You are what you remember.
Consciousness itself is clearly quite a controversial and subjective topic. It is thought to involve both the modern neocortex found in all higher mammals (cats, dolphins, elephants, etc) as well as certain profoundly developed sections of the brain stem only found in humans. These “overdeveloped” sections, along with the extremely pronounced encephalization and connectivity of the human forebrain, may account for our superior communicative and innovative capabilities, as well as our unique ability to harness and control emotions. But can these traits be called consciousness?
Science has proven at least the existence, if not the clear definition, of consciousness. We know that people lose and regain it; that specific neuropathologies correspond with specific deficits in consciousness; and that conscious activities are impossible if key neural structures are lost. All of these ingredients indicate the presence of a direct link between the mind, human awareness, and the physical brain. Yet the subtleties of this link are still largely unknown, and questions regarding it may stump neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers for many years to come.
Recent brain studies investigating the electromagnetic theory of consciousness explores the possibility that the electromagnetic field generated by the brain is the actual carrier of conscious experience. The starting point for the theory is the fact that every time a neuron fires it also generates a disturbance to the surrounding electromagnetic (EM) field. Information coded in neuron firing patterns accounts for how information located in millions of neurons scattered throughout the brain can be unified into a single conscious experience:the information is unified in the EM field. When neurons fire together their EM fields combine to generate stronger EM field disturbances; so synchronous neuron firing will tend to have a bigger impact on the brain’s EM field (and thereby consciousness) than the firing of individual neurons. Different EM field theories disagree as to the roleof the proposed conscious EM field on brain function.
Even with advanced techniques and technologies, we have yet to pinpoint the physical characteristics of the brain that build the most characteristic features of the human mind — creativity, intelligence, and self-awareness. The role played by genes, time, environment, and component parts from individual protein particles to neurons to the nervous system as a whole will continue to be explored. But that is not to say that we have not already built a large body of knowledge regarding the structure and function of the human brain; provided in this section are short descriptions of what we know today about the brain, nervous system, and some of its most important component parts.
