With a feverish pace and a candid eye for story, Consciousness in a Nutshell delivers an unforgettable account of what it means to be alive while, at the very same time, answering the question of all questions, once and for all: What is consciousness?
Consciousness in a Nutshell is a work of psychological mastery. A 21st century portrait of Nature, Nirvana, and what it means to be a human being. Written in the style of creative non-fiction, this multi-layered conversation spans the fields of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, cosmology, and evolutionary biology, all in the pursuit of explaining 'what' consciousness is.
Set inside a psychological thriller, this semi-autobiographical tale follows two young neuropsychopharmacologists on the verge of publishing a major breakthrough, when one of them (only identified by the name "Ava") winds up missing, and the other finds himself trapped in a room without doors or windows. Faced with impending doom, "James" decides to write a letter to a total stranger explaining everything he knows about the subject of consciousness in exchange for one little favor.
"A masterful synthesis of neuroscience, philosophy, and evolutionary biology."
-The Awareness
"Creative nonfiction at its finest!"
-The Narrative Self
WE WERE WATCHING the nature channel when it happened. Sitting on that gaudy leather couch when the ground beneath my thoughts just completely drops away, plunging me into the world of thoughts and dreams; ideas and connections. The place where sheer chaos meets practical order.
From somewhere beyond the screen stands everyone’s favorite wildlife enthusiast, holed up in some recording booth, sipping on some herbal tea, as he masterfully narrates the scene. This drone shot of some wildlife preserve suddenly gives way to a couple aerial shots of this beautiful, grey bird gliding along the tree line. With long grey feathers and piercing gold eyes, at first we think it might be a hawk—that is, until the narrator starts in with his famous whisper narration.
“The common cuckoo,” the narrator says, “is technically, a parasite.” Parasitic to a species of birds known as the reed warbler, the guy everyone secretly wishes was their long-lost grandfather goes onto explain how Cuculus canorus might be Nature’s most ingenious con-artist.
Before some clocksmith decided to incorporate its mating call into one of his clocks, before the word came to be associated with someone crazy or “off their rocker,” ornithologists have long been fascinated by this odd species of bird. Namely, because cuckoos are one of the few avian species that don’t bring up any of their young. Instead, they trick other species of birds into doing all the work for them.
Ava sitting next to me, clutching that big blue bowl we only use for popcorn, she pulls up the plush blanket coiled around her feet and shoots me a look.
“Watching from afar, the cuckoo must wait patiently for the mother to leave her nest, for when she finally does, the cuckoo will only have seconds.”
Completely transfixed by what’s on the TV, Ava and I watch as this rather innocent-looking bird, about the size of a sparrowhawk, swoops down to an itty bitty nest perched above some flooded reeds and stands on its edge. Head looking both ways, we then watch as this golden-eyed trickster dips her head down into the nest only to resurface holding a spotted green egg seconds later.
Then, she tilts her head back.
Like a pelican, she jerks her head forward a few times so she can swallow the egg all in one go, and if that weren’t bad enough, she even lays one of her own in its place.
“The whole endeavor takes less than ten seconds,” boasts the narrator, “and within that time, the cuckoo has just destroyed this entire family’s hopes of reproductive success.”¹ Knowing where this is going, I reach for a fistful of popcorn and tell Ava, “Watch this.”
The next shot is of some poor unsuspecting mother, about the size of a sparrow, flying back to her nest completely unaware that one of the eggs is not her own. What’s worse, this impostor egg she’s about to help incubate will be the first to hatch, and when it does, the first thing it’ll do is slaughter all its would-be brothers and sisters.
Just then Ava turns to me with arched eyebrows and says, “This is crazy.” The way she’s sitting, it’s the same way you’d sit if you were watching a slasher flick. Legs tucked underneath her. Legs tucked off to the side. She’s sitting all the way up, blindly grabbing for popcorn, when the baby cuckoo on TV finally busts out of its shell. Naked and featherless, it then walks on limbs it’s never used before over to one of the four remaining eggs and starts to do the unthinkable. Using its back and its legs, it rolls one of the eggs up the side of the nest, hoisting its foster-brother up onto its shoulders, like it was Atlas about to move some furniture, when suddenly, the cuckoo staggers back. She’s standing at the edge of the nest now, the very place her mother stood eleven days before, when the baby cuckoo finally flicks its “wings” and the egg goes flying.
“The cuckoo will repeat the process until there’s nothing left,” whispers the narrator. But even in that sultry British tone, these words send a shiver down my spine. Not even ten minutes spent on the other side of that shell and this chick has already committed a quadruple homicide.
