Have scientists found our ‘soul’?

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Have scientists found our ‘soul’? Discovery of 'on-off' switch in human brain could help coma patients regain consciousness
Scientists in Washington D.C. have found a switch for consciousness
By stimulating part of the brain they were able to turn a patient's brain off
The discovery was made by accident during clinical trials for seizures
An electrical impulse in the claustrum made the patient 'go to sleep'
She woke up again after the impulse - but had no recollection of the event
The technique could be used to bring people in a coma back to consciousness
By JONATHAN O'CALLAGHAN
PUBLISHED: 11:07 GMT, 7 July 2014 | UPDATED: 12:22 GMT, 7 July 2014

Scientists claim to have found an 'on-off' switch in our brain that can bring people in and out of consciousness.

Dr Mohamad Koubeissi and his team from George Washington University studied an epileptic patient and found that electrical impulses of a specific region sent her to 'sleep' on repeated occasions.

Stopping the stimulation of the brain brought her out of the vegetative state - and she had no recollection of what had just happened.


Researchers have found that electronically stimulating a patient's claustrum in the brain acted like an on/off switch, making them come in and out of consciousness. When stimulated the patient stopped responding to commands and also just stared blankly into space, while her breathing also slowed

Consciousness is the state of being aware of one’s surroundings; a lack of it can commonly be associated with sleeping.

ARE PEOPLE IN A COMA ACTUALLY CONSCIOUS?
The levels of consciousness experienced by patients in a vegetative is still a mystery.
But scientists are coming closer than ever to proving that patients locked in their body can understand their environment.
A study in Israel last December suggests people in a vegetative state can react emotionally to photographs of people they know personally,
Patients in a vegetative state may be able to recognise photographs of their loved ones, the research revealed.
Dr Haggai Sharon from Tel Aviv University, who led the research alongside Dr Yotam Pasternak, said: 'We showed that patients in a vegetative state can react differently to different stimuli in the environment depending on their emotional value.
'It's not a generic thing; it's personal and autobiographical. We engaged the person, the individual, inside the patient.'

How consciousness works, though, is a bit of a mystery - indeed, the exact reasoning behind why and how we sleep is still up for debate.

The discovery of this on-off switch, as reported by New Scientist, could therefore be very useful in certain areas of medicine.

In the clinical trial, the researchers employed low-frequency deep brain stimulation to try to help reduce epileptic seizures in patients.
Dr Koubeissi, who led the trial, found that low-frequency stimulation reduced epileptic seizures in patients by 92 per cent without impairing memory.
‘This is an innovative clinical trial that aims to identify novel modalities to reduce seizures in individuals with medically-intractable temporal lobe epilepsy, who are at risk of sustaining memory decline with the surgical removal of the temporal lobe,’ he said.
‘Over the next few years, we hope that the results will be similar to previous research, leading to better treatment options for these patients.’
When they switched to high-frequency electrical impulses, however, they discovered the fascinating on/off effect.


The effect was produced by stimulating the patient's claustrum (a thin sheet of neutrons at the lower part of the central brain, shown by the red arrow). Once stimulation of the claustrum stopped the patient regained consciousness, and was unaware of what had happened

One exciting possibility for the discovery could be that, for people who are trapped in low states of consciousness, such as people in a coma, the region could be stimulated to help regain a conscious state. The next step will be to emulate the effects in other patients

Stimulating the 54-year-old patient’s claustrum - a thin sheet of neurons at the lower part of the central brain - the researchers found that she lost consciousness.
This meant she didn't respond to commands and also just stared blankly into space, while her breathing also slowed.

Once stimulation of the claustrum stopped she regained consciousness, and she was completely unaware of what had just happened.
Over two days, every time the claustrum was simulated the same thing happened - with additional study confirming this wasn’t just a side effect of a seizure.
To New Scientist, Dr Koubeissi likened the effect to the ignition on a car, explaining that turning a key brought all the other components of the car to life.

One exciting possibility for the discovery could be that, for people who are trapped in low states of consciousness, such as people in a coma, the region could be stimulated to help regain a conscious state.
The next step will be to emulate the effects in other patients to further see just what role the claustrum plays in consciousness.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz36obq56Gf

[JoeyGee8688]

Neato. I figure everything that was once thought as "spiritual" or "mental" will be shown some day by science to exist in some physical capacity- the soul, thoughts, emotions, and so forth.

[Scrutinizer]

What does it have to do with finding the "Soul"?

[Odin]

[sean]

Neurosurgeons often keep patients awake to monitor in real time the regions being targeted, to avoid accidentally interfering with important processes like language. Sometimes they get cheeky and poke something that hasn't been studied much to see what happens. If you mess with a region called the claustrum everything shuts off, no dreams, no memory. Just oblivion. What do you think happens when oxygen can't reach this structure upon death?

Scientists at George Washington University were experimenting with a single patient who suffered from epilepsy and began using deep brain electrodes to stimulate parts of her brain and record electrical activity in an attempt to figure out what parts of her brain were malfunctioning and causing her seizures. Stimulation of the claustrum - which had never been done before - quite literally turned her 'consciousness' on and off.

The woman stopped responding to outside stimuli and, as soon as the activity around her claustrum was removed, she regained consciousness without remembering ever having lost.

Given that the woman didn't respond to any form of stimuli while her claustrum was stimulated, it implicates that the claustrum is responsible for integrating the various activations of the cerebrum rather than 'consciousness'. If the claustrum was responsible for 'consciousness', then the woman would have been able to respond to stimuli without any higher order cognition in relation to the response (or anything else).

Consciousness occurs in the brain in membranes between the grey and white matter, controlled by the claustrum, filtered by the thalamus, and processed by the hippocampus. When these systems cease to function consciousness ends, leaving your subjective experience in the same state it was in before you were concieved.

The claustrum acts to bring together all the other information in the brain. It assembles sight, smell, taste, thoughts, and memories - all the bits in the brain that make us who we are. The consequences of this research can be staggering. If the claustrum is responsible for giving humans their defining consciousness, that means we're one step closer to recreating it in artificial brains.

However, consciousness is much like a desktop computer's display, it simplifies and distorts the intricate and complex functions of the brain into something useful to the organism. This doesn't mean the source of consciousness is the claustrum, but it does imply something about its function as a bridging or some such part of the overall anatomy.

It's been theorised that humans have more than five senses. How do we sometimes know that we're being watched from the distance? How do mothers know when their children are in peril even if they are miles away? Our brains could be evolving to make us perceive our universe beyond what our primal senses can understand.

Now imagine we make contact with an alien species and they bring us a new language. Learning this new language creates new neural connections in the human brain that activate dormant areas that we didn't know what they were for (there are some gray areas in the brain whose functions are still a mystery, like the claustrum) and this lets us "unblock" a new sense that lets us percieve our universe in four dimensions (the fourth being non linear time).

Quantum mechanics is made up of waves interacting with each other, and all spinning circles are conscious souls, they typically spin at 3-10 Hz. The circle goes around in a solid curve, the emanations in the tree of life refer to basic waveforms, which reflect emotions. In Kabbalah, the da'at is represented by the claustrum, the seat of consciousness.

In any case, consciousness doesn't have to correlate with anything resembling intelligence or dexterity. They may be conscious but have zero understanding or insight into what they're experiencing.

Anyway, there are various methods of measuring consciousness, but it depends on how you define consciousness. You have things like the Glasgow Coma Score, which is used to measure "awareness" in emergency medicine, and more general assessments like AVPU (also in emergency medicine). Situational awareness can be measured using objective measures such as SAGAT and WOMBAT.