C H A P T E R

1
A Framework for Mind and Brain
THE NEURAL SYMPHONY OF THE MIND AND BRAIN

Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in

different parts of the brain. It’s the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones
from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, and seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra.
Francis Crick, British Scientist.

A stylized interpretation of the neurons of the brain. Source: Public domain.

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF MIND AND BRAIN

In this chapter, we invite you to join us in exploring the mind-brain. What brain processes
are at work as we watch a beautiful sunset, listen to a favorite song, or remember the face and
name of a new friend? Join us as we see how brain imaging techniques are revolutionizing the
way we can “see” into the human brain to unlock the mysteries of just how the human mind
works.

Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience

[Link] 1 Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
2 1. A FRAMEWORK FOR MIND AND BRAIN

FIGURE 1.1 The Thinker, Rodin, 1902. Source: Public domain.

Cognitive neuroscience is the combined study of the mind and the brain. The brain is said to
be the most complex structure in the known universe. It can be changed by drinking a cup of
cappuccino or by listening to a favorite song. Some neuronal events happen over a thou-
sandth of a second, while others take decades.
This book is written to simplify the facts. We are in a revolution in our understanding of
the human mind and brain. The ability to record from the living brain has brought out new
facts, raised new ideas, and stirred new questions. Just 15 years ago, we might not have
seen a link between cognition and genes, brain molecules, or the mathematics of complex
networks. Today, those are hot topics. Some traditional ideas are returning, like
consciousness, unconscious beliefs and goals, mental imagery, voluntary control, intuitions,
emotions, and the executive self. Many unsolved puzzles remain, but we can see progress
(Fig. 1.1).

1.1 Where Do We Begin?

Just as exploring the universe in outer space requires us to consider what level of analysis
we will usedwill we investigate the universe at the level of galaxies? stars systems? stars? . or the
molecules that form their basis?dstudying the human brain requires us to determine our level of
investigative analysis. In Chapter 2, The Brain, we explore the structure, cellular bases, functional
processing, pathways, and rhythms of the brain. To do this, we use five aspects of neuroscience
investigation: neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, functional neuroanatomy, neuroconnectivity, and
neurodynamics. These disciplines allow us to separately examine the diverse aspects of the
brain as we explore the internal universe inside our heads: our mind-brain (Figs. 1.2 and 1.3).
In Chapter 3, Observing the Brain, we explore the ways to observe the living brain along
the same aspects of investigation introduced in Chapter 2. Imaging the living, acting, thinking
brain has provided new insights into how our minds work. In Chapter 3, we provide a tuto-
rial of how these methods work and how they relate to human cognition.
 1. INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF MIND AND BRAIN 3

FIGURE 1.2 The large spiral galaxy NGC 1232 taken Sep. 21, 1998 during a period of good observing conditions.
Source: [Link] Produced by the European Southern Observatory, free to use under license
of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available on [Link].

FIGURE 1.3 An abstract image of the brain. Source: Brain image created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) program. Courtesy of Massachusetts
General Hospital and Draper Labs. Public domain figure provided by the US federal government.
4 1. A FRAMEWORK FOR MIND AND BRAIN

2. CONSCIOUSNESS, CORTICAL CORE, CONNECTIVITY, AND

CONSISTENCY
Several themes tend to recur when investigating the brain. A current focus of many scientists’
attention is the study of human consciousness in the brain: the neural correlates of consciousness.
Consciousness themes occur in virtually every chapter of the book but are specifically highlighted
in Chapter 8, Attention and Consciousness, and Chapter 13, Disorders of Consciousness.
The connectivity pathways of the brain include fiber tracts that form the highways, streets,
and small roads that provide the bases for neural communication traffic flow. These path-
ways provide a key linkage for the billions of nerve cellsdneuronsdthat are the mighty
working units of the brain. The dynamics of these billions of cells together provide the
rhythms of the brain that hum together across varying frequencies that together provide
the instantiation of the symphony of neural activity that underlies our mind-brain.
A key feature of the brain is its consistency: despite the overwhelmingly complex sights,
sounds, textures, aromas, and tastes of our daily experience, the brain extracts consistent el-
ements that form the basis for that is a chair or this smells like chocolate. This consistency allows
us to extract important patterns so that we know that a dog is a dog despite being very near to
us, and therefore relatively large, or far away, and therefore relatively small, or in an abstract
painting, and therefore relatively unrealistic, or in a cartoon, and therefore relatively simpli-
fied, or simply as a word on a page, and therefore relatively abstract.

