11 ms·

Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain

319 points by chanux 12y ago

ivan_ah 12y ago
There's a more thoughtful take on the paper on Conscious Entities: http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=1673 http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=1673
gambler 12y ago
I've found that unplugging radio from the wall makes it stop talking. This is a great step forward in finding how it works! This is how it sounds to me.
mathattack 12y ago
I like that it was Crick who gave some early research. Good to see that some scientists do get a second act. If he had published and survived, would this have been a second Nobel?
thathonkey 12y ago
I listened to an episode of Radiolab about 3 "Black Boxes" lately and the first one is about this mysterious threshold in the brain between consciousness and unconsciousness. Here is the episode if anyone is interested: http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/
ommunist 12y ago
Well, a hammer also makes a good consciousness switch. Especially when combined with needles and applied to nails. Seriously, how can you discuss a marginal case with absolutely no statistical evidence. Do apes have claustrum? If yes - run on them, then speak sense. Besides, brains are immensely resilient and damaged parts functionality can be replaced functionally by other brain regions.
greenyoda 12y ago
Link to the original article that this article is quoting from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-consciousness-onoff-switch-discovered-deep-in-brain.html?full=true http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-conscious...
- dang 12y ago
  Yes. Changed from http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/07/consciousness-on-off-switch-discovered-deep-in-brain/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/07/consciousness-on-off-switch-....
zaroth 12y ago
And people are concerned about how Facebook ranks their wall posts?
staunch 12y ago
They're pointing a zapper at different "areas" of someone's head and seeing what happens. That's what counts for brain science today. We have a long way to go.
- lnanek2 12y ago
  Honestly, some of the best brain science ever was by accidental injuries removing some portion of the brain and scientists getting to study the difference. So being able to pick and choose now is ground breaking. It's the equivalent of genetics when we started being able to selectively turn off or insert genes (along with a fluorescent market to know it took).
  - staunch 12y ago
    Poking "areas" of a massive organ with a stick vs direct manipulation of DNA at the molecular level.
    - CodeDiver 12y ago
      Toggling big switches vs smaller switches. Same idea, different scale, different "stick". What is/are the appropriate scales to study brain function at? Quarks? Molecules? Brain regions? Which ones? All the above? None? We need to know the answer in advance before pronouncing a method "crude", or conversely, "too precise", by some criteria. We don't know the answer to the scale question but poking "areas" to build up a fuzzy picture of regional function at first approximation is getting us there. Would the knowledge gained from knock-out/stimulation experiments be more fine-grained if the investigators already had a fine-grained understanding of what they were studying and thus, the cleanest way to study it? Yes. But breakthroughs are not made where investigators know what they're doing. Breakthroughs are made where nobody knows what they're doing--often crudely, frequently accidentally. The history of scientific advance is messy. Significance of results doesn't map neatly to sophistication of methods/tools. I wholly agree that neuroscience has a long way to go. But to me that doesn't diminish the achievements of neuroscientists pushing us there, using whatever ethical opportunities available to them.
    - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
opbreadsticks 12y ago
Now they can turn us off just like Data did to the Borg......
- goldenkey 12y ago
  relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8
nmac 12y ago
Im not sure why there seem to be some negative comments, this is absolutely amazing- albeit a little scary in a sci-fi clockwork orange kind of way... Additionally, consciousness gets commonly defined in philosophy of mind as the "likeness" of sensation and perception (i.e. its "like" something to smell roses and its "like" something to hear Mozart). So, this study cuts at the root of consciousness.
TheBiv 12y ago
"Although only tested in one person" As a classically trained scientist, I fail to see how this can be newsworthy given how big of revelation this would be to broader scientific discovery and how statistically invalid this claim is at this point. However, as legend would have it, psychologist B.F. Skinner was famous for performing his experiments on a single cat/dog. When prodded by other psychologists on how he could claim his results were valid since he only tested it on one subject, he would say "Well, bring me your cat"
- robbiep 12y ago
  Most neurology reports are case reports of 1 patient, the most notable of all of course being Phineas Gauge.
  - TheBiv 12y ago
    Howdy! I definitely understand how a lot of neurological progress has happened with single person experiments. I guess my main quip is how matter-of-fact this article expresses the finding! Then again, I may just be arguing over semantics and not taking the gist of the finding. I appreciate your simple note to remind me of the fact that the finding is the cool thing, not the words used when being reported!
