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Consciousness Studies: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Posted on: Thursday, 8 April 2004, 06:00 CDT

CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES: CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES by K. Ramakrishna Rao. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002. Pp. vii + 367 $65.00 (illustrated case binding). ISBN 0- 7864-1382-4

This remarkable volume is notable because of: (a) the breadth and depth of its coverage of topics related to consciousness, both from Western and Eastern perspectives, (b) its serious, scholarly character, and (c) its generally clear, straightforward writing about some complex, abstract, and difficult topics. It is subdivided into "Part I-Western Tradition" (Chapters 1-7) and "Part II-Eastern Tradition" (Chapters 8-12).

In Chapter 1, "What It is Like to Be Conscious," the multiple connotations or meanings of the term consciousness, both commonplace and scholarly, are described. The author makes particular note of the subjectivity of consciousness, the factor that makes it intrinsically inaccessible to other individuals - at least, in any direct sense - and makes it difficult to study and measure.

Several varieties of awareness are catalogued and briefly discussed in this chapter: awareness of awareness, self-awareness, dreaming as an altered state, daydreaming and hypnagogic imagery, pathological awareness, unconsciousness, implicit awareness (response to information not in conscious focus or inaccessible to consciousness), special natural (e.g., nondreaming sleep) and induced (e.g., meditation or biofeedback) states, anomalous awareness (ESP), and what is termed awareness-as-such or pure consciousness (e.g., a blissful state that lacks awareness of objects, situations, or even self as an object). Also discussed are: criteria for inferring consciousness; the functional significance of consciousness; special charts or diagrams to organize Rao's concepts regarding awareness or conscious experience; and, finally, "The Four P's of Awareness" (pp. 28-29). The latter are: (a) primary awareness, which is everyday consciousness and involves specific content of which one is subjectively aware; (b) paradoxical awareness, which is the implicit awareness noted earlier;

(c) pathological awareness, which involves maladaptive processing (e.g., schizophrenic hallucinations); and (d) paranormal awareness, which is construed to include ESP and pure consciousness.

Rao asserts that "In states of paranormal awareness, the relationship between the knower and the known is one of identity" (D. 29). Given that he does not confine this statement to pure consciousness, he seemingly presumes that it applies to ESP. Inadequately supported conclusions or generalizations on fundamental conceptual issues such as this are rare in this volume, and this one seems surprising.

Chapter 2, "Primary Awareness," is built in considerable part around the writings of William James. It emphasizes the subjectivity and private character of consciousness, the fluid character of mental states and the constant flux of ideation, the therefore paradoxical sense of perceived continuity in experience, the intentionality of consciousness (which provides the sense of knowing about something in particular), and the selective activity of consciousness (or attention), called here volition. What may receive insufficient emphasis here is the capacity of certain events to preempt controlled attentional selection, plus the possibility that some acts of ostensibly volitional attention might really have been subtly primed by unattended information. Much of human mental life, including even goal-oriented behavior, may be less truly volitional and more unconscious than is often supposed. This is demonstrated in studies by John Bargh, a cognitive-social psychologist (see Bargh & Chartrand, 1999, a review). Rao's volume would have been far better balanced had it included some discussion of that important work and of parallel developments regarding extrasensory function.

Chapter 3, "Paradoxical Awareness and Pathological Awareness," includes brief descriptions of a number of experiments, some of them classics in so-called subliminal perception. Rao sketches some important illustrative research examples on this topic, which is a domain now likely to be called by some other names, such as subception. He discusses studies that effectively address major criticisms of subception work, criticisms that sometimes have imposed arbitrary and unfair criteria on the demonstration of such effects. Rao's treatment of this difficult and complex area is reasonably well-rounded, considering its brevity.

This chapter also discusses what Rao somewhat oddly and even confusingly introduces as subliminal memory, but which cognitive psychologists usually call implicit memory. Implicit memory involves evidence of the retention of information, as inferred from its influences on behavior (usually in a priming paradigm), whether or not one can consciously access that information. Rao does bring up the traditional term, though, at some point in his discourse. His discussion of implicit memory pinpoints some of the most important findings in that domain.

Discussion of paradoxical awareness in Chapter 3 continues with summaries of work on subliminal awareness in brain-damaged individuals (e.g., in those with blindsight) and on functional suggested blindness during hypnosis. The primary discussion of suggested blindness ends, appropriately, on a cautious note about interpretation of those findings, but that caution does not seem to adequately constrain later references to this matter, including some made within the same chapter.

Discussion turns, finally, to pathological awareness, and there is special focus on dissociation and multiple personality disorder. Rao's discussion of Stephen Braude's treatment of these topics is a very positive feature. I wish that he also had discussed and cited the social-psychological perspective on these matters as reflected particularly in the writings of the late Nicholas Spanos (1994), which include consideration of crosscultural work. The chapter concludes with an introductory section on the neuropsychology of unconscious function, which includes three different models of the nature of subjective experience that are sufficiently diverse to suggest something of the range of possible approaches to this topic.

