Northoff, Georg. The spontaneous brain: From the mind-body to the world-brain problem. MIT Press, 2018.
Northoff, Georg. Neurowaves: Brain, Time, and Consciousness. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2023.
The short story on both of these books is I like them. The first is complicated and challenging. The second is shorter and more accessible. They cover a lot of the same ground but there is less technical language challenges in the second. I consider Northoff an important voice and somewhat overlooked scientist and philosopher.
Initially I bought the Spontaneous Brain (SB) as an Amazon recommendation. That was a few years ago. When it arrived, I glanced at it and was somewhat daunted about the large amount of content. The book is dense reading, although maybe the problem in part is my getting older, more impatient – you know grumpy old man. It didn’t take long for something else to capture my attention and the book was put away on the shelf. A few weeks ago, while looking for a different book, I happened to spot the book again on the shelf and decided to pull it down for a second look. That look included the video I posted about previously.
SB is over 400 pages with dozens of pages of references and a glossary. The index has over 10 pages referencing Kant to give an idea about the scope of the book. Georg Northoff has a background in medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy and the book reflects a deep background in all of those things.
The second book, Neurowaves (NW), is recent and I found it when I began searching the Internet on Northoff. It is only around a hundred pages divided into six relatively short chapters. It covers much the same ground as SB but is easier to read. It is a more condensed view, although it is not “dumbed down” either.
Northoff is sometimes identified as a neurophilosopher. The book is a mixture of philosophy or neuroscience. The first two parts of SB are more neuroscience related and the next sections are more philosophical, but the book goes back and forth with its argument and blends it all into coherent whole. Of course, this makes the book difficult for some readers, myself included, who must be prepared to understand the terminology and concepts of two separate disciplines.
Northoff’s goal with these books seems broader than simply explaining the brain and consciousness. Although he acknowledges we still have gaps in our knowledge, much of the philosophical problem of mind-body and its hard problem variation arises from the substance-based metaphysics passed down from Descartes. Northoff is a ontic structural realist which is an ontology based on relationships rather than substances or properties. Ontic structural realism has as its core the idea idea that the structure of physical reality is relational. There are numerous nuances and variations of structural realism.
Northoff regards the mind-body problem as misguided and he isn’t offering a new solution to it. Instead, he wants to move the discussion to the world-brain relation. He writes” “Empirical evidence suggests that the brain’s spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure are central for aligning and integrating the brain within the world – the world-brain relation; hence, the main title of this book.” (p vii) The spontaneous neurological activity of the brain ties directly to the ontology argument of the world brain relation.
Let’s step back a little and get back to neuroscience.
Brain and Consciousness
Probably the first question we should answer is what is meant by the “spontaneous brain” and its activity?
Scientists have been studying the details of what the brain does for more than a century. Even with one of the earliest tools, the electroencephalograph developed by Han Berger in 1924, it was realized that the brain has internal electrical activity that cannot be related to any external stimulus or task related activity. As scientists focused more on stimulus or task related research, study of the brain’s steady background activity was neglected. Recently that neglect has begun to be rectified and increasingly studies are appearing using the latest tools, like fMRIs, that seek to understand the brain’s spontaneous activity.
Northoff compares this situation in neuroscience to the philosophical differences between David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume emphasized a passive model of mind where everything was largely determined by external stimuli. Kant argued for an active model that stresses the importance of the mind’s internally generated activity.
Of course, it is clear that the brain both has its own internal, spontaneous activity and it responds to stimuli and task needs. Northoff believes that a complete account of neural activity requires a active brain that generates its own activity but also responds to the external world. He refers to this as a spectrum model where various mixtures and balances of internally generated activity and stimuli induced activity explain the brain’s range of activity.
The internal activity, however, does occupy a special place in this model. A key proposal of Northoff is that for external stimuli to be processed it must interact with the resting state brain activity and its spatiotemporal structure. Northoff writes about the spatiotemporal organizations of this spontaneous activity:
The brain’s spontaneous activity show a sophisticated structure that operates across different frequencies from infraslow over slow and fast frequency ranges. Importantly, the neural activity in these frequencies show a nested, or fractal, organization: just like a smaller Russian doll nests with the the next larger and so forth, the lower power of a faster frequency nests within the slightly higher power of the next slower frequency and so forth. Such temporal nesting is described as “scale-free dynamic,” since the same temporal relation (of slower and fast frequency power) holds across different (i.e. slow and fast) timescales.
