Source of Consciousness: Why are feelings and dreams so controversial? with neuropsychologist Mark Solms

Consciousness is feeling. Thoughts are ways we maintain our homeostasis. A quick conversation with Mark Solms and Andrea Hiott on the topics of Mark's book The Hidden Spring.

Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. He is the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital (Departments of Psychology and Neurology), President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, and Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He founded the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society in 2000 and is a Founding Editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis.

The Mysteries of the Mind: From Childhood Trauma to Neuroscience Insights
In this thought-provoking episode, we uncover a deeply personal journey sparked by a childhood trauma that led to a fascination with the brain and consciousness. Join us as a dedicated neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst shares how their brother's severe brain injury at a young age ignited a lifelong quest to understand the mind-body connection. We explore reflections on mortality, the challenges within academia, and pivotal discoveries about the brainstem's role in consciousness. Delve into Freud's neuroscience roots, the subjective nature of the mind, and how feelings underpin our conscious experiences. This episode bridges historical perspectives with contemporary research, offering profound insights into the architecture of consciousness and the essence of human awareness.
#consciousness #rawfeeling #neuropsychiatry #freud #loveandphilosophy #hiddenspring #marksolms

00:00 Introduction and Setting the Stage
00:24 A Childhood Trauma: The Accident
01:46 The Aftermath: Brother's Transformation
02:43 Early Realizations: Mind-Body Connection
08:20 Existential Questions and Depression
15:59 Academic Pursuits: Neuroscience and Consciousness
23:18 Discovering Freud and Psychoanalysis
26:07 The Struggle with Subjective Experience in Academia
26:53 Personal Reflections on Pain and Guilt
28:37 The Embarrassment of Subjective Mind in Science
29:24 Behaviorism and the Exclusion of the Mind

Transcript

Consciousness is feeling. 
Thoughts as ways to maintain homeostasis with Mark Solms

Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. This is Andrea. I'm really glad that you're here today. This is love and philosophy. Where we try to look at the patterns that connect. We try to learn to hold the paradox. Find ways of new navigability between all these different disciplines and fields and interests. And today in that sense, we're talking about feelings and what it means for cognition. With mark Soames, who is a south African psychoanalyst. And in neuropsychologist. He's known in the neuroscience world. For his discovery relative to the brain mechanisms of dreaming. Which, as he tells us here was, believe it or not something people didn't dare to [00:01:00] even study for awhile in neuroscience because. Dreaming seems to be too subjective and too connected to, for example, something like the work of Sigmund Freud. But why has it been so hard for us to have a look at our own inner feelings and subjective experience when it comes to the harder sciences? That's a question. That gets asked a lot on this podcast in different ways. There's a lot of conversations I've had that I haven't posted yet. 

They're coming soon. Like one I had with Evan Thompson about the blind spot. The point is that a lot of people, a lot of very smart and successful people like mark had been trying to include the subjective point of view in science. For a long time and

we discuss it here through his own personal experience that he had with his family, a traumatic experience he had in South Africa that as a little boy made him want to [00:02:00] know what consciousness was. In fact, he almost had to answer this question. It was a way he got himself out of depression after this event happened in his life that we talk about here. And it really did become his career to try to understand what consciousness is, what it means to be sent in and in so doing to not pretend that the world is not a source of wonder. And that our feeling actually matters and our subjective experience, our lived phenomenology is the word we use often really does matter for everything, including our science. And the way he's tried to sort of hold this paradox and get beyond this dichotomy is through this idea of feeling and bringing feeling back into neuroscience, I guess you could say, at least in the form of being able to talk about it as root or even raw consciousness. That consciousness arises from physical laws and that emotions actually can be placed at the center of our conscious or [00:03:00] mental life,

his book the hidden spring, a journey to the source of consciousness is the foundation for this talk. We had to do it very quickly. We have a part two, which we'll do soon, but this is just part one and we just let it flow. It's a good introduction of first of all how much feeling matters to us and how early it matters in our life and how it really does sort of guide us in a way that mark shows in his book is like homeostasis. 

 If you think of the body in the world Moving through it's encounter. Our feeling is almost like a gauge. Helping us stay within the parameters of health or move towards better parameters. Not that it always works perfectly, but any kind of creature, even a fish. Is moving through these parameters of feeling at a very basic level. And we can think of that as consciousness or cognition, which aren't the same things. I go into that a lot in other areas. So I won't [00:04:00] go into it here, but the point is just the broad point as we were in the world, we're trying to find our way. And feeling is it's a key way for us to monitor our own needs and desires relative to what we find ourselves moving within. And as and all that we are becoming. And so that is a subjective. Point of view and trying to understand it scientifically is what mark has been doing. He has kind of held this paradox of being a trained neuroscientist and a trained psychoanalyst. And those don't always fit so well together in the communities that hold them. But Mark's really shown a way to move past that dichotomy. And this conversation today is towards starting to unpack that it is itself kind of an expression of. Of the raw feeling. And of getting to this very interesting idea. I think of. Understanding that what we think of as thinking is [00:05:00] itself coming from that spring of feeling. So it, it too is a way that we maintain our homeostasis, 

that we steer to think of my conversation with a max Bennett, the way we sort of steer through the world and all these different landscapes has to do with our feeling. That helps us monitor. And stay within certain parameters and thinking is not discontinuous from that thinking is itself a homeostatic mechanism, so to speak. This is a very general summary and I really recommend the book. 

If you want to go very deeply into it and think it through. And also I'll Unpack more of these ideas with mark when we talk the second time, which is coming up. So send me any questions you might have or any particular things you'd really like for us to explore together. Just to say a little bit about mark, because there's so many things that one could say 

He's a south African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist. He's the chair of neuropsychology at the university of Cape town. He's started [00:06:00] neuro psychoanalysts the journal. I think he co-founded it or he was the founding editor. He also founded the international psycho analysts society and he's the director of the neuro psychoanalysts foundation analysis. 

I'm sorry, I can't say that. Right. The neuro psychoanalysis foundation in New York, to be honest, his credentials go on and on and on. he also brings in Sigmund Freud and Freud's work. 