3. CONSCIOUSNESS

The scientific study of human consciousness is once again front-and-center in the field of
cognitive neuroscience. Swept away from the foreground of the scientific study of the mind
during periods of behavioral and psychophysical investigations, human consciousnessdas a
valid and scientifically viable topic of researchdhas landed squarely in the center of contem-
porary neuroscience. Leaders in the field that opened the doors to the current study of human
consciousness include Francis Crick, Christoph Koch, Gerald Edelman, Bernard Baars, Stan
Dehaene, Guilio Tononi, and many many more.

3.1 A Useful Framework for Investigating Conscious and Unconscious Brain

Processing
Human sensation, perception, language, cognition, attention, goals, memory, actions, and
emotions form a multidimensioned discipline of study, each with their core bases in terms of
phenomena and each with a distributeddyet highly interactivedbrain network subserving
their neural bases.
To help understand these many aspects of human thought and action, we provide a func-
tional framework as a simplified way to organize the broad study of the human mind (Fig. 1.4).
The functional framework provides an overview of how sensory information from the world
enters our mind-brain to form the input to our mental processes (left side of Fig. 1.4). Chapter 4,
The Art of Seeing, and Chapter 5, Sound, Speech, and Music Perception, describe in detail how
the sights and sounds of our everyday world combine to form our visual and auditory
 3. CONSCIOUSNESS 5

FIGURE 1.4 A functional framework for human cognition. Sensory inputs (vision, hearing, touch, left side of
figure) enter the brain system through the sensory pathways. The executive and attentional processes governed by
frontal lobe regions serve to focus attention, hold information temporarily in working storage (center of figure), and
prepare it for long-term storage (green boxes at bottom of figure). Action plans and response outputs are shown (right
side of figure). Note that green-shaded boxes grow lighter in color as the processes and information they represent are
mediated by more and more unconscious processing. Source: Baars & Gage.

knowledge and ultimately our conceptual representation. That conceptual knowledge is held in
networks and brain regions that form our long-term memory cores and language knowledge
(bottom of Fig. 1.4) that together provide the basis for decision making and goal setting
processes for action planning (right side of Fig. 1.4). Chapter 6, Language and Thought, and
Chapter 7, Learning and Remembering, discuss the neural bases of these processes in detail.
Chapter 14, Growing Up, describes their development as we grow from infants to adults.
In the center of Fig. 1.4dand at the core of the neural processes that guide our behaviord
are executive functions that allow us to focus our attention on this and not on that, to keep
something in mind, and to act on goals. Chapter 9, Decisions, Goals, and Actions, provides
an overview of the many brain areas that together form our central executive that allows us to
work through the daily and life-long problems we must solve to make our way through life.
Not shown on the functional framework but key to the very essence of being human are
the social and emotional processes that form our personalities, guide our behavior, and lead
us through the human interactions that are essential to our survival as happy living creatures.
The brain processes that underlie our social and emotional selves are presented in Chapter 10,
Humans Are Social Beings, and Chapter 11, Feelings.
6 1. A FRAMEWORK FOR MIND AND BRAIN

