- So, I would like to take this opportunity again
to thank the sponsors that helped to bring our next speaker
to this conference.
The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds,
the Department of Neuroscience,
the Neuroscience Training Program,
the Center for Sleep and Consciousness Research,
and especially the Department of Anesthesiology,
who contributed substantially and financially
and logistically to putting on this conference.
Our next speaker is John Dunne.
He holds the distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities
here at the University of Wisconsin,
which is a newly endowed position created
through the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds.
John also holds a co-appointment
in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature.
John received his PhD from Harvard in 1999
and had a faculty position at Emory
in the Department of Religion for 10 years.
And just recently, this past summer, moved to Madison.
We are very glad to have him here.
John's work focuses on Buddhist philosophy
and contemplative practice,
especially in dialogue with cognitive science.
He had a recent publication
on a heuristic approach to mindfulness in
the Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation
and he also had a chapter in the book,
In Vimalakirti's House entitled "What is Inner Science?"
And on a personal note,
I first thought of inviting John here
when I saw him give a talk at a meditation group here
in town and he told us the story of a dinosaur mouse
that was eaten by a tiger because the dinosaur mouse
didn't sufficiently have a sense of self.
And I thought, well, this guy
has a really interesting perspective on biology.
(laughter)
And what's also interesting is that the obliteration
of the self is a theme in many religions,
including in Hasidic Jewish philosophy
where it is called bitul hayesh.
And achieving that brings you closer to God.
And lo, and behold,
that's apparently what happens to the dinosaur mouse.
(laughter)
So please join me in welcoming John Dunne.
- Thanks.
(applause)
- Thanks very much, Matt.
And also Misha for the invitation.
I feel like I should start this talk by saying,
by quoting Monty Python
"and now for something completely different"
because we've been seeing slides of neuronal interfaces,
of neuronal systems.
We've seen a few scans here and there,
and I'm not going to show anything like that.
My role, and indeed my role
at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds,
is to try to raise some questions for you,
to invite you to think about consciousness
in a different way,
and I'll be leaning on the resources
that I'm most familiar with,
which are going to be primarily the philosophical traditions
of India, especially Buddhism, but some others as well.
But I do want to make some shout-outs to some colleagues
who have also inspired me and whose work will appear here.
One of them is Evan Thompson,
my colleague through the Mind and Life Institute.
He's written this wonderful book, Waking, Dreaming, Being.
Outstanding piece of work.
Had a great review in the New York Times.
I highly recommend it.
I think, given what I've heard this morning,
some of you would find this book very interesting.
I'd also like to mention Thomas Metzinger.
Thomas is a German philosopher at the Max Planck Institute,
and his book, The Ego Tunnel is another book
that's an important inspiration
for the kind of work I'm doing here.
Both Evan and Thomas could be identified
as neurophilosophers, in other words,
they really integrate some neuroscientific findings
into their philosophical work.
They also do empirical philosophy
in the sense that they are experimentalists.
I don't think they would like that term neurophilosopher.
It sounds a little too trendy.
But it does in some ways describe part of their work.
You'll see that some aspects of neuroscience
will appear here.
But I'm not going to try to tell you anything
about brain anatomy or neuronal group selection
or any such thing.
I'm going to just suggest some ideas
that are going to have obvious parallels
to what we've been hearing already today.
So, I'm going to begin by talking about consciousness
and what's known as intentionality.
And that term will come clear momentarily.
And I'm going to move on to a different way
of thinking about consciousness,
which is in terms of something that we can call reflexivity.
Then finally, I'm going to ask the question,
can it be studied empirically?
And I'm going to make some suggestions, show some ways,
and perhaps we've already done that a little bit,
and then invite you to think about how you might do it.
So consciousness and intentionality.
We have a common way of talking about consciousness
in English, of using the word consciousness.
And we find similar locutions in other languages.
We say, "I am conscious of something."
That means that I have a certain relationship
to something that is an object of my consciousness.
So my consciousness is directed toward an object.
And this relationship of a subject
directed toward an object
is called in the phenomenological tradition
in the West, intentionality.
