Human Cognition – Self Awareness

It had been six months since Ra’s passing and Alph was beginning his 17th year. Mum had taken the role as Shaman; her mother’s wishes accepted by the clan without dispute. Now they spent their days preparing for the spring fertility ceremonies. Costumes were being made and torches were being prepared to light the deep inner parts of the cave. Mum’s ideas for creating a special experience for the clan were coming together nicely. With Alph’s assistance, she was turning the deepest part of the cave into a sexual alter which would convey the strength of the lion and the fertility of the Mother Goddess. The drawings had to be very elaborate, very symbolic. One afternoon, only days away from the first of the ceremonies, the pair was busy at work on the final drawings of the lions when Alph asked, “Mum, how will we draw the spirits of the great lions?”

Mum paused from her work. After pondering the insightful nature of her son’s question, she explained to Alph that they would not draw the spirits of the lions. Instead, she was designing the ceremony to recreate the lions’ spirits in the clan’s men. Alph thought for a moment and then asked, “Can you ever draw a spirit?” And then another question, “Mum, can you draw my spirit?”

Mum laughed and told Alph to place his hand on the cave wall. She then dipped a hollowed reed into the red ochre dish. When the reed was loaded with paint, she placed her thumb over its end and trapped the liquid. She then put the reed to her lips and aimed it at Alph’s hand. She blew out the red over his hand until it was completely covered. When the reed was emptied, she told Alph to remove his hand from the wall and place it, palm down, into the red ochre dish. She then took his hand, placed it on the wall and then removed it quickly.

Alph looked at the two prints on the cave wall. One hand was solid red. The other hand had no color but was outlined with the sprayed red paint. Mum explained, “The solid hand print is your body, Alph. The other print is your spirit.”

Awareness and self awareness evolved in early humans at two different times. The former came gradually, generation after generation, evolving over millions of years. The later appeared quite suddenly between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago in the caves of southern France. Why people started to think symbolically and represent these thoughts on cave walls was the result of a confluence of changes that came together at the same time. Minor changes in the brain’s structure to increase integration and to expand capacity for awareness no doubt played a major role. The improving living environment brought on by the ice age melt allowed life expectancy to increase. More clans became three generations deep. Having more grandparents meant that clan history was older and ritualized collective memory more valuable. The evolution of language, its richness in texture and meaning, increased neuronal synapses and memory associations in more complex and abstract ways. Human experience became more vivid, meaningful and symbolic. As humans became more aware, our brain began to construct abstract expressions of its surroundings. At some point, brain awareness turned inward and constructed an abstraction that was itself. We have never been then same since.

It is fascinating that the construction of awareness by the brain has been a subject that is not easy for the brain to understand. How awareness emerges from the physical brain and how awareness controls the brain are two of life’s greatest mysteries. Our collective memory is replete with many explanations. The most common of these revolve around the idea of “dualism”; that there is a body (a brain) and there is a separate other, a spirit or a soul. This made sense for the earliest humans of southern France 35,000 years ago and it continues to this day in several of world’s major religions which formed around 3,000 years ago. It has only been in the past 500 hundred years that philosophers began to question dualistic collective memory and to postulate alternative explanations. The construction of modern science and the scientific method of inquiry have further challenged these beliefs. It has only been in the past 100 years with the advent of quantum theory, the theory of relativity, computerization, information theory and the prospects of artificial intelligence that this age-old collective memory is being replaced by evidence based alternatives.

Awareness is relative. A human may be partially aware, subconsciously aware, or acutely unaware of an event. At inception, awareness is a form of primary consciousness consisting of the capacity to generate emotions and information about one's surroundings, but not an ability to talk about what one has experienced. It is like a feeling that cannot be labeled or described; a phenomenon that is especially common in pre-verbal human infants. Awareness may be focused on an internal state, such as a visceral feeling, or on external events by way of sensory perception. Physically, awareness is dependent upon the brain stem, the posterior part of the brain which adjoins and is structurally continuous with the spinal cord. The fact that humans share this brain structure with most vertebrates gives insight to how the ancestors of early humans behaved prior to language and self awareness. It is easy to imagine hominids, steeped in emotion, using facial expressions, undefined sounds and physical actions to communicate much the same way lower animals do today.

The human brain is a highly sophisticated, incredibly complex biological decision making machine honed by evolution to produce the best decisions possible for the survival of the species. It is the ultimate processor of information that makes a difference. While it is awake, the brain takes in external and internal information continuously. It processes that information by running the data through emotional algorithms to determine appropriate actions. It queries prior information from personal experiences and from collective memory to assess what it might glean from history to make more informed decisions. It forecasts what outcomes might be expected, based on current and prior information, and makes a decision. This decision could include crossing an intersection, buying a new dress, trusting your partner, going to the bathroom, or running from a tiger. The brain does all of these things almost instantaneously and continuously by being aware of its surroundings and itself.

At its most sophisticated level, awareness is the abstract expression of the brain itself, self awareness. The more integrated and expansive its capacity to process information, the more awareness becomes self awareness. It was self awareness that turned primitives with primary consciousness into modern human agents of conscious decision making. Self awareness is the brain at its highest form.

As simple as this may sound, self awareness is “we are aware that we are aware.”

