New Study Rethinks the Origins of Consciousness

A groundbreaking seven-year experiment has delivered fresh insights into what creates consciousness. The study, involving human participants and published in Nature, explored the fundamental question of how our minds become aware.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness arises when information within a system, like our brain, is highly interconnected and functions as a unified whole. Think of it like a perfectly synchronized orchestra – all the instruments playing together create a single, conscious experience.

Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), on the other hand, suggests that specific brain areas act like a spotlight, highlighting important information and broadcasting it across the brain, making us consciously aware of it. Imagine a news bulletin being broadcast widely so everyone knows about it.

Researchers put these two theories to the test. Their findings indicate a strong connection between the brain’s visual processing areas (at the back) and the frontal areas (involved in thinking). This suggests that our conscious experience might be more rooted in how we perceive the world through our senses rather than solely in higher-level thinking.

As Christof Koch, Ph.D., from the Allen Institute, stated, “Adversarial collaboration fits within the Allen Institute’s mission of team science, open science and big science, in service of one of the biggest, and most long-standing, intellectual challenges of humanity: the Mind-Body Problem. Unravelling this mystery is the passion of my entire life.”

The research implies that while the front of the brain is crucial for reasoning and planning (“intelligence is about doing”), consciousness (“consciousness is about being”) may heavily rely on how our brains process sensory input.

The study also revealed that the back of the brain appears vital for holding the specific details of what we see, such as the orientation of an object.

While the front of the brain is involved in recognizing the general category of an object, it might not be the primary storage for all the fine visual details. This challenges the notion that the front brain region holds all the specifics of our visual experiences.

These discoveries have significant implications for understanding consciousness and could offer new perspectives on disorders like comas and vegetative states.

Identifying the brain regions associated with consciousness could help doctors detect “covert consciousness” – hidden awareness – in unresponsive patients with severe brain injuries, a condition reported in about 25% of such cases.

While IIT suggests consciousness arises from the brain’s various parts working together to integrate information like a team, the study didn’t find enough consistent connections in the back of the brain to fully support this. Similarly, while GNWT posits that consciousness originates in the front of the brain, the findings didn’t provide strong enough evidence for this idea either.

Anil Seth, Ph.D., from the University of Sussex, noted, “It was clear that no single experiment would decisively refute either theory. The theories are just too different in their assumptions and explanatory goals, and the available experimental methods too coarse, to enable one theory to conclusively win out over another. Having said all this, the findings of the collaboration remain extremely valuable – much has been learned about both theories and about where and when in the brain information about visual experience can be decoded from.”

The study involved an unprecedented 256 participants, who were shown various visual stimuli while their brain activity was measured using techniques that track blood flow, magnetic, and electrical activity.

Koch emphasized the power of this approach: “Adversarial collaborations are a powerful social process, little used because of their challenging nature, seeking to coordinate the research and associated protocols across many, independent laboratories, and competitive individuals. The bio-medical field could hugely profit by more such ‘friendly’ competition among theories—neurobiological or others. But it requires a great deal of cooperation and constant work to keep everyone aligned.”