Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Your Mind is an Amazing Place with Dr. Mark Solms

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

In this episode, Sharon is joined by neuropsychologist, Dr. Mark Solms, to discuss some seriously brain-tingling facts. Dr. Solms has been studying human consciousness for decades, and in his newest book “The Hidden Spring,” he explains that human consciousness is defined by feelings, not intelligence. Sharon and Dr. Solms discuss why we may (or may not) hear a little voice in our heads as well as the importance of dreams and what they tell us about human consciousness. Ever wonder what is going on in your head? Join Sharon and Mark as they explore the fascinating world of the human mind. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. I have got a fascinating conversation for you today. It is about the brain, the human mind. I am chatting today with Mark Solms, who is the Director of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. And he also is a lecturer at the Royal London Hospital School of Medicine. And he has done extensive, and I mean extensive, to the tune of hundreds of academic papers and eight books. Extensive, extensive research into the human brain, the human mind, what makes us conscious. into the human brain, the human mind, what makes us conscious. Oh my gosh. I also made sure to ask him because I know y'all are interested about the topic where some people talk to themselves and some people don't. You guys are fascinated by that. So we are going to get into all of that and

so much more. Let's dive into my conversation with Mark Solms. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Hello, thank you so much for joining me. Tell everybody what you do, where you're from, what you study. Well, I'm a professor in neuropsychology, which is the interface between brain and mind. I have two positions. The one is at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where I'm director of neuropsychology in the Neuroscience Institute. And I'm a lecturer in neurosurgery at the Royal London Hospital in London, which is where I am now. I always love to meet people who know a lot of things that I don't know.

It's always very exciting. What is the difference between the brain and the mind? Well, the way I think about it is that the brain is what you see with your eyes when you look at the mind from the outside as an object. The mind is what you experience with your eyes when you look at the mind from the outside as an object. The mind is what you experience in your feelings when you are the brain from the inside. So it's the same thing. It just depends on whether you're looking at it from the inside being it or from the outside, in which case it's a physical object. Oh, I see. So if I'm looking at your brain, I'm looking at your brain. But if you're inside your body, you're inhabiting your body, you're experiencing it as your mind. That's it. Love it. Okay. This is a question that I have been dying to ask you, which is, do some people

talk to themselves in their mind all the time? And some people not talk to themselves at all? I think that human consciousness, the human mind, is absolutely dominated by language. And so what you've just said about talking to ourselves, I think that is the typical way in which human beings experience their minds. It's a kind of an inner speech, an inner dialogue going on constantly. But there are two important things to add to that. The one is that that doesn't mean that all minds are like that. We must remember that other animals, our dogs and our cats and so on, they too have minds, but theirs are not dominated by inner speech. And then the other thing to add is that some people literally hear voices.

That's not the typical experience. That's more unusual. Okay. So this is a conversation, a debate that I've been having with my family. My mother and I do not speak to ourselves. We do not have a conversation of like, oh, Sharon, definitely remember to get apples at the store later. Oh, don't forget to go here and do this thing. And like, ooh, I wonder what I should make for dinner.

But apparently we are very unusual in that experience. My other sister is like, are you kidding me? I talk to myself 24 seven. I wake up in the middle of the night talking to myself. So it sounds like you're saying that most people do, at least in some manner, either by auditorily hearing a voice or experiencing it in a sense of different type of consciousness, experience talking to themselves. So why do some people not talk to themselves? Do you know the answer to that? Well, first of all, what you've just said is correct, that your sister who hears herself talking to herself all the time, she's more

typical than you and your mom. But I also think it's a matter of, you know, to what extent are we aware of it? I think that probably you and your mom do that, but it's less perceptual, you know, you're less concretely aware of it, but still human beings think in words, that we organize our mental processes in words. We have categories for things which wouldn't exist if it weren't for language. So, for example, you can think about a thing like tomorrow. The very idea of tomorrow, you know, is a concept. It's an abstract idea, which is tied to a word. I doubt that your dog or your cat thinks about tomorrow, because they have no concept for such a thing. They might just feel, I hope, I hope, I expect, I expect. But the abstract concept of tomorrow, yesterday, the past, the future, good and evil, you know,

these sorts of, and I'm just thinking of these abstractions off the top of my head. They're all manner of such abstractions. There are many things, you know, like think of the concept of celebrity. What is celebrity without a word? celebrity. What is celebrity without a word? You know, it's an entirely abstract concept that only we humans can conceive of. And it's inconceivable, such a category, such a concept without there being a word for it. So the words literally bring things into being from the point of view of human minds. And it enables us human beings to do things that other creatures can't do. We can think in abstract and far-reaching ways for that reason and very deep ways.

