- Do you dream in color? This question can be surprisingly hard to answer. If you said "yes," are you sure that you actually experienced your dream in color, versus remembering it in color now? Schwitzgebel reviews historical data showing that before the 20th century most observers of the mind (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, Freud) wrote about their dreams with details suggesting they were in color. But in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s less than 40% of people said they dreamed in color, and the well-known psychologist Calvin Hall even said that people had rare "technicolor" dreams that were the exception to the rule. Then, in surveys conducted from 1962 onward, the number of people reporting that they dreamed in color changed to 75% or more. Given that the human brain couldn't have changed very much over so few decades, it seems that people's actual experience of dreaming was different in some way. Schwitzgebel demonstrates a correlation between reports of full-color dreams and having been exposed to color film media before age 11. What people seem to be reporting, then, is their opinion about their dreams (a product of the Narrative System), not their experience of the dreams themselves. The actual Intuitive-level experience of dreams, says Schwitzebel "eludes me -- eludes many of us, and I suspect it eludes you."
- Now imagine yourself sitting at your breakfast table this morning. Where is your consciousness located? Are you looking out from your own eyes, or do you see yourself from outside, as though you were watching a movie about your life? Does your perspective change from time to time? How are the objects illuminated? Where is the light coming from, and does it cast shadows from the objects in the room? What happens if you focus on a piece of furniture or a wall decoration on one side of the room -- can you see it more clearly? What happened to things in the other parts of the room when you did that -- did they become less clear, or were they not there at all? Just how much of the image can you see vividly at the same time? Schwitzgebel concedes that a minority of people may have eidetic or "photographic" memory, but most people seem not to be able to accurately reproduce their own past visual experiences. Like dreaming, our capacity for mental imagery seems much more limited than it first appears: Our initially rich visual experience passes through a kind of filter in the Narrative System that lets out much less information, and in much more abstracted form, than what went in.
- Can you currently feel your feet inside your shoes? And now that your attention has been called to your feet, what about your tongue? Did you notice it sitting inside your mouth? It doesn't quite fit in there, does it? How does it get through the whole day avoiding all of those sharp teeth? Now you are perhaps moving it around to avoid them. Why haven't you felt this uncomfortable about your tongue before? Like imagery, our tactile experience seems limited when we call attention to aspects of it in this way. We do, it seems, have some ability to notice things that we weren't specifically attending to -- things seen out of the corner of our eye, for instance, or a gradual awareness that a headache is beginning. Once we focus conscious attention on the same phenomena, they burst into a much larger and "more real" sort of awareness in our minds. Schwitzgebel reported one of his own experiments in which people were given beepers, and were asked at randomly cued times to report whether they were having any experience of their far right visual field, or of their left foot. Most participants reported these experiences about half the time, although there are concerns about over-reporting bias (were they really aware before the beeper went off, or did it cue them to pay attention?). In either case, their consciousness was far below the level of complete awareness.
Schwitzgebel argues that our own unclarity about our mental phenomena is not primarily because we misremember or misreport. More fundamentally, he suggests that we simply don't know if our dreams happen in color, if our mental imagery occurs from varied perspectives, or whether we can feel our feet in our shoes at various points during the day. Consciousness is "sparse" in the sense that we can pay attention to only one or two things at a time (probably no more than two -- "walking and chewing gum" is about all most of us can manage).
The idea of sparse consciousness is important for Two Minds Theory, which argues that awareness or attention have strict limits. Neurocognitive models suggest that the Narrative System is a small channel of information, compared to the Intuitive System which offers massively parallel processing. But even if the Intuitive System is processing a broad range of information, we usually have no access to it. When we try to describe it, or even to form mental imagery without specifically using language, the process of moving that experience into the Narrative System filters and distorts it.
More fundamentally, Schwitzgebel's findings offer support for the Two Minds Theory idea that conscious experience -- the "I" or "me" that I perceive as central to my identity -- exists at the level of the Narrative System. We may have experiences that we are unaware of at the time, but attention seems able to bring these into "focus" or conscious awareness. But attention, like the Narrative System as a whole, is a limited resource -- we can't focus our attention on all aspects of an experience at the same time. It is for this reason that TMT suggests attention is an aspect of the Narrative System, and is directly connected to the "me" of conscious thought.
The Narrative System helps us to notice things we might not have noticed otherwise, and the process of paying attention is something that feels at least partially under people's control. These useful aspects of the Narrative System facilitate interventions like mindfulness to modify problematic behaviors. On the other hand, the Narrative System doesn't always provide accurate information because it processes experience into a language or imagery form that seems to be strongly influenced by beliefs and expectations, as in the example about black-and-white versus color dreams depending on what type of movies people grew up with. And because it is a narrow filter the Narrative System always and without question omits information that might potentially be important. TMT argues that we should therefore regard our Narrative System consciousness as simply narratives, not as facts. Narratives are often highly useful and adaptive representations of the world, but they are not actual experiences, and we can lead ourselves into deep problems when we mistake them for truth itself.
The idea of sparse consciousness is important for Two Minds Theory, which argues that awareness or attention have strict limits. Neurocognitive models suggest that the Narrative System is a small channel of information, compared to the Intuitive System which offers massively parallel processing. But even if the Intuitive System is processing a broad range of information, we usually have no access to it. When we try to describe it, or even to form mental imagery without specifically using language, the process of moving that experience into the Narrative System filters and distorts it.
More fundamentally, Schwitzgebel's findings offer support for the Two Minds Theory idea that conscious experience -- the "I" or "me" that I perceive as central to my identity -- exists at the level of the Narrative System. We may have experiences that we are unaware of at the time, but attention seems able to bring these into "focus" or conscious awareness. But attention, like the Narrative System as a whole, is a limited resource -- we can't focus our attention on all aspects of an experience at the same time. It is for this reason that TMT suggests attention is an aspect of the Narrative System, and is directly connected to the "me" of conscious thought.
The Narrative System helps us to notice things we might not have noticed otherwise, and the process of paying attention is something that feels at least partially under people's control. These useful aspects of the Narrative System facilitate interventions like mindfulness to modify problematic behaviors. On the other hand, the Narrative System doesn't always provide accurate information because it processes experience into a language or imagery form that seems to be strongly influenced by beliefs and expectations, as in the example about black-and-white versus color dreams depending on what type of movies people grew up with. And because it is a narrow filter the Narrative System always and without question omits information that might potentially be important. TMT argues that we should therefore regard our Narrative System consciousness as simply narratives, not as facts. Narratives are often highly useful and adaptive representations of the world, but they are not actual experiences, and we can lead ourselves into deep problems when we mistake them for truth itself.
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