Absent, in this and in other chapters of this volume, was meaningful discussion of an important class of models of cognitive function, developed in recent decades, namely connectionist models. These consist, generally, of computer models of neural networks presumed to engage in parallel distributed processing in the brain. These computer models of neural-network function can accomplish some of the known functions of higher human cognition. Although these models as a group are controversial-especially as complete accounts of various aspects of higher cognitive function-they have the particular virtue of using some conceptually simple, parsimonious means to achieve outcomes that recreate several important known features of higher cognitive function (see Martindale, 1991, for an introduction to these topics) . Among other matters, these models allow pattern recognition and the generalization of knowledge (Reisberg, 2001; Ch. 3, pp. 80-81; Ch. 8, pp. 262-269). They obviate the need for conscious, controlled, serial processing in the actual execution of certain tasks and allow greatly enhanced processing speed. Rao fully acknowledges that unconscious processing underlies much of cognitive function, but he would, in my view, have done well to have much more fully apprised his readers of the kinds of mechanisms that could help to explain unconscious cognitive function. He instead opts to view the models of modern cognitive psychology as efforts to do an end run around the real problem of consciousness, which he deems to be its subjective element. I would ask, though, whether anyone has done a good job of addressing that problem. Frankly, I doubt that, even after reading this book.

Chapter 4, "Paranormal Awareness," covers: spontaneous cases and a fine synopsis of some of Louisa Rhine's conclusions about such cases; experimental work on ESP; the replicability of ESP studies; remote viewing work; ESP in dreams; a possible relationship between extrasensory and subliminal sensory functioning (see later remarks), sheep-goat research and, more generally, attitudes and ESP; personality variables, largely neuroticism in some sense; physiological correlates and measures of psi influence; memory and extrasensory function; psi missing; the differential effects, of which Rao was the major investigator; extraversion and ESP; RSP during relaxation and during hypnosis; meditation as possibly fostering extrasensory ability; ganzfeld and ESP; and topics potentially related to post-mortem survival, including spontaneous occurrences (both unique and recurrent), mediumistic controls, cross- correspondences, apparitions, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and studies of ostensible reincarnation cases. This chapter concludes with discussion of awareness as such (i.e., so- called pure consciousness) and the commentary of several contemporary philosophers of mind that bear on the meaning of these mystical experiences. Rao puts special emphasis, as seems appropriate, on the transformative potential of such experiences.

In his discussi\on of a supposed positive relationship between subliminal sensory response and extrasensory response (pp. 83-85), his argument might have been strengthened by the citation of a meta- analysis of work correlating extrasensory and subliminal functioning in laboratory tests (included in Stanford, 1990) that sustained the very point that Rao seemingly wanted to make here: namely, parallels between extrasensory and subliminal sensory functioning. Rao might have advanced the conceptual plausibility of his case by providing some incisive discussion of how the particular, presumably similar, processing demands of subliminal and extrasensory tasks might create the expected positive correlation of performance of these two kinds. He says "In neither case do we have a clear understanding of the process by which the subliminal stimulus or the ESP target causes these behavioral effects from which we infer subliminal or extrasensory perception" (p. 85). Discussion of the work of Bargh (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999), concerned with unconscious sensory influences on thought and behavior, and of Stanford (1990) in regard to unconscious extrasensory influence (i.e., the PMIR model) could have provided some precise hypotheses related to such matters.

The section on memory and ESP proved a disappointment, but, admittedly, some of the past work in this area is a disappointment to me, conceptually speaking. What seems lacking in Rao's discussion here, and in some of the research publications, is a clearly stated, logically coherent rationale for expecting a particular kind of relationship of performance on memory and on extrasensory tasks or for expecting an intrinsic process-relevant relationship between these kinds of functioning.

In Chapter 4's discussion of the Stanford-Stein (1994) meta- analysis of studies examining hypnosis and a control condition, it is said that "Stanford and Stein also report cumulative ESP-test scores significant for hypnosis" (p. 92). Rao's treatment of our meta-analysis neglects to mention that the hypnosis-comparison contrast was not significant when the experimenter was used as the basis of the analysis so as to obviate the possibility that heavy contributions to the database by particular experimenters would bias the outcome. Also, ESP performance in neither the hypnosis nor the comparison condition was significant when analyzed in terms of chief investigator. This important set of qualifying findings should have been mentioned, for it brings into question the generalizability of the outcome that hypnosis can be used to facilitate ESP performance.

