How physiology shapes our inner world. Brain and soul. How physiology shapes our inner world Chris Frith

The famous British neuroscientist Chris Frith is well known for his ability to talk simply about very complex problems in psychology - such as mental functioning, social behavior, autism and schizophrenia.

It is in this area, along with the study of how we perceive the world around us, act, make choices, remember and feel, that today there is a scientific revolution associated with the introduction of neuroimaging methods. In Brain and Soul, Chris Frith talks about all this in the most accessible and entertaining way.

Preface

I have an amazing labor-saving device in my head. My brain - better than a dishwasher or a calculator - frees me from the boring, monotonous work of recognizing things around me and even frees me from the need to think about how to control the movements of my body. This gives me the opportunity to focus on what really matters to me: friendship and the exchange of ideas. But, of course, my brain does more than save me from the tedium of everyday work. It is he who shapes the me whose life is spent in the company of other people. In addition, it is my brain that allows me to share the fruits of my inner world with my friends. This is how the brain makes us capable of something more than what each of us is capable of individually. This book explains how the brain performs these miracles.

Why are psychologists afraid of parties?

Like any other tribe, scientists have their own hierarchy. The place of psychologists in this hierarchy is at the very bottom. I discovered this in my first year at university where I studied science. It was announced to us that college students - for the first time - would have the opportunity to study psychology in the first part of the natural sciences course. Encouraged by this news, I went to our team leader to ask what he knew about this new opportunity. “Yes,” he replied. “But it never occurred to me that any of my students would be so stupid that they would want to study psychology.” He himself was a physicist.

Probably because I was not entirely sure what “clueless” meant, this remark did not stop me. I left physics and took up psychology. From then until now I have continued to study psychology, but I have not forgotten my place in the scientific hierarchy. At parties where scientists gather, the question inevitably comes up from time to time: “What do you do?” - and I tend to think twice before answering: “I’m a psychologist.”

Of course, a lot has changed in psychology over the past 30 years. We have borrowed many methods and concepts from other disciplines. We study not only behavior, but also the brain. We use computers to analyze our data and model mental processes. My university badge doesn't say "psychologist" but "cognitive neuroscientist."

And so they ask me: “What do you do?” I think this is the new head of the physics department. Unfortunately, my answer, “I’m a cognitive neuroscientist,” only delays the outcome. After my attempts to explain what my work actually is, she says: “Oh, so you’re a psychologist!” - with that characteristic facial expression in which I read: “If only you could do real science!”

An English professor joins the conversation and brings up the topic of psychoanalysis. She has a new student who "disagrees with Freud in many ways." In order not to spoil my evening, I refrain from expressing the idea that Freud was an inventor and that his thoughts on the human psyche have little relevance.

Some years ago the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry ( British Journal of Psychiatry), apparently by mistake, asked me to write a review of a Freudian article. I was immediately struck by one subtle difference from the papers I usually review. As with any scientific article, there were many references to the literature. These are mainly links to works on the same topic published earlier. We refer to them partly in order to pay tribute to the achievements of predecessors, but mainly in order to reinforce certain statements contained in our own work. “You don’t have to take my word for it. You can read a detailed explanation of the methods I used in the work of Box and Cox (Box, Cox, 1964). But the authors of this Freudian article did not at all try to support the facts cited with references. References to literature were not about facts, but about ideas. Using references, it was possible to trace the development of these ideas in the works of various followers of Freud right up to the original words of the teacher himself. At the same time, no facts were cited by which one could judge whether his ideas were fair.

“Freud may have had a great influence on literary criticism,” I tell the English professor, “but he was not a real scientist. He wasn't interested in facts. I study psychology using scientific methods.”

“So,” she replies, “you are using a monster of machine intelligence to kill the human element in us.” From both sides of the divide that divides our views, I hear the same thing: “Science cannot study consciousness.” Why can't it?