It is definitely true that my three dogs have no concept of celebrity. They're like, Jennifer Lopez, what now? Does she have treats? That's what I care about. Are there treats? Okay. This is the best way I could describe it. And I promise I will not monopolize this entire conversation with the fact that I don't talk to myself, but this has been a hot topic around my platform. When I am reading, for example, I'm reading silently to myself. Of course, I look at words, know what they are. Of course, the words are what makes sense of our thoughts. But when I look at a word, I don't hear the word crystals. I just look at it and it's like

a knowing. I just know what it is. Does that make sense? It's not like crystals. I don't hear it in my mind. I don't hear a word. And what I realized literally about a year or two ago that most people are literally talking to themselves all day. I had a mind blown moment where I was like, that sounds exhausting to just like be talking to yourself constantly. But do you have any concept of what the difference is between people who do talk to themselves versus people who don't? Do you have any idea what we might attribute some of those differences to? Well, these are just matters of cognitive style. I said that it's a matter of how aware you are of it. Concepts like the ones we were just

talking about, concepts like celebrity, you can't have such a thought without it being tied to a word. That doesn't mean that you have to actually hear the word. Crystals, celebrity, Jennifer Lopez, you don't need to actually hear it, but it's there implicitly. Otherwise, you would not be able to think such things. These abstract concepts come into being with the learning of the concept, the vehicle for which is a word. But when I say it's a matter of cognitive style, it doesn't only apply to language. You know, it also applies to visual thinking. Some people really can revisualize an experience, relive it in their mind's eye. They can see the people

that were there. Others can't at all. And there's a word for that called aphantasia, people who cannot conjure up a visual image. I'm a little bit like that. I must tell you, I cannot see people's faces. I recognize them. I don't have any trouble with that, but I can't conjure up a face in my mind's eye. Clearly, the concept is there because when I see Sharon, I recognize her. There she is. I have no doubt that that's you that I'm looking at. And if I were to see you tomorrow, I would recognize you again. So I have the image. It's there. But that doesn't mean I'm able to bring it up in this kind of internal mental imagery. Visual imagery, auditory imagery, audio-verbal imagery, all of these things are there.

But some of us are more, well, I don't know whether to say more burdened by them or more gifted by them. But, you know, it's just a matter of cognitive style. There are extremes. So there are people who cannot recognize faces. The famous Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, he was an example. He couldn't recognize people. He didn't have the visual image at all,

just wasn't there at all. And there are at the other extreme, there are people who hallucinate and that's both visually and in words. So schizophrenic people, for example, when they think in words, they hear it, to the extent that it becomes difficult for them to realize, that's just my own thought process. They think it's literally somebody speaking to them. So there are these extremes, and I don't want to deny that they're extremes where there are people who visualize or hear their thoughts too vividly, and there are others who cannot at all do it. But most of us live somewhere between those two extremes, and it's like everything else about us. There's a great sort of variety that makes up the spice of being human.

variety that makes up the spice of being human. So what I'm hearing you say is that I probably am processing those things in a form of words. I am just not aware that that is what is going on. My brain isn't kicking that to the forefront of my consciousness or whatever you want to call it, where it's like, we are now talking to ourselves. Is that accurate? Yep. You have done a lot of interesting work about dreams. And I know that this whole book that you've written is about consciousness and understanding what actually makes the human mind conscious. Because you really, in your book, break down the difference between

just being alive and being conscious. So I would love to hear you tell everybody a little bit more about your work, and then we can get a little bit more into your studies about dreams. Well, the distinction you just drew between being alive and being conscious is very easily illustrated. If I were to say to you, unfortunately, tomorrow, you're going to fall into a coma, you're going to lose consciousness. But don't worry, we have wonderful life support machinery these days, and we'll keep your body alive for decades. Would that reassure you? I think not. Because you'd say, but where will I be? You know, it's all well and good that my body will be alive and you'll all be able to see it. But I want to be there experiencing being me