    - robbiep 12y ago
      Very courteous reply. With regard to the tone of the article, I guess you could say new scientist often take that tone. Have a nice day!
  - oelmekki 12y ago
    Isn't it a problem ? I'm only looking this field from far, as public interest does, but I kind of remember reading brain can actually reorganize so that impaired zone's functionality are transferred to other ones, to compensate. If I'm not mistaken here, doesn't this make using a single subject even more of a problem in neuroscience than in other science experiments ?
jjallen 12y ago
My favorite part: "Koubeissi thinks that the results do indeed suggest that the claustrum plays a vital role in triggering conscious experience. "I would liken it to a car," he says. "A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key."
- evincarofautumn 12y ago
  “We may have found the key” is a short phrase containing only Germanic origin words, so it sounds “strong”; and occurring last, giving you serial position bias.
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    I don't know why that got downvoted - fascinating to see there is a degree if theory behind why some phrases and speeches come over bette than others. Thank you
    - jjallen 12y ago
      Evin* stated that Germanic words sound strong and that is why I preferred this excerpt. Do you have something to back that up? You don't know me at all, so in my opinion this statement is more speculative than the n=1 stumbled-upon-discovery being discussed. I actually didn't focus much on the end of this excerpt. And I should have added the following in my original comment - I actually honed in on this part: "but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together" Immediately after I read this, I actually imagined the key turning off, and the car shutting down. This is precisely what the author/surgeon stated happened during the surgery. Also, I was too going to point out that 'clé' comes from French too. Maybe an etymology dictionary says it comes from Old English, but English is of course partially derived from Old French as well as Norse/Germanic languages [1]. Saying that I liked a metaphor because it contains Germanic words (like much of the English language) that occurred last is a nice theory. But what if I preferred softer sounding words for some other reason and had a bias against Germanic words - say because I studied French in school, lived in France or had grandparents that died horrifically during WWII. I didn't downvote FYI. But another theory as to why I liked it is because that passage instantly helped me to understand what the author believes the incredibly complex system the brain is like by using a simple rhetorical device called a metaphor. On the important subject of whether or not consciousness is actually switched on and off in the claustrum, as a non-neuro-professional I have to grant his metaphor some credence and resolve to investigate further. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Influence_of_other_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Influence_of_other_...
EGreg 12y ago
I wonder what http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Greenfield,_Baroness_Greenfield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Greenfield,_Baroness_Gree... would say about that ... she always says that consciousness isn't found in any one part
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Consciousness is not found in one part. To use a software analogy, they have commented out the main() function - but what makes the system what it is is all the code and it's mutual interactions - but it won't run with that important function removed.
FatalLogic 12y ago
I think some readers might be mistaking this for a 'Self-awareness on-off switch' The subject's state could be compared to somebody in certain phases of sleep or in a coma. Not the same as those, but quite close. A quote in the article describes her as being 'still awake', but I wonder what that means. It's not like the subject became a zombie. According to the very brief description, she just became completely unresponsive, didn't do anything, and had no memory of what had happened.
- Synaesthesia 12y ago
  Yes it seems the claustrum integrates all your sensorial input, I'd also really like to know more about the subjective experience of it being switched off.
  - FatalLogic 12y ago
    The article repeatedly gives the impression of an abrupt change, by using words like 'switched' and 'stopped', but the description used later makes it sound like a more 'normal', gradual process. she gradually spoke more quietly or moved less and less until she drifted into unconsciousness. That part of the process sounds very similar to someone undergoing anesthesia, or simply falling asleep. Though there are obvious differences. So maybe that's what it feels like? Some people remember the feeling of going under, but maybe not the last few seconds of it.
- lloeki 12y ago
  > A quote in the article describes her as being 'still awake', but I wonder what that means. I suppose both physical and neurological observable processes that as we know define 'sleep' and 'awake': her eyes were open but with a blank stare and so on, and since they said she did not exhibit neural signs of epilepsy, she was wired to an EEG, so brain patterns would possibly not be matching any phase of sleep but wakefulness. That's all that could be inferred from the article, which is honestly quite thin and sensationalist.
