Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-consciousness-onoff-switch-discovered-deep-in-brain.html?full=true

by chanux • 12 years ago

319 111 12 years ago

newscientist.com

greenyoda• 12 years ago

Link to the original article that this article is quoting from:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329762.700-conscious...

dang• 12 years ago

Yes. Changed from http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/07/consciousness-on-off-switch-....

zaroth• 12 years ago

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

staunch2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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).

staunch2• 12 years ago

Poking "areas" of a massive organ with a stick vs direct manipulation of DNA at the molecular level.

ethana• 12 years ago

Well...until brain electrical signal is decrypted, they'll keep on zapping until something interesting happens. Remember when electro-shock therapy was used for nearly everything in medical practices?

ramblingrain• 12 years ago

This seems pretty interesting if you read the description of the brain region.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claustrum

I find this more interesting than 'rebar through the eye' style stuff like the Phantoms in the Brain book by this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran

It's more interesting since they mention consciousness, though I don't know what they're really talking about.

I think stuff like 'rebar through the eye' has revealed interesting 'machine learning'-type defects, like funny ways your vision can be messed up and see at a very low fps, unable to perceive most quick motion.

But machine learning is popular and stuff because it works, unlike strong AI and consciousness, which are pretty difficult to get any handle on.

macspoofing4• 12 years ago

So?

Fundamental physics is done by smashing particles together and seeing what happens. We've gotten tremendously far with this approach. Do you have a better idea?

alex_doom• 12 years ago

I find that talking a problem to death usually solves things.

canjobear• 12 years ago

Before smashing particles together, physicists use mathematical models to predict exactly what they will see given different assumptions, usually with incredibly high degrees of accuracy. There are no such models of higher-level cognitive processes in neuroscience. They are very different.

quick111• 12 years ago

I often think about exactly both these points. We are so far behind in terms of research compared to particle physics because we don't have the ability to destructively smash consciousness apart just to see what falls out over and over again. "Zapping" very low number of brains is going to be slow going, and unfortunately is not far from the best we have to work with.

Synaesthesia2• 12 years ago

We absolutely have a long way to go, I wonder if we'll "solve" many of the open problems in brain science, medicine and consciousness in the next 100 years. The human brain is outrageously complicated, and much of it's workings are hidden to us, in essentially a featureless grey goo.

opbreadsticks• 12 years ago

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

goldenkey7• 12 years ago

relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8

nmac• 12 years 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.

TheBiv2• 12 years 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"

robbiep2• 12 years ago

Most neurology reports are case reports of 1 patient, the most notable of all of course being Phineas Gauge.

TheBiv2• 12 years 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!

oelmekki2• 12 years 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 ?

brudgers4• 12 years ago

Well as soon as you admit more than one consciousness into the world your already on shakey ground. And allowing one consciousness is perhaps being charitable.

Not that I am arguing against other minds, mind you. It's rather that a starting point of classical science doesn't really get one anywhere in regards to consciousness. We are always performing an induction from the one we have privileged access to for any claim about others

goldenkey7• 12 years ago

What brudgers is saying is that there is no proof that can be made that anyone is conscious but yourself. Sure, you can experience love and feelings that lead you to believe that this partner of yours is conscious, and other people are.. But ultimately, there is a HUGE difference and leap of assumption between consciousness and reactiveness. We know animals are reactive. We only know that our self-being is conscious.

Obviously these are Matrix-type thoughts. I am just trying to explain brudgers point.

Tycho• 12 years ago

It's hardly statistically invalid. This wasn't a drugs trial. They noted an effect on a subject from a direct stimulus and then repeated the experiment numerous times with variations that corroborated their finding. Obviously the next step is to find another test subject but I think it's pretty obvious why this is newsworthy.

jjallen3• 12 years 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."

evincarofautumn2• 12 years 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.

lifeisstillgood4• 12 years 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

nagrom• 12 years ago

No. The German word for key is schlüßel. The English word key is derived from the French word clé, meaning key.

RivieraKid5• 12 years ago

This is a really terrible analogy to be honest.

jjallen3• 12 years ago

Care to expand on why you think so? I'm happy to learn from people that know more about neuro-subjects in general.

Is it terrible or just imperfect?

EGreg• 12 years ago

I wonder what 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

lifeisstillgood4• 12 years 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.

FatalLogic2• 12 years 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.

Synaesthesia2• 12 years 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.

FatalLogic2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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

andrewtbham• 12 years 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_gottlieb5• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

Dylan168073• 12 years 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.

PeterGriffin2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

PeterGriffin2• 12 years 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).

RivieraKid5• 12 years 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.

h1karu• 12 years ago

exactamondo, but isn't science merely an epiphenomenon of consciousness ? If so isn't this a case of the snake trying to eat it's own tail ?