and being alive. That's the distinction between being alive and being conscious. And I think it also shows that distinction draws attention to the fact that what really matters to us is our consciousness. We are our consciousness. And so it, I think, should be center stage in life sciences. But consciousness is a very difficult thing to study because each one of us can only experience our own. In other words, consciousness is something subjective. You can never experience

somebody else's experiences. You can only ever experience your own. And science is about objectivity. We try to exclude what is subjective. This thing we call consciousness, it has a very ambiguous status in natural science. Okay. So one of the things I was reading in your book is about the cortex and how for decades, science has attributed consciousness to the cortex. And you, in a lot of ways, are not a fan of that theory. And you give a lot of examples about how consciousness can't be attributed to the cortex. You use examples of children who have had strokes in utero and are literally born without a cortex who are still experiencing consciousness.

Can you talk a little bit more about where consciousness actually comes from? So we were talking at the beginning of this conversation about language and how it dominates our consciousness and how it's a uniquely human thing. And I think because human beings, consciousness is so dominated by language and language is a cortical function. It's a very highly developed, by which I mean, it's something that only applies to us. It comes very late in evolution. I think that we mistook our own

experience of consciousness for consciousness in general. We used human consciousness as our sort of model example of what we mean by consciousness. And I think that that has led us astray. You've just given the most dramatic example that there are children who are born with no cortex. For that reason, there's no possibility that they will ever learn to speak because the cortex is the necessary substrate for language and all that flows from it. But it is not the necessary substrate for consciousness itself. We were talking earlier about dogs and cats. It doesn't only apply to dogs and cats. I just mentioned those because all of us who have dogs and cats and relationships with them, we know that they're conscious.

They have personalities. We have relationships with them and so on. So I think that we have a much deeper understanding of what consciousness actually is. If we remove ourselves from center stage and look at it more broadly, what we find, as that example of those children illustrates, is that even in patients who have no cortex at all, they're still conscious. That means they wake up in the morning, they go to sleep at night, and they have emotional experiences. They react to good things and bad things of various kinds. You know, they get angry, they have fun, they get tickled and they enjoy it and so on.

So feelings, the basic form of consciousness, I think, is not these thoughts and these abstractions that we were talking about earlier, but rather simply being there, simply having experience. And the basic form of experience seems to be feeling. And feeling is generated not in the cortex, but rather in the brainstem, in a much more primitive, lowly structure. Lowly in every sense of the word. It's lower anatomically in our heads than our cortex is. It's lower in the sense that it evolved a lot earlier, but there's overwhelming evidence that consciousness itself, not in the uniquely human form, but in the basic form that we share with so many other creatures, that consciousness in the form of feeling, of being there, of experiencing,

of there being something it is like in the moment, that is not something that the cortex is required for. And that I think is very important also in terms of our understanding of what consciousness is there for. But that's a whole long story. That speaks to something that I'm curious about. speaks to something that I'm curious about. Let's say somebody has had a stroke and they are not able to speak anymore. They appear as if they are mostly just lying there, but you are often encouraged by nurses and doctors, keep talking to them. They might know that you're there. They might understand you, even though they can't verbalize a response. Do you have any insight to share about people in that kind of a condition? Are they still conscious, even though they are not having that kind of cortex brain activity?

There are two things to say about that. The one is that obviously I work with those sorts of patients every day and I have relationships with them. I communicate with them. They have personalities, they have feelings, they have a full inner life. They just can't communicate it in words. So the experience of communicating in other ways with those patients and observing how they go about their affairs is abundant evidence that they are still feeling sentient beings, even if they don't have language. But the other thing to say about it is that, thankfully, many such patients recover. And when they recover and regain their capacity to communicate about their inner experience

in words, they tell you, yes, of course I was there. I was fully present. I was full of feeling. I had all sorts of thoughts. I just couldn't cast them in words. So both what we can infer from the way such patients behave and what those patients tell us if they're lucky enough to recover is that they're fully conscious beings entirely in

the absence of language. Even if they are unable to open their eyes, maybe they can squeeze your hand or react in some other way. But are you saying that even people who are not necessarily in a coma, but they appear unresponsive, are they still experiencing consciousness? Let me just be a little more precise about what we're talking about. So I was talking there about patients who have strokes, who lose the language parts of their cortex, and therefore can no longer use words. That's who I was talking about a moment ago. But what you're saying now refers to a broader category of patients who are patients who are not responsive at all, or who are minimally responsive. And there are many different grades of that. So the extreme version is something called

