What "no brain" patients teach us about consciousness | Ideas For Our Time

0:00 In 2007, a strange headline shocked the world.

0:03 The mysterious case of the white-collar worker without [music] a brain.

0:06 On the outside, a normal 44-year-old man, employed,

0:10 married with two children, and an [music] IQ of 75.

0:13 And on the inside, a gaping fluid-filled cavity where a brain would normally be.

0:18 And he's not the only one.

0:19 Stories like this keep making headlines.

0:22 [music]

0:21 People living otherwise regular lives, but underneath the surface, nothing.

0:26 How do these stories challenge our understanding of how the mind works?

0:30 [music] And how would you feel if you found out you had no brain?

0:32 Today, we explore the mystery of how

0:34 consciousness can exist [music] without the brain,

0:36 and how the structures of music might offer a radical new perspective.

0:40 Welcome to Ideas for Our Time.

0:45 [music] We choose to go to the moon.

0:46 There are things we thought we knew and still [music] don't know.

0:49 And it's one of the things we're hoping to discover.

0:51 I have a dream today.

0:58 Today's idea comes from Michael Gazzaniga and Bridget Quinnan,

1:01 two distinguished neuroscientists.

1:04 This video is based on an article that they wrote for our website,

1:06 which [music] you can find the link for in the description below.

1:09 Michael and Bridget propose a new way of thinking about consciousness,

1:12 [music] not as a physical phenomenon, but as the music of the mind.

1:16 Along the way, we'll hear directly from Bridget,

1:18 who was kind enough to let me interview her about this idea of theirs,

1:20 [music] and how it could shed light on the matter of artificial consciousness.

1:24 I sort of trust that if anyone is going

1:26 to figure out how life works and nervous systems and brains,

1:30 it would probably be musicians.

1:31 Like, my money is on them.

1:33 But first, the missing brain.

1:37 The case of the missing brain is rare, but not unique.

1:40 Outside of the headlines, there have been many studies examining these instances

1:44 of people missing most of their brains.

1:46 Often, these people go into hospital for other reasons,

1:48 and only then does a scan reveal that they just have a thin layer of cortex,

1:53 the rest of their skull filled with fluid.

1:55 In these cases, it's a surprise that these people

1:57 have been going about their lives fairly normally,

1:59 all while lacking so much brain matter.

2:02 Even rats with hollowed-out brains have been

2:04 shown to perform well in various tasks.

2:07 Importantly, if you're born with no cortex, things look pretty bleak.

2:10 Infants born with hydranencephaly rarely survive longer than a year.

2:14 But these cases of having barely any brain reveal something quite extraordinary.

2:18 If you were born with just a tenth of your liver, you'd have a serious issue.

2:23 [music] But somehow, the brain can handle it?

2:24 We know what brains are supposed to look like,

2:25 and these brains just don't look right.

2:27 Our nervous system, the brain, the spinal cord,

2:29 and the brainstem, float around in cerebrospinal fluid.

2:32 [music] Our brain should have a few ventricles, but not ventricles that big.

2:37 A normal adult skull has a bit of fluid in the center and around the edges.

2:40 The rest is brain matter.

2:42 But the skulls of these individuals are mostly filled with fluid,

2:45 with just a little bit of brain matter at the outskirts.

2:48 It's like the central ventricles have overflown completely,

2:50 which is actually something that can happen in adulthood,

2:53 a condition known as hydrocephalus, and it's bad news.

2:56 The [music] skull fills with excess fluid,

2:58 which impairs behavioral, cognitive, and motor functions, [music]

3:01 and to prevent serious damage,

3:03 shunts have to be installed to drain the excess fluid.

3:06 [music] But in these cases, if the initial brain-to-fluid ratio is different,

3:09 somehow it works just fine.

3:11 It's just a different arrangement.

3:15 [music]

3:19 The big question here, of course,

3:20 is how does consciousness work if you have so little brain?

3:23 Neuroscience has been trying to solve

3:24 the problem of consciousness for a long time.

3:26 According to Michael and Bridget,

3:28 it might be time to look at the problem in a whole new way.

3:31 In a field that has been stuck for a minute, if you're stuck,

3:36 you might as well just like start playing around with ideas,

3:39 and then you'll get there faster.

3:41 And you know, you have different waves

3:43 of like a technological revolution where you're like,

3:45 okay, now we're going to crack this thing right [music] wide open, right?

