>> rose:elcome to our program, tonight a special edition, the charlie rose bane series year 2. in our second episode, we focus on conscious and unconscious cognitive processes in the brain. >> this is a great unknown in al of brain science and wt i think we're gng to learn today is how much progress ha been made in th last two decades in beginning to understand aspects of consciousness, disorders of consciousness and unconscious mental processes. >> rose: episode two of the charlie rose brain series 2 underwritten by the simons foundation coming up.

>> rose: tonight we continue our exploration of the wonders of the human brain. for this program, we examen the brain's most complex function, consciousness. here is what sigmund freud said. "the conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing into a sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises." consciousness remains one of the great mysteries of human existence. when scientists aresked what poses th greatest challenge i modern science, they swer "consciousness." is the mind separate from the body? how can interior subjective lives be explained?

what is awareness itself? these qstions ipire a search to understand the very essence of what it means to be human. from t time of aristotle and plato, tse ideas were often contemplated by philosophers. many religions think of consciousness as living in a ul tt survives the physical body after death. but with the rise of cognitive neuroscience over the last century, we know now and better understand the biological underpinnings of consciousness. we know that everything the body does from our sense of sight and smell to our sense of self is a result of neural activity in the brain. yet questions still remain. some define the current study of consciousness as the pursuit to disentanglits neural circtry. this is the first step in our effort to ask about the nature of inner experience. one way scientists have begun this study is to look at correlations between brain acvity and different states of

consciousness. why are we consciously able to pick up a pencil but unconscious of the sequence of muscle contractions that allow us to hold it. on a more profound level, how do neural connections actually create a sense of obctivity? for instance, how do we know that our perception of the color red isn't another person's idea of green. we'll also explore the importance of the unconscious. how do event wes may not be aware of actually shape our experience of the world and the decisions we make. are people we perceive as unconscious really unare? tonight we explore these and other questions with a remarkable group of scientists. patricia church churchland is a professor of philosophy at the university of california san diego and an adjunct professor at the salk institute. stanislas dehaene is a cognitive neuroscientist and the chair of experimental college of

psychiatry at college defrance in paris. timothy wilson is a professor of psychology at the university of virginia and the author of "redirect, the surprising new science of change." nicholas schiff is the jerrod b. katz professor at weill cornell medical college. and once again my co-herself is dr. eric kandel. he is a nobel laureate, a professor at columbia university d a howard hughes medical investigator. this is going to be fun. tell me, is it really true that one of the great questions is about consciouess? >> it is the greatest question in all of science and certainly the deepest question in all of brain science. and the amazing thing is as we sensed in last year's program that this is an area of knowledge that we thought was very primitive and i think what we're going to learn today is that an amazing amount of progress has occurred in the last decade and a half.

we not only have a better unrstanding of unconscious processes but also of conscious processes and of disorders of consciousness. and we're going to learn a lot from this. to begin with, it's important to realize consciousness is not a unitary faculty of mine. there ardifferent stages that range from coma to deep sleep to waking up from sleep to stumblingaround, to recognizing people, to enjoy, being present with people, to initiating voluntary actions. these are all aspects of consciousness. and they really happen in a single day's events. for example, when you wake up from a deep sleep you stumble out of bed, you make your way to the bathroom to wash your face, to brush your teeth. you then work your wayinto the breakfast area where if you're lucky yourpartner has prepared a cup of coffee for you.

you recognize her, pick up the cup of coffee, enjoy it, it arouses you even more so you can sit down and enjoy the morning newspaper. we understand consciousness better, these various stages, causwe realize we can analyze phlegm two separate dimensions. one is the dimension arousal and vigilance, the degree to which you're really alert. and the other is the dimension of the content of conscious and unconscious processes. how do they vary from one other? let's begin with the area of arousal, vigilance. it used to be thout that consciousness depended upon sensory inflow into the cerebral cortex. and that was dramatically changed by a great viennese neurologist who was studying patients with flu during the flu epidemic of 1918.

he found that a number of patients with influenza had a co before they died. and when they came to autopsy he examined their sensory systems and their sensory systems were completely intact. but when he looked carefully at the brain he noticed there was a lesion in the midbrain. upper area of the brain stem. and he called this the wakefulness area. this was his suggestion, people took it seriously, but it was not a proven fact. but in 1948/'49-- may have the next image, please-- these giants of neuroscientists, the italianscientist and an american horace ma gun collaborated togher on a classic sees of studies. th deprived the brain of the major sensory infl. they found this in no way interfered with consciousness, it no way interfered with sleep.

