I have a. So we'll make a start now.
Welcome, everybody, to the fourth seminar in the Unconscious Memory Network series.
It's great to see you all. So, Mark, the convenor of Just Say a few words about the network by way of invitation.
This network was set up to develop ways in which you might reduce the conceptual gap between mind and brain with a focus on unconscious memory.
And so far, we have examined the neurobiology and literature of of memory,
the neuroscience of reading, and what literature neuroscience can tell us about priming.
Coming up in a couple of weeks is a seminal Proustian memory, led by Gordon Sheppard, the eminent neuro anatomist at Yale,
and his daughter, Professor Christine Shepherd Ball, who teaches in the English faculty here.
We warmly invite your participation and collaboration and see if you have any suggestions.
Just drop me a line.
For those who have not attended this series before, what we do is hear one talk after another, pausing only very briefly for clarification questions.
And after we've had both papers, we take a short break for drinks and with drinks in hand, begin the discussion.
So to turn to today's topic, neuroscience and psychoanalysis,
I am delighted to introduce to you our chair, the Goldsmith Professor of English at Oxford, Laura Marcus.
Many of us know her through her welcome modernism, Virginia Woolf and film.
But perhaps with so many psychoanalysts in the room, Professor Marcus may be more familiar to you in the context of psychoanalysis.
She has edited Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as a collection of interdisciplinary essays on the Interpretation of Dreams.
And last year we saw both the publication of our landmark study Dreams of Modernity, Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema,
published by the Cambridge University Press and the Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature and Culture, published by Blackwell Wiley.
Please join me in welcoming our chair, Professor Marcus. Thank you very much.
So it's a great honour and pleasure to be asked to chair this session,
which I know a number of people all of us have been looking forward to, but the room is very crowded and that's excellent.
I'm going to introduce speakers one by one, as it were.
So first to introduce our first speaker, Professor Richard Brown,
who is a university research professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
But he has had a lot of history, spent a good deal of his career here at Oxford, including completing a degree in zoology in Oxford.
And he's returned as a senior visiting research fellow at St John's College, Oxford recently,
and also a visiting professorship at Wolfson College, which he held last year.
And the list of his achievements research the post he's held is very long.
I would just single out a few.
He was president of the International Behavioural and Genetic Society and President of the Canadian Society for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science.
And his work has been on neurological disorders through mouse models which we want to hear more about and working on Alzheimer's disease,
on Fragile X Syndrome, ADHD and other neurological disorders.
And he has also written wonderful work more on the history of science and perhaps we might be able to ask more about that in Question Time.
But today, he's going to be talking to us on the question of multiple memory systems in the brain,
integrating conscious and unconscious memory pathways.
So it gives me a very good welcome.
Well, I would like to thank very much, Professor Sutton Park, for inviting me to this symposium and everyone for making this sunshine.
As was mentioned in the introduction, most of our work these days is on mouse models of Alzheimer's disease.
And what I want to talk about is the problem of trying to understand mouse models of any disease and translating that information to human disorders.
So we sit back and forth from the human situation to the mouse situation.
So H.M. is probably the most famous person in psychology and neuroscience in memory.
Died recently, and he's famous because he's been a long term patient who had epilepsy,
and he had a bilateral removal of his medial temporal lobe, which caused enormous problems with memory and brand new.
Milner from Montreal Neurological Institute, a student of Donald Hebb, went and did the first experiments on age since the 1950s when this began.
And it has been an endless series of age.
I mean, it's been studied in every possible human learning and memory experiment that you can imagine.
This is a review paper by John Horgan in 2000 to have all the studies done on age and up to the end.
And there have been more recent reviews that are obituaries of age and of everything we've learned from H.M.
And what I want to start out with is the question H.
M had his medial temporal lobes removed as became many other areas of the brain, what could he do and what could he do?
So this is from Suzanne Perkins article.
So what was impaired at that picture?
Memory tests, words, them completion category decision, lexical decision,
what seemed to be normal pattern recognition words that were confused with similarly words,
exemplary reduction, fragments of vision from before spelling familiar words, certain words in other words.
So even though he'd lost a big chunk of his brain, a big chunk of his memory, he still could do some things.
And the the day this experiment was done, the world of the neuroscience, of learning and memory changed.
So Brendan Milner would go to HMS Room and she'd say, Hello, do you remember me?
No, I've never seen you before in my life. Do you remember this test?
No. I've never done this test before in my life. And the test was to take a pencil and trace the lines of this star when looking in a mirror.
And this is the ten trials they want.
And trials they do ten. Trials they three. And his ears went down to almost zero by the third day.
Each day he said he'd never done this test before.
So it was clear that memory was not just memory.
Memory must have at least two components a conscious, explicit memory and a sort of unconscious procedural or implicit memory.
So in preparing for this, I.
I was concerned that I didn't know what the unconscious was, although I have had surgery and been under anaesthetic and I do sleep.
So there were times and I was once in a car crash where I woke up on the side of the road with people saying, Is he dead?
Is he dead? I said, No, I'm not. I don't know how to look here.
So I'm conscious, not conscious, knowing when myself.
Is that a very you know, there's designated mental processes of which a person is not aware of,
but which are powerful effects of his or her attitudes. And then we'll see in the second thought today, in Freudian theory,
designated process as activated by desires, fears or memories which are unacceptable to the conscious mind.
Maybe a lot of critique of this so repressed.
Also designating that part of the mind or psyche which such processes operate from the Oxford English Dictionary.
If I look in a dictionary of psychology and look at unconscious memory and just
generally implicit memory and conscious cognitive processes involving thinking,
reasoning, judging, problem solving, you think about consciousness.
See incubation period of brooding required to do something to the point where it's forming a substance.
Uh, in cognitive psychology period of time, which no conscious effort is made to solve the problem and the solution comes to.
So there is something about unconscious memory and cognition.
It's like the problem. That solution just comes to you. I wasn't that interesting.
You don't have to really touch this. Very hard to be so implicit.
I'm sorry. Implicit memory at explicit memory, then, that you think of these facts.
The names I recall in recognition.
Parts of memory. Implicit memory that you say precede your memory.
Learning to ride a bicycle. I'm learning to draw this scar backwards.
And people with amnesia, you can say, well, they've lost their memory, but what does that mean?
And this leads into the whole world of multiple intelligences and multiple memory systems.
So you have somewhere it's a memory located in the brain.
And if you are free and all that, just there it is somewhere there.
We're all free knowledge, as it turns out.