3:48 And so, you know, when you couldn't look inside a human brain,

3:52 people did phrenology, right?

3:54 So, you're like, what information is available on a skull?

3:58 Uh you know, like that's If that's the best you can do,

4:01 then that's the best you can do.

4:02 So, might as well start with that.

4:03 Certainly, when all the you know, structural brain imaging came into play,

4:08 then obviously you could do CT and X-ray and MRI.

4:11 And then it's like, okay, now that we can look inside brains,

4:15 you know, can we do this voxel-based morphometry?

4:18 Can we see if like this brain area is larger or smaller?

4:21 But then once the functional imaging came into play where you're like,

4:24 we can have PET scans and we can have, you know,

4:26 bold signals of where the oxygen is and various things,

4:30 there was the sense of like, okay, you know,

4:32 we can see inside a living human brain,

4:34 [music] so like this will be wrapped up in, you know, a couple weeks.

4:40 So, you get these sort of surges of like,

4:42 all right, we're going to figure this all out,

4:44 and then you know, it's just how science works is everyone does their homework,

4:48 and then at a certain point,

4:50 you sort of you exclude all of the reasonable things,

4:53 and then you're like, well, those didn't work,

4:55 so like [laughter] what's the next idea, right?

4:58 Let's begin by comparing music to brain activity.

5:01 Both of them could be described in terms of volume,

5:03 [music] the amount of sound happening at once,

5:05 or the amount of brain happening at once.

5:08 But the volume of music is not the sole determiner of what makes a good song.

5:12 Unless we're talking about the loudness war,

5:14 but that's a story for another time.

5:16 There's also other components like the rhythm, the harmonies, the melody.

5:20 Music is the elaborate interplay of these different frequencies,

5:23 which in combination creates something beautiful.

5:26 Now, consider the brain.

5:27 Once again, the volume might not be

5:29 the sole determiner of what makes a brain good.

5:31 There's also the circadian rhythm, the central pattern generators,

5:34 [music] and the real-time brain activity.

5:36 The conscious mind is the elaborate interplay of these different frequencies,

5:40 which in combination produces something beautiful.

5:43 In both cases, volume is the easiest thing to measure.

5:46 [music]

5:46 In music, it's hard to quantify rhythm,

5:47 and very difficult to quantify the melodies and harmonies.

5:50 Same in brains.

5:52 [music]

5:51 For years, neuroscience has found better and better tools for measuring volume,

5:55 but it's hard to quantify the circadian rhythms,

5:58 and [music] very difficult to quantify activity from firing neurons.

6:02 In both cases, volume only tells you part of the story.

6:05 Now, how does this musical analogy help us think about these brainless patients?

6:08 You know, there's a lot of people who've been put in scanners where like,

6:11 yeah, there there is clearly a certain shared layout.

6:15 The same thing as an orchestra where you're like, yeah,

6:17 we put like it's not random that the big

6:19 instruments are at the back, [music] right?

6:21 Someone thought this through.

6:22 And so, you're like, yeah, you sort of expect timpani to be in a certain place.

6:26 And so, there are reasons why it's set up this way,

6:30 there's reasons why it works this way.

6:32 And so, [music] if you go to hear a symphony, yes,

6:34 you should reasonably expect that the cellos

6:37 are going to be where the cellos are.

6:38 And so, I think that's a healthy way to be thinking about

6:43 [music] brain structure.

6:43 What Bridget means here is that we can

6:45 kind of think of the brain like an orchestra.

6:46 [music] The brainstem is the conductor,

6:49 and in vague semicircles around the conductor,

6:51 you have the hypothalamus, the thalamus, the basal ganglia,

6:54 like [music] the different sections of the orchestra.

6:56 And then the largest arc at the back is the cortex,

6:59 like the choir at the back of the hall.

7:01 That's what Bridget means about a shared layout.

7:04 [music] Neuroscientists have used modern brain imaging

7:05 to figure out the brain's orchestral layout.

7:08 Language is here, vision is over there, [music] memory over in that section.

7:13 But our friends without a brain are like orchestras without instruments.

7:17 Just a conductor in the middle, and a small choir at the back.

7:20 So, I think it's just like a healthier way of being like,

7:22 yeah, of course, you have a genetic [music]

7:25 program that unfolds, and if everything goes well,

7:27 you sort of use the thing that worked before, and that's great.

7:29 [music] Um but that's not It's not deterministic.

7:32 It doesn't have to be that way, right?

