 Okay. We talk what you can do without being conscious. Now, it is a tourism today in today's culture that much of what goes on in our head is unconscious. This is, of course, this is a new realization in the western intellectual thought tradition. It's really Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, who sort of first... I mean, he wasn't the first strictly speaking to talk about unconscious processing, but he's the one sort of who made it a major part of his philosophy. If you read some of it, such as it is, that unconscious drives and urges and motivations, particularly in his case with respect to, with regard to Christianity in the church, have very powerful and mainly as he sees it, negative influences on life in general. So he introduced really the concept. Of course, then it is really Sigmund Freud to whom we own the idea of the unconscious. Now, of course, he's constructed an entire hierarchy of various types of unconscious. There's the pre-conscious, there's unconscious, and there is subconscious. And he's, you know, has elaborate theoretical arguments sort of to understand the relationship between the previous sub and the unconscious as compared to the conscious. And, of course, he has all these mythological creatures like the Oedipus complex and the Aden, the super ego and all of those things, which really have been, basically have not proven their worth in terms of objective criteria. So we don't talk about them anymore today in science, but nonetheless Freud remains a very powerful influence. I'm co-organizing next year a big conference on consciousness in Tucson, and half the people want to organize symposium on Freud and the unconscious and what Freud taught us about the dreams, about dreaming and all of that, which I think is very little. He was a little bit too much sex-obsessed, of course, also. But it is true that there's enormous amount of, there's enormous amount of unconscious post-thing going on in the brain. So in that sense, Freud was onto something. Of course, Freud himself was a very smart guy, no question about it. He himself was a neuroscientist. He got his MD working on single neurons. In fact, at the time, you might know, some of you at least, that at the time when he did this in the 70s and 80s, 1870, 1880, the neuron theory was the neuron doctrine was still very controversial and there was still a toss-up of fight between those people who thought that the nervous system consists of this reticula, out of this continuous sheet of entities of neurons, we would say today, this reticula net, this sort of continuous network, and those people who said that just like anywhere else in biology, the cell, the neuron is the basic unit of the nervous system that wasn't established till around then. He himself contributed to that by working on one particular type of neuron, the stomatogastric neuron in the lobster crayfish. And then he made very valiant efforts in the early 90s to try to come to grips, to try to construct psychology-based neurology. One of the very famous unpublished works of his 100 pages called the, or it doesn't have a title in the original, it's German. Some notes he wrote to himself when he visited Fleece in Berlin. You know, the guy with the nose, these strange beliefs. When he visited him in Berlin on the way back, he composed this. It was really very clairvoyant. I mean, he talks about synapses. He used context point. He doesn't use the term synapse since that wasn't introduced by Schacht until a few years later. He talks about that the memory probably resides in the changes of those context point, which now today we know to be true. And he also talks about something like the NCC, he talks about their neurons there, whose activity gives rise to conscious sensation. But he very quickly gave that up. He never published that because, and you realize why, because at the time, so little was known about the brain. It was even controversial that vision took place at the back of the head in terms of prime visual cortex. They knew about functional locusation, about certain things like the motor cortex had been identified and Broca's area had been identified. It was really very, very primitive. And in his writing at the time, they talk about energies. They talk about sort of energies around in the brain and because he didn't really realize about specific nerve conduction along highly specific pathways, although some of that was already known from conduction in muscles. Anyway, so he was a very smart guy, but then he went off and started the church and became very uncritical. How many of you know what this is? The enteric nervous system. Most of you have one of this in your gut. So the enteric nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system. It's probably on the order of 50 to 100 million neurons that are down here in your gut. For the most part, you're totally oblivious to the workings of the enteric nervous system. In fact, you don't want to know because when you know about the existence of the enteric nervous system, usually it's when you have bad things happening. I mean, nausea or things like that of that nature. I mean, the enteric nervous system is responsible for digestion. It's responsible for the peristalsic rhythm that finally allows you to go to the bathroom. All those sorts of things. There are neurons there. There are neurotransmitters there. So you can ask a question, why is it true there are 50 million neurons there? Why don't they give rise to conscious? As far as we know, there isn't any conscious down there. As I said, there's even very little, I mean, there's some communication, but it's basically pretty, to first order, highly autonomous system that works without intervention of the, some people call it the second brain and some people claim, you know, this is where gut feeling comes from, come from at least some types of, quote, gut feeling that come actually from the gut from the enteric nervous system. And there's some minimal communication, but it's really pretty autonomous. So we have to ask, so this is a case of a nervous system that works pretty well without consciousness, and we have to ask, well, how's that possible? Where's the difference to those types of systems that give rise to consciousness? Reflexes at the very simplest level, you know, like this reflex here, or the Babinski reflex, right, when you tickle sort of a little below your toes to see whether you curl. These are all reflexes. Some of them don't involve the brain, some of them don't involve cortex, and most of them in fact just involve local loops to the spinal cord, but they're reasonable sensory motor reactions and they work well without consciousness. We'll now talk about some of these cases, posture judgment, estimating steepness of hills, reaching and grabbing. In fact, most overtrained abilities of this, most things that we do every single day, like talking, like driving, like climbing, like dancing, like lots of other things, are done unconsciously. Of course, you can perfectly well become conscious of when you drive, when you climb, or when you talk, but usually it's after the fact, probably a couple of hundred milliseconds later, and in fact, when you become conscious of many of these things and when you try to interfere with it very often, and if it's a highly trained ability, it might actually give rise to a decreased performance. That's the function of training. That's why you train and train and train so you don't have to think about it, you can execute the action effortlessly. The dissociation between what you see and what your eyes see and of course, and there's famous which I won't talk about because one, there isn't all that much evidence for it, although the basic idea once again is plausible that many high level decisions that you take, why did I marry a particular person, why did I go to college X rather than to college Y, these important lifestyle, life changing decisions, probably may be beyond the realm of conscious introspection and what you're conscious of after the fact, one morning you wake up and you decide, okay, I'm gonna do it, and then you try to reconstruct knowing yourself, knowing something about your own history, why did I make this decision? Well, probably because A, B, C and D, and those that might be true, or it might not be true, depending how well you can sort of, to what extent you actually know about yourself and how much are you enthralled about the way you would like to be rather than the way you really are, and of course this is sort of one of the adage of Western philosophy, know thyself, and so we know it's very, very difficult to know yourself because of all these wonderful compensation mechanisms we have in our head that prevent us from trying to understand what we really like, what we really want, what we really, you know, the true decisions, the true reason for our decisions. So all of that just to say that it's really unclear to what extent we have access to high level, we have conscious access