Omega 3

What is consciousness? Where does it reside? Does it belong to the mind or the body, or does it exist outside both? Is consciousness part of our souls, or does it live in the things we create – our art, our music, our cities and wars? As science and spirituality converge, what’s the next leap: humans with the souls of computers, or conscious machines?

From the smash-and-grab acid of the ’60s CIA to stoner elephants and singularitarians, Bella Bathurst follows the world’s longest-running detective story.

Newsweek, 24th June 2015

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Once you accept the Universe as matter expanding into Nothing that is Something, wearing stripes with plaids comes easy. Albert Einstein

Extract from Chapter 4

Through all of this – its use first by Hofmann, then by the CIA, then by the artists and hippies and now again by the scientists – the final goal was identical. Whether for benign reasons or malign, by fair means or foul, everyone has been looking for the same treasure. LSD and the other hallucinogens seemed to provide the tools to open up the perceptions and offer a new way of seeing the world. As did another, even more effective route to altered consciousness: death.

For a long time, the vivid accounts of experiences by patients pronounced dead but later revived were dismissed as hallucinations. Just like the sufferers of phantom limb syndrome, who often reported experiencing agonising pain in an arm or leg which had long since been amputated, many of those who claimed Near-Death Experiences (NDE) were either ignored or denied. In theory, the brain stops functioning about half a minute after the heart stops beating. And, under the current definition, if for ten minutes or so there’s been no detectable activity in your brain, you’ve got no pulse and you’re not breathing, then you’re dead. As a doornail. Or a parrot.

Legally, morally, medically and physiologically, you’ve completely left the building.

Or not. The work of researchers such as Dr Sam Parnia coupled with the growing body of neuroscientific work suggests not only that in some people consciousness appears to persist after death, but that there are so-called ‘liminal states’ which belong neither to life nor to death. ‘Death,’ as Parnia puts it in his 2013 book The Lazarus Effect, ‘is no longer a specific moment in time, such as when the heart stops beating, respiration ceases and the brain no longer functions. That is, contrary to common understanding, death is not a moment. It’s a process – a process which can be interrupted well after it has begun.’

©Bella Bathurst

Medicine has always recognised different stages of alertness from full awakeness through sleep right down to death. The Glasgow Coma Scale – the nearest we have to a rating for physical consciousness – gives each stage a grading from 15 down, based on a patient’s responses to different stimuli. A high score is indicated by the patient withdrawing from pain, responding to verbal commands, and visually registering their surroundings. No-one gets lower than three. If you’re three, then the next step down is six feet under.

So, instead of defining consciousness as a series of attributes or capacities, perhaps it’s easier to see it as a series of deepening planes. Very broadly speaking, oceanographic currents move round the globe in belts. Polar ice is laid over warm water which covers cold water, as if the sea was not a single seamless whole but a confluence of rivers all sliding through each other. Everyone has at some time had the sensation of wading through water of differing temperatures – feet warm, knees tepid, chest cold.

Maybe consciousness is the same. Maybe it’s just depths of selfhood, one laid over the other, through which we all swim. Sometimes we’re sunbathing on the surface, sometimes in sleep or coma we’ve dived far down into silence. It’s only a metaphor, but it is at least curious that the sea always slips into the way we describe conscious states – falling to sleep, deep trance, descents into oblivion. At any rate, some neuroscientists have begun using similar terms for the way the brain behaves during comas and PSV states. They describe the way neurons behave as being similar to sonar. When you’re fully conscious the sonar’s on, the signal’s great, and everyone’s receiving. When you’re unconscious, the sonar’s still on and the pings are still pinging, it’s just that they’re not going anywhere. They stay localised, starry little bursts of light and energy in the mind’s deeps, firing alone through the darkness.

And in a coma state the sonar is still on, but the signal itself is broken.

Those who work most closely with the brain do not lose their wonder at it, though neurosurgeons seem as divided as everyone else about exactly what, or who, keeps the show on the road. The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield describes looking down at a human brain for the first time as a student. ‘Well, first of all they smell of formaline. It’s a really horrible smell. It stinks, but it keeps the brain firm while you’re dissecting it so you have to keep a set of gloves in a tupperware box. I remember it vividly – I remember holding it and thinking, ‘God, this was a person.”’ You can hold it in one hand and if it’s ready for dissection, it’s kind of browny-colour with dried blood vessels, and it looks like a walnut. Two hemispheres like two clenched fists.’

She believes that consciousness is not, ‘some disembodied property that floats free. I don’t believe in the the theory of panpsychism – that consciousness is a reducible property of the universe and our brains are like satellite dishes picking it up. I can’t disprove it, but assuming that consciousness is a product of the brain and the body, then it’s inevitable that if the brain is changed then consciousness will change.’ Similarly, in his 2014 memoir Do No Harm her friend and erstwhile colleague the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh regards the muddle over what belongs to the mind and what to the brain, ‘confusing and ultimately a waste of time. It has never seemed a problem to me, only a source of awe, amazement and profound surprise that my consciousness, my very sense of self, the self which feels as free as air, which was trying to read the book but instead was watching the clouds through the high windows, the self which is now writing these words, is in fact the electrochemical chatter of one hundred billion nerve cells.’

Some forms of neurosurgery are better done under local anaesthetic, which means the patient is awake and responding to questions throughout. How strange and how miraculous to spend your working life looking down at a brain within its bony casing whilst holding a conversation with its owner. Teilhard de Chardin would probably have loved neurosurgery, with his palaeontologist’s mindset and his sense of the span of things. But does taking apart the brain, that living piece of physical origami, really get anyone nearer to knowing what consciousness is? Is it where the self resides, and if so, is that why brain diseases like Alzheimers gnaw away at the stuff of the self? If time or disease pulls away someone’s personality, burglarisising all the stories that made them them and leaving nothing but a physical body, then has that disease made off with their consciousness too?

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