On TUITs and TRITs

Contents

• Introduction
• Reading
• TUITs and TRITs
• Memory
• Translation to LWS
• Conclusions
• References

Introduction

At reference 1 there is an extensive discussion by Schooler and others of a phenomenon called zoning out, when one’s attention wanders off the text that one is reading, a wandering off of which one might or might not be aware or become aware. Wandering off which one might go so far as to call day dreaming. We suppose that the text is interesting and, most of the time, absorbing. Much of this discussion might well be applied to activities other than reading, such as walking to town or making a cake, but reference 1 is mainly about reading. Schooler reports experiments that suggest that on average we might zone out while reading between five and ten times an hour – which, from our own experience, strikes us as a rather low estimate.

This small, closed world of reading and zoning out from that reading is accessible and replicable, and the present paper is motivated by the thought that it includes at least three distinct flavours of consciousness – reading, inner thought and aperçu – and provides a good vehicle for the discussion of consciousness, against the background of our overall objective of providing some description and explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness, of subjective experience generally. We use the LWS model to support that description and explanation.

A lot of the work on zoning out in the past has taken an educational view, has been on the effect of zoning out on time management and comprehension, with the thought being that zoning out must be bad for comprehension, for the efficiency with which students soak up their set books, which we assume to be worthy and interesting. The students have chosen their subject and we might reasonably suppose them to be interested in it, to want to get to grips with their set books. So one must improve their concentration and cut down on their zoning out. Various people came up with various wheezes to do this, some involving speaking aloud, thought to be fairly destructive of inner thought, and some involving something called mindfulness. Reference 4 will tell you something about this last, and Google offers plenty more.

One can easily try this for oneself, trying to think about something else, in words or otherwise, while:

• Reading aloud from a book
• Declaiming aloud from memory
• Reading silently from a book
• Declaiming silently from memory
• Listening to someone else reading or declaiming aloud

With the exception of the last of these, the most passive of the five options listed, the best we can do is odd words; we failed to achieve any parallelism with connected words, with sentences, although we imagine that one could do better with practise and that proper investigation would reveal systematic differences between these options. But we did succeed in plenty of zoning out, with the inference being that one stream of language takes up so much brain power, in one way or another, that there is not enough left for another.

A more recent example of this work is to be found at reference 4 – involving an experiment in which about one third of the zoning out found by probes was intentional, deliberate or wilful. Where we take ‘intentional’ to mean that the experimental subjects knew that they were zoning out, more or less from the outset, but let it roll anyway. We have yet to find the instructions to the subjects on this point, but in any event, the present interest lies with the other two thirds.

There is also the suggestion, raised at, for example, reference 3, that even thinking words engages some large part of the machinery for speech. And there is only one copy, one instance of at least some of that machinery. So in addition to evidence that reading and day-dreaming, or at least reading and inner speech, do not go on concurrently, we have a possible reason why they are not compatible, cannot go on concurrently.

Which reminds us of the story of the Victorian politician, perhaps Disraeli, who was said to be able to dictate letters to two secretaries at once. We suspect that this was not the same thing at all either: Disraeli was not doing both at once, but he was clever enough to keeping switching between his two trains of thought, keeping both going fast enough to keep the quill-pen writing secretaries busy, this being before the invention of biros or shorthand.

And which may point us to an explanation of why it often happens that one suddenly realises that one has stopped reading, and one glimpses what one had been thinking about instead. One cannot read and do inner speech at the same time, so while can one drift from one to the other imperceptibly, after a while some monitoring process notices than something has gone wrong and pulls one up. If one could carry on reading, at least after a fashion while thinking inwardly about something else, maybe the monitoring process would be fooled. So driving the car yes, reading a book no.

We close this section by noting a weakness of the work reported at reference 1, a weakness recognised by the authors, a weakness in that one would rather not have to rely on self-report to collect data about a phenomenon which is largely unconscious. They look to machines which can track eye movements, to EEG and to scanners to address this weakness.

Reading

Since this paper is about reading, we thought it appropriate to do a little revision with references 4 and 5 on the Kindle, a hand held device with a screen about the size of the page of a standard paperback book, and so organised that one can read one handed – not really the case with a book, with it being much more convenient to use the second hand to turn the pages, rather than attempting the whole business with the first – possible, but rather clumsy.

