What (or How) and Where Areas

Lacking a good answer to this question, I was helped by a (not altogether flattering) discussion of my post on the Philosophy of Photography Forum on photo.net. In particular, my thanks to Craig Cooper for providing a link to this lecture by Dr. Margaret Livingstone. Here is another interesting link with more detail. For a really fascinating discussion with examples see Phantoms in the Brain, chapter 4, “The Zombie in the Brain,” by V.S. Ramachandran.

Here is a nice drawing representing the visual processing areas which I owe to Dr. David Heeger who posted his lecture notes on the internet here. The small cartoons represent the kind of information being processed in these brain areas: edges, binocular vision, angles, curves, color, location, and face recognition, for instance.

The take home lesson is that after a number of intermediate steps, luminance (black and white) information and color information are processed by separate areas of the cortex. In particular, luminance information is transmitted to the parietal cortex and color information to the temporal cortex.

Luminance information ends up in what is called the “Where” area (marked by a compass) of the parietal cortex. This area is so named because in specializes in analyzing information about location, visually guided movement, contrast, and depth. Ramachandran prefers to call this the “how” area because it directs actions like avoiding objects, reaching out to touch something, etc.

Color information, however, is routed in an entirely different direction to the “what” area of the brain located in the temporal lobe. This area of the cortex is required to identify objects, faces, as well as associated memories and emotions. This evolutionarily newer area of the cortex is involved in attributing meaning, via emotional systems, to what we see.

Reaching For Light

Now imagine what happens if we look at a black and white photograph. The “where” or “how” area immediately receives input. But the “what” area is deprived of information, particularly color information, that it expects. I suppose that we might expect to find the black and white image devoid of emotion and uninteresting. But this is the opposite of what happens. Why?

My theory is that the brain makes up for this missing information by drawing on memory and imagination. After all, the brain is amazingly good at “filling in the blanks” when expected input is not there. We never miss information from the blind spots in our visual fields. More dramatically, consider the cases of phantom limbs so elegantly discussed by Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks, and others. Following amputations some individuals experience complete feeling, and often pain, in the missing limb.

Hence, black and white photography stimulates our inner imagination and creativity. We make emotional associations that otherwise might be absent. This effect is powerful and dramatic. In fact, many people complain of being “distracted” by color if it is added back to an image. Black and White forces us to look in the shadows of our own perception. There we see reflections of ourselves.

A paradox is supposed to define what is false.

The statement below is false.

The statement above is true.

You can go around and around on this one. But most of us try to work it out a couple of times, say, “Oh, it’s a paradox.” and go about our business. Unlike a computer, which could cycle over this classic paradox until eternity, or Windows crashes, which ever comes first.

Mideival Thought

What is it about our brains that allow us to tolerate paradox as well as we do? In general, it is considered incompatible with good math or physics. Godel’s theorem,  discussed in a previous post, suggests that all mathematical systems, however rigorous, will turn up paradoxes, or fail to prove things that are true or both. How does Godel establish truth or falsity? By reference to common sense attributes of the real number system which we know to be true or false.

This is all related to the time-honored philosophical battle between ontology versus epistemology, or what is true versus what can be known. As they delve into relms of physics further removed from everyday experience, physicists have settled on the principal of falsifiability. A theory or hypothesis in physics may be considered true if it predicts the outcomse of experimental tests. Such tests accumulate and continue to be consistent with the hypothesis, the hypothesis is more likely to be true. If any such experiment fails, the hypothesis may be considered false.

This sounds like hedging to me. But consider the theory of relativity. To this day new tests of Einstein’s theory continue to be designed. To date, none have falsified relativity. As this record builds, the theory of general relativity gains acceptance of scientific truth.

Hmmm … “gains acceptance” sounds a little like truth by committee, don’t you think?

Does this mean we will every “know” that the theory of relativity is correct? Let me know if I’m wrong about this, but I think the answer is no. More likely, it will be found that relativity is true and useful under most conditions but breaks down under others (such as the micro-realm of quantum mechanics).

So how can scientists agree about the validity of quantum mechanics, evolution, and global warming? It’s a combination of testability, a lack of  falsification, and common sense.

In the end we fall back on the ability of our brains to model the physical world. Our internal feeling of trugh is strong enough it can persist in the face of contradiction. Note that contradiction is different than falsification. If you both believe that god exists and that god doesn’t exist, you tolerate a contradiction. In reality, neither assertion is testable or falsifiable.

