Physicist turned Neuroscientist Doctor Christof Koch is on a quest to track the footprints of consciousness in the brain.
As part of the Fraser Lecture Series at Western Washington University, Koch will speak about his research and experience on Feb. 28 on the main stage in the Performing Arts Center.
His book, “Then I Am Myself the World,” discusses the science of consciousness, the focus of his lecture.
Having spent the past 40 years researching the framework of consciousness provided by science, he wants to understand how the brain engages with transformative experiences.
“Given that you have a brain, like your brain or my brain — when can these experiences occur? What happens during these experiences in terms of physics, the physics of the brain?” he said.
A transformative experience can be a religious conversion, mystical, near-death, or psychedelic experience, which leads to irreversible changes in one's beliefs and habits.
“Most cultures believe consciousness arises in the heart, right?” Koch said. “But it's the brain that gives rise to thoughts, pleasure, love, hate, fear, boredom and dreaming.”
While neuroscience approaches consciousness from a scientific point of view, many religious and cultural practices have engaged with it from a more internal perspective.
“In Sikhism, for instance, you might speak of the amazing feeling of receiving God's grace (prasād) and focus on listening to God's name (nām) as a path to transformative spiritual experience,” said Michael Slouber, Western professor of South Asian Studies, in an email. “In Thailand, experiences may be explained in terms of Buddhist terminology for levels of awareness or through a folk framework of spirits of the land and waters.”
An example of a cultural practice from India is yoga, characterized by a scholar as a “technology of ecstasy,” Slouber said.
Regarded as a discipline of long-term meditation, yoga was considered a serious training regime, he said. Evolving into traditions like Tantric Sādhana, with elaborate visualization and mantra practice for many hours a day, it led to results like visions of the divine, possession and trance.
“We have video footage of such practitioners in modern times, tears streaming down their faces as the guru whispers mantras in their ears, generating transformative experiences most of us can only imagine,” Slouber wrote.
These culturally developed techniques have assisted transformative experiences throughout history.
At the core, each technique tries to achieve the same result of losing your sense of self while still being highly conscious, Koch said.
Despite the illusion of a controlled environment in self-induced transformative experiences, these events often occur when least expected.
“Why can one mind in a certain condition have this abrupt realization that causes [a person] to radically change their life?” Koch said. “For example, after I had my near-death experience in Brazil, I completely lost my fear of death, and it hasn’t come back. Why did it happen there and then? Who knows? We don't know.”
Although there are ways of tracking how the brain reacts to these moments, he said, the usage of a CT or MRI scan has its limitations in tracking the changes in the brain compared to a person using psychedelics and “tripping out.”
“Like with 5-MeO-DMT — within 20 seconds, the world is gone, but you’re still there,” he said. “Something is still there that’s highly conscious.”
He noted that the transformation is tied to consciousness regardless of the intensity observed during these experiences.
As more connections between cultural traditions and neuroscience are made, Koch’s research remains focused on understanding how the physics of the brain shapes the human experience.
“When everything is said and done, you experience yourself in the world through your conscious experience,” he said. “It is the only way we know that we exist; the only way we know anything exists is because we can hear and feel, be bored and be in love.
McKenna Kilayko (she/her) is a campus life reporter for The Front. She is in her second year at Western, working towards majoring in journalism with a minor in French. You can often find her drinking an iced matcha latte, DJing for Western’s radio station, KUGS, or complaining about the lack of sun. You can contact her at mckennakilayko.thefront@gmail.com.
