Neuronal “Superhub” Might Generate Consciousness

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neuronal-superhub-might-generate-consciousness

by dpflan • 12 years ago

76 34 12 years ago

themgt• 12 years ago

Fascinating. This is looking more and more likely. I've wondered for a while if one of the main pieces of resistance to this theory is just the tiny size of the claustrum - no one wants to accept that the seat of their own consciousness is so miniscule.

the8472• 12 years ago

From how I understand it it's not so much that all the processing happens there, it's just integrated and coordinated. And that integration is what we think of as conscious thought and action.

You have to consider that there are many layers of emergence in play. A mass of neurons doesn't make a brain. A pile of neural networks doesn't make symbolic thinking. Everything needs to be linked together at a higher abstraction level to produce useful results.

niels_olson• 12 years ago

They're asserting it imposes the singularity of experience, not "defines consciousness". One could think of the claustrum as something that prevents multi-threading.

hosh7• 12 years ago

It's actually possible to go enter a state where there are multiple streams of thoughts, feelings, and action while simultaneously remaining in a complete, integrated experience with clarity. It requires decoupling awareness from a single strand of thought. (You are not your thoughts).

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

Doubt it. Its possible to scramble your neurons so you think you did this; or so you think you remember doing this. How was it measured? What instrument was used to document this? If the instrument was the same one that was being tinkered with (your brain) then its highly doubtful.

pluma• 12 years ago

I think you may be mixing up something. What you're describing is still a "single strand of thought", just one that is a lot fuzzier.

We can hear, see and feel at the same time even though we can at other times be hyper-focused on any one of those experiences individually. We can observe a single fish in a swarm closely, but we can also track the entire swarm and all the fish in it -- albeit with a much higher error rate at the level of the individual fish (e.g. because of "change blindness").

Unless I missed some serious research on the topic, it's not possible to be intensely aware of every single particle (be it a particular sensation or an individual entity that is being observed) in a complex system while observing the system as a whole.

grizzkill2• 12 years ago

Yeah, it seems possible, my experience with it is through seizures though. I've had a bunch of temporal lobe seizures (the general area which the article says this neuron superhub lies), and it seems like this superhub malfunctions and sends and receives signals to every part of my brain. My entire subconscious bubbles up at once with no filter. I can feel my heartbeat, I can feel my breathing, I can feel every nerve in my body but the feelings don't make sense, memories from years ago flood my brain, I have simultaneous multiple inner dialogues, I see everything in whatever environment I'm in but I'm confused, I have no idea what I'm doing. My brain then starts to shut down after a few seconds of this, or at least my memory does. The seizure either spreads into a grand mal or stops. It's really overwhelming. Anyway, it feels like these disparate parts of the brain are all working at once but the overarching controller malfunctions.

Retric• 12 years ago

I find it normal to have several streams of thought going on at the same time. Picking just one to give voice to is sometimes difficult. For example I have two or three independent answers to the same question based on different assumptions. Or only having two hands to move several things at the same time. So, if anything this is a problem not a benefit.

Also, split streams tend to be individually dumber.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

I sometimes think my mental processes must be very weird because I can't even figure out what "You are your thoughts" would mean, yet I'm guessing from your parenthetical remark that it is an idea people find not only meaningful but plausible?

rnhmjoj• 12 years ago

It's the GIL.

vorg• 12 years ago

They say there's two distinct claustrums ("claustra"?) so shouldn't they be asserting there's two singularities of experience? Perhaps there's two consciousnesses in the typical human brain!

devindotcom• 12 years ago

Wish we could generate a few more words for the various aspects and interpretations of consciousness. It's such a difficult thing to define that to say we've located a region associated with it could mean all kinds of things — to all kinds of people. Some spiritual people will find this to validate ideas of chakras, perhaps, while materialists will decide this is the true and only source of the "self," while behaviorists might interpret it as being merely the executive function.

Nevertheless, it's interesting research even if the findings are (as they inevitably are) somewhat overstated.

hosh7• 12 years ago

For some of the spiritualists, the premise is reversed: the brain is a receiver rather than generator of consciousness. Going by that premise, the application of electrical current on the claustra doesn't necessarily mean it turns consciousness on or off, though it suggests that the current disrupts the reception of consciousness.

I personally don't find anything in here that validates the ideas of chakras.

I've been recently probing the nature of awareness (and the experience of awareness) in my meditation practice. One of the things you can find out through meditation is that what you think of as your "consciousness" is not. What meditators and psychonauts consider "consciousness" is very different than the ordinary conception of "consciousness."

