A Mind Greater Than an Alpine Mountain

Koma Kulshan/Mt. Baker

Source: jamcgraw / 123RF

Christof Koch was the second neuroscientist to make me stop and wonder at my own mind. He said, “The world is transcendent and beautiful, and consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe.”

The first such neuroscientist was Giulio Tononi, an associate of Koch’s, who told me my consciousness was “so much greater” than the alpine mountain I lived under at the time, Washington’s Koma Kulshan or Mt. Baker.

That Skype conversation with Tononi took place in the afternoon, and I could see Kulshan out my window, with its late, blushy tinge of sunset on ice. I felt anything but greater than such a mountain.

Integrated Information Theory

I talked to Tononi several years ago and to Koch several weeks ago. Both explore consciousness through integrated information theory (IIT), a theory holding that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and can be measured in a unit called phi. Phi isn’t limited to humans or mammals. Even an electron could have some amount of phi—some element of it feels like something to be this thing that I am.

Koch’s latest book, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It, walks the reader through IIT and consciousness research. He describes the search for the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and the ways we can use this understanding to measure consciousness: in ourselves, our planet-mates, and artificial systems (he’s not optimistic for conscious artificial intelligence).

Here is another thing Koch told me: “What we think we know is a construct of our minds.”

This statement sounds simple—but it’s not. “Our minds” are tied inexorably to our bodies. Thoughts emerge from a sensory array and physical inputs, a lived experience that is emotional and limited. My spouse and I, like many who share space, differ not only in the sounds that bug us but also in the ones we notice. Bruce doesn’t hear his phone notifications pinging, while they wake me from the deepest sleep. I'm immune to dripping faucets, which he’s sure I ignore deliberately.

Perception Box

Meritorious investigator for the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Koch also serves as chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. At Tiny Blue Dot, he works with founder and thinker Elizabeth R. Koch (no relation). The foundation is dedicated to helping others adjust what Elizabeth Koch has dubbed their “Perception Box.”

What is a Perception Box? Think of a tidy carton of reality tucked around your head. You have generated it, so all within feels right to you (phones bad, leaky faucets fine!). As Tiny Blue Dot puts it, “Our conscious experience of the world, our body, and our self—with its attendant emotions and feelings—are the only reality we know. . . We each live in our own Perception Box, a box whose walls are invisible and unbreakable, as we can only experience what our neural circuitry permits our mind to experience.”

So we have wonderfully creative inner worlds, combined with a complete inability to see where they end, and different ones begin. Koch’s Then I Am Myself the World addresses the dilemma of Perception Boxes. Transformative experiences—flow states, mystical experiences, guided trips with psychedelics—can expand them.

Around the time I spoke to Tononi, I saw a psychiatrist who backed his chair away from me so hard he scraped the wall. Psychiatric stigma among doctors is very real. I think of an article that ran in 2011 in a New York State newspaper: Written by a doctor-in-training, the story gleefully declared psychiatry the “one specialty where it’s okay to hate your patient.” Doing so was, the author wrote, normal and even diagnostically useful.

More recently, at a public event, I heard a psychiatrist mention “those moments when you remember these people we deal with are human.” (Perhaps one of them studied with the same people as my doctor-in-training?) Professions have their Perception Boxes.

When you love someone, as I love my husband, you love their quirks, so in between feeling like he really ought to shut off his dang phone, I find Bruce’s obliviousness sweet. It reminds me, however fragmentarily, of another sensory world, one I have been privileged to live adjacent to for lo these many years.

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As I watch the other creatures who share my space—the cat who can hear the mating call of a cricket or the blue jay who can sense magnetic fields—I love to imagine the richness of all our Perception Boxes. Somehow it creates a fullness, a sense of wonder at all the sensory richness our cosmos holds.

My earliest clear memory is of this richness. My father took me to the candy store down the street from our apartment and offered to buy me one sweet. As I tried to choose, dizzied by a superabundance of root beer barrels and wax lips and licorice, the effort suddenly made me aware of my own mind. And simultaneously, the minds of everyone around me—the handful of kids and parents in that store. I realized that not only did this candy-studded universe converge in my own head as my consciousness, but everyone else’s did as well.

The revelation—I had my own mind, so did everyone around me—was, like imagining the cat and the jay, joyous. A kinship. I believe that, in some sense, the universe gets reborn in each individual consciousness, whether it is small or large. Think of art: The Perception Box of a van Gogh is very different than one of a Frida Kahlo. If we want to put a value on individual life, it’s a good place to start.

Koch writes that we “can expand the invisible walls that constitute our Perception Box by interventions and transformative experiences.” That expansion should include the experiences our Perception Boxes generate naturally, which, though they might sound wrong to others, have the power to be transformative, too.

I have had many out-of-consensus inner experiences, some painful, some enlightening. My family, some friends, and many readers know about these. My doctors do not, because when I try to share them, they literally or figuratively back away. Neuroscience has helped me realize that's the last reaction any mind deserves.