And Freud actually was a neuroscientist at the beginning all of his career. So that's an interesting story too, in rethinking Freud, which is something Mark Solms also does, but I've already rambled on too long. The main point is that think of feeling as a source of consciousness and begin to unpack that. And it's a very interesting thread. And I'd love to hear what you think about it. So I'm really glad you're here. I hope you enjoy this and let me know what questions you might have for Mark. Okay. Bye. 

Thank you for doing this today.

Mark Solms: Pleasure is mine.

Andrea Hiott: Today we're going to talk mostly about Hidden Spring, um, but to get [00:07:00] into, to that and issues related to it, I wonder if we could start the way you start the book the beginning of your journey, What I think of almost as a change in your own consciousness, so to speak, and feeling

Mark Solms: yes, um, so the story you're asking me to tell, um, is really, I'm fairly certain, the origins of my, uh, interest in the brain. Um, which is an event that occurred when I was just going on five years old. I was four. Um, my older brother named Lee, um, and I were, uh, playing in a yacht clubhouse while our parents were yachting.

And my brother and some pals of his clambered up onto the roof. Um, and he tripped. At the high end of the roof and fell, uh, quite some distance, about three floors. and landed, uh, on his head, [00:08:00] uh, on the paving stones below and suffered a, a fractured skull and a, and a brain hemorrhage. Um, he was, we were in a small town.

He was flown, uh, bizarrely, he was flown to the hospital that I now work in, in Cape Town. Uh, and in fact, uh, was treated in the very building where my office is now, which was, uh, which was and partially still is where the Department of Neurosurgery, uh, is situated. And, um, he, he, he, he was, um, well, uh, looked after there in the sense that his life was saved.

And, um, he returned back to our little village. Um, looking the same, apart from the fact that he was wearing a helmet to protect his, his fractured skull. [00:09:00] Uh, but I say he looked the same because that was in sharp contrast to the fact that he was not the same person. Uh, he was really utterly changed and, uh, I found that you must remember I was very little at the time.

I found it absolutely incomprehensible. Uh, you know, who's this guy? Uh, where's my brother? How can he come back in the same body, but be a different person? 

Andrea Hiott: Do you remember when that struck you was, I mean, in the book you talk a little bit about some games you used to play and he sort of didn't play the game the same way, 

Mark Solms: I have, I actually have even a fragmentary memory of the incident itself, um, when he, when he fell. And, um, I remember him, I think it's a semantic memory that he was wearing a helmet. I don't have a. a picture in my mind of him wearing the helmet. Uh, but yes, what I remember is the, the, these, uh, [00:10:00] sorts of things, uh, that you mentioned.

We, we were actually good friends, although he was older than me, two, two years older than me. Uh, we, we played a lot together. And, uh, one incident that I do literally remember, uh, is playing this game, that we used to play. Our father was in the mining game. He worked for a company called De Beers, a diamond mining company.

And, um, the diamonds in the, in the area that we lived in were alluvial, which means they're not buried in the, in the, in the rocks of the earth. They, they lie loose in the sand, uh, and desert sand. And I, um, my father, took us to see these mining operations, which were truly impressive. These massive earth moving machines.

Um, picking up all the sand, uh, which was then processed, uh, for, uh, for diamonds. [00:11:00] Sounds cinematic almost. Yes. 

Andrea Hiott: Sounds very magical in a way as a kid. 

Mark Solms: Yes, indeed. It was a very strange, Place to grow up in. I mean, there are all sorts of things I could tell you about. It was really a very strange place, but I was obviously terribly impressed by what I saw.

And so my brother and I played that game. We had little little earth moving toy earth moving machines on. We were playing at mining. You know, that's what we were doing. And the scene that I remember was playing that game with him after his accident and realizing that he was not playing the game in the way that we used to, which was a symbolic game.

You know, these things, what we were doing was mining. Um, Symbolically. I mean, it's not real mining, it's play play mining. Uh, but for my brother now, the game had become digging holes. You know, what we were doing was digging a hole and I thought, what the hell? Digging 

Andrea Hiott: holes. That must have been shocking for you because it's, I mean, we have to remember you're just like five.

[00:12:00] Yes. I'll tell, I'll share something with you because I wonder if you, what, what this was like for you. But my brother is like about three years younger than me. And I remember his kind of entrance into my life as of a kind of realizing that I'm conscious or something because we had this kind of, I don't know, there was a, like a reflection or something.

It's, it's, it's when I start remembering. things very easily and I was about the age of you. And um, so I just wonder what it was like as a little kid to kind of have to realize that your brother isn't in the, in the imagination state anymore? Did it make you become aware that there was an imagination state?

Because, I mean, this is kind of a heavy thing to go through at that age, but it's also exactly the age, at least in my experience, when you do start to think of yourself as a self and remember and so on. 

Mark Solms: Well, um, let me just tell you one or two other things, and then I'll be able to better address the question you're putting to me.

Uh, it, that, that's the one incident I remember, but there was also [00:13:00] the fact that he lost his developmental milestones. Um, so for example, he, he, he was no longer continent. And, uh, this is an embarrassment to a child, you know, to, to not have bowel control and, and bladder control. Control. And so this was part of what then became a bigger realization that that I had overtaken him, you know, developmentally, so that he he was now behind me, and not only in terms of those kinds of milestones, but also in terms of his intellect, that there were things he couldn't do cognitively that I could do, and it had previously been the opposite.

So, I wouldn't say I became aware, uh, in this, in the philosophical sense that you evidently did, um, of, of selfhood. But what I did become aware of is another philosophical problem, which is the mind body problem. You know, I became aware of the fact that somehow my [00:14:00] brother, the person that I had known, was bound up, with this bodily organ that had been damaged in him.

And, uh, so I became aware that there's, that, that this, of this mysterious connection between, between personality or personhood or, you know, mind, uh, and, and brain. And it, and it, uh, I also remember realizing, in fact, I remember looking at an encyclopedia, where there was a, It, it was, it sort of plates as they were transparent plates.

