The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Carolyn Dicey Jennings. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Carolyn Dicey Jennings. She’s a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Merced, and her work is based in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It aims at understanding the nature of attention and its impact on the mind, such as perception, consciousness, and action. Welcome, Carolyn.
Carolyn: Thanks so much, Jim. I’m looking forward to this conversation.
Jim: Yeah, me too. I really enjoyed the book that kind of caught my attention. I reached out to you, I saw a review of it someplace, I don’t remember where, and I said, “That’s the kind of stuff I usually do.” So I downloaded the book, took a look, said, “Yeah, that looks good.” And the book’s called Attention and Mental Control, and it’s from Cambridge University Press, and it’s part of their Elements and Philosophy of Mind series. And I’ll make a note for people sometimes these days, kids today don’t read books. This is a nice short book. The actual core text is about 55 pages plus, as you would expect, a voluminous collection of references and notes. I also read four of her papers in preparation for this podcast and also a popular essay she wrote, which I would recommend, on Aeon titled, I Attend, Therefore I Am, and as always links to the book, the papers and the Aeon article will be on the episode page at jimruttshow.com.
Carolyn: Awesome.
Jim: Yeah, it’s interesting when I saw the title I Attend, Therefore I Am, it really resonated with this because in my own work on consciousness and attention as we’ll talked about, you have somewhat different perspective, but some similarities is I often say that attention is the cursor of consciousness. You are what you attend to. And so when I saw that title, I said, “Yeah, I agree with that.” Not as I read it. It was [inaudible 00:01:47]. Some things I agreed with, some things not quite, but, so anyway, we’ll dig into that as we go along. So feel free to ask me my thoughts and I’ll jump in occasionally, probably more in this topic than in most, because this happens to be pretty close to my center of interests. So let’s start with what is mental control? And let’s just start with what is mental control?
Carolyn: Yeah, good. So that phrase is mostly associated with a specific person, Dan Wagner, and he introduced the term or phrase in order to criticize it. So that’s a good starting point is to realize that most of the time when academics talk about mental control, that phrase, they’re thinking of it as something that doesn’t exist. They’re talking about it to dismiss it. And one of the things I’m trying to do in this book is to make a case for it, to make a case for the possibility of mental control. In short, mental control is control of the mind by the mind. It’s very closely associated with attention. So that’s a short version.
Jim: Okay. And you contrasted it with much more talked concept of self-control. Maybe you could make some distinctions between those two.
Carolyn: Yeah, yeah, sure. So philosophers, I’m a philosopher. I mean, I consider myself interdisciplinary, but I trained largely in philosophy and philosophers have talked about self-control much more than mental control. Mental control comes up almost not at all for example, in the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy, which is a reference that philosophers tend to use, it comes up just a few times in that entire resource, but self-control comes up all over the place, and self-control is control. It’s still control of the mind by the mind, but it tends to be associated with inhibition. So when you are trying to inhibit specific reactions, so a very common example is like, there’s a tasty treat and you want it, but you don’t want to want it. And so you try to inhibit your desire for it. So self-control is a narrower form of control because of this association with inhibition and mental control is broader and can involve other forms of control that are not necessarily inhibitive.
Jim: Yeah. The other classic example we hear a lot about in experimental psychology is the marshmallow test.
Carolyn: Yes, that’s right.
Jim: Where you give the kid, put one marshmallow in front of them and say, sit here for 10 minutes or whatever it is, we’ll give you two marshmallows. But if you eat it, that’s the only one you get. And apparently it turns out to be, well, there’s some controversy now about whether it’s well correlated with later success in life or not. But I think that’s a pretty good example of self-control. Now, a framing metaphor that you use throughout the book is a ping pong game.
Carolyn: Yes.
Jim: So why don’t you introduce the ping pong game and how that relates to mental control?
Carolyn: Okay. I don’t think I’ll be able to recreate all of the examples I use in the book. But around the time I was writing that, my husband turned 40 and was gifted a ping pong table by his friends. And so it was really on my mind. We were playing a lot of ping pong. But the ping pong example includes things like if you are playing a game of ping pong with your friends, then you are doing things like tracking the ball through space. So you’re watching the ball as it’s coming toward you in order to respond. And that tracking can use attention. So you could be purposefully focusing on the ping pong and not, for example, on other distracting things around you.
If you’re playing ping pong outside, there could be birds flying by and you are paying attention to the ping pong ball and not the birds. And that selectivity that we associate with attention is a type of mental control. So you are controlling your mind. You’re controlling what thing you’re perceiving by your mind, so your mind having this task of playing ping pong is controlling what things you’re perceiving like the ping pong rather than the bird. So that would be not as traditional of an example as the marshmallow task, but that works as well as an example of mental control.
Jim: It’s more multidimensional, right? How does that then impact, say, the mind-body relationship? Because when you get… I used to be quite a serious ping pong player and not Olympic type, but good neighborhood ping-pong player.
Carolyn: I’m sure you’re better than I am then. So tell me about your experiences. What do you mean by that with this question?
Jim: When you get your head into ping pong, right? It’s like any deeply learned skill. You’re not exactly thinking about it, right? You’re in the zone, right? It’s now automatized substantially, but not totally obviously because you have to watch the ball. And then you also are trying to create probably unconsciously a model of the strategy of the other player, are they a spinner or a smasher? And is their left or their right stronger? And so you’re learning as you play, particularly if you’re playing in a tournament where each player has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. So how does those kinds of things relate to the concept of mental control? Or don’t they? When you get outside the mind, we no longer going to call that mental control.
Carolyn: So I think one of the benefits of the mental control concept, one of the ways in which it is broader than self-control, I think this example helps to illustrate that. So when you’re talking about playing through skill, which it sounds like you play through skill, I’m not sure if I play through skill, but somebody who’s actually good at ping-pong is using skill in order to play. Your skills, you might not think of those as things that you activate consciously. It may be that the play is very fast as you were describing, and so you don’t have time.
Sometimes people say this about tennis, the serve is too quick, you don’t have time to process that perception consciously. So you may be thinking of it as something that is more automatic, but that’s still mental. So the scope of the mental is broader than the scope of what we may think of as what is conscious or what is explicit or what we’re aware of doing. So you can say that it’s control of the mind by the mind, even if the mind that we’re talking about here is something like a skill that you’re not intentionally controlling.
Jim: And of course the other everyday example is driving, especially when you’re driving to work, you’re not really even thinking about it, you’re just doing it, but if some anomaly turns up, then boom, suddenly it’s into your mind. You go, “Oh, shit, what’s that? Is that bus there parking, broke down, what the hell? It’s been there for three minutes,” and you have to sort of deal with an exception, which we’ll talk about little bit later on your three forms of there. So the next step, and this is what really hooked me in wanting to talk to you, was the relationship between attention and mental control. So let’s start with what do you mean by attention?
Carolyn: Okay, yeah, that’s a tricky one. So it has to do with selection. So attention is polysemous. It refers to a lot of different, especially if we’re thinking operationally. If we’re thinking like scientists, there are many different types of experiments that are associated with the word attention that target different types of mental functions. And so sometimes people will say selective attention in order to talk about the form that I’m referring to. So it’s the ability of attention to select one thing over another. And I usually use the term prioritization instead of selection, because I want to focus on the activity of selecting. And I think the word selection sometimes sounds like the result. So when we talk about attention, I don’t think we’re talking about just the result of the activity. We’re talking about the activity of prioritizing one thing over another thing.
And in my own work, I define it as prioritization by the subject that’s what’s controversial about my own definition of attention. Other philosophers have said things like it’s selection for action. So that’s Wayne Wu. His account is close to mine. We have a lot of overlap and shared interests, but I don’t think that all forms of attention are for the sake of action necessarily. I think that it’s possible to attend without doing that for an action. So that’s why I focus on it being by the subject, because I think of that as a defining feature of it.
Jim: Yeah. One of the things I do have been working on is theories of attention and how they relate to theories of consciousness. And my definition of attention is just a bit different, which in my model, only one and almost always exactly one item is in attention, and it’s quite fine-grained based on reading of the literature, lab experiments, et cetera. I basically say that about every 250 milliseconds, your focus of attention can change. It actually can be even faster than that with some fixed biological side tracks that don’t go through the cognitive stack, but approximately no quicker than 25 milliseconds, no longer than 250, you can switch your attention and it’s happening constantly all the time.