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List of abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Prologue: Real scientists don't study consciousness
Why are psychologists afraid of parties?
Exact and inexact sciences
Exact sciences are objective, inexact sciences are subjective
Will big science help inexact science?
Measuring brain activity
How can mental phenomena arise from material phenomena?
I can read your mind
How the brain creates our inner world

Part one
What is behind the illusions of our brain
1. What a damaged brain can tell us
Perception of the material world
Psyche and brain
When the brain doesn't know
When the brain knows but doesn't want to say
When the brain tells a lie
How brain activity creates false knowledge
How to make our brain deceive us
Checking experience for reality

2. What a healthy brain tells us about the world
The illusion of completeness of perception
Our secretive brain
Our inadequate brain
Our creative brain
3. What our brain tells us about our body
Privileged access?
Where is the border?
We don't know what we're doing
Who controls everything?
Our brain copes without us
Phantoms in our brains
Everything is fine with me
Who does this?
And where is “you” here?

Part two. How our brain does it
4. Developing the ability to predict consequences
Natural rewards and punishments
How the brain integrates us into the world around us, hiding it from us
Feeling like we have everything under control
When the system fails
The invisible actor at the center of the universe
5. Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality
Our brain gives us a feeling of ease of perception
Information revolution
What can clever devices do?
The problem with information theory
Reverend Thomas Bayes
Ideal Bayesian observer
How can a Bayesian brain create models of the world?
Is there a rhinoceros in the room?
Where does a priori knowledge come from?
How our actions tell us about the world
We perceive not the world, but its model created by the brain
Colors only exist in our heads
Perception is fantasy that coincides with reality
We are not slaves to our feelings
How do we know what is real and what is not?
Imagination is a very boring thing
6. How the brain models the inner world
Movement of living objects
How movements can reveal intentions
Imitation
To imitate someone, you need to understand their goals
People and robots
Empathy
Feeling of activity
Privileged access problem
Illusions of activity
Figures generated by hallucinations

Part three. Culture and the brain
7. People share thoughts - how the brain creates culture
Translation problem
Intentions and goals
Solution of the inverse problem
A priori knowledge and prejudices
What will he do next?
Someone else's example is contagious
Communication is not just talk
Learning is more than just demonstration and imitation
The cycle closes
The cycle finally closes
Knowledge can be shared
Knowledge is power
True

Epilogue: Me and my brain
Chris Frith and me
Searching for will in our brains
Where is the source of all control?
Homunculus
This book is not so much about consciousness as it is about the brain.
Why are people so nice (as long as they are treated fairly)
Even illusions come with responsibility.

Primary sources
Sources of illustrations
Subject index

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All Rights Reserved. Authorized translation from the English language edition published by Blackwell Publishing Limited. Responsibility for the accuracy of the translation rests solely with The Dynasty Foundation and is not the responsibility of John Blackwell Publishing Limited. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the original copyright holder, Blackwell Publishing Limited.

Publishing house CORPUS®

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private or public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.

* * *

Dedicated to Uta

List of abbreviations

ACT – axial computed tomography

MRI – magnetic resonance imaging

PET – positron emission tomography

fMRI – functional magnetic resonance imaging

EEG – electroencephalogram

BOLD (blood oxygenation level dependent) – depending on the level of oxygen in the blood

Preface

I have an amazing labor-saving device in my head. My brain, better than a dishwasher or a calculator, frees me from the boring, repetitive work of recognizing things around me and even frees me from having to think about how to control the movements of my body. This gives me the opportunity to focus on what really matters to me: friendship and the exchange of ideas. But, of course, my brain does more than save me from the tedium of everyday work. It is he who shapes that me whose life is spent in the company of other people. In addition, it is my brain that allows me to share the fruits of my inner world with my friends. This is how the brain makes us capable of something more than what each of us is capable of individually. This book explains how the brain performs these miracles.

Acknowledgments

My work on the mind and brain has been made possible by funding from the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The Medical Research Council gave me the opportunity to work on the neurophysiology of schizophrenia through financial support from the Tim Crowe Psychiatric Unit at the London Northwick Park Hospital Clinical Research Center in Harrow (Middlesex). At that time, we could judge the relationship between the psyche and the brain only on the basis of indirect data, but everything changed in the eighties, when tomographs were invented to scan the working brain. The Wellcome Trust enabled Richard Frackowiak to establish the Functional Imaging Laboratory and provided financial support for my work in that laboratory on the neurophysiological basis of consciousness and social interaction. The study of mind and brain lies at the intersection of many traditional disciplines, from anatomy and computational neuroscience to philosophy and anthropology. I have been very fortunate to have always worked in interdisciplinary – and multinational – research groups.

