1995-04-02: Making Connections: New Understanding of Consciousness

Vol. III, No. XIV

Transcription:

Pribram, (RU)
Tease
With Good Reason
Volume II, XIV
"Making Connections:
New Understandings of Consciousness"
The quest to unlock the workings of the human mind continue to
intrigue us. Next on With Good Reason, an interview with world-renowned
brain scientist Karl Pribram. I'm Carolyn Elliott.
Music Up
Is the music too loud? If your answer is yes, chances are you're
a woman. It's sexism with a scientific basis. New findings
suggest the female brain is more sensitive to loud sounds than
the male brain. Thus men like their music a few decibels higher
than women.
But on the other hand -- if the lighting in a room seems too dim,
the opposite is true. The male brain sees more light than its
female counterpart. An explanation for why women turn lights on
and men turn them off.
These are just a few recent breakthroughs in brain science.
Others are breaking almost daily. Appropriate for the 1990's,
which President Clinton has declared, "The Decade of the Brain".
My guest today is a pioneer in developing a revolutionary idea of
how the brain works ... one that may shed light on phenomena
like emotion, desire and the human need to understand the world
and ourselves. Dr. Karl Pribram's holographic theory of the brain
was received with skepticism when he first proposed it in the
1970's. But new advances in computer modeling and lab work are
slowly proving him to be right.
Dr. Karl Pribram is an eminent professor of psychology at Radford
University and joins me today.
INTERVIEW
Elliott
Dr. Pribram, most of us have a general idea of how the
nervous system works. Touch your finger to a hot stove and a
message fires back to take your finger off the stove. But the
brain doesn't work on such a simple stimulus-response fashion-)
Can you give us an idea of how the brain works, a general idea of
what your holonomic or holographic theory is?
Pribram
(yes, let's go back to the reflex, because it's simple, it's
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easy. And what you described is correct, but not quite. Starting
in about the 1950's, we began to see that these so-called
"reflexes" operate much more the way thermostats do. Sure, a
thermostat turns on when the room gets cold, turns the furnace
on, or the air-conditioning on if it's too hot. But you can
control it. 7 It's like a bunch of thermostats that can be
controlled,-but some houses for instance have thermostats in the
living room and another one in the bedroom and they work in
parallel. The actual circuitry has in it this parallel
distributor processing level which is like thermostats where
settings are made constantly of different parts of the circuits,
frontal, middle, back part. Hundreds of different circuits are
constantly being reset on the basis of what else is going on in
the brain. As for instance right now, a lot of our circuits are
being set to concentrate on each other and ignore any possible
distractions that might be happening in our surrounds.
Elliott
And I'm trying to think of what question I'm going to ask
next.
Pribram
Exactly, and at the same time, and realize that when you
talk to me as I'm talking to you, we're not really aware or
conscious of the words that are corning out of our mouth. You're
already planning what you are going to ask me next, and I'm
already planning in my brain, I'm changing the settings in my
brain. And we have, when I was at Stanford we already did
experiments showing the kind of process you mentioned, the
holonomic theory. The only kind of process that we know that
would be reactive enough and have enough memory capability is the
kind of process that we talked about in the synapsis, in those
connections between circuits so that, and we showed actually
that this works, that this mechanism really works in that
fashion, in the motor systems.
Elliott
Well we came up with, the staff of With Good Reason, was
brainstorming before this interview, trying to think of some
questions we could ask you about the way that our mind works, and
thought that perhaps you could come up with some explanations.
One thing that had happened to all of us, and happens to most
people, is you work very hard and you're trying to figure out a
puzzle or a problem, spend hours on it and your head hurts, and
all of a sudden that light bulb goes off, all of a sudden you
understand. What's going on in the brain that all of a sudden
the light bulb pops on and it's all crystal clear.
Pribram
If you'll interview me in five or ten years I hope to have
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the answer for you. That's the kind of question, that question
has been asked now for 150 years and Harvard here took up the
problem, "What is the stream of thought". What's going on that
suddenly you get an answer, and what they found originally is
that no two people do it the same way. Some people work at it,
as you described, other people go to sleep, and wake up with the
answer. Still other people have the answer come to them just at
that juncture between sleep and wakefulness. And some people
write all the answers down.