Halfway around the world, sitting on that tattered leather couch, you almost can’t help but feel anger towards this little monster and nothing but sympathy for the reed warblers duped into feeding it.
But, of course, this isn’t really the right way of looking at it.
First and foremost, we need to remind ourselves that both creatures are only ever trying to do what we’re all trying to do: survive and reproduce. And second of all, we actually have no reason to suspect that either party actually knows what they’re doing. Which isn’t to say that birds don’t have some semblance of awareness. More like, they might be better conceptualized as being unconscious robots acting largely on instinct. “Clockwork robots” is the way the world’s leading evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, would describe it.² But sitting at home, munching on popcorn, it’s just way more convenient to start making up stories. To start picking sides and assigning agency.
To think, that somehow, this blind bird (no older than a few minutes) had some kind of diabolical plan etched on the inside of that shell, the first item of which read: Kill all your would-be brothers and sisters.
The baby cuckoo almost certainly doesn’t think that.
It doesn’t toss out all of its would-be brothers and sisters because it ‘wants’ to, it does this because it was ‘programmed’ to do this. Just as a newborn baby has instincts for sucking, a newborn cuckoo has instincts for bucking. An instinct for balancing an egg up atop the hollow bone in its back and then ejecting it off the side just as easy. In actual truth, the poor cuckoo never meets its real mother. It never builds its own nest or rears any of its own young. It’s never explicitly shown all the tricks behind successful brood parasitism—of which there are several—and yet, in less than one year’s time, she too will make the return journey all the way from Africa to this same marshy area of Wicken Fen to play the trick on another host family.³ You want to talk about learned behavior vs. instinctual behavior? About the ingenious tricks of survival crafted by eons of time and that righteous caretaker we call Mother Nature?
Then let me introduce you to Cuculus canorus.
By the time the nature doc was finished, Ava turns to me with a face that didn’t know what it wanted to be—anger, fear, curiosity, respect—just a mishmash of conflicting emotions. And even though there weren’t any words exchanged, knowing Ava, I still knew what she was thinking. She was thinking something to the effect of, “This is life?”
Then, me looking back at her, feeling like an alien or some kind of robot trapped in my own skin, I force a half-smile. My eyes looking at the floor, then back up to find hers, I reply in kind.
Yes, this is life.
But for some reason this nonverbal response stirs up something dark in her, and in that moment Ava grabs the remote. Mashing the button with her fingers, she hits the button labeled “OFF.”
—
Here’s the thing, in six hours…I will be dead. In less than six hours, I will be nothing more than a memory in the minds of the few people that knew me—and you’re going to have your whole life ahead of you—so don’t waste your time investing emotions into someone like me. I’m no hero. I’m no saint. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when an idea just fell into my lap.
Correction: *our laps.
And then, well…life happened. I don’t want to bore you with the details, so let’s just leave it by saying that, through no fault of my own, I wound up getting trapped in a room without doors or windows. Trapped in a place where if I’m not dead in six to eight hours, I’ll wish I was.
The story I want to tell, it’s only the greatest story of all time, quite possibly because this is the story of how we got here. And by “we” I don’t mean Ava and me, I mean it in the grandest sense of the word. We meaning all life.
You know, in a perfect world, this might be the kind of story I’d tell you over the course of a few semesters. Slowly but surely building our arguments from the bottom up, but sadly, we just don’t have that kind of time. On account of me dying and all, we simply aren’t going to have enough time for me to answer every question, address every outlier, or go on every tangent. However, I will be able to offer you the abridged version of how we got here.
Right about now, I’m sure you’re probably wondering why I’m even writing to you in the first place. I mean, you don’t know me. I don’t know you. But truth be told, that’s probably a good thing. Sometimes, you can be more honest with a total stranger than you can be with a friend, and for this story to work, I’m going to have to be brutally honest about something I regret.
Once upon a time, the way I used to tell this story was through a giant lecture series. Starting with a firm understanding about what evolution is, and then building upon that foundation with ever-increasing complexity. In fact, this whole thing used to be more like a laundry list of facts than a story. It was this gigantic, monstrous, detail-ridden manuscript dog-eared with hundreds of those little Post-it notes and factoids. Until one day, I caught a glimpse of how to make it shorter. The moment after that, the love of my life disappears and somehow I wind up here. Trapped in the kind of place you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy.
I apologize for having to put the matter so bluntly, but when you can literally calculate the number of seconds you have left in your head you tend to stop sugar-coating the inevitable…I’m dying.