locked-in syndrome. These are patients who are fully conscious, but cannot move a muscle, cannot move at all. And you can just imagine what a nightmarish situation that is. Because until recently, these patients were, for the most part, mistaken for being in a coma. They were assumed to be unconscious and to be experiencing nothing, but they were experiencing fully everything that you and I experience and listening to people saying, oh, well, you know, he or she's in a coma, shall we switch off the life support machine, et cetera. You can imagine the nightmare. That's called locked-in syndrome. Then there are other degrees of this. There are things called minimally conscious

states where people are not able to communicate in words. They're not able to communicate also in movements in any kind of goal-directed way, but they still are experiencing. And this has everything to do with what we were talking about earlier about overvaluing cortex, that even if your cortex is not functioning, even if the EEG, the way we measure cortical activity, it doesn't show cortical responses. That doesn't mean that there isn't a conscious being there. However, there are degrees of that. So minimally conscious states move into the next thing is called a persistent vegetative state or non-responsive wakefulness. And then beyond that, you get coma proper. There are people who are in a coma who

really are utterly unconscious. But we've recognized in recent decades that many people who appear to be in a coma and utterly unconscious, in fact, they're not. It's not a black and white thing. It's a matter of degrees. How do we tell now that we have developed better techniques, better testing, whatever it is, whatever scientific advancement, how does science now tell the difference between somebody who is minimally conscious and somebody who is persistent vegetative state or in a true coma? So we used to just use behavioral things. And as I said, even in the case of locked-in syndrome, you can see how blunt an instrument mere behavior is. So those patients in locked-in syndrome are entirely conscious,

but can't behaviorally demonstrate it because they can't move anything. We've learned in recent years, there are ways in which you can communicate with these patients. There's something to do with eye movements because it relates to aspects of the brainstem anatomy and so on. You can learn to communicate just through looking up and down or through blinking, or sometimes they can move one finger. So, you know, you then learn a technique. These are behavioral techniques in which we can communicate with these patients. But it's not only a matter of behavior. It also was that we used to rely on EEG, which is these electrodes you place on the outside of the skull and you measure brain activity through the skull.

But what you're measuring is not brain activity. It's cortical activity, the part of the brain that's directly underneath the skull. You're not measuring what's going on more deeply in the brain. So we now have other techniques like, for example, positron emission tomography, which measures the metabolic rate of the cells. It doesn't matter whether they're on the surface or they're in the core of the brain. you have equal access with that technology. So I'm just giving you some examples. We have other technologies, other behavioral techniques that we've developed over the last couple of decades, which makes us able to be

more certain about what we're dealing with. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! There's my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday.

Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. My dad passed away a number of years ago, and he had Parkinson's disease and then had a massive stroke from which there was no possibility he could recover and was in probably what people would consider a he could smile, but he couldn't speak to you. When he had a friend come visit him, tears, just tears streaming down his face, even though he could not say anything, he couldn't necessarily even respond to the cue of like, can you open your eyes? But you knew that he was in there because he recognized the sound

of that person's voice when they said, hey, it's me, just tears streaming down his face. So what you've touched on there is really pretty much to the heart of the matter that my book is about, you know, where I argue that consciousness is bound up first and foremost with feelings. I'm sorry to hear about your father. And I also was wondering, how come you know so much about what we're talking about? So that's why you've lived through it. You know, there you have it.

Your father responding in those ways shows he was still there. He wasn't fully himself. He wasn't exactly the same person, but still there's a person that's there, a person with feelings. And I think that has enormous implications, not least ethical implications for what we consider brain death and how we treat such patients. Feelings are the last thing to go. They're the absolute essence of mental life. And also in our own healthy minds, if you reflect upon it,

you know, what matters most is how we feel. You know, all of this cognitive gymnastics, all of this planning and thinking and, you know, fretting about all kinds of abstract things. In the end, it all comes down to feeling. But I must tell you the example you gave of your father crying when a friend came into the room and so on. I have a hard time persuading many of my colleagues that I'm not just indulging in wishful thinking. And this is why, as I was saying earlier, we don't rely only

on behavior. We also rely on these technologies we have now where you can literally visualize what's going on inside the living brain and there you have evidence that the emotional parts of the brain are reacting and so you know why would you believe that what you're seeing is just some sort of reflex which is what many of my colleagues say you can't be sure like those children we were talking about you know who have no cortex at. They have full emotional reactions and they have appropriate emotional reactions. When you give them a fright, they startle. You know, when you give them a favorite toy, they smile and they're happy. When you frustrate them, they arch their backs and go, you know, and they seem to be angry. And my colleagues say, well, you don't know that they are. And my answer to that is, well, we use all of these other techniques too.

