Continuation of the conversation with neuropsychologist Daniel Siegel. What is consciousness? What do we inherit from previous generations, parents, and how does this affect our lives?
Daniel Siegel, physician, professor at the Medical School of the University of California at Los Angeles (USA), director of the Mindsight Institute he founded. The founder of a new field of research – interpersonal neuroscience, which is directly related to our daily lives: health, relationships, well-being. Among those who listened to his lectures are Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, the King of Thailand and the leadership of Google.
Daniel Siegel: I was a young medical student who decided to drop out of medical school because everything in me protested the way medicine and my professors treated humans as biological machines in need of repair. There was no empathy in this, no awareness of the connection between the internal state of a person and his illness. And I tried to somehow name for myself the quality that, in my opinion, they lacked. This is how the term “mindsight” was born.
But what I understand today as a mindsight is somewhat different. And in order to better understand what I’m talking about, we need to talk a little about interpersonal neuroscience. It studies how our personal neurobiological characteristics are related to what kind of interpersonal connections we are able to make. This is not a subspecies of neuroscience, but a whole field of research that includes many different disciplines and approaches – from mathematics to chemistry, from biology to sociology, from anthropology to psychology.
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- Dick Swaab “We are our brain”
It all started in 1991, when scientists suddenly had tools to study the brain that weren’t there before. I led a group of researchers who represented a variety of areas of science – physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, mathematics. Our task was to form some general idea about the brain and consciousness. At that time, a very common point of view was this: consciousness, the mind is just a product of brain activity. We also wanted to understand whether this is so. But our very first meeting almost ended in disaster – it turned out that representatives of different scientific disciplines define what the brain is in completely different ways. And most of them didn’t even think about what consciousness is. Imagine: a person has been taught psychology for six years, and during these six years he has never been given an exact definition of consciousness! I was at a dead end. Didn’t know what to do…
But the project eventually took off. How did you manage to get out of this impasse?
D.S.: In frustrated feelings, I went for a walk on the ocean shore. I walked for a long time, and finally it dawned on me. I suddenly realized that when we talk about consciousness, we can talk about the physical or chemical processes in the brain or about the interaction between people, but these different interpretations have something in common. We always talk about what can be called the exchange of energy and information. It could be chemical energy that a chemist understands, or psychic communication energy that psychologists don’t mind, or electromagnetic impulses between neurons.
And when I returned to our working group, my proposal was as follows – that if one of the aspects of human consciousness we can define as manifested in the body, a self-organizing process that occurs in a situation where there are some separate elements – brain structures, neurons , people, groups of people – and building relationships between these elements by regulating the flow of energy and information between them? Consciousness is necessary to be aware of internal processes within us, between us and other people, and between large groups of people.
And suddenly everyone agreed. Anthropologists who study cultures, sociologists who study groups of people, biologists who study the structure of the individual, chemists, physicists, everyone in our group – everyone agreed! It was amazing. All 40 scientists could observe in their experience how various elements and structures really constantly exchange information and energy, and there is a process that clearly controls this. And we stuck to this definition for 4,5 years, while our working group existed.
What conclusions did you come to as a result of this work? In other words, how can you decipher your definition of consciousness, clarify it?
D.S.: First, consciousness is the flow of energy and information that constantly defines our lives. We are now talking and exchanging energy and information, and when the interviews are published, this flow will be directed to thousands of people – and this is being studied by anthropologists and sociologists. Neuroscientists are investigating how energy and information is transferred through the neural circuits in our brains when someone reads this interview. Between different structures (from individual neurons to entire civilizations) there is always a flow of energy and information.
Secondly, this flow is always associated with relationships and is always somehow manifested in us at the level of the physical body, embodied in our body.
And finally, consciousness is a complex system that always has three qualities: openness to external influences, a tendency to chaos, and non-linearity. But what then keeps the integrity of such an open, non-linear and chaos-prone system? In the theory of complex systems, this quality is called “self-organization”. For self-organization to be possible, we must have the ability to be aware of this complex system, to direct attention to it.
You often use the term “integration”. What meaning do you put into it?
D.S.: In the context of neuroscience, this means the relationship between different parts of the brain – for example, between the right and left hemispheres, between the cortex and the limbic system. In the context of relationships, this means that we are constantly aware of our connections with other people and the quality of these connections. For any system, from the brain to human society, to function harmoniously, two conditions must be met. There should be separate elements with a specific specialization. And clear, flexible, working links should be established between these elements. Then the system is in a state of integration – and we perceive it as harmony. When I talk about integrated self-awareness, I mean that this definition includes the need for connections with the outside and the world and other people.
In other words, in your understanding, our brain is a social organ, and in order to develop its structures, we need healthy, open social relationships? This, in my opinion, directly concerns Russia. We are a country with broken social ties, and our brains can’t stand it. What can we do or change in this situation?
D.S.: The structure and function of our brain is influenced by two main factors. The first is genetics. Our everyday experience does not directly affect genetics, but it has a significant impact on the expression of certain genes. This is called epigenetic regulation. If we look at Russian history, it is an extremely traumatic social history – wars, revolutions, repressions.
An extensive German study found that the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, although they lived in a completely safe environment, were many times more prone to stress than the control group. For example, their brain circuits, which are activated when there is danger or hunger, were active in the same way as in people who are threatened with danger and hunger in real life. We store this memory in our genes, and it shapes our subjective perception of reality. For example, if during the repressions people could literally trust no one, even close relatives, now the descendants of these people in Russia keep this memory in their genes. And then trust will be difficult to take root in such a society. We know that stress activates these epigenetic mechanisms. The social stresses of recent years could have activated these dormant reactions in Russian people. And if you understand this, then you can change this situation.
The second factor is early childhood. We know, again through research, how babies’ very first impressions affect their entire life experience. We can say that if a child grows up in a situation of integrated healthy relationships, then his brain develops integrated. What does integrated relationship mean? This means that parents are able to feel and understand the unique needs of their child, to see and feel him (that is, they have developed a mind-sight in themselves). Satisfying these needs, they thereby form the child’s trust in relationships between people and in the world.
Does this mean that the new data of science do not cancel the long-known role of attachment?
D.S.: On the contrary, they only confirm it! I have studied for many years how the formation of healthy attachment in early childhood affects a person’s health and well-being later on. And what completely shocked me was what a huge, decisive influence early attachment mechanisms have on our whole life later. It depends on them whether your brain develops healthy or stops developing.