Is the brain stem the “Seat of the Soul”?

(First let us get it right out of the way and ignorantly insult the reporter (and all reporters). We should all know that we can’t trust them. Reporters are idiots, stupid, compromising, idiots, who never get the information right, but simply present a kindergarten variety of word-stimulus that we can all superficially enjoy. Out of sheer luck in this case, the article itself stands as a well-enough representation of the work in question.) Merker, a neuroscientist, is suggesting to us all that our consciousness is a product of the brain stem.

I think he’s wrong, but this is otherwise a fantastic finding, and while old-school philosophers might prefer consciousness in the pineal gland, in a place we’ve later found to be a zone for lust, lying below our wonderfully overgrown cortex (that powerful and superior brain matter we’re all referring to when we talk about doing math, having a language, and forming an identity about ourselves); they certainly would take the brain stem, to say, connectionist models, the Multiple Drafts model, models of information system experiences, models that talk about processes while completely dashing away our ideal of a certain place that consciousness arises (Chalmers, a pretty cool philosopher, has a nice resource for our newer ideas here). How nice it would be to re-revolutionize consciousness, and give it back to the “seat of the soul”.

If consciousness is in the brain stem, then we once again have a place that we can talk about. Merker points out that in children who have severe brain damage to the cortex — even those with hardly any cortex — we still have reason to suspect that they are conscious. They move their heads towards stimulus, and seem to experience emotions even when their limbic system is malfunctioning (the system encompassing our emotional faculties). It is pointed out that this is similar to reptiles, and it is not a long shot at all to suppose that since a huge variety of information travels through the brain stem highway, the collage of these neurons creates a virtual feedback for itself to envision the world by. The brain stem would be the primary experiencer of stimulus, and the final gatekeeper of action. The brain stem is then our most basic self.

So what role would the rest of the brain serve? One could see the remaining aspects as additional functions, amendments of perception and cognition we have evolved for ourselves that aid in the functionality of the body and the outside world. Parts of the cortex, parts which house our language, our memory, which reticulate to the thalamus, could be seen to feed through the brain stem, I suppose, and integrate with the stem’s ‘central experience engine’. A good metaphor is the computer: the processor receives all information in the form of binary data (neurons also use an emergently binary system to disclose information), but the memory for that data is stored in different parts that are connected, such as the hard drive, which holds most of our on-board programs. But the brain stem has more flexibility: it can house data, as well as seemingly recognize the data’s nature. That’s why, despite the critical loss of other brain functions, people with a working brain stem still carry reflexes, and even a sense of contextual emotion.

I don’t doubt that the brain stem has experience. I’m not placing that sense of experience into a panexperiential hand-wave either; it is a sophisticated system that can experience sensory information on an emotionally charged network, well above the average experience of a thermostat or a fire. But while the difference between a thermostat and the brain stem is a difference of great sophistication, the sophistication is still not enough, and to claim our brain stem as the primary consciousness of the brain is, without support, robbing the rest of the brain from being able to generate a much more satisfying, human, and self-identifiable form of consciousness — one that does not all imply that its most valuable experiences pass through the brain stem at all.

While someone might have you believe that the brain stem is like a computer processor compounded with emotional and various other experiencing properties, evidence for brain stem independence does not translate to what we mean when we ask about human consciousness. At the point of the brain stem, what evidence is there to say that it is a distinctly human experience, different enough from a reptile or lowly animal so to consider it the sort of consciousness we are interested in? You should not need much convincing to conclude that studying the brain stem will not at all account for higher forms of conscious awareness. We are talking about a sophisticated system in the brain stem, yet we can not with such little brain matter justify any talk we might have about self-awareness, the ability for it to identify its own emotions – to distinctly feel (more on this later), remember, and resonate what it experiences, or any sort of internal account for itself at all. It might be experiencing the outside world, but its reactions undergo no sense of choosing (the property of choice, as it is understood, is most probably a feature of the left hemisphere of the higher-brain, and is distinctly a cortex feature) — there is no contemplation whatsoever. The brain stem, more or less, can only be justified as a primal system that is hard-wired to network body actions and reactions. It is a comparitively simple chemical and neural system, devoted to external mechanisms; what vague relationship it shares with consciousness is merely a side-effect. A cortex-lacking, thalamus-damaged child may share similar stimulus expressions with a normal child, but these features of expression are just features of muscles reacting to neuron firings. Of course a human child will not smile like a reptile.

(Talk about brain systems that are evolutionarily devoted to external manipulation might without specification lead us to claim that all systems in the brain are simply input-output enhancers. If we truly are determinable (perhaps so, but we need not be forever troubled), we could vaguely consider our thoughts as only a naturally-selected means towards an end, but consciousness itself is still an existing state in the brain, if not one fooling itself. These accidents in nature gave us a sure advantage, but there is no reason for us to think that an analytical, communicating system must be conscious — a fast review of the study of how beehives get along puts that notion to rest – but an accident is just that. We are conscious. That’s how our brains have evolved to get the breeding done.)

A sense of conscious choice remains important to be explained, as does our sense of self, and of course our feelings. Feelings could be considered different from emotions in that emotions have empirical results, data of chemical release, synapse blocking, etc..  But feelings are the internal result — not how the emotion makes us act or where it leads our thoughts, but the qualia of the lasting experience of the emotion itself. Feelings are not explainable in the brain stem: if we want to talk about reacting to our own reactions, we need to talk about a system that can model its experiences and integrate those models into future decisions, as well as reinterpret those models to gain alternate access to them (possibly entailed in linguistics); what we need to feel ourselves is the ability to meta-analyze. We need the cortex.

The cortex is still not the possessor of consciousness — it more or less contains the hardware needed to make physical experience unique and elegant enough to be aware of itself. We can’t think without the limbic system; emotions power our faculties by providing the chemical wirings that access our rational selves. Further, aspects of the temporal lobe, feeding through the hypothalamus and the thalamus, provide our sensory input. Without these, parts of the cortex can still reticulate through the thalamus to provide a feeling of awareness, but we have found through isolation chambers and similar tests that our sense of identity goes awry. We need input, and a sufficient reticulation of information throughout the brain to feel ourselves, and if we do not have that, consciousness itself changes. You take enough of our brains away, and what we may call the remaining, if still labeled “conscious,” is bleak, and not quite what we mean at all.

And this bleak, shaky notion is what I insinuate of what Merker calls consciousness. It would be interesting to test his notion still, to provide more than just reasoning to the debate, though I doubt it is practical, either in finding a patient who would do, or from the ethical trouble of making a patient who would do. What we need is a person with multiple personalities, and the ability to observe their isolated brain stem at work. We observe their state of consciousness and confirm a certain personality they have — what they identify in the moment as themselves. Then, before they can change personalities, shut down the cortex and limbic system and observe their brain stem. Done enough times and with all personalities receiving ample report, we compare to see if there is any verifiable difference in the operation of the brain stem due to different self-identities. If I am right, there should be no real effect; the valuable, in-question consciousness that the rest of the brain generates should have no experiential effect on the brain stem through experience — there will be a correspondence between input and output when everything is online, but the feeling is just not there.