- quasque 12y ago
  Consciousness in the medical sense can be considered along axes of wakefulness and awareness. For example, in a coma the subject is neither aware nor awake. In contrast, patients in a persistent vegetative state are awake, but not aware. It sounds like the researchers may have replicated this state of consciousness, which would imply that the claustrum is important in awareness, but perhaps not as critical in wakefulness, at least in this particular subject (keeping in mind that her brain is already abnormal in some sense due to epilepsy and neurosurgery that excised the left side of her hippocampus). This paper has a nice review of the topic: http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/2005_VS_TICS.pdf http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/2005_VS_TICS.pdf
andrewtbham 12y ago
When people think about the future and artificial intelligence, they have all these crazy ideas about robots becoming conscious like skynet in terminator or Hal on 2001 a space odyssey. But I suspect the opposite will be true. Things like the human brain project in the EU and the brain initiative in the US, and other research are likely to explain human consciousness. I suspect it will answer long standing questions about spirituality. And by time we implement sophisticated AI, consciousness won't be a mystery.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Consciousness and AI have almost nothing to do with each-other. Human beings only reason when awake and self-aware, but this is most likely a quirk of ours (ie: the daemon `cognit` only runs at init-level 3), not a fundamental feature of cognition.
rectangletangle 12y ago
Very interesting. Naturally I'm skeptical due to the small sample size, and them seemingly only testing her auditory, and motor responses. However, the apparent gradual dampening of her reactions is indeed intriguing, it'd be nice to see some sort of follow up study. If they indeed found an on/off switch, it'd be interesting to attempt to "kickstart" some coma victims. If it works, it'd be a major breakthrough.
- Someone 12y ago
  Lots of neurology results are on truly small data sizes. You can't insert electrodes into brains or cut out brain parts at will for ethical reasons, so you have to wait for a patient where you have to insert one in just the right place for other reasons. So, it may be a while before you see that follow-up study. On a side note, the combination of antibiotics with fast recovery of injured soldiers has been very beneficial to neurology, as it meant that neurologists saw more living patients with horrific brain injuries. It is unlikely that anybody would find this in patients with traumatic injuries, though. A projectile damaging this area deep in the brain likely would take out lots of other areas, too, and would be lethal, even if one gets the patient in a hospital within minutes.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Auditory and motor responses and a total cessation of internal thought and/or short term memory formation that would provide any evidence of internal thought continuing during the stimulation. But they seriously need to test that on someone with an intact hippocampus.
PeterGriffin 12y ago
> "Counter-intuitively, Koubeissi's team found that the woman's loss of consciousness was associated with increased synchrony of electrical activity, or brainwaves, in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain that participate in conscious awareness. Although different areas of the brain are thought to synchronise activity to bind different aspects of an experience together, too much synchronisation seems to be bad. The brain can't distinguish one aspect from another, stopping a cohesive experience emerging." Right, counter-intuitively... As long as we'll be making up reasons based on that piece of data, how about this: Global synchrony occurs when a brain is recovering from an unknown or detected bad state, and all major parts of the brain say "HLO" to each other to notify for their existence, proper operation and to establish connection. So it's not that it's bad to be synchronous, but the lack of information from critical parts of the brain causes it to repeatedly reboot in order to recover from a bad state forced by electric rods in the brain. Hey, I'm a scientist! Seriously though, why aren't we thinking about what the implications of our experimental data would be on a distributed computing system, which our brain is, instead of giving silly "it's like the key in a car" explanations, assigning causality randomly and without merit?
- marmaduke 12y ago
  The result isn't counter-intuitive to those familiar with fairly basic human neuroscience. When you close your eyes, for example, low frequency, long-range synchronization also increases. The stated "counter-intuitive"-ness is more likely an artifact of the translation of the result to layman's terms, where the traditional (since the industrial revolution) way of thinking about the brain and mind is that it is a machine, and the function of this machine is consciousness. I think several such artifacts often appear in these sorts of articles on neuroscience. If you wish to actually understand and interpret the results for yourself, without the crude and inevitably inaccurate lens of the science writer, you have to read some of the books written by neuroscientists themselves. Rhythms of the Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki is the best I've read so far.
