 Dr. George Nortov, who is a philosopher, neuroscientist and also psychiatrist in the University of Ottawa in Canada. And Dr. Nortov is also an author of various books, including Neurowave's Brain, Time and Consciousness and other books. So, enjoy. Thank you very much. I'm always happy to be here in Armenia, and thanks for this one. I'm going to talk to you about consciousness, and of course everybody knows what is consciousness. But if I were asking you what consciousness is, you would probably stumble. And that's basically the state of the art also in current philosophy and neuroscience. So there's a lot of debate and there's some mysteries. I want to show you three key mysteries about consciousness that block at our pre-Z positions that sort of block our view on it. So sometimes you don't see things because you look into the wrong direction. And I think that's exactly the state of art with consciousness. So, let me start with somebody who wants to be admitted. Can I go to the next? Maybe it works here. No? Okay. So, the first mystery. Nowadays, in the age of neuroscience, we of course think consciousness is inside the head. And maybe some of you are engineers, they think, oh maybe consciousness is inside my artificial agents. There's a lot of discussion about that these days. As you know about artificial intelligence and consciousness, I will come back to that. So we think that consciousness, where we perceive ourselves as part of the world, is inside our brain. And that's the first mystery. So it's inside here, it's not in our relation to the world or outside in the world itself. Can I do the next one? Yeah. The second mystery goes back to philosophy. I will come back to that towards the end of my talk. That we often assume that mental states or consciousness states are something special. Because if you have a feeling of boredom, I've got another one of those guys talking about consciousness here. That feeling of boredom, I cannot observe it from the outside. I can observe your smile, but I cannot observe your feeling. And that has led to the assumption consciousness is something special. So now I have to stay here a little bit for the photo. And now for the next one, third mystery. That has led to the assumption that consciousness is something special and different from anything else in the brain, in the physical world. So that has led to the assumption of the mind. And that the mind is different from the body and nowadays for the brain. And I will tell you later towards the end of my talk that we still search for the mind, but in forms of special features in the brain itself. So my talk, we basically try to address these three mysteries by providing you some insight from neuroscience, also from people who lose consciousness. And basically the main assumption is consciousness is not inside the head. It's also not just outside in the world, it links the inside and outside. The second assumption, remember that consciousness or conscious content are mental, some special mental features. I will discard with that and say consciousness is temporary. It will show you a lot of interesting data. Even your thoughts, where you think they are mental, they are temporary. I will demonstrate that. The third one that consciousness, as I said, has always been assumed to be something special. And I will say, no, it's nothing special, just look in the natural world and you see a lot of similar features, phenomena. And then at the end, I will try to give a little bit outlook for my view on artificial intelligence and artificial agents with respect to consciousness. So let me start with the first view. Consciousness, I already showed that. Consciousness is inside your head rather than outside in the world. Now I will show you various data that undermine that assumption. When you look into the outside world, if you are engineers, you will see a lot of what is called dynamic phenomena. You go to the seaside, you go to the Black Sea, to the Cuspian Sea, to the Mediterranean. You see a lot of waves, you see small waves, big waves. And you all know that the big waves have a lot of power and the small waves have not enough power. The longer waves, the big waves have a longer duration and if you happen to be a surfer, you know the dynamics of the waves very well because you need to adapt to the dynamics of the waves to get the groove of the surfing. And seismic earth waves, they happen on a much longer scale. You might have heard about the earthquake in Taiwan just yesterday and there are different kinds of waves, very slow waves, very fast waves. And despite the differences, they share that you can sort of have a certain time series of changes, fluctuation, change. And basically if you want to have the main message of my talk, it's basically that consciousness is about change. Change is described as a pattern of change, a certain pattern and that's what consciousness is about. So now if you want to go home, you can go home now. And you will see that will basically... So now the question is, if you have continuous changes, unfortunately I'm not allowed to move here to the other end. So you have continuous changes. If you follow my talk, for instance here, my hand movement, how does your brain process that? And the brain is really an ingenious organ. The more I research on it, the more I become aware of that. It's absolutely amazing and this is one of the most amazing features how adaptive your brain is. So your brain has continuous ongoing fluctuation, even if you don't do anything. If you just mind wander or just walking around or your sleep, your brain is continuously active. So I often compared that in my earlier talks to let's say you go out there, you try to pick up your car, but your car is not standing still, it's moving back and forth in different trajectories. That's what your brain is. So the brain has an inner time, it's continuously changing in a pattern. And that is basically here, the time series, dynamics, pattern of change. And you see this is in different frequencies for the expert. You have different frequencies here, delta setter. It doesn't matter, it's from 1 hertz to 80 hertz for the expert. But it's also even slower frequencies in let's say 100 second 0.01 hertz. So this is important. The brain has basically, as I say in my book here, has different waves. So basically like the seaside, it has very big waves, powerful, very small waves, fast and less powerful. So now the question is, a neuroscience really doesn't know that. What do these waves do? Why is this brain continuously spontaneously active? And this is probably so now here. And you can measure that for instance here with the frequencies of the brain. It's what you call a power spectrum. Here you have the frequency, this is slower frequency, faster frequency. This is power, this is more power, less power. And you see a typical pattern that in your slower frequencies you have much more power than in the faster frequencies. Now again, go to the seaside, look at the seismic earth waves. You see exactly the same pattern for the expert among you. This is called scale free dynamics which is ubiquitous in nature. And you will see that is key for consciousness later. So now the question, but what does the brain do with all these different frequencies and waves? Why is the brain continuously active and why does it do this? And that's one of the next things. So for instance, I told you our environment is continuously changing. So I do these movements. I move fast, I move very slow. And I can predict that your brain, if I do this continuously, you don't want me to do this for one hour than you're bored, that your brain will process the frequency of these movements. Now if I move a little faster, your brain will again process these frequencies. So here we tested that. So here we did a functional magnetic resonance imaging, basically where you can scan the whole brain, fMRI. And we presented a short auditory stimulus every 52 to 60 seconds. So it's extremely sparse design. Stimulus and then basically almost a minute of waiting, next stimulus. And in between, nothing. So