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Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul

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The astonishing hypothesis referred to in the title of Crick's book is that all of your phenomenological experience is ultimately reducible to "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." So, just how is consciousness neurally instantiated? What the reader should take away from the book is just how difficult of a question this is.

Francis Crick was a thorough going empiricist and he strongly believed that the experimental method was the only way of successfully tackling the problem of consciousness. Along with his close collaborator, Christof Koch, Crick chose visual awareness (rather than say, self-awareness) as the main point of attack. The reason for this is because the visual system is relatively well understood and much easier to study in the laboratory.

Visual processing is an extremely complex business. Essentially, the visual system has to create a fairly high-fidelity representation of the environment (a model) from an array of heterogeneous light patches falling onto the retina. A staggering number of computational processes need to be performed in order for you to become aware of the final output. These processes operate unconsciously, in massively parallel streams. So, what we finally become aware of (our model) is the end result of a great many hidden computations. Much has been learned about the details in which the various features of a visual scene are decomposed and processed, but what remains a mystery is how we ultimately see something (i.e., become visually aware of it). As Crick says, what is required is an account of our "explicit, multilevel, symbolic interpretation of a visual scene."

"The Astonishing Hypothesis" does not provide anything like a Crick-Koch `theory' of consciousness. In fact, Crick goes to some length to eschew any precise definitions or theories. Any such purported theories, he believed, were pre-mature. (The closest that he comes to presenting some kind of a theory is his `Processing Postulate'). Instead what the book offers is a general strategy for submitting the problem to experimental study. Here the idea is to look for neural signatures of awareness or more technically the neural correlates of consciousness (abbreviated NCCs). In a nutshell (excuse the oversimplification), here is what NCCs are all about: submit to study some visual phenomenon which has an ambiguous interpretation (e.g., the Necker cube which can be perceived in two possible ways) and simultaneously obtain measures of neural activity. Some portion of the neural activity associated with the processing of an ambiguous figure will remain invariant (that portion which corresponds to the unchanging retinal input) while another, minimal portion of the neural activity will vary along with the percept. This variant, minimal portion is a good bet for representing a NCC, a neural signature of awareness. Finding a NCC can also tell us many other interesting things, such as whether or not there any special properties of the neurons in question, whether they are located in particular places or cortical layers and so on. And, a similar mechanism which underlies visual awareness is likely to underlie other forms of awareness. [Note that this addresses what David Chalmers has called the `easy' problem of consciousness and does not touch on the `hard' problem. There is a possibility however that Chalmers' hard problem is ill-posed and that there may in fact not be a hard problem to address].

Crick presents the results of many interesting research studies that bear on the problem of consciousness. He devotes some space to the issue of temporal binding and the 40-Hz oscillation hypothesis (or more precisely, the gamma-band oscillation hypothesis) as well as the potential importance of reverberatory thalamo-cortical circuits (see also the work of Gerald Edelman). Crick also speculates about the possibly important role played by the claustrum in the generation of consciousness (something he thought about a lot just prior to his death). Unfortunately for the general reader, this comes only near the end of the book, after a rather protracted discussion of the psychology and neurobiology of vision. For a reader who is unfamiliar with neuroscience, all the hard work done to get to the final portion of the book may produce a low pay-off. It seems that Crick could have got the main point of the book across just as strongly while omitting some of the technical details along the way. For those who have some familiarity with the subject matter the book will actually be an interesting and concise review but since the work was intended for a general readership one must judge it according to that criterion (and this is one of the book's flaws).

Francis Crick died in 2004. This marked a tremendous loss to the field as Crick was blessed with a brilliant mind and he undoubtedly had it in him to make many more important contributions. He brought his enthusiasm to the study of consciousness and made it a bona-fide scientific problem. For this, among other things, he should be celebrated.

A few final remarks about the book's title are in order. First, "The Scientific Search for the Soul" is a sensationalist title that was more likely than not the publisher's idea. Second: as most of the people working in the neurosciences adopt a materialist perspective (the most famous exception of course was Sir John Eccles), the purported astonishing aspect of the hypothesis has sometimes been questioned. And yet, this idea (that our consciousness, in all its richness, is in some mysterious way the result of biophysical processes) really should be astonishing. It is easy to be familiar with the workings of the brain and still slip into old habits of thought, implicitly believing that there really is some homunculus in the head who is doing all of the perceiving. As Crick says, "A man may, in religious terms, be an unbeliever but psychologically he may continue to think of himself in much the same way as a believer does, at least for everyday matters."

It is interesting to speculate about whether our experience of ourselves would change even in the hypothetical case that we did have a complete neurobiological theory of consciousness.