  - PeterGriffin 12y ago
    Thanks. And yet, nothing you said really rejects my made up explanation, even more, it supports it (the visual center stops sending information as it lacks input, and synchronization attempts begin).
RivieraKid 12y ago
I don't see the importance of this study outside of the neuroscience field. They just found another way of making people to stop reacting to external stimuli. I've come to the conclusion, that science will never be able to even define consciousness, let alone explain it.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  >I've come to the conclusion, that science will never be able to even define consciousness, let alone explain it. I think the real problem is that people don't really want consciousness defined. They want to keep it as this magical, special thing.
  - RivieraKid 12y ago
    > I think the real problem is that people don't really want consciousness defined. They want to keep it as this magical, special thing. I disagree, what makes you think so? Hard problem of consciousness is the real problem. Consciousness isn't a physical thing, that's why physics can't define it.
    - macspoofing 12y ago
      >Consciousness isn't a physical thing, that's why physics can't define it. Says who? It is most certainly caused by physical neurons which are built by particles following the laws of physics. In principle it is both understandable and explainable in terms of physics, though likely any explanation will follow some other nomenclature (e.g. we don't describe weather in terms of motions of quarks)
    - CodeDiver 12y ago
      If you want to keep the assumption that consciousness and the physical world share causal interactions, consciousness must be a physical thing. How could consciousness and the physical world interact causally if consciousness is not part of the physical world? The reason physics can't define consciousness isn't that consciousness isn't physical. Consciousness is just part of the world our current physics, and really our current philosophies, haven't developed satisfactory means to address. Many physical phenomena, now explained by physics, were once unexplained by previous iterations of physics. Previous physics were just incomplete, until people came along with new ideas to expand what phenomena physics could explain. Doesn't mean those phenomena weren't physical things before physics evolved ways to understand them.
tinystark 12y ago
if it comes in some device form I can use it to switch off my consciousness when recovery agents come to my home..
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  Its more likely that 'recovery agents' will use this device on you in a dark alley so they can recover some organs in demand.
theFish 12y ago
I think this book fits nicely in here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind/dp/0465020690 http://www.amazon.com/The-Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind/dp/0465020...
md224 12y ago
I'm doubtful we can really "prove" true unconsciousness exists (in the sense that subjective awareness completely ceases) until we have a much more advanced understanding of how experience arises in the brain. Right now the most we can say is "X results in an amnesic, non-responsive state". After all, if we rely on self-reporting, how can someone remember being unconscious if they have no memory of it? Also, the article keeps saying the claustrum, but don't we have one in each hemisphere? Which one did the scientists stimulate, and what would happen if you stimulated the other one?
wpietri 12y ago
The result is really interesting, and I would love to read more when they reach n=5. (Or even n=1 on a reasonably normal brain.) But Crick's notion sounds a lot like what Dennett derisively calls the "Cartesian Theater", the tendency to imagine consciousness as little room where a tiny homunculus watches the screens where all sensory data is displayed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater In Dennett's view, consciousness is basically a distributed system. There is no single place where consciousness "really happens". That a single electrode can disrupt consciousness doesn't suggest otherwise. If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens".
- stcredzero 12y ago
  If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens". What if instead of a cable junction for AWS, it was more like a clock in a CPU? Then it is part of what "really happens," but only a part.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >What if instead of a cable junction for AWS, it was more like a clock in a CPU? Then it is part of what "really happens," but only a part. Well, the cable junction is also part of what really happens. So the example is not that different.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - stcredzero 12y ago
      Well, the cable junction is also part of what really happens. Not quite as much. If the cable junction fails, someone downstream of that junction won't have access to the calculations, but someone upstream of it still will. Whereas, if the clock in a CPU fails, there's no calculations happening anywhere.
- 12y ago