to many of these high level decisions. Now I'll be following much of the work of two neurologists, a neuropsychologist, and David Milner at St. Andrews in Scotland and Mel Goodale at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. They've written an entire book on it, which I recommend. I think it's one of the supplemental readings, the visual brain in action. They call all these systems online systems. Online because there's some evidence and we'll mainly talk about this coming Friday next lecture that these systems don't really have access to memory. They work in the here and now. They don't have access to shorter memory. The idea is that all these systems are there online in order to deal with some contingency, right? I have to reach out and grab this. It doesn't really happen that I say, okay, I'm going to grab this, but I'm going to wait three seconds and then I'm going to reach out. The claim is if I do that, then I evoke for that I need a conscious system. Just reaching out and grabbing, just reaching out and scratching, just talking, just driving, all those things I do online in real time, there's no need for memory. And that might in fact be one way, one operational way I can distinguish the online system from the conscious systems. Now Francis Crick and I call these zombie systems. Why? Well, it's just a cute name. Remember that movie, Night of the Living Dead? So we call these zombie systems, the ideas that there are many zombie systems in your head. Each one is sort of dedicated, or zombie agents, each one is dedicated to sort of one particular function. So one zombie system might have one particular input like your eyes or like the receptors in your ear that tells you the orientation of your head or your ears for auditory input or your olfactory system, the vomeronasal system. And that might have one particular output like it might control sexual behavior or it might control social behavior or it might control my eyes or it might control the way I run and the way I climb. So the idea that you have this multitude of these different systems, most of which of course not segregated, some of them will overlap in the brain, that serve very specific functions. So if you look up, it is quite likely that in order to train them up you actually need it to be conscious but that once you train them you don't need consciousness anymore. Procedural memory that we'll talk about in next week, most of these systems involve sort of procedural memories. Now zombies is also a technical term, believe it or not. Now of course zombies originally come from the name, comes from the voodoo culture in West Africa and Haiti. And of course it denotes somebody who's, you know, a zombie who sort of there's this process of zombification that people talk about. It's somebody who, where the soccerer, what's it called? Soccerer, I think the soccerer or something has put a special spell on this person and this person is now undead. There's actually some interesting research done on that topic. It turns out that one of these potions that these sorcerer administers to these, to the unsuspecting victims of zombification actually concerns a very effective poison called TTX which is gained from the pufferfish which is used today in neurobiology across two blocks, sodium channels, it's a very infactant muscle paralyzer and the claim that this is one of the active ingredients in this potion that these people bring or become administered unsuspectingly. What? Don't touch, okay. Now in philosophies, zombies mean something related to that. It means a person who's exactly like me who, I mean, not like me, Christoph, but just like another person who is, who behaves exactly like a normal person would, who claims that they're conscious but there's no light inside them. It doesn't feel like anything to be this person. So the zombie would sort of, you know, procrate and have children and live a normal, you know, normal, I wouldn't say happy life because there is no feeling to him or her. But the idea is that this person behaves exactly like a normal person would and you can't tell him apart with the only difference that inside there's no light. It doesn't feel like anything to be the zombie. And this sort of a gedunking experiment that's used by philosophers to argue for and against the notion that consciousness is necessary or is not necessary. Philosophers are concerned about the question to what extent does consciousness follow from the natural properties of the world? To what extent is it supervenient from the natural laws in the universe? Or to what extent does it transcend them? To what extent do you need to add something special? And for example, most famously David Chalmers has argued in his Ph.D.C. this where he's popularized the term the hard problem that you can, that everything we know today at least about the laws of physics and chemistry and biology, they are, well, sorry, put differently, that consciousness does not arise out of any of these laws right now. There's no right now lawful explanation for why a zombie should not exist. In other words, he says it's perfectly compatible with everything we know about science today that everybody in the universe including myself is a zombie, that consciousness doesn't exist. Yet he takes as a starting point the obvious fact that he, David Chalmers at least is conscious and has sensation of pain and pleasure and beauty and all of that and so do most of you, at least I assume most of you. And so there's this discrepancy. So therefore he says this is known as the hard problem. The hard problem, when philosophy referred to the hard problem, it's a hard epistemological problem as compared to the easy epistemological problem. Easy, that's what we do. That's what scientists do. Now of course they realize it's not easy in the practical sense, but it's easy in the sense that for every function that you can imagine that consciousness has, let's say, consciousness, the function is planning or memory access or all of those things, you can imagine some sort of mechanism that does that. Although in practice it's going to be very difficult to figure that out. But in conceptually epistemologically it's not difficult to imagine such mechanisms just like for artificial intelligence. The hard problem is that it's hard right now. There's no idea why, how consciousness should from what property of the world does consciousness follow. And so all of that is based on this idea of zombies that there's no law in the universe that prevents all of us from being zombies. So zombies in that sense do not exist. It's a very important point. There's no evidence that you can have these complex properties that we associate with consciousness such as short-term memory and planning and all of this without having consciousness. In fact, when a patient has lost consciousness access to for color or for object or for smell or for whatever, then there are always losses, there are always behaviors that the patient cannot do. There's no case known and I claim there will never be a case where a patient can have let's say a patient has lost conscious access to parts of whatever it is, vision or fractional, self-contained without also having a concomitant loss in some function. But yet there are these mini-zombie systems. Okay. Oops, sorry, it should be in yellow. So a classical, a simple case this was done a number of years ago already by, above mentioned, Mel Goodale. So this relates to this relates to psychotic suppression. Remember, psychotic suppression is the fact that when you move your eyes due to mechanisms that are being, that are still ill understood you don't really see, your vision is partly shut down when you move your eyes, right? I don't know whether you ever tried this or what I said you should. Looking in the bathroom mirror and sort of trying to seek, trying to catch your own eyes in movement you can't do it. Probably that's because of the fact that when you move your eyes your vision is severely reduced. Okay, so now you're sitting in the dark and there's a target. Let's say you're sitting in the dark and there's a little LED. The LED goes off and the LED over here goes on. Okay, so the target jumps from here from where to some other location. It's there and just does this quick saccade. So this is the velocity of her eyes. So she makes a very quick saccade here, gets in the neighborhood of that point. This saccade is made, it's a ballistic saccade. Yes, it's an open loop. The brain sort of computes, okay, I'm here, I need to go over there, so let me quickly make a jump in that direction. Usually it undershoots and then she makes a second so-called corrective saccade. And she after, what's the time? Okay, the time doesn't, it's like 200 milliseconds, the eye target lands right on, the eye lines right on target. Same thing with the hand, so you do the same thing with the hand. You're pointing at the target. The target goes off, the target goes on over here, you make a shift with your hand. It takes a little