Near-death experiences

Fairly interesting article at CNN on NDE's (near-death experiences). People want to think of them as portents of heaven but they're really just shows your mind puts on in extreme circumstances. Still, an interesting read.

When I was in a coma and no one thought I'd live, my experience wasn't like the stories you hear about NDE's. When I was coming out of the coma, first I was five beings, then four, then two (I was never three beings), and then one -- at which point I woke up.

To me, this confirms that our consciousness is the result of several brain functions coming together to create the illusion of being a unitary, conscious creature. We are not one, we are many disjointed functions coming together to focus. And focus is consciousness.

So much for heaven and the afterlife. But I like my experience better than that of the godders.

Interesting article on tracking consciousness

I bumped into an article about the possibility that anesthesia can tell us something about how the brain constructs consciousness. How does it come about? What feeds into it? And what the heck is it? The article has many interesting insights. Here's one:

"[T]he patterns that anesthesiologists see do support another theory: that consciousness emerges from the integration of information across large networks in the brain."

News about consciousness

This is my favorite topic, bar none. It's the year 2011 and we still don't know how consciousness occurs. Somehow the brain creates a sense of being, of awareness. We call this consciousness and it is why we feel we have a "self". It's a stunning feat yet we don't understand the process that makes this happen. Consciousness is the quintessential experience of our lives -- and we don't even know what it is. How could this not be everyone's favorite topic?

Today there's an important story on physorg.com about the opposite end of the spectrum -- how consciousness disappears when we go to sleep or are put under an anesthetic. Scientists were able to monitor changes in the brain as consciousness fades away -- and the results bolster the notion that there are sub-assemblies in the brain that create the illusion of consciousness by linking together as one. I say "illusion" because that's what consciousness is: a virtual reality phenomenon caused by the brain's activities.

In the study, they monitored the brain as these sub-assemblies lost their ability to communicate with one another. As they became unlinked, consciousness faded away -- and therein lies the story. This fits perfectly with the sub-assembly theory. It's like your brain is composed of various electrical devices which, when wired together, focus as a unit on sensory input. This act of "focusing as a unit" is consciousness. I love this.