The problem with Crick's book--a rather common problem these days--is that it does not do what it sets out to do. According to Crick, there is this revolutionary and "astonishing" hypothesis that most people either do not know or cannot accept, namely the century-old idea that neurons, as individual and independent units of the brain, are solely responsible for all the higher functions that most people attribute to God, to mind, or to some mysterious agent. Well, if you tell this to any neuroscientist, you probably won't astonish him; if you tell this to a lay man, you won't astonish him any more than, say, the god hypothesis. So Crick, who is a reductionist in need of a little sophistication, really isn't telling us anything extraordinary. His arguments neither shock nor enlighten. The primary merit of this book lies in a solid, if technical, summary of some interesting research in recent years. It is handy as reference, but not particularly a pleasure to read. Crick is not much of a writer; nor is he competent enough in other fields to talk about some of the issues that he does talk about. The more entertaining part of the book, for me, is the delightful bibliography, in which Crick briefly describes each book that he recommends. His remarks are sometimes sharp and witty. Overall, though, this is merely an average book on a most popular subject.

This is one of the top 10 science books I have ever read. Not a light read, but anybody with a basic grasp of biology and computers should be able to follow along.

Francis Crick plays the quintessential scientist in this book. He puts forward a hypothesis about human consciousness that closely mirrors the philosophies of John Searle: there is no mind-body problem. There is only the body. You, your soul, is basically a complex pattern of neurons in your brain.

Naturally, gathering supporting evidence for such a hypothesis is quite a daunting task. This book does not provide ultimate proof, nor ultimate answers. Rather it presents a large body of promising and highly interesting anecdotal evidence. Since its a huge subject, Crick focuses mainly on how vision affects consciousness. He discusses a good part about the human visual cortex, and neural network theory in computer science.

The book is filled with fascinating stories about people with brain trauma, and how it affected their behavior, their personality... their SOUL.

Did you know that there is a form of blindness, where the people don't know they are blind? Did you know that human free will is probably located in the anterior cingulate sulcus?

If Crick is correct, this scientific journey to understand the soul is a long one: it might take a century. This book is the first step on a very, very long journey, and it might not even be correct. Readers and reviewers must keep this in mind.

To emphasize again, its a HYPOTHESIS. Not a THEORY. So don't expect a ton of supporting evidence. Just a bunch of good ideas, some compelling data, and a good direction for future research.

Francis Crick is probably best known to most of us from high school biology classes for his pioneer work with James Watson on the structure and function of DNA. In his book the Astonishing Hypothesis he tackles a topic hardly less complex, the origin of awareness. Although the subtitle would suggest that the discussion is the scientific proof for the existence of the soul--and possibly thereby the existence of God--the reader who takes up the book with this expectation will be resoundingly disappointed. Instead he or she will find a very convoluted discussion of brain neurophysiology, the theoretical basis of sensory systems, the attempts to synthesize human neural function in computers, and the author's personal theory of free will. What if anything any of this has to do with the soul is anybody's guess.

On the whole, I have no quarrel with the author's choice of subject matter, but I found the book at times overly in depth and at others too brief in its discourse. I also found that the train of thought was a little confusing, as though the author went off on interesting tangents at great lengths and could only with great effort get back on track. It was as though he could have used a better outline to begin with or had attempted to cover too much in too small a space. It might also have arisen from his need to extensively paraphrase the work of others in fields in which he himself has less expertise. The discussion of the neural function of the human brain, particularly the oddities of its dysfunction were quite good. Indeed I felt it was an excellent update on what I had learned years ago in A&P for nursing school. The discussion of neural networks and artificial intelligence got a little too detailed for me, but if you're the type who finds Roger Penrose a pleasant afternoon's read, then Crick's account might actually be a little too light minded for you.

In general I found the writer's style was labored enough for it to require a concerted effort to plow my way through it. It took several attempts, during which I read several other books on wholly different topics, before I could actually finish it. I even went to the extreme of taking it with me to my health club where I would be a "captive audience" with nothing better to take my mind off the boredom of my half hour on the tread mill. On the whole, I preferred boredom. While I've no doubt the gentleman is a very learned individual, I've undertaken more readable books on the subject of mind and awareness. States of Mind by Conlon and Hobson would probably be more understandable by and enjoyable to the average reader, although this book too tends to try to cover too much in too little space.

I'm not surprised to see mixed reviews for this book because it's as close to 'real science' as such books get. It's definitely not the compendium of gee whiz human cognition observations and not the philosophical musings that the audience for consciousness books seems to lust after. Re the philosophical side of things, I sometimes imagine that a certain proportion of the audience hopes we never figure out what consciousness is, because that would bring an end to that opium-like haze around the topic to which many are addicted.