bit longer partly because of course the hand is substantially more, you know, it's heavier, it's sort of more inertia rather than the eyeball. Okay, now here what the experimenters did is sometimes while the subject moves her eyes you cheat and you move the target a little bit more, you move it a little bit outward. Okay, just a little bit. Let's say, you know, it's five degrees and you move it by another half degree. And then you ask the subject to well, you don't tell anything into the subject. Just like before and you do this, the important point is you move this target while she actually makes her saccade. Okay, that's important because otherwise you could see it. So as I said, here when the woman moves her eyes, vision is a little bit shut down so you don't really see this. Yet after the subject still just like here, she makes the corrective saccade and at the end she lands right on target. Now with the eye the same thing with the hand. The hand is slower and makes a single smooth movement. The remarkable thing is the subject doesn't know this. The subject cannot tell this case from this case. To the subject in both cases what happened the target went off, the target over here went on, she made an eye movement to it. She cannot distinguish this from this. So you could do that you could ask her to distinguish it or you could do for example half the time you move the target outward half the time you move the target inward. So half the time she has to do this corrective saccade or half the time she does this corrective saccade. And you ask her, you know, tell me which was the inward or the outward and she doesn't know. So here you have a nice case when you have a dissociation between what your visual system knows and what you see what you know. In this case the visual system knows that the target moved and makes incorrect for that. Yet you the conscious you, you don't see that. Now you can see it like I said if you move the target during the period here or here when the eye is stationary or if you make a big step you know, if you move it by another 5 degrees or something then you will become conscious of it. But for small, for small shift the subject doesn't have access to this information. Functionally you can make a nice story, why would you as we as I emphasize several times you move your eyes roughly 100,000 times a day if every time you moved your eyes you would have to be conscious of it given the limited conscious you know, access that you have you know it will clutter up, I mean you know but eye movements, I mean you wouldn't be conscious of anything but eye movements. So the DS, the eye movement is a perfect example of a highly stereotypical system, okay, you have the eyes, the eyes are constant load, the load doesn't change the size, you know, very different than this this one is always a constant load you have 6 eye muscles that you move it's highly, highly trained, you do this very early on in life and so there's really no reason to involve consciousness. That's not to say that you cannot become conscious of your eye movements but that's probably a different mechanism and for sure it takes much longer time. Same thing with pain for instance, it's very interesting, most people assume that you put your finger on a hot plate of let's say your stove and you move your finger away because of pain, that's probably not the case, in fact I would really be surprised if that's the case. I think first what you have, you have a very fast reaction and the pain the affect, I'm pretty sure will only follow later, in other words you're probably not withdrawing your hand in response to the painful aspect of that I mean clearly you can, right, if you leave your hand on it for many seconds till you actually feel the pain and then you move it away but you know, certainly if you're at our stage, in other words if you're indulged or already experienced what it is to put your hand on a hot plate you know it can be very long, you know there can be a very bad thing happening to you you'll move it very very quickly and that's probably done before you actually perceive the pain I mean I haven't really seen anybody who tests that but it's a nice experiment here by somebody called Lee where the claim is here is that this zombie system not only operates for your eye movements and there are different types of eye movements we've only talked about psychotic, these fast eye movements but also for all sorts of body adjustment, as I walk around or here I don't really have to adjust myself but if I walk in the hills you know I constantly have to adjust myself depending on the load I carry the steepness of the hills when you go out in the downtown Pasadena on Saturday evening at 9 o'clock you cross the street it's incredible complex what you have to do there's all this traffic, foot traffic, road traffic you have to move your body particularly if you run you have to really move very very quickly as a function of the incoming visual information the claim is that all of that happens so fast and so effortlessly that it doesn't involve conscience you do it unconscious so here they tested this for example you have a room when you have a second sort of suspended you know you have the suspended room here inside the real room and the floor is fixed and now you gently move the floor back and this sort of ceiling back and forth so you don't move the floor you move the ceiling back and forth and again if you do it over a short time so here you give the room sort of the sign gently sway the room back and forth if you do over small distances the person will sort of compensate for that automatically the person will sway I'm sure if you do it over this distance you'll notice but if you do it over a very small distance the claim is the person doesn't notice again it's something you do all the time effortlessly it's a very specialized system why clog up your limited bandwidth that you have for conscious perception let me see yeah we'll see so we'll talk on Friday we'll talk mainly about patients we'll talk about various evidence from patients from particular patients with specific lesions from patients with what's called blindside from patients who have specific ataxes and so there you'll see there's some nice evidence for reaching and grabbing it's another one of these systems that works very sophisticated when you reach out and grab something you immediately make a judgment as to how big it is how heavy it is or that you make implicitly and unconsciously and you do it every time you reach out and grab something you make these unconscious very complicated processing let me show you estimating steepness of hills trust the scientists to study this so there's this profit University of Pennsylvania studied this so he studied how do how do people perceive steepness now I don't know about you but I have always had this and I only realized it once I read his papers I've always had this disconnect let's say you're driving the California Sierras you drive somewhere up at Mineral King for example somewhere in this Sierra National Park and there's a road and it says 5% inclination and you think no way this is not 5% this is 20% when by your judgment you think it's really very very steep and I always had the surprise that I difficultly believing that those signs were correct because I always found that they vastly underestimated the steepness so that's essentially it turns out that's true there is a dissociation the road bill has got the angle right but there's this dissociation between the way you perceive the steepness and the actual steepness which is interesting so these people profited out studied this question so in university they went to one campus University of Pennsylvania where you have lots of different hills they essentially asked people and I gradually randomly waited for people to come by and asked them to judge the steepness of one particular hill using three different criteria one was just to say it to estimate it in angles the other one was to do it visually using a protractor essentially they had to adjust this disc they could look at the hill and they were asked to adjust the disc in relation to what they felt was the steepness now they don't describe exactly and I haven't seen the video of the hill but the idea was what I get from the experiment that they were standing in front of the hill so it wasn't there was a silhouette they can judge but they're essentially standing in front of the hill and they were told to adjust the protractor to the angle of the hill and they were laughing they had to do this but they had to do this tactile out of sight of the hand so they were sort of asked blindly to adjust the slope of this protractor to what they felt was the perceived angle of the hill without looking at it so verbally, visually and then just tactile okay this is the real angle of the hill of the different hills varying between 0 and 40 degrees this is the perceived angle now if people were perfect this is what they should say