It's called grahya-grahaka-dvaya (Sanscrit a in gra has overline)
but that's probably less meaningful to you.
Here is Metzinger's own diagram
of what he calls "Good Old Fashioned Intentionality."
So we have here depicted in the head,
it's interesting that it's the head,
we can discuss why that's interesting later perhaps,
a sense of subjectivity.
That there is, in other words, a kind of zero-zero point
at the coordinates of your spatial temporal world.
You are at the center of your perceptual world,
and that sense of being at the center
of your perceptual world is what we can call subjectivity
in this particular context.
And that subjectivity is then oriented toward objects.
The goal of good, old-fashioned intentionality
suggests that what we have is sort of inside, subjectivity,
and outside, objects, and that relationship
of the inside to the outside is called intentionality.
Now Metzinger calls this "good old fashioned intentionality"
because it's also meant to elicit in some ways
what's been called phenomenological tradition
the natural attitude.
So as we experience our,
as we observe our own experience now, it seems that,
for example I'm here you're seeing me
if you are not asleep yet,
and as you are seeing me, I seem to be over there.
I'm not presented as inside of your consciousness,
I'm presented as outside of your consciousness.
So, it's a natural attitude,
it's something that, it's the way in which you could say,
consciousness operates in this intentional mode.
Now part of what's distinctive about the notion
of consciousness as intentionality
is that it also involves reportability.
That is to say when we are conscious of an object
we can give a report about that object.
We can say what we are seeing.
And in the current Western philosophical tradition,
in philosophy of mind we call this access consciousness.
So, access consciousness essentially means
that I am holding an object in consciousness.
And one feature of that, one mark of that fact
is that I can give a report about that object.
I am seeing blue, I am seeing a person, and so on.
Now the kind of concept formation that's necessary
in order to give that kind of report actually involves
what we can call agency.
Here there are some suggestions
in Western philosophical literature
and even in cognitive science,
but I'm really going to turn to an Indian Buddhist theory
developed in the seventh century of concept formation.
It's called the apoha theory.
It actually resembles in a certain way grounded cognition,
as developed for example by my colleague Larry Barsalou.
Now the basic point here without getting into the details
of this theory is that at its base, concept formation,
even the kind of concept formation that we observe
for example in pigeons.
There's some famous work from the 60s
about concept use in pigeons is that the capacity
for concept formation is within a structure
of intentionality.
That is to say, a subject against an object.
But that subject is not just sort of a knower,
not just a passive mirror for the world,
but is rather an agent trying to do something in the world.
What is that subject trying to do?
Survive.
So, when we form concepts,
the notion here is that the context for concept formation
is about trying to get something or avoid something.
It's approach or avoidance.
I want to get affordances,
things that will enable me to survive or flourish,
and I want to avoid dangers, right?
So when we are in the context of reportability,
when we're saying that access consciousness
means I can report on an object,
part of what we're also saying is
that I am an agent acting in the world.
Now this is all fine.
This is one way of talking about consciousness,
and of course I'm sure some of you are familiar
with this way of talking about consciousness.
Even in the scientific literature
you'll certainly find some cognitive scientific approaches
that really emphasize this approach to consciousness.
Basically, if you can't report, you're not conscious.
But is that really all that there is to consciousness?
Is that all we want to say?
What I'd like to raise is the interesting example
of inattentional blindness.
That was developed by Mack and Rock as a term,
and then they wrote this book
for MIT Press way back in 1998.
And I bet if you've taught sort of basic psychology
or certainly cognitive psychology
you've probably even shown
this video of inattentional blindness.
I'm not going to go through the whole video.
Many of you know it.
The video starts, you are given a task.
You're supposed to count how many passes have gone between
the people in the white shirts on that team.
They're throwing a basketball back and forth,
so you're counting, and as you count,
in the middle of it, a person in a gorilla suit walks by.
And as all of you know, I'm sure many of you have seen this,
some 50% of the observers
don't notice the person in the gorilla suit.
They cannot report that there was a person
in a gorilla suit.
So they were not conscious
of the person in the gorilla suit.
When we understand consciousness
in terms of this reportability.
When we understand consciousness
to mean I am knowing that thing
that I want to act toward.
