I hear you: Getting out of our heads

I am standing in my kitchen listening to a BBC World Service report on the unrest in North Africa. The correspondent turns the microphone over to a man whose name is not mentioned, presumably for security reasons--the measured yet insistent tones belong to a human rights defender who speaks out against the injustices of his country's authoritarian government. In the middle of the speaker's second sentence, I suddenly recognize a dear friend, from whom I had been estranged. In an instant, his voice brings his face, his bearing, his person, back to me. I email him to find out how he is doing.

Did I hear my friend, or did I hear my friend's voice? What is it to hear someone? Judging by introspection, it does not seem that I analyze a bundle of properties of a voice--its timbre, diction, pitch, and so on--and conclude that I know who caused it. Still less does it seem that I encounter the sounds as mere noises--acoustical objects rendered meaningful by a cognitive task of interpretation. Rather, it seems that one moment, someone is not present to me, and in the next moment, he is. I hear his presence.

The prosaic event of hearing someone can reveal important truths about the nature of the mind and consciousness and expose prevailing myths that have addled the brain sciences, if the philosopher Alva Noë is correct. In his latest book, the brilliant and bracing Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, Noë rejects the computational and "intellectualist" models of the mind that dominate artificial intelligence and neuroscience research in favor of an evolutionary-ecological perspective indebted to Darwin, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Putnam. He argues that

the brain is not the locus of consciousness inside us because consciousness has no locus inside us. Consciousness isn't something that happens inside us: it is something that we do, actively, in our dynamic interaction with the world around us.

That world includes other persons and the "cultural habitat" we create together. Consciousness is an achievement, "more like dancing than it is like digestion."

The book, written for a general audience, is in part an elaboration of Noë's collaboration with the psychologist J. Kevin O'Regan on the sensorimotor or "actionist" account of visual perception and sensory experience more generally. O'Regan was one of the discoverers of the phenomenon of "change blindness," in which people fail to notice major changes to a pictured scene when the changes are accompanied by a momentary interruption such as a flash or blink or a minor visual distraction. Here's one example of many available at his website. The fact of change blindness explodes the commonsense idea that vision simply consists in light striking the retina. Notre Dame shifted in your retinal image, but it didn't shift in your experience. More interestingly, change blindness creates a quandary for the computationalist notion that seeing just consists in the brain's construction of an "internal" mental representation of the world. For, in cases of change blindness, the representation must be crucially incomplete, and yet you do not experience the scene as incomplete--you are not struck by any cathedral-shaped holes in your visual field.

The sensorimotor theory attempts to explain this by positing that although you do not represent all of the visual details at once, you have access to all of the details, in that (1) there are details available in the world to access; (2) you are competent in the bodily and practical skills and habits necessary to move your eyes, head, or attention to any of these details; (3) you have some felt awareness of this access and this competence. This is a practical, embodied understanding of the subtle connections between what you do and what you experience--for instance, how an object will loom larger in sight as you move your body closer to it. Seeing, and sensory consciousness generally, involves all of this know-how and the social practices in which it is embedded.

Noë would not pretend to have answered all of the questions about consciousness or the self. Instead, he wants to demonstrate that the domain to which such questions must be addressed is the human organism, including the brain but also the organism's relations to its environment, both physical and socio-cultural. Mind science, like biology more broadly, "must give pride of place to the whole, living being."

What perks the ethical ear in particular is the normative--even Kantian--turn that Noë takes in Out of Our Heads. The book's argument begins with an exciting rethinking of the perennial philosophical "problem of other minds": How do we know that other persons are conscious, that they are subjects of experience? The problem is that we cannot observe a person's experiences; we can only observe the way he looks and sounds "on the outside." Noë admits that from a "theoretical, detached standpoint," the belief in other minds is not justified because it is inadequately supported by evidence. Nevertheless, it is justified--not by theoretical reason, but by practical reason. The commitment to the inner lives of others is not an intellectual commitment but a moral one:

Even to raise the question of whether a person or a thing has a mind is to call one's relation to that person into question. . . . For most of us, most of the time, our relations to each other simply rule out the possibility of asking the question. For the question can only be asked from a detached perspective that is incompatible with the more intimate, engaged perspective that we actually take up to each other.

