Self Comes to Mind

conscious of. But what is mind made of? Does mind come from the air or from the body? Smart people say it comes from the brain, that it is in the brain, but that is not a satisfactory reply. How does the brain do mind?
    The fact that no one sees the minds of others, conscious or not, is especially mysterious. We can observe their bodies and their actions, what they do or say or write, and we can make informed guesses about what they think. But we cannot observe their minds, and only we ourselves can observe ours, from the inside, and through a rather narrow window. The properties of minds, let alone conscious minds, appear to be so radically different from those of visible living matter that thoughtful folk wonder how one process (conscious minds working) meshes with the other process (physical cells living together in aggregates called tissues).
    But to say that conscious minds are mysterious—and on the face of it they are—is different from saying that the mystery is insoluble. It is different from saying that we shall never be able to understand how a living organism endowed with a brain develops a conscious mind. 1
Goals and Reasons
     
    This book is dedicated to addressing two questions. First: how does the brain construct a mind? Second: how does the brain make that mind conscious? I am well aware that addressing questions is not the same as answering them, and that on the matter of the conscious mind, it would be foolish to presume definitive answers. Moreover, I realize that the study of consciousness has expanded so much that it is no longer possible to do justice to all contributions being made to it. That, along with issues of terminology and perspective, make current work on consciousness resemble a walk through a minefield. Nonetheless, at one’s own peril, it is reasonable to think through the questions and use the current evidence, incomplete and provisional as it is, to build testable conjectures and dream about the future. The goal of this book is to reflect on the conjectures and discuss a framework of hypotheses. The focus is on how the human brain needs to be structured and how it needs to operate in order for conscious minds to emerge.
    Books should be written for a reason, and this one was written to start over. I have been studying the human mind and brain for more than thirty years, and I have previously written about consciousness in scientific articles and books. 2 But I have grown dissatisfied with my account of the problem, and reflection on relevant research findings, new and old, has changed my views, on two issues in particular: the origin and nature of feelings and the mechanisms behind the construction of the self. This book is an attempt to discuss the current views. In no small measure, the book is also about what we still do not know but wish we did.
    The remainder of Chapter 1 situates the problem, explains the framework chosen to address it, and previews the main ideas that will emerge in the chapters ahead. Some readers may find that the long presentation in Chapter 1 slows down the reading, but I promise it will also make the rest of the book all the more accessible.
Approaching the Problem
     
    Before we attempt to make some headway on the matter of how the human brain constructs a conscious mind, we need to acknowledge two important legacies. One of them consists of prior attempts to discover the neural basis of consciousness, in efforts that date back to the middle of the twentieth century. In a series of pioneering studies conducted in North America and Italy, a small band of investigators pointed with astonishing certainty to a brain sector that is now unequivocally related to the making of consciousness—the brain stem—and identified it as a critical contributor to consciousness. Not surprisingly, in light of what we know today, the account provided by these pioneers—Wilder Penfield, Herbert Jasper, Giuseppe Moruzzi, and Horace Magoun—was incomplete, and parts of it were less than correct. But one should have nothing but praise and admiration for the scientists who intuited the right target and aimed at it with such precision. This was the brave beginning of the enterprise to which several of us wish to contribute today. 3
    Also part of this legacy are studies performed more recently in neurological patients whose consciousness was compromised by focal brain damage. The work of Fred Plum and Jerome Posner launched the effort. 4 Over the years these studies,