And of course, part of the reason that they probably
are not capable of reporting on the presence
of the person in the gorilla suit is
that it's irrelevant to the task.
It's not part of survival, if you like.
It's not something to pay attention to.
It's not an affordance, it's not a danger,
it's something that is irrelevant.
And in that sense they're not conscious.
But could we say that they're conscious
in some other fashion?
Is there a kind of background awareness
through which the information within that scene
is all being presented,
even if not all of it is reportable
So for example, Mack and Rock themselves
in their book back in '98,
and this literature has of course developed since that time,
but these basic findings remain unchallenged.
They use, for example, the stem completion task
in which you are shown, the subject is shown,
a series of words that are to be completed.
A few letters are there
and then they need to complete the words.
Previously they had been primed by seeing other words,
but the task was designed such
that they didn't notice those other words,
they couldn't report the other words.
In other words, they induced inattentional blindness
in the subjects.
And then when they asked them to complete the words,
there's a much higher probability
of them completing the words by using the ones
that they had previously been primed with.
They didn't know those words were there,
but they were primed to use them.
So for example if it said H-O-U-blank-blank,
and they had previously seen HOUSE but not able to report it
because they were distracted in some fashion,
then when they're asked to complete H-O-U house,
they use house, they don't use some other word.
So, what this suggests of course is that these fragments
were in some sense being accessed by consciousness.
The information was being presented in consciousness.
The more interesting example
is the example of affect,
where we can prime behavioral responses by showing,
for example, fearful faces at a rate that is too fast
to be reportable but nevertheless has a behavioral response.
We can also ask persons to report
on how they are feeling after doing a mood induction.
Even though they haven't noticed the mood induction,
they may notice that they are feeling
some kind of sensations,
some kind of affect, some kind of emotion.
This is what we can call
not access awareness
but phenomenal awareness, the sense that there is some way
that it feels to be in an experience.
Now one of the features of phenomenal awareness is
that it can be recalcitrant to reportability.
There's an interesting reason for that.
One way to understand that is by looking at an extreme case.
The extreme case is something
that William James has identified actually.
James was famously interested in religious experience,
especially what we might call mystical experience.
And one of the four features that he noted
within these types of experiences is ineffability,
the incapability to really give a description.
There's a sense that there something there,
that I had an experience, that there was something
that it was like to have that experience,
and yet I can't quite articulate what that is.
Now one way of understanding this is that these kinds
of conscious states involve a dissolution
of the ego, if you like, of subjectivity.
And because they involve the dissolution of subjectivity,
it is difficult to generate a report.
Why is that?
Because if subjectivity dissolves that relationship
of intentionality between subject, object also dissolves.
And that is required for concept formation
and then of course language use built on top of that,
I'm not going to be able to give a report.
I'm going to have a sense of an experience.
The claim is that experience persists, awareness persists,
consciousness persists, and yet I can't report on it
precisely because that structure has
in some sense dissolved.
Now of course this is James.
There are good reasons why James might have detected this.
Despite the fact that comparative mysticism
is a very problematic field in some ways.
It is certainly the case that we find this basic claim
in many different traditions:
Nagarjuna among the Buddhists,
Samkara among the Advaitins,
Meister Eckhart among Christians,
reporting that these kinds of experiences
that involve the dissolution of the ego,
or dissolution of subjectivity,
also present themselves as ineffable.
But sometimes it's even difficult to say how it feels
without any kind of extreme case
where you have dissolved into the universe.
And an interesting example and one that is used
by a number of these contemplative traditions
is the taste of honey.
So famously, in a number of different traditions,
in trying to articulate the ineffability
of these kinds of experiences, one might be asked,
"What does honey taste like?
"Describe to me the taste of honey."
Why would this be similar to those experiences?
Because part of what you are being prompted to do
when you are asked to describe how it feels to taste honey,
is to not attend to honey as an object
but to attend to your experience of honey.
To tend to what it is like or how it feels
to have that experience.
And the problem here,
the reason that this can also be recalcitrant
to clear report is that you're attempting
a subject-side report from information
that is presented without agentive intentionality.
Now that's a mouthful.