in that corresponds, unfortunately it cannot be seen here, it corresponds to a frequency range of 0.016 to 0.019 hertz. So you can recalculate this 52 to 60 seconds into a frequency range. So now what we see in the brain, so people were in the scanner, got the stimuli, we see that in exactly this frequency range where the stimuli were presented, you see an increase in the power spectrum. So again, if I do one hertz movement, your brain, if I do this over the next five minutes, your brain probably will show an increase in the power at exactly one hertz. So then we said, oh, maybe it's just an artifact. So then we also looked in the resting state without any stimuli. And you don't see this peak in the power spectrum. So it's really basically the periodicity of the task of the stimuli is processed and encoded by your brain in its own frequencies, in its own waves. It's quite amazing. That's why I can say if I do these kind of things. So here I show you another example of that. And I think this is one of the really... Okay, let me try this one. It doesn't want to go away. Can we do it there next slide? Ah, here's a good idea, Steve. Good idea. Not a good idea, sorry. Okay, finally. Okay, but there was another one. Okay, this goes back. Are you doing it? Too many cooks spoil the slides, yeah? Not the meal. Okay, so yeah, perfect. Thanks so much. So here we did another thing. So here we presented stimuli for 25 seconds. Emotional phases for 25 seconds. And then 25 seconds, nothing. So that amounts to a frequency of 0.022 seconds, 0.025 hertz. And what did we see? So there's one region in the brain which is called the fusiform phase area, which is specialized for phases. It's amazing. So when you see me, that region will become active. I hope so, yeah? And look what the fusiform phase area does. It shows an increase in exactly that frequency range where the stimuli are presented, yeah? And this is every 20 seconds, yeah? So it's really amazing. Your brain keeps a score. It tracks the frequency of the outside stimuli. And this sounds trivial, but it's not, because that's exactly the difference to current artificial intelligence. They do not track the frequency and the temporal structure of the stimuli, the external environment, and that's why they cannot adapt as well, yeah? And they come back. So you see this. It's quite amazing here. This is a resting state. No such peak in the task. Yeah, resting state. They don't see any phases. Here they see phases 20 second blocks. And you see this. So now, next one. Or shall I do it? You will. OK, perfect. So now, how is that related to consciousness? So I often try to say that consciousness is about that you experience yourself as part of the wider world. You can make a difference between yourself and the rest of the world, but at the same time, you experience yourself as part of this room. And if this room would be different, which are much higher ceiling and much bigger in thousand seats, you would feel and experience yourself in a very different way, yeah? Because the room in which you're situated is very different. And that affects your consciousness. So consciousness cannot be inside the head. So here, that's why we tested this. So here, we had people first in the awake state and then in the unesthetic state. And here, this was yet another study. So here, we again, every 20, 25 seconds, you see here this is the frequency in which the stimuli were presented. And you see the increase in the awake state. Now, same subject, go into an unesthetic state, lose their consciousness, and that's what you see. Completely flat. And also, for the experts among you, the engineers or physicists or others, you see the typical scale-free activity here, more power in the slower frequencies, less power in the faster frequencies, and you see it's completely flat here. This is basically what you call, oops, white noise, this one. This is also noise, slide noise. So here, this is basically white noise because it's completely flat. Hello, this is from Taiwan. And in the awake state, you have pink noise or scale-free dynamics, whereas it's completely lost in the unesthetic state. You can see this here, look completely flat. So that basically means you encounter the seaside, it's completely flat, no waves at all. And that's probably exactly what your experience or non-experience when you're unconscious. Everything is the same, completely undifferentiated, meaning you don't experience anything at all when you lose consciousness. So, I do the next one. Okay, thank you. I kind of missed the part where... Ah, sorry, sorry. Okay, sorry. Okay, this is a single subject. Each line is one single subject. Single one? Single subject. One subject. Sorry, I forgot to mention that. So each line is one single subject. You can see it's really consistent. All subjects are completely flat. And here you see this almost all subject, but you see a huge inter-individual variability here. How the brain adapts to the frequency of the environment. So this is something we all receive. So when I do this movement, I'm sure that we have, basically, I don't know how many people are here in the room, 60, 70 different power spectrum. The peak is slightly different. You all show some activity in this frequency, but it's slightly different. Yeah? Because your brain reacts in a different way. Okay. I can do the next one? Okay. Not that the screen becomes unconscious. Yeah? So, so here, and you already see that your brain has different kinds of frequencies. Later I use the term time scales. I will explain them. Yeah? As I said, you go to the seaside, you see all kinds of waves, different frequencies. Same in the brain. And the question is, and this is, so this is, that basically your different frequencies are used to track different time scales in your environment. So here, the very short time scale, just the kaya guy. So this is fast. It goes very fast. So your brain also uses its own fast frequencies to track this one. But then there is sort of longer time scales, slower frequencies. You see here the water, the waves of the water. So the brain also uses slightly slower frequencies for that. Yeah? And then very slow frequencies in the background. It uses its own frequencies. So you see now, you see get an idea that probably the brain uses its own inner time scales and frequency to track corresponding time scales and frequencies. And when you would decompose, even my behavior here over time, let's say you have come some kinematic measures here on me and you later do a fast Fourier transform and make a power spectrum of all my movements, you will see quite a variety of time scales and frequencies I'm using. And that's really amazing, yeah? And you will see that the more frequencies the brain itself has, the better the brain can track the environment. And that makes your consciousness. So your consciousness is basically multi-layered, yeah? Of a foreground layer, intermediate layer, background layer, and these are different time scales, yeah? So it's multiple layers of different time scales and that's actually also what you experience. You do not just experience me, my face, you experience my face, my body, you experience standing here in front of the table, you experience the whole room. So it's a foreground background with multiple layers in your consciousness, yeah? So, so now I need to do this. Arthur, I need to do this. You will push the right button for me. Sometimes the brain is easier than all this technical stuff. So now the questions. How do you experience this sort of tracking of the environmental frequencies by the brain? So what do you experience? Now imagine we would play music here. Very arrhythmic music. I don't detail because all your musical tastes will be different. But let's say it's very arrhythmic and you really go with the melody, with the tune and the rhythm of the music and you feel a certain synchrony and groove, yeah? And you feel good about it, yeah? So that's basically synchrony. So here we indeed, just on the psychological level, with a large-scale study with thousand subjects, and we tested, we asked