The power of self-reflection (Stephen Fleming, New Scientist, May 05 2021)
“What was surprising was that some of his patients were unaware of having memory problems.
In laboratory tests, they showed a striking deficit in metacognition: they were unable to rate how confident they were in getting the answers right or wrong.
It turned out that those individuals with metacognitive problems also had damage to the prefrontal cortex, part of the brain involved in complex thought, decision-making and personality.
More specifically, the damage affected the machinery that we now know is involved in building higher-level models of ourselves and others. (…)
But aside from confidence, there is also amore elaborate aspect to metacognition, one that may be unique to humans and which allows us to consciously think about our own minds and the minds of others.
This “explicit” form of self-awareness emerges between the ages of 3 and 4 years, continues to develop throughout adolescence and shares neural machinery with mentalising – our awareness of other people’s mental states.
In fact, it now seems likely that the brain computations that elicit this explicit metacognition work as a “second-order” process that infers how confident we feel in our decisions or actions from a variety of cues,
just as we infer what is happening in the minds of others from what they do or say.
Because the brain circuity for explicit metacognition has a wide-angle lens, we have shown that it is able to pool information arising from different sources, tagging this information to create abstract estimates of our skills and abilities.
What this research is telling us is that the human brain plays host to specific algorithms for self-awareness.
In turn, these findings imply that the effects of brain damage on self-awareness may be more widespread than we think.
People with dementia may experience what clinicians refer to as anosognosia or loss of “insight” – being unaware of having cognitive problems.
One way of understanding the causes of a loss of insight is that the disease has not only affected the brain circuits involved in memory and cognition, but also those responsible for maintaining normal self-awareness. (…)
In one study from my lab, we asked hundreds of people to answer questions about different mental health symptoms.
From the pattern of their answers, we could see where each person fell on three core dimensions of mental health:
their levels of anxiety and depression, their levels of compulsive behaviour and intrusive thoughts and their levels of social withdrawal.
Where they sat along these dimensions predicted their metacognitive fingerprint.
People who were more anxious and depressed had lower confidence but heightened metacognitive sensitivity, whereas those with compulsive behaviour and intrusive thoughts showed the reverse pattern. (…)
If it were possible to systematically boost self-awareness, what might that feel like?
One possible insight comes from work on lucid dreaming, where people are aware of being in a dream.
Imaging studies have shown that when people become lucid, they recruit similar brain networks to those that support metacognition while awake.
I find it appealing that boosts to self-awareness in our daily lives might feel like the experience of becoming lucid in a dream – we might notice things we haven’t noticed before in ourselves, in others and in our surroundings.”