319 points by chanux 12y ago

There's a more thoughtful take on the paper on Conscious Entities: http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=1673 http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=1673

gambler 12y ago

I've found that unplugging radio from the wall makes it stop talking. This is a great step forward in finding how it works! This is how it sounds to me.

mathattack 12y ago

I like that it was Crick who gave some early research. Good to see that some scientists do get a second act. If he had published and survived, would this have been a second Nobel?

thathonkey 12y ago

I listened to an episode of Radiolab about 3 "Black Boxes" lately and the first one is about this mysterious threshold in the brain between consciousness and unconsciousness. Here is the episode if anyone is interested: http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/black-box/

ommunist 12y ago

Well, a hammer also makes a good consciousness switch. Especially when combined with needles and applied to nails. Seriously, how can you discuss a marginal case with absolutely no statistical evidence. Do apes have claustrum? If yes - run on them, then speak sense. Besides, brains are immensely resilient and damaged parts functionality can be replaced functionally by other brain regions.

greenyoda 12y ago

Link to the original article that this article is quoting from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-consciousness-onoff-switch-discovered-deep-in-brain.html?full=true http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-conscious...

dang 12y ago
Yes. Changed from http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/07/consciousness-on-off-switch-discovered-deep-in-brain/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/07/consciousness-on-off-switch-....

zaroth 12y ago

And people are concerned about how Facebook ranks their wall posts?

staunch 12y ago

They're pointing a zapper at different "areas" of someone's head and seeing what happens. That's what counts for brain science today. We have a long way to go.

lnanek2 12y ago
Honestly, some of the best brain science ever was by accidental injuries removing some portion of the brain and scientists getting to study the difference. So being able to pick and choose now is ground breaking. It's the equivalent of genetics when we started being able to selectively turn off or insert genes (along with a fluorescent market to know it took).
- staunch 12y ago
  Poking "areas" of a massive organ with a stick vs direct manipulation of DNA at the molecular level.
  - CodeDiver 12y ago
    Toggling big switches vs smaller switches. Same idea, different scale, different "stick". What is/are the appropriate scales to study brain function at? Quarks? Molecules? Brain regions? Which ones? All the above? None? We need to know the answer in advance before pronouncing a method "crude", or conversely, "too precise", by some criteria. We don't know the answer to the scale question but poking "areas" to build up a fuzzy picture of regional function at first approximation is getting us there. Would the knowledge gained from knock-out/stimulation experiments be more fine-grained if the investigators already had a fine-grained understanding of what they were studying and thus, the cleanest way to study it? Yes. But breakthroughs are not made where investigators know what they're doing. Breakthroughs are made where nobody knows what they're doing--often crudely, frequently accidentally. The history of scientific advance is messy. Significance of results doesn't map neatly to sophistication of methods/tools. I wholly agree that neuroscience has a long way to go. But to me that doesn't diminish the achievements of neuroscientists pushing us there, using whatever ethical opportunities available to them.
  - 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

opbreadsticks 12y ago

Now they can turn us off just like Data did to the Borg......

goldenkey 12y ago
relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8

nmac 12y ago

Im not sure why there seem to be some negative comments, this is absolutely amazing- albeit a little scary in a sci-fi clockwork orange kind of way... Additionally, consciousness gets commonly defined in philosophy of mind as the "likeness" of sensation and perception (i.e. its "like" something to smell roses and its "like" something to hear Mozart). So, this study cuts at the root of consciousness.

TheBiv 12y ago

"Although only tested in one person" As a classically trained scientist, I fail to see how this can be newsworthy given how big of revelation this would be to broader scientific discovery and how statistically invalid this claim is at this point. However, as legend would have it, psychologist B.F. Skinner was famous for performing his experiments on a single cat/dog. When prodded by other psychologists on how he could claim his results were valid since he only tested it on one subject, he would say "Well, bring me your cat"