Chapter 5, "Consciousness, Mind and Intentionality: Philosophical Discussions," consists of sketches of the positions of certain historically important philosophers relative to such issues as the mind-brain or mind-body relationship. One often has the impression here of reading a very basic philosophy text, the more so given that the ideas of numerous philosophers of the mind, of a variety of persuasions, are discussed in the span of 28 pages. This chapter may prove interesting for those who have not had basic philosophy courses and possibly for some who have. How much of this chapter will be of interest to those primarily interested in the science of consciousness is difficult to know.

Chapter 6, "Consciousness, Brain, and the New Physics," discusses, among a variety of topics, quantum theory as some have viewed it to relate to consciousness, including Evan Harris Walker's observational theory, which is well known to parapsychologists. Among the other theorists covered are David Bohm and Roger Penrose. Criticisms of some of their ideas are briefly discussed. The writings of several neuro-scientists are considered in the latter part of this chapter. What I find fascinating about Rao's writing in this chapter is his ability to write reasonably clearly and thoughtfully about a diversity of somewhat esoteric topics. I lack the expertise to comment incisively on many of the topics in this chapter, which involve both quantum physics and consciousness and some unique interpretations of both.

Chapter 7, "Psychologies of Consciousness," contains considerable repetition of material mentioned earlier, especially as discussion is related to William James. This chapter then evolves into a treatment of topics ranging from the psychology of consciousness to such abstruse ideas from depth psychology as Carl Jung's collective unconscious and what might be termed transpersonal psychology as per commentators such as Ken Wilber (who gets three reference citations but whose name does not appear in the index). This chapter also, somewhat oddly, includes a variety of theories of psi, including, once again, Walker's observational theory. A serious gap in this chapter is the lack of treatment of the psi-mediated instrumental response (PMIR) model (see Stanford, 1990, which reviews and conceptualizes work bearing on unconscious psi influence).

Very little is said in this chapter or elsewhere about non- Indian Eastern ideas, which may have something to contribute here, especially the works of Taoism. Essentially nothing was said about the contributions of other, quite different, religious orientations (e.g., judaism, Christianity, and Islam and others) to understandings of consciousness and of human experience.

Too much of this chapter focuses on essentially philosophical speculations about psi (e.g., C. D. Broad's compound theory and R. Thouless's Shin hypothesis) that, so far as I know, have inspired no actual research and that may well be incapable of experimental testing. Substantial deficiencies in a chapter on psychologies of consciousness are the lack of discussion of cognitive psychologists' methods for differentiating automatic and controlled processing, such as the processdissociation methodology of L. L. Jacoby (Jacoby & Kelley, 1992), which has had a major influence in cognitive psychology, and even of how a process may be operationally determined to be automatic. Rao's discussion seems, also, somewhat marred by a failure to acknowledge the divergence of opinion among researcher-theorists about the degree and kinds of processing that can be had by information to which one docs not attend. Rao says "Only the messages to which we attend are processed for meaning" (p. 163). There are certainly cognitive psychologists who would agree, but not all researcher-theorists agree on this, including some of the authors cited by Rao elsewhere in this volume, in connection with subception.

Chapter 8, "Yoga: Royal Road to Higher Consciousness," is centered on the Samkhya-Yoga philosophy, a Vedantic viewpoint that has much to say about the nature of the mind and how it relates to other elements of this philosophic system. Anyone interested in yoga as a philosophy or as a method of self-development might find much of interest here. The treatment here seems accurate and about as clear as discussions of some of these rather abstruse concepts can be. The discussion includes ideas from the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, which, among other things, relate yogic practice to the development of psychic powers. This and the other chapters in Part II can be valuable for Westerners who wish to look beyond their own cultural framework to understand some potentially very different views of reality.

Chapter 9, "Vedanta: A Philosophy of Pure Consciousness," describes the philosophical system advanced by the Indian philosopher Samkara, the spokesman for Advaita Vedanta. This theory of unqualified nondualism or monism involves, in part, explanation of a metaphysics of so-called pure consciousness.

Chapter 10, "Buddhism: A Psychology of Consciousness," makes clear the distinct divergence between the form of Buddhist beliefs about consciousness discussed here, the Theravada tradition, and the Vedantic beliefs discussed earlier. Rao aptly sums it up by saying that "Buddhism is a philosophy of becoming whereas Vedanta is a philosophy of being" (p. 251). Buddhism, as it is discussed here, focuses on the development of an understanding of the human condition, including of the mind, and the development, through various spiritual practices, of a freedom from false ideas we have about ourselves and our minds. Buddhism's various systems of psychology are, therefore, highly developed, and it can be fascinating to compare and contrast them with ideas from both historical and contemporary psychology. Rao sees the possibility of some kind of psychotherapy developing out of Buddhist thinking and practices, one attuned to liberation from the consequences of past conditioning.