if they could physically if they had access to the true angle they should be on here if you look at the haptic measurement it's actually pretty good so for small angle it's overestimated but then it's it's not bad now both visually and verbally what they estimated was actually relatively the same it's a high degree of concordance so this really well the implication is that really here you're making use of the same sort of information probably visual information and here you just express it one way and you express it here you express it using the area but that's probably exactly the same sort of information but it's very different than here what you do you consistently overestimate by a big big amount you overestimate the steepness of the hill you consistently overestimate so for example when it's 10 degrees on average you say it's actually 35 and 30 degrees and this is exactly what I that's always been my experience that when I was on a 10 degrees road I always felt it was much much higher you know when you're on a 20 degrees it's actually closer to 35 or 40 degrees so there's a persistent overestimate of the visual the estimate of the slope based on visual cues but not if you do it using a different system so the claim is that this is a dissociation between between two different aspects of vision between vision for action and vision for perception and just keep that in mind because we'll return to it that if you do that one part of your brain namely the one that gives rise to visual perception or language in this case seems to be the same they vastly overestimate the the angle while the other system that sort of might be closer to the vision for action system where you clearly requires visual input since you have to look at the hills and you don't get to touch them or walk on them first you have to judge them visually but then you sort of you're supposed to adjust this with your hand this other system seems to have more veridical information veridical in the sense it seems to be closer to the true state of the world now this interesting got worse they also did this in a separate study they looked at it how does this mismatch between reality and percept how does it change when you're old, when you're tired they did something else feeling of a climb and at the end of a climb okay that was the same heavy load and when you have a light load and what they found is very striking effects that when you when you're asked to carry a very heavy backpack with lots of stones and in this case or when you were tired at the end of a day versus at the beginning of the day you would make a bigger you would judge this even larger than before so if you are young and fit and didn't have the law to carry your estimate was closer to the veridical then when you were a frail or when you were tired or when you had to carry a big load no no no is there an fmi study to say a functional imaging study to show which part of the brain is involved in doing these shape estimates people have studied areas like LO for shape estimation but that shape estimation of objects that are two-dimensional images of objects here they in part of this paper it's a very nice paper this psychologist studied this at the last picture they show this this is a depiction of a 10 mile race called the charlotte 10 mile race and they give you in this little description of the topo associated with this foot race they give you the individual miles and this is the elevation this is the sense they have this is the sense in the brochure for the runners the last mile of the course we trace the rolling first mile but now the downhills are more painful for some runners than the uphills so this turns out to be identical to physically the same mile yet here for whatever reason the artist to do this perspective vastly hugely emphasize the changes and the claim of profit is that's exactly what runners experience because here you're much more tired and then you experience the hills are steeper than you did at the beginning of the day when you were about to run the race so the claim is the explanation is it's one of these evolution about well I'm not sure the explanation they say well it's obviously much more much less expensive for the audience to overestimate the steepness and to underestimate to underestimate steepness could really be bad that you're willing to run up this hill although it's going to over tax you and you'll be more likely to be eaten than if you're a little bit more cautious that's sort of the high level explanation of the psychologist but it's a very striking dissociation on the other hand there's another case when I looked at when I was reviewing this a year ago for my book we do not find a dissociation it's a little bit surprising and I don't know why you find in one case this dissociation between the perceived between this one variable between the dissociation between what your let's say your haptic systems perceive and what your visual system perceives in one case but not in the other this is studied by Jack Loomis Jack Loomis is a psychologist at Santa Barbara you see Santa Barbara and he's sort of one of the world's expert on navigation, navigation that people use to navigate around 2D space or 3D space like pilots also he works with blind people making use of GPS etc so here he studied a distance estimate so you know essentially ask you how far am I to that whiteboard let's say to the first edge of that whiteboard there so that's one way estimate so people estimate this visually it's like 5 meters and then he said ok now close your eyes and walk until you ok I cheated walk to there until you think you've come at that point he did it without there being anything physically no no there was a light pole press or something like that you couldn't really hurt yourself coming into things and then he did different tools he did it in the light he did it in the dark he did it when there was an isolated cue on the ground he did it when there was a cue at my eye height because of course you get different estimates so here what do you see this is a physical distance this is for short distances up to you know up to 6 meters up to 20 feet and here's the indicated distance either visually or so either verbally when I say ok I think this is like 4 meters or walk when people close their eyes and walk till they think they've reached that point ok so they close their eyes and they walk till they're actually at that point and what you can see is if you look at them A, two patterns A, this is real distance this line here well this is if people would have accurate access to the true distance and they should be on the line and for example here when you have the cue at eye level in other words if he puts a little light at my eye level height then I'm really very good at estimating that for short distances here he puts the cue down on the floor definitely make much difference this was dark this was only when I think there was a single light present so this was I mean in national conditions like this when I have access to lots of information this I think he only had a single light here or single light down on the floor and obviously you're much worse in that case but the other so A in Germany doing pretty good the other thing to notice from before is there's always this high degree of concordance between the verbally or visually estimated distance and the actual walk distance so he shows that in the second plot so he plots the visual estimate of the distance as expressed by the subject in words and forming it as a way to the distance expressed by their walking system you can see it's a very high correlation so here you don't have a disconnect so here you A you're doing pretty well in terms of having access to the true distance and B those two different sources of information give rise to the same same output while here you have this haptic system gives rise to much better information than the visual system why why is one dissociated and the other one not who knows so many if not most overtrained sensory motor activities were used procedure learning which we'll discuss later which you have to learn by doing the same procedure over and over again like I mean particularly for all of us that's driving but it's also things like riding a bike and brushing your teeth and talking and all these activities that do require lots of feedback early on I mean most of this happens in our childhood but of course driving doesn't you know dancing or other things like rock climbing any other sophisticated sensory motor activity that you do doesn't happen till you're older all of that requires several things it requires constant training at the time when you're doing it you have to be highly exquisitely conscious of what you're doing but once what you're doing you're really doing it and you're really trained or you've overtrained as people say you can do it effortlessly in fact very often then when you stop just think about it when you stop the activity and think about it and think what to