NW p. 14-15
Scale-free dynamics “are characterized by hierarchical self-similarities of patterns of synaptic connectivity and spatiotemporal neural activity, seen in power-law distributions of structural and functional parameters and in rapid state transitions between levels of the hierarchy.” The slowest frequencies of the brain – slow and infraslow – generate a structured pink noise-like signal that builds the foundation for self and consciousness.
A prime example of the brain’s spontaneous activity is the so-called default mode network (DMN), a term coined by Marcus Raichle in 2001. Essentially the brain is active at a high level all of the time while a person is awake. Its energy consumption barely changes whether the person is engaged in an intense mental task or at rest. The DMN seems to take a backseat when the brain is engaged in an external task but it doesn’t switch-off as initially thought. There has been an explosion of interest in the DMN in the last decade or so since it was realized the DMN connects many different parts of the brain, especially ones related to self. Northoff points out that perhaps because of the DMN position in the middle of brain it seems to interact with more circuits than the other circuits do with each other. At any rate, the DMN has a definite spatiotemporal structure. It not only connects many regions of the brain, it also is integrated within its temporal wave patterns.
The DMN isn’t the only type of resting, self-initiated brain activity. It seems, in fact, that DMN as it is usually defined (unfocused brain activity) is more a subset of spontaneous activity that goes on all of the time in the brain. Spontaneous state activity is where most of the brain’s energy goes. Much of it occurs in the physical position of the middle of the brain. This not only gives it wide access but also provides a centering point, not left or right, not up or down, but physically aligned with the body. What’s more the range of frequencies encompasses both the fast (milliseconds) to very slow (many seconds/minutes). This suggests that consciousness doesn’t jump from instant to instant but smoothly changes over minutes and hours with spikes of activities from external stimuli that become assimilated into the core resting state activity.
There is a parallel in Northoff’s theory with global workplace theory which proposes that information from the senses must be broadcast throughout the brain to become conscious. New information from external stimuli is constantly brought into the resting state activity through wave propagation and interference patterns across the spatiotemporal structures of the brain. There are also parallels with aspects of Integrated Information Theory in that the primary function of this activity is integration of information from across the brain.
Northoff’s theory seems somewhat unique in that it doesn’t seem to provide some privileged position to a particular part of the brain, for example the frontal cortex. Consciousness isn’t created by a part of the brain but by the ongoing spatiotemporal dynamics of synchronized activity across the many parts of the brain and across time.
World Brain
First, let me note, it is world-brain not brain-world. Northoff believes the brain cannot be understood apart from the dynamics of the world in which it exists. The ongoing spatiotemporal alignment of brain with the world is at the core of what consciousness does.
Northoff especially points to research showing how the brain aligns itself with heart and the center of the body. We know also that brains begin to work differently (abnormally?) in sensory deprivation or outside of regular social contact. The brain regularly needs to resynchronize with the world in time and space. Depression, manias, and schizophrenia are characterized by poor temporal alignment between the brain and the world. People sharing the same activities synchronize their brain waves.
This world-brain alignment means that our consciousness bears some relationship to objective reality – that consciousness is not a total fantasy, hallucination, or illusion albeit there may be some “artistic” license in consciousness’s portrayal of that reality. Northoff explains:
Given these and other examples in nature like sea waves, wind, and bird-songs, scale-free activity is a universal feature in the world. The world constructs its own inner time in a scale-free way with temporal nestedness between the fluctuations of the different frequencies. The same hold true for the brain. As the brain is part of the world as a whole and its scale-free activity, the brain also constructs its own inner time in a scale-free way.
NW p 17
In other words, the brain exhibits scale-free temporal dynamics because it is a part of the world which exhibits the same dynamics. The brain and consciousness fractally represent the world by using the same temporal dynamics.
Northoff believes that shifting the focus to world-brain will create an equivalent of a Copernican revolution in neuroscience and philosophy.
My Thoughts
All in all, I still not sure I understand all of Northoff’s positions or how they all fit together. Hopefully nothing significant that I’ve written is wrong or misleading. At any rate, I have tried to provide a few snapshots into some of Northoff’s arguments but let me be clear, there is a lot of his arguments that I have left out.
My initial interest in Northoff’s ideas came from the emphasis on the explanatory power of spatiotemporal structure for explaining the brain. After reading Pockett and McFadden on EM field theories and their emphasis on the spatiotemporal aspects of the brain, I had begun to suspect that the physical structure of neurons and their relationships – the actual geometrical architecture – combined with temporal variations might be a common language between the physical brain and the elements of consciousness. If this is correct, eventually some day we may understand the phonemes and sentences of the language.
