Scientists have struggled for millennia to understand human consciousness - the awareness of one's existence. Despite advances in neuroscience, we still don't really know where it comes from, and how it arises.
But researchers think they might have finally figured out its physical origins, after pinpointing a network of three specific regions in the brain that appear to be crucial to consciousness.
"For the first time, we have found a connection between the brainstem region involved in arousal and regions involved in awareness, two prerequisites for consciousness," said lead researcher Michael Fox from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre at Harvard Medical School.
The Harvard team has identified not only the specific brainstem region linked to arousal, but also two cortex regions, that all appear to work together to form consciousness.
Paper:http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2016/11/04/WNL.0000000000003404.short
Source & further reading:http://www.sciencealert.com/harvard-scientists-think-they-ve-pinpointed-the-neural-source-of-consciousness
Corina Marinescu
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