The ultimate protagonist is the conscious self at the center of every life story, the observer who answers to the name of “I” from the first moment of memory until the curtain falls. But what is consciousness, really? And how does it emerge so fully from the organ of the brain? These long-unanswered questions, grist for generations of philosophers, drive the discussion between neuroscientist and neurologist Antonio Damasio and novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt—both authors of recent books on the topic, though from different points of view. Damasio, who directs the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute, wrote Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (Pan­theon, 2010) to explore “the phenomenal ability that consists of having a mind equipped with an owner.” Where is consciousness located in the brain, he wonders, and how does the brain make a conscious mind? He explores the terrain with Hust­vedt, whose book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (Henry Holt, 2010) examines her own seizure disorder from historical, philosophical, and neuroscientific points of view. “How our brains become minds and how neurons create our inner selves remain burning questions in both science and philosophy,” she states. Like her book, this discussion investigates the nature of consciousness and the connections between body, mind, and the arts.

Siri Hustvedt: When I got my Ph.D. in English at Columbia, the intellectual truism of the time was that language created consciousness. But over time I began to doubt this. Where was the body? Where was my felt, lived experience? I’ve had migraines all my life, and later a strange seizure disorder. I began to feel that biology was deeply connected to both personality and the flowering of human culture, and that was the beginning of my profound interest in neuroscience.

Antonio Damasio: For a long time in Western discourse the body was nowhere. But of course the body is of the essence. We have brains and minds because they serve the survival needs of the organism. The regulation of life is the main business of brains and minds. It is called homeostasis.


Hustvedt: What we think of as the self, our subjectivity, is influenced by unconscious forces. Take [Benjamin Libet's famous experiment in the 1980s], which created a tremendous uproar among philosophers and neuroscientists. Libet asked test subjects to move a finger and discovered something called a readiness potential in the brain. It went off about a third to a half second before the subject was conscious of moving the finger. This became a debate about free will: Does free will require a fully conscious action? If you’re thirsty and you get a glass of water, you do not have full subjective linguistic consciousness of the act. It is mostly unconscious, but that doesn’t mean we have no free will.

Damasio: It does not, because most of the decisions important for one’s life are not made in the same way we decide to move a finger or pick up a glass. Important decisions—what we’re going to do with our career or whom we’re going to marry—are usually not made on the fly. For such decisions we tend to deliberate for minutes or hours or weeks or months; we do not do it in the moment of execution of the action. We do it “offline.” That is why people turn their eyes up and look at the ceiling as they deliberate; if they do not, images of the perceptual moment will conflict with the images that they are forming as they make plans.

I used to think of consciousness as a late evolutionary development that tended to be largely human. But the forerunners of consciousness can be found in very simple life-forms—even bacteria.

Hustvedt: You can pay attention to something out there or to your own internal narrator, but paying attention to both does not work. Reading provides a good example. It happens that I suddenly realize I am taking in the words, but my mind has traveled on to another subject. I have some cognitive relation to the words on the page, but it’s not one of semantics, of digesting meaning.

Damasio: What is so fascinating is the limitation of the reasoning space—the screens in which we exhibit our brain maps. We have many such screens: visual screens, but also “screens” for sound, for touch, for olfaction. The brain has discrete anatomical spaces for each one. There is no doubt that when you are listening to a Mahler symphony and watching Daniel Barenboim conducting at the same time, you are having perceptual impressions in two entirely different screen spaces, auditory and visual. Those spaces are so independent that they might as well be in two different cities of your brain.

Hustvedt: The big question for brain research has been, how does all this get put together? It is often called the “binding problem,” because we have the subjective sensation of a unified vision of the world, but how that unity actually functions is unclear.

Damasio: That has led some people to conclude erroneously that there is one space in the brain where all of it is happening. In other words, because we have a seemingly unified experience of space and time, it is assumed that there is one single theater for the whole thing. Right now the favorite single theater for many people is the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain located up front, behind one’s forehead. But I have terrible news for anyone who thinks so: We can get rid of our entire prefrontal cortex and still have unified perceptual experiences.

Next page: The efficient hack that is human memory