To fully explain consciousness we may still need more than a common language. Some candidates would include EM field, extra spacetime dimensions, a quantum element, or a new type of wave, field, or particle (psychons, anyone?). Northoff, I think, has made a big step in pointing out the importance of spatiotemporal architecture without the complications involving additional explanatory elements.
That AI trained on fMRI data can begin to “mind read” even to a limited degree suggests that spatiotemporal patterns themselves must bear some relationship to the associated phenomenal events. Of course, the patterns could be correlated but epiphenomena. What argues against that in my mind is that geometric behavior exists in many other natural forms. Life itself is primarily based on L- varieties of sugars and amino acids rather than the twin D- varieties. This is essentially a geometric difference in how the molecule forms. DNA, RNA, proteins, and so on, almost of the chemicals of life have complex and dynamic geometric (and electromagnetic) structures. In many cases, the geometrical shapes of the molecules, how they fit together, is key to how they interact or fail to interact. Scale-free dynamics appears in nature, in ocean waves, wind, and bird songs for example, which suggests that it may be core organizing principle in complex phenomena. That the human brain and the consciousness it generates would have characteristics of natural phenomena, indeed, reflects its fractal nature.
Northoff’s notion of the world-brain didn’t grab me at first. Tentatively, before reading Northoff, I had already begun exploring the idea that consciousness may be more public than we might think. We have common shared metrics. We can agree on how to measure distance, time, and other physical relationships. We can even agree when we both see blue (most of the time). Certainly we also share a common substrate. Although each of our brains may have an architecture as individual as our fingerprints, in major ways normal, uninjured brains look, behave, and, from most reports, work similarly. Not surprisingly when people engage in common activities like singing, dancing, working on a group task, their brain waves also begin to synchronize. Those are social settings, of course, but there is no reason that principle doesn’t extend from the brain to the social and natural world as Northoff suggests.
It isn’t hard to see how the fractal relationship between world and brain would come about, even almost be compelled by the mimetic nature of networked neurons. If neurons imitate the world, then the most important part of that imitation would be maintaining the same or similar relationships between what exists in the world and what exists in neuronal relationships. If the world is based on temporal scale-free dynamics, then the brain would have to adopt the same to represent it.
The world-brain relation and its alignment could be exactly what is at the root of much consciousness alteration efforts. The therapeutic effect of psychedelics derives from the opportunity to rewire connections or, in Northoff’s terminology, bring about the alignment of brain, body and world. Would not the ultimate alignment of brain and world be cosmic consciousness? Perhaps it isn’t so strange that spiritual traditions, especially in the East but also in the esoteric branches of Western religions, have embraced physical practices that deliberately or inadvertently may be effective techniques for modifying brain wave patterns to more fully align with the world. In addition to the breathing and postural techniques of yoga and similar practices, we could add chanting, prayer, and mantra reciting. What the shaman and his techniques attempt to cure is a misalignment with the world. What the shaman promotes is the maintaining of existing harmony and a realignment when harmony is disrupted. The ultimate end for alignment would be a consciousness fractally representing the world in a universal chorus of conscious beings.
Broad Speculations 
Thanks James. I find a lot to agree with in your description of Northoff’s views. The part about the world-brain interface reminded me of an interview he did a while back with Ginger Campbell.
https://brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/1740-northoff?rq=northoff
I might have to go back and re-listen to it. I considered buying his Spontaneous book back then, but at the time it was pretty pricey (not unusual for an academic book). It looks like the price has come down since then, although at this point I might opt for the lighter read.
Did he discuss any resonance between his views and predictive coding theories or Friston’s free energy principle? The spontaneous inside-out aspect seems like it could be the same concept at a different level of description. Maybe.
I’m not sure what to make of the temporo-spatial thing. It seems like all information is spatial and all information processing temporo-spatial, and will have a relationship with the things and processes in the world that cause it and that it causes. But it seems like he’s seeing a significance beyond that to it, going so far as to call his theory of consciousness the “Temporo-spatial Theory”. Although you indicated he might see his theory as explaining things at a particular level with other theories maybe coming in at other levels.
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Absolutely he talks about predictive coding. There is so much in that book it is impossible to cover even a good fraction of it. Friston, I think, is touched on.