And the, the first page was, um, the skin. Uh, and then you peel that back and there you saw the musculoskeletal system, you know, and then you peel that back and then you saw the, the soft tissues, uh, and uh, in the case of the head, of course you saw the brain, uh, on that plate. So I remember looking at this and thinking and feeling, you know, I too have a skull.

Um, and [00:15:00] inside the skull, I too must have a brain, and if my brain were damaged. as my brothers was, then I too would change as a person. And, uh, and that rapidly led on to, when I say rapidly, I don't know how rapidly, but certainly still, uh, you know, in childhood, I remember, uh, that this led to, A, um, first confrontation with mortality, you know, the realization that the flesh is mortal, uh, and, um, that I, if I am my body, uh, and my body dies and rots one day, what does that mean for me?

You know, where, where will I go? If I am my, my brain and my brain, um, you know, uh, dissipates, then do I dissipate too? And came to the conclusion that yes, surely I do. I say this because my, my parents sent me to Sunday school [00:16:00] where I was learning a very different story, um, from, from Christian teachers.

And, uh, so I, I started to realize that actually this, this is, this is not true. True, you know, I am my body. And, uh, so I'm not going to survive, uh, beyond my, beyond my, my biological existence. And that in turn, I mean, apart from the loss of my brother and all kinds of other things, because it was really a very complicated situation, um, in our family, uh, in the wake of, uh, of the, all the difficulties that he now had.

Um, So for those reasons, and also for this existential reason, I became very depressed. I have no doubt that I was literally, you know, psychiatrically depressed because I can remember that very vividly, too. I can remember, for example, in the morning before going to school, not being able to put my shoes on.

It [00:17:00] just felt like too much of an effort. And it felt, you know, what's the point? What's the point of going to school? Everything's going to end in nothingness. You know, there's no point in doing anything in your entire life. Uh, because it will all just, it'll all just come to nothing, no matter how happy or successful you are.

Uh, in the end, it's all taken away for eternity, you know, and I remember thinking that. And, and, um, and then sometime later, I think only in adolescence, uh, I remember coming to the solution to that sort of nihilistic despair, the solution I came to in terms of, you know, There's no point in doing anything.

The solution I came to was, well, the one thing that, that is worth doing in under these circumstances is to try to understand what sentient being is. You know, and I think that attached to that, which I still believe is true, [00:18:00] but attached to that was also, I think, the wishful fantasy that maybe, maybe, if I can really understand what being is, you know, what, what What we would now call consciousness, what it is, then maybe I'll find some solution to this, to this, um, uh, uh, conclusion, uh, this inevitability of, of it disappearing with your body at death.

Uh, I think I, I still harbored the hope that maybe if I really understand what Sentient being is that I'll find some way of being able to cling to possessing it, um, beyond my death. 

Andrea Hiott: Gosh, it's, it's a really remarkable story that you were feeling all of that as a kid, but just that, that time period is already so potent.

And I was thinking, as I was reading it, that I don't even remember when I realized there was a brain, you know, like you kind of learn that stuff slowly usually. And also of course, like having the religious [00:19:00] things. Given to you and then you sort of slowly start to question What's real or not, but it sounds like it all hit you in a really heavy way, but like two things one you you already started looking at books to try to find the answer, you know looking for pictures and and That's interesting to me.

And also that you called it the mind body problem, but at that age Was it a min was it a problem then or was it more that you realized that the body and the mind are one thing sort of? That that that wasn't different, like your brother's body changed and his Self changed and so that made those Religious stories and the other things not make sense. I know, of course, you weren't thinking about all this in depth at that age, but

Mark Solms: I think that we generally underestimate, uh, what kinds of, uh, Problems children think about.

Um, but I do agree that, that in my case, it was, uh, I don't think I would have thought [00:20:00] about those things at that age if it wasn't for what had happened to my brother. But, you know, I was learning in Sunday school about the soul and the soul that survives after death is kind of me, you know, so, um, there I saw.

Uh, my brother's me, my brother's self, uh, had changed. So his soul, you know, as it were, had changed. Um, and this clearly was, therefore, uh, thoroughly attached to his body. Uh, and then, you know, all the, all the other things that, that we just spoke about. Another thing that I think was formative arising out of all of this was That I, um, it was a source of pain in my family, especially for my brother, but guilty feelings arose in me whenever I did well at school, because he did very badly.

Um, he had great difficulty getting through, um, even his first grade at school. [00:21:00] And, um, no, in fact, he repeated it. He didn't get through it. And so, and I was a clever kid, you know, so I did well. And every time I did well it was it was a problem. And, and it was a real sort of dilemma for me of how do I deal with this, because I want to, I was ambitious and wanted to do well, but at the same time, it was clearly a source of distress.

to, to my brother and, and, and in, in a different sort of way for my parents. I don't know, uh, where my, uh, um, I mean, I, I, I don't think that I had. more ambition and, and, uh, and sort of epistemophilic drive than, than the average kid.

Um, I think I was bright, but I think that, um, the, the, the solution that I came to, and this was not consciously, I don't remember deliberating on the, on the point, but I think that I came to a compromise. Um, sort of pre subconsciously, you know, with, with, without being aware of it, [00:22:00] that, um, if I go into the field that I then did go into later, you know, when I went to university, uh, I, I studied neuroscience and in particular, uh, the, the, that branch of neuroscience called neuropsychology, which deals with the relationship between brain and mind.

But I always. was determined to be not only a scientist, but also a clinician. And I think that's the solution, the solution to the conflict between my ambition and my guilt, uh, was if I excel in a field where I'm helping people like my brother, then, then it's permissible. 

Andrea Hiott: I hadn't really thought about the clinician part because it's also related to the medical part, which that kind of saved your brother, even though he was a bit of a different brother.

So that, that starts to make sense. So, so at some point you ended up actually trying to study the brain and what consciousness is. And it sounds like that you were trying to understand that subjectivity of how that subjectivity changes or consciousness.[00:23:00] 

and still maybe thinking it was bodily. If you study the body, you're also going to study that. But then when when you actually began studying it, you found it disappointing that those things actually had been separated and extracted in a way that felt dissatisfying.