subjects how much they feel in synchrony with their own self, with the body, with the environment and with the other. So it was pure psychological investigation and you can see indeed that that is here and we had also other questions about your thought on the past, thought present, thought on future and others. This is basically a network model and you can see that this is really the core, the synchrony with your own self, other and environment. And you can also see, we did this also before and after Covid and the same subjects before and after Covid and you can see that after Covid they felt significantly lower synchrony with their own self, synchrony of other, synchrony with nature, environment and body. And that was also related, which I don't show here, to higher incidences of anxiety and depression. So you need to be aligned to your environmental context through your brain frequencies and timescale. That makes you feel good is like when you tap you probably can't see it because the table is in front of you, tap to the rhythm of the music. And if you can synchronize with my movements here then you feel connected and you might decipher the meaning of what I try to convey and then you understand and hope it makes you feel good. So it's really a key feature and that let me try. Ah, maybe I need to do this here. No? Okay. Yeah. So that leads me basically to the first conclusion. Consciousness is neither inside the head nor outside in the world. But it relates the inside and the outside. Yeah? And we call the temple spatial alignment. You're aligned to your environment sort of in a temple way. It's of course virtual. You can't grasp it in the observance like that but this is always there. And your brain amazingly tracks all this. So we have many more data on how the brain tracks the temple structure of your outer environmental context. And that's really a key. So that means that consciousness is not inside the head. It's really ecological or relational as I like to say. Yeah? So relating to the outside world through adapting the dynamics of the brain inside. And that is really a remarkable feature of the brain. I cannot overemphasize that. That distinguishes the brain from artificial agents. And you mentioned that I'm also a psychiatrist. This is the key problem in psychotic disorders. Like depression or schizophrenia. Where you have changes in this temple spatial alignment. So it's a very basic dimension. And usually we're not aware of this. Yeah? We don't perceive how our frequencies track the frequencies of the environment. Your brain does the job. It's automatic. Autopilot. It's an amazing, amazing feature. As I said, I cannot overemphasize it. So now let me go to the next one about conscious contents. Usually as I said the mystery is that conscious contents are mental. Especially mental features in your brain. And that has been assumed that goes philosophy back. And the mark of the mental, what is here, everything that is mental is conscious. So rather than physical. So now I show you that that is not the case. And I give you the example of thoughts. So the question is how can you measure thoughts. So you can measure, you can ask subjects. For instance, you can ask the subject whether their thoughts are about the task. For instance about the talk. Or whether you mind one and have some different thoughts. Oh god, does this not stop soon hopefully and then I can have a nice good Armenian dinner. Which by the way I really appreciate your food. So that basically then you call that yeah. Yeah. And then you can also say, okay I have only one content. I'm really focusing on Nortov and his consciousness stuff. And that's all I'm thinking now. However you might also think your mind is wondering all the dinner and then I see my girlfriend or my boyfriend and tomorrow I go here and there. So you have multiple thoughts, a chain of thoughts, different thoughts. And you can ask the subject whether that thoughts are multiple contents or single contents. And that's what we did in this study. And at the same time we measured the brain activity, the electrical activity with electroencephalography EEG. And in EEG there's a special measure where you can basically see how the frequencies of the brain change. Yeah. Whether they high or low and at each time point how your frequencies change you will see the slides results in the next slide. Which is called frequency sliding. Yeah. So and with that we try to track your thoughts whether they're on or off. Whether they're about the talk of the consciousness or you're somewhere else. And whether you have multiple or just single thought content. So this is a difficult slide I know. But what we basically can see, we can really see that, let me explain you this one. So this is about for the expert is the alpha frequency is the faster frequency between 8 and 12 hertz. And you can see that here the yellow line is basically your on thoughts and your single thoughts. Yeah. That's a brown line or yellow whatever you call it. And the blue line is the off thoughts and the multiple thoughts. We grouped them together. I'm just doing that. Just give me a second and then I come. Yeah. So here you can see the yellow or the brown line are the on and single thoughts and the blue are the multiple and off thoughts. So these are the blue lines are the thoughts where you wonder you're not interested in the talk your thoughts wonder somewhere else. Here the yellow line is basically you really focus on trying to understand me. And you see that in the faster frequencies you see much higher frequencies. This is basically the movement that changes in the frequencies over time. You can really see that the on thoughts the single the task focus thoughts are so higher peak frequency here in the faster frequency than the thoughts when you're off. Now when you wonder your thoughts you will go into a slower frequency range set up 5 to 8 hertz and you see now the opposite pattern. Now the blue line shows higher frequencies in the slow one than the yellow line slash brown line of the on thoughts. So basically what you see to cut a chart you see that different kinds of thoughts on task or off thoughts are needed by slower or faster frequencies. We are talking about frequencies of the brain measured with the EEG. So this is neuronal data electrical activity in the brain your different frequencies in the brain how they track your different kinds of thoughts. Correct. That of course is a question for the hand and the egg which I cannot answer here but this is all that you basically have when you have more task focus thoughts or single thoughts you have faster frequencies and I will come back later to the mechanism here because a rule of thumb and the data shows this more and more if you are more externally oriented and your on thoughts when you focus on the talk here is more externally oriented you are usually faster when you are more internally oriented towards your own mind running you are usually slower and these results support that. There are various lines of evidence supporting that it is an interending organization of the brain that is currently in work because we are doing I don't know whether you are an engineer or a granger causality between the time series of thoughts time series of EEG The results are clear it is the brain spontaneously changing and that causes the thought This is basically it is the time from the onset we also presented a stimulus a simple stimulus here basically the onset of the stimulus Ok, any more questions any more thoughts on the thought more about thoughts will come so you can see that now let me go to the next one so here we did exactly basically what he was a little bit asking for but only on the psychological level so here we tracked the changes in the subject thoughts over time so basically we asked them is your thought more internally oriented about your own self or is yourself more externally oriented about your own environment and subjects had to do this for half an hour and we asked them every 10 to 30 seconds ask the question how much did your thought change, was it more