3.2 Conscious and Unconscious Processes Together Form the Bases of Our
Mental Processes
As Bernard Baars has written, “Consciousness is the water in which we swim. Like fish in the
ocean, we can’t jump out to see how it looks from the outside. As soon as we lose consciousness, we can
no longer see anything.” We are well aware of our conscious selves. We can report on what is
occurring right now as we experience an event or taste a food. Our knowledge of what is
occurring moment by moment of our conscious lifedthe contents of our consciousnessdforms
the base of our awareness. Fluid, flexible, ever-changing contents of our consciousness seem
to be a vast sea in which we swim.
Careful experimentation has time and time again proven this feeling to be false. In fact, the
contents of our consciousness are quite limited. At any given time, only so much information, so
many senses, feelings, and thoughts, can share the mind-space of our consciousness. More and
more evidence is providing support for the notion that it is our unconscious processing that
forms the overwhelming majority of brain functions. Our vast store of memories, language
knowledge, automaticities, and procedural learning combine to form the largely unconscious
but accessible if recalled storage of what we have learned and experienced throughout our life.
Shown in the green boxes at the base of Fig. 1.4, this information is retrievable, in large
part, and forms the bulk of the iceberg of our knowledge store (Fig. 1.5). Conscious contents,
at any given moment, form merely the tip of this massive iceberg.
Conscious and unconscious threads together form the thoughts and ideas and actions on
any given day. We may be reading a book and thinking consciously about the topic of the
book while keeping an eye on the time so we are not late for work. At the same time that
these conscious processes enter and recede from the contents of our consciousness, largely
unconscious processes are also at work outside our attention or our influence. If we are
skilled readers, the process of reading the bookddecoding the shapes of the print to form let-
ters, decoding the strings of letters for form words, parsing the sequence of words to form
sentences and so ondis not something we are usually conscious of. Similarly, we may be
walking around the room while reading the bookdthe act of walking is an overlearned process
and so the individual motor movements and balance required are largely automatic.
Together the conscious, task-based activities of our lives combine with their unconscious
and automatic elements to help us achieve our goals, large and small.

3.3 Global States: Waking, Sleeping, and Dreaming

For healthy individuals, our typical conscious state includes a balance of full wakefulness
and awareness (Fig. 1.6). As we move through the three global states of waking, sleeping, and
dreaming, our level of awareness (contents of our consciousness, y-axis on Fig. 1.6) is coupled
with our level of wakefulness (x-axis on Fig. 1.6). As we begin to feel sleepy, then, both the
levels of awareness and wakefulness drop until we reach deep sleep where we are neither
aware nor awake (Laureys, 2005). We will discuss the waking conscious state in more detail
in Chapter 8. We will discuss the sleeping and dreaming states in Chapter 12, Sleep and Levels
of Consciousness. Disorders of Consciousness, including coma and vegetative states, are
described in Chapter 13.
 3. CONSCIOUSNESS 7

FIGURE 1.5 Most brain processes are not conscious: the limited capacity of the contents of consciousness at any
given moment are represented by the “tip of the iceberg.” The vast store of largely unconscious knowledge and
representations is not available; however, much of it is retrievable from stable knowledge stores. Source: http://
[Link]/gallery/[Link].

3.4 The Theater of the Mind and Its Stage

Several aspects of the contents of consciousness are important to note: they are limited in
capacity, controlled by voluntary attention, and directed by executive functions. Baars devel-
oped a “theater of consciousness” analogy to help understand the many “players” on the
stage of consciousness (Fig. 1.7).
According to this analogy, the entire theaterdstage, audience, players, and backstage
areasdform the basis of conscious and unconscious brain processes (Fig. 1.8). The theater
stage represents working memory. A spotlight on the stage represents voluntary attention.
Only the stage contents illuminated by the attentional spotlight are conscious. The rest of the the-
ater represents the vast unconscious store of knowledge and memories that can enter the
8 1. A FRAMEWORK FOR MIND AND BRAIN

FIGURE 1.6 A simplified version of the global states waking, sleeping, and dreaming showing levels of the two
major components of consciousness: awareness and wakefulness. On the vertical y-axis, levels of awareness are
shown beginning at the bottom of the axis with no level of awareness, as in a coma or when under anesthesia (shown
in pink). Moving up the y-axis, level of awareness increases as one moves through heavy sleep, light sleep, and into
drowsiness and finally to full conscious wakefulness (shown in blue). On the horizontal x-axis, levels of wakefulness
are shown beginning with coma and moving similarly through stages of sleep to conscious wakefulness. According
to this simplified version, levels of awareness and wakefulness are roughly similar as one moves through the stages
from coma to deep sleep to wakefulness, represented by the pink and blue shapes forming a diagonal from the bottom
left corner, where no awareness or wakefulness are observed in coma, to the upper right, where both levels of
awareness and wakefulness are high during conscious wakefulness. For more on this topic, see Chapter 13.
Source: Laureys, 2005.