Mark Solms: Very much so. Again, I think I said a moment ago that we underestimate children's intellects. I think that this thing that happened to me, I think it also applies to many people who come into my field, that they, they have the, a sense of wonder, You know, and, and mystery about, you know, how on earth does it happen that, you know, that's subjective being arises somehow from, you know, the, the physiological activities of a bodily organ.

But, um, that sense of mystery, uh, was not encouraged. So once I, you know, once I got to university and started, you know, probing [00:24:00] these questions. I rapidly became aware that these were not the sorts of questions you were supposed to be interested in if you wanted to be a proper scientist. And I remember one professor in particular literally saying to me, don't ask questions like that.

It's bad for your career. You know, and I think that when I say I'm, I'm sure I wasn't to learn in, in that respect, I think we get it beaten out of us. You know, this, my, my naive understanding as I, as I, um, started my, uh, studies was that the mind is, you know, something like the, the person, the being, the, the, the thing that the subjective, uh, Uh, you know, immaterial being of my brother, of his personality.

I thought, you know, this is what we mean by mind. So neuropsychology, you know, that's, that's what we're going to study. We're going to study things like selfhood and, and sentience and, and, uh, you know, where does it all come from and what is it all [00:25:00] for? And, uh, as I said, I, I was rapidly dissuaded from, from, from being interested in these sorts of things. And I'm talking about the early 1980s. I mean, we'd barely emerged from behaviorism then. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. But I guess it's interesting because you, you really had these questions and you were trying to understand and people were embarrassed by the subject matter, but the subject matter is itself.

Really the most important thing in a way. I'm always talking about holding the paradox and I feel like I wonder how you were doing that. People were telling you not to ask the questions you were asking, but you kept asking them anyway, right? 

Mark Solms: Yes, um, indeed, and I have continued to ask them all my life. Um, sort of make clear what, what, what was so frustrating and disappointing is that what my, uh, professors considered to be the mind, uh, was the sort of abstract, functional, uh, the [00:26:00] functions of the brain, uh, were studied.

In exactly the same way as you might study the function of digestion or the function of respiration, you know, that it's a, um, that's not a mind, you know, that's a, that's a mechanistic understanding of how this organ works, but where, where, where, where is the subjectivity in all of this, you know, how does it, how does it come about?

That was what was completely excluded. So the one and only aspect of consciousness, uh, that was respectable, uh, to study those days was the sleep waking cycle. Um, the, you know, in the, in the late 40s, uh, Magoon and Maruzzi had, had, uh, identified these upper brainstem structures, which, which, which underpin wakefulness.

And so, You know, wakefulness was, and, and it's, it's waxing and waning, uh, was a respectable topic. So, I decided I'm gonna study that brain mechanisms of sleep and wakefulness and [00:27:00] in particular. Uh, I was interested in, uh, the wakefulness that occurs while we're asleep, in other words, dreaming.

You know, that consciousness punctuates the unconsciousness of sleep. And so that was a kind of, uh, uh, uh, a sort of a trick as a way of being able to study something subjective, uh, something, uh, obviously mental in the sense that, that I understood the And, um, So it was in, whilst I was doing that, uh, research, which was in fact my doctoral research, um, that was my, in my, my, my, there were two things that happened.

The first one was that I, I made some fortunate discoveries. I mean, it really was just good luck. Um, that, that, well, 

Andrea Hiott: you noticed something that It seems obvious in retrospect that, but the people weren't actually studying what happens to dreams when 

Mark Solms: the 

Andrea Hiott: brain is damaged. I mean, in retrospect, this seems obvious, but actually it's quite a thing to notice, I guess.

Mark Solms: It is really quite remarkable. And I think that it speaks [00:28:00] again to the, um, the avoidance of studying the subjective side of, of mental, uh, you know, life or the subjective side of, of, of This bodily organ. Mm-Hmm. , um, that we studied REM sleep and so on, but we didn't study dreaming. Uh, the, the, it, it's a kind of a, uh, you know, a questionable topic to be, to be doubling in because you can't see the dream.

You have to get a, a, a, a subjective report from the patient. And, uh, that's what I did. It is, I say, remarkable that nobody had done it before, but that's why they hadn't done it before, is I started to systematically examine, uh, that the changes that occurred in dreams, uh, in a very large, uh, sample of patients, hundreds of patients, uh, and, and discovered that they are systematic changes in the reported experience of dreams.

And the most important observation was that a certain [00:29:00] group of patients. With damage to the white matter of what's called the ventromesial quadrant of the frontal lobes, that these patients stop dreaming completely. They continue to have REM sleep, but they don't dream. And now the really important thing about that observation, as it gradually unfolded, I'm giving a sort of a concertina account of it, but it gradually became apparent On the basis not only of the, where the damage was, but then other studies that I did, uh, trying to determine why should damage there lead to a loss of dreaming.

It became clear from those other studies that the, the, the part of that white tissue that is responsible for generating dreams, if I can put it so, so, so, uh, it's such an awkward way. Um, Is what's called the Mesocortical Meso limbic Dopamine System. Now that is generally known as [00:30:00] the Brain Reward System.

Uh, pan Cept calls it the Seeking System, and Ridge calls it the wanting system. So this is clearly, you know, a sort of a desire system, and I thought, oh my God, you know, this is, this sounds like Freud. You know, the, my only encounters with Freud. Uh, up until then were, you know, the kinds of crass things that scientists, uh, especially neuroscientists, they say, Oh, that's just rubbish.

And, you know, 

Andrea Hiott: avoid it a bit, like avoid the questions that you want to ask, avoid fluid. There's a similar theme there. 

Mark Solms: Yeah. That made me interested, uh, I mean, because I had this, I had this, um, sort of layperson's understanding that Freud thought that dreams were wishful. Uh, and um, so I attended a seminar, uh, bizarrely the seminar was, was, was taught by a professor of comparative literature.

