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Despite the myriad stunning achievements Homo sapiens has racked up over the preceding centuries and millennia, developing a naturalistic account of consciousness remains one of the biggest challenges facing modern science today.
A new study published in the journal Science Advances takes a crack at the question of which specific brain networks are involved in conscious perception, which is not only philosophically fascinating, but also highly relevant to doctors and families of people with brain injury who need a reliable way of figuring out if a patient has any subjective experience.
Perhaps the key challenge in trying to identify the neural correlates of consciousness (provided they even exist) comes down to the difficulty of figuring out someone‘s level of conscious awareness, or lack thereof, in the absence of capacity to report it.
In the study, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner was deployed on 53 patients in a vegetative state (thought to involve no conscious experience), 59 patients in a minimally conscious state, and 47 healthy volunteers to monitor their brain activity at rest.
Neuroscientists have gotten one step closer to nailing down the neural underpinnings of consciousness. Image credit: NICHD via flickr.com, CC BY 2.0.
This technique allows researchers to measure how individual regions of the brain “communicate” with each other by tracking blood supply and oxygen consumption patterns indicative of different levels of activation.
After combing through the data, two patterns of communication arose – one simply reflected physical connections of the brain (such as between pairs neighbouring regions that have a direct physical link), which is not particularly interesting or surprising.
The other pattern, however, “represented very complex brain-wide dynamic interactions across a set of 42 brain regions that belong to six brain networks with important roles in cognition,” said co-author on the study Davinia Fernández-Espejo. And this pattern was observed almost exclusively in patients with some degree of consciousness.
Importantly, the researchers were also able to verify that their methods were sensitive to patients’ level of consciousness, rather than degree of brain damage, by showing the absence of the “active” pattern under deep anaesthesia.
According to Fernández-Espejo, apart from taking us a step closer to tackling the “hard problem”, these findings might also eventually be used to restore consciousness in people who have lost it.
Sources: study, medicalxpress.com.