robbiep 12y ago
Most neurology reports are case reports of 1 patient, the most notable of all of course being Phineas Gauge.
- TheBiv 12y ago
  Howdy! I definitely understand how a lot of neurological progress has happened with single person experiments. I guess my main quip is how matter-of-fact this article expresses the finding! Then again, I may just be arguing over semantics and not taking the gist of the finding. I appreciate your simple note to remind me of the fact that the finding is the cool thing, not the words used when being reported!
  - robbiep 12y ago
    Very courteous reply. With regard to the tone of the article, I guess you could say new scientist often take that tone. Have a nice day!
- oelmekki 12y ago
  Isn't it a problem ? I'm only looking this field from far, as public interest does, but I kind of remember reading brain can actually reorganize so that impaired zone's functionality are transferred to other ones, to compensate. If I'm not mistaken here, doesn't this make using a single subject even more of a problem in neuroscience than in other science experiments ?

jjallen 12y ago

My favorite part: "Koubeissi thinks that the results do indeed suggest that the claustrum plays a vital role in triggering conscious experience. "I would liken it to a car," he says. "A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key."

evincarofautumn 12y ago
“We may have found the key” is a short phrase containing only Germanic origin words, so it sounds “strong”; and occurring last, giving you serial position bias.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  I don't know why that got downvoted - fascinating to see there is a degree if theory behind why some phrases and speeches come over bette than others. Thank you
  - jjallen 12y ago
    Evin* stated that Germanic words sound strong and that is why I preferred this excerpt. Do you have something to back that up? You don't know me at all, so in my opinion this statement is more speculative than the n=1 stumbled-upon-discovery being discussed. I actually didn't focus much on the end of this excerpt. And I should have added the following in my original comment - I actually honed in on this part: "but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together" Immediately after I read this, I actually imagined the key turning off, and the car shutting down. This is precisely what the author/surgeon stated happened during the surgery. Also, I was too going to point out that 'clé' comes from French too. Maybe an etymology dictionary says it comes from Old English, but English is of course partially derived from Old French as well as Norse/Germanic languages [1]. Saying that I liked a metaphor because it contains Germanic words (like much of the English language) that occurred last is a nice theory. But what if I preferred softer sounding words for some other reason and had a bias against Germanic words - say because I studied French in school, lived in France or had grandparents that died horrifically during WWII. I didn't downvote FYI. But another theory as to why I liked it is because that passage instantly helped me to understand what the author believes the incredibly complex system the brain is like by using a simple rhetorical device called a metaphor. On the important subject of whether or not consciousness is actually switched on and off in the claustrum, as a non-neuro-professional I have to grant his metaphor some credence and resolve to investigate further. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Influence_of_other_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#Influence_of_other_...

EGreg 12y ago

I wonder what http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Greenfield,_Baroness_Greenfield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Greenfield,_Baroness_Gree... would say about that ... she always says that consciousness isn't found in any one part

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Consciousness is not found in one part. To use a software analogy, they have commented out the main() function - but what makes the system what it is is all the code and it's mutual interactions - but it won't run with that important function removed.

FatalLogic 12y ago

I think some readers might be mistaking this for a 'Self-awareness on-off switch' The subject's state could be compared to somebody in certain phases of sleep or in a coma. Not the same as those, but quite close. A quote in the article describes her as being 'still awake', but I wonder what that means. It's not like the subject became a zombie. According to the very brief description, she just became completely unresponsive, didn't do anything, and had no memory of what had happened.