So you had Larry Squire, this is one of my favourite drawings and try to think of a ten best drawings in neuroscience.
And this is one of those drawings that really tells the tale.
It's 1996, but still worth using that long term memory.
Divided into implicit and explicit memory.
We've got a gem's medial temporal lobe there. Facts and events we've got learning to ride a bicycle.
Motor skills astride of priming which you had a seminar on here.
Simple classical conditioning, fear conditioning and conditioned emotional responses involving the major and also in occasion the hippocampus,
I believe, conditioning the cerebellum and habituation in sensitisation involving reflex pathways.
This is such a favourite figure of mine that I've collected every version I could ever find.
I'm not going to show you them all, but this is from David Sweat's book,
and I know it's the one I mentioned David Sweat the show on it because he is an artist as well as a neuroscientist.
And in his book, every chapter begins with a painting that he did himself.
But here he's got unconscious learning, unconscious storage, certain types of subject.
The conscious recall, though I'm not sure, but he's unconscious, recall, love, interest, etc. and then conscious learning and working memory.
So a different type of division of labour of the memory systems.
And this is a play by Catherine Hankey on that altering the way you see this and I
should have deleted that one and just kept this one because she but she did say,
well we can look at memory in terms of rapid encoding and flexible associations.
Episodic memory is a canvas in your cortex, slow encoding of rigid association through basal ganglia, cerebellum,
your projects of procedural memory, classical conditioning, semantic memory and the rapid encoding of single units is a critical gyrus neuro.
So just about and it's like schools of multiple memory systems almost.
And you can ask a more detailed question. You can say, well, what is the neural circuitry underlying of memory?
And this is possibly the neural circuitry of the hippocampal type memory.
You've got the hippocampus connected to the subjective on the environment cortex better on the cortex through the centuries into the thalamus.
But the neuroendocrine and emotional hypothalamus, the phase of forebrain, the parietal lobe,
temporal lobe, frontal lobe, and you can try and trace the circuits involved in any memory.
And people are working on that. Just down the road here the other day, you can ask the question of what is the neurochemical basis of memory?
And for this, all I've chosen is that cholinergic system. You've got the nerve to experiment with acetylcholine in all the pathways.
There's the nucleus itself. It may not, which I spent four years working on, and they've been published my paper about that and better so.
And it has cholinergic pathways to all parts of the brain that could be involved in learning
and memory and are thought to underlie some of the problems in Alzheimer's disease.
And then you can go deeper to biochemical and molecular biology mechanisms.
Uh, calcium you're going to campaign for protein kinases.
Krebs And protein synthesis, brain growth neurotrophic factor and changes in that in the,
in the structure of the cell associated with learning and memory and long term biochemical changes.
And last week I heard you talk on PCA Zeta, which I thought was dead, but it's having a resurgence.
So there's a whole world of, yeah, I'll tell you about it. There's a whole world of molecular biology involved in learning.
Now, this is one of my favourite papers. And by a twist of fate, the author Rob McDonald, is here on Live at Oxford.
Stand up, Rob. He's one of the great experts in Canada and the world of multiple memory system theory.
And this was your Ph.D., wasn't it? And to show you how important this paper was last year, it was completely reprinted in behavioural neuroscience.
You say is reprinted twice or just that time in behaviour no science.
Last year, 2013, yeah, 2013 was reprinted.
So this is an important paper because it follows on from Brandon Miller's research with H m on trying to disassociate memory systems.
But Rob and my old pal going, why did it I mean,
is this is a broad range of methods that you can bake different arms with food and you can have different rules for the.
Rat or mouse to learn the eight hour made your mess and you can set up different rules and different visions of the brain.
So this is the experiment, too, with your neurotoxic lesions.
And so if you lesion the hippocampus and ask them to do a little shift paradigm, so you bait forearms,
they go to an arm, they get food, then they have to go to another arm to get food.
And the hippocampal lesion, they make a lot of errors.
The other lesions, they don't make any errors. You can also have a condition.
Q Prep that you can put a red light on one of the arms and the animal has to learn to go to the where the light is to get food.
And if you do that around immediately, then they can't make that discrimination.
And then you can have a wind stage situation where you put food in an arm.
An animal has to go back to the arm a second time to get another pellet of food.
And if you give it or subscribe to that, you get poor performance in that.
So a beautiful study of different effects of lesions, of different memory systems and how they encode different types of information.
And I'm glad Rob was here because I told him this is one of my favourite papers
and I forgot until this afternoon when I checked that it was in my talk.
So we move now to Alzheimer's disease, to humans with Alzheimer's disease, and we asked many questions.
And this question comes from research on cancer.
When you research on cancer, the question is, what is the first cell that gets cancer and how does it spread?
And so you can ask, what is the first cell that gets Alzheimer's disease and what's the system that it goes through?
And so you have patients with damage to the hippocampus, only patients with damage to the medial temporal lobes, much like H.
And then you have certain types of learning and memory that are impaired in certain types of learning and memory that are preserved.
And you can start to try and disassociate. And what does it mean to have a hippocampal system that's impaired?
What does it mean to have episodic memory that's impaired?
What kind of memory is preserved? And I'm going to go into this in a bit more detail in a second.
But the essence is when you lose your memory, you don't lose your memory.
You lose one type of memory. And the others may be spared, at least for some time, until the degeneration hits those other areas.
And so this is a case of piano playing know, Alzheimer's disease.
I mean, we often hear about people who forget the name of their children,
forget where they live, forget their hat, recognise their husband can still play the piano.
And so this was a reading of one patient in language abilities.
And can some of this, whatever that says it really does.
Yeah, let's add some tension and tension and the score is there with the stars on the show,
ones that are preserved to some extent, the others that decline.
And then sequencing remote implicit memory and autobiographical memory.
So here you see the sequencing they fail by you're the control subjects are getting scores of ten they're getting scores of two.
Whereas with some implicit memory, the controls are getting 5.6 and they're getting 4.4 and no significant controls 10.6, 0.2.
So a number of things are preserved in these people or this one person with Alzheimer's disease.
And what's interesting is when you start looking at what goes wrong and what's preserved and musical knowledge,
the ability to name that tune, to say what song it is that it each year.
Whereas the motor control part, the performance aspect is maintained at eight out of eight,
whatever the total score is, eight doesn't change over the years.
Five, five, four it doesn't change. And here this is the piano playing skill and many of the results that the FDA is vested.
Right? So there's only two significant differences. Through significant declines over three years, there is no decline significantly.