RivieraKid5• 12 years ago

If so isn't this a case of the snake trying to eat it's own tail ?

Pretty much. Consciousness is one level above science in a way, so every attempt to only use science to explain consciousness will fail. Consciousness is a metaphysical concept, "meta" = an abstraction layer above.

kitbrennan• 12 years ago

The first step is to understand consciousness and how it works. Once we understand how it works it has a multitude of applications. Not least in computer science (eg. trying to create machines that display consciousness), and neuro-medicine (eg. how do we wake people up that are in a coma).

RivieraKid5• 12 years ago

The first step is to understand consciousness and how it works.

The first thing should be to define consciousness IMO.

trying to create machines that display consciousness

In other words, trying to create machines that behave like humans? I don't know what "displaying consciousness" means.

pcrh• 12 years ago

Apart from being an increase in knowledge, it could have significant implications for our understanding of the experiences of non-human animals.

It appears that mice have a claustrum, and I would be very interested to see the effect of manipulating that area on their behaviour. If it has little effect, one might conclude that mice don't experience consciousness the way we do, for example, or the reverse.

Edit: here is an open access version of Crick & Koch's paper on the claustrum:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569501/

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

For starters, if it can be induced externally without shoving wires into your brain, it could conceivably be a safer, more reliable form of surgical anesthesia. Even with "anesthesiologist" being a dedicated career path, botched anesthesia kills more people than we'd like to admit, plus there's the rare-but-horrific surgical awareness cases. Even if it can't be induced by (say) an external magnetic field, a minimally-invasive implant might be provided to a patient who's expected to need repeated surgeries.

Also, as the article points out, reversing the process could potentially be useful in awakening coma patients.

Of course all that's very speculative, and more research is called for, but that's how science is done.

gress• 12 years ago

Presumably it will also be developed into a non-lethal weapon for the police.

macspoofing4• 12 years 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.

RivieraKid5• 12 years 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.

tinystark• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

md224• 12 years 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?

wpietri2• 12 years 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

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".

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

I would assume these researchers are well aware of such problems. I still think it's very important to research it.

If we take a signal like a certain sound that evokes an experience, or we can even ask the person to do some conscious processing based on the sound, the sound could be a question like "what is the color of the sky?". We can follow the signal: We can see first some mechanical preprocessing steps in the ear, then some neural preprocessing steps, and the signal is branched out, lots of different brain areas are probably activated and then again some fine movement post processing steps are done so that the person finally answers "blue".

I think it would be premature say that all the trivial very low level preprocessing steps in the ear are just as a relevant part of the conscious experience of hearing the question, as the understanding of the question.

Say, in a stretched analogy, if someone would like to understand how the computer can calculate some ray tracing or use some compression algorithms, it would not be that important to just understand how on die caches or PCI express lanes work. The important bit is to understand how instructions cause the ALU:s to wrangle the bits in registers, that's the core of the magic, most of the other stuff is relatively trivial pre- and postprocessing.

So in this sense I think the question is well posed.

There's also practical implications. Think if we could have reliable anesthesia (or the hypnosis part of it, you might still need pain killers and muscle relaxants). We might have very few side effects. We would not have to give big doses just to be safe. This could mean much faster recovery after anesthesia. Also costs of anesthesia would drop immensely if it could be even better controlled than it is now. It costs a lot to stay in a hospital. Also if you're unconscious, you have to be taken care of, again tying people...

_bdog• 12 years ago

The reliable anesthesia you are talking about more or less exists. It's called Ketamine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine

stcredzero2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

ommunist2• 12 years ago

Yup. I like your analogy about the cable junction.

CodeDiver4• 12 years ago

The claustrum is suspected to be a key junction that ties together different systems, making coordination between systems possible. This possibility is suggested by the claustrum's seemingly unique anatomical situation--so many other regions run into it like no other.

If the claustrum is a junction connecting myriad systems, enabling coordinated forms of mental life, possibly consciousness, then in a sense, it could really be a key to consciousness.

Calling this critical juncture key to consciousness is not saying the claustrum is a theater where a homunculus watches everything come together, or that consciousness happens in the claustrum.

Consciousness is a state of the brain where disparate systems interact, and the claustrum may be key to explaining that coordination in consciousness.

Borrowing the car analogy in the article, the ignition system isn't where a car "runs". Nonetheless, the ignition is key to explaining how everything that comes together to put the car in a running state. I think people are misreading what the investigator meant when he suggests the claustrum might be key to explaining the conscious state.

Am I wrong here? Somebody quote me the passage I'm missing where the investigators say the claustrum is where consciousness happens, rather than just saying that the claustrum may be key to understanding how consciousness happens.

wpietri2• 12 years ago

The sentence in the article that reminded me of Dennett was this one: "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."

ivan_ah• 12 years ago

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

gambler• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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/

ommunist2• 12 years 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.

Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain

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