There’s one thing in attention and then another thing in attention and what you describe as prioritization, I describe as kind of a voting mechanism of the unconscious mind, which is looking at all the items that are currently in the conscious frame, say roughly the Bernard Baar Global Workspace theory and sort of ranking them on their salience from your epistemic memories to your declarative memories, to your emotional states, emotional states of the episodic memory, not epistemic, episodic memories.
And they’re more or less ranked in vote, but the top one is cleanly cut. It is distinct from the rest. And that this thing, this is constantly hopping around. And in some sense, the moves of that cursor of attention is who you are when you’re thinking you’re going from one word, an internal dialogue space to another as the locus of attention. When you’re trying to learn something, you’re watching the movements at the hand of the expert as they disassemble the lawnmower engine you’re trying to build yourself a model. And the other item that comes up from a fair bit of the experimental psychology is not entirely, but to a very substantial degree, you can only learn things that are in this locus of attention. So the mechanism for learning is closely related to the single threaded fast moving part of attention. And so that’s the Ruttian view. And interestingly, it combines two the things that you talk about, and we’ll move on to that next, which is, you talk about voluntary attention and automatic attention.
Carolyn: Well, I have some things that you might want to think about for your view. They could be questions or comments, so you can take them as you like. But one is on this question of whether the voting mechanism is, if we should think of that as only unconscious with a strict cutoff that you were describing. So this idea of a salience, you’ve got the salience. Sometimes people talk about it as priority maps or salience maps. That fits with a lot of the literature. But the question or comment is how do you think of that as interacting with tasks or voluntary attention? And the reason I’m asking is that we have, this is an example I use often if somebody asks you like, “Oh, can you smell that dill?” And you can’t smell it yet, so it’s not conscious for you yet, it’s still unconscious for you.
You could make an effort to smell it. And the way I think of that is that you’re voluntarily attending to something that’s currently not conscious for you. It’s in the unconscious. So your one way of framing that, a natural way of framing that would be that you are prioritizing something that’s currently unconscious for you. So then you would think of your voluntary attention as interacting with that same salience map. I don’t think that that makes as much sense on a picture where that is entirely unconscious and then just feeds forward. So how do you think of that as working?
Jim: Well, I consider the voluntary part actually manipulating the elements, right? Though it is an interesting question. What happens if the element is unconscious? For instance, the smell of dill. That’s a good one. I’ll have to think about that.
Carolyn: Yeah. Okay.
Jim: But if someone tells me to look over there at what the dog is doing, the dog is sort of vaguely in my map, but my wife’s really into our dog. She says, “Oh, look what Riley’s doing.” And then I go, “Okay, yeah.” In which case, that’s a classic example of mental control changing, voluntarily changing my locus of attention. But it’s a good question, what happens if the motivation is towards something that’s not currently in the global workspace? I have to think about that a little bit.
Carolyn: And then another kind of one that I’m curious about, another aspect of your view, which is that this idea of there being one item in attention and then having the fast switching, I think that that might be able to handle work by people like… So Liz Spokey’s dissertation work was on the capacity to have a split attention that was really controversial in the ’70s and ’80s, whether you could split attention or not, and I think you could use the fast moving attention to argue. It’s not truly split across two things. It’s moving quickly from one to another. And she addresses that actually in her dissertation work. But there’s this more recent work by George Alvarez at Harvard, for example, on tracking, your ability to track a number of items at once. And so four seems like it consistently in his work, it’s like you’re able to track four items using your attention. How do you deal with stuff like that? Do you try to treat those four items as one item? What do you like to do with that kind of work?
Jim: Yeah, let me talk about the first one first, which I did do a fair bit of reading. I will say that most of my reading was a few years ago, so I’m not up on the most recent research, but there was, as you pointed out, lots of laboratory research that confirmed that in general, looking at four lights and then pressing the button when one turns green that you’re actually time-sharing. When you add a fourth button, the speed goes down by one third approximately. So you’re kind of hopping back and forth at a relatively rapid rate to see if one of them’s turned red. And so that it does support the model of a single nexus of attention that is moving rapidly. And there’s quite a lot of laboratory research for that demonstrating that it is time-sharing essentially, and degrades exactly as you would think it would if it was indeed the time-sharing system.
Now, in terms of tracking motion, let me think about that. I would suggest that that is probably not actually in the conscious frame, but in the perceptual stack, because we’re doing a lot of processing in the perceptual stack. The famous example is a major league baseball player confronting a fastball pitcher cannot consciously process the pitch and swing the bat. It turns out that there is a more primitive cutoff in the visual stack that can send the… Get the consciousness takes a minimum of 80 milliseconds approximately to go through the whole visual stack. But there’s a cutoff much earlier. That’s the same one that if someone throws a ball at your face, that you immediately react before you even knew you’ve reacted. And so I’d suggest that say tracking four moving objects is closer to that kind of perceptual processing than it is the conscious processing. Yeah. So I’d say that they’re in your conscious frame, but I would suggest probably are being processed in the perceptual stack, not in the conscious stack until, for whatever reason, you select one of them for attention.
Carolyn: Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting hypothesis. I also haven’t read that work for a while. One of the reasons I noticed the four number is because of course there’s this idea that there’s a limit. There are different numbers.
Jim: Working memory limits, et cetera.
Carolyn: Exactly. And so that would indicate that it is a conscious level limit, but that would be an interesting thing to look into. And then the other thing I wanted to bring up is this idea of learning. You mentioned that you have this idea that you don’t learn things that are not in this focus of attention. And of course that too has a long history of support that there’s obviously a close connection between attention and learning. But I was curious what you thought about work by people like Takeo Watanabe on perceptual learning, if you’re familiar with this.
So in Watanabe’s work, he and his lab and collaborators have demonstrated the possibility of task irrelevant perceptual learning. This happens when you have a background. So you’re doing a task and there’s a background that’s irrelevant to that task, and they found that there are changes to your sensitivities, your perceptual sensitivities, which is a form of learning, arguably, even when that could distract you from the main task. So even when they tell you don’t do that, even when it could distract you from the task, your brain still seems like it picks up on regularities in the background and adapts to them making you better at being responsive to those regularities for future tasks. And I was wondering what you thought about stuff like that.
Jim: That’s an interesting example. I would put that in… When I talk about learning, I’m talking about sort of the classical learning modalities that we explain-
Carolyn: More like semantic learning.
Jim: Or procedural learning or conditional learning, et cetera. Skinnerian conditioning, operant conditioning. So again, I would come back and say, because we also know there is another kind of learning, which is perceptual learning, which is basic, again, happening in the visual stack before you get the consciousness and all kinds of interesting things. The more we study it, the more we understand that a non-trivial amount of our learning is actually happening in the perceptual stack, including probably things like it’s interacting with our object store as well. But is that a mouse or is that a gray piece of fuzz on the rug? Some of that is up higher in the temporal lobe, and some of it is in the upper levels of the visual stack. So I’d suggest that… Interesting question. I’ll go out and look, read the research on this, that the thing you just described would no reason it could not be learned perceptually, but not through the classic laboratory type learning experiments, which are, I suspect are a quite different mechanism.
Carolyn: Yeah, there’s some really interesting work there. But one of the things that I found the most interesting from that, from all those papers is on how you get a peak of perceptual learning when it seems like it’s out of the range of attention, but still in the range of consciousness. But what I mean by that is out of the range of suppressive attention, so you have these different thresholds, but when it’s above the conscious threshold, but below the recognition threshold, you’re able to notice it. That’s where you get the peak of this learning. So it seems like because you haven’t noticed it, you’re not able to suppress it, even though it’s task irrelevant, but you’re still aware enough of it that it’s changing your actual core text. Anyhow, so that’s some kind of interesting promising work from…
Jim: That’s interesting. I wonder, I would contrast that with the famous basketball and gorilla man that’s been…
Carolyn: Yeah. Right.
Jim: Where you’re counting number of times the ball goes back and forth and a guy in a gorilla suit walks right through the middle of it. You don’t notice it at all.
Carolyn: That’s right.
Jim: Yeah. Does it leave some trace on your cortex? Probably. Again, I always try to remind people, all of our theorizing is the map, not the territory. And the territory is always more complicated than the map. So when we say exactly one thing in attention, it’s not exactly one. It’s sort of one. We talk about all the classical learning modalities are closely associated with attention. It’s probably not a hundred percent true, but it’s generally true, and it’s very easy for theorists to mistake the map for the territory. And of course, that’s also an easy way to say, “Well, it’s an exception.”
Carolyn: Yeah, no, it’s so tricky though to figure out when are we talking about this sort of exception, exception to the rule, and when are we talking about something that really should be considered a violation of the rule? We should change the rule. It’s so tricky.