What does that really mean?
It means that I'm trying report on,
I'm in a relationship with an object, the honey.
I am having an experience.
I'm not reporting about the honey,
I'm reporting about what's happening here,
so to speak, on the subject side.
And I'm trying to generate a report from the subject side
without making the subject into a new object.
How does that work?
This is where we have a different way
of talking about consciousness.
We're now going to start introducing
the notion of reflexivity.
Remember, we had good old-fashioned intentionality,
we had the subject with objects out there.
An alternative version, a version,
this is also Metzinger's diagram, but this is based not only
on the Western phenomenological tradition,
but also on various Indian philosophical traditions,
but especially Buddhism.
And here we have what's called
The Phenomenal Model of the Intentionality Relation,
which is being presented within consciousness.
So the important aspect of this diagram
is that now this subject-object relationship,
which we call intentionality,
is not about a subject inside the head,
so to speak, and an object outside,
but both of these, the subject and the object
and the relation itself, are being presented
within consciousness.
So let me describe that a little bit better.
This involves what's called the phenomenological reduction.
When you look at the screen and you see
for example the white color of the screen,
what you have is an experience
which seems to suggest that that white color is out there
and you are in here.
So that's intentionality.
But that white color is not actually out there.
The claim on this model,
which of course I think most of you would agree with,
is that the experience of white.
There is no white color out there.
What there are is presumably some kind of matter,
a complex physical process that interacts
with our optic nerve.
It eventually through visual processing presents
in the end with the phenomenal experience of white.
That phenomenal experience of white is presented
within consciousness.
It's not outside the head, so to speak.
So what's happening when we are seeing white is
that that object is presented within consciousness
and at the same time the subject is occurring
within consciousness, simultaneously.
Indeed, Metzinger doesn't go in this direction,
but there's a very important theory in the Dharmakirti,
from the seventh century Buddhist philosopher
named Dharmakirti.
He speaks about the fact that anytime we have a sense
of an object or a sense of a subject.
Anytime we have an object or a subject,
we have to have both.
They are always presented simultaneously.
And they are presented in a single moment of consciousness,
not as something out there in fact.
It seems to be out there but is actually occurring
within a single moment of consciousness.
So what's happening then when we try
to give a report about the honey?
As we try to give a report about the honey,
we're trying to generate a report from this side.
The way in which concept formation operates
because it's all about survival,
it's like this is a good thing, this is a bad thing,
is that it's concerned primarily with this side,
so to speak.
It reports in a causal stream on this account.
There is a causal stream of information
that's coming from that moment of consciousness.
It has subject-side features, it has object-side features.
And when we are doing concept formation
the way it's developed, it's such that that causal stream
is designed to deal with this causal stream
on the object side.
So when we try to apply them to the subject side
we have difficulty generating a report.
But that doesn't mean
that the subject side is not being presented.
Now, this model does allow us to speak
about some interesting features of experience
that we can observe.
For example, if you can imagine
that you're on a plateau of Tibet, for example,
and you are seeing a beautiful sunset.
Completely absorbed.
Let's just suppose that you're completely absorbed
in the beauty of this sunset.
For a few moments you just find yourself
forgetting everything else.
Completely absorbed.
And then you turn around.
A couple of moments later I ask you,
"You seemed to be quite fascinated by that.
"How did you feel?"
Now, what you don't do is then say to me,
well, anyway I hope you don't do this.
You don't say to me, "Oh, give me a second.
"I'm going to check inside.
"I'm going to look at it and check inside quickly
"and then I'll be able to tell you how I feel.
"Because I don't know how I feel without checking inside."
I didn't prompt you to,
at the time that you were looking at the sunset,
I didn't say, "Oh, pay attention to how you're feeling
"while you're looking at the sunset."
Instead, after a few minutes I asked you,
"How did you feel?"
And even though you were completely paying attention
to the object,
the strength of that affective state allows you
to give a report.
You can say, in that causal stream descending
from both subject and object,
there's enough lingering affective effects
that you can still give a report on it.
So the claim here is that as you are
in this kind of a state, both the subject side
and the object side are generating effects
that can allow for a subsequent report.