7:34 If you only have five people up on stage,

7:40 then you're going to play the song with those five people.

7:42 You know, I went to see like a [music]

7:43 a chamber group do Beethoven's fifth and seventh.

7:47 It was great, you know?

7:49 They know what they're doing.

7:50 Obviously, someone had to put some effort in into distributing [music]

7:54 a symphony for, you know, 80 people onto four or five.

7:58 So, it's not to say it doesn't work.

8:00 But But you can't tell me like that's not That's not Beethoven's fifth symphony.

8:04 It's recognizably Beethoven's fifth symphony.

8:07 And And so, the thing that made it recognizably

8:09 his symphony wasn't the number of people playing it.

8:18 We've now seen how using music as a metaphor can

8:20 provide new ways of exploring the mysteries [music] of the brain.

8:23 But can music be more than a metaphor?

8:25 And is there something that musicians know that we don't?

8:28 I sort of trust that if anyone is going

8:30 to figure out how life works and nervous systems and brains,

8:33 it would probably be musicians.

8:35 Like, my money is on them.

8:37 You know, it's like if they figured out how

8:38 to mathematically interrogate a world that's entirely invisible to us,

8:43 and like make these insane calculations on the fly,

8:45 you're like, I would put them in charge of wave physics.

8:48 I'd put them in charge of a lot of stuff, you know?

8:50 Like, they seem to know what they're doing.

8:51 Michael and Bridget push this idea further,

8:53 and explore what it would mean to define a basic layered hierarchy

8:57 of consciousness based on the rhythms of the body that we observe in others.

9:00 Instead of consciousness being a thing that you have or don't [music] have,

9:03 they define it using a musical hierarchy,

9:05 starting with the minimum requirement for life, that the brainstem keeps time.

9:09 we already know that it's like if your brainstem is not involved,

9:13 that's the end of everything.

9:15 So, I think building from the brainstem back up is a a healthier way

9:19 of doing it than starting from our highest-order

9:22 cognitive processes and working back down.

9:25 Without this tempo, you are brain dead.

9:28 No music, the lowest level of the hierarchy.

9:31 One step up, you get asleep.

9:33 With a tempo set by the brainstem,

9:35 you get a simple polyrhythm consisting of the heartbeat and the breath.

9:42 Now, we have awake, a complex polyrhythm [music]

9:45 where we add in blinking and limbs in motion.

9:52 The body now has a whole rhythm section, [music] and the pace has increased.

9:55 Finally, we have awake and aware,

9:58 a complex polyrhythm that changes and evolves [music] in response to stimuli.

10:03 In musical terms, a band that can improvise.

10:05 [music] [music] Now, building up a hierarchy from the minimum requirements like

10:26 this is interesting and a very different way of thinking about consciousness.

10:30 Crucially, it's a very broad definition,

10:33 one that admits more than just humans into the consciousness club.

10:36 If you're just talking about basic theory of mind of like do you understand

10:39 that this other creature has a mind that is not yours that you could anticipate.

10:46 You're like, I know plenty of dogs who have higher theory of mind than you know,

10:52 colleagues [laughter] of mine, right?

10:55 I was like, they clearly understand that you're like, yeah,

10:58 you're you and I'm me and like I want

10:59 that thing that you have and if I do this thing, it will be more likely.

11:03 So, to me, it's just like it's pretty clear.

11:07 There were some crows that I used to feed at UCSB in the parking lot

11:11 and they wouldn't eat the food unless I first ate it and then they would eat it.

11:16 And so, you're like, they're in the club.

11:17 That's theory of mind.

11:18 Clearly in the [laughter] club, like like not I mean, I was like,

11:21 that's more sophisticated than a lot of people to just be like,

11:24 we are not falling for this one.

11:25 We are not getting poisoned again.

11:27 At the physical level as well, you mentioned phrenology.

11:30 Throughout history, people have tried to find ways that the human brain is is

11:34 more impressive than every other animal to to [music] show what sets us apart.

11:39 For me, one of the things about certain there's like an alarm bell

11:43 that goes off in my head with certain people how they talk about consciousness.

11:46 You're like, this is just a eugenics kind of thing that we're doing here, right?

11:51 And you're [music]

11:52 you're coming in determined to find evidence that certain people are in the club

11:59 and certain people are out of the club and I already know how this goes.

12:02 We have already done this simulation.

12:05 Like you did it with women, you did it with black people,

12:07 you did it you like you're doing it with animals.