Outside of the philosophy of science seminar, the problem of other minds simply does not arise because the reality of other persons is presupposed by the practices of social cooperation. Noë's work suggests an intriguing area for exploration: the nexus between auditory perception, social cooperation, and the attribution of moral status to beings that have a point of view. When such beings speak, we do not hear noises, or even voices. We hear persons. To hear a person is not merely to have something happen in the head. It is to take a thing to be a certain kind of being, and therefore to give that being a special kind of concern and respect.

Sex, dopamine, and rock 'n roll?

A neurotransmitter that makes the experience of sex, drugs, and food pleasurable is also triggered by listening to music. The "experience of pleasure while listening to music is associated with dopamine release." So finds a study published in the 9 January issue of Nature Neuroscience, "Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music."

From an initial pool of 217 participants, researchers from McGill University in Canada selected 8 subjects who displayed consistent "arousal" responses to music. During several listening sessions, their brains were scanned using PET and fMRI techniques. The study is one in a growing literature on the neurophysiology of musical frisson. But do we like music simply because it makes us feel good?

The authors write,

Most people agree that music is an especially potent pleasurable stimulus that is frequently used to affect emotional states. It has been empirically demonstrated that music can effectively elicit highly pleasurable emotional responses and previous neuroimaging studies have implicated emotion and reward circuits of the brain during pleasurable music listening particularly the ventral striatum, suggesting the possible involvement of dopaminergic mechanisms. However, the role of dopamine has never been directly tested. . . .

The study's demonstration of a dopamine link is remarkable, but it is also a temptation to reductionism, a cheap high to which many a science writer cannot say no. The Associated Press' coverage, circulating under the title, "Love music? Thank a substance in your brain," begins, "Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says."

Of course, even if they were to be corroborated, such results would not explain why you love music. In what was apparently the first scientific study of aesthetic frisson, "Thrills in response to music and other stimuli" (Physiological Psychology, 1980), A. Goldstein looked at American samples and found that only about half of the population were personally acquainted with the phenomenon. Experimental evidence suggests that for those who do experience "chills," the feelings are short lived. They tend to accompany moments of transition in music, such as harmonic modulations and crescendos.

What should raise even more serious philosophical scruples is the identification of the emotions of music with feelings of pleasure in the listener. More than a hint of this lurks in the language of the McGill article:

Pleasure is a subjective phenomenon that is difficult to assess objectively. However, physiological changes occur during moments of extreme pleasure, which can be used to index pleasurable states in response to music. We used the 'chills' or 'musical frisson' response, a well-established marker of peak emotional responses to music. Chills involve a clear and discrete pattern of autonomic nervous system (ANS) arousal, which allows for objective verification through psychophysiological measurements. Thus, the chills response can be used to objectively index pleasure, a subjective phenomenon that would otherwise be difficult to operationalize, and allows us to pinpoint the precise time of maximal pleasure.

Now surely it must be that one of the things we love about music is our "emotional response" to it; more precisely, our enjoyment of musical expressions of emotional states. Musical objects have what the philosopher Peter Kivy calls "expressive content." Somehow, by means that have yet to be explained, they can exhibit not just "thrills" but joy, mirth, tenderness, resolve, longing, grief, anxiety, fear, rage, bewilderment, serenity. And yet it does not seem to be the case that: (1) our enjoyment of these various expressions is the same thing as the enjoyment of some uniform feeling--call it pleasure--that they stir "inside" us; or even that (2) our enjoyment of expressive content in music is the enjoyment of corresponding, distinctive emotions inside us--musical expressions of grief that cause feelings of grief, expressions of rage that enrage us, expressions of fear that scare us, and so forth; still less that (3) our enjoyment of expressive content typically is connected to the tingling spines or erect hairs of the frisson.

There must be more to the savoring of sonority than the delivery of a chemical fix. And I say this as a stone-cold junkie.