1/12 A thread on whether perception is discrete, an idea Varela, Rosch & I discussed in The Embodied Mind (72-79) and I covered in Waking, Dreaming, Being (40-45). I blogged about this at @philofbrains a while agohttp://philosophyofbrains.com/2015/07/29/is-consciousness-a-stream.aspx …
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2/12 It's an old idea -- that consciousness is discrete -- found in the Indian Buddhist Abhidharma philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abhidharma/ …
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3/12 In cogsci the idea is that perceptions occur in discrete perceptual frames: stimuli with the same ISI can be perceived as simultaneous or sequential if they fall within different perceptual frames. See this recent review by VanRullen https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/S1364-6613(16)30104-8.pdf …
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4/12 Temporal frames are hypothesized to be based on the phases of endogenous neural oscillations, so depending on when the stimuli are presented in relation to the oscillatory phase influences whether they're perceived as both occurring "now" or as following one another
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5/12 In this pioneering 1980 paper, Varela et al found evidence that endogenous alpha phase influences visual peception of stimulus timing, evidence he interpreted in terms of discrete temporal frames. I was a subject in the experimenthttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0028393281900051 …
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6/12 VanRullen and Koch restated the idea in their 2003 paper but stated it had been difficult to replicate Varela's findingshttps://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(03)00095-0 …
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7/12 Varela's findings were later replicated, in this paper by Milton and Pearce https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.02.065 …
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8/12 Baumgarten et al also found evidence in the somatosensory domainhttps://www.pnas.org/content/112/39/12187 …
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9/12 I blogged about the Baumgarten findings herehttps://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/waking-dreaming-being/201509/is-consciousness-stream-update …
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10/12 Now, finally, for what set off this thread: I just read an excellent and comprehensive critical review of the discrete perception idea. White reviews evidence pro and con and raises difficult questions for the ideahttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810018300047?via%3Dihub …
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11/12 TLDR there's increasing evidence for periodic modulation of perceptual content based on endogenous neural rhythms. But it's not so clear this evidence supports discrete temporal perceptual frames (see White's review)
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12/12 Coda: William James was right: consciousness flows, but it's not a uniform flow; it has inner rhythms. Whether it's also discrete (as Abhidharmikas held) is an open question
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