so they showed experimentally what was derived, that the sensory systems are not essential for wakefulness and conscious deception. however, these were experimental animals. when they made a lesion the cats, in this midbrain area the cat became comatose and if in a normal cat they stimulated this area they aroused it. they could arouse it from deep sleep. so this provided a clear evidence of the fact that the sensory input they say is not important, there's an area in the brain, they call this area-- may i have the next image please-- the retick already a ac serating system. it goes from the brain stopl the thalamus and then projects to the cerebral cortex. niko schiff is the modern extension of those two scientists. he's been interested in patients who have a disorder of consciousness, patients with coma and a particular variant of

that. patients who suffer from minimal conscious states. these are fascinating patients. they can be comatose for five or ten years but periodically, a long period, they will show signs of responding to commands, of interacting with people. and he imaged those patients and he thought that the cerebral cortex would be severe damaged to his amazement he found in many casest was completely intact. what was damaged was this retick ready a ascending system. so he wondered whether the lack of consciousness was due to the fact that the cerebral consciousness wasn't being stimulated enough by the retick you already a activating system. he did deep brain stimulation like in parkinson's's patients and found these patients who were rarely in a conscious state moved into a conscious state more frequently. and one can do this with drugs.

this was really quite amazing. in addition to this insight into different levels of arousal, we've also made a lot of progress in the nature of conscious and unconscious information and th is something pat churchland is ing to tell us about. this came out of what is called the global work space hypothesis it's suggested that consciousness does not arise from a single point in the brain, that lots oflace from which it can arrive but when consciousness really gets recruited, it propagates throughout theerebral cortex. stanislas dehaene has tested this and haseveloped what he called the neuroneural work space hypothesis and he's shown that you can image people, normal people when they're consciously perceiving something and perceiving the same thing unconsciously. so, for example, if i were to show you a picture of stanislas dehaene very rapidly with a masking stimulus, you would not consciously perceive him.

your virile cortex would light up showing that some unconscious... but you would not perceive him, stanislas dehae. but if you saw it more slowly without a masking stimulus, you clearly see him. if you look at the difference between the two perceptio-- unconscious and conscious-- under one case it was restricted to the visual cortex. when you consciously perceive it it propagates forward to the parietal and frontal cortex. it's a badcasting of the information. this holds true when you perceive a tone unconsciously and you perceive it consciously if you deal with number unconsciously. in each case it's broadcast widely throughout the cerebral cortex. quite fantastic for broadcasting function of consciousness. while all these studies were going on, tibets and wilson were studying the nature of unconscious procses. now, freud-- whom you cited before-- made us realize that a lot of our mental state is unconscious. even y or i are functioning

unconsciously most of the time. consciousness ishe tip of the iceberg. and when he looked at the nature of unconscious processes he found they were even more subtle than freud appreciated. freud appreciated it that the language of the unconscious was different from the language of consciousness but didn't appreciate that under many circumstances your unconscious thinking process were better than your conscious one. in consciousness you could only focus on one item at a time. i focus on charlie rose, i cat focus on anybody else. unconscious you can deal with several items simultaneously. so if you ever make the decision between two alternatives, consciousness is the way to go. but if you have to make a decision between many alternatives, the unconscious often leads you to more satisfactory solutions. so this is an amazing set of insights that we're going to be treated to tonight. >> rose: all right. for me this is as exciting as anything we have done: understanding consciousness. >> it's fantastic. >> rose: i wt to go to this remarkable group of people have put together to understand

conscious mind, unconscious mind, what it is that makes us make the decisions that we do. we begin brain series 2, episode 2 with patricia churchland. >> from a htorical perspective there have beetwo traditions. one started with hippocrates in ancient greece who really did believe that mental activity was nothing other than activity in the physical brain. the other line was really initiateby plato who thought that there was somehow an independent thing, the soul. now, this really got its fullest develoent with day cart in the 17th century and in day cart's view there was physical body and it had all the properties we understand and then there was nonfiz cal soul that has no physical properties whatever.