BTW, did you see this?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-brain-hard-to-see.html
quote
They found that the brain’s ability to recognize targets was directly related to when and where the traveling brain waves occurred in the visual system: when the traveling waves aligned with the stimulus, the observer could detect the target more easily. These traveling brain waves, which occurred several times per second, were similar to a stadium of sports fans successively standing up and raising their arms, then lowering them and sitting down again. It appears that the visual system is actively sensing the external environment, according to the team.
“There is a spontaneous level of activity in the brain that appears to be regulated by these traveling waves,” says Salk Professor Terrence Sejnowski, an author of the paper and holder of the Francis Crick Chair. “We think the waves are the product of the activity that is propagating around the brain, driven by local neurons firing.”
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And this too which suggests the waves play a role in uniting past, present, and short-term future.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-06-vision-brain.html
quote
“Each cortical region in the visual system contains a map of visual space. In this new paper, we reasoned that waves traveling over these maps may enable short-term predictions into the future,” said Muller, Western Institute for Neuroscience faculty member. “When we developed this network with traveling waves, we found it can help the system to forecast what comes next in upcoming movie frames.”
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Actually there is entire chapter on predictive coding that ends up assessing the theory to be incomplete because cognitive models can’t extend beyond the contents of consciousness to non-cognitive consciousness.
At that point, he references this paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4574706/
Which turns out to be a discussion of Phi in IIT and argues that Phi is a measure of non-cognitive consciousness.
Please, don’t ask for more explanation because I’m mostly at my limit of understanding. 🙂
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Thanks. Interesting articles, particularly the second one which gets into how the traveling waves may fit into the overall functionality. And the paper criticizing IIT, I only read the abstract of, although it reflects my usual concerns with that theory.
I also did listen to the interview Northoff did with Campbell. I had forgotten a lot of his positions, such as an eliminativist attitude toward the mind, but not, curiously, toward consciousness.
Although Campbell asks him for his definitions of “consciousness” and he has a pretty specific conception of it. Seems like it has resonance with Mazotti’s mind-object identity hypothesis. Or I could see someone arguing it’s a variant of the representationalist view of consciousness.
After listening to it, I decided the earlier, more technical book is the one I wanted, and added it to my Kindle account. Although looks like it will take a while to read. It doesn’t look as hardcore as The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul, but it’s in that direction. To your final point, I was frequently at the edge of my understanding in that book, but those are the ones I learn the most from.
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See my reply to FC in a little bit about mind.
I think SB is harder to read than ESS but it is certainly in that direction.
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Hmmm, ok. We’ll have to see if I finish it. And I might end up skipping around rather than trying to read it straight through.
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Skipping is sometimes difficult because of his use of acronyms. It’s to wander into acronym filled passages without knowing what the acronyms are when you don’t read straight though.
The introduction does, however, sum up his arguments so you should make sure to start with that.
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The nice thing about the ebook version is you can do full text searches to find the first use of an acronym. Although having to do it constantly would be a headache.
Thanks for the intro recommendation. Good to hear he summarizes there. It might serve as a useful barometer for whether I want to go on.
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I hope I haven’t steered you into the wrong first book. I’m going back through Neurowaves and it is so much an easier read while covering much the same ground.
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You didn’t really steer me to it. I chose it. So no worries. It’s totally on me. And if his ideas do hook me, this is the book I’ll want.
Read the intro. Similar to after reading your post and listening to the interview, I found myself agreeing with a lot of his points, but then asking, “Yes, and?” It’s a way of looking at things, but similar to Manzotti’s, I’m not really seeing it as that different from some of the views he seems keen to distinguish himself from. But it may be I’m losing the big innovation in the way he’s defining his terms. I’ll probably take a shot at chapter 7 and 8 and see if anything clicks.
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Sounds like there is a lot to unpack. Does he address the notion of emergence; namely that the mind is a separate, distinct and sovereign system that emerges from the brain? It seems that his take on internal spontaneous activity would support the idea of emergence.
FMRI is a new technological advancement in neuroscience however, fMRI actually maps or measures blood flow in the brain. Like measuring electrical activity in the brain, fMRI is still like riding blind and relatively primitive in its approach.
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On fMRI I mostly agree, but that’s what makes the ability of AI to detect the patterns more remarkable in my view. If there is some kind of pattern analogous to phonemes in language, it might be possible to directly manipulate the consciousness of a human being. The language might more like written Mayan but multiple ways of representing the same thing.