I benefited greatly from my colleagues and friends at University College London, especially Ray Dolan, Dick Passingham, Daniel Wolpert, Tim Shallies, John Driver, Paul Burgess and Patrick Haggard. In the early stages of working on this book, I was helped by repeated fruitful discussions concerning the brain and psyche with my friends in Aarhus, Jakob Hove and Andreas Roepstorff, and in Salzburg, with Josef Perner and Heinz Wimmer. Martin Frith and John Law have argued with me about everything in this book for as long as I can remember. Eve Johnstone and Sean Spence generously shared with me their professional knowledge of psychiatric phenomena and their implications for brain science.

Perhaps the most important inspiration for writing this book came from my weekly conversations with past and present breakfast groups. Sarah-Jane Blakemore, Davina Bristow Thierry Chaminade, Jenny Kull, Andrew Duggins, Chloe Farrer, Helen Gallagher, Tony Jack, James Kilner, Haguan Lau, Emiliano Macaluso, Elinor Maguire, Pierre Macquet, Jen Marchant, Dean Mobbs, Matthias Pessiglione, Chiara Portas, Geraint Rees, Johannes Schulz, Suchi Shergill and Tanja Singer helped shape this book. I am deeply grateful to them all.

I am grateful to Karl Friston and Richard Gregory, who read parts of this book for their invaluable help and valuable advice. I'm also grateful to Paul Fletcher for supporting the idea of introducing an English professor and other characters who argue with the narrator early on in the book.

Philip Carpenter has contributed selflessly to the improvement of this book with his critical comments.

I am especially grateful to those who read all the chapters and commented in detail on my manuscript. Sean Gallagher and two anonymous readers have provided many valuable suggestions for how to improve this book. Rosalind Ridley forced me to think carefully about my statements and be more careful with my terminology. Alex Frith helped me get rid of jargon and lack of coherence.

Uta Frith was actively involved in this project at all stages. Without her example and guidance, this book would never have been published.

Prologue: Real scientists don't study consciousness

Why are psychologists afraid of parties?

Of course, a lot has changed in psychology over the past 30 years. We have borrowed many methods and concepts from other disciplines. We study not only behavior, but also the brain. We use computers to analyze our data and model mental processes. My university badge doesn’t say “psychologist,” but “cognitive neuroscientist.”

Rice. clause 1. General view and section of the human brain

Human brain, side view (top). The arrow marks the place where the cut was made, shown in the bottom photo. The outer layer of the brain (cortex) is made up of gray matter and forms many folds to fit a large surface area into a small volume. The cortex contains about 10 billion nerve cells.

And so they ask me: “What do you do?” I think this is the new head of the physics department. Unfortunately, my answer “I am a cognitive neuroscientist” only delays the outcome. After my attempts to explain what my work actually is, she says: “Oh, so you’re a psychologist!” - with that characteristic facial expression in which I read: “If only you could do real science!”

An English professor joins the conversation and brings up the topic of psychoanalysis. She has a new student who “disagrees with Freud in many ways.” In order not to spoil my evening, I refrain from expressing the idea that Freud was an inventor and that his thoughts on the human psyche have little relevance.

Several years ago, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry ( British Journal of Psychiatry), apparently by mistake, asked me to write a review of a Freudian article. I was immediately struck by one subtle difference from the papers I usually review. As with any scientific article, there were many references to the literature. These are mainly links to works on the same topic published earlier. We refer to them partly in order to pay tribute to the achievements of predecessors, but mainly in order to reinforce certain statements contained in our own work. “You don’t have to take my word for it. You can read a detailed explanation of the methods I used in the work of Box and Cox (1964).” But the authors of this Freudian article did not at all try to support the facts cited with references. References to literature were not about facts, but about ideas. Using references, it was possible to trace the development of these ideas in the works of various followers of Freud right up to the original words of the teacher himself. At the same time, no facts were cited by which one could judge whether his ideas were fair.

“So,” she replies, “you are using a monster of machine intelligence to kill the human element in us.”

From both sides of the divide that separates our views, I hear the same thing: “Science cannot study consciousness.” Why can't it?