this has perception, feeling reason. and then how do they xer connect that w the oblem descartes cod not solve. so i we fast forward to the 19th century, a great german scientist was her man von helm the >> extraordinary man. >> helm holts realized... he formulated the law of conservation of energy and he realized if by some miraclehis non-physical soul affected the body that there's well established physal law would be trashed so helmholtz took the view that it's almost certainly... despite appearances it's almostertainly all physical. it's the bra. and then he... what he did was study perception. and in the course of studying

perception he came to the realization that a lot of non-conscious processing is not just reflexes and dumb, it's adaptive and smart. it's creative. and that one of the things that the brain... the non-conscious ain does is assemble basic bits of information from the sensory systems. and i'm going to show you very scanty information that the brain will use to make an inference of a very complex sort. so when you look at that, it's a series of black lines. it doesn't seem to mean anything. but when it begins to move, your brain makes an inference! it's a person. it's not just a person,t's kicking! it's jumping. it's actually a man and people think of it as being a young man. and all of this comes out of just movement of those small

swatches. so helmholtz realized that the brain is very constructive. that the non-conscious brain sort of delivers to consciousness something that integrates across a whole lot of information and brings information stored as well as what's currently perceived. now, i'll say a little bit about freud. because i think freud picked up on this idea. now, the early freud was an aphaseologist. and that means that he was interested in the various defects in the capacity to speak. and freud in thinking about speech made this very interesting observation which many of us have but he took it a step further. he noticed that, of course, we don't conscisly pick the words that we're going to use. we don't consciously form the grammatical structu. that that's somehow all done for us nonconsciously and we just speak.

in fact, i sort ofnow the gist of whati'm going to say but i don't know precisely what i'm going say until i say it. and he he, too, thought the non-conscious processs are not stupid and reflexive and automatic. they're adaptive, they're smart, they're complex. fast forward again and now into about 1980 when bernard bars realized that many of the questions that came to us at the beginning of the 20th century were these. what's the difference in the brain when something is consous and wh it's not? is what's the mhanism swrb something that's not conscious bemes conscious? and how smart really are non-conscious processes? and if they're really smart what does that... be for consciousness? is it just an epiphenomenon

that's kind of a nice glow that we like or is it functional? so he developed a framework and the framework tried to pull together certain ideas from psychology in such a way that ultimately they would fit with neuroscience and we can see that now happening. the idea is where first of all that consciousness has a limited capacity. i can't pay attention to two conversations at once. it's also extremely important when we need to deal with a novel and complex problem. i walk into the kitchen, the electric stove is on fire. i need to be conscious in order to pull out of my knowledge systems that i better find the baking soda and dump it on. helso knew that whatever else is true about consciousness that what we're aware of is the product of veryomplex integration.

so when i look at your face, i don't consciouslyee some eyes and anyebrow and some ears d a uth and say,eeyes, that's god to be... oh, and look who that is! it just comes to me. i don't have to consciously figure anything out. and so his question really was what's the nature of all of that integration that allows us to see something complex. and so ba then thought that these observations about the psychology cal character of consciousness could probably come to fit with developments in neuroscience if we knew what to look for. and that's what happened. >> rose: stanislas, let me talk about how you can approach consciousness empirically through a kind of experimentation? >> well, you know there's been enormous progress in the ability

to see the brain i action with brain imaging teciques and there's a whole variety of them allong you to see the brain in three dimensions and also in the dimeion of time. and the main problem has bn to try to find experimental paradigms that would allow us to bring into theab this contrast between non-conscious and conscious processing. and it's thanks to bernard bass' book that psychology suddenly realized that they had many techniques at their disposal before that book the question of consciousness in psyology was quite a boon. they did not speak about it. and this book allows us to play with consciousness in the lab we are able to take a face, a word and play with it as well and make it come and go in and out

of your consciousness as we wish i'm going to show you a demonstration of this. what we will see is the words "one, two, three four." and we just flush them away quickly and still you see them. it's really the speed with which they are presented whh makes them invisible but what we are going to do now is we're going to take these words and very closely just before and just after we're going to put other shapes and you shod see that the word "four" disappears because now the duration is just right there. 's no word "four." well, the word "four" is still there on the screen. it's still there on your retina. it's being processed by the brain but it's not conscious and there's other situations like that where the brain flips between conscious and unconscious states. so this is the ideal experimental situation. then we can use our brain imaging tls and look into the brain and ask what's the difference, right?

