TEDxRíodelaPlata - Tristan Bekinschtein - Losing consciousness

Tristán Bekinschtein "To lose consciousness" For some years now, we neuroscientists have been to places where we are not called to. Nowadays, there´s political neuroscience... Brain studies on moral and consciousness neuroscience as well. When I was studying Biology, a few years ago, obviously... I wanted to study consciousness but... most of my professors told me: "Well, you may study Philosophy in order to study consciousness" And so I did, I attended some courses on theory of mind. And after several years of studying consciousness, but at an experimental and scientific level all the philosophers I knew from theory of mind started studying neuroscience. And it is quite funny. That all this had happened. And so, this talk is about limits, consciousness' limits. So I ask you... At which moment are we born? At which moment we fall in love? At which moment we fall asleep? Or, at which moment do we die? When is the exact moment at which things happen, change?... The thing is we're really obsessed with borders, with limits, with moments, with instants. And it is quite logical because they help us separate one thing from another, right? One country, one border, another country. But... these lines, these borders may be completely imaginary. two dots, one line, one state, another state. To illustrate how borders may be imaginary and a bit blurry as well I'd like you to imagine that we´re playing soccer with friends in the park. I am the goalkeeper... here comes the forward player, he kicks... and the ball goes over my shirt. It hit the goal post! No doubt! All the players know the ball hit the goal post, nobody is going to object to that... We´re even quite conservative in considering this goal post, because if the same guy kicks and the ball goes a bit to the inside of the post, but still over my shirt, may be one of the players screams: "Goal!" "Nah, nah, nah. It hit the goal post, didn't you see it went over the sweat shirt?" But the situation is different if... the forward player comes again, I step a little forward he kicks and... I touch the ball. He kicks, the ball goes over me and I touch it. All my team will say: "Touched! It went over the crossbar. It was nothing..." And the other team will say: "He touched and it went in!" Because, of course, the crossbar imaginary border is not the same as that of the goal post. It definitely isn't... and... this idea of precise limits and borders makes me think that, well... these borders are easy, we may say they're "visual" although they don´t exist. But I am interested in talking about conceptual borders, difficult borders, for example: At which moment do we die? Do we die when... the heart stops beating? or do we die when there is no brain activity? or, do we die when a lawyer says so? Do we die when a medical doctor says so? Do we die when a priest says so? When do we actually die? Do we start dying when are we born? This idea reflects that borders are blurry and that we don't need an instant or a limit or that it should always be cut-clear. We sometimes need a transition, we need things to happen slowly trough a process, between two states, a process, a dégradé. And that is what I do, actually. I wanted to define consciousness and to do so I looked for the outlines, to define these outlines, their borders. And when I looked for these outlines, they weren't clear, rather, they seemed a transition. And that made me think of starting some experiments quite crazy, sometimes quite boring, and at others very entertaining. Those are experiments on consciousness' transitions: when we begin to fall asleep, and this happens to all; even right now to some... In order to do these experiments I started working at the lab with people who fall asleep easily, right? For example, if any of you, and I know many fall asleep while on the bus or while on the train, then you are my ideal subject, right? You come to the lab and I pay you for taking a nap. The best of experiments... fancy the amount of experimental subjects I get. So, this experiment is already done, but if any of you came to the sleep lab I'd put you on a bed with an electrode helmet, and I'd measure with those electrodes attached to an amplifier. I'd measure your brain activity trough out the experiment, from the moment you're awake until you're asleep. and I'd say: "Take this button with your left hand, and this one for the right one, when you hear a high pitch sound 'beep beep, beep beep' press the button with your left hand, when you hear a sound 'boop boop, boop boop' press the button with your.." the other way around, isn't it? Left, right. The guy at the beginning, of course, hears the sounds... 'puc, puc, puc", with eyes closed, right? "puc, puc, puc" but well, the experiment is boring and sounds come rarely and it's dark... and is quiet, and you are of those who fall asleep and you begin to answer more slowly, until there are those who take 3, 4 seconds to answer "beep beep" and they press... Ridiculous! But true, it happens to all who come to the lab. And eventually they stop answering and they cease to answer for a while. So I ask you now... at which moment did this guy lose consciousness? When he ceased to hear? When he ceased to understand the sounds? When he couldn't decide which hand to use? When he ceased to answer? I think the problem is wrongly put. It is not "at which moment?" but rather, "how it took place?", because it's a transition. And this experiment led me to another one, but before I'll tell you about the most impressive result of the experiment on falling asleep. That is: all experimental subjects, each guy that came to the lab, showed, through electrode readings, in their brain activity, they were able to make the decision, although they were no longer pressing the button, Which left me amazed. Because: "OK, he won't be able to decide and he'll stop pressing". But it wasn't like that... They stopped pressing, but they were still making the decision. I could see the electrical signal, he was making the decision "press with the left hand or the right hand', but he didn't press. It was quite impressive and... That triggered other experiments a bit more crazy. And experiments that to some extent put at risk some things from my childhood. That is... you remember watching cartoons when somebody had to fall asleep, sheep would pass. They started counting sheep, they'd pass, they closed their eyes and sheep would pass