Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

Consciousness and cognition 153
major and minor chords) have “universal” emotional meaning, it can be said
that the affective state of the RH is transmitted to the LH as a pattern of neuronal
activity in the form of a tonotopic “intonation map” and expressed vocally
by the LH. Several candidate neuronal mechanisms concerning the interhemispheric
transfer of topographically-organized information are known and
constitute a small set of physiologically-plausible processes by which information
can be stored and transmitted to other brain regions (Chapter 5). While
the scientific argument is as yet far from proven, the major pieces concerning
cortical mapping, interhemispheric transfer, and the perception and the production
of auditory affect have been empirically established. Those patterns of
corticocortical communication are the physiological pieces that constitute the
“brain code.”
The arguments outlined in Part I are incomplete on many counts, but –
even granting the theoretical possibility of such a “code” –many psychologists,
and perhaps all those working on the problems of consciousness, would
nonetheless object to an assertion that the establishment of a brain code is a
sufficient understanding of the brain. Even if, for the sake of argument, one
were to accept that the central dogma provides a rough summary of the major
pathways of information flow in the human brain, and even if one were to
accept that the cortical representation of emotions takes the form of activation
of tonotopic maps, still questions remain: Why do we not only “think” about,
for example, the pitch changes in the voice, but also “feel” them? It is relatively
easy to understand how cognition and the control of behavior might occur due
to the firing of neurons, but why do people subjectively experience emotions
that are distinct from cognition?
And those are important questions.
In the chapters that follow, I argue that the key to these and related issues
concerning subjectivity does not lie in the realm of neuropsychology; in other
words, these issues are unlikely to be resolved at the “whole-brain” level and
require that we rethink the entire issue of subjectivity starting from the neuron
and working gradually to larger neural systems. Thus far all arguments
concerning the brain code have been at the relatively macroscopic level of cortical
mapping and the sequential flow of patterns of activation from one brain
region to another. That, I maintain, is the proper level at which to address
questions concerning the higher-level cognition that leads to characteristicallyhuman
behavior. In effect, much of the discussion of the brain code has been
concerned with differences between the cortical activity of human beings and
that of apes, with particular emphasis on the significance of the functional
cerebral asymmetry that we, but apparently few other species, have evolved.