Since he rejects the mind-body problem, in essence, mind in the way he uses the term doesn’t exist. However, that may not be how you use the term. But consciousness could be emergent. Certainly it emerges every time we awake accompanied by the complex brain dynamics. 🙂
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“……..mind in the way he uses the term doesn’t exist.”
Yeah, that’s a non-starter for me. When a theory denies the existence of mind, one is left with computationalism.
Stuart Kauffman has an interesting schema for an emergent quantum mind. His model is very similar to my own rendition. After the fat lady sings, computationalism will be an artifact when everyone wants to get on the quantum bus……😎
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This isn’t computationalism since Northoff does accept the existence of consciousness. I think he is primarily rejecting the idea of a “mind” as an entity or substance, something ontologically different from brain that must be explained.
I am typically careless in my use of terms and frequently use consciousness and mind to mean the same things. In any case, I am talking about an abstraction that describes/encompasses the varieties of elements involved in subjective experience, not a thing or substance.
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BTW, you ought to listen to the first minute of the podcast link Mike put above. It wraps up in the nutshell his problem with “mind”.
His objective is to understand how coordinated brain activity generates mental features. This doesn’t require in his view the notion of “mind” which doesn’t add anything to mix.
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Is this a fair representation of Kauffman’s view?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.01538
It has extended discussion about all sorts of psi phenomena which really discredits it in my view.
Personally I’m holding out for a fifth dimension, but lately it occurred to me that maybe the fifth dimension isn’t like a spatial dimension but is more like a additional temporal dimension, which would play directly into Northoff’s temporal dynamics of the brain.
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Yeah, I get where he is coming from. In his view the notion of mind doesn’t add anything to the mix. So in that way, his model is similar to Mazotti’s mind-object identity hypothesis with a ton of specificity added on.
Rejecting the idea of mind being something ontological different from the brain does add something to the mix that must be explained for sure. Personally, I think this is the direction we need to go. We need to address that difference and explain how something so ontologically different from the brain can interact with that classical system; and it would also be helpful to know what the mechanism is that bridges the ontological gap.
Personally, I think the mechanism that bridges the gap between two ontologically different systems, one being classical and the other being quantum is measurement.
Measurement collapses quantum “possibilities” into a single discrete outcome resulting in a classical “actual” that is then stored in the brain. This actual in return becomes the fertile ground for future possibilities that can then be measured, collapsed, and stored. This occurs quickly as memory grows exponentially over time as more “actuals” are stored generating more possibilities to be measured, etc.
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I really don’t know why these folks have to throw in shit like psi because like you, it’s a turn-off for me also. Here’s a link on Kauffman from the information philosopher website. About half way down they get into his quantum theory. It’s brief but gets right to the nitty gritty of his theory. There are also some youtube videos if you’re interested.
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/kauffman/
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Regarding QM, I think the thing to be looking at is quantum many-body field theory, which would align well with Northoff’s approach.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-95972-6_3
This aligns well with my “modelism” and idea of mimicry being at the base of how the brain works. Think of the brain/consciousness as something like a chameleon of networked neurons that assumes it inner structure and shape from its environment.
I really need to see some the psi stuff demonstrated in experiments with really tight controls. Aside from that, there is Eric Wargo idea I wrote about in another post.
“The idea simply is that precognition does exist and happens regularly but it doesn’t involve direct knowledge of things that will happen in the future. Rather precognition is a memory of an experience in the future. It is a future memory”.
If you start to introduce extra dimension, particularly a time dimension, classical causality begins to break down.
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In science it seems that from time to time the data create a vacuum that theory needs to fill; data leads, theory follows. At other times theory leads and provides a need for certain data: theory leads and data follows. It seems like in two fields currently (and probably more), cosmology and consciousness research, it seems as if theory is leading, but so far out in front to be likened to being a bit too far out over its skis.
Much of conscious “research” seems consciousness speculation, often providing no clues as to the data needed. I am afraid that I am no longer capable of following such complexities, so I may well be quite wrong.
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Well, I certainly speculate a lot. 🙂
Personally I think that there a lot of solid empirical data that points to something but there is a lack of consensus about what the something is.
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:o) I am a speculator, too! Yeah, lots of data and no way to make them coherent . . . so far. At least we have gotten away from magical “minds” and “souls,” or have we?
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I’m beginning to think we are actually on the verge of explaining consciousness scientifically. But we are not quite there yet.
Unfortunately I think once we understand it, that understanding will open the door to real mind-control technology and where that goes will be anybody’s guess.
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