Rhythm, tempo, tone, quality, posture.
The motor control parts are not declining,
whereas the naming the song part is this is a paper and then with different patients, all of whom had some motor skill.
And so the output, the objective is to describe cognitive skills in patients with dementia.
What can they do? And they look at their particular skill.
So one patient continues to play the trombone in a Dixieland band.
Although they could not name the song, he was playing another completely dissolve jigsaw puzzle skillet.
And that's the dominoes. The fifth remains of the contact.
Gradually, you could not name the soup to articulate simple fitting rules,
so the motor component is staying there and cognitive component seems to be deteriorated.
And memory for music is interesting. A lot of people at McGill McGill University do memory for music and memory for music has two components.
As I said, the naming of the tune and the beat out, the failed food.
And so the explicit and implicit musical memory functions, the implicit being the motor control,
the ability to play continues to be spared in patients with maybe the explicit musical memory.
Recognising familiar, unfamiliar matters is impaired.
So you get this dissociation, the things that Rob does.
So they move to our mind. So Wonderful World and Manzarek tested zillions of mice over the last number of years.
You can have a lot of background strains in mice,
genetically inbred strains that the 57 black tick is the most common mouse that day are little French age.
And then you get transgenic Alzheimer's.
Most of us have genes put into them. So yeah, the ADP gene and of this one gene and they have five different genes and five
times and the three times that I'll tell you a story about each of these mice,
one story per mouse so as not to take up too much time.
So we have tested seven different mouse models every thing their first these days, every year, every number, every punctuation mark has a meaning.
And so we've agreed in the names that they the genes have put in in different ways.
They express different genes and they have different background strains.
All of that confounds things. But I won't go into that now. I talked about it last week in physiology.
There are also a number of different memory tests you can do numerous vitamins.
The spatial test of autism is.
That's rotary burning trying to both scoop has odour preferences, air conditioning, visual discrimination, breed policy,
division of startle, etc. So you have huge batteries of tests like we called it years ago, our mouse IQ test.
So the the Delta 89 mouse, a double transgenic mouse.
I tell you the story of the barn because it illustrates a number of things.
And we've published this in the Barnes Maze.
The mouse starts out in the middle, there's a loud noise, there's bright light, and it can run into one of these walls and find a high level.
And you record the time and the pathway and the latency, how it gets there,
what it does, what's going on in the mouse's mind as it tries to solve this problem.
And we can do it over a number of days, I should say something more,
so that what we do is we test it for a number of days with an escape or here that day,
and then one day we surprise it and move escape hole over there.
So just when it thinks it knows what it's doing, it has to rethink it.
Sort of like going down the Headington Road when it's all jammed up with roadworks.
Let's see what happened. Touch something. Okay.
Going away. This is where we get confused.
Next, I guess. Next is what I want. So this is the latency and that's the number of errors.
And we've got females and males, the white dots, the wildtype, the black dots are the transgenic and you see the trends.
And if are taking longer and making more errors, both females and males, females are slightly worse than men.
So you've got a learning difference. When you reverse it, they all get confused and then they learn it again.
And the bigger that is, the better they've learned over here, a spatial technique.
So now that mice could learn this in a number of different ways, hopefully I've got it here.
The mice can run around at random and bump into the correct form, and this is the amount of their trials they run around the rat.
They don't want anything to at the beginning, but gradually they start running around at random.
At least the wild type, the transgenic still running around at random a bit more.
And when you finish running around at random, you say, okay, if I go there, I just go, right, I'm going to sequence a procedural rule.
So what's that? When they develop a procedural rule and the transgenic mice work by procedural more,
when you discover where the whole thing is, you can look around there and say, Oh, there is the door.
I don't have to go around the wall. I don't have to go. I can focus on that green sign.
I go right to the door. So they develop a spatial strategy and the wild type are much better at developing a spatial strategy than the transgenic.
So their little mouse minds are working differently than the normal mouse.
That control mouse is more rapidly getting rid of its random behaviour.
It's developing a procedural passive in switching into a spatial tax.
And so you can say they have two types of learning, a procedural learning.
Every time I touch something, I don't even have to touch it very much.
Okay. And show. No, I don't want any show I want next. Thank you, little machine.
Now you do a memory test. At the end of the day, you you put it in there with no escape call and say, where does the mouse take the stakeholders?
So females and males and females make more errors of this than males and there's not as big a difference.
And between that, there's the correct or not and the one next to it, anyone on the other side.
It's not as big a difference between their females, whether it's transgenic or wild type, but the male is a huge difference.
There's the wild type males and there's the ATP males.
They're not as good at spatial orientation as the wild type mouse.
But then we ask the question, what happens in the reversal memory test?
So it used to go to the door over there, the exit over there.
Now that's the correct one. So what you do well, you go to the correct one or the one next to it.
Not very many areas. The wild type are better than the trend setting.
But what if it's not there? You go to the old place now that means the little mouse brain has two memories.
It has today's memory where how to get out of the maze, yesterday's memory and last week's memory.
How you used to get out of the maze so you can infer that the little mouse has only one type of memory or one type of learning.
It can flip back and forth. So let's go to the five page mouse and the rotor right there, learning to ride a bicycle path.
You put them on this drive, you turn it on and it turns slightly faster to slightly faster.
So they have to coordinate the. Cell phone. And they can learn to balance on it and to stay on it.
And we test these mice from birth to death.
Three, six, nine, 12, 15 months of age.
You see at three months of age, these two in the transgenic bats, the female, they're fine at six months of age, they're fine at nine months of age.
The transgenic are falling off sooner. At 12 months of age, they're getting to be post in 15 months of age.
They can hardly balance on this game at all. Notice in general, the females are better than the males.
They say, Well, you've got a genotype difference and you've got a sex difference.
Well, you would be fooled. So what you have to do.
Oh, isn't that annoying? I guess I'll be talking about that later.
So you've got now a motor control problem and it's five times five.
And the motor learning problem is you can't stay on the road. You can't learn.
And these are exactly the same mice tested by force two every three months for most of his life.
And so they know what to do. They've done it before, but they're failing because of motor control problems.
Let's look at the Maurice Waterman's here. They swim.
You put them in at various places, and they swim to this platform that is standing water.
And we run through this platform for a few days and then we trick them and move it over there.
Then we get an invisible platform. I want to talk about that. They get four trials a day for three days.
Then we switch them over and see what their little mouse mind is thinking.
So this again tells you many here, the same mice three, six, nine, 12, 15 months of age.
