In what part of the brain is consciousness originates? Theories abound, but neuroscientists have not yet merged around an explanation, largely because it is such a difficult question to investigate with the scientific method. Unlike other phenomena studied by science, the concion cannot be observed externally. “I observe your behavior. I observe your brain, if I do an intracranial EEG [electroencephalography] Study. But I never observe your experience, ”says Robert Chis-Ciure, a postdoctoral researcher who studies awareness at the University of Sussex in England.
Scientists have landed in two leading theories to explain how consciousness emerges: the integrated theory of information, or IIT, and the theory of global neuronal work space, or GNWT. These frames could not be more different: they rest on different assumptions, they are based on different fields of science and can even define the awareness in different ways, explains Anil K. Seth, a conscience in the university.
To compare them directly, the researchers organized a group of 12 laboratories called Cogitation Consortium to test the predictions of theories with each other in a large study of brain images. The result, published in its entirety on Wednesday Nature, It was an effective draw and raised many more questions than he answered. The preliminary findings were published on the Biorxiv Preprimpression server in 2023. And only a few months later, a group of academics publicly called “pseudoscience” and tried to get it out of the field. As the dust sits, the researchers of the leading consciousness say that the results of the cogitation point to a path to follow to understand how consciousness arises, regardless of what an executive comes out.
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“We are all very good to build castles in the sky” with abstract ideas, Sayes Chis-Ciure, which did not participate in the new study. “But with the data, you do the most founded.”
What are the two theories of consciousness?
The contestants in this confrontation are, in some way, inverse directly to each other. “The two theories are very different creatures,” says Christof Koch, a cognitive scientist at the Alles Institute in Seattle and co -author of the results of the cogitation. The global neuronal work space theory takes what psychologists have learned about the brain and cognition to suggest that consciousness is a kind of stage. When a particular stimulus enters our conscious consciousness, such as an annoying sound or a bright color, it pushes on stage and stands out.
The integrated information theory, Koch’s favorite framework begins by defining what awareness is more abstract and then imagines what properties would need to have a system to experience it. The Concion, argues IIT, arises from the information processing: the more information, the more conscious it can be a system, more or less.
While thesis explanations are quite abstract, theories can be used to make verifiable predictions about what happens in the brain when someone consciously perceives something. For example, GNWT says that the frontal regions of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, convert the “focus” into the information when one becomes conscious for the first time, a phenomenon called ignition that should be dated in an image study experience and that Iit says that the conscious experience emerges more towards the back of the brains, where the close networks of the neurons are more closely related, Koch explain.
The Cogitation Consortium project, which Begen Begen in 2018, set out to face the predictions with each other in multiple laboratories administered by neutral theory teams. “These were people who had no skin in the game,” explains Chis-Ciure. They used three different brain image techniques to observe the brains of 256 participants, a very large sample size for a neuroscience study, while these participants complete the same visual tasks, which interpreted faces and rotating letters. These types of tasks require conscious experience.
The results challenge both theories because Neith’s predictions were completed by the data. For example, GNWT predicted that electrodes in the prefrontal cortex would detect a signal when a stimulus disappeared and was eliminated from the mental stage of consciousness, but that was largely absent in the findings. Challenge, “says Seth, who was in the new study. Iit, on the other hand, predicted that a sustained synchrony of networks or neurons would occur in the back of the brain, which was also observed.
The researchers expected the findings to be nuanced. “It was always understood … that a single experiment [wasn’t] I’m going to refute a specific theory, “says Seth. That is extremely weird in science, where knowledge develops incremental.
Will scientists ever find the source of consciousness?
The results were presented for the first time at a conference in June 2023. Koch and the philosopher David Chalmers used the installation of the findings to solve a long -term bet: in 1998 Koch bet on the chalmers that neuroscientists in the cisestres brain. Koch admitted his loss at the 2023 conference.
In September of that year, an open letter that described the state of IIT in questioning first circulated online. The letter publicly raised the “pseudoscience” label, saying that Iit was not a scientist because its central principles were not falsifiable, which means that they could not be refuted with current technology. More than 100 authors finally signed. In fact, critics have linked Iit with Panpsiquism, the philosophy that consciousness drills everything, equally not living entities. If consciousness arises from complex systems processing information, could a computer chip simply be aware?
The attempt of “scientific excommunication”, to quote Seth, was ultimately in the pages of Nature neuroscience Last month. Iit is a bold theory, and “when it comes to consciousness, we have the right to be wrong and perhaps only the duty to be bold,” Seth wrote in a comment at the Journal.
Seth Doess does not think, as Koch does, that the results of the cogitation study inspired the open letter. He sees it more as the result of a field at a crossroads. “Everyone has their own theory. And that is not a great state of affairs. So I think there is a feeling that, in fact, theories must become a little more precise.”
What follows?
Duration The total solar eclipse of May 1919, two competitive theories of gravity faced with each other: the classical explanation of Isaac Newton versus the new general theory of the relativity of Albert Einstein. The scientists pointed to their telescopes to the eclipsed sun to prove Einstein’s prediction that the seriousness of our local star would fold the light of the distant stars. He did, claiming Einstein.
Almost 100 years later, Koch and others involved in the Cogitation Consortium wanted to prove the theories of consciousness in a similar way. This type of adverse collaboration, as it is called, can be productive and instructive because it requires that both camps meet and test the predictions in neutral terrain, with carefully controlled and reproducible findings. Other adverse studies on consciousness are ongoing. Seth, for example, is in the Steering Committee of another adversary collaboration between and two other theories of consciousness.
This type of research “will encourage a new way of doing studies, which is to design experiments that have the best opportunity to distinguish between theories instead of finding evidence for or against a specific theory,” says Seth.
For a field with an objective as high as explaining the phenomenon of consciousness, “it is or easy to obtain loosts in existential fog,” says Seth. But “even if we do not have an adequate theory, we are progressing in really important practical applications”, such as understanding consciousness in cases of brain damage and coma or silly anesthesia.
“There are people who are far from the intervention of life support intervention because they are considered not,” says Chis-Ciure. “The bets are too high not to address the front problem.”
*Editor’s note (04/30/25): This sentence was published after publishing to correct the description of the GNWT prediction that was largely absent in the findings.
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