The Attention Dilemma: Explaining Consciousness and Autism (and ADHD)
How Consciousness is Made Chapter 8
Chapter 8
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
.Mary Oliver, “Yes! No!”Note: These consciousness articles need quality illustrations and graphics to make the ideas clear. I possess neither talent nor time to do it right. Fortunately, I’ve found someone very skilled to illustrate these articles about consciousness who cares about the material as much as I do. It will likely take a few months to get going, but fairly soon I’ll be folding in brand new special graphics for all the consciousness articles. I’ll alert you when we start.
Our ultimate collaborative goal is to make a graphic novel version of How Consciousness is Made.
.1
Every mind, whether the molecule-driven mind of a salmonella bacterium or the module-driven mind of an African Bush Elephant, must solve the same challenge over and over again for as long as it can think:
What should I focus on next?
This is the Attention Dilemma.
A dilemma, recall, is a choice with no perfect solution. It always involves a trade-off. In the case of attention, you can only focus on one thing at a time.
If you focus on this, you can’t focus on that. That’s why it’s a dilemma! Your brain must choose what to pay attention to, and by doing so, your brain also chooses what not to pay attention to.
Indeed, attention is the most influential mental dynamic that embodies choice.
Every mind, at every moment, must decide what to focus on. A decision with monumental consequences.
If you choose to watch the pretty yellow balloon float into the sky instead of the bloody machete swinging at your cheek, you have not resolved the attention dilemma satisfactorily and will be making choices no more.
Though attention is decidedly a life-or-death mental dynamic (as any SWAT officer can tell you) its real force and influence occurs over the tens of thousands of attention choices your mind makes automatically every day.
When this salesman is talking to me, should I focus on his eyes or his words?
As I’m listening to this new musical track, should I focus on the lyrics or the melody?
As I’m drinking this soda, should I focus on the fizz or the flavor?
Though every mind on the ladder of purpose must resolve the attention dilemma, when we ascend to the third rung, the monkey minds (all living vertebrates save humans), these module-driven brains face a particularly daunting form of the attention dilemma:
What thing should I focus on next?
Purpose came up with a solution for the monkey mind attention dilemma.
The name of the solution is consciousness.
.2
Your mind is activity. Your mind consists of four hierarchical layers of simultaneous activity.
All this activity is seamlessly interconnected. Like the currents in the ocean. The powerful Gulf Stream flows into the smaller North Atlantic Current, Canary Current, and North American Coastal Current, for example.
Of course, the flow of activity in your brain is far, far more complex than the flow of water in the ocean.
How does the whirlwind of activity in your brain manage to focus on anything at all? Isn’t it like suggesting the Atlantic could somehow “focus” on something?
Yes.
In principle, an ocean could pay attention to something. But the ocean would need a lot more structure than it has! A billion years worth of evolved structure—like in monkey minds!
Let’s see if we can understand how the incredibly complicated flow of mental activity in your brain—molecular flow, neural flow, modular flow, supermind flow—can somehow cause you, pilgrim, to focus on this and not that.
How can whirling activity in your eighty billion neurons1 make you suddenly aware of the mayonnaise stain on your shirt when you’re in the middle of a conversation with an attractive stranger?
How can physical activity focus on something at all?
Posing the question so simply allows us to identify the key element in the question:
Something. Some thing. Some THING.
The free flow of mental activity needs a stable THING to focus on.
But the thing to focus on must itself be made of mental activity—out of the physical dynamics of the brain.
Mental activity must convert itself into a thing—the very thing to focus on.
Analog must get converted into digital.
Flow must become structure.
.3
In the previous chapter, The Liberating (& Deceiving) Power of THINGS, we learned how the brain converts activity into things. This is one of the core tricks of monkey minds: converting analog to digital, reals to integers, activity to things.
Flow to structure.
There’s actually more than one way the human brain converts analog into digital (and digital into analog), and we’ll explore these ways in future articles. But to understand the attention dilemma—to understand consciousness (and autism and ADHD)—we will focus on how the consciousness cartel handles the conversion of flow into structure.
We will learn about the consciousness cartel in a moment. For now, think of the consciousness cartel as the collection of all the consciousness-generating modules in your brain, such as the visual Where module (Where is this thing?), melody What module (What is this sequence of notes?), and the Why module (Why should I make this choice?)
As we’ve learned, your subjective experience of consciousness (I am aware of this polka-dotted pumpkin!) is physically embodied within the neural dynamic of resonance. Resonance occurs within a consciousness cartel module when an expectation matches reality: when what you expect to see matches what you do see.
