The Search For Consciousness

When I was a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago I met Dr. Eugene Genelin who was a professor of psychology. He was well-known for his discovery of the technique known as focusing, which, in my view is very similar to vipassana meditation.

While preparing for a talk for him and his graduate students on The Strange Reality of the Quanta, I had a remarkable insight about how the brain knows it is in a transcendental state. The insight was that the altered state produces a population inversion of neurons that then, like a laser, fire simultaneously and release a wonderful perception of oneness.

Had this insight occurred when fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) was available, I might have gotten my degree in neuroscience instead of physics and computer science.

This post reports on the research from the  BBC documentary on consciousness. I first reported on this video on Best Meditation Videos: The Search for Consciousness.

As I watched the video I took copious notes because I knew there would be some incredible insights.

The video was narrated by Dr. Markus Du Sautoy a professor of mathematics at Oxford University. He is also an atheist!

His search for consciousness began when he had cracked a mathematical problem he was working on while riding in a train thinking about nothing.

The Search For Consciousness

His first question was, “When do we first become aware of ourselves?”

To answer this question, he consulted with Dr. Vasu Reddy at the University of Portsmouth.

She uses the mirror self-recognition test developed by Dr. Gordon Gallup at the State University of New York, Albany. Dr. Vasu’s research has show that children between the ages of 18 to 24 months become self-aware.

Dr. Gallup’s research indicates that orangutans and chimpanzees as well as humans pass the mirror self-recognition test. He says that the price we pay for being self-aware is death awareness.

Dr. Stephen Gentleman at the Imperial College in London spent some time showing the anatomy of a real human brain. This was a brain that no long had consciousness. He said that there were over 100 billion nerve cells in the brain. He said, “Consciousness appears to be all about activation of the cortex.”

This doesn’t tell us how consciousness is activated or what it is!

Dr. Adrian Owen at the Medical Research Council works with people who are in a coma. What he said supports imagery as a mechanism for scientific research as well as a model for healing. He has demonstrated that a women in a coma can be directed to imagine a game of tennis and the same areas of the brain light up as in a conscious person. Pretty astounding – eh?

During a test under anesthesia, administered by Anthony Absalom at the University of Cambridge, Du Sautoy also imagined playing tennis at various levels of sedation. Eventually, he reached a point where he could no longer imagine playing tennis.

When Du Sautoy went to Sweden to work with Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, he was fitted with virtual reality goggles that gave him the experience of being three feet behind his body. This strange experience indicates that thesense of “I” is just an illusion, created by the brain processing data.

According to Ehrsson, the brain is constantly trying to figure out, “Where am I?”

The next stop on the journey was in the mountains outside of Los Angeles where Dr. Christof Koch from the California Institute of Technology studies cells deep inside the brain. Dr. Koch studies the neural correlates of consciousness. This is the minimum amount of brain activity necessary to feel something like a toothache.

They also discussed the idea of concept neurons, which is some unknown number of neurons firing together for something like the face of the Dalai Lama (the video used Jennifer Aniston). This idea emerges out of a collection of neurons working together, something like water is wet only when you have enough molecules interacting together.

At the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Marcello Massimini studies the difference in consciousness between being awake and being asleep. He uses transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to map theinterconnectivity among neurons. He finds that certain channels shut down during sleep.

This interconnectivity among neurons is a definitive insight that integration of elements is essential for consciousness. We could say that certain parts of the brain are interdependent on each other for certain experiences to take place. This is an example of where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In Berlin, Dr. John-Dylan Haynes investigates the source and timing of decisions. He tries to answer the question, “Who is in charge – me or the neurons.” What he finds is quite amazing.

In Dr. Du Sautoy case, there is a pattern activity in the brain a whole six seconds before a decision is made! Thus the conscious mind is encoded in brain activity. Consciousness and brain activity are different aspects of the same process. Your consciousness is your brain activity.

So What Am I?

The “I” is just a threshold of the final stage of a whole complex of brain activity. We are unaware of most of it. The tiny portion of what we feel is what we are.

We also know that who we are is interdependent with integrated neuronal activity in the brain. No activity, no consciousness!

Furthermore, from the teachings of the Buddha as well as neuroscience we know that the sense of I is an illusion.

The out of body experience that many people report has been scientifically validated.

What do you think of all this? Please share you feelings and experience.