over you, quite obvious, many must have done it... So I said: "Let's do an experiment, it's worthy". I went to the lab, I am of those who fall asleep easily... I went to the lab and grabbed a button set a student of mine put an electrode helmet on me, and I started counting imaginary sheep and pressing a button Right? I kept on counting until I ceased to answer, and when I ceased to answer, my student waited a minute, following precise instructions, and woke me up and said: "How many sheep, Tristán?!" "134" I answered... and so I asked him: "but how many times did I press the button?" "120" he told me... "Uh! so I kept on counting, after pressing, after I ceased to press the button" "Yes!" OK, let's repeat this 6 or 7 times with other 40 subjects to confirm this result, shall we? Bottom line, we're scientists and effectively... and first line as well, but... (joke) This experiment showed us I could kept on counting although I was no longer able to press the button. The same with making the decision. Not exactly the same, two different cognitive processes and the experiment on making the decision "left button, right button" works well with people who fall asleep this way. They fall asleep slowly, as though in a slide and probably, 20 to 25% of you are of those who fall asleep very, very slowly, and reach deep sleep. The sheep experiment works much better in people who, like I do, begin to fall asleep, they woke a bit, and fall, and... (utters sleeping sounds) These people talk while falling asleep, right? And this gave the idea of... of things being reversible/irreversible. Because we are able to do these experiments because falling asleep is reversible, you wake up afterwards, it is even quite easy to wake up. And I thought: from other consciousness' transitions there is one irreversible, to die. I ponder over this and talked to several medical doctors. And I came to realize that dying is irreversible, but the process of dying it isn't anymore. Because under certain circumstances, if somebody's heart stops beating and he stops breathing, for a while, there are ways to make him come around. When the dying process begins when somebody's heart has stopped and they are not breathing we can stop something that it was irreversible from being so. And this showed me that, apart from changing the process from irreversible to reversible, we also moved the limit. The limit of life, we've moved it. So, we're accomplishing things regarding transitions quite interesting. For example, to move the limit of life. Let's go back to falling asleep which is for me, the easiest to study, because really, to study people dying is quite difficult, the ethics committee won't let me put them electrodes. It is..it is... I don't know why (joke). Anyway... Other thing that interests me is for you to think that when we're falling asleep, one has many things on his mind and you begin to lose control, don't you? You start like...images being to appear, you see things. You start to lose control, to lose inhibitions, and begin to gain the opportunity of playing with your mind. And many people play these mind tricks. Most of the people when falling asleep have the experience of for example... Spasms, right? They have spasms as it were. Or others feel as though they were falling and... other people... feel trapped, feel like they are trapped and suddenly, "Oh! I can't move!" This happens more frequently while awaking and many of us we see phosphenes. And when you close your eyes, those little lights on your eyelids when you close your eyes. Let's see, how many of you see phosphenes? Spectacular! and how many are able to control these phosphenes? Uh, not bad... Not bad... Those people controlling phosphenes, evidently have little to do, while falling asleep. (laugh) And they begin to play with their consciousness, right? and... that's OK, isn't it? Because in fact we realize that the ones we're while awake, when falling asleep we begin to let go a bit the consciousness of being awake and begin to enter the consciousness of being asleep. And we can play with that, the ideas we come about while awake, when you are awake if you put them, even problems, if you put them in a dream in the fog of consciousness things appear different. And the first idea of this talk, to talk about transitions, had to do with, well, that things are not instants. They are not instants, they're not points, they are, rather, transitions, that they may be processes. And this description fits perfectly with consciousness. Consciousness scans the present, but the present is not a moment, it's also a transition, and this transition, which has been for the last years under study and under research, I know it enables us to think differently, and the contents of consciousness start getting in our research. So, we begin to ponder on the appropriate experiments for this kind of science fiction and to get into people's contents. To get inside dreams, and we are beginning to do it. I know it because I even begin to dream experiments on dreams in my own dreams, which is quite terrible. But anyway, it must be happening to you as well. Normal people may think about, dream about things that happen during their day, right? Which leaves us to think on, even to formalize, in science, the research: that awake processing and asleep processing are different. And that... when you're asleep you can't act on things, but we know that there is a lot going on, when you're falling and when you're totally asleep, there's an enormous brain capacity. And we should liberate such different consciousness, we have to start playing, putting one consciousness inside the other. There's an amount of brain energy we have to start using. Right? Because if we outline correctly the borders between two consciousness or between those two consciousness, those transitions, we'll start to play with controlling them. And if we are able to control them, we'll solve problems differently, and we'll get into that third of our lives that many people, in modern life, consider a waste of time. I'd rather be twitting all night than being asleep, right? What a waste of time! And I wish to come back to TED some years from now and tell you if we were able to learn further on who we're while awake, while asleep, in between those two, and during transitions and I wish... that these transitions which amaze me and hope they now amaze you as well, and that you go home and play with your own consciousness. (Applause)