Where Does Consciousness Reside in the Brain? New Discovery Helps Pinpoint Its Location



The location of consciousness in the brain may be something that science is getting closer to understanding. Recent studies have shown the importance of specific brain connections in defining consciousness.

The study, which was released in the journal Cerebral Cortex, was carried out by Jun Kitazono, a project researcher at the Department of General Systems Studies at the University of Tokyo and a corresponding author of the study.

The study's corresponding author and head of the lab that conducted the research, Associate Professor Masafumi Oizumi, stated that "where in the brain consciousness lives has been one of the largest puzzles in science." Even if we haven't come to a definitive conclusion, there is a lot of empirical data that has been gathered in the process of looking for the brain correlates of consciousness or the bare minimum mechanisms required for conscious experience.

It has been proposed that because conscious experience requires both feed-forward and feedback processes, the portion of the brain network that supports consciousness should have connections between its brain areas in both directions. For instance, earlier research on visual perception has demonstrated that conscious awareness only develops when both feed-forward and feedback processing are present, as opposed to the other way around. the year 2022 Kitazono, Jun

With this study, the researchers took a step toward identifying the minimally required subnetworks in the brain that underpin conscious experience.

To identify the regions of the brain where awareness dwells, researchers searched for a specific indicator of consciousness inside the neuronal networks of the brain: bidirectional pathways. When we see something or experience something, our brains digest the information. This is referred to be a feed-forward signal, although awareness cannot be attained simply by receiving such signals. Additionally, our brains must provide feedback to us in the form of information. Not every part of the brain has the capacity to take in and process feed-forward data. These connections in both directions, according to researchers, are a crucial characteristic of the regions of the brain involved in awareness.

The suggested algorithm has the ability to breakdown the complete network hierarchically into the portions of the network with the strongest bidirectional connections, the second-strongest, and so on. the year 2022 Kitazono, Jun

"For people to consciously perceive stimuli, feed-forward processing alone is insufficient; feedback is also required, showing the need for bidirectional processing. According to Kitazono, the feedback component vanishes not just when specific conscious contents are lost in awake states, but also in unconscious states like general anesthesia, sleep, and vegetative states, where conscious experiences are typically lost. He added that the bi-directionality of processing is crucial whether you are looking at a human, a monkey, a mouse, a bird, or a fly.

To test their hypothesis, researchers used computational methods and a mouse connectome. The connections in the brain are depicted in great detail in a connectome. They first created an effective method to extract the complexes, or regions of the brain with strong bidirectional connections. The mouse connectome was then subjected to the algorithm.

The association between the type of brain activity that takes place in response to an external stimuli has been examined by conventional neuroscience (e.g., an image of an apple). The key research being conducted by traditional neuroscience has been to elucidate the function f, which may be stated if we write this relationship using the function f as r=f(s). Such studies have uncovered a lot about the mechanism of information processing, or how the brain interprets data from outside inputs. However, in addition to processing data from the outside world, our brain also creates the subjective sense of "seeing an apple." The ultimate goal of the Oizumi Lab is to clarify the function g that links brain activity r and consciousness C, where C is the consciousness created from brain activity r (C=g(r)), in order to conceptually grasp the subjective experience and consciousness produced by the brain. Credit: Masafumi Oizumi, 2022

The retrieved complexes with the greatest degree of bidirectionality, according to Kitazono's research, are concentrated in the cortical and thalamic regions rather than being distributed equally throughout all main brain regions. On the other hand, the bi-directionality is modest in the other major regions. Particularly, the cerebellum has substantially lesser bidirectionality in certain areas.                       
These findings support the location in the brain where scientists have long hypothesized consciousness to dwell. The cerebral cortex, which is found on the outside of the brain, has sensory, motor, and association areas that are thought to be crucial for experiencing consciousness. The thalamus, which is situated in the center of the brain, has also been linked to consciousness. In particular, the thalamocortical loop, which is the interaction between the thalamus and cortical regions, is regarded to be crucial for consciousness. These findings lend credence to the notion that locating the location of consciousness requires understanding the brain network's bi-directionality.

"This study only considers anatomical connections that are'static' between neurons or brain regions. However, Oizumi noted that awareness is "dynamic," shifting based on brain activity from one moment to the next. We need to actively analyze the dynamics of neuronal activity to determine the location of awareness at any particular time, even though physical connections explain how neural activity would spread and how different brain areas would interact.                         
He stated that as a subsequent step, the group is now reviewing activity-based networks of the brain in various kinds of neural recordings.

Finding the mathematical connection between awareness and the brain is the ultimate objective of our work, according to Oizumi. In this study, we tried to link the location of awareness to the network features of the brain. In order to achieve our ultimate goal, we will continue to research the connection between consciousness and the brain.

By UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO 

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