And then it's a matter of converging lines of evidence. You know, if you stimulate that structure, you get the response. If you look at it with a positron not about cognition, about intelligence, about cortex. Consciousness is fundamentally about feelings as scientifically and ethically and for each one of us personally. Feelings are at the heart of it all. Tell me more about your work with dreams. This is a sort of an unexplored area of science. People who have had neurosurgery, nobody has ever studied these kinds of things. How have your

dreams changed? Do you still experience them in the same way? Can you just touch on a little bit more about your work related to dreams? Because I found that really interesting. on a little bit more about your work related to dreams, because I found that really interesting. Well, I said earlier that the trouble with the mind when it comes to science is that it's something subjective. You can only experience your own. And science is objective. And so it tries to exclude subjective phenomena as much as possible. For that reason, when I came into this field, which was in the early 1980s, it was not a respectable topic. Consciousness was not something you should be focusing your career. In fact, my professors very generously advised me. They said, it's bad for your career. Don't study things like this.

But for me, it was what interested me. It was why I was attracted to the brain in the first place. It is the most fascinating thing in science. And I think we have to adjust our methods to what exists rather than pretend that they're things that don't exist because it's hard to study them. Experience, consciousness, subjective being, it's part of nature. And so we have to find natural scientific methods for studying it. So when I was a student and a young scientist, the one aspect of consciousness we were allowed to study that was semi-respectable was sleep. People fall asleep, they wake up. Animals fall asleep, they wake up. How does that happen? So this was something that we were studying in the 70s and the 80s. And so I studied that aspect of sleep, which is conscious, in other words, dreaming. It's the most remarkable thing that the unconsciousness of sleep is punctuated with these conscious experiences called dreams. And so it was via the topic of sleep that I was able to smuggle the real conscious experience.

And you talk to anybody, well, just about anybody. And I mean, anybody all over the world, all cultures, regardless of religious beliefs, cultural norms and practices, educational level, and so on. People feel that their dreams are important. They're interested in dreams. They feel that dreams communicate or convey something. There's some kind of insight that we can gain and so on. So, you know, dreams are a great point of entry into studying the heart of subjective life and what motivates us, what moves us, what matters to us. Via that topic, I was able to study what I was interested in in the first place, which is the psyche, the mind, being, consciousness, subjectivity, and so on.

What are some of the things that you uncovered in your research about dreams? The main thing was in the 1950s, we discovered something called REM sleep. I said that the remarkable thing is that the unconsciousness of sleep is punctuated with these conscious experiences that we call dreams from a physiological point of view. Studying, remember, from the outside, I said earlier, the mind is the being of the brain. The brain is the mind as an object, as a thing. If you study the brain physiologically during sleep, it activates.

Brain activity goes down and then 90 minutes later, it goes up again. And then it goes down and then 90 minutes later, it goes up again. So that activation of the brain physiologically correlates with dreams. If you wake people up during REM sleep, during that activated state, they report dreams. If you wake them up outside of that activated state, they report nothing. When REM sleep was discovered in the 50s, by the 60s, we'd identified which part

of the brain generates REM sleep. By the 70s, we had a very good grip on it. After we'd made the correlation that during REM sleep, you are dreaming, which is a correlation you can only make in human beings. You can say, I was dreaming because we can speak. But once we'd made that correlation, we then left the psychological side out of the picture and we studied only the physiological side, the objective side. Remember what I said, subjectivity, psychology, the mind, consciousness, it's an embarrassment to science.

So we want to study only the objective stuff. And so we left aside the psychological side and we studied the brain mechanisms in cats and in rats because, you know, there are all kinds of experiments, right or wrong, there are all kinds of experiments you may do on those animals that you may not do on human beings. And so in order for us to unpack how it all works, we didn't study human beings. So my big discovery, and I have to confess it was accidental, it was just good fortune, I discovered by studying human beings in whom I obviously didn't do experimental, I didn't damage their brains, but nature damages our brains.