And the males show the shift here,
suggesting they're using a phase of approach that females not so much at six months of age, hard to tell them apart.
At nine months of age, at 12 months of age, you're starting to have a sex difference.
And is that for transgenic mice?
They're not doing well compared to the wild type.
And by 15 months, when they're perfectly separate, it is much harder to do it at all.
Whereas the Wildcats are not only learning rapidly, they're using a spatial approach.
So now you've got a big separation in their ability.
And is it confounded by motor control? Some of it is, but some of it's not.
You look at a memory test, you just take out that platform and ask them where they think they're going.
Just look at this one. Correct. Three months of age, no problem.
Six months, nine months, five months, 15 months.
The transgenic mice can no longer remember. They're not using a spatial approach, but they can still solve the problem.
Not so well. So maybe. Maybe the tests aren't hard enough.
We turn to rob McDonald's experiment with knowing right and the vision cues you and
my friend in now in France who developed the eight hour radio made for mothers.
So these are the little kids. You can put a pallet in any one of these arms.
You can do it different ways. And we baited four arms at random.
And if they went to bed in order to get the food, they did it correct.
They would do an animated arm. They have a reference memory there.
If they go to A and get the food, they go back, they do it.
They have a working memory here. So they're juggling a lot of little mouse thoughts in their mind and we test them.
These are different groups of mice that each age two, six, 9 to 15 months of age,
it doesn't matter the but the working memory errors are higher at every age in the transgenic mice.
So the reference memory here is if occasionally you get a six difference.
So they're they're not having really age related effects, but they're having problems.
It doesn't look like a big problem, but you average them all together, but they're making more and more errors.
So now what about the motor function of the transgenic mice?
This is so there is the world's mice and there's the transgenic mice.
And every time they explain this, they get it wrong because the transgenic mice are doing better than usual.
It doesn't matter who test them, it doesn't matter what age they're tested.
We replicated this now at least four times. So the transgenic mice are doing better in this motor control group.
Even they did worse than working memory reference group. And the females are doing better than the males and females of each one.
The females are better. But now you have to remember males are you and females.
So if you just do a correlation of body weights, there's a high potential for it,
especially when you get to the last day they fight and it doesn't matter whether you're male or female.
The lighter ones do better than the heavier ones. In fact, on average, females are lighter.
So the the sex difference washes out when you control for body weight.
But the genotype difference stays. Why?
Why? Why is that mouse with three different Alzheimer's genes, genes doing a better job at motor not just motor coordination,
but motor learning, a procedural type of learning, implicit learning, not explicit learning.
So what have we learned about this from this? Just small examples of 728 experiments have done in the last ten years.
The Delta 89, the double transgenic mouse has, of course, spatial learning.
It uses procedural, not spatial learning has poor spatial memory.
The procedural learning and memory in the five times mouse is poor, maybe because of fear for motor control as a used motor function.
It also has forestation and triple transgenic for some unknown reason.
Probably because of that. How do you have very good procedural memory, reduced spatial reference and working memory?
So you see these different memory systems gradually pulling apart.
So what have we learned about learning? And what I learned the last hour, I forgot to put an arrow down here.
So you start a person or a mouse, you don't know what you're doing, you have a random approach.
Then you develop a procedural approach, go right,
and then you can develop a spatial search for a semantic search or episodic search, which I gave an instructor afternoon.
So if you don't know where this is, I'm sorry to discuss it, but you can go back and forth.
If your space of search doesn't work, you can go back to a procedural search that doesn't work.
And no doubt you go back to a random search back and forth so you're different.
It's not like you're fixated on one way of doing things.
You can slip in different types of learning, different mechanism.
So what about very well, you can score in memory.
And so where that platform is in advance, there's this time where that from was last time, where is last time?
And so if this memory doesn't work, you might want other memory.
Well, what's the mechanism? You ought to invite Rob McDonald because he has worked on that a lot.
You ought to invite him to give a talk and he can answer these questions.
Well, now we come to memory networks, and this is a case from my own life.
Last time I was in England, I got on a plane at Heathrow and one of my students, one of my former students,
it worked with me for about five years, got on the plane behind me and you sat right behind me and his wife.
Do you think I could remember his name? So I knew he went into college and how he did is all these women that receive it that he got married.
His wife's name came up and she was sitting beside him. He was making tangible advances, enjoying life.
He lived in Montreal. He did venison every year. His wife bought him a piano and they got an apartment together.
Why? Why? Why could I not remember his name?
The whole damn flight? I'm thinking, what the [INAUDIBLE] is this kid's name?
He's sitting right behind me. I've known him for years. I finally said I can't remember anything better.
Then of course it's been. Why, but why? Why?
Why is that gone with all this? I could tell you everything.
How he met his wife, how they're both my students in different years.
And we both went through like, why did this name go my getting Alzheimer's?
Or am I just aged and feeble? Or is that common problem?
So how do we understand memory changes in ageing and Alzheimer's disease?
Well, one question is which memories are lost and which remain?
And what's the neural mechanism underlying that lost?
And the remaining memories, explicit or conscious memories, are lost.
And you try and use implicit or unconscious memories or networks to edit memory.
And so how do we understand why some memory systems fail and others don't?
If only Donald had were still alive, maybe he could help because he developed the idea of self assemblies and I was lucky enough to get
both reprinted in writing an introduction to it and he came up with the idea of these self assembly.
So I'm going to ask you about cells, at least in psychoanalysis.
I've already written questions in other processes. So what's going on?
How do we can we use have cell assemblies to think about memories this.
Is this my memory of Ben and I've lost that bit with his name?
Or does my memory of Ben. And I'd like to be part of it.
And rest remains. How is it that so much remains? But you can't remember one certain thing now?
Is it an Alzheimer's disease that maybe this system fails your cognitive abilities?
Motor system? That's the visual system. Areas over the Internet.
Jim Broadbent areas.
How is it that they remain and one feels it may be that in different clinical disorders one system fails and you develop a clinical disorder.
But as other systems are normal, how do we understand neural functioning in terms of these large networks?
And so there we are. There's our brain there. We are thinking about these things.
Thank you very much. Excellent.
Well, put it for a second, speaker. And I'm sure Professor Mark Soames is going to be familiar to many, if not most of us here.
I first came upon his work some years ago, and I think the fascination for many of us, as it were,
coming from the humanities is that he has been one of the few people, it seems to me, to try and connect neuroscience with psychoanalysis.
I'm sure we'll be talking more about this this later.