Awareness is like watching TV and self awareness is like using a personal computer that is hooked up to internet. Watching TV is passive. You watch the shows and react to them emotionally. You see something that you don’t like and change the channel or turn the TV off. Awareness is a passive experience. We take in information from our surroundings and respond emotionally to the experience. If the sensations become too hard to handle, we close our eyes or run away. Now consider using an internet connected personal computer. We choose the information we want to experience. We click on links that expand our knowledge. We may like certain collective memories and we ignore others. We can be entertained, informed or connected. While the analogy is simple, it does make the point that awareness is the passive collection and processing of external and internal information. On the hand, self awareness is dynamic and active, purposeful and empowering.

We are not alone when it comes to self awareness. While it is difficult to measure in other animals due to the limitations of language and ethics of animal testing, self awareness presents itself in a limited number of other animals in varying degrees. The “mirror test” has been used successfully to make these assessments. The test involves putting an animal to sleep. A red dot is then placed on the animal’s forehead so that it can only be seen by the animal when it awakes and looks into a mirror. If the animal acknowledges the red dot, it is deemed to be self aware. Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas have passed this test; as have elephants, pigs, dolphins and magpies. Without the context of language, however, we should assume that self aware animals have cognitive experiences which are very different and significantly less complex than humans.

The physical nature of self awareness, where this process is constructed in the brain, is still in question. One of the most intriguing ideas about how self awareness physically manifests involves “mirror neurons”. A mirror neuron fires when an animal acts. It can also fire when an animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer was acting. While controversial, a mirror neuron could be called an “empathy neuron”. As such, when an observer recognizes or imagines feelings in another person or thing, the observer imagines the same feelings. If a person is crying, for example, the mirror neurons of person who sees the crying would fire off and produce a feeling that might cause the observer to cry too. V.S. Ramachandran has speculated that mirror neurons may provide the neurological basis of human self awareness. In an essay written in 2009, Ramachandran gave the following explanation of his theory: "... I also speculated that these neurons can not only help simulate other people's behavior but can be turned 'inward'—as it were—to create second-order representations or meta-representations of your own earlier brain processes. This could be the neural basis of introspection, and of the reciprocity of self awareness and other awareness.”

There has been a lot of hype surrounding mirror neurons and their social implications. Certainly the use of mirror neurons to create the abstract construct of “self” is a hypothesis that requires additional study. The topic, however, does beg the question of what the construction of self awareness does to the brain. Further, why does the brain construct feelings that it imagines to be in other people, animals and deities?

World powers and large corporations have significantly increased funding in the past ten years for research of algorithmic decision making processes of the brain in hopes of creating artificial intelligence and, possibly, consciousness. This research frames the body/mind issue in a different way; not as a question of how the body and mind work together, but how the brain constructs information to make better decisions. By changing the definition of awareness from a “state of mind” to “constructed information”, emergence and control become less of an issue.

Michael Graziano, a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University, conducts scientific research on awareness. He has proposed the "attention schema" theory, an explanation of how, and for what adaptive advantage, brains attribute the property of awareness to themselves. This theory, which he presents in his 2013 book “Consciousness and the Social Brain”, proposes that the brain is a collector of information and “attention” is an enhanced data-handling method that is produced by the brain. Acting as a biological expert system; attention increases when one integrated set of neural signals grow in strength and dwarf other signals. There is nothing supernatural about this process. The brain uses its resources of memory and language to create a description, a rendering, of attention. Awareness is this rendering, a simplified useful description of attention, its dynamics and its consequences. 

Using the constructs of attention and awareness, Graziano builds a more useful explanation for self awareness. He changes the historical definition, “the brain being aware that it is aware”, to “self awareness is a schematized model of one's own attention”. He also suggests that this process was first introduced by the brain in an attempt to understand other people’s feelings or thoughts, to predict their behavior and monitor their attentional state. Once a brain imagines what another brain is thinking, it is much easier for a brain to describe itself being aware. 

When the brain constructs a description of being self aware, it takes a first step at describing the control and ownership of its volition or will. A sense of agency is created. A pre-reflective description is created that it is “I” who is executing bodily functions and movements or thinking thoughts. Tightly integrated with this construction is a sense of ownership, that “I” own my thoughts and actions. It is fascinating that the construction of “self” ownership and control are descriptive illusions. Studies have shown that when asked to verbally make a choice between a green or red ball, the brain will light up milliseconds before the decision is announced. The “self” is the last to know the brain’s choice.

The brain is truly an inventive organ. Once it starts describing “I”, it constructs a new one for most every occasion. Most brains have many “I’s” (pardon the gender): the son, the father, the student, the manager, the lover, the athlete, the submissive, etc. Each plays the agent role at different times depending on how the brain assesses its needs. It is thought that taking a further iterative step of constructing an “I” that is describing “I’s” (an observer who’s role is to oversee observers), the brain attempts to create a controller for this “squadron of simpletons” of “I’s” referenced by Robert Ornstein. Being in control of the “self” that is attending implies conscious selection. This second iterative process is used when the brain constructs a description of a deity, an ultimate controller. The same parts of the brain that create “I’s” and “other people’s feelings” are used. The same imagination that thinks of itself as “I”, imagines thoughts in someone else’s brain, and imagines the minds of gods. All three imaginations are heavily influenced by personal experiences and abstract, ritualized collective memory.