Consciousness May Be the Product of Carefully Balanced Chaos by sciencehabit.
From the posting:
The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical. But the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is a bit easier to measure. In a new study (abstract) of how anesthetic drugs affect the brain, researchers suggest that our experience of reality is the product of a delicate balance of connectivity between neurons—too much or too little and consciousness slips away. During wakeful consciousness, participants’ brains generated “a flurry of ever-changing activity”, and the fMRI showed a multitude of overlapping networks activating as the brain integrated its surroundings and generated a moment to moment “flow of consciousness.” After the propofol kicked in, brain networks had reduced connectivity and much less variability over time. The brain seemed to be stuck in a rut—using the same pathways over and over again.
These researchers need to be shown the red card as they say in soccer.
I thought it was agreed that during the Human Brain Project, no one would research or publish new information about the human brain, in order to allow the EU project to complete its “working model” of the human brain.
The Human Brain Project is a butts in seats and/or hotels project and a gum ball machine will be able to duplicate its results. But discovering vast amounts of unknown facts demonstrates the lack of an adequate foundation for the project at its inception.
In other words, more facts may decrease public support for ill-considered WPA projects for science.
Calling the “judgement,” favoritism would be a more descriptive term, of award managers into question, surely merits the “red card” in this instance.
(Note to readers: This post is to be read as sarcasm. The excellent research reported Enzo Tagliazucchi, et al. in Large-scale signatures of unconsciousness are consistent with a departure from critical dynamics is an indication of some of the distance between current research and replication of a human brain.)
The full abstract if you are interested:
Loss of cortical integration and changes in the dynamics of electrophysiological brain signals characterize the transition from wakefulness towards unconsciousness. In this study, we arrive at a basic model explaining these observations based on the theory of phase transitions in complex systems. We studied the link between spatial and temporal correlations of large-scale brain activity recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging during wakefulness, propofol-induced sedation and loss of consciousness and during the subsequent recovery. We observed that during unconsciousness activity in frontothalamic regions exhibited a reduction of long-range temporal correlations and a departure of functional connectivity from anatomical constraints. A model of a system exhibiting a phase transition reproduced our findings, as well as the diminished sensitivity of the cortex to external perturbations during unconsciousness. This framework unifies different observations about brain activity during unconsciousness and predicts that the principles we identified are universal and independent from its causes.
The “official” version of this article lies behind a paywall but you can see it at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.04304.pdf for free.
Kudos to the authors for making their work accessible to everyone!
I first saw this in a Facebook post by Simon St. Laurent.