Self Comes to Mind

processes, for images as well as movements, along with several cortical regions dedicated to motor control that probably play a role in assembling continuities in the mind process as well. This is critical, of course, for the comprehensive functioning of a mind, but it is not required for the basic making of images. The negative evidence regarding the mind-making capacities of the hippocampus and the adjacent cortices is especially powerful. It comes from the behaviors and self-reports of patients whose hippocampi and anterior temporal cortices are destroyed bilaterally, as a result of conditions such as anoxic injury, herpes simplex encephalitis, or surgical ablation. Their learning of new facts is largely precluded, as is, to a smaller or greater extent, the possibility of recalling the past. Yet the patients’ minds are still immensely rich, with mostly normal perception in the visual, auditory, and tactile domains, and their recall of knowledge at generic (nonunique) levels is abundant. The fundamental aspects of their consciousness are largely intact.
    When we turn to the cerebral cortex, the panorama is radically different. Several regions of the cerebral cortex are unequivocally involved in making the very images we behold and manipulate in our minds. And those cortices that do not make images tend to be involved in recording them or manipulating them in the process of reasoning, decision, and action. The early sensory cortices for vision, hearing, somatic sensation, taste, and smell, which appear like islands in the ocean of the cerebral cortex, certainly make images. These islands are aided in the task by thalamic nuclei of two kinds: relay nuclei (which bring inputs from the periphery) and associative nuclei (with which large sectors of the cerebral cortex are bidirectionally connected).
    Powerful evidence supports this claim. We know that significant damage to each island of sensory cortex extensively disables the mapping function of that particular sector. For example, victims of bilateral damage to the early visual cortices become “cortically blind.” Patients so affected are no longer able to form detailed visual images, not just in perception but often in recall as well. They may be left with a residual so-called blindsight, in which nonconscious clues permit some visual guidance of actions. A comparable situation applies to situations of significant damage to other sensory cortices. The remainder of the cerebral cortex, the ocean around the islands, albeit not primarily involved in making images, participates in the construction and processing of images, that is, in the recording, recalling, and manipulating of images generated in early sensory cortices, which are discussed in Chapter 6 . 5
    But contrary to tradition and convention, I believe that the mind is not made in the cerebral cortex alone. Its first manifestations arise in the brain stem. The idea that mind processing begins at brain-stem level is so unconventional that it is not even unpopular. Among those who have championed the idea with great passion, I single out Jaak Panksepp. This idea, and that of early feelings arising in the brain stem, are of a piece. 6 Two brain-stem nuclei, the nucleus tractus solitarius and the parabrachial nucleus, are involved in generating basic aspects of the mind, namely, the feelings generated by ongoing life events, which include those described as pain and pleasure. I envision the maps generated by these structures as simple and largely devoid of spatial detail, but they result in feelings. These feelings are, in all likelihood, the primordial constituents of mind, based on direct signaling from the body proper. Interestingly, they are also primordial and indispensable components of the self and constitute the very first and inchoate revelation, to the mind, that its organism is alive.

     
Figure 3.1 : Varieties of maps (images) and their source objects. When maps are experienced, they become images. A normal mind includes images of all three varieties described above. Images of an organism’s internal state constitute primordial feelings . Images of other aspects of the organism combined with those of the internal state constitute specific body feelings . Feelings of emotions are variations on complex body feelings caused by and referred to a specific object. Images of the external world are normally accompanied by images of varieties of I and II.
Feelings are a variety of image, made special by