But as a science teacher of the subject, I loved it. Challenging to read if you're not already versed in the anatomy of the visual cortex, absolutely. But worth plowing through, absolutely.

Crick was definitely correct that the visual cortex is key to what consciousness is about. He provides an in-depth review of what was known at the time about visuocortical organization and how it relates to human behavior. That body of knowledge was extremely spotty (is spotty still), which means a whole lot of loose ends. That's unsatisfying in a way, but hardly Crick's fault.

Strongly recommended.

Crick claims to be investigating consciousness through the visual system because he believes that the visual system is more amenable to scientific investigation. Those who do not appreciate this tactic, he sniffily claims, do not understand how science operates. It should be clear why it is often necessary to study what can be experimented on first, but this in no way validates this particular strategy. Crick's approach is a lot like trying to understand the mechanics of a car's engine by studying its wheels. Yes, there is a connection, and yes, the wheels are a lot more accessible (especially if you haven't yet figured out how to open the hood). But you won't necessarily learn very much about how the engine actually works.

Closely connected to this difficulty is his refusal to countenance the very question of what consciousness actually is. Of course, not doing so makes his investigation of visual perception as a `mode' of consciousness much more plausible. If one explicitly refuses to define what is under investigation, then investigating almost any related phenomena will do. Unfortunately, this mindset will not actually serve to advance the enterprise very far. Crick uses the glib analogy of a battle: in war, he notes, one will not get far trying to define what a battle is when what is needed are troops and strategy. It should go without saying that this analogy is so deeply flawed as to be useless, except for its intended rhetorical purpose. There is no need to define the battle because that is clearly understood by all out the outset; the same can hardly be said of consciousness. If one does not know what the battle objective is, fighting it well becomes a lot harder. And that is the unfortunate plight of this book.

To be more specific, it seems relatively apparent that whatever else we can say about consciousness, it involves an essentially subjective dimension. Crick makes no mention of this, except to dismiss it as something to be perhaps considered much later. Conversely, it is far from apparent that consciousness must involve visual awareness inherently. Where does this leave blind persons, one might ask? Are they not fully conscious? And today we are close to developing sighted machines, which can process and navigate three-dimensional environments using lasers or stereoscopic video cameras (e.g., the DARPA challenge). Are these machines therefore approaching consciousness? This seems patently absurd.

The book as a whole reeks of a lack of erudition beyond narrow scientific training. We are treated to freshman physiology lessons on neurons, brain areas and basic visual processing, the details which are both not deep enough for real scientific comprehension and far more detailed than necessary for advancing the concepts being discussed. At times, it reads like an undergraduate report in which the student is eager to impress and not let a single fact they have uncovered go unreported - no matter if they actually enlighten the stated aims or not.

In sum, most of the problems with this book could be fixed with a single simple but profound change: change the title to "Primer on Vertebrate Visual Physiology", circa 1995. It probably would not have sold many copies that way, though.

I purchased "The Astonishing Hypothesis" by Francis Crick with great expectations. I am very much interested in the scientific search for what some call "soul" and was under the impression that Crick (co-discoverer of the double helix DNA structure) had marshalled plausible or powerful evidence that the soul merely is a person's mental activities that result from the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, atoms, molecules and ions that influence glial or nerve cells. For the most part, mutatis mutandis, I affirm Crick's hypothesis. However, I don't think "The Astonishing Hypothesis" comes anywhere close to providing information that supports Crick's hypothesis. His detour on how the human brain sees is at times interesting, but ultimately not all that helpful in illuminating Crick's "astonishing hypothesis." The book (page 259) supplies a reasonable answer to presupposed objections via-a-vis Crick's modus operandi for supporting his hypothesis. The scientist explains why he chose the visual system to buttress his hypothesis. It evidently yields most easily to "experimental attack" and is only the start (i.e. a prolegomenon) of explaining what soul is. The work's provisional nature is to be applauded. However, since the attack on "soul" has just started, it seems that Crick should have been more modest in his claims and not proclaimed the death of the human soul (as the term is commonly understood) until a full "experimental attack" of the brain had been carried out. Personally, I believe that theoreticians who have undertaken studies in the philosophy of mind offer more reasonable alternatives or explanations for "soul" than Crick does. The concept of supervenience more adequately accounts for "mind" or "soul" than "The Astonishing Hypothesis" does. While "mindness" is probably a higher-level phenomenon based on a lower-level phenomenon, as are qualia, it is my belief that mind is not reducible to brain states. But without the brain, mind does not exist: mind supervenes on the brain. William Hasker's "The Emerging Self" satisfactorily develops these points.