FIGURE 1.7 The United Palace, Manhattan, New York. Source: [Link], Author: Beyond my Ken,
open source permission under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
 3. CONSCIOUSNESS 9

FIGURE 1.8 The theater analogy for the global workspace theory. According to this analogy, the entire
theaterdstage, audience, players, and backstage areasdform the basis of conscious and unconscious brain processes.
The theater stage (shown in teal) represents working memory. A spotlight (shown in turquoise) on the stage represents
voluntary attention. Only the stage contents illuminated by the attentional spotlight are conscious. The rest of the
theater (shown in purple) represents the vast unconscious store of knowledge and memories that can enter the contents
of consciousness once they are on the stage and under the spotlight. A key point here is that the spotlight of attention
on the stage is very limited in capacity: it represents just a small portion of the stage (working memory), which in turn
represents a small portion of the vast theater (unconscious knowledge and processes). Source: Baars.

contents of consciousness once they are on the stage and under the spotlight. A key point here
is that the spotlight of attention on the stage is very limited in capacity: it represents just a
small portion of the stage (working memory), which in turn represents a small portion of
the vast theater (unconscious knowledge and processes).
10 1. A FRAMEWORK FOR MIND AND BRAIN

4. THE CORTICAL CORE

A generally held belief, supported by mounting evidence, is that the cortical core supports
human consciousness: the mighty thalamus located deep in the heart of the brain connects to
nearly every region in the cortex and together they form the cortical core, the central machin-
ery of the brain.
The two thalami are nestled into the center of the brain and form a massive influence over
the cortex and the brain in general (Fig. 1.9, top). As we will discuss in more detail in later
chapters, the thalamo-cortical core (Fig. 1.9, bottom), made up of the thalami and the cortex,

FIGURE 1.9 Top: the thalamus (shown in red) is located in the middle of the brain in the subcortical region.
Bottom: the thalamus is highly interconnected with the cortex, with fibers extending to the frontal, parietal, temporal,
and occipital lobes (shown in red, blue, and green in this diffusion tensor study). Source: Left: Images are from Anato-
mography maintained by Life Science Databases (LSDB). Life Science Databases (LSDB)の Anatomography. Right: Izhikevich,
E. M, & Edelman, G. M. 2007.
 5. CONNECTIVITY 11
can almost be thought of as a single massive hub that provides the lightning fast connectivity
needed for waking cognition and the modulatory influences required for shifting the brain
through the stages of sleep and the states of consciousness (Izhikevich & Edelman, 2007).
Together they form the target for anesthesia and, when damaged, the basis for sustained un-
consciousness and vegetative states.

5. CONNECTIVITY

The massive fiber tracts of the brain form the connective highways streets and small roads
that provide the bases for neural communication traffic flow (Fig. 1.10). These tracts, large
and small, provide the pathways for the billions of neurons to propagate the flow of informa-
tion throughout the brain. Populations of neurons oscillate at similar rates to form synchro-
nized frequency bands, such as alpha, beta, and gamma (Fig. 1.11) that carry information
across the hemispheres and along the front-back regions of the cortex.
The massively interconnected cortex, subcortex, thalamus, and brainstem are difficult to
visualize. While images such as those presented in Fig. 1.10 and 1.11 convey the complexity
of the fiber tracts and pathways in the brain, they lack the specificity to address the question
“Does this brain area connect directly with this brain area? The Human Connectome Project of

FIGURE 1.10 Visualization of a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) measurement of a human brain. Reconstructed
fiber tracts course through the midsagittal plane. The front of the head is at the left of the figure, the back of the head
is at the right of the figure. The brainstem and spinal cord are shown in purple in the center of the figure. Source:
Thomas Schultz, [Link], open source, licensed through GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
12 1. A FRAMEWORK FOR MIND AND BRAIN

FIGURE 1.11 Neural oscillations in the alpha, beta, and gamma bands. Source: Sebastien Dery McGill University.

the National Institutes of Health ([Link]

has developed brain analysis (Irimia, Chambers, Torgerson, & Van Horn, 2012; Fig. 1.12) and
visualization methods (Fig. 1.13) to provide a more intuitive method for understanding
whole-brain connectivity patterns. See Chapter 2, The Brain, for more on how to “read” the
connectograms like the one shown in Fig. 1.13.