String theory lies in this purgatory of truth/untruth. String theory is a highly developed and sophisticated quantum mechanical theory which explains many facets of the universe. However, to date it makes no predictions which are falsifiable. As long is this is the case, it will remain difficult for many physicists to take it seriously.

It is my observation as a psychiatrists that we gain wisdom, flexibility, and breadth of knowledge as our ability to tolerate contradiction increases. “Is the world getting better or is it getting worse?” — Laurie Anderson. The answer depends on perspective. Is it wrong to kill someone? Yes, but the principal of self defense is a time-honored exception.

In psychotherapy opposites are often two sides of  the same coin. Excessive anger is similar to the inability to become angry. They are both problems with modulating anger. The opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. Ask someone in marital counselling what originally attracted them to their mate. “He was so strong and confident.” It will often be the chief complaint. “He never listens and always thinks he is right.”

It is said that confusion is the highest state of knowledge. Seeking premature closure and simplified prescriptions of right and wrong cause more problems in the world than uncertainty.

___________________

BREAKING NEWS: String theory may predict an experimental result.

Does the valus of paradox suggest the desirability of ambivalance? I suspect so, but this would be another blog.

All children play. If toys are not available to children in primitive cultures or in areas of poverty, they will utilize whatever items are available. Imagination animates sticks, old cans, blocks of wood, and discarded cooking utensils. Dolls, toy animals, and imaginary playmates develop lives of their own. Children re-create the world and manipulate it in play, stimulating neurological development and creating the inner space which we call the mind and which will be used to understand the external world and plan for the future.

To our detriment, we forget to play as adults. Some of us were never given much chance to play as children. Some of us just get too busy.

My recommendation is this. Every day, do something for no good reason and with no goal in mind. It should be fun. It helps if it’s silly.

This week’s example: building a Jacob’s Ladder.

I will never forget seeing the scene in the original film Frankenstein (1931) in which the inanimate monster is raised to the roof, lightening cracking, surrounded by fabulous electrical equipment with electric arcs galore. My favorite was the Jacob’s Ladder, in which a tiny electric arc rose, becoming bigger and bigger, only to decintigrate and have the process repeat itself. If electricity can do that, there is no doubt it could bring the dead to life.

To my delight I stumbeled across a wonderful book, Gordon McComb’s Gadgeteer’s Goldmine. $20 later (plus $20 for shipping and about $30 for copper wire and a switch), adrenalin rushing, I turn it on. It works!

Uh … now what? Well, one spark after another travels the gap, and I begin to notice the smell of ozone and figure I had better turn it off. But soon I am back to see it again. I begin to imagine that it mysteriously imparts me with life energy, especially when I am tired and unimaginative.

Oops! I’m missing the point. It isn’t actually supposed to _do_ anything. It’s playing!

PS I tried to photograph my 12,000 v Jacob’s Ladder but the pictures doesn’t catch the fun. Try going to the Arcs and Sparks page to see some really impressive, well, arcs and sparks!

When I started this blog, I set out to combine 3 of my major interests: photography, psychiatry, and the nature of time. So I have a confessionto make. Thoughtlessly, I ommitted the most important and overriding interest of all: music.  How could this have happened? I suppose that might be a question for my psychiatrist or music teacher. But music is not ery easy to talk about. It is much easier to make and listen to. Music spans regions of experience and of expression largely uninhabited by language. Language is but the crudest of tools to explore this intepersonal space.

Listen to Contrapunctus 1 of the “Art of the Fugue” by JS Bach played by a young Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist that one can only imagine had been designed by God for the expressed purpose of playing Bach.

Glenn Gould playing Bach

The Art of the Fugue was one of the last pieces composed by Bach and the end of his lifetime. By that time composing a fugue was a bit of an anachronism, and composers had moved on to more lyrical musical forms. Bach’s fugue is almost mathematical in construction. And yet this music is to my ear some of the most emotional ever written. There is hope, love, determination, sadness, and resignation. But what is breathtaking is the flow of complex feeling states, instant by instant, that weave about each other and produce an emotive conversation beyond all possible language.

We start with beauty and contentment. But what if … can we hope … but that could only mean … alas … the sky darkens … were it not for such beauty the longing would be intolerable … any yet …  hope, love  … and surely an end to all things … absolution and peace.

