Consciousness and the Social Brain by Michael S. A. Graziano (review)

Abstract

issn 0362-4021 © 2015 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer 2015 177 1 Correspondence should be addressed to Eva Catenaccio, 24 Coventry Lane, New Rochelle, NY 10805. E-mail: Eva.Catenaccio@med.einstein.yu.edu. Book Review Consciousness and the Social Brain. By Michael S. A. Graziano. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 280 pp. Reviewed by Eva Catenaccio1 Selecting a book on neuroscience for review in a journal for clinical group psychotherapists may seem counterintuitive and surprising. What significance does contemporary brain research have for the therapist who is steeped in the care of patients? Nonmedical readers are often turned off by sensationalist articles in the popular press that reduce complex psychological phenomena to abstract biological processes on a molecular level. These explanations are frequently unsatisfying and seem to offer little application to the everyday practice of psychotherapy. Enter Michael Graziano, a Princeton neuroscience professor who combines both his wealth of knowledge as a neuroscientist and his writing skills to tackle one of the remaining Big Questions: What is consciousness, and how do we have it? This mystery has occupied great thinkers since Hippocrates first housed the mind in the brain and Descartes suggested the presence of a magical fluid, res cogitas, which acted as the “mental substance.” In his book Consciousness and the Social Brain, Graziano provides an accessible, logical, and ultimately fascinating account of his neuroscientific theory regarding the nature of human consciousness. He details his hypothesis with examples from decades of clinical and experimental neuroscience research with the goal of providing a mechanistic rather than a magical explanation for human conscious experience. In essence, Graziano argues that the same parts and processes of the brain responsible for self-perception are also instrumental for our understanding and perception of others. Why we are endowed with a social brain—according to Graziano—is a question that has already been settled by Darwin. Human consciousness and social cognition have evolved together because it is advantageous to have 178 catenaccio a way of predicting both your own and others’ behaviors. It is well established that humans are capable of creating descriptions of other minds; watching a friend hungrily contemplate a slice of cake, you can make an educated guess about his or her intentions. It is also useful for generating social cohesion, empathy, and cooperation . As the most socially intelligent species on the planet, humans have been able to achieve incredible evolutionary success. The theory is titled the attention schema hypothesis, and in brief, it states that “awareness”—a more precise definition for what we colloquially call “consciousness ”—is the description the brain produces of its own attentional state. Attention, from a neuroscientific perspective, is a cognitive tool for data handling, a way of boosting signal strength in a sea of competing stimuli. When you attend to something , those signals are amplified until they outcompete the rest. Awareness, in turn, is the brain’s representation of that process. A recurring example in the book is that of gazing at a green apple—your visual system computes that the wavelength of the reflected light is in the green spectrum, but you can also report having a conscious experience of the apple, of its color or its shape, that you can describe and put into words. You have an awareness of yourself as an observer. Graziano links his theory to neuroanatomy by exploring the contributions of brain regions at the junction of the temporal and the parietal lobes, an area situated a little above the ears. A patient with damage to these regions—from a stroke, for example—can suffer from “neglect syndromes,” in which the person’s spatial awareness is compromised. A famous example refers to a Milanese patient who was asked to describe the Piazza del Duomo while looking at it from two different sides (Bisiach & Luzzatti, 1978). When he visualized himself standing on one side, he described only the half of the square to his right, unaware that he had left out the entire left side of the scene. When asked to imagine instead standing on the opposite side, facing the cathedral, the patient described all the structures he had previously neglected and left out...