The Rhythm of Consciousness

Have you ever heard somebody talk about how we experience a “stream of consciousness?” This is actually not an uncommon thought, and in 1890, William James famously proclaimed our conscious experience to be a “stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life” (Hickok). However, in the New York Times article, It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness, Gregory Hickok argues that a “stream” of consciousness is an illusion, and that we “actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than a continuous flow” (Hickok).

Hickok goes on to explain how some of the first hints of this understanding came with the discovering of brain waves, and how the rhythms of brain waves (alpha waves, delta waves, etc.) correlated with various mental states, as well as the fact that the amplitude of your brain waves vary with different cognitive and perceptual events (Hickok). Rhythms in the environment, such as those in music or speech, can synchronize the brain’s rhythms with those of the external perceptual world.

Hickok gives the example of a noisy café in which there is loud background music, people chattering away, and the clanging of dishes. He points out how you can focus your attention to one particular aspect in the scene – such as your lunch partner’s voice – even if it is not the most dominant or loud feature in the environment. In this way, he explains that your brain synchronizes its rhythm to the rhythm of the voice “and enhances the perceptibility of that stream, while suppressing other streams, which have their own, different rhythms” (Hickok).

This example is similar to the cocktail party effect, proposed by British psychologist E. C. Cherry. In this proposed effect, Cherry describes how people can focus on a single conversation in the loud environment of a cocktail party. This is achieved by selective auditory attention, in which you can perceive the signal of interest despite the potentially louder background noise (Gazzaniga).

Furthermore, an experiment conducted by Steven Hillyard and colleagues at University of California, San Diego, demonstrated how the ERP (event-related potential) response to a physically identical stimulus was different when the stimulus was focused on versus when it was ignored. The researchers looked at auditory selective attention, and obtained auditory ERP’s to stimuli entering one ear when that ear’s input was attended and when it was ignored. They learned that auditory sensory ERP’s were larger in amplitude when a stimulus was focused on, versus when it was ignored (Gazzaniga).

In this manner, we are now learning how consciousness is more like a rhythm than a “stream.” The brain synchronizes its rhythm to the rhythm of the voice you are paying attention to with selective attention, as shown by the cocktail party effect. Furthermore, paying greater attention to one aspect in your sensory environment results in an increase in amplitude of the ERP related to the specific sensory event. This shows how the consciousness is like a rhythm, and how the brain synchronizes its rhythm with that of the sensory environment.

Works Cited

Gazzaniga, Michael S., Richard B. Ivry, and G. R. Mangun. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Print.

Hickok, Gregory. "It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness." The New York Times. N.p., 08 May 2015 Web. 11 Oct. 2015. < http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opinion/sunday/its-not-a-stream-of-consciousness.html?_r=0 >.

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