Going back to the early Freud, the Freud that, as it were, lacanian psychoanalysis pushed out because we wanted script and text and narrative.
But but we're now going back to the early Freud of the neuro psychology.
And Professor Soames is editing the complete neuroscientific works of Sigmund Freud and amazingly being the new translator,
the translator of the Revised Standard edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Freud, the 24 volumes of stretch his work.
So in addition to all that,
he is chair neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and unrelated to neurosurgery surgery at San Bartholomew's for London School of Medicine,
honorary professor of Neurology, neurological surgery at Cornell Medical School in New York.
He's a practising analyst with membership of the New York Psychoanalytic Society
and honorary and she's honorary fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.
His sister publications is much too long for me to to even make a stab at it with over 300 articles and five books.
But his most recent book with Oliver Turnbull is The Brain and the Inner World,
and he is continues as a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and the South African Psychoanalytic Association,
of which he's president and research chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
So really someone wonderful for us with amazing footholds in both those camps.
I suppose so. Please welcome him to.
So since you mentioned that I'm president of the South African Psychoanalytical Association,
I must tell you it has eight members, one president and seven vice presidents.
I'm very glad to have been asked to give this too, because I like talking to many neuroscientists especially.
I enjoy the questions because it's not boring. You get to think about things from an entirely different perspective.
I also was glad to be asked to give this talk because I think that some recent work I've
been doing with two close colleagues of mine on the brain mechanisms of consciousness is,
I think, of particular interest to the sorts of things that I understand motivate this series of seminars.
So I'll just dive straight into that.
Some new developments in our field in relation to brain mechanisms of consciousness that I've been working on together with York tanks
up in Washington and with Tony Dimarzio in California and more recently with and to a lesser extent with Carl Friston here in London.
And let's see if they do interest you.
I certainly think that Bill provokes those of my neuroscientific colleagues who are here.
We start with the question as to where consciousness comes from.
What is it in the brain that generates consciousness in the common sense view?
And I think it was probably from common sense that human Locke and that lot also derived.
The view is that it comes from our sensory perceptual modalities consciousness.
So obviously the contents of our consciousness is so obviously made up of what we perceive, what we see, what we hear.
And to a lesser extent, you know, touch, taste, smell and so on.
And of course, our cognitions have the same sort of content, the same sort of qualities,
the same sorts of properties as our external perceptual modalities.
And so we following in the footsteps of those great philosophers we think of our cognitions
derive from memories to ultimately also be derived from our external perceptual modalities.
This, in fact, is the totality of the stuff that makes up our consciousness.
And as I say, it squares the world with our common sense. The problem is, it appears to be completely wrong.
Consciousness is not generated by our perceptual inputs or the memory traces attaching to them at all consciousness.
And this is not needs. Consciousness is generated in a primitive part of the brain, in the upper brainstem, very ancient parts of the brain.
And this we discovered in the 1940s, in fact,
it was such a great surprise in the 1940s that we still haven't entirely gotten among our minds around it,
which is why this is old news, but also new news.
McGoohan and Morrissey did a series of experiments in the forties in which they sought to establish brain mechanisms of sleep and wakefulness,
which is more or less the same thing as brain mechanisms of consciousness.
And it was to their very great surprise that they found in a series of experiments,
the most dramatic of which was severing all the sensory inputs in the brains of cats,
with the prediction that the cat would fall asleep because there's no consciousness streaming in anymore.
And that's simply isn't what happened. The cats not only stayed awake, they were very awake, quite educated to be without any sensory inputs.
They still did go to sleep and wake up. But this was according to the normal sleep waking cycle.
It didn't have anything to do with the deprivation of sensory inputs.
And in that same series of experiments, there were some single cell recordings that McGoohan and Morrissey did,
and it was in these recording studies that they found that these structures that are generating the consciousness,
the structures that wake the cats up in the morning and put the cat to sleep again at night, that those structures are help.
So that part of the brain has very little connection with the external world, especially the deep nuclei that I'm referring to.
Of course there are parts of the brainstem which are in connection with the outside world,
but the structures that generate our consciousness, that generate our wakefulness,
that make us conscious,
that make us different from comatose people are deeply embedded in the upper brainstem and consciousness is generated from their endogenous.
Consciousness is a property not about perceptual modalities,
not of the streaming of information from the outside world, but rather it's a property of the brain.
The brain itself, in a very ancient part, generates the consciousness.
Now, as I told you, this is something we've known since the forties.
Penfield and Jaspers did other experiments on humans, cases of epilepsy surgery in which they were able to confirm.
Magoon and Marissa's observations and came to the same conclusion.
They called this the synchronous italic region, and they came to the conclusion that this is the part of the brain where consciousness is generated.
That if you're going to have a generalised seizure in which consciousness is lost,
it has to recruit this part of the brain stem, which, as I said, they called the sentence italic region.
So why is this? Why do I need to tell you about this?
As I said, it's such old news that the reason why it's both old and new news is because we use the
kind of a semantic fudge to get out in order to keep our theories the same as they were,
despite the fact that we had overwhelming evidence that our theories were wrong.
Our theory being, as I said, the commonsensical one that conscious the contents of our consciousness are derived from those
parts of our brain which receive and represent the activities of our peripheral sensory organs.
That is to say, the organs which transduced information about the state of the outside world.
So the semantic fudge that we came up with was to divide consciousness into two components.
And we said that the contents of consciousness, the stuff that's filling your mind right now, that this we can keep it exactly the same as it was.
Contents of consciousness are derived from your external perceptual organs and ultimately represented on
the surface of the cortex in the way that we always thought that it was this unwelcome news down here.
We decided to call this the level of consciousness. We called it wakefulness.
And we distinguished this sort of quantitative dimension of consciousness from the qualitative dimension, the qualities of our consciousness.
So what we are experiencing now and the fact that we are awake is a kind of background,
quantitative and a necessary prior condition for us to be able to have qualities of consciousness and contents of consciousness.
Okay. So that's from the fifties onwards. That's that's how we got around this, this unwelcome fact.
But really and this brings me not closer to the present, although some of the things I'm going to tell you.
We've also known for years. Really, that just isn't correct.
It isn't correct to say, well, let me put it in an absolute nutshell.
It feels like something to be awake is what we've realised that there is a content to wakefulness,
that there is a quality to wakefulness, and that content and that quality is the word I've just used.
Feelings, affective emotional feelings are not derived from the external perceptual world.
You can't see rage. You can see somebody who's in a rage.
