A recent review at Scientific American covers “new and ingenious ways to measure consciousness” in noncommunicative (i.e., vegetative) patients:

[A researcher] placed the noncommunicative patient in a magnetic scanner and asked her to imagine playing tennis or to imagine visiting the rooms in her house. You and I have no trouble doing these tasks. In healthy volunteers given these instructions, regions of the brain involved in motor planning, spatial navigation and imagery light up. They did likewise in the unfortunate woman. Her brain activity in various regions far outlasted the briefly spoken words and in their specificity cannot be attributed to a brain reflex. The pattern of activity appeared quite willful…

But this small argument doesn’t work. I don’t see any way to structure it other than as follows, which I take as faithful to the terms of the article:

1. Let “consciousness” be an awareness of one’s environment or of the people in it.
2. Let “a brain reflex” be a brain responding to a stimulus in a way that does not require consciousness. (This last part makes the response a reflex, as opposed to what we usually think of as “cognition.”)
3. Let “a noncommunicative person” be one who cannot indicate that he or she has consciousness. (The lack of such an indication in fact propels the researchers towards the search for signs consciousness in the patient other than deliberate communication.)
4. Inversely, let “a communicative person” be one who can can offer such indications.
5. Noncommunicative person x‘s brain responds to stimulus a in manner b, just as we would expect communicative person y‘s brain would.
6. Person y‘s brain’s response b to stimulus a requires consciousness (in the “willful” imagining of the required material).
7. Therefore, any brain’s response b to stimulus a must require consciousness.
8. Given 1 – 7, x‘s response must not be a reflex.
9. Given 1 – 8, x must have consciousness.

First, I question premise 5’s soundness. Although y‘s brain’s response would include b, y‘s brain would also likely respond in ways that led to things like talking—in short, the kinds of things that differentiate x from y in the first place. The section of the review covering this study mentions scans of 17 noncommunicative patients, but no scans of communicative patients, a clear lack of a control group. In short, premise 5 seems akin to arguing that, although you ate the ice cream and the cone and I tossed my cone away, we both ate the same thing.

More crucially, I see no reason to claim, as in 7, that just because we expect y to involve consciousness in her response b, we should expect every response b to involve consciousness. Let’s assume that conscious experience requires a functioning brain structure p, for example (as is widely held, and as some collected thoughts by the author of the review, Christof Koch, might lead us to believe). Couldn’t it then be that damage localized to p might allow for certain responses b in the brain that were not included in consciousness?

I grant that it’s difficult to imagine responding to a command to visualize playing tennis without consciously making the decision to do so. But that could be a failure of imagination. Couldn’t there be some analog to blindsight applying to the realm of consciousness? Do we require the filter of consciousness in order to imagine? Or, as during dreams or under anesthesia, can the brain operate in ways that resemble consciousness without actually having it?

The researchers would answer this charge, I take it, by pointing to the conclusion in 8 (hence also the flow of the argument in the article, in which 8 comes last). Even granting 7, though, the argument begs the question. Highly condensed, it looks like this: x has response b, which we take (because y also has it) to require consciousness; therefore b cannot be a reflex; therefore b requires consciousness.

To avoid the charge of circularity, you have to knock 8 out of the argument. Without it, though, you have no answer to my objection to 7. When we measure things that neither are nor certainly require consciousness, how can we claim that we’re measuring consciousness, even indirectly?

Here’s an article on how human eyes might be indicators of personality. More pits in the iris means correlates with “tender, warm, and trusting” personalities, and more curves around the edge correlates with neurosis and impulsiveness.

The most important objection here, it seems to me, is that correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. However, the study did provide at least some provisional notes on causation. One gene, PAX6, controls embryonic iris development. Scientists have also found that PAX6 mutating correlates with “impulsiveness and poor social skills.”

I suppose this just puts the correlation ≠ causation charge at one remove. In other words, the crucial decision to make is whether PAX6 mutations cause social issues. If you grant that, then this study of irises makes perfect sense.