But because a report on the subject side
is very difficult to generate,
it tends to be recalcitrant.
It tends to feel ineffable.
It seems difficult to describe our feelings.
Now you might say, well, this is silly,
because obviously, sure, I might admit,
and especially I think if we're cognitive scientists,
that most of us these days are certainly going to say yes.
If we admit that there's a sense of subjectivity,
and maybe some of you out there
don't think there such a thing,
but if we admit that there is a sense
of subjectivity in experience, we would certainly agree.
Yes, this structure of subject and object
is being presented in our awareness.
There's no object out there, it's all in here, so to speak.
But I don't need to,
When I generate a report about how I am feeling,
all I am doing is that I'm taking that as an object.
In other words, I have a second-order subjectivity
that's simply watching that moment of experience.
So right at that moment of experience
there's a second-order subjectivity that can then report
about any features of that experience,
subject or object, right?
I don't need to have some idea that I'm going to
generate this directly from subjectivity itself.
And in fact, if I'm good enough at it
I should be able to generate a very accurate report
because the whole problem of having to generate a report
from the subject side falls away.
This, that experience itself,
is now the object for a new subject.
Well, the problem with this is that if you do that,
let's just suppose that we say
you are going to ponder your experience.
As you are pondering your experience,
the sense of subjectivity is now present
at this second order.
You are a subject pondering your experience.
That itself has an intentional structure.
And the fact of your subjectivity is presented,
the experience of your subjectivity
as you can say the over here as opposed to the there,
is being presented at the same time
as the experience itself.
So that would mean that we need another subjectivity
to be somehow knowing that subjectivity,
and another and another and another.
And this is of course the problem of infinite regress.
Interestingly enough,
several Indian philosophical traditions as well as
Western phenomenological traditions
discovered this independently,
or came to this conclusion independently.
So if this model is right then
if we are going to have information about experience
and be able to report about how it feels, so to speak,
then we can't be doing this by having a second order
or an third order or an Nth order of subjectivity.
It has to be presented at the moment of experience itself.
So a moment of consciousness is a moment
in which subjects and objects are all being presented.
And they are all, in a sense, information.
There's a capacity to report on every aspect of it.
This fact of it all being presented simultaneously is called
in the Western phenomenological tradition reflexivity.
"La conscience de soi" is the term
that Jean-Paul Sartre used.
In the Indian philosophical tradition
it's called svasamviti, self-knowing, or self-awareness.
But just as in the French, it doesn't mean
that you're knowing yourself,
it means self as in reflexive, the reflexive pronoun.
It is self- presenting.
It's not doing, it's not presenting itself
as an object over against the subject.
All of this together in a moment of experience
is being presented.
Now, when we think about that notion,
we can then go back to William James'
kind of extreme case,
which is a case that's very important
for many Indian philosophical traditions
and others in China and Japan as well.
And this is the case in which intentionality
completely subsides.
The claim is that this happens,
that it can be induced by certain times of yogic practices
meditative practices, but also, interestingly,
interesting claims is that for example
that sometimes happens when you sneeze.
Next time you sneeze you can have a look.
At the moment of orgasm, I'm still not sure
about getting people and the fMRI to examine that.
That could be a little difficult.
And at some other extreme physiological states,
awareness persists but the intentional structure collapses.
It may even occur under certain circumstances
with a startle response, interestingly enough.
Now, when we represent it this way,
the claim would be that you could sustain awareness
without that subject, object intentionality.
Because the feature in this,
here we have subject,object intentionality
all being presented simultaneously.
Concept formation works such that
it's best reporting on objects,
but it can still generate reports from the subject side,
just less perfectly.
But now we're in a place where there is
that intentional content has subsided,
and yet the claim here is that the presenting,
if you like, continues.
Thus, awareness or consciousness
would continue in this state.
Now one way of representing it
would be this sort of circle here,
but really in some ways
we should just have the blank screen.
It's just the mere capacity for presentation,
for phenomenal presentation,
that is the most basic aspect of consciousness
on this account.
The capacity, in other words,
to present information coherently
without any intentional structure.
That capacity for coherent presentation of information,
if you like, even when the information is absent persists.