We also learned that resonance converts activity into a thing. Two mental dynamics—expectation activity and reality activity—each flowing independently through the brain, come together and synchronize and stabilize. The resulting stable neural resonance becomes a literal thing in the brain: a sustained enduring entity that the rest of the brain can make use of as if it were a tangible physical object.
This is a very important truth to understand about minds, so let me hammer this home: in order to think about things, your mind needs to create an actual physical thing inside your skull. Any time you think about something—baseballs, beauty, biology, barnacles—the subjective idea of the thing you are aware of “in your mind’s eye” must correspond to a physical thing inside your brain: a stable, unchanging resonance.
The world outside is replicated inside your mind—or, to be more precise, the seamless world outside is carved into an amalgam of things by your mind, like a butcher carving a cow into chops, steaks, and roasts. This amalgam of things, a carved and jointed version of the world outside, is what physically manifests inside your mind.
So modular dynamics—the mental activity that flows between the modules in a monkey mind—creates literal things in the brain. (Expectation activity resonating with reality activity inside a neural module.)
But there are many thing-producing modules in the brain—many consciousness-generating modules in the consciousness cartel. Such as the tactile Where module, letting us know where we’re being touched. The olfactory What module, letting us know what we’re smelling. The rhythm What module, letting us identify grooves and beats. At any given moment, any or all of these modules might be generating its own THING—its own resonance.
I’m touching something with my toe!
I’m smelling something bad!
I’m hearing samba!
The world is full of an infinite variety of things, which causes your mind to fill up with things as your mindwhirl interacts with the world and converts sensations into resonances within your brain modules.
So now we understand the precise nature of the attention dilemma in module minds—including your own brain2:
Of all the things in the world—of all the things in my mind—which one should I pay attention to now?
.4
The reason the attention dilemma is such a challenge is because there is no centralized decider in the brain.
There is no boss module that surveys the resonating things in all the other modules and decides, Let’s attend to the polka-dotted pumpkin in the visual What module!
Instead, the global activity of the entire module mind must somehow choose which thing to focus on. Every module participates in the global choosing dynamics, and every module has roughly equal influence in the choosing process (except for one special module).
One way to think about these mind-wide attention-choosing dynamics is to think of the resonant modules as forming a consciousness cartel.
The consciousness cartel governs the attention economy of the mind.
At any given moment, each module in the consciousness cartel may be resonating on a different thing.
[ The CONSCIOUSNESS CARTEL includes all consciousness-generating modules; only five are shown here for clarity. All conscious modules interact with all the other conscious modules. Better graphics coming soon! ]
Let’s imagine the consciousness cartel in your own brain holds three different potential THINGS to focus on right now:
Your visual What module is resonating on a SNAIL on the forest floor.
Your olfactory What module is resonating on the scent of GRILLED MEAT drifting through the forest.
Your auditory What module is resonating on the sound of a BEAR growling behind you.
How does your consciousness cartel decide which thing to focus on?
By selecting the thing with the greatest emotional intensity.
.5
What determines the emotional intensity of a resonating thing in your brain?
The Why module.
It is a special module. Even though we share the Why module with all other vertebrates, including goldfish, it’s no exaggeration to say that our Why module is the most human of all our brain modules. It is the module that most defines who you are, because it is the module exerting the single greatest influence over your choices.
The single greatest influence over what you pay attention to next.
Does that mean the Why module is a boss module? A centralized decider?
No.
Though the Why module is the most influential module in the consciousness cartel—if you want to derange someone’s personality and behavior most outlandishly, the easiest way would be to damage their Why module—the Why module does not have any direct control over other modules. Nor does the Why module alone decide what to focus on.
Instead, the Why module sets the conditions for a monkey mind’s global activity to choose which thing to focus on. It is the mind-wide activity rather than the Why module that is the ultimate decider.
Let’s see how.
Every time a module in the consciousness cartel resonates on a thing (which can be a perception, object, person, idea, plan, memory), the resonating module shares its resonant activity with the Why module. If the visual What module is resonating on a SNAIL, it sends the SNAIL to the Why module (more precisely, the What module allows the Why module to synchronize its internal modular activity with the What module’s resonant activity; the SNAIL doesn’t actually leave the What module, the Why module activity reaches out and “touches” the SNAIL resonance.)
After the Why module receives a THING to process from a cartel module, it gets to work. The Why module determines how it feels about the THING. It might decide that the SNAIL is boring. It assigns a “boring” feeling to the SNAIL’s resonance (which needs to remain a stable unchanging THING while the Why module does its emotional work).
A “boring” feeling doesn’t generate a lot of emotional intensity. So the SNAIL resonance doesn’t generate a lot of intensity.
