Here’s your weird fact of the day, courtesy of EP: the human brain, as it turns out, actually does come with an on/off switch. By which, I meant that through experimentation with deep brain probes, scientists managed to accidentally discover the key to human consciousness, where it originates, and how to turn it off or back on.
This discovery is thanks of Mohamad Koubeissi and his colleagues at Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University, who stumbled across the key to human consciousness when performing a completely unrelated procedure on a woman who has epilepsy. The procedure, using deep brain electrodes, recorded signals from different parts of the brain, in order to determine what portion of the brain the woman’s seizures were originating.
Koubeissi and his team placed an electrode next to the part of the brain known as the claustrum—a thin, almost sheet-like section of our brains beneath the neocortex—which had never been electrically stimulated before, though researchers such as neuroscientist Francis Crick and colleague Christof Koch of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science have theorized it might play a role in consciousness.
As it turns out, Crick and Koch were pretty spot on—when the George Washington University team stimulated the area, the woman lost consciousness, and only returned to a conscious state after the team turned off the stimulus. The teem repeated the experiment, receiving the same result each time.
Additional research on the subject is definitely needed, but there’s no denying that we’ve never been more conscious of our own consciousness before.
Ah, the human brain. 2014, and still so full of mystery.
Source Discovery
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