Team of Scientists have identified areas of the brain that are activated when a person realizes themselves and their thoughts. This enigmatic process appears to be controlled by the thalamus, a central region of the brain, already known as a filter between sensory signals and the cerebral cortex.
Conscious awareness is the ability of a person to recognize stimuli received by their senses. The sensation is processed automatically and repetitively, and is a different state than simply being awake. Rather, conscious perception requires detailed and spontaneous analysis of external stimuli. For example, we can breathe automatically, but we can also recognize the breath and change its rhythm. Similarly, when listening to a song, you can pay attention to and distinguish the instruments that make up it.
Recently, neurologists have been trying to find parts of the brain where this perceptual change occurs. Researchers traditionally suspected that such functions must be controlled by the cerebral cortex. This is because it is where progressive brain processing occurs. Thalamus has never been ruled out for involvement in conscious awareness, but is usually assigned a minor role as a filter to prepare sensory information in the cortex. New research recently published Science It redefines that view and positions the thalamus as an active participant in conscious perception.
Most studies of consciousness, including the thalamus, face skepticism when evidenced by the data because they lack important observational data on thalamus in the workplace, or because they are likely obtained. To see if a patient’s brain area “lights” activity when he consciously pays attention to something, he needs to recognize that the patient is stimulating, or conscious, but at the same time, he investigates the brain with invasion sensors.
However, in this new study, a team from Beijing Normal University in China turned to a group of people who have already inserted thin electrodes into the brain as part of their experimental headache therapy, bypassing the ethical question of whether this type of study justifies invasive surgery.
The researchers conducted visual perceptual tests on these patients. A flashing object appears on the screen, hiding half the time of the test. These characteristics meant that patients had to focus on the object, adjust their eyes and continue to look at it rather than considering the screen without analyzing it. Therefore, this promoted conscious perception and already implanted electrodes recorded the brain activity associated with this.
Researchers say this is one of the first simultaneous records of conscious perception, and the information they record provides strong evidence for the hypothesis that the thalamic region creates a kind of gateway for conscious perception. “The findings show that the thalamic nuclei within the thyroid and medial regulate conscious perception. This conclusion represents an important advance in understanding the networks that form the basis of human visual consciousness,” the author writes.
This story originally appeared Wired enspañol Translated from Spanish.