so on the screen now what you see is what happens to a subliminal word. it starts in the visual cortex in the back of the brain, it's very active there. you can have a lot of activity which is non-conscious but it's dying away. it's a wave that comes inside the brain and then it will slowly die out without reaching the higher centers of the parietal and frontal cortex >> but this is so surprising because i think if you were to ask most of us 30 yea ago to what degree does unconscious perception reach the cerebral cortex we would have said no. >> in fact, it's processed inside the cortex, processed in many different areas of the cortex. >> rose: >> very important. >> rose: >> very important. >> but there is different going on. it's an amplification and we see it with the very same starting point. the activity in the brain is being amplified and it becomes very large. it'sike a tsunami instead of a dying wave. and it gets into higher spots in

the brain, especially the pre-frontal cortex in the front of the brain and from there it's bidirectional. it goes back to the original spots where it started so this is the broadcasting of information that occurs when you're con shengs. in terms of psychology, what happens is is the information becomes available in the system which becomes detached from the external word word is extremely brief but it becomes stable in your mind and you can keep in the your mind withorki mory. you can hold in the conscious mind and broadcast it to all of the areas that need it. so we can say conscious information is information which is available in the brain, basically. globally available. this is the global wk space model. we begin to know the areas that are being concerned but there's a lot of mysteries to be solve and one of the mystery is that from experiment to expert we see that non-conscious processing can go to very different depths

in the brain, actuay. so we're going to see that i the next slide. we have shown that word recognition can occur in the brain. non-consciously, face recognition can occur in the brain non-coniously but even much higher levels like the meaning of the word is being accessed. if it's the number you will access the mathematical systems of your brain. if it guides you to command a gesture this will activated in your brain. other aspects like the sound of a rd are whether it's an emotional word or not, whether it's an error thayou made. all of that can be computing uncociously. so it's still a struggle to try to understand how there can be so much non-conscious processing but the findings are always the same. non-conscious processing is local in time, it's small and conscious axive thety is being amplified and connected boldly across the brain. that's the main finding. >> rose: let me turn to you and talk about how much is

unconscious. >> well, behavioral research psychologists for many years have been looking at everyday kinds of judgment and decisions to see if we can tease apart to what degree they occur consciously and unconsciously. and it's a very exciting time. a picture is emerging of the mind as having two very different ways of thinking. one is the slow, deliberate conscious kind of thought we're all familiar with but the other that we refer to as the adaptive unconscious seems to be quite powerful and sophisticated, table to monitor what's going on around us, interpret incoming information, make decisions even for us. now, as eric said, divining the mind into the conscious a the unconscious does remind us of sigmund freud, a brilliant thinker who also talked about conscious and unconscious pressing. i think freud's ehasis s on a somewh different kind of unconscious. he mostly referred to the

unnscious as the seat of the primordial instincts. the urges that are e arise in childhood that we're often trying to repress and keep hidden. the modern view certainly doesn't deny that powerful kind of unconscious but expands it to look at more sophisticated higher level kinds of inking that we couldn't live without. how do we know this? well, there's some very interesting experiments going on. freud was at a disadvantage in that he didn't have the modern methods that we now have to look at conscious and unconscious processing and a number of experiments have been done, some similar to the methodology that stanislas has talked about, where words are flashed at quick speeds so that people don't see them coniously butthen we look at w that influences later judgments and decisions. so in one early experiment by john barge, for exale, people were flashed words that they didn't see consciously and then they were given a description of

a guy named donald. donald was described as in his apartment and a salesman came to the door and he abruptly sent the salesman away. in another segment he goes to a hardware store and buys a gadget andmmediately demands his money back. well, what do we make of donald? is he hostile or is he just assertive? well, it depended on the words that people saw in the first part of the experiment. some of the participants saw words... again, saw in quotation marks because they didn't see these words consciously about words that had to do with hostility. hoste, unfriendly, unkind. whereas those in a control condition saw neutral words like table and chair. and indeed ones who saw the flashes of the words connoting unkindness thought that dond wasn't a very nice guy. they thought, man, he's kind of hostile. whereas those in the control condition whsaw the neutral words kind of gave him the benefit of the doubt and said, well, i guess donald's just kind of assertive.