You spoke of your own father's case. We have strokes, we have tumors, and so on. So over a long period of time, I gathered information from human patients, from my patients. In fact, I studied 361 patients with damage to different parts of their brain. And I asked them to describe to me what had happened. I woke them up in REM sleep in the sleep laboratory. I asked them in the mornings. They kept dream diaries, that sort of thing. And the big discovery was that when the part of the brain that generates REM sleep is damaged and we lose REM sleep, that arousal state that I spoke about, these patients

still reported dreams. So, you know, the rats and cats couldn't tell us that. And conversely, there was damage in another part of the brain in human beings, where the patients described a loss of dreaming, you wake them up in a sleep laboratory during REM sleep, they report no dreaming, but it was an entirely different part of the brain from the part that generates REM sleep. So what I discovered, I'll say again by good fortune, was that the brain mechanisms for REM sleep and the brain mechanisms for dreaming, although they're activated at the same time, they're not the same thing. at the same time, they're not the same thing. And the brain mechanisms for dreaming, as opposed to REM sleep, turn out to be the emotional parts of the brain. And this was what led me into the study of the brain mechanisms of emotion. So via studying sleep and dreams, I became interested in emotion and recognizing how emotion and feeling is at the heart of conscious experience.

That is really interesting that there are two separate parts of the brain that are activated simultaneously. And do we know how they both get activated at the same time? I don't want to pretend that we understand that in any definitive way. There's still lots of research going on and lots of disagreement about it. And my own view is that REM sleep, which is an activation state, as I told you, it arouses our brains during sleep. It's not the only time during sleep that we dream. We also dream as we falling asleep. Yes. Many times you realize you're falling asleep because you're dreaming. You're like, what is happening? That's right. So that's 90 minutes before your first REM phase. So clearly you're

able to have dreams 90 minutes before you've gone into REM. And the other thing is in the late morning, as you're heading towards waking up, then if you wake people up during non-REM sleep in the late morning, they report lots and lots of dreams, which are every bit dreamlike, you know, just the same as REM dreams. So what I inferred from that is that what is in common between those three things is relative arousal. So as you're falling asleep, you're relatively aroused. When you're in REM, you're relatively aroused. And as you're heading toward waking, you're relatively aroused. When you're in REM, you're relatively aroused. And as you're heading toward waking, you're relatively aroused. So I think that why REM sleep correlates with dreaming is because dreaming happens when

the brain is aroused, not only by REM sleep, but whatever arouses the brain can generate a dream. And so then the question becomes, why should that be? And this is the part about which there's not yet agreement. But my own view is that dreams help us to stay asleep. Rather than becoming interested in the real world outside, we generate this imaginary world. And we have these virtual experiences, which enable us to deal with all of the things that are motivating us without actually waking up. So I think that dreams help us to deal with all of the things that are motivating us without actually waking

up. So I think the dreams help us to stay asleep. That is so interesting. That sounds very, I can, I absolutely see what you're saying that your body knows it needs to rest. It needs to repair. It needs time. Like, give me some time here. Stop waking up and finding other stuff. Interesting. And it really is when you say the body knows it needs to rest, that cannot be overemphasized. The importance of sleep for our physical health is greatly underrated. It's terribly important for our physical health in all sorts of ways to get a good night's sleep. And so the fact that we have these mental mechanisms, which enable us to stay asleep

is no small thing. It really is biologically important. I'm going to turn you on to something that maybe you're not aware of. Maybe you are. Bet you will find fascinating, which is Bunny the Talking Dog. Do you know who she is? No, never met her. Okay, you're going to have to look her up.

She's a sheep, a doodle. Her owners have created a pretty elaborate button pressing situation in which she can communicate by pressing buttons. She can say outside and, you know, initially it started very simply with just like outside and I need to go to the bathroom and, you know, hungry, et cetera. It started with what they thought were a dog's very basic needs, our human understanding of a dog's consciousness, right? Like I have these, I want scratches, I want to play, whatever. And it has evolved to where they can now understand the actual complexity of Bunny's thoughts. And she will wake up from a nap and go over to her little buttons and press dream.

