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This is the age-old question isn’t it? The one that baffles people of religion, science, atheism, and all walks of life. People of any race, age, gender, or culture. What is consciousness? What is that essence or spark of awareness that makes us feel alive in a physical body? The state of being awake and conscious of one’s surroundings?

Take a moment to close your eyes and focus inward, meditate on your ‘being’. What does it feel like to be you? Most of us would agree it feels almost as though we are someone or something that lives or ‘sits’ inside the mind. That our consciousness, as it were, is responsible for sending demands to different areas of the body in order for every part of us to work together as a cohesive unit.

So what does any of this mean? What is sentience itself? How does the human brain, consisting of about one hundred billion interacting neurons, become aware of and compute information?

It’s a heavy question that has puzzled scientists and philosophers since the beginning of known time. The Mirriam-Webster(1) dictionary defines it as the following…

Consciousness: Noun

the condition of being conscious : the normal state of being

awake and able to understand what is happening around you

:a person’s mind and thoughts

Consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain; being awake and processing information. It’s also what allows us to exist and understand ourselves in the World. When we’re unconscious, we no longer respond to external stimuli.

Various research has been done in the attempt of branching deeper into this psychological neuroscience; below you will find two of the more prominent case studies.

The first groundbreaking neurobiological theory of consciousness was presented by scientists Christof Koch and Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the DNA structure). In 1990 they presented the claim that consciousness lies in the prefrontal cortex, where electrical signals in the brain oscillate.(2) This area is composed of neurons linked together that pass information from one to another. Henceforth, they explain consciousness as being the electrical activity operating together in the prefrontal cortex.

The second study was done by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hamerhoff in 2009. They developed a theory called ‘quantum mind theory’ that suggests consciousness is the result of quantum mechanics. This states that micro-tubules inside the brain work to compute elements in a system they call ‘orchestrated objective reduction’. Meaning, the wave functions of quantum particles collapse once they reach specific energy levels.(3)

In Hammerhoff’s blog, Quantum Consciousness, he writes…

“One thing to keep in mind is that consciousness is not uniform among humans. Different people may experience consciousness in different ways, and it can be difficult to make comparisons of people’s subjective perceptions of reality with very much detail. Nonetheless, when you look at people from the same culture, roughly the same age, and not very different in intelligence – and you make a lot of detailed questions about the experiences of colors, situations, and so on, you’ll get very similar answers. So I think it’s reasonable to say that even though, in all likelihood, we have slightly different experiences of reality, they are similar enough to us not to clash.”

Both of these studies are certainly interesting yet also subjective. Consciousness itself is a subjective experience of the world. Our sense that the world and everything within it is separate from us, yet on a deeper cellular level, we are all connected by the same force, or spiritual energy that gives us the ability to think for ourselves.

It seems most widely accepted that conscious thinking is related to the prefontal cortex and/or the pineal gland (aka the seat of the soul, or third eye). However, rather than try to explain consciousness, why not simply marvel at it’s insolubility. The elusive mystery that it represents is far more fascinating than many other human conundrums.

Sources:

(1) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consciousness

(2) http://www.alternet.org/books/what-consciousness-neuroscientist-may-have-answer-big-question

(3) http://phys.org/news/2009-03-frhlich-condensates-quantum-consciousness.html

(4) https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201303/what-is-consciousness

Image: http://thepositivemindblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Flow-Waves.jpg

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