Jim: Yeah. It’s a classic scientific question as basically go back to Kuhn when the anomalies start to build up on the current paradigm. At some point you go, “Well, they’re just exceptions around the edges.” But at some point you have to say, “Wait a minute, the paradigm’s got to be wrong. Time for a new paradigm.”
Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, sorry, that was a little bit of a detour, but I was just curious.
Jim: No, it was good. I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed a lot. So I’m going to do another detour, which gets sprinkled through your book here and there, but I thought it would be useful to do upfront. Because I just found it so interesting was your framework for understanding attention and agency around fixed, formed, and fluid interests.
Carolyn: Yeah.
Jim: … formed and fluid interests.
Carolyn: Yeah.
Jim: I’ve seen other things vaguely. I’ve never saw it quite done that way, and I really liked it.
Carolyn: Oh, I’m so glad. I’ll tell you a little bit about why that was important to me to work out. My notion of attention is directed by a subject, depends on an understanding of what the subject could be, and my explanation of what the subject is has to do with interests. I see the subject as the collection of all of our interests. And so, as might be obvious, I need to have an understanding of what an interest could be in order to make sense of a subject. So my understanding of attention depends on the subject, and my understanding of subject depends on interests, so I’ve played around with what exactly an interest is. And in considering that, I’ve noted that attention can be driven by pretty wide range of things. It can be driven by things you were describing as in the perceptual stack. I don’t use that language, but I think I understand what you’re talking about.
And that could be things like whether something’s red versus blue, that we are more responsive to red things than blue things. That seems like a very low level response. And by low level, I just mean more biological, something that’s innate or we’re born with, I mean. So we have things like that, but then we also have things that direct attention like philosophy. So if I’m at a bookstore, I’m going to be more likely to be interested in the philosophy books than the, I don’t know, history books just because I’m more interested in philosophy. So that doesn’t seem like that was something I was born with, right? So there’s a wide range of things that can influence attention. And so, I knew that interests would have to be able to cover that wide range.
And what I found is that when people have talked about interests, they’ve sometimes talked about them as just preferences, these very weak things that come and go. That would be closer to this fluid interest idea. It’s something that comes and goes. It depends on you to keep it alive, but they also talk about them as biological interests, things that have to do with our species and survival, things that make a difference to evolution and survival. There are not very many people who have tried to link those two together in a kind of continuity, and so that’s one of the things that was important to me is to try to make sense of how we could have that wide range of things directing attention. And so, to make sense of that, I formulated three types. And like you said before, it’s messy. Things don’t necessarily fit in perfectly to these three types, but there’s at least three kinds of things that can direct attention, and fixed things would be those things that you’re born with, the biological things that are difficult for us to change.
Jim: Yeah. I use an example fairly regularly that would fall into your fixed classic class perfectly. You could be paying as much attention do you want as to whatever you’re doing, playing ping pong, thinking through a logical proof, writing a computer program, but if somebody sets off a firecracker five feet behind your head, your attention is immediately… Your high vigilance immediately grabbed by that. And no doubt that is a… You can’t condition yourself away from, I suppose maybe you could if you have a thousand firecrackers set up, but extremely difficult to condition yourself not to immediately react to a loud noise nearby.
Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah, nice. So yeah, when they’ve done work to try to figure out whether attention is ever automatic, whether it can be really grabbed in a way that you can’t control at all, the one type of stimulus that they have not been able to rule out as automatic are sudden onset stimuli, things that rush onto your visual space. Those-
Jim: Yeah, the ball thrown at your face is a classic [inaudible 00:27:59]
Carolyn: Yeah. They very reliably capture attention. That’s right. Yeah. So yeah.
Jim: It may well be-
Carolyn: Fixed interest.
Jim: … pre-consciously even. I’d argue that some of that could be pre-conscious, especially in the visuals thing where there is this more primitive early circuit that comes through the thalamus before it goes through all of the whole visual stack and then can trigger a reaction. It’s like [inaudible 00:28:21] hypothesis is that a lot of that’s due to the angle. How big of an angle of your vision does it subtend, right? So if it’s big and far away, it’s not going to subtend much. If it’s tiny and close, it’s a gnat near your nose, that doesn’t fire this up. But if it’s a wedge like that, irrespective of the distance, and it’s moving rapidly, then it fires that circuit.
Carolyn: Yeah. No, that makes sense. I mean, even though in laboratory settings, that is what they find, that sudden onset stimuli reliably capture attention, I think there are conditions in which it seems that does not happen, and one condition is weapon presentation. So they have these really interesting studies of both police officers and military personnel. When they’re presented with a weapon, they have pretty reliable changes to their experience, things like tunnel vision, noise dampening, temporal changes, that at least when I’ve talked to people who have had these kinds of experiences, things that would normally capture attention do not. Things like being stabbed don’t capture their attention. They’re focused on something else, and they’re focused very much on something else, so it might be surprising. How could that ever happen? But even sometimes when people are playing video games, they get so locked in. You could be doing something right in front of their face, and they’re still completely locked in, so I think the laboratory just might not be interesting enough. You know?
Jim: Yeah, try the firecracker test, right?
Carolyn: Yeah, I don’t know. The firecracker is loud as well as sudden onset. But yeah, that would be a good question. In a situation like I described like a high stress, weapon presentation situation, in that situation, can you capture their attention with a firecracker or do they sometimes exclude it?
Jim: Yeah, I can imagine. This is where this idea of subconscious voting, unconscious voting is going on that the current vote is just so strong about the current situation that nothing can outvote it, even the firecracker. So the strength-
Carolyn: Yeah. But is that really subconscious? I mean, it’s task related at least, so conscious, unconscious, maybe that’s not as helpful of a division there. But minimally, it’s related to their current task. It’s not just their general set. They’re not going around the world doing that. It’s like this moment demands it.
Jim: Yeah. This is in your fluid range, I would argue.
Carolyn: Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Jim: I’ve been in a few confrontations. I grew up in a rough neighborhood. I’ve had guns pulled on me. I pulled a knife at least on somebody. I never pulled a gun on-
Carolyn: Wow. That’s a story that I didn’t expect to hear, but I’m excited.
Jim: Yeah. One of my brothers was a Marine and then a career in law enforcement officer, and we talked. My father was a cop and a Marine, so-
Carolyn: Wow. Okay.
Jim: … I’ve been in that context a lot. It absolutely is critical if you are a police officer or a soldier that you are able to, particularly a police officer because it’s more upfront and personal there, shooting from somebody from 300 yards away is very different, but getting into a sudden fray with not knowing a whole bunch of things, you have to be able to lock into that hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper state. It is a specific state, probably partially innate. Some people have the ability, some people don’t. But it’s also trained. That’s why they train cops for a couple of two, three months before they let them out on the street and simulate combat quite a lot.
Carolyn: Well, which one is trained though? Is it trained that you’re able to get a tunnel vision and lock in, or is it trained that you keep the broader perspective? Which one do you think of as better for that person? Because I could see both.
Jim: Yeah, I would say they’re both important because you need to be able lock in-
Carolyn: Take control. Yeah, the control and for being able to do either, I could see.
Jim: And let’s say, for instance, I suppose you’re in a confrontation on the street and one of the bystanders is screaming as they do. Your tunnel vision, if it’s going to be effective for dealing with the tactical situation, needs to… Normally, somebody screaming 10 feet from you is going to be a high salience, grab your attention, but you need to have somehow trained up or some combination of innate and trained up ability to stay in that very high vigilant state irrespective of what’s going on around you. Now, whether that would survive the firecracker three feet behind your head, I don’t know. But…
Carolyn: Yeah, it reminds me of there’s this really great paper on how it works to land aircraft onto aircraft carriers. It’s extremely-
Jim: That’s a very high focus thing, right?
Carolyn: Yeah, extremely high focus. Right. And one of the things that these two authors described, so these researchers went to an aircraft carrier and stayed on it for months to observe and to try to figure out when it goes wrong and when it goes right. And one of the things that they said is that when it goes right, each individual both has a very high-focus state and is able to keep in mind all of the other people that they depend on. And when they lose track of those contingencies, the fact that all of these other people are important, that’s when they make mistakes. And I thought that was really interesting, an interesting account of what they think, how they think it works because those two things are hard to do together, to both stay really focused and stay… Yeah.
Jim: So maybe in shorthand, you could say that one of the failure modes is over-focusing on the task.