do next your performance drops it'll interfere with the performance and you have to back up and say okay let me just not think about it let me just do it it's also very the other characteristics of these things is of these ability of these skills is that it's exceedingly difficult to explain them to somebody in the abstract I can perfectly well explain you as I'm doing I'm demonstrating right now at least I hope I'm demonstrating I can talk to you about mathematics things like consciousness and about theory of relativity or mathematics but I cannot really tell you about how to drive a car and I can tell you abstract what the pedals are and the relationship the steering wheel etc but the only way to really learn is to actually do it train us called this muscle memory you have to get the muscle memory it's not only the muscle of course the learning isn't actually in the muscle it's in the sensory associated basal ganglia and motor cortex but sort of it denotes what I mean by that I found this wonderful quote this is a beautiful instance it's a classic you should read it it's a classic of the meditation literature Zen and the art of archery subsequently of course there have been a few book a particular Zen and the art of the art of tea drinking and then of course then in the art of motorcycle maintenance they all come from this this book here this describes I think it was a German professor before the war in fact he went to Japan and learned in the 30s and learned to shoot these huge bows you know these bows that are almost as big as a man they take many years of training they are just physically incredible demanding and it's a very Zen like thing I mean this is where you train the first 6 months you just look at the bow and you walk around you never touch the bow this is the first training that you do it's not something that we here in California I think would take take on with vengeance anyhow at the end of the book he has this little description where he talks about other similar skills like in this case the skill of fighting with a sword and I mean I was really just struck by this quote particularly it relates to some of the things that we talked about in class, undervalued attention the alighting reaction which has no further need of conscious observation in this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose and that is a great gain so what he stresses in this entire chapter that once you do it you have to do it in order to do it to truly master archery or swordsmanship you have to do it at the level of where you do it so effortlessly that you don't think about it and if you think about it interferes that's exactly what he says here it's really very nice now these things have not been studied a lot scientifically obviously for well for a number of reasons it's but you know in humans of course it's much more difficult to do it and you know doing over these timescales really does not lend it so very well to sort of laboratory research but of course any training book that you read training in you know any particular activity including even golf they emphasize that they emphasize this nature of the true mastery of the sport sort of requires you to do this training and to require to let go and not think about things so so there's this Milton Goodale and they published this book called the visual system in action where they really argue based on a lot of 100 years of prior research in neurology and in your physiology about the ventral and dorsal system so they talk specifically about vision and remember okay let me just move forward here remember this this is a monkey brain but similar in the human brain and we know from lots of clinical literature in the inshumans and we know from lesion studies in monkeys and from electrophysiological recordings in the monkey that they're two broad pathways two broad streams of information in the visual system they both originate in primary visual cortex one moves and down here to the to the infotemple cortex the posterior central and anterior infotemple cortex this is the ventral stream okay and this is the dorsal stream that moves to interpital circles and then on to prefrontal cortex and from here it also moves to prefrontal cortex so those two streams if you want they sort of reconverge in the frontal part of the brain but these are all the neurons that are involved in very specific object identity so here you have neurons that respond to specific colors or that respond to specific faces or to other things well here you have neurons that seem to encode more that seem to encode things like reaching or moving your eyes this is where for Richard Anderson does his research in the primal reach area where they want to implant the electrode for neoprostatic purposes in patients we also know about patients that if you have a lesion here in this part of the brain around the interpital circles you'll have difficulty with reach movement for example or you get things like neglect well here if you have a lesion here you don't have any difficult with sensory motor you have specifically difficult in perception like optic agnosia like protopagnose in case of faces that you're unable to recognize the face you can see the individual things but you're unable to put it together as a face or similar visual deficiencies so this is why people also call this the vision for perception pathway and this is the vision for action pathway the idea that the vision for perception pathway those are the neurons that underlie visual perception when I look at something and I see it consciously well these are the neurons that also retake visual input but they're responsible for guiding me if I want to walk from here to there if I want to reach out something on a visual guidance that's what this part of the brain does so Milner and Guttel spun the story that based on a patient very striking patient we'll talk about on Friday but also from some of the evidence I just reviewed and some more that's going to come right now that these two systems really map onto the online unconscious system versus the conscious system that the rental pathway is really responsible for conscious vision for perception and the docile pathway is really responsible for all these online systems Online essentially as I mentioned before based on one patient you can show that if the patient can do certain things automatically although she claims she can't see she can still execute visual motor behavior but if you ask her to delay three seconds then she's unable to do that and it fits nicely in with the idea that these systems are online they work in the year now they don't require memory because they're made for reaching for grabbing, for doing things immediately in the world and they're not made for storing things for three seconds and then doing them for that you would have to activate the other system so to review theirs so these things, the idea, the online system are relatively simple and stereotyped moving your eyes I mean, simple is maybe the wrong word to use here but I guess stereotype, that's important things like driving I mean, driving is far from simple but after a while we do it we have a feeling at least that we can do it fairly we can do all sorts of other things while we drive it's stereotypical you always execute sort of the same motor behavior in response to some sensory input or sequences of motor behavior in response to sequences of sensory input over time again and again and again, that's the characteristic short response time, they really react very fast that's the entire point of training that's what people in the army and the police everywhere train and train and train to make this as short as possible you don't have access to shorter memory in these systems they use egocentric coordinate system what I mean by that is that this visual system is made to actuate that this visual system is made to move my hand or to move my eyes or to move my limb therefore I want the system has to be in coordinates of the relevant output effect that has to be in the coordinate that's useful for the hand or has to be in the coordinate useful for the eye or has to be in the coordinate useful to my limb and it needs to have access to the veredical properties of objects in other words it really needs to know how fast that object away how big is that object, how heavy is that object because all those things matter if I pick something up you all must have had this case when you pick something up it's much heavier than we expected or when it's much lighter and sort of you do like this or when you go down the stairs and for some reason it happens rarely, fortunately we're very good at this you miscount you run upstairs which you do every day to get to your house to your condo and then for some reason you miscount or somebody play the trick on you and remove the stairs or whatever I mean that hasn't happened to me but it has happened to me occasionally for some reason I miscount and you know you can sort of barely fall short