Exact and inexact sciences

In the system of scientific hierarchy, “exact” sciences occupy a high position, and “inexact” ones occupy a low position. Objects studied by exact sciences are like a cut diamond, which has a strictly defined shape, and all parameters can be measured with high accuracy. “Inexact” sciences study objects similar to a scoop of ice cream, the shape of which is not nearly as definite, and the parameters can change from measurement to measurement. Exact sciences, such as physics and chemistry, study tangible objects that can be measured very precisely. For example, the speed of light (in a vacuum) is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. A phosphorus atom weighs 31 times more than a hydrogen atom. These are very important numbers. Based on the atomic weight of various elements, a periodic table can be compiled, which once made it possible to draw the first conclusions about the structure of matter at the subatomic level.

Once upon a time, biology was not such an exact science as physics and chemistry. This state of affairs changed dramatically after scientists discovered that genes consist of strictly defined sequences of nucleotides in DNA molecules. For example, the sheep prion gene consists of 960 nucleotides and begins like this: CTGCAGACTTTAAGTGATTSTTATCGTGGC...

I must admit that in the face of such precision and rigor, psychology appears to be a very imprecise science. The most famous number in psychology is 7, the number of items that can be held simultaneously in working memory. But even this figure needs clarification. George Miller's article on this discovery, published in 1956, was entitled "The Magic Number Seven - Plus or Minus Two." Therefore, the best measurement result obtained by psychologists can change in one direction or another by almost 30%. The number of items we can hold in working memory varies from time to time and from person to person. When I'm tired or anxious, I'll remember fewer numbers. I speak English and can therefore remember more numbers than Welsh speakers. “What did you expect? - says the English professor. – The human soul cannot be straightened out like a butterfly in a window. Each of us is unique.”

This remark is not entirely appropriate. Of course, each of us is unique. But we all have common mental properties. It is these fundamental properties that psychologists are looking for. Chemists had exactly the same problem with the substances they studied before the discovery of chemical elements in the 18th century. Each substance is unique. Psychology, compared to the “hard” sciences, had little time to find what to measure and figure out how to measure it. Psychology as a scientific discipline has existed for only a little over 100 years. I'm sure that over time, psychologists will find something to measure and develop devices that will help us make these measurements very accurate.

Exact sciences are objective, inexact sciences are subjective

These optimistic words are based on my belief in the unstoppable progress of science. But, unfortunately, in the case of psychology there is no solid basis for such optimism. What we are trying to measure is qualitatively different from what is measured in the exact sciences.

In the exact sciences, measurement results are objective. They can be checked. “Don't believe that the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second? Here's your equipment. Measure it yourself!” When we use this equipment to take measurements, the results will appear on dials, printouts and computer screens where anyone can read them. And psychologists use themselves or their volunteer assistants as measuring instruments. The results of such measurements are subjective. There is no way to check them.

Here's a simple psychological experiment. I turn on a program on my computer that shows a field of black dots continuously moving downward, from the top of the screen to the bottom. I stare at the screen for a minute or two. Then I press “Escape” and the dots stop moving. Objectively, they no longer move. If I put the tip of a pencil to one of them, I can make sure that this point is definitely not moving. But I still have a very strong subjective feeling that the points are slowly moving up. If you walked into my room at this moment, you would see motionless dots on the screen. I would tell you that it looks like the dots are moving up, but how do you check that? After all, their movement occurs only in my head.

A true scientist wants to independently and independently verify the results of measurements reported by others. “Nullius in verba” is the motto of the Royal Society of London: “Do not believe what others tell you, no matter how high their authority.” If I followed this principle, I would have to agree that scientific research into your inner world is impossible for me, because it requires relying on what you tell me about your inner experience.

For a while, psychologists posed as real scientists by studying only behavior—taking objective measurements of things like movements, button presses, reaction times. But behavioral research is by no means sufficient. Such studies ignore all that is most interesting in our personal experience. We all know that our inner world is no less real than our life in the material world. Unrequited love brings no less suffering than a burn from touching a hot stove. The workings of consciousness can influence the results of physical actions that can be objectively measured. For example, if you imagine yourself playing the piano, your performance may improve. So why shouldn't I take your word for it that you imagined yourself playing the piano? Now we psychologists have returned to the study of subjective experience: sensations, memories, intentions. But the problem has not gone away: the mental phenomena that we study have a completely different status than the material phenomena that other scientists study. Only from your words can I learn about what is happening in your mind. You press a button to tell me you saw a red light. Can you tell me what shade of red this was? But there is no way I can penetrate your consciousness and check for myself how red the light you saw was.