But the rage, the feeling of rage or of sadness or of anxiety or whatever, these feeling states,
these emotional feeling states, are contents of consciousness, and they don't come from our external perceptual modalities.
In fact, the contents of our consciousness are made up of more than seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. The contents also made up of these feelings.
How could we have left that out? I hope that you literature people you know will forgive us, but we did sort of leave that out for decades,
that the contents of consciousness include feelings and that there's feelings.
Not only are they not generated on the external cortical surface, but that very same part of the brain,
which generates the so-called level of consciousness wakefulness, the so-called quantitative dimension of consciousness,
is also the part of the brain that generates the feelings and in fact,
the things that the psychoactive substances that that to psychiatrists tinker with are,
for the most part, the source nuclei of the neurotransmitter systems that they fiddling with are in this part of the brain.
So we might even have been able to infer from that simple fact that why is it that all these psychotropic medications concern,
you know, the neurotransmitters that are released at the terminals of these systems which activate the entire forebrain?
It's not only a part of the brain that should concern a coma care and anaesthetist specialists, but also psychiatrists.
And as I say, in fact, it is the parts of the brain that the tinkering with, even though they never seem to think about it that way.
The fact is, as Penfield and Jaspers observed in in the fifties, you can remove great swathes of cortex.
What you do is you lose certain types of information processing, but you can't render the patient unconscious by removing cortex.
The cortex simply isn't the organ of the conscious mind.
The organ of the conscious mind is Thornhill. Now, there's absolutely oodles of evidence for that.
And I'm just going to show you what I think is the most sort of in a way,
the most moving evidence and in some sense is also the most dramatic evidence for what I've been telling you, which I'll just restate.
Consciousness is an endogenous property of the brain.
It's generated from below. It is not something that streams in from outside.
That's if the consciousness that's generated from below is switched off, then all the rest of consciousness is switched off.
If you lesion this tiny structure that I'm pointing to now, which is called the Perry Aqueduct,
which is the size of a jelly bean, and there's one of them inside of your head right now.
If you damage that structure, you will go into coma.
Absolutely. Definitely. It is a 100% certain prediction.
It is it is impossible to remain conscious without an intact Perry aqueduct, too.
Great. That can't be said for anything up here. And as I say, you can remove whole hemispheres.
And I'm going to show you no cases of high adrenaline 70 where the child is born with no forebrain.
They're born with no cortex. These little slivers of cortex, you are totally non-functional.
There's no white matter connecting them to thalamus.
They therefore can't be activated. And in any event, if you look at them histologically they are closed.
So the even these little flaps of cortex here are effectively functionally absent.
But look at this. These are children who have a brain stem and nothing else.
All these children conscious? You bet. Your bottom dollar, they all they have a normal sleep waking cycle.
And unfortunately for obvious reasons, they are given to seizures.
They're given, in fact, especially to episode seizures.
And their parents have no difficulty recognising when the child's awake, when the child's asleep,
when the child's had the seizure and is in the absence states and when they're back again.
So they are they are conscious.
And I hope you can see from this little sequence, by the way, these photographs are shown to you with the permission of the parents.
This little sequence here. This is the child without a full brain, without any cortex.
Yeah. Her little sibling is put on her chest and she goes, oh, the you know,
the sort of emotional response of the pleasure of having the little baby put on her chest.
And here is another child. Also hydrogens defending absolutely no forebrain, absolutely no cortex.
And she is obviously not only conscious but emotionally present, which is the important part of the story.
I want to go back and reiterate something that I've said already, but say it's slightly more specifically.
I've said that all of the consciousness that is generated in the forebrain, that is to say the somatic sensation, the vision, the hearing,
the parts of the cortex that generate these different properties,
these different modalities that we thought made up the totality of the contents of our consciousness.
None of these structures generate consciousness unless they are activated from below.
You can remove any one of those. You can remove the whole of the full.
Brennan As I showed you, you don't remove consciousness. All you remove is certain types, certain certain types of information processing.
But if you lesion this area over here, you lose all of that type of consciousness.
Therefore, and here's my point. Therefore, what we are talking about is a hierarchical relationship in which these types of consciousness,
which are not intrinsic to this part of the brain. Consciousness is not intrinsic to this part of the brain.
The consciousness is derived from down here. This is what activates the rest of the brain.
And so that's what we always knew. This activates the forebrain.
And it is this area here that activates, therefore, the consciousness that we thought came from the external world.
And we just have to get our heads around that, if you'll excuse the pun.
We just have to get our heads around the fact that the consciousness does not come with the perceptual information.
The perceptual information registered in cortex and the cognition derived from it is intrinsically unconscious.
Some of the things that you heard just now, and Richard Bronze talk refers to a whole sea of information that we've gathered over the last few
decades in cognitive neuroscience about all the things that the full brain can do without consciousness.
You know, there's just about no cognitive operation that can't be performed without consciousness unless you start being tautological and saying,
well, episodic memory can't be performed without consciousness.
And that's only because the definition of episodic memory is that it's conscious memory,
that there has to be a central subject bear having the memory,
but reading and solving problems, priming, as you heard, learning the most complex of tasks, all manner of things, decision making of all kinds,
all of this cognitive gymnastics that we are so proud of and that we attribute to our full brains
because we have so much of it in comparison to the mice and rats that you heard about earlier,
all of this stuff, brilliant as it is, commendable as it is, and proud as we should be of it, does not intrinsically require consciousness.
The consciousness, as I say, comes from down here. And there's a hierarchical relationship between all these operations and this stuff down here.
And I've told you already that this is emotional, that this sort of consciousness is not without quality, it's not without content.
And when I say that there's a hierarchical relationship between these two aspects of consciousness,
I hope that you can see implicit in what I'm saying is also this, that the core basic, raw stuff of consciousness,
the fundamental type of consciousness,
the type of consciousness upon which all this other type of consciousness depends is affective consciousness in its most fundamental form,
is affect, is feeling. And when you think about all of the things that we have been puzzling about in cognitive neuroscience,
when we ask ourselves, but what is what is the consciousness for, you know, why?
Why do we need consciousness if we can do all of these brilliant things cognitively without consciousness?
What is the consciousness that it boils down to that to what I've just said to you, it it's feeling that's what you can't have without consciousness.
Feeling your way into your cognitions and feeling your way through your cognitions.
There's some sort of comical problems that cognitive neuroscience have got that good scientists have got themselves into,
like, for example, the famous bonding problem where they ask, how can it happen?