so this system needs to know the true properties as best as the brain can of the world this system can be quite different A, here the claim is it can be arbitrary complex I can do amazingly complicated things you know, I can make a movie I can do anything that humans can do but using this seeing conscious system it has any possible number of inputs and any possible number of outputs it has access to shorter memory I can perfectly well remove this slide and you can remember this slide perfectly well for many seconds most importantly this system has a very different function computationally one of the functions of this system for example is to recognize a bottle of water no matter where you see it no matter whether it's close up or far away no matter whether it's like this or like this no matter whether it's half occluded or when it's very very far away it only makes up a very small part of your visual space why because you know I want to recognize objects like bottles of water or like lines in the world or like a banana and I want to recognize them in it because there's so many different contexts there's so many different backgrounds there's so many different ways the banana can sort of show itself in the real world depending where the sun is and where the foliage is etc I cannot depend on the vagarities of the universe that I can only you know that I have a system that's sort of just only recognize a banana if it's exactly you know this size and this particular orientation clearly that wouldn't work very well if you have objects constancy for example it needs to recognize things independent of their distance independent of their shape, independent of their location which is very different from this system now this I mean to you all of this might seem fairly obvious but it's it's far from it particularly early on because early on the idea was let's say in the 50s, 60s and 70s partly motivated by machine vision that the way for them to build a visual system is you have sensors, cameras they all feed together into one central representation of the world so you have a central map of the world where let's say all the visual information is reconstructed as best as the robot or the animal can it's all said you know you take the two guys you get stereo and you take motion you feed all that information into one map the internal representation of the world that you may get as accurate as you can and then use that information then to plan or to move your actuators or whatever but here what's happening now and what we know from biology it seems to be very different that there's this multitude of different systems they have their own specialties there are a whole bunch of specialists those are the zombie system and then you might have one more general purpose module but that general purpose module is slower and yes it can control all the other modalities but the main drawback is that it's slower so very often in life you want to use the specialist system and the specialist system have access to their own special information to the general purpose information because that might just not be fast enough and so that's why I mean couldn't you say well the system has access to this information but it turns out that for example this system uses different information than this system and it has to because computation and the function of the system is different so Mill and Goody made some specific rather ingenious predictions particularly about object constancy now you might all know this illusion now perceptually I mean you know in the context which I'm asking this so you can imagine what the answer is but just if you look at it doesn't this monster look much bigger than this one right? clearly does substantially bigger now I guess what I should do next time actually cut it out and move it over here because they're exactly the same well sorry I'm a scientist they're exactly the same what goes on here due to the perspective geometry the fact that it's placed higher and it's placed more distant in this tunnel and we suffer from this illusion that this one has to be much bigger than this one well in fact exactly the same so in general we have this remarkable thing called object constancy when we look at things let's see if I move this twice as far away the angle it's up stand is going to be you know half the size the area is going to be a quarter of the size yet things don't look that way I mean they for sure look smaller clearly I can say this is smaller than when it's far away but they don't look nearly as small as it should just based on geometry if you look at your friend and you ask your friend to walk twice for distance she's not going to look twice she's not going to look half the size she should be just based on simple geometry what goes on here well we have this mechanism or a whole set of mechanism probably called object constancy that enable us that we know of course something more dimension of people and we know something about geometry etc and but so things that are farther away don't look as small as it should it's a special mechanism called object constancy now what Mill and Guttel claim that those should not exist or those object constancy illusion should be much weaker for the vision for action system why well if I have to look at and identify that bottle of that bottle of water here then yes as I said it's great that I can do it independently of where it sits or independently whether it's bigger or smaller upside down however when I'm supposed to reach out and grab it I better know it's exact distance because when it's here or when it's here you know I want to be able to directly grab it or here I mean I want to know the correct distance also I'd like to know you know same applies for weights etc I really want to know the exact geometry and so therefore when I'm when I'm reaching out for things to pick them up I should not suffer from this illusion compared when I'm just looking at this so he made use of this illusion called named after German psychologist Titchner so let's see which one is which one you have to look at it again so just judge this disc with respect to this and this with respect to this so which one is large which one are the same one of them is the same one of them is smaller so I'm just asking you to judge the size of this disc compared to that one or the size of this disc compared to that one okay good okay good excellent okay so you all suffer from this illusion this is the real that's why I put it next to this is the real this is the original thing so here they're actually the same size exactly the same size but here what happens you do your visual system does a normalization so here it says well because it's surrounded by these little discs and here it's surrounded by these big discs so this disc appears smaller compared to that and this one appears bigger well here actually this disc has been adjusted it's like 10% larger than this one so physically this one is larger than this yet perceptually they appear to be the same size let's see I tried to do this right so you can try to move it there so you can see it doesn't quite fit inside right I should have made a javascript but you know I had to give a big talk yesterday evening and there you see okay no that doesn't work no it doesn't anyhow that doesn't work okay sorry anyway so it's a small effect here it's roughly the size it's like 10% of the illusion so if I make this 10% larger than this one then they'll look the same here they're physically exactly the same but perceptually dissimilar so now what Mel Godiel did he asked people to judge this psychophysically just like I'm asking you which one is larger also he made discs sort of what he had these are little elevated this and this are little elevated wooden blocks and he asked them he asked people to pick them up and then he puts these LEDs on their on their thing on that on the thumb and there the what's this for finger the next finger and what you do what we all do if I for example give this to you and you reach it out thank you I'm gonna take it from you again what you'll do as you reach out you automatically scale your grip proportional to what I give you we all do that effortlessly it's one of these unconscious things we do all the time so if I give you something big you might reach you know if I give you my laptop I'm not gonna give you my Macintosh but if I would then you would immediately have two hands or if I give you a pencil versus that bottle of water you would do this or you would do this and so you and it has a time-dependent trajectory so first you reach first you over extend and then you then you as you get closer to the to the object you're grasping your your your grasp also become smaller this by the way definitely you can do this without visual feedback so I can just show you something I turn of the light and you reach out to grab and you do the same constant trajectory and here it's plotted so here they did this they asked people to do this to pick up both here