Carolyn: Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, and forgetting that you have to pay attention to the tower or you have to pay attention… Yeah, exactly. Right.
Jim: It’s like when you’re driving. You could be very focused on driving, but if you’re not also bringing in the peripheral, “There’s somebody running a red light. Oh, shit.” Right?
Carolyn: Right. Exactly.
Jim: Yeah. So I-
Carolyn: Your example of a screaming person made me think of it because even if in normal situations, there’s not a person who you might need to change your setup basically because there’s this unusual situation on the side now, and if you’re not aware of that, if you’re not paying attention to that, that could be everything could fall apart, so very interesting.
Jim: Yeah, I like that. John Vervaeke has been on our show a few times, who’s a philosopher and a cognitive scientist. He talks about essentially the core capacity of cognition is relevance realization in real time. What is your relevant set of things in this case? And then, tuning that relevance realization is in some sense relatively close to what wisdom is thought to be. So you are a wise fighter pilot if you can maintain the correct tension between the central task and the other people. You have to watch the guy with the flag, and you have to make sure that some idiot hasn’t driven the fuel truck out right into your path.
There are cases of people bringing a plane down and going right into a fuel tank. I don’t think on a carrier. I think those guys are well enough trained, but it happens at civilian airports from time to time because they’re so focused, and I was a student pilot as well. So landing a plane, especially when you’re a rookie, it’s like an all consuming task. And they do warn you, “Get out of the task from time to time and make sure you haven’t missed something bigger in the picture-
Carolyn: Yeah, nice.
Jim: … like a truck right in the middle of the roadway. You might miss it,” right?
Carolyn: Wow. Unbelievable. That’s amazing.
Jim: Yeah. So the relevance… What is the right set of attentional and near attentional focuses to deal with a particular task?
Carolyn: Okay, so that lines us up well for the third type of interest. So I feel like we’ve done a decent job with fixed and fluid. Those are kind of obvious. We often talk about top-down, bottom-up, these dichotomies. But many people have challenged the top-down, bottom-up dichotomy in recent years, and one of those challenges is that there seems like there’s a lateral influence, and that’s really what the formed interests are. So we don’t just have some things that are given to us by biology and some things that are mere preferences or fluid. We also have some things that are over our lifetime, over our personal history we’ve developed as an interest. It’s not completely fluid. It’s not completely fixed. It’s in this in-between space. And an example I often give is my interest in dresses. And the reason I give that is because it’s not universal. I wasn’t born with it, but I did grow up in Texas in the ’80s and ’90s as a woman. And if you grow up in the Midwest, arguably your experience is going to push you in that direction. Yeah. So-
Jim: Did you have big hair though? I guess that was-
Carolyn: I wanted big hair. I did not have big hair. You always want the hair you don’t have. But yeah, I remember just loving these pictures of corkscrew curls that were so big in the ’80s. I wanted that, but I didn’t have it.
Jim: Interesting. Now, something I used to talk about what you call formed attention is how we relate to music. There’s, again, a fair bit of when you’re listening to music, you are paying attention at some level to the rhythm, and you’re making predictions about what’s going to come next, and you want to be surprised some but not surprised totally. And it turns out that the music that you listen to previously strongly conditions what your attention will be doing. If you hear a completely alien using a 12 or even better, one of these completely variable tonal music systems, your brain is going, “What the fuck is this?” Right? You’ve been formed to listen to western music. And if you’re a classical pianist, even more so than if you’re a random person listening to rock and roll on the radio.
And so that your brain for tracking music is highly conditioned, and there seems to be some vague amount of biological scaffolding, but the number of things that have been called music by different people around the world at different times is so incredibly variable that it’s now believed that a very large amount of that is cultural conditioning.
Carolyn: Yeah, that makes sense. Actually, I like that example a lot. It also makes me think of taste and comfort foods. I recently introduced some friends of mine to persimmons. They hadn’t had persimmons before. I have a persimmon tree, so I’m introducing everyone to this taste. I love that one of them said, “Well, I don’t know if I like it or not. It’s the first time I’ve had it. I’m still sort of processing it.” And I loved that reaction because well, it feels like a very healthy reaction to a completely new flavor, but it also sort of points in the direction you were describing that you can’t yet lock onto anything. It just feels so new that you don’t know what to lock onto. Whereas if it’s a familiar taste, you are like, “Yes, I know this.” I think [inaudible 00:39:50]
Jim: I like this or I don’t like this.
Carolyn: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I bet there’s something similar you could do with taste, although, of course, that’s a more difficult sense to describe.
Jim: And also more primitive, right? It goes back to the olfactory reptilian brain as opposed to audio, visual, and touch, which seem to be higher in the stack, more cortical.
Carolyn: Well, I don’t have a reptilian brain, but…
Jim: Yes, you do. We all do. We try to suppress it, but on certain occasions, it’ll come out.
Carolyn: Oh my.
Jim: Okay, so that’s good. Yeah. So I found that, and as far as I know, this is your creation, this fixed, formed, and fluid.
Carolyn: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Jim: I couldn’t find it anywhere else.
Carolyn: God, it’s my attempt to make sense of how we could… I guess maybe an additional thing that could be helpful here is the reason I’m talking about all three is not just to categorize them, but also to introduce the idea of how we could get from one to the other. So how can we get from these fluid interests to fixed interests? One of the things that I’m trying to do is explain the continuity in the account by explaining how one becomes the other. So the idea is that over evolutionary history, we get the fixed ones, but formed ones come from the fluid ones.
Jim: The things you have learned essentially.
Carolyn: Right, exactly. Yeah.
Jim: So the fluid is stuff that are just happening and maybe a little bit learned, but not heavily learned or not learned at all, but it’s totally a unique experience. And then, the formed stuff are the long-term learning. LTL has been laid down enough recognitions to produce some patterns in your brain when you see this so that there’s a partially conditioned response. And the fixed is hardwired, right?
Carolyn: Yeah, exactly. Over generations, you’re getting the fixed ones. That’s right.
Jim: Maybe an experiment one could do is in advance, categorize a number of stimuli as fixed, formed, or fluid, and then test how strong a distraction it takes to pull somebody off of one. And I’m going to put out as the hypothesis that it would be in the order fixed, formed, fluid, that if someone’s in a fluid state, it’s easier to distract them than it is in a formed state, which is easier to distract than a fixed state. Hey, graduate student out there, you got yourself a paper.
Carolyn: Done.
Jim: No need to quote me. I’m old and retired. I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit anymore, right? All right. Well, let’s move on to a more applied section, which I found quite interesting, which is your thinking about, I thought that’s very interesting, meditation, mind wandering, all those kind of things, and whether meditation is or is not controlling the mind, et cetera. So tell us about what you think about how both meditation and mind wandering kind of fit into your model.
Carolyn: Okay. Yeah, good question. So one of the reasons I chose those two applications is because they’re typically thought of as at either end of this extreme with mental control. That is meditation is normally thought of as being total mental control, that you have this total control of your mind by your mind. And then, mind wandering is you have no control of your mind, it’s just doing its own thing, and it’s like a failure of mental control. And so, this section is talking about that, but then also talking about challenges to those ideas. Both the idea that meditation can sometimes occur without control, so it sometimes might not be a form of mental control, and the idea that mind wandering could sometimes be an expression of mental control. The conclusion that I come to at the end of that section is that it’s not clear whether or not meditation can occur in the absence of control, but it is clear that mind wandering can be an expression of control.
So the mind wandering challenge is one that I accept, whereas the meditation, I’m a little bit more circumspect. The forms of meditation that people think of as being outside of control are like open awareness meditation. So there are many types of meditation, but a very common pair that are discussed are focused meditation like if you’re sitting and paying attention to your own breath, that would be focused meditation. Open awareness would be, you’re trying not to focus on anything in particular. You’re trying to be open to the things that are happening around you. Sometimes people talk about mindfulness in similar ways. You’re being in the present moment, letting things come up, and then not grabbing onto them and letting them pass away. And in descriptions of that, sometimes people say that they’re able to do that without attention, without control of any kind, that the whole point of it is to not control.
But it’s unclear if that really is a case of no control or whether it’s like a zoomed out control basically, or what you’re doing is you’re trying to control the experience as a whole rather than control any particular aspect within the experience. So to me, the jury’s out on that one, whether it’s truly no control at all or whether it’s zoomed out or minimal control or something like that. On the mind wandering one, there’s just this conflicting evidence about when we mind wander more. And people mind wander more when they’re bored, when they’re doing a very easy task. That seems like that’s evidence that they’re doing it on purpose because they’re bored, but they also mind wander more when I believe if they have drunk more alcohol is the case of that. Hopefully, I got that one right. But anyhow, there are all these situations in which people mind wander more when they have less control overall.