d many experiments of ts type have portrayed the adaptive unconscious as being able to interpret information, to learn many things about the world. an example of that is language acquisitioas children. we soak up language automatically. we're not doing it consciously. motoring the worlde're able to keep track of what's going on around us while we focus consciously on one thing. but there's part of our mind which is making sure something important isn't happening elsewhere. and some of the most interesting work is on decision making. so many of us when faced with an portant choice have taken out that pro proverbial piece of paper have taken out that line and made that lists of plus and minuss to tell us what to d but experiments ha shown that may not be the best way. that if we are overly conscious about a decision we can sometimes ta ourselves into thinking we prefer something we really don't. and it might be better to... by

all means we should get as much information as we should about the decision. we shouldn't be so impulsive that we just go with the first thing that comes to mind. but once we have all that information, it's best to let it percolate unconsciously and bubble up into a preference without overly... being overly deliberative and thoughtful about it. all this work suggests that the adaptive unconscious is vital to our survival. it works in hand with consciousness to guide us in ways that make us the smartest species on earth. >> rose: nick, tell me abo the disorders that come... >> well, we've learned a lot about the stores of consciousness in the last 10, 12 15 years. and the things we've learned are sort of shocking to most people and they haven't quite been fully understood. and what we've seen over the last ten years in this area of research are examples of people who appear to be unconscious if more years who sometimes reemerge.

i have a video to show one example of this. this is a man named don herbert who was a firefighter in upstate new york. i think he's t most extreme case i'm personally aware of. mr. herbert was rescued from a burning buding... this is actual footage of his rescue. and it was found that he was unconscious for a period of time a few weeks, a then slowly recovered consciousness. he got to the point after this injury where he could talk, he could speak a little bit but then he regressed back and he was out of contact. and he appeared unresponsive in the family... they brout him tovents and you can see here he's with his children slumped in the chair not apparently aware. and for nine years this remained the case until about a month before a dramatic event, his physician in the nursing facity deced to put him on a cocktail of medications and one day his family got a call and they saw this. >> how long have i been...

>> i'm right here. >> oh, my god! (laughr) >> mr. herbert was awake. and what you see is that he's alert. and he asks "how long i have been gone?" amazingly ev though he's been out of contact, this man once he reemerged and was told what the date was, could actually understand that he was goneor ten years. as he reaches out to grab his son, you can see his hand go down because his son wasfour yes old when he had this injury and now he's 14. >> rose: he imagined him as four. >> when his son grabs his hand that's why he says "oh, my god." because he can't believe it. it's just a remarkable thing. the man who you see him reach out to grab and call simon is his uncle. the family was quiet every time someone came in the room because mr. herbert was blinded by the injury and then he would identify people by voice and as each new person came in they tried to test him and that was

his uncle and everyone said who's that and once he spoke that's his reaction. he instantly realize it's simon and tries to grab him. this case is an end point for me of that kind of phenomena. and we've learned that the human brain can remain capable of much higher levels of consciousness and not show that capacity for insdef in the periods of time so it really underwrites an interest in trying to understand what are the mechanisms to gain control of restoring consciousness and as eric identified the central thalamus in the upper brain stem play a central role in that process and we've been trying understand and study that. the other major finding happening over the last ten years the recognition that some patients have recovered consciousness but becae they don't show motor function they don't ke it evident. and is prints a very scary a very important problem where yo may look at a person and they appear they're in a vegetativ

state and we can identify through e.e.g. that they are showing activity in their brain that is indicativ of them carrying out these conscious mentalperations. turning that into a way for patients like that to communicate remains an undemonstrated challenge and you can see that that's sort of the other big thing here. >> rose: how do you think they might meet that challenge? >> well, there are groups all over the world. stan's group is working on it, we're working on it. >> it's a huge motivation for people like me working normal subjects to try to discover signures of consciousness from brain imaging that may be applied to these patients so we can begi to do that with the e.e.g. so that the hope is that we may have to put a few electrodes on the head, analyze the signal and find about these gnatures of consciousness. and beuse it's a big event? the brain-- as i showed you, a big explosion of activity--