the disc and here the disc right so they I so they wanted to know so here perceptually to me they look the same to you and also to you they look the same although this one is physically different and so the question is while these ones physically are the same yet perceptually this one looks smaller so the question is what about my my scaling my my grasp here the claim is that because these are this one is actually physically larger that my grasp should also be physically larger although perceptually they look the same but the claim is if Milner Milner good in a story is true that the vision for action system has access to the true information and so therefore here it should the hand should be larger compared to here and that's what they found so the this is the actual the maximum grip aperture here so as you say this is the trajectory at first you become larger and then sort of you you become smaller as you become as you move closer to the target and that here the so the these are perceptually different tiles and these are so these are perceptually the different tiles here the things look exactly the same to this correspond to the this corresponds to the lower case and this corresponds to the upper case but the the aperture is not fooled by that the aperture if it's a small if it's physically the small disc the aperture the reach the maximum aperture is smaller than if it's in both cases it's the same size although here perceptually here they look the same and here they look different so that's kind of very cute that's rather nice experiment I mean it's a non trivial prediction unfortunately unfortunately like often in science and other people have now replicated it using a bit more complicated situation using two comparison discs and they can't find the same result so now it's up in the air this came out a year ago which is really too bad because it it sounds such a nice story but it's not unclear what this actually carries through this particular experiment so the people have tried to make other experiments there's a whole bunch of illusion people study this a lot around the turn of the century the 19th century where you have all sorts of Miller Liar illusion all sorts of other illusions where things appear smaller or larger depending on things in their environment and illusion books if you buy illusion books they're filled with these and so people are trying to do many of these experiments and some of the experiments find similar things other find no effect other experiments find no effect in the sense that perception and vision for action have the same make use of the same information so it's up in the air right now well it's up in the air okay it's two things up in the air A the fact that this specific prediction that the vision for action system doesn't suffer from the same consistency or suffer doesn't obey the same consistency laws that vision for perception does and B a claim that always found very unlikely that this conscious unconscious distinction maps totally onto the ventral dorsal if you look at the anatomy these are highly interconnected area if you remember the processing hierarchy from S and all these areas are heavily interconnected it really would surprise me if it's something as simple as all those neurons are involved in unconscious and all those neurons are involved in conscious processing it's likely to be much more complicated now the other zombie systems that people have studied three of them one is night walking another one case where there's a this is a case where there's a PhD topic here waiting there's a PhD that's waiting to happen so I did this a couple of years ago when clicker and I were staying at the center of the institute for complexity research and then we met this Samra Blakely she writes she's a science writer for the York Times and she knew these sort of new age people who promised who did this thing called night walking and the problems they get to you in touch with in your child and you know with pyramids and all that sort of baloney so first I thought you know this just sounded pretty wacky to me but then she told me she said no the people are actually pretty sensible you should try this and I did I went there with my two kids what is it well so this is in Santa Fe this was during a moonless night so we were walking in these Arroyos in New Mexico so this is not flat right this is riverbeds like here walking up the Arroyo here in St. Gable mountains there's lots of rocks there's sand there's a riverbed you walk around this is at night so there was some light from the staff but there was no moon and the idea is what they did at first the following you put this this is a fluorescent sphere you shine a light on it and then sort of fluoresces for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and then the idea is it's not old the idea is that you walk around and you go and fixating this so after you just look you never look down you only just fixate this after a while after like 20 minutes you don't need this you can essentially just fixate a distance down the horizon or planet there was a planet up you just fixate that and you walk around like that now early on of course you're very nervous and this is dark and you know they're bushes and you know holes and what not so you know early on so you don't really trust your feet you constantly look down but after a while sort of you walk at a decent pace like this and hike a lot I wouldn't have done this before because I wouldn't have trusted myself but the remarkable thing is this is also true for my kids that after a while after you trusted yourself you got in touch with your inner child it was actually very remarkable it was actually remarkable that you could walk around after a while you sort of stopped looking down you could walk around perfectly well in this canyon land just okay so what cues do you use so first of all they say and I've tried it once if you take a a smoke glass and you only use your phobia it's a catastrophe you don't get anywhere so okay well the very first time if you close your eyes it's not going to work although there might be some auditory cues you know because if you talk you know clearly let's say you're in a cave or you're in front of a wall you know let's say you're in a room and you know you'll listen to an echo how large that is but it's really not in this relatively open land so I don't think there's any auditory cue I mean one possible explanation is that essentially you just make use of visual memory you know I don't look down but you know of course I can see let's say 30 feet ahead so I know what the terrain is there and then I make use of that so that's something one would like to repeat these or I would like at some point to repeat these experiments sort of in the lab and you can do them in principle but the claim is I mean not their claim they had this sort of new age explanation for it that just didn't make any sense at all I think while I talk about it in class I think what might be going on is the following this might be an instance of one of these unconscious army system in the sense that you have visual information down here at the extreme periphery for example some evidence from monkey that in the superior colligalos the receptive fields go down all the way to 90 degrees you know so not you know typically you can see if I look ahead I can see sort of probably till 60 degrees or 70 degrees here at least I feel I can't see anything anymore now the question is is that true so if you actually do control experiments down here you know to attend the first choice for instance can you actually see down here or we've tried that doesn't work very well with fingers but is it possible that you can use that information down here to guide your feet because that's all what you need to do you don't need to do anything with your fingers the important thing is you need that information down here in the lower part of the visual field you need that information down here to do conscious vision because you don't need to look see down here you can always do this you don't do complicated object information processing down here but that information might be perfectly there focused on the colligalos and it's fed directly to the parts of let's say the basal ganglia or the motor cortex that control my feet or that control how long I live how high I live because I have to know you know whether I lift my foot like this or like this or like this to step over some obstacle so that's so the question is what is the case of an unconscious zombie system where you make use of this visual information that's not consciously accessible in let's say infertile cortex but then nonetheless can control your factor seems entirely plausible to me one other two other cases I won't talk about this I'll talk about next week so I don't want to but there's some evidence I mean quite strong evidence that for certain fear evoking stimuli you do unconscious processing fairly quickly and then there's a very nice story