6. CONSISTENCY
Conscious perception seems to have a consistency constraint in the brain. Simple shapes are
always perceived (consciously) as internally consistent, three-dimensional objects rather than
the two-dimensional, partially occluding drawings they actually are, because that is, after all,
the world we live in (Fig. 1.14).
When the brain receives any ambiguous or even cluttered sensory input, we tend to
impose consistent interpretations, at least consciously. In recent decades it has become clear
that unconsciously the brain can consider many interpretations of many inputs, some of them
inconsistent with each other. The examples are rife. Our brain’s ability to extract consistency
in an inconsistent-to-lifelike image underlies our love for and understanding of abstract art
forms, such as Impressionism (Fig. 1.15).

7. SUMMARY

Together and separately, the themes of consciousness/unconsciousness, cortical core, con-

nectivity, and consistency will appear and reappear throughout this book as they are key
 7. SUMMARY 13

FIGURE 1.12 Constructing the connectogram. (A) Brain areas are segmented, results are shown for a sample
subject. (B) Results of DTI tractography (for white matter reconstruction) are shown for a sample subject. (C) Recon-
structed cortical surface is shown for a sample subject. (D) Example of a connectivity matrix computed for a sample
subject. (E) A sample connectogram created for a single subject (see Figure 1.13 for details). (F) Legend of the repre-
sentations shown in (E). The legend describing the rings of the Connectogram, which show different attributes of the
corresponding cortical regions. From outermost to innermost, the rings represent the grey matter volume, surface area,
cortical thickness, curvature, and degree of connectivity. Source: Irimia, Chambers, Torgerson, & Van Horn, J. D., 2012.
FIGURE 1.13 The Connectogram. The circular Connectogram, is a graphic way to show brain connectivity. The
left half of the circle depicts the left hemisphere and the right half depicts the right hemisphere. The lobes and
subregions of each hemisphere are shown and labeled, beginning at the top of the circle, as frontal lobe (fr), insular
cortex (Ins), limbic lobe (Lim), temporal lobe (Tem), parietal lobe (Par), occipital lobe (Occ), subcortical structures
(SbC), and cerebellum. The brainstem (BStem) is shown at the bottom of the circle, between the two hemispheres.
Within the lobes, each cortical area is labeled with an abbreviation and an assigned color. Note the five rings that are
inside the Conneectogram, just next to the color-coded cortical regions. The legend for these rings is shown in at the
bottom of the figure. In the center of the Connectogram, lines connect regions that are structurally connected. The
relative density (number of fibers) of these connections is reflected in the opacity of the lines, with the more opaque
lines reflecting less densely connected regions and the less opaque lines reflecting more densely connected regions.
The color of the line is color coded to reflect the density of fibers within that connection. Source: Irimia, Chambers,
Torgerson, & Van Horn, J. D., 2012.
 7. SUMMARY 15

FIGURE 1.14 Consistency in visual processing: basic shapes are easily perceived as three-dimensional due to
their color shading, despite the fact that they are actually two-dimensional and partially occluding one another.
Source: Author Mysid, Elisabethd; available at [Link] Licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share aLike 2.5 Generic.

FIGURE 1.15 Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and her Son, Claude Monet, 1874 Impressionism as an
example of visual consistency: although the clouds in the sky are just daubs of paint and Madame. Monet’s face is
largely veiled; our perception of this painting is typically clear and consistent with how a more realistic image of
Madame Monet would be interpreted due to our visual experience. Source: Public domain.
16 1. A FRAMEWORK FOR MIND AND BRAIN

aspects of the mind and brain. The trading relationships between conscious and unconscious
processing; the massive hub of the cortical core and its nightly descent into deep sleep; the
lightning speed of the fiber tracts and their synchronized slowing as we transition from
wake to sleep; and the strength of consistency coupled with the agility of learning, mental
flexibility, and adaptation are just a few of the fascinating aspects of the almost limitless brain
processes that occur within our heads.