12:08 So, just this is yeah, that is not science.

12:11 If you're building it from the ground up to just say,

12:14 okay, what is the minimum requirement?

12:16 Everyone who meets this requirement is on level one.

12:19 Okay, now what is the next one?

12:21 Level two.

12:21 And so, that is a if you're doing it as a bottom-up approach,

12:25 then you're actually in you know,

12:28 what are the features that are shared and then that helps you figure out,

12:32 okay, now what are the features which differ?

12:34 There is a stunning history [music] of humans trying

12:36 to find ways of scientifically defining our superiority over other species,

12:39 especially when it comes to consciousness.

12:41 Yet, again and again,

12:42 the physical characteristics of our brains do not seem to set us apart.

12:45 [music] Not brain mass, not brain density,

12:48 not the number of neurons or the number of folds.

12:50 According to all of these metrics, humans [music] are not remarkable.

12:53 So, to fulfill this agenda of ours,

12:55 we turn to things like language to set us [music] apart.

12:58 This thing that only humans can really excel at.

13:01 Right?

13:06 The arrival [music] of artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence

13:09 Artificial intelligence

13:10 Artificial intelligence [music] Michael and Bridget's definition

13:13 of consciousness has nothing to do with language.

13:15 In the musical metaphor, lyrics are not the same as music.

13:18 And so, language is not the same as consciousness.

13:21 You weigh down very heavily in the article on kind of admitting

13:24 animals into the the consciousness club and kind of turning down language,

13:29 which some people argue is very much what sets humans apart

13:33 and then maybe is what makes us conscious rather than animals.

13:36 So, do you think it came from this idea that if we want to exclude AI,

13:40 which is this thing that is very good

13:42 at language but doesn't have those physical characteristics?

13:46 Is it is this an idea of how we can redefine consciousness?

13:49 Yeah, and I guess probably in my musical definition,

13:53 none of those systems are going

13:54 to meet the requirement for consciousness because yeah,

13:56 it's going to be much more based on sort of physiological rhythms and variants

14:01 and and also like what are the minimum

14:03 resources you need to produce the maximum [music] thing.

14:07 Originally, I was a biochemist.

14:09 So, biochemists are like the economists of the science world, right?

14:12 It's like how much can you do for how little energy?

14:14 And so, you're like, living things are so interesting to me where you're like,

14:17 a handful of Skittles and I can

14:18 like solve all these math problems, [laughter] right?

14:21 Like I just need coffee.

14:22 Yeah.

14:22 And like whereas you're just like, yeah, sure,

14:25 if you need to like drain the entire Colorado

14:27 River and like has start a nuclear power plant,

14:30 I don't actually think that's impressive.

14:32 I think it's really cool that you can do this on the fly.

14:35 Well, I guess that's part of what's so

14:36 interesting about those those folks' [music] brains, right?

14:38 Is it's like if you could get all of that cognitive

14:40 performance out of just this, like good job, you.

14:46 I don't think we should be making fun of these folks, like Yeah.

14:49 Well, how how amazing a structure that with a like

14:54 tiny amount of brain mass that you can achieve all that.

14:57 Perhaps this alternative definition of consciousness built up

15:00 from physiological rhythms can help separate man from machine.

15:04 Or maybe consciousness shouldn't be our main

15:06 concern [music] when it comes to AI.

15:09 Are you worried about the effect that these systems will have on our brains

15:13 and and the brains of people who develop while using all this technology?

15:17 Yeah, yeah, absolutely because I think that one

15:20 of the things that people have forgotten and a lot

15:23 of my neuroscientific colleagues would [music] this would also be

15:25 true is the nervous system is also neck down, [laughter] right?

15:31 Like this part is great.

15:32 Don't get me wrong.

15:33 I love it.

15:34 But like this part also is involved.

15:37 Your [music] conscious mind is for problems that you haven't solved yet.

15:46 But every time you solve a problem neurologically you move

15:53 the solution to a different part of your nervous system, right?

15:56 [music] So, like once you know how to ride a bike you don't

16:00 have to think about it because the knowledge lives in the basal ganglia, right?

16:04 You know, the knowledge of how to breathe and beat your heart [music]

16:08 is not conscious.

16:09 And so, I think that that that's also like if you spend all of your time,

16:14 you know, kind of in your conscious mind [music]

16:17 you're spending all of your time with your failures.

16:20 Right?