So that evidence is conflicting. And so, I talk about that in this section and about how it just seems like mind wandering has both settings. Sometimes our minds wander because as a kind of failure, but sometimes they wander because that’s the way that our control system works is to kind of come in and out of… I like to think of it through waves that it’s not… Control is not a constant state. It’s a kind of up and down state, and that’s just the way that it works biologically. So the fact that sometimes things are able to grab our attention is the normal way that attention works.
Jim: Yeah, I would put a slightly different frame on that.
Carolyn: Yeah. Okay. Let’s hear your frame.
Jim: As I’m hearing this, this is say, okay, this is interesting because I dabbled a little bit in meditation, not much, just enough to find out what it was, but mostly the breathing, try to keep the thoughts out of your head and shit-
Carolyn: Okay, the focus-
Jim: Yeah. And then I did the other, a little bit, so-called tantric meditation [inaudible 00:47:37] the person I heard it from where you’re trying to just take it all in and particularly the second. So let’s focus on the second one, the tantric open meditation and mind wandering. I’m going to suggest that perhaps both are manifestations of down-regulated prefrontal executive function control, and the control still-
Jim: … executive function control. And the control is still happening, but it’s happening through this unconscious voting mechanism. Your thoughts are not random. In fact, some of the best work I’ve ever done has been while mind wandering, right? And somehow there’s an unconscious guidance for the trajectory of the things that you’re pondering and something similar happens in this open meditation kind of thing. And the two come together for me in something I do regularly, not so much this year, but up till this year, I’m a deer hunter.
And a deer hunter goes out in the morning when it’s still dark, stumbles through the woods, goes to their deer stand, climbs 16 feet in the air, sits up there and tries to be as quiet as possible, absolutely nothing to do for hours. And at one level, your perceptual system is still processing sound and vision. But to your point about boredom, very quickly, your mind just goes off into all kinds of things. But they’re not chaotic. There is a sense of some sort to them. I’d say that when you’re in the best of those states, your executive function mind control per se isn’t going on. But this unconscious thing to thing to thing is happening in some ordered fashion. It’s not chaotic, it’s not crazy. It sort of makes sense in context. And that kind of thing is similar both to open-ended meditation and to classic mind wandering, at least so I have found.
Carolyn: Yeah, that makes sense. There’s actually a philosopher, Zach Irving, who has this, the way he describes mind wandering is that it’s unguided attention. And so if you think of guidance as you were putting it like prefrontal cortex or executive, then you could see mind wandering as… He still thinks of it as attention, it’s just not being directed. But yeah, I think another thing the listeners might be familiar with is in dreaming. In dreaming, typically prefrontal cortex is less active. We don’t have the dopaminergic chemicals. Those are being suppressed. So prefrontal cortex relies on those. So it’s less active and in dreaming too, it’s not fully logical, but there can be sequences that follow that make sense, associations that make sense in the dream.
Yeah. So there’s a kind of even our unconscious mind is not completely chaotic, completely unordered. It is more chaotic in our unconscious mind. But there are connections and associations and some sort of thing like logic. But yeah, I think that it is conducive for many people to creativity if you later are able to make use of the things that come out of that state. I don’t think of that state on its own as a creative state, but it can be a helpful state to reach a creative solution.
Jim: Particularly if you’re in an early stage, right?
Carolyn: Yeah, right.
Jim: When you’re saying something like, “Okay, what the hell is this thing I’m trying to think about?” Then later, again, this relevance, realization, keeping things intention. Then when you’re starting to think about, okay, now what do I do? Right? Then I like a combination if I can achieve it of mind wandering-ish, but some steering from executive function, “Wait a minute, Rutt, you’re getting off the track here,” back thinking about the problem. So it’s both open-ended and free, but with an executive function monitor to keep it from going off into not particularly productive space.
And then of course the opposite is when the executive function is really, really strong and that’s where you’re trying to actually create a technique or you’re writing software, you’re trying to solve a math problem, then the executive function is turned all the way up and basically every step is executive function is putting a pretty strong vote on not overwhelming, the firecracker goes off. I’m still going to stop thinking about the theorem, but executive function is driving that pretty intensely. And so sort of think of a rheostat of executive function from the low end being real mind wandering or real open meditation. And then all the way up being, solving, developing a proof of a math theorem or writing code that actually works.
Carolyn: So based on your own experiences, so you mentioned a down regulated prefrontal cortex or down regulated executive, but do you think that in your experiences of meditation, that what we’re talking about is sometimes the absence? Because down regulated, I’m assuming you just mean a little bit. It could be less, but there-
Jim: It could be a lot less. It could be a lot less.
Carolyn: Yeah.
Jim: Probably. Good. I don’t know.
Carolyn: Yeah, I’m just curious. I’m just curious.
Jim: That’s basically interesting to look at. I’ll bet the answer is executive functions always functioning at some level. It would be pretty unsafe for an animal to turn off its executive function entirely.
Carolyn: But we do lots of unsafe things.
Jim: That is true. That is true. But in the Rutt model, I would just say that the vote of the executive function is reduced very substantially. The neurons, we look at the MRI study, fMRI studies, and see how the activity of the executive function changes. I’ll suspect it comes down regulated some, but probably less than we think. Again, hypothesis, it could easily be wrong, because there’s some change in the voting mechanism as well that says, “I’ll ignore that man up there and that homunculus up there in the executive function control room and don’t pay too much attention to him right now. We don’t want to hear his shit.” But he may still be chattering, but just not quite as loud as normal and his volume knob has been turned down by whatever it is that’s controlling the actual attention mechanism.
Carolyn: So here’s a division that I’ve used in another paper, I don’t think one of the ones that you looked at. I think this might help to think about to kind of interrogate this a little further. So one of the ways of thinking about the prefrontal cortex is that there’s a difference between medial and lateral activity in prefrontal and don’t worry if the story is actually true because the question doesn’t depend on that being true. But you could also think of the executive as having two roles with tasks. One is to maintain the task and one is to switch tasks to determine which is the better task and to switch to whichever is the best. And in my story of things, the lateral prefrontal has more of a switching activity and the medial is more about the maintaining the task activity. So vigilance, for example, would depend on medial.
And one of the things that I’ve talked about in work with Alex Dayer is this phenomenon of strategic automaticity. And sometimes, especially when we’re doing a very skilled task, we were talking about ping pong earlier, you might intentionally enter a state where you’re not open to switching. You might even be suppressing the lateral prefrontal, the switching part of your mind, but you may nonetheless have hyperactive the kind of medial prefrontal, this kind of maintaining the task.
In fact, you might be using the medial prefrontal or the maintaining part of your mind in order to suppress the switching part. That might be the part that’s way turned up. It’s like we’re really maintaining this at the expense of any other task that might come along in order so that we can be whatever it is, either totally in this skilled environment, this automatic skilled environment, or maybe in a completely we want to stay attuned to this creative state or this meditative state. So I’m just curious if when you’re in your experience with this kind of open forms of meditation, do you think that this other type of executive activity could be turned up like I really want to stay in this state? Or do you think that both of them are getting turned down?
Jim: That’s a good question and certainly at sort of the micro level, it appears that the longer you’re paying attention to one thing, the less your brain wants to continue to pay attention to. They’re opponent processes. It gives you attention, but the longer that you dwell on one thing, the harder it is to stay on it. The attention switching vote changes to be biased towards change after two or three seconds at the longest. So I think that’s one thing to consider that the mechanism itself is doing some of that which makes it hard to stay focused for very long. And it also provides the granularity for our ongoing consciousness that things are changing at a relatively rapid rate. And so I think about the open-ended conscious meditation, maybe not, maybe, but I would say what certainly is when you’re doing the focus on your breathing, at least for me, I don’t have enough experience. They tell me they’re great meditators. It just happened.
Carolyn: Yes, I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that.
Jim: But for baby me who has maybe 40 days worth of meditation experience, there’s a lot of suppressing going on to keep me from not thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch or when does my car need to oil change next or whatever. And so somehow keeping yourself in that clean blank slate room that you can get yourself into, and I could do it for 10 or 20 minutes, that’s about my limit. But supposedly the great meditators could do it for hours. I go, “Okay, good for them.” Their asses probably get pretty sore too from just sitting there.
Carolyn: Well, hopefully it doesn’t distract them.