we're quite hopeful this can be detected with simple methods. >> it's thdvantage that it's extremely easy to use this complicated imaging and if you can use that as the technique it will be very powerful. what interests me that really interests both of us. so you can enhance the functioning of somebody with minimal consciousness by either electrical stimulation or by this cocktail which is reall a sedative. how does thawork? >> this one of the findings that people who get the sedative medicati, ambien, have these paradoxical recoveries. and with the way we think about the ambien effect is very much the way we think about the central thalamus brain stem effect that is... and i have a colleague emery brown who's shown me this is very similar to what happens innesthesia as well. so let's take the anesthesia case because that's something we can relate to. if you give almost anyone an anesthetic their brain quiets and they get sort of less active

and sedate. then there's a period of xi station and emery has taughte this is a generic thing called paradoxical xi station. and what you seethe is rhythms in the e.e.g. come up over the frontal lobe of the brain and the person gets disquieted. what we think is going on in am bee general that general phenomena in an underactive brain is releasing a break and the bre is put on because the central thalamus has been disconnected, it's underactive and what happens is that there's a combination of exciting the cortex, releasing the brake on the thalamus and just like when we stimulate the thalamus, the frontal part of the brain gets turn on and then the whole thing sort of takesitself for a ride. kind of like catching a wei. most dmatic case we have right now a man who goes from a level well below where we started with in our study to well beyond what we achved reliably. >> rose: do i get the impression that the study of consciousness

is about understanding what stimulates the unconscious? >> consciousness appears like the tip of the iceberg. it's maybe 2%, 5% additional that you can do. they're very limited. so there are operations that can be done nonkoshsens i. you can calculate 23 xipls 14 nonconsciously. you can't do it. >> and another question is whether the kind of non-conscious operation that tim was talking about can be carried out in someone with a minimally conscious state. i have the feeling that you have to use the capacity as it were, for full blooded consciousness in order for the fancy srt non-consous processes to take place. >> they may come later. >> yes, yes. >> actually, it's annteresting point. i'm curious to get your approach on this.

you very correct make e point that fre's view of the unconscious was that it dealt primarily with instinctual drive. but he did have an unconscious process which he called the pre-conscious unconscious which had creativity and all this kind of stuff. the diinction you make between the unconscious that you study and that aspect of unconscious that freud was studying is his moved easily to consciousness and yours stays in the unconscious. >> i think most pple view the unconscious as perhaps evolutionary older system that was in existence for a long time before we acquired consciousness as apecies. i'm speculating here but witness we acquired consciousness the connections weren't fully made so there's some things we cannot access. >> i see,ut he is dling with something that propagates from the... i mean, you're dealing with freud's pre-conscious unconscious. >> i think it's a little bit different because in one sense

if you work on some problem, you begin to play chess and it's a very conscious effort and you have to attend to it. it's been showed it gets compiled. >> i think hig level pattern regnition cans bome quite automatic and we see that inn clinicians. th can size up a really good... a good clinician can size up diagnostically a patient very quickly whereas the intern has to be... icould be this, it could be this and so forth. but that i think is also a different ki. i mean this skill is also different from what tim is talking about. >> well, i think that's part of it but there's much more of i think just ability to process information. i mean, language acquisition is a good example. a two-year-old isn't listening to commercial language tapes and studying vocabulary lists.

it's just soaking it up in a way we wish we could do as adults. >> rose: i don't understand why we can't do it as adults? >> because theplastyty of the brain is so enormous when you're young that it can do these things. for example, a child age two or three or four is a universal learner. they can learn any language that you expose them to. if you expose them this critical period. if you do this after puberty, extremely difficult to look at the language. you'll never get the accent right. even more surprising, face recognition in a two or three-year-old child can learn the fference between 100 2,00 different monkeys. if they are not exposed to monkeys inhat period, all moeys look the same to them. just absolutely amazing how the creative and intellectual capabilities of yo brain and mind is limited after aertain critical period. anthis is why the mozarts of

this world started out early in order to reach this extraordinary skill thatevelop so you can show, for example, that the hand representation-- particularly for the left hand, which is the fingering on a violin, for example-- has a large representation in professional violinists than people who don't play any instrument whatsoever. and if you start at an early age off much larger representation than a professional musician who started later. >> is there anything happening to figure out how to make... to overcome this obvious reality of the decline of plasticity and the ability to absorb new. that >> that's a very, very good question. it's one of the facts of life that the brain goes through a maturational process which is the moment we have very little control of. >> rose: i gets smaller, too,

does it not? >> loss of connections with time, that's absolutely true. and certainly as you age there's a further loss of connections and a a reduction in size yes. and it is interesting. we don't really understand what protects cognitive function with aging. but one thing that certainly lps... >> exercise. >> physicalxercise and intellectual... running a charlie rose... if you have a shot of taking up a program in the morning, that would probably enhance your cognitive... (laughter) have you ever thought of tt have >> rose: i appreciate the argument. (laughter) this is enormously exciting to me because suppose we had a way of increasing the amount of stuff we could load into our unconscious. do we... >> there is some research that shows distracts consciousness ennces non-conscious processes. >> rose: ah!