Elliott
But could it be all the parts of the thermostat ...
Pribram
... coming together. That's right. What Freud said, if you
just talk in a fairly free situation but with the answer of what
you're looking for, at least in mind, you know of what the answer
might, where you're directing it, it was called free-association,
it isn't, it was, you've got a problem and you want to ...
Elliott
So you're just kind of doing it verbally.
Pribram
Right, and so the whole Freudian endeavor really is, though
most people don't know this, really aims at the question that
you've just asked.
Elliott
States of intense concentration. We've all been in a
situation like working on a deadline where the brain seems to
shut out everything. You don't get hungry. You don't feel
sleepy. A bomb could go off and you couldn't hear it because
you're just focused on getting that one thing done. What's
happening in your mind, and the mental processes to allow you
just to blank everything out?
Pribram
Well since I'm a brain scientist I don't know what's going
on in your mind but I do hope to know what's going on in the
brain when that happens. It looks as if the frontal lobe, the
very far front of the brain, becomes involved in order to allow
you to concentrate on something very tightly. And if you do
that, that shuts out distractions and the indirect evidence is
that if we electricly stimulate this part of the brain in
monkeys, then we change the input channels to the senses.
Elliott
So if I see you the way I see you know and then you give me
this electrical stimulation, would I be seeing you differently?
Pribram
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Correct.
Pribram
You've probably had this experience if you've been in love
and had somebody touch you. It feels different.
Elliott
Now you're embarrassing me.
Pribram
But it feels different, doesn't it?
Elliott
Yes.
Pribram
And if I touch you, or if some bloke, you know, comes in and
touches you, it's so different, the feel. Well the same thing
goes in "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", we have various
ways of describing this.
Elliott
And my understanding is that the kind of upshot of all of
this is that the frontal lobe is kind of the control center for
the brain, and you can have things stored all over the brain, but
in order to pull them all together your frontal lobe has got to
be functioning correctly.
Pribram
Certainly. I wouldn't go quite that far but most of the
time the brain becomes organized by the input. So most of the
time it's the external situation that determines that. But there
are ambiguities, there are ambiguous situations where, when you
just don't know what. At that point you need an executive, and
he just does things on the basis of previous experience. It's
not all that difficult.
Elliott
Oh really? The frontal lobe is organizing on the basis of
previous experience?
Pribram
Sure.
last time,
five, what
or ... ? ".
Elliott
You know, you remember things better, "It worked that
let's try it again. It didn't work three times out of
do you do then? Well, should I give it another chance
That sounds very computer-like.
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Pribram
Well, the brain is very much like a computer although many
scientist and philosophers right now are damning that analogy,
the analogy is still a very useful one up to a point. And that
point of course is emotions and so on and so forth.
Elliott
You head up Radford University's Center for Brain Research
and Informational Sciences, which the acronym for that is
"BRAINS". And your work includes studying pain control, and that
brings the frontal lobe back in because you've also shown that
the frontal lobe has determination in whether you actually feel
pain. Can you tell us a little bit about that ongoing work?
Pribram
What we do is very simple. We stimulate the middle finger
with an electric current which is pulsed, and you can change the
strength of that current and when you get up to a certain
strength it feels uncomfortable. Then we tell the patient, the
subject, under hypnosis to go away and enjoy themselves, go to
the beach with their girlfriend or boyfriend or go to a concert
and forget all this. When these subjects are at the beach or at
a concert hall the frontal lobe seems to have electrical activity
which suggests that it's saying to the rest of the brain, "Don't
pay attention, don't pay attention, don't pay attention," every
time the stimulus goes on. And in other subjects that frontal
lobe activity is more pronounced, sort of, at the end of the
interval, let's say 500 milliseconds after the stimulus. We
don't know what the difference is between these two classes of
subjects.
Elliott
So what do you hypothesize is going on in the mind to make
them not feel?
Pribram
You have to make a conceptual leap here. I've claimed since
I wrote a book Languages of the Brain in '71, that what we are
aware of is what's going on in the cerebral cortex in the
synaptic dendritic level ...