Jim: If they’re good enough, probably doesn’t. So we can combine all these things and say perhaps there is some total speculation, people, do not take this one to the bank is that if as you meditate more this suppressive side is, that the medial was the suppressive, actually gets learned in the same way ping pong or tennis gets learned so that it becomes automatized and whatever the circuits are that do that suppression no longer require much executive function if you can get yourself into the state. In the same way-
Carolyn: [inaudible 00:59:14] lot of philosophers who have tried to push that idea of they call automatic attention. Wayne Wu, Ellen Fridlund, Barbara Montero, they’ve argued that sometimes attention can be automatized in that way. Actually, I’m just going to say Ellen Fridlund and Wayne Wu, I’m not sure if Barbara Montero made that point now that I’m thinking about it.
Jim: I’m going to have to track those down. That’s very interesting to me. And think about in terms of improving or at least changing who you are as a person on automatizing attentional algorithms could be hugely powerful.
Carolyn: It does seem like it would be powerful and it does make sense that attention could be a skill like anything else.
Jim: Like the example you gave of the life, which I love, I’m going to be pondering this one is the fighter pilot landing on the carrier who also has to super focused on getting that plane down, but also has to have the right amount of attention on all the other things that are going around.
Carolyn: I love that example too, and I’m not sure if I agree, I’m just sitting with it because it’s such an interesting way of framing it. Yeah.
Jim: It really is. I’m going to ponder that one a bit too. All right, let’s move on to the next topic you talked about in your book, which is to some sense, a disorder of attention, which is ADHD, which is giving a lot of press and certainly a lot of Facebook ads these days. “Do you have ADHD? What kind of ADHD do you have?” And maybe it’s just my style, it must say, “Oh yeah, he’s got ADHD.”
Carolyn: Yeah, yeah. There is some kind of correspondence with ways of being online and ADHD. So they have been able using Twitter activity to predict whether someone has ADHD just through their patterns of using Twitter. So it may be that they’re able to identify.
Jim: The algorithm has said, right?
Carolyn: Yeah, that’s right.
Jim: When I read the DSM and such about ADHD, it doesn’t sound like me much at all, but maybe a little bit. I can go chaser rabbit holey things and what have, but anyway, I can tell you your story about how ADHD is a lens into these phenomena of attention and mental control.
Carolyn: Yeah, well, one of the things that I talk about in that book is something that I have found so fascinating about ADHD, which is this phenomenon of hyperfocus. As just background step here, there has been an effort to reframe disability and mental disorder in terms of not only what is lost, we often like to think of what is normal and then pose anything that’s not normal as a loss. But of course you don’t have to think that way. You could think of it in terms of it being just divergent, just different.
Jim: Yeah, the neurodiversity conversation.
Carolyn: Exactly. Yeah. So you’re totally familiar with that. I think that’s an important background point here. And the reason that I’m bringing that up is that in ADHD, it’s literally called a disorder, and you can see it that way. There are things that feel disordered about it like that in the school setting that it might be more difficult for somebody with ADHD to focus on what the teacher wants them to focus on because they find it difficult to control the focus of attention when it’s not something that’s intrinsically motivating to them.
When it is motivating to them, then motivation intersects with the disorder. So if it’s something that’s interesting to them that they don’t struggle in the same way, but if it’s not interesting to them, then they struggle more than normal children with directing their attention. Especially when we’re talking about the inattention subtype of ADHD, there are different subtypes, so the hyperactive subtype may not have these problems of focusing attention, but I’m assuming we’re talking about the inattentive one, and you really see this with hyperfocus because people with ADHD have a greater capacity for hyperfocus this ability to stay focused on something that is interesting to them for very long periods. And you could see that as a shorter, but you could also see that as a gift that they have.
Jim: Yeah, it’s a superpower.
Carolyn: Yeah, it seems like their kind of superpower. So this inability to move attention easily onto what other people want comes along with this ability to keep attention on the things that they do want. And I think that that helps to see why there is this discussion or debate about how to think about these diagnoses because they have multiple sides to them, but in any case, it’s in our normal social world. Those with ADHD do struggle with the standard environment, especially the educational environments, even if we think of them as having these other gifts, like the hyperfocus gift. And you can see hyperfocus as having its own downsides. And I think I mentioned this in the book, you might fail to drink water for 12 hours because you’re coding. I’ve done that. That’s not good for you to not drink water for 12 hours. So yeah, there’s downsides to hyperfocus.
Jim: Indeed. And I suspect, and again, let’s just think about this a little bit out loud, it may have something to do with the efficacy and of the interaction between the attentional mechanism and executive function, right? When I read, somebody said, “You might have ADHD,” and it wasn’t just Facebook. I read up on it. Wait a minute. I was always a very good student and I could learn even the most boring shit.
And I thought about it for a little bit and I said, “Well, I just made myself do it, right?” I much, much more preferred when I was 11 years old to go play one of my Avalon Hill war games with my best friend. But hey, I’m in math class. I got to listen to the stupid shit the teacher says, and I will pay enough attention to get an A on the test. All right, I know how to do that. It struck me that at least for the classic attention deficit side of ADHD, that may be a failure of, or I’m sure failure is not the right word, but the executive function isn’t as powerful as it might be for other people in making their attention do what they want it to do.
Carolyn: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the inattention subtype, the control of the focus of attention is what’s difficult when they’re not intrinsically motivated. Yeah, moving that around and it’s heterogeneous, there are different subtypes and people can be on a spectrum with the different aspects of the disorder. And it’s worth saying that you may not be able to self-diagnose, it’s something that you might require clinical expertise to tell whether you are or not on the spectrum, and it may not be useful to you anyhow. If you’re perfectly functional in your everyday life, it might not be something that matters. You might not need to. I’m not just saying you, Jim, I’m saying people listening who are wondering about themselves. You don’t necessarily need to know how other people categorize you, how the government categorizes you, how healthcare categorizes you. Sometimes it’s not helpful.
Jim: Yeah, that was my reaction. My life has unfolded really well, mostly of course, we always have our bounces in the world. So whatever my tunings are, I like them. I don’t want to sit there and decompose them. I think they’re just right.
Carolyn: Yeah. But yeah, if you’re concerned about it, I think it makes sense to seek medical care, of course. But just the fact that there is some kind of diagnosis doesn’t mean you have to know whether or not it applies to you. But anyhow, this issue of the disorder, one of the things that they’ve found is that for a good percentage of people who are diagnosed with the inattentive subtype that they have genetic commonality with respect to dopamine. And for a while, they were focusing on dopamine transmission genes. I can’t remember the exact gene or exactly what it does. But anyhow, it has to do with your ability to process dopamine.
And like we said, executive function, prefrontal function depends heavily on dopamine. Your ability to switch from one task or another depends on dopamine. Your ability to stay on one task or another depends on dopamine. And so if you have irregular dopamine transmission, then that can affect that in both of these directions, both for you can have increased. Hyperfocus can be explained through this as well as difficulty switching can be explained through this. So there is also a biological explanation. That doesn’t mean that everyone a diagnosis of ADHD has the exact same genes or the same genetic difference. It’s just that there is a large subset of people with especially that subtype that they have found that to be true of.
Jim: Yeah, of course. One thing we know about dopamine, it’s also close. The dopamine breadcrumb is closely related to goal attainment and staying on path to your goal because if your brain is operating properly, each step towards your goal should give you a little dab of dopamine to keep you going. But then when you get to your goal, then you get the big one that then wraps the whole thing. And in fact, another part of my theory of consciousness is that our episodic memories are actually built of subparts linked by dopamine and also perceptual discontinuities. Like when you walk from one room to another, that perceptual discontinuity actually segments a subpart of your epistemic memory. Episodic memory, don’t say epistemic, episodic memory. And little teeny bits of dopamine come along, “Oh, I made it from one room to another.” You’re probably not even conscious of it. But then they get to my car, I get a bigger payoff and it wraps the whole thing into a full episode and stores it.
Carolyn: I don’t know about episodic memory and dopamine. I should look that up and see. Do you know anything about hippocampus and dopamine? Does hippocampus rely on dopamine as well?
Jim: I do not know. I do not know.
Carolyn: I don’t neither. Yeah, that would be interesting.
Jim: I mean, interesting to know because certainly the first stages of the consolidation of episodic memories do appear to happen in the hippocampus, and then they’re consolidated. Either they’re forgotten, which a lot of them are, or they’re consolidated to cortex over a couple of [inaudible 01:10:32].