particular from mice right now but it's unclear for humans so I don't know how many of you know there are actually two visual you actually have two olfactory systems in your head I mean by two I don't mean the two nostrils but I mean you actually have two systems okay I should be a little bit careful lots of animals have two systems mice have been very well studied they have two olfactory systems in human it's probably the second one might be vestigial organ it's called in humans also Jacobson's organ so we have the main system we used to smell is the main olfactory system we know quite a bit about it and then there's a second system that might be vestigial and that's called the vomeronasal system it's present at the base of the nose you can see it in 30 to 40% of human feet it is visible it doesn't seem to present all human fetal tissue it's very difficult to find reliable in adults when you do autopsy to find reliable so it's unclear the propensity is probably there it's there thing in macaque monkeys but it's unclear whether it has any function in even those individuals in which it's still present the claim is that there are lots of very nice studies on it we had a whole bunch of speakers talk to us about this that in mice this vomeronasal system it's a highly specialized system not only mammals but many other animals it mediates it mediates pheromones it uses pheromones it might be a highly sensitive system it might be a single individual molecule an individual pheromone and this system it's a very special purpose system the one we use is the general purpose system just like general purpose vision we can smell almost any kind of not quite but we can almost smell any possible odor this one is the the idea of the highly highly dedicated system there are these signal molecules that usually conspecific use so they use it for sex and gender and sort of aggression all sort of social related signals and there's some recent very nice stuff done at Katherine Duluck at Harvard Marcus Meister and Axel Rich at Columbia and other people we can now specifically inactivate in a mouse we can specifically inactivate this vomeronasal system and so we can study specific sex link behavior in mice that involve this system now there's some claim there was a bunch of nature papers a couple of years back by Barbara McClintock in Chicago and she claims functionally, physiologically that and this is a complicated story that we have access I mean by humans have access to all factor information that's not consciously registered and let's see the evidence was one sort of evidence is synchronization of menstrual rhythm in women that live together that camp together or that go to the army together people have done studies for example in Israel all Israeli women have to go two years to the army and of course you would expect women to roughly you know if you take two women the chance of that they menstruate on the same day you know it's what is it 1 over 28 times the width of the menstruation period but the claim is that that actually the incident is much much higher again that's somewhat controversial everything I could find out about all factions somewhat controversial and then there was Barbara that this is based on unconscious all factor clues although it's very difficult when you live close together with people to rule out all sorts of other verbal clues or visual clues all sorts of other cues then there was this McLean also published this study see what was said where women were asked to, what was it, they smelled the they were asked to it was rather bizarre study but it did come out in nature it was a study where they were asked to choose men based on smells what was it yes they they related it to the major historic compatibility complex that's right yeah all of this is somewhat controversial if you look at the literature I find it rather fascinating so it might be true that there are these all factor cues that are unconscious whether or not, so there are several questions here Ace's question, okay to what extent is the vomonasal system in humans active not just the vestigial organ that might be important for mice, for sex and aggression but it just might be relevant for us that's one question to what extent is there unconscious all factor processing particular for things like for gender sex specific behaviors and I guess they might be mediated just like they might be mediated by the main olfactory system not by the vomonasal olfactory system so I mean I know that quite a bit of research going on, particularly of course by the perfume industry they can claim that they have sex specific perfumes they would like that so they've done all these experiments where they take a random haul and they have people male or females walking in they spray certain seeds and then they check are people more likely than not to avoid those seeds that's been sprayed with these hormones or to go towards them and then they ask them do they smell them, do they not smell them that sort of research it's rather amusing so let me finish so this if it's true and there does seem to be a lot of evidence that there's and certainly it agrees with our experience of life that huge amount of stuff goes on in our head that we're not conscious of and that most of the things we do in fact when you become older dawns upon you that maybe the majority of things that you do of this unconscious nature when you talk or walk or greet somebody in the morning when you brush your teeth, when you drive home all those things you can do quite sophisticated but without sort of spending too much conscious thought on it so that raises two questions if conscious isn't a valve property of the of the brain why do you need it, why do you need consciousness at all if you have all these unconscious system and they do all these things so wonderfully why do you need consciousness I'm not going to answer it but that's why doesn't the brain consist of a large collection of these unconscious system if they're so great and second world you have to ask at the neuronal question where's the difference between all those scales and behaviors and procedures that can go on without consciousness to those that involve consciousness is it different neurons like for example myelin and guttiles say that one is ventral, one is dorsal there's just something special about the dorsal passage that's not found in the ventral it doesn't have to do something with the complexity of the associated brain circuits it's a different type of firing like oscillation versus non-oscillation people have speculated in all of these things whatever it is one thing we do we do know it appears to exist and we'll talk more about it in the second last lecture of the series based on split brain experiments whatever it is it seems to be found in both hemispheres it's one of the few things we really know for sure whatever the mechanism is it appears to exist independently in split brain people and to a certain extent possibly independently normal people now my favorite hypothesis here is that the difference probably relates to the fact feed forward versus feedback and we sort of touched upon this theme when we talked about masking that every time you have just feed forward activity racing through a system or primarily feed forward activity running through a system as I showed you I hope to have demonstrated to you in the lecture last week with this ultra rapid recognition where you can flash up images 150 milliseconds later something in your brain knows it's an animal or it doesn't contain an animal given those times involved it only involves feed forward activity and that does not involve conscious perception the conscious perception has to involve massive feedback back to the system there has to be some sort of reverberatory activity that builds up maybe for a couple of hundred milliseconds and that is not possible without feedback activity so therefore the prediction would be that in any system you can or anywhere in the brain you can get these zombie behaviors if it's just based on feed forward activity or primarily feed forward activity that of course can be very fast because you don't need to wait to do endless cycling you have one sweep through the system you go from the motor from your retina to v1 to let's say motor cortex, the basal gang and you go bang bang bang bang and you move your finger whatever but that if it involves consciousness you have to reflect upon, you have to access planning stages you have to put it in short of memory all that involves feedback circuits one critical difference would therefore be in the nature of the circuit that one is feed forward then it's unconscious from a point when it involves feedback a massive amount of feedback it might give rise to conscious sensation right now we just don't know but those are some of the speculations and I'm leaving you with that so on Friday we'll talk about nightwalking sleepwalking partial complex seizures all sorts of interesting behaviors in patients