>> so experiments where you give people a proem, a bunch of stimulants about new cars, which one is the best. then you ask them to think about it or distract them, giving them something very absorbing to do where they can't tnk about it. >> rose: and what happens? >> the people who are distracted make the best choice. >> rose: and why is that? >> well, the idea is that consciousness can intrude and get in the way of non-conscious processing. >>t focuses on one or two points because it's limited. >> there can be many processe at the same time. in fact, many people... >> >> rose: the unconscious can do many processes at the same time. >> consciousness is very limit to what it can do. unconsciousness is much broader. and we know very ltle about the true nature of creativity, one emerging theme that ces out of this is that if you're trying to solve a mathematical

problem or any intellectual problem you keep focusing at it. you may get stuck. taking a break, taking a shower, going for a walk, playing golf you come back refreshed and often doing the other activity boom, the idea will come to you. >> rose: what was happening in those nine years. >> we don't know. we don't know, of course, because we didn' measure it but i think we can have some understanding of it and take a guess. what i think is that his brain was chronically underactive because of the injuries it suffered and that when it woke up it didn't really wake up enough. this is the thing. it is obvious operationally to us when somebody truly is conscious. the best example i have for one of these kinds of situations is a man who looked vegetative that we studied three years after it had become clear only to one person after a year that he could move his head a little bit to signal and identify words and communicate.

and this man did not have a consistent communication system when we first saw him. we tried things with e.e.g., eventually put a head mouse on his head that one o our medical students found and started using a computer. and this patient was the first patient to send us an e-mail. so if sobody reache out and sends you an e-mail, then you know they're conscious and tt's kind of the final operational... >> is it the cruelest thing in the world to be conscious and people think you're unconscious? >> i think so. >> terrible, terrible. >> that's the one thing that underwrites putting more energy into this than anything else. >> this is why this is such a terrific advantage because god knows how many people are in this state and this ultimately is a way of being able to overcome it. we're at a very early stage for this. but i think it might be worthwhile pulling this together and the idea of doing deep brain stimulatiooccurred in the treatment of parkinson's and we heard about that. then it was applied to depression.

this is a completely new application of this idea. >> rose: deep brain stimulation. >> he argued that it seems to be a right but deep down in the thalamus there isn't enough activity to keep the cortex goin if we artificially stimulated the thalamus he could awake this forwad propagation you see here. >> can i come back to a point stan made earlier. we've been portraying the unconcious as a smart, sophisticated set of processes, which it is, hence the term adaptive unconscious. that doesn't mean it's perfect. one thing about non-conscious thinking is it does categorize quickly and it can rigid and there is one school of thought that this is theeat of overcategorizing someone based on theace or gender or whatever you and one thing consciousness can do is to undo that. i may have had this quick negative reaction about somebody but that's wrong, i thought think otherwise. so there's a correction process that consciousness is very good at. >> that's exactly right.

that's the frontal cortex. >> the fact that you can take partial informatn and the brain... compare it to previous experience, previous knowledge and make it more... a more learned, rational, historical judgment. francis crick, who is the most important biologist o our lifeti devoted the last 30 years of his life... >> i would say. >> ...to studying consciousness and in all fairness you have to say that he made us aware that this is a problem that should be studied but made relatively it will little progress. >> rose: he said in his 1994 book "your joys and sorrows, memories and ambitious, sense of personal identity and free will are no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." >> and you know, hippocrates 500 b.c. said the same thing. francis knew that, of course. >> but what is interesting is

we're at an early stage but the progress in the last two decades have been quite spectacular. one couldn't have had this conversation even ten years ago. >> rose: this is me in my very limited way. in understanding consciousness... we're really talking about understand unconsciousness. >> you're understanding both because one of the things we want to know what that what are the mechanisms that such that transfers e to the other? but what is it that makes this sound the way it is and why are some things things we're consciously aware of and others stay below. so the two can be studied in tandem and the kind of co-evolutionary science. but it isn't all about the unconscious. >> what is really attractive about this if we understand it further is the that there are a number of different ways of