In Sanskrit the term that's used is prakasha,
and it's an important metaphor.
You all get to show brain scans,
I get to show Sanskrit.
And prakasha means luminosity.
It's a metaphor for this aspect of consciousness,
the fundamental capacity for presentation,
for presentation of content, of information.
It means, basically, that just like a light fills the room,
so, too, consciousness fills experience.
Now the other term as I mentioned previously
for this is reflexive awareness.
Reflexive awareness, to summarize,
is what can give us an account of how we get
to off-object or background features of an experience.
How we are able to report upon our affective states.
How we are able to report upon
what we did not notice at the time.
It does not require an introspective turn.
We don't have to turn inward in order for us
to detect aspects of the background.
We don't have to turn inward in order to report
about our state of subjectivity.
So it's not a second-order meta-awareness.
And this is what accounts for what we just called
previously phenomenal awareness, right?
And the way in which it is recalcitrant to reportability.
That how something feels, because when we are prompted
to describe how something feels
we are already on the subject side.
And because concept formation emerges,
presumably, to deal with objects,
it is not so good at generating reports on the subject side.
Now finally and very interestingly,
in the Indian traditions in particular,
but indeed in many Asian contemplative conditions,
this capacity is actually trainable.
You can enhance reflexive awareness.
This raises a very interesting question:
Can it be studied empirically?
Now, one option that I think is fascinating
and I'm not going to say very much about it
because I don't know very much about sleep science,
but Evan Thompson actually does.
And those of you who are sleep researchers,
I highly recommend Thompson's book.
There are a few chapters that deal with sleep and dream,
and also with the hypnagogic state.
He points out that the hypnagogic state is one
in which there is this dissolution
of that sense of subjectivity,
which he describes as the "I-me-mine."
And at that dissolution
some lucid dreamers in particular
who use certain kinds of techniques,
mostly Western techniques to induce lucid dreams,
claim that they're able to sustain awareness
all the way through the hypnagogic state into a lucid dream,
as they fall asleep.
You can look at the literature that he reports there.
This involves especially what's called
signal verified lucid dreaming.
Some of you have probably heard about this,
but this is where you,
because the eyes can still be controlled
while you're in the REM state of dreaming
or even in a dream state that emerges
right after the hypnagogic state,
you can actually give a signal
So lucid dreamers were trained
to look in a particular direction in order to signal
that they were in a lucid dream
so that they could then using fMRI scan examine
what's happening in terms of brain activity at that time.
And actually one of these lucid dreamers even was able
to control his eyes enough to send a Morse code signal
through that technique.
Fascinating.
Look at Thompson's account, very interesting.
So that of course is an,
when we are in the lucid dreams,
a lucid dream is a state
in which intentionality has returned.
We are back in that state of the subject and the object.
So, if we're trying to understand whether
we can sustain awareness without that sort of a structure,
then the lucid dream is actually not an example
of an experience in which that structure is absent,
the structure of subject and object.
But getting into that state does involve the dissolution
of that structure, it would appear,
for at least some short period of time.
Of course, obviously, here we should talk about anesthesia,
and it does seem to be an obvious case
that anesthesia certainly is going to wipe out not only
that structure but apparently even the presence,
the kind of coherence that is necessary
for this minimal presentation,
the kind of coherence that is necessary
for phenomenal awareness,
it would appear that it would wipe even that out.
But can we titrate it appropriately
such that we can actually get to the point
where we would examine experience
as it is slowly dissolving into that state?
Now obviously there are many difficulties
experimentally with that.
I'm going to raise,
I'm going to point to some options later.
I also want to mention the possibility
that hallucinogens would also be an option here.
There are some research that's beginning to emerge again.
This I think is a very fraught area,
but it is a common report
from most forms of hallucinogens
that in the hallucinogenic experience
there is a dissolution of the subject,
object intentional structure and yet a persistence
of the sense that phenomenal experience is occurring.
And then finally, of course, contemplative practices
are a very interesting option.
One of them is mindfulness.
And one feature of mindfulness that's very interesting,
this is a, uh, I'm not going to
I just wanted to show this to you
to maybe encourage you to read the article
in which it appears.
