The Limits of Consciousness - A Conversation with Martin Monti

By Howard Burton

This book is based on an in-depth conversation between Howard Burton and Martin Monti, Associate Professor in Psychology and Neurosurgery, Brain Injury Research Centre, UCLA. This extensive conversation examines Martin Monti’s innovative work with patients who are in a vegetative state or minimally conscious state which has led to some surprising results that might well prove to be integral to our development of a deeper understanding of consciousness.


This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, The Collective Unconscious, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter:

I. Dualism and Science Journalism - Changing hearts and brains
II. Inside The Other - A constant concern
III. The Vegetative State - Evolving understanding
IV. Probing Vegetative States - Some experimental details
V. Beyond Reflex - A thin line
VI. Assessing Consciousness - Unlikely tennis players
VII. Extracting Information - Two types of controls
VIII. Quantifying Consciousness- Towards more rigorous models
IX. Interdisciplinary Interlude - Mathematics, cognitive science and other issues
X. Language and Thought - The Whorfian
Hypothesis and Italian football
XI. Structural Similarities? - Comparing language, mathematics and music
XII. What Makes Us Human - In search of distinction

About Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series:

Presented in an accessible, conversational format, Ideas Roadshow books not only explore frontline academic research featuring world-leading researchers but also reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781771700764

Book preview

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Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the world’s leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn’t otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

Copyright ©2014, 2020 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77170-076-4

Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I. Dualism and Science Journalism

II. Inside The Other

III. The Vegetative State

IV. Probing Vegetative States

V. Beyond Reflex

VI. Assessing Consciousness

VII. Extracting Information

VIII. Quantifying Consciousness

IX. Interdisciplinary Interlude

X. Language and Thought

XI. Structural Similarities?

XII. What Makes Us Human

Continuing the Conversation

A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Martin Monti in Los Angeles, California, on April 6, 2014.

Martin Monti is Associate Professor of Psychology at UCLA.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Introduction

The Collective Unconscious

Martin Monti spends a considerable amount of time around people who seem decidedly indifferent to his efforts.

It’s not that Martin is an unsympathetic fellow, you understand, or a masochistic one—it’s just that this engaging cognitive scientist has spent a good chunk of his burgeoning career carefully studying patients in a vegetative state: a severe consciousness disorder characterized by, as the Merck Manual puts it, "an absence of responsiveness and awareness due to overwhelming dysfunction of the cerebral hemispheres."

The only difference, practically speaking, between being in a vegetative state and a coma, is that the former condition is accompanied by the appearance of wakefulness—that is, patients in the vegetative state sometimes have their eyes open for prolonged periods of time, as if awake. Typically, those in a vegetative state have first been in a coma. Sadly, most remain in that state for the rest of their lives.

Why would a dynamic, talented researcher such as Martin, spend so much of his time studying patients in such an intractably horrendous condition?

Well, one reason is that there seems to be considerably more to vegetative-state patients than first meets the eye. Up until recently, all behavioural tests had demonstrated that such patients seemed comprehensively unresponsive to any external stimuli—leading scientists to conclude that their cerebral cortex, the extensive outer layer of the brain largely response for higher brain functions, was completely inactive.

But most intriguingly, as Martin informed me, recent advances in brain-imaging technology tell a rather different story.

It actually turns out that after 10 to 15 years of using neuroimaging to look directly into the brain and see what’s happening, that a lot can be going on in the brain, a lot of activity in terms of cognitive faculties, even in the absence of consciousness.

What sorts of things might be happening in the brains of such patients? Well, they might be reacting to light, colour, sounds, or smells. They might be able to distinguish between a well-formed versus scrambled version of an object. They might be able to distinguish between spatial representations and faces.

And while Martin is anxious to clarify that, "None of this tells me that the patient is actually seeing or recognizing what that image is", all of our recently acquired neuroimaging data are certainly highly suggestive of a state of affairs that is a far cry from the complete absence of cortical activity that we thought we were facing.

That is certainly surprising. But then Martin and his colleagues probed deeper, using a technique known as motor imaging. It turns out that just imagining performing certain actions leads to a measurable increase in activation of certain areas of the brain associated with those actions.

"I could ask you to imagine performing a motor