Chapter 11, "When East and West Meet: The Case of Meditation," discusses some of the major scientific work on meditation, both in psychological and psychophysiological studies, and describes how a variety of ideas and social influences have been exchanged between East and West. One topic addressed here is whether there is scientific justification for regarding meditation as a unique physiological state: there may not be. The potential long-term consequences of meditation also are discussed, including whether it may facilitate psychic (psi) development. In the latter regard, Rao wisely notes that despite some positivesounding outcomes, the absence of suitable controls make clear inference a very difficult matter.

Chapter 12: "Confluence of Two Streams: East-West Sangamam," seems largely a summary and integration of the entire volume. This chapter is sufficiently repetitious, especially in regard to the yogic view of meditation and to the topic of pure consciousness, that the reader may be inclined to shut the pages. Nonetheless, this chapter constitutes a good review of considerable amounts of the material that went before and might even serve as an overview of the volume for those with too little time to read all of its chapters.

Rao concludes that it is ultimately necessary to make a fundamental distinction between m\ind and consciousness, a distinction found in Vedantic teachings. This is coupled with a charge that the West has developed no fruitful approaches to studying subjectivity in consciousness. Rao believes that fruitful approaches of the latter kind have been developed in the East, but that they involve what he calls firstyerson approaches to knowledge, that of personal experience and inward activity such as meditation and spiritual discipline. The approaches of science to studying the mind and of yoga to illuminating it with pure consciousness are not, in Rao's view, antithetical, but complementary.

One final gap of coverage deserves mention. There are now perhaps thousands of pages of scientific literature related to cross- cultural studies of psychology, many of which seem to directly illuminate some of the topics addressed in this volume (see, e.g., reviews by Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999; Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1996). Important examples include investigations of fundamental differences between specific Western and Eastern cultures in: the tendency to explain the behavior of others as due to a personal characteristic or as a function of that person's situation in the world; the attentional selection and perception of objects more as unique objects than as part of situations or groups; whether the very sense of self is constituted by an independent, individual self or by one's relationships with others; and the tendency to recall certain personal social interactions in terms of oneself looking out toward others rather than from the perspective of someone looking at oneself (Cohen & Gunz, 2002). This exciting research continues at an accelerated pace. It illuminates how cultural learning shapes the experience of the self, one's views of others, and perceptions of the very contingencies of life. Discussion of some of this work could have made this book more fully a discussion of "cross-cultural perspectives," in accord with the volume's subtitle. I hope that, should there be a future edition, this gap might be filled.

Additional editing might have been useful to eliminate (a) repetition, (b) errors of citation, referencing, and indexing (i.e., disparities among these), and (c) the frequent and sometimes bothersome use of the editorial we. Nonetheless, the knowledge and skill involved in the preparation of this volume are impressive. Rao's treatise is packed with diverse information about consciousness and consciousness studies, described in a remarkably straightforward, clear-headed fashion. It is an outstandingly valuable resource, despite the important gaps and lapses noted earlier. I heartily recommend it as a very useful reference or for a long, thoughtful read.

REFERENCKS

BARGH, J. A., & CHARTRAND, T. L. (1999). American Psychologist, 56, 462-479.

CHOI, I., NISBETT, R. E., & NORENZAYAN, A. (1999). Causal attribution across cultures: Variation and universality. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 47-63.

COHEN, D., & GUNZ, A. (2002). As seen by the other . . . : Perspectives on the self in memories and emotional perceptions of Easterners and Westerners. Psychological Science, 13, 55-59.

JACOBY, L. L., & KELLEY, C. M. (1992). A process-dissociation framework for investigating unconscious influences: Freudian slips, prqjective tests, subliminal perception, and signal detection theory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, 174-179.

MARKUS, H. R., KITAYAMA, S., & HEIMAN, R. J. (1996). Culture and "basic" psychological principles. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 857-913). New York: Guilford Press.

MARTINDALE, C. (1991). Cognitive psychology: A neural-network approach. Pacific Grover, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

REISBERG, D. (2001). Cognition: Exploring the science of the mind (2nd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

SPANOS, N. P. (1994). Multiple identity enactments and multiple personality disorder: A sociocognitive perspective. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 143-165.

STANFORD, R. G. (1990). An experimentally testable model for spontaneous psi events: A review of related evidence and concepts from parapsychology and other sciences. In S. Krippner (Ed.), Advances in parapsychological research 6 (pp. 54-167). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

STANFORD, R. G., & STEIN, A. G. (1994). A meta-analysis of ESP studies contrasting hypnosis and a comparison condition. Journal of Parapsychology, 58, 235-269.

REX G. STANFORD

Psychology Laboratory

SB-15 Marillac Hall

St. John's University

8000 Utopia Parkway

Jamaica, NY 11439, USA

stanforr@stjohns.edu

Copyright Parapsychology Press Fall 2003

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