Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain
Source: newscientist.com
One moment you’re conscious, the next you’re not. For the first time, researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single brain area.
Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a century, exploring their function by zapping them with electricity and temporarily putting them out of action. Despite this, they have never been able to turn off consciousness – until now.
Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions. It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and philosophers for millennia – namely how our conscious awareness arises.
Many theories abound but most agree that consciousness has to involve the integration of activity from several brain networks, allowing us to perceive our surroundings as one single unifying experience rather than isolated sensory perceptions.
One proponent of this idea was Francis Crick, a pioneering neuroscientist who earlier in his career had identified the structure of DNA. Just days before he died in July 2004, Crick was working on a paper that suggested our consciousness needs something akin to an orchestra conductor to bind all of our different external and internal perceptions together.
With his colleague Christof Koch, at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, he hypothesised that this conductor would need to rapidly integrate information across distinct regions of the brain and bind together information arriving at different times. For example, information about the smell and colour of a rose, its name, and a memory of its relevance, can be bound into one conscious experience of being handed a rose on Valentine’s day.
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Read the full article at: newscientist.com
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Tune into Red Ice Radio:
Carol de la Herran - Hour 1 - Robert Monroe & Altered States of Consciousness
Tom Campbell - The Big TOE (Theory of Everything), Consciousness & Reality
Anthony Peake & Tom Campbell - Consciousness Creates Reality
Anthony Peake - Mystery of the Brain, Precognition, Time Dilation & Déjà vu
Peter Russell - The Primacy of Consciousness
Scott Onstott - Hour 1 - Explorations in Number, Architecture & Consciousness
Jim Elvidge - Are we Living in a Simulation, a Programmed Reality?
Paul Levy - The War on Consciousness
Marcel Kuijsten - Julian Jaynes, the Bicameral Mind & The Origin of Consciousness
Graham Hancock - Entangled, Supernatural, Shamanism & The Origins of Consciousness