16:20 By definition.

16:21 Mhm.

16:22 Like this is all of the stuff on your to-do list that you haven't done.

16:27 And so, the you have to spend time with the activities where you're like,

16:32 you did already like learn to walk and learn to ride a bike.

16:35 And if you're only consuming music or you're only consuming art then

16:40 your nervous system has no opportunity to do what it likes to do,

16:46 [music] which is to experiment with, you know, with music,

16:50 with sports, with painting, with you have to physically implement it.

16:55 And and you're just walking around,

16:57 you're testing your hypothesis of where the ground is.

16:59 And every time you step, you're like good job, me.

17:02 Like [laughter] uh and like I got that.

17:05 Like you do it your thousand steps and every

17:08 single time you got that math problem [music] correct.

17:11 So, yeah, so I think that the more you're divorcing

17:14 people from their kind of physical interactions with their environment,

17:19 the more crazy you will drive people just because [music]

17:23 your your nervous system is that's I mean,

17:25 that's what it's interested in doing is kind of confirming these physical

17:29 hypotheses about the world and if you're starving it for things to do,

17:34 then you know, yeah, it's you put it in like solitary confinement.

17:38 So, of course it's going to go a little little crazy.

17:42 So, yeah, I do think that it is a recipe

17:44 for insanity if you don't let yourself do these things.

17:48 And I mean, I guess that's why I'm sort of naively

17:49 hopeful that one of the things that that, you know,

17:52 is emerging and could emerge more with the AI conversation is like I

17:58 understand that we're outsourcing the creation of music and art to these things.

18:03 [music] But that's assuming that art and music are just things to be consumed.

18:10 Right?

18:10 And that the whole point of some of these activities are like,

18:14 no, they are actually things that you do, right?

18:18 Because [music] the process of doing them is the thing, right?

18:22 Not the product at the end.

18:24 And so, of necessity,

18:26 you have to make a product that you can sell [music] because

18:28 you live in a capitalist system that has required it of you.

18:32 But that wasn't the point of it.

18:35 Right?

18:35 Like if money was no object you would do it because it creates [music] meaning.

18:41 To end my conversation with Bridget, I wanted to ask her more broadly about how

18:44 music should be treated within [music] the scientific community.

18:47 I do sort of think that you know, modern scientists don't realize that obviously

18:53 there are certain things that we have

18:55 that are so amazing and we are in sort of a golden age,

18:58 but there are other things where you're like, no,

19:00 this really is a dark age of science because

19:03 you've kicked all of the arts and humanities out.

19:07 [music] And that's a fairly recent development where you really ripped you

19:11 just ripped the heart and soul out of the scientific [music] enterprise.

19:15 Um and so, like A, it's going to lead to evil

19:20 but also just like it's not going to be fun.

19:22 You know, just [laughter] like it can't be fun.

19:25 It has to be like it's not a human enterprise.

19:28 It's [music] a creative profession, right?

19:31 It's just like wondering about the world and experimenting with the world

19:35 and drawing pictures of the world and describing it in numbers.

19:37 I mean, [music] it's supposed to be an art form.

19:41 And that's why I like kind of using [music]

19:44 Plank or Newton to just be like, okay,

19:46 these are people that you respect and like

19:50 they didn't look down on arts and humanities.

19:56 You know.

19:57 Today we've explored the mysteries of consciousness

19:59 [music] through the lens of music.

20:00 We've seen how thinking about consciousness

20:02 as the music of the mind not only helps

20:04 us understand these cases [music] where the brain

20:06 structure is radically different from the norm,

20:08 but also helps inspire new definitions of consciousness that bring

20:12 us closer to our animal friends and [music] further from AI.

20:15 The beauty of music is an emergent property

20:17 that cannot be easily explained by its components.

20:20 Maybe consciousness [music] is the same.

20:22 A beautiful emergent property that can't be explained by physical measurements.

20:26 Perhaps there is still a lot we could learn from musicians.

20:29 People with dementia,

20:31 like [music] they they've forgotten everything else, right?

20:35 Like they've forgotten their partner, they forgot their kids,

20:37 they forgotten their names, but you know,

20:39 when you see the footage of pianists [music] kind

20:42 of coming back to life and performing or ballet dancers,

20:46 I mean that to me is just [music] like if that's the last thing to go,

20:52 then it's probably the first thing that you built.

20:54 Thank you for watching [music] Ideas for Our Time and stay tuned.