For my friend Rosalind, each number has a certain position in space, and each day of the week has its own color (see Fig. CV1 in the color insert). But maybe these are just metaphors? I've never experienced anything like this. Why should I believe her when she says these are her immediate, uncontrollable sensations? Her sensations relate to phenomena of the inner world that I cannot verify in any way.

Will big science help inexact science?

Exact science becomes “big science” when it starts using very expensive measuring instruments. Brain science became big when brain scanners were developed in the last quarter of the 20th century. One such scanner typically costs over a million pounds. Thanks to pure luck, being in the right place at the right time, I was able to use these devices when they first appeared, in the mid-eighties. The first such devices were based on the long-established principle of fluoroscopy. An X-ray machine can show the bones inside your body because bones are much harder (dense) than skin and soft tissue. Similar density differences are observed in the brain. The skull surrounding the brain is very dense, but the tissue of the brain itself is much less dense. Deep in the brain there are cavities (ventricles) filled with fluid; they have the lowest density. A breakthrough in this field occurred when axial computed tomography (ACT) technology was developed and the ACT scanner was constructed. This machine uses X-rays to measure density, then solves a huge number of equations (requiring a powerful computer) to produce a 3D image of the brain (or any other part of the body) showing differences in density. Such a device made it possible for the first time to see the internal structure of the brain of a living person - a voluntary participant in the experiment.

A few years later, another method was developed, even better than the previous one - magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI does not use X-rays, but radio waves and a very strong magnetic field. Unlike fluoroscopy, this procedure is not at all dangerous to health. An MRI scanner is much more sensitive to density differences than an ACT scanner. In images of the brain of a living person obtained with its help, different types of tissue are distinguishable. The quality of such images is no lower than the quality of photographs of the brain, after death, removed from the skull, preserved with chemicals and cut into thin layers.

Rice. clause 2. An example of an MRI structural image of the brain and a section of a brain removed from a cadaver

Above is a photograph of one of the brain sections removed from the skull after death and cut into thin layers. Below is an image of one of the layers of the brain of a living person, obtained using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Structural brain imaging has played a huge role in the development of medicine. Brain injuries caused by motor vehicle accidents, strokes, or tumor growth can have profound effects on behavior. They can lead to severe memory loss or serious personality changes. Before the advent of CT scanners, the only way to find out exactly where the injury occurred was to remove the lid of the skull and look. This was usually done after death, but sometimes in a living patient - when neurosurgery was required. Tomography scanners now make it possible to accurately determine the location of an injury. All that is required of the patient is to lie motionless inside the tomograph for 15 minutes.

Rice. clause 3. Example of an MRI scan showing brain damage

This patient suffered two strokes in a row, as a result of which the auditory cortex of the right and left hemispheres was destroyed. The injury is clearly visible on the MRI image.

Structural tomography of the brain is both an exact and a big science. Measurements of brain structural parameters made using these methods can be very accurate and objective. But what do these measurements have to do with the problem of psychology as an “inexact” science?

Although I must admit that there are some retrogrades who generally deny that studying the brain or computers can tell us anything about our psyche. – Note. auto

Believe it or not, this is a link to an actual paper that establishes an important statistical method. Bibliographic information for this work can be found in the bibliography at the end of the book. – Note. auto

She is a specialist in the work of Australian writer Elizabeth Costello. – Note. auto (Australian writer Elizabeth Costello is a fictional person, a character in the book of the same name by the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee. – Translation note.)