Reference 4 is a murder mystery of the better sort, written at the end of the 20th century, while reference 5 is a novel written nearly 150 years previously, set somewhere in rural England. A much denser read that reference 4, with far more complex use of language, which meant, in our case, quite often needing to read a sentence more than once. We suspect also that there was more zoning out.

Here we restrict ourselves to reading, rather than being read to.

Here we restrict ourselves to reading prose fiction in English, the sort of English spoken in England. We do not suppose that the language makes much difference. And while the match of this fiction to our tastes may well affect the dynamics of our reading, we do not suppose that the overall shape of things is much affected.

Reading is usually done sitting down, or at least sitting up, with standing up and lying down also being possible.

Reading is still usually done with a book with pages, usually a book which can be comfortably held with one hand, rather than needing a lectern or a table, with various other media being possible. Posters on a wall or the side of a bus, a cinema or television screen, some form of computer, which might be desktop, laptop or hand held.

Books are often organised into parts and chapters. Here we restrict ourselves to more or less continuous reading within a single chapter. We do not turn back to read something again, skip forward to see how things turn out or skim. We do not look at the pictures, consult the index or read about the author on the back cover.

The business of reading commonly takes place in bursts. We read for a few minutes, less commonly many minutes, then we pause. Attention shifts to something else. Perhaps to the fire or window in front of which we are sitting. Or perhaps because we have something else to do, to the clock round to the right. Perhaps to the drink sat somewhere to hand. And, in addition to these overt shifts of attention, we have the more or less covert zoning out.

Here we restrict ourselves to a few minutes of reasonably absorbed reading of favoured prose fiction, sitting down, during which there will usually be some zoning out, some page turning and some shifts of attention, but no big changes of scene, position or posture. Where by scene we mean scene in the sense of a play, a few pages of continuous prose, prose reflecting some continuous flow of thought, action or both. The sort of thing that you get in most fiction, leaving aside some of the more exotic offerings, past and present.

TUITs and TRITs

A lot of the work has also talked about TUITs, task unrelated images and thoughts, comparable in some ways to Hurlburt’s inner speech and inner seeing, which taken together are called inner thought and which are discussed at reference 2. With the task in this case being reading. To which we add the acronym TRITs, task related images and thoughts. The rationale for this last is that while one might read a novel continuously, one might be lost in that reading, one might not be taking breaks, this is less likely to be true and even less likely to be helpful in the case of reading non-fiction, where sitting back, taking stock and asking questions is an essential aid to comprehension. Reading is nowhere near enough.

However, this does not disturb the interest of this scenario for students of consciousness. A scenario involving a rather narrow world of reading and day-dreaming while reading, but, as noted above, a world in which one can reliably generate at least three rather different kinds of consciousness, thus making it a useful vehicle to talk about different kinds of consciousness more generally.

As far as TUITs and TRITs are concerned, we think that rather than setting up a binary divide between tasking and TUITing, that it would be more helpful to set up a spectrum with the task, in this case reading, at one end, TRITing along the way and full-on TUITing at the other end. And regardless of whether one is TUITing or TRITing, the resources available for reading are diminished. The eyes may continue to scan the written word, the words might be sinking in, one might well be able to replay recent words if poked, but comprehension is going to be low. And one may or may not be aware that one has stopped reading – with the experiments described at reference 1 suggesting that a lot of the time one will not be so aware. But also a lot of the time, as noted above, what happens is that one suddenly realises that one has stopped reading, and one glimpses what one had been thinking about instead. We call this sort of thing an aperçu. At this point one might decide to resume reading, perhaps going back a bit to pick up again at the point of departure, or one might decide to carry on with the inner thought. Is that decision conscious or not? Our guess is that a decision to resume reading is often going to be a very quick decision, with no time for conscious reflection, while a decision to carry on with inner thought might be more considered. One might actually think about whether the TUIT or TRIT was something that should be pursued, written down or otherwise followed up.

In this, the suggestion is that while one might drift into TUITing without noticing, one is apt to snap out of it.

One might say that one has to be conscious to read, that one has to be awake, although it seems to us likely that there have been cases of sleep walkers reading. Perhaps to the extent of reading directions on signs or reading labels on doors. But what Schooler seems to be saying is that there is an intermittent something beyond consciousness which he calls meta-consciousness. From time to time, one becomes aware that one is doing something or other, a something or other which one had until that point been absorbed in. And most of the time, during both reading and the inner thought which at times displaces the reading, there is no meta-consciousness. But when one becomes aware, one has the opportunity to review and reflect. Am I doing what I ought to be doing, what I want to be doing? Am I happy? Have I lost the plot? And one can often achieve much the same effect with one of Hurlburt’s random probes.

