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There’s an interesting write-up and video at Edge on the nature of consciousness. From the introduction:

On October 17, Edge organized a Reality Club meeting at The Hotel Ritz in Paris to allow neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene to present his new theory on how consciousness arises in the brain to a group of Parisian scientists and thinkers. The theory, based on Dehaene’s past twelve years of brain-imaging research is called the global neuronal workspace. It promises to offer new tools for diagnosing consciousness disorders in patients.

“For the past twelve years”, says Dehaene, “my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

“Furthermore, when we render the same information non-conscious or “subliminal”, all the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all our signatures suddenly appear.

But this is already more than a theory. We are now applying our ideas to non-communicating patients in coma, vegetative state, or locked-in syndromes. The test that we have designed with Tristan Bekinschtein, Lionel Naccache, and Laurent Cohen, based on our past experiments and theory, seems to reliably sort out which patients retain some residual conscious life and which do not.

“My laboratory is now pursuing this research intensively on patients, animals, human adults and young children, with the hope of turning our brain-imaging measurements into a real-time monitor of conscious experience. The time thus seems ripe to share this work with a broader audience of readers interested in cutting-edge science and technology, but also those concerned with the philosophical, personal and ethical implications of these findings.”

The questions regarding what consciousness is and how it impacts our lives are numerous and fascinating. Investigating consciousness is essentially our brains attempting to understand themselves. Some speculate we’ll never fully understand consciousness because we’ll never be able to make objective observations using the very organ we’re trying to understand. Yet in the last decade or so we’ve developed new tools that allow us to explore our consciousness better than before, and may allow us to draw conclusions we couldn’t using only our minds in the effort to understand our minds.

(Tip o’the hat to Josh Ellis on Friendfeed)

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