Sheep prion is a protein whose modified configuration of molecules causes the development of a disease in sheep similar to mad cow disease. – Note. translation

Working memory is a type of active short-term memory. This is the memory we use when we try to remember a phone number without writing it down. Psychologists and neuroscientists are actively researching working memory, but have yet to agree on what exactly they are studying. – Note. auto

. “Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri” - “Without swearing allegiance to the words of any teacher” (Horace, “Epistle”). – Note. auto

These were followers of behaviorism, a movement whose most famous representatives were John Watson and Burres Frederick Skinner. The zeal with which they promoted their approach indirectly indicates that all is not well with it. One of the professors I studied with in college was a passionate behaviorist who later became a psychoanalyst. – Note. auto

Moreover, judging by the results of tomographic studies, the same part of the brain is involved in the reactions of physical pain and suffering of a rejected person. – Note. auto

. “Big science” is expensive scientific research involving large scientific teams (a colloquial term in modern English). – Note. translation

€ 4,20 )

The book was published by the Astrel publishing house in the “Elements” series of the Dynasty Foundation (this is an inter-publishing series of scientific literature), circulation 5000 copies. Subtitle: “How neural activity shapes our inner world.” (Chris Frith. Making Up the Mind. How the Brain Creates our Mental World.)

In the “Dynasties” series, I have yet to come across uninteresting books, and here is also a popular science book on psychology, which is rare (after all, Carnegie, etc. have no real relationship to psychology as a science).

I wasn't disappointed. In a sense, this book rehabilitated psychology for me as a science, and even as a natural science, similar to physics, chemistry and biology. And that psychology and Freudianism are different things. (" In order not to spoil my evening, I refrain from expressing the idea that Freud was an inventor, and his thoughts about the human psyche have little relevance."). Unfortunately, Freudianism and other “vulgar psychology” have become so ingrained in the public consciousness that the author himself prefers to introduce himself as a “cognitive neuroscientist.” This book is a story about what people actually do.

It turns out that psychologists are actively using the latest tools - various tomographs - to objectively study the processes occurring in the brain. Moreover, now on tomographs you can observe not only photographs of the brain, but also see the process of activation of various parts of the brain over time. And thanks to this, you can, for example, see that if a person imagines a face in his head, then the same parts of the brain are activated as if he saw this face in reality. However, tomographs are only one of the tools.

It turns out that our brain doesn’t tell us anything about many things. For example, they studied a woman who suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning, as a result of which the part of her brain responsible for the perception of shape was damaged. She vaguely saw light, color and shadows, but could not recognize anything. She was given a stick, and asked how she was given the stick - vertically or horizontally. The woman, naturally, could not say this, she did not see. But when asked to take a stick, she extended her hand correctly, depending on whether it was horizontal or vertical. It turns out that the brain saw the stick, but did not want to share this information with consciousness at all.

The book talks about a lot of experiments, including quite simple ones (for some reason I didn’t know how to detect a blind spot, I was impressed by the missing finger). In general, we do not directly receive any information about the world around us. We communicate only with our brain, and it builds ideas about the world around us, and it adds and completes many things; the brain’s attempts to predict the world around us are very important. Hence, by the way, optical illusions, and hallucinations too. But from here comes the feeling of empathy, the ability to understand what another may feel.

It is interesting that the author very carefully avoids the question of free will, of how much control a person can have over his brain. It seems that this question is still outside of science. The key word is “yet.” (By the way, there is no “soul” in the original English title of the book!)

As a summary: it’s a pity that such There are few books on psychology. And what is the big difference between what psychology really studies and the everyday idea of psychologists? I even have doubts that our university psychology departments actually train psychological scientists. I wish there were more books like this!

We feel like independent agents, freely interacting with the material world around us. We are aware of ourselves and our actions, because we are in complete control of our actions. We act according to our own understanding and are responsible for our choices. Every action and every decision becomes part of the experience that forms our inner subjective world of ideas and sensations. A separate world that belongs exclusively to us. But is it?

British neuroscientist Chris Frith shows us with examples that the inner world of each of us is formed by the brain, and that this very brain hides from us most of the decisions it makes, creating in us the illusion of independence. In his book, he shows us that understanding other people is not just a possible thing, but no less natural than the perception of the material world. But first things first.

The first illusion - we think that we interact with the outside world directly

“Our brain creates for us the illusion of direct contact with the material world.” This, according to Chris Frith, is the first illusion that should be overcome.