Dying I can live with.
What I can’t live with is the idea that I’d be breaking a promise I made to an old friend.
You see, a long time ago, I made a promise that whatever happened I’d figure out a way to share our research.
“No matter what,” I said.
So if I can’t somehow figure out a way to distill a decade’s worth of research into this one letter to you, then my entire life’s work will have been for nothing.
Where I’m trapped, Ava isn’t here, and neither is that manuscript. Although, in order to tell this story correctly, I’m going to have to imagine she is. In all fairness, I’m going to have to imagine that all of my mentors, teachers, and colleagues are standing behind me if I’m to make it through this thing. So if you ever catch me using the royal “we” as I try and explain something, just realize that, for me, everything about this story is a collective endeavor. And if I’m being perfectly honest, the only reason I’m even able to explain some of the finer points about consciousness or evolution is because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, who were once standing on the shoulders of giants, and I simply cannot stress that point enough.
Who I am is of no importance; what I have to tell you is.
That said, for the remainder of this thing I’m going to have to rename you to Tom, if that’s alright. I realize that’s not your real name, but calling you Tom will make some of our thought experiments go a lot easier, and in the interest of all fairness I’ll take on a pseudonym too. From here on out, you can call me James.
Methodology
Back in the mid 1930s, the father of modern ethology, Konrad Lorenz, was studying the imprinting behavior exhibited by greylag geese when he made a discovery of sorts. Just for context, Konrad Lorenz wasn’t the first person to discover that little gosling’s will imprint on the first moving object they see, like a pair of Wellington boots or a model train, but he was the first to really popularize this finding, helping to secure ethology (the study of animal behavior) as a legitimate sub-discipline of biology.⁴,⁵ Although, if you asked Lorenz, he’d have probably said that his most significant contribution to science wasn’t the discovery of a new animal or a behavior, but rather a new way of interpreting the facts. More specifically, it was Konrad Lorenz who first got hold of the idea that instincts, or “fixed action patterns” as he called them, could be better thought of as being like anatomical organs.⁶,⁷
Of course, nowadays, we take this sort of observation for granted.
Because this idea came to us before you and I were even conceived, it seems rather easy for us to accept the idea that we might be able to identify a certain species of animal solely by watching their behavior, but at the time, this idea was revolutionary. Like most great ideas, it seems rather obvious to us in hindsight. However, when it first came out (the idea that certain behaviors are innate, while others are learned) certainly caused some ripples in the intellectual community. But then, by employing some clever experimentation techniques, Lorenz was able to show the limitations of these instincts.
How so?
Basically, it breaks down like this: Genes build bodies (we have tons of genes that contribute to the building and shaping of bodies through the processes of embryology), but when a gene exhibits a particular effect on a body, say slightly longer tail feathers or piercing yellow eyes, we call those effects phenotypes. And what Konrad Lorenz bravely conjectured nearly a century ago was that these fixed action patterns weren’t being consciously worked out by the individual; they were inborn. Or, put in another way, these rather stereotypical patterns of behavior weren’t being consciously passed down or imitated, because really, they were just phenotypic expressions of a certain gene.
So, for example, the way a bird constructs a nest isn’t by watching its bird parents or by going to some bird primary school. Rather, a bird builds a nest in much the same way it grows a liver or it grows a stomach; it just does it. A bird doesn’t have to know how or why it follows these highly stereotypical patterns of behavior when it comes to building nests or bringing up chicks, and it doesn’t have to.
Thing is, these fixed action patterns once helped its ancestors to survive; these patterns were subsequently selected for, implying that in our times, a bird can now exhibit wildly complex patterns of behavior, like brood parasitism or egg-smashery, without ever being shown how or why.
Why’d we start off talking about cuckoos and not human behavior?
In part, it’s because instinctual behavior is a lot easier to spot in birds than it is in humans, but more importantly, it’s because the cuckoo story just happens to be the perfect vehicle for describing some of the more nuanced points about evolution.
With most birds, even the most severe skeptic could always make the claim that somehow these birds were teaching their offspring how to hunt or how to find mates—but not with cuckoos. With cuckoos, we can be certain the parents aren’t passing down any life lessons to their kids because by the time their chicks hatch, the real mother is already halfway back to Africa. Presumably, on her way to accept some kind of Mother of the Year award, seeing as she just laid between eight and twenty-five eggs that season while suffering none of the economic costs involved in bringing up a family.⁸
No nests. No child support. No visits on weekends.
What’s more, you know the foster parents never taught these cuckoos how to parasitize another host family, so how else do we account for this behavior?