Elliott
The cerebral cortex being?
Pribram
The bark.
Elliott
The bark on the outside of the brain, okay.
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Pribram
And it has layers in it, and it has nerve cells, and the
nerve cells have these connection points that you talked about.
Where the connections are within the branches of the nerve cells.
So, they're called dendrites. That's a Latin word for branching.
And so, at this synapto-dendritic level, branching, where all
these branches connect up, it's what's going on there that we are
aware of. And the longer it's going on there, the more awareness
there is. And frontal lobes are there to tune the mechanism of
how long all of this is going to last. Now after lobotomy, on
days that people used to do them, I took a set of subjects,
patients, and they had intractable pain, and I would play chess
or checkers with them, depending on whether they could play. And
they would keep interrupting, you know, "I can't concentrate now,
I've got so much pain," and so on and so forth. After the
lobotomy I'd simply time how often they would come in with their,
you know they've got pain and it was almost nil. And even if I'd
ask them, "How's it feel, how's your pain doing?", they'd say,
"Well, it hurts, yeah," and then they'd make the next move. I
mean it just shortened the duration.
Elliott
Is that because the reactions aren't going on or is it
because the frontal lobe isn't organizing the reactions for you
to sense them?
Pribram
keep
And
Well, in normal, normally you use your frontal lobe to
paying attention as you said, to concentrate on something.
once the pain gets going, it's there, and the concentration is
there for it, and you can't get rid of it.
Elliott
I may be making a jump here but does your research suggests
that if the pain is regular, if there are regular throbs, that
perhaps you can, we are getting to a point where you can learn
not to pay attention to that pain?
Pribram
Oh sure. In fact David Spiegel who worked with me at
Stanford and did some experiments, he quite inadvertently found
that with chronic pain patients who have cancer, that simply by
doing hypnotic like pro-seeself hypnosis that these people really
can control their pain, but the thing that he found that's so
fascinating is that these people lived twice as long as the
control subjects.
Elliott
Because they're not feeling the pain.
Pribram
Well, you said because.
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Elliott
Right. I'm not a scientist, I can make those leaps.
Pribram
Well, one of the things about holonomic brain theory is that
the human brain is so organized that it can make correlations so
easily. That's how we know this is an entity, cause we just
correlate, correlate, correlate. That's how these brain scans
are done. That's how they're done. You get a picture from this
side, from this side, from this side.
Elliott
Using an MRI, correct me if I'm wrong, an MRI or something
called a PET scan, you can actually watch the processes going on
in the brain.
Pribram
And many of them are parallel. But that just tells you at a
very superficial level that many things are going on
simultaneously in the brain. The problem with all those
techniques is they take so long. And one of the things that
we're developing at Radford in the Center for Brain Research is
ways of measuring the dynamics of these processes which are going
on at a very great rate, in milliseconds. If we can get the
newer technologies going and look at the whole brain, not just
the top half and you know, and just, and so on. And those
techniques are being developed now and we have good reasons ....
Elliott
So you're talking about really wiring the brain and looking
at a computer and seeing, and when I was talking to you before
the interview you were referring to that as "firepower" I think.
Pribram
That's right. I mean 128 electrodes, 128 amplifiers hooked
up to 128 channels in a computer that's going to, and then of
course the programming of that so that we can learn what's
actually going on. But it will be five years, or ten years from
now, we'll be able, in much better shape to say, "Yes, hey, you
know. It goes like this. Boom-boom-boom!".
MUSIC
BRIDGE
This is With Good Reason, I'm Carolyn Elliott. My guest is Dr.
Karl Pribram, who's here to explain why sometimes it does seem
like the body doesn't know what the brain is doing. Dr. Pribram
spent more than thirty years studying the brain and behavior at
Stanford University and today is an eminent professor of
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psychology at Radford University. He's author of the landmark
book Languages of the Brain, which he wrote in 1971. Some of his
other books include The Biology of the Mind, The Biology of
Emotions and Other Feelings, and Brain. Mind. and Consciousness.