I agree though, this is an interesting finding.

thenmar2• 12 years ago

I would be careful comparing the work of pseudo scientific "spiritualists" to that of neuroscience. Why do you think scientists don't embrace these ideas? Is it really because they're somehow spiritually devoid and foolish and intentionally ignoring whatever truth you think you're grasping? Or is it because what you're talking about is nebulous and inherently impossible to test, with no theoretical underpinning based on experimental observation?

hyp0• 12 years ago

Since mice also have it, it's being awake rather than sapient self-awareness.

\tangent I increasingly incline to Dennet's view, even though it seems simplistic, that we have models of the world, of other people, and of ourselves. And that self-model is self-awareness.

chestervonwinch• 12 years ago

The researcher who wrote this article was also featured on Radio Lab recently:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91503-the-unconscious-toscanin...

amalag• 12 years ago

This article was originally published with the title "A Brain Structure Looking for a Function."

I think that is a far better less click-baity title.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

Simple rule for editors: any headline that includes a word like "might" or "may" or "could" can be replaced by a headline with the meaning that has that word replaced with "might not"/"may not".

When faced with such a headline, please use the negation of the one you originally thought of, then ask yourself if it makes a terrible headline. If it does, don't use either. If there is no headline that describes the story without such weasel words, consider spiking the story. It contains no interesting information.

comex• 12 years ago

I disagree. The article mostly consists of evidence for the hypothesis that the claustrum is essential for consciousness. This focus strongly contributes to its interestingness: while just about anything about the brain is interesting, people are naturally most interested in the elusive "consciousness". Not mentioning the focus, as in the original title, is burying the lede, and since people browsing the HN front page are expected to judge whether a link is worth reading from the title and domain alone, it gives them a significantly worse experience without any real benefit.

cpncrunch2• 12 years ago

I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a bunch of neurons connected to other neurons. If that was the case then we could create a conscoius robot from a bunch of transistors. Roger Penrose's theory is that consciousness is somehow created by quantum superposition.

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

It would be interesting to see if there are any strange quantum effects at work in the claustrum.

Of course there isn't really any evidence towards quantum consciousness, so it's just a highly speculative theory at the moment (albeit a very compelling one).

burnte2• 12 years ago

I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a bunch of neurons connected to other neurons.

Well, considering the brain is just that, and consciousness exists in the brain, then at a physical level that's exactly what consciousness is. But like a computer, it requires more than the simple presence of the hardware. That hardware has to be in an active state executing instructions, the mass of neurons has to be firing in a specific pattern, which seems to me self-booting given how we start out. We know consciousness is just a bunch of neurons, the question is how do they work. Just like we know a given chip is capable of various functions, the question is how.

Knowing the building is made of steel does not make one capable of recreating a skyscraper.

cpncrunch2• 12 years ago

Let me rephrase (seeing as someone downvoted me). I meant that I have a gut feeling that consciousness isn't simply a group of neurons communicating using electrical impulses, firing in a specific pattern. If that was the case then it would be physically possible to build a computer out of transistors that had consciousness, and that seems unlikely (again, just a gut feeling).

If that is the case then some other physics must come into play, and the other other possible physics is quantum mechanics.

Anyway, it's obviously very speculative, but I find it interesting thinking about consciousness - it's one of the few things we don't understand.

Regarding downvotes: what's the obsession on HN with people downvoting opinions you don't happen to agree with, but are nevertheless logical and coherent?

smosher_• 12 years ago

I don't find this idea very compelling.

Penrose has a lot of ideas, apparently trying different things when others were invalidated or not promising. He really wants there to be some essential quantum involvement, but his arguments that there must be are not great. It leaves me with the impression he's seeking the vital essence, and naming QM. He could be right since there is a lot we do not understand, but he lacks the evidence to be anything but misguided in my opinion.

No doubt a lot of quantum phenomena are at work in the brain in various ways, but we have no evidence that it has any essential relationship with consciousness beyond the chemical and electrical properties needed for the biological foundation.

I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a bunch of neurons connected to other neurons.

I can appreciate that feeling, but I wonder what difference it would really make to have quantum consciousness.

jostmey• 12 years ago

I totally agree with smosher. Once upon a time men of science used to describe biological systems in mystical terms because they could not understand it. Now we live in a post-Darwin world and have started to understand biology at the molecular level. No one uses phrases like "animate-matter" vs "inanimate-matter" anymore.

moioci• 12 years ago

Speaking of self-awareness, should there be a test akin to the Turing test to look for this? It seems that it would be fairly simple to simulate self-awareness, given that it is necessarily a subjective experience, so it seems you would want to look for something more than the most successful simulation. I'm sure we're nowhere close with computer programs, but one might also apply such a test to goldfish or oak trees.

Neuronal “Superhub” Might Generate Consciousness

Related Stories