Consciousness while reading

This being prompted by skimming the papers at references 1 and 2, papers which address the extent to which reading is a parallel or, alternatively, a serial process – given first, the massively parallel capability of both the eyes and the brain and second, the very serial nature of text – particularly in languages like English in which word order is important. Is the brain working on several words in a sentence at the same time, or is it doing one word at a time? What can we deduce from tracking the movements of the eyes? When does the brain put it all together?

The word conscious appeared a few times in reference 1, prompting me to wonder about what conscious might mean in the context of reading, say reading a story – rather than about the proper subject of the paper. Or more generally, and not for the first time, what do we mean when we say we are conscious: do we have to be conscious of something, of anything at all?

By way of an aside, I associate to what I take to be a Buddhist notion of being fully conscious of nothing, of being conscious of the essential void of being. With nothing and everything, as in mathematics, being quite closely associated. Bubbles!

One needs to be conscious in the ordinary sense of the word in order to be able to read at all – although I dare say one could come up with circumstances or scenarios which confuse this simple assertion. In the less ordinary sense of the word, one is often said to be conscious of something, of something in particular. So I am conscious of this bus heading in my direction. I am conscious of being uncomfortably hot. But is this necessary, in the case of reading?

When I read a sentence, say in the Maigret story at reference 4, I am conscious when I have not understood something. I usually stop reading and I know why I have stopped. Contrariwise, when I have read and understood something, I am not at all sure what gets into, what has passed through consciousness. I could probably play some or all of the something back, if asked immediately after reading. I could probably answer comprehension questions about it. But I do not think that I am conscious of what I have read. If, for example, I read the word ‘corpse’, I am not conscious of various facts about or images of corpses coming into mind, although I dare some such stuff has been brought nearer the surface. And the word ‘corpse’ only passes through consciousness, if it gets there at all, and does not stay there very long. And perhaps all the other stuff only makes it to the surface when Simenon uses some particularly felicitous turn of phrase, or brings to mind – evokes – something that I have seen or done in the past.

There is also the question of to what extent reading words activates the vocal machinery, gets the tongue going. A question on which I have posted in the past – see, for example, reference 6 – but which I not think is relevant here.

Quite often I look a word up, for example ‘piquette’, in the context cheap, not very good wine served in a village bar twenty miles south of Paris in the 1920’s. So I look the word up, with luck turn up one or two English words to stand for the meaning and I am satisfied; that meaning fits. But again, both the words rapidly drop out of consciousness and I am not aware of relevant facts or images ever having been there – apart from the words that I have selected to stand for the meaning. These words were enough.

So when one is reading the brain is being told to bring stuff up for processing – but not necessarily to bring it all the way into consciousness. In this particular example, the brain does bring it all the way into consciousness when it needs to interrupt. When the host needs to stop reading and fetch up the dictionary.

Perhaps all this follows from my reading quite a lot. I dare say that I read more than average. And I dare say that when one is learning to read, or learning to talk for that matter, a lot more stuff about individual words is brought into consciousness. I dare say also, if I spent all day reading Maigret, even the business of consulting the dictionary might become more or less unconscious.

I associate to the business of training in some sport, for example when one is working on a particular shot in tennis or a particular stroke in golf. One starts out by being very conscious of what one is doing, by needing to be very conscious of what one is doing, but a good result is often associated with the activity drifting back down into the unconscious. Something similar happens when one learns to ride a bicycle or drive a car.

And, thinking with my fingers, I am not sure that watching a film of the story is any different from reading. In the sense that, I do not think all kinds of stuff about the stuff on the screen is being brought onto consciousness. The goings-on on the screen are not translated into inner thought of the Hurlburt variety, of reference 5. And I am only conscious of the emotions generated after the event; during the event they just are.

All of this fits with what I think some people call reporting consciousness. I am conscious of something if I can tell you about it immediately after the event. Or if I press a button when am I aware of something having been put up on the computer screen in front of me. An operational definition which can be tested, unlike all this subjective stuff.

A related issue

I have suggested that reading is largely unconscious. I also suggest that writing and speaking are too. Quite often one writes good stuff without thinking about it at all; any thinking that might have been necessary should have been got out of the way beforehand. And the same is true of speaking without a script, say telling a story to a child or making a speech to some assembled audience. Indeed, in both cases, the intrusion of consciousness is all too likely to bring the process to a shuddering halt – and restarting can take some seconds.

Conclusions

A reminder that the word ‘conscious’ is not simple, and talking about being conscious of this or that is not simple either. Perhaps the authors of references 1 and 2 knew what they were about when they opted to work with the term ‘attention’ instead.

To quote: ‘Attention: the direction to – or filtering of – information in our immediate environment. Whereas proponents of serial processing believe … proponents of parallel processing believe that readers generally attend to multiple words simultaneously. Attention can be directed to a region of our visual field without directly looking at it. We may also to some degree attend to locations or objects (causing those locations or objects to be processed by various brain regions) without necessarily being aware of it’.

A definition in terms of the concrete, in terms of processing resources, rather than in terms of the more tricky business of subjectivity, of consciousness. A definition which avoids consciousness tainted usages like ‘I was paying attention to what my father in law was doing while he crossed the road’ or ‘I was attending to the fire when the phone rang’.

I conclude with the snap taken of the scene just to the right of the laptop on which I am typing. I quite often attend to the pint pot therein – but I am not really conscious of it. And the words ‘pint pot’ do not usually come to mind. The brain is just computing – in some sense or other – the scene without coming to any conclusion it feels the need to bring to consciousness. Or perhaps it is just resting on something on the scene, without doing anything much. Just steadying the brain down while it gets on with its proper work elsewhere.

References

Reference 1: Consciousness is not key in the serial versus parallel processing debate - Joshua Snell & Jonathan Grainger – 2019.

Reference 2: Readers Are Parallel Processors - Joshua Snell , Jonathan Grainger – 2019.

Reference 3: Evidence of Serial Processing in  Visual Word Recognition - Alex L. White , John

Palmer, and Geoffrey M. Boynton – 2018. Some useful background on the sort of experiments done in this area.

Reference 4: La nuit du Carrefour – Simenon – 1931. Vol II of the collected works.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html.