When you look at your phone, the visual neurons talk directly to the frontal cortex, creating a bridge between perception and higher cognition. This critical discovery from the seven-year experiment of the landmark challenges our understanding of consciousness, neither dominant theories fully explain how our consciousness emerges.
A team of more than 200 scientists from 200 institutions conducted what they called “adversarial collaboration” – deliberately confronting competition theories with each other through experiments involving 256 human participants surveillance of three different brain imaging techniques. This unprecedented approach aims to reduce confirmation bias in consciousness research, and the field often interprets data to support its preferred theory.
“The integration of widely accepted theory of neuroscience consciousness will have profound medical, social and moral implications,” the team wrote in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.
The study tested two main theories: Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which proposed that consciousness emerged from comprehensive information processing mainly in the hindbrain region and the Global Neuron Workspace Theory (GNWT), which argued that consciousness requires information to be broadcast to the frontal brain region.
Participants viewed the images, while the researchers measured brain activity using fMRI, magnetocerebrograph, and intracranial EEG. The focus of this experiment is on what happens in the brain when we are consciously aware of something – especially how information about categories (faces), directions, and identities is handled and maintained.
The results reveal significant challenges to both theories. For IIT, researchers failed to find continuous synchronization of predictions in the posterior brain region. For GNWT, they found no evidence of “ignition” of activity in activity predicted when stimulation disappeared, and some aspects of conscious perception were not indicated in the prefrontal region.
“For IIT, the lack of continuous synchronization in the posterior cortex contradicts the claim that network connectivity specifies awareness,” the researchers noted. “The general lack of ignition in the stimulus offset by GNWT and a limited representation of certain conscious dimensions of the prefrontal cortex.”
Dr. Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, who participated in the project, described the study as “one of the largest, longest, and longest knowledge challenges in human beings: the body of thinking problem.”
These findings have potential clinical implications for the secret consciousness of patients with unresponsiveness. If consciousness depends more on sensory processing than previously thought, then new technologies may better detect consciousness in people with awareness disorders.
The seven-year project, which began with the 2018 workshop at the Allen Institute, brings together competitive theoretical bootcamps to design and implement experiments, said Koch could benefit many areas of science.
“The field of biomedical can make a big profit through ‘friendly’ competition between theories,” Koch said. “But it requires a lot of cooperation and work.”
Professor Anil Seth of the University of Sussex noted that despite the challenges of both theories, collaboration is valuable: “About theories and when, when, when, where, can be learned about the visual experience when, when, and when.”
Rather than announcing the winner, the study highlights the need for more refined theories. Researchers suggest moving towards a quantitative framework for systematic testing and development of awareness theory, emphasizing that scientific advances often involve challenges and refined cycles rather than simple judgments.
Research shows that consciousness may be more about sensory processing and perception than higher-order thinking, and studies reveal important functional links between visual brain regions and frontal lobe regions. This raises the fundamental questions about the relationship between perception, consciousness and cognition that future research will need to address.
Although adversarial experiments do not crown the ultimate winner in the theoretical competition, it significantly improves our understanding of the neural basis of consciousness and builds powerful new models for scientific collaboration.
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