Carolyn: Yeah, totally. I could see the early stages depending on frontal activity and so on dopamine indirectly. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a more direct.
Jim: Well, I’m going to look that one up. That’s actually a very interesting question. All right, well, let’s get on to our probably last topic, which as a complexitarian obviously appealed to me, which is when you’re trying to make sense of all this, you come up with a theory of the emergence of control. Tell us what you think about that.
Carolyn: Yeah. Well, I was hoping we would talk about this because I figured you would have a lot to say and I’m really curious about your take on it. So one of the things that I do that’s pretty controversial is argue for the existence of subject or self. And my argument for the subject is that it’s emergent, but it’s also natural. So it’s based in the natural world, the term emergence people usually associate with and non-scientific approaches or unscientific approaches. So the term emergence was really popular over 100 years ago to talk in terms of something that was… This is the way philosophers talk about it. I don’t know if your audience is going to like this, but we use this language of necessity and sufficiency. So some things are necessary for other things and some things are sufficient for other things. We love these terms of philosophy. So basically the term-
Carolyn: We love these terms in philosophy. Basically the original term emergence had to do with things that did not have relationships of necessity or sufficiency with their parts. The parts of this emergent phenomenon were neither necessary nor sufficient for it. And the problem with that is that then it’s a puzzle to explain how they’re connected at all. That fell out of fashion. That was seen as unscientific. It had some of the same problems that Cartesian dualism had, the interaction problems. Well, how, if there’s no connection between the parts and the whole, no logical connection, then how do they interact? Just like how do you explain the interaction between the mind and body and Cartesian dualism?
That fell out of fashion, but contextual emergence, which I rely on, is a very different kind of beast. In between that old version of emergence and this newer versions of emergence, people have been thinking about other ways of explaining the connection between these parts and the emergent holes. And one that’s very popular at places like Santa Fe Institute is called, by some philosophers, weak emergence. And that’s where you have local interactions doing something we call self-organization. You get patterns that build up based on certain types of local interactions. But those patterns are merely descriptive. They’re like mathematical constants.
We might not be able to predict them exactly from what we know about the local activity, but nonetheless they just come down to just local activity. They’re completely reductive metaphysically. That’s another term philosophers like. Within what exists, the things that exist are the little things in our local interactions, and then we just describe them at this global level. We call that weak emergence because it doesn’t give you very much metaphysically. It’s weak in terms of the metaphysics. And then strong emergence, as I described before, is like you have this totally new thing in the metaphysics. It doesn’t have very much connection to the parts. It has its own status totally apart from the parts.
In between are couple of forms, including the kind that I’m interested in. Philosophers have been for decades interested in something called supervenience where the parts are sufficient but not necessary for the emergence. Philosophers have put a lot of work into understanding that. I accept that as a form of emergence, but I’m interested in this other form called contextual emergence where the parts are necessary but not sufficient. And they’re not sufficient because there’s a context that’s also required to bring about the emergent phenomenon.
And what I argue in my work is that that’s a way of understanding the emergence of the subject. The subject is emergent from brain activity. You get basically the whole collection of your interests, those fixed formed and fluid interests, and that whole collection comes together in a specific context. Then that collection is able to constrain itself, constrain individual interests to exert control over the collection. That would be a circular causation, which many philosophers object to, a downward or circular causation if it weren’t for the context playing a role. But because the context is part of the equation, then it’s not a fully circular causation. It’s the parts of the whole, the interests plus this context that make it possible for the whole to control which of its interests is dominant.
And that’s what I think is happening in attention. You’re prioritizing which interests gets to win out. When there’s a fight between two interests, it’s not just the strength of those individual interests that determine which one wins in my account, it’s also the entire set, entire collection of all of those interests that determines which one wins. And so in that sense, mine is an emergence-based account. The subject is the full collection of interests with this power over its own interests. That was a long-winded answer.
Jim: That was good, though. This is a very important, a very important topic. And of course it’s very close to the core of the work we do at the Santa Fe Institute.
Carolyn: Yeah, I know. Yeah.
Jim: And I won’t speak for the other people at Santa Fe Institute. There’s people there who would agree with me and there are people that disagree with me and people in the complexity space that agree and disagree. But my position is that emergence is absolutely real and natural; no magic involved. And it will never violate physical law. And so wait a minute, you go, “Wait a minute here. Is everything deterministic?” And I go, “No, because the level of emergence is real.”
And then people say that there is no downward causation. I go, “I could refute that in a second. If you took me and put me in a blender and poured all the ingredients into a 55 gallon drum, the probability that it goes down to the local liquor store, those pile of chemicals go down to the liquor store and buy a six-pack of beer is exactly zero.” On the other hand, if at the level of mind, mind is real, in the level of mind I say, “I want a six-pack of beer,” that thought is real. It’s part of what you describe as this… I call it the dance. And I make the distinction that complexity is about understanding that the dance is at least as important as the dancers. And so this dance in my mind produces the thought, the idea, the concept. Jim, go down to the store and buy a six-pack of beer. All these atoms that normally would have no reason to go down to the liquor store, let alone move the mouth and pull the money out of the wallet, do so. That is absolutely clearly downward causation. And I don’t know how anybody could deny that that is not downward causation.
Carolyn: Here’s one thing that people who are more interested… It’s really tricky in this space not to get caught up in straw men because there are not very many people who take the really extreme positions. I guess that’s good that there’s lots of people who are sophisticated and complex thinkers out there, but on this point of… I don’t think that there are very many people who would accept that if you blended up Jim Rutt that you’ve preserved all of the local interactions. I think what they would want to say is that to have the micro-physical reproduced, you have to have not just the micro-physical elements like the micro-physical parts, but also the local interactions between those, the relations. You want to have is this part next to this part? I think to have a real test of their view, you’d want to preserve those better. And I think that makes it more challenging to respond, actually.
Jim: Yeah, let me go onto that. Of course it’s correct, right?
Carolyn: Yeah.
Jim: And again, my hypothesis about what distinguishes emergence is that there’s a tremendous amount of reality in the pattern, in the dance, in the dynamics. I stole this from somebody. I wish I could remember who I stole it from. But it’s so good. A simple tool to distinguish the complicated from the complex is like say a car engine is complicated, but it’s not complex. A biological cell is complex. Is something that’s complicated you can take apart, put it back together again and it will still work. A complex thing, in most cases you can’t take it apart, put it back together again and have them still work the same way.
And why is that? Because so much of the reality is in the dynamics. It’s not in the fixed. That’s your objection to, okay, the blended gym isn’t really Jim because it doesn’t have all these loops and loops within loops within loops. There’s all kinds of cyclical things going on in the cells, then the cells are cyclical with each other in the systems. The respiration is a series of homeostatic cycles that autopoetically… I don’t quite like autopoiesis, but homeostasically self-maintain and self-regulate themselves. All those things are the results of 13.5 billion years of emergences starting with the emergence of atoms from the fog and the long period where stars were the big emergent thing. And then somehow life got started three and a half or 4 billion years ago, and it has its own stack of emergences.
And so my take is it’s really quite naive, which is all those emergences happened and they’re real. And the result is that to the degree you preserved all that stack of emergencies so the Jim can think about going down and getting a six-pack, then that does produce downward causation on the atoms. And the atoms do not break the law of physics when they go to the store, a 7-11 and buy a six-pack of beer. Every single motion is still constrained by the law of physics, but it is driven by this higher level emergent concept. And it’s interesting that that is so hard for so many people to get their heads around and that.
Carolyn: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people, they have this kind of methodological commitment to analyticity. They hope for a future in which we will able to explain these things mechanistically through the parts. They want to be able to break it down to parts. And if what you’re saying is that’s not the case necessarily, that won’t be possible, I think that’s just really frustrating to that mindset.
Jim: I call it naive Newtonianism. Remember Laplace who said, “Yeah, give me the motion and the positions of all the atoms in the universe and I can predict all of history.” Right?
Carolyn: Right. Yeah, yeah.
Jim: Well, it turns out he’s probably wrong for all kinds of crazy reasons. But even if he were right, as it turns out, we’ve been able to demonstrate that the computational load would be so ridiculous that even if you turn the whole universe into a computer, you still couldn’t predict just the atoms in my body, the inherent… The layman’s terms of complexity is so high in our real universe that almost nothing can actually be analytically derived from top to bottom. They try to explain why a squirrel runs around the ground, picks up an acorn from quantum physics. [inaudible 01:23:00] there, dude. I don’t care how much computation you have, you will never be able to move up through all those stacks of causation and emergence to figure out why and how the squirrel went and jumped off the tree and went and picked up an acorn.
