Image via: Author's Collection

To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I signed up to cover the Wanderlust Festival. Billed as part yoga retreat and part indie rock festival, sure I’d seen the ads in the paper, but what did that really mean? Would people really be able to focus and center themselves with guitars wailing in the background? Would hipsters really be able to fit in at a place ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Welcome to Citiwire.net! The Obama administration’s urban policy is finally coming into focus. My column this week focuses on the opener of a series of “listening tours”; next we I’ll turn to analysis of the emerging policy’s full focus. … Our Citistates Associates Bill Hudnut, in the Citiwire piece for the week, takes a look at a critical issue for America’s metropolitan regions–the (massive) unmet potentials, contrasted to the (exciting) ideal format of MPOs (Metropolitan Policy Organizations).

I've been thinking about the nature of consciousness. This post will be a speculative and somewhat unrealistic "what if?" propositon about extreme qualia. Qualia is philosophical speak for "what it's likeness" (redness, tastiness, pain, etc.). Qualia is essentially how we consciously perceive aspects of the objective world through our senses. Will people be able to increase their capacity to enjoy foods? Will future neuromodulation techniques allow us to make the food we consume amazingly delicious? One current way of making a delectable meal is to slave hours over the stove using only the finest ingredients available. A future method to create a sumptuous mouth-watering taste experience may be done by using advanced brain manipulation techniques so as to actually enhance the mind's ability to assess pleasant foods. We can also possibly ensure that we are able to enjoy a diverse and unparalleled array of textures that exceed our current palate by several orders of magnitude.

Using neuro alteration, one can potentially make any food taste exceedingly wonderful. These types of of extreme piquant qualia have previously been inaccessible to any conscious mind in the history of the earth. Darwinian natural selection precludes their existence. However using neuroengineering, the taste of the ambrosial food of the divine can be summoned up on command. Perhaps this marvelous savory taste perception can be applied to healthier foods so we don't become excessive unhealthy gourmands. Or maybe these sensations could be turned on without the actual consumption of food. A brain chip might enable us to elicit these feelings whenever a person so desired. The chip could be specifically designed to artificially induce extreme taste qualia that would be uncoupled from any sort of eating.

Scientists are increasingly unraveling the neural correlates of taste hedonics. Kent Berridge has done extensive research in determining the location of specific "hedonic hotspots" that are involved in sensory taste pleasure. The brain regions related to experiencing these phenomenon include the ventral pallidum and also the nucleus accumbens. Amping up mu-opioid and endocannabinoid receptor activation in these discrete brain areas has the capacity to make certain food much more appetizing. A lot of this research has been done on rats by observing the changes in their facial expressions when neurochemicals in specific regions are altered. They can actually tell that the rat is enjoying sweet food more by the way it licks its lips. I think for most people it should not be too surprising that drugs which affect the opioid or cannibinoid neurotransmitter systems have the ability to make food subjectively more palatable. People often use alcohol to increase food enjoyment and alcohol perturbs the opioid system. A pizza that normally might taste like fodder could taste amazing after taking a large amount of alcohol. Marijuana (a cannabinoid) tends to give people the munchies as does heroin (an opioid). These neurochemicals are dissociable from dopamine, which does not seem to increase "liking" of food. In the future, more sophisticated techniques may become available for precise taste perception alteration.

Taste hedonics has been an important evolutionary driver of behavior for an organism. On one level, the tongue has evolved the capacity to detect certain molecular configurations of matter. On another level the brain has evolved a way to assign value to specific types of matter that are placed in the mouth. Matter that has an overall beneficial affect on the functioning of an organism often subjectively tastes really good. Conversely, matter that is harmful to the organism may taste awful and is in general quite noxious. Sugar tastes sweet because this specific sensory qualia was adaptive, evolutionary wise, for our ancestors. Organisms that found sugar to taste sweet did better than organisms that found sugar to be repugnant or neutral in flavor.

Currently, there has been a substantial environmental shift for humans. The advent of the supermarket has made a plethora of sugary foodstuff items available in plenitude. This has happened while the neural signatures for assessing sweets in the brain has remained largely the same. This may not be the case forever, though. In the present/future, evolution will likely select against finding sugary foods as being too sweet. A person who consumes a lot of sugar probably ends up overweight and thus reduces their reproductive potential overall. They may be less likely to have children. Rational brain engineering may allow us to overcome this negative effect, however.

We can assume that different animals may experience somewhat similar forms of taste hedonics. All mammals may enjoy foods with high glucose concentrations for instance. However a specific item that tastes scrumptious to one organism does not necessarily taste good in the same way to another organism. On the earth there are trillions of conscious minds and each likely experiences some sort of perceptual taste hedonics. Consuming food is integral to the life of almost any animal. Each conscious brain is the result of a unique aggregation of atoms that encode for a particular perceptual experience. Will we be able to categorize and actually understand these perceptual qualia of all organisms on the tree of life and their neural correlates? Once we have correlated these neural signatures, then can we possibly replicate it in our own brain chemistry and amplify those textures of experience to dizzying heights?

Why don't these extreme qualia currently exist? Suppose you were to saturate a single macroscopic item (example sugar) with extreme positive value. Imagine if a neural pathway evolved to find this specific foodstuff item exceedingly delicious. This item would taste so good that you could never get enough of it. This foodstuff would in essence become an all consuming driver of behavior. A single item would become a veritable black hole abyss by which an individual's behavior would be inescapably and indefinitely drawn toward. In the evolutionary fitness landscape this would be maladaptive. Evolution normally wants an organism to have a diversity of behavior (like eating a variety of food items that serve separate biological purposes). Extreme qualia drives an organisms behavior toward that one item and would potentially cause them to ignore other perhaps equally important items in the environment. Also sometimes evolution just does the least amount of work necessary to motivate an animal. Why make something extremely tasty when you can get the same behavioral output by making it just taste pretty good. Evolution often tends to spurn excess.

Can you engineer extreme qualia while at the same time maintaining a diversity of behavior? Also, can we disentangle these qualia from the actual act of consuming food? How do you ensure that a person's behavior does not get stuck in a suboptimal rut? Perhaps these future extreme qualia will serve no functional purpose. Maybe they will merely be based on whatever arbitrary whim a person has. Like activating and deactivating a brain chip whenever they want to experience a specific sensation. I think the future will become extremely interesting if we can potentially affect discrete qualia and shape them to whatever we desire. Neuroengineering may eventually allow extreme qualia that are currently closed off to current brain wetware.