But there are other modules in the consciousness cartel that are simultaneously resonating on other things. Your olfactory WHAT module is resonating on the scent of GRILLED MEAT. This THING gets passed to the Why module. Because you’re hungry, your Why module assigns an emotional value of “Yummy!” to the GRILLED MEAT.
A “Yummy!” feeling has more emotional intensity than a “boring” feeling, so this should direct your brain to focus on the MEAT, which has a resonance with a greater intensity than the SNAIL.
Except your auditory WHAT module has something to say, too! It’s resonating on the growl of a BEAR. The WHAT module passes the BEAR to your WHY module. Your sister-in-law got attacked by a bear last week, so your WHY module assigns an emotional value of “Holy hell!” to the BEAR.
The feeling of terror creates more intensity than a “Yummy!” feeling. So the BEAR resonance in your audio WHAT module gets linked with the greatest emotional intensity, out of all the THINGS resonating in your brain right now.
Now the global dynamics of the consciousness cartel get to work. Modular activity flows through all the modules of the cartel in a special cartel-wide choosing dynamic known as winner-take-all.
All of the resonating THINGS in your cartel modules (in this case, the SNAIL, MEAT, and BEAR) now compete to “take control” of the entire cartel. The winner-take-all dynamic (a form of mental activity) uses a “rich get richer” dynamic that boosts the most intense resonances and dampens the less intense resonances until only one resonance wins all the intensity—and “takes control” of the consciousness cartel.
The winning module doesn’t actually become the cartel kingpin, lording it over the other modules. The winning module (in this case, the audio WHAT module that detected the bear growl) serves as a sort of “program director,” controlling what all the other modules will pay attention to next—what they will resonate on next.
The resonances of all the modules in the consciousness cartel will now synchronize with the resonance in the winning module. In this case, all the “losing” modules will now PAY ATTENTION TO THE BEAR.
.6
Now comes the fun part.
Think about what the consciousness cartel is doing:
All of the members of the cartel focus on a different segment of reality: sight, sound, scent, location, feeling, and so on. But whenever one of the modules detects something important—like the sound of a hostile bear—then all the other modules spring into action to fill out a complete “conception” of the bear.
This all occurs in less than a second.
In the case of the bear, though the first attention to the bear was triggered by the audio WHAT module—which focused on a small piece of the bear (its growl), after the entire consciousness cartel springs into action, the bear is “fleshed out” into a multi-sensory THING:
You hear the bear, but now you also see the bear, smell the bear, remember recent bear attacks, and feel fear towards the bear. The consciousness cartel works harmoniously to create a rich, multi-dimensional portrait of the bear in your awareness, which you perceive seamlessly—as a single THING: a scary stinking growling bear.
All of the MINI-THINGS (sounds, smells, visuals, memories, feelings) that make up the big THING (the bear) are all individual resonances within modules that synchronize with one another across the cartel. In effect, all the little things in your brain link together harmoniously to form a single vibrating THING that unites your entire mind in a conscious experience:
Bear!
Now the payoff for solving the attention dilemma. The rest of your mind can make use of the stable resonant THING uniting your consciousness cartel in a single attentional focus. In particular, you can decide what to do about the THING.
Because your consciousness cartel successfully paid attention to the most urgent stimulus in your environment—an attacking Grizzly!—you can execute a vital plan of action:
Run for your life!
… and after you flee the bear and catch your breath, the attention dilemma starts up all over again.
What thing should you focus on now?
.7
Armed with a basic understanding of how consciousness manages the attention dilemma, we can take a closer look at the attention-disrupting dynamics of autism—and another condition that we haven’t addressed previously here on the Dark Gift: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Approximately. Neurons aren’t easy to count. I haven’t spent a lot of time on counting neurons, though enough to know they’re not easy to count and I don’t think anyone has come up with an excellent estimate of the range of neurons in human brains. I like to use 80 billion mostly because that’s “conventional wisdom” (which should never be trusted) and I don’t want to constantly be saying “we don’t really know exactly how many neurons are in the brain, but the estimate that everyone uses—and I can’t even say how wrong it might be, simply because I haven’t spent the effort to work through it—is 86 billion so we’ll use that.”
The number of neurons in a brain is not perfectly correlated with intelligence—I believe whale brains have many more neurons than we do, though there’s that counting problem again which makes such comparisons tricky. There’s also ladder of purpose issues which confounds neuron-count comparisons (e.g., human brains have neurons simultaneously working three levels of thinking: neural, modular, supermind—when counting neurons in a human brain, should we include the neurons in the brains of others in the human’s supermind? After all, that’s where all the language and culture that a brain uses is stored…)
You’re part of a supermind, but your own brain contains all third-rung modular dynamics. So you are simultaneously a module mind and (a component of) a supermind. And you have molecule minds and neuron minds inside you, too.