By Jon Frederick (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
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The mind-body problem, as it is usually stated, is the question of how the properties of the mind interact with or can be explained by the properties of the body. Most discussions of the problem begin with Descartes, who conceived of the mind as purely spiritual, and outside of space and time, and the body as material and mechanical. The problem Descartes never solved was, given that we do mentally perceive or exert our will upon the material world, exactly how do these distinct substances interact?
Kupfermann and Weiss (1978) described how scientific research can only demonstrate three types of relationships between biology and psychology. Correlation between biology and behavior can be shown by recording experiments, such as fMRI, EEG, or single-cell studies. Meanwhile, stimulation experiments, whether stimulating electrically or with an agonist drug, can demonstrate that activity in some region or system is sufficient to evoke a given behavior or experience. Finally, lesion studies, by removing a brain region or administering an antagonist drug, can show that some physiological system is necessary for some psychological process to occur.
Modern science has succeeded in showing many causal relationships between the mind and the brain. However, philosophers like David Chalmers (1995) argue that showing causal relationships doesn't solve the "hard problem" of explaining qualitative phenomena or qualia. Qualia are defined as "what it is like" to experience particular feelings or perceptions, such as pain, or the color yellow. "It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis," Chalmers argues, "but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises."
For example, suppose we noticed that a 40 Hz evoked rhythm was always observed in the visual cortex EEG when "yellow" was experienced (correlation); that applying a 40 Hz stimulus to the visual cortex evoked an experience of yellow (sufficiency); and that blocking all 40 Hz waves in the visual cortex prevented every subject tested from experiencing yellow (necessity). Would we really have a complete explanation? Something still seems to be missing. In Maxwell's reduction of heat to molecular motion, it is easy to imagine how boiling water feels painfully hot to the touch because rapidly moving water molecules are damaging the skin. There is, however, nothing intuitively obvious about why neuronal membranes depolarizing 40 times per second is somehow "exactly the same as" the experience of yellow-even if this neuronal process is correlated, necessary, and sufficient for the experience. The "yellowness" seems to be missing!
Given that the goal of biofeedback is to increase conscious awareness and voluntary control of otherwise subconscious and involuntary physiological processes, it is surprising how unpretentious workers in this field are about the potential for biofeedback as a research method, to advance our understanding of the mind-body relationship. How do mental processes arise from a material substrate without possessing innate knowledge of that substrate? The mysterious and often pathological nature of this transition is what creates demand for biofeedback therapists, who are uniquely trained and equipped to study this essential question.
In Beyond Biofeedback, Elmer and Alyce Green (1977) made an important contribution when they proposed the Psychophysiological Principle. They said, "Every change in the physiological state is accompanied by an appropriate change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious; and, conversely, every change in the mental-emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state... this principle, when coupled with volition, allows a natural process-psychosomatic self-regulation-to unfold." Green and Green documented the diversity of physiological processes that were known to be trainable through biofeedback at the time, supporting an optimistic view that essentially any bodily process which can be measured can be subject to some degree of self-regulation. This view continues to influence the field to this day, where every clinical practitioner has their favorite physiological measurement or measurements along with some rationale for why training its self-regulation helps their particular clients. In fact, most published research in biofeedback is focused on the problem of demonstrating its efficacy as a therapy. This emphasis is understandable, but I think that more basic research into biofeedback's mechanism of action could potentially pay off in the form of more precise and targeted therapies.
To me, the most important contribution the biofeedback field can make both theoretically and clinically would be to characterize not just how the mind and brain are related, but the mechanistic details of how this relationship is limited. A variety of considerations lead me to believe that what awaits us is not just more effective behavioral medicine, but the discovery a specific organ system that regulates the flow of information between conscious and subconscious systems, where the permeability to specific kinds of transmission is determined by learning, development and evolution. I postulate the existence of a "mind-brain" barrier, whose functional existence is no less real than the "blood-brain barrier" that regulates the flow of dissolved substances between the blood and cerebrospinal fluid.
In an influential essay, Ramachandran and Hirstein (1997) argued that qualitative phenomena or qualia have three properties: (1) they are irrevocable on the input side; (2) they are flexible on the output side; and (3) they must last long enough to be maintained in short term memory.
By irrevocable, they meant that qualia have an involuntary nature. While we might be able to imagine how our sensations might be different, all existential optimism aside, we can't willfully change our visual percept of a red fire truck into a yellow one. This property of qualia, their involuntary construction by preconscious systems, makes it clear how conscious and subconscious processes are not mutually exclusive, but inextricably linked. The most successful "reduction" of qualia would simply represent them in terms of other, more interesting, preconsciously-generated qualia. Similarly, "self-control" is paradoxical because volition itself arises involuntarily.
The second property of qualia is that their output is flexible. We can choose any of a wide variety of responses to most stimulus situations. By contrast, reflex reactions have only one possible output. Consciousness appears to have evolved, among other reasons, as a system for making choices in situations for which reflex reactions do not present adequate options.
Finally, qualia must be present in short term memory long enough for executive processes to act upon them. These two properties help us to understand why qualia have the property of irrevocability on the input side. Executive processes, like attention and working memory, are famously limited in their capacity. For executive processes to make effective decisions, they must at some level have premises that are not subject to further questioning and uncertainty.
Bernard Baars (1993) explained how consciousness is a limited resource. For instance, studies have shown that most people can only hold "seven plus or minus two" independent items in working memory. You can only attend to a subset of your sensory field. It is generally accepted that attention has a "center" and a "surround," or a focus on the most important or relevant information and a periphery of less important information that can become the focus if internal or external factors warrant a shift of attention.
Secondly, consciousness operates serially. Divided attention experiments have shown that even the most skilled individuals are not truly "multitasking" but rapidly shifting their attention between tasks.
Finally, consciousness is integrated-we seamlessly attribute the many different aspects of an object to the same object. The subconscious nervous system, by contrast, is a distributed, parallel system of enormous capacity. Hundreds of millions of receptors simultaneously represent discrete pieces of the sensory field, of which only a tiny fraction are processed consciously. One of the essential functions of sensory systems, then, is to exclude information from consciousness. Studies comparing the sensory neurophysiology of different animal species have shown that the phenomenal field of animals is specifically limited to forms of energy that are relevant to survival.
So, the irrevocability of qualia is a clue to their adaptive function. The limited capacity of consciousness as an executive system creates an adaptive requirement for it to operate on finite number of assumptions, and to orient, allocate, and focus on novel problems whose solution is not already hardwired by millions of years of evolution. So, one could argue that our preconscious systems construct our qualitative experience more from a perspective of "efficiency" than from a concept of "reality."
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Jon Frederick received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology, specializing in electroencephalography, from Joel Lubar's lab at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He earned his Masters degree in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan, (
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