Memory

Schooler goes on to question whether there is any real distinction between processes which are conventionally regarded as being unconscious, like cooking lunch on autopilot while having an important conversation with one’s next door neighbour and processes which are conventionally regarded as being conscious, like being engrossed in reading a book.

One distinction might be to do with memory. If one is engaged on a truly unconscious activity, one cannot say anything about it if asked. There is no report.

But if one is interrupted when absorbed in reading a book, one can usually say something about it. One might be able to say a great deal about the doings of Commander Dalgliesh, or whoever else it was that one had been reading about. Which links back to the concerns about comprehension with which we started, with memory being an important ingredient in demonstrating comprehension of what one has just read. One needs to remember quite a lot of what one has read in order to be able to answer questions which you do not know about in advance. You can’t just store the answers to the questions, in the way that you might if someone showed you a copy of the question paper for a test that you were due to take the next day.

One complication is that one might not be listening to what someone is saying because one has carried on reading the newspaper. But when the someone complains that you are not paying attention you can prove that you were by replaying what they were saying. So you were more or less unconscious of what they were saying, but you do have memory of it. And in the case of cooking lunch on autopilot you might replace the missing autobiographical memory with semantic memory. The brain can quickly work back from where you have got to, recreating something which you then experience as something like an autobiographical memory.

Another complication is that the brain might well remember stuff of which you were never conscious. It is just that you don’t know about it, never knew about it, and cannot recover it. Turning to the computer for an analogy one might see various problems:

• One does not know that it is there, so don’t think to ask for it
• One does not have the key to access it with. In the same way as with a person you might need to have their national insurance number to get at their file. No access by name. Although brains, like modern computers, can manage with any one of various keys: the image of the face, some fact or other about the person concerned, perhaps something they are or something they have done
• The data is in the wrong format for conscious consumption. So back on the computer, you might have the chunk of stuff which you know contains the information you want, but you do not have the key with which it has been encrypted. Or, which might amount to much the same thing, you don’t know how the information has been organised.

Turning to this last, what is the difference between the muscles of the leg and the muscles of the large intestine, both driven by nervous impulses from the brain, but with our only being aware of the resultant movement in the case of the former? Leaving aside the body control powers attributed to some gurus. One difference is that one can see the leg and one can learn to correlate the sight of the moving leg, which is easy, with the obscure feelings from the motor apparatus, which is hard – but which, with a bit of help, can be done. With the end result that one can then consciously feel the movement of the leg even when one cannot see it.

In sum, we might say that something is more conscious, the more apt the brain is to store an autobiographical memory of that something. Or we might say that a person is conscious of what they are doing to the extent that they are able to remember their doing it. Or put another way, to the extent that they can report on what they are doing when poked. Back again to where we started. And from where we associate to the teachers’ trick of getting their charges to memorise stuff by reciting it. The act of putting something into speech makes it very apt to get into memory – although in this case we are talking semantic rather than autobiographical memory.

It seems likely that this is firstly a result of words being a very compact way to store information, they do a good job of leveraging the large amounts of regularity and repetition there is there out in the world, and secondly of their being something that can be replayed, with much more ease than is the case with a visual scene. Almost all of us can rehearse words, with the precise way that we do it not usually mattering very much, a word is the word however it is said, but very few of us can rehearse pictures. Diagrams maybe, photographs maybe not.

Translation to LWS

Figure 1

Figure 1 is a box model adapted from the beginning of Reference 7. Where we have it that a unit of consciousness is a frame, lasting for the order of a second or so, with sequences of frames grouped into takes and sequences of takes into scenes, by analogy with the world of film. The subject is the person having the experience. Further background on LWS is to be found at reference 8.

Here, we have grouped layers into threads, so the subject might have several threads about reading, as it were, on the shelf, to be brought into frames of conscious as and when appropriate. Data and objects is the information contents of threads and their layers, derived somehow from a combination of old input from memory and new input from the senses and the rest of the body. This new input being real time input (in the jargon of computer people) in that it is arriving not much before, maybe a few hundred milliseconds before, a few tenths of a second before the corresponding subjective experience.