internally or externally oriented with exactly the definition now when you think about consciousness and somebody giving a talk your thought is more externally oriented but if you think about let's say the dinner or whatever other things then it's probably more internally oriented so when we looked basically and what we constructed is a time series of thoughts so we really wanted to investigate your thought dynamics so and here and then we did and then we plotted it we did a time series of thought changes and we did also fast Fourier transformation and basically developed a power spectrum of thoughts of thought change over time internal external thought change so and you can see here you see a healthy subject then we could calculate the frequency, the power of the thought changes and this is basically here the highest power peak here unfortunately you can't see this is about 0.035 and that also gives you how often the thought changes your thought particularly the internal external can last relatively long 10 to 20 seconds but that is probably superseded by faster thoughts so probably you have also different layers of thought according to the time scale but that's a hypothesis we're working on so what you see here you see a good power and you see changes and you see frequencies now look this was done also in seriously depressed patients patients suffer from major depressive disorder seriously depressed and you may know that these patients are not only depressed but that they also show sort of ruminating thoughts which are as you see in my hand movement circulating it's always the same and nothing changes when you are a severe depressed patient they tell you nothing changes and it drives them nuts so imagine that you have the feeling nothing changes and that's literally also the state of your brain also nothing changes and you see this here look at this power spectrum there's no power they feel they have no energy that's also what they often report they have no power and you see very slower frequency they were also much slower in their frequency you can read this in the paper so that's why we coined the paper slow and powerless thought dynamics relates to the rumination and the brewing to the thoughts and depression so you can also construct a series of your psychological measures which is really new thing and that is something we're doing more and more so you investigate the dynamics of your thoughts and your psychological functions so now here show you a third example to make my point how temper features determine your thoughts so this is a study on meditation so here you have different forms of meditation here you have the Shunya meditation where you don't focus on any specific object at all so this is something we're doing with India so where you don't focus on any object at all you just let them pass by you not get involved, you don't attach you don't focus on a particular thing you just sit in front and the river flows and you don't care just passing by you don't get involved you don't focus on anything particular and you just get everything like that then you have the other meditation this is here Supranya where you focus on specific body parts so here your attention is really focused on specific objects this is indicated here on specific objects like your different body parts so now the idea are the different numbers of the attended thoughts in these two meditation techniques related to different time scales or inner durations in the brain as you said everything is about frequencies frequencies is about duration let me drink a little bit in the meantime can you push the button so here and you can measure that basically temple windows it's basically do these two different forms of meditation have different kind of temple windows in the brain so here again we measured with EEG and we calculated what is called an auto correlation window auto correlation function is basically your temple window I will explain that in a couple of slides what exactly it is but the main message is when you focus on specific objects your temple window is much shorter because you focus on the specific object on your different body parts whereas if you don't focus on anything you just let it pass by your temple window becomes much longer as I said I will explain a little bit more about these temple windows in the following so it's important that basically the kind of attention or to your own thoughts tested through these two different forms of meditation really are related to different temple window sizes in your brain so that already tells you you see already where I'm going that your mental contents are not mental they are temporal you focus on completely different contents here here basically you don't focus on any content here you focus on the bodily contents and you see that is related to different temple windows in your brain so let me go to the next one so now I come to one of the key terms one was frequencies you already saw that another one is time scales what are time scales time scales are intrinsic durations so for instance you have geologic time scales so these are processes and the geologic time scales are extremely long I don't need to tell you it's impressive look up in Google it's amazing I cannot go into detail but it's very long seismic earth waves have also relatively long time scales longer than probably your whole person's life so meaning the time scales we have in our brain are relatively short compared to many other processes in the world and the brain this is indicated here as I said has also different time scales different intrinsic durations of various processes shorter longer and the interesting thing that in the sensory regions of your brain like here your visual regions here in the back here in the time scales then for instance here in your higher order regions you might have heard the prefrontal cortex here you process the external information everything is changing fast so you need short time scales to track that and your inside of the brain here the higher order regions prefrontal regions they're not as affected by all these external changes so they can do whatever they want so they're a little bit slower now what do these time scales do and why they are important I definitely cannot cope with the time scales of this one and that is shown so here I give you the example of a window so here of course we are in the spatial domain but it will be the same for the temple domain so look this is a tree nobody knows this however if you were only showing this window you wouldn't know whether it's a tree or not you would say yes maybe it's a vase with some branches or it's a bush you have no idea if I were showing you only this one and maybe not this one you might not see the lane so the tree could be everywhere but you don't know whether it's this kind of landscape in a forest so meaning different window sizes you see different things even the same thing like here's a tree appears very different in different window sizes now imagine your brain is exactly that it's a collection of different temple window sizes so which it tries to scan and address and track the environment through these different window sizes so I see your face probably a very smaller temple window fortunately you don't move so my window needs to be variable but then I have a longer window size when I probably scan the whole room because that takes time so I need a longer window to integrate all that that's an interesting change and that's exactly it so your brain is basically what I present here is a spatial window it's basically a collection of different temple windows different time scales different durations and that is huge consequence I know this is a complex slide but let me walk you through so if you have a collection of different time scales indicated here very long ones shorter ones you can track all these environmental changes police running after a thief you need a long you need shorter time scales police stop stop now stop now so you need a short time scale to pick up those words however you also want to link the police to the stop