Nature & Nurture #142: Dr. Mark Solms - A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

Dr. Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, Professor at the University of Cape Town, and author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. 

In this episode, we discuss The Hidden Spring - core areas within the brainstem which are the root of all feeling and consciousness in all vertebrates - and pioneering discoveries from affective, cognitive, and computational neuroscience that bridge together to build this theory. We discuss connections to philosophy of mind, active inference and predictive processing theories of consciousness, the (im)plausibility of panpsychism, whether memory is necessary for consciousness, the difference between metacognition and consciousness, how brain damage influences consciousness, feeling, and decision-making, whether invertebrates or even single cellular life can learn and possess consciousness, and where cognitive neuroscience has gone astray in being overly reductionist and dismissive of the complexity of animal subjective experience. We also talk about core differences between basic emotion theory, which states that we evolved with core brain systems dedicated to innate qualitatively distinct emotions, and constructed emotion theory, which argues that all emotions are cognitive contextual interpretations of affective valence and arousal. Finally, we discuss Dr. Solms’ early research on dreams, the connection between dreams, memory consolidation, imagination, and problem-solving, and the history and legacy of psychoanalysis in shaping modern neuropsychology.