And her owners will say, what dream, Bunny? They try to speak in very simple grammar because it's hard to elaborate, you know, sense of English grammar with these buttons. What dream, Bunny? And she will press the button and be like beach. And then she'll, she'll name some items that were in her dream beach, you know, this sticks swimming, et cetera. And she'll like yawn and stretch. And it has become very obvious that this is not just conditioning where it's like, we go out,

we press the button and we go outside. She's initiating conversations about her own experiences. And she has learned how to create sentences. She won't just say, dad, she'll press and be like, dad upstairs. And then we'll press a question mark button to have it go. So she can communicate. I'm asking a question. Is dad upstairs? Not just pressing the button saying that she knows things. She asks questions. Anyway, she is absolutely fascinating. She has millions of social media followers because bunny is so articulate. And because of all of the scientific research that is being done into bunny's ability to communicate, of all of the scientific research that is being done into bunny's ability to communicate. It is interesting how much longer it takes her brain to process language than it does the human brain.

Often the owner will even just like fast forward the video for a second because bunny will sit in like tip her head like this, like she's thinking, and it will take her 30 seconds sometimes to form a thought that uses English language. Whereas in a human that's, you know, that's right there for most of us, we can immediately come up with it. Whereas bunny has to think, dad upstairs, you know, like, but it takes her a while to make those connections anyway, because you're interested in consciousness. I know you've talked in your book significantly about even dogs who have had experimental operations where their cortex has been removed. They're still able to experience life, raise puppies, et cetera. I bet you would find Bonnie the talking dog.

find Bunny the talking dog. Super interesting. I'm amazed that I have not heard about her, but there is a lot of research, not only with dogs, especially with primates, a lot of that sort of research has been done over the years, and also with dolphins and with whales and so on. So although I don't know about Bunny, I do know about that general research tradition, and I agree with the conclusion that you come to, both that they do not have the uniquely human talent of this just coming to us as kids so easily, but that they are able to communicate with effort in our way of communicating. Again, we mustn't assume our way of communicating

is the best and the only way. It's the way that works for us, but they have ways that work for them in relation to the sorts of things that matter to them. And I think we greatly underestimate the complexity and depth of animal experience. I've always loved dolphins and whales. And one of the reasons I've always been fascinated with them, even since childhood, is because of the complexity of their communication. Clearly how sentient they are. And yet they are difficult to study because where's the captive humpbacks? You know what I mean?

Like, it's not a thing. It's very difficult to study them. And yet they are so, so interesting to me. Okay. humpbacks. You know what I mean? Like it's not a thing. It's very difficult to study them and yet they are so, so interesting to me. Okay. Just a few more questions, even though I feel like I have so much that I want to ask, so much I want to talk about. What do you wish people understood better about the brain or about the mind? Well, I think we've been talking about the things that matter most to me. Let me emphasize two things. The first of them is that we must not confuse intelligence with the mind.

Intelligence is an aspect of the mind. It's a highly developed aspect of the human mind. But for me, the mind is first and foremost about feelings. And it really is what drives the engine of the mind. All of this thinking and this problem solving and this planning ahead and our ability to perform abstract concepts and pass the world

in all of these highly precise, detailed ways. Ultimately, it's in the service of meeting our needs. And I think that we lose sight of that, you know, our needs, we have bodily needs, and we feel them, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, etc., pain. And we have emotional needs, we form attachments, we get irritated and frustrated, and we get scared, you know, etc. So these are the fundamental things about the mind feelings they're not about intelligence they're not about language they're not about the cortex they're not about abstractions so that's the one thing that really matters to me that we must ground our understanding of what

the mind is how it works what it's there for, what it does. We must ground it in feelings. And then the second thing, which is overlaps with what I've just said, and which we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation, that the science of the mind, like I spoke about dreaming earlier, it's so much easier to do science on REM sleep because it's an objective physiological phenomenon. But we can be greatly misled if we don't also study the experience. So we, for example, as I said, we thought REM sleep and dreaming was the same thing because we only studied the REM sleep side of it. We didn't study the dreaming side of it.

We were only too happy to leave out the dreams because they're embarrassing. They're subjective. Who knows how to do precise, objective, measurable, quantitative science on such fluffy, ephemeral things as dreams. But it leads us astray if we leave it out. So the second thing that really matters to me is that we have to just get over ourselves as scientists and accept that feelings exist, subjectivity exists, experience exists. It's all part of nature and we must not exclude it. We mustn't airbrush it out of science, especially not out of biological science. Because, you know, as I've been saying in the first part of my answer to your question,

what ultimately drives us is our feelings. Every animal is driven by feelings. They are the heart of the matter. And if we don't understand that, if we think the brain is just some kind of computer doing incredibly complicated logical grammatical exercises, we're missing the main event. We're missing what it's all about. I think we really have done that.