thinking about things. one is unconscious process, the other conscious. each has their own strength. so if you evolve two different kinds of mental ocesses to deal with dferent kinds of formation it will be inresting to see how far this goes back. these are very deep questions that are going to occupy usor many more charlie rose programs. (laughter) >> rose: i hope so. i think the excitement about this... so can i say in a journalistic wide ranging way that studying the brain is the frontier of medicine and science today. understanding consciousness and the impact of unconsciousness is on the cutting edge of understanding the brain. >>bsolutely. >> rose: let me go back to you. tell me what you hope will be the next break through. >> i would like to see a way for us to identify somebody who's conscious and to get them out. if they're aware and able to communicate with the world i'd

like to see that be something we kn how to do immediately, systematically and with scientific medical school. i'd also like to see how we can take patients who may not get to the level where they can completely communicate to the highest level they can get from where they're at and what's availablto them and both of the are sort of really future goals. >> rose: >> i think there's been a co-person can revolution in psychology where we thought that consciousness was the special thing that distinguished us from other species and there been research narrowing it showing everything the unconscious can do. i think it's time perhaps far to retreat litt bit and show that the rol of consciousss processing. stans's work is doing ts to a large extent to see what is special about nsciousness. >> for me, the challenge is to identify coherent signatures of consciousness. this would be markers in brain activity that a label states in

which a person is conscious and the challenge is to make it available for normal people, for impaired patients, for anesthesia, for sleeptv coherent story about what makes a state of the brain conscious or not. >> yes, indeed. and i am really preoccupied by a question that affects both unconscious processing and conscious processing and this is how is information integrated. how is it that a sensory signal from ear and a sensory signa from theye is integrate sod that i see you as speaking? and something very deep about that has to be understood before we can understand consciousness. because we do know what gets into consciousness is by and large highly integrated. so the really deep question for me is about integration of information.

>> consciousness is not a problem i've worked on but i come orinally from psychiatry and when disorders of consciousness, delusions, how do they come about. what's happening to consciousness? what would happen if one would... if we had the kinds of thing stans stanislas wants and patients who were actively deluded. there's another point that's not a direct answer to your question that we see very nicely here and th you and i have talked about repeatedly. we're talking about a new biology of mind. and this is coming together of psychology on the one hand and brain science in the other stand two are inseparable. without a good psychology you can't make progress in the biology and without the biogy you'll never understand the underlying mechanisms. so we're seeing in action this marriage, the synthesis of the new science of mind. >> rose: i was thinking about

this over the weekend. is it clear freud would have wanted to be a neuroscience? >> without a doubt. >> oh, yes. >> he said "i'm giving up biology because it's sommature can't handle the questions i'm interesd in. i know when biology comes along andeals with a psychology cal problem, they're going t change it. it's going to all fall art because i vngtd been able to test these things." so he was modest. the problem with psychnalysis is not with freud. the problem is the people that came after him did not begin to imply empirical methods until very recently. >> rose: they rejected it. now the other thing i'm not sure i understand the capacity of the unconscious and its consequences is a measure of intelligence as we commonly think of it. >> to what dey intelligence determined by unconscious mental processes.

>> we were just talking about this. >> it involves many different skills. in so far as it involves creativity, it many very well be importantlydependent upon the unique aspect of unconscious mental processes. >> we use the word wisdom we might come up with a different answer. >> wisdom is more conscious and creativity is more unconscious. >> you have to vision and the hands to do it. a sculptor. this is largely unconscious. >> rose: what are we doing next time? >> well, this is a broad subject so we're dealing here with the global features of consciousness. next time we're going to take up something called agnosia which is a selective defect in consciousness. this also comes from fre. people used to think that blindness is a result of defect in the eye. and he discovered a patient whose eye was perfectly normal but he had a defect in the higher reaches of the system and he developed the word agsia

for selective defect in vision thatomes from the cortical region and we now have people that have face blindness that can't recognize faces, people who have difficulty with musical recognition. so we can take all of this and chuck close, who has face blind and is a great portrait painter is going to join us. >> that's fantastic. >> rose: until next time. thank you allvery much.