Material objects and phenomena affect our senses directly. We feel the rough surface, hear the sound, feel the taste of food. However, as it turned out, the direct impact of material objects on our senses does not yet mean our direct perception of the world around us. What comes from the senses to our brain are only signals. By transforming them into separate ready-made models, the brain creates images of the external world, which become our ideas about reality. How objective are these views? Hard to say. In this case, something else is more important to us: we perceive not the world itself, but its models created by our brain. Take, for example, our vision: “the visual image that appears in the retina of our eyes is two-dimensional, and yet the brain creates in us a clear sense of the world, consisting of objects distributed in three-dimensional space.”

The feeling of immediacy of perception of the world is reinforced by another important component, namely the ease with which we receive information about the world. Instantaneous perception is also the result of brain activity. We simply do not notice all the work done that precedes the creation of this image.

So it turns out that what we perceive is not the world, but its model. And although the model of the world is not the world itself, for us, in essence, it is one and the same thing. As Chris Frith writes in his book: “We can say that our sensations are fantasies that coincide with reality.”

The second illusion is that we believe that our inner world is separate from the outer world and belongs only to us.

Unlike the outside world, the perception of which is not a problem for us, with the inner world of other people everything is more complicated. The subjective world of ideas cannot be studied using natural scientific methods. We can measure the speed of movement of a material object, even one that we cannot see with the naked eye. However, it is not possible to make such measurements with mental processes. Does this mean that the inner world of an individual person will remain a secret behind seven seals for us?

Not at all necessary. The impossibility of revealing the essence of the inner world using the above methods only means that these methods are not suitable for this particular area. Then how can one comprehend the inner subjective world?

It was already mentioned earlier that we do not have direct access to the material world. The brain constantly builds models of the world around us. “Our knowledge of the inner world of other people can arise in the same way. Signals coming from our senses allow the brain to create a model of the intangible world of ideas, desires and intentions."

In other words, the same brain techniques that allow us to perceive the material world give us the opportunity to comprehend the inner subjective world of another person.

A clear example is the explanation given by Chris Frith:

When I look at a tree in the garden, I do not have a tree in my mind. In my mind there is only a model of this tree created by my brain (or an idea of it). This model is built using a number of assumptions and predictions. In the same way, when I try to tell you something, your thought cannot be in my mind, but my brain, through assumptions and predictions, can create a model of your thought (an idea of it in my mind). Now I have two things in my mind: 1) my own thought and 2) my model of your thought. I can directly compare them. If they are similar, then I have probably succeeded in communicating my point to you. If they are different, then I clearly failed.

There really is no difference between the inner world of man and the material world.

We experience the external world completely differently than our internal one, not to mention the subjective world of another person. When we look around, we see the world around us and ourselves in it. However, Chris Frith explains this feeling by citing Helmholtz's developments in the book, in which the German scientist explains that the brain creates in us a feeling of a static world, although with every movement of the eyes we should see the opposite.

How does he create this feeling? The brain knows when and where our gaze will be directed. Knowing the trajectory of eye movement even before this very movement, our brain determines exactly how the space we see will change. With this information, predicting our next move, it paints a complete picture of what we see. This is how the brain generates a feeling of the stillness of the world.

Our separation from him is also illusory. In fact, our brain embeds us not only into the material world, but also into the inner world of other people. Our knowledge of the world through images allows us to create similar images of the inner world of other people, which gives us the opportunity to influence their behavior. Moreover, our own inner world is largely determined by the people with whom we interact, they also influence our actions and thoughts.

Conclusion

Chris Frith writes about how the brain shapes our consciousness and influences our perception of the world and ourselves in it. This book will not provide answers to questions such as “What is consciousness?”, “What is I?”, “Is there free will?” and others. It's not designed for that. In it, the neuropsychologist, summarizing numerous experiments and experiments conducted by both himself and his colleagues, tries to change our traditional ideas, which subsequently, according to the author, will allow us to lay the foundation of a science that will explain to us how the brain shapes our consciousness. .

Literature:

1. Brain and Soul: How Nervous Activity Shapes Our Inner World / Chris Frith; lane from English P. Petrova. - M: Astrel: CORPUS, 2010. – 335 p.
2. Chris Frith https://sites.google.com/site/chrisdfrith/Home

Editor: Chekardina Elizaveta Yurievna