Elliott
Dr. Pribram, in 1990 you wrote a book on perception, and
again it's a complex idea. But I'd like to again list some
everyday occurrences that occur with perception and maybe you can
help us understand what's happening or what you believe is
happening in the brain. Two people go to a museum and they look
at a painting and they see completely different things. -
Pribram
Well, we've already answered that question, haven't we?
Because the rest of their brains, especially these higher order
locations, so called systems, intrinsic systems I call them, they
used to be called association systems, operate top down. And so
they alter, they program the way your input is organized. And so
the configuration of that input depends on the organization
higher up.
Elliott
And so you're saying no two people's brain have the same
program?
Pribram
Definitely.
Elliott
But you know, we learned that there are certain things we
are supposed to see in a picture. And now you're saying that no
two people see it the same way.
Pribram
Well it depends on the picture. If it's a very simple
picture of a triangle, hopefully everybody will see it as a
triangle and not as a pentagon.
Elliott
I'm thinking of more like a Monet or, you know.
Pribram
Sure, well those you know, you appreciate different aspects,
and you yourself will see it differently at different times.
Elliott
I've saved the most exotic for last. Your theory of the
holonomic brain al$o, you have said, may explain spirituality or
humanness urges, sensations, love. And you went a step further
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and said when we understand the spiritual side of humanness,
which you believe is connected with understanding the function of
the brain, we're going to increase human potential.
Pribram
As far as the spiritual aspects, the way I define spirit is
simply that there seems to be, in humans, the propensity to get
in touch with something larger than their individual selves.
They can do it in terms of nature, they can do it in terms of
religion, they can do it in terms of science. But they always
want to know, when did the big bang occur? You know, the
cosmology in science, or in a social setting, social science or
the fact that we have communal ways of talking about doing
things, or religious ways. That's what I mean by spiritual. And
of course that organizes the loving aspects, and so the whole
body gets into that. What we have suggested is that when the
frontal lobes become hyperactive, that is if you really use your
frontal lobes as you've said, when you were concentrating. Very
often when I do that I feel as though I'm a "through-put". Have
you ever, when you're witting, that something is operating
through you?
Elliott
Oh yeah.
Pribram
It seems from our experiments that when we stimulate the
frontal lobes electricly, that what happens at these channels
that I was talking about, input channels, sensory input channels,
that they, each of them have what's called an inhibitory
surround. They are separated from each other.
Elliott
Each channel separated with something to inhibit them around
that.
Pribram
It isn't interacting. I mean it is an interaction to get
the intermission, but they can, in technical terms they can
multiplex the whole system so you have, several channels can act
independently. It's like having several telephones at home. Now
what happens when you stimulate frontal lobes electricly is that
all of these run together. The inhibitory surround is gone. The
inhibition is inhibited. And so all the channels run together
and it's like one big channel. When you do that in a system like
a holographic-like system, it looks like a hologram. Like one
big area. And so when you do that you have no boundaries. All
the boundaries dissolve.
Elliott
And that's when you get that zooming in, that intense
concentration, that kind of ...
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Pribram
Yes. And every one of the spiritual traditions, the
practice is always of highly concentrate, and then everything
dissolves.
Elliott
Well that's fascinating. The one thing I will say is that
when I get into that mode I do get the distinct feeling that my
physical body couldn't take it very long. It's exhausting.
Pribram
It's when we stimulate the frontal lobe that the
organization of the brain is such that we can derive from that,
we can infer from that that this must be what's going on. Now we
haven't shown it in a particular experiment, that hypnosis stuff
that we talked about is the closest to it. But another five
years, if everything goes well, I'm really hopeful that we can do
this, and really show that when you have a transcendental
experience that what is going on in the organization of the
entire brain.
Elliott
Well I wanted to ask you something, because in the past, I'd
say five years there's been a real increased interest in
spirituality, I mean it's even making it into t.v. with shows
about angels. And I'm wondering if that's kind of corresponding
with the brain research? As we're being told that there may be
explanations for transcendental experiences or spirituality, if
people are feeling more free to explore than they were in the
past?
