The Connected Brain
Christof Koch uses studies of visual awareness to open a window on the way the brain perceives the world around it. Two years ago Koch, a specialist in computer vision, teamed up with Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, to devise a neurobiological theory of consciousness. This is not the consciousness that involves subjective feelings of pain or pleasure; although Koch believes this is an integral part of consciousness, he argues that it does not lend itself to rigorous tests and scientific analysis. Instead, he and Crick focused on a phenomenon observed by other researchers: that neurons in different areas of the brain, when presented with a common stimulus, will fire at roughly the same time. Koch and Crick argue that this firing is a way of temporarily uniting information in different areas of the brain, and it is this synchrony that generates the brain’s awareness. DISCOVER saw the 36-year-old Koch in his basement office and lab at Caltech, surrounded by various computer workstations and a cappuccino machine.
DISCOVER: You talk in your papers about obstacles to the study of consciousness, such as behaviorism and the computer paradigm. What do you mean by those?
KOCH: Behaviorism arose as a reaction partly to the German Gestalt school of psychology and, in general, to late-nineteenth-century theorizing about internal human drives. Behaviorists threw out any mention of internal states. They believed the only important thing to know about is human behavior, human actions. In effect these scientists were saying, I don’t know what you want, I don’t know about whether you’re aware or not. All I know is that if I stimulate you in this manner, you’ll respond in that manner.
Now, certainly you can describe some human phenomena in terms of stimulus and response; but very complicated abilities, like why you play, or things like that, cannot be explained in such terms. Still, that school of thought really blossomed in this country, particularly in medical schools. That’s why it’s difficult today to talk about consciousness with hard-core scientists. There’s a sense that once you start talking about consciousness, next you’ll talk about religion.