Carolyn: Can I ask you a question? Because a lot of your examples are living ones. You use the cell. I agree with you. I am also really captivated by the living examples. We have autopoiesis as an explanation. We have different explanations. We don’t know exactly how the cell boundary comes about. That’s still open territory in terms of is it emergence or is it not? And I also agree with you that I’m more interested in emergence explanations for those things, but I’m curious if you also… Some physicists, for example, have wanted to use the language of emergence for non-living examples and lots of thermodynamic examples, for example. Are you also interested in… Yeah, tell me more about where do you think… Yeah.
Jim: Oh, absolutely. There’s all kinds of examples of emergent results where the dynamics are what’s actually in play. One of the strongest ones, think about the long arc of history, is stars. If you took a bunch of hydrogen gas and saw it floating around in space, the idea that it would turn into this very crazy dynamic thing called a star which evolves through a lifespan and changes its [inaudible 01:24:33], there’s no way you’d be able to predict that. The classic example that the actual result was not predictable… What the hell’s going on here? It says I can’t see my own video. I don’t know why, but that’s all right. Let me try turning my camera on and off. Sometimes that works. I’m locked. Can you see my video? My-
Carolyn: I can, but you’re frozen.
Jim: Oh. Don’t worry about it. A star-
Carolyn: You’re gesticulating.
Jim: Yeah, I see. It’s like, ah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A star is a classic example of a physical non-biological emergence; so is a river, actually. A river has been the result of all kinds of changes that have occurred that you can mathematically describe, though not with sufficient position to actually say what the river’s going to do next. And you end up with this river from water landing on the land, and it comes trickling down, and then it gets concentrated and concentrated. And over time, it erodes its riverbed, et cetera. And then they’re the more classic examples that you read about in the books on emergence of the physical systems. You put some oil in a pan, I forget what the name of it is, it produces these hexagonal patterns. Those are emergences.
Carolyn: Yeah, Bénard cells.
Jim: Yeah, Bénard cells. A hurricane is an emergence. It has coherence, it has a shape, and then it comes into being and it goes out of being. And guess what. That’s just like us. We have our homeostasis, and then one day our homeostasis stops and then we’re just a pile of atoms again.
Carolyn: Okay, but all of those examples you use the language of predictability, and predictability could still, in the framework I was introducing earlier, you could still see that as an epistemic or weak form of emergence. That, yes, we can’t predict it, our knowledge systems or access to it, something like that might be limited. But you might still think that ultimately in what exists, all that we really need to explain what exists here are the parts of the hurricane and the local interactions between those parts. We don’t need anything more. There’s no additional hurricane. This doesn’t sound like a question, but I do intend this as a question. Is there anything more to the hurricane, in your view, a new causal power at the level of the hurricane that goes beyond the causal power of the parts in their local interactions?
Jim: Oh, sure. For instance, a hurricane, why does it have a wall and a eye? There’s a whole series of very complex fluid dynamics that have to do with how stuff comes out of the warm water and rises and produces this emergent shape of whirling winds around a calm hole. And a wall is produced around the wall, which would be unpredictable from the local interactions of the molecules of the air. It is a thing itself.
Carolyn: But is it just a pretty thing? Is it just something that you see?
Jim: It’s very real. When the eye of a hurricane hits your condo in Miami, you’ll know it’s real.
Carolyn: Yeah, I think I struggle with that a little bit in some of those cases and seeing the argument for there being an additional thing. In the biological case, I see it more strongly. But yeah, that’s interesting.
Jim: Yeah, maybe I’ve just been looking at this stuff for so long. I would recommend you take a look at Harold Morowitz’s book called Emergence. He lays out, I think it’s 28 levels of emergence from the Big Bang to-
Carolyn: Oh, gosh. Yeah. Nice.
Jim: And they’re nested. Or they’re not nested everywhere. But if you get his view of things, then you can see the continuity from the emergence of atoms from the primordial fog all the way up to let’s say financial derivatives. They are a very far out emergent effect that are kept together by a system called the market, which is in some kind of dynamic meta stable, quasi equilibrium, et cetera. And they’re all the-
Carolyn: Is the idea that you’re providing or that he was providing that emergence itself can be stronger or weaker and emergence itself in its early stages was weaker?
Jim: He actually doesn’t talk about weakness or strength, he just says there’s-
Carolyn: Yeah, that’s an really interesting idea. Maybe living systems are a stronger form of emergence, but that might be only a degree difference from these weaker forms that you see in thermodynamic systems. I hadn’t heard that before, so I was just curious.
Jim: Yeah, he basically talks about pruning rules, that what happens at emergence is a bunch of things are ruled out. The fog of energy before it turns into matter has more degrees of freedom. And once it turns into matter… And again, think of the atoms in your cell, they can no longer kind of diffuse out into the water. They’re stuck inside this membrane and now they’re stuck in these biochemical loops, and so they’re constrained. And he makes a pretty good case that each level of emergence is the result of pruning rules which are “discovered,” quote, unquote, as the universe is unfolded. And that’s why the classic way we talk about is you can’t predict them because you don’t know about what pruning rules are out there until you stumble upon them.
Carolyn: But it’s not the case that just having more degrees of freedom is more emergent, right?
Jim: No, no, less degrees of freedom is emergent. Yeah. Emergence means that you’ve reduced the degrees of freedom in the system. The atoms in yourself can wander much less freely than the atoms if they were just in the water without a membrane around them.
Carolyn: Yeah, it’s both more constrained and more free.
Jim: All right, let’s wrap up with your philosophical epilogue. What were you pointing to with that?
Carolyn: The neuroscientific story is I’m very interested in that, but it’s challenging part of the story. I think if the emergence discussion was difficult, I think this one for many people is just one step too far. The thing that I think some of your listeners might find intriguing is that we can understand brain dynamics not simply through neural firing but through wave activity. And there have been some very interesting attempts to do that in the last 15 years, people like Earl Miller, people that see wave dynamics as explanatory in ways that go beyond what just neural activity can explain. That’s what I’m interested in. And so my account of some of this way of discussing attention and the subject has been abstract, but this is applying it to neuroscientific research.
Jim: Yeah, of course that’s a very hot area; it has been for 20 years or so. I’m trying to pull up the book here, which was the first book I read on this topic. Damn, there’s too many books now and too many of them are bullshit self-help books. But anyway, yeah, this is an area of high interest of mine and that the nature of these waves, for instance, and one of the leading theories, at least was… Again, it’s been three or four years since I’ve updated my knowledge, is that there’s waves at all different speeds. There’s the gamma waves, there’s theta waves, beta waves, et cetera. And not only are they mathematical multiples of each other so they can be nested as we talk about, but they also use phase locking. A phase of a wave is a peak and a trough, and the way that some waves will interact at a 90 degree phase lock, et cetera. This highly complex set of wave dynamics is something that a lot of people are thinking is going to be very, very, very important to actually figure out what the hell is it? How does mind actually emerge from brains?
Carolyn: Yeah. I’ve used that example of the phase amplitude coupling as one of the ways to think about how is it that an emergent subject could control its parts? And the idea there is that local activity corresponds with these faster waves of smaller amplitude, and then more global brain activity corresponds with the slower waves of higher amplitude. And that relationship between amplitude and power is an observed phenomenon in the brain. We have these scale free observations that sometimes people call 1 over F activity, that the amplitude is related in an inverse way to the frequency. You do tend to see slower waves have larger amplitudes, and that means that they have this capacity to nest the smaller, the more frequent waves that correspond with local activity within them.
Jim: It may also explain why long range control is slower, right?
Carolyn: Yes. Right. Yeah.
Jim: If you’re talking about a wave at four hertz, it basically means it can’t send meaningful information more than four times a second.
Carolyn: Right. It’s spread out over space and time. That’s a kind of Dennett idea. But it has this new ability to control because of that. Because of the scale of our bodies in both space and time, they are slow, and so those really fast waves aren’t going to be able to make an impact on the body anyhow. And so the scale of our bodies is part of the contextual story for me, part of the reason why those slower waves are able to constrain the faster ones. I’m so pleased to see people exploring these new spaces in neuroscience. It’s a very innovative time.
Jim: Yeah, really a hot area; what I call systems neuroscience. What’s happening at the higher levels? And rhythms and waves seem to be a big part of it. This has been a wonderful conversation, been a lot of fun, a lot of back and forth. I think we both maybe learned something.
Carolyn: Yeah, for sure we did.