It was an open seminar. Any, any graduate student could go to it. Um, and he was teaching Freud's interpretation of dreams. And so [00:31:00] you can only 

Andrea Hiott: teach Freud in a literature class, I guess. Yes, 

Mark Solms: that's, that's certainly how, how it became, you know, by the 80s, it was like that. I think it's even more so now. Um, so, This, this chap, uh, this professor of comparative literature, um, you know, he was really very good, and he gave a very comprehensive account of Freud's, uh, interpretation of dreams, and then he said that you can't understand the theory In that book of Freud's, uh, if you don't, uh, uh, acquaint yourself also with something he wrote five years earlier in 1895, uh, he wrote something that's come to be known as the project for a scientific psychology, which was while he was still a neuroscientist, uh, Freud was trying to.

imagined, you know, what, what's going on in the brain that, that could produce, uh, the, the kinds of mental phenomena that he was observing clinically, uh, in, in, in patients, [00:32:00] which are now called patients with functional neurological disorders. Those days it was called hysteria. And, um, so I was just amazed. I was amazed to discover that Freud was a neuroscientist, you know, I think most 

Andrea Hiott: people would still be today, right?

To think that Freud was a neuroscientist first and foremost. 

Mark Solms: Yes. So that kind of gave, gave me, um, not permission, but it made me feel, uh, well, if he's, if he's actually one of us, you know, uh, Freud was a proper scientist and he was a neuroscientist and, you know, and so that I remember reading his book on aphasia, Freud's book on aphasia, which was written in 1891.

And it was really remarkably good neuropsychology, you know, and, um, So, one thing led to another, and I then decided to train as a psychoanalyst, much to the horror of my professors and colleagues. One of them, one of my colleagues said to me, that's like an astronomer studying [00:33:00] astrology. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's, why do you think people are so?

What's the word I don't know like turned off by these things that are so important to us I mean, I don't mean to blame people because it's hard I was thinking about your parents for example, and that what they went through was very hard So it's not it was it was hard for them to just look at it and confront it and talk about it And so on, and I, I feel like that's not completely discontinuous from once we get into academia that the things that matter most or that seem the most real to us are we're embarrassed by somehow, or we can't talk about them academically.

 Like our own subjective experience in an academic context, or, 

Mark Solms: yeah. I have to just clarify that my parents, their difficulty in talking about what had happened to my brother, I don't think it had to do with the same sorts of things as we're talking about now.

I think it was just too painful. And I think they felt terribly guilty about [00:34:00] what had happened to him. And it was just a thing that we, it was a topic we avoided for those sorts of reasons. While I'm at it, I know I'm speaking too much, but while I'm at it, I have to say, I am grateful to my father for allowing me to stop going to Sunday school.

He said to me, um, you know, your mother believes in all of that. Uh, I don't, you know, so it's up to you. And that was a real revelation was that, oh, so you can. You can make up your own mind about these sorts of things, you know, that, that, that I think was, it was a good, a good thing that he did. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that's wonderful.

And I don't mean to suggest it's the same thing, but these are humans, right? Telling you this, who had their own experiences and their own growing up. And I think we've all had this where, as a kid, you realize there's certain places that are just too hard to go. And I don't mean that's the same in academia, but for me, I've felt it in a similar way, even in myself, that it's like almost like more than we can handle.

I know in, in science, it can become more [00:35:00] about, you need to be able to prove it with data and experiments and so on. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that through line of something like feeling or something like the most basic kind of stuff that through layers and layers of all of this, we come to not really think of it anymore as, essential and important in the way that it really is in those situations that form us like that one in your life.

Mark Solms: Yeah. Well, uh, I, I, I'm very, uh, glad that I, uh, never gave up my interest in these embarrassing, scientifically embarrassing questions. Um, and I think that's the source of it. I mean, you're right, it's a, it's feeling, uh, and the feeling in, in, in question here, uh, is the embarrassing fact, uh, that the, that the mind is something subjective.

Uh, you know, there's, that's just the absolute ground zero. Uh, fact about the mind is that it is something ex uh, subjective. And secondly, it exists. It's part of nature. So, you know, sorry, uh, [00:36:00] there's a part of nature that's subjective and, um, and, and science, of course aspires to objectivity. So there you have the problem, uh, uh, the, the mind is an embarrassment to science.

And so the. The history of psychology, uh, which, you know, ironically means science of the mind, um, you know, in the 20th century, I mentioned behaviorism a moment ago, uh, you know, that was the way in which it was dealt with, was literally you must exclude the mind from the science of the mind, you know, and you must only study its external manifestations in the form of behaviors, and the external stimuli, uh, as they called it, you know, that that triggered these behavioral responses.

And they literally, you know, airbrushed the mind out of, not only out of science, but out of the science of the mind. You know, it's very, 

Andrea Hiott: very strange, isn't it? I mean, don't see what is the most important and then you kind of, [00:37:00] turn it into something that seems to be objective and not based on the very thing that started it all and that you're trying to understand.

Mark Solms: In the case of behaviorism, it began as a methodological or epistemological stance that because As you can't study subjective things objectively, um, we, we will exclude them from study, but then it became a sort of ontological position, and they started to say that it literally doesn't exist. I mean, that's, that's even worse.

Skinner infamously said, you know, the famous behaviorist B. F. Skinner, he said, emotions, which he put in scarce, scarce quotes, he said, emotions are an excellent example, um, of the fictitious, fictitious explanations, where you Who's, uh, to, to account for behavior. Incredible. 

Andrea Hiott: But I also don't want to be too hard on them because I think that's why I was trying to link it to something personal, because it comes, I feel like there's a way in which we [00:38:00] just, we started building all these instruments and technologies and we started thinking that only when you have something that all of us can kind of examine through one of those technologies together, then it can be legitimate or something like that.

Um, And I don't know, maybe you don't think it's connected, but I, I do think it's too hard to think about your own emotions and your own feelings and your own, all of these things through that lens, so it's better to just kind of bracket all of that as just your own stuff. 