Synaesthesia 12y ago
Yes it seems the claustrum integrates all your sensorial input, I'd also really like to know more about the subjective experience of it being switched off.
- FatalLogic 12y ago
  The article repeatedly gives the impression of an abrupt change, by using words like 'switched' and 'stopped', but the description used later makes it sound like a more 'normal', gradual process. she gradually spoke more quietly or moved less and less until she drifted into unconsciousness. That part of the process sounds very similar to someone undergoing anesthesia, or simply falling asleep. Though there are obvious differences. So maybe that's what it feels like? Some people remember the feeling of going under, but maybe not the last few seconds of it.
lloeki 12y ago
> A quote in the article describes her as being 'still awake', but I wonder what that means. I suppose both physical and neurological observable processes that as we know define 'sleep' and 'awake': her eyes were open but with a blank stare and so on, and since they said she did not exhibit neural signs of epilepsy, she was wired to an EEG, so brain patterns would possibly not be matching any phase of sleep but wakefulness. That's all that could be inferred from the article, which is honestly quite thin and sensationalist.
quasque 12y ago
Consciousness in the medical sense can be considered along axes of wakefulness and awareness. For example, in a coma the subject is neither aware nor awake. In contrast, patients in a persistent vegetative state are awake, but not aware. It sounds like the researchers may have replicated this state of consciousness, which would imply that the claustrum is important in awareness, but perhaps not as critical in wakefulness, at least in this particular subject (keeping in mind that her brain is already abnormal in some sense due to epilepsy and neurosurgery that excised the left side of her hippocampus). This paper has a nice review of the topic: http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/2005_VS_TICS.pdf http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/2005_VS_TICS.pdf

andrewtbham 12y ago

When people think about the future and artificial intelligence, they have all these crazy ideas about robots becoming conscious like skynet in terminator or Hal on 2001 a space odyssey. But I suspect the opposite will be true. Things like the human brain project in the EU and the brain initiative in the US, and other research are likely to explain human consciousness. I suspect it will answer long standing questions about spirituality. And by time we implement sophisticated AI, consciousness won't be a mystery.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Consciousness and AI have almost nothing to do with each-other. Human beings only reason when awake and self-aware, but this is most likely a quirk of ours (ie: the daemon `cognit` only runs at init-level 3), not a fundamental feature of cognition.

rectangletangle 12y ago

Very interesting. Naturally I'm skeptical due to the small sample size, and them seemingly only testing her auditory, and motor responses. However, the apparent gradual dampening of her reactions is indeed intriguing, it'd be nice to see some sort of follow up study. If they indeed found an on/off switch, it'd be interesting to attempt to "kickstart" some coma victims. If it works, it'd be a major breakthrough.

Someone 12y ago
Lots of neurology results are on truly small data sizes. You can't insert electrodes into brains or cut out brain parts at will for ethical reasons, so you have to wait for a patient where you have to insert one in just the right place for other reasons. So, it may be a while before you see that follow-up study. On a side note, the combination of antibiotics with fast recovery of injured soldiers has been very beneficial to neurology, as it meant that neurologists saw more living patients with horrific brain injuries. It is unlikely that anybody would find this in patients with traumatic injuries, though. A projectile damaging this area deep in the brain likely would take out lots of other areas, too, and would be lethal, even if one gets the patient in a hospital within minutes.
Dylan16807 12y ago
Auditory and motor responses and a total cessation of internal thought and/or short term memory formation that would provide any evidence of internal thought continuing during the stimulation. But they seriously need to test that on someone with an intact hippocampus.

PeterGriffin 12y ago

> "Counter-intuitively, Koubeissi's team found that the woman's loss of consciousness was associated with increased synchrony of electrical activity, or brainwaves, in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain that participate in conscious awareness. Although different areas of the brain are thought to synchronise activity to bind different aspects of an experience together, too much synchronisation seems to be bad. The brain can't distinguish one aspect from another, stopping a cohesive experience emerging." Right, counter-intuitively... As long as we'll be making up reasons based on that piece of data, how about this: Global synchrony occurs when a brain is recovering from an unknown or detected bad state, and all major parts of the brain say "HLO" to each other to notify for their existence, proper operation and to establish connection. So it's not that it's bad to be synchronous, but the lack of information from critical parts of the brain causes it to repeatedly reboot in order to recover from a bad state forced by electric rods in the brain. Hey, I'm a scientist! Seriously though, why aren't we thinking about what the implications of our experimental data would be on a distributed computing system, which our brain is, instead of giving silly "it's like the key in a car" explanations, assigning causality randomly and without merit?

marmaduke 12y ago
The result isn't counter-intuitive to those familiar with fairly basic human neuroscience. When you close your eyes, for example, low frequency, long-range synchronization also increases. The stated "counter-intuitive"-ness is more likely an artifact of the translation of the result to layman's terms, where the traditional (since the industrial revolution) way of thinking about the brain and mind is that it is a machine, and the function of this machine is consciousness. I think several such artifacts often appear in these sorts of articles on neuroscience. If you wish to actually understand and interpret the results for yourself, without the crude and inevitably inaccurate lens of the science writer, you have to read some of the books written by neuroscientists themselves. Rhythms of the Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki is the best I've read so far.
- PeterGriffin 12y ago
  Thanks. And yet, nothing you said really rejects my made up explanation, even more, it supports it (the visual center stops sending information as it lacks input, and synchronization attempts begin).

