The loopy nature of
consciousness trips up scientists
studying themselves
By Tom Siegfried
When Francis Crick decided to embark on a sci- entific research career, he chose his specialty by applying the “gossip test.” He’d noticed that he liked to gossip about two especially hot top-
ics in the 1940s — the molecular basis for heredity and the
mysteries of the brain. He decided to tackle biology’s mol-
ecules first. By 1953, with collaborator James Watson (and
aided by data from competitor Rosalind Franklin), Crick had
identified the structure of the DNA molecule, establishing
the foundation for modern genetics.
to near the origin of life when things had to be simple,” Crick
said in a 1998 interview. “It isn’t clear there will be a similar
thing in the brain.”
In fact, it has become pretty clear that deciphering con-
sciousness will definitely be more difficult than describing
the dynamics of DNA. Crick himself spent more than two
decades attempting to unravel the consciousness riddle,
working on it doggedly until his death in 2004. His collabo-
rator, neuroscientist Christof Koch of Caltech, continues
their work even today, just as dozens of other scientists pur-
sue a similar agenda — to identify the biological processes
that constitute consciousness and to explain how and why
those processes produce the subjective sense of persistent
identity, the self-awareness and unity of experience, and the
“awareness of self-awareness” that scientists and philoso-
phers have long wondered about, debated and sometimes
even claimed to explain.
So far, no one has succeeded to anyone else’s satisfaction.
Yes, there have been advances: Understanding how the brain
processes information. Locating, within various parts of the
brain, the neural activity that accompanies certain conscious
perceptions. Appreciating the fine distinctions between
awareness, attention and subjective impressions. But yet
with all this progress, the consciousness problem remains
MICHAEL MORGENSTERN
www.sciencenews.org
