Drawing

Late last night, on my way home from drawing group, I turned on the radio and landed in the middle of an interview with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. The question he was answering, apparently, was "where does consciousness come from?" One by one, he knocked out the various forms of sensory experience off the list: it doesn't come from seeing; it doesn't come from hearing, or touch or taste or smell -- a human can lose every one of those senses and still be what we call conscious. But, he said, there's a sense that we can't lose and maintain self-awareness: our sense of our body. Proprioception, a neuroscientist would call it, the countless, almost instantaneous signals that feed our brain the information it uses to construct an image of our body in space. Where is my nose, where is my hand, where is the back of my knee…every moment of our lives the body is "talking" to our brain and our brain is coordinating that chat into a sense of self that is deeply founded in the body.

Coming as I was from several hours of looking at a body, choosing, consciously or unconsciously, certain ways to hold my hand, certain modulations of pressure on the pencil, certain angles for my stance and rates of speed for my movements, I wondered about the link between this experience and Damasio's ideas. The fascination of drawing -- the reason to keep at it, whether or not one is pleased with the results -- is the process, the dance, the circuit, the connection between the vision of another body (which may stimulate mirror neurons to create parallel sensations in one's own body), the control of the hand and materials, and what appears on paper. In this process one encounters so many subtle variations of understanding the body in space, and, if one is skilled or lucky, linking them to leave physical, tangible evidence of that link on paper. I think it is not too grand to say that in the best moments, the process creates a sensation of greater awareness or more consciousness. What that means is not esoteric or spiritual as people sometimes refer to a "higher plane of being" but very humble and momentary and physical.

One of the callers-in to the talk show asked Damasio how his ideas related to "higher consciousness," and he pointed out the spatial notion embedded in the language, that more consciousness would be "higher." For him, an increase in consciousness might occur "lower" -- further down the brainstem -- where all the preconscious wrangling of bodily sensation takes place.

The interview (which is linked in the first paragraph) was part of Damasio's tour for his new book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. It was sitting on my desk before I heard the interview, as I've been interested in his other books, but I haven't read it yet. So this is not exactly a book review, but a preamble to one perhaps.