For this interview, I corresponded with Dr. Joel Snyder, professor of neuroscience and the coordinator of the Neuroscience Department at UNLV. He teaches classes on Perception and Cognitive Neuroscience, and studies the measurement of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

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Q: To start with, give me a summary of who Joel Snyder is, what do you do, and how you are contributing to the world around you through your work?

 

Dr. Snyder: My main contribution is in basic research. I study auditory cognitive neuroscience, with the goal of understanding how the brain helps us perceive sound. The main approach I take is to perform listening experiments in human participants to understand how they perceived music, speech, and other kinds of sounds. Sometimes we also record brain activity during listening experiments using EEG or fMRI, and I collaborate with a lab in Maryland that builds computational models of how the brain processes sound to provide further understanding and translate that into new technologies for automated sound processing. I also teach undergraduate courses on Perception and Cognitive Neuroscience, and I’m the director of the new Ph.D. program in Neuroscience at UNLV, which I helped design and propose to the administration over the past few years. For the Neuroscience program, I’m also teaching a proseminar, which helps the students in the program with their professional development and grant writing. Outside of the university, I’m an Associate Editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, which means I solicit reviews for submitted papers and make decisions about accepting or rejecting the papers.

 

 

Q: What do you love most about what you do?

 

Dr. Snyder: I love discovering new things about the brain and our perception. I also love teaching and mentoring students, especially in one on one settings, where I can provide tailored advice about how they can seek out what they want to do in education or in employment. 

 

Q: Now, enter the fun part of the questionnaire. My project was inspired by a book called “Darwin’s Pharmacy” written by Richard Doyle, an English professor at Penn State University. 

 

“Darwin’s Pharmacy” is Doyle’s attempt at changing the rhetoric that governs our relationship with the planet. In “Darwin’s Pharmacy,” he builds this image of the ecosystem of the universe, that is people, animals, plants and everything in-between as being interconnected, and interconnectedness is his central theme. However, this book is not just about climate change, it’s an exploration of both the visible and invisible realms that connect us to the planet, physics as well as consciousness, connecting the scientific with the mystical. And to build this image of a web of matter and natural laws and everything else, he calls on different disciplines, physics, biology, rhetoric, philosophy, religion, etc. 

 

For example, he uses the term “noösphere,” something that biogeochemist Vladimir Verdansky coined as the “conscious layer of the Earth’s ecosystem.” And the noösphere becomes a central theme in the argument for interconnectedness, it’s the source of the “implicate order” that dictates the processes of the Earth’s living spheres. 

 

In your work, you study the inner workings of the brain. How does this concept of a cosmic consciousness interfere with the idea that the brain, instead, crafts its own reality?

 

Dr. Snyder: Consciousness is one of my main interests right now. In fact, some of my recent publications are trying to figure out how the brain makes up our mind about what we are perceiving:

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811919308110 

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007746&rev=2 

 

There are a lot of theories about consciousness and in my opinion some of them are more fruity than others (pardon the colloquialism). I’m not too familiar with the particular theory you describe above, but it does have a similar flavor to a theory called IIT (Integrated Information Theory), which some people take seriously but other people think is not specific enough to make real scientific predictions about the outcomes of experiments, which is important if it’s going to be testable. Here’s a Wikipedia page about it:

 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory.

 

The theory basically says that there are different parts of your consciousness that are processed in the brain such as the color of an object you see and the shape of the object, and for you to be consciousness of the object, you need to activate the color and the shape and integrate those things together. One neat thing about the theory related to your question is that it provides some quasi-mathematical conceptions about what kind of information processing produces consciousness and therefore you might be able to look for consciousness in animals that can’t talk to you to convince you that they are having conscious thoughts. You might even be able to look for consciousness in other structures such as an ant colony, where the intelligent behavior and communications between different ants might resemble some aspects about how neurons in our brain cooperate together to create consciousness. This resembles the idea of panpsychism, which is controversial but interesting to think about.

 

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Q: Lastly, let’s imagine that people learn to adopt this vision of a world interconnected physically and mystically, after Doyle’s model. What can we do with this, where do you think it would lead us, as a society or as a species?

 

Dr. Snyder: As I said above, if there is some truth to panpsychism and IIT, maybe we can find consciousness in other organisms, or even inanimate objects. This would be an astounding scientific discovery but I think we’re pretty far from doing that because there is not much good agreement by scientists about how to measure consciousness even in people.

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The bottom line? Human consciousness alone is on the dark side os scientific research, with much uncertainty about the nuts and bolts of it still reigning. A universal consciousness would be even further away from a scientific recognition. 

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The question would now be, do we need a mathematical equation to explain consciousness, the single most inherent element of our humanity, the essence of human authenticity? 

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If you have any questions for Dr. Snyder, here are his credentials!