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IF YOU had to point to the place where consciousness emerges, you would probably aim your finger squarely at your head. That is the easy bit. Exactly where the brain circuitry for consciousness lies, or how the physical properties therein seemingly transform into the subjective feeling of being, are questions that have bamboozled us for centuries. And it turns out that we might have been looking in the wrong place all along.
The brain on its own isn’t enough to generate subjective experience, says Catherine Tallon-Baudry, a neuroscientist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Without the body, the self simply wouldn’t exist. “Just as the notion of ‘car’ exists only if a certain number of components are present and interacting with each other,” she says.
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Instead, researchers have come to recognise that our sense of interoception, which monitors internal body signals – such as heart rate, pain, thirst and pleasure – plays a major role in creating our thoughts and emotions. Now, many consider interoception to be a fundamental feature of consciousness, too.
Our internal organs, particularly the heart and gut, are key players in building our conscious experience, says Tallon-Baudry. Both have their own self-generated rhythm, separate from the brain – and this, Tallon-Baudry believes, provides a handy hook on which the brain can hang its sense of self.
Taking the idea a step further, Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California says that internal body signals aren’t just involved in consciousness – they are consciousness. “People continue talking about consciousness as the great mystery that will be revealed by understanding the brain, and that’s wrong,” he says. “It’s not about the brain, it’s about what the brain achieves with the interoceptive system in the body.”
In this view, the brain is still involved, but more in an operational role. Conscious thought allows us to respond to what the body is saying, “but you are not conscious because of the cognition”, says Damasio.
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The hard problem of consciousness
What’s more, he believes that the body-centred view of consciousness makes the question of how physical matter gives rise to conscious experience, known as the hard problem, disappear. “I don’t think it exists, because these feelings generate a constant perspective,” he says. “It is the construction of a self.”
Not quite, says Hugo Critchley at the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, UK. “Thinking about low-level feeling states as primordial consciousness is probably the way to go, and then the expectation is that everything builds up from that,” he says. “But that’s where it gets really complicated.”
This idea of consciousness arising in the body still doesn’t explain how physical processes turn into that feeling of being “you”, says Critchley, nor how consciousness allows us to mentally travel back and forth in time.
Even so, few in the field today believe that consciousness is an entirely brain-based phenomenon. “Bodily explanations are a step toward understanding how subjective experiences can arise from biological material,” says Tallon-Baudry. “In that sense, they are a step toward solving the hard problem.”
This story is part of a special package in which we explain 13 of the most mind-bending concepts in science. See the other entries below
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