that you need a longer time scale for that and then you also want to link this guy to this guy you need a very long time scale remember the different temple layers I presented at the beginning the background foreground same thing here so your temple windows the more temple windows you have the better you can track the environment so now this is now data driven based on data we have when you start sleeping or become drowsy your temple windows measured by this autocollination function becomes slightly longer so we would assume that it becomes more blurry because you are missing the shorter time scale you cannot distinguish between here police stop because it's just put together into one now your time scales become even longer second sleep stage and you are sedated now I need to water a little bit and your autocollination your temple windows in the brain become even longer and the shorter ones are missing even more so it becomes more and more blurry now when you are in deep anesthesia and prolonged disorders of consciousness your time scales are extremely long measured by the autocollination function so you cannot integrate anything at all it's completely dark no differentiation anymore these are of course assumptions this is all based on data unfortunately you cannot ask unconscious patients what she or he experiences but that's basically an inference from the time scale so you see how the seemingly mental contents are in truth really temple content so now here I give you some more details let's say here is your external input and this is the actual physical duration of your input so I do this I do longer input yeah and this is the length of your brain of your time scale in your brain if it's sort of medium long you might put these two inputs together into one so you will not perceive a difference between these two finger movements but you can distinguish these finger movements from my arm movements because your temple windows are short enough and you have two different forms of evoked activity in the brain now if you have a very long temple windows you put everything together so you cannot make a differentiation you put everything together then you would not experience a difference between the different timings, the different events in your environmental context and indeed we have various papers including brain imaging as well as a lot of computational modeling where we can really show this your longest tail ACW depends on the frequency range where you measure so if you measure at an fmi you go from 100 seconds to 10 seconds so it's in that range if you measure in EEG it's on faster frequencies 1 Hz to 80 Hz so it's relatively short it's in the millisecond range really depends on your measure instrument it's relative to that so conscious contents are not mental but their temple this is a very daring hypothesis because philosophers will not like this but they really temple, we have a lot of more and more supporters coming, I wouldn't have said this two years ago but we have more and more support set because they are shaped by the intrinsic duration of the brain time scales and the larger your repertoire of different time scales you have faster, slower frequencies longer, shorter temple windows in your brain the better, the more sophisticated the more complex you can track your environmental content so that is really so it's your range of your time scales so it's a repertoire of different time scales and that basically shapes your conscious content and another thing which I do not report here these time scales you have are probably also shaped by your environmental context so that's probably why we all are in a different environmental context there are cultural differences as we all know and that also why we perceive things in a slightly different way so now let me come to the third point which is more sort of on the theoretical side consciousness is non-special so I think I already mentioned that consciousness is special that's the assumption from anything else in the physical world so that's why here you can see consciousness is special and everything else is distinguished from non-consciousness or unconscious non-special so when that goes philosophically when you go into western philosophy it goes back to René Descartes who assumed a mind as distinguished from the body and the brain and he assumed that the mind must be special as I said initially we cannot observe it the mind like this book so I cannot observe your thoughts as such and you cannot observe them in that sense also you can introspect but there's a long discussion about that too but that's basically it so now of course you say no no no no and interestingly that specialness is still prevalent even in our time in neuroscience so of course now we assume yes it's in the brain consciousness is related to the brain and not a separate mind anymore however then they assume and many neuroscientific theories of consciousness assume that special neuronal features within the brain special neuronal mechanism underlying consciousness as distinguished from all other mechanisms in the brain so the substrate has changed from mind to brain but the specialness that consciousness is something special is still preserved because they assume special neuronal mechanism only for consciousness and then of course you focus that implies that you focus what is the difference from the conscious brain and the conscious brain so you focus on the difference so you assume a special mechanism to know some of you might know the integrated information theory assumes IIT assumes integration global neuronal workspace theory assumes a global workspace and so on I could say the same for many other theories so the specialness originally from philosophy is still preserved in current neuroscience always puts a smile on my face as a philosopher so then you might say maybe we can also approach this in a different way by saying maybe we look for what is similar what is similar between the brain and consciousness and you already saw a lot of examples you saw the temple dynamic pattern you saw the time scales you saw the frequency tracking of the environment yeah and all that is lost when you lose consciousness so that's why I say maybe consciousness is nothing special there is the same properties in the brain temple dynamic features which are also manifest on the mental level and you saw for instance the salt dynamics we have many more studies now where we really look for the dynamics of psychological features and even more interesting these dynamic features are not only in the brain and in the consciousness but they are abundant in the world remember my example of seismic earth waves like waves geologic time scales so here that's why I go that's why I always like to look go back to nature into the world and there is a very nice quote by Nikola Tesla you all probably know the Tesla cars and when you look on his google website you see why Ellen Musk named his cars Tesla because Nikola Tesla seemed to be as brilliant and as eccentric as Ellen Musk yeah so highly recommended if you want to find the secrets the secrets of the universe think in terms of energy frequency and vibration so as I said we see the same dynamic phenomenon maybe on slightly different time scales but the same time scale here sea waves seismic earth waves and this is explicated here so they all seismic earth waves sea waves brain and I could enlarge this by many examples they all have a pattern of change a certain dynamic the time series the only difference whether they operate on slightly different time scales but the phenomena within the time scales are similar and of course certain frequencies from the sea waves our brain can capture there is a certain overlap so that is quite so in these these phenomena different durations but they all show time series of the changes of fluctuations so exactly and I showed you earlier that exactly these phenomena are key for consciousness so that's why we say time scales inner durations are shared by brain and consciousness remember my slides with the difference between brain and consciousness