Introducing the brain: the circuit for conscious awareness (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 01, 2020, 19:50 (1481 days ago) @ David Turell

Is it due to electromagnetic fields in the brain:

http://nautil.us//blog/are-the-brains-electromagnetic-fields-the-seat-of-consciousness?...

"Christof Koch is a neuroscientist distinguished by his rock-solid scientific work and romantic yearning to understand consciousness. He recently closed an essay by wondering: “What is it about the brain, the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe, that turns its activity into the feeling of life itself?” No coincidence with that phrasing—The Feeling of Life Itself is his latest book. He argues that consciousness is produced by the brain but that it’s also more widespread in nature than we might suppose.

"His essay described new experimental work, from Stanford neuroscientist Kieran Fox and his colleagues, that explored the effects of electrically stimulating the brain, which revealed an ordering principle. That is, the more removed from sensory input or motor output structures a brain region is, the less likely it is that it contributes to our subjective experience. The “exacting data,” Koch wrote, “provides critical causal, not just observational, evidence to identify the neuronal correlates of consciousness.”

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"What if the electromagnetic fields generated by, but which are not identical to, the neuroanatomy of the brain, are in fact the primary seat of consciousness? The brain’s fields are generated by various physiological processes in the brain, but primarily by trans-membrane currents moving through neurons. These fields are always oscillating and they come in various speeds, clustered around certain bands, from delta on the lower end at 1-2.5 cycles (oscillations) per second (Hertz) up to gamma at 40-120 cycles per second.

"Some neuroscientists have long considered the brain’s oscillating electromagnetic fields to be interesting but merely “epiphenomenal” features of the brain—like a train whistle on a steam-powered locomotive. Electromagnetic fields may just be noise that doesn’t affect the workings of the brain. Koch still seems to lean this way.

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"It’s far too early to claim that the brain’s electromagnetic fields are the primary seat of consciousness with much confidence. But philosophers and neuroscientists who have proposed electromagnetic field theories of consciousness, of which my own General Resonance Theory is one variety, are building up evidence. The interested reader should check out Douglas Fields’ new book, Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better, as an introduction to this line of work. It delves into this debate in great detail. “Brainwaves are key to consciousness,” he writes. “But the results thus far are correlations and don’t prove cause and effect.'”

Comment: Still trying hard but all we still know is a conscious active brain is still required to have consciousness. And NDE's confuse the issue of understanding..