Abstract
The brain may undergo functional reorganizations. Selective loss of sensory input or training within a restricted part of a modality cause “shifts” within for instance somatotopic or tonotopic maps. Cross-modal plasticity occurs when input within a modality is absent – e.g., in the congenitally blind. Reorganizations are also found in functional recovery after brain injury. Focusing on such reorganizations, it may be studied whether a cognitive or conscious process can exclusively be mediated by one neural substrate – or may be associated with multiple neural representations. This is typically known as the problem of multiple realization – an essentially empirical issue with wide theoretical implications. This issue may appear to have a simple solution. When, for instance, the symptoms associated with brain injury disappear and the recovery is associated with increased activities within spared regions of the brain, it is tempting to conclude that the processes originally associated with the injured part of the brain are now mediated by an alternative neural substrate. Such a conclusion is, however, not a simple matter. Without a more thorough analysis, it cannot be concluded that a functional recovery of for instance language or attention is necessarily associated with a novel representation of the processes lost to injury. Alternatively, for instance, the recovery may reflect that apparently similar surface phenomena are obtained via dissimilar cognitive mechanisms. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework, which we believe can guide the design and interpretations of studies of post-traumatic recovery. It is essential to distinguish between a number of levels of analysis – including a differentiation between the surface phenomena and the underlying information processing – when addressing, for instance, whether a pre-traumatic and post-traumatically recovered cognitive or conscious process are actually the same. We propose a (somewhat preliminary) system of levels of analysis, which can be applied to such studies.
Highlights
One of the primary concerns in the attempt to isolate some neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) is the question whether conscious content relates to brain processes in a fixed 1:1 pattern, or whether the same content may be realized in different brain processes
There is a constantly growing number of studies demonstrating that when a particular sensory input is lacking a series of short- and long-term reorganizations take place within various levels of the brain systems representing the affected modality
One might question whether reorganization after brain injury will not lead to a structuring of the postlesional areas that is similar to the prelesional ones in such a way that the conception of multiple realization this way will be challenged. Considering such examples of recovering language abilities after massive injuries to the left hemisphere, such a worry seems to lean on a rather “coarse grained” notion of the involved brain processes. We argue that such a worry may be applicable to some cases but is less relevant to a more general discussion of the possibility of multiple realization per se
Summary
One of the primary concerns in the attempt to isolate some neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) is the question whether conscious content relates to brain processes in a fixed 1:1 pattern, or whether the same content may be realized in different brain processes The answer to this question will have important theoretical consequences: Should the latter view be correct, it would seem futile to reduce or identify conscious content with one specific brain process. Well-established the phenomenon of brain plasticity may be, the question whether we should conceive of mind–brain relations as 1:1 or 1:X remains unanswered We believe this lack of success is mainly due to the lack of a proper conceptual and methodological framework to approach the issue: It seems difficult to decide whether two occurrences of a mental state or a brain state are identical or not. This paper aims to take the first steps toward such a framework, outlining an approach to analyze the problem, and giving examples of the issues being considered
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