The information all arrives here in V1, V2, and then it gets absolutely fragmented in the brain as we process all of the visual stuff.
And then over there the movement happens and over there the colour gets added in.
Over there you discover whose face you're looking at, how come all of it gets sent back into this combined bound experience that I have?
It's it's all of that. It's got to do with the misconception that that's where the consciousness is being generated.
The consciousness is down here, it's yours, it's endogenous.
It has to do with my state and it's your consciousness.
And you are activating your perceptions and you are experiencing them.
Your presence inside of all of that cognition is what binds it.
So that's how it works, that we always should have known that from the forties and fifties.
And as I say, it's this that together with the colleagues I mentioned earlier, you know,
that we've gradually been sort of almost embarrassed putting together and realising, well, actually that's how it works.
And it's probably got something to do with the kind of aversion within our field to affect and to subjectivity and, you know, to,
to the stuff that's back to the departments like English literature, you know,
always did and probably always will say much more about that than we do.
So that's how we see it.
And at least that's how the group of colleagues that I mentioned earlier, how those of us who are working on this theory, this is how we see it.
We think that consciousness in its totality is generated here and then lends itself by activating these forebrain cortical thalamic mechanisms.
It is, as it were, samples those representations and lends consciousness to them.
It sort of projects us into our representations which are intrinsically unconscious.
I mean, I really hope I don't need to argue that, you know, this is absolutely definitely established in a million ways,
that all of that cognitive stuff happens without consciousness.
What what it being activated by these structures adds, is the possibility of your being able to feel your way into it.
So now that leads to this question of said, what is the consciousness for?
Well, you know, what I've done in this little drawing here, the red structures, these are body monitoring, body regulating structures.
The hypothalamus is the big ticket item button in this area,
prostrate the stream of the nucleus of the Taurus over the apparent brachial nucleus and certain intricate organs.
These those structures are directly related to monitoring the internal blur and the bodily economy.
They tend to project to these purple structures not incomprehensibly represent, represented, represented,
just wanting you to be able to see things like the dorsal nucleus, nucleus like a surrealist ventral segmental area.
Also these non-specific binds the public structures that here which in turn activate the forebrain.
These are thought and this is theory. These are thought to be connected to these body monitoring structures.
Because how are you doing aesthetically?
How you doing in relation to these many parameters of, of the vital needs of the body salt, sugar, oxygen, water, temperature and so on.
How you're doing in relation to these things, you have to have some sort of way of monitoring that as a subject.
How am I doing? Am I doing well? Am I doing badly within the biological scalar values?
And according to this theory,
feelings evolved as a jolly good way of being able to determine how you do anything that's good for your survival and reproductive success.
Monitored in this way feels good, it's pleasurable.
Anything bad for your survival and reproductive success measured in this way feels bad.
So you avoid doing those things which feel bad. You prefer to do those things that feel good.
Why? Because it enhances your chances of surviving and reproducing.
That's what consciousness is for. These are very basic 525 million years old.
Those structures, we share them with all vertebrates. Above them are these limbic structures which have which are more complex.
It's not a simple matter of monitoring the here and now in the James language sense of the word of your bodily economy.
But but built in stereotyped behavioural compulsions like fear and rage and exploratory foraging and maternal care and attachment bonding and so on.
All of them with unique neuro anatomies, unique chemistries and unique feeling, states that go with them, that compel us to behave in certain ways.
These are varieties of pleasure and pleasure, which are properties of these limbic circuits.
It's not a matter only of here and now. It's also these built in structures, as I say,
that gain intrinsic properties of brain generating these these emotional types of consciousness, which in turn give rise to learning.
So if I take just for example, this what we call the wanting circuit or the seeking circuit,
the so-called badly named brain reward circuit, this dopamine object circuit in the medial forebrain bundle.
This thing motivates the animal, as included, to go out into the world to seek to satisfy our needs.
There you learn what actually satisfying your needs satisfies your needs.
Likewise, in relation to the built in mechanisms as to how to how to deal with noxious stimuli.
But then you have to learn in addition to the in-built ones,
you have to learn about all sorts of noxious things that you couldn't do that evolution couldn't have predicted.
And so this whole full brain business adds detail edge content to these basic in the tools for living.
Coming from this instinctual affective part of the mind and feeling your way into these representations is hard.
The things that you couldn't predict, how you start to add meaning to them, how you start to grade them.
Is this good? Is this bad? You have to feel your way into these things in order to be able to know what they mean, to know what to do with them,
to know how to respond to them, and all of the complexities that come with this, that's what conscious cognition is for, is our hypothesis.
Conscious cognition is there in order for you to be able to feel your way through life's problems.
Once you've solved the problem, once you know how to get to work, for example, you don't keep on thinking, Is this good?
Is this the right way? Is this bad? You know, you're traumatised. And here we move to the famous unconscious cognition and unconscious memory.
You only need explicit memory, you only need episodic memory.
You only need to be able to feel your way through your representations when feelings are required.
But it seems as if the great aim of cognition is to get beyond these troublesome feelings and to be able to automatons things,
to just know exactly how it works. So where is at the level of the brainstem?
There are these homeostatic mechanisms which if you deviate from the set point, it feels good or it feels bad.
This is how you know, gosh, this is good, this is bad.
You know, these inbuilt mechanisms down here in relation to vital needs, the same sort of thing seems to happen up at,
at the level of these cortical thalamic representational processes that it's
you have to feel your way through things when there's all this uncertainty,
but then you find a solution that actually meets the need in the outside world.
Then the feelings can recede. And so you don't need episodic, conscious, explicit cognition anymore.
And the whole thing gets automatons. Then Bob's your uncle and you're a zombie, and that's what you cognitions aiming for.
I really think that it's kind of alarming that that does seem to be what cognition is aiming for,
the absolute mastery of the environment in relation to your needs so that the feelings can be removed from the equation.
Thank God that world is so unpredictable, so full of surprises, that that ideal some of my cognitive colleagues never, never is actually reached.
So now why am I putting this picture here next to it? Well, it's because this is Freud's drawing of this same apparatus.
And as you know, I am also a psychoanalyst,
and I'm particularly interested in the relationship between the sorts of things that we deal with in psychoanalysis,
the lived life of the mind and the sort of stuff that we deal with in cognitive neuroscience,
that learning with all the wonderful tools that we have available to us these days,
about the same parts of nature that studied from the external mechanistic point
of view rather than from the subjective experiential life point of view.
I'm very keen on drawing parallels between the two and seeing how you know, how we can use how we can correct viewpoint dependent errors.
