Abstract
Qualia, the individual instances of subjective conscious experience, are private events. However, in everyday life, we assume qualia of others and their perceptual worlds, to be similar to ours. One way this similarity is possible is if qualia of others somehow contribute to the production of qualia by our own brain and vice versa. To test this hypothesis, we focused on the mean voltages of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the time-window of the P600 component, whose amplitude correlates positively with conscious awareness. These ERPs were elicited by stimuli of the international affective picture system in 16 pairs of friends, siblings or couples going side by side through hyperscanning without having to interact. Each of the 32 members of these 16 pairs faced one half of the screen and could not see what the other member was presented with on the other half. One stimulus occurred on each half simultaneously. The sameness of these stimulus pairs was manipulated as well as the participants’ belief in that sameness by telling subjects’ pairs that they were going to be presented with the same stimuli in two blocks and with different ones in the two others. In the P600 time window, belief, and thus social cognition, was found to have an effect on ERPs only at left anterior electrode sites. In contrast, ERPs were more positive at all electrode subsets for stimulus pairs that were inconsistent with the belief than for those that were consistent. In the N400 time window, at frontal electrode sites, ERPs were again more positive for inconsistent than for consistent stimuli. As participants had no way to see the stimulus their partner was presented with, and thus no way to detect inconsistence, we proposed that these data could support the existence of spontaneous brain-to-brain communications. Such communications might provide a research avenue when trying to explain the similarity of qualia across individuals, which is assumed in virtually all instants of every day life.
Highlights
Colors, sounds and smells do not exist in the outside world
We focused on one operational hypothesis: the event-related brain potentials elicited by a stimulus in one person, the P600, could depend on the stimulus displayed to another person
Based on our a priori hypothesis, we focused on the late positive component (LPC or P600) and computed the mean voltages of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the 650–950 ms time window for all electrodes, all subjects and all four conditions
Summary
Sounds and smells do not exist in the outside world. The fact that the same word is used by all the people speaking a language to designate a qualia merely establishes a correspondence. The yellow qualia for one person could, for instance, be the blue qualia for another person Such differences across individuals appear unlikely since many use the same associations and agree that red is a warm color and that blue relates to sadness. The same relations between qualia appear to exist across people whereas if qualia were different across individuals it seems that these relations should differ It could, be argued that metaphors used in a language convey relationships between certain qualia and are responsible for building the links between them. A number of new metaphors can be understood at their first occurrence[6], which suggests that relations between qualia are, at least partly, independent of language
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