by Steven Novella via Skepticblog
Where is the “seat of consciousness” in the brain? This is often presented as an enduring mystery of modern neuroscience, and to an extent it is. It is a very complex question and we don’t yet have anything like a complete answer, or even a consensus. The question itself may contain false assumptions – what, exactly, is consciousness, and perhaps what we call consciousness emerges from the collective activity of the entire brain, not a subset. Perhaps every network in the brain is conscious to some degree, and what we experience as our consciousness is the aggregate effect of many little consciousnesses.
One way to approach this question (really a set of related questions) is to study different mental states – altered states of consciousness. How those differences relate to brain function are likely to tell us something about the contribution of that brain function to full wakeful consciousness.
A new study by scientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Psychiatry in Munich and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and from Charité in Berlin attempts to do just that. They have studied the brain activity of those in normal dreaming and in a so-called lucid dreaming state.
Dreaming is an excellent subject of study for questions of consciousness. I often use dreaming when discussing this topic as an example of an altered state that everyone experiences. While dreaming we have awareness and experience and are forming memories (at least sometimes). When we remember our dreams, however, they don’t quite make sense to our waking selves. Things happen in dreams, for example, that …
… continue reading: Skepticblog » The Seat of Consciousness.
Related articles
- max planck institute study on lucid dreaming and seat of brain’s meta-consciousness (prn.fm)
- Lucid Dreamers Offer Clues to Consciousness (illuminutti.com)
- Lucid Dreaming Gives Scientist a Window into the Nature of Consciousness (bigthink.com)
- The seat of meta-consciousness in the brain (eurekalert.org)
- Lucid Dreamers Offer Clues to Consciousness (livescience.com)