It needs to almost be like a sterile place that's not connected to your personality or something, because it feels too embarrassing or close. 

Mark Solms: Freud said in a letter to Einstein, uh, that The mind is like the esophagus. Uh, it wants, everything must flow, uh, only in one direction. So in the case of the mind, he means we must only look outwards, and it causes a feeling of revulsion if we reverse the direction of flow and look inwards.

Andrea Hiott: And weirdly that, though, that looking inwards kind of ends up [00:39:00] being the moments of, that matter the most in the life. But this, I think, points to this, this looking for the spring in the wrong place, which is a big part of the book, the cortical kind of model, because I think that's connected to what we're saying here. A certain way of thinking about science or results or data or whatever that also resulted in a way of thinking about consciousness or cognition. In a very general cartoonish sense, it became that whatever is consciousness or cognition that can be studied in the way we've been talking about probably has, is connected to what is called the cortex in the brain, right?

Mark Solms: Yeah, well, the, the reason that, uh, we became, uh, so, uh, enamored with the cortex, uh, is, I suppose, first and foremost, because it's our evolutionary pride and joy, you know, we humans have got such.

Yeah, we have it. Yeah. Um, but, um, beyond that, uh, it's also the obvious place to start to look for a physiological and anatomical account of consciousness, because all the sensory end organs, uh, [00:40:00] project to the cortex. And there's a dedicated zone in the cortex for each one of the special senses. And if that zone is damaged, you lose the conscious awareness that goes with that sensory modality.

Andrea Hiott: Like that's, that's where we're located, even in your research with the dream, right? That's where you were looking and you seem to have found it. 

Mark Solms: Yeah, now, I had no reason to question that, what shall I call it, prejudice, that cortex and consciousness are bound up with each other.

Now, the mistake Or the, or the, um, I don't know if I should call it a mistake so much as the, the weakness in the, uh, in that way of thinking is that it assumes that consciousness, uh, has to do with something coming in from the outside, you know, that consciousness flows in, uh, without, without, uh, uh, with perception.

And um, so then again, we are talking about, about something that's about [00:41:00] objects, something that's about. You know, these are the objects of consciousness, things that you see, uh, things that you hear, um, whereas The essence, in my view, uh, the, the, the fundamental form of consciousness is just feeling, you know, it is, it, it, it's, that's something that, that comes from within.

Uh, and um, so, uh, the, the idea that consciousness consists in, uh, five qualities, uh, that coincide with the five perceptual modalities, leaves out of account. feeling, which is not a perception, in the sense of a perception of a thing. You could say in a sense it's a perception of your own being. And this illustrates what I mean when I say that it's something that comes from within.

But when you start to look into the brain mechanisms which generate feeling, Uh, then, uh, you find that it is the innermost [00:42:00] core of the brainstem, uh, which also is the part of the brain that sustains wakefulness. I mean, the whole, the whole sort of, the, the, the state of being conscious, um, is generated Endogenously, uh, from within, uh, you have to first of all have a subject of consciousness before that subject can become aware of its objects, uh, of consciousness.

Andrea Hiott: But it gets completely lost. Um, and so like, just to link it to your research, people should know that that was a really big discovery, actually, with understanding that REM and dreams are dissociated or aren't the same, and there's a lot that you did there that's really, really very important, but you still were kind of locating it in this cortex, which I'm making kind of the metaphor of, of language based understanding of thought or something, or, or this kind of scientific, way in which we don't think feeling has anything to do with it, which is associated with more lower areas of [00:43:00] the brain, like the brainstem.

But as it turned out, someone pointed out to you that even though you'd found this in the cortex and, It's, it's very important what you found and so forth. Actually, it originated in the brainstem. So you were kind of forced to then rethink this in a way

Mark Solms: yes. Um, so it was known that REM sleep, and I know we're speaking overly simplistically here. Uh, it's, it's for brevity. We knew at the time that I started those studies in the 1980s, that REM sleep was, not to put too fine a point on it, generated by brainstem nuclei. Um, uh, and the, the whole view was therefore, there's nothing mental going on here.

This is just a sort of like a, uh, something like a reflex, you know, and so I, I was interested in the, in the changes in the quality, the content, the phenomenology of dreams arising from damage to different parts of the brain.

And I meant cortex. That's what I expected. I expected that For example, as I mentioned a moment ago, the occipital [00:44:00] cortex bound up with visual consciousness. If you have damage there and you lose visual consciousness, then surely you will, you're not, you won't have visual dreams anymore. Uh, if you lose language cortex and you can't speak anymore, then surely in your dreams too, you know, you will no longer be able to speak.

That's the sort of thing I, I was hypothesizing. Um, and what I found, as I told you, was that there was this white matter Um, uh, in the frontal lobes, and I just, like, I linked it to frontal cortex, you know, this is, so this has got to do with something in the frontal lobes, and I just assumed we were talking about something cortical, and then, as you say, a colleague of mine, uh, Alan Brown, let me name him from, from NIH, uh, he said, but, you know, and also I was trying, sorry, I didn't make this clear.

I was in doing this, I was drawing, um, attention to the fact that REM sleep and dreaming are different things. REM sleep is generated [00:45:00] in the brainstem, uh, dreams are generated in the frontal lobes, and then it was this chap, uh, Alan Brown, who pointed out to me that the fibers that I had identified, the fiber pathway, uh, which is this mesocortical mesolimbic dopamine, immune system, it has its source cells, its origin, also in the brainstem.

So we were back in the brainstem again. And then, which was the seat 

Andrea Hiott: of, of feeling, right? So everything, I mean we have to be a little cartoonish because we have one hour to speak, but Let's just say that the cortex was associated with what we think of as consciousness in, in this way that is, is very legitimate. There is, as you were saying, everything connects up there and as humans, it's, there's all this research towards it. But now you were finding out that what we thought of as consciousness was actually, connected to the brainstem, which has to do with feeling. We can even think of consciousness, as feeling, uh, as That raw feeling is already consciousness in a way.