This is a new phenomenological model
to try to describe the different states,
different styles of mindfulness.
And as you'll see, one of the main axes
is actually reflexive awareness.
In the final version of this article we ended up changing
that to meta-awareness for reasons I won't go into.
Basically, my colleagues and I, Antoine,
I think you can maybe read that,
Antoine Lutz, Amishi Jha, and Clifford Saron.
We developed this model in an attempt to actually engage
in a kind of neuro-phenomenological approach
that would enable us to align the phenomenology
of mindfulness with various
empirical third-person measures.
And one of the features that we've decided
over three years, actually, of work
is that this kind of capacity for reflexivity,
the capacity for generating off-object reports,
if you like, of an awareness off the object,
of a background awareness,
that this is a key feature that's trained in mindfulness.
Now another contemplative practice that's,
I think, of some interest here is one
that in Tibetan is called chagzog.
And this is actually one of the traditions
that specifically focuses on cultivating
this kind of reflexive awareness.
And here is a picture from, I think 2000,
way back when when these practitioners
in this traditions were first being studied.
These are very long-term practitioners.
Some of them have meditated
for more than 30,000 hours in their lifetime.
One fellow who was only 33, I think,
had already meditated 30,000 hours.
And the style of practice that they engage
in is a style of practice in which the structure of subject,
object intentionality is deliberately lessened, attenuated,
and in principle at least eliminated
under certain circumstances.
This you might recognize Richard Davison,
looking a little younger although Rich
is pretty ageless, actually, and Matthieu Ricard.
This is one of the very earliest sessions
in which we're trying to work
on the experimental design for this study.
Some of what came out of that study was this chapter
that I wrote with my colleagues Antoine Lutz
and with Richie Davison.
And part of what we tried to do
was actually explain
the nature of these kinds of practices.
Very briefly, the ways in which these practices work
is that one begins by focusing on an object
and as it turns out this is the same feature
that you find in mindfulness.
As you focus on an object your capacity
to regulate your attention is dependent upon
this kind of background monitoring.
So as you gain more and more expertise,
your capacity to deal with distractors
before they move you off the object
is an indication that you are able to monitor the background
much more effectively and compensate
when off-object information about the perturbation
of consciousness is being presented.
Training on certain styles of focused attention,
as it turns out, gives you this capacity for monitoring,
which is a kind of reflexivity.
Gradually you begin to de-emphasize focus
on the object, that's Stage Two.
And finally, you try to drop the object altogether
in Stage Three
And in Stage Four, which maybe is only theoretical,
I really don't know, not being able to do that myself,
in which the subject, object intentional structure
completely subsides.
That, in principle, is this final point.
Now the idea here is that the intensity or clarity
of experience increases
as one moves along these stages.
One adapt, for example, when we were doing a pain study,
reported that when quite intense pain was applied
to his arm that it was just like a match
in the midst of the burning sun.
The intensity or clarity of an experience
becomes extremely heightened.
Now a very speculative question would be:
Well, then does this correlate somehow
with some aspect of brain function?
I'm just going to point to this paper
in which there is a remarkably high gamma signal.
I remember actually showing this.
Antoine Lutz and I went to Giulio Tononi's lab
to show him some of the initial results,
and the people were practically falling off their seats
in terms of the amplitude of the signals here.
These practitioners were doing a form
of this style of practice.
Is there something?
We've also then collected some later data
that has not been published yet
in which a phenomenological report
of the intensity of experience also matched
to an astonishing degree the amplitude of the EEG signal
across frontal lobes in the gamma band
So does this suggest that there might be some way,
especially with trained practitioners,
to examine this aspect of consciousness?
To look beyond simply understanding consciousness
as reportability of objects?
To say that your conscious is to say simply
that you can report on what you're seeing?
Does this gave us an opportunity perhaps
to move into a different way of exploring consciousness,
where consciousness is also about subjectivity
and indeed is about all of them.
Perhaps there is even something more basic
than either subjectivity or objects.
It's a big question.
Maybe in some ways, all we should do is enjoy the sunset.
Thank you very much.
(applause)