When the subject is in a coma or in a deep sleep, there are no scenes or anything else. When the subject is awake, the whole panoply of scenes through to layers is there and some of those layers may be conscious. In this model, we have it that in order to be conscious, content has to be expressed in one or more layers. But that is not sufficient and there is an in-between condition where content has been expressed in one or more layers, but is still not conscious – although it might recently have been conscious or might be about to be made conscious.

This being made conscious is the business of the activation processes, active for the duration of a frame and which have been set up as part of the compilation of the frame.

These frames do not form an unbroken sequence in time. While the interval between many frames will be small compared with the duration of the frame, sometimes there will be long intervals, long periods where there is nothing in LWS at all.

Figure 2

Figure 2 offers five threads supporting sitting reading in the front room, an activity to which we might devote several hours each day, and ten layers. One of the ideas in LWS being that a layer contains data in just one mode, so sights, sounds or words, but not any permutation from three.

In the case of reading, one layer is devoted to the business of holding and handling the book, turning the pages. Most of the time, very much in the background. Another is devoted to scanning the words on the page. Again, most of the time, very much in the background. We are experienced readers and do not need to pay much attention to the workings of the eyes, either the inner workings of the eyes proper or the outer workings of the muscles which support them and move them about. The third layer is devoted to the content of the book, a structured and annotated stream of words.

What we are at here is the coming and going of this third layer of the reading thread and the inner speech layer of the inner thought thread, as sometimes observed by aperçu.

We suppose that this last will, as well as pointing to the substantive content of whatever it is that is being noticed, will contain a summary of that content, perhaps in the form of a few words, perhaps even a couple of sentences.

Figure 3

All of which we capture in a simple way in the LWS world of Figure 3. One starts off with a reading thread, with that thread occupying at least one layer of LWS, probably more. This is then supplanted by a thread of inner thought, words, images or both, in turn supplanted by an aperçu. One then goes back to reading. Dark blue for a strong thread, light blue for a weak thread.

The aperçu will be linked to the inner thought and will contain or will be linked to a self image and its activation gives rise to Schooler’s meta-consciousness. This self image will sometimes, perhaps often, be present in other contexts, with its strength giving us, rather than a binary choice, another spectrum from not self aware to very self aware.

Figure 4

Figure 4 illustrates the overlapping windows onto the evolving text, with the same notion applied to the inner thought. With the result that the aperçu has access to a bit of history.

While other parts of the brain will be doing comprehension and will be tracking more of the story, the story so far, in some way or another, and will be checking for consistency and coherence, this is not necessary for consciousness. It is enough for it to have the last few words and some supporting, soothing, possibly feeling or emotional content in the background.

Figure 5

With Figure 5 illustrating a rather simpler scenario. One is reading away, but from time to time surfacing in a frame of self awareness. An aperçu of one’s reading, rather than of one’s having zoned out.

Conclusions

We have talked about the phenomenon of zoning out and have sketched how it might work in the context of LWS.

We note in closing one agreeable feature of the LWS model. It can hold lots of stuff, but one can vary that stuff’s presence in consciousness in a continuous way: any particular item can be present, absent or anything in between. There is no insistence on uncomfortable binary choices.

PS: an interesting feature in all this is that language, which is needed for both reading and inner speech, is more or less confined to humans and is relatively recent, in evolutionary terms very recent. With speaking being perhaps a quarter of a million years old, and reading of the order of ten thousand years old. With this last being not much time to breed a fancy dog in the natural way by evolution – although more than enough to breed one by the art the breeder. This in contrast to vision, with human vision having a great deal in common with primate vision and a lot in common with vertebrate vision more generally.

References

Reference 1: Zoning out during reading: evidence for dissociations between experience and meta-consciousness - Schooler, J.W. et al. – 2004.

Reference 2: The phenomena of inner experience - Christopher L. Heavey, Russell T. Hurlburt – 2007.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html.

Reference 4: Increasing participant motivation reduces rates of intentional and unintentional mind wandering - Paul Seli, Daniel L. Schacter, Evan F. Risko, and Daniel Smilek – 2017.

Reference 5: A certain justice – P. D. James – 1997.

Reference 6: Silas Marner – George Eliot – 1861.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/on-scenes.html.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/geometry-and-activation-in-world-of.html.