now is a similarity that's why we like to speak of a common currency when you go to the European Union you literally have a common currency it's the euro same here what is a common currency between brain and mind or brain and consciousness is not the euro sorry it's not the drama either is dynamics and interestingly this is not just a common currency between brain and mind or consciousness but between world brain and consciousness so that's why I like to speak of neural waves so that's basically and you see many of the studies I showed you and many others which you can see on our website are really trying to show this temple special features or the dynamics of brain and mind so the third conclusion consciousness is not special at all since time and its dynamics are shared by world brain and mind so it's nothing special just look into nature and you will see abundant of ideas and examples where you can learn how consciousness works go ahead be careful I did not say that consciousness is not important I didn't say that and I did not say that you cannot read it because read you can also have verbally and non-verbally and as a psychiatrist I deal a lot with non-verbal interaction so you can read the behavioral manifestation of some inner mental state particularly because it is relational because it is tracking the frequency so there are certain patterns in that again so actually we are working on the emotion dynamics exactly that maybe I finish the talk and then the questions because sorry I didn't know that so the fourth part is short so now what does this imply for science and in general so first we develop a temple spatial theory of consciousness different mechanism of consciousness later in 2017 other papers this is both neuroscientific but also philosophical and ontological which is in different books so now that leads me to really a different form of neuroscience you have heard a lot about cognitive psychology cognitive neuroscience and different forms of neuroscience which are all here however that just captures the other part of the iceberg that what is visible you need to go deeper that's where the interesting things happen and as you know if you go to the bottom the bottom at the iceberg right in the water is the basis and fundament is that major changes here everything will change here so we need to go deeper and that's where brain dynamics operates that's what I showed you and it's not trivial because it's not a random process there's a certain structure and that structure that's why I like to work with engineers we really go into that structure different measures for that structure like scale free activity autocorrelation function and so on that's what we call spatial temporal neuroscience and that shapes these kind of different functions including the emotions and this is the moment where mental features come this is that level consciousness we also develop the same for self you saw the data on the mind wandering and we also develop the whole spatial temporal psychiatry for novel diagnostic and also therapeutic tools for therapy of these and diagnosis and therapy of these disorders like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety so this is what we call brain dynamics that's about brain function and if you want to extend this you would need to put in the world so that basically why are the brain's time scales so relevant for consciousness this is basically already clear here it's your continuous matching and tracking of your environmental input why is that important for your consciousness because by that you become part of the world and that's what you experience in consciousness you consciously sort of implicitly or explicitly aware of this room as your background and so on and so forth yeah so it's a continuous tracking matching between environmental dynamics and your brain dynamics and that's key for your consciousness without that you lose consciousness if that changes in abnormal ways you have mental disorder so now what does this imply for artificial intelligent or artificial agents so my claim is here when you look into the design of these guys they have a lot of cognitive activity and they're certainly better in this part than we are chess playing go I don't need to tell you all of them but they're extremely bad in this part in the adaptation, in the alignment why because they lack these different time scales as far as I can see so let's say if you play music classical music you have different time scales fast, short at the same time over the time of the music so now if you have only the faster time scales the shorter time scales but not the slower one you will always dance too fast or the robot will dance too fast now if your robot has only longer time scales it will always dance too slow and tragically this is exactly what you for instance see in certain mental disorders this is what you see in depression the people really lack behind because their brain is too slow, literally we can measure that and in mania when you're too happy for the psychiatrist nothing is good, when you're too happy you get into psychiatrists, when you're depressed you dance too fast so for the manic patient we are too slow because her or his time scales are faster relative to the environmental so you need a repertoire of different time scales you need different layers of time scales as I like to say and that's exactly what you see here so my assumption now next slide these agents do not have time scales we worked they do not yet show consciousness because they do not have time scales they not temple in that sense they don't have temporality and therefore they cannot track and link and align to the environmental content and if you can't do that you lose consciousness as I showed in my anesthesia patients and many other data so you also see I included the yet here so meaning this is not a principle argument because I am very interested in agents with time scales why as a psychiatrist because I would like to have these kind of agents with time scales to treat my patients abnormal time scales so that's sort of the idea that's why I'm very interested in that and it still lacks the brains inner time and time scales that allow for its matching and alignment with the environmental dynamics that is key and you saw the initial data I'm completely fascinated by that that your brain really tracks the risen and time scales of your environment I mean it's an ingenious evolutionary matching because the brain adapts but at the same time it keeps itself stable it stabilizes it through reaching out to the environmental it's like in a relationship you stabilize yourself through a relationship same thing and your brain is much more clever than us and knows how to do that it's amazing and I see the consequences as a psychiatrist on a daily basis so there are huge philosophical implications I don't want to go long into that you might have heard about the what is called the heart problem that basically there's a gap between brain and consciousness and I think that gap is no longer there once it's clear dynamics time is a common currency and the same goes for the mind body problem which is basically the problem of how world and brain are related and with that I come to the end of my talk I hope that I can at least trigger some thoughts in you and maybe change your thought dynamics a little bit so that you get some other ideas about consciousness that consciousness is nothing special it is just a temporary feature of how world dynamics and brain dynamics connect with each other you can see this is a textbook which is just about to come out here a bigger textbook on spatial temporal neuroscience this is more for broader audiences neural ways and thank you very much thank you very much is this my question is whether major depression can be diagnosed by EEG and if yes is it conducted currently EEG is EEG testing practice for diagnosing major depression so certainly currently there are no EEG based diagnostic marker for depression but we are working on that and it goes into the time what you see in the brain of depression you see