RivieraKid 12y ago

I don't see the importance of this study outside of the neuroscience field. They just found another way of making people to stop reacting to external stimuli. I've come to the conclusion, that science will never be able to even define consciousness, let alone explain it.

macspoofing 12y ago
>I've come to the conclusion, that science will never be able to even define consciousness, let alone explain it. I think the real problem is that people don't really want consciousness defined. They want to keep it as this magical, special thing.
- RivieraKid 12y ago
  > I think the real problem is that people don't really want consciousness defined. They want to keep it as this magical, special thing. I disagree, what makes you think so? Hard problem of consciousness is the real problem. Consciousness isn't a physical thing, that's why physics can't define it.
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    >Consciousness isn't a physical thing, that's why physics can't define it. Says who? It is most certainly caused by physical neurons which are built by particles following the laws of physics. In principle it is both understandable and explainable in terms of physics, though likely any explanation will follow some other nomenclature (e.g. we don't describe weather in terms of motions of quarks)
  - CodeDiver 12y ago
    If you want to keep the assumption that consciousness and the physical world share causal interactions, consciousness must be a physical thing. How could consciousness and the physical world interact causally if consciousness is not part of the physical world? The reason physics can't define consciousness isn't that consciousness isn't physical. Consciousness is just part of the world our current physics, and really our current philosophies, haven't developed satisfactory means to address. Many physical phenomena, now explained by physics, were once unexplained by previous iterations of physics. Previous physics were just incomplete, until people came along with new ideas to expand what phenomena physics could explain. Doesn't mean those phenomena weren't physical things before physics evolved ways to understand them.

tinystark 12y ago

if it comes in some device form I can use it to switch off my consciousness when recovery agents come to my home..

rasz_pl 12y ago
Its more likely that 'recovery agents' will use this device on you in a dark alley so they can recover some organs in demand.

theFish 12y ago

I think this book fits nicely in here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind/dp/0465020690 http://www.amazon.com/The-Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind/dp/0465020...

md224 12y ago

I'm doubtful we can really "prove" true unconsciousness exists (in the sense that subjective awareness completely ceases) until we have a much more advanced understanding of how experience arises in the brain. Right now the most we can say is "X results in an amnesic, non-responsive state". After all, if we rely on self-reporting, how can someone remember being unconscious if they have no memory of it? Also, the article keeps saying the claustrum, but don't we have one in each hemisphere? Which one did the scientists stimulate, and what would happen if you stimulated the other one?

wpietri 12y ago

The result is really interesting, and I would love to read more when they reach n=5. (Or even n=1 on a reasonably normal brain.) But Crick's notion sounds a lot like what Dennett derisively calls the "Cartesian Theater", the tendency to imagine consciousness as little room where a tiny homunculus watches the screens where all sensory data is displayed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater In Dennett's view, consciousness is basically a distributed system. There is no single place where consciousness "really happens". That a single electrode can disrupt consciousness doesn't suggest otherwise. If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens".

stcredzero 12y ago
If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens". What if instead of a cable junction for AWS, it was more like a clock in a CPU? Then it is part of what "really happens," but only a part.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >What if instead of a cable junction for AWS, it was more like a clock in a CPU? Then it is part of what "really happens," but only a part. Well, the cable junction is also part of what really happens. So the example is not that different.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - stcredzero 12y ago
    Well, the cable junction is also part of what really happens. Not quite as much. If the cable junction fails, someone downstream of that junction won't have access to the calculations, but someone upstream of it still will. Whereas, if the clock in a CPU fails, there's no calculations happening anywhere.
12y ago