Gary Williams and I are working together on a paper investigating the consciousness and neuroplasticity. We’re using Google wave for this collaboration, and I must say it is an excellent co-authorship tool. There is nothing quite so neat as watching your ideas flow and meld together in real time. There are now new built in document templates that make these kinds of projects a blast. As an added bonus, all edits are identified and tracked in real time, letting you keep easy track of who wrote what. One of the most suprising things to come out of this collaboration is the newness of the thoughts. Whatever it is we end up arguing, it is definetely not reducible to the sum of it’s parts. As a teaser, I thought I’d post a thread from the wave I made this morning. This is basically just me rambling on about consciousness and plasticity after reading the results of our wave. I wish I could post the movie of our edits, but that will have to wait for the paper’s submission.

I have an idea I want to work in that was provoked by this paper:
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/18/6205

Somewhere in here I still feel a nagging paradox, but I can’t seem to put my finger on it. Maybe I’m simply trying to explain something I don’t have an explanation for. I’m not sure. Consider this a list of thoughts that may or may not have any relationship to the kind of account we want to make here.

They basically show that different synthesthetic experiences have different neural correlates in the structural brain matter. I think it would be nice to tie our paper to the (likely) focus of the other papers; the idea of changing qualia / changing NCCs. Maybe we can argue that, due to neural plasticity, we should not expect ‘neural representations’ for sensory experience between any two adults to be identical; rather we should expect that every individual develops their own unique representational qualia that are partially ineffable. Then we can argue that it this is precisely why we must rely on narrative scaffolding to make sense of the world; it is only through practice with narrative, engendered by frontal plasticity, that we can understand the statistical similarities between our qualia and others. Something is not quite right in this account though… and our abstract is basically fine as is.

So, I have my own unique qualia that are constantly changing- my qualia and NCCs are in dynamical flux with one another. However, my embodiment pre-configures my sensory experience to have certain common qualities across the species. Narrative explanations of the world are grounded in capturing this intersubjectivity; they are linguistic representations of individual sense impressions woven together by cultural practices and schema. What we want to say is that, I am able to learn about the world through narrative practice precisely because I am able to map my own unique sensory representations onto others.

I guess that last part of what I said is still weak, but it seems like this could be a good element to explore in the abstract. It keeps us from being too far away from the angle of the call though, maybe. I can’t figure out exactly what I want to say. There are a few elements:

• Narratives are co-created, coherent, shareable, complex representations of the world that encode temporality, meaning, and intersubjectivity.
• I’m able to learn about these representations of the world through narrative practice; by mapping my own unique dynamic sensory experience to the sensory and folk psychological narratives of others.
• Narrative encodes sensory experience in ways that transcend the limits of personal qualia; they are offloaded and are no longer dynamic in the same way.
• Sensory experience is in constant flux and can be thrown out of alignment with narrative, as in the case of most psychopathy.
• I need some way to structure this flux; narrative is intersubjective and it provides second order qualia??
• Narrative must be plastic as it is always growing; the relations between events, experiences, and sensory representations must always be shifting. Today I may really enjoy the smell of flowers and all the things that come with them (memory of a past girlfriend, my enjoyment of things that smell sweet, the association I have with hunger). But tommorow I might get buried alive in some flowers; now my sensory representation for flowers is going to have all new associations. I may attend to a completely different set of salient factors; I might find that the smell now reminds me of a grave, that I remember my old girlfriend was a nasty bitch, and that I’m allergic to sweet things. This must be reflected in the connective weights of the sensory representations; the overall connectivity map has been altered because a node (the flower node) has been drastically altered by a contra-narrative sensory trauma.
• I think this is a crucial account and it helps explain the role of the default mode in consciousness. On this account, the DMN is the mechanism driving reflective, spontaneous narrativization of the world. These oscillations are akin to the constant labeling and scanning of my sensory experience. That they in sleep probably indicates that this process is highly automatic and involved in memory formation. As introspective thoughts begin to gain coherency and collude together, they gain greater roles in my over all conscious self-narrative.
• So I think this is what I want to say: our pre-frontal default mode is system is in constant flux. The nodes are all plastic, and so is the pattern of activations between them. This area is fundamentally concerned with reflective-self relatedness and probably develops through childhood interaction. Further, there is an important role of control here. I think that a primary function of social-constructive brain areas is in the control of action. Early societies developed complex narrative rule systems precisely to control and organize group action. This allowed us to transcend simple brute force and begin to coordinate action and to specialize in various agencies. The medial prefrontal cortex, the central node, fundementally invoked in acts of social cognition and narrative comprehension, has massive reciprocal connectivity to limbic areas, and also pre-frontal areas concerned with reward and economic decision making.
• We need a plastic default mode precisely to allow for the kinds of radical enculturation we go through during development. It is quite difficult to teach an infant, born with the same basic equipment as a caveman, the intricacies of mathematics and philosophy. Clearly narrative comprehension requires a massive amount of learning; we must learn all of the complex cultural nuances that define us as modern humans.
• Maybe sensory motor coupling and resonance allow for the simulation of precise spatiotemporal activity patterns. This intrinsic activity is like a constant ‘reading out’ of the dynamic sensory representations that are being constantly updated, through neuroplasticity; whatever the totality of the connection weights, that is my conscious narrative of my experience.
• Back to the issue of control. It’s clear to me that the prefrontal default system is highly sensitive to intersubjective or social information/cues. I think there is really something here about offloading intentions, which are relatively weak constructions, into the group, where they can be collectively acted upon (like in the drug addict/rehab example). So maybe one role of my narration system is simply to vocalize my sensory experience (I’m craving drugs. I can’t stop craving drugs) so that others can collectively act on them.