the closest genetically, as well as in myriad of living organisms who communicate vocally, aurally, visually and chemically. Did language confer something so unique and special to humans that in order to express it consciousness must be uniquely present? And what about normal biological circumstances in humans, in sleep and infancy, when there is no language? Some people talk in their sleep and do not recall doing so afterwards, implying a disconnection between language and consciousness, for example. To continue the argument, was there some kind of a cut-off point in distant biological time when consciousness became exclusively linked with language? Put differently, has the development of language introduced a particular, human-specific state of consciousness? These are some of the profound issues scientists continue to debate.

A critical insight comes from the realization that, in evolutionary and biological terms, language could not suddenly ‘present’ itself to humans one bright day, and we would be hard put to explain that prior to the development of language there was no consciousness. Of relevance to this edited volume is that what art and language share is symbolic cognition, something that only humans possess in abundance, although, again, precursors of symbolic thought are present in some mammals and birds. In all of human behaviour there is an evolutionary trail of selective adaptation, advantageous selections, survival issues, genetic modifications and environmental changes (Hernandez et al., 2011). Hence, it is highly likely that the antecedents of human consciousness, even ones that may be language-specific, arose from the biological ancestry and that consciousness is itself adaptive (to the particular life of the organism).

Neuroscientific consciousness research

As described above, a major obstacle in the search into the neurological nature of consciousness was the definition of consciousness proposed by Descartes. For centuries scholars and non-scholars alike used this as the principal consciousness gauge. If you can make that utterance, you are conscious. The difficulty is that, according to Descartes’s definition, animals cannot be conscious, nor can babies be conscious or even very small children, nor can deaf and mute individuals. Fortunately, around the beginning of the 1960s biologists began to question the validity and usefulness of Descartes’s assumption. A key turning point in the neuroscientific community’s thinking about consciousness occurred when a group of neurosurgical cases known as the split-brain patients (complete commissurotomy) were studied under the direction of psychobiologist and Nobel Laureate Roger W. Sperry at Caltech, Pasadena (Sperry, 1968, 1984). These patients underwent therapeutic neurosurgery that separated the left and right cerebral hemispheres in order to improve intractable life-threatening epilepsy that did not respond to medication. The empirical laboratory studies revealed that while the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain specialized and controlled speech production and language comprehension, the right cerebral hemisphere was ‘mute’ (could not control the expression of language) and yet specialized in many other cognitive functions (Zaidel, 1993). Together the findings showed that both verbal and non-verbal cognition co-exist in the human brain albeit in separate cerebral hemispheres. The non-verbal cognition witnessed for the right hemisphere required conscious thought; it was not something that can be derived automatically or reflexively. Non-verbal did not spell absence of consciousness. How could Descartes’s definition be applied to the human brain, then? Only the left cerebral hemisphere can control the linguistic production of ‘I think, therefore I am’, the right cerebral hemisphere does not. We would be hard put to claim that humans walk around with only half of their brain conscious! In light of the scientific evidence about the way the brain is organized functionally (asymmetrical hemispheric specialization), the philosophical definition was called into question and deemed critically inadequate.

As part of the debate that ensued, philosophers inspired by the research findings on Sperry’s split-brain patients worked out another definition and this time it was more amenable to behavioural non-verbal input and output. Specifically, if an organism can be shown to have (1) self-consciousness and/or (2) the ability to reconstruct its past, this would be a valid test of the presence of consciousness (Dewitt, 1975; Gullup, 1970). Accepting self-recognition as part of this new definition became a critical scientific tool in the search for neural underpinnings of consciousness in humans as well as in animals. With animals, it is not and has not been possible to test reconstruction of the past, so the focus centred on the operational definition of requiring the recognition of oneself in pictures or in a mirror without requiring a verbal output (or input). The key tool here is the non-verbal feature of the measure. With it, neuroscientists could begin to test humans’ right cerebral hemisphere, babies, mute individuals and a whole host of other organisms. A new door opened and ushered in a new era of research into the neural footprints of consciousness, and the findings challenged the critical role of language in the determination of consciousness. Indeed, a suitable non-verbal study was designed specifically to determine whether through the use of pictures consciousness is present in the human left and right cerebral hemispheres of the complete commissurotomy patients (Sperry et al., 1979). The study revealed that consciousness of the self as well as the capacity to reconstruct the past are both present in each cerebral hemisphere (Zaidel, 1993).

To uncover the neurological underpinning of consciousness we need to look at additional behavioural factors, including developmental issues, that is, when in the course of human development, from infancy to adulthood, does consciousness emerge, and when in phylogeny does consciousness make its appearance?

Consciousness of the self: embodiment knowledge

The first non-verbal test for measuring self-recognition was applied to chimps by Gordon Gullup (Gullup, 1970). A mirror was first placed in a chimp’s cage and separately in a monkey’s cage, allowing each animal time to get used to its own reflection. Commonly, animals respond towards their reflection aggressively, as if other animals were staring back at them; they react belligerently towards the image or look behind the mirror to locate the ‘other’ animal. In other words, they respond to a reflection of a stranger rather than to a reflection of their own image. After an extended period of familiarity with the reflected image in the mirror, Gullup placed a spot of red dye on each of the animals’ faces while the animals were anaesthetized. When the effects of the anaesthesia wore off and the chimp saw its reflection in the mirror the first thing it did was not touch the mirror itself nor search behind it but rather placed its finger directly on the red spot itself. In contrast, when the animal was a monkey, it did not touch its own face but rather the reflection in the mirror. Thus, the chimp passed the test of self-recognition while the monkey did not. In the intervening years, in addition to chimps all of the other higher apes, which include gorillas, orangutans and bonobos, have been found to show self-recognition in the mirror (see review in de Waal et al., 2005). Additional animals have also passed this test, namely bottlenose dolphins, elephants (Plotnik et al., 2006), killer whales and magpies (Prior et al., 2008), and evidence for rhesus macaque monkeys has also been published recently (Rajala et al., 2010).

As scientific work progressed, recognition of one’s image in the mirror became further modified. Thus, de Waal and his colleagues carefully analysed eye-movement responses of capuchin monkeys to their own mirror reflections and distinguished between those made by females versus by males. They found that males reacted with greater ambiguity towards their own mirror reflections than females did. Signs of anxiety were also explored, as were a number of eye contacts with mirrored reflections. They concluded that various non-verbal responses made by capuchin monkeys clearly indicate that they are aware of whose image they are looking at; they have the knowledge that the image reflected in the mirror is not that of a stranger but rather of their own very own body (de Waal et al., 2005). Careful work revealed that the definition of self-recognition as measured in a mirror test should be parsed further if we are to understand the evolutionary development of self-recognition (de Waal, 2008).

Developmentally, children begin to recognize their self-image in the mirror sometime between 6 and 24 months of age...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1   Consciousness and the Brain: A Window to the Mind
• Part I   Pedagogy of Performance Training
• Part II   Eastern Influences on Western Performance Training Technologies
• Part III   Reception and Reflection in Contemporary Performance
• Part IV   Theorizing the Consciousness of Postmodern Performance
• Index