So to summarize what I care about and what I want to get across is that the mind is not about intelligence. The mind is about feelings. That's the core of it. And that feelings are subjective things that makes it hard to study them, but it doesn't mean they're not important and that we can ignore them. We have to find a way of bringing them center stage in biological science. interstage in biological science. I love that. It's kind of like I was saying at the beginning of this, like, it's so exciting to me to be able to learn all of these new things that I'm very motivated by that, very motivated by learning new things. But it absolutely makes sense that some observers might be like, oh, well, she's just, you know, a smart person. She just enjoys acquiring knowledge or whatever. But it makes sense that what is underneath that is the emotional satisfaction that is achieved

when I learn something new. Because learning for learning's sake isn't enjoyable unless there's an enjoyable emotion attached to it. Yeah. So one of the basic emotional circuits of the mammal brain, not human, humans are mammals. So it's a basic circuit of our brains, but of all mammals, it's called seeking.

It's a curiosity and an interest in what is novel, what is unknown, what is unexpected and so on. I suspect that's what you're talking about right now. You know, that's what gets you up in the morning. It does. My mom used to tease me a lot where it was, you know, like my desire for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge has always been a big driver of my behavior. But I can see what you're saying now, that it's just those seeking emotions. You are an extraordinarily accomplished scientist. You've published hundreds of papers, written, is it eight books that you've written? Yes. And tell everybody about The Hidden Spring,

your book, that is the basis for a lot of what we've been talking about. As the title suggests, The Hidden Spring, I'm arguing in that book that there's a hidden source of consciousness, and that is in the brainstem, that it's very ancient, it's very basic, and it's fundamentally emotional. That the outer part of the brain, the more readily visible part of the brain in all senses of the word, hides from view. And all of the functions, these cognitive intellectual functions, hides from view that the source of consciousness, the wellspring of the mind, is the brainstem and his feelings. So that's what that book is about. It's a book I've written for general readers. It's not only for my colleagues, because I think this is something that we should all be talking about. It's a book I've written for general readers. It's not only for my colleagues,

because I think this is something that we should all be talking about, that we should all become more cognizant of. So it also tells the story of my own scientific life, where it began, you know, how I slowly unpacked the story and realized that consciousness arises from the brainstem, that it's all bound up with feelings. So my book is telling the story and realized that consciousness arises from the brainstem, that it's all bound up with feelings. So my book is telling the story of my own scientific life, the patients that I've known, who've helped me to learn these things, the colleagues who I've known, who've done experimental work in this area, and the story of how the mystery gradually was revealed. And then I, at the end, talk about what are the implications

of this for the future of our science, and ultimately for the really quite scary but fascinating possibility of an artificial consciousness. If we really have understood in natural scientific terms how consciousness is generated, what causes it, what the actual mechanisms are whereby feelings come about, then can we produce artificial feelings? Can we produce robots that have feelings? And this is frightening in all sorts of ways because robots and computers are under our control. For now.

For now. For now. But also from the point of view of the robots and the computers, one of the reasons why we want robots and computerized intelligence is because they serve us. They are basically slaves to us. And we don't mind. They don't mind because they don't feel anything. But once they start to have feelings, then the whole question of, you know, what is appropriate and inappropriate scientifically, commercially, exploiting these artificial consciousness, all of those questions also come in.

So that's where the book ends. It's a journey that also looks to what lies ahead of us. With the premise of a science fiction movie. Yes. I'm just teasing, but it is a legitimate ethical question of if we know that the heart of consciousness is in feelings

and can we create feelings in another non-human entity, where are the lines supposed to be drawn? It's a legitimate question. Oh my goodness. I am so grateful for your time. I feel like I just learned so many things. I had so many takeaways from your book.

I really enjoyed the Hidden Spring and I really enjoyed talking to you today. Thank you. Me too, Sharon. I'm amazed that that was an hour. It felt like five minutes. So time flies when you're having fun. And my whole life's like that. I don't know why anybody studies anything else. It is endlessly fascinating and there is an endless number of

things to learn about it. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind-blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.