This right here—this is just one of the many intellectual hurdles we’re going to have to leap over in order to fully understand what consciousness is because, believe it or not, there are unconscious forces operating within us that drive the majority of what we do. In all honesty, we’re not even aware of most of the learning that shapes our behavior.
—
Over the course of this conversation, I hope to be able to explain some of the differences between instinctual behavior and learned behavior, between unconscious cognition and conscious cognition. And being that this is the big elephant in the room when it comes to this subject, I thought you two should meet. The real problem is, our brains are so biased in the way that we learn, think, and perceive that we often have a hard time comprehending unconscious learning and unconscious behavior. Which, when you think about it, is kind of a big deal, given that 95 to 99% of our cognition is unconscious.⁹
For the sake of clarity, we should probably mention that most experts fall into the 99% camp. However, because there are some who’ve low-balled the estimates of what the subconscious is capable of, I suppose we’ll grant the conscious mind a little footing before we systematically start pulling the rug. Also for clarity, please note that we’ll be using the words unconscious and subconscious rather interchangeably, but please don’t let prefixes like “un” or “sub” mislead you into thinking that these processes are somehow beneath you in some way. Because really, these unconscious processes give rise to you and your thinking. And now that we’ve covered that, we may now draw our first line in the sand together.
On one side, I want you to imagine all the conscious aspects of consciousness (that which you’re aware of and can see). On the other, a buzzing flurry of electrical activity (that which you have no awareness of and cannot see). Arguably, this is the side of consciousness that’s of most interest to someone like me, for without these sorts of unconscious processes I wouldn’t be able to walk in a straight line, pick up a glass of water, or even write a letter to a stranger, such as yourself. As amazing as the conscious mind is, it really does fail to compare against what the subconscious is capable of. And to explain this one massive, massive point, we’re going to have to flashback to the first time you could say I really “met” Ava.
Back when I thought I knew everything, but really, didn’t know much of anything.
For the record, I still don’t think I know anything, but what little I do know, I’ll tell you in exchange for a favor. A question, really. So there you have it, everything I know about the subject of consciousness in exchange for one little favor.
If that’s not a deal of a lifetime, I don’t know what is.
Chapter 1: Endnotes
1. Davies, N. (2015). Cuckoo: Cheating by nature. Bloomsbury. (p. 23)
2. Memoirs of Professor Richard Dawkins. (2013, November 19). Richard Dawkins—Cuckoos and a History of Life [Lecture]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USdjFRqVI7E (4:20 in).
3. The majority of these facts concerning cuckoos were either derived from Nick Davies’ book Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature (item 1) or from the lecture he gave at the Royal Society entitled: Davies, N. (2015, May 14). Cuckoos and their victims: An evolutionary arms race [Royal Society Lecture]. https://youtu.be/n0O6S4hDDfE
4. Goslings will follow human beings they’ve imprinted on whether they were wearing striped boots, zigzag boots, or polka dot boots. Leslie Nielsen; National Geographic Society. (1975). Konrad Lorenz—Science of Animal Behavior (1975) [Documentary]. Jack Kaufman Pictures, Inc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IysBMqaSAC8
5. Lorenz also found that Goslings would imprint on a box when he placed it atop a model train. See: T.L. Brink. (2018). Psychology: A student friendly approach. San Bernadino Community College District. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335128923_Psychology_a_student_friendly_approach (p. 268).
6. Lorenz, K. (1981). The foundations of ethology. Springer verlag. (p. 5).
7. Lorenz, K. (1937). On the formation of the concept of instinct. Die Naturwissenschaften, 25(19), 289–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01492648
8. Davies, N. (2015). Cuckoo: Cheating by nature. Bloomsbury. (p. 14).
9. Most neuroscientist’s cite around 98 to 99% of our cognition being unconscious. George Lakoff, for example, cites 98% in his book, The Political Mind, but agrees that it is likely to be higher in his lectures. See: Lakoff, G. (2009). The political mind: A cognitive scientist’s guide to your brain and its politics; [with a new preface]. Penguin Books. (P. 9); and George Lakoff. (2015, March 14). George Lakoff: How Brains Think: The Embodiment Hypothesis [Keynote address]. International Convention of Psychological Science, Amsterdam. https://youtu.be/WuUnMCq-ARQ, respectively. Dr. Jordan Peterson has cited 99%, see: Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson & Douglas Murray in London—Part 4. (2018, July 16). Pangburn Philosophy. https://youtu.be/aALsFhZKg-Q (68:20 min. in).