Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2011, Pages 993-997
Consciousness and Cognition

A mind to go out of: Reflections on primary and secondary consciousness

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.09.018Get rights and content

Abstract

Dreaming and waking are two brain-mind states, which are characterized by shared and differentiated properties at the levels of brain and consciousness. As part of our effort to capitalize on a comparison of these two states we have applied Edelman’s distinction between primary and secondary consciousness, which we link to dreaming and waking respectively. In this paper we examine the implications of this contrastive analysis for theories of mental illness. We conclude that while dreaming is an almost perfect model of organic psychosis, it is less so for schizophrenia and major affective disorder where it must serve a primarily heuristic role helping us to model hallucinations and delusions but not the diseases themselves.

Introduction

We have recently adopted Edelman’s (2005) distinction between primary and secondary consciousness as part of our attempt to formulate a theory, which recognizes the bimodality of dreaming and waking as complementary states of consciousness (Hobson & Voss, 2010). In this paper we examine some features of this bimodality, which bear heavily on our concept of mental illness.

In summary, we examine the thesis that only those higher order animals, which possess the capability of secondary consciousness suffer from psychosis. This thesis leads us to consider the possibility that humans, and only humans evince fully developed secondary consciousness and, therefore, humans and only humans have minds that can become dysfunctional in ways that we call psychotic. In other words an animal needs to have a highly developed mind in order to go out of it.

Our discussion of this theory looks at a variety of paradoxical implications, in an attempt to answer the following four questions: (1) If dreaming is akin to psychosis (and we accept the assertion that it is) then why cannot subhuman animals become schizophrenic, for example? (2) Does the apparent sparing of subhuman animals of the indignity of schizophrenia mean that their dreaming is so unlike ours as to be an unacceptably poor model for psychosis? And (3) If it is true that subhuman animals are incapable of schizophrenia, what is the scientist in search of an animal model for the most debilitating of all human diseases to do? In short, is dreaming really a good model for psychosis? In particular must we give up the fond hope that by studying REM sleep in an animal model, we might gain valuable insights into the brain basis of such major symptoms as hallucinations and delusions? (4) Finally, we wonder why animals, which are afflicted by schizophrenia have survived in a Darwinian sense. Does psychotic potential imply adaptation in some subtle, unexpected way?

Section snippets

Primary and secondary consciousness defined

At the risk of oversimplification, the fundamental difference between the two levels of consciousness is concreteness (for primary consciousness) and abstraction (for secondary consciousness). Animals, which are capable of primary consciousness make faithful copies of the world (perception), react to the world and project onto it feelings (emotions) and adjust their behaviors according to experience (learning). To those animals with primary consciousness we grant the probability of low levels

The four questions

Question 1: why cannot subhuman animals become schizophrenic - do subhuman animals have a mind to go out of?

This apparently facetious query is deadly serious. Even posing it makes us stop and think. What is the mind? Is it all the information in the brain? Is consciousness, as Giulio Tononi (2008) would have us believe, the amount of information that is processed by the brain? Tononi’s famous phi is seductively appealing because it is so quantitative and so simple, but surely we do not believe

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    At the neurophysiological level, activation patterns of the FPCN in REM sleep may differentiate between lucid and non-lucid (regular) dreaming. Deactivated regions of the FPCN in regular dreaming become reactivated in lucid dreaming (Dresler et al., 2012, 2015; Filevich, Dresler, Brick, & Kühn, 2015; Hobson, 2009; Spoormaker, Czisch, & Dresler, 2010; Stumbrys, Erlacher, & Schredl, 2013). The rlPFC and dlPFC are among regions of the FPCN whose increased activation is observable during lucid dreaming (Dresler et al., 2012; Stumbrys et al., 2013; Filevich et al., 2015).

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This article is part of a special issue of this journal on European Science Foundation EMRC Exploratory Workshop: The Dreaming Mind-Brain, Consciousness and Psychosis (Challand Saint Anselme, Italy, 25th – 28th May 2009).

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