The Samskara Papers, Part 4

I've been thinking about and meditating on my theories of consciousness, samskara, mental maps, and schema for at least eight years now.  Posts to his blog about these topics are dated as early as July 2012, when I first came across writing that suggested to me that samskara and schema were two different terms that basically describe different aspects of the same thing.  Since then, I've come across writing and ideas by such diverse minds as writer and translator Red Pine, neurologist Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, and psychologist/philosopher Erich Fromm, that further guided my thoughts and illuminated my inquiries.  

Today, while randomly scrolling over my phone, I came across an article written by Princeton neurologist Michael Graziano about his attention schema theory, or AST, on the origin of consciousness.  His earliest publications on this matter are dated 2011, so the good Doctor Graziano and I were both cogitating on this matter at the same time.

As I literally just came across his AST theory today, I won't pretend that I fully understand it yet or even partially understand it, except in the most superficial, preliminary way.  All I've read so far are one article in The Atlantic by Dr. Graziano and the Wikipedia entry on AST.  But I can summarize what I think it means, colored, of course, by my own thoughts and preconceptions:

• We're constantly bombarded at any second by more sensory input that we can possibly consider.  But our mind filters out all those sights, sounds, and sensations and focuses instead on those things that we fear might cause us harm or that we hope might by useful or pleasurable.  But the vast majority of the input is simply ignored.  For example, I don't have to think about the sound of my own breath unless, of course, it sounds "off" to me (why am I wheezing?).  It's simply not possible to think about every sound that reaches our ears, everything in our field of sight, and so on all the time.


• Our minds have created subconscious "filters" to sort out the sensory impressions that we can ignore to focus instead on the ones that require our attention.  Some of those filters are instinctive and others we've learned in life.  I've learned to ignore the sound of the HVAC system in the house, and I've learned to pay close attention to sounds of possible intruders in the night (not that I've had any intruders, but I have awakened to many "false alarms").  The tree recently falling on my house has made me hyper-aware of sounds on my roof, and unfortunately now I'm hyper-aware of the sounds of raindrops tapping on the roof.  It might be a while before my mind can "unlearn" being concerned about sounds from the rooftops and i can sleep again on a rainy right.


• Those filters are based on mental models, schema if you will, of the world around us, and as our experiences in life change, so do our models and so does our filters based on those models.


• We also have models of our bodies and how they move us through the world.  I can look at a stream and decide if I can step across it, of if it will require a running jump to cross, of if it's impossible to cross dry shod.  That's a model.  But there's also subconscious models.  When we're out walking, we don't have to consciously think about each step, or how far each step will move us forward through the external world.  We can think about it if we choose to, and we do think about it when we encounter something - a stairstep, say, or a log across our path - that requires us to deliberately calculate our move.  But even complex movements can be selected subconsciously - just watch an athlete for an example.  A basketball player, runs, jumps, throws a ball, flicks a pass behind his back, and fakes a move in the opposite direction of his actual path without conscious thought about it.  If he did have to think about each and every motion, he'd get bogged down in thought and probably couldn't play, or at lest couldn't play well, at all.


• Finally, we also have filters and mental models of our own thoughts.  We don't have to think about why - or even if - we're listening to bird sounds, or noticing an approaching stranger more than we're noticing a lamp post, or thinking about what to make for dinner tonight. We don't have to pay attention to everything we're paying attention to.  The filters for our thoughts and our attentions are based on models, schema, just like the filters for our senses.  This is "attention schema."


• Dr. Graziano's theory, if I understand it correctly, holds that we can pay attention to our attention schema if we so choose, and when we do we become aware that something's going on inside of our mind - something that seemingly is working separately from the rest of the world.  The "something" is intensely personal and uniquely ours, seemingly independent of anything in the outside world, so we identify with it and consider it to be, in fact, ourselves - the Ego-Self as they say in Buddhism, the self that is not others.

I can almost hear Dr. G or those familiar with his work groaning right now over how wrong I've got it - I can almost hear myself groaning in the future when I re-read this and realize how off-base I was.

But regardless, I find it fascinating to discover someone who's been on the same path of inquiry as I have, and sees based on entirely different evidence than mine that consciousness seems to be intricately linked to schema.