that the brain is literally too slow you can really measure that the power spectrum is shifted and that's exactly what the patients also experience everything is too slow so we hope that this is sort of a temple marker which we can measure in EEG and FMI and also on the psychological level also the visual perception is too slow we showed that the movements are too slow so the basic disturbance in depression is probably abnormal slowness so for me depression is a speed disorder so is is there a method of diagnosing of depression through EEG or not yet as I said there is no diagnostic marker yet we are working on that thank you this is really a different approach very different from what you see otherwise the other approach is always focus on cognitive function Nerozun well thank you very much for this very interesting talk I wonder if I may ask what do you mean by mental so I think you said something like consciousness is not mental but temporal that's right and I wonder what it is to be mental in your language and that clearly it seems to me at least incorrect me if that's wrong is not linked to whatever let's say Chalmers would understand by mental the author of this the hard question of consciousness or it's not what at least philosophers of mind would understand by mental or if it is then that would be very helpful how you would explain what mental is and how is it possible that consciousness just because it's temporal it cannot also be mental so so mentalist the opposition of course is not physical so that's basically the original dichotomy of mental and physical and then you have all kind of strategies of linking the two reductionism, non-reductionism, parallelism so mental is defined in a negative way it's not physical and then you can associate specific mental properties with it like the card mental so called mental properties yeah and then you can say okay I reduce these mental properties to physical properties that's a strategy of reductionism I need to go a little bit here to answer that question or you say yes no I cannot reduce mental properties to physical properties then I have a parallelism that's for instance basically what neuro phenomenology these days does and you see my approaches fundamentally different and that's explicated in the slides let me go back you wanted the philosophy you get it it's here this is the key feature this is the presure position of the heart problem of the mind body problem of charmas the whole philosophy of mind in the current discussion I do not share that everything is basically that's if you want to speak philosophically that's a transcendental background assumption use the kanchen term here yeah that's the background assumption of current philosophy of mind neuroscience that's basically the flaw on which you stand but I say no I use a different background assumption this one sounds trivial there's major implications yeah and that opens the door for me to say dynamics is the common currency is shared that opens the door for me to investigate the dynamics of thoughts it's completely crazy yeah that's the conceptual background for that and that's why the heart problem is for me it's not answered it's dissolved it's no longer relevant if you change your background assumption your problems also change it's like oh god I don't have a good example yeah okay try to surf in Hawaii and try to surf on the lake one yeah it's a completely different background for the surfing same here so you're exposed to different problems in your surfing in Hawaii and in lake one you see what I mean and that's what I'm doing here so I dig much deeper often philosophers of mind don't understand that because they're not aware of their own background assumption of this difference do I get a follow-up question if I may so the difficult question or the heart problem is supposed to come from intentionality or aboutness so we experience our thoughts are about something else like my thought that is not you is about you how can a frequency whatever it's hurts or whatever how can it ever be about something else that's question number one that's one of the sources of the heart problem and the second problem I'm sure you're aware just to voice it for the class maybe that would be interesting it's the phenomenal feel it feels somehow to be bored so if consciousness is purely some kind of frequency it turns out that if you produce that kind of frequency everywhere that thing that has that frequency must feel bored so it seems that you're led to believe and that's let's face it that's what leads to talk about the heart problem and I don't see this answer here that consciousness can be correlated with some kind of frequency it's a given it has been given for a while and it's stunning so much detail that you have discovered but I don't think that answers the philosophical problem and if I'm making lots of mistakes I'm looking for all the correct answers thank you so much so again this is a transcendental background assumption and I'd explicate that by your first example of intentionality what is intentionality exactly it's about something now make a kanchen move here what does this presuppose in order for intentionality my thoughts to be about something out there what does this presuppose a relation and how is this relation constituted I showed you an example I do not deny intentionality I don't reduce it you get me wrong reduction is only the possibility the possible option conceivability as philosophers say is only here an option reduction versus non reduction the question of non reduction is nonsensical here so I do not cash out your intentionality against my frequencies what I say I see what does intentionality presuppose if there were no relation between my inside and my outside intentionally would remain impossible yeah otherwise your thoughts cannot be about something outside the thoughts themselves I look for a deeper layer for that what it necessarily presupposes yeah first my answer to that the second answer to your feel you're right so you misread me because you misread me in terms of reduction and then you cash out no no no it cannot be just frequency you cannot reduce that the theme of this one reduction is not conceivable in this one it doesn't raise the question read the introduction to my spontaneous brain 2018 MIT press second qualitative feel you're right I didn't address that but that it's transformation so you say no no no it cannot be and then you cash out hard problem I say no it's a process of transformation give you an example I'm living in Canada water you know water it's trivial it's H2O you know the chemical formula it transforms from fluid into vapor into ice yeah so if we weren't and these transformation are dependent upon the environmental context whether it's hot or warm or whatever and if you weren't knowing that all these three states are related to the chemical formula at H2O you would say it's a different thing that's exactly what I'm saying under certain dynamical context you have a transformation of your neuronal activity into phenomenal activity slash what you described by qualitative feel yeah I try to do this first and unlocking the brain volume to consciousness 2014 now we have many more data on that yeah so it's a completely different approach and that I agree that transformation I didn't show in detail here I provided some indirect evidence for that but I didn't tackle it directly you're right but you already see here I use transformation it's a completely different approach that is based on the similarity yeah and transformation is now the actual process yeah if you have this you would not even come up with transformation because it would not be conceivable it's not in the options given by your transcendental background sorry for going too deep into philosophy but it's needed so it's a completely different framework if you judge it with the criteria of your philosophy of mind you will not understand this I mean what I say is nonsensical and meaningless I know I'm going fast but I interpret you I know this it took me many many years to understand this it really depends