So it's very gratifying to find that Freud's it, you know, that the drives,
the parts of the mind that that responds to the demands made upon us to perform work by dint of its connection with the body,
that this can be localised. You know, it's also the hope, the perceptual.
Surfaces and the memory systems that are attached to them.
These can be localised. Freud called them aid and ego.
And the fact that these things down here drive these things up here, you know,
it's very nice to see that we can more or less dynamically localise that relationship.
But the big surprise is this Freud, as you can see from this drawing, thought of the ID as being synonymous with the unconscious,
or at least overlapping in very large part with what he called the unconscious.
But if you think about what I told you at the beginning of this short presentation,
as much as this part of the brain performs all the functions that Freud attributed to it, in fact, this part of the brain,
very far from being unconscious, is the fault of all consciousness and of affective consciousness,
which you would think would be the part I think Freud's pleasure principle governs down here.
You know, you would think that this would also please psychoanalysts and Freud's to discover that this part of the brain,
the part of the brain, is generating all these primitive, instinctual affective mechanisms, the compulsive motivations that go with them.
But in fact, if Freud was it was claiming, as he was, that this part of the mind is unconscious,
then how on earth could it be the generator of ethics?
In fact, how could there be a pleasure principle governing this part of the mind?
What's what is a pleasure principle that's unconscious? I mean, what is the point of pleasure and unpleasant if you don't feel it?
You know, so the great error, it appears in Freud's topologies is this type of this topographical model of the mind.
There are many contradictions in it which are happily sort of like resolved when we
realise in fact the part of the mind that performs the functions that Freud called it,
a fall from being unconscious. This is, as I said, the font of all consciousness and consciousness in the raw, its most basic form is effort and,
and these primitive feelings which represent demands upon the mind to perform work because they're problems.
Something's going wrong here. Something I can't manage. And that's what all the cognition is for.
It's to learn. How do I deal with this feeling in the outside world?
How do I meet the needs, solve the problems that these feelings represent?
And the aim of doing all of that is, as I've said to you already, in order to render it unconscious.
So the great irony is that the ID is the conscious part of the mind,
the function of the ego, which Freud thought of as being the conscious part of the mind.
The function of the ego is to temporarily represent its workings,
its cognitive doings in consciousness, so that you can feel your way through the problems,
and then ultimately to automatons that cognition to render it unconscious,
which is the ideal state of affairs as far as the ego and cognition is concerned.
In order to be able to that is to say, tame all these feelings, all of these emotions, all of the demands upon the mind to perform work.
So where does this leave us? And this is the last thing I'm going to say to you.
Where does this leave us as far as Freud's repressed and the famous unconscious is concerned?
I think that it's it's not a different place from the unconscious that I've spoken
to you about already in relation to cognition that you heard about earlier,
in relation to memory mechanisms,
the unconscious of the cognitive scientists is the same place as the unconscious of the Freudian and the psychoanalysts,
2 to 2 to sort of roughly and readily translated into functional anatomy.
It's a sort of chunking down from cortex to a basal ganglia, cerebellum, sort of levels of functioning.
This is automatism of of, of cognition.
This is what happens with the sort of normal process that I spoke about earlier.
But I think that what the repressed consists in and this is an absolutely speculative but I think worthy of some attention hypothesis,
is that it's the same thing, but it's premature.
That's when you've solved the problem, like how to get to work you can legitimately or the representational cognitive process involved.
But if you console that and you're still traumatised that then you have repressed it.
Why would we do that? Well, it's because there are consciousness is a very small place.
You can only think about a very few things at any one point in time, so you must use it wisely.
And if there are insoluble problems, there's no point in bothering your mind with the day in and day out because you're not going to get anywhere.
It's best to just put it out of mind and say, Well, let me get on with the things that I can deal with in childhood.
If you care to remember, there are a great many things you simply can't solve.
There are a great many once a great, many desires.
A great, many feelings that are generated in childhood.
There's all sorts of bubbling over it, things which cannot be resolved in the outside world.
I'll give you a sort of an example. I'm a little three year old Mark Salt, and I look at my daddy and I think I want to be big like him.
Well, you can't because you three. Yeah. I want to go to work like him.
You can't. You don't know. What the [INAUDIBLE] are you doing? Nobody's going to give you a job. I want to drive a car like him.
I want to be married. I want to be married to her. These things are you know, they're not going to happen.
I want babies now. You can't. So you know all the feelings and all the desires and all the hatreds and all
the resentments and all the anxieties and everything that go with all of that.
You know, it's no point in pondering at all and trying to resolve it cognitively just traumatise it and say, okay, that's the way that it is.
You know, I'm not thinking about that anymore.
Then frozen in time and then, you know, it opens up your mind to be able to carry on with those things that you can resolve.
I think that's what the repressed is. It's automatons, cognitions.
Just illegitimately or traumatised. The problem hasn't been solved.
What that means is the feelings still bubble up but pop out all over the place.
So what Freud famously called the threat of the return of the repressed,
because your predictions, in fact constantly lead to what Friston calls prediction errors.
And then you have this unbound energy again. Then you have this free energy, and then you have the effect again.
But it can't be attached to the representations that it belongs to, because those representations have been rendered unconscious.
That's how I think it works.
And therefore our task as psychoanalysts, in order to allow reconsolidation to happen, in order to allow this frozen in time,
wrongheaded solution and wrongheaded prediction to be revised in the light of new knowledge is it has to be felt again,
has to be rendered into episodic memory again. It has to be with all of the feelings and all of the troubles and all of the difficulties it involves.
Take a deep breath. Hold your analyst hand. Little, little. But you know what I mean.
And in this way, you know, think your way through it again.
And automaton is a better solution. Something like that, I think, is how it works in psychic analysis.
And I'll end just with this one last observation, which my psychoanalytic colleagues also don't like.
Some of the things I've just told you, and I point out to them that our patients don't come to us saying, Doctor, I'm unconscious of something.
Can you please tell me what it is? Our patients come to us saying, I'm feeling like this.
I'm troubled by feelings. I can't cope with this feeling.
And our job is to deal with those feelings by finding the right kinds of representations that can actually manage those feelings in the outside world.
And in order to do that, we first have to unfreeze the repressed ones.
So that's a broad brushstroke picture of how I see now unconscious memory in the Freudian sense of the word,
in relation to cognitive science and in relation to brain mechanisms of consciousness generally.
And I think that we're in exciting times. Thanks very much.