How Consciousness is Made 3: Resonate, My Lovely
One of science's greatest mysteries, solved: the physical activity that embodies conscious experience.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Moderate
I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery—and the idea is to make that resonance work.
.Carl Sagan, Conversations with Sagan.1
Whenever you experience a thought, feeling, or sensation it is always accompanied by a special sort of activity in your brain.
Whenever you marvel at a pinkish moonrise on a warm summer evening, whenever you frown and shake your head while reading the latest headlines, the special mechanical activity of consciousness vibrates within your cranium. It’s hardly exaggeration to call this vibrant activity cosmic, for this marvelous physical dynamic is responsible for every idea, dream, scheme, feeling, meaning, and romance that ever existed on Earth or anywhere in the cosmos.
The enchanted physical activity embodying consciousness is known as resonance.
Resonance is a well-studied physical activity. Resonance involves two distinct waves of activity that vibrate together in harmony to produce a single synchronized wave. A familiar example of resonance is found in music.
Imagine a violin and a trumpet playing the same melody at the same time. Their musical tunes will resonate. Because the violin’s melodic waveform matches the trumpet’s melodic waveform, the two waveforms merge together in synchrony to form a single united waveform that carries the tune.
We don’t find musical instruments in our brain. But we do find music-like waves of neural activity. Our brain is designed to bring together two waves of neural activity to discover if the waves will resonate.
In this chapter we’re going to shine a spotlight on the objective activity that embodies subjective experience. Everything about awareness—everything about the human soul—is related in some vital fashion to the dynamics of resonance.
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Every form of consciousness in the universe—smelling and philosophizing and exalting and calculating and inventing and aiming—is physically embodied within the resonance uniting two distinct forms of mental activity:
· Expectation.
· Reality.
Powered by the mindwhirl, our mind continuously generates mental activity that represents (or embodies) the mind’s prediction of what will happen next?
Imagine I’m walking a trail through the woods. When I turn past this old stump I expect to see a giant white oak tree because last time I was here I encountered such. My brain generates expectation activity representing “white oak tree.”
I pass the stump and lo, I see the white oak tree I was anticipating. Now my brain generates reality activity that represents the real-time perception of “white oak tree.”
My brain now automatically brings together the expectation activity and the reality activity. Because they are “playing the same melody”—because the physical waveform of the top-down expectation neural activity matches the physical waveform of the bottom-up reality neural activity—they resonate.
My private human awareness of the silvery bark, seven-lobed leaves, and enormous gnarled branches of the white oak is now physically embodied in resonant activity in my brain synchronizing my perception with my prediction.
If expectation matches reality then resonance occurs. If expectation does not match reality then resonance will not occur and I will not experience a conscious episode. If I pass the stump and encounter a fifty-foot green gummy bear, I will be surprised—and I will not become conscious of a white oak tree.
I may not even become conscious of the giant gummy bear, not immediately. We’ll learn about the psychological consequences of non-resonance later.
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Comparing the activity of expectation with the activity of reality is the fundamental mechanism of conscious thought.
Our brain continuously forms new guesses about what will happen next. Each guess is an act of pure imagination. Our brain continuously forms impressions of the cold hard world unfolding around us. Documenting the facts on the ground. And our brain continuously compares its guesses to its impressions. Whenever prediction matches perception, we become aware of the perception and can act consciously upon it.
Resonance influences the neural activity of expectation and reality in three ways fundamental to the operation of consciousness. Resonance causes the synchronized neural activity to become:
Longer
Louder
Tighter
If a trumpet and a violin play the same melody, that melody becomes louder than either of them playing alone. The joint musical wave is amplified.
This is due to straightforward mechanical action: if the peak of one wave matches the peak of another wave, the peaks strengthen. They grow in amplitude. If trough matches trough, the troughs strengthen. But if two waves don’t match—if trough matches up with peak—the two waves cancel out. This prevents resonance from forming.
The same holds true in our brain. When expectation matches reality, the synchronized neural activity grows louder.
If a trumpet and violin play the same note, that note will also last longer for similar mechanical reasons. The musical wave is extended. The famous E-major chord at the end of the Beatles’ A Day in the Life played simultaneously on four pianos is heard longer than a note played on a single piano alone. Similarly, when expectation matches reality in our brain, the joint brain activity embodying the confirmed perception of reality also lasts longer.
If a violinist and a trumpet player play the same note at the same time, the two musicians will adjust their performance in real-time so their own pitch perfectly matches the pitch played by the other. Each performer converges on the same shared target note in order to synchronize their musical activity.
Perhaps the trumpet was playing a slightly sharp C note and the violin was playing a slightly flat C note. The two performers will adjust their performance so that both soundwaves converge on an identical C somewhere between their initial pitches. Similarly, when expectation matches reality in our brain, the synchronous activity embodying expectation and reality gets “tighter,” converging on a mutual target.
Any time you experience a conscious perception—of a tomato, a tornado, a blind date with a toxicologist—two melodies are resonating together in your cranial jukebox. A song of expectation. And a song of reality. These twin melodies grow louder, longer, and tighter until they finally burst into your conscious awareness as a single arresting experience.
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Resonance is your soul’s interface with reality. The front line of purpose’s ceaseless war against chaos.
With each cycle of your mindwhirl, your mind forms a prediction about what it expects to encounter during the next cycle. The next cycle generates a perception of gritty reality that your mind compares to the prediction from the previous cycle. If perception resonates with prediction, you bask in a warm conscious experience of the universe.
Though we have already identified the most essential and fundamental element of consciousness—the resonance of expectation with reality—we still have much to learn about the flow and structure of consciousness before we can elucidate the hard problem of how it becomes me.
Previous Conciousness: 2: A Proclivity for Activity
Next Consciousness: 4: The Ladder of Purpose