as I said whether you surf in Lake Van or in Hawaii it's a completely different challenge with different issues in your surfing same thing I would like to talk about the recent concept about consciousness that consciousness relies on information information is not some aesthetic it's dynamic and it itself creates process so could we say that bits of information are connected to consciousness that everything relies on information we cannot be conscious without some spectrum of information yeah that's basically the integrated information theory and I know him very well so I tell you what it is you say yes you're right no you're not right so of course you're right at this level you have information but trust me your brain produces a lot of rubbish which is no information at all a lot of random stuff yeah a lot I'm always amazed for instance I have proposals which of course nobody likes to do but including me and then at the end you have to shorten it to 10 pages how much stuff you can take out how much rubbish and gibberish we include which is not information at all so what I'm targeting here is deep down here there's complete chaos there's random and the brain structures it it constructs the information yeah so information is maybe here at this level but not here and I'm interested in this level because that's the necessary condition of the ground upon which your consciousness stands so I would probably locate Tononi here yeah the IIT integrated information theory and you see for instance again mental disorders schizophrenia suffer from insufficient constructing information or wrong information so you cannot just take information as a given but your brain constructs it in interaction with the environment and those processes how information is constructed that's what I'm looking for yeah that's down here yeah and that's how your brain does it it constructs the information if you say quote-unquote now it constructs dynamic information from the environment I can't read it see you can't even get around it but it constructs frequency by that it constructs information yeah and that's quite amazing so information presupposes a certain temple structure that's temple structure your autocorrelation function your scale-free dynamic and if that structure is lost or abnormally changed then you lose information or it becomes abnormal like in mental disorder I hope I gave you some information correct me if I'm mistaken but you said that what prevents AI from having consciousness is time-tracking capabilities tracking time scales yeah time scales which allow for the tracking of time scales in the environment so my intuition hints me that that idea is wrong but make me find some proof so are you saying that what prevents AI to have consciousness is ability to track some frequencies around them not only that there is of course more also here the whole thought content stuff and you need this inner time remember my example of the car on the parking lot which constantly moves spontaneously you need this spontaneous activity that enhances your spontaneous pattern and your dynamic range of that and the larger that is the higher the likelihood that you respond and match with something in the environment so everything I talked about time scales is also the spontaneous activity spontaneous brain activity and that's really very unique and the body invests a lot of energy into this spontaneous brain activity basically your brain is only 2% of the body weight but it consumes 20% of all the body's energy and when you do a certain task it's just 5% incremental energy increase your spontaneous activity your brain is like a little kid it runs into this direction it runs into that direction it goes here, it goes there, it tries out that's basically what your brain does and then you call it mind and we call it mind wandering and suddenly you have a new pattern and that range of pattern is very unique that's quite amazing and that makes it possible that you can track then the frequencies in basically a second or millisecond exact way this is an amazing thing for me yeah and that's an active process yeah so that's the difference you can see you can be yet now here for the philosopher you can be just David Hume and say okay this is just a passive thing it just receives the external input no no no it actually adapts with its own frequency it changes its whole power spectrum yeah so that's an active process it's a very Kantian like brain it's not a human like brain that's an interesting thing and that is missing in current air this active spontaneous component yeah also the intra and intersubject variability yeah so we actually as I said I do not principally exclude that yeah you saw the yet indeed I trying to work on building time scales into some of the stuff yeah particularly for the machine learning for getting better prediction of our neuronal data yeah if I involve time scales build in time scales into my machine learning algorithms then I might get or in my deep learning networks then I might get better prediction of my data yeah because the tool with which I try to predict the data include some feature which is key for the brain and for the behavioral abnormalities I try to predict yeah so don't misunderstand me that I'm blocking here quick and a short answer I hope so when measuring the frequencies of the brain activity I was wondering what part of the brain was studied yeah good question really depends if you study sensory processes visual perception dynamics of visual perception of course you look for the visual cortex for the thought stuff that was mainly EEG where the regions and source localizations usually more difficult usually we look at the brain not in terms of regions but in terms of topography so topography is a concept which comes from geography basically describes the lines and so you have certain ways of how the different regions stand in relation to each other yeah and that's probably key so let's say if you have the same level of let's say activity in occipital cortex but you have different activity levels in prefrontal cortex you will perceive different things so we consider the brain we are holistic as we say or really in a topographic way and interestingly the brain has indeed some intrinsically preformed topographic organizations I showed for instance here going back to my beloved examples of time scales where is this here you see for instance as a repertoire of time scales and you usually see shorter time scales in your sensory cortex longer time scales in your prefrontal cortex and that's a gradient that can also change for instance we showed that if you have certain fast frequency tasks that difference disappears transiently but it comes back so intrinsic topographies that's another thing which is lacking in AI if an intrinsic topography but is not written in stone dynamic again so it's a certain structure pattern if you go into dynamic system theory so and then there is even an intrinsic topography with different layers for your sense of self it's a set of regions different layers each layer different set of regions which are in charge for your interceptive inner body self outer body self and for your mental self so it's basically written into your brain's so you will never get an answer for me it is this network or that region I consider this in an overall relative topographical collected data from different parts and made an average is that right or for different questions you study different parts I still miss a key answer I still for instance look in depression I not only look at the prefrontal cortex but how it relates to the visual cortex and that relationship predicts the symptoms and the subjective for instance and it's not only the interceptive layer of yourself the inner body layer of yourself but it's relative relation to the mental layer that determines your experience so in the same way I look at all time scales the relationship between the time scales and the power law exponents scale free or auto correlation I also look at all regions and look at their relative relationships and that's the topography