But just if we could cartoon it a little bit, how did, how [00:46:00] does that, how did that come that, Oh, actually what I thought of was consciousness in the cortex is in the brainstem and this is feeling, and we have to take feeling seriously in the way that you were already trying, but of course being told not to

Mark Solms: yeah, so in a nutshell, um, in the upper brainstem, there are structures which very loosely we call the reticular activating system, and the word says it all, they, these nuclei activate the cortex. You can't, although the cortex is the seat, as it were, of those various modalities of perceptual consciousness, um, if you have damage to the reticular activating system in the brainstem, then all the lights go out.

So it's not one or another perceptual modality, the whole bang shoot, uh, disappears. So that, that indicates that the, that cortical consciousness is contingent upon brainstem arousal. uh, brainstem activation. And, um, [00:47:00] then, uh, if you think about what I was saying about one of those arousal systems, the one that generates dreams, the, which, which, as I said, is generally known as the brain reward system, uh, also known as the seeking system or the wanting system.

This is a. This is a feeling system. It has to do with a particular quality of feeling. Uh, which in the case of, uh, of, of the system we're talking about, it's the kind of exploratory interest, a kind of a, a kind of a, uh, um, engagement with uncertainty, engagement with novelty, you know, that kind of feeling.

So. And what this shows that this one example, the same applies to all of these arousal systems for coming from the reticular activating system is that it's not just a light switch, or a volume control, kind of like, you know, switching on consciousness which Which is somehow blank. And then, you know, you have to populate the [00:48:00] contents and, uh, if the, the actual qualitative stuff of consciousness comes from, from the outside.

What, what this, uh, that, this system is an example of the fact that these arousal systems, which are prerequisite for any form of consciousness, they have a content and the quality of their own, uh, which is not perceptual, but rather affective. So these raw feeling states are generated by the very same structures that are prerequisite for any sort of consciousness.

So that's, you put those two and two together, and you realize, okay, so the fundamental form of consciousness, it's sort of elemental, um, prerequisite for any form of consciousness is feeling. And that does not flow in from the inside. It's, it's, I feel like this. about that. It's a sort of a feeling our way into our perceptions, uh, rather than, rather than the perception than the consciousness coming from outside.

It comes from [00:49:00] inside and we kind of palpate it with feeling. 

 To try to link it to what we've been talking about because we, you know, like as a kid, when you, when you come into the world, you have certain ways of, of dealing with that world.

Andrea Hiott: And then do you see this as a kind of continuity in terms of the way that spring, that Does interact with the world and I mean you go into a lot of different models that we could talk here But there's this kind of looping what through the Markov blanket so to speak that's happening and When we think about something like consciousness you say it always has its feeling is always conscious but this gets a little confusing in terms of like, where does this consciousness that we talk about now as if it's an awareness of our own consciousness come into play for you and how does that relate to feeling and in your model or in your way of really starting to almost bridge these cortical and brainstem notions of what consciousness really is?

Mark Solms: Yeah, so the, um, the way that I look on it. Uh, and for good reason, [00:50:00] uh, which I'll explain to you in a moment, uh, is that first of all, selfhood, uh, it's not reflective selfhood. It is just being. So it's just the feeling. Is it just 

Andrea Hiott: the body? Can we say that the body is it? Or are you already at, is there a layer to that for you?

Mark Solms: Well, different parts of the body, have, uh, different relationships with consciousness, so obviously consciousness is more bound up with the brain than any other part of the body. Uh, and, it's more bound up with this brainstem core that we're talking about than any other part of the brain.

Uh, do you know, In fact, I think I mentioned it in my book that the smallest area of damage in the human brain that reliably produces coma is just two cubic millimeters in extent in a part of the reticular activating system called the parabrachial complex. So, you know, when I say that this is the This is the font of [00:51:00] consciousness.

You know, this is the, this is where it all comes from. Uh, there's, there's, there's very little reason to doubt that, um, that when you stimulate these tissues, uh, it generates raw feeling. Uh, when you, uh, manipulate the, the neurotransmitters, uh, that, uh, that, that arise from, these systems, uh, you manipulate feeling states.

So raw feelings, I mean, think, try and think. Fish rather than human, you know, it's it's just the fish just goes where the good feelings are, you know, that's that's where that's where the right temperature is. That's where the food is, you know, that's where all the good stuff is. And so it goes there. It doesn't think.

I am a fish, um, and I'm trying to sustain my energy supplies, therefore, um, it's just a feeling brings about a, a mind, a mind which is not mindful of itself, but just is sentient, [00:52:00] just is just there is something it is like to be it. Uh, and that's, that's its mind. Then with cortex, uh, you have the, you have the, the, the capacity and especially with the development of language, uh, with all of its abstract, uh, reasoning that it, it enables, uh, then you can start thinking about your thoughts or, or rather thinking about your feelings, uh, which incidentally, uh, To go back to where we were at the beginning of this conversation, it's what it's all for, it's what it's all about, it's what matters to us, you know, it's how we feel.

The whole, the reason that we do all of this learning and understanding of how the world works is because Uh, it, uh, assists us in our task of trying to feel better. Uh, in fact, it's the only reason that we eat and drink and all of that too, you know. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, we want to understand. I think the story that you start with illustrates it a lot in a way that you want to understand it [00:53:00] and you need motivation.

You need a reason to keep going. And all those have been separated because they're too embarrassing to think of scientifically, but weirdly they're also what created science. So, I'm, I'm being metaphorical, but for the sake of time, but I feel like with coming back to the brain stem, for example, the way you do, and people are just going to have to read the book because there's a whole lot more than we can even touch on, but you definitely show that consciousness, uh, doesn't necessarily need the cortex, which doesn't mean the cortex isn't very important for a lot of forms

forms of consciousness, but there's a way in which we can start to think of this differently. It's very hard, almost like holding the paradox. And similarly, you also show that a lot of what Freud was doing, with the tools that he had at that time was trying to show that too, even maybe spelling that out in a different way.