In 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson discovered DNA and in so doing uncovered a key part of the mechanism by which Darwinian natural selection operates.

Four decades later, in this book, Crick gives fight to the received tradition that our soul somehow exists independently of our biology. Though this news is clearly neither considered to be either astonishing or a hypothesis to members of the scientific community, it is certainly is such to the average layman.

Considering the average level of scientific awareness, I think Crick has well positioned his book in the strike zone of ignorance.

And so, when he says that our mind is created and altered by the physical features of our brain, that is news to most people.

And there was a time not too long ago when it was news to the scientific community as well. Perhaps no more dramatically was the point made than when, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a railway worker named Phineas Gage was placing explosive charges. To Gage's misfortune, one of his charges exploded prematurely sending a metal spike through the front part of his skull.

"After that," in an exteme understatement by a Gage co-worker, "Phineas wasn't the same Phineas anymore."

Where once there had been a thoughtful and sober employee, the new Gage (brain could actually be viewed through the hole in the top of his skull) became sullen and irratible...more prone to drinking than working.

What was significant was the wound helped fuel the first truly modern theory about the workings of consciousness...viz. that they emerged from the brain and therefore could be changed by the brain.

In fact, the one Nobel prize so far awarded in psychiatry (Munoz' 1949 achievement) came when doctors would remove the connecting tissue between the brain's hemispheres to reduce siezure activity (a remedy that now thankfully is achieved with drugs instead of such invasive surgery).

And what doctors accomplish through treatment, Mother Nature accomplishes through natural selection. Just like evolution impacts the development of limbs and internal organs and other anatomy, it also impacts brain development.

While certainly all these developments can't help but throw cold water on traditional notions of a soul/body dichotomy, it nonetheless remains astonishing news to most members of the general public. However, far from from making us feel more common and purposeless, it should makes us feel more lucky, that from a process that usually produces bacteria, bugs or at best meandering animals, that we've been given the opportunity to really understand (at least as best we can) nature and in so doing truly appreciate its beauty.

What a pity it would be to walk through an art museum with our eyes closed or attend a symphony with our fingers in our ears.

A most interesting and revealing unconscious account of a Nobel prize winner's frustration in trying to untie the Gordian knot of consciousness armed with the scientific methodology approach. The real value of this book is the unarticulated pessimism it distills about the possibility of science ever being an effective tool to unravel the mysteries of life and consciousness. It happens everytime a mathematician or a theoretical physicist strays away from the safe axiom-structure of his discipline and navigates in the unchartered waters of biology, sociology or philosophy. It happens in the best of families, Nobelists Nirenberg, Crick and Edelman being just the most recent examples. After all, should anyone expect retiring baseball star Cal Ripkin to be as good playing chess? The rules and perspectives of the game are different. The clue to Dr. Crick's deception is found in his homily during the Sunday Morning service at the end of the book when he critizes the psalmist for saying: "I am fearfully and wonderfully made.", to which he responds, tongue in cheek: "..he had only an indirect glimpse of the delicate and sophisticated nature of our molecular construction." And we ask, after several decades of trying to focus directly on the brain, what has he -or anybody else- come up with? Or perhaps he has the illusion he has explained "life" with his double helix model of DNA?, as when he claimed that DNA structure accounts for the "..mysterious aspects of embryology." Can an engineer, after calculating how the construction materials used account for the structural stability of a building, claim to have a knowledge of the master plan in the mind of the architect who designed it? When you take stock of the book you realize that there is nothing astonishing, not even any hypothesis, only a frustration. Did he solve the problem he set out to resolve? Did he develop strategies for the "Scientific Search of the Soul"? Hardly. He projects his displeasure when he points out the "..poor record.." of philosophers who "..would do better to show a certain modesty rather than the lofty superiority that they usually display". In one occasion he complained why church goers do not instead conduct experiments to demonstrate life after death! When he declares how "..our behaviour..based on a vast, interacting assembly of neurons..." enlarges the view humans have of themselves, any charitable reader would conclude, it must be only the British humor....

given the author and his research interests for the last 15 years, I expected a direct evaluation/presentation of a theory of consciousness. Instead, one gets a review of visual neuroscience. Of course, he and Kotch have made it clear they will use the visual system as a starter to finding the neural correlates of consciousness. But even so, one must be disappointed. Crick reviews his "searchlight hypothesis", which actually received some support at the end of the nineties. He also proposes the Gamma band ocillation theory, and that too has suport (in a way), importantly through the work of LLinas and W. Singer. Synchronization and temporal binding is a hot and promissing field. The book is an interesting read, despite my negative comments. A consciousness studies must, alongside Edelman and Damasios work.