What is reality?

WHEN you woke up this morning, you found the world largely as you left it. You were still you; the room in which you awoke was the same one you went to sleep in. The outside world had not been rearranged. History was unchanged and the future remained unknowable. In other words, you woke up to reality. But what is reality? The more we probe it, the harder it becomes to comprehend. In the eight articles on this page we take a tour of our fundamental understanding of the world around us, starting with an attempt to define reality and ending with the idea that whatever reality is, it isn’t what it seems. Hold on to your hats.

Researchers have identified a novel mechanism that helps explain the power of placebos and nocebos.

Described in the Sept. 10 on-line issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the new findings demonstrate that the placebo effect can be activated outside of conscious awareness, and provide an explanation for how patients can show clinical improvement even when they receive treatments devoid of active ingredients or of known therapeutic efficacy.

"In this study, we used a novel experimental design and found that placebo and nocebo [negative placebo] effects rely on brain mechanisms that are not dependent on cognitive awareness," explains first author Karin Jensen, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Program in Placebo Studies (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School. "A person can have a placebo or nocebo response even if he or she is unaware of any suggestion of improvement or anticipation of getting worse."

“Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so fascinating to create and to view … we are forced to contemplate a new, higher pattern that binds lower ones together.”

It seems to be the season for fascinating meditations on consciousness, exploring such questions as what happens while we sleep, how complex cognition evolved, and why the world exists. Joining them and prior explorations of what it means to be human is The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (public library) by Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Bor in which, among other things, he sheds light on how our species’ penchant for pattern-recognition is essential to consciousness and our entire experience of life.

The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience. Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to maximize further learning. We can allow our attention to roam anywhere around us and glean interesting new clues about any facet of our local environment, to compare and potentially add to our extensive internal model.

Like a melody that keeps playing in your head even after the music stops, researchers at the University of Illinois’s Beckman Institute have shown that the beat goes on when it comes to the human visual system.

In an experiment designed to test their theory about a brain mechanism involved in visual processing, the researchers used periodic visual stimuli and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings and found, one, that they could precisely time the brain’s natural oscillations to future repetitions of the event, and, two, that the effect occurred even after the prompting stimuli was discontinued. These rhythmic oscillations lead to a heightened visual awareness of the next event, meaning controlling them could lead to better visual processing when it matters most, such as in environments like air traffic control towers.

Yale researchers studying epileptic seizures have shed new light on the neurological origins of consciousness.

When epileptics lose consciousness during a variety of types of seizures, the signals converge on the same brain structures, but through different pathways, says Dr. Hal Blumenfeld, professor of neurology, neurobiology, and neurosurgery.

“Understanding of these mechanisms could lead to improved treatment strategies to prevent impairment of consciousness and improve the quality of life of people with epilepsy,” he said.

Blumenfeld’s research is described in the current issue of the journal Lancet Neurology.

(Image: The fMRI images are different viewpoints of the brain of a child experiencing an epileptic seizure. Areas in yellow and orange represent increased brain activity compared to its normal state, while areas in blue show decreased activity. These are the areas of the brain needed for normal consciousness.)

The Cosmological Foundations of Consciousness explores the cosmological foundations of subjective consciousness in the biological brain, from cosmic-symmetry-breaking, through biogenesis, evolutionary diversification and the emergence of metazoa, to humans, presenting a new evolutionary perspective on the potentialities of quantum interactions in consciousness, and the ultimate relationship of consciousness with cosmology.

Cosmic symmetry-breaking and its interactive fractal and chaotic effects leading to biogenesis.

(a) Life portrayed as the consummation of interactive complexity (Σ) resulting from symmetry-breaking of the fundamental force of nature in the big-bang (α), whatever ultimate fate is in store (Ω). Inset (i) possible fractal inflation , (ii) the distribution of dark energy and matter and the matter of stars and planets. (b) Logarithmic time scale of cosmological events showing life on earth existing for a third of the universe’s current lifetime. (c) Symmetry-breaking of the forces of nature results in the color and weak forces generating 100 atomic nuclei, while gravity and electromagnetism govern long-range structure determining biogenesis, from fractal chemical bonding, to solar systems capable of photosynthetic life in the goldilocks zone of liquid water. (d) Interactive effects of cosmic symmetry-breaking lead to hierarchical interaction of the forces, generating hadrons, atomic nuclei and molecules (i). Non-linear energetics of chemical bonding lead to a cascade of cooperative weak-bonding effects, which generate fractal molecular complexity, from the molecular orbitals of simple molecules (ii), through the 3D structures of complex proteins and nucleic acids (iii) to supra-molecular cell organelles (iv), cells (v), and tissues (vi) and organisms. (e) These fractal effects are complemented by the chaotic effects of gravity as a non-linear force, resulting in extreme variation of the planets, generating a diversity of potential conditions for biogenesis, similar to the dynamic variations surrounding the Mandelbrot set.

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”