This is not meant to be poetry, just a sketch of one person on the adventure of listening to music at the height of human creativity. But I must point out the paradox of time and music. Lost in music, the  present moment blurs. If the piece is well known, each note is illuminated by those before and behind. As so at the heart of music is the paradox of time. The present note or chord is not music. Music arises with flow of time. And yet each moment is made of the past and depends on the past. It is made of the future and depends on the future. No moment could be without the whole. And so it is with our lives. The incapability of the moving present implies and is inseparable from all of time past and present. And so it is only in this unique present moment that we confront all of life, from the non-beginning to the non-ending.

Music gives wings to hearts so they can soar high above our heads.

This sense of time differs from my experience of physical distance in space. The metric is much clearer. It doesn’t matter if I drive from Colorado to San Francisco or walk or fly there by plane. The distance feels the same. I know what lies between Colorado and San Francisco and what it takes to get from here to there and back. Of course, with some effort I can fill in all the events between two points in my lifetime. But I remain unable to explain where the time went (if it went anywhere).

On getting older (I am now 61) this time thing began to take on more importance. Yikes! Here I am trapped is something called the “present” moving inexorably away from the past (which was fun) toward the future (death and decay doesn’t sound like fun). I began to compare my passage through my lifetime to riding the big hill on the roller coaster. It’s great fun starting out, getting pulled higher and higher with all the girls waving and shouting “wheeee.” Now we are at the top! Look how far you can see. It’s fantastic. Oh oh! We’re starting to go down. ‘Aieeeeeee!!!’ Is that a black tunnel at the bottom? Or a brick wall?

Contemplating  our inevitable progression toward death and decay assumes that time really exists, as we perceive it. But who can seriously question the nature of time which we all experience?

Just in time (pun intended) I happened on some ideas that offered me an escape from time’s trap. I have always been interested in Kurt Gödel, the friend of Einstein who shook up the mathematical world with his “Incompleteness Theorem“. Less famously, he published a short paper demonstrating that if Einstein’s theory of general relativity is true, time as we know it cannot exist.

The history of this extraordinary article is described in the brilliant but difficult book “A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein” by Yourgrau. I am not a physicist. But the idea of the nonexistance of time continues to grow on me.

Eternal Traffic Circle

Here is the gist of the idea. There are at least three kinds of time:

• Experiential time. You are reading this right now. You read the last paragraph in the past. You can’t to the past from here no matter how hard you try. Everything in the future is yet to come. The future, including death, is inescapable.
• Clock and calendar time. This is the time we can measure with wrist watches and cesium clocks.  We assume it is related to experiential time because we can mark today on the calendar. Yesterday is remembered and we don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
• The time of space-time as described in general relativity. Space-time contains all of time and all of space. Objects can be located in space and time. But time is relativistic, that is, measurements of time differ depending on their frame of reference in space-time. .

I would propose that experiential time is an artifact of our consciousness. More specifically, our experience of the passage of time is an inescapable consequence of the way in which our brains think and remember events. It is only indirectly related to the time of space-time, which I will call real time.

There is no “now” in space-time. All points in times are equal, and so in a sense eternal. After all, all points in space exist and are equally real. Why would the axis of time be different?

If we allow ourselves to really believe this, the present moment becomes the only moment there ever is. Every moment of our life, from birth to death, is the present moment. If we could really get in a time machine and travel into the past, we would be no wiser because it would be just the present moment, as it always has been and always will be.

Our consciousness moves in time because in order to be conscious we have to think, and thinking requires activity in our brains that spans time. Our brains use energy, so thinking and forming memories increase entropy. As pointed out by Steven Hawkings, this entropy increase means that the arrow of experiential time must point in the same direction as the arrow of the time of space-time time. But I am suggesting that the arrow is arbitrary. Switch the head and tail of this arrow and real time is unchanged.

And so I believe that the trap of time is an illusion. There is no more reason to worry about what it will be like after we die than there is to worry about what it was like before we were born. Our lives span a limited region of space. Why should they not also span a limited region of time? Death and birth are artificial boundaries that represent transitions. In reality, we die and are reborn every moment.

More about this from the perspective of Buddhism to follow.

You would expect the most exciting developments in psychiatry to have something to do with medications, or diagnostic procedures, or even some mysterious power of magnetic fields or crystals.

Instead we have learned that we are seldom really conscious. Rather than sitting in the drivers seat, we ride the crest of a multitude of mental functions. Perhaps we attend a kind of secret committee only a minority of whose members are known to us.