 So how can we hold these things and not be embarrassed 

Mark Solms: yeah. Well, Freud's great, contribution was to do the opposite of what the behaviorists did. Rather than adjusting, uh, [00:54:00] the object, uh, to our methods, uh, you adjust your methods to the object. So, you know, if you, if the object that you're studying is a subject, you know, then you've got to find a way of, you know, of, uh, investigating subjectivity, which is what Freud's method, uh, for all of its faults, uh, that was its great merit, you know, that its starting point was that we are dealing with the subjective experience, uh, of people, and therefore we have to investigate their first person accounts of what it is that they're experiencing.

You do that, uh, Um, I mean, I am now a psychoanalyst, have been for decades, so I can tell you from my own experience, both as a patient in psychoanalysis, which you have to do as part of your training, and also from my analyses of, of other fellow human beings, you know, you very rapidly, when you, when you start taking seriously, uh, what is it that makes us tick subjectively, you very rapidly discover, you know, that it's all about feelings, that [00:55:00] this is what matters to us, that it really is the governing principle of everything that drives the life of the mind.

And so Freud observed that it's kind of impossible not to observe that. And, um, That led him to what I think was, uh, the, the most fundamental contribution, uh, that, that he made beyond the mere, uh, uh, decision that I'm going to explore. Subjectivity. It's part of nature. I'm sorry. Uh, I have to include it in science.

Um, the, the, the question of, well, where do these feelings come from? Uh, led Freud to the idea. that fundamentally it has to do with the fact that we're embodied creatures. Uh, that, um, and if you think about the most rudimentary of feelings, I alluded to them a moment ago, things like hunger and thirst.

I mean, these are feelings. And, um, Why? And they have an imperative quality, you know, you try not [00:56:00] eat for a few days or you try to not drink, or you try to not sleep or you try to not breathe, you very rapidly feel very powerful feelings. And so it's very clear where the feelings come from. They come from, it's it's the, uh, the demand.

Uh, from the, from the flesh, it's a demand, uh, that we, we have needs, um, and we have to satisfy those needs and feelings tell us, um, how well or badly we're doing in that, in that respect. This is what they're for. Um, so this was Freud's great, great insight is his first true discovery. And it's what he called drive theory.

You know, the idea That he defined drive, I can quote it literally, he said, drive is a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work by virtue of the connection between the mind and the body. [00:57:00] And so that is the starting point of of, of, of sentience. It's the starting point, uh, of mental being, of, of the body having a subjective aspect, a body coming to know its own state, uh, is what, is what feeling is.

 That's a kind of 

Andrea Hiott: minimizing of free energy you show in the book too. Yes. 

Mark Solms: Well, that's a way of understanding it. So in the book, I try to, I try to, uh, understand Uh, well, you know, how does that work? And the fundamental mechanism is called homeostasis. Um, homeostasis is the most basic biological mechanism.

Uh, it is, it is what distinguishes, uh, living things from non living things. That living things have needs. They have to occupy certain, uh, parameters. If they, if they don't stay within their preferred states, they, they, they die. You know, so like I was saying now about oxygen and [00:58:00] water and temperature and sleep and so on.

These are, these are, uh, these are imperatives. We have to meet those needs and the homeostasis or the feeling is an extended form of homeostasis where bad feelings mean I'm moving away from where I need to be and good feelings mean the opposite. I'm heading in the right direction. Feelings are a value system.

Um, which, uh, which reflects, uh, or which perhaps I should say broadcasts to us, um, the basic value system of all biology, which is that it's good to survive and bad to die. Uh, and, uh, this is the, this is the absolute bedrock of feeling. So. Once you recognize it's homeostasis, then you have all kinds of tools at your disposal.

You know, for one can, can explain homeostasis. Uh, for example, uh, in in ordinary mathematical models, you know, me, mechanistic, uh, uh, [00:59:00] physicalist account, uh, of, of homeostasis is, is not, is not that difficult. And so what I was groping for, uh, in that book. was trying to understand, uh, in this way, uh, you know, in the se using the same tools as we use in all of natural science, trying to explain how feelings come about, uh, and what they do.

And this is something I cannot emphasize enough, that feelings have come about. consequences. Feelings have causal power. Now, you will never understand how the brain works if you don't understand that what it's doing is fundamentally determined by feelings. You know, in other words, if you only take a bodily perspective.

In other words, if you only look at the external anatomy and physiology, and you don't recognize that this is somehow causally inter [01:00:00] digitated with the subjective feeling states, they're not just epiphenomena, they're not just nice to have, they actually change what we do. And I mean, nothing could be more obvious in a sense, but in that book, I'm trying to come up with a, uh, I mean, when I say I'm trying to, I'm rather, I'm rather pleased with what I was able to, how far I was able to get with it, uh, in, in terms of trying to account for feelings and therefore consciousness, uh, using the, the same tools as we use in all of science.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I think you show that, from my point of view, the free energy principle and active inverse and everything they bring in, we have to be careful not to mistake the map and the territory and all that, but in a way, it just shows that you can apply a similar statistical model to a lot of, to this pattern in a lot of different ways, including the pattern of understanding that the way that our feeling or what we think of as consciousness as humans in the most kind of special way could be [01:01:00] a way of finding our homeostasis or another level of, of that homeostatic process.

Does that seem true for you? I mean, can you, can you say that? I 

Mark Solms: think it's deeply true. I think it's deeply true. Um, speaking about maps and territories and bearing in mind, I know that we've got literally a minute to go. 

But, um, the, the, uh, subjective perspective, uh, uh, in other words, the being, uh, of the mind, uh, and the objective perspective, the organ of the mind, uh, the connecting, you know, what is, if these are just observational perspectives upon one and the same thing, uh, then it, then it, it, it asks the, it, it, it raises the question, well, then what the underlying ontological stuff.

Uh, and it's, that's what, what I think we need the language, the abstract language of statistical mechanics, things like, um, the free energy principle. Um, and, and as Galileo said, you know, the book of nature is, [01:02:00] is written in the language of mathematics. So it's trying to find something beyond these two appearances, which can explain, which can explain them both