Pribram
I think it is for many people, in my case it's not. As a
scientist I've never felt the need to say, "Oh, spiritual
experiences don't exist", which so many people feel that if
somebody has spiritual experiences or that somebody describes
them, "Oh they're nuts!", and we don't want to deal with it. I
just feel that's very unscientific. If somebody describes
something to me they may be charlatan, they may be putting me on,
there's no way I have of knowing "it. I see magicians working and
I know they're doing magic, and you know it's sort of fun. But
I've seen people like Yuri Geller do things like bending keys and
so on, and he may have a little capsule of chemical, but at least
when you look at it under laser light it looks different from any
bending that I've or anybody else has ever seen. Let's just
accept the fact that we don't understand it.
Elliott
Deja Vu. Any idea what deja vu is, we all have that?
Pribram
It has to do with familiarity. And we did about forty years
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of research on this so it has do with familiarity. "Deja" means
"I'm familiar with". You know you've been in a place, and you
come in and it feels very unfamiliar. That's "Shame Vu". And
that's due to a seizure going on in that particular location of
the brain. And Deja Vu is the same thing, when a seizure can set
in. You walk into a place that you know from your own experience
that you've never been in but it "feels". It feels right in
fact. And you can do this in an interpersonal experience too.
Elliott
Right.
them but you
kind of ...
Pribram.
You feel like you know the person, you've never met
feel like you've met them someplace. They fit some
It's again, it's this part of the brain that seems to be
involved in that doesn't have to be pathological. And this part
of the brain, one more thing about it, it's also this part of the
brain that allows you to take a particular episode and integrate
it into your personal history, into the narrative consciousness
that makes you feel as though your entity and I ...
Elliott
I want to give you a chance, right now you're organizing the
fourth appalachian conference, and tell us real briefly about
this.
Pribram.
The fourth appalachian conference is going to handle, the
title of it is "Learning as Self Organization, not Self
Gratification". And it comes out of the history of psychology
where learning theory in the 1940's, 30's-40's, where everything
was drive reduction. The idea was that the only reason you ever
learn something is 'cause if you're hungry, you get to eat. My
own experience and the experiences of the very good students that
I've seen, it all started with that. That they reorganized their
lecture notes. Once or twice or three times during the semester.
And when they do that they come out with almost perfect grades
every time. And those who don't reorganize, in terms of their
own brain organization, their own mental organization, they keep
floundering around.
Elliott
And so at the conference, how are you going to look at this?
Pribram.
Well, uh, in terms of first of all reenforcement theory, a
fellow by the name of Colleen has developed mathematical models,
I've been following his work for a number of years. We need
computer scientist, with parallel distributing processing kinds
of things, to come in and take a look at this and see how much
they've done and how those things fit together, and then we want
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some people who have been working on a nervous system, both
experimentally and clinicly. They will go out with new ways of
looking at things.
Elliott
So you're coming at it from three different directions?
Pribram
Three different directions.
Elliott
The 1990's have been declared by the President as "The
Decade of the Brain". Will there be a big breakthrough by the
turn of the century?
Pribram
Oh the breakthroughs are coming right and left if anybody
could recognize them. Well we've described one set of
experiments here where we can find out electrical activity of the
brain in enough detail so that we can look at the dynamics and
correlate it with the thinking process, let's say, and
personality and how different people think. So I think that's
one major thing. The chemistry has been about since the mid-S0's
and maybe even mid-70's, a breakthrough, we'll learn so much more
about the brain's chemistry. The same chemical does different
things in different parts of the brain, completely different
things, maybe even opposite things.
Elliott
There's so much more I'd like to talk to you about, we
didn't get to talk about the male and the female brain and
artificial intelligence but we're out of time. Karl Pribram,
thank you so much for joining me on With Good Reason.
Pribram
It has been a great pleasure, thank you for all the
preparation that you've done and the good work and asking such
really good questions.
OUTllO
My guest has been Dr. Karl Pribram, eminent professor of
psychology at Radford University. On our next show we'll take a
look at whether the public should take a more active role in
science research.
This is With Good Reason. The project coordinator is Michael
McDowell. John Wilkinson is the assistant producer. Kevin
Piccini wrote the theme music. I'm Carolyn Elliott.
"What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" by R.E.M. and Laurie Anderson's
"Baby Doll" are both available on Warner Brothers Records.
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also to WVTF Roanoke.
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