Let me try to defend this rather dramatic statement. Research in neuroscience suggests:

• Our brains consist of a number of systems or modules. Although interrelated, these systems can display a surprising degree of independence.
• We all have the experience of being conscious and having control of our thoughts and actions. However, consciousness resists attempts at location in place and time.
• If we ask when in time we become consciousness of an experience, the answer depends on details of the way in which we phrase our question. Different parts of the brain react to an event well before we first know that something has happened. Our conception of what it was that happened changes over seconds, minutes, weeks, and years.
• Brain modules control our emotions, behaviors, and thoughts more than we can guess or imagine.
• These modules manage different aspects of our minds, selves, and perhaps even our souls. Identification of events and their agents, perceptions of beauty, moral judgments and ambiguities, and the emotional color of experience are determined by distinct modules of the brain.
• The ability to be informed by past memories and to form expectation of future events are organized in particular brain regions, functional circuits, and neurochemical states.

Such ideas constitute an exploding area of knowledge in neuroscience. They bridge conventional destinctios between psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and even spirituality and religion.

How does this impact my personal psychiatric practice?

When a person comes into my office and asks for assistance with a problem or for insight into behavior, I can always fall back on my training. For instance: Such a symptom constellation suggests such a diagnosis and might predict a favorable response to a particular medications. Cognitive and behavioral strategies (all the rage) might offer recipes for altering reactions to persons or events. Psychoanalytic strategies (out of favor and probably socially incorrect) might seek a deeper understanding dating from patterns laid down in childhood that would catalyze personal growth.

Now a different option presents itself. Perhaps we can take a moment to observe the many aspects of ourselves that ultimately are synonymous with self. They must be respected and given due consideration. An undesired emotion or impulse might be understood as an essential element of the whole. It might be appreciated for its intrinsic value and constructively directed. A more functional version of ourselves might result.

One of my mentors used to say that we are all a little like Humpty Dumpty. Sometimes we fall off the wall or sometimes we are pushed. In either case we break into many pieces, which we must try to reassemble. Each piece must be turned over and examined. Some are better discarded. Perhaps there are new pieces to be added. We only hope that in the end we may function better than before.

Wizardlings 1

The digital revolution in photography has been an unquestionable step forward (although I miss the wonderful graininess of silver images). Digital cameras shoot color effortlessly. I always assumed black and white photography would fade away in time like gaslights, the extended family, and barber shops.

But something odd is happening. It struck me when I was waiting for my hairdresser at his salon, browsing through huge glossy fashion magazines. I noticed that at least 30% of the photographs were in black and white. It is unlikely that these top end fashion photographers are doing this to save expense.

Wizardling 1 Color Original

What is the special power of black and white?

When I photograph I am seeking to reveal something beneath the surface of the visable image. On some occasions black and white photographs draw me into an alternate psychological space. The image is stripped of the mundane. My perceptual assumptions fail, and I am drawn toward some vaguely discerned truth. Stripped of visual color, the emotional color of the place and the time are enriched.

Our brains process color and luminance information separately but in parallel. The information is analyzed at multiple way stations and aspects of the image such as lines, movement, patterns, and more complex features emphasized. Relevant emotions and memories are identified and woven into our perception. All of this happens effortlessly and without our conscious awareness.

I suspect the lack of color information disrupts this normal mental processing. The information reaching our awareness has not been properly screened and edited, Our perceptions become more primitive and more real,  We become consciously involved in pondering the mood and meaning of the particular instant which our camera has captured in time.

This is ony one idea. If you have others please share them.

As a psychiatrist, I am fortunate to have a lot of time to ponder how the brain works. And this greatest of all mysteries is beginning to yield up some secrets.  This blog is an attempt to tie what I am learning about the brain with some of my major interests: photography, music, and our experience of consciousness.

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Photography captures what we see in the world. But it captures something about ourselves. Sometimes it illuminates something beneath the surface of what we can see. When we photograph we cannot escape creating art. And art enevitably changes us. Photography captures an instant in time. An instant which what we thought to have been lost has been frozen forever. And in this way we believe we can stop time.

But we are fooled. Each time we view the image its meaning changes before our very eyes. “I never noticed that before.” “It has become more beautiful.” “Finally I understand”. Experience in the past and experience in the present cannot be separated.

In truth, I do not think that time really exists at all. I believe that our experience of the passage of time is an inevitable artifact of the workings of the human brain. And so we come full circle. A photograph captures our perceptions, our feelings, and our imagination. And what are these but processes in our brains. But our brains can only function in time. The timelessness of the image is trapped in the movements of our thoughts in the irresistible current of our lifetimes.

Wayne Phillips Boulder, Colorado

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