Even if the study is sound, I think, this particular “biomarker” would vary in importance based on the individual and on the culture. David Schmitt has argued that “humans evolved a pluralistic mating repertoire that differs in adaptive ways across sex and temporal context, personal characteristics […], and facultative features of culture and local ecology” (259).¹ That argument seems readily portable to questions of more general personality evaluation (that is, those in which mate choice is not necessarily the genre of decision-making).

Anecdotally, I find myself mistrustful of people with small pupils.

¹ “Fundamentals of Human Mating Strategies.” In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Buss, David M., ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005. 258-91.

Sharon Begley, one of the better science journalists (and science editor for the Wall Street Journal), wrote an article in 2003 called “This Year, Try Getting Your Brain into Shape.” (Sorry for the link to a reproduction; the original’s not available for free.)

The piece details a study at the University of Wisconsin that looked into the neurological effects of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “mindfulness” meditation. What’s remarkable about the study’s conclusions is that meditation apparently increases the firing of neurons in patterns associated with strong positive emotions—whether or not the subject is meditating at the moment such firings are measured.

Begley alludes to other studies of neural plasticity in which it is shown that mere thought about a physical movement repeatedly can affect the brain as much as actually performing the movement. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses some such studies involving sports training; it turns out that making a habit of watching a professional swing a golf club, let’s say, can improve one’s swing somewhat dramatically.

All this makes me wonder, though: What, precisely, is being imagined in meditation? It’s certainly not a movement, and, at least in my experience, it’s not any particular emotional state. That is, one doesn’t sit on a cushion striving for happiness or envisioning a joyful life (though to be fair, some people may do just that). Kabat-Zinn’s brand of meditation, like so many others, is about observing the emotional states that are present, and naming thoughts as they come and go (e.g., “judging, judging”) without taking any other particular mental action.

Or at least, that’s what practitioners say. But Gladwell also discusses the ways that, for example, professional athletes tend to be mistaken when describing the mechanics of their swings, shots, pitches, and so on. In baseball, it seems, it isn’t quite possible to “look the ball into the bat,” as per the oft-repeated tidbit of guidance. Keeping our eye on the ball may be just a story we tell ourselves because the description somehow meshes with our conscious experiences of swinging, even though it does not correspond to physical reality.

Could the same be true of meditators? Could the conscious experience of mindfulness meditation—nonjudgmental observation of thoughts and feelings—be something we work towards only in order to allow or encourage the unconscious mind to do the real work of meditation? If counting your breath or “noticing, noticing” your thoughts as they drift through is akin to keeping your eye on the ball (something that Ted Williams famously swore he was doing), then what’s happening below the surface that leads to neural patterns associated with joy? What allows us to make contact with that ball, despite our flawed description about how we did so?

It would take some research to make anything but the most rudimentary, speculative suggestions, but in the meantime, here’s something of that latter kind (which I would call evolutionary philosophy in order to underscore the distance from any actual scientific practice): In my mind, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that humans and our closest primate ancestors could increase their reproductive success by enjoying simple, somewhat repetitive tasks for some part of the day, all or most days. In other words, if my clan’s primary or sole source of protein is this sago palm, I and my offspring would do well to enjoy grinding its inner layers to a pulpy paste, some part of the day, every day. If I have no sago palm, but the forest where I live is scattered with small animals and the occasional large one, I’d better enjoy the tedium of walking in the woods all day every day, and indeed coming back all but empty-handed most of the time. (I have often thought of the shallow promise embedded in this “most of the time” while playing hand after hand of no-limit Texas hold ’em with the lads.) Given these possibilities for our mental architecture (and I promise to do some research here in the coming days or weeks), it seems also at least possible that the performance of a simple, repetitive mental task (or a physical one—hence the existence of